Knowledge is power : $b A view of the productive forces of modern society and the results of labor, capital and skill.Knight, Charles
Philosophy
Knowledge is power : $b A view of the productive forces of modern society and the results of labor, capital and skill.
Knight, Charles
Industrial arts; Industries
There may be some persons still who object to machinery, because, having
grown up surrounded with the benefits it has conferred upon them,
without understanding the source of these benefits, they are something
like the child who sees nothing but evil in a rainy day. The people of
New Zealand very rarely came to us; but when they did come they were
acute enough to perceive the advantages which machinery has conferred
upon us, and the great distance in point of comfort between their state
and ours, principally for the reason that they have no machinery, while
we have a great deal. One of these men burst into tears when he saw a
rope-walk; because he perceived the immense superiority which the
process of spinning ropes gave us over his own countrymen. He was
ingenious enough, and so were many of his fellow islanders, to have
twisted threads together after a rude fashion; but he knew that he was a
long way off from making a rope. The New Zealander saw the spinner in
the rope-walk, moving away from a wheel, and gradually forming the hemp
round his body into a strong cord. By the operation of the wheel he is
enabled so to twine together a number of separate fibres, that no one
fibre can be separated from the mass, but forms part of a hard and
compact body. A series of these operations produces a cable, such as may
hold a barge at anchor. The twisted fibres of hemp become yarn; many
yarns become a strand; three strands make a rope; and three ropes make a
cablet, or small cable. By carefully untwisting all its separate parts,
the principle upon which it is constructed is evident. The operation
is a complex one; and the rope-maker is a skilled workman. Rope-making
machinery is now carried much farther. But the wheel that twisted the
hemp into yarn was a prodigy to the inquiring savage.
[Illustration: Making Ropes by Huddart's Machinery.]
[Illustration: Analysis of a Cablet.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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