2 MACHINE TOOLS
1Orchestral Instruments of America's Mass-Production Symphony
2 When the Almighty happened to bemuse his wisdom with playing shoot-the-works, he opened with one hand the hot valve of absolute energy and with the other the cold valve of absolute time.
3 Now with seemingly deft attention, and now with seeming abandon, he valved them together in variety of proportion—out through the mixing spigot of universe to occur in the reservoir of absolute space—and the synthesis
4 no matter in what proportions always combined as degrees of motion.
5 However that motion is only measurable in dimensional units of energy, time, and space which are mostly infra or ultra to the dimensions which the personal faculties of man are accustomed to detecting by direct sensing and by conscious awareness of relative comparisons made by himself to previously established measures of any conscious experience with motion.
6 Thus self-limited he fails to comprehend the astronomical speeds of the infinite host of heavenly bodies which seemingly hang motionless in his carelessly accepted scenic environment.
7 ‘‘What do you mean, macrocosm?’’ he says to his tiresomely thinking self.
8 He fails equally to comprehend
9 the exquisite speeds
10 at which infinite numbers
11 of atomic components
12 course
13 and which seemingly bulk
14 to his bored ego as
15 gross solids, liquids, or gases.
16 The microcosm, phooey!
17 He fully perceives a few score
18 of mediocre speeds,
19 for instance: his twenty-five-mile in four hours marathon,
20 his four-hundred-mile in one hour flying
21 whose speed ramifications
22 are now scaring his limited imagination
23 almost to death,
24 and whose relatively slow propeller speed he cannot even see.
25 He can see a few objects illuminated by light, e.g., dust mote or elephant, as these super whizzing atomic universes move slowly en masse relative to man, but he cannot see light which moves at five hundred thousand times the speed of the fastest moving propeller tip.
26 In like manner he hears the slow motion of air molecules mechanically agitated in expanding waves, propagated by a diaphragm magnetically vibrated by electron-stream motions in turn valved by radio wave impulses, which themselves in turn moving at the speed of light he also hears not.
27 But all anywhere about man, within and without, is eternally, ceaselessly motion, whether he senses it or not, and which God alone seems to care that he know.
28 For God may reasonably be slowly up-winding that game of shoot-the-works through the instrumentality of man; or failed by man, possibly through some other animate specie or process like aurora borealis cosmic electrolysis.
29 For, though sensing motion only relatively and that to limited degree man has nevertheless measured and fixatingly accumulated, first by subconscious storage later by records in books his constantly re-experienced engagements with motion, such as with the days, tides and heart beats, and finally music.
30 Finally man has accumulated
31 sufficient knowledge of certain proportions of time and energy and of their respective special relationship behavior to selectively segregate and reassemble
32 those constituents for himself.
33 In such a manner
34 has man
35 learned to control
36 motion
37 external to his own body-motions to a meager degree, directly by tangible devices.
38 But as uncounted increment
39 have his faculties gained distinct new abilities through momentum of faith in effort of learning from events as they happen further to capture and segregate for immediate or later use, in portional recomposition non-directly sensed units of motion by intellectually selected operations of those firsthand devices.
40 So amplified in degree are these quantities of motion paptured by faithful extension if both ends of the sensibly charted scales beyond the sensorial limits as progressively to place a working measure of the original omnipotent power within man’s conscious control.
41 This control is in turn pyramided, in direct proportion to man’s witting appreciation of his reorderingly creative potential; at least to the extent of dynamically balanced composure of those areas of environment seemingly valved off by original ad lib.
42 of the almighty.
43 But there are those who cogently argue that man still falteringly progresses by the two forward and one back locked-step of an active inferiority complex.
44 But any way
45 we may choose to argue, the fact is unaltered that man has already captured harnessed and put to work what is relatively a whole lot of motion.
46 He has already devised
47 certain mechanical extensions of his integral mechanics, one thousand square miles of whose bearing surfaces
48 are now all in motion
49 relative to
50 one thousand square miles of their complimentary supporting and controlling mechanical surfaces.
51 And between these two one thousand square miles
52 of intimate surfaces
53 occurs
54 the boundary layer
55 within whose special dimensions
56 time and energy
57 war for supremacy—
58 with wisdom
59 as match maker referee and judge.
60 And their battle
61 is vastly more vital
62 at this particular stage of the game
63 of shoot-the-works
64 than that simultaneously occurring within the dimensional space of several million square miles of most fertile farm land
65 of the earth’s own boundary layer.
66 For somewhere between
67 nature’s random dispersion
68 of the ninety-two chemical elements
69 as simply constituting
70 the panorama first viewed by Adam—as seemingly motionless except for himself, and through which now flies an airplane—somewhere between that original dispersion and the magnificent composure in orderly arrangement of those dynamic elements
71 not only in structure
72 and mechanics of the airplane
73 but also throughout
74 the innumerable processes and instruments involved in wresting the plane from the raw countryside, and thereafter maintaining its useful passages between chosen loci;
75 there must be, by mathematical law, a weakest link.
76 In converting one hundred tons of raw broad countryside into five tons
77 of scintillating airplane-in-flight, the machine-tool is specifically that link
78 in the industrial chain of events.
79 In the machine-tool operations the final pounds, ounces, and litres of twenty to one tonnage reduction of materials
80 exquisitely occurs.
81 Here are prepared
82 the mechanical surfaces
83 between which time and energy are masculated.
84 And here man and his wisdom must be the master.
85 Yet there are few of his members qualified for such mastery. And there creaks incisively today’s weakest link.
86 Where there is creaking there is dominant friction; and where friction is dominant there time is winning out over energy—cold death is strangling warm life.
87 And that weakest link creaks at its one end with the rusting substance of experienced artistry and at the other with the frustrated tendon of fatiguing knowledge required respectively to both operate and design for the machine tools with sufficient speed, flexibility and precision, efficiency and reliability, to keep pace with all the other functions of industrial survival.
88 As the routine industrial functions become ever more simple and of less labor as consolidated result of all the time harnessed machine-tool technology the pinch becomes more excruciating at the machine-tool operator’s station itself—a station and its baggage master too easily forgotten by man as he dozes by in his streamlined express of ever more carelessly limited stops.