9: Efficient Use of Materials

A great deal of waste is produced by human labor, which can be greatly reduced by the employment of machinery.

One example of this is the task of cutting planks from a of. A human worker, using hatchet and adze, requires considerable skill to produce a board of any length that is perfectly straight and uniform. This is very difficult and tedious work to produce a plank, and much more difficult to produce a veneer.

Much usable material is wasted because his first cut is imprecise and the board must be shaved down to a smooth and even surface. The simple use of the saw-mill that passes logs along a guide to a rotating blade cuts uniform planks with greater speed and accuracy than a human laborer with hand-tools, and much of the waste is eliminated.

He then speaks of the many operations in printing that have been aided my machines in the twenty years prior to the writing of this book. Spreading ink uniformly on a place, using neither too much nor too little; exerting the right amount of pressure to imprint the page; aligning the pages accurately on the press; cutting printed sheets uniformly; and many other operations are very labor-intensive and much ink and paper was wasted before the introduction of mechanical presses that automatically perform these functions.

(EN: As an aside, it's significant that printing was one of the eeliest industries to adopt industrialization, as the speed and reduced cost of disseminating knowledge was a significant factor in causing a sudden and widespread burst of activity.)

He also goes into a bit too much detail about the impact of small savings on large production runs. Efficiency was of little interest to the weaver who produced a few yards of cloth a day on a manual loon, as a fraction of a penny's worth of thread might be wasted. But a manufacturing operation that produces tens or hundreds of thousands of yards would find that a fraction of a penny per yard added to a considerable waste.