11: Copying

Babbage devote a chapter of providing intricate details of various manufacturing processes that are geared to making large numbers of copies of various products. Aside of the benefits of standardization mentioned in the previous chapter, there are greater economies for making vast quantities of identical products.

Consider the process of making copies of books longhand, as monasteries and convents did in medieval times. Even if there is painstaking effort to make copies perfect, the creation of each book takes a considerable amount of time. While a machine might have been used to facilitate the process, the cost of machinery is prohibitive when only a few copies are produced. Production on a mass scale enables the cost of equipment to be spread across thousands of copies.

Here he begins to go into detail about various copying processes. (EN: I am skipping much of the detail, as it's very tedious and of questionable value except as trivia because the processes have changed much since the author's time.)

He describes various printing methods: copperplate, steel engraving, pewter engraving, calico printing on cylinders, stenciling, printing from wooden blocks, moveable type, stereotype, embossing, gold lettering, oil cloth, printing on porcelain, lithographic printing, and register printing. He speaks of casting metal products of iron, bronze, porcelain, plaster, wax. Then of molding bricks, tiles, earthenware, china, glass, tortoise-shell, and other materials. Then of stamping, then punching, drawing wire and pipe, rolling iron, making pasta, turning on a lathe, etc.

(EN: IN the original work it is quite a long chapter as he describes each of these manufacturing processes in a paragraph or two of detail.)