28: Proper Application of Machinery

Machinery is properly used only when it is required to produce a large number of things of exactly the same kind. If only a few items are required, it would be an absurd waste of time and capital to construct a machine to produce them - the time required to produce them by a non-automated method is vastly more efficient.

Consider the example of a document. If hundreds or thousands of copies are wanted, then the printing press is a far more economical method. But if only one or two copies are needed, the cost of making plates and configuring a press is entirely wasteful. A scrivener with a pen would suffice, and would do the work in less time and at less cost. (EN: In the modern day, the scrivener is obsolete - but the point is still valid. A computer printer, a photocopier, and various printing presses are options that depend on how often copies are needed and in what quantity.)

Exceptions exist. For example, even if a small number of items are needed, which are delicate, small, and must be produced in a precisely accurate manner, then the work of human hands may not be sufficient to create them without a machine.

In other instances, speed may be of the essence. He gives the example of journals or newsletters that have a relatively small readership, but the timeliness requires use of machinery that is far more powerful and complicated than would seem to be necessary. It may be less expensive to use a process that produces two hundred copies per hour, but to produce ten thousand copies would require fifty hours - which is not acceptable if there is to be a daily publication. Given the time required to write and edit content and then configure the press, as well as to distribute the product, it may be necessary to employ a machine capable of printing ten thousand copies in four hours.

He goes on to speak of other printing operations, most notably the London Times, which produces a vast number of copies that must be distributed to newsstands in cities across the nation and even shipped abroad. The delivery of a daily edition requires a massive printing operation capable of producing hundreds of thousands of copies, all through the night, for delivery the following morning.

There's also a rather long and bizarre consideration of a mail delivery station that would use a system of "high pillars" along the roads between towns supporting a wire-and-pulley system that could be driven by steam engines to carry bags full of letters from one location to another at speeds that horses are incapable of achieving. (EN: It's a preposterous idea - but given that this book predates the invention of the telephone or telegraph, it is interesting to see how Babbage contrives a way to serve the same need is served by paper rather than electric signals.)

Babbage then spends some time marveling at steam power, which was quite an advancement in his time. There had been watermills and windmills, which limited manufacturing to locations where natural powers were readily available, but the use of steam made it possible to implement an engine to provide power in virtually any location. Moreover, steam was more powerful and could be more easily controlled than many of the organic systems of providing power.

In particular, the steam engine used in transportation provides not only swift carriage from one established town to another, but provides access to remote locations. He speaks of the dense forests which are "permitted to grow and perish without being of the least utility to man" because of their distance from populated areas, and describes some of the ingenious use of technology in logging camps in remote locations to furnish vast quantities of timber to civilized areas, processed by equally amazing mechanized sawmill operations, facilitating the rapid growth of populating and industry.