Quantum Living - Part Four - Machine Revolution

NEWTON’S MECHANICAL REVOLUTION

Newton’s ideas fuelled the industrial revolution and the machine age was given a great boost.

Newton’s mechanics added power and reach to humanity’s body, and so it was essentially an extension and enhancement of muscle. What the machines could not do very well was make decisions and choices. This had the effect of enslaving workers as choice-making cogs in a machine which could outwork them and outrun them.

Movies from the 1920s and 1930s illustrate this very well. Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’ which followed Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’. Both films portrayed the dehumanizing effect of mechanization on the front line worker.

The fabric mills of England and Scotland were prime examples, where laborers worked long hours in drab surroundings for low pay, while fortunes were made by those whose investment built the mill towns.

None of this was Newton’s fault, of course. He had uncovered a major part of Nature, and people rushed in to take advantage of their new knowledge of applied mechanics. The problem lay partly in trying to fit a new set of technologies into an old social system which was not designed for it. The other parts was simply the failure to strike a balance between investors, who felt their input was entirely responsible for the increased productivity, and workers, who felt they paid the higher price for it in terms of job quality.

The European guild system of manual skill apprenticeships was a fair fit for the pre-industrial age. While it led to a meager lifestyle based on low productivity, still it tended to allow some dignity to the individual, which tending most early machines did not. Unions arose as a counterbalance to the dreary and dehumanizing pace of early factories, not to mention the mines and mills that supplied them.

The assembly lines of America would have been no different, if Henry Ford had not angered the whole industry by choosing to pay workers in accordance with the higher productivity of his factories. He alone saw that the real profit in automobiles lay in every worker being able to buy one. America likely owes to Ford the birth of its middle class, which there seem to have been efforts since to downgrade.

Not only was the human arm and hand magnified by machine, but people could travel farther and faster than any legs could carry them. But there was a problem. Traveling is wasteful of energy and inefficient for the conduct of business. A better way soon emerged– communications.

Author and Professor Marshall McLuhan analysed the effect of the machine age upon human thinking, and made some predictions as to the corresponding effects of electronic communications on the thought processes of bith individual and society. Another wave of revolution was to come.