When the machine becomes the master: Window sash edition

Impressions

Let’s talk about machines. Not machines as metaphors, but grease-and-sawdust, rattle-and-hum, be-careful-or-you’ll-hurt-yourself machines that do actual physical work in the actual physical world. When, and how, does an actual machine take charge?

In a 2006 episode of The Woodwright’s Shop (“Old Woodworking Machines“), Roy Underhill visited a restored 19th-century factory that makes window sashes using belt-driven machinery. Roy built his reputation working with hand tools, but in the presence of all this chatter-roaring interconnected machinery he is as excited as any little boy. And as much as I too prefer working with hand tools, I have to admit it’s all just really cool. Everything runs off the same steam-driven belt! You can see all the working parts: the gears, the levers, the controls. There is no magic, no black box whose workings are obscure; the genius of the machines’ creators is right before your eyes, and accessible to the worker’s hands.

Until we come (at about 10:30 in the video) to a mortising machine that, rather than plunging its bit into the wood when the worker steps on a pedal, reciprocates. “Wait a minute, now,” Roy says. “You’re not having to force the chisel down here. It ‘s going automatically.” To this point each operation as been at the worker’s command. Roy himself owns a mortising machine that chops each time the worker steps on a treadle. Make no mistake: despite saving physical labor it still requires skill and care to use. (I’ve used it. Oh, wouldn’t I love to have one?) But here, the worker has to bring the wood to the machine and position it precisely on the machine’s schedule. “It isn’t going to wait for me!” Roy is told.

“I don’t like this,” Roy says. “You are having to be the servant to the machine!”

There—precisely there, I would say—is the dividing line. Reduce the relationship between worker and tool to its essence and this is what you have. Whether you bring your work to the machine or the machine to your work, if you do it on your own time and under your own control, you are the master. (Or, at least, you have the opportunity to develop mastery.) If you are following the machine’s patterns and obeying its designs, you are the servant. Your relationship to your work has fundamentally changed. You have lost, as they say, agency. In a few steps across the floor of a 19th-century factory, the machine took charge, and Roy pointed it out, and didn’t like it. Nor do I. Nor, dear reader, should you.

There in my old-fashioned shop the new machinery had almost forced its way in—the thin end of the wedge of scientific engineering. And from the first day the machines began running, the use of axes and adzes disappeared from the well-known place, the saws and saw-pit became obsolete. We forgot what chips were like.... "The Men," thought still my friends, as I fancied, became machine 'hands.'...

Of course wages are higher—many a workman to-day receives a larger income than I was ever able to get as "profit" when I was an employer. But no higher wage, no income, will buy for men that satisfaction which of old—until machinery made drudges of them—streamed into their muscles all day long from close contact with iron, timber, clay, wind and wave, horse-strength. It tingles up in the niceties of touch, sight, scent. The very ears unawares received it, as when the plane went singing over the wood, or the exact chisel went tapping in (under the mallet) to the hard ash with gentle sound. But these intimacies are over. Although they have so much more leisure men can now taste little solace in life, of the sort that skilled hand-work used to yield to them.... The products of work are, to be sure, as important as ever... But it remains true that in modern conditions work is nothing like so tolerable as it was say thirty years ago; partly because there is more hurry in it, but largely because machinery has separated employers from employed and has robbed the latter of the sustaining delights which materials used to afford them. Work is less and less pleasant to do—unless, perhaps, for the engineer or the electrician.

—George Sturt, The Wheelwright's Shop (1923), 201–202.

The thin edge of the wedge of scientific engineering