(^304) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
The difficulty of finding good armorers no longer exists; they abound in
every machine shop and manufactory throughout the country. The skill of
the eye and the hand, acquired by practice alone, is no longer indispensable;
and if every operative were at once discharged from the Springfield ar
mory, their places could be supplied with competent hands within a week.^26
Small wonder that when the British, with all their industrial achieve
ments, belatedly (mid-nineteenth century) wanted to make good and
cheap muskets for military use, they sent their people to the United
States to study American arsenal methods.^27
That did not mean that the British simply junked old ways. Know
ing is not doing, and Europeans in general found it harder than Amer
icans to accept the ruthless logic of productivity. Take the doctrine of
sunk costs, which says that spent money is spent, obsolete is obsolete;
that just because machines will work is no reason to work them. This
kind of reasoning goes against the grain, but the open frontier (robber
baron) mentality accommodated it. The standard examples are An
drew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick (the big mean): when they de
cided to go over from Bessemer to open-hearth steel, they just
scrapped the old plant. But listen also to this account of a cotton mill
superintendent at the turn of the century:
The mule spinners are a tough crowd to deal with. A few years ago they
were giving trouble at this mill, so one Saturday afternoon, after they had
gone home, we started right in and smashed up a room-full of mules with
sledge hammers. When the men came back on Monday morning, they
were astonished to find that there was no work for them. That room is now
full of ring frames run by girls.^28
The "American system" set standards of productivity for the rest of
the industrial world. Each technology became a stepping stone to oth
ers. Clocks and guns prepared the way for watches and sewing ma
chines. Mowers and harvesters led to sowers (planters and drills),
reapers, binders, threshers, and eventually combines; bicycles, to au
tomobiles; cash registers, to typewriters and calculators. And machines
invented for one purpose slid easily to others: a sewing machine could
be used on leather and canvas as well as fabric, could make boots and
shoes and sails and tents as well as cloth garments.
This was a mechanic's wonderland, in agriculture as in industry. A
letterwriter to the Scientific American of July 1900 exulted: "Indeed
there is scarcely a thing done on the farm today in which patented ma-
nora
(Nora)
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