210 THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONSof higher wages, the mills still seemed a prison to the old-timers.
Where, then, did the early millowners find their labor force? Where else
but among those who could not say no? In England that meant chil
dren, often conscripted (bought) from the poorhouses, and women,
especially the young unmarrieds. On the Continent, the manufactur
ers were able to negotiate for convict labor and military personnel.
So was born what Karl Marx called "Modern Industry," fruit of a
marriage between machines and power; also between power (force and
energy) and power (political).
The Primacy of Observation:
What You See Is What There IsThe great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) lived and
worked before the invention of the telescope, but he was a keen
observer and he knew all the stars he could see in the sky. And these
were all there were supposed to be. One night in November 1572,
however, he saw something new in the heavens, a point of light in
the constellation Cassiopeia that should not have been there. This
troubled him, so he asked his servants whether they saw what he saw,
and they said yes, they did. For a moment he was satisfied, at least
regarding his power of sight; but then he began to worry that his
servants had merely wanted to reassure him and were reluctant or
afraid to contradict their master, for he knew himself to be a man of
pride and temper. (He had lost his nose in a duel as a youth and
wore a copper—some say silver—prosthesis.) So he went out into the
street and stopped some passing peasants and asked them the same
question. They had nothing to gain or lose by telling the truth, and
no one could be more matter-of-fact than a peasant. And they also
said they saw the light. And then Tycho knew that there were more
things in heaven than were dreamt of in his philosophy. He wrote up
his observations in a pamphlet, De nova Stella, published in
Copenhagen in 1573, a monument in the history of science.
A note of caution: Tycho, for all his show-me empiricism, sought
to find a middle way between Ptolemy and Copernicus by having the
sun, circled by the planets, revolve around the earth. It takes good
induction as well as good observation to do good science.