e genius not less remarkable in this century than
the textile inventions of the eighteenth century.

"In textile manufacture it was improved machinery that first called
for a new motor; in metal manufacture it was the new motor which
rendered necessary improved machinery.... For all modern purposes the
old handicraft implements were clearly obsolete. The immediate result
of this requirement was the bringing to the front a number of
remarkable men, Brindley, Smeaton, Maudsley, Clements, Bramah,
Nasmyth, etc., to supply mechanism of a proportionate capacity and
nicety for the new motive-power to act upon and with, and the ultimate
result was the adoption of the modern factory system in the larger
tool-making and engineering workshops, as well as in metal
manufactories proper. Thus there gradually grew up," says Jevons, "a
system of machine-tool labour, the substitution of iron hands for
human hands, without which the execution of engines and machines in
their present perfection would be impossible."[81]

In the later era of machine development an accumulative importance is
attached to the improvements in the machine-making industries. The
great inventions associated with the names of Maudsley and Nasmyth,
the cheapening of steel by the Bessemer process, and the various steps
by which machines are substituted for hands in the making of
machinery, have indirect but rapid and important effects upon each and
every machine-industry engaged in producing commodities directly
adapted to human use. The economy of effort for industrial purposes
requires that a larger and larger proportion of inventive genius and
enterprise shall be directed to an interminable displacement of
handicraft by machinery in the construction of machinery, and a
smaller proportion to the relatively unimportant work of perfecting
manufacturing machinery in the detailed processes of each manufacture
engaged in the direct satisfaction of some human want.

A general survey of the growth of new industrial methods in the
textile and iron industries marks out three periods of abnormal
activity in the evolution of modern industry. The first is 1780 to
1795, when the fruits of early inventions are ripened by the effective
application of steam to the machine-industries. The second is 1830 to
1845, when industry, reviving after the European strife, utilised more
widely the new inventions, and expanded under the new stimulus of
steam locomotion. The third is 1856 t