s of industry--and of
science as well, as I am about to prove--that all over the world we hear
complaint about the scarcity of precisely such men.

What is the meaning, in fact, of the outcry for technical education
which has been raised at one and the same time in England, in France, in
Germany, in the States, and in Russia, if it does not express a general
dissatisfaction with the present division into scientists, scientific
engineers, and workers? Listen to those who know industry, and you will
see that the substance of their complaint is this: "The worker whose
task has been specialized by the permanent division of labor has lost
the intellectual interest in his labor, and it is especially so in the
great industries: he has lost his inventive powers. Formerly, he
invented very much. Manual workers--not men of science nor trained
engineers--have invented, or brought to perfection, the prime motors and
all that mass of machinery which has revolutionized industry for the
last hundred years. But since the great factory has been enthroned, the
worker, depressed by the monotony of his work, invents no more. What can
a weaver invent who merely supervises four looms, without knowing
anything either about their complicated movements or how the machines
grew to be what they are? What can a man invent who is condemned for
life to bind together the ends of two threads with the greatest
celerity, and knows nothing beyond making a knot?

"At the outset of modern industry, three generations of workers _have_
invented; now they cease to do so. As to the inventions of the
engineers, specially trained for devising machines, they are either
devoid of genius or not practical enough. Those "nearly to nothings," of
which Sir Frederick Bramwell spoke once at Bath, are missing in their
inventions--those nothings which can be learned in the workshop only,
and which permitted a Murdoch and the Soho workers to make a practical
engine of Watt's schemes. None but he who knows the machine--not in its
drawings and models only, but in its breathing and throbbings--who
unconsciously thinks of it while standing by it, can really improve it.
Smeaton and Newcomen surely were excellent engineers; but in their
engines a boy had to open the steam valve at each stroke of the piston;
and it was one of those boys who once managed to connect the valve with
the remainder of the machine, so as to make it open automatically, while
he ran away to play with othe