Chapter 19
Machinery Follows Longing and Carves a Trend Pattern
2In the development of mills and factories machines were first located in rear rooms, sheds and storehouses. The latter shelters were haphazardly adjusted to the requirements of the machine. Subsequently, however, the profitableness of the machines required the extension of their scientific efficiency to buildings specifically designed for the various mechanical processes.
3 The history of machines and factory designs has been an insideout radiant one, in sharp contrast to the evolution of man’s dwelling design. Man has designed his shelters for dwelling, worship and play from the outside-in, for it was first necessary to be shielded against the elements and marauder attack in the shortest time possible. This expediency overlooked and obscured the fact that the manmechanism is vastly superior, in exquisiteness and inclusiveness, to the industrial machines of man’s devising. Not understanding himself as physically a machine, man has failed to extend radiantly from his machine-self with the efficiency that he has devoted to his industrial mechanisms, viewing which he has had greater perspective, and relative to which more daring in prophesy of use-satisfaction.
4 In the space of a comparatively few years the American colonies traversed every step of the industrial development which, in Europe, had required 1500 years. Mind-over-matter demonstrated itself with exquisite acceleration in the new country, and man rapidly conquered TIME.
5 Whenever man’s industrial mechanism has moved westward, the new mechanical colonization has not repeated the earlier mechanical schedule of development of the locality from which it migrated, i.e. through successive crude mechanical stages. The new westward mechanical colonization has always imported the latest mechanical devices from the east. This is currently demonstrated in highly advanced form in the Orient where warring planes are not the old Jennies of the last World War, but the latest Douglases, et cetera. In other words, the westerly takes up where the easterly leaves off.
6 It was not long before the industrial productivity of the American colonies—despite manifold handicaps—attracted from the Old World an even greater extraction of longing-dominated people, though of lesser longing-domination than the first settlers. The new colonizers were agglomerated to a colonization that was already so scientifically pure that the efficiency of the hardy originals quickly communicated itself to the newcomers. The latter, inspired and emboldened to further longing-pioneering, pressed onward into the wilderness of the rich new continent and discovered more of its resources to abet the centrals of communal productivity.
7 Ocean transportation, of a diminutive character but adhering to more or less scheduled regularity, was established from the Old to the New World. Colonization increased as a geometrical progression.
8 Extractions from widely divergent Old World sources pooled in new unit communities in the New World. These pooled units resulted in the cross-breeding of the members of the longing type of various races until, by the advent of the World War approximately three hundred years later, there was in the United States a longing type embodying, in potentially numerically equally proportions, all white ‘‘nationalities.’’
9 Although colonists from the Old World still represented highly districtized units of populace extraction, they were indicative, nonetheless, of America’s potentially integrating a white race of the longing-domination type with rapidly diminishing specific nationalistic traits and traditions. This was made possible by the absence of hard-and-fast national boundaries to keep the Old World extractions in continued separation.
10 Not long after their establishment, the high productivity of the healthy American communes as well as their need, in terms of efficiency, of goods and mechanisms of the Old World’s industrial specializations, attracted the trader, and, consequently, his feudal capitalist. (Even up to 1917 cotton mill machinery was primarily imported from England and France and was superior to any obtainable in America.)
11 Now that the trans-Atlantic voyage was less fear-arousing, due to its having been successfully negotiated a number of times, the fear-dominated traders and their crafty capitalists dared to come to the new continent for the purpose of appraising its geography for the expedient location of trading centrals. Since their particular exploitation ability was in the field of maritime commerce, they chose locations that were most central and which simultaneously were consistent with the best anchorage facilities and best transportation means to and from the hinterland. They found New York particularly adaptable to their purpose, with Boston and Philadelphia next in importance.
12 The Dutch—the moneyed bankers whose specie was so essential to the feudal trader—colonized New York. Hence it is not surprising that New York is, in its town plan, eloquently articulate of an old materialistic civilization penetrating a new one. Manhattan Island necessarily called for a water-front street paralleling the curvature of the island. Back of this curving thorough-fare, however, the land was not laid out after the radiant plan adopted by the philosophic Pilgrims in the design of their communes.
13 Not only is the materialist’s flat earth static concept, with its resultant square designing, in marked contrast to the triangulated structures of nomads, as earlier mentioned, but it is the opposite of the radiant town-planning of the philosophic-minded. In the early plan of Boston, for instance, there was a communal radiant design. As Boston came under the dominance of trading exploiters and capitalists (the materialistic-minded) the radiant town plan was encompassed by sections of square blocks (Back Bay, et cetera). Detroit, also, was laid out on a radiant plan which broke down into smaller triangles, having been designed by engineers of the army. It was not long, however, before materialistic exploiters superimposed a square plan upon the original design, and so Detroit today, as a city, is the oddest of directional hodge-podges.
14 It may be noted in passing that highways, which are in effect mechanical extensions of the communal phantom captain, just as is the dynamo, were, by the indirection of the random element, brought into being as a militaristic instrument. As the great highways of Europe were laid down by the Romans entirely for army utilization, so, also, are the wide arterial avenues of Washington of military origin. They were designed in their great width—now so seemingly by-chance suitable for automobile traffic—to provide gun vistas that guns in the central part of the capital might have clear shooting at an approaching enemy. The untutored in this knowledge remark upon the sagacity of the planners of Washington in anticipating automobile traffic, which was not invented until the lapse of many years. When disillusioned in such matters, the majority exclaim, ‘‘Oh, everything has such a morbid causality!’’
15 Upon inspecting enough of man’s instruments, ‘‘inadvertently’’ provided by original causes seemingly at great variance with ultimate use, one often discovers a planning-intelligence or sagacity beyond any ever demonstrated by man with pre-professed objective. It would seem that true intelligence must ultimately have its way and that those who oppose it, or wait upon destruction or stitch-intime provocation, are ineffectual. Society may just as well set about doing intelligent town planning at the outset and, wherever possible, correct old town plans to conform to what intelligence alone may dictate. For instance, aeroplane depots should certainly be in a town’s center. It is ridiculous for Bermuda air passengers to spend only five hours flying to New York, and then ‘‘waste’’ an hour and a half or two hours traversing the few miles from Port Washington to Times Square, New York’s ‘‘town center.’’ Chicago has had a remarkable opportunity for airport placement in the area on which the World’s Fair was constructed, that is, on the midtown lake front, but is still vascillating about it (probably retarded by R.R.-emanating propaganda, as Chicago is America’s largest center of this obsoleting mechanism) while bemoaning ‘‘another depression’’ as they creep through fifteen miles of traffic between the present airport and the city’s center.
16 New York, today having revolted against the spoilage system, is to be commended upon having acquired its formerly ‘‘private’’ North Beach airport, which is central to all of greater New York, as a result of its ‘‘fiery’’ Mayor’s four year fight. Mayor La Guardia has literally brought about the construction of an airport out of a vast, mountainous dump-heap island in Flushing Bay. The latter has been spread out to fill in the bay and flats. Little did the dumpers dream of winged ships to land upon their reeking load. This area adjacent to the ‘‘Fair’’ grounds will constitute the largest airport in the world, with facilities not only for land planes but for sea planes in protected waters. Although obviously less in size as a project, this great airport plan has involved an engineering vision equal in brilliance to that which conceived our new age wonders, Grand Coulee, Boulder Dam and the Tennessee Valley operation where an entire regional revamp has taken place. Although ninety per cent of all American millionaires’ yachts have ‘‘steamed’’ out by this rubbish mountain island, Flushing’s ‘‘Fujiyama’’ at the mouth of Long Island Sound, none of their minds envisioned its speculative purchase for revamping into the world’s largest airport.
17 It goes without saying that an adequate airport could not have been inserted in the center of New York City by any conceivable manipulation of private enterprise and ‘‘condemnation,’’ or underwritten solely by any local or state authority. This project was of necessity locally subscribed to in direct proportion to the local benefit, although primarily federally accredited, since airports are subject to national prerogative. Many are international in scope of efficiency-required jurisdiction. The newest and most important must be intercontinental, or, better, world-considerate, and ergo of world-wide patronage requirement not only of establishment but maintenance.
18 Airports are within the category of de-personalized, de-localized, de-nationalized universality of dependability which included earlier the aquatic era’s ‘‘aids to navigation’’: buoys, charts, lighthouses, radio beacons, et cetera. In ‘‘aids to navigation,’’ idiosyncracies-of-nations and personal-pride-perversions have been progressively removed in equal measure to the removal of their inefficient and ofttimes fatal imposition upon ships themselves (the rococco crippled Armada), or upon ‘planes, or most recently upon radio circuits, since disaster makes the whole world kin (notwithstanding mystery maniacs such as faked the Amelia Earhart S.O.S.’s), because the ‘‘ole debil sea’’ is too historically vivid and dramatic in man’s commonweal to allow of such jeopardization. A sailor making a landfall in a fog and storm must not be confused by ‘‘tricolor’’-painted ‘‘can’’ buoys or ‘‘swastika’’ shaped ‘‘spars.’’ The time element in the fast-moving liquid estate allows of no measure for interpreting such ‘‘fool’’ish business. International law and maintenance of the ‘‘aids’’ has supplanted the kindly but fatally inadequate personal contributions of the good Abbots of Aberbrothoc and their errant ‘‘bells’’ on the ‘‘Inchcape Rock.’’ The time lag for navigational-aid recognition is exquisitely lessened in the gaseous estate’s aerial navigating, As machinery follows longing it certifies success to the commonweal integrating force.
19 San Francisco, too, is planning a World’s Fair for 1939 and has arranged that at the conclusion thereof the 400-acre exposition site will become the ‘‘Air Crossroads of the Pacific,’’ capitalizing surely on its strategic convenience of location by serving the greatest number and those in the greatest hurry: 10 minutes by bus or cab from the air terminal building to downtown Oakland or San Francisco.
20 The phantom captain is indeed extending his mechanisms of mutual interservice in a magnificent, hope-inspiring manner at the start of the integrating era.