Part XVIII
4 The first big industrial scene on the new stage was played in a baby carriage factory in New England where Henry Ford discovered the prototype of his moving line,— or time design prototype for automobile production,—a processing flow design springing precisely from a vast water shed and unitary river system like the Mississippi; —compounded as design model with the chemical process and sequence principles demonstrated by the internal human mechanics, in reversed flow.
5 The logical outcome of this new industrial phase of bringing the work to the worker
6 (even when the work was larger than the worker) and having the latter use his mechanical extensions in the most facile way was multifold.
7 Ford’s time designing was eventually responsible for the ‘‘production’’ development of alloys, first in the mechanisms of producing machines, to make them last longer
8 and later in the end-products themselves
9 to simplify the producer’s
10 service responsibilties to users.
11 Alloys in turn were responsible for the abandonment of the warehouse in the production cycle.
12 For the alloyed metals
13 constantly changed by improved formula
14 thus rendering any extensive advance storage and production of quasi ‘‘stock’’ materials uneconomic;—
15 sometimes fatal,—
16 therefore the moving line’s
17 source freshets
18 reached clear back
19 to the mines and the fields
20 of all comers of the globe.
21 This ‘‘timing’’ arrangement reaching clear back to the soil in turn was responsible for production and worker decentralization. The workers had to get to the sources and to the smaller fabrication factories, of decentralized sub-units manufacture, and subassembly shops.
22 And the general overall assembly lines themselves tended to detour around time wasting and uncertain city concentrations to insure the synchronized movement of such world encompassing moving lines as those logically resulting from Ford’s new principle.
23 The latter attained a dynamic stage wherein his constantly moving inventory worth multiple millions of dollars covered the face of the earth, pausing only in visible piles of finished parts for an hour’s run alongside the final assembly lines.
24 This decentralization
25 and the measure of its speed of realization was also interactively bound up with the end-product,—the automobile,
26 and with the automobile’s combined worker-producer-consumer mechanical extension rolls whose respective mechanical extensions progressively tit for tat evoked, provoked and were dependent upon, yet made possible road building.
27 As public function
28 this ‘‘high road’’ extension
29 of U.S.A, man
30 was readily financed
31 by its easily collectable gas tax
32 as were his railroad and ‘‘high wire’’ extensions by toll, tax, and bond sale, (all out of man’s pocket) because man was so intent in extending himself
33 to the mechanical ability
34 to go sixty miles in one hour
35 with his family or his produce or his household effects, kangaroo like in his pouch.
36 The desire was not
37 just for the high speed going’s sake
38 but for speed as it effected
39 time limited distance
40 to and from work
41 (which latter is at once the most religious both rite and right of Industrialization),—and to a bettering life,—to better schools, —to sweeter air,—to quiet nights,—decentralized somewhat from early human overcrowding at necessary points of continental debarkation at least to semi-truck garden and flower fringed homes.
42 In the former basically agricultural world families could survive well enough on the fruits and labors of their own land and their own hands; and everyman and his family were jacks-of-all-trades and therefore highly independent of other individuals and their families, and the economic accounting system reflected the hard bitten you or me survival necessities of pioneers primarily engaged in lone combat with wild nature.
43 However in the newly developing industrial world survival was precisely dependent on specialization of productive and defensive effort
44 and concomitant progressively cooperative management of the unavoidable commonwealths inherent in the new phenomena.
45 And while the warring emotions of these superficially diametric forces
46 has caused many political ructions as the new system
47 came onto dominance over the old these ructions are but baby rash as proportioned to the violent impacts of the individual industrial commonwealths which mushrooming up all over the world map
48 were forced upon inevitable inter impact to integrate into larger unit commonwealths.
49 With the integrations the larger units in turn impacted and grappled with increased violence and each spread its organic roots, branches, fruit and seed further afield with the strangulation holds of giants primarily because
50 the you-or-me accounting system of agriculture had been carelessly adopted to instrument a system to whose cooperative necessity it was as a razor blade to a baby’s digestive ensemble.
51 For instance in early usurious transactions developed to integrate the two systems of survival merchants underwrote the hazards of export caravans and voyages with loans collateralized by herds of cattle (Pecus-pecuniary),—interest in the care of which produced for the lender increment in kinde.
52 But as the trades involving organic and inorganic materials processed and semi-processed goods became more complicated and the geographical distances and time lags increasingly greater various inorganic metallic moneys and then inorganic mechanical extensions were substituted for the original organic collaterals and though bearing no natural interest in fact wearing out and ever more rapidly obsoleting, interest was nevertheless by trade tradition required.
53 This interest requirement started a ‘‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’’ chain of events impossible of ultimate pay off and vastly aggravated by profit extraction by entrepreneurs and speculative share purchasers requiring division ad infinitum, to those who put up no capital to originally implement industrialization.
54 This unpayable debt imposition and aggravation waxed to insufferable international proportion when the U.S.A, took over the consolidated debt in 1919 where after being kicked around every which way settled into the U.S.A. National Debt or was progressively ‘‘forgiven’’ as inherently uncollectable, or was sold off as bond issues of unstable governments and subsequently written off by default.