Part XXX
4 And aware of gain
5 in all branches of technical activities
6 the technologist learns constantly
7 to recheck for new preferential
8 tactical choices
9 in new design application
10 the family of engineering principles
11 of leverage (mechanical advantage)
12 stress balance,
13 kinetics (of solids, liquids, gases),
14 and thus through the behavior of elements in new structural arrangement
15 and dynamic balance,
16 under new gains
17 to attain ever improving solutions
18 of a major character
19 within broad categories,
20 such as that of ‘‘transportation.’’
21 Such a major tactical design change would be that of the airplane metamorphosed out of
22 the engineering elements of the auto.
23 Here the inventor develops a compound symphony of hundreds of thousands of individual inventions integrated to ultimately comprise the airplane.
24 With the result for instance that an airplane is evolved of the same weight, of approximately the same basic materials and same quantities thereof as those which comprise an automobile;
25 which moreover, with the same horsepower, will cover a hundred miles
26 in one-third the practical running time of the car
27 with one third net overall gasoline consumption.
28 One thousand such airplanes might readily be made from the scrap of one thousand automobiles with certain slight material addition,—by purchase offset by sales of the slight excesses in other types.
29 This in effect
30 is what the English had learned to do to advantage in scrapping an old ship which could no longer compete in efficiency and producing a new efficient one out of the same materials by expenditure of energy and brain function only while keeping people busy.
31 Thus does the increase in unseen energy/brain content to tangible-material content ratio constantly increase, represented by a commonwealth increase in potential performance of the mechanical extensions of man.
32 Finally all these ways of producing more with less have been compounded upon one another to cause rising curves of all sorts, not easily catalogued separately.
33 Thus, passenger miles per capita per annum by all modes of transport represents a smoothly ascending curve from 1850 to date, though the automobile curve rose in 1918 to take the curve lifting burden from railroads which latters’ own curve, thereafter declined;
34 and today the flying miles are starting to rise rapidly as though soon to lift the burden from earth borne traffic altogether.
35 The same compounding and succession of major roles is true
36 with the history of telephone and telegraph message frequencies per capita, a case history in communication now joined by radio.
37 Analagous trends are discovered also in progressively maximum diameters of microscopic magnification;
38 volume of astronomical space increasingly observable;
39 the college enrollment percentage of the U.S.A, youth population.
40 These are all composite dynamic measures of Industrialization’s social integration gains.
41 Statically speaking a business may go sour, but not dynamically.
42 Dynamically speaking
43 business is a service in a broad category in which the instruments are constantly improved;
44 that is, Wells Fargo is a member in good running order
45 of an express service
46 employing successively
47 the horse, coach, railroad, motor truck, airplanes.
48 Static business assumes each last stage
49 to be ultimate
50 and is always wrong.
51 There is a trend
52 of increasing rapidity
53 with which inventions mature
54 from initial stages
55 to full industrialization in the U.S.A.
56 It was a forty-two year lag
57 between the invention of Portland Cement and its designed combination with imbedded steel bars as reinforced concrete;
58 But that lag was in the gay nineties.
59 In contrast, the ‘‘plastics’’
60 had been invented but five years
61 before they were first structurally reinforced.
62 Thus each new industrial art
63 rises to its place
64 in the ascending all-service curve with increasingly vertical trajectory.