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Twentieth Century Inventions: A Forecast

<h2>CHAPTER XIV.</h2> <h3>INVENTION AND COLLECTIVISM.</h3> The ownership of machinery and of all the varied appliances in the evolution of which inventive genius is exercised is a matter which, strictly speaking, does not belong to the domain of this work. Nevertheless, in endeavouring to forecast the progress of invention during the twentieth century, it is necessary to take count of the risks involved in the inauguration of any public and social economical systems which might tend to stifle freedom of thought and to discourage the efforts of those who have suggestions of industrial improvements to make. It is plain that those economic forces which prevent the inventor from having his ideas tested must to that extent retard the progress of industrial improvement. Thousands of men, who imagine that they possess the inventive talent in a highly developed degree, are either crack-brained enthusiasts or else utterly unpractical men whose services would never be worth anything at all in the work of attacking difficult mechanical problems. It is in the task of discriminating between this class and the true inventors that many industrial organizers fail. Any economic system which offers inducements to the directors of industrial enterprises to shirk the onerous, and at times very irksome, duty of sifting out the good from the bad must stand condemned not only on account of its wastefulness, but by reason of its baneful effects in the discouragement of inventive genius. Considerations of this kind lead to the conclusion that during the twentieth century the spread of collectivist or socialistic ideas, and the adoption of methods of State and municipal control of production and transport may have an important bearing upon the progress of civilisation through the adoption of new inventions. Many thinking men and women of the present generation are inclined to believe the twentieth century invention par excellence will be the bringing of all the machinery of production, transport and exchange under the official control of persons appointed by the State or by the municipality, and therefore amenable to the vote of the people. Projects of collectivism are in the air, and high hopes are entertained that the twentieth century will be far more distinctively marked by the revolution which it will witness in the social and industrial organisation of the people than in the improvements effected in the mechanical and other means for extending man's powers over natural forces. The average official naturally wishes to retain his billet. That is the main motive which governs nearly all his official acts; and in the treatment which he usually accords to the inventor he shows this anxiety perhaps more clearly than in any other class of the actions of his administration. He wants to make no mistakes, but whether he ever scores a distinct and decided success is comparatively a matter of indifference to him. So long as he does not give a handle to his enemies to be used against him, he is fairly contented to go on from year to year in a humdrum style. Even a man of fine feeling and progressive ideas soon experiences the numbing effects of the routine life after he has been a few years in office. He knows that he will be judged rather on the negative than on the positive principle, that is to say, for the things which it is accounted he ought not to have done rather than for the more enterprising good things which it is admitted he may have done. Now any one who undertakes to encourage invention must necessarily make mistakes. He may indeed know that one case of brilliant success will make up for half a dozen comparative failures; but he reckons that at any rate the blanks in the chances which he is taking will numerically exceed the prizes. An official, however, will not dare to draw blanks. Better for him to draw nothing at all. He must therefore turn his back upon the inventor and approve of nothing which has not been shown to be a great success elsewhere. This means that the socialised and municipalised enterprises must always lag behind those depending upon private effort; and the country which imposes disabilities on the latter must, for a time at least, lose its lead in the industrial race. This is what happened to England, as contrasted with the United States, when, under the influence of enthusiasm for future municipalisation, the British Legislature laid heavy penalties upon those who should venture to instal electric trams in the United Kingdom. The American manufacturers and tramway companies, in their keen competition with one another and perfect freedom to compete on even terms with horse traction, soon took the lead in all matters pertaining to electric traction, and the British public, at the close of the nineteenth century, have had to witness the humiliating spectacle of their own public authorities being forced to import electrical apparatus, and even steam-engines applicable to dynamos used for tramway purposes, from the other side of the Atlantic! The lesson thus enforced will not in the end be missed, although it may require a considerable time to be fully understood. Officialism is a foe to inventive progress; and whether it exists under a regime of collectivism or under one of autocracy, it must paralyse industrial enterprise to that extent, thus rendering the country which has adopted it liable to be outstripped by its competitors. The true friend of inventive progress is generally the rising competitor in a busy hive of industry where the difficulties of securing a profitable footing are very considerable. Such a man is ever on the watch for an opportunity to gain some leverage by which he may raise himself to a level with older-established or richer competitors. If he be a good employer his workmen enter into the spirit of the competition, feeling that promotion will follow on any services they may render. They may perhaps possess the inventive talent themselves, or they may do even greater services by recognising it in others and co-operating in their work. It is thus that successful inventions are usually started on their useful careers. It is therefore upon private enterprise that the principal onus of advancing the inventions which will contribute to the progress of the human race in the twentieth century must necessarily fall. The type of man who will cheerfully work pro bono publico, with just as much ardour as he would exhibit when labouring to advance his own interests, may already be found here and there in civilised communities at existing stages of development; but it is not sufficiently numerous to enable the world to dispense with the powerful stimulus of competition. Just as a superior type of machinery can be elaborated during the course of a single century, there is no doubt that—mainly through the use of improved appliances for lessening the amount of brute force which man needs to exert in his daily avocations—the nervous organisations of the men and women constituting the rank and file during the latter part of the twentieth century will be immensely improved in sensitiveness. A corresponding advance will then take place in the capacity for collectivism. But a human being of the high class demanded for the carrying out of any scheme of State socialism must be bred by a slow improvement during successive generations. A hundred years do not constitute a long period of time in the process of the organic evolution of the human race, and, as Tennyson declared, We are far from the noon of man— There is time for the race to grow. Yet the public advantages of collectivist activities in certain particular directions cannot for a moment be denied. Much waste and heavy loss are entailed by the duplication of works of general utility by rival owners, each of them, perhaps, only half utilising the full capacities of his machinery or of the other plant upon which capital has been expended. Moreover, as soon as companies have become so large that their managers and other officials are brought into no closer personal relations with the shareholders than the town clerks, engineers, and surveyors of cities, and the departmental heads of State bureaus are associated with the voters and ratepayers, the systems of private and of collective ownership begin to stand much more nearly on a par as regards the non-encouragement which they offer to inventiveness. One of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century, therefore, will be the adoption of a via media which will admit of the progressiveness of private ownership in promoting industrial inventions, combined with the political progressiveness of collectivism. One direction in which an important factor assisting in the solution of this problem is to be expected is in the removal of the causes which tend to make public officials so timid and unprogressive. So long as a mere temporary outcry about the apparent non-success of some adopted improvement—whose real value perhaps cannot be proved unless by the exercise of patience—may result in the dismissal or in the disrating of the official who has recommended it, just so long will all those who are called upon to act as guides to public enterprises be compelled to stick to the most conservative lines in the exercise of their duties. More assurance of permanence in positions of public administration is needed. The man upon whose shoulders rests the responsibility of adopting, or of condemning, new proposals brought before him, ostensibly in the interests of the public welfare, ought to be regarded as being called upon to carry out quasi-judicial functions; and his tenure of office, and his claim to a pension after a busy career, ought not to depend upon the chances of the evanescent politics of the day. If a man has proved, by his close and successful application to the study of his profession—as evinced in the tests which he has passed as a youth and during his subsequent career in subordinate positions—that he is really a lover of hard work, and imbued with conscientious devotion to duty, he may generally be trusted, when he has attained to a position of superintendence, to do his utmost in the interests of the public whom he serves. This is the theory upon which the appointment of a judge in almost any English-speaking community is understood to be made; and, although failures in its application may occur now and then, there is no doubt whatever that on the average of cases it works out well in practice. If private manufacturers, whose success in life depends upon their appreciation of talent and inventiveness, could be assured that in dealing with public officials they would be brought into contact with men of the standing indicated, instead of being confronted so frequently with the demand for commissions and other kinds of solatium on account of the risks undertaken in recommending anything new, they would soon largely modify their distrust of what is known as collectivism. It is the duty of the public whose servant an official is, rather than of the private manufacturer, to insure him against the danger of losing his position on account of any possible mistake in the exercise of his judgment. In short, the day is not far distant when the men upon whom devolves the responsibility of examining into, and reporting upon, the claims of those who profess to have made important industrial improvements will be looked upon as exercising judicial functions of the very highest type. When the important reforms arising from this recognition have been introduced, the forces of collectivism will cease to range themselves on the side of stolid conservatism in industry, as they undoubtedly have done in the nineteenth century even while they inconsistently professed to advance the cause of progress politically. The inventor, who in the early part of the nineteenth century was generally denounced as a public enemy, will, in the latter part of the twentieth century, be hailed as a benefactor to the community, because he will be judged by the ultimate, rather than by the immediate, effects of his work, and because it will be the duty of the public authorities to see to it that the dislocation of one industry incidental the promotion of another by any invention does not, on the whole, operate to throw people out of employment, but, on the contrary, gives more constant work and better wages to all. But the slow progress of the fundamental traits of human nature will retard the attainment of this goal. The world has a long distance to travel in the uphill road of industrial and social improvement before it can succeed in obtaining a really true view of the part fulfilled by inventive genius in contributing to human happiness. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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