CHAPTER 10

TOOLS AND MACHINES IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE

What tools are.

A tool may be defined as a device employed to facilitate the application of mechanical power. The simplest tools are unshaped natural objects used in connection with the release of muscular force, as when a stone is picked up and hurled at an attacking dog, or a stick is thrust out to keep one from falling. The object is here utilized as it exists in the order of nature, no attempt being made to work it over into a more effective form. Animals are often found using objects to whose construction they have contributed nothing, as when a monkey beats his companion with a club, or climbs onto a box to reach a banana suspended from the ceiling of his cage. In this elementary sense few objects escape being tools.

But there are also manufactured tools, or natural objects made over so as to better adapt them for mechanical utilization. Köhler has shown that monkeys are capable of making simple tools, for they will fit two sticks together so as to form a longer stick with which to reach a banana lying outside their cage, or they will make a ladder by piling packing boxes on one another until they are able to reach fruit which has been suspended high above their heads. Such acts, as well as many others described by Köhler in his work entitled "The Mentality of Apes," require no little intelligence, and cannot fail to increase one's respect for these near-humans.1 Whether other animals actually manufacture tools is not so clearly established, except possibly in the case of the social insects, where some tool-making may occur.

One of the most important sources for an understanding of prehistoric man is the large array of tools, such as chipped flints, smoothed stones, and shaped bones, which have been found in and about the places where he lived. These exist in many different styles and forms, and of widely varying workmanship. Considerable ingenuity, skill, knowledge, and muscular control were required to chip out an arrow head or a moderately good cutting edge with the limited facilities available to primitive man. The manufacture of nearly all even of these early artifacts was only

possible through the use of yet other tools. Thus in making an arrow head, at least two implements might be required-a stone with which to deal the blow, and a bluntly pointed object with which to localize its effects; and the force must be applied at just the right angle and with just the right strength, or the job will be spoiled.

Tools as foci of human activity.

Tools furnish excellent objective examples of the interaction and interdependence of individuals, the physical environment, and the social heritage. Every manufactured tool concretely embodies a social heritage of accumulated knowledge, requires a technique of use with its accompanying qualities of personal skill, and implies or indicates a body of materials upon which it is to be used. It will be best to discuss each of these topics in turn.

(1) Tools and the social heritage. No tool is ever more than an improvement or adaptation of an already existing device. This is beautifully shown in the case of Watt's first noteworthy advance on the steam engine as developed by Newcomen. In Newcomen's engine the steam was condensed within the piston cylinder by a jet of cold water after it had pushed the piston up to the other end. This device, which Newcomen had hit upon by the accidental leakage of water through a piston being run under other conditions,2 required that the piston cylinder be alternately heated and cooled-heated, that is to say, by the steam and cooled by the jet of water-and was therefore inefficient. Watt after considerable thought decided to provide an extra chamber for the condensation of the steam, so that it might expand in the cylinder and thus drive the piston, and then be removed elsewhere to be condensed. As he himself tells it,3

I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon. I had entered the Green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street and had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking upon the engine at the time and had gone so far as the herd's house when the idea came into my mind that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder. I had not walked further than the golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.

Watt's greatest invention, which consisted in the idea of introducing the steam alternately on each side of the piston, instead

of on one side only, as in all former engines, while undoubtedly a stroke of genius, nevertheless in principle involved only a minor alteration of the existing mechanism.

Striking examples of the dependence of new items upon already existing cultural elements can be seen in the early locomotive and coach and the automobile, which were modeled in their first phases upon the stage-coach and the horse-drawn carriage. Only with the passing of time did they develop forms more appropriate to their own particular functions. The existing locomotive, passenger-coach, or automobile is of course a great congeries of hundreds of inventions, besides being dependent on hundreds of other improvements which have by now been superseded. In 1857 it was said that the spinning machinery then in use was a compound of about 800 inventions, and most if not all of these inventions were no doubt dependent on many other improvements and adaptations.*

(2) Tools and the individual. At the same time the tool is an evidence of the continuous efficacy of individual action in the social life, for not only are practically all tools individual creations, but the mere use of a tool requires acquaintance with and some degree of mastery of a specific technique. This technique is itself no doubt almost entirely socially inherited, and seldom could be reproduced de novo by the tool-user were it to be lost, but he must be competent to apply it with at least a minimum degree of effectiveness to the peculiarities of the concrete task. The situation alters seriously with the passing of the hand tool in favor of the machine, as we shall see, but so long as the workman is called upon to use tools his work requires from him coordinations of mind and of muscle, and offers felt resistances to the working out of his purposes, that cannot but be developmental.

(3) Tools and the materials on which they are used. Every tool while being used presupposes and requires a fairly intimate contact with certain natural materials. It is generally not difficult to know when these materials have been spoiled, and good workmanship also can usually be detected, so that fairly objective standards by which to judge one's work are continuously available. And these standards are to some degree (though by no means absolutely) impersonal, in that one's output can to a point be compared with the possibilities of the situation, rather than with entirely extrinsic considerations. For good work, the proper instrument must be applied to the right materials in the most effective manner; and it is usually possible to determine the presence of bad work by an examination either of the product or of the instrument that was used.

The effect of tools upon thinking.

This leads naturally to a discussion of the effect of the tool upon the life of thought. A tool embodies and objectifies a relation, for every tool indicates a means, or a series of means, whereby some natural object can be shaped to some human end. It establishes a concrete relation between the tool-user, the tool, and his materials, and a relation, too, upon which attention must be focussed during the activity of use. Here I am, for example, with a knife and a piece of wood and a few minutes to spend whittling. When the knife is applied to the wood a large number of different things, some of them in the knife, some in the wood, and some in me, are brought together into an extremely intimate relationship and jointly act to determine the nature of the resultant cut. What of the blade—is it sharp, long, thin, light, well-socketed in the handle? What of the wood-is it soft, closegrained, free from knots and from a tendency to split? What of me-how do I wield a knife, what notions run through my mind as I sit here whittling? A synthesis of all these factors, as well as of many more too numerous to mention, is achieved in the different cuts made in the stick right before my eyes.

Relations are extremely important in our lives, for thought very largely subsists on them, and imagination seems to be the power of viewing objects in new and significant connections. Now, while the use of an object as a tool within the strict meaning of our definition (“ a device employed to facilitate the application of mechanical power") is certainly not necessary in every instance where relations are perceived, the pattern of the toolsituation is certainly characteristic of many thought-situations. Just as a heavy stone may be shifted through the use of a handy stick and a smaller stone as a lever and fulcrum, so an intellectual problem may be solved through the mediation of an idea which relates it to other things already known and under control. The user of tools may be expected to apply to his mental constructs the same considerations of objectivity and relevance he is in the habit of applying to his physical constructs. He will not be content (to make use of a vivid phrase of the engineers) to depend upon sky-hooks in his thinking. The man who has had little experience with the use of tools, on the other hand, is likely to find his thinking somewhat naïve and lacking in balance. Toolusing therefore affects thinking in at least two directions-by making it vividly real at the points where the use of tools (or their ideational equivalents) has laid objective relations open to our eyes, and by making it cautious and reserved elsewhere.

It is enlightening to look at thinking itself from the instru

mental point of view-with respect, that is to say, to the functions it performs in our lives. Thinking may be conceived of as one of the ways of maintaining organic equilibrium. From this standpoint our ideas really function in two different though related contexts, for on the one hand they are connected with items in the environment, while on the other they are associated with a complex of bodily processes. Neither the external nor the internal reference of our thoughts need have anything to do with the implications one might legitimately draw from them according to the canons of pure logic. Just as the remark, "Isn't it a pleasant day?" need have no meteorological reference, and indeed may have no significance whatever when taken out of its context, but may merely be part of a conventional interchange of amenities, or perhaps a bid for a conversation on the part of a lonely person; so the real import of our thinking is not logical, but is to be sought in its external context-in the natural situation in which it arose and in its internal context-in the subjective conditions which gave it birth. We cannot hope to understand a man's idea of God or of anything else if we approach it in abstraction from its historical and its biographical connections. This is why all strange faiths are likely to seem so artificial; they draw their life blood from another culture stream than our own, and they feed different natures, so it is not surprising if they often appear unintelligible. For an idea to be intelligible, it must stand in some familiar context, be relevant to other items in experience, perform some function either in the external economy of things and persons or in the internal economy of feelings and thoughts. An idea is an idea by virtue of its being in a functional relationship to other things, just as a tool is a tool because it facilitates the application of mechanical power. In a world totally given over to the mending of watches, a sledge hammer would not be a tool, and there would be no ideas except those connected with the art of repairing watches.

Tools as liberators of human energy.

The tools which human beings have invented very greatly extend man's power over nature. Some of his organs, as for instance the hand, are themselves quasi-tools, but by invention he has to all intents and purposes gained additional organs, while at the same time he has increased the dexterity of his natural parts by submitting them to the discipline of tools. The effects. of this training can be seen by comparing the adult's hand with the baby's, or with his own foot. In the beginning the baby can do but few things with his hands-he can grasp a small bar and