"MACHINES, MACHINES!"

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 23, 28 January 1928, Page 6 (Supplement)

"MACHINES, MACHINES!"

A VISION OF THE FUTURE. SOME CURIOUS INVENTIONS. THE MECHANICAL MAN. (By EDWARD ALDEN JEWELL.) Machines . . . machines . . . machines! This is the cry that, running like a leit motif through the modern world, echoes off along the highway of the future toward a goal that cannot bo other than imaginatively foreseen. To-morrow is inscrutable. Meanwhile, every day witnesses an increase in the multiplicity of tasks the machine can do and is asked to do that man maymore truly walk erect, the master, in a universe full of energy awaiting the bridle. Out of the age of the machine may arise incalculable benefits, if also it may seem an age that threatens to exact a price. It is startling to pause and reflect how far already we have gone toward turning the spun dreams of earlier romancers into facts of everyday. What the romancers often conceived as a mysterious power discovered by ages yet to come, the modern world has tamed, calling it electricity—not yet fully explored or utilised, but tamed. And by means of cunning mechanisms of many sorts wo are everywhere freeing men's hands from the bondage of labour; causing to straighten the backs that are bent in toil. Daily the machine grows in stature, in intricacy, in the variety of its services to a race that is learning to live by mind rather than by brawn. Recently, at the Westinghouso laboratories, a mechanical man was put through his paces, made to obey various orders with neatness and dispatch, I quietly and without argument. His name is Televox. And close upon his heels arrived another marvel—a so-called "thinking machine," the Integrator. Of the latter the least that can be said is that he is a sublimated adding machine. His task in life is not to turn the wheels of industry, hut to solve problems of advanced electrical theory— and never go wrong. He does not bother his head with simple arithnivtical problems familiar to the schoolboy, but rather with "curves and graphs, which represent for him the past, present and future of the things in which he deals"; with complicated differential equations in differential calculus. ' A Tide Predicting Machine. There is the Kelvin Tide Predicting Machine —which remembers as well as predicts. Should you want to know, for example, about the condition of the tides on the coast of China for any particular day in the year 1175/ say, this machine will give you the figures; with equal ease can it tell you about the tides in the year 2075. Dr. Dayton C. Miller of the Case School of Applied Sciences has invented an ingenious device by means of which he hopes to be able to predict solar variation—another case of stealing thunder in advance from time yet unborn.

Machines ... machines ... machines. Two and two into the Ark of the modern world they come. Monsters that almost of themselves turn out the product of a great factory; delicate Lilliputians that will bake you a potato in one minute, cook yon a steak in half a minute, fry you an egg in two seconds; telephones that will answer promptly • and efficiently when left alone in the house, giving such information as they have been instructed to give—and, discreetly, no more; competent self-operative copper washtubs that can set the calendar back converting the suburban housewife's Monday into a day of rest, while her husband in the I city (tius, at least, is in experimental prospect) dictates directly to an office typewriter. "Open Sesame" used to be a term belonging to magic: The masters of a machine age are robbing the fairy tale of its ancient glamour. Once it took a magician of considerable ability to lure obedience frMB things inanimate. Now, by means of control"—a system recently reported from England— machinery can be arrested, in case of accident or other emergency; railroad trains, it is announced, can be governed by the staccato of an operator who, standing before a microphone, orders: "Ahead!" or "Stop!" or "Back!" Music of tbe Brain. "Meanwhile, Professor Cazzamali in Milan fits an apparatus upon a man's head and, with the aid of headphones fitted to his own ears, listens to the mysterious music of brain waves —a possible forerunner of radio thought communication. We see. in the machine a benign if awesome benefactor, capable of delivering man from the economic treadmill and of wiping the sweat of toil from his brow. It is liberation, an effective extension of control, we vision. A future of this sort was recently outlined in Italy by Signor Azari, secretary of the curious "Futurist Movement."

The machine, he said, is destined "to redeem humanity from slavery of manual labour and definitely to eliminate poverty and all traces of class struggle." He foresaw tbe human race of the future as completely served by "generations of machines"; people free to indulge in "esthetic pleasures and intellectual labours." The machines, instead of being tended by a vast, submerged army of men, will be "commanded without effort by a few privileged persons." But Signor Azari's picture of the future, if novel, is also, in some respects, a little terrifying. Ho prophesies with equanimity and even an enthusiastic blitheness, that "the onward march of progress aiid civilisation will have swept all the lower forms of animal off the face of the earth." Our food, he says, "will have to bo mainly synthetic and artificial-machine-inadc. the cities of the future will contain no useless garbage of trees and flowers or loathsome promiscuity of animals, but geometrical buildings in glass and armed cement. Above all, there w iu machines, machines, machines!"