GAOL FOR THE INVENTOR.

Waikato Times, Volume 114, Issue 18986, 1 July 1933, Page 6

GAOL FOR THE INVENTOR.

Samuel Butler, if he still retains any interest in this planet, should be satisfied to see. how rapidly we are approaching the condition of “ Erewhon,” comments the Manchester Guardian. In that country, it will be remembered, the possession of machinery was a penal offence, and an inventor was liable to be sent to gaol for his had taste in trying to get ahead of his neighbours.

This is precisely the suggestion which was put forward at Buxton recently. Assembled glass manufacturers rose one by one to declare in conference their solemn conviction that the only solution for over-production was to put a closure on the inventive geniuses whose unnecessary cleverness was at the root of the trouble.

Machinery was now turning out 200 bottles a minute where human hands, could only make two bottles before. “There is no security,” remarked Sir Max Bonn sadly, “ against sabotage of the inventive mind.” But one security, it was pointed out, was to lock the inventor up or compel him to divert his attention to the study of politics or economics—fields in which, presumably, he could do harm to nobody.

In some ways the suggestion may sound attractive, No more science, no more schemes for reoganisation, no more appeals for “research in industry”; merely put all the inventors in gaol and everything in the industrial garden will be lovely. Yet somewhow, coming from members of a trade which has owed as much to inventive brains ns any other, there is perhaps some slight flavour of ingratitude about this attack.

One remembers the adage about dwellers in glass houses and stone-throwing; especially when the dwellers happen to be glass manufacturers they ought to make sure of their aim. Are our troubles all the inventors’ fault? Or have not the mistakes of politicians, the ills of an industrial system which nobody set out to invent, and the inability of manufacturers to relate their output and wage conditions to the needs of a rational world also something to do with it?