Ancient Inventions, Unions and Automation
Heron, the great inventor of Alexandria, described in detail what is thought to be the first working steam engine. He called it an aeolipile, or “wind ball”. His design was a sealed caldron of water was placed over a heat source. As the water boiled, steam rose into the pipes and into the hollow sphere. The steam escaped from two bent outlet tubes on the ball, resulting in rotation of the ball. The principle he used in his design is similar to that of today’s jet propulsion. Heron did not consider this invention being useful for everyday applications: he considered his aeolipile invention as a novelty, a remarkable toy.
http://www.smith.edu/hsc/museum/ancient_inventions/steamengine2.html
The Baghdad Battery is believed to be about 2000 years old (from the Parthian period, roughly 250 BCE to CE 250). The jar was found in Khujut Rabu just outside Baghdad and is composed of a clay jar with a stopper made of asphalt. Sticking through the asphalt is an iron rod surrounded by a copper cylinder. When filled with vinegar - or any other electrolytic solution - the jar produces about 1.1 volts.
There is no written record as to the exact function of the jar, but the best guess is that it was a type of battery. Scientists believe the batteries (if that is their correct function) were used to electroplate items such as putting a layer of one metal (gold) onto the surface of another (silver), a method still practiced in Iraq today.
http://www.smith.edu/hsc/museum/ancient_inventions/battery2.html
The steam engine was one of the machines that sparked the industrial revolution but not in ancient Alexandria. Electrical power ushered in a new age as well. But not in ancient Baghdad. There was no demand for labor saving devices in civilizations that ran on slave labor. Humans hate hard, back-breaking work but the wishes of slaves didn’t matter. The owners of slaves would find such devices an unnecessary additional expenses. A slave owner bought a slave and provided the minimum food and care necessary to keep him alive. A slave was bought to work, forced to work. That was what a slave was for. An owner was unlikely to buy a machine that made the life of a slave easier.
When a man worked for himself a machine that made his life easier would be a valuable item, worth buying or building. When a rich man had to pay for labor then he would be willing to invest in devices that reduced the number of laborers he had to pay. The more the rich man had to pay for labor, the more likely he would buy machines that would reduce his dependence on that labor.
The unions and capitalists engaged what seemed a dance to the death but which yielded great benefits for all of society. As unions forced wages up, capitalist found it profitable to rely on machines more and more, until today we have huge automated factories run by only a few people. The terrible jobs, the pick axe and shovel jobs, the back breaking labor jobs, when such jobs are unionized, when unions force wages up, then capitalists suddenly find it expedient to automate and the terrible jobs go away. The present immigration debate is about the wealthy importing cheap labor to do terrible jobs rather than automating those jobs and eliminating them. It’s about them not being capitalists and investing capital but just exploiting cheap labor from desperate people. It’s anti-capitalism.
Cheap labor is used cheaply. Cheap labor is used contemptuously. Expensive labor … well, capitalists hate high labor costs like death, their own. They will spend millions to automate rather than thousands to make jobs easier and thus the entire society benefits. Productivity is increased, wages rise, and, while employment in a single factory may fall, total employment does not. So, thanks to unions, left wing political movements and capitalist greed, automation increases and labor becomes less onerous. Now as immigration and offshore outsourcing increases, as unions are destroyed and as the cost of labor falls, so automation and progress slows or stops. The exploitation of cheap foreign or immigrant labor makes progress unnecessary while, in the past, increasing labor cost bettered people’s lives.
For example: There was a time in the American south when the slaves had been freed but fields were still planted, weeded and all cotton picked by hand. Then the owners of great factories of the north sent labor agents (more dangerous to southern plantation owners than commie agitators) to the south to recruit black workers to move north and work in their factories (in order to help break white unions). There was a great migration of labor, not all of it black, from the south. Fewer and fewer people were willing to pick cotton and they had to be paid more and more. Then mechanical cotton pickers appeared. They were horribly expensive but farmers bought them anyway because they had to if they wanted to raise cotton. The cost of hiring humans was greater than the cost of a mechanical cotton picker so the hard labor of field work disappeared.
In ancient time there was no such pressure to replace human labor with machines, not by the slave owners of the ancient world. So Heron’s machine remained a toy, no one used it to ease the burdens of human laborers.
It took unions and high wages to drag the world into the real industrial revolution.
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© Alllie 2006
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