Los Angeles herald. [microfilm reel] (Los Angeles [Calif.]) 1900-1911, 1909-03-06
INVENTOR WRITES OF
WONDERFUL INGENUITY
Tells About the Marvellous Machines
Designed to Replace Thousands
of Human Hands
BY j. S. zERBE


III mechanical eYolutions have been
devised by human ingenuity. We see
examples of this on every hand, and in
the human mind these wonders grow as
| each successive example is brought
forth. But how few really know the
real wonders of the inventions con-
ceived by man.
Some years ago an inventor devised a
machine which was the marvel of the
times. 1t was an apparatus for stick
ing pins on paper. 1t not only took the
paper from an endless web but it
crimped the paper, selected only the
perfect pins, aligned them perfectly
across the web. folded the paper, cut
off the sheet at regular intervals ana
packed them in boxes. This was, IN
deed. marvel But the wonderful per-
Torrance of this piece of mechanism,
as in all other automatic devices. con-
sisted not so much in the purely me-
chanical elements involved as in the
fact that man, in building this wonder.
had to rely on something beyond purely
natural forms to accomplish the result.
Prior to the invention of that ma
chine the eyes and the fingers per-
formed the work: the fingers being the
mechanical part, the eye the directing
agency. This latter function repre-
sented instinct or Intelligence. When
the inventor attempted to construct
mechanism to do this work he might
simulate the fingers, the mechanical
part: but where could he go to find a
counterpart of the intelligence which
directed the movement of the fingers?
Obviously he must substitute some
thing for this intelligence. He must do
mechanically what nature does in
stinctively. This is one of the wonders
of invention.
Machine VS.. Nature
The other equally wonderful thing Is
that man does not, and cannot, copy
natures forms to do what nature does.
He must make his own form, and actu-
ally compel the mechanism to do, me-
chanically, what nature does by intellt-
gence, or instinctively.
Let us see how the pin sticking ma
chine does this. Imagine a paper con-
tanning thousands of pins, good, bad
and Indifferent, as they come from the
pin making machine. These are fed to
an inclined table on which are shallow
longitudinal grooves, and as this table
has a slight vibratory motion the pins
arrange themselves in these grooves so
that when they reach the lower end
of the table the grooves terminate in
slots lust wide enough to take the body
OF the pin itself. The result is that the
pin drops through the slot and hangs
by it's head. If it has no head 1t drops
through and is eliminated. The crooked
pin proceeds on its course and is dis
charged at the tail of the machine. The
good pins are now arranged in rows
like soldiers. and are ready for the final
operation, that is to separate them,
which is done by a bar, or bars, that
have V-shaped projections, and so ar
ranged that when each tooth engages
with a pin it will hold the same by a
simple ciamping device, and when the
paper web is presented to this line of
pins and the latter are forced through
the paper the line of teeth are ready
for the next operation.
Has No Limitations
Now ir this entire machine there is
not one single point of similarity be-
tween the finger which nature has pro-
vided and the mechanism made by the
inventor. The eye would naturally d.
rect the finger to reject headless pin,
but the slot does this automatically.
The eye would tell the finger to throw
away bent pin, but the groove in the
machine refused to present such pin
to the slot.
But this is not ALL One human ma
chine has a limit to its performance.
The machine made by man has no such
limit Originally one human pin stick
er, after years of experience, could stick
5000 pins a day. The first purely me-
chanical sticker had capacity of &c.
COO pins a day, and now such machines
are turned out which can stick. wrap,
count and box SOC, 900 a day. or over 1900
times more than natures most perfect
machine.
But there is another most surprising
thing in all these wonderful develop
ments and that is the marvellous per-
lection of purely mechanical products.
| Take for instance the shoe. The hand
made product turned out by the ex-
pert sewer was long regarded as the
best product. 1t is even now so re-
garded by many. The hand-sewed shoe
seems, in the minds of many, to typify
superior product. 1t will be a shock
to all such to be told that the machine
made shoe, the shoe sewn by machin-
cry is infinitely better than any sewn
by hand. The trials made by the French
government. and confirmed by our own.
have forever set at rest the theory that
handmade shoes are better than ma
chine-made.
Here are the reasons: In the ope-
ration of sewing by hand the awl for
| making the hole is not as large as the
combined cross sections of the threads
which pass each other when threaded
| through, hence these threads are conf
pressed within the hole when drawn
! through. In the machine made product
1
tually larger than the threads which
fill It. The advocate of the handmade,
therefore, argued that by virtue of this
tightly fitting thread there was more
compactness to the superposed soles,
and such seemed to be the case.
Machine Shoes the Best
But experience proved otherwise. The
| French government made elaborate
tests extending through fourteen
months with the two products, and II
was found that for wearing qualities,
for capacity to hold it's shape and to
prevent leakage, the machine product
was in every way superior. 1t also APP
pears in the official report submitted
| that the exceeding regularity of the
stitches in the machine made shoe was
an important factor. If two holes
should by accident be placed too. close
together "a thing not uncommon in the
d-made). and the threads tightly
compressed as stated, this contracted
space would represent a weakness, and
an abnormal strain would rupture the
fibers between the slightly separated
holes. Thus again does it show how
the machine made element in the per-
lection of it's operation is superior to
any human machine.