This has now all been altered. By means of elaborate machinery the whole of the work of cutting out every wheel and the making of every single part is done by tools moved independently of the will of the workman, whose only duty is to sit still and see the things made. He is, as it were, the slave of the machine, watching it and answering to its calls. Or shall we rather say that he is the machine’s employer and master? He has here a servant who never tires nor ever disobeys him. All the machine requires is that its cutting edges should be exactly true and sharp and microscopically perfect; then it will cut away and make wheel after wheel. It oils itself. It only wants the man to act as superintendent, and stop it if any cutting edge gets unduly worn. For this purpose he measures the work it is doing from time to time with a microscope to see that it is good and true and exact.
When all the parts have thus been made you have perhaps a hundred boxes, each with a thousand watch parts in it, each part exactly like its fellows. You take one wheel or bit from each box indiscriminately, and you then have the materials for a watch, screws, fittings, pins, and all. All you have now got to do is simply to screw them all together, like putting together a puzzle. Everything fits; there is no snipping or filing.
In such a watch if a bit gets broken you simply send for another bit of the same kind and fit it into its place.
Motor cars, bicycles, and many other machines are, or ought to be, made in this manner, so that if a driver at York breaks a part of the car he simply sends to London for another. It comes and fits into its place at once. But for this sort of plan you must do work true to much less than a thousandth of an inch, and, of course, no one must want to indulge his individual fancy as to the shape or appearance of the watch. The whole advantage consists in dead uniformity. But the cheapness is surprising. You can have a better watch now for 30_s._ than could have been got for £30 twenty years ago.
Artistic people are in the habit of condemning this uniformity as though it were inartistic and degrading. In truth, it is not degrading to get a machine to do what you want at the expense of as little labour as possible. You pay 30_s._ for the watch, but you have £28 10_s._ left to spend on pictures.