The Wreck of a World/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
At the period of which I write the Yellow Creek Works, Dakota, had long enjoyed the primary rank as a School of Engineering. Founded about the year 1910, with the advantage of unlimited capital, it had been from the first the aim of the intelligent directors to organize invention. The idea was itself perhaps the most pregnant invention ever devised, and requires some slight exposition here. Up to a late period in the last century the inventive talent of the world had been content to act like the literary and scientific talent of an earlier date in a wholly desultory fashion. An ingenious artificer or mechanic engaged in a factory was content to make any improvement that might suggest itself to him in the machinery under his hands, provided he could obtain his employer's sanction to risking some expenditure, and could see his way to gaining some recompense for himself. His genius, however, was little encouraged, and did not extend itself to matters outside his own domain. The celebrated Edison was the first to show what valuable results might be obtained by devoting that singular faculty which may be called adaptiveness to employ itself exclusively in invention. Thousands of valuable hints had been thrown out, hundreds of clever devices patented, which from one reason or another had never been brought to perfection. To examine the innate possibilities of these inventions, to bring the adaptive talent of the world to bear upon crude and incomplete designs, to combine A's ideas with B's, and adapt both to complete the valuable project bequeathed by C, and finally to concentrate the maximum of inventive ability in their own employment,—such was the grand device of the projector of the Yellow Creek Works. The result more than justified the design. Invention being reduced to a system, and the genius of one inventor no longer working in solitude, but assisting and supplying the deficiencies of every other, mechanical improvement advanced by leaps and bounds.
The speciality of the Yellow Creek Works, in which they were without rivals, was the invention and perfecting of automatic machines. The public had been considerably startled by the first proposal to run railway trains without driver or stoker on the locomotive, but the proposition was generally regarded as a mere piece of clever advertising until actually carried out in the summer of '40, when a train of six passenger cars was run with speed and safety on the automatic principle from Detroit to Chicago. By an ingenious, yet simple mechanism, the signals were connected with electric contact makers, which acting on the engine levers stopped and started the train with perfect precision. Astonished indeed was the world to find that automatism could act as well as the trained intelligence of skilled drivers, nay better, for all chance of accident arising from carelessness, colour-blindness, or fog, was at once eliminated. This successful result gave a vast impetus to the credit and energy of the Yellow Creek Works; and the demand for self-acting machinery was increased tenfold. To make their engines self-feeding, self-supplying, even self-repairing, was now the object of every engineer in the company's service. Such was the eager competition in the work that many a warning of the impending catastrophe passed unheeded by the eyes and ears of those who were recklessly preparing it.
Who, indeed, could have foreseen the issue? Looking back upon events our blindness appears as insane as that of the man who should rear on his farm a litter of tigers. Yet history teaches that in all ages men have been sadly deficient in the prophetic instinct, and blind to all signs of the calamities they are bringing on themselves. When the bolt has fallen from the (to them) clear sky, then indeed all is plain enough.
The warnings to which I allude were of the following nature. On one occasion—and then on another and another in quick succession—-it happened that a machine of some description, while fulfilling admirably the functions designed by its inventor, displayed powers or performed operations which that individual had certainly not contemplated. Thus, the newest class of locomotives were arranged to stop automatically whenever the signals were against them. But no provision has been made for a similar stoppage in presence of accidental obstructions. When therefore a railway train travelling at thirty-five miles in the hour, suddenly pulled up a few yards short of a fallen tree which blocked the line, it might reasonably have been supposed that some very singular development had taken place, quite transcending the confines of scientific engineering. Will it be believed, however, that though at first startled, yet after a few instances of a similar prescience on the part of their machines, the engineers were pleased to regard them as evidence of superior workmanship, and by shallow untenable arguments silence, though not convince, their own easily-satisfied minds and the credulous questionings of the public? But there are some subjects concerning which the truth is so disagreeable, nay, so terrible, that the world prefers to ignore or explain it away rather than face the reality, and this was a remarkable instance. So the inventing and perfecting of automatic machines went on as steadily if not as merrily as ever.
The deputy manager, Cornelius J. Hanap, who had the entire charge of the "loco" department, was a shrewd, hard-headed, middle-aged New Englander of the old Puritan stock, with all the valuable Puritan qualities except the Puritan creed. A hard worker himself, he suffered no idleness among his subordinates. To his admirable qualities as a business man he added that of an expert mechanician. Not an inventor on the grand scale, he was constantly able to point out the one detail needful to convert a crude and costly notion into a remunerative speculation. In temper he was neither amiable nor agreeable, but no one could have suggested a more admirable occupant of the post he held.
One morning,—it was on the 6th of April, 1948,—a young assistant fitter, lately joined, entered locomoshed No. 7 on some trifling errand, when he was horrified to find this hard-headed Yankee, this sober Puritan,—Mr. Hanap, in fact,—foaming at the mouth and raving with every symptom of acute mania or rabies. But it was not this sight, painful as it was, that caused the young man to drop his tools and rush shrieking from the building. What was the spectacle of terror that could in a moment deprive one strong man of his reason, and expel all the manhood from another? In this shed—No. 7—was contained the chef d'œuvre of the Yellow Creek Works. With the view of rendering its automatism complete the agency of steam had in this engine been supplemented by hydraulic pneumatic and electric appliances of every description. I am not engineer enough to explain, nor would my children care to hear, how these wonderful appliances performed their respective functions; how the supplies of water, coal, and oil were conveyed to the several parts of the machine at the precise time and quantity required, by what ingenious mechanism defective bolts were replaced, loose nuts tightened, choked tubes cleared, and furred boilers cleansed; all I can say is that all this apparatus and much more was there. After all this particular engine was but little superior to many in the sheds, though doubtless it did possess a completer equipment of subsidiary appliances than any previously designed.
It might indeed have been imagined that a country bred child, or a savage, upon seeing for the first time this monster of stell and brass in active operation would have been scared into supposing it to be the incarnation of the Evil One, or at best some deadly ogre or fury. But these men were neither children nor savages; the engine was their own handiwork, their pride; moreover, it was not even in motion. Whence then this panic terror that subdued both?
The deputy manager had been seen to unlock and enter the shed in his usual calm and business-like manner. Inside he saw the nearly finished engine, steaming gently (for her fires had been burning for the last nine months, and she had been subjected daily to tests of every sort, until perfect) and glorious in her paint and polish. Nothing alarming so far. But by her side was—yes, solid and palpable, though small—another engine never made by the hand of man!
He stood awhile gazing stupidly at the prodigy. For a time he seemed to be in a trance or nightmare. The thing was too monstrous to be real. But when the conviction of its reality had forced itself upon his brain, and the full meaning of that tremendous spectacle broke upon him, his horror-stricken reason gave way, and he was found as described, a raving madman.
The young mechanic who discovered him in this plight bore his incoherent story to the workshops, whence the men and boys streamed in twos and threes to be sickened by the sight so justly awful to all human instincts. Awful, for it portended a war between the marshalled forces of nature, the entrance of the Inorganic world into unnatural rivalry with the Organic, in which war or rivalry a vast advantage was to be on the side of the former, owing to the absence of affections and a nervous system. They argued not thus, these poor artizans, but they felt in their hearts an instinctive horror and apprehension founded in the deepest principles of their common humanity. At length the manager, who had been summoned to the spot, had poor Mr. Hanap removed, and double-locked the doors of the shed, and slowly the throng dispersed to their work. Little enough work was done during the remainder of that day, and the next morning when names were called some half-dozen defaulters were found, a thing never known in the Works since the great strike of 1928. For a week the Works went on, outwardly, much as usual, though without the zeal and enthusiasm which had hitherto animated every employé, until on the 13th it was whispered that another of the engines had been found with a little one at its side, and later in the day the same tale was told of a third. The general uneasiness now became a panic: the men marched in a body to the manager's office to ask for their wages and announce their departure, only to find that the manager and all his staff had already fled. By the evening there was not a soul left within five miles of the Yellow Creek Works, which that morning had boasted 1500 hands. Only the steaming fiery engines with their monstrous brood lent a ghastly animation to that desolate scene.