3.The best and most expensive clothes are made by highly skilled and highly paid tailors, each of whom works right through first one garment and then another: while the cheapest and worst clothes are made for starvation wages by unskilled women who take the cloth to their own homes and do every part of the sewing themselves.But clothes of intermediate qualities are made in workshops or factories, in which the division and subdivisions of labour are carried as far as the size of the staff will permit;and this method is rapidly gaining ground at both ends at the expense of the rival method.Lord Lauderdale (Inquiry, p.282)quotes Xenophon's argument that the best work is done when each confines himself to one simple department, as when one man makes shoes for men, and another for women; or better when one man only sews shoes or garments, another cuts them out: the king's cooking is much better than anybody else's, because he has one cook who only boils, another who only roasts meat; one who only boils fish, another who only fries it: there is not one man to make all sorts of bread but a special man for special qualities.
4.One great inventor is rumoured to have spent ?00,000 on experiments relating to textile machinery, and his outlay is said to have been abundantly returned to him.Some of his inventions were of such a kind as can be made only by a man of genius; and however great the need, they must have waited till the right man was found for them.He charged not unreasonably ?000 as royalty for each of his combing machines; and a worsted manufacturer, being full of work, found it worth his while to buy an additional machine, and pay this extra charge for it, only six months before the expiry of the patent.But such cases are exceptional: as a rule, patented machines are not very dear.In some cases the economy of having them all produced at one place by special machinery has been so great that the patentee has found it to his advantage to sell them at a price lower than the old price of the inferior machines which they displaced: for that old price gave him so high a profit, that it was worth his while to lower the price still further in order to induce the use of the machines for new purposes and in new markets.In almost every trade many things are done by hand, though it is well known that they could easily be done by some adaptations of machines that are already in use in that or some other trade, and which are not made only because there would not as yet be enough employment for them to remunerate the trouble and expense of making them.
5.Smiles, Boulton and Watts, pp.170-1.
6.The system owes its origin in great measure to Sir Joseph Whitworth's standard gauges; but it has been worked out with most enterprise and thoroughness in America.Standardization is most helpful in regard to things which are to be built up with others into complex machines, buildings, bridges, etc.
7.The perfection which the machinery has already attained is shown by the fact that at the Inventions Exhibition held in London in 1885, the representative of an American watch factory took to pieces fifty watches before some English representatives of the older system of manufacture, and after throwing the different parts into different heaps, asked them to select for him one piece from each heap in succession; he then set these pieces up in one of the watch-cases and handed them back a watch in perfect order.
8."The type-founder was probably the first to secede from the concern; then printers delegated to others the making of presses;afterwards the ink and the rollers found separate and distinct manufacturers; and there arose a class of persons who, though belonging to other trades, made printing appliances a speciality, such as printers' smiths, printers' joiners and printers'
engineers" (Mr Southward in the Article on Typography in the Encyclopaedia Britannica).
