John Desmond Bernal Quotes

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time.

Instruments, machines, looms will increasingly supplement the strength and skill of men; will augment at the same time the perfection and the precision of manufactures by lessening both the time and the labor needed to produce them

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production.

When water power then steam power were harnessed to spin and weave cloth, a cottage craft turned into an industry overnight.

In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money.

Not as ours the books of old - Things that steam can stamp and fold; Not as ours the books of yore - Rows of type, and nothing more.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

Economies of scale are a good thing. If we didn't have them, we'd still be living in tents and eating buffalo.

The electronics industry expanded rapidly and the seeds for the semiconductor and software revolution were planted. The postwar period also saw the suburbanization of America, the rise of the homeowner, the build-out of the interstate highway system, and the rise of automobile culture. Credit availability expanded dramatically.

In a sufficiently prosperous society where people specialize sufficiently, and where enough of the crappy work is done by machines, all work becomes art.

The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad.

Industrial forces set in motion by steam and electricity have materially changed the structure of our civilization.

Steam and the telegraph and other machinery have required capital greater than any individual can furnish.

One of the objections most frequently urged against machinery is, that it has a tendency to supersede much of the handlabour which was previously employed; and in fact unless a machine diminished the labour necessary to make an article, it could never come into use.

The only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

Who is not rich to-day when compared with his ancestors of a century ago? The steamboat and the railroad bring to his breakfast table the coffees of Java and Brazil, the fruits from Florida and California, and the steaks from the plains. The loom arrays him in garments and the factories furnish him with a dwelling that the richest contemporaries of his grandfather would have envied. With health and industry he is a prince

The marriage of Capital with Science was responsible for the great leap forward into what we live in today. Pure scientists discovered the components into which the natural environment could be decomposed; investors placed their bets on the various methods of decomposition; applied scientists or managers saw to it that the wage workers in their charge carried the project through. Social scientists sought ways to make the workers less human, more efficient and machine-like. Thanks to science, capitalists were able to transform much of the natural environment into a processed world, an artifice, and to reduce most human beings into efficient tenders of the artifice.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

The essence of the Industrial Revolution was the substitution of competition for the medieval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth.

The great question, however, for the poor man is, or shortly will be, that of escape from competition with labor-saving machinery

Americans have made the common sense discovery that it is inefficient for women to bake their own bread and brew their own beer when the lot can be produced more cheaply by the cooperative cooking establishment.