Businessmen versus Neocheaters

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Road Construction and Mail Delivery

Two generally accepted functions of government are, as expressed in the Constitution of the United States, "to establish post offices and post roads." The history of postal service dates back to the ancient Eastern empires, where maintaining control over wide areas required rapid and frequent communication. This has essentially remained the motive behind state provision of both of these services: to insure official control of communications and traffic. As early as 1657, the postal service was made a state monopoly in England, but even then many reforms, such as the London Penny Post, inaugurated in 1680, were the result of private competition with the state service.

The same was true in the United States. During the early 1840s, many private express companies came into existence. At first they only carried packages (like United Parcel Service, today), but eventually their efficient service led their customers to request that they handle letter delivery, as well. People like Henry Wells (1805-1878 (the Wells of Wells-Fargo) offered a far-flung delivery service across the country. On his Philadelphia-New York route, he charged six cents against the government's twenty-five and gave just as prompt service. At one point Wells offered to carry the government's mail for one-fifth of its published rate, but his offer was rejected out of hand. Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) of the American Letter Mail Company claimed that the government's monopoly over the postal service was unconstitutional. In 1844, he pointed out that the real reason the post office loathed competition was that "government functionaries, secure in the enjoyment of warm nests, large salaries, official honors and power, and presidential smiles, feel few quickening impulses to labor." Rather than relinquish their monopoly, the government lowered its postage rates to a point at which it became unprofitable for the private expresses to compete. In 1851, the government rate of 3 cents covered sending a letter to any point in the country.

The history of the government prerogative of providing roads and highways parallels that of the postal service. Roads are not only required to transport the mail, they are needed to move armed forces within the country in the event of insurrection. If the government could not protect itself from attack, it would be in dire straits indeed. So it is not strange to find the history of roads closely connected to the needs of military preparedness. Public roads were most often the responsibility of local government authorities, both in England and the United States. Until the automobile became popular in the early 20th Century, these roads were usually poorly cared for and in dreadful condition. On the other hand, private turnpike companies which originated in the latter part of the 18th Century, often provided their stockholders a small rate of return on their investments. These turnpikes were toll roads which charged a fee for the use of the road. Many were constructed along the lines suggested by two Scottish engineers, Thomas Telford (1757-1834), and John MacAdam (1756-1836), who gave his name to the macadam surface. Both engineers advocated the importance of adequate drainage to roadways constructed according to their specifications.

As in the provision of services like postal delivery and the minting of coins, near-total government monopolization resulted in the enshrinement of neocheaters, who were more content to enjoy "their warm nests" than demonstrate any "impulse to labor" (as Spooner described it). In order to maintain control over a geographical area, the neocheaters had to latch onto the most vital services. Whatever improvements came about, were generally not the result of the efforts of government employees, but rather the struggle of privately competing individuals to provide a better service at a lower price.

The Internal Combustion Engine and the Horseless Carriage

The internal combustion engine as we know it today is the result of the contributions of hundreds of experimenters, engineers, and scientists. Its origins can be traced back to the late 17th Century when the idea was conceived of exploding gunpowder inside a cylinder in order to move a piston. The first really successful internal combustion engine was produced by a French engineer, Etienne Lenoir (1822-1900), in 1860. In 1876, Nikolaus Otto (1832-1891) built the first engine on the four stroke principle. Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900), one of his employees, introduced the idea of using gasoline as a combustion agent rather than coal gas. Daimler fitted his engine into a primitive motor cycle. The next year, 1886, Karl Benz (1844-1929) fitted an engine of his own design to a four wheeled cart, to produce the first forerunner of the modern automobile.

The original horseless carriages were cumbersome contraptions, and had been powered by steam engines as far back as the late 18th Century. They met great public resistance on two accounts: stagecoach owners were afraid that horseless carriages would mean the end of their business, and the general public found that their horses were scared of the machines. Eventually in country after country, neocheaters succeeded in harassing experimenters and laws were passed forbidding the use of steam engines on roads. In England, mysticism triumphed when Parliament passed the Locomotive on Highways Act in 1865. Popularly referred to as the "Red Flag Law," it stipulated that all self-propelled vehicles on public highways be limited to a maximum speed of four miles per hour and be preceded by a man on foot carrying a red flag to warn oncoming horse-drawn vehicles. Although the law was amended in 1878, it still retained the speed limit and required two people to operate the vehicle and a third to go ahead at danger spots, like intersections, and give a warning. Rather than try to compete, stagecoach owners succumbed to laziness and tried to cling to the existing state of affairs.

Fortunately, such laws were unknown in the United States. They had deterred Siegfried Marcus (1831-1899), a German inventor living in Vienna, Austria, who had actually driven a crude gas-powered vehicle there in 1864, and again in 1875, as well as Edward Butler, an English experimenter who worked prior to the repeal of the Red Flag Law, which came about in 1896. The main outlines of the modern auto had been laid out by 1891, when Emil Levassor, a Frenchmen, began commercial production of a vehicle, which included a front-mounted twin cylinder engine connected by a friction clutch to a three speed gear box, with a chain driving the rear axle, which included a differential gear. Similar type vehicles were independently produced in the United States by Charles (1862-1938) and Frank Duryea in 1893, Elwood Haynes (1857-1925) in 1894, and Henry Ford (1863-1947) in 1896.

There was a different type of problem in the United States. In 1879, a Rochester patent attorney and experimenter, George Selden, had applied for and was eventually granted a patent on the gasoline automobile. Although he had never built a self-propelled vehicle himself (the most he had done was some experimentation with a gasoline powered engine), by being the first to file a patent application, he effectively secured himself a monopoly on his so-called invention. By the time the patent was granted in 1895 (it was not scheduled to expire until 17 years later), Selden had amended his original application several times, and been able to incorporate many of the technological advances brought about by other inventors. When his patent was bought by an automotive syndicate, eventually designated the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, it was used to levy a royalty of 1.25% on the retail value of every auto sold in the United States. All of the major United States manufacturers and many of the makers of foreign cars imported into the United States at that time paid this tribute. However, Henry Ford refused to pay the royalty and challenged the validity of the Selden patent in court. After a half-dozen years of litigation, an appeals court finally upheld Ford's position that the Selden patent should be narrowly interpreted and that Selden, in fact, had contributed nothing to the development of a practical road vehicle.

It is obvious how the mystics and neocheaters tried to cash in on the development of the horseless carriage. They first tried to use the government legislation to prevent widespread usage of automobiles by imposing unrealistic conditions for their use. In the United States, the governmental patent system was used as a means to collect tribute from all the producers of true value. As it was, the automobile trust, based on Selden's patent, collected over $5 million in royalties before it was disbanded. This was an enormous amount of money during the first decade of the l900s.

Industrial Standardization

One of the enduring legacies of the struggle between Ford and the Selden interests was the formation of automobile trade associations. This set the pattern for institutionalizing the idea of voluntary cooperation between the various competing automobile firms. For example, the Society of Automotive Engineers can trace its early existence back to 1904 when it was formed during the early days of the automobile trust. The S.A.E. has been largely responsible for the standardization of parts in automobiles around the world. For example, it pioneered the system of identifying oil viscosity by numbers, and standardized carburetor mountings, tire and rim sizes, horsepower ratings, automotive bulb ratings, and literally countless other items which did not even come into existence until the automobile and airplane industries were born in the the early 20th Century.

This pattern of cooperation among competing industrial concerns was fairly common. The railroads in America had set the stage for such activities in the last half of the 19th Century. Due to the necessity of interchanging rolling stock, there was a need for the standardization of track gauges, safety equipment, coupling hooks, and repair items. When railroads had begun laying their tracks, there had been no agreement on a common gauge. Some used the standard of 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches, which had first been adopted in England by the Stephensons, because it was based on the width required for a horse to walk within the rails of wagonways. Many other gauges were in use, such as the 4 foot, 10 inch, the 5 foot (most popular in the South), and even the 6 foot gauge. During the 1870s, most of the railroads in the northeastern part of the United States standardized their rails to the 4 foot, 8 1/2 inch width. For example, by cancelling all traffic on Sunday, July 23, 1871, the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad standardized some 400 miles of track in one day. It was not, however, until three weeks during May and June 1886, that the southern railroads followed suit.

Another major problem confronting the railroads in the United States during the l9th Century was the lack of uniformity in calculating time for scheduling purposes. Local sun time was most commonly used and this meant, for example, that noon in one place was not not noon in another, even though the two cities might only be fifty miles apart. Considering that the railroads spanned a continent, it was easy to envision the problems created by each locality keeping to its own time. During the third quarter of the l9th Century, plans were suggested whereby the continent would be divided into several different time zones; each zone having a standardized time. Due to political rivalry, neither Congress nor any other group was able to arrive at an amicable settlement to the problem. Therefore a group of railroads, which was to be the forerunner of the Association of American Railroads, took it upon themselves to form the Time Table Convention. After several years of planning and consultation, nearly every railroad in the country adopted Standard Time on November 18, 1883.

Although the federal government did not make Standard Time mandatory until World War I, the fact of the matter is that its adoption did not require legislation or after the fact legalization. Both track and time standardization in the U.S. were the result of voluntary business adjustment, compromise and cooperation among many hundreds of competing companies, all privately owned. Rational businessmen understood that their need for smooth business operations required a reasonable approach to dealing with industry-wide problems. These Neo-Tech thinkers understood that the force of government could never accomplish what they set out to achieve.

Flying Machinery

When Orville (1871-1948) and Wilbur (1867-1912) Wright made their first successful flight in a heavier-than-air machine in 1903, they probably had no idea of the military or commercial significance of their invention. Although primitive gliders and balloons had been used during the later half of the l9th Century, only a few farsighted people realized the transportation possibilities of the airplane. Barnstormers soon showed the commercial possibilities of air service and it was left to those early pioneers to develop commercial aviation. Probably no other invention has been so influenced by the advent of two world wars in the same century. World War I broke out just as the plane was becoming a practical means of transport. It was immediately adapted to military purposes, such as reconnaissance, strafing, and bombing both on land and at sea. Both World War I and World War II accelerated improvements in aircraft performance, such as increased flying speeds due to new engine developments. Nor should it be forgotten that the first atomic bombs used in warfare were dropped from airplanes over Japan.

Radio, Television, and Radar

Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1919) was the person most responsible for bringing the use of radio waves out of the university laboratory and into industry. The first radio transmission occurred in 1886, when Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894), a German professor of physics, was trying to prove the light and electrical wave theories of a Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). By 1897, Marconi succeeded in building his `wireless' telegraph, which at first was limited to the transmission of morse code signals. In 1897, Marconi was instrumental in forming a company in London to market his new invention. Its utility in saving life at sea was demonstrated for the first time in 1899, when it enabled life boats to be quickly dispatched to a vessel sinking off the English coast. Within a decade the first broadcasts of speeches were made by wireless, and this marked the beginning of a new industry: commercial news and entertainment. The first commercial broadcasting stations began shortly after the end of World War I.

Both television and radar were logical spin-offs of the radio. The former had far more commercial possibilities, while the latter was primarily developed for its military uses before and during World War II. Although the transmission of pictures by wireless took place in the late 1920s and during the 1930s, it was not until after World War II that the television really became popular and within the budget of the majority of consumers. Commercial firms, such as the Baird Television Development Company in Britain, and Westinghouse Electric and Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in the United States were basically responsible for the development of television. On the other hand, radar was primarily developed by scientists working in government funded laboratories. The principles of radar had been known since the beginning of the 20th Century, but they were not really exploited until Britain, fearing German aggressiveness during the 1930s, set up a committee of scientists to investigate practical methods of making radar work. Radar was used as a means of land defense, as well as in ships and planes during World War II.

The Instant Picture and The Instant Copy

The first photograph was taken in 1826, and since then there have been many advances, which ultimately culminated in the Polaroid Land Camera and the Xerox photocopier. The convenience of "instant prints" is hard to beat and has a wide market. The process that provides an instant picture was perfected in 1947 by the American inventor Edwin H. Land. A film pack containing both positive and negative film and developer was designed and in 1963 extended to accommodate color photographs. The xerox process was initially developed in the kitchen of a New York patent lawyer, Chester Carlson, in 1938. Eventually the Haloid Company of Rochester made the process commercially practicable in the form of the Xerox 914 photocopier which was brought out in late 1959. Since then the market has been flooded with Xerox copiers as well as machines made by its competition.

Both the story of Land and Carlson demonstrate that rational thinkers, entrepreneurs, and scientists offer genuine values that people want. Both the Polaroid and Xerox success stories are monuments to what the brilliant, yet determined lone inventor can accomplish; proof that the small, entrepreneurial firms can create new markets and outcompete and outinvent both giant firms and state funded inventors.

The Calculating Devices and The Computer

The ancestor of the modern calculator can be traced back to an adding machine invented by Blaise Pascal in 1642. During the 19th Century many calculating machines (which could both add and multiply) were manufactured, such as those by W. S. Burroughs (1857-1898) whose results could be recorded on a roll of paper. The ancestry of the modern computer, which does far more than calculate (as it can be used for the processing, storage and retrieval of all kinds of information) can be traced back to the conceptions of Charles Babbage (1792-1871), a mathematics professor at Cambridge University in England, and Herman Hollerith, an American statistician who worked for the U.S. Census Bureau during the 1890s. Hollerith developed a punched card system and electro-mechanical counters to record census data. After leaving the Census Bureau, he founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, and developed the principle of entering data by means of a keyboard in 1901. By 1924, as a result of several mergers, Hollerith's original company became the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM, as we know it today.

The IBM corporation was one of the pioneers in bringing about the realization of some of Charles Babbage's ideas. Babbage had envisioned an analytical engine, which could not only compute, but store or memorize the data it was working on. Researchers at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania, along with research scientists at IBM, all contributed to the evolution of the modern electronic computer. The first real demand for computers came from the United States Government, which wanted to use them to prepare ballistic tables for wartime use and later for census use. However, IBM eventually realized that the computer had a far wider potential in industry and in the home, and actively promoted the computer in these areas.

Nuclear Power

Perhaps it is fitting to conclude our overview of the contributions of inventors and businessmen to civilization by considering the advent of nuclear power. Nature herself is neutral. Man can put her to aggressive and potentially harmful uses, or he can master nature and use her forces in ways beneficial to himself. The development of nuclear power, by physicists and scientists -- generally employed by the governments of the world -- is an example of the profound influence that technology can have on the course of history. From the Encyclopedia of Inventions: "The unleashing of atomic energy was unquestionably one of the most significant events in the long history of civilization."

The basic fission process entails bombarding the uranium atom with neutrons. The uranium atom, which absorbs the neutron, is split into two lighter elements, but the mass of the products is slightly less than that of the original uranimum. The difference is released as energy. The importance of the fission process is that it starts a chain reaction, by releasing further neutrons, which spark off further fissions. From the Encyclopedia of Inventions: "If this chain reaction takes place slowly, the result is a release of power which can be used to generate electricity. If it takes place very rapidly, the result is an atomic bomb." Since man is capable of regulating the rate at which these chain reactions take place, he is capable of harnessing atomic energy for life-sustaining as well as life-destroying purposes.

At the outbreak of World War II, scientists all over the world were familiar with the principles involved in nuclear fission. The theoretical and experimental data had been published for all to read. The United States Government employed war-time scientists who led the way in translating these theoretical principles into practice. Work was undertaken at the University of Chicago; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Los Alamos, New Mexico, (subsumed under the master name of the Manhattan Project) to develop a workable atomic bomb. A successful nuclear explosion was detonated in the New Mexican desert on July 16, 1945, and by August, 1945, the first two nuclear bombs had been exploded over Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

At the end of World War II, it was clear that there were two separate paths of development: the military one leading to more and more powerful weapons that eventually would threaten to blow up the entire world, and a peaceful, commercial one leading to the use of nuclear power in the production of electricity. The nuclear story is by no means finished. As never before, new technologies hold the possibility of obliterating mankind. The responsibility is awesome, yet it seems to have fallen into the hands of the neocheaters and mystics of the world, those in the seats of power in government. In fact, it would be interesting to speculate how the nuclear power industry would have evolved in the absence of government wars and government funding.

IV. Conclusion

There are a number of different lessons to be learned from a study of these technological contributions to man's civilization.

Robert LeFevre: "There are only two sources from which all the difficulties we face arise. There are difficulties caused by nature and there are difficulties caused by man." As we have seen, nature is never wrong, it simply is. The difficulties we face caused by man are the result of neocheating, mysticism, irrationalism, and value destruction. The difficulties caused by nature are scarcity of resources, harsh climatic conditions, and a shortage of time with which to deal with these problems. The only sure way to eliminate the difficulties caused by man is for each one of us to literally take responsibility and control for our own self. If each one of us takes care of the means, the end of ridding the world of neocheating will come about in due course.

Another lesson to be learned here is how to answer Ayn Rand's question: "Who decides what is right or wrong in any category of human knowledge?" Who decides at what temperature water freezes; who decides when it is noon; who decides if a photographic process will result in an instant picture; who decides if a bow and arrow is more effective than a hatchet? As Ayn Rand has explained it, "Any man who cares to acquire the appropriate knowledge and to judge, at and for his own risk and sake. What is the criterion of judgment? Reason. What is the ultimate frame-of-reference? Reality." Again, Neo-Tech thinkers must take responsibility for acquiring knowledge and then applying it to the world around them. If they are wrong, they will harm no one but themselves; if they are right, they stand to benefit themselves as well as all that choose to deal with them voluntarily.

Only rational thinkers can make accurate and proper decisions for themselves. Government officials, bureaucrats, and churchmen have no exclusive knowledge of the facts. Often they have less command of the facts than an informed observer. Scientists, businessmen, rational thinkers, and others who have followed Neo-Tech have hardly ever persecuted or imprisoned their fellow man. They had no need to forge chains, build dungeons, erect scaffolds, or conscript armies to bring about their will. They have offered legitimate and creative values to those that chose to deal with them. It was only their opponents, the neocheaters and mystics, who have had to resort to violent means to subdue those over whom they sought authority. The story of what people can do if they are left alone to think and work and invest and employ their energies is the story that has been related here. Civilization is the story of human freedom if it is anything.

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