I’ve received permission from the author – Kevin Carson – to serialize a small section of his book on Home Based Businesses. You can read all his work here:
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto Kevin Carson (Amazon link)
Here Kevin continues writing about the “Neo Technic Phase” and really what it increasingly means for us who are concerned to see home business thrive:
Steam power meant that machinery had to be concentrated in one place, in order to get the maximum use out of a single prime mover. The typical paleotechnic factory, through the early 20th century, had machines lined up in long rows, “a forest of leather belts one arising from each machine, looping around a long metal shaft running the length of the shop,” all dependent on the factory’s central power plant.
The neotechnic revolution of the late nineteenth century put an end to all these imperatives.If the paleotechnic was a “coal‐and‐iron complex,” in Mumford’s terminology,the neotechic was an “electricity‐and‐alloy complex.” The defining features of the neotechnic were the decentralized production made possible by electricity, and the light weight and ephemeralization (to borrow a term from Buckminster Fuller) made possible by the light metals.
The beginning of the neotechnic period was associated, most importantly,with the invention of the prerequisites for electrical power—the dynamo, the alternator, the storage cell, the electric motor—and the resulting possibility of scaling electrically powered production machinery to the small shop, or even scaling power tools to household production.
Electricity made possible the use of virtually any form of energy, indirectly, as a prime mover for production: combustibles of all kinds, sun, wind, water, even temperature differentials. As it became possible to run free‐standing machines with small electric motors, the central rationale for the factory system disappeared. “In general,” as Paul Goodman wrote, “the change from coal and steam to electricity and oil has relaxed one of the greatest causes for concentration of machinery around a single driving shaft.”
…The introduction of electrical power, in short, put small‐scale machine production on an equal footing with machine production in the factory.
Carson goes on to note that, in theory, electricity should have decentralized production and made for thriving small towns. Being diverted to the factory that was now upgraded to run on electricity, manufacture was kept centralized preventing the revolutionary prospect of electricity creating more self-sufficiency from the factory to creating more dependence on it!
Read it all here… (Amazon link)
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