In practice, I don’t think it worked that way. If the machine broke, it was not at all easy to repair; you couldn’t just factor in a maintenance cost. And if the machine damaged or lost grain, it was worse than useless.
Good question about looms/mills, I don’t know. Before the 1800s or so, I think looms were mostly owned by weavers who worked from home. There was no “specialist on site”. But I don’t think they broke much, because there weren’t high forces involved. (In the late 1800s, when large power looms were set up in factories such as those at Lowell, Mass., I imagine they would have had an engineer on staff.) Re mills, I would guess that a broken mill would be repaired by the local millwright. But I doubt they were on-site.
Your model of costs vs. benefits is logical, but in practice there is uncertainty (about machine reliability / breakdowns) and people tend to avoid tail risk by seeking reliable machines. Also, previous standards of quality (that can be achieved by manual labor) tend to set a quality bar that machines have to meet before they are adopted. People don’t like reducing quality, even if the efficiency gain theoretically makes up for it. At least, that’s how it seemed to be in the early days of mechanization.
previous standards of quality (that can be achieved by manual labor) tend to set a quality bar that machines have to meet before they are adopted. People don’t like reducing quality, even if the efficiency gain theoretically makes up for it. At least, that’s how it seemed to be in the early days of mechanization.
That’s how it still is, at least in some industries. People hate going backwards in any metric (or software feature)
In practice, I don’t think it worked that way. If the machine broke, it was not at all easy to repair; you couldn’t just factor in a maintenance cost. And if the machine damaged or lost grain, it was worse than useless.
Good question about looms/mills, I don’t know. Before the 1800s or so, I think looms were mostly owned by weavers who worked from home. There was no “specialist on site”. But I don’t think they broke much, because there weren’t high forces involved. (In the late 1800s, when large power looms were set up in factories such as those at Lowell, Mass., I imagine they would have had an engineer on staff.) Re mills, I would guess that a broken mill would be repaired by the local millwright. But I doubt they were on-site.
Your model of costs vs. benefits is logical, but in practice there is uncertainty (about machine reliability / breakdowns) and people tend to avoid tail risk by seeking reliable machines. Also, previous standards of quality (that can be achieved by manual labor) tend to set a quality bar that machines have to meet before they are adopted. People don’t like reducing quality, even if the efficiency gain theoretically makes up for it. At least, that’s how it seemed to be in the early days of mechanization.
previous standards of quality (that can be achieved by manual labor) tend to set a quality bar that machines have to meet before they are adopted. People don’t like reducing quality, even if the efficiency gain theoretically makes up for it. At least, that’s how it seemed to be in the early days of mechanization.
That’s how it still is, at least in some industries. People hate going backwards in any metric (or software feature)