Conversely, if our craftsmen studed mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, physics, technical drawing, if they read accounts of new machines that are invented abroad, not only would they be able to operate imported machines, but they could send their own inventions abroad.
Unfortunately, we see no sign of anything like this being in prospect. So far, craftsmen not only are not seeking to acquaint themselves with the sciences but they actually have no interest in advancing their trades. Gazeta Przemysłowo-Rzemieślnicza [The Industrial-Trades Gazette] has been coming out for over a year, from time to time noting the more important inventions that are being made elsewhere; but among the hundred thousand craftsmen in the country, the Gazette has barely four hundred subscribers!... This single fact seems the most eloquent evidence of our ineptitude.
I have said that, in order to make inventions and in order to know how to use them, it is essential to learn the most diverse things, because we do not know which of them may come in useful. I have also said that societies and people that do not make inventions or do not know how to use them, lead miserable lives and ultimately perish. And so today, amid the deluge of ever new improvements being made in the world, craftspeople have two ways open to them: either to take to the books and thereby partake in the general intellectual movement that, in a dozen or so years, will lead them on to fortune – or to remain where they are and, in a dozen or so years, to lose even the livelihoods they now have. What choice any individual makes, is not a matter for me.
In closing, I should add that I consider this lecture to be a sketch for a study in which I shall elaborate on, and substantiate, the second part of this lecture, dealing with the inception of discoveries and inventions, and the laws that govern them.
THE END.
