50 Years Ago

By and large the effect of automization is to reduce severely the demand for unskilled and semi-skilled workers and to increase sharply the need for skilled workers ... This trend is surely to be welcomed. Repetition work is an insult to the people who have to do it. It treats them as less than human. It is not surprising if it often turns them into something less than human. If you make a man spend eight hours a day in which he has nothing to ... exercise his mental powers on, is it surprising that he is incapable of exercising those powers in his leisure time and must spend it watching television or wrecking a dance hall? Automation offers the prospect of giving every man and woman a job that is interesting and worth doing in itself, a job requiring initiative or creative thought. Surely that is as desirable an object as providing a higher standard of material living.

From Nature 22 June 1963

100 Years Ago

After expressing his admiration for the character of Wilbur Wright ... the lecturer considered the resemblance and differences of the manufactured aëroplane and the living bird. The resemblance may be simply the result of copying the bird, or it may be that similar designs have been arrived at independently by birds and men ... These resemblances are remarkable, but there are great differences ... No flying animal uses a continuously rotating propeller to drive him forward on soaring wings, and it is perhaps scarcely too much to say that if birds only knew how, they would now copy the Wright brothers. Muscular action and the circulation of the blood, however, put supreme difficulties in the way of the development of the continuous rotation of a part of an animal.

From Nature 19 June 1913