Note 125 — Chapter VI · The Era of Handicraft122

The case of the treadle applied to the production of rotary motion is typical of what happens to a technological element of the general class here under discussion. Such a new technological expedient appears at the outset to be apprehended in terms of manual workmanship; but presently it comes, through habitual use, to take its place as a mechanical functioning of the tools in whose use it takes effect,—to be associated in current apprehension with the mechanical appliances employed in its production and, by so much, dissociated from the person of the workman. In a measure, therefore, it falls into the category of impersonal facts that are available as technological raw material with which to go about the work in hand. With further use, and particularly with the interjection of further mechanical expedients between the workman and this given technological element, it will be conceived in progressively more objective fashion, as a fact of the mechanics of brute matter rather than an extension of the workman’s manual reach; until it passes finally into the category of mechanical fact simply, obvious and commonplace through routine use; in which there remains but a vanishing residue of imputed personality, such as attaches to all conceptions of action. The given technological element in this way may be said to pass by degrees out of the workman’s “quasi-personal fringe” of manual effects, into the domain of raw material available for use in workmanship; where it will, in apprehension, be possessed of only such imputed quasi-personal or anthropomorphic characteristics as are necessarily imputed to external facts at large.

Concretely, the concept of the treadle seems in its beginnings to be a variant of the same conception that leads to the use of the bow-drill. Both inventions comprise at least two distinct forms. In each the simpler and presumably more primitive form converts a reciprocating longitudinal motion into a reciprocating rotary motion; and it is apparently only after an interval of familiarity and externalisation of this mechanical achievement that the next move takes place in the direction of the perfected treadle, which converts a reciprocating longitudinal into a continuous rotary motion.