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Show 6. inventions which had harnessed the theme of time in Ben Franklin fashion. A rotating study desk organized hours of study for a student who appeared to one friend "as if chained, working like a beaver against the clock and desk;" a loafer's chair discouraged sloth with a sharp gunshot; an "early rising machine" threw John out of bed each morning, and seemed to say, "Early to bed, early to rise . . ." - all of these machines were designed to reduce a man to an efficient mechanism, to make him a machine. Behind them was a need to hoard time which Muir had developed during his days of heavy labor on the farm. Making the most of time could be measured in terms of efficiency. And the theme of efficiency followed Muir's work as he learned to turn out brooms at a prodigious rate for the Trout Brothers in Canada, and later developed automated manufacturing systems for Osgood Smith and Company in Indianapolis. Time was, of course, Money. What had begun as a diversion, as an entertainment, as an expression of Muir's need to think and do something exceptional, became as the years went by a means toward what? He wasn't sure. He hoped that his work with practical machinery was "done for the real good of mankind in general," hoped that it was a kind of true philanthropy to make brooms, rakes, or wheels more efficiently and cheaply. He wrote to his brother Daniel in 1863, "To what end do we receive life and health from God if not to do good and to be good." Did he think that making machines was a way of doing his duty to God? Perhaps he did. He was a conventional, shy, moralistic young man when he arrived |