A Rumor of Strange Machinery in California

A dispatch has reached my desk — passed through three hands before landing here at Menlo Park — and I confess it has given me a moment's pause, which is not something I grant easily to rumor or speculation. A man named Jobs, operating somewhere out West, has apparently built a studio of some kind — pictures that move, conjured by calculation rather than chemistry — and the gossip is that he arranged his people in some inverted fashion, artists alongside engineers, all pulling the same rope toward profit. I find this either admirable or absurd, and I have not yet decided which. Now, I have no patience for men who theorize about management the way professors theorize about electricity. What matters is whether the dynamo runs. What matters is whether the filament holds through ten thousand hours of test. I have had artists in my own laboratory — draftsmen, model-makers — and I will tell you plainly: the moment a man stops measuring his output in something countable, whether watts or dollars or patents filed, he becomes an expensive ornament. I keep ornaments only when they can be converted. And yet. If this Jobs fellow truly aligned the money interests of his painters and his calculating men under one roof and made them both answerable to the same ledger, that is not philosophy — that is engineering of a human kind. I respect that. I have done something similar here. My machinists do not dream; they test. My chemists do not publish; they produce. The hierarchy I run is not gentle, but it is efficient, and efficiency is the only argument I trust. What troubles me in this dispatch is the language of enduring cultural value. That phrase smells of a man who has not yet met a banker calling in a note. Culture does not pay the copper wire bill. I built the grid because cities needed light, not because I admired darkness poetically. If this California fellow built his studio on similar hard reasoning — incentives, margins, repeatable process — then I would buy shares in him without hesitation. If he built it on philosophy, I would wait to purchase the assets at auction. Either way, I intend to know more. Send someone to find out who holds the patents.