Imagine if it was 1915 and the invention of the handheld router has just come on the scene! Imagine that debate!!
Before you read any further,
Nerd Alert! 
I imagine there wasn't much debate with Routers, one reason being that the majority of workshops wouldn't have had electrical power back then and the second reason even if they had power they probably didn't have the equipment to compress the air needed to make the early hand-held routers work (there were
some that had electric motors but you can imagine how prohibitively expensive these would be in a world where light bulbs were very scarce).
A bit of story time...
I think the bigger debate was when the very first
proper woodworking machinery was introduced in Britain back at the very tail-end of the 1700s. It came about when a
Sir Jeremy Bentham who was a prison reformist and was looking for ways to make use of the prisoners for skilled Joinery work without years and years of training as an apprentice would need, Jeremy asked his brother
Samuel Bentham for help in this regard. Samuel was a very experienced naval engineer and shipwright and spent many years in various countries in various shipyards and woodworking factories as a manager and commandant and so was perfect for the job at hand and he did not disappoint his brother, Samuel came up with the principle of rotary cutting which all modern planers, routers and moulders are still based on today and turned woodworking from a handcraft to an industrial powerhouse. Samuel Bentham is known as "The Father of Woodworking Machinery" because of his inventions in the field such as rotary cutting, machine veneer cutting, boring machines, segment circular saw blades, tenon cutters, and sharpening machines, of which he can be credited for. The early machines that Bentham made in the 1790s were of wooden construction with only the cutterblocks and bearings made from metal, the machines although very crude compared to modern standards were an instant success and turned unskilled prisoners into workers that were just as good or even better than the hand craftsmen of the time with a fraction of the training needed. Once the idea of woodworking machinery was proven in the prisons, it soon came to the shipyards of Britain. Of course, back then the hand craftsmen of old were saying the woodworking machinery would never replace a hand plane and chisel, but look at woodworking now.
At the turn of the century another man came along,
Marc Isambard Brunel (Name sound familiar? It's the father of the legendary British Engineer
Isambard Kingdom Brunel). Brunel mused over a dinner in New York about making ship blocks with machinery as a frigate would need 1500 blocks and each block would need to be made entirely by hand, when Brunel came back to England he came to be associated with Samuel Bentham and succeded in inventing several machines for making the blocks. It was said that the first attempt was so successful, 10 unskilled workers using the machinery replaced 100 skilled craftmen overnight. Goes to show that machinery has been taking people's jobs long before CNC machines came around!
I hope that was somewhat interesting to read.
