is yet easily attained, and which makes but slight demands upon muscular force or intelligence, has remained outside machine-production.

f) Skilled workmanship.-High skill in manipulation or treatment of material, the element of art infused into handicraft, gives the latter an advantage over the most skilful machinery, or over such machinery as can economically be brought into competition with it.

C. Some Characteristic Results of the Machine Process 165. STANDARDIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS1 The modern industrial communities show an unprecedented uniformity and precise equivalence in legally adopted weights and measures. Something of this kind would be brought about by the needs of commerce, even without the urgency given to the movement for uniformity by the requirements of the machine industry. But within the industrial field the movement for standardization has outrun the urging of commercial needs, and has penetrated every corner of the mechanical industries.

As a matter of course, tools and the various structural materials used are made of standard sizes, shapes, and gauges. When the dimensions, in fractions of an inch or in millimetres, and the weight, in fractions of a pound or in grammes, are given, the expert foreman or workman, confidently and without reflection, infers the rest of what need be known of the uses to which any given item that passes under his hand may be turned.

The materials and moving forces of industry are undergoing a like reduction to staple kinds, styles, grades, and gauges. Even such forces as would seem at first sight not to lend themselves to standardization, either in their production or their use, are subjected to uniform scales of measurement; as, e.g., water-power, steam, electricity, and human labor. The latter is perhaps the least amenable to standardization, but, for all that, it is bargained for, delivered, and turned to account on schedules of time, speed, and intensity which are continually sought to be reduced to a more precise measurement and a more sweeping uniformity.

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Adapted by permission from Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise, pp. 8-14. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912.)

The like is true of the finished products. Modern consumers in great part supply their wants with commodities that conform to certain staple specifications of size, weight, and grade. The consumer (that is to say, the vulgar consumer) furnishes his house, his table, and his person with supplies of standard weight and measure, and he can to an appreciable degree specify his needs and his consumption in the notation of the standard gauge.

From this mechanical standardization of consumable goods it follows, on the one hand, that the demand for goods settles upon certain defined lines of production which handle certain materials of definite grade, in certain, somewhat invariable, forms and proportions; which leads to well-defined methods and measurements in the processes of production. Besides this, the standardization of goods means that the interdependence of industrial processes is reduced to more definite terms than before the mechanical standardization came to its present degree of elaborateness and rigor. The margin of admissible variation in time, place, form, and amount is narrowed. Materials, to answer the needs of standardized industry, must be drawn from certain standard sources at a definite rate of supply.

Machine production leads to a standardization of services as well as of goods. So, for instance, the modern means of communication and the system into which these means are organized are also of the nature of a mechanical process, and in this mechanical process of service and intercourse the life of all civilized men is more or less intimately involved. To make effective use of the modern system of communication in any or all of its ramifications (streets, railways, steamship lines, telephone, telegraph, postal service, etc.) men are required to adapt their needs and their motions to the exigencies of the process whereby this civilized method of intercourse is carried into effect. The service is standardized, and therefore the use of it is standardized also. Schedules of time, place, and circumstances rule throughout. The scheme of everyday life must be arranged with a strict regard to the exigencies of the process whereby this range of human needs is served, if full advantage is to be taken of this system of intercourse, which means that, in so far, one's plans and projects must be conceived and worked out in terms of those standard units which the system imposes.

For the population of the towns and cities, at least, much the same rule holds true of the distribution of consumable goods. So, also, amusements and diversions, much of the current amenities of

life, are organized into a more or less sweeping process to which those who would benefit by the advantages offered must adapt their schedules of wants and the disposition of their time and effort. The frequency, duration, intensity, grade, and sequence are not, in the main, matters for the free discretion of the individuals who participate.

166. THE TRANSFER OF THOUGHT, SKILL, AND

INTELLIGENCE

Suppose it be desired to drill four holes in a number of plates, so that they bear a certain fixed relation to the edges of the plate; and suppose the operator to be equipped with the ordinary drilling machine which guides the drill so that it pierces the plate squarely. To drill these holes in one plate, with any degree of accuracy, requires a high degree of skill on the part of the operator; and to drill any number of such plates so that the spacing of the holes in them will correspond closely with those in the first plate requires a very high degree of manual skill, considerable time per plate, and is a very costly operation.

Suppose, however, a skilled workman makes a so-called "drilling jig" in which the plate can be securely clamped by set screws and in which all the plates can in turn be clamped in exactly the same position. The plate contains four holes, which have been very carefully located to correspond with the required location of the holes.

Now it is evident that almost any unskilled person can drill the plate, when so held, as accurately as the most skilled workman can without it. Further, he cannot drill the plate inaccurately. True, he must have a slight amount of training in handling the drilling machine, but this is small and soon acquired. The accuracy of the work no longer depends on the skill of the operator but on the accuracy of his tools.

This principle, illustrated above, has been aptly called "The Transfer of Skill," and it is to be especially noted that this principle has nothing to do with division of labor, though, as can be seen, it allows an extension of the same. Nor is the principle inherently applicable to machines alone; it can be and is applied to hand methods. True, most machines are constructed with this end in view, the drilling machine mentioned above, for instance, having this characteristic in so far as guiding the drill vertically is concerned.

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Adapted by permission from D. S. Kimball, Principles of Industrial Organization, pp. 10-13. (McGraw-Hill Book Co. Inc., 1913.)

It is evident that for a given operation the more skill that is transferred to the machine the less is required in the operator. When nearly all the skill has been so transferred, but the machine still requires an attendant, it is called a semi-automatic machine. Turret lathes are excellent examples of this class of machinery.

In drilling the plate without the jig the skilled mechanic must expend thought as well as skill in properly locating the holes. The unskilled operator need expend no thought regarding the location of the holes. That part of the mental labor has been done once for all by the toolmaker. It appears, therefore, that a transfer of thought or intelligence can also be made from a person to a machine. If the quantity of parts to be made is sufficiently large to justify the expenditure, it is possible to make machines to which all the required skill and thought have been transferred and the machine does not require even an attendant. Such machines are known as full automatic machines. Automatic screw machines are excellent examples of a complete transfer of skill and thought. Care should be taken to distinguish clearly between transmission of intelligence, as illustrated in drawings, specifications, and written or spoken communications in general, between men and the transfer of intelligence or thought from a skilled man to a machine. These principles, transfer of skill and transfer of thought, lie at the bottom of modern industrial methods. Under former and simpler methods of manufacture the machine was an aid to the worker's skill, the amount of skill that had been transferred being very small. In the new machines the transfer of skill and thought may be so great that little or none of these are required of the attendant worker.

[NOTE. The foregoing illustrates a principle. The application of this principle in the increasing use of automatic machinery is of wide extent and tremendous social significance. It should be noticed, too, that there is occurring a transfer of thought, skill, and intelligence to management. Scientific management is a phase of this movement.]

See also 221.

Craft Skill and the Competitive Struggle.

167. IMPERSONALITY AND THE MACHINE PROCESS.1 The machine process compels a more or less unremitting attention to phenomena of an impersonal character and to sequences and correlations not dependent for their force upon human predilection nor

Adapted by permission from Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise, p. 310. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912.)

created by habit and custom. The machine throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought. It compels the adaptation of the workman to his work, rather than the adaptation of the work to the workman. The machine technology rests on a knowledge of impersonal, material cause and effect, not on the dexterity, diligence, or personal force of the workman, still less on the habits and propensities of the workman's superiors. Within the range of this machine-guided work, and within the range of modern life so far as it is guided by the machine process, the course of things is given mechanically, impersonally, and the resultant discipline is a discipline in the handling of impersonal facts for mechanical effect. It inculcates thinking in terms of opaque, impersonal cause and effect, to the neglect of those norms of validity that rest on usage and on the conventional standards handed down by usage. Usage counts for little in shaping the processes of work of this kind or in shaping the modes of thought induced by work of this kind.

See also chapter xi. Impersonal Relations.

168. THE NEW STRAIN IN INDUSTRY'

What are the special forms of overstrain found in modern industry viewing industrial conditions, as was our premise, from the physiological point of view? In a brief sketch of this vast field it will be possible to single out only a very few features for comment. We can do no more than glance, as it were, at some of the innumerable processes which directly or indirectly feed the machinery of the world, supplying man's needs and luxuries.

Of those elements in industry which are most characteristic and which make the greatest demands on human energies, we may select the following: speed and complexity, monotony, piece-work, and overtime. Other fatiguing influences in machine work, such as noise and the mechanical rhythms, will of necessity come within the scope of our brief analysis, as well as the now recognized relation between fatigue and the incidence of industrial accidents.

The fatiguing effect of the roar of machinery is chiefly due to its influence upon the faculty of attention. Mental fatigue is "characterized pre-eminently by a weakening of the powers of attention." Voluntary attention is essentially a selective process, a "focalization

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Adapted by permission from Josephine Goldmark, Fatigue and Efficiency, passim. (Charities Publication Committee, 1912.)