SAFETY PEOVISIONS IX THE UNITED STATES STEEL. 



CORPORATION.^ 



[With 11 plates.] 



By David 8. Beyer, 

 Chief Safety Inspector, American tit eel and Wire Company. 



At the outset it should be explained that this article is not intended 

 to be either " popular ■' or " technical," in the accepted sense of these 

 terms. If it were framed on purely technical lines it would pre- 

 suppose a thorough knowledge on the part of its readers, of power 

 generation — of machinery — of industrial organization — and would 

 resolve itself largeW into a statement of rules, specifications, methods, 

 and appliances, that would be both uninteresting and incomprehen- 

 sible to any one who did not have this knowledge. On the other 

 hand, to explain to an outsider the mechanical construction and 

 operation of, for instance, the different types of electric cranes, with 

 the accidents which may occur on them — and to make clear the value 

 of the rules and safety devices which have been worked out to pre- 

 vent such accidents — might readily fill the entire space allotted to 

 this article. The attempt will be, rather, to touch in a general way 

 on some of the principal features of safety work in its present stage 

 of development in the United States Steel Corporation, and to give 

 some impression of the problems encountered, and how they are being 

 solved in a practical way. 



This work is a logical outgrowth of association with the accidents 

 which must inevitably accompany the use of machinery. It is prob- 

 ably safe to say that the " casualty " or "' accident " department has 

 always preceded the "safety" department; that dealing with the 

 men who have been injured has brought about a desire to prevent 

 the recurrence of accidents. From the first scattering efforts in this 

 direction have grown more systematic methods, until accident pre- 

 vention has developed such a variety of detail and such breadth of 

 possibilities, that it is fast becoming a technical branch of itself. 

 What w^as originally a species of self-defense has broadened out into 



1 Copyright, 1910, by the Charity Organization Society. Reprinted by permission from 

 The Survey : A .Journal of Constructive Philanthropy, New York and Chicago. Vol. 24, 

 No. 6, week of May 7, 1910, pp. 205-230. Some of the illustrations of the original article 

 are here omitted. 



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