76 



Where Men Are Still Cheaper 

 Than Machinery. 



GREATEST good to the greatest 

 number makes some strange cus- 

 toms in India. The inhabitants are num- 

 bered by milHons, and they are so 

 pinched for money that a httle has to go 

 a long way. The companies operat- 



Machinery would be used to sift ashes 



and pump slime in modem communities, 



but in India hand work is cheaper 



ing gold mines there find it the best 

 poHcy to hire all the labor they can, 

 both because it is cheaper than in- 

 stalling labor saving machinery and 

 because by that means they can save 

 many from starvation. 



Wages are extremely low and work- 

 men are often very intelligent, perform- 

 ing exceptionally good work. Raw ma- 

 terial is cheap, too, and the combination 



Popular Science Monthly 



effectually bars out modern progress. 

 For instance, the trains of ore cars are 

 hauled by bullocks. An aerial tramway 

 was installed by an enterprising man- 

 ager, but he soon found that his mainte- 

 nance charges were much greater than 

 the total freight costs when the bullocks 

 were used. Back came the bullocks and 

 their native drivers. 



Instead of using machin- 

 ery, women and girls are 

 employed to sift the ashes 

 and recover small particles 

 of unburned coal. The sys- 

 tem is cheap and effective. 

 So is the handling of slime 

 pulp from the mills. This 

 is a fine, slimy mud which 

 is settled in big stone tanks 

 in order to recover the wa- 

 ter from it. 



In progressive countries 

 heavy pumps are used to 



empty the settled mud from 



the tanks, but in India they use native 

 laborers and a primitive mechanism 

 which takes much more time, uses more 

 labor, and is not nearly so satisfactory, 

 but it is cheaper and keeps many natives 

 in food. A woman scoops the mud into 

 a basket, two men raise it on the end of 

 a long lever sweep, another empties it 

 into a trough while a woman pushes it 

 with a long stick to give it impetus 

 enough to move along to its destination. 

 The spectacle would drive a modern 

 efficiency expert to distraction, but he 

 would reconcile himself to it when he 

 figured out the relative cost of machin- 

 ery and men. 



Ingenious Slide Rule for Motorists 



A SLIDE rule has been devised by 

 which a motorist can compute accu- 

 rately the ratios which exist between the 

 number of revolutions of the engine and 

 the mileage of the car per mile; the cor- 

 responding ratio of gear reduction, etc. 

 It can also be used to ascertain the theo- 

 retical horsepower by the knowledge of 

 the cylinder dimensions, and the reci- 

 procal relations between various parts 

 of the machinery. It is intended that 

 the device will bear the name of some 

 automobile manufacturer and be used as 

 an advertising novelty. 



