290 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE. — 1915. 



Vogt as holding that ' operations involving will, memory, and associa- 

 tion have a marked disturbing influence when they enter into combi- 

 nation with other operations, ' and also that ' operations which are par- 

 ticularly closely related as regards the psycho-physical parts that they 

 employ disturb one another in a particularly high degree ' ; further that, 

 though ' after a certain period of habituation several combined pro- 

 cesses can be made without any disturbing influence whatever,' there 

 will naturally be a corresponding increase in fatigue. 



(c) In the industrial world to-day there is the widest variation in 

 the uniformity of any one worker's occupation — i.e., in the similarity 

 of the different actions in each recurrence of the whole operation. 

 Machine-tending, for instance, involves constant nervous attention 

 perhaps, but the muscular action varies continually according to what 

 it is that goes wrong with the machine. In agriculture also a man's 

 occupation is not uniform, nor yet in lumbering and transport — for soil 

 and roads, plants, animals, and goods are always varying. Similarly 

 in all organising and policing work the people dealt with vary. In 

 building, ' navvying, ' mining and stevedoring, repairing and washing, 

 also, work is not altogether uniform, for there is a continual adaptation 

 to different situations. In all assembling or fitting together by hand, 

 too, there are generally certain slight dissimilarities in the parts which 

 must alter the workers' actions in each recurrence of the operation. 

 Soldering tins by hand is a further case of non-uniformity, due here 

 to the necessity of reaching a certain standard even at the expense of 

 added vigilance and added movements, and this applies all the stronger 

 to the work of pure inspection. 



But wherever the conditions of place are the same and the material 

 used homogeneous, as in working with a machine on machine products, 

 there will be found the quahty of uniformity in the occupation. 



(d) In studying here the frequency of the recurrence of any ' unit ' 

 operation we must concentrate on the frequency due to the simplicity 

 of the work or to the (most economical) speed of the machine rather 

 than any addition to such frequency induced by special systems of pay- 

 ment. These would be studied under Incentive (Factory Organisation). 



It has been one of the results, if not the aim, of the industrial Divi- 

 sion of Labour to simplify or ' specialise ' the task of every individual 

 so that he may become an adept by its frequent repetition. While in 

 the old days the housewife boiled her jam but once a year, there are 

 now factory hands that boil and boil day after day ; while in work on a 

 machine that must repeat its motions every minute or so, such as a 

 metal-stamping press, the frequency can be reckoned in ' output per 

 hour.' There are still processes, however, that have remained of small 

 ' frequency. ' The iron blast-furnaces are only tapped every four hours 

 according to Mr. Parrell (Pres. of the U.S. Steel Corporation), and 

 there is only one furnace to be tapped by each gang. In the open- 

 hearth and Bessemer steel-making processes a gang goes from one 

 hearth or converter to another, but the actual operation occupies con- 

 siderable time in each case. Other infrequently recurring processes are 

 found in tanning and in most ' finishing ' trades where much time 

 must be spent in bringing the article up to the desired pitch of 

 perfection. 



