152 
THOMAS A. LEWIS 
man from an apprentice: ^^Why is is that when a subscriber tips the 
telephone instrument in talking, the party at the other end does not 
hear so well?” 
The answer is that the sound box in the instrument contains a lot 
of little carbon granules which, when put under pressure by the sound 
waves of the voice, transmit electricity. The harder the pressure the 
more electricity they transmit, and the better the voice is carried. 
Tip the instrument, and the granules, which are loosely packed, are 
displaced, and the person at the other end says, don’t hear, you’ll 
have to speak a little louder.” 
A journeyman repair man knows that, because he is expected to 
open sound boxes and fix them when they are wrong. An apprentice is 
forbidden, under any circumstances, to open a sound box. His func- 
tions are limited to taking a faulty sound box out and putting a perfect 
one in; and he never sees the inside of one of them. 
To the oral tests were added picture tests. One of these — the test 
for typewriter repair men — I myself took. A four-page leaflet was 
put in my hands, containing on each page a picture of one section of a 
typewriter. There were twenty questions on this order: ‘What is the 
purpose of the screw marked B?’ ‘If your carriage was running too 
slow what part of the machine would you adjust?’ The test proved 
that as a typewriter repair man I rank as a low apprentice — which is 
about right. 
In the same concrete fashion, Randall gives an example of a 
performance test — one for an automobile repair man. In this 
case the man was a ^Hrame-up’’ — a person coached for the occa- 
sion just to see if he could not weather the automobile test, 
though in fact only a novice. Randall says: 
He appeared in camp, and on the oral tests made a perfect record, 
which was so unusual as to excite the admiration of the examiner. 
The result was that he was led into a tent where a certain part of an 
automobile lay on the table in pieces, and left to put it together. The 
examiner discovered him a half-hour later. The part was screwed 
together and looked pretty workmanlike. But the candidate had 
forgotten entirely to put in any packing, and he was cudgeling his 
brain to discover what the two springs and a bolt for which he had 
found no place could possibly be intended for. 
