135
132. Water pressure 135
133. Prony brake 141
134. Speed indicator 142

PRACTICAL MECHANICS FOR BOYS

INTRODUCTORY

The American method of teaching the mechanical arts has some
disadvantages, as compared with the apprentice system followed in
England, and very largely on the continent.

It is too often the case that here a boy or a young man begins work in a
machine shop, not for the avowed purpose of learning the trade, but
simply as a helper, with no other object in view than to get his weekly
wages.

Abroad, the plan is one which, for various reasons, could not be
tolerated here. There he is bound for a certain term of years, and with
the prime object of teaching him to become an artisan. More often than
otherwise he pays for this privilege, and he knows it is incumbent on
him "to make good" right from the start.

He labors under the disadvantage, however, that he has a certain tenure,
and in that course he is not pushed forward from one step to the next on
account of any merit of his own. His advancement is fixed by the time he
has put in at each part of the work, and thus no note is taken of his
individuality.

Here the boy rises step after step by virtue of his own qualifications,
and we recognize that one boy has the capacity to learn faster than
another. If he can learn in one year what it requires three in another
to acquire, in order to do it as perfectly, it is an injury to the apt
workman to be held back and deterred from making his way upwardly.

It may be urged that the apprentice system instills thoroughness. This
may be true; but it also does another thing: It makes the man a mere
machine. The true workman is a thinker. He is ever on the alert to find
easier, quicker and more efficient means for doing certain work.

What is called "Efficiency" in labor methods, can never obtain in an
apprenticeship system for this reason. In a certain operation, where
twelve motions are required to do a certain thing, and a minute to
perform the twelve operations, a simplified way, necessitating only
eight motions, means a difference in saving one-third of the time. The
nineteen hundred fewer particular movements in a day's work, being a
less strain on the operator, both physically and mentally, to say
nothing what