eless nor reckless, and they do not act against
instructions, but their psychical mechanism makes them unfit for that
particular combination of attention and imagination which ought to be
demanded for the special task of the motorman. If the many thousands
of injury and the many hundreds of death cases could be reduced by
such a test at least to a half, then the conditions of transportation
would have been improved more than by any alterations in the technical
apparatus, which usually are the only objects of interest in the
discussion of specialists. The whole world of industry will have to
learn the great lesson, that of the three great factors, material,
machine, and man, the man is not the least, but the most important.

IX

EXPERIMENTS IN THE INTEREST OF SHIP SERVICE

Where the avoidance of accidents is in question, the test of a special
experimental method can seldom be made dependent upon a comparison
with practical results, as we do not want to wait until the candidate
has brought human life into danger. The ordinary way of reaching the
goal must therefore be an indirect one in such cases. For the study of
motormen the conditions are exceptionally favorable, as hundreds of
thousands of accidents occur every year, but another practical example
may be chosen from a field where it is, indeed, impossible to
correlate the results with actual misfortunes, because the dangerous
situations occur seldom; and nevertheless on account of their
importance they demand most serious study. I refer to the ship
service, where the officer on the bridge may bring thousands into
danger by one single slip of his mind. I turn to this as a further
concrete illustration in order to characterize at once the lengths to
which such vocational studies may advance.

One of the largest ship companies had approached me--long before the
disaster of the Titanic occurred--with the question whether it would
not be possible to find psychological methods for the elimination of
such ship officers as would not be able to face an unexpected suddenly
occurring complication. The director of the company wrote to me that
in his experience the real danger for the great ships lies in the
mental dispositions of the officers. They all know exactly what is to
be done in every situation, but there are too many who do not react in
the appropriate way when an unexpected combination of factors suddenly
confronts them, such as the quick approach of a ship