fore tested with carefully graded
experiments what weight ensured the most favorable achievement by a
strong healthy workingman. The aim was to find the weight which would
secure with well-arranged pauses the maximum product in one day
without over-fatigue. As soon as this weight was determined, a
special set of shovels had to be constructed for every particular kind
of material. The laborers were now obliged to operate with 10
different kinds of shovels, each of such a size that the burden always
remained an average of 21 pounds for any kind of material. The
following step was an exact determination of the most favorable
rapidity and the most perfect movement of shoveling, the best
distribution of pauses, and so on, and the final outcome was that only
140 men were needed where on the basis of the old plan about 500
laborers had been engaged. The average workingman who had previously
shoveled 16 tons of material, now managed 59 tons without greater
fatigue. The wages were raised by two thirds and the expenses for
shoveling a ton of material were decreased one half This calculation
of expenses included, of course, a consideration of the increased cost
for tools and for the salaries of the scientific managers.

Whoever visits factories in which the new system has been introduced
by real specialists must be surprised, indeed, by the great effects
which often result from the better psychophysical adaptation of the
simplest and apparently most indifferent tools and means. As far as
the complicated machines are concerned, we are accustomed to a steady
improvement by the efforts of the technicians and we notice it rather
little if the changes in them are introduced for psychological instead
of the usual physical reasons. But the fact that even the least
complicated and most indifferent devices can undergo most influential
improvements, as soon as they are seriously studied from a
psychological point of view, remains really a source for surprise.
Sometimes no more is needed than a change in the windows or in the
electric lamps, by which the light can fall on the work in a
psychologically satisfactory way; sometimes long series of experiments
have to be made with a simple hammer or knife or table. Often
everything must be arranged against the wishes of the workingmen, who
feel any deviation from the accustomed conditions as a disturbance
which is to be regarded with suspicion. In one concern I heard that
the scientific manager