of Mr.
S.E. Thompson's work in a bicycle ball factory, where a hundred and
twenty girls were inspecting the balls. They had to place a row of
small polished steel balls on the back of the left hand and while they
were rolled over and over in the crease between two of the fingers
placed together, they were minutely examined in a strong light and the
defective balls were picked out with the aid of a magnet held in the
right hand. The work required the closest attention and concentration.
The girls were working ten and a half hours a day. Mr. Thompson soon
recognized that the quality most needed, beside endurance and
industry, was a quick power of perception accompanied by quick
responsive action. He knew that the psychological laboratory has
developed methods for a very exact measurement of the time needed to
react on an impression with the quickest possible movement; it is
called the reaction time, and is usually measured in thousandths of a
second. He therefore considered it advisable to measure the
reaction-time of the girls, and to eliminate from service all those
who showed a relatively long time between the stimulus and reaction.
This involved laying off many of the most intelligent, hardest-working,
and most trustworthy girls. Yet the effect was the possibility of
shortening the hours and of reducing more and more the number of
workers, with the final outcome that thirty-five girls did the work
formerly done by a hundred and twenty, and that the accuracy of the
work at the higher speed was two thirds greater than at the former
slow speed. This allowed almost a doubling of the wages of the girls
in spite of their shorter working-day, and at the same time a
considerable reduction in the cost of the work for the factory. This
excursion of an efficiency engineer into the psychological laboratory
remained, however; an entirely exceptional case. Moreover, such a
reaction-time measurement did not demand any special development of
new methods or any particular mental analysis, and this exception thus
confirms the rule that the followers of scientific management
principles have recognized the need of psychological inquiries, but
have not done anything worth mentioning to apply the results of really
scientific psychology. Hence the situation is the same as in the field
of vocational guidance. In both cases a vague longing for
psychological analysis and psychological measurement, but in both
cases so far everything has remai