Efficiency Methods
An Introduction to Scientific Management

92 EFFICIENCY METHODS unrealized aspiration. But the amount of literature on the subject of time-study which is now published brings the possibility distinctly nearer, and a large number of workers have constantly followed Dr. Taylor’s excellent example by making their results as widely known as possible. There is still, how- ever, the struggle of opposed temperaments, and of opposed incentives ; between the impulse to keep a discovery from one’s competitors and the impulse to let a good piece of work accomplish all that it can in increasing human knowledge and capacity. Mr. Gilbreth’s published work on Motion-Study is a very considerable contribution to the stock of general knowledge on the subject, and presents facts of the greatest importance in industrial matters,1 1 In the preface to the book an interesting anecdote is given of Mr. Gilbreth’s rapid diagnosis, criticism, and improvement of an observed motion. He saw a girl worker at one of the In- dustrial Exhibitions in London putting paper covers on small round boxes filled with a polishing material. She was pointed out as an unusually rapid worker; he timed her as doing 24 boxes in 40 seconds. He ventured to suggest to her a new dis- position of the material and motions, which she tried with much scepticism. At the first attempt she did the 24 boxes in 26 seconds ; at the second attempt in 20 seconds, and she was not, she admitted, " working any harder.” Mr. W. Ennis gives, in Industrial Engineering, vol. ix., p. 462, a very interesting record of elementary motion-study in a college where the students were put to arrange in proper order sets of mimeograph notes when they had been received from the ap- paratus with sets of the duplicated pages. The operation was first performed in a haphazard way ; and then repeated after a sensible plan of action had been thought out—for the sake of comparing the times. The adoption of a careful method of distribution thoroughly j ustified itself. Operations such as stamp- ing envelopes, or inserting folded papers in them, will occur to everyone as worth systematizing. But Illustrations V. and VI. will show how much can be accomplished by ingenuity in devices.