Chapter C: E. Knoeppel (10)

=Effects of Weather.= The principal obstruction to economical construction work in the temperate zone, is due to _rain_. If it is raining at about the time when the men come upon the work, they will rarely fail to retire to their homes or to some point so far from the scene of operations as to make it difficult if not impossible to get them back upon the job if the weather should clear.

If a rain comes on in the noon hour, they generally leave and do not return to work. If it should start to drizzle in the middle of the afternoon, and the men are under fairly good discipline, they stand a very good chance to stay the day out rather than miss getting a full day's pay.

Next to rain as an obstacle is _freezing weather_. On concrete work, if the concrete is laid at temperatures below 22 degrees, and particularly when a slow─setting brand of cement is used, special precautions have to be taken, and even then the work is liable to be rejected. For work in which steam engines are employed, as dinkeys, steam shovels, steam drills, etc., continued cold weather is likely to result in the freezing of supply pipes, the freezing of valves, and the breaking of pipe connections, necessitating a good deal of frost protection and a well─disciplined and well─handled gang of pipe─fitters under a responsible foreman charged with the express duty of keeping the water lines clear. In very cold weather──say below zero──the freezing of water will seriously interfere with the economy of the work on the water end alone. Where steam drills are used and the weather is exceedingly cold, the steam from the drills blown upon the men condenses and freezes upon their clothes, involving great inconvenience and suffering. Under such conditions the men will not work so many hours per day as otherwise, and frequently they will not work at all at critical times in the progress of the work, to the great detriment of economy.

It has been observed that a combination of stress of weather a few hours before the coming of the paymaster seems to be more discouraging than at any other time, and it is seized upon as an excuse to quit work.

In very windy weather, more coal is burned than at other times; and sometimes a boiler which is capable of running seven or eight drills in ordinary weather will not be able to furnish steam for more than 70 or 80 per cent of this amount in the high, cold winds.

For the above reasons it is essential to keep a record of the temperature and weather.

=Accidental Conditions.= Besides the weather, there are a host of accidental conditions that may arise to influence the economy of the work and complicate a precise study of the performance. Some of these, named at random, are:

1. The blowing─out of the gasket in a main water supply pump.

2. A shipment of poor coal.

3. The wrecking of a trestle.

4. A derailment of cars.

5. The breaking of machinery on a shovel.

6. The burning─out of a boiler, due to carelessness on the part of a watchman over night.

7. The non─arrival of necessary and important material.

8. Irregular blasting, due to irregular spacing of drill holes, or to bad loading, or to poor detonators or a poor exploding machine, or to irregularity in the character of the rock itself.

9. Erratic action on the part of one or more of the men, due to drunkenness, ill─temper, or general contrariness.

10. Errors on the part of foremen in coöperation, some of which are not detected in time to be eliminated.

In working out any special problem, care should be taken that such accidental causes affecting performance──whether they decrease the performance or, as may happen, increase it──should be carefully noted and be a part of the regular report on the work. These features of a report ordinarily are ignored as being unimportant, but they are of the utmost value to the success of the work.

STIMULATING THE MEN

The art of persuading a man who is turning out 500,000 foot─pounds of work in ten hours, to turn out 800,000 foot─pounds of work in ten hours with a trivial increase in pay, is on its face difficult; but is by no means impossible, and a list of some of the ordinary means of doing this should not be out of place here.

1. =Watching the Work.= If, on the average work under the observation of a foreman whom they know, the men are made to realize that their individual performance is being watched and recorded by someone who is above and beyond their own foreman, there will usually result an increase in performance of from 10 to 20 per cent per man; and particularly if a tab is kept upon the performance of the gang as a whole, the foreman will add his own stimulus to that applied by the men themselves, resulting in highly increased efficiency.

On such work as teaming, where teams are hauling earth along a road for a considerable distance, a punch─card is very valuable. The driver knows that the time of his trip is being recorded and compared with the time for the same work done by other drivers; and it has the effect of concentrating his mind upon his performance, which in itself causes him to use more care in cutting down delays and keeping his team up to their work.

In the operation of drilling, most valuable results have been achieved by giving each drill runner a card on which, at the completion of each hole, the time of the finishing of the hole is punched; and also the time of starting the new hole, in the same way. This card will then show the length of time that it took to drill the hole, and the length of time required to move his drill. He will be stimulated to move quickly, which in soft rock is an exceedingly important element of the drilling work, and he will be stimulated in the effort to get his holes down rapidly.

Where earth or rock is being loaded by steam shovels and hauled by dinkey trains, great economy can be arrived at by providing each dinkey runner with a punch─card or a report card on which he indicates the time when his train left the shovel and when it returned again to the shovel. This card then indicates the time for a round trip, and his mind is constantly being stimulated to look out for causes of delay; and, if he is at all conscientious, as most men are, he will instinctively attempt to make the best time. Some remarkable results have been achieved by this means alone in recent work.

When concrete is being mixed by hand, if a record is made of the time when each batch is finished, there will inevitably be an increase of activity of all the men in the mixing gang.

2. =Discharges.= The principle of natural selection of the men can be very advantageously applied. Where the supply of labor is adequate, it is advisable to make a rule of discharging a few of the poorest men every few days, taking on new men to fill their places. This necessarily results in an increase of the ability of the average men on the work, and it gives a healthy spur to the men who are not discharged. In carrying this method out, it should be done judiciously and with care to avoid discharging good men, lest the discipline of the work be interfered with. Any man who is not willing to do his best, or who is caught loafing deliberately, is an economic disadvantage to the work, and should be allowed to go. Likewise, any man who with good intentions is so dull as to hinder the progress of the work, should not be retained because of his good intentions alone.

3. =Bonus Systems.= An immense advantage can be counted upon by the employment of a bonus system, of which there are a good many; and it should be said at the start, that a bonus system may, although it probably will not, be opposed by labor unions. The general idea of a bonus system is to place the men upon a contract footing whereby they will be guaranteed a minimum wage, and more money than the minimum if they perform unusually good work. A refinement of this system may be applied where the men receive less than the guaranteed minimum if their work is noticeably poor. Where this latter arrangement should be applied, will depend largely upon the local conditions; and this feature is the one that is peculiarly obnoxious to the labor unions. Where the supply of labor is adequate, it is usually better to discharge the inefficient men than to attempt to work them under a depressed rate.

On a recent piece of work, the steam drills, of which there were 14, were averaging 4 feet of hole drilled per drill hour, the drillers were getting 30 cents per drill hour, and helpers 18¾ cents. For a period of ten days the drills were kept under the personal supervision and instruction of the expert in charge; and at the end of that time a bonus of 2 cents per foot for everything above 70 feet in 8 hours was offered to the men. On this basis no one could get a bonus unless he did 100 per cent better than the average previously attained. Exceedingly cold weather intervened, preventing a good deal of drilling; but within two weeks of the return to normal weather conditions, the average drill output rose to over 6 feet per drill hour, and one man obtained the remarkable record of 142 feet in 9 hours, or over 15.7 feet per drill hour. On this work a careful record was kept day by day, of the performance of each man; and the men who had a consistently low average were gradually discharged, thereby helping out the bonus system. The men were also under more or less constant instruction, and therefore the improvement was not entirely due to the bonus system.

A further modification of the bonus system is advisable in some cases, where an extra bonus is given for exceedingly high performance, such, for example, as paying the men an extra cent bonus, making 3 cents above, say, 90 or 100 feet per 8 hours. It is well, however, to apply this modified arrangement only after there has been an elimination of the poorest men. When possible, the payment of bonuses should be made at very short intervals, and not left to a monthly settlement.

4. =Bulletin Board Posting.= Posting upon a bulletin board in the storehouse or office, of the records of performance accomplished in different parts of the work day by day or week by week, is a very valuable adjunct to the other methods of stimulation. The methods above indicated will keep the men on the _qui vive_ during the day. A very valuable improvement can be instituted if the more intelligent among them can be led to think about their work after working hours. This must necessarily be done in rather a subtle way. Posting records at the end of the day's work so that the men see them on their way home, will do a great deal toward keeping the subject alive until the next morning. When the men have been led to a state where they discuss with each other the methods of improved efficiency, for the following day amazing results can be counted upon.

5. =Gang and Team Work.= If a certain number of men have been working together under one foreman on one particular piece of work, they come to know each other's methods and their foreman's methods intimately; and they necessarily will become very much more efficient than when they are shifted from gang to gang or when they have to work under different foremen. If the record of the performance of each individual gang can be obtained, and the men, as well as the foreman, are acquainted with the record, a spirit of rivalry between the gangs can be developed which will add greatly to efficiency. In making such a record, inasmuch as the gangs are likely to vary in size, it is necessary to have a unit of performance that will be independent of the number of men in the gang. It will be found that, shortly after the application of this principle, the men are themselves making suggestions as to improvements in method; and frequently their suggestions are immensely valuable.

6. =High Pay.= Some contractors have found it economical to pay a little more than the prevailing rate of wages, thereby attracting to their organization the best of the labor available. As a general thing, a man is perfectly willing to do 10 per cent more work for 5 per cent more pay per hour; and the difference in men is so great as to make it more than well worth while to secure the very best of the labor obtainable.

7. =Prompt Pay.= Men will work very much more contentedly when they can count upon their pay with promptness and regularity. There is nothing that demoralizes a piece of construction work more than the postponement of a pay─day. Special care should be taken that each man's pay is accurate. A man will seldom be over─paid unless there is "graft" on the job, but it sometimes happens that through errors on the part of the time─keeper or bookkeeper a man's pay is short, much to the agony of the man himself.

8. =Early Hours.= A good deal of money is lost by the men not starting to work promptly at the commencing hour, and by quitting before the final hour. On a recent piece of work that had to be drastically reorganized, an entire blasting gang rested on their shovels for over one hour, because their foreman had decided to quit without notice, and the man who was supposed to be in charge of the work arrived late himself, and was detained at the other end of the job. On this particular piece of work, it was not the habit to blow a whistle at the commencing or the quitting hour, and the men started work in the morning and quit work in the evening according to their own timepieces. It was noted that nobody on the whole job quit a minute after he should have quit, or started a moment earlier than he was paid to start.

In factory work it is feasible to have all the men go through a gate which is closed one minute after the hour and not opened again for perhaps 25 minutes, so that, if a man is two minutes late, he loses a half─hour's pay. This has the merit of not working injustice to anyone, and, after being instituted, seems to be accepted by the men with a reasonable degree of contentment. It is not easy to start a strike because some men lose their jobs from being late.

Such a system as this, however, is practically impossible on outside contract work; and while it may be feasible to institute a modification of the time clock method, it is not known that this has yet been successfully done. Probably the most satisfactory way of insuring prompt arrival of the men, is to measure the output of each gang and make each foreman responsible for it, thus giving him a personal incentive to get his men on the job promptly.

9. =Enough Foremen.= It is necessary, in any organization, to have the chain of responsibility lead through a sufficient number of foremen; otherwise a superintendent or supervisor will find himself "spreading out too thin," and will be attempting to perform a lot of work that should be done by a foreman. One superintendent can supervise the work of 20 or 30 foremen with a favorable layout, and each foreman can supervise the work of from 10 to 25 men. If, however, there be more gangs than there are foremen, the superintendent will find himself trying to play the part of foreman in instructing the men, and not able to do his own work, which is to instruct and supervise the foremen. In the matter of drilling, a number of able managers are not in favor of having a foreman over the drills. It is calculated that by substituting a boy to keep the records of the drilling, and putting bonuses on the drills, the difference between the pay of a foreman and the pay of a boy is saved, with no appreciable loss in performance.

There are strong grounds for the opinion that there should be no process, such as drilling, without a foreman, where the work is on a large scale. When 10 drills are working, they will employ altogether 20 men on the drills, a number of muckers clearing the ground, and a pipe man. The work of these men cannot fail to be improved by their being at all times under the watchful eye of a man to whom they are responsible for the quantity and quality of their work. Aside from this, if the foreman is an expert driller, the instruction that he can give to the less able of the drill runners will be worth ten times its cost.

The same argument applies to all processes in the field.

10. =Education on the Work.= As a general thing, men who take money for their labor are more than willing to deliver a square deal to their employer; and it will almost invariably be found that the more familiar a man is with the difficulties and possibilities of his fellow─workmen, the more efficient he will be himself. For this reason it has been found highly satisfactory, in some lines of work, to change the men around on the job. In a certain concrete building 12 stories high, the upper stories were built in a small fraction of the time required for the corresponding lower stories. The greater part of the extraordinary increase in efficiency was attributed to the fact that the men were so educated that a man at the top of the building knew how the men at the mixer and in other parts of the job were doing their work, and knew that the superintendent in charge was measuring the speed of the deliveries from the hoist. The disadvantage of this method is that it takes a long time to work up the efficiency. It is, however, an admirable method for disciplining an organization.

=Discipline.= To the practical man, or to the intelligent student, there seems to be no necessity for arguing in favor of _discipline_ as an essential to economical field work; but so large a percentage of contract work in the field is badly disciplined, and the general principles seem to be unknown to so many field organizations, that a brief statement of them appears to be called for in this volume.

By _discipline_ is meant the cultivation of a spirit of:

1. Co─operation;
2. Obedience;
3. Responsibility;
4. Personal loyalty.

The subject will be discussed on the basis of _reorganization of work_, because here the chief difficulties are met.

The three types of organization that are most clearly defined in the way of discipline, are those of a _military nature_, _railroad work_, and _factory work_.

On construction work, it is not feasible to introduce a military form of discipline. In the first place, the penalties of the military service are not permissible; and in the second place it is not usually practicable to have so thorough a system of distribution of responsibility; while in the third place the same men are not here together for a long enough period to make military discipline practicable.

In railroad work a man is usually employed for a long term of years, on rather small pay, with a large chance of promotion. From the day of his initiation on the work, he is impressed profoundly with the necessity of protecting lives and of keeping trains moving all the time; and, in a short time, he comes to the frame of mind in which his pay, his personal convenience, and his personal prejudice are subordinate interests. The initials of the superintendent on a little slip of paper are sufficient to make him do almost anything within the limit of endurance; and, as a general thing, he does it ungrudgingly (but not uncomplainingly), and with a cheerfulness that is in many respects astonishing.

Such a degree of discipline is entirely feasible on any contract work of long duration, and it should be obtained if economy is desired. It is not possible to institute successfully radical reforms and methods, without first securing good discipline on the work; and when work is badly disorganized, the discipline should be the first point of attack.

It is necessary to have, first, a system of locating responsibility. If a dinkey becomes derailed, if the spacing of drill holes be erroneously made, if a steam shovel be out of line, if the wrong methods of loading be pursued, if a pump be out of order, if necessary material or supplies be wanting, if the pipes freeze up, if, in short, one hundred and one little things happen that cause confusion on the work, it should be possible to find someone who, by some crime of omission or commission, is responsible for the trouble, and who can be made, in some degree at least, to bear the brunt of it. The only man who seems destined to be entirely free from the consequence of his mistakes, is the clerk of the Weather Bureau.

The organization should be laid out from the bottom upward, rather than from the top downward. The laborer is responsible practically for carrying out the instructions of his foreman to the satisfaction of his foreman and of no one else, and for this reason he should not work under the impression that anyone except his own foreman is likely to discharge him, to criticise him, or to praise him. If his foreman be the right sort of man, the laborer, with his dozen associates, will have at heart, besides the interests of the work, a strong feeling of personal loyalty to the foreman; and this feeling will be reciprocated by the foreman. If a foreman be noticed vigorously complaining that the men he has to deal with are inefficient, incompetent, and a disgrace to civilization compared to the men he had to work with some years before, he may as a general thing be put down as a "blow─hard" and of little value to the organization. The most successful are usually the ones who are ordinarily quiet, cool under emergency, and yet of sufficient determination to inspire among the men a wholesome respect for them. A man who loses his temper on the work for any reason, does not, as a general thing, make a good foreman or superintendent.

The relations obtaining between the men and their foreman, should obtain to a more marked degree between the foreman and their superintendent. Briefly stated, every man on the job should have to look for orders from one man and only one man; and he should be responsible to that man for the satisfactory performance of those orders.

Conflicting orders can be avoided only by systematic compliance with the rule just above outlined.

It sometimes happens after periods of financial depression, or as a result of special conditions, that it is feasible to reduce the pay of a good many men on the work. This should always be done with great care and after an intimate knowledge has been obtained of the personalities of the men affected. As a general thing, if you cut down a man's pay 10 per cent, you will cut down the work 20 per cent, at least for a time; and it frequently happens that after such a pay reduction, small, petty depredations on the work are committed. Articles get stolen; machinery is damaged by "sore heads." It is usually unwise to reduce the pay of a few men. As a general policy, where a small percentage of the working force is to be affected, it is better to discharge a few men outright, and endeavor by economic methods to increase the output of the others.

Differential pay is a prolific source of trouble, and it is very common. By this is meant the payment to different men of different rates for the performance of the same work. The men who obtain the less pay think that their pay ought to be raised; and the man who gets the most pay can in no probability appreciate the fact that he may be over─paid. Rather than cut his pay down, it is well, if possible, to put him at some other class of work.

It is often necessary for economical reasons to place men who have been paid by the month, upon an hourly basis; and even when by this they average rather more than they formerly received, it usually causes discontent. Any man likes to know how he is coming out at the end of the month regardless of the weather, and it is an additional source of anxiety to him not to know what his pay envelope will contain. When he keeps his own record of the hours worked, he is likely to disagree with the time─keeper, and this can lead to a good deal of disaffection and dissatisfaction.

A frequent cause of disaffection on work is due to the habit too often indulged in by time─keepers, of gossiping with the men. The time─keeper and the storekeeper necessarily come into contact with a very large percentage of the men every day; and if the time─keeper particularly be disposed to gossip, he has abundant opportunity to gratify his desire, and can produce a great deal of trouble. For this reason the general character of the time─keeper should be carefully scrutinized before employing him; and he should be cautious, when making his rounds, to confine himself strictly to business. If the men on the job know as much about the work as the General Manager, if they know all the ins and outs and ups and downs of the contract, they necessarily discuss it among themselves, and a great deal of restlessness is produced, which is very difficult to stamp out, because, by the time it has reached a pronounced stage, the men have learned so much about the politics, as it were, of the job, as to interfere with the discipline.

If there be dissensions at headquarters, if the parties that control the work are at war, and if the methods and performance of the manager or superintendent be not absolutely satisfactory to every one of the officials, nothing can be worse than to let a suspicion of this matter get around among the men. How a general manager or superintendent can prevent this, if an officer be disposed to talk, is a problem that no attempt will here be made to solve. In reorganization, such a condition is one for which the manager should be continually on the alert, and he is advised to be suspicious of the time─keeper and storekeeper.

=Labor─Saving Devices Involving Plant.= If the men are in a reasonably good state of discipline, it is feasible to make changes in the layout involving special apparatus or plant; and in deciding upon such measures, a question arises as to how much money it is justifiable to spend for a new plant. A piece of work under reorganization is ordinarily a piece of work that is more or less in financial difficulties, and the purchase of plant for the economizing of the work is usually looked upon by the officers as a dangerous move. Particularly is this the case when any changes of this kind turn out to be unsuccessful. A small amount of money wasted on special apparatus is always in sight──at the scrap heap, if nowhere else──whereas a good deal of money wasted in fruitless labor can be easily lost to view.

If the amount of saving on a certain operation by the installation of special material be sufficient to pay for this material in a few weeks, the purchase of the material can be immediately justified, and the cost of the apparatus can be charged as _current expenses_ to be shortly recovered in the economy of the work. Where expensive and heavy machinery is to be installed, however, the matter should be gone into with the greatest care and detail.

A few of the articles which come within the class chargeable to _current expenses_, are:

1. The use of water jets for increasing the speed of drilling in soft rock.

2. The use of hickory wands for stirring up sludge in drill holes, and increasing the speed of drilling.

3. The use of special explosives and good exploding machines, and of loading tubes for blasting.

4. Small grading machines for spreading earth and macadam.

5. Special wheelbarrows or carts for moving material.

6. Special small tools for the blacksmith, including a trough in which he can set his bits to be hardened, with the points in the water.

7. A sufficient supply of picks and shovels.

Some of the items of plant that may be classed in the other category, are:

1. Special wagons and scrapers for hauling earth.

2. Concrete mixers especially adapted to the work in hand.

3. Derricks.

4. Locomotive cranes.

5. Cableways.

6. Bit─sharpening machines.

=Labor─Saving Devices Involving No Plant.= Where the labor preparatory to introducing the improved methods is considered, it should be taken as equivalent to a plant charge as affecting the interest of the contractor. If, for example, it has been the practice to drill and blast immediately in front of a steam shovel on rock excavation, and it is desired to have the drilling and blasting so far ahead of the shovel as to avoid the occasional necessity of holding up the shovel, the money involved in the work done ahead should be considered in the nature of a temporary investment and charged to money expended on plant which will not come back for a period of perhaps one month.

A steam─shovel crew has a good deal more pride in its work, and will continue working under more disagreeable weather conditions, than a drilling gang; and when drilling in front of a shovel, severe weather conditions may cause the drilling work to stop without interrupting the operation of the shovel. If, then, the drills are working too close to the shovel, the shovel may catch them.

On the other hand, it is unwise to blast far ahead of the shovel, for a number of reasons. In the first place, there is no advantage in investing money in drill holes, except to avoid such a contingency as outlined above. In the second place, it is impossible to tell how effective the blasting has been until the shovel has attacked the broken rock; and if the blasting is done far ahead of the shovel, poor blasting may go undetected until an immense amount of financial damage has been done.

To cite a specific instance──On a recent piece of important work, a cut several hundred feet long was drilled to a depth of supposedly fourteen feet, and blasted with more or less unsatisfactory results. The steam shovel was then put in, and excavated to a depth of five or six feet. The subsequent cut of from eight to nine feet deep had to be entirely re─drilled and re─blasted. The drilling in the already partly broken rock was immensely difficult, the drills sticking a great deal and a good many of the holes having to be abandoned; while the blasting was unsatisfactory because of the fissures.

The rapid reorganization of work can be furthered by the issuance of _special instructions to foremen in the field_. This practice has been admirably followed by Frank B. Gilbreth, and is described in his "Field System." As illustrations of such orders, are the following to drill and blasting foremen, issued on some recent work:

INSTRUCTIONS TO FOREMEN

RULES FOR DRILLING──

Drill foremen are requested to do their utmost to enforce the following rules for drilling:

1. Each drill at the beginning of a hole is to be supplied with a complete set of sharp bits and a pump, which will be laid alongside of the drill tripod by the drill tender, under the directions of the foreman.

2. As soon as a hole is finished, one of the muckers at the direction of the foreman will assist the two drill runners to move the tripod; and the mucker under the direction of the foreman will then pump out the hole that has just been completed.

3. The foreman will then personally, with a wooden rod, measure the depth of the hole, and punch said depth on the drillers' card, the mucker placing a well─made round plug in the hole and hammering it home.

4. Foremen will see that the drills are so distributed as to keep them as near as possible to the manifold, from which the steam supply is taken.

5. Pipe connections are to be made by a pipe─fitter who will be assigned to each drill gang, and who may be assisted by the foreman and by a mucker when necessary. No pipe─fitting is to be done by drill runners or helpers unless absolutely necessary.

6. The time for drilling is from 8 A. M. until noon, and from 12.30 until 4.30 P. M.; and the moving of the dinkey supplying the drills with steam is never to be done within those hours, unless absolutely necessary, and when it is necessary, a note to that effect must be made on the quarry card.

7. Whenever for any reason the drills are out of steam, the drill foreman will indicate the time when the steam pressure failed and the time when pressure was again turned on, with a reason why the pressure gave out. This to be written on the quarry card.

8. Foremen will see that each drill is in proper working order, and supplied with an exhaust pipe of the proper length and with a throttle. Whenever for any reason a drill is not in perfect condition, the foreman will immediately report it and make requisition through the storekeeper for the necessary parts and repairs.

The attention of all concerned is particularly called to these rules, the enforcement of which is essential to the economic performance of the work; and all concerned are particularly urged to make a most earnest effort to see that, as far as it is possible, every drill on the work shall be in actual operation for 8 hours on every working day.

By order of,

RICHARD T. DANA, General Manager.

INSTRUCTIONS TO FOREMEN

RULES FOR THE GUIDANCE OF BLASTING FOREMEN──

Blasting foremen are requested to do their utmost to enforce the following rules for the conduct of blasting operations:

1. Attention is called to the fact that dynamite will freeze in about 45° temperature, and that at this temperature, a little above or a little below, dynamite is exceedingly sensitive to shocks, and should be handled accordingly.

2. Whenever a part of the charge in a hole has been exploded, leaving any unexploded dynamite in the hole, do not under any circumstances blow out the unexploded dynamite with a steam jet. You may, however, put a stick of dynamite down into the hole on top of the unexploded powder and endeavor to fire the entire hole in this manner.

3. The blasting foreman will provide himself with a measured wooden rod for tamping, and personally see that every hole that is loaded is down to grade. If he should find any hole that is not down to grade, he will immediately report the fact to the superintendent or assistant superintendent on the work, and make a note of the same on his time─card.

4. The attention of the foreman is called to the fact that dynamite is not as efficient in a hole full of water as it is in a dry hole, and every effort should be made to load the holes as dry as possible.

5. The tamping of the holes should be of the heaviest and stickiest clay that can be obtained, and this tamping should extend the entire length of the hole above the powder.

6. Never thaw dynamite in front of the fire, or on a hot stone removed from a fire, or by piling sticks in a boiler or in an oven.

By order of,

RICHARD T. DANA, General Manager.

In hauling earth, the principal elements of team expense are the time to haul and the standing still to load. This last item can be very materially reduced by the simple expedient of having on the work an extra wagon or two. A team can be changed from one wagon to another in about one and a─half minutes, and the same number of teams on a short haul will do easily 15 per cent more work by this trick.

The same principle applies to the mixing of concrete involving extra wheelbarrows; and here it may be mentioned that the arrangement of the concrete platform is seldom economical. The men, if left to themselves, will usually not have sufficient runways, so that a man with a loaded wheelbarrow will be painfully struggling up a plank, while a man with an empty wheelbarrow is waiting for him to get out of the way. Much can be accomplished by having the men move in procession so that no man with a wheelbarrow will ever have to stand and wait for another man to get out of his way. Of course the ideal method of handling concrete into a mixer is to do it from bins with chutes; but the great majority of this class of work is not done in this manner.

On contract work, the emergency charges for the moving of plant are usually considerably higher than they ought to be, owing to the fact that the work is done by men who are not especially skilful in this kind of work. The direction of these processes should be given to a man who is especially good at it; and the work should be provided with a good supply of gin poles, snatch blocks, tackle, etc.

If a piece of work has been under personal observation for considerable time, a great many sources of improvement in the performance can be detected that are entirely invisible upon casual inspection; and the student of economics is urged to devote a large amount of time to the most careful and complete study of minor and apparently trivial operations. Too much respect is usually given to established methods, just because they are established methods; and the analysis of a process that is apparently simple and of minor importance, but which is repeated scores of times in a day, is nearly always given too little importance as compared with the process that is elaborate and complicated, and which may in itself be of great importance, but which, on the particular work at hand, is dependent upon apparently minor processes. To illustrate──A shovel, loading eight or nine thousand yards of rock per month, was inspected; and the first impression obtained was that the reason the shovel output was so small was because of the inefficient layout of the shovel work itself. It was found, however, that the shovel was actually able to work a good deal faster than the drills and the blasting could provide broken rock for it; and the ultimate solution of the problem was found in the reorganizing of the drilling, in order to do more work with the same number of drills, and in the use of improved methods in blasting. The handling of the shovel took care of itself as soon as the other problems were solved.

The cost of spreading broken macadam on a road, to the average contractor, is not far from 12 cents per cubic yard; and the work is done with shovels and forks. This method is one that has been pursued for a great many years; and there are very few contractors who realize that it is exceedingly expensive. Some contractors, however, are doing work of this kind with the aid of a road machine that requires for its operation two or three men and four horses. A small grader machine that can be operated by one man and two horses for rough spreading, assisted by one man on the ground with a potato hook, has been known to do this work for about 2 cents or less per cubic yard.

In bridge─erecting work, a great deal of money can be saved over ordinary methods by the designing of special tools, such as dolly bars; and a good system of keeping detailed cost on such work will be sure to result advantageously. Much labor is lost in the erecting of roof trusses and in the erection of trusses in general, by crude and old─fashioned methods. The pneumatic riveter which strikes a great many light blows per minute has revolutionized field riveting; but the use of such a machine for cutting rivets has been unsuccessful in competition with hand labor on at least one large piece of work in New York City.

In painting, considerable time is ordinarily lost by the painters in preparing their own staging. Whenever possible, these preparations should be done for them under the direction of a skilled man; and the use of small winches on the staging whereby the painters can quickly raise and lower themselves, has been found of great value.

On contract work, the blacksmith is in a position peculiar to himself. He is classed as an expert, paid by the month, and is supposed somehow to get all the work done that comes to him. He has general charge of his department, and he gets very few orders and practically no instruction from the superintendent or manager. He is nearly always an interesting personality, and, outside of a very limited field, extraordinarily ignorant. The excuse on a great deal of uneconomical work is that it is impossible to get a competent blacksmith who knows how to do the work that he is called upon to perform. Tools will not hold their edge, or they break. Upon the matter being referred to the blacksmith, he will usually come back with a complaint about his coal, or the grade of steel with which he is supplied, or his tempering solution, or the condition of his forge. He should be provided with a thoroughly good set of tools, and the superintendent should know that his tools are of the best. He should next be carefully and thoroughly instructed as to how to harden and temper steel. A convenient shop for the blacksmith, and proper methods of forging and tempering, will add incalculable value to the organization.

=Introduction of New Methods.= It should be adopted as a cardinal principle, that there are no methods in the field which are not capable of improvement along the line of economy; and it should be remembered that a very small improvement in any one method is invariably worth a great deal of thought and time in arriving at it. The systematic perusal of the proceedings of the engineering societies and the engineering press, will result in the suggestion of new and improved methods and of a good many bad and unimproved methods; and the trained expert should be able to sift the wheat from the chaff, and apply only such as will fit his special needs.

The literature of shop development and shop economics is rich in illustrations and suggestions that can be adapted to field work, and should be gone over very carefully for this purpose. In this connection it should be urged that it is a duty of a professional man to publish new methods. There is no room for argument on the proposition that the principle of free trade, showing the other fellow two blades of grass growing where one grew before, is an advantage to all concerned.

=Design of New Methods.= When there is crying need for improved methods in the field on account of special necessity, it behooves the man in charge to invent improved methods and design improved apparatus. The cardinal elements of such design include the following:

1. Simplicity.

2. Low first cost, so that if the experiment is not successful, nothing will be lost.

3. The use of standard sizes of material.

4. Generality of application.

Whenever possible, a new method or a new machine should be so constructed as to apply to as large a proportion of the whole work as possible, and every effort should be made toward the standardization of materials and apparatus.

In attempting work in blasting, it should be remembered that the use of new and untried explosives is attended with peculiar dangers. The men are familiar with the use of the standard grades of powder; and while they are ignorant of how dangerous it is to take liberties with dynamite, they are at a great disadvantage when a new explosive is given to them for trial. If it looks like dynamite and is exploded with the ordinary detonating cap, its peculiarities do not receive much attention.

Men in the field are instinctively opposed to new ideas, and it will invariably be found that new methods meet with stubborn opposition. A foreman to whom a new method is suggested will not expect it to be successful, particularly if he has ever heard it condemned; and it always seems as if the thought were father to the wish, for, when ordered to try it in the field, if he can make it fail, he will do so with unerring accuracy. As a general thing, however, when it is successfully demonstrated, he will become a loyal supporter of it. In presenting a new method to a foreman or superintendent, it is well not to encourage the raising of objections. It is better to let the objections raise themselves in the application of the process; and a man who has not gone on record as saying that in his opinion a new scheme is no good, is a much more loyal supporter of the new scheme than when he has committed himself against it.

One of the difficulties in improving the efficiency of work, is the extraordinarily ingenious line of excuses that the men will present for not getting their work done properly. Of these, perhaps the most hard─worked is that of improper and insufficient material. When a man is berated for poor work, and presents the argument that he was unable to do so and so because he ordered material for it several weeks previously and the material has not yet arrived, the situation is embarrassing. The best preventive of this is to have small requisition blanks measuring about 2½ by 4½ inches, made up into pads of about fifty each, and to give each foreman a pad. Each blank should have a space for the date, the articles ordered, the time when the article is needed, the particular part of the work where the article is needed, the class of work for which the article is needed, and the foreman's name. The foreman should then be instructed that material will be purchased through the storekeeper, and that non─delivery of material will not be accepted as an excuse. The storekeeper should then go around a job at least once a day, and get from the foremen their requisition slips; and an intelligent storekeeper will see to it that useless and unnecessary material or superfluous material is not ordered. Material that is ordered on requisition, and is not in the storehouse, should be purchased if necessary on a rush order, because, contrary to the ordinary apparent belief, it is economical to spend a dollar for material in order to save two dollars in labor.

=The Field Layout.= In laying out the plan of campaign on starting a new piece of work, it is important to consider the proposition from the capitalization end, as well as from that of pure construction. It is usually not appreciated by the engineer or the owner, that the contractor is doing a piece of delicate financiering, for the performance of which his own available money is usually inadequate, and that he is therefore obliged to borrow money on the work as it goes along, and to depend upon his monthly estimates. It is sometimes specified in the contract, that the contractor shall own all of his plant in fee, but it may be said that this arrangement is seldom lived up to. He can in addition nearly always borrow the amount of his pay─roll a month in advance, from his bank. He can also sometimes borrow money, giving as security his interest in the money retained on the contract, which is ordinarily something like 10 per cent. Therefore, provided that all goes well, if he gets his estimates when they are due, if his pay─roll is not more than the amount of his monthly estimate, and if no very large and disastrous contingencies interfere with the progress of the work, the contractor can swing a large piece of work with a comparatively small capital. If, however, things do not go well; if, through the failure of the owner's engineer, or through the insolvency of the owner, or through liens and attachments upon the work brought by dissatisfied creditors, the contractor does not receive his monthly estimates on time; if, in order successfully to prosecute the work, it is necessary for him to buy a large amount of additional machinery at a time when payments on old machinery are due; or if the portion of the work that he is doing is bringing him in less than the amount of his pay─roll and immediate materials and supplies, unless he has a large capital back of him, which capital is at once available, he is liable to be placed in an exceedingly embarrassing position. At such a time, if there should come a period of financial stringency, bankruptcy may stare him in the face, even though he has at the same time a contract on which he can be reasonably sure of making a large profit.

It is therefore of great importance that the work be prosecuted in such a manner as to have a continuous running profit, if possible. A contractor may turn in what is known as an _unbalanced bid_. In that event it will be very easy for him to start a certain portion of the work upon which he will lose money before he reaches the portion on which he expects to make money. Unless, as above indicated, the contractor is provided with a large fund for contingencies, great care should be taken to avoid this. The nature of unbalanced bids will be explained below.

As a case in point, on a certain contract involving over a million dollars, the company that was organized to conduct the work was provided with a small working capital, bought its plant on a time basis, and proceeded with a small working capital, under the impression that it would not be necessary to borrow any money, that the work immediately commenced would be sufficient to pay all the expenses and leave a profit, which profit would gradually accumulate and enable a running fund to be maintained which would take care of future contingencies. The idea was admirable. It happened that the work was in earth and rock excavation also known as _unclassified_, and was taken at a price which would admit of a large profit in any event. The rock work, if taken economically, would cost more than the contract price; the earth work, if taken economically, would cost considerably less than the contract price. The original plan contemplated starting the earth excavation at a point to which another contractor was to excavate, and it was not deemed feasible to commence the earth excavation until the other contractor had cut up to the line between the two contracts. Dependence was placed upon the other contractor doing his work on time, which he did not do; and it was then decided that it would be impracticable to commence in the earth, and work was accordingly commenced in rock, which work was conducted at a considerable loss. The strong financial position of the contracting company was the only thing that prevented it from going to the wall with a most excellent contract partly completed and a lot of good money tied up.

We shall assume, for purposes of illustration, that a certain contractor desires to bid on some public work involving the removal of 100,000 cubic yards of earth work and 50,000 cubic yards of rock work. He estimates that he can do the earth work for 30 cents per cubic yard, or $30,000, and rock work for 80 cents per cubic yard, or $40,000, making a total of $70,000 for the entire 150,000 yards, or 46.66 cents per yard for an average of the earth and rock; and he puts in his bid at this figure.