a man of keen, alert mind and quick intelligence, he had
quickly grasped the fundamentals of the heating business. He was soon able
to talk with the firm's designers and engineers in their own language. But
the more he studied boilers and radiators, the less interest he took in
them. He had sense enough to know that the only thing that would win in
the plan he had in mind was a radical change in design which would
increase the amount of heat delivered in proportion to the amount of fuel
burned, or the amount of heat delivered in proportion to the cost of fuel
burned, or would reduce the amount of supervision required, or would do
away with some of the long-standing sources of trouble and annoyance in
heating apparatus. Long and hard he thought and conjectured, and studied
statistics, and followed reports of experiments, but for the life of him
he could not take any interest in any such line of research. He hated the
gases, ashes, soot, smoke, and dirt generally. Huge rough castings of
steel and iron seemed gross and ugly to him, and the completed product
seemed coarse and unfinished. The only improvements he could think of were
improvements in beauty of line, in refinement of the design, in added
ornamentation, and other enhancements of the physical appearance of the
product. In these he took some interest, but he had the good sense to know
that no change of this kind would accomplish what they wished in the
matter of going after a national market.

THE HIGH-SALARIED ONE FAILS

For a while President Jessup waited patiently; then, as the big salary
checks came to him to be signed month after month, he began to grow
restless. No result had yet been announced and in his conferences with
Lynch, he could not determine that any hopeful progress was being made.
Finally, in desperation, he called his engineers and designers together.
For three weeks he worked with them night and day, studying, analyzing,
making records, and computing results. They took cat-naps on benches in
the laboratory while waiting for fires to burn a standard number of hours;
ate out of lunch-boxes; and finally, unshaven and covered with soot and
ashes, they triumphantly produced a fire-box and boiler which would burn
the cheapest kind of coal screenings satisfactorily, with but little
supervision and a high degree of efficiency. This was the best thing they
had ever done in the laboratory. This was the attainment which he had so
long desired. This, prop