stock was taken and the
books balanced at the end of the year, the manufacturers were in total
ignorance of results. I heard of men who thought their business at the
end of the year would show a loss and had found a profit, and
_vice-versa_. I felt as if we were moles burrowing in the dark, and
this to me was intolerable. I insisted upon such a system of weighing
and accounting being introduced throughout our works as would enable
us to know what our cost was for each process and especially what each
man was doing, who saved material, who wasted it, and who produced the
best results.

To arrive at this was a much more difficult task than one would
imagine. Every manager in the mills was naturally against the new
system. Years were required before an accurate system was obtained,
but eventually, by the aid of many clerks and the introduction of
weighing scales at various points in the mill, we began to know not
only what every department was doing, but what each one of the many
men working at the furnaces was doing, and thus to compare one with
another. One of the chief sources of success in manufacturing is the
introduction and strict maintenance of a perfect system of accounting
so that responsibility for money or materials can be brought home to
every man. Owners who, in the office, would not trust a clerk with
five dollars without having a check upon him, were supplying tons of
material daily to men in the mills without exacting an account of
their stewardship by weighing what each returned in the finished
form.

The Siemens Gas Furnace had been used to some extent in Great Britain
for heating steel and iron, but it was supposed to be too expensive. I
well remember the criticisms made by older heads among the Pittsburgh
manufacturers about the extravagant expenditure we were making upon
these new-fangled furnaces. But in the heating of great masses of
material, almost half the waste could sometimes be saved by using the
new furnaces. The expenditure would have been justified, even if it
had been doubled. Yet it was many years before we were followed in
this new departure; and in some of those years the margin of profit
was so small that the most of it was made up from the savings derived
from the adoption of the improved furnaces.

Our strict system of accounting enabled us to detect the great waste
possible in heating large masses of iron. This improvement revealed to
us a valuable man in a clerk, William Borntr