months, with a heavy resulting
financial loss to the company. The tests are numerous and somewhat
complicated and require more time to conduct them than tests in other
lines of work, but for these very reasons will be particularly
illuminating. Professor Muensterberg says:

"After carefully observing the service in the central office for a
while, I came to the conviction that it would not be appropriate here
to reproduce the activity at the switchboard in the experiment, but
that it would be more desirable to resolve that whole function into
its elements and to undertake the experimental test of a whole series
of elementary mental dispositions. Every one of these mental acts can
then be examined according to well-known laboratory methods without
giving to the experiments any direct relation to the characteristic
telephone operation as such. I carried on the first series of
experiments with about thirty young women who a short time before had
entered into the telephone training-school, where they are admitted
only at the age between seventeen and twenty-three years. I examined
them with reference to eight different psychological functions. * * *
A part of the psychological tests were carried on in individual
examinations, but the greater part with the whole class together.

[Sidenote: _Memory Test_]

[Sidenote: _Test for Attention_]

"These common tests referred to memory, attention, intelligence,
exactitude and rapidity. I may characterize the experiments in a few
words. The memory examination consisted of reading the whole class at
first two numbers of four digits, then two of five digits, then two of
six digits, and so on up to figures of twelve digits, and demanding
that they be written down as soon as a signal was given. The
experiments on attention, which in this case of the telephone
operators seemed to me especially significant, made use of a method
the principle of which has frequently been applied in the experimental
psychology of individual differences, and which I adjusted to our
special needs. The requirement is to cross out a particular letter
in a connected text. Every one of the thirty women in the classroom
received the same first page of a newspaper of that morning. I
emphasize that it was a new paper, as the newness of the content was
to secure the desired distraction of the attention. As soon as the
signal was given, each one of the girls had to cross out with a pencil
every 'a' in the text for s