"Don't try to get back your belief that your own machine is
perfect--that has gone forever--only look at the other machines
and learn that your own is the best."

This kind of confidence will not be exuberant, but it will have
marked efficiency in the cold gray world in which you are to again
try your strength.

Specialization.

We find that in keeping with the trend toward specialization, the
machine shop is now manned and directed by specialists, whose
close application to the technical science of their respective
specialties has in a degree obscured other elements with which
their interests should be coordinated. Among these we generally
find the so-called human element. This feature of specialization,
which is the natural result of concentration and undivided
attention to the work in hand, has entailed a string of
consequences that has lessened the spirit of fellowship and
co-operation.

The workman in the old machine shop was known as a machinist, an
apprentice or a helper. The machinist trade required skill at
bench, vise and forge, and in the operation of the lathe and
planer. It also required a general knowledge and resourcefulness
which enabled the machinist to make good with the meager
facilities. The large specialized shop of today was not known.

Today the machine shop is filled with a variety of machines which
have grown out of the original types. Each shop's equipment is
selected to serve the needs of that shop, and since each shop has
a special purpose, its equipment seldom includes the full range of
machine-shop machinery.

Today the work flows through the machine shop in lots of large
numbers of pieces of a kind, and each machine, as well as each
worker, is kept at one kind of work and usually at one simple
operation.

The worker in the machine shop of today is no longer known as a
machinist, because that term does not cover the present
range of positions. Even the term "all-round machinist" is no
longer satisfactory.

Specialization has made so many divisions in the work that it has
resulted in developing men for special branches, so that today we
have relatively few men who can skillfully operate for instance
the engine lathe and planer. Even if there are those who ever had
that ability, most of them have lost it through disuse.

The workers are now designated by many names indicating their
special work.

The all-embracing term machine shop is divided into departments
for drafting