ted without greater fatigue what after the old
methods it would have taken 100 masons to do, and that the total
expense for the building was reduced to less than a half in spite of
the steady increase of the wages of the laborers. For this purpose it
was necessary that exact measurements be made of the height at which
the bricks were lying and of the height of the wall on which they must
be laid, and of the number of bricks which should be carried to the
masons at once. He studied how the trowel should be shaped and how the
mortar should be used and how the bricks should be carried to the
bricklayers. In short, everything which usually is left to tradition,
to caprice, and to an economy which looks out only for the most
immediate saving, was on the basis of experiments of many years
replaced by entirely new means and tools, where nothing was left to
arbitrariness. Yet these changes did not demand any invention or
physically or economically new ideas, but merely a more careful
adaptation of the apparatus to the psychological energies of the
masons. The new arrangement permitted a better organization of the
necessary bodily movements, fatigue was diminished, the accessory
movements were better fructified, fewer inhibitions were necessary, a
better playing together of the psychical energies was secured.

The students of scientific management stepped still lower in the scale
of economic activity. There is no more ordinary productive function
than shoveling. Yet in great establishments the shoveling of coal or
of dirt may represent an economically very important factor. It seems
that up to the days of scientific management, no one really looked
carefully into the technical conditions under which the greatest
possible economic effect might be reached. Now the act of shoveling
was approached with the carefulness with which a scholar turns to any
subtle process in his laboratory. The brilliant originator of the
scientific management movement, who carried out these investigations[28]
in the great Bethlehem Steel Works, where hundreds of laborers had to
shovel heavy iron ore or light ashes, found that the usual chance
methods involve an absurd economic waste. The burden was sometimes so
heavy that rapid fatigue developed and the movements became too slow,
or the lifted mass was so light that the larger part of the laborer's
energies remained unused. In either case the final result of the day's
work must be anti-economic. He there