Industrial Uses of Measurement.
Measurement industrially is taking on a new and rapidly extending scope. It is of great moment that a railroad or a steamship, a factory or a mill, should be built of the best materials in the most economical way, that it should be equipped with the most efficient boilers, engines, machines, and lamps: in effect, that every dollar be expended for the utmost possible value.
At Altoona the Pennsylvania Railroad Company has a laboratory for testing the materials which go into its roadbed, bridges, tracks, rolling stock, buildings, telegraph, and signal systems. Every gallon of oil, each incandescent lamp, car axle, or boiler plate accepted by the Company must pass a due test in a continuous series of competitive examinations. The huge scale of such a Company’s purchases, the strains placed upon its equipment by a service growing in extent and in speed, make this course indispensable. Take another case, this time in New York, at the power-house of the Interborough Company in West 59th Street. There every day a fair sample of the coal brought to the dock is burned, and its heat-units ascertained as a basis for payment. With a consumption which may rise to 1500 tons a day this precaution is obligatory.[30]
[30] The United States Geological Survey, Washington, D. C., in 1906 published a report on the coal testing plant at the Exposition, St. Louis, Mo., 1904. Part I, Field work, classification of coals, chemical work. Part II, Boiler tests. Part III, Producer-gas, coking, briquetting, and washing tests. This report, with elaborate tables and many illustrations, is of great value.
The Pennsylvania R. R. Co., Philadelphia, in 1905 published a large and handsomely illustrated volume, “Locomotive tests and exhibits, St. Louis, 1904.” $5.00. The locomotives represented the best American practice of 1904. Every detail of construction and operation is given in the most instructive manner.
The Company is continuing these tests of locomotives at Altoona, Pa.
On quite other lines, equally important, the ascertainment of values proceeds at laboratories thoroughly organized for the purpose by staffs at the service of the public. In the United States the first in rank of such laboratories are grouped at the Bureau of Standards in Washington. At leading universities and technological institutes throughout the Union are other laboratories well equipped for chemical, physical, and engineering tests. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, for example, is an Emery testing apparatus for making compression tests of specimens up to eighteen feet in length, for tension specimens up to thirteen feet. In Europe analogous institutions are supplemented by the Board of Trade Laboratories in London, the Laboratoire Central in Paris, the Reichsanstalt in Berlin. The Electrical Testing Laboratories, a joint-stock concern, has been established in New York, at Eightieth Street and East End Avenue, for similar tasks in so far as they come within the electrical field. Its direction in ability and character is authoritative. Here is some of the best apparatus in the world for tests of the permeability of magnet iron, of the light from incandescent, arc, or other electric lamps, of gas-burners and mantles, of the extent to which reflectors and globes fulfil their purpose, and so on.
It is altogether probable that this concern will be copied in every other large city of the Union. When an electrical plant is installed it is not enough that the specifications be drawn with care, it is necessary that verifications of quality follow upon delivery of dynamos, motors, lamps, and all else. Tests should be continuous: let us suppose that for a specific task of illumination Nernst lamps are selected. All very well, but the question is, What quality has each lamp? Buyers in cases of this kind are more and more referring rival manufactures to tests which settle, as in a court of final appeal, differences upon which they themselves are incompetent to pass. Not only in sale but in production these tests are of the first importance. If a copper refinery turns out from the same batch of crude metal two samples which vary by a thousandth in electrical conductivity, it is worth while knowing every detail which may explain how the better sample was produced. So likewise in the drawing of wire, the alloying of lead with other metals for anti-friction bearings, and so on.
It is altogether likely that recourse to authoritative tests will soon become general. Before many years elapse we may see private and public laboratories multiplied for the comparison of building and road-making materials, fuel, boilers, engines, machines, lubricants, finished goods of all kinds. In the textile industry, for instance, much is said about the waste entailed in mixing sound wool with shoddy, long staple cotton with short inferior brands. Let pure and adulterated fabrics be compared in resistance to wear, and let the effects of scouring, bleaching, dyeing, and mechanical washing be measured. In another field Professor W. O. Atwater has done much to ascertain the nourishing value of foods: his labors might well be extended full circle, not omitting tests of popular medicaments and common drugs.