Omission of Needless Elements.
A fresh eye, with a keen brain behind it, often detects wasted work in a process long sanctioned by tradition. At the Tamarac Copper Mine, in Northern Michigan, some new ore-crushers were needed in 1891. Among the engineers who sought to furnish these machines was Mr. Edwin Reynolds, of Milwaukee, whose improvements of the Corliss engine have made him famous. That he might see ore-crushers at work for the first time in his life, he visited the Tamarac mine. He observed that the stamps were built on an immense bed of costly timbers and rubber sheets, supposed to be indispensable to efficiency. His eye, unwarped by harmful familiarity, utterly condemned this elastic foundation. He at once proposed to discard both timbers and rubber, and rear new crushers directly on a vast block of solid iron. This heresy quite shocked the directors of the Tamarac Company; they stood out against Mr. Reynolds’ plan for two years. Then, with profound misgivings, they allowed him to erect a stamp of the cheap and simple pattern he had suggested, so laying the iron bed that, in case of its expected failure, work would be delayed not more than two days. Up went the Reynolds’ stamp, and out poured sixty per cent. more crushed ore than from a preceding machine using the same power. Instant by instant its energy was wholly exerted in crushing rock, not largely in the useless compression of an enormous elastic bed.
Long before there was any Tamarac Mine, inventors had bothered themselves providing for difficulties as imaginary as those which, at vast outlay, were met by the timber underpinning of old-time ore stamps. In 1825 the builders of locomotives at Easton, in England, provided their engine-wheels with teeth which worked into racks with corresponding projections. They were afraid that a smooth wheel on a smooth track would slip without onward motion. Their unnecessary gear was discarded when it was found that under a heavy engine a smooth wheel has adequate adhesion on a rail as smooth as itself. Toothed wheels and racks are now only at work on the railroads of Mount Washington and other steep acclivities. As James Watt used to say to William Murdock, his trusted lieutenant,—“It is a great thing to know what to do without. We must have a book of blots—things to be scratched out.”