The transportation devices illustrate the principle of gravity, and also the principle of constant and careful adjustment of the transportation to the worker.
How to Use the Devices.
The devices of the fatigue museum are useful rather as suggesting devices than as object lessons. If your problem is to enable seated work to be done standing, raise your work-bench to the standing level, and put your work chair on stilts with casters, provided the work is not of a kind that requires a chair against which one can push. If your problem is to enable work that has been done standing to be done sitting, construct a chair that will bring the worker to the desired height. If your problem is to reduce vibration, put springs under the four legs of your chair. If your problem is simply to make sitting work more comfortable, be sure that the chair is of the proper height; that the seat slopes right and has a rounded front edge; and that, if it has a back, it is one that does not interfere with work. If the chair is too high, saw off the legs; if too low, add wooden blocks. Chairs of this type, as actually used by the workers, will usually offer suggestions as to what needs to be done.
In many factories one is astounded to find books, cardboard, cloth, blocks of wood, almost anything heaped in the seat of a chair to make the chair higher. Wherever workers are seated at a work-bench that is not adjustable, look for trouble with the chairs; that is, a tall girl crouching in a kindergarten chair fit only for a child or a dwarf, a short girl balanced on a high stool at a high table, without a proper place to rest the feet. No matter what the height of the table or the chairs, if many workers are seated at the same table, and the chairs are not adjustable, there is field for study. If workers vary much as to height, they should be sorted for height, and sent to tables with adjustable height legs; or, if workers cannot be sorted, the short ones should be provided with platforms to bring their elbows to the right height to fit the table, which should be adjusted to fit the tall workers. If your problem is to make standing work more comfortable, and a chair seems impracticable with the methods used, perhaps a chair or some kind of seat could be provided for rest periods.
Starting Your Own Fatigue Museum.
We advise every employer to set aside a small space and assemble at least one example of each type of fatigue eliminating device actually in use, or that may suggest a device to be used. In the absence of a regular motion study man assigned for the purpose, the ideal state of affairs would be to have every member of the management walk through the factory once and look at present fatigue conditions in order to see what improvements could be made. This, however, is almost too Utopian to hope for.
It is the exception where the worker in any large plant knows intimately any part of the plant except the few little work places where he has toiled. A girl who had worked for years in a cotton mill, and who finally went into household work, begged to be taken on a visit of inspection to the factory. “But,” said the woman who was to make the inspection, “I thought you worked there. Surely, you must know about the factory.” “No, indeed,” said the girl, “I never went anywhere except to get into the room where the machine was that I tended.” Even in one excellently managed plant where welfare, or betterment, is a prime consideration, a girl in the office department had never once been out into the plant itself. There is an enormous amount of educational work, that is also fatigue eliminating work, to be done in putting each member of the organization in touch with the entire working plant. There is not time or space, however, for an extended discussion of this problem here.
Therefore, until the workers can be taken to see the fatigue eliminating devices in actual operation, collect such devices, or photographs of them, and put them all in one place. Start a little fatigue museum of your own, even if it is limited to a properly labelled scrap-book of pictures always ready for inspection, and observe the effect upon management, workers, and invention in general. This effect will be reflected in the suggestion box, which in itself provides a unit of measurement of the progress of the fatigue eliminating campaign. When fatigue elimination has progressed to this stage, when actual devices are being installed, when the entire organization has come, as it will, to think in terms of fatigue elimination, the problem may be attacked scientifically. This, the scientific elimination of unnecessary fatigue, is the subject for discussion in the next chapters.
Summary.
A fatigue museum is a collection of devices for eliminating or overcoming fatigue. The parent museum in Providence aims to exhibit such devices as object lessons, and to encourage the spread of fatigue study by sending photographs with descriptions to all who are interested enough to start museums or even a scrap-book for pictures of devices for the elimination of unnecessary fatigue in the industries. Our fatigue museum specializes on chairs, but welcomes devices of any kind. It advocates the establishment of similar museums in colleges, or other institutions, and also in industrial plants and work places of all kinds.