At one stage of the American automobile industry, the European cars displayed a strength and sturdiness so superior to ours that our manufacturers nearly despaired. This was another crisis of many in the industry. But co-operation enabled the cause to be found and the crisis to be met. The European manufacturers knew why their cars stood up better than ours, but they wouldn’t tell. This was the same old dog-in-the-manger that has helped to make the world’s progress slow. So our manufacturers, co-operating, went to work and found out for themselves. Tungsten, vanadium and chromium spelled the reason. The Europeans had been using these and other alloys, and with scientific heat treatment had been producing a special steel, and keeping it strictly to themselves.
Trust the peeking, inquisitorial, persistent “Yankee” to find out when he once gets well started on the scent. And when there are a lot of them, all peering and peeking about, what chance has the poor European? But it is to be doubted if one “Yankee” could have “tumbled” to chrome steel. It took a combination of them to do it. They didn’t discover the secret until they were banded together by co-operation.
Co-operation contributed to the general adoption by the motor industry of the automatic machining of parts. What that meant in economic production was the saving of millions in cost of construction, which in turn got the automobile down to the level of the common people’s price.
In the adoption of the system which substituted the “machining” of automobile parts for hand production, the industry instituted savings of time and labor and therefore cost, one instance of which illustrates the almost incredible potentialities in scientific economy.
A block of cylinders, which takes eleven hours to bore by hand, is bored in two hours by automatic machinery.
World Yet to Learn the Lesson of Economy.
Will the world as a whole ever learn thoroughly the lesson of what the saving of time means in its equivalent of money? Full realization of this is practically confined in this day and generation to some manufacturers, and to most efficiency experts. But the great mass does not acutely see it.
The farmer knows that if he takes four hours to go to town when it is not necessary, he has lost the money represented by four hours’ work. That is plain to him, but it does not strike him that taking four hours to haul a load of grain to town by horses when it would take only one hour to do it by motor truck is throwing money away, and is an economic waste only in another form. Nor does he quickly see that a motor truck will perform service more economically than the horse, including cheaper cost of maintenance.
He also appears unable to get the same viewpoint on the economic loss by bad roads, that he does of wasting four hours to go needlessly to town.
The farmer has long had demonstration of the economic superiority of the mechanical reaper over the hand cradle, that of the mechanical thresher over the flail, and that of the drill over sowing by hand. But he is slow to see that the motor truck is superior to the horse and a factor in greater economy as the reaper, the thresher and the drill were superior to man, while at the same time his liberator from the hardest types of labor, and an economic saving to boot.