As time went on, however, Lynch began to show signs of restlessness and uneasiness. Being a man of keen, alert mind and quick intelligence, he had quickly grasped the fundamentals of the heating business. He was soon able to talk with the firm's designers and engineers in their own language. But the more he studied boilers and radiators, the less interest he took in them. He had sense enough to know that the only thing that would win in the plan he had in mind was a radical change in design which would increase the amount of heat delivered in proportion to the amount of fuel burned, or the amount of heat delivered in proportion to the cost of fuel burned, or would reduce the amount of supervision required, or would do away with some of the long-standing sources of trouble and annoyance in heating apparatus. Long and hard he thought and conjectured, and studied statistics, and followed reports of experiments, but for the life of him he could not take any interest in any such line of research. He hated the gases, ashes, soot, smoke, and dirt generally. Huge rough castings of steel and iron seemed gross and ugly to him, and the completed product seemed coarse and unfinished. The only improvements he could think of were improvements in beauty of line, in refinement of the design, in added ornamentation, and other enhancements of the physical appearance of the product. In these he took some interest, but he had the good sense to know that no change of this kind would accomplish what they wished in the matter of going after a national market.
THE HIGH-SALARIED ONE FAILS
For a while President Jessup waited patiently; then, as the big salary checks came to him to be signed month after month, he began to grow restless. No result had yet been announced and in his conferences with Lynch, he could not determine that any hopeful progress was being made. Finally, in desperation, he called his engineers and designers together. For three weeks he worked with them night and day, studying, analyzing, making records, and computing results. They took
cat-naps on benches in the laboratory while waiting for fires to burn a standard number of hours; ate out of lunch-boxes; and finally, unshaven and covered with soot and ashes, they triumphantly produced a fire-box and boiler which would burn the cheapest kind of coal screenings satisfactorily, with but little supervision and a high degree of efficiency. This was the best thing they had ever done in the laboratory. This was the attainment which he had so long desired. This, properly advertised and handled, certainly ought to revolutionize the steam and hot-water heating business. But it was not one of Lynch's brain-children. However, Lynch would now have an opportunity to prove his value and return to the concern large profits for the amount they had spent and would spend upon him. At any rate, he knew how to plan and conduct an advertising and selling campaign.
Lynch, intensely relieved by the solving of this problem, the utility of which he very readily saw, threw himself, heart and soul, into the construction of the advertising campaign. As this work progressed, Jessup began to have some misgivings. While the advertisements, circulars, catalogues, and other literature were beautiful; while the English in them was elegant, and the form of expression refined, somehow or other, they seemed to lack the necessary punch or kick which Jessup knew they ought to have. The two big things about the new product were, first, economy of fuel; second, ease of operation and small demand for supervision. These points were not brought out clearly enough. They did not grip. They did not get home as they should. There was a good deal of talk in all the advertising about the beauty of the new apparatus; about the refinement of its finish; about its workmanship, and many other things which, to Jessup's mind, detracted from the main issue. The one thing he wanted to hammer into the minds of the readers of his advertising was the fact that here was a heating apparatus for which fuel could be purchased in the usual quantities and at half the regular price. What he wanted to do was to make them actually see the dollars and cents saved, not only in fuel, but also in
the cost of operation. He wanted suburbanites to see the fact that they could attend to their furnaces each morning before going to town, and that the fires would not need any further attention until the following morning; but, somehow or other, the advertising did not seem to picture this clearly enough. The statements were made, yes; there was plenty of evidence produced to show this; but it was done in a way which, somehow or other, did not produce an intense conviction.
Jessup had secured from his board of directors an appropriation of fifty thousand dollars for a national advertising campaign. Upon the result of his first attempt would depend his securing a further appropriation for such a campaign as he had planned and as he wanted to execute. This being the case, he did not feel that he was justified in permitting Lynch's advertising to go out as it was. The result was that, just before the time came when copy must be sent to the magazines, newspapers, and street-car advertising companies, Jessup called his old advertising manager into conference and for a week they struggled together, revising the copy, rewriting the selling argument, and placing emphasis in clear, strong, unforgetable figures where it would do the most good.
WHY THE "GREAT FIND" WAS A DISAPPOINTMENT
The result of all this was that Lynch, seeing the writing on the wall, tendered his resignation—which was all too gladly accepted. In offering his resignation, however, Lynch had stipulated that he was to receive four thousand dollars out of the six thousand five hundred still due him on his year's contract. President Jessup's error in selecting an employee had cost him ten thousand dollars in salary. Besides this was the still larger sum in expenses, in wasted effort, and in the disorganization of his entire factory and selling force as the result of the introduction of a man who did not belong there.
His mistake was due to two fundamental errors. In the first place, the facts that a man is personally agreeable, that he belongs to the same political party, that he belongs to the same lodge or fraternity, that his ideas and opinion on