"Granning's idea," said young Garnett. "Carries off the fumes. This room was a hell before. Now it's clean and safe as a garden. Here's a machine the Governor's just installed—does the work of six women. Isn't it a beauty?"
Bojo looked beyond it to the clustered groups of women by long counters piled with steel parts, working rapidly at slow, intricate processes of assembling.
"I suppose you'll get a machine some day to do all that too," he said.
"Sure. Wherever you see more than two at a job there's something to be done. Look here." They stood by a couple of swarthy Polack women, who were placing tiny plugs in grooves on round surfaces to be covered and fastened with ball-bearing casters. "Looks pretty tough proposition to get out of those fingers. We've worked two years at it, but we'll get them yet. It's the slug shape that makes it hard; the simple ball-bearings were a cinch. Here's how we worked that out."
A machine was under Bojo's eyes that caught the open roller and plunged it into a circular arena, where from six converging gates steel balls were released and fell instantly into place, a fraction of a second before the upper cover, descending, was fixed and hammered down.
"One hundred and fifty a minute against thirty to forty, and two operations made into one."
"But you can't do the same thing with an irregular slug," said Bojo, amazed.
"There's a way somehow," said Garnett, smiling at the tribute of his astonishment. "If you want to see what a machine can do, look at this, the pride of the shop."
"Who's watching it?" said Bojo, surprised to see no one in attendance.
"Not a soul. It's a wise old machine. All we do is to fill up the hamper once an hour, and it goes ahead, feeds itself, juggles a bit, hammers on a head, and fills up its can, two hundred a minute."