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word, this was possible because the art of cutting metals involves a
true science of no small magnitude, a science, in fact, so intricate
that it is impossible for any machinist who is suited to running a lathe
year in and year out either to understand it or to work according to its
laws without the help of men who have made this their specialty. Men who
are un-familiar with machine-shop work are prone to look upon the
manufacture of each piece as a special problem, independent of any other
kind of machine-work. They are apt to think, for instance, that the
problems connected with making the parts of an engine require the
especial study, one may say almost the life study, of a set of
engine-making mechanics, and that these problems are entirely different
from those which would be met with in machining lathe or planer parts.
In fact, however, a study of those elements which are peculiar either to
engine parts or to lathe parts is trifling, compared with the great
study of the art, or science, of cutting metals, upon a knowledge of
which rests the ability to do really fast machine-work of all kinds.
The real problem is how to remove chips fast from a casting or a
forging, and how to make the piece smooth and true in the shortest time,
and it matters but little whether the piece being worked upon is part,
say, of a marine engine, a printing-press, or an automobile. For this
reason, the man with the slide rule, familiar with the science of
cutting metals, who had never before seen this particular work, was able
completely to distance the skilled mechanic who had made the parts of
this machine his specialty for years.
It is true that whenever intelligent and educated men find that the
responsibility for making progress in any of the mechanic arts rests
with them, instead of upon the workmen who are actually laboring at the
trade, that they almost invariably start on the road which leads to the
development of a science where, in the past, has existed mere
traditional or rule-of-thumb knowledge. When men, whose education has
given them the habit of generalizing and everywhere looking for laws,
find themselves confronted with a multitude of problems, such as exist
in every trade and which have a general similarity one to another, it is
inevitable that they should try to gather these problems into certain
logical groups, and then search for some general laws or rules to guide
them in their solution. As has been pointed out, however, the underlying
principles of the management of "initiative and incentive," that is, the
underlying philosophy of this management, necessarily leaves the
solution of all of these problems in the hands of each individual
workman, while the philosophy of scientific management places their
solution in the hands of the management. The workman's whole time is
each day taken in actually doing the work with his hands, so that, even
if he had the necessary education and habits of generalizing in his
thought, he lacks the time and the opportunity for developing these
laws, because the study of even a simple law involving say time study
requires the cooperation of two men, the one doing the work while the
other times him with a stop-watch. And even if the workman were to
develop laws where before existed only rule-of-thumb knowledge, his
personal interest would lead him almost inevitably to keep his