Where Men Are Still Cheaper
Than Machinery.
GREATEST good to the greatest number makes some strange customs in India. The inhabitants are numbered by millions, and they are so pinched for money that a little has to go a long way. The companies operating gold mines there find it the best policy to hire all the labor they can, both because it is cheaper than installing labor saving machinery and because by that means they can save many from starvation.
Machinery would be used to sift ashes
and pump slime in modern communities,
but in India hand work is cheaper
Wages are extremely low and workmen are often very intelligent, performing exceptionally good work. Raw material is cheap, too, and the combination effectually bars out modern progress. For instance, the trains of ore cars are hauled by bullocks. An aerial tramway was installed by an enterprising manager, but he soon found that his maintenance charges were much greater than the total freight costs when the bullocks were used. Back came the bullocks and their native drivers.
Instead of using machinery, women and girls are employed to sift the ashes and recover small particles of unburned coal. The system is cheap and effective. So is the handling of slime pulp from the mills. This is a fine, slimy mud which is settled in big stone tanks in order to recover the water from it.
In progressive countries heavy pumps are used to empty the settled mud from the tanks, but in India they use native laborers and a primitive mechanism which takes much more time, uses more labor, and is not nearly so satisfactory, but it is cheaper and keeps many natives in food. A woman scoops the mud into a basket, two men raise it on the end of a long lever sweep, another empties it into a trough while a woman pushes it with a long stick to give it impetus enough to move along to its destination. The spectacle would drive a modern efficiency expert to distraction, but he would reconcile himself to it when he figured out the relative cost of machinery and men.
Ingenious Slide Rule for Motorists
A SLIDE rule has been devised by which a motorist can compute accurately the ratios which exist between the number of revolutions of the engine and the mileage of the car per mile; the corresponding ratio of gear reduction, etc. It can also be used to ascertain the theoretical horsepower by the knowledge of the cylinder dimensions, and the reciprocal relations between various parts of the machinery. It is intended that the device will bear the name of some automobile manufacturer and be used as an advertising novelty.
