“The only perfect machine is the one you do not know.”

“Study the machines offered by your competitors, just to get the same degree of knowledge of the ‘other’ machines—­not for the purpose of slandering or even mentioning—­but just to restore your confidence in the relative value of your own machine.”

“Don’t try to get back your belief that your own machine is perfect—­that has gone forever—­only look at the other machines and learn that your own is the best.”

This kind of confidence will not be exuberant, but it will have marked efficiency in the cold gray world in which you are to again try your strength.

Specialization.

We find that in keeping with the trend toward specialization, the machine shop is now manned and directed by specialists, whose close application to the technical science of their respective specialties has in a degree obscured other elements with which their interests should be coordinated.  Among these we generally find the so-called human element.  This feature of specialization, which is the natural result of concentration and undivided attention to the work in hand, has entailed a string of consequences that has lessened the spirit of fellowship and co-operation.

The workman in the old machine shop was known as a machinist, an apprentice or a helper.  The machinist trade required skill at bench, vise and forge, and in the operation of the lathe and planer.  It also required a general knowledge and resourcefulness which enabled the machinist to make good with the meager facilities.  The large specialized shop of today was not known.

Today the machine shop is filled with a variety of machines which have grown out of the original types.  Each shop’s equipment is selected to serve the needs of that shop, and since each shop has a special purpose, its equipment seldom includes the full range of machine-shop machinery.

Today the work flows through the machine shop in lots of large numbers of pieces of a kind, and each machine, as well as each worker, is kept at one kind of work and usually at one simple operation.

The worker in the machine shop of today is no longer known as a machinist, because that term does not cover the present range of positions.  Even the term “all-round machinist” is no longer satisfactory.

Specialization has made so many divisions in the work that it has resulted in developing men for special branches, so that today we have relatively few men who can skillfully operate for instance the engine lathe and planer.  Even if there are those who ever had that ability, most of them have lost it through disuse.

The workers are now designated by many names indicating their special work.

The all-embracing term machine shop is divided into departments for drafting, designing, accounting, production, flow of work control, cost accounting and many other divisions.  Each calls for executives and workers having special titles.