While the replies to my letters showed that hardly any attention had so far been given to such problems of objective psychology in the industrial concerns, it became evident that the managers felt distinctly that here a problem was touched which must be of highest importance for economic success.  From many different sides willingness was shown to study the problem of employment under the psychological aspect.  As my material came mostly from very large establishments in which labor of very many different kinds is carried on side by side, of course I frequently received the assurance that whenever an industrious energetic man is unsuccessful in one kind of work, a trial is made with him in another department, and that by such shifting the right place can often be found for him.  Young people, to whom, in spite of long trial and the best will, it seems impossible to supply certain automatic machines, become excellent workers at much more difficult labor in the same establishment.  Women who are apparently careless and inattentive when they have to distribute their attention over a number of operations do high-class work when they are engaged in a single activity; and in other cases the opposite is reported.

I may mention a few concrete chance illustrations.  In a pencil factory the women in one department have to grasp with one movement a dozen pencils, no more and no less.  Some learn this at once without effort, and they earn high wages; others never can learn it in spite of repeated trials.  If those who fail in this department are transferred, for instance, to the department where the gold-leaf is most carefully to be applied to the pencils before stamping, very often they show great fitness in spite of the extreme exactitude needed for this work.  To show how often activities which appear extremely similar may demand different individuals, if the work is based on different psychical functions, I may refer to a report from one of the largest establishments in the country.  In the accounting department a large number of girls are occupied with looking over hundreds of thousands of slips from which the weekly pay-list is compiled.  Each slip contains six figures and small groups of twenty slips have to be looked through to see whether those six figures on each correspond.  With moistened forefinger they turn up the slips one by one in much the same manner that a bank clerk counts money.  A good sorter will turn up the slips so rapidly that a bystander is unable to read a single figure, and yet she will not overlook an error in thousands of slips.  After the slips are sorted, the operation of obtaining the totals on each order number is performed with the aid of an adding machine.  The machine operator rolls up the slips of the pile with the thumb of her left hand and transfers the amount to the proper keys of the machine.  It has been found that the most rapid and accurate girls at sorting are not seldom useless on the machines.  They press the wrong, keys and make errors in copying the total from the machine indicators to the file-card.  On the other hand, some of the best machine operators are very slow and inaccurate at the sorting table.  Girls have been found very poor at the work at which they were first set, and very successful and efficient as soon as they had been transferred from the one to the other.