The students of scientific management stepped still lower in the scale of economic activity.  There is no more ordinary productive function than shoveling.  Yet in great establishments the shoveling of coal or of dirt may represent an economically very important factor.  It seems that up to the days of scientific management, no one really looked carefully into the technical conditions under which the greatest possible economic effect might be reached.  Now the act of shoveling was approached with the carefulness with which a scholar turns to any subtle process in his laboratory.  The brilliant originator of the scientific management movement, who carried out these investigations[28] in the great Bethlehem Steel Works, where hundreds of laborers had to shovel heavy iron ore or light ashes, found that the usual chance methods involve an absurd economic waste.  The burden was sometimes so heavy that rapid fatigue developed and the movements became too slow, or the lifted mass was so light that the larger part of the laborer’s energies remained unused.  In either case the final result of the day’s work must be anti-economic.  He therefore tested with carefully graded experiments what weight ensured the most favorable achievement by a strong healthy workingman.  The aim was to find the weight which would secure with well-arranged pauses the maximum product in one day without over-fatigue.  As soon as this weight was determined, a special set of shovels had to be constructed for every particular kind of material.  The laborers were now obliged to operate with 10 different kinds of shovels, each of such a size that the burden always remained an average of 21 pounds for any kind of material.  The following step was an exact determination of the most favorable rapidity and the most perfect movement of shoveling, the best distribution of pauses, and so on, and the final outcome was that only 140 men were needed where on the basis of the old plan about 500 laborers had been engaged.  The average workingman who had previously shoveled 16 tons of material, now managed 59 tons without greater fatigue.  The wages were raised by two thirds and the expenses for shoveling a ton of material were decreased one half This calculation of expenses included, of course, a consideration of the increased cost for tools and for the salaries of the scientific managers.

Whoever visits factories in which the new system has been introduced by real specialists must be surprised, indeed, by the great effects which often result from the better psychophysical adaptation of the simplest and apparently most indifferent tools and means.  As far as the complicated machines are concerned, we are accustomed to a steady improvement by the efforts of the technicians and we notice it rather little if the changes in them are introduced for psychological instead of the usual physical reasons.  But the fact that even the least complicated and most indifferent devices can undergo most influential improvements,