The interest in all these problems of large concerns, in transportation and factory work and complex industries, ought not to make us overlook the fact that on principle the same problems can be found in the simplest industrial establishment.  Even the housewife or the cook destroys economic values if daily she has to spend useless minutes or hours on account of arrangements in the household which are badly adjusted to the psychological conditions.  She sacrifices her energy in vain and she wastes her means where she herself is under the illusion of especial economy.  Scientific management would perhaps be nowhere so wholesome as in kitchen and pantry, in laundry and cellar, just because here the saving would be multiplied millionfold and the final sum of energy saved and of feeling values gained would be enormous, even if it could not be calculated with the exactitude with which the savings of a factory budget can be proven.  The profusion of small attractive devices which automatically perform the economic household labor and disburden the human workers must not hide the fact that the chief activities are still little adjusted to the psychophysical conditions.  The situation is similar to that of the masons, whose function has also been performed for thousands of years, and yet which did not find a real adaptation to the psychical factors until a systematic time-measuring study was introduced.  A manufacturer who sells an improved pan or mixing-spoon or broom expects success if he brings to the market something the merits of which are evident and make the housewife anticipate a decrease of work or a simplification of work, but the development of scientific management has shown clearly that the most important improvements are just those which are deduced from scientific researches, without at first giving satisfaction to the laborers themselves, until a new habit has been formed.

Perhaps the most frequent technical activity of this simple kind is sewing by hand, which is still entirely left to the traditions of common sense, and yet which is evidently dependent upon the interplay of many psychical factors which demand a subtle adaptation to the psychical conditions.  To approach, at least, this field of human labor a careful investigation of the psychophysics of sewing has been started in my laboratory.[33] The sewing work is done, with the left hand supported, and the right hand connected with a system of levers which make a graphic record of every movement on the smoked surface of a revolving drum.  For instance, we begin with simple over and over stitches, measuring the time and the character of the right hand movements for 50 stitches under a variety of technical conditions.  The first variation refers to the length of the thread.  The thread itself, fixed at the needle’s eye, varied between 3 feet and 6 inches in length.  Other changes refer to the voluntary speed, to the number of stitches, to fatigue, to external stimuli, to attention, to methods of training, and so on, but the chief interest remains centred on the psychical factors.  We are still too much at the beginning already to foresee whether it will be possible to draw from these psychophysical experiments helpful conclusions.  The four young women engaged in this laboratory research will later extend it to the psychological conditions of work with the various types of sewing-machines.