who packs incandescent lamps in tissue paper.  She wraps them from morning until night, from the first day of the year to the last, and has been doing that for the last 12 years.  She performs this packing process at an average rate of 13,000 lamps a day.  The woman has reached about 50,000,000 times for the next lamp with one hand and with the other to the little pile of tissue sheets and then performed the packing.  Each lamp demands about 20 finger movements.  As long as I watched her, she was able to pack 25 lamps in 42 seconds, and only a few times did she need as many as 44 seconds.  Every 25 lamps filled a box, and the closing of the box required a short time for itself.  She evidently took pleasure in expressing herself fully about her occupation.  She assured me that she found the work really interesting, and that she constantly felt an inner tension, thinking how many boxes she would be able to fill before the next pause.  Above all, she told me that there is continuous variation.  Sometimes she grasps the lamp or paper in a different way, sometimes the packing itself does not run smoothly, sometimes she feels fresher, sometimes less in the mood for the work, and there is always something to observe and something to think about.

This was the trend which I usually found.  In some large machine works I sought for a long time before I found the type of labor which seemed to me the most monotonous.  I finally settled on a man who was feeding an automatic machine which was cutting holes in metal strips and who simply had to push the strips slowly forward; only when the strip did not reach exactly the right place, he could stop the automatic machine by a lever.  He made about 34,000 uniform movements daily and had been doing that for the past 14 years.  But he gave me the same account, that the work was interesting and stimulating, while he himself made the impression of an intelligent workingman.  At the beginning, he reported, the work had sometimes been quite fatiguing, but later he began to like it more and more.  I imagined that this meant that at first he had to do the work with full attention and that the complex movement had slowly become automatic, allowing him to perform it like a reflex movement and to turn his thoughts to other things.  But he explained to me in full detail that this was not the case, that he still feels obliged to devote his thoughts entirely to the work at hand, and that he is able only under these conditions to bring in the daily wage which he needs for his family, as he is paid for every thousand holes.  But he added especially that it is not only the wage which satisfies him, but that he takes decided pleasure in the activity itself.