WORKER’S RETENTIVE POWER INCREASED.—­We note in the second place, the increased retentive power of anyone who is working with standards.  There is great difference between different people of the same degree of intelligence as to their ability to memorize certain things, especially such as sequences of the elements of a process.  This lack of retentive power is illustrated particularly well in the cases often found where the student has difficulty in learning to spell.  It is here that the standard instruction card comes into play to good effect.  Its great detail remedies the defect in memorizing of certain otherwise brilliant workers, and its standard form and repetition of standard phrases aid the retentive power of the man who has a good memory.

STANDARD ELEMENTS SERVE AS MEMORY DRILLS.—­This use of standardized elements makes the time elapsing between repetitions shorter, for, while it may be a long time before the worker again encounters the identical work or method, still, the fact that elements are standard means that he will have occasion to repeat elements frequently, and that his memory will each time be further drilled by these repetitions.

GANG INSTRUCTION CARD AN AID TO MEMORY.—­The gang instruction card has been used with good effect at the beginning of unfamiliar repetitive cycles of work to train the memory of whole gangs of men at once, and to cut down the elapsed time from the time when one man’s operation is sufficiently completed to permit the next man to commence his.  It has been found, in the case of setting timbers in mill construction for example, that to have one man call out the next act in the sequence as fast as the preceding one is finished, until all have committed the sequence to memory, will materially decrease the time necessary for the entire sequence of elements in a cycle of work.

INDIVIDUAL INSTRUCTION CARD AN INANIMATE MEMORY.—­The instruction card supplies a most accurate memory in inanimate form, that neither blurs nor distorts with age.

The ranter against this standard memory is no more sensible than a man who would advocate the worker’s forgetting the result of his best experience, that his mind might be periodically exercised by rediscovering the method of least waste anew with each problem.

Other things being equal, that worker has the longest number of years of earning power who remembers the largest number of right methods; or at least remembers where to find them described in detail; and, conversely, those who have no memory, and know not where to look for or to lay their hand on the method of least waste, remain at the beginning of their industrial education.  “Experience,” from an earning standpoint, does not exist when the mind does not retain a memory of the method.  The instruction card, then, acts as a form of transferable memory—­it conserves memory.  Once it is made, it furnishes the earning power without the necessity of the former experience having been had more than once.