part 20

190 Here is a night watchman in a motion picture studio (plant) keeping it safe from danger of fire at night. He has his time clock with him. He walks all night long through the plant from one station to another. At each station he pushes his time clock against a key which is fixed in the wall. This key prints a number on a long narrow roll of paper which is moving all the time through the lock of the time clock. In this way the time clock makes a full record of whether and when the watchman went to each station in the studio in turn. The time at which he was at each one of them is recorded. If a number is not recorded, that is proof that the watchman did not go to that station.

191 This record is necessary before the insurance company will pay for damage done to the plant by fire. The insurance company needs to know where the watchman was all through the night. The motion picture company pays insurance money every year to the insurance company. In exchange the insurance company will pay for any damage to the building done by fire. But the motion picture company is responsible for keeping the studio as safe as possible from fire. The night watchman with his time clock is part of the system of keeping the studio safe from fire.

192 Here is a more fully automatic part of a system of controls against fire. Some metals melt at low temperatures for metals. Thin lengths of such metal are placed at many points in the plant. A fire starting near one of these points will quickly melt the metal. This starts an electric system working. It opens outlets through which water comes down from the ceiling to put out the fire. The price of such a system may be high, but it is much lower than the price of a new building. Such insurance is cheap at the price.

193 Much of the work in present-day factories has to be automatically controlled. The much-talked-of Assembly Line was a first step in this direction. It lets us make automobiles and many other things much more cheaply than they could be made before. An Assembly Line is a moving line of parts of whatever is being made. Each worker (human or machine) does one thing (adds or changes some part) to each automobile (or whatever is being put together) as it goes by. The work of each is dependent on what has been done before. They are parts in an over-all design with an over-all purpose. If you make workers into machines for short working hours you can free the rest of their time. What for? To what purpose? What are we designed to do? This new free time has been given us by the workers and thinkers of the past. We have to think about what we will do with it, and about the best possible use of it.

194 It seems sometimes as if we want very much to put an end to waiting on one another. There are many ways, for example, of making the serving of food in restaurants more or less automatic. One of the causes of the high price of food in restaurants is the use of waiters and waitresses. One waitress can serve only a small number of people, if she has to go to and from the tables with trays. And fewer people than before are interested in doing this sort of work even when the hours are short, the pay is good and the work not too hard. In present-day living more people than ever before eat at restaurants. Many families who used to have servants now do all their own housework.

195 There are ways of making restaurants self-serving, that is, of getting the public to do more of the work so that fewer waitresses are needed and less time is wasted in waiting to be served. The nearest thing to complete self-serving is the AUTOMAT. Food and drink are put into boxes with glass doors in front. You look at the food. If you want what you see, you put in the right amount of money and the door is unlocked so that you can open it. You take the food out and shut the door again. Fresh supplies of food are put in the boxes as they are emptied.