MACHINES THAT OUST MEN.

Taranaki Daily News, 5 June 1920, Page 9

MACHINES THAT OUST MEN.

MARVELS OF MASS PRODUCTION. The British working man is going to hear a lot about, mass production very soon. It is the new dominant factor in world trade, and it is going to affect him in all manner of ways he perhaps little dreams of. American workmen, of course, have been up against it for a long time. American manufacturers turned out cheap AValtham and Elgin watches by tlie million many yeai's ago, each watch, and each individual part of each watch, being an exact duplicate of every other timepiece of that grade, and of every corresponding individual part. Later, Henry Ford applied the same principle to the manufacture of motorcars, with the result that he was able in a very little while practically to monopolise the American market for cheap cars, and seriously to threaten the European market.

To-day, over there, they are applying similar methods to the making of all sorts of other commodities and articles in common use. Human labor is in many instances being almost wholly eliminated. One mechanical wonder, once started, will continue working without pause day in and day out, Sundays included—a IGS-hour week.

_ The newest American mass production factories employ very few workmen. Hero and there a man may be seen gliding silently about the vast shops crammed with intricate machinery, clicking a lever here, pressing a button there. The mechanism does the rest. To cite but one instance. A machine has been invented which can turn out a quarter of a million electric light bulb* every twenty-four hours, and nil the human clement in connection with it w represented by three shifts of three men each-

Twenty-four steel arms gather trie glass from a tank, each arm virtually taking the place of a pair of human hands, and the rest of the processes arc similarly performed and expedited. One man mixes by machinery the whole liquid glass required to feed six of the furnaces.

The efforts of several hundred skilled workmen, spread over an entire week, would have been requisite in order to produce a like output working in the old-fashioned way.