operating machinery, his abilities turned in the direction of working out the technique of literary expression. Instead of repairing machinery he loved rather to revise and rewrite his stories and plays. In other words, the constructive talent, which he had shown as a child in material mechanics, turned in the direction of mental and intellectual construction as he grew older.
COMMERCIAL CONSTRUCTIVENESS
There are many boys who exhibit in their early years a great love of machinery, and it is usually considered a kindness to them to prepare them for either mechanics or engineering. In mechanical lines, they are misfits, because they are frail and insufficient physically. In engineering lines they are more at home, because the engineer works principally with his brains. But very often they would still be more at home in the realms of literature or oratory.
In a similar way boys often manifest great interest in machinery in their youth, and afterward, if given the right opportunities, show their constructive ability in the organization of business enterprises and the successful devising of plans and schemes for pushing these enterprises to success.
Sometimes those of this type of organization devote themselves rather to invention and improvement than to the direct physical handling of machinery. The following brief story of the struggles of Elias Howe[7] should be an inspiration to every individual who fights physical frailty; also, a lesson to him as to the way in which he should express his mechanical ability:
[Footnote 7: From “Great Fortunes,” by James D. McCabe. Published by George Maclean.]
INTELLECTUAL TRIUMPH OF A FRAIL MAN
“Elias Howe was born in the town of Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1819. He was one of eight children, and it was no small undertaking on the part of his father to provide a maintenance for such a household. Mr. Howe, Sr., was a farmer and miller, and, as was the custom at that time in the country towns of New England, carried on in his family some of those minor branches of industry suited to the capacity of children, with which New England abounds. When Elias was six years old, he was set, with his brothers and sisters, to sticking wire teeth through the leather straps used for making cotton cards. When he became old enough, he assisted his father in his saw-mill and grist-mill, and during the winter months picked up a meager education at the district school. He has said that it was the rude and imperfect mills of his father that first turned his attention to machinery. He was not fitted for hard work, however, as he was frail in constitution and incapable of bearing much fatigue. Moreover, he inherited a species of lameness which proved a great obstacle to any undertaking on his part, and gave him no little trouble all through life. At the age of eleven he went to live out on the farm of a neighbor, but the labor proving too severe for him he returned home and resumed his place in his father’s mills, where he remained until he was sixteen years old.
“At the age of twenty-one he married. This was a rash step for him, as his health was very delicate, and his earnings were but nine dollars per week. Three children were born to him in quick succession, and he found it no easy task to provide food, shelter and clothing for his little family. The light heartedness for which he had formerly been noted entirely deserted him, and he became sad and melancholy. His health did not improve, and it was with difficulty that he could perform his daily task. His strength was so slight that he would frequently return from his day’s work too exhausted to eat. He could only go to bed, and in his agony he wished ‘to lie in bed forever and ever,’ Still he worked faithfully and conscientiously, for his wife and children were very dear to him; but he did so with a hopelessness which only those who have tasted the depths of poverty can understand.
“About this time he heard it said that the great necessity of the age was a machine for doing sewing. The immense amount of fatigue incurred and the delay in hand sewing were obvious, and it was conceded by all who thought of the matter at all that the man who could invent a machine which would remove these difficulties would make a fortune. Howe’s poverty inclined him to listen to these remarks with great interest. No man needed money more than he, and he was confident that his mechanical skill was of an order which made him as competent as any one else to achieve the task proposed. He set to work to accomplish it, and, as he knew well the dangers which surround an inventor, kept his own counsel. At his daily labor, in all his waking hours, and even in his dreams, he brooded over this invention. He spent many a wakeful night in these meditations, and his health was far from being benefitted by this severe mental application. Success is not easily won in any great undertaking, and Elias Howe found that he had entered upon a task which required the greatest patience, perseverance, energy and hopefulness. He watched his wife as she sewed, and his first effort was to devise a machine which should do what she was doing. He made a needle pointed at both ends, with the eye in the middle, that should work up and down through the cloth, and carry the thread through at each thrust, but his elaboration of this conception would not work satisfactorily. It was not until 1844, fully a year after he began the attempt to invent the machine, that he came to the conclusion that the movement of a machine need not of necessity be an imitation of the performance by hand. It was plain to him that there must be another stitch by the aid of a shuttle and a curved needle with the eye near the point. This was the triumph of his skill. He had now invented a perfect sewing machine, and had discovered the essential principles of every subsequent modification of his conception. Satisfied that he had at length solved the problem, he constructed a rough model of his machine of wood and wire, in October, 1844, and operated it to his perfect satisfaction.
“It has been stated by Professor Renwick and other scientists that Elias Howe ‘carried the invention of the sewing machine further on toward its complete and final utility than any other inventor has ever brought a first-rate invention at the first trial.’ …
“Having patented his machine, Howe endeavored to bring it into use. He was full of hope, and had no doubt that it would be adopted at once by those who were so much interested in the saving of labor. He first offered it to the tailors of Boston; but they, while admitting its usefulness, told him it would never be adopted by their trade, as it would ruin them. Considering the number of machines now used by the tailoring interests throughout the world, this assertion seems ridiculous. Other efforts were equally unsuccessful. Every one admitted and praised the ingenuity of the machine, but no one would invest a dollar in it. Fisher (Howe’s partner) became disgusted and withdrew from his partnership, and Howe and his family moved back to his father’s house. Thoroughly disheartened, he abandoned his machine. He then obtained a place as engineer on a railroad, and drove a locomotive until his health entirely broke down….
“In 1850 Howe removed to New York, and began in a small way to manufacture machines to order. He was in partnership with a Mr. Bliss, but for several years the business was so unimportant that upon the death of his partner, in 1855, he was enabled to buy out that gentleman’s interest, and thus became the sole proprietor of his patent. Soon after this his business began to increase, and continued until his own proper profits, and the royalty which the courts compelled other manufacturers to pay him for the use of his invention, grew from $300 to $200,000 per annum. In 1867, when the extension of his patent expired, it is stated that he had earned a total of two millions of dollars by it.”
STARVED BY HIS HANDS, ENRICHED BY HIS HEAD
Robert Burns was a failure as plowman and farmer. Rousseau was a failure at every kind of physical work. Henry George nearly starved himself and his family to death trying to make a living as a journeyman printer. The following extract from the autobiography of Jacob Riis[8]–another excellent example of this type of organization–shows how useless it was for him to attempt to make his living at physical labor:
[Footnote 8: From “The Making of an American,” by Jacob A. Riis. Macmillan & Company, New York.]
A missionary in Castle Garden was getting up a gang of men for the Brady’s Bend Iron Works on the Allegheny River, and I went along. We started a full score, with tickets paid, but only two of us reached the Bend. The rest calmly deserted in Pittsburgh and went their own way….
The iron works company mined its own coal. Such as it was, it cropped out of the hills right and left in narrow veins, sometimes too shallow to work, seldom affording more space to the digger than barely enough to permit him to stand upright. You did not go down through a shaft, but straight in through the side of a hill to the bowels of the mountain, following a track on which a little donkey drew the coal to the mouth of the mine and sent it down the incline to run up and down a hill a mile or more by its own gravity before it reached the place of unloading. Through one of these we marched in, Adler and I, one summer morning with new pickaxes on our shoulders and nasty little oil lamps fixed in our hats to light us through the darkness where every second we stumbled over chunks of slate rock, or into pools of water that oozed through from above. An old miner, whose way lay past the fork in the tunnel where our lead began, showed us how to use our picks and the timbers to brace the slate that roofed over the vein, and left us to ourselves in a chamber perhaps ten feet wide and the height of a man.
We were to be paid by the ton, I forget how much, but it was very little, and we lost no time in getting to work. We had to dig away the coal at the floor with our picks, lying on our knees to do it, and afterward drive wedges under the roof to loosen the mass. It was hard work, and, entirely inexperienced as we were, we made but little headway.
When toward evening we quit work, after narrowly escaping being killed by a large stone that fell from the roof in consequence of our neglect to brace it up properly, our united efforts had resulted in barely filling two of the little carts, and we had earned, if I recollect aright, something like sixty cents each. The fall of the roof robbed us of all desire to try mining again….
Up the railroad track I went, and at night hired out to a truck farmer, with the freedom of his hay-mow for my sleeping quarters. But when I had hoed cucumbers three days in a scorching sun, till my back ached as if it were going to break, and the farmer guessed he would call it square for three shillings, I went farther. A man is not necessarily a philanthropist, it seems, because he tills the soil. I did not hire out again. I did odd jobs to earn my meals, and slept in the fields at night….
The city was full of idle men. My last hope, a promise of employment in a human-hair factory, failed, and, homeless and penniless, I joined the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals, and fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or doorway. I was too proud in all my misery to beg. I do not believe I ever did.
There was until last winter a doorway in Chatham Square, that of the old Barnum clothing store, which I could never pass without recalling those nights of hopeless misery with the policeman’s periodic ‘Get up there! move on!’ reinforced by a prod of his club or the toe of his boot. I slept there, or tried to when crowded out of the tenements in the Bend by their utter nastiness. Cold and wet weather had set in, and a linen duster was all that covered my back. There was a woolen blanket in my trunk which I had from home–the one, my mother had told me, in which I was wrapped when I was born; but the trunk was in the ‘hotel’ as security for money I owed for board, and I asked for it in vain. I was now too shabby to get work, even if there had been any to get. I had letters still to friends of my family in New York who might have helped me, but hunger and want had not conquered my pride. I would come to them, if at all, as their equal, and, lest I fall into temptation, I destroyed the letters. So, having burned my bridges behind me, I was finally and utterly alone in the city, with the winter approaching and every shivering night in the streets reminding me that a time was rapidly coming when such a life as I led could no longer be endured.
Not in a thousand years would I be likely to forget the night when it came. It had rained all day, a cold October storm, and night found me, with the chill downpour unabated, down by the North River, soaked through and through, with no chance for a supper, forlorn and discouraged. I sat on the bulwark, listening to the falling rain and the swish of the dark tide, and thinking of home. How far it seemed, and how impassable the gulf now between the ‘castle,’ with its refined ways, between her, in her dainty girlhood, and me sitting there, numbed with the cold that was slowly stealing away my senses with my courage. There was warmth and cheer where she was. Here an overpowering sense of desolation came upon me. I hitched a little nearer to the edge. What if—-? Would they miss me much or long at home if no word came from me? Perhaps they might never hear. What was the use of keeping it up any longer, with, God help us, everything against, and nothing to back, a lonely lad?…
It was not only breakfast we lacked. The day before we had had only a crust together. Two days without food is not good preparation for a day’s canvassing. We did the best we could. Bob stood by and wagged his tail persuasively while I did the talking; but luck was dead against us, and ‘Hard Times’ stuck to us for all we tried. Evening came and found us down by the Cooper Institute, with never a cent. Faint with hunger, I sat down on the steps under the illuminated clock, while Bob stretched himself at my feet. He had beguiled the cook in one of the last houses we called at, and his stomach was filled. From the corner I had looked on enviously. For me there was no supper, as there had been no dinner and no breakfast. To-morrow there was another day of starvation. How long was this to last? Was it any use to keep up a struggle so hopeless? From this very spot I had gone, hungry and wrathful, three years before when the dining Frenchmen for whom I wanted to fight thrust me forth from their company. Three wasted years! Then I had one cent in my pocket, I remembered. To-day I had not even so much. I was bankrupt in hope and purpose. Nothing had gone right; and worse, I did not care. I drummed moodily upon my book. Wasted! Yes, that was right. My life was wasted, utterly wasted.
A voice hailed me by name, and Bob sat up, looking attentively at me for his cue as to the treatment of the owner of it. I recognized in him the principal of the telegraph school where I had gone until my money gave out. He seemed suddenly struck by something.
[Illustration: Photo by Marceau, N.Y. FIG. 9. Richard Mansfield, Actor-Manager. A fine, balanced combination of artistic talent, creative power, and capacity for great emotion, with good judgment, financial sense, great energy, great determination, uncompromising devotion to ideals, fine powers of expression, and executive ability of the driving, compelling, rigid type. Note high head, domed above temples and wide across center of forehead; large nose; long, straight upper lip; firm mouth; prominent chin; long line from point of chin to crown of head; intense expression.]
[Illustration: FIG. 10. Hon. A.I. Cutting (same as FIG. 11). Intellectual, idealistic, yet practical; mild, but very shrewd and persistent; good-natured, friendly, social, sympathetic, kindly, yet with good commercial and financial judgment. Observe height of head, with dome above temples; moderate width of head; pleasant, but firm-set, mouth; fine texture and fine chiseling of features; strong, prominent chin, and genial, kindly, friendly expression.]
[Illustration: FIG. 11. Hon. A.L. Cutting. Ambitious, aspiring, hopeful, cheerful, friendly, social. A good public speaker. Excellent planner, prudent, far-sighted, and deliberate in speech and action. Note high head, both at crown and above temples, long behind ears; high forehead; well-formed eyes and nose, and prominent chin.]
[Illustration: FIG. 12. The late Melville Fuller, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Unusually keen analytical powers, unaffected by sentiment or irrelevant considerations. Great ability to get down to essentials. Note fullness of brows and of upper corners of forehead; keen, penetrating eyes, and long nose with depressed tip.]
[Illustration: FIG. 13. Frank A. Vanderlip, President of National City Bank, of New York. A man of both financial and political acumen–also humanitarian. Note high, domed head; width across center and lower part of forehead; inclination to stoutness; large, well-formed features; long lines of face.]
[Illustration: _Copyright American Press Association_. FIG. 14. Hon. Joseph W. Folk, of Missouri. A keen politician, shrewd lawyer, and hard fighter. Note height and width of head; large, prominent nose; square, firm jaw; long upper lip; dogged set of mouth; unflinching eyes, and inclination to stoutness.]
[Illustration: FIG. 15. The late Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, of Rhode Island. Keen, practical observation, financial judgment, diplomacy, shrewdness, energy, intellect, industry, courage, determination, and command. Note well-developed brows; height and width of forehead, especially across center; long, well-developed nose; straight, firm mouth; broad, square, prominent chin; long ears; long line from point of chin to crown of head, and keen, shrewd, alert, penetrating expression of eye.]
[Illustration: FIG. 16. Showing large, well-developed base of brain, usually an indication of a tendency to stoutness. Note fullness of back of head at nape of neck.]
“‘Why, what are you doing here?’ he asked. I told him Bob and I were just resting after a day of canvassing.
“‘Books!’ he snorted. ‘I guess that won’t make you rich. Now, how would like to be a reporter, if you have got nothing better to do? The manager of a news agency downtown asked me to-day to find him a bright young fellow whom he could break in. It isn’t much–$10 a week to start with. But it is better than peddling books, I know,’
“He poked over the book in my hand and read the title. ‘Hard Times,’ he said, with a little laugh. ‘I guess so. What do you say? I think you will do. Better come along and let me give you a note to him now.’
“As in a dream. I walked across the street with him to his office and got the letter which was to make me, half starved and homeless, rich as Croesus, it seemed to me.
“When the sun rose I washed my face and hands in a dog’s drinking trough, pulled my clothes into such shape as I could, and went with Bob to his new home. The parting over, I walked down to 23 Park Row and delivered my letter to the desk editor in the New York News Association up on the top floor.
“He looked me over a little doubtfully, but evidently impressed with the early hours I kept told me that I might try. He waved me to a desk, bidding me wait until he had made out his morning book of assignments; and with such scant ceremony was I finally introduced to Newspaper Row, that had been to me like an enchanted land. After twenty-seven years of hard work in it, during which I have been behind the scenes of most of the plays that go to make up the sum of the life of the metropolis, it exercises the old spell over me yet. If my sympathies need quickening, my point of view adjusting, I have only to go down to Park Row at eventide, when the crowds are hurrying homeward and the City Hall clock is lighted, particularly when the snow lies on the grass in the park, and stand watching them awhile, to find all things coming right. It is Bob who stands by and watches with me then, as on that night.”
TALENT IN THE BUD AND BLOSSOM
The big important lesson underlying all of these concrete examples is that the individual of this type never ought to attempt to do any kind of work in which success depends upon physical effort. Whatever talents he may have will express themselves always best in an intellectual way. It may be art, it may be music, it may be machinery, it may be business, it may be mining or agriculture, it may be any one of many other active pursuits which have also a purely intellectual side. In his early youth his mind naturally turns to the more material manifestation of his talent. But, with proper training and given the proper opportunities, he will always gravitate surely to the mental and intellectual phases of his bent. The boy who is interested in machinery may become an inventor or he may become a playwright or an author. The boy who is interested in plants and flowers may become a botanist or a naturalist, or, perhaps, even a poet. The boy who is deeply interested in battles and fighting may be far better adapted to the profession of historian than to the trade of soldier. The boy who likes to build houses and factories in his play, and seems to be deeply interested in the construction of edifices, may not be fitted to become a contractor or a draughtsman. If he is of this intellectual type, he is far more likely to become an architect, or, perhaps, to idealize his talents even further and devote himself to literature on the subject of architecture, home planning, and home decoration. The boy of this type, who in his youth seems to take a particular interest in horses, cattle, dogs, and other animals, may not necessarily be best qualified for a stock breeder or a dairyman. Possibly he should become a veterinarian or even a physician and surgeon. Or his bent may be in the direction of science, so that he makes a name as a naturalist.
The first and most important thing for people of this type, and for parents having children of this type, is to get it firmly fixed in their minds, once for all, that they are not fitted for hard physical work. The next important thing, of course, is to secure a broad and complete education along general lines. If there is any striking and particular talent along any one line, such an education is more than likely to bring it out and to cause it to seek further development. In case there is no such distinct predilection manifested, further and more minute study of the individual will have to be made in order to determine just what kind of intellectual work will give him the best opportunities for success and happiness. Even in the want of such a careful analysis, it is, nevertheless, true that an individual of this type, who has no marked inclination toward any one form of mental activity, is always far better placed, far happier, and far more successful if trained to do any kind of intellectual work than if left untrained and compelled to try to earn his own living by the use of his bones and muscles.
CHAPTER V
THE FAT MAN
When we were children and went to the circus, our favorite performer in the sawdust ring was always the clown, and our favorite clown was the fat one. In fact, we do not remember ever having seen a clown who was not a fat man.
Alas! how many were the tribulations of our rotund friend! How he was buffeted, and paddled, and slapped! How often he tumbled and fell! How maliciously inanimate objects flew up and hit him in the face! How constantly his best efforts went for naught, how invariably he was misunderstood! How great was the glee with which everybody persecuted him and knocked him about the ring! And yet, notwithstanding all his troubles, did he win from us a sympathetic sigh or even the fraction of a tear, except tears of laughter? All his troubles seemed funny to us.
Millions are still laughing at the comic tribulations of dear old John Bunny, although he has gone beyond the power of things to trouble him. We have laughed and are still laughing at Thomas Wise. From the days of Falstaff down to those of the “movies,” we have enjoyed laughing at the plights of a fat man on the stage.
FAT MEN RULE THE WORLD
In real life it is much the same. Every fat man knows that only by unusual patience, good nature, and friendly tolerance can he live with his fellows. He is the butt of all jokes; he must smile at a constant patter of pleasantries about his unusual size. He hears the same old stupid japes over and over and over again. If he weren’t the prince of good fellows and the best-natured man in the world, it would fare ill for those who torment him.
As a matter of fact, it may be better for the rest of us than for the fat man that he is good natured, easy going, genial, fond of a good laugh; because fat men rule the world. Perhaps that is why it is so funny to us to see them in trouble. It is one of the foibles of humanity always to find pleasure in the mishaps of its rulers and superiors. The pranks of the schoolboy are intended to cause perplexity and distress to his teacher. This is true of the college youth in his playfulness. The same human trait manifests itself in a thousand other ways.
The fat man was born to rule. He enjoys the good things of life. He is fond of luxuries. He has a keenly developed sense of taste, and a nice discrimination of flavor. He likes to wear good clothing. He likes soft, upholstered chairs, comfortable beds, a goodly shelter. Like old King Cole (always pictured in our nursery books with a Garguntian girth), he enjoys “his pipe and his bowl and his fiddlers three.” He is fond of a good joke, and laughs more heartily than any one else at it. In fact, enjoyment and pleasure may be said to be the keynote of the typical fat man’s personality. But he is too heavy for physical activity. His feet are too small for the weight of his body. He does not care for strenuous physical exercise. It is not his idea of a good time to follow a golf ball all over a twenty-acre field. He does it only because he thus hopes to reduce his flesh and enable himself to become once more the romantic figure he was in his youth. For, while the fat man may be a master of comedy, and while he may be a ruler of the people, he is not romantic. The big fellows do not well sustain romantic roles, except in grand opera, where nearly everything but the music is illusion and elusive. Our novelists all tell us that as soon as a man’s girth begins to increase, he looks ridiculous in a fine frenzy. J.M. Barrie makes a very keen point of this in his story of Tommy and Grizel. It was the increasing size of his waist band that drove poor Tommy to such extreme measures as to cause his final downfall and death. His one great aim in life was to be romantic, and when the lady of his desires giggled about his increasing size it was too much.
Scientific research, philosophy, and the more strenuous and concentrated forms of mental activity seem to require a certain degree of asceticism in order to be wholly efficient. We are told that the person who feeds too well causes his mind to grow rather ponderous in its movements. He is inclined to fall asleep if he remains quiet and practices severe mental concentration for too long a time.
HE PLANS WORK FOR OTHERS
If, therefore, the fat man cannot work at physical labor, if he is not fitted for romance, if he is incapacitated by his love of the good things of life for severe mental labor, what can he do to fill his purse, supply his table, clothe his portly person, and surround himself with the elegancies and luxuries which are so dear to his heart?
Evidently the fat man found out long ago that the eager, active, restless, energetic, muscular, raw-boned soldier and workman was far more interested in the exercise of his muscles and in outdoor activity than he was in securing niceties and luxuries. He also learned that the thinker, the philosopher, the scientific experimenter, and all who took delight in mental effort were more deeply interested in their studies, in their research, in their philosophies, and in their religions than they were in money, food, clothing, and shelter. So he set about it, with his jovial personality, his persuasiveness, and keen sense of values, to organize the thinkers and philosophers under his direction, so that he could take and use for himself the product of their mental labors. He was perfectly willing to agree to feed and take care of them, to clothe and shelter them, in return for what they could give him. They didn’t eat much. They didn’t care much for fine clothing. They were perfectly satisfied in very plain and rather ascetic surroundings. They were, therefore, a rather inexpensive lot of people for him to keep.
Taking the plans, schemes, inventions, and discoveries from those who thought them out, the fat man carried them to the muscular fellows, who were just spoiling for a fight or for some opportunity to exercise their physical powers. These he organized into armies–to fight, to till the soil, and to build and manufacture. These armies carried out the ideas the fat man got for them from the lean and hungry thinkers. They gloried in hardship. They rather enjoyed roughing it, and took delight in privation. Therefore, they also were a comparatively easy burden on the hands of the fat man; who was thus enabled to sit upon a golden throne, in a comfortable palace, surrounded by all the beauties and luxuries gathered from the four winds, and enjoy himself while directing the work of both the intellectual giant and the physical giant.
THE SLENDER SCHOLAR AND THE RUGGED SOLDIER
Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Spencer, Emerson, and Bergson were philosophers, and were all lean and slender men. Lord Kelvin, Lister, Darwin, Curie, Francis Bacon, Michelson, Loeb, Burbank, and most of our other scientists are also of the thin, lean type. Shakespeare, Longfellow, Holmes, Ruskin, Tindall, Huxley, and a long list of other intellectual and spiritual writers were men who never put on much flesh. James Watt, Robert Fulton, Elias Howe, Eli Whitney, S.F.B. Morse, Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, and nearly all of our other great inventors have also been men whose habit was slender. Alexander, Napoleon, Washington, Grant, Kitchener, and most of our other great soldiers, while robust, are of the raw-boned, muscular type. They do not belong in the list of the fat men. The same is true of our great railroad builders, of Stanley, Peary, Livingston, and other explorers, of De Palma, Oldfield, Anderson, Cooper, Resta, and our other automobile racing kings. You look in vain among the aviators for a huge, rotund figure. Spend a week in New York City looking over subway workers, structural iron workers, guards, brakemen, motormen, carpenters, bricklayers, truckmen, stevedores, and boatmen. Go out into the country, look over the farm hands, the gardeners, the woodsmen, and all who work with their hands in the midst of nature, and in all the list you will find very few, if any, fat men. Fat men are, therefore, doing neither the actual intellectual nor the actual physical work of the world.
THE FAT MAN’S MODERN THRONE
Study butchers, bakers, chefs, provision merchants, and others who deal in food products. Among them you will find a good many corpulent figures. They are interested in good things to eat. They know how to handle them. They know how to purchase them, and they know how to sell them. They are able to tickle the palate of the lean and hungry scholar, of the robust and active soldier or worker, and, especially, of men as epicurean as themselves. They are, therefore, successful in the handling of food products. Go a little further–study foremen, superintendents, managers, and presidents of corporations. In many a large upholstered chair, which represents, in our modern life, the golden throne of the olden days, you will find a fat man. Here, as of old, they are taking the ideas of the thinkers and the muscular powers of the workers, and combining the two to make profit for themselves. At the same time, they are finding for the thinker a market for his ideas that he himself could never find. Unless the fat man fed him, the lean man would become so lean that he would finally die of starvation. The big fellow is also finding a market for the muscular power, energy, and skill of the worker; a market which the worker, by himself, could never find.
THE FAT MAN’S VALUABLE SERVICE
Recently we made a study of a large corporation. Amongst other things, we found it required ten thousand dollars capital to provide the building, machinery, help, tools, advertising, selling, and other necessities of that business for every employee on the payroll. It also required unusual organizing ability and unusual selling ability to gather together the means for manufacturing the product and getting it into the hands of the consumer. It also required considerable genius to collect the money for the product and apply it to the needs of the workers in the form of payroll. These services of the fat man are often forgotten by those who work under his direction.
In order that huge industries may be built up and employment secured for hundreds of thousands of men, large bodies of capital must be gathered together. This is a work for financiers. Go down into Wall Street, in New York; La Salle Street, in Chicago; State Street, in Boston, and look over the financiers there. A considerable number of them are fat men. Because thinkers and workers cannot appreciate financial value, many of them complain loudly because the fat man sits in an easy chair and reaps the profits from their efforts. They restlessly agitate for an economic system which will yield them all the profits from their ideas and labor. They want to eliminate the capitalist–to condemn the fat man to a choice between scholarship or working as they work and starvation. They know human aptitudes so vaguely that they want to turn the corpulent into farm hands or philosophers and the great mass of lean and bony into financial rulers.
There is a prevalent notion among the unthinking that capital takes about four-fifths of the products of labor’s hands and keeps it. A committee of the American Civic Federation, after three years of careful investigation in industries employing an aggregate of ten million workers, found that this idea is based upon the assumption that capital gets and keeps all the gross income from production except what is paid to labor. It leaves out of account the cost of raw materials, the upkeep of buildings and machinery, and miscellaneous expenses. When these are subtracted from gross income, the committee found, labor receives two-thirds of the remainder in wages and salaries, capital one-third for interest, upkeep of capital, and profit.
FINANCIER AND JUDGE
With some exceptions, neither the deep thinker nor the hard physical worker is capable of handling finances. They are lacking in financial acumen, due, no doubt, to the fact that the thinker is interested chiefly in the object of his thought, the worker chiefly in the exercise of his powerful muscles. Neither of them is sufficiently eager for the good things of life to have a true and unerring sense of financial values. The lean man is nervous. He is inclined to be irritable; he probably lacks patience. Therefore, he is not well qualified to judge impartially. The active, energetic, restless man is not contented to sit quietly for hours at a time and listen to the troubles of other people. He must get away, be out of doors, have something to do to exercise those splendid muscles of his. Therefore, it is left to the fat man to sit upon the bench, to listen to tiresome details of the woe of those who have had trouble with one another. Because he is neither nervous nor irritable; because his mind is at rest; because he is well fed and well clothed and has no need to be anxious, he can take time to be impartial and to judge righteous judgment between his fellowmen. And so you will find fat men on the bench, in politics, in the halls of legislature, on the police force, and in other places where they have an opportunity to use their judicial ability.
HOW MISFITS HAPPEN
So unerring is the fat man’s judgment of values, as a general rule, that it is not at all likely that he would ever find himself a misfit were it not for the fact that many men are lean and slender or muscular and robust up to the age of 30 or 40, and after that put on flesh rapidly. These men, therefore, are often deceived in regard to themselves. In the slenderness of youth, they feel active and are active. In short, they have the qualities, in these early periods of their life, which we should expect in men of similar build. They are, therefore, too likely to enter upon vocations for which they will find themselves unfitted as the years go by and they put on more flesh. It often happens that men of this class graduate from the ranks of thinkers or workers into the ranks of managers, financiers, bankers, and judges, as they put on flesh and become better and better adapted for that particular kind of work. The only trouble is that sometimes they are not well enough trained–they do not have sufficient education for the higher positions. In these cases they remain misfits. Oftentimes they succeed in getting into positions of comparatively mediocre executive nature, when they could assume and make a success of very much higher positions if they had a true knowledge of their vocations.
A FAT MAN’S SUCCESS
The story of Hon. Alfred L. Cutting, of Weston, Massachusetts, perhaps illustrates as well as any other in our records the aptitudes and vocational possibilities of this type. Mr. Cutting comes of good old New England stock, his ancestors on both sides having settled in Massachusetts comparatively early in the seventeenth century. His father and his grandfather before him were merchants, and young Alfred began working in the parental general store as soon as he had finished school.
As a youth, Mr. Cutting was quite distinctly of the bony and muscular type, being very active, fond of rowing and fishing, a great lover of nature and of long tramps through the beautiful hills of eastern Massachusetts. As he entered manhood, however, he began to put on more flesh and to take less interest in strenuous outdoor sports. At the same time, he began to take a hand, in a quiet, modest way, in the town politics of Weston. While still a comparatively young man, he was elected a member of the board of selectmen of this town and has held this position with singular acceptability to his fellow-citizens almost continuously ever since.
For a number of years, Mr. Cutting was associated with his father and brother in the general store, but, as time went on, he became ambitious to enlarge his activities. He, therefore, assisted in the organization of the New England branch of the Sheldon School, of Chicago, and was its manager for a number of years. When he first undertook this work, Mr. Cutting had never made a public speech in his life, and, while he was interested in politics and ambitious for success along this line, he felt greatly handicapped by what he considered to be his inability to face an audience acceptably. It was at about this time that we first formed the acquaintance of Mr. Cutting and, upon consultation, informed him of his natural aptitudes and talents. He immediately began a careful study of public speaking, supplementing this study with actual practice both in politics and in his capacity as manager of the Sheldon School. In 1908 and 1909 he was a member of the House of Representatives for the State of Massachusetts, gaining credit for himself as a member of important committees and rendering to his own constituency unusually faithful and efficient service.
SUCCESS IN EXECUTIVE CAPACITY
As manager for the Sheldon School, Mr. Cutting selected and trained a number of salesmen and assistants in the leadership of whom he did excellent work, he himself delivering lectures before boards of trade, chambers of commerce, trade conventions, and other such bodies in all parts of New England. He has since, however, given up this particular line of work to devote himself to politics, to his civic duties, and to the management of his growing mercantile business. He is, at present, chairman of the board of selectmen for the town of Weston, an office which he has held with distinction for five years. He is also a member of the executive committee of the Republican Club of Massachusetts. In 1913 he was the Republican candidate for representative in Congress for the thirteenth district, at the special election held during that year to fill the vacancy caused by the promotion of the Hon. John W. Weeks to the United States Senate. This was the year when the Progressive vote was very large and the Republican candidate for governor in Massachusetts was thousands of votes behind the Progressive. Notwithstanding this unusual political situation, Mr. Cutting, though not elected, led his Progressive opponent by more than 3,000 votes, and, by his splendid leadership, helped lay the foundation for the Republican victory in the same district the following year. At this writing, Mr. Cutting has just won a notable victory at the polls, having been elected a member of the board of county commissioners for Middlesex County by a very large plurality. He carried every district in the county except two, and in nearly every district he ran far ahead of his ticket.
POLITICAL PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES
Mr. Cutting’s ability, however, is by no means fully indicated by the offices which he has held. He has never been an office seeker, but has preferred rather to work as a political leader. His great interest in politics arises, first, from his ardent desire for excellence and efficiency in the public service. Under his leadership, the town of Weston has built and maintains more miles of excellent roads, at less cost to the tax payer, than any other town of its area in the State. Its schools and other public institutions are similarly efficient and conducted with a similar degree of economy. Second, Mr. Cutting enjoys politics because he loves the game. Like all true sportsmen, he plays to win, but is neither chagrined or cast down if he loses. He is always able to rejoice with the victor if beaten in a fair fight.
FINANCIAL ACUMEN
Mr. Cutting is one of the organizers of the Metropolitan Bank of Boston, and a prominent member of its board of directors, thus indicating his growing interest in financial matters.
The portraits of Mr. Cutting, shown on pages 126 and 127, are well worthy of study. In them are evident his cheerfulness, his geniality, his shrewdness, his friendliness, and his honesty of purpose. These are shown largely in the expression, but also in the full, found development of his head just above the temples, in his long back head, and in the general squareness of the head. This squareness, especially in the back, indicates also his prudence, his tendency to take precautions and, through foresight, to forestall disaster. The narrowness of the head, just above the ears, indicates mildness of disposition and an ability to secure his ends by tact, diplomacy, and intellectual mastery rather than by open combat and belligerency. The fulness of the eyes indicates Mr. Cutting’s command of language, and the broad, square chin his determination and deliberation; the long line from the point of the chin to the crown of the head, his love of authority and his ability to lead and to rule.
INDICATIONS OF APPROACHING STOUTNESS
The man of slender build who has indications clearly marked and easily recognizable of approaching stoutness should prepare himself for executive, financial, judicial, or merchandising work. He should study law, economics, finance, banking, politics, political economy, public speaking and other such branches. If he has the ability to write, he should prepare himself to write on financial or political subjects. Many of our most noted political writers are fat men. Such writers as Alfred G. Lewis, Samuel G. Blythe, and others are good examples of this type.
Indications of approaching stoutness are not difficult to detect. Heredity has a powerful influence. The young man who resembles his father in facial appearance and coloring, will probably grow stout if his father is a fat man. When the face inclines to be round, the cheeks rather full, and the lips full, there is a fair probability that the individual will take on flesh. A concave form of face is also another good indication. The concave face is shown in Figure 31. It will be seen that it is prominent at the point of the chin, and not so prominent at the mouth, and prominent at the top of the forehead, near the hair line, and not so prominent at the brows. The nose, also, is inclined to be sway backed. Another indication which should have a bearing in the choice of a vocation is the thickness of the neck, especially, at the back, and a fulness of the back head, at the base of the brain. Such fulness is shown in Figure 16.
Wideness of the head, in comparison with length and height, is also another indication that the individual may put on flesh as he grows older. The man or woman who has a majority of these indications will do well to prepare himself or herself for a position of command.
The world is a richer, pleasanter, better fed, better clothed, and happier place because of its fat men. It is true, they enjoy the good things of life themselves, but, as a general rule, they also like to see others enjoy them, and well deserve the rich rewards they reap. We are glad that so few of them are ever poor and hungry.
[Illustration: FIG. 17. Beaumont, Aviator. His square jaw, strong chin, large nose, large ear, convex profile, and alert, keen expression all indicate activity, energy, love of motion, desire for speed, and physical courage.]
[Illustration: Photo by Paul Thompson. N. FIG. 18. The late Lincoln Beachy, Aviator. A man of consummate physical courage and coolness. Note long lines of face and unusually long, prominent chin.]
[Illustration: _Copyright by Harris & Ewing_. FIG. 19. Col. George W. Goethals, Builder of the Panama Canal and Governor of Canal Zone. Of the intellectual but bony and muscular type. Short, stocky, enduring, and resistant. Finer and kindlier than FIG. 20 or FIG. 21, as shown by texture and expression, but firm, dogged, and just. A natural-born executive for construction or mechanical work. Note firm mouth and chin, with slight droop at corners, showing determination and self-control.]
[Illustration: _Copyright American Press Association_. FIG. 20. Field Marshal von Hindenberg, of the German Army. A splendid example of the bony, muscular type. Unusually determined, persistent, enduring, and resistant. Prudent, far-sighted, dogged, unsentimental, capable of enduring great hardship. Note short, stocky build; big, square chin and jaw; long, square head; relentless expression of mouth and eyes; coarse texture, and big, heavy-tipped nose. A great executive, especially as a relentless driver and rigid disciplinarian.]
[Illustration: _Copyright American Press Association_. FIG. 21. Rear Admiral Frank E. Beatty, of the American Navy. A fine example of the bony and muscular type. Rugged and enduring, keen, alert, and resourceful. Finer and kindlier than von Hindenberg, but not quite so fine, intellectual and kindly as Goethals. Just and determined as an executive, of which he is an excellent type. Note finer texture and more genial expression.]
[Illustration: FIG. 22. William Lloyd Garrison, the Great Abolitionist. A man of the bony and muscular type, with the passion of his type for freedom. A man of high ideals, great courage, determination, and perseverance. Note large, well-formed features; forehead prominent at brows; long upper lip, and high, spirited expression. Such a man cannot be overlooked.]
[Illustration: _Photo by Pach, N.Y._
FIG. 23. Samuel Rea, Railroad Builder and Executive. Very alert, keen, practical, matter-of-fact, hard-headed; a good observer, a quick thinker. Very decisive, determined, and persistent. Understands construction, mechanics, and operation. Note well-developed brows; moderately low, square forehead; height of crown; width of head; large, well-formed nose, mouth, chin, jaw, and ears, and keen, but calm, self-possessed expression.]
[Illustration: FIG. 24. Lon Wescott Beck, the Sign Poster of Death Valley. An out-of-doors man. Loves grandeur of scenery, wide spaces. Note long, square, prominent chin; long lines of face; width between eyes, and width at top of head.]
CHAPTER VI
THE MAN OF BONE AND MUSCLE
Consider the record of the man of action.
He built the pyramids and temples of Egypt, raised up the monuments and artistic triumphs of Greece, fared forth across the plains of Arabia and the deserts of Africa on horses and camels before the dawn of history. He wore the coat of mail of the Roman legion; he penetrated through the northernmost forest of Europe; he pioneered in barbarous England. Thousands of years ago he built ships and sailed them, and, finally, drove them across the sea. Thus he found two new continents. In America, he cut down forests, built roads, established industry, fought battles for freedom, invented and built steamships, telephones, telegraphs, cotton gins, aeroplanes, railroads, submarines thousands of electric light and power stations, and millions of shops and factories. He explored darkest Africa; found both the North and the South Poles. This man drives his steamships at thirty knots an hour, his locomotives at 70 miles an hour, his automobiles at 100, and his aeroplanes at 120. He is setting higher and yet higher records for running, leaping, swimming, rowing, throwing weights, and driving horses. He has organized great athletic contests, baseball leagues, tennis associations, golf clubs, and other organizations for the promotion of physical activity. The man of bone and muscle has climbed to the peaks of all the mountains of the world; has dug down into the depths of the earth after her treasures of gold and silver and the baser metals, precious stones, and other products of the mines. This man tills the fields, manufactures all fabricated products, and carries goods to the ends of the earth. This active type mans navies, fills the ranks of armies, erects great buildings, and cut through the backbone of a continent.
ACTIVITY AND SPEED
This man loves motion. He is not satisfied with slow, languid motion, but demands speed, greater and ever greater speed. And so his horses, his locomotives, the machines in his factory, his automobiles, his aeroplanes, his motor-cycles, his farm implements, his ocean liners, his motor boats, are being constantly studied, constantly improved, and constantly raised to higher and higher performances in speed of production, speed of transportation, speed of accomplishment.
This man not only demands speed, but he demands space. The man who can travel at a hundred miles an hour needs many hundred miles in which to travel. This is why nearly all of his activities are in the big out-of-doors; this is why he is constantly exploring and pioneering in order to extend his boundaries. He has a craving for more space in which to breathe, more scope of action.
This ardent and irrepressible desire for physical freedom, for physical liberty of action, also leads to the desire for political and economical freedom. All of our great liberators, from Moses down to Lincoln, have been men of this active, muscular, bony, type. Because they desire freedom for themselves, they want freedom for everyone else. They often go to extremes and strive to secure freedom for those who have no use for it, who do not care for it after it is won for them, and who only abuse it when they should enjoy its blessings.
THE MAN OF MUSCLE GROWS A BRAIN
In the early days of the race, the man of this type had little intelligence. He was supposed to be, principally, bone and muscle with no brain. He did the physical work which was assigned to him and other men did the thinking, the planning, and the directing. But, as the race has increased in intelligence, the man of bone and muscle has developed a brain. Manual skill, educators tell us, is one of the best of all means for gaining knowledge and increasing intelligence. So now the muscular man can think, now he can plan, now, especially, does he manifest his thinking, planning and constructive ability along lines for increasing speed, getting more out of machinery, buildings, inventions, manufacture, agriculture, horticulture, transportation. In all these lines the man of action is also a man of thought. This is well; this is an improvement, and our active, hustling, pioneer type of man is happier, more efficient, more prosperous in his intelligent state than he was in his purely physical state. But here, also, he gets into trouble. So long as his mental activity is accompanied by considerable physical activity, his health is good, he is satisfied, he enjoys his work and he is successful in it. But the time comes when the work to be done by brain becomes so important that many men of this type give up physical activity entirely and devote all of their time to mental work.
THE ACTIVE MAN’S DILEMMA
Strange that we have not learned that any faculty possessed must be exercised or the possessor surely falls into evil ways. Strange that we have not seen that the man who explores the unknown world in mighty pioneering work, who frees it from oppression, who carries on its tremendous physical and industrial development, could never be satisfied if imprisoned within the four walls of an office. Thus hampered and confined, unless he finds expression for his speed mania, he grows irritable, ill, nervous, depressed. He troops, by the thousand, into the consulting rooms of the physician and surgeon. And always and always is the same prescription given: “You must get away from your work; you must get out into the open; you must get plenty of outdoor exercise.”
Exercise, exercise, exercise, has become the slogan. Magazines are devoted to it. Whole libraries of books are published showing the relationship between exercise and health. Sanitariums multiply whose principal means of cure are located in the gymnasium, in the garden, in the woods, at the wood pile, and on the farm. Fortunes have been made in the manufacture of the equipment for exercise: Indian clubs, dumb bells, and whole shiploads of so-called sporting goods, the object of all of which is to enable the active man to get some relief from the ache of his muscles or nerves due to lack of exercise.
EXERCISE FOR EXERCISE’S SAKE DULL
But the man of muscle is, as we have said, frequently a man of brains. He has common sense; he has a desire for accomplishment and achievement. To such a man, the mere pulling of cords, or the swinging about of his arms and legs, the bending of his back, just for the sake of exercise, seems a trifle stupid.
Very few men of this type ever keep up exercise for exercise’s sake for any very long period of time. They read in some magazine about the benefits of exercise. Perhaps, on account of some trouble, they go to their physicians, and exercise is prescribed. So, with a great show of resolution and not a little feeling of martyrdom, they buy a pair of Indian clubs, or wall exercisers, or a weight machine, or, perhaps, merely buy a book of “exercises without apparatus,” and make up their minds to take their exercises regularly every morning. At first they attack the task with great enthusiasm–but it is still a task. Perhaps marked improvement is shown. They feel much better. They push out their chests and tell their friends how they get up, take a cold bath every morning, and then take ten or fifteen or twenty minutes of rapid calisthenics. In a righteous glow, they relate how it shakes them up and makes their blood course through their veins; how they breathe deeply; how the process clears out their heads; and how much better they feel They wind up: “You ought to do it, too, old man; it would make you young again.”
By and by, however, to stand gazing blankly at the wall of a bathroom, or out of the window of a bed-chamber, and put your arms up five times and then straight forward five times, then repeat five times, etc., etc., grows dull. You lose interest You hate the task–you revolt. Even if, by power of will, you keep it up, you do so under protest. It is a physical truth that that which is disagreeable is also physically harmful. In order to be wholesomely nourishing, food must taste good. The same is true in regard to exercise. There is no very great benefit in exercise which is drudgery.
WHEN GAMES PALL
To take the “task” element out of exercise, many kinds of games have been invented–some indoor, some outdoor, some for men of little activity, some of great strenuousness and even danger. But it requires a particular type of man or woman to take interest in a game, to play it well and profitably, as a form of exercise. To enter into a game whole-heartedly, one must have a keen zest for combat. The man who plays purely for the sport, and not to win, doesn’t win. And the man who doesn’t win, loses interest. Not all men, not even all active men, have this desire to win. To them a game soon becomes dull–nearly as dull as any other form of exercise. They do not see that they are any further ahead in anything worth while simply because they have knocked a golf ball about more skilfully–or luckily–than some other fellow, or pulled a little stronger oar than their opponents. There are plenty of men to whom it is humiliating to be beaten, who are not good losers, and because they are not good losers they are not very often winners. Such men do not really enjoy games at all, and, as a general rule, do not play them with enthusiasm and persistence.
For those, then, who do not enjoy calisthenics of any kind, who take very little interest in games and contests, there remain, for exercise, gardening, farming, carpentry, forestry, hunting, fishing, mountain climbing, and other such forms of physical activity. All of these, however, require considerable leisure, and some financial investment. They are out of the reach of many of those in lower clerkships and other such employment. These men, by the thousands, work in offices which are, perhaps, not as well ventilated as they should be, under artificial light. They travel to and from their work in crowded street cars and subways, and live in little dark, narrow flats and apartments, with one window opening out on sunlight and fresh air, and all other windows opening on courts and so-called light and air-shafts. Golf, tennis, baseball, rowing, etc., are good forms of exercise for these men–but few of them care for games. Gardening, forestry, carpenter work, mountain climbing, hunting, or fishing are out of the question in a city flat. So the majority jump up in the morning, hurry on their clothes, snatch a bite of breakfast, run for a car, get to work, burrow in the warrens of industry until lunch time, rush out, snatch a sandwich and a cup of coffee at some lunch counter, and back to work again until dinner time. Another dive into the bowels of the earth in the subway, home to the little flat, dinner at seven o’clock or even later, and then the short evening. This little time from eight o’clock until ten at night is practically the only time the worker has for himself, except for holidays and his annual two weeks’ vacation. How shall he get sufficient physical exercise during that time to satisfy all his needs? If he is so constituted that he enjoys such things, he may go to a gymnasium or to a bowling alley, but he is just as likely to go to a pool room or to a dance hall. Of course, it is far better for him to play pool or to dance than to sit quietly at home, as many do.
SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM
This whole question is a serious one. Even those who have the time, the means, the opportunity, and the inclination find themselves confronted with problems. Even with all of their opportunities, most of them do not get enough outdoor physical activity. And so they fret, they fume, they beat their wings against the bars, they are unhappy, dissatisfied, and therefore, oftentimes inefficient and unsuccessful. Even when they are successful, they have fallen far below what they might have accomplished had they been engaged in some vocation which would have given them not only physical activity out of doors, but _some intense vital interest_ in the _result_ of that activity. In other words, their vocation should supply them with the necessary physical exercise as part of the day’s work. They should see themselves advancing, making money, achieving something worth while, creating something beautiful or useful, making a career for themselves, instead of merely playing or exercising for the sake of exercise. Then they would be happier. Then they would be better satisfied with their lot. They would be more efficient and far more successful.
Current literature abounds in true stories of those who have gone forward to the land and have found help, happiness, and success in the cultivation of the soil. This one has redeemed an abandoned farm in New England. That one has taken a small ten-acre farm in southern California. Another has carved out health, happiness, and a fair degree of fortune for himself on the plains of Washington or Idaho, or among the hills of Oregon. Old southern plantations have been rehabilitated at the same time with their new owners or tenants.
ONE MAN’S “WAY OUT”
Near Gardiner, Maine, is a little forty-five acre poultry and fruit farm which pays its happy owner $3,800 a year clear of all expense. Seven years ago this farm was abandoned by its former owners, who could not make it pay. Five years ago it was purchased by its present owner for a song–and only a half-line of the song was sung at the time. He was a clerk who had lived the little-flat-dark-office-and-subway life until tuberculosis had removed him from his job and threatened his life. Farm work–on his own farm–proved to be a game at which he could play with zest and success. The stakes were a life and a living–and he has won. We–and you, too, no doubt–could multiply narratives from observation and experience, to say nothing of reading.
A WORLD OF OPPORTUNITY
All these experiences and the reports of them are both a part of and a stimulus to the “back to the land movement.” This movement has its mainspring in two plain economic facts, namely: first, clerical and other indoor vocations have become overcrowded; second, while crops grow bigger year by year, the number of mouths to feed multiplies even faster, and unless more land is tilled and all land cultivated more intensively, we shall eat less and less, as a race, and pay more and more for what we eat. Here is opportunity for the men of bone and muscle–opportunity for health, prosperity, usefulness to humanity, enjoyment and happiness. Other opportunities lie in the conservation of our forests and the planting and development of new timber lands; in the building up of new industries for manufacturing our raw materials; in restoring the American flag to the seas of the world; in extending our foreign trade; in opening and operating inland waterways; in irrigating or draining our millions of square miles of land now lying idle; in the development of Alaska, and the harnessing of our great mines of “white coal”–water-power.
Our foreign trade requires men of this type to travel in all parts of the world as commercial ambassadors, diligently collecting, compiling, and sending back to the United States information necessary in manufacturing goods for foreign consumption; also information regarding credits, prices, shipping, packing–in short, complete and detailed knowledge about commerce with foreign lands, how to secure it and how to hold it.
The world’s greatest opportunities to-day, perhaps, lie within the grasp of the men of this active type. Instead of pioneering in exploration, as in former years, they are needed to pioneer in production. From the earliest history of the race, these restless men have been faring westward and ever westward, adding to the wealth and resources of humanity by opening up new lands. But the crest of the westward moving tide has now circumnavigated the globe, and the Far West meets the Far East on the Pacific Ocean. Here and there are comparatively small, neglected tracts of land still to be developed, but there are no longer great new empires, as in former days. The great welling sources of human life have not ceased to flow, even though the final boundaries of its spread have been reached. Population will continue to grow and its demands upon the resources of the earth to increase. The man who discovers a way to make a hundred bushels of wheat grow on an acre of land where only twenty-five bushels grew before is as great a benefactor of the race as the discoverer of a continent. The invention of the electric light, the telephone, the automobile, the trolley car, and the aeroplane have added as much to the products and power of the race as the pioneering of thousands of square miles of fertile hills and plains. The man who can find a cheap and easy way to capture and hold nitrogen from the air will add more to the wealth of the race than all the discoverers of all the gold mines.
America needs to find efficient and profitable methods for manufacturing her own raw materials. Up to the present time, our exports have been coal, petroleum, steel rails, wheat, corn, oats, lumber, and other products which carry out of the country the riches of our soil. We have been exporting raw materials to foreign lands, where they have been refined and fabricated by brain and hand and returned to us at some five hundred to a thousand times the price we received for them. With the increase of population, we need to capitalize more and more the intelligence and skill of our people, and less and less the virgin resources of our lands. Ore beds, coal measures, copper, lead, gold and silver mines, forests, oil wells, and the fertility of our soils can all become exhausted. But the skill of our hands and the power of our intellects grow and increase and yield larger and larger returns the more they are called upon to produce.
The man of bone and muscle–the restless, active, pioneering, constructing man–would do well to consider these things before determining upon his vocation, and especially before entering upon any kind of non-productive work. The world has need of his particular talents and he should find his greatest happiness and greatest success in the exercise of them in response to that need.
We have seen so many men of this active type so badly placed that individual examples seem almost too commonplace for citation. Yet, a few may be instructive and encouraging.
William Carleton’s remarkable story, entitled “Rediscovering America,” is, in fact, the story of a man who was a middle-aged failure in a clerical position, and who afterward made a remarkable success of his life by taking up contracting and building. James Cook, a misfit as a grocer, afterward became famous as a naval officer and explorer. Henry M. Stanley, office boy to a cotton broker and merchant, afterward won immortal fame as a newspaper correspondent and explorer. What would have become of Theodore Roosevelt had he followed the usual line of occupation of a man in his position and entered a law office instead of becoming a rancher? We might add other experiences of similar importance from the biographies of other great men.
DESCRIPTION OF ACTIVE TYPE
The active type of man is, of course, easily recognized. He has broad, square shoulders, and is well muscled. He is either of the wiry, elastic, exceedingly energetic type, with muscles like steel springs and sinews like steel wire–very agile, very skillful, very quick, and somewhat jerky in his movements–or he is tall, raw-boned, strong, enduring, graceful, easy in his movements rather than quick, and yet with considerable manual skill. Or he may be of the short, stocky type, with broad shoulders, short neck, short arms, short legs, with big, round muscles and an immense capacity for endurance. The railroads of the early days, in this country, were built by Irishmen. They were either the large, raw-boned type or the quick, agile, wiry type. The railroads, subways, and other construction work of to-day are built mostly by Italians, Hungarians, Greeks, and others from the south of Europe. These men are of short, stocky, sturdy, and enduring build. As a general rule, they are far better fitted for this class of work than the tall or medium-sized, large-boned or wiry type. As an evidence of this, take notice of the fact that the Irishmen who built the railroads in the sixties own and manage them to-day.
These active men usually have square faces. That is to say, there is a good development of the outer corners of the lower jaw, which gives to the face a square appearance. Oftentimes their cheek bones are both high and wide. As a general rule, they have large aquiline or Roman noses. When they are of the enduring type and capable of long-sustained muscular activity, they have prominent chins. Their hands are square. Their feet are large. If they have mechanical and constructive ability, as most of them have, their foreheads are comparatively high and wide just above the temple. Professional baseball players, professional dancers, middle-weight and light-weight prize-fighters, most aviators, automobile racers, and athletes belong to the wiry, springy, medium-sized type of this particular class of men. U.S. Grant, Robert E. Peary, Henry M. Stanley, Ty Cobb and Ralph DePalma belong to this type. Abraham Lincoln, W.E. Gladstone, Joseph G. Cannon, William G. McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson, and other men of this build belong to the raw-boned type. Napoleon Bonaparte, with his tremendous activities on only four hours’ sleep a day, is a good example of the short, stocky type. While men of these types may make brilliant successes in purely mental vocations, as the result of the development of their intellects, and may keep themselves in a fair degree of health and strength by games, exercise, mountain climbing, farming, or some such avocation, they are, nevertheless, never quite so well satisfied as when they have something to do which not only gives them opportunity for the use of their intellects, but also involves a certain degree of physical activity as a part of their regular work.
CHAPTER VII
SLAVES OF MACHINERY
To multitudes of men and women the lure of levers, cranks, wheels and pinions is as seductive, as insidious, as heavenly in its promises, and as hellish in its performances, as the opium habit. The craving for opium, however, is an acquired taste, while the passion for machinery is born in thousands. We have seen children, while yet in their baby-cabs, fascinated by automobiles, sewing machines, and even little mechanical toys. We knew a boy on a farm who built a fairly workable miniature threshing machine with his own hands before he was old enough to speak the name of it in anything but baby-talk. We have seen boys work in the broiling sun day after day hoeing potatoes, pulling weeds, gathering crops, and doing other hard jobs for small pay, carefully saving every penny to buy a toy steam engine.
Parents usually look upon these evidences of mechanical ability with pleasure. They regard them as sure indications of the vocation of the child and oftentimes do everything in their power to encourage him in these lines. They little realize, however, the supreme danger which attaches to this very manifestation. Nor have they looked far enough ahead to see what is, in so many cases, the lamentable result.
THE RESTLESS “MACHINE CRAZY” BOY
The boy of this type hates to sit quietly on a hard bench in a school and study books. Some of the boys who went to school with us had imitation levers and valve-handles fastened about their desks in an ingenious way, and instead of studying, pretended that they were locomotive engineers. With a careful eye upon the teacher, who was his semaphore, such a boy would work the reverse lever, open and close the throttle, apply and disengage the brakes, test the lubrication, and otherwise go through the motions of running a locomotive with great seriousness and huge enjoyment.
These boys usually have considerable trouble with their teachers. They do not like grammar, frequently do not care for geography and history. They flounder dolefully in these studies and are in a state of more or less continual rebellion and disgrace. Because of their intense activity and restlessness, they irritate the teacher. She wants quiet in the school-room. Their surreptitious playing, rapping and tapping on desks, and other evidences of dammed-up energy and desire for more freedom and more scope of action, interferes with the desired sanctity of silence.
Outside of school hours and during the long vacation, the fatal fascination of machinery draws these young people to factories, railroad yards, machine shops, and other places where they may indulge their fancy and craving for mechanical motion. The boy who hangs around a machine shop or railroad yard is always pressed into voluntary and delighted service by those who work there. In a small town in Wisconsin we once knew a boy who worked willingly and at the hardest kind of labor in a railroad yard for years, voluntarily and without a cent of pay. In time he was entrusted with a small responsibility and given a small salary. Even if the boy does not begin in this way, the result is substantially the same. He may take the bit in his teeth, leave school and go to work at some trade which will give at least temporary satisfaction for his mechanical craving, or he may, through economic necessity, be forced out of school and naturally gravitate into a machine shop or factory. Oftentimes a few dollars a week is a very welcome addition to the family income. To the boy himself, three, four, five or six dollars a week seems like a fortune. Neither the parents nor the boy look ahead. Neither of them sees that when the little salary has increased to fifteen, sixteen, eighteen or twenty-five dollars a week, the boy will have reached the zenith of his possibilities. There will then be no further advancement, unless, during his apprenticeship and journeymanship, or previously to them, he has secured mental training which will enable him to go higher, hold more responsible positions and earn larger pay.
“MAN OR MACHINE–WHICH?”
In former days, the boy who left school and took up employment in a factory learned a trade. He became a shoe-maker, or a harness-maker, or a wheelwright, or a gun-maker. To-day, however, the work on all of these articles has been so subdivided that the boy perhaps becomes stranded in front of a machine which does nothing but punch out the covers for tin cans, or cut pieces of leather for the heels of shoes, or some other finer operation in manufacture. Once he has mastered the comparatively simple method of operating his particular machine, the boy is likely to remain there for all time. His employer–perhaps short-sighted–has no desire to advance him, because this would mean breaking in another boy to handle his machine. Also, it would mean paying more money.
Al Priddy, in his illuminating book, “Man or Machine–Which?”[9] thus describes the case of the slave to the machine:
[Footnote 9: The Pilgrim Press, Boston.]
“The workingman has been taught that his chief asset is skill. It has been his stocks, his bonds, the pride of his life. Poor as to purse and impoverished in his household; his cupboard bare, his last penny spent on a bread crust, he is not humbled; no, he merely stretches out his ten fingers and two callous palms, exactly as a proud king extends his diamond-tipped sceptre, to show you that which upholds him in his birthright. ‘My skill is my portion given to the world,’ he says. ‘I shall not want. See, I am without a penny. I touch this bar of steel, and it becomes a scissors blade. My skill did it. I take this stick of oak and it becomes a chair rung. My skill is the grandest magic on earth, the common magic of every day. By it I live and because of it I hold my head royal high.’
“But the machine now attacks and displaces this skill. The cunning of trained fingers is transferred to cranks, cogs and belts. The trade secrets are objectified in mechanical form; able to mix the product, compound the chemicals, or make the notch at the right place.
“Besides this loss of skill, the workman loses, in the grind of the machine, his sense of the value of his work. Next to his pride of skill the workman has always been proud to be the connoisseur: stand back near the light with his product on his upraised hand, showing to all passers-by what he has done. Perhaps it was a red morocco slipper for a dancer, or a pearl button to go on the cloak of a little child, or maybe it was a horseshoe to go on the mayor’s carriage horse. On a day a party of visitors would come to the little shop and the owner would pick up a hand-forged hammer and say, ‘See what John made!’ But, in our modern industry, no one man ever completes a task. Each task is subdivided into twenty, forty, a hundred or more portions, and a workingman is given just one to work on, day by day, year after year, for a working generation.
“After the time has come when the workman can find no distinct esthetic pleasure in his work, his loyalty to his employers suffers a shock.
“Then, when this indifference or disloyalty is full grown, the employer has full on him acute and formidable labor diseases. The man who should stand at his shoulder faces him, instead, with a hostile poise. The mill full of people over whom he holds power, upon whom he depends for his success, and who, in turn, depend upon his initiative and capital for their bread and butter, is turned into an armed camp of plotting enemies, who, while they work, grumble, and who, while they receive their wages, scheme for the overthrow of the entire concern! His mills, instead of being shelters for his brothers and sisters, are nests of scratching eagles–ready to rend and claw!
“It is further given out that the machine robs man of his industrial initiative; that the complicated and specialized machine decreases his mental alertness. In addition to his skill and his appreciation of his product, the workman has ever prized the appeal his labor has made to his individual intelligence. His work has brought thinking power with it. His day’s task has included the excitement of invention and adventure. In the heat and burden of the week has come that thrilling moment when his mind has discovered the fact that a variation in method means a simplification of his task. Or, in the monotonous on-going of his labor, he has suddenly realized that by sheer brain power he has accomplished a third more work than his neighbor. He has counted such results compliments to his initiative, to his thinking power. They have brought a reward three times more satisfying than a mere increase in wage, for, in his eyes, they have been substantial testimonies to the freedom of his mind, something which every reasonable person puts higher than any king’s ransom. But the coming of the machine deadens the workman’s inclination toward inventive adventure.
“So the multitude of men and women stand before the cunning machinery of industry, in the pose of helplessness before a mechanical finality. They cannot help feeling that in so far as their special task is involved, the machine has said the last word. The challenge dies out of their work. The brain that has ever been on the quiver of adventurous expectancy relaxes its tension, and the workman moodily or indifferently lets his machine do its perfect work, while his undisciplined, unchallenged thoughts wander freely over external, social, or domestic concerns. It may give an indolent, unambitious, selfish type of employee a certain amount of satisfaction to know that the machine frees his mind of initiative, but to the considerate workman it is a day of tragedy when his brain power receives no challenge from his work, and that day has dawned in the minds of millions of men who throng our industries.
“So, then, when this machine-robber, without heart or conscience, makes of little repute the workman’s most shining glory–skill; steals rudely from him the esthetic pleasure in his product, and leaves him mentally crippled before his work, how little force has that honored appeal, ‘The dignity of labor’! Talk as we will, in this machine-ridden time, the ‘dignity of labor’ is but a skeleton of its former robust self. Take away the king’s throne, the courtier’s carpet, the royal prerogative, and then speak about ‘The Divine Right’! All that ‘dignity of labor’ can mean in these days is simply that it is more dignified for a man to earn a wage than it is to be a doorway loafer. The workingman’s throne–skill–has gone. His prerogative–skill–has been taken away. The items that have formerly given dignity to labor have been largely displaced, so far as we have adventured, by the machine, and the future holds out no other hope than this, that machines shall more and more increase. There is little ‘dignity’ in a task that a man does which may be equally well done by his fourteen-year-old boy or girl. There is little ‘dignity’ in a task which less and less depends upon independent knowledge.”
But must these workers remain always slaves of machine? Is there no escape for them? Is there no “underground railroad” by which they may win their way to freedom?
Here is what Al Priddy has to say about it:
“The most convincing way in which man may master the machine is when he invents a new and better one, or improves an old one. This is the real triumph of mind over matter, of skill over machinery.
“With all its arrogance among us, machinery is always final in itself; incapable of change; incapable of progression or retrogression. Till the clouds fade from the sky, or the earth cracks, a machine will remain the same from the day of its creation until the day of its last whirl–unless man says the word to change it. Once started on its mission, there is nothing in the world can change the motion and purpose of a machine save man’s mind. So, then, whatever relation man might have toward a machine, this stands sure: he will ever be able to stand before it and say: ‘I am thy master. I can change thee, make thee better or worse. I made thee. I can unmake thee. If thou dost accomplish such mighty works, more honor to the mind which conceived thee!”
“But it is suddenly discovered by an industrial diagnosis that the machine has never been properly operated, even by the most skilled operators. It has been proved that ‘there is more science in the most “unskilled” task than the man who performs it is capable of understanding.’ This dictum of Mr. Taylor, a practical experimenter, has been dramatically proved in many directions. In the task of the sand shoveler, or the iron lifter, for instance, it was proved that by scientifically undertaking such work, fifty selected men, properly drilled, scientifically rested, intelligently manoeuvred, could accomplish a third more than one hundred ill selected and improperly managed men, in less time and under a larger salary. It is suddenly found that, contrary to theory, a machine, to be economically operated, leaves open man’s chance for skill and does not rob him of it.”
Perhaps a few cases taken from our records will indicate how men of this kind are able to come up from slavery and take successful places in their true vocations.
FROM BOILER-ROOM TO CHIEF ENGINEER’S OFFICE
G—- manifested very early indications of the lure of machinery for him. While yet in his cradle, he would play contentedly for hours with a little pulley or other mechanical trifle. Before he was able to walk, he could drive nails with a hammer sturdily and with more precision than many adults. This also was one of his favorite amusements, and it was necessary to keep him provided with lumber, lest he fill the furniture with nails. As he grew older he became more and more interested in machinery and mechanical things. He took to pieces the family clock and put it together again. He nearly always had the sewing machine partly dismantled, but could always put it together again, and it usually ran better after he had finished his work. He built water-wheels, wind-mills, and other mechanical toys. When he was about fourteen years old he built a steam engine. He used a bicycle pump for the cylinder and pieces of an old sewing machine, a discarded wringer, some brass wires, and other odds and ends for the rest of the parts. So perfect mechanically was this product that when steam was turned on it ran smoothly, and with very little noise, at the rate of three thousand revolutions a minute. In this engine he employed a form of valve motion which he had never seen, and which had never been used before. While not particularly efficient, and therefore not a valuable invention, it at least showed his ability to adapt means to ends mechanically.
After G—- began earning money for himself by mechanical and electrical work, he would go without luxuries, food and clothing, tramping to the shop almost barefoot one entire winter, for the sake of buying tools and equipment to carry on his mechanical experiments. It is not surprising, therefore, that he left school at an early age to engage in actual work in railroad shops. He afterward secured a position as a locomotive fireman. Circumstances arose which made it necessary for him to give up railroading. He secured a position as fireman on a stationary engine.
A HARD FIGHT FOR AN EDUCATION
It was while he was engaged in this kind of work that the suggestion was made to him that he ought not to try to go through life with only the rudiments of an education. It was pointed out that, while he had undoubted mechanical and inventive ability, he would have small opportunity to use it unless he also had the necessary technical and scientific knowledge to go with it. At first his interest in mechanics was so intense and his interest in school in general so comparatively slight, that he did not look with very much favor upon the suggestion. However, as time went on and he saw more and more of the results of such action as he was contemplating, he became more and more interested in completing his education. He therefore entered a good preparatory school and, with some little assistance from relatives, worked his way through by doing electrical and mechanical work about the little college town. In this kind of work he soon became well known and was in constant requisition. Occasionally his ingenuity and resourcefulness enabled him to do successfully work which had puzzled and baffled even those who were called experts. Having finished his preparatory course, he began a course in mechanical and electrical engineering in one of the best known of our universities. About this time practically all assistance from relatives had been withdrawn, owing to changed circumstances, and he was left almost entirely dependent upon his own efforts. The story of his struggles would fill a volume. Oftentimes he was almost entirely without food. There was one month during which he was unable to collect money due him for work done. Because he was a poor university student he had no credit. So he lived the entire month on $1.25. He thus explains how it was done:
LIVING A MONTH ON $1.25
“After visiting all of my clients trying to collect money, I came to the conclusion that it would be useless to expect anything to come in to me for at least thirty days. At this time I had $1.25 in my pocket. My room I had paid for in advance by doing a piece of work for my landlord. I also had about a cord of good oak wood which I had sawed and split and piled in the hallway under the stairs. I had a little sheet-iron stove which I used for both heating and cooking. I sat down and carefully figured out how I could make my $1.25 feed me until I could collect the money due. Twenty-five cents purchased three quarts of strained honey from a bee-keeper friend of mine. The dollar I invested in hominy. Every morning, when I first got up and built the fire, I put on a double boiler with as much hominy as would cook in it. While it was cooking I sat down and studied hard on my calculus. By the time I had got a pretty good hold of the pot-hooks and the bird-tracks in the calculus lesson, the hominy would be ready to eat. Hominy and honey is not a bad breakfast. While perhaps you would like some variety, it is also fairly edible for lunch. If you are very, very hungry, as a growing boy ought to be, and have been hard at work putting up bell wires and arranging batteries, doubtless you would rather eat hominy and honey for dinner than go without. The next morning the combination doesn’t taste quite so good, and by lunch time you are beginning to wonder whether hominy and honey will satisfy all your cravings. In the evening, however, you are quite sure that, in the absence of anything else, you will have to have some hominy and honey in order to keep yourself alive. By the end of the first week you feel that you can never even hear the word hominy again without nausea and that you wish never to look a bee in the face. By the end of the second week you have become indifferent to the whole matter and simply take your hominy and honey as a matter of course, trying to think nothing about it and interesting yourself as much as possible in calculus, generator design, strength of materials, and other things that an engineering student has to study.
“The month finally passed. I felt as if I had eaten my way out of a mountain of hominy and waded through a sea of honey. Collections began coming in a little and I went and bought a beefsteak. You may have eaten some palatable viands. I have myself partaken of meals that cost as much as I made in a whole week’s work in my school days. But let me assure you that no one ever had a meal that tasted better than the beefsteak and fried potatoes which finally broke the hominy and honey regime.”
After this our young friend hired a little larger room, laid in a few cheap dishes and cooking utensils and took two or three of his fellow students to board. He did the marketing and the cooking and made them help him wash the dishes. Two were engineering students and the third was a student in the college of agriculture, all working their way through college. A few cents saved was a memorable event in their lives. Our young engineer furnished table board at $1.25 a week, and out of the $3.75 a week paid him by his boarders was able to buy all of his own food as well as theirs, and pay his room rent.
THE HARD FIGHT JUSTIFIED
After many troubles of this kind, G—- finished his engineering course and secured a position in one of the largest corporations in the United States at a salary of fifty dollars a month. At the time when he went to work for the big corporation there were probably three or four hundred other graduate engineers added to the staff. So keen was his mind along mechanical and engineering lines, and so great were his natural aptitudes, that within a few months his wages had been increased to $60 a month and he had been given far more responsible work. Almost as soon as he took up work with the corporation, he began making improvements in methods, inventing machinery and other devices, and thinking out ways and means for saving labor and making short cuts. Within a few weeks after his joining the force he had invented a bit of apparatus which could be carried in the coat pocket, and which took the place of a clumsy contrivance which required a horse and wagon to carry it. In this way he saved the company the price of horses, wagons, drivers, etc., on a great many operations. From the very first the young man rose very much more rapidly than any of the others who had entered the employ of the company at the time he did. Soon he was occupying an executive position and directing the activities of scores of men. To-day, only nine years after his leaving school, he occupies one of the most important positions in the engineering department of this great corporation, and while he does not have the title, performs nearly all the duties of chief engineer.
The point of all this story is that this young man, while he had plenty of mechanical ability and enjoyed machinery, was not fit to be a locomotive fireman or stationary engine fireman. He had, in addition to his mechanical sense and great skill in the use of his hands, a very keen, wide-awake, energetic, ambitious, accurate intellectual equipment, which did not find any adequate use in his work as a mechanic or fireman. Nor could he ever have found expression for it unless he had taken the initiative as a result of wise counsel and secured for himself the necessary education and training. With all his ingenuity, he would always have been more or less a slave to the machine to be operated unless he had trained his mind to make him the master of thousands of machines and of men.
FROM TURRET LATHE TO TREASURY
About eight years ago, while we were in St. Paul, Minnesota, a young mechanic, J.F., came to us for consultation. He was about twenty years old, and expressed himself as being dissatisfied with his work.
“I don’t know just what is the matter with me,” he said. “I have loved to play with mechanical things. I was always building machinery and, when I had an opportunity, hanging around machine shops and watching the men work. On account of these things my father was very sure that I had mechanical ability, and when I was fifteen years old took me out of school and apprenticed me in a machine shop. This shop was partly devoted to the manufacture of heavy machinery and partly to repairs of all kinds of machinery and tools. I have now been at work in this shop for five years. I am a journeyman mechanic and making good wages, and yet, somehow or other, I feel that I am in the wrong place. I wish you could tell me what is the matter with me.”
After examining the young man and the data submitted, we made the following report:
ANALYSIS OF AN EMBRYO FINANCIER
“While you have undoubted mechanical ability, this is a minor part of your intellectual equipment. You are also qualified for commercial pursuits. You have a good sense of values. You understand the value of a dollar even now and you have natural aptitudes which, with proper training and experience, will make you an excellent financier. You also have executive ability. You like people and you like to deal with them. You like to handle them, and because you enjoy handling people and negotiating with them, you are successful in doing so. While you are fairly active physically, you are very much more active mentally. Your work, therefore, should be mental work, with a fair amount of light physical activity mingled with it, instead of purely physical work. You ought to hold an executive position and ought to have charge of thee finances of some concern which is engaged in the building and selling of machinery. You have worked, up to the present time, with heavy, coarse, crude machinery. But you are of fine texture, refined type, and naturally have a desire to work with that which is fine, delicate and beautiful–something into which you can put some of your natural refinement and artistic ability. You are still young. You have learned a trade at which you can earn fairly good wages. You ought, therefore, to prepare yourself in some way for business. Work during the summer, and then during the winter resume your studies, preparing yourself for an executive position in connection with manufacturing and selling fine machinery. Study accounting, banking, finance, salesmanship, advertising, mechanical engineering and designing. At the earliest possible moment give up your work in a machine shop where heavy machinery is manufactured and begin to get some actual experience in the manufacture of something finer and more artistic; for example, the automobile.”
A few years later, in Boston, a young man came to us, well dressed, happy, and prosperous. He said he wished to consult us. After a few minutes’ talk with him, we said: “We have given you advice somewhere before. This is not the first time you have consulted us.” He smiled, and said: “Yes. I consulted you in St. Paul, some years ago. At that time you advised me to secure an executive position in the automobile business. This advice struck me at the time as being wise, and satisfied my own desires and ambitions. I lost no time in following your directions and was soon engaged as a mechanic in an automobile factory. I attended night-school at first, but finally made arrangements to spend half my time in school and the other half in the factory, learning every part of the business. At the present time I am the vice-president and treasurer of the —- Motor Company, and one of the designers of the —- Motor Car. We are doing an excellent business and making money. Whereas I was certainly misfit in my old job, I am well and happily placed since I have learned my true vocation.”
EVOLUTION OF AN ELECTRICAL ENGINEER
D.B., of Chicago, was a young man admirably endowed with mechanical ability. From his earliest years he was especially interested in matters electrical. His father told us that he always had dry-cell and other batteries around the house. He used to try to make magnetos out of horseshoe magnets, and at one time attempted to build a dynamo. When he was sixteen years of age, having finished grammar school and having had one or two years of high school training, young B. became so ambitious to get into electrical work that his father, thinking that he was intended for exactly this vocation, consented to his leaving high school and taking a position as assistant to the linemen of a telephone company. He worked at this a year or two, and finally became a full-fledged lineman. He did well as a lineman and after a year or so attracted the attention of an electric light and power company, who enticed him away from the telephone company and gave him charge of poles and wires in a residential district. Here his unusual ingenuity and quickness soon became so manifest that he was taken off the outside and placed in charge of a gang of men wiring houses and installing electric fixtures. This was a pretty good job for a young fellow and paid good wages; at least, the wages seemed quite large to young B. at the time. By this time, however, he was twenty-one and decided to marry. He needed more money.
GETTING HIS BEARINGS
He had a long talk with a very kind and wise advisor, who finally said to him: “See here, B., you have abilities that ought to be put to use at something better than stringing wires and hanging bells.”
“Why, I am a foreman now,” said B.
“Yes, I know you are a foreman, but who plans all the work you do?”
“Why, the Super.”
“Yes, the Super hands the plans down to you, but who plans the work for him?”
“Why, the Chief.”
“Now, look here; the Chief comes to his office at ten o’clock in the morning. He uses his head until noon. He leaves at noon, and perhaps he doesn’t come back until two or three o’clock. He uses his head then until five or, sometimes, until four; then he goes off to play golf. But as the result of those few hours’ use of the Chief’s head, the Superintendent, and you six or eight foremen, and all the two hundred men under your direction work a whole day or a week, or even a month, as you know. You are merely carrying out in a mechanical, routine kind of a way the thoughts and ideas that another man thinks. Now, you have the ability to think for yourself.”
“I could think for myself,” said he, “but I can’t do all the figuring that is necessary in order to decide just what size wire should go here, and what kind of equipment should go there, and all the different things. That’s beyond me.”
“Yes, it is beyond you now, but it doesn’t need to be beyond you. You have the mental ability to learn to use those formulae just as well as the Chief does. The thing necessary is for you to learn how to do it, to get needful education. Now, you are young, and you’re strong, and you’ve got lots of time before you. If you want to make more money, the way to do it is to learn to use your head and save weeks, months of time, as well as the labor of your hands.”
“If I went off to college or university for two or three years, I don’t think Bessie would wait for me,” said he. “She wants to get married. I want to, too, and I think we ought to do it.”
AN EDUCATION BY CORRESPONDENCE
“Well,” said his counselor, “you don’t need to go off to school. You can take electrical engineering in a correspondence course, even after you are married. You’re making good wages now as a foreman. Your hours of work are only eight a day, and you have plenty of time in the evenings and on holidays and other times to study this subject. Besides, you will probably make better progress studying it while you work at the trade than you would in school and withdrawn from the practical applications of the principles that you are learning.”
The result of all this was that D.B. did take a correspondence course in electrical engineering. It was pretty tough work. He had not studied for years. One of the first things he had to learn was how to study; how to concentrate; how to learn the things he had to know without tremendous waste of energy. After a little while he learned how to study. Then he progressed, a little at a time, with the intricate and complicated mathematics of the profession he had determined to make his own. Again and again he was puzzled, perplexed, and almost defeated. But his young wife encouraged him, and when things got so bad that he thought he would have to give it all up, he would go and talk with his counselor, who would inspire him with new ambition, so that he would go to work again. So, month after month, year after year, he struggled away with his correspondence course in electrical engineering. Little by little, he got hold of the technical knowledge necessary for professional engineering work.
A VICTORY FOR THE CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOL GRADUATE
At first he was greatly handicapped by the prejudice of some of his superiors against correspondence school courses, which were very much newer at that time than they are now and regarded as much more of an experiment. His superiors were graduates of universities and looked down with contempt upon any merely “practical” man who tried to qualify as an engineer by studying at home at night and without the personal oversight of authorities in a university. But D.B. was dogged in his persistence. Missing no opportunities to improve and advance himself, he was, nevertheless, respectful and diplomatic. And he repeatedly demonstrated his grasp of the subject. Eventually he was promoted to the position of superintendent of the electric light and power company. There was only one man then between him and the desired goal, namely, the chief engineer.
At the time B. became superintendent the chief engineer was a young university graduate, and was perhaps a little too egotistical and dogmatic on account of his degree and honors. Soon after B. took charge as superintendent, the company decided to build a new central power station. The design was left to the young chief engineer, and the practical work of carrying it out to our friend. When, finally, the design was complete and passed on to D.B. for execution, he felt that it was defective in several ways. He spent several nights of hard study on it and became convinced that he was right. He therefore took the whole matter to his superior and tried to explain to him how the design was defective.
“I made that plan, and it is right,” said the chief engineer. “Your business isn’t to criticize the plan, but to go ahead and carry it out. Now, I don’t care to hear any more about it.”
“But,” said B., “if we carry out this plan the way it stands, it will mean the investment on the part of the company of something like $35,000 which will be practically dead loss. I can’t conscientiously go to work and carry out this plan as it stands. I am sure if you will go over it again carefully, pay attention to my suggestions, and consult the proper authorities, you will find that I am right.”
“That’s what comes of studying a correspondence course,” said the chief. “You get a little smattering of knowledge into your head. Part of it is worth while, and part of it is purely theoretical and useless, and because you have had some practical experience, you imagine you know it all. Now, you have lots yet to learn, B., and I am willing to help you, but I want to tell you that that plan and those specifications are technically correct, and all you need to do is to go ahead and carry them out. I’ll take the responsibility.”
“Very well,” said B., “if you want those plans and specifications carried out as they are, you can get someone else to do it. I would rather resign than to superintend this job which I know to be technically wrong.”
His resignation had to be passed upon by the general manager, who, before accepting it, sent for him.
“What’s the trouble, B.?” said he. “I thought you were getting along fine. We like your work, and we thought you liked the company. Why do you want to leave?”
“I don’t like to say anything about it, Mr. Jones,” said B., “but the plans passed on to me to carry out in the construction of that new power-house down in Elm Street are technically wrong. They mean an expenditure of $35,000 along certain lines which will be pretty nearly a dead loss. When you come to try to use your equipment there, you will find that it all has to be taken out and replaced by the proper materials.
“Suppose you get the plans, B., and show them to me, and explain just what you mean,” said the general manager, who was also a professional engineer of many years’ successful experience.
So B. produced the plans and explained his proposition.
“Why, of course you are right,” said the general manager. “I’m surprised that Mr. F. should have thought for a moment that he could use that type.”
The result was that B. was reinstated and the chief engineer reprimanded. Stung by his reprimand and angered because the correspondence school graduate had bested him, the chief engineer resigned. His resignation was accepted and B. became chief engineer of the company. Later, he was promoted to the position of chief engineer of an even larger corporation, and, finally, occupied an executive position as managing engineer for a municipal light and power plant in one of the large cities of the country.
THE GENESIS OF AN INVENTOR
Some years ago we spent a few months in a very comfortable and homelike hotel in one of the largest cities in the Middle West. Down in a nook of the basement of this hotel was a private electric light plant. In charge of the plant was an old Scotch engineer delightful for his wise sayings and quaint philosophy. The fireman, a young man named T., was rather a puzzle to us. He had all the marks of unusual mechanical ability, and yet he seemed to take only the slightest interest in his work, and was constantly being reproved by his chief for laziness, irresponsibility, and neglect of duty. “What’s the use?” he asked us, after we gained his confidence, and had asked him why he did not take greater interest in his work. “What’s the use? After years of experience shoveling coal into a firebox and monkeying around these old grease pots, I suppose I might get an engineer’s certificate. Then what would I be? Why, just like old Mack there–$75 to $100 a month, sitting around a hot, close basement twelve hours a day or, perhaps, twelve hours at night, nothing to look forward to, no further advancement, no more pay, and, finally, T.B. would carry me off because of the lack of fresh air, sunshine and outdoor exercise. No, thank you!”
“Well, then, why don’t you do something else?”
“I don’t know what to do. I like mechanics, and some job of this kind is the only thing I know how to do or would care to do. Yet, I don’t care for this. I must confess that I am puzzled as to what in the world I was made for, anyhow.”
“What you need is to give your time and attention to the intellectual side of engineering rather than the purely mechanical and physical. You are of the intellectual type, and you are as badly placed trying to do mere mechanical work as if you were an eagle trying to cross the country on foot.”
“I believe you are right in that. I am going to get an education.”
AMBITION, INDUSTRY, AND PERSISTENCE
He began at once with correspondence courses in mechanical and electrical engineering. Twelve hours a day he shoveled coal in his basement boiler-room. Some four to eight hours a day he studied in his little room up under the roof. It takes an immense amount of courage, persistence, and perseverance to complete a correspondence course in engineering, as anyone who has tried it well knows. There is lacking any inspiration from the personality and skill of a teacher. There is no spur to endeavor from association with other students doing the same kind of work and striving for the same degree. There are no glee clubs, athletic games, fraternities, prizes, scholarships, and other aids to the imagination and ambition, such as are found in a university. It is all hard, lonely work. But what the student learns, he knows. And, somehow, he gains a great knack for the practical use of his knowledge. Night after night T. toiled away, until he had finished his course and secured his certificate of graduation.
By this time T.’s ambition began to assume a definite form. He was determined that he should have the honor and the emoluments which would come to him as a result of solving one of the toughest problems in engineering–one which had puzzled both technical and practical men for many years. He therefore saved up a few dollars and, packing his little belongings, departed to complete his education in one of the most famous technical engineering schools of the country. Tuition was high. Board cost a good deal of money. Books were distressingly expensive. Tools, machine shop fees, and other incidentals ate into the little store he had brought with him, and inside of two months it was gone. He hunted around and finally secured a job running an engine. This meant twelve hours in the engine room every night. In addition, he did what other students considered a full day’s work attending lectures and carrying on his studies in the laboratories and classroom. He went almost without necessary food and clothing in order to buy books, tools, and other equipment. But he was young, he was strong, and, above all, he was happy in his mental picture of the great object of his ambition. In due time he had taken his degree, having specialized on all subjects bearing upon the solution of his great problem.
PATIENT TOIL HIS GENIUS
Coming back from the university after having finished his course, T. found a position as engineer in an electric light and power plant. Then he began saving up money to purchase the necessary equipment for a laboratory of his own. Finally, he had a little building and was one of the proudest young men we ever saw. Little by little, he added to his apparatus the things he needed. Several nights a week, after his hard day’s work in the engine room, he toiled, trying to solve the problem upon which he had fixed his mind. About this time he married, and he and his wife moved into a narrow little flat. Years passed, children came into the little flat, and still he worked at his problem. Again and again, and still again, he failed. Yet, each time he failed, he told us he was coming closer to the solution. At last came the day, after many heart-breaking experiences, when the problem, while not fully solved, had at least revealed a solution which was commercially valuable.
His years of self-denial and toil seemed to be about to end in success. But he found that he had only begun another long period of discouraging and almost desperate work. It was a struggle to scrape together the necessary funds for securing a patent. If he was to complete and perfect his invention, he must have more capital. So, with his model, he made the rounds of manufacturers of engines, manufacturers who used engines, railroads, steamboat companies, electric light and power companies; in fact, everywhere he thought he might get some encouragement and financial assistance. His little family was living on short rations. He himself had not eaten as he ought for years. One after another, the men in authority said: “Yes, your proposition looks good, but I don’t think it can ever be made practical. Some of the brightest men in the engineering profession have spent years trying to solve that problem, and have not found the answer to it. I do not believe that it will ever be found. You seem to have come near it, but yet you have not found it, and we cannot see our way clear to put any money into it.”
REAPING HIS REWARD
T. argued, pleaded, and demanded an opportunity for a demonstration, but all in vain. Then, one day, a lawyer, who had been consulted by T., said: “I have no money to invest in anything myself, but I’ll tell you frankly and honestly, it looks good to me. Now, I happen to be on very good terms with Mr. J. over at the T. & B. Company. He has been interested in this problem for years and has worked along toward its solution. He understands every phase of it, and I believe he will do something with your device. Unless I am mistaken, he will be interested in it, and will give you an opportunity to demonstrate it. If your demonstration works out as well as you think it will, he has the authority to put you in a position where you can go ahead and perfect it if it is perfectible. I will give you a letter of introduction to him.” And thus began T.’s prosperity. He now lives in a beautiful home on a wide boulevard. His invention, still short of perfection, but highly valuable, is coming slowly into use, and would probably be in very widespread use were it not for the fact that he is constantly working on it, perfecting it, improving it, and hoping finally to have a complete solution to the problem.
CHAPTER VIII
THE IMPRACTICAL MAN
“My life is a failure,” wrote Sydney Williams to us, “and I do not know why.”
In middle life my grandfather Williams moved his family across the Potomac River from Virginia in order to study to enter the ministry. He is said to have freed some slaves at that time, so he must have been a ‘planter,’ He became a Congregational minister. My grandfather Jacobs was a carpenter; but, as I knew him, and for some years before my birth, he was a helpless invalid from paralysis on one side.
My father graduated from college and then became a minister. He preached for many years, then he took up work with a religious publishing house, finally having charge of the work at St. Paul. He was there, I believe, when he was elected president of a small school for girls. He assumed his new duties in June and I was born the following November. (I am the youngest of eleven children, of whom there are now three boys and five girls still living, three boys having died while still babies before my birth.)
Until I was nearly twelve years old we lived at the girls’ school, which father succeeded in greatly enlarging. Mother taught me to read a little and write a little. She and others read to me a great deal. I had no playmates except my nephews and nieces, to whom I was continually being pointed out as a ‘model.’ Out of the sight of the grown-ups, I was not always such a model as they could have wished; yet I did feel a certain amount of responsibility that was oppressive and repressive. When nearly