GAS METERS

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 56, 8 March 1919, Page 10

GAS METERS

WATCHED BY WOMEN

A CHECK ON THE BILL.

One hundred women in New York have organised a movement to face, emergencies. The World Magazine, New York,'describes them as the first-body of women' to engage irt that work, and they are succeeding so well that in all probability they will make this industrial field permanently their own.

Having demonstrated in many a cellar their domination of the situation with respect to mice, they aTe also disproving the popular fallacy that the gas meter is a contrivance of intricate mystery upon which the feminine mind may concentrate but never hope to understand.

A gas meter is part hidden mechanism, but mostly gas in motion. Standing on J a shelf, usually just above a mouse hole, it presents an austere and frigid front. Three eyes look out from it, one marked 10,000, another 1000, and the third 100. Every time the tea' kettle sings on the gas, range, or the beef stew simmers in the pot, the eyes blink the fact. It may .be called meat for the meter. AH the gas that enters a meter passes into a diaphragm, composed of metal plates fastened together with oil:soaked sheep akin. The gas distends the sheep akin, in a way like lungs expand when the breath is drawn in. When one diaphragm is choked with gas, it exhales into another diaphragm, similarly constructed, takes another deep s gaseous breath, exhales again, and keeps at it religiously while there is a lighted' jet in the house; When the gas is turned low in the parlour after 10 o'clock, as is sometimes the case in well regulated families, the meter operates in a sort of Mendelssohn time, so to speak. The click in the meter is made by the registering mechanism. Every click sets the home pay master back some. v DEMAND FOR SHEEP SKINS.

Forty thousand sheep skins are used in Manhattan and the Bronx' every year just for diaphragms. Figuring back from the price of mutton chops on the platter to the price of mutton on the hoof, it will be seen that a meter is no cheap tin. toy. It is an interesting fact that gas companies began using the pres.ent style meter as long ago as' 1844. They have been unable to find any newfangled meter which will work for three eight-hour shifts^ a day and' play fair with the consumer and not overlook the stock holder.

Most of these facts were passed out in a cellar on Tenth-avenue by one of the women meter readers, who had kindly consented to show how to walk a plank ' over ah awe-inspiring pile of .anthracite to a hard working meter, guided only, by , a hand flash light. Sho wore a poncho i cape, waterproof puttees and a look of determination. She read the meter 'as though it were a verso in one of Laura i Jean Libbey's'stories. _ i There is some difficulty in directing a flash lijjht on the dials, setting down- . figures in a record book and balancing on a plank at the same time, but this inspectress said that particular cellar was ' what they call "the limit.'1 Meter readers are started at 8 o'clock in .*:e morning and get fifteen dollars a week. They are advanced in pay with developing experience. Speaking generally, women .under 28 aro considered too young for the work. < WOMEN PREFERRED.

Mrs. Dprothy Manning, chief of tho corps of readers, says that apart from tho fast-disappearing prejudice against the mouse and spider- phase of the business, meter reading is a worthy field for

women. Housewives rather prefer to have women "take the meter," and in the inspection of gas ranges and explaining how a range may be coaxed into producing pies and muffins, ribs roast and oatmeal with the greatest efficiency and at the least cost, which is now a recognised part of the gas companies' side lines, of course women are greatly to be preferred.

"How are the gas meters behaving?" she was asked. "Are they strictly on the level, or like political campaigners?" Mrs. Manning appealed to the editor of Gas Logic, who stood near, and he dug down in his desk and produced the integrity record for the month, of 908,052 meters, the kind we're' all more or less suspicious about. This record showed that 54 people made complaints to the Public Service Commission that their meters were cutting up something awful. Twenty-one of these meters were found to be uninfluenced by their corporation affiliations and jogging along accurately. Twenty-seven were found to be giving the consumer the best end of it by running slow (what do you know about that?). ' Five were putting it over on tbe consumer by sprinting in the dark, when nobody was looking. One had laid down on the job and wasn't registering at all. ■ , There is nothing in Gas Logic to show the logic of a thing like that.