TWO-HOUR DAY WILL COME

Greymouth Evening Star, 27 January 1933, Page 3

TWO-HOUR DAY WILL COME

SCIENTIST’S FORECAST. The age of leisure will be brought, on. by the multiplication of machines. We have too few of them not too many. To be sure, those that we have are enforcing leisure on many millions- but the trouble is not with the leisure, but with lack of support and subsistence. Unemployment is entirely unobjectionable, if conjoined with ample means— every millionaire will tell you that. With more machines than we have hitherto dreamed of doing all of our physical, and the routine part of our mental labour, and with their products justly distributed, I we shall be all “on velvet. ’ Too good to be true? It is coming, says Dr. C. C. Furnas, associate professor of chemical engineering in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University. In hook entitled America’s To-morrow,” which he describes as “an informal excursion into , the eia of the two-hour working day.” he essays to tell us of it. He writes:“There are a number of things which the machine has not yet been trained to do, but we Americans are working hard on the job. “I am expecting, each year, to heat that some clever man has harnessed the photo-electric cell in such a manner as to make a machine to pick

strawberries, though I have the feeling that it will always be easier to make small boys do. it There is a limit somewhere to what can be done with a machine.

“There is a limit, also, to the number of things we can possess and enjoy, for there are only a few hours in a day, and relatively few days in a lifetime.

“The most important thing that our industrialism will give us will be leisure. Some of us have entirely too much, and others not enough. “Estimates have been made that in colonial times each individual, on the average, had three slave power units at. bis command, either in person, in horses, or in water wheels. Now, a few generations later, we each have on the average, one hundred and sixty-live slave-power units, mostly in copper wires or tanks of gasoline. Yet, is our working time cut to three one-hundred-sixty-fifths of that of the colonial period? It is evident that the arithmetic has slipped somewhere. RISE OF MACHINE“When the machine arrived, 20 yards of cloth came forth where one came before. In England, Lancashire hand-weavers lost their- jobs—and them they raided factories to smash the machines that had chased them from the grind and their bread and butter. “Obviously it was bad for business

to let too many would-be workers starve to death. There were two ways of meeting the difficulty. One was to shorten labouring hours, raise wages, and keep as many employed as before. The other was to have the machine make more articles —create new jobs.

“Railways camo into being, steamboats, steam-pumps. steel ploughshares, the reaper, kerosene lamps, gas-pipe, and the cotton-gin. There were new jobs being created, but the factory man still did his twelve hours or more of work per day to get a bare sustaining wage.

“Shortly after the head of the patent office resigned because of anticipated lack of business, ingenuity began to pick up a bit; to produce the telegraph, the camera, the trans-Atlan-tic cable, the telephone, the phonograph, the arc-light, the incandescent light, dynamos, motors, safety-pins, Bessemer steel, steel rails —the list grows too long.

“Until a generation ago, most of the inventions were obvious things, the products of clover mechanics; bu’ shortly before the century changed the work of fundamental physicists such as Maxwell, Crookes, and Hertz began to bear fruit, and things were invmn.ed which operated in an unseen and mysterious manner. X-rays looked -,n people’s bones, and Marconi flashed wireless signals across the Atlantic. The discoveries of radio-activity and .electrons belong to this period, and,

then, before many years, the Edison effect was used by DeForest in his invention of the three-electrode vacu-um-tube, as we know it, and radio came into being to displace the baby as the chief noisemaker of the home.

THE INVENTIVE FLAME. “Then, too, back in those last faltering years of the nineteenth century, the internal-combusion engine was made satisfactory, and the automobile and aeroplane began changing life’s hazards, aims, and tempo. “This inventive flame is like other fires, the hotter it gets the faster it goes; which makes it hotter, an 1 so on and on until the fuel is gone. We still seem to have a good supply of fuel.

“We have at least a hundred times as many thing at our disposal as we had a century ago. The curve of rate of consumption of new items is probably slowing down already. That may be one reason why the hours of labour have been greatly shortened in the. past two decades. ’ There is only one way, declares Dr. Furnas, to distribute tile work of the country now that the machine dominates our industry so completely - shorten the working flay. We cannot spend our time cutting wood: there is not much left to cut. We simply must, find something to do beside? work. He elucidates: — “While some have nothing to do

but sit down and waste away and wish for work, for the rest of us the labouring hours are still too long. Then, when we do leave the manufacturing precincts, we spend all the rest of the time using mechanical things, so that there will be a, market tor manufactuied articles, so we can work all (lay tomorrow. This keeps on until heart failure or a misstep in traffic, closes the account.”

The Socialists have long said that four hours of labour per day per person would be sufficient, if every oi%e worked. Dr. Furnas thinks they at'wrong, but they soon will he right, ho predicts. Then, in Ihe machine-clut-tered years to come, three hours will be enough, then two, perhaps. Even two hours may be too many.

He uses this, lie says, as a first approximation of the ultimate length of the average working day. Be goo-? on:—-

“The social problems arising from such an age of leisure will be infinite, What to do? How to keep out of trouble? What's the use. anyway? Someone will have to answei these questions, and 1 nominate the educa tional system.

“There are a great, many things that mechanical fingers can do better than human ones. In some factories you may see one man tending ten automatic. machines. A tractor-drawn harvester with four men now threshes grain faster than 40 men did a few

years ago. “Even inspectors are becoming obsolete. Photo-electric cells can separate the different grades of cigars or apples better than the eye. They can count articles faster than any human. Thev can ring a bell to tell a fireman (hat he is creating a smoke nuisance. “The guiding slogan of every industrial superintendent tor years has been ‘more production per man-hour. Still, the campaign is only begun. Men and women should be saved for those places where judgment and brains are required. “There is no reason why the accounting business can not bo large!v automatic; the necessary machines are. or soon will be. available. A robot bank-teller should pm-form to perfection; it could do anything .mt pass judgment upon the soundness ot a man’s credit. “Most of the routine affairs of the world can be carried on by brainless robots, and why shouldn't they be? There are so many other more interesting things for humans to do.”