The Manawatu Daily Times. The Oldest Manawatu Journal. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 1905. OFFICE WORK BY MACHINERY.

Manawatu Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 380, 29 April 1905, Page 2

The Manawatu Daily Times. T he Oldest Manawatu Journal. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 1905. OFFICE WORK BY MACHINERY.

In the imagination of the Daily Mail, an old-fashioned merchant, who had retired from business owing to worry, visited his office six months later. As he entered, the^manager was speaking into a phonograph. " I want two thousand copies of the following letter posted to our regular customers in time for the 4 o'clock mail this afternoon "—the letter being an intimation that, owing to the use of labour-saving machinery, the firm was able to quote lower prices for all their goods. The oldfashioned merchant suggested that a mistake had been made—he supposed two dozen copies was the required number. The manager replied that the whole of the work would be done by one girl clerk and a boy, and that if they tried they could do double the quantity in the time. The wax cylinder, he explained, was removed from the phonograph, and placed on another instrument in the next room. A typist took the letter down from the phonograph in shorthand, typed it and placed it on a rotary duplicator, and an office boy reeled off copies at the rate of eighty a minute. In the meantime the typist was feeding envelopes into an addressing machine which was printing them (each with a different name and address) at the rate of 2000 an hour. "In my time it would have taken a man about four days to do what that machine does in one hour," mused the old-fashioned merchant. Then came the envelope-sealing machine. The envelopes were put into the machine, a handle was turned, and they came out sealed at the rate of 9000 an an hour. The manager then showed his visitor a type-writer for bookkeeping—pens were used in the office only as pipe-cleaners. Bound books, however, were out of date. The loose.leaf book was the modern idea. " Then all you have to do is to cast up the figures," said the oldfashioned merchant. " Pardon me, we do nothing of the kind," was the answer. "With calculating machines that will tell you in ten seconds what 9,756,834 multiplied by 456,873 amounts to, and which will extract the square root of 587,867,901 with a few turns of a handle, the human brain becomes too slow for practical purposes." " It seems to me that brains are quite obsolete," said the visitor. " And that is the biggest mistake of all," returned the twentieth century manager. "Brains are what we want, and all we want. We are freed of the old grinding routine that business men used to break their hearts over; now we have time to think, Our clerks have shorter hours and are better paid 5 but those we do employ have brains, otherwise we should have no use for them. No! brains are not at a discount, but brainless handwork is." Whether or not the old-fashioned merchant was converted, we are not told.