A MUSEUM OF SAFETY

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 174, 26 July 1938, Page 10

A MUSEUM OF SAFETY

'J’HE penalty of prosperity and re-

duced unemployment is seen in the annual report for 1936 issued by the Chief Inspector of Factories which states that industrial accidents notified during that year numbered 176,390, of which 920 were fatal; an increase of 1C per cent, and 9 per cent, respectively over the figures for 1935. The explanation (writes David Le Roi in Chambers’s Journal) is that during times of industrial activity, more young, inexperienced workers and more previously unemployed workers, long out of practice, are absorbed; new machinery with unknown dangers is installed; and longer hours with great speed of production prevail. Heavy as is the grim toll of life and wealth (£6,000,000 lost in ten years in wages and compensations alone through accidents), that harvest would most probably have been trebled but for the lessons to be learned from the exhibits ir. Britain’s least-visited museum: the Home Office Industrial Museum in Horseferry Road, Westminster. The object of this 11-year-old museum is to standardise ideas for protection from accidents at work, and so mechanical safety devices of every description are exhibited to demonstrate to employers how the most dangerous piece of machinery may be rendered harmless. Most of the exhibits in the Home Office Industrial Museum represent some type of machine that has claimed a human life or limb, but whose dangers have now been made nihil. For whenever a mechanical criminal has committed an offence against its attendants, experts set to work and devise means to prevent repetition of the accident. Once upon a time, paper-cutters were constantly losing fingers while operating power-driven guillotines; a man would incautiously attempt to smooth

some paper when the machine was in motion, and in an instant the blade descended and sliced off one or more fingers. After numerous experiments, a lattice guard was attached across the cutting area, and the action of the blade’s descent thrusts 'he lattice forward, pushing the feeder's hands out of the danger zone. Until recently, too, the steel jaws of printing-presses would frequently close upon the hands of minders who ventured to adjust sheets of papei while the press was in motion. Thereupon the experts devised a pecial trip wire, sc that if. a minder places his hands within the danger zone his fingers instantly come into contact with the wire and stop the press. Not so very long ago, the automatic machines which stamp out tin lids from sheet metal were responsible for injuring the hands of between 400 and 500 operatives every year. To-day, thanks to a device shown at the museum, the most careless worker could not so much as scratch a finger while feeding the meal into the press. When the operator has fed a piece of metal into the machine a specific distance, and the power-driven ram descends to punch out a lid, a sliding arm fitted with a rubber-covered grip pushes the man’s hand out of the way and holds it imprisoned until the ram rises again. For some years after the introduction of mechanical dough-mixing machines, it was a common occurrence for

Reducing the Accident Rate

bakery employees to have their hands mangled by the heavy revolving arms of the mixers. Thinking they saw some foreign body in the dough, attendants would lift the lids of the machines and put in their hands to scrape the arms as they turned. More often than not, they were a fraction of a second too late, and the metal arm swung over to crush their hands into pulp. Now, however, a special interlock guard makes it impossible to raise the lid of the mixer without stopping the machine. In certain weaving mills, the unhygienic practice called “shuttlekissing” is persisted in: the weaver drawing the weft, or loose end of the cotton, through the wooden nose of the shuttle by sucking the material with his mouth. But, as an exhibit in the Industrial Museum proves, this potential danger to health is eliminated by a device consisting of a shuttle so conducted that it is impossible to draw ; the thread through with the lips; the operation must be performed with a pneumatic “kisser” fitted with a rubber mouth. Thus are factory owners beginning to realise that a more general adoption of safety devices means better production. By accepting the recommendations of the museum authorities, several concerns have already reduced their accident rate by 80 per cent. If every firm in the country could do likewise, it would save ind' ,c,4i 'v £9,000,000 a year.

Home Office experts are always ready and willing to collaborate with manufacturers’ and employees’ representatives in evolving new safety devices, and the museum is constantly approached by firms seeking advice regarding the best means of overcoming potential dangers from new machinery about to be installed in their workshops. But since there are a good many industrial accidents for which machinery is not responsible, and it is impossible to devise a robot safety device for the protection of every type of worker, records in the library of the Home Office Industrial Museum give all kinds of advice how nonmechanical mishaps may be prevented. Recently, two workmen were cleaning a drinking-well by the light of a naked candle, when there was a violent explosion and they were both seriously injured. Subsequent examination of the scene of the accident revealed that paraffin and lubricating oils had seeped into the well through a fault in the drainage system of a nearby garage. As a consequence, the Home Office recommended that future cleaning of wells should be done by the light of electric torches. While smoking a cigarette during his work at a plating plant employing trichlorethylene, a man collapsed and . At the subsequent inquiry, a Home Office expert stated that trichlorethylene was a narcotic similar to chloroform, being a combination of chlorine and ethylene; the inhaling of the trichlorethylene through the smoking of a cigarette had resulted in the creation of phosgene, or mustard gas. In other words, the unfortunate man had unwittingly gassed himself. So now employees are forbidden to smoke while operaing trichlorethylene plants.