Wausau pilot. [volume] (Wausau, Wis.) 1896-1940, 1913-05-06
HARRINGTON EMERSON LECT-
URES ON EFFICIENCY AT
WAUSAU CLUB.

Last Tuesday evening about 12O of
the manufacturers and business and
professional men of the city sat down
to an excellent dinner in the Wausau
club house dining room, and later
listened to lecture by Mr.. Harring-
ton Emerson, president of the Emer-
son Co., efficiency engineers.
Mr.. G. E. Turner, president of the
club, in a few brief and felicitous re-
marks, presented the speaker of the
evening.
While there was nothing new or
radical in Mr.. Emerson's speech, there
was much that was instructive, and
much food for thought. He began
by giving his reason for being in
Wausaa at this particular time, and
said it came about by the enthusiastic
letters he had been receiving from
one of his associates who had been
engaged up here the last three months
and remembering that Hannibal lost
out in Italy after his associates had
spent winter in Capua he thought
it behooyed him to come to WauSau
to see what was happening to his
young man. He paid high tribute
TO the city's institutions declaring
that the smaller cities where men
had opportunity for the development
of their talents were the backbone of
the country Coming down to his
subject he went on to say that from
the six thousand billion persons born
into the world since the creation pro-
badly not more than six Thousand new
ideas originated. A new idea is one
of the rarest things in all the world;
sometimes merely reversing the pop
ular conception of things will reveal
an entirely new truth, and in proof
OF this cited the belief of the ancientS
that the earth was round, that the
sun reyolved around the earth until
scientists proved the contrary and
changed completely the whole phil
osophy of existence. In medicine a
reversal of the old order brought
about many startling changes, so ap-
parently small a matter as the wash
ing of the surgeons hands be-
fore an operation instead of after as
had been the custom resulted in
bringing down the mortality in a
Vienna hospital from 40 per cent to
8 per cent. Another evidence was
the change in placing the eye of the
needle at the point end, and the con-
sequent perfecting of the sewing
machine By Elias Howe. The speaker
went on TO say that in Egypt they
think the flies are scavengers, and no
attempt made to destroy them and to |
this is Directly attributable the fact |
that one out of every four Egyptians is |
afflicted with sore eyes and many
with blindness.
Mr.. Emerson said it is particularly |
difficult for the manager of a plant |
who has been successiyely apprentice,
foreman, superintendent
and finally manager, as is the case in
q plant at Franklin, Pa, to under
stand how an outsider can possibly |
tell him anything about his own
business that he does not know, but |
the manager watches his men only |
while they are at work, the expert |
them all the time, and thus
discovers where the waste of time or
energy occurs.
His descriptionofc civic departments,
the method Cf arranging material so
as to be handled with the least ex-
penditure of energy, and the means
TO not only make a certain
factory get its orders out on time but
10 so actually increase its output as
10 outrun its orders was most inter-
esting.
The speaker brought out the facts
hat in America the factories and
)ther organizations are suffering from
two evils, one is, we are overequipped, /
-he other, we are undersupervised
and owing to the abolishment of
hand labor and the introduction of
there has come into ex-
Istence what is known as the law of
dependent sequences; where in the
course of production, an article for
its perfection must depend upon the
perfect working out of a number of
operations and if an error creeps into
Dne part and another in another part,
the whole makes a poor showing and
makes for low efficiency.
What the speaker brought out most
was the tremendous waste