The Waterbury Democrat., 1934-10-23
In New York
By PAUL HARRISON

New York-After attending the National Business show. your New York observer has a report to make on office efIiciency: Tn spite of all the new labor-saving devices, sec retarial noses will still be powdered by hand, just as they were before the industrial revolution.
 You'd have thought that by this time the inventors would have turned out some wax-model robot stenographers-all beautiful, unat- tached, mechanically incapable of betraying confidence, and per- haps thermostatically controlled But they haven't. Instead they have gone to some lengths to pro- vide live, fluffy blonde scenery to offset the chill detachment of the clicking machines. I watched one gentleman who in turn was watch ing dazzling young woman run tabulator. After the demonstration ! he said he didn't want a machine, but that there was job in his office if she needed one after the business show closed.
 !
 Efficiency Undone
 Buoyed by this victory of girl over gadget, I strolled over t, watch a contraption which seemed designed to do everything froIi simple addition to the calculation of compound interest and issuance of vouchers. A great time and labor saver, no doubt, except th-t something had gone wrong and it now was wasting. lot of time. Wasting labor, too, because two mechanics and the girl demonstrat- or and the salesman all were fuss ing with it. The latter seemed an- noyed because the machine had broken down right in the middle of his pretty speech.
 Everything is speeded up this year. Typewriters are Is per cent faster; calculators are 11.476 per cent more efficient, and so on. The only reason go to business shows
 is because I like the fiattery of
 salesmen who slyly pretend that
 must be the president, at least, of
 some vast concern, and start chat 1. ting easily in terms of hundreds of thousands of dollars. always promise to send around one of my
 executive vice presidents M talk terms.
 Coping with MIRA Exhibitors have new sales talk. They say that more machines and faster machines are needed In of
 fees to cope with shortened hours ! prevailing under the national re-
 covery program. Fortified with new
 machines, an office can do more
 work in less time, and without hir-
 ing any additional help.
 | l wanted to ask somebody what
 good the recovery program could
 do if it's shorter hours didn't re-
 suit in the hiring of more people. I kept quiet, though, for fear of
 goading some great mind into sit-
 ting down and inventing a machine for turning out better pieces for the newspapers than this one is. T
 Signing on
 Being in a sort of mechanistic
 mood. I went to see about that
 fiashy electric sign which belts the
 Times building with moving news
 bulletins. Everybody who has seen
 Times Square after dusk during
 the last six years has seen that
 sign; hundreds of thousands gather to watch 1t when election returns
 are coming in, and when other big
 stories are breaking.
 But few people ever see it's in-
 nards. It was designed, built and
 installed by a Mir Frank c. Reilly, } twho used to make most of the moving and reading rigns which are part of the Broadway kaleido- tscope. He went into the sign busi- ness 25 years ago, after he had ] been a subway electrician. Liquids
 flowing out of bottles and Ssmoke
 rising from cigars were simple
 tasks in electric sign making com
 pared to his masterpiece on the
 Times building.
 The interior mechanism occu- | pies almost every inch of a large room. Frank Powell. the chief en- gineer, and his assistant receive
 the bulletins to be flashed and then
 set them from a tremendous type
 case full of metal letters mounted Lon fiber bases. They have to work Hast because the sign is in continu-
 ous operation. but in six years they
 haven't made any embarrassing typographical errors.
 The letter, with blank slabs for spaces, are stacked one above the
 other and put into vertical maga-
 zine. Then they emerge, in order.
 to pass over a bed containing 29,-
 500 brushes, two for each of the
 14,S00 electric light bulbs which
 band four sides of the building out
 side. Thus contacts are made and
 the proper lamps fiash-fiash 21, 925,664 times each hour, If you
 want to get statistical. Each bulb. flashes for only 1-42 of a second. and special bulbs are used because
 a lingering glow would blur the