Will You Lose Your Job Because of A New Machine?


By MICHEL MOK
AN ENGLISH watchmaker's apprentice named John Kay, in 1738, invented a flying shuttle for weaving cotton. This was the first modern labor-saving device and with its aid, one man could do the work of two.
To the amazement of the young inventor, a roar of protest rose from the English weavers when it was introduced. Thirty years later, Kay aided in the development of a second labor-saving device, the spinning jenny. When this was installed in the English cotton factories, riots broke out.
An American manufacturer named Lloyd Raymond Smith, president of the A. 0. Smith Corporation put into operation at Milwaukee, Wis., in 1920, an automatic plant for making automobile frames. His monstrous machinery turns out steel automobile frames at the rate of 10,000 per day—one every eight seconds of the day and night. ' Two hundred men do the work of 2,000. Only fifty of them actually touch the frames. Without doubt, the Smith plant is the most complete instance of the use of labor-saving methods to be found in the world.