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turned to the selling organization. This, at first thought, seemed to offer a barrier to the modern procedure of standardization. Salesmanship, apparently, was an intangible thing that depended chiefly on a sort of magic that could not be put into the typewritten pages of the Book of Standards. But when the investigating staff set out to analyze the sales department, amazing discoveries were made. Most of the magic faded away into cold, relentless facts.

Some of these facts harked back to the production department. For instance, it was shown that out of one hundred possible customers, only twenty-four had bought the company's goods, while sixty-two had purchased of a competing house. No specific information of this sort had been tabulated before, and it suggested two things: faults of the product and faults of salesmanship.

When the two products were studied and compared by the investigators-whose duty and keen delight was the showing up of defects in their own house-the selling arguments of the competing establishment were shown in a new and convincing light. This analysis led to several important though simple improvements that had been neglected. under the dynasty of the executive committee.

The same critical dissection was made of salesmanship and salesmen's methods. Here was the proposition presented to the sales manager by the investigation chief: "We have twenty traveling salesmen, only two of whom are expert. Each of these two can go out and sell twice as much product as any other salesman on the staff. Is it because heaven has endowed these two men to sell double the volume, or can our other salesmen be developed in the expert method of these two?"

"Go ahead and find out," agreed the sales manager.

As the result of several months of quiet observation, the methods and characteristics of the expert salesmen were reduced to hard-and-fast terms and established as standards. It was found that many of the home methods of the sales department were quite as crude as the field salesmanship itself, and the whole mechanism was revised. In the course of the next six months, nearly all of the salesmen responded in an

encouraging way to the new conditions, only two or three showing themselves so incapable that they had to be dropped.

Then the scope of the standards in the sales department was broadened. To each salesman the sales manager said: "Your aggregate sales for the coming year ought to be such and such a figure. The company will help you in every way to attain that standard, and for attaining it you will re- . ceive in addition to your salary a fixed percentage very much larger than your percentage will be if you fall short of the goal."

A striking commentary on the former crude and inelastic selling organization. was the fact that only three salesmen fell short. In salesmanship, the development of men is just as amenable to fixed procedure as in other departments of a business.

This analytical process was extended through every ramification of the business, and is still being extended to-day, after a lapse of three years. The present organization is made up chiefly of the same men, but otherwise there is scarcely any similarity between the old and the new.

To-day, each executive is a business man, not a clerk. He is a business man, too, of a higher order than nine-tenths of the merchants and manufacturers of the country, because he has had the advantage of every technical aid possible, and has absorbed from his standards the brains and technique of the business world.

And to-day the lines of authority are drawn with precision. No man can escape his designated responsibility. His very

freedom of personal actions is built on responsibility. The organization is dissected so that every nerve stands out by itself. Each executive shows his comparative results, in volume and in percentages; and his costs and expenses are so minutely itemized and compared, by ratios, that a brief scrutiny suffices to show how well he has carried his responsibility.

Without any increase of capital or relative increase in the operating force, and with a sweeping reduction in cost and expense ratios, this company is paying to the stockholders, or turning into the surplus, fifty per cent. annually on its capital stock. The whole credit is due to the development of the organization.

Nikola Tesla, Dreamer

His Three-Day Ship to Europe and His Scheme to Split the Earth

By

Allan L. Benson

The man who lives ahead of his age is called a dreamer. Such a man is Tesla. He predicted wireless telegraphy long before it came about, and he gave the world the alternating current without which long-distance transmission of electric power would be impossible. Tesla is a man you will be glad to meet. His dreams are fascinating even if

A

LONE man dines nightly in the Rose Room at the Waldorf. For eighteen years, he has sat at the same table. The table, which stands near the wall, is just large enough for two; but it is never set for two. It is never set for more than one and that one is Nikola Tesla.

Nikola Tesla is fifty-nine years old. Where he keeps his years, no one knows. They are not in his face, for his face looks like forty. They are not in his hair, for his hair is black. If they are anywhere, they are in his eyes, for his eyes are sad.

This lone man, who always dines across from a vacant place, has given to the world a long series of wonderful inventions. Tesla's system of electric power transmission is used by all the world, and he has a new turbine which, he says, could drive the Lusitania across the Atlantic at the rate of fifty miles an hour.

"That means less than three days to cross the Atlantic," he continued, "upon the same coal supply that is now used. But I have a ship in mind that my turbine could put across the Atlantic in sixteen hours.

"But the world need not wait for the fiftymiles-an-hour ship. The turbine that can drive it is here. It is a simple matter of mathematics. The best type of reciprocating engine a quadruple expansion-yields only 51 per cent. of the energy that is contained in the steam. The turbines that drive the Lusitania and the Mauretania yield 62 per cent. My turbine yields 99 per cent. This it is enabled to do because the steam goes around and around the spiral circuits, imparting energy all along its track, while in the old type of turbine, the steam goes around but once and, when it escapes, still contains much energy."

The superior efficiency that Tesla claims

for his turbine is not sufficient, of course, to bring the two-and-a-half day ship. Adding 60 per cent. to power does not add 60 per cent. to speed. The law of diminishing returns prevents that. But Tesla contends that his turbine can as well be driven by steam created by gas explosions, which give enormous pressures.

This suggested internal combustion engines and aeroplanes.

"I will guarantee," said Tesla, "to put my turbine into a Wright biplane and drive it 200 miles an hour. That is to say, the turbine will furnish sufficient power. Of course, no one could sit in a Wright biplane going 200 miles an hour. I expect to develop a new type of flying-machine that my turbine will drive at almost the speed of a bullet."

The fact that Tesla dreams of such speed is not, of course, conclusive proof that such speed will soon be attained. But it should be remembered that some of Tesla's dreams have come true. I myself have seen a clipping from a New York newspaper bearing date of 1893, in which Nikola Tesla said:

"If I cannot send a message to a ship at sea, send it without wires, and make the message understood to those aboard the ship, I am willing to lay my head on the block."

No, he was not the first to send such a message. That is true. Marconi, five years later, sent the first such message. But Tesla, years before Marconi's achievement, obtained American patents upon a system of wireless telegraphy.

While on the subject of dreams, here is a Tesla dream that, so far as I know, has never been equaled by Tesla, or by any other human being, since the world began.

Every one knows that a note upon a violin will sometimes shatter a wineglass in the same room. Every one knows that a note

upon a flute will set some string in a piano softly to humming. But every one does not

[graphic]

The violin and the flute each set the air to vibrating. The wineglass and the pianostring were imperceptibly vibrating before either the violin or the flute sounded, precisely as all matter is always imperceptibly vibrating in response to the multitude of noises and shocks in the world. But the vibrations of the violin's note happened to coincide with the frequency of the vibrations of the wineglass, as the vibrations produced by the flute happened to coincide with the vibrations of this particular piano-string. And, coinciding in frequency, as they happened to do, they

Tesla's new turbine, which, he claims, could drive the Lusitania across the Atlantic in less than three days, upon the same coal supply that is used now

[graphic]

produced the same accel-
eration that a boy produces
when he swings some one
in an old-fashioned swing.
The person in the swing
may weigh 200 pounds and
the boy may weigh but 50
and may push but a pound.

But if he times his pushes to coincide with the turn of the swing from him and keeps adding a pound each time, he will eventually have to stop to avoid throwing out the occupant of the swing. While, on the other hand, if he did not time to coincide with the movements of the swing-in other words, if he pushed a

"Nikola Tesla is fifty-nine years old. Where he keeps his years, no one knows. They are not in his face, for his face looks like forty. They are not in his hair, for his hair is black. If they are anywhere, they are in his eyes, for his eyes are sad"

The wineglass that is broken by a violin's note is broken because the vibrations of the air that are produced by the violin happen to be of the same

frequency as the vibrations of the glass. In the beginning, the glass is expanding and contracting only within infinitesimally small limits. But each time that the glass begins to contract, the vibration produced by the violin gives it a little push. After thousands or millions of such pushes, the expansion and contraction of the glass are so increased that the glass breaks.

The principle embodied in this experiment interested Tesla, and he determined to try it upon a larger scale. He ordered from a steel company a steel link, two feet long and two inches thick. He was careful to specify that the steel should be of the best quality. As a matter of fact, the link was strong enough to bear a weight of hundreds

[graphic]

of tons.

Tesla fastened

to this link an electric

By means of a little electric vibrator, a steel building could be shattered as a wineglass sometimes is by the note of a violin

vibrator,

no larger than an alarm-clock, but

so constructed that the

frequency of the vibrations

could be altered at will. He set

the vibrator to going and then began to vary the vibrations for the purpose of getting the vibrator in "tune" with the link. For a long time, nothing happened-the vibrations of the link and of the machine did not chance to coincide. But at last he got them together, the great steel link began to tremble, increased its trembling until it dilated and contracted like a beating heart-and finally broke!

Sledge hammers could not have done it; crowbars could not have done it, but a fusillade of taps, no one of which would have harmed a baby, did it.

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