serve its operations with their own eyes, and many thousands more co-operated with the experimenter through questionnaires that were sent to them, covering every aspect of home management and practical housework. Among the results, already apparent, attending the investigation, is the birth of a movement urging the establishment of the course of domestic engineering in some Eastern universities. The course is now given at the New Jersey State College. To put it in a word, the idea originally was to meet and, if possible, solve the "servant problem" and to enable women to achieve better housekeeping through the adaptation to the home of modern methods and machinery. The inspiration to practical methods, Mrs. Pattison states, came from the late Frederick W. Taylor, the efficiency expert. Mr. Tay lor, when he had analyzed the results of the long series of experiments which followed, summed them up in the estimate that, through the introduction of labor-saving machinery into the home, it is practicable for a housewife to reduce her work fifty per cent and conserve herself while doing it—an estimate which applies to ninety per cent of the households in the United States as being the proportion of homes without servants. The home being an enterprise involving something far more than a place in which to eat and sleep, the Station's investigations and deductions, far from being limited to the mechanical operations required to expedite its uses in. those essentials, embraced its fundamental organization, including its finances. A household budget was advised, and the advantages of its application to the year's expenses were outlined. The house itself should be organized, apart from the financial features, on an auto-operative plan, which calls for a Home Office wherever the size of the establishment will warrant it. Some room on the ground floor should afford space for a desk, a typewriter, a small filing system and, where household affairs are on an extensive scale, even a dictaphone. metal on the A card index not only gives the location and uses of rooms and closets throughout the house, but the location of all material to be utilized in its conduct. The room doors are numbered in small figures near the knob, and a card inside of the door directs one to the precise location of the article required, thus-Molasses: Card Index: "Kitchen, Door 9, First Floor"; Kitchen Door card: "Molasses, Cupboard 6, Shelf 4, Section 1". Or, if it be towels for Bathroom-Card Index: "Linen Room, Door 7, Second Floor"; Linen Room Door card: "Shelf 3, Section 3". Besides this Location Index, another is maintained which applies to the Instruction Bureau, a continually growing compendium bearing upon household information, from recipes to memoranda of garment sizes and prices for the family. The management of supplies begins before they come into the house. In the new science of Domestic Engineering, it is termed the Routing of Material. A receiving station was improvised which made needless the entrance of all tradespeople into the house, and contained a set of standard scales, and measures wet and dry, which prevented the tradespeople from dipping too deeply into the budget. New Jersey women, it may be remarked in passing, have taken very much to heart, of late years, the duty of watching their tradesmen. The supplies for the table passed on from the outside receiving station to a kitchen the fittings of which-ice box, working table, storage places, stove, and serving table-were planned for the minimum number of steps necessary in preparing, serving and clearing away the ordinary meal. This economy of time and effort was studiously observed in the routing of the laundry, the general cleaning, and in every other recurring feature of the housework to which a fixed system could be applied. Mrs. Pattison did the work while President of the New Jersey State Federation of Women's Clubs, for the organization, and at a personal expense of over twelve hundred dollars. bonbons-was prepared in four hours. When, in addition to these economies of time, it is noted that the Station reduced making the average double bed to sixty motions and sixteen steps within four minutes, the remarkable routine finally established for her day by Mrs. Pattison becomes understandable. Rising at 6:45 a. m., she THE WOMAN WHO IS REDUCING HOUSEKEEPING TO A SCIENCE Mrs. Mary Pattison, who is working out the problems of keeping the home in order without trouble, by studying her own work as a housekeeper. reaches the breakfast room at 7:15, and any member of the household can have breakfast and agency for short time cooking; alcohol catch the 8 o'clock train to New York. proved to be the cleanest and readiest of By 9, dishes are washed and the lunch- flames, yet a trifle more expensive than eon planned-sometimes started. oil or gas; and electricity, in view of its hour is consumed in tidying the upstairs adaptiveness and absence of waste, the most economical in the practical workings of the home. With electricity, three rooms. One Two hours are devoted to any special task required. Preparation, eat the hour from noon until 1 p. m. An hour for dinner preparations leaves time for some other two-hour task, plus two hours for herself, to dispose of as she may choose. The evening meal, in all, is allotted two hours, and the time from 8 p. m. until retiring is her own. were Where ing and clearing away of luncheon takes pints each of potatoes, beets and carrots cooked with the minimum of trouble for four cents; and a twentypound turkey was roasted to perfection at a fuel cost of twelve cents. only one heat source is practical or desirable in the home kitchen, the Station's choice is electricity. The greatest efficiency, at present relative costs and usefulness, is to be had from the presence of both electricity and gas. A series of comparative tests of fuels resulted in stigmatizing the coal range as the most uneconomic cooking plant for the household. At $6.50 a ton, the fourcover range, or stove, cost twenty-one cents a day. Gas was the preferred In the course of the investigation the Experiment Station was besieged by thousands of housewives anxious to ob But the dining room presented a hard located at the shortest possible distance problem, because of the difficulty of serv- from the furnace. The shoveling, lifting, ing the family without rising from the carrying, and heaving of twenty pounds table. Two devices solved it. One, of coal from bin to furnace, she made a dubbed the Dumb Butler, proved to be study in physical culture, and she laid the original dumb waiter of a century special emphasis upon filling the lungs ago, but adjusted to five disks instead of with air before assuming the strain of three and which, mounted upon wheels physical work-a safeguard against responding to the slightest touch, came injury known to very few. more quietly and far more expeditiously To learn how much actual pedestrian to the left of the hostess than any English work she performed in a day, Mrs. Pattibutler who ever lived, and carried, in one son wore a pedometer. She found her load, just twice as much as the largest average, indoors, was seven miles, with double-shelved The other the pedometer record rising occasionally device, placed in the center of the table, to twelve or fourteen. She soon man tea-cart. was the Table Butler, a revolving tray aged to cut down these promenades apcapable of holding each course and mov- preciably. In her hand motion tasks, she ing near everyone for self service. used a stop watch. The questionnaires she sent to her neighbors under the query, "Which HOW A MEAL IS SERVED WITHOUT RISING FROM THE TABLE The Dumb Butler-the "five story" device standing beside the table-contains task do you most dislike?" had elicited the grimly unanimous response: "Dishwashing." The mechanical device took care of the actual washing; but plates have to be scraped. At the "Experiment Station"-as she dubbed her home-the primitive plan of using a dinner knife for the job stood indicted as guilty of twenty strokes a plate, fifteen seconds of time, fatigue, racket, and lack of proper cleanliness after all. The method evolved was to have at hand a plate scraper-a piece of bread, paper napkins or small doilies. The plate was lifted the courses, while the Table Butler-the glass disk on the table-furnishes with the thumb and first and condiments and sauces. Taken together, the two devices will provide a com- second fingers of the left plete meal without compelling the hostess to move. At the bottom of all the innovations and plans, as they gradually evolved from experience, was motion study, the key to modern efficiency methods in industry and trade. It extended as far down as the coal bin, for this particular housewife did not shy at shoveling coal. The bin, carefully marked for the coal measure corresponding to selected weights in tons, was hand; emptied of all that would drop into the garbage receptacle which was in readiness; and then circled with the scraper, held in the right hand, in a motion from the wrist, with a final sweep down the middle, and off. Time consumed: Five seconds, with no noise and real cleanliness. Breakfast for four people, including cereal, toast, coffee, fruit and eggs, when SHORT time ago, a certain New Jersey A woman decided that keeping house as she did was too expensive a process. Her household of five people was served by three maids, whose direction used up most of her energy and whose wages absorbed practically all of her allowance; and the results were hardly satisfactory. Mrs. Mary Pattison-that was her name-gave six weeks to silent -very silent-study of the housework on the assumption of having no "help" at all, dismissed the maids, and then started in to see what could be done. First, she cleared out all the heavy iron pots, the hard-to-clean pans, and every article that was not actually necessary. Meanwhile she carried on a search for mechanical devices which would lessen the manual labor. Her first investment was in a general utility electric motor, which the family promptly christened "James the Great". And James was great. He ground the coffee, cleaned the silver, made bread and cake, washed, wrung, and mangled the clothes, grated the cheese, chocolate and cocoanut, sharpened the knives, beat the eggs, made the ice cream and did it all for one and one-half cents an hour, spent for his electric current. was Her next act to discard the vacuum cleaner and to purchase a portable electric one of the brush type. Her third acquisition was a fireless cooker. An incinerator, operating at a cost of four cents a bushel, disposed of all garbage and eliminated many trips to the spot formerly used for its burial. mangle saved fifty per cent in time on ironing, and gas and electric irons proved efficient aids. The electric dishwasher disposed of seventy pieces of china and glass together with fifty or more pieces of silver within ten minutes. A By that time, Mrs. Pattison felt that she was getting somewhere in her economies of labor on routine operations throughout the entire field, from floor cleaning to the preparation of vegetables. She cleaned seven rugs in the front hall while she was dressed and gloved for a reception, and she slit a pound of small green beans with a bean cutter in two and one-half minutes by hand power, and in less time with the help of James the Great, as against twenty minutes for one pound of bean slitting under the old regime. All these things counted. 589 thousand dollars will be distributed among the winning flyers. To carry the competition into every State, three main trans-continental routes cross have been outlined, so that every aviator in America will be able, by a country flight of moderate length, to reach one of these routes. The main aerial highway will be the central route, or over the Lincoln Highway. Aeroplane circuit races, with distances up to fifteen hundred miles, have been arranged to provide flying demonstrations for every part of the country. These may be held simultaneously in different parts of the country, and any records made by the participants will count in the competition for the awards. In these contests, as in all others, land and water aero on planes will compete equal terms. The The latter can find landing places anywhere along the Coasts, the Great Lakes, the Gulf, and along the rivers and streams of the entire country. When the great meet is over, on Columbus Day, October twelfth, towns that have never yet seen a plane will know the airship as a familiar sight, the National Guard will have a fleet of aeroplanes which will be twice as formidable as the present corps of the United States Army and Navy combined, and we shall have a huge corps of trained flyers ready for military service. The National Aeroplane Competition, as the great tournament has been designated, will be held as an effort to rouse greater interest in machines of the air; to develop a fleet of planes for protection of the country in time of war; to dem reserve, other words, to forming an aeronautical which might be utilized daily for mail carrying, instruction of pilots, and other peaceful purposes, and yet be immediately available in case of need. All conditions imposed upon the contestants have been made with the intention of fostering normal flying by normal aviators, and to emphasize the useful side of flying at the expense of the over-exploited sensational side, which has so long depended for its drawing power upon the extent of danger involved in it. For this reason the Contest Committee has limited the "flying day" to ten hours. There are but one hundred and fifty aviators in the United States who can provide themselves machines and who are ready with to fly, but when the Competition was first announced, twenty-five. of the most prominent immediately wired their entries. State and city govern ments are co-operating and some public subscriptions have been received as well. Wherever official appropriations have been made, and in fact in all cases where the public has provided funds for the purchase of machines to enter, the machines will go to the organized militia. |