Abstract
IN the Quarterly Review for October 1933, Mr. W. F. Watson contributes an interesting article on “The Machine and its Purpose” in which he combats the view so often taken for granted that machinery involves dull, monotonous work which ‘dehumanises’ the worker, robs him of interest in his job and crushes individuality. The machine, he admits, continually encroaches on the sphere of certain crafts and changes the form of others, but at the same time it has created new crafts involving a high degree of skill, initiative and individuality, such as that of jig, tool, fixture, mould, die and gauge makers. Passing on to consider the machine operator, he argues that a person who controls a machine with ease, skill and precision is the master of that machine, not its slave. The man who is master of his job, no matter how elementary it be, must of necessity take some interest in it. Moreover, modern industrial investigations such as those of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology have led to an appreciation of the importance of the ‘human factor’ and have shown how to counteract the effects of monotony.
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Man and Machine. Nature 132, 816–817 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132816d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132816d0