The candidates are paid for months of mere training, and
they themselves waste their energy and time with practice in a kind of
labor which cannot be serviceable to them in any other economic
activity. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that one
city system approached me with the question whether it would not
interest me from a scientific point of view to examine how far the
mental fitness of the employees could be determined beforehand through
experimental means.
After carefully observing the service in the central office for a
while, I came to the conviction that it would not be appropriate here
to reproduce the activity at the switchboard in the experiment, but
that it would be more desirable to resolve that whole function into
its elements and to undertake the experimental test of a whole series
of elementary mental dispositions. Every one of these mental acts can
then be examined according to well-known laboratory methods without
giving to the experiments any direct relation to the characteristic
telephone operation as such. I carried on the first series of
experiments with about thirty young women who a short time before had
entered into the telephone training school, where they are admitted
only at the age between seventeen and twenty-three years. I examined
them with reference to eight different psychophysical functions. In
saying this, I abstract from all those measurements and tests which
had somewhat anthropometric character, such as the measurement of the
length of the fingers, the rapidity of breathing, the rapidity of
pulse, the acuity of vision and of hearing, the distinctness of the
pronunciation, and so on.
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