But this is the one field which has been thoroughly ploughed over by
science and by practical life in the course of the last decades. No
new suggestion and no new hint of the importance of the problem is
needed here. Our short discussion was planned to be confined to those
regions which have not been worked up in systematic investigations
and for which new devices seemed desirable. Hence we do not reproduce
here the rich material of facts which the physiologists and
psychophysicists have brought together in the last half-century, the
importance of which for industrial labor is perfectly evident.
Moreover, the practical applications and the insight into the social
needs have transformed the factories themselves into one big
laboratory in which the problem of fatigue has been studied by
practical experiments. The problem of the dependence of fatigue and
output upon the length of the working day has been tested in
numberless places with the methods of really exact research, as it was
easy to find out how the achievement of the laborers became
quantitatively and qualitatively changed by the shortening of the
working hours.
When in one civilized country after another the exhaustingly long
working days of the industrial wage-earner were shortened more and
more, the theoretical discussions of the legislators and of the social
reformers were soon supplemented by careful statistical inquiries in
the factories.
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