Men were shifted from job to job to suit the whim of the foreman or the exigencies of a rush order. Parts were cast, recast, filed down to fit other parts. Scrap iron accumulated in the corners of the shop. A piece of work was abandoned half finished in order to make up time on another order, delayed by some accident. By to-day's standards it was a veritable helter-skelter, from which the finished machines somehow emerged, at a fearful cost in wasted time and labor. When Henry was switched from one piece of work to another, taken from his job to help some other workman, or sent to get a needed tool that was missing, he knew that his time was being wasted. His thrifty instincts resented it. With his mind full of pictures of smoothly running, exactly adjusted machines, he knew there was something wrong with the way the iron-works was managed. He was growing dissatisfied with his job. CHAPTER V GETTING THE MACHINE IDEA When Henry had been with the James Flower Company nine months his wages were increased. He received three dollars a week. He was not greatly impressed. He had not been working for the money; he wanted to learn more about machines. As far as he was concerned, the advantages of the iron-works were nearly exhausted. He had had in turn nearly every job in the place, which had been a good education for him, but the methods which had allowed it annoyed him more every day. He began to think the foreman rather a stupid fellow, with slipshod, inefficient ideas. As a matter of fact, the shop was a very good one for those days. It turned out good machines, and did it with no more waste than was customary. Efficiency experts, waste-motion experiments, mass production--in a word, the machine idea applied to human beings was unheard of then. Henry knew there was something wrong. He did not like to work there any longer. Two weeks after the additional fifty cents had been added to his pay envelope he left the James Flower Company. He had got a job with the Drydock Engine works, manufacturers of marine machinery. His pay was two dollars and a half a week. To the few men who knew him he probably seemed a discontented boy who did not know when he was well off. If any of them took the trouble to advise him, they probably said he would do better to stay with a good thing while he had it than to change around aimlessly. He was far from being a boy who needed that advice. Without knowing it, he had found the one thing he was to follow all his life--not machines merely, but the machine idea. He went to work for the drydock company because he liked its organization.