a distinct improvement in the art. The fact that this improvement was
made not by manufacturers of tool steel, but in the course of the
adoption of standards, shows both the necessity and fruitfulness of
methodical and careful investigation in the choice of much neglected
details. The economy to be gained through the adoption of uniform
standards is hardly realized at all by the managers of this country. No
better illustration of this fact is needed than that of the present
condition of the cutting tools used throughout the machine shops of the
United States. Hardly a shop can be found in which tools made from a
dozen different qualities of steel are not used side by side, in many
cases with little or no means of telling one make from another; and in
addition, the shape of the cutting edge of the tool is in most cases
left to the fancy of each individual workman. When one realizes that the
cutting speed of the best treated air hardening steel is for a given
depth of cut, feed and quality of metal being cut, say sixty feet per
minute, while with the same shaped tool made from the best carbon tool
steel and with the same conditions, the cutting speed will be only
twelve feet per minute, it becomes apparent how little the necessity for
rigid standards is appreciated.

Let us take another illustration. The machines of the country are still
driven by belting. The motor drive, while it is coming, is still in the
future. There is not one establishment in one hundred that does not
leave the care and tightening of the belts to the judgment of the
individual who runs the machine, although it is well known to all who
have given any study to the subject that the most skilled machinist
cannot properly tighten a belt without the use of belt clamps fitted
with spring balances to properly register the tension. And the writer
showed in a paper entitled "Notes on Belting" presented to The American
Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1893, giving the results of an