¶ Total capacity of U. S. industrial equipment is one billion horsepower, which does the work of ten billion men, or five times the earth's total population.
¶ On the basis of 1830 methods six million men would have been needed to cultivate the soil for the 1929 U. S. wheat crop. With the best extant equipment (such as 60-duckfoot gang plows) 4,000 men could have planted the whole crop.
¶ A new machine for making light bulbs produces 540 bulbs a minute, replaces 10,000 men.
¶ If every structure on Manhattan Island were destroyed and the entire community rebuilt with the latest inventions, the reconstruction would pay for itself in 20 years.
¶ To produce a motor car in 1904 required 1,291 man-hours; in 1919, 303 man-hours; in 1929, 92 man-hours.
¶ Six hundred million man-hours produced eleven million tons of steel in 1900. In 1929, 770 million man-hours produced 58 million tons. One ton required 70 man-hours in 1900; 13 man-hours in 1929.
The men who are making these studies of U. S. industrial efficiency call themselves Technocrats. They have a loose national organization, Technocracy, at No. 159 West 13th St., Manhattan. To Technocracy, engineers, scholars and businessmen send money and information. But the backlog is $100,000 earmarked by the Architects' Emergency Relief Committee. Two dozen otherwise unemployed architects last week were busily codifying the data. When they are through Technocracy will, have an informative industrial survey of North America from 1830 to date.
For each of 3,000 commodities (steel, cement, wheat, corn, cotton, etc. etc.) there will be a chart to show the amount of energy expended each year in production, the number of men employed, working hours, volume produced and flow of goods. By last week about 150 charts were completed and the Technocrats permitted themselves a first bit of publicity.
Already obvious is the fact that 1918 marked the peak of employment in the U. S.; 1929 the peak of production. If all U. S. factories were running today at 1929 production, half of the 12 to 14 million now out of work would still be unemployed, note the Technocrats. One hundred men. they show, working steadily in less than a dozen U. S. brick plants, can produce all the bricks the country needs. To produce all the commodities which the U. S. requires, the individual worker needs to work only 660 hours a year.
Spokesman for the Technocrats and director of their "Energy Survey of North America," is Howard Scott, consulting engineer.* His analyses of power have set many a tycoon pondering into the night. Says he: "The price system and its concomitant political administration are hangovers from past sequences of history in which production depended on the conversion of energy through manpower alone. Before the last century the only means by which energy could be converted into products or services was the human engine, whose rate is equivalent to about one-tenth horsepower.
"Since then we have increased our rate of energy conversion until a turbine capable of generating 300,000 horsepower, equal to the energy of 9,000,000 men on a 24 hr. basis, is under the operating control of about half a dozen of them.