Use of Factory Statistics in the Investigation of Industrial Fatigue

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART I ELEMENTS CHAPTER I Fatigue Fatigue may be defined for our purposes as a diminution of working capacity, often accompanied by feelings of weariness, caused in the human organism by the length or intensity of some activity. THE HUMAN ORGANISM Though the application of physiological definition is...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART I ELEMENTS CHAPTER I Fatigue Fatigue may be defined for our purposes as a diminution of working capacity, often accompanied by feelings of weariness, caused in the human organism by the length or intensity of some activity. THE HUMAN ORGANISM Though the application of physiological definition is impracticable in the present state of our knowledge, yet it is important, for the benefit of investigators without physiological training, to emphasize the fact that the fatigue they are seeking is something very definite and physical and by no means merely imaginative. The actual modus operandi within the human organism, whereby length and intensity of activity causes diminished capacity, and rest causes an increased capacity, is described very vividly in the British Health of Munition Workers Memorandum No. 7. In the animal body the performance of work depends on the activities of parts which are best considered under three groups ?first, the complex nervous mechanism of the brain and spinal cord, which are concerned in the initiation and distribution of impulses to action; second, the nerves, which conduct the impulses to muscles; and third, the muscles themselves, which by contracting finally perform external work. 453] I5 Fatigue has been separately studied in all these parts. In its essential features the fatigue of all alike has been found, when it occurs, to depend not upon the simple using up? exhaustion ?of the substances supplying the chemical energy which is liberated during work, but upon the accumulation within the living elements of the products of the chemical changes involved. Fatigue of the animal machine, that is to say, is not to be compared with the failure of fuel as in a steam- engine, or with the running-down of a clock weight, bu...