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HOB-NAILED BOOTS IN THE LOWLANDS
so
designed as to substitute automatic adjustments for much of the skill
of hand and eye on the part of the worker, will make it possible to
train apprentices quickly and easily.
There
is an even more important reason for optimism. Put it down to American
ingenuity! After six months the young men who had entered as
apprentices—and still were apprentices—were turning out better
small-cut melee stones than the European refugees brought over to
"teach" them.
So significant is this development that the Diamond News
of Kimberley, South Africa, the most important publication—indeed, the
"Bible"—of the diamond industry, devoted an entire article to it.
Particularly interesting to the public, which has heard conflicting
stories about New York's becoming a diamond-cutting center, is
editorial comment of the News:
The
new Baumgold enterprise is also to be welcomed in other directions. It
will, firstly, have proved to the master cutters that by correct
approach, the diamond cutters' labour organisations can be induced to
see reason and agree to permit the use of improved types of cutting and
polishing equipment, if really sensible propositions are placed before
them. After all, the American labour organisations are tremendously
powerful and difficult, but at the same time they are farsighted,
progressive and amenable when, in a case like this, they are, through
their wide experience of production methods, clearly able to visualise
an appreciable expansion of this particular trade and see through this
expansion, increased labour employment.
Secondly,
it will have at last led to the introduction of some badly needed
modern types of machinery into the cutting factory. At the present
moment even the most recently built factories stilt use pathetically
antiquated machines.
It
is doubtful whether there is any other industry in existence today
which has made so little progress with its equipment as the diamond
cutting industry. Cutters are still using precisely the same type of
equipment (with probably the one exception of the me-
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