Easy Does It (1940)

here's to the ladies the fair and the week there they are we all admit but who dares call them weak our modern girls play as hard and with as much vitality and stamina as any man how do they do where do they find all that energy that seemingly inexhaustible store of pep and ginger what is that clipboard resilience that lets the weaker sex play an item then bob up clear-eyed ready for the next morning's work this frail creature strikes her typewriter keys about 40,000 times a day spaces seven thousand times shifts to capitals and returns the carriage more than a thousand times each all together a few ounces at a time she exerts more than five tons of pressure on her dainty fingertips in one day's work and anyway you look at it women's work is not for sissies most men would have a hard time of it if they were to change jobs with wife mother or girlfriend the homemaker walks miles every day from sink to ice box from cupboard the stove and from kitchen to dining table let's use some very special photography to compress the whole job of preparing a meal into a few seconds of time to see how many steps it really takes to get dinner on the table remember this is a hurry up picture of just one meal out of more than a thousand is that what you'd call a blitz meal even an efficiency expert would be staggered by the amount of chasing around an indoor roadwork that the little woman takes as a matter of course there's the stair climbing event for example usually accomplished Full Tilt and with an armload of brooms mops blankets and sundry household paraphernalia here's another hurry a picture of the clinging vine whizzing through a day's programme that would leave the average Mountaineer gasping for breath each trip upstairs is the equivalent lifting her own weight 12 feet and at the rate of 20 trips a day that's lifting about 12 tons of weight who said weaker sex ironing is another kind of work that's a lot of little jobs all rolled into one just are and one of hubby shirts for instance the iron may have to be lifted 20 or 30 times and since a flat iron weighs about as much as a brick a days ironing actually uses just about as much muscle as bricklaying flattening at all or wielding a trowel even steven add your iron today lady because men are beginning to realize how much lifting and pushing the little woman has to do around the house more and more muscle savers are being designed to make the little jobs easier it's one thing to make 6,000 separate scrubbing motions over a tub of clothes and quite another to push a button that does all the work here's another example of sheer brute force now let's make a super scientific test you'll notice that this girl is wearing a very special symbol in fact it isn't a thimble at all but a gadget of Springs and levers to measure the amount of force needed to sew on a button and it's called an ergometer according to the ER gamma to dial it takes 18 units of force to push the needle through the cloth just once in sewing stitch by stitch that work adds up any man will admit that's a lot of work when it's called to his attention in the right way and this is one way of calling it to his attention this hurry up picture shows that a stitch in time doesn't always save 9 in any way who wants to save nine stitches when a machine can do all the work a sewing machine is really an amazing invention especially when you stop to think that a man invented it yet it's simple when you know how it works real slow this one down so that for the first time on a theater screen we can all see exactly what goes on inside a sewing machine well there's the needle with a little loop of thread running through the eye that's the eye right there close to the point the needle carries the thread down through the cloth at the same time underneath the cloth another little loop of thread is being carried in a moving carriage called a shuttle the shuttle moves past the needle the loops have thread cross each other and form a smooth stitch and so that's the way a sewing machine takes the place of a lot of needless needle nudging and keeps everyone in stitches amazing in the early days of motoring no woman in her right mind would tackle the job starting the engine because the job had to be done the hard way let George do it was the slogan and ever since men have bragged about being the better drivers then the muscle savers got to work and the self-starter put the woman driver behind the wheel instead of in the backseat but even recently a motorcar demanded a certain amount of athletic prowess on the part of the driver for example in shifting gears let's hook up one of these work measuring machines or our gamma tease to this old-fashioned gear shift lever to see how much muscle it needed to run through the gears 90 units starting and stopping parking and backing up on a full day's driving a monitor more than a ton of pushing plus about a city bark of reaching putting the shift lever up by the steering wheel would cut down the amount of reaching but with such a short lever it would be even more work to shift the gears in fact more than a hundred units to make this job easier some sort of machine was needed to take over the muscle work of moving the gears in and out of mesh yet because the speed of the car and the conditions of load are never twice quite the same a certain amount of human judgement would help to shift gears quietly and smoothly muscle saving engineer who went to work on this two-sided problem found that the vacuum produced inside the motor car engine could develop plenty of power to do the actual work and by means of a super sensitive control the driver could still be the real gear shifting boss the sensitive control can regulate the pressure and a powerful vacuum chamber so that the slightest movement of the lever will bring about a strong push in a desired direction a push that can be controlled to follow the movement of the lever with infinite exactness this device connected to the gears of a motor car can do eighty percent of this work of shifting yet leave enough for the driver to sense the response of the gears as they move smoothly into place now let's use that origami gadget again to see how much undesirable exercise we've saved this member of the fair and so-called weaker sex now the dial shows about 30 units only a few ounces of push with the vacuum gear shift and if you stop to think about it that's a vast improvement when it's multiplied by the amount of extra driving that our American girls do nowadays now that the muscle savers are busy cutting down the amount of unnecessary work for women and for men we all have more energy left for playtime but there are still plenty of jobs left for the odometer and the work saving scientists to tackle think of all the energy that our charming million spend and keeping beautiful and if science is so darn wonderful why doesn't some genius build a contraption like this