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Updated: May 10, 2025
The carriers of oxygen had neglected their proper task; the granules whose duty it was to bring elaborated food-stuffs to supply the waste of brain and nerve and muscle had forgotten their cunning. The bricklayers of the bodily fabric had gone out on strike; the weary scavengers had declined to remove the useless by-products. His vivid tongue, his picturesque fancy, ran away with him.
We have all been used to seeing bricklayers tap each brick after it is placed on its bed of mortar several times with the end of the handle of the trowel so as to secure the right thickness for the joint. Mr. Gilbreth found that by tempering the mortar just right, the bricks could be readily bedded to the proper depth by a downward pressure of the hand with which they are laid.
With union bricklayers, in laying a factory wall, twelve inches thick, with two kinds of brick, faced and ruled joints on both sides of the wall, he averaged, after his selected workmen had become skilful in his new methods, 350 bricks per man per hour; whereas the average speed of doing this work with the old methods was, in that section of the country, 120 bricks per man per hour.
The ghost went downstairs into the kitchen, glided over and stood in front of the hearth, sighed and disappeared. Next morning, Joe had a couple of bricklayers in, and made them haul out the stove and pull down the chimney, while he stood behind with a potato-sack in which to put the gold. They knocked down half the wall, and never found so much as a four- penny bit.
There were, altogether, about twenty-five men working there, carpenters, plumbers, plasterers, bricklayers and painters, besides several unskilled labourers. New floors were being put in where the old ones were decayed, and upstairs two of the rooms were being made into one by demolishing the parting wall and substituting an iron girder.
It had begun with the prosperity of incoming money; the money of a little group of speculators and adventurers and the others who hung on their train. They had filled the few hotels and office buildings. Presently some one began to build a new hotel. Labour was scarce and dear; carpenters, masons, bricklayers, plumbers, plasterers, labourers, had to be brought in from the outside.
To enforce the exclusion, paid agents are employed; every cart of bricks coming toward Manchester is watched, and if the contents be found to have come from without the prescribed boundary the bricklayers at once refuse to work.... The vagaries of the Lancashire brick makers are fairly paralleled by the masons of the same county.
I was there last Tuesday. Did I see the sights? I did not. "Last Monday I amalgamated myself with the Bricklayers' Union, and in accordance with the rules I was ordered to quit work the same day on account of a sympathy strike with the Lady Salmon Canners' Lodge No.2, of Tacoma, Washington.
The London bricklayers thoroughly believe that it is their interest to be inefficient: it is said that they have a rule that no bricklayer shall ever lay a brick with the right hand; they have also a rule against "chasing," i.e. that no bricklayer, whatever his skill, shall lay more than a certain number of bricks a day; they believe that if the bricklayer laid a larger number of bricks he would get no more pay for a harder day's work, while the "work" would afford employment to a smaller number of labourers.
And thus does wise Madam How stand in no need of bricklayers, but makes her chimneys build themselves. And why is the mouth of the chimney called a crater? Crater, as you know, is Greek for a cup. I have seen some of them as beautifully and exactly rounded as if a cunning engineer had planned them, and had them dug out with the spade.
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