250
se the amount of heat delivered in proportion to the amount of fuel burned, or the amount of heat delivered in proportion to the cost of fuel burned, or would reduce the amount of supervision required, or would do away with some of the long-standing sources of trouble and annoyance in heating apparatus. Long and hard he thought and conjectured, and studied statistics, and followed reports of experiments, but for the life of him he could not take any interest in any such line of research. He hated the gases, ashes, soot, smoke, and dirt generally. Huge rough castings of steel and iron seemed gross and ugly to him, and the completed product seemed coarse and unfinished. The only improvements he could think of were improvements in beauty of line, in refinement of the design, in added ornamentation, and other enhancements of the physical appearance of the product. In these he took some interest, but he had the good sense to know that no change of this kind would accomplish what they wished in the matter of going after a national market.
THE HIGH-SALARIED ONE FAILS
For a while President Jessup waited patiently; then, as the big salary checks came to him to be signed month after month, he began to grow restless. No result had yet been announced and in his conferences with Lynch, he could not determine that any hopeful progress was being made. Finally, in desperation, he called his engineers and designers together. For three weeks he worked with them night and day, studying, analyzing, making records, and computing results. They took cat-naps on benches in the laboratory while waiting for fires to burn a standard number of hours; ate out of lunch-boxes; and finally, unshaven and covered with soot and ashes, they triumphantly produced a fire-box and boiler which would burn the cheapest kind of coal screenings satisfactorily, with but little supervision and a high degree of efficiency. This was the best thing they had ever done in the laboratory. This was the attainment which he had so long desired. This, pr