SEVENTH SESSION. (continued 2)

We have a department of agriculture expending vast sums—nearly fifty millions in the last decade—in improving the soil, improving the growth of vegetation, improving the health of animals, and no department to do anything to improve human health. We spend $700,000,000 a year for past and imagined future wars, and pay no attention to the 700,000 calculated above—a larger number dying every year, unnecessarily from disease, than bullets have slain since the continent was discovered. As we are reminded by Dr. Dixon, our Pennsylvania health commissioner, we are spending millions a year for the protection of our forests and water supply and other natural resources, but it is no credit to our intelligence that while guarding these material interests we allow man himself, without whom all else is worthless, to remain unguarded.

Yet it is a mistake to say that we do and have done nothing; what has been done is greatly to the credit of mankind, only it has not been enough. Jenner’s discovery and his application of it has left no excuse for smallpox anywhere. The president of the board of health in Mexico assured me that compulsory vaccination had freed his city of smallpox; and the Japanese health authorities, since their enforcement of compulsory vaccination, have ceased altogether to look upon the presence of smallpox as a source of danger. It is no longer a scourge in the Philippines and Cuba. Similar to the work of Lister in antiseptic surgery is that of Pasteur and Koch in various germ-diseases, of King and Carroll and Lazier in mosquito-transmission of infection. With the elimination of the Stegomyia mosquito, yellow fever is no longer dreaded; Havana and the gulf ports are as safe as anywhere; and the construction of the Panama Canal has become possible—as, but for the discoveries by Carroll and Lazier (or their rediscovery of Dr. King’s discovery) it never could have been.

From the brilliant successes attained in the directions just indicated, we seem to see that the most important thing for us is to know; we are to find our safety in knowledge. When we know that malaria is inoculated by the bite of the mosquito Anopheles, and yellow fever by the mosquito Stegomyia, that typhoid fever is fed to us, in a large proportion of cases, from the feet of the house-fly, that the fearful bubonic plague is inoculated by the bite of a flea infesting the rat, we have already traveled more than half way to deliverance. We can drive off the mosquito, or, by oiling the puddles, prevent her from hatching; we can “swat the fly,” or abate the manure-heaps and other filth from which it draws its unblest being; and, if we can not catch the flea, we can make war upon its host, the rat. If, as is computed, within the last 2,000 years 2,000,000,000 people have fallen victims to the bubonic plague, it is enough to justify wholesale enlistments in a grand rat-hunt.

Half a century ago people were afraid of night air, and closed their windows at night. It is hard to guess how many lives might have been saved by opening those windows. We are told that the average duration of human life has doubled in the last 200 years. Whatever gain there has been is due, more than anything else, to more knowledge.

The case of pure air as against contaminated air is but one way of putting the general case of cleanness against foulness. Bad air has the same vices that attach to dirt in other forms; one of the uses of more knowledge is to be able to detect dirt in all forms, however concealed or disguised; and another is to discover the best means of sweeping it away. Our ancestors used to drink water from pools and wells that were sinks of organic filth, to worship in churches built over an array of corpses in all stages of putrefaction, to wear the same suit of leather clothes, day and night, till they fell apart or the wearer outgrew them—all because they knew no better. They had no conception of the disgust with which such habits were to be regarded by a more educated posterity. Now the golden rule of health is “Wash you—make you clean!” It is not enough to make, or even to keep, the children’s faces clean; we must look no less to the cleanness of the lung passages, of the alimentary canal—yes, of mind and heart also.

Morally and esthetically, there is nothing in relation to which the duty to be clean is more stringent than the reproductive function. The source of the greatest work in all God’s creation, the human race, ought more than all else to be pure; and the necessary condition of our endowing the earth in coming ages with a better human race than it now has, or has ever had, is that we provide that coming race with the best kind of parentage. The quality of the next generation is determined by the quality of this generation; it will be in most respects as we make it, clean if brought forth in purity, foul if engendered in foulness. And the truth so strikingly evident in the moral and esthetical view is even more clear in the view we are here taking, that of the race’s health. To sexual impurity, by the testimony of the best physicians—the illustrious Dr. Osler for instance—more physical degeneration is due than to any other one cause. Dr. Prince A. Morrow, president of the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, estimates the number constantly ill from syphilis in this country—although that number has of late been considerably reduced—as still no less than 2,000,000. The syphilitic poison is communicated by inoculation—a contagion that has no danger for us so long as held at a respectful distance; and the essential point in guarding against it is to preserve that distance. Like the venom of the rattlesnake it is best known in a knowledge of its lurking places. It was first recognized in Europe, some time in the fifteenth century; and it came from the Orient, not of its own initiative, but because Europeans went after it and fetched it. Similarly now, a man does not have it unless he goes after it. There is nothing in the whole range of human disorders that shows more emphatically than this, the feebleness and inadequacy of the best possible cure as compared with prevention. Knowledge seems all that is needed for complete prevention; any young man, having more than the resolution and self-control of an infant or an idiot, ought to require nothing more than an elementary acquaintance with a few facts that should be at the command of every instructor of youth, to insure his leaving the syphilis and gonorrhea factory permanently alone. If their baleful function were made clearly known to those who most need to know it, the entrance door to every such temple of moral and physical ruin would carry to the eyes the sign that greeted those of Dante: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here”—a prospect whose unrelieved blackness looks even darker when contrasted with the brilliant glory of the hope relinquished. It is a law of our human constitution that the richest, deepest, keenest joys that life has for us are those that come from the contrast of two sexes. Even when that contrast is hostile, there seems to be some pleasure in it; but immeasurably more when it is an incident of ardent attraction. Byron in one of his earlier poems thus puts it:

It is too well known that the poet’s own loves, in after years, were not always of this ideal quality; but no one ever better set forth the exalted possibilities of the sex sentiment, to which the continuance of life on earth is due. But the worst, we are often reminded, is the corruption of the best, and it is another possibility of the same sentiment that it may urge a man to blast his whole future by incurring an incurable disease, and sadder yet—too often to involve others, tender and innocent lives, in his own condemnation. If more knowledge can ward off such a grisly fate, it is surely inhuman cruelty not to supply that knowledge, however disagreeable the duty may appear. When clearly seen as a duty it will be no longer disagreeable.

While making this call for more knowledge of vital truths primarily on account of the young men, since it is in the vast majority of cases the man who tempts, the man to whom the outcast woman owes her fall, it would be the wildest folly to stop with one-half of the rising generation. The future of the race is too dependent on its mothers to excuse or permit the neglect of any preparation of them for motherhood, which health in its fullest sense may demand.

Most of the great questions of health in its widest sense, of health as a public concern, resolve themselves into resisting the entrance of this or that species of bacterial germs into the body. The essential distinction between Mother Earth, that bringeth forth flowers and fruits, and grass for our herds, and dirt or filth, the especial opprobrium of the hygienist, is that the latter carries germs of bacteria. Cleanness, in the hygienic sense, is freedom from pathogenic germs; and when the doctors tell us that the marked improvement in health conditions recently observable in Germany and Switzerland, and pre-eminently in Sweden, is due to their exceptional attention to cleanliness, they use the term with particular reference to the provoking causes of preventable sickness. Not only is the death rate from the acute diseases in those lands rapidly falling off, but diseases of the chronic class are beginning to yield to the inculcation of better habits among the people.

We are by no means without instances in this country, of death rates reduced by preventive methods, as shown for young children in our largest cities after the introduction of pasteurized milk. Deaths have been thus spared for that peculiarly helpless class of sufferers, to the extent of fully 50 per cent. in some districts—in large measure through the well-directed activity of one public-spirited New York merchant. But we have much to do in other lines, and we have only begun to free ourselves of the typhoid fever incubus. As late as fourteen years ago there were 11,000 cases of that infection in the camp at Chattanooga, with 800 deaths. In the entire Spanish war the deaths of our soldiers from diseases, it was calculated, were thirteen times as many as from wounds in battle—the diseases mostly, like the Chattanooga typhoid, of the preventable kinds.

Loss of life by preventable accidents, on railways, in factories and mines, is too closely associated with that by diseases to be here omitted, though entitled to much fuller treatment than we can here afford. The deathroll from this cause is still disgracefully large in this country, far surpassing any country of Europe; but there are signs already of diminution. For instance, one steel factory, reporting 43 accidental deaths among 6,000 employes in 1906, showed only 12 fatalities in a payroll of 7,000 in 1909, safeguards having been introduced in the meantime. This instance is very good, so far as it goes, but we need to make much more progress in the same direction.

What we want is systematic effort, by some powerful consolidated agency, to promote the conservation of human life. We have no need to find fault with any of the organizations now engaged in furthering that end, several of which are doing good work. We may gratefully acknowledge the aid of the various medical societies, “regular” and “irregular”—though we take the liberty of wishing that they might fight the common enemy a little more and each other a little less. We may also welcome the assistance of the life insurance companies, notably the Equitable and the Metropolitan, whose managers clearly realize how their interests are involved. Whatever lengthens the average term of human life is a factor operating to increase their dividends and to reduce the cost of insurance to their policyholders. It is worth while to note, at this point, that the majority of life insurance officers are strong advocates of the formation of a national bureau or department of health.

Still more do we owe to the activities of State and municipal boards of health, which do more good because they have more power. Where properly supported they have done a great work, at obstructing the spread of epidemics by quarantines and other methods of isolation, at curing pollution of water supply, at instituting improved sewer systems, at bettering the general food supply by inspection of markets. You have just heard a condensed account of the activities of one of our best State health departments, that of Pennsylvania. You will infer from what that department has done in seven years what might be done by a national bureau or department, with powers and field of operation extending over the entire country.

The movement for a bureau or department of health, national in its scope, has been most actively advanced in Washington by Hon. Robert L. Owen, Senator from Oklahoma. His bills call for a department, and he gives strong reasons for the view that such an organization would, while that of a bureau would not, suffice for the national governmental activities in behalf of the public health. President Taft strongly urges a “Bureau of Public Health,” and plainly intimates a preference for the bureau plan. The “Committee of One Hundred on National Health,” formed by the Association for Advancement of Science, in 1906, with Prof. Irving Fisher as its president, originally contemplated a department whose head should be a member of the President’s cabinet, but it has in its recent publications adopted the alternative phrase “bureau or department,” which course is here followed, because there is manifestly nothing to gain by keeping up a contest on the point. The memorial prepared by the committee of one hundred proposes for a national department of health certain functions, as follows:

1. Administration—Including the national quarantine work, and whatever regulation of interstate commerce might affect human health, such as meat inspection and enforcing the food and drug act.

2. Co-operation—The work of assisting State, county and city health agencies, after some such fashion as the National Department of Agriculture co-operates with State agricultural colleges and institutions.

3. Research and Investigation—The work of obtaining needed scientific information concerning the cause and prevention of diseases that now shorten or impair human life; this would include a study of accidents, of poisonous manufacturing trades, of hygienic conditions in schools, etc., just as yellow fever was studied in Cuba, as the hookworm is now to be studied under private endowment, as the work of the Pasteur Institute was conducted under French government support.

4. Education—The work of supplying to the country scientifically established data on matters pertaining to health, such work as is done by the “publication division” in most of our governmental departments; thus rendering available for practical use the work of research and investigation. The countries in which is found the most rapid reduction of the death rate are just those (Sweden for example) in which the spread of a knowledge of hygiene is widest.

Of these functions the mere statement is a most powerful argument for the bureau or department suggested. It only remains to remove a few misunderstandings. One objection, for example, is powerful in many minds—that such a centralized office must necessarily be the organ of a particular medical school, and must so give that school—the one denominated “regular,” for example—an unfair advantage, unsuited to a government of liberty and equality. To this it may be frankly replied, that the primary objects of the new office being the four just stated (administration, co-operation, investigation, education), it would aim to collect and diffuse the greatest attainable amount of accurate knowledge on the subject of health; and that if it found a larger quantity of better knowledge in one school than in another, it would be false to its trust if it did not spread that knowledge accordingly. Personally, the writer finds it hard to believe that it could treat a school that taught the unreality of disease, or the surpassing value for all kinds of disorders, of drugs, of a narrow range of characteristics, on an exact equality with schools that deal with facts as they find them; but he heartily agrees that the citizen ought to enjoy the liberty of choosing his own medical advisers, so far as he does not endanger life or health by so choosing.

There are other objections to organized national work for health, many of them from a so-called National League for Medical Freedom, the most active workers in which have been shown to be interested in one or another kind of proprietary medicine, backed by some “mental healers,” and by associations of druggists who object to the “pure food and drugs act” of 1906. Several homœpathical State societies have repudiated that “league for freedom,” and have emphatically attested their approval of the proposed bureau or department of health; this, notwithstanding their well-understood grievances against “regular” practitioners. Some of the best informed among the osteopaths and the Christian Scientists are pronouncing similarly; and so, if the disavowals keep on, the League of Medical Freedom may soon be left with only those who seek freedom to dope their victims with drugs that enslave; stupefy them—infant and adult—with opium and thinly disguised alcohol, and generally to reverse the progress of a century. But, since it is estimated that $75,000,000 a year are expended by our fellow-citizens for patent medicines, it is easy enough to see how they must regard a national department which is to improve the sanitary conditions of the country, show people how to care for health, stop the sale of poisonous nostrums and impure foods, and end the career of opium under the name of “soothing syrup.” Their profits would be gone, and of course they disapprove and protest.

Altogether, the cause of a national bureau or department of health is commended, both by those who favor and those who oppose it. It could not ask better advocates than the distinguished men who heartily favor it, on the congressional or the collegiate stage; nor more suitable adversaries than those constituting the League for Medical Freedom.

President White—This is a most valuable paper, and it will be printed, together with the other papers and addresses of this convention. Every one should avail themselves of the opportunity to subscribe for this book, which costs one dollar.

I will now introduce to you the gentleman who kindly gave his hour to Mr. Farquhar. He is Mr. Reginald Pelham Bolton, of New York City, who will speak to you on “The Prevention of Elevator Accidents.”

Address, “The Prevention of Elevator Accidents”

Mr. Bolton—The preservation of human life and the protection of our fellow-creatures from physical injury, claim prior consideration over conservation of mere materials.

Any form of danger which results in the destruction of life, and exhibits a tendency toward increased developments, invites our systematic investigation. Ameliorative measures, if undertaken in advance of the growth of an evil, are of double value. To one phase of the subject, of the conservation of life, I desire to direct your attention.

The increase of fatalities and injuries resulting from the extensive use of passenger elevators has become sufficiently marked to deserve careful attention by those who are concerned with the benefit of our fellow-citizens. Complete statistics as to the number of accidental occurrences in and about elevators of all classes throughout the country are not available, but an estimate based upon such official returns as relate to labor alone, indicate that the annual total is now probably in excess of seven thousand, of which probably three-fourths are of a preventable character.

From small beginnings, the roll of such accidents reported by the New York Department of Labor, which it is conceded do not cover all such occurrences, rose in 1909 to a total for five years of 1,600 injured persons, of whom 198 were killed and about 298 permanently disabled.

The Wainwright-Phillips Commission of the New York State Legislature reported in 1911 a list of injuries and deaths, in the three years 1907 to 1910, affecting 1,108 persons, of whom 106 were killed and 241 were more or less seriously and permanently crippled. In addition, no less than 200 persons fell down hoistways, of whom 43 were killed outright and 19 permanently injured.

These occurrences took place only on elevators in industrial establishments, and are only those which have been officially reported.

The Industrial Commission of the State of Wisconsin reported for the ten months, September, 1911, to June, 1912, thirty-nine accidents in and upon elevators, and fifteen more due to falls down elevator shafts; all occurring in establishments of various industries. Accidents occurring in transportation were 195, so that the relation of elevator accidents and falls was 28 per cent. of transportation.

That such accidents are duplicated outside the limits of observation of labor departments is indicated by an examination of the reports of the New York county coroners, which show about one hundred deaths annually from elevator accidents in the county of New York only. In the year 1911, in the Borough of Manhattan, there were reported sixty-eight fatalities in connection with elevators, about two hundred permanent injuries, and probably about three hundred more may be estimated as having sustained lesser injuries.

The fact that accidental occurrences in or about elevators are thus found to be deplorably numerous and increasing is not to be taken as a reflection upon the general security of elevator travel. Their number is relatively small in comparison with the vast number of persons utilizing these appliances. One express schedule elevator handles about 700,000 persons per annum. Further, by far the larger number of mishaps are not due to failure or fault of the elevator itself, but occur in and about the entrances of, or in the hoistways of such apparatus, from persons falling through unguarded openings into elevator shafts, and of course a number are due to the recklessness and incompetence of employes and operators.

It remains the fact, however, that a large part of these occurrences are unnecessary, just as was found to be the case with many of the forms of danger to life and injury to limb which attended the operation of freight and passenger trains prior to the adoption of certain of the safety appliances and methods which have been brought into general use on railroads, as a result of the concentration of public attention upon the subject, and legislative action based thereon. Similar attention and action with the compilation of statistics upon the subject will undoubtedly result in diminishing the number of fatal and injurious occurrences connected with elevator operation.

Some loss of human life and injury to the person may to some extent be regarded as an unfortunately inevitable accompaniment of all forms of motive apparatus, and the complex conditions of modern existence have not only increased this liability by demands for more rapid movement of all forms of mechanical transportation, but the vast increase in the usage of appliances has introduced new elements of danger.

In no class of transportation are the effects of haste and crowding more apparent and dangerous than in the modern means of vertical transportation, use of which is now made by all classes of people. Liability towards accidental occurrences in elevators, therefore, affects the whole public, and it is needless to dilate upon the general concern in, and economic loss resulting from deaths or injury of any member of the community. It may be conservatively estimated that the economic value of the mere services of persons killed in and about elevators, based upon life expectancy, and the loss of time of those injured, would annually exceed the cost of equipment of all passenger and freight elevators with modernized safety appliances.

There are some features connected with elevator accidents which call for consideration and rectification. These have grown up around the development of the appliance in a manner somewhat peculiar to it. The elevator is a transportation apparatus which is for the most part privately operated and owned. Unlike the railroad, it is not regarded by the law as the apparatus of a common carrier. Unlike the road carriage or car, it is not operated upon the public highways. Unlike the machinery of a factory, it is not utilized exclusively by employes.

Its development and use have been, perhaps, too restricted to require the attention of such legislation as has been rather freely applied to the other classes of appliances engaged in transporting human beings.

It has therefore come about that the legal status of the elevator is in a very indefinite condition, its public regulation is generally local and therefore at best erratic, and the liability for the security of its occupants is as varied as the legal practice and rulings of different States.

The results are unfortunate to all concerned except perhaps that part of the legal profession which concerns itself with the prosecution of claims for injuries. Only two States, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, have adopted legislative provisions, of limited character, relating to elevators. The former State provided so long ago as 1895 a requirement for automatic locking devices on all passenger elevators, thus being the pioneer in this direction. The State of Rhode Island by its general law, Chapter 129, requires all elevators “to be equipped with safety appliances to prevent the starting of the elevator car in either direction while any door opening into the elevator is open.”

The State of Wisconsin, by its Industrial Commission law, Chapter 485, of 1911, placed in the hands of that body general power to require safeguards “in all places of employment,” but it does not appear that the powers of the act extend to every class of building in which elevators may or can be employed. Other efforts have been made to effect legislation in the same direction, but have so far failed of enactment.

A bill was introduced in the House of Representatives December 12, 1910, by Mr. W. Bennet, requiring all elevators in the District of Columbia to be provided with gate and car interlocking devices, which bill did not become law. A bill was introduced in 1911 into the Assembly of the State of New York amending the labor law in the direction recommended by the Wainwright-Phillips Commission, and empowering the Commissioner of Labor to require automatic door-locking and car interlocking on all passenger elevators in factories. Senate Bill 911 and Assembly Bill 329 of 1911 were designed to require in general terms the use of “such safety devices as will prevent accidents to persons getting on or off elevator cars and from falling through open doors into the elevator shafts.”

The attention of the American Museum of Safety has been directed for some years towards the accomplishment of some amelioration of existing conditions, and that humane organization made a strong effort to arouse public interest in these measures and to secure their enactment, but without success.

The subject has received some sporadic attention by several public associations, including the National Civic Federation, the American Association for Labor Legislation and the New York Association for Labor Legislation, but without effective results.

With the foregoing exceptions, the obligations of an owner of a building, as regards the security of an elevating appliance, are practically limited to a compliance with the then existing local regulations to the purchase of a device commensurate with the existing state of the art, of a design made by a reputable concern, and to the employment of reasonable care in upkeep and operation.

No legal obligation appears to lie upon an owner to alter or modify the appliance in conformity with greater knowledge of the art, or to add to it greater means of security. Until some unfortunate occurrence has taken place, an owner of property naturally feels unwilling to embark on such expenditures. The present system of liability insurance rather tends to such a situation, as an owner has no inducement in the form of reduced premiums, to expend money upon desirable safeguards. If the liability corporations should concede a substantial reduction of premiums, in connection with appliances dealing with a certain proportion of the risks attending elevator operation, much could be accomplished without the aid of special legislation.

While the law-making powers do not hesitate to direct such measures to be taken with and upon the property of common carriers, they seem to regard the operation of a practically public conveyance within private property as a privileged possession and hesitate to enter the castle of the owner and involve him in enforced expenditures upon a privately operated appliance.

Yet an elevator, whether used for the purpose of the carriage of goods, of tenants, of employes, or of visitors to a building, is a common carrier earning a profit, even if indirectly, for it is as much a source of revenue as is the machinery of a factory around which many enforced safeguards have, by legislation, been thrown.

If, therefore, the owner of a building installs elevators for the convenient carriage of tenants and visitors within his property, he does so because the apparatus enhances the value of that property, and that enhancement is largely due to the public use of the appliance, in which use the unknowing users have some right to legislative protection from results of ignorance or incompetence, of neglect or parsimony.

It has taken a long time for this view of the matter to become even partially recognized, even in the city of New York, in which the use of elevators has multiplied beyond all conception of what seemed probable twenty-five years ago. The number of passenger elevators in the Borough of Manhattan alone, now exceeds nine thousand, and these increase annually by about five hundred new machines. The estimated number of freight elevators, none of which under present circumstances are subject to official inspection, is not less than ten thousand.

The regulations regarding elevators in Manhattan, commencing with feeble beginnings, have advanced under the careful direction of the present Superintendent of Buildings of Manhattan, Rudolph P. Miller, C. E., into the field of interference with private control, and the department is compiling further regulations which will go a long way towards the protection of the public in safeguarding the elevating apparatus they are compelled to use. The Manhattan regulations, while in themselves excellent, are directly applicable to passenger elevators only with such freight elevators as are within the same shaft enclosure as a passenger elevator. They require the operator to be of reliable and industrious habits, not less than eighteen years of age, with at least one month’s experience in his duties.

A number of known elements of unsafe character are prohibited and some constructive features of value are insisted upon. No provision is, however, made for automatic interlocking of gates and car movement, nor are projections in the shaft prohibited. Some good, detailed regulations and suggestions have been issued by the Wisconsin Labor Commission, but these and other State and local regulations could be substantially increased in value, by a thorough technical investigation and settlement.

Some improvement of deficiencies in apparatus existing prior to these rules has been effected by requiring safeguards to be applied upon any alteration or large repair work being sanctioned. This course has brought about the addition of speed safety appliances in a number of old installations where this elementary security was absent.

Later regulations will, in similar manner, require carefully conducted tests of all machines whether new, altered or repaired. Many minor matters of security are or will be thus provided for, yet the limited powers of a bureau can but at best halt in dealing with the entire problem. And when the regulations of Manhattan are made, as they should be, the best possible, it is regrettable that in another city or even in another borough of the same city, the same desirable conditions will not apply.

Yet the security of an elevator requires the same measures of attention, in one State as in another, as much in the merest hamlet as in the great metropolis.

The use of elevators is now widespread through all States, and in all classes of buildings, affecting the convenience and security of all classes of persons; and calling for the establishment of well considered and equalized regulation in every part of the country.

It speaks volumes for the sense of responsibility of our leading manufacturers of elevators, that among all the tens of thousands of machines turned out by such concerns as the Otis Elevator Company and their competitors, accidents due to the physical breakage of the machinery of elevators should be in number only what they are, when they include the failures of machines built in days when the industry was small and the art far less understood than it is at present.

When we reflect upon the fact that the passengers carried in elevators in the city of New York far exceed in number those carried on all the surface and subway lines, we may the more appreciate the point to which I desire specially to direct your attention, namely, the desirability in the public interest of State regulation, and as far as possible, uniform regulation, of the security and operation of elevators. The local regulations may be left to care for details of installation but the State authority is necessary to require elevators to be not only modern but progressively modernized appliances; that no antiquated and essentially dangerous apparatus shall be continued in use, and that necessary safeguards and properly qualified operators shall accompany their operation.

The State may further require that in excessively tall buildings, where the elevators constitute the only practical means of egress in emergency, there shall be a proper sufficiency of such appliances capable of removing the occupants within a reasonably safe period of time.

The limitations of the carrying capacity of an elevator are now well understood, and the safety of operatives in high loft buildings and of tenants in loftier “tower” office buildings, demands that the parsimony of owners and the ignorance of architects should not be allowed to restrict the exit of occupants of such buildings. A second elevator, in the Triangle fire disaster, would not only have saved its capacity in human occupants, but would have averted the fatal overcrowding of the single car which rendered it practically of no avail.

Many loft buildings of twelve stories and some even exceeding twenty stories are in existence in which the elevator accommodation is utterly inadequate for the removal of occupants of upper floors in a reasonable time, in case of emergency. The effectiveness of exterior “fire escapes” and of crooked interior stairways, especially for great heights, is now known to be strictly within certain limitations, and elevators have on many occasions demonstrated their value in the saving of life in panic and fire.

Office buildings are constructed thirty and more stories in height, without fire escapes and with winding stairways which are useless in emergency, and with such limited elevator capacity as would not remove the tenants in less than thirty minutes.

A most important and desirable subject for general action is afforded by provisions for safeguarding elevator gates and doorways. In and about these orifices, as previously observed, a large proportion of unnecessary accidents and fatalities occur. The unlatched door, the open gate, the absence of inner gates, the projecting sill, and the slippery tread, are fruitful causes of deplorable injuries and have caused the unnecessary loss of many precious lives. The proportion which this class of occurrence bears to the total is evidently large. An analysis of a list of four thousand accidental occurrences shows the following proportions:

Per cent.

Getting on or off cars 58

Falling through unguarded openings 20

Fractures and fall of cars, only 17

Mechanics making repairs in shafts, etc 4

Unexplained 1

A number of devices have been developed during recent years, which have overcome objections to their use in the past, whereby the gates of elevators must be securely locked and fastened before the car can be moved. Six of such devices are approved for use in the State of Pennsylvania. It would seem that so simple a feature eliminating the essential danger surrounding the operation of a car moving vertically between floors in a shaft would long ago have been demanded by every form of authority.

With other engineers, I was at one time opposed to the use of such appliances on the ground of their uncertainty. But the growing volume of fatalities directly attributable to the lack of such safeguards, together with radical improvement in their construction, now demand the opposite conclusion.

There has been particular objection in some large cities to the application of devices for locking the gates, on the ground that the speed of operation on rapid schedule service would be retarded and inconvenience and overcrowding would result. In order to satisfy myself upon this point, I made this year a series of comparative trials of elevators equipped with one such appliance, the Clarke automatic safety devices, and found that no such loss of time in service actually resulted. On the contrary, a trial of the elevators in the Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company’s Building, 49 Wall street, New York City, and in the Hotel Imperial, showed that the operators made better time with the device in service, as they were compelled to make more exact landings and thus avoided much of the time frequently wasted in reversals of the car movement.

Under the present circumstances, therefore, it seems that the proper time has arrived for action in this respect, and that the example set by the States of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island may be embodied in careful legislative requirements in other States, which would, at some expense, it is true, to private owners, safeguard the public from those peculiarly present dangers which have taken such unnecessary toll of human life and limb, in the ghastly entanglement between the gate or doorway and the moving car, or the dreadful fall through the opened gate.

It would be very desirable, if, in the investigation of this subject, and the preparation of legislation to deal with it, competent technical and legal ability were employed, as the subject is of a technical character. Some of the legislation already in existence has been worded in so ill-considered a manner, as to give the impression that it was phrased in order to prevent the recovery of damages by injured persons.

The expression of your interest in this matter will tend to strengthen the hands of those who are seeking at present, by the limited means available, to enforce good methods of installation, proper safeguards and proper operation. It will also aid our great manufacturers, who lead the world in the design and construction of these truly American appliances, in securing the proper surroundings and proper care they are constantly urging for the appliances they construct, and will aid humanity by averting some unnecessary wastage of the health and lives of our fellow creatures.

Following Mr. Bolton’s paper he presented the following resolution:

Resolution, Mr. R. P. Bolton

Whereas, The number of accidents and fatalities attending the operation of elevators is increasing, many of which are of a preventable character;

Resolved, That the National Conservation Congress recommends to the Legislatures of all States an official investigation of this subject, and the enactment of such provisions as have been adopted by the States of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

President White—This is important, and if there is no objection it will be handed to the Resolutions Committee.

Resolution, Mr. Frederick Kelsey

Mr. Frederick Kelsey (Orange, N. J.)—I would like to offer this resolution:

Whereas, Under the laws of the District of Columbia and some of the States, fictitious and fraudulent overcapitalization of corporations is permitted; and

Whereas, Under the operation of these promoter-made laws enormous and widespread losses to innocent persons all over the country and throughout the civilized world have resulted;

Resolved, That this Congress earnestly favors the amendment of these laws and calls upon the President and the United States Congress to enact such legislation affecting the incorporation and control of corporations as will bring the creation and conduct of these creatures of the State back to the moorings of common honesty.

I would like to say that, like most of the previous speakers, I have given this subject very careful attention. I was chairman of a committee, a civic and economic committee of our State, which committee spent eight months in considering this subject, and I want to say that you cannot appreciate the widespread loss, the injury, the injustice of improper concentration of wealth that has been the direct outgrowth of these laws in our own State and other States of the Union.

President White—The resolution will be referred to the Resolutions Committee.

The Congress now stands adjourned until 2:30 o’clock this afternoon.