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Dock Management Progress Section How Successful Dock Operators Have Met Problems of Giving Best Service to Ships Unloading trucks—U. S.S. HENpDERSON at Corinto, Nicaragua. Photo courtesy Four Wheel Drive Auto Co. Cut Cost of Cargo Handling at the Port of New York paper many conferences were held with representatives of large transportation companies to obtain their views, and the statements made by two men who hold positions of re- sponsibility in two different com- panies are sufficiently interesting to be repeated. The author may not use their exact words, but in substance the first one said: “The port of New York is still handling its freght as it did fifty years ago.” The second one said: “The port of New York is handling its freight as _ satisfactory and probably as economically as any port in the country.” There is perhaps some truth in both statements, and the whole truth prob- L COLLECTING data for this A paper presented at a meeting of the Metropolitan section of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, New York, March 1, 1927. The author is application engineer, material handling, industrial engineering de- partment, General Electric Co. and is an asso- ciate member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. 36 BY JAMES A. JACKSON ably falls somewhere -between the two. However, to anyone who has studied the situation carefully the fact cannot be overlooked that New York has made and is continuing to make pronounced progress in_ its methods of handling material and that the speed of this progress, which in the last analysis is going to be governed by economic conditions, is no doubt being made about as fast as these economic conditions will per- mit. In other words, to convert the port of New York from what it was to what it ought to be must be by evolution and cannot be by revolution. Never in the history of our country has more attention been given to the development and introduction of more efficient methods in industry than at the present time, and material han- dling is one branch of our industry. Never before has money been spent any more freely for new facilities to MARINE REVIEW—June, 1927 speed up production and reduce costs than it is being spent today. The principal controlling factor of the rate at which money will be spent is the economic factor, namely, that it must be so spent as to earn a reasonable rate of return. This economic condi- tion applies to the improvement of methods for handling freight in the port of New York just as it applies to every other branch of industry. Now let us analyze some of the con- ditions which slow up the universal use of mechanical devices for han- dling material in the port. The port is suffering from two con- ditions, one of which is beyond our control—its geography, and the other, which might have been controlled but was not, namely, its facilities, which to a large extent just grew instead of being planned. Its geography, a wonderful asset with its fine harbor and great length