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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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so much the first day that there was a great pile on the side-walk. Somebody thought of a big container on a cart and they piped it into that. They sold that dust to a company that made scouring powder. It became a by-product. Isn't that amazing. It shows American ingenuity. They had all this stuff which was finely powdered as it came up from the jack hammers. So they sold it.

We carried on that experiment over several months while they were working on that. It was an absolutely great success. I forget what the readings were as to the number of particles of dust to so many cubic millimeters, but it was very slight. It was reduced to almost zero. The examination of the men showed that those who entered clear came out clear. It was also predicted that the men would offer objection to using these silly rubber tubes along with their jack hammers. The jack hammers were hard enough to handle anyhow without fussing with these tubes. The union helped us on that. They explained to the men. Literature was circulated in Italian as well as in English. A great many of them were Italians.

It was a great success. The result was that we gave this fellow the prize and began advertising it. Then we began making regulations requiring the elimination of the dust at the point of operation on all silica producing





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