2 5 8 D O C U M E N T 2 6 5 J U N E 1 9 2 4
I’m enjoying my subject more and more. Two things in particular impressed me
very much: one was a theodolite: a very small little apparatus 20 cm in height and,
with packaging, 5 kg in weight; and with it one can read angles down to seconds!
The horizontal circle for that has roughly a diameter of a mere 12 cm. The reading
is done with microscopes, namely, in a second tube attached directly parallel to the
telescope.
You thus sight through the telescope, then shift your eye about 3 cm up to the
eyepiece of the microscope. There we can see both horizontal-circle microscopes
simultaneously and make the precise reading by sliding the two images against
each other with a micrometer whose exact gauge we see in the same view. So one
doesn’t need to budge at all. What this means in terms of performance is that a
skilled reader of this instrument gets the same observations of a site more accurate-
ly in half the time than an equally skilled observer using a customary theodolite.
The 2nd was a cement
factory.[5]
What does one imagine a cement factory to
look like? An atmosphere that greets one with 95% dust and is so hot that one
would rather turn back right away. How surprised I was when I got there: a beauti-
ful, airy hall about 200 m in length. Not a speck of dust. All the machines and mo-
tors, all the pumps and tanks, bright and shiny like in an electric power station; and
what’s nicest is: not a man servicing it in the entire space. I won’t recount every-
thing there is to see there in detail because that would probably lead me too far off
track, but I’ll say this much: For the 3 quarries they have, for the factory itself, and
for all the distributors—office administration, etc., in brief, all in all, there are 120
people employed at the factory with an 8-hour workday; and they manufacture dai-
ly, nonstop, also on Saturdays, 400 t of high-quality Portland cement. The subsid-
iary operations don’t run on Saturdays, of course. When you consider that each day
this amounts to one long freight train (40 carriages), you have to be thoroughly im-
pressed about setting up such a firm where every detail is machine operated. I can
tell you more about that later maybe, when we meet.
I’m already very much looking forward to our seeing each other again. Many
greetings for now,
from Adn.