No Noise

Drop hammers fall with ground-shaking concussions. The planishing machine makes a staccato racket that would drown out a couple of machine guns. The operators pay no attention to these shattering factory noises.

They are deaf-mutes. To North American Aviation (as to many other plants now employing them) their unique usefulness was as much a surprise as the successful use first made by Brewster Aeronautical of midgets to work in tight places.

To talk to them the foreman need not travel across a long room and shout instructions. Instead he taps a shoulder near him, points to the man he wants. This man taps the next shoulder in the silent grapevine to the wanted worker. Then the foreman wigwags his instructions: A clenched fist pulled down above his head means drill press. Palms close together in front mean to the mute that his measurements are too short. Palms apart: he has erred in the opposite direction. The mutes need no bells to warn them of overhead crane and boom movements. They watch moving shadows.

West Coast deaf-mute supply chief is redheaded, ham-handed William B. Sain, a wireless technician and diemaker who, aware of the dreary and dim cult lives of most of his 2,000 fellow Los Angeles deaf-mutes, decided after Pearl Harbor to equip them to help the war effort, persuaded the U.S. Employment Service to let him open up class in the defense school at Inglewood High. There he has to date graduated 250 mutes in bench machining, 150 more in machine-shop practices, shop mathematics and blueprint reading. The mutes themselves developed the new industrial sign language they must teach their normal-hearing, vocally equipped bosses.

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