JHolland:
Thank you for posting this youtube. It was easy enough to understand the German captions, not that it was necessary to understand what was being shown. What intrigued me was the high degree of sophistication in the prosthesis. In most of the clips shown, the persons using the prosthetic devices were quite adept, and the devices themselves had been developed to the point of being "interchangable tool holders". The fellow running the lathe used interchangeable grips (which the film captioned as "claws") to do a variety of steps in running the lathe. When it showed that fellow changing the different ends for his prosthetic arm, he may as well have been changing tooling on the lathe. Of course, seeing him working with that involved mechanism on the end of his forearm near a spinning lathe dog had me wondering if he was worse off in terms of safety for being an amputee. A person with two good hands might feel the lathe dog slapping his hand or nicking it. With that prosthetic device and all its mechanism, he looked a lot more likely to get wound into the lathe. With the prosthetic device made of metal and securely strapped to his body, there was nothing to give way if the device did get caught by the lathe dog. But, those were the times and machinists and workers in general were expected to know how to work around the open and unguarded machinery of those times.
The linotype operator was also an interesting study. Certainly, he was not going to "touch type" with a prosthetic device, but he was able to hit the keys with one side of his prosthetic device and get the work done. In servicing the linotype machine, the prosthetic device became a true tool holder.
The welder was perhaps the best example of why a prosthetic device had some advantages. He could get that device down close to the welding and not worry about getting a burned hand. In one old copy of the "Welding Journal" (an American Welding Society publication) from the 'teens or 'twenties, a welding shop owner wrote in to describe a job he had done. Some castings had broken and a repair was needed in a hurry. The castings (which had to have been fairly small) were put aboard an airpland and flown to the town where this fellow had his shop. He jigged and welded the castings back together successfully. He went on to write that he had lost his right arm to an accident (saying it had been "blown off") about a year previously. I had wondered how a man could weld successfully with one arm, and this youtube answered the question. Back in the days that article was written, oxyacetylene (which the film refers to as "autogenous" welding) was pretty much the norm, and it took two hands to do it.
The film speaks well of the social welfare system in Germany for the times. Amputees were rehabilitated with prosthetic devices that were made to enable them to work at their trades. Employers hired disabled people. While this film may have been showing the best picture and not the across-the-board norm for the time, it said a lot. It predated laws in the USA requiring employers to employ disabled people and make accomodation for them. I have to wonder if those amputees were not World War I veterans rather than victims of industrial accidents, and perhaps some government social program or private agency dedicated to helping disabled veterans took care of their prosthetics and training them to use them.
People with serious permanent injuries can be rehabilitated and put back to useful work. In one of the sadder photos along these lines, there was a photo of a man who had lost both legs above the knees. He was fitted with two short wooden "peg legs". In the photo, the man was coming out the gates of the Pennsylvania Railroad's Juniata Shops. He was a solid muscular man from the waist up. He was wearing pants with the legs rolled up, and was carrying his dinner pail. A straw "boater" type hat was on his head, and he was in the workforce coming off shift. He was evidently an accident victim on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and they'd put him back to work. No accomodations for his being a double amputee. If he wanted to eat, he had to work, and in order to work, he had to use the same means and facilities as everyone else.
I was on a job years ago in Northwestern Wisconsin at a small family-run electric utility. They had a hodge-podge of small old hydro units from the 1920's, and an assortment of diesel generating units to supplement the hydro units. The diesel generating units were home-made using EMD 567 series engines from locomotives. Large used 3 phase synchronous motors were used as generators. One of the shift operators was a character named Barney. Barney had his right arm off above the elbow and kept the stump covered with what looked like a white sock. Barney's story was unique, spoke of hard times, and was still debated. During the Depression, Barney, as did other men in that area, tried to support their families by fur trapping and hunting for meat. During winter, the trapping season was on, and the traplines were worked by going out on snowshoes. While working the traplines, Barney came afoul of another trapper. Whether Barney was raiding the other man's traps, or what the real reason was is unknown. Barney claimed he was simply going about his business when the other trapper shot at him with a shotgun loaded with buckshot. The buckshot hit Barney's right arm and tore it up. Barney got a torniquet on it and mushed back into the town. The town had not changed much when I worked there. It was unincorporated and had one single street and two or three businesses, one of which was a bar. Barney staggered into that bar and slapped what was left of his right arm on the bar. Someone fetched a doctor, though in that remote spot, it was more likely someone with rudimentary knowledge and skill who could tend to Barney's arm. As Barney told it, his right arm was amputated then and there on the bar. Whether they knocked him out with ether, or just had him drink enough whisky to nerve up for the surgery he never told me.
Time passed and Barney worked a variety of jobs including driving logging trucks adapted so he could drive them with his amputated right arm to work the gearshift levers. Eventually, Barney got a job with the local utility company. He had an overstuffed and well worn chair he'd salvaged from the town dump set up in one of the diesel plants, and he had controls rigged up with paddles so he could work them with his stump. I saw him bring up a diesel unit and manually synchronize it into the grid with his left arm and stump of a right arm.
In another story that was something the men there pointed to with pride and some humor, Barney's children grew up and moved out of his house. He and his wife were paying taxes on a two story house. One winter, Barney knocked out walls on the second story and framed a new roof over the first floor in the large room he'd created. He had that roof pretty well completed with the ends of the rafters sticking out holes he cut in the second story siding. Come spring, he called his buddies at the utility company. They brought a crane and a flatbed truck and a bucket truck. Barney and another fellow cut holes in the original roof and passed slings thru the holes so the crane could hook onto it. Barney and his buddies then took chainsaws and cut thru the siding and sheathing and studs on the walls above the first story. The crane lifted off the original roof and landed it on the flatbed. Barney and his buddies quickly finished the carpentry and roofing to reduce his home to a one story house. Barney then called the tax assessor.
One of the principals in this same utility was a fellow who was a degreed electrical engineer. When I first met him, I was surprised to see he had two prosthetic "articulated claw" type hands and was driving the truck he picked me up with. The story was that when this fellow was a kid, he was working with his father and uncles on some high voltage lines. Apparently, he was alone and did not realize a line was energized, and went to do something without lineman's gloves or a hot stick. He was just a kid, probably not much over 12 years of age. The high voltage current hit both his hands and forearms resulting in a double amputation. This fellow went on to get an electrical engineering degree and had worked for a major builder of powerplant generators and turbines before coming home to the family utility company.
Another great example of what a person can do it they set their mind to it despite an amputation is Captain van ************, a skipper of Great Lakes railroad car ferries. van ************ grew up sailing on the Lakes. As a young teenager, he was out hunting with a friend when the friend's shotgun discharged accidentally, hitting van ************ in the right arm. It was light shot, not buckshot, and the doctor did not think too much about the wound. Dressing it and treating it in the era before antibiotics, he sent van ************ home to heal up. van ************ kept insisting the wound was not healing properly and the doctor kept insisting it was healing normally. An infection had set in, and the doctor had to amputate van ************'s hand and forearm. The infection progressed, and van ************ underwent something like 7 operations as more and more of his arm was amputated. He wound up with his arm amputated at the shoulder. This did not stop the young man. He resumed sailing, skippering some cargo schooners and then finding his way into shipping for possibly the Ann Arbor Railroad on their car ferries. He was a successful and very good skipper for a number of years, doing so with no prosthesis as there literally was nothing left to attach one to. In one instance, Captain van ************ was able to transfer railroad cars from a grounded car ferry to his ferry using the action of the heavy seas, having the cars released from the grounded ferry to roll onto the tracks on his ferry when the wave action levelled the ends of the two ferries. Captain van ************ is remembered for coming ashore in Milwaukee between trips and seeing a one armed man sitting on the pavement selling pencils. Captain van ************ was wearing his "dress blue" uniform and looked down at the fellow selling the pencils and reportedly said something like: "You could have made a lot more of yourself. Look what I've done in spite of my missing my right arm". Whether the fellow selling the pencils got up off the pavement and did something to advance himself is unknown.
Captain van ************ and Barney are two people who picked themselves up and made something of their lives with little or no help from any formal agencies. It was a time when if a person did not pick themselves up and make their way in the world despite a serious injury, society and certainly the employers, had little or no safety net for them. The men in this youtube seem to have fared better, as they were fitted with quite advanced and ingenious prosthesis.
