The Breaking Point

I

SUCH gods as watch the weary ways of man must have smiled pityingly when the new apple-vending machine made its appearance a few months ago. Selling apples on street corners and in lobbies of office buildings became a refuge of the unemployed in 1929 and 1930, but no sooner had apples established themselves in the wayside market than someone invented a shiny machine which sells apples automatically — a nickel in the slot brings a red apple rolling down a chute. A sanitary apple, at the right temperature, summer or winter. The machine is cheerful to look upon, well kept, frequently groomed. Even this humble, random occupation is at the mercy of invention and enterprise. Yet so far are we under the spell of progress that apple venders fatalistically suffer this silent competitor without giving way to a natural desire to kick in its shining sides.

Whatever can be done better and cheaper by machines will be done by them sooner or later. Rightly so; there is no reason why a man should waste his time standing on a street corner in the cold beside a box of apples. A better use than that can be found for almost any human being. The trouble is that the machine comes along before a door to other employment can be opened.

This parable of the apple sellers shows the alert follow-through of machine development, which produces a machine to fit every market challenge, and reveals the economy of machine use. The machine sells apples better than the man does it, and at less cost to society. Not that society gets apples cheaper from the machine than from the human vender, or that the apple raisers get more for their Jonathans and Spitzbergens. But less effort is involved, more time released for something else. And when enough apples have passed through a machine to pay the cost of designing and manufacturing it, then perhaps consumers may get apples cheaper or producers get more for them. Some of the saving may eventually work around even to the displaced competitor of the machine, but he is the last.

If society ever needed apple venders standing forlornly in public places, it will not need them long. Their jobs have become obsolete through the superior technique, economies, and beauties of machine apple vending. For a time the human apple sellers may escape its competition by moving on to other corners and lobbies, but the machine is on their trail.

‘Occupational obsolescence’ is the new name for the process by which improved machines and ways of production put human beings out of work. ‘Technological unemployment’ was the first mouth-filling phrase invented to cover this, but it does not describe the situation quite as accurately as the new one. Jobs of many sorts really become obsolete as industrial technique advances; they tend to disappear as surely as obsolete animals now called prehistoric have disappeared, as surely as an ancient lathe goes on the scrap heap. Those jobs are worn-out. It does not matter that they sustained considerable numbers of human beings up to a point; if those human beings cannot shift their work to other jobs, they find themselves in a market which has less and less use for their services.

II

From 1923 to 1929 all American conditions save one favored heavy and steady employment. Times were good, credit easy, employers confident, trade expanding. Nevertheless, the number of unemployed grew throughout those years of flash prosperity. Why? Only one answer was found at the time, and it remains the only adequate one. Improving mechanisms, processes, and systems of production kept releasing workers from their jobs faster than they could find new jobs.

The Report of the Committee on Recent Economic Changes, of the President’s Conference on Unemployment (Herbert Hoover, Chairman), was published in 1929, together with a report by a special staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research. From the figures therein Professor Rugg of Columbia estimates the number of unemployed at 1,500,000 in 1923; 1,775,000 in 1925; 2,000,000 in 1927; 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 in 1929. Presumably the 3,000,000 figure measures the unemployment in the early part of 1929, before the plunge into cyclical difficulties.

The same period saw the largest increase in goods production ever recorded, — 58.5 per cent, according to the London Spectator, — yet this record in efficient toil was hung up by a total factory force smaller by more than 1,000,000 persons in 1929 than in 1919. The figures are: 1919, 10,813,000; 1929, 9,730,000. Both money and real wages rose, while hours of work decreased. Factory workers, and many outside of factories, had more of everything than ever before except security of tenure, and of that they had considerably less.

If industrial employment had increased from 1919 to 1929 in the same proportion as the population of the United States increased, about 1,450,000 workers would have been added to industrial pay rolls. Since there was no room for more workers in the factories, mines, and on the farms, which also reduced their staffs, the surplus workers took to producing services instead of goods; many of them lived by serving directly the well-paid industrial workers. There were increases in the numbers of salesmen, gasoline attendants, bootleggers, hotel and restaurant employees, civil servants, teachers, domestic servants, motion-picture workers, delivery men, garage workers. Many of these could be easily dispensed with, and were laid off when decreasing wages hit the purchasing power of the goods producers.

Among both ‘makers’ and ‘servers’ more workers were in debt than ever before. When credits were based on possessions instead of futures, a workman could hardly. get credit beyond his immediate creature needs — a month’s house rent, two weeks’ groceries, and a half ton of coal on ‘tick.’ Beyond these he could not go far into debt. But in the twenties he could buy anything from a ring to a house on time, provided he had what was optimistically called ‘a steady job.’ Labor carried a heavy load of debt into this depression and some of it still lingers. Those still in debt are slow to begin buying other than sheer necessities, and the forced liquidation of their equities of course depresses values.

Watching the reactions of American society to these novel conditions, the London Spectator drew this conclusion:

The doctrine that high wages mean prosperity works well enough so long as the high wages are paid to a sufficiently large number of citizens. But if the numbers of the wage earners are to diminish steadily . . . and if the labor surplus, dependent on those wage earners, is to grow in proportion, we must expect the unemployment problem to become more menacing as the years go by.

How swiftly American industry increased output and decreased jobs is revealed in this table from Professor Rugg’s Introduction to Problems of American Culture, giving the percentages of increased production and decreased labor forces in nine industries from 1923 to 1927: —

For a more stirring picture, consider the two plants of the A. O. Smith Corporation at Milwaukee, described by Stuart Chase in Fortune, November 1930. In one plant equipped with huge mechanical ‘dragons,’ 200 men (since reduced in number) made as many steel automobile frames as 2000 men made in an adjoining plant of the same size equipped with the usual conveyor systems and machine equipment, reckoned efficient until the ‘dragons’ were put to work. It was inevitable that jobs should be killed by those new giants.

III

I am aware of the arguments from economics and history with the quieting purport that supplanting men with machinery can have little effect on employment ‘in the long run.’ While opportunity for a long run remained, all was well. Individuals, family groups, and localities might suffer temporarily, and of these some might never recover their former status, yet these losses were overshadowed by the gains of far larger numbers. But now the staccato raps of science are so insistent that time enough may not elapse between one blow and the next to permit the adjustment in what is considered a normal manner. The question becomes, ‘How long a run?’ Man starves in a few days and loses his morale under despair in a few weeks. Society reels a little under a blow from science to-day, staggers back part way, and gets another facer before equilibrium has been quite established, and then a third and a fourth. It does not matter that the innovations are excellent ‘ for the long run ’ if the patient is overwhelmed to exhaustion in the meantime.

All the exponents of the ‘long run’ theory of industrial beatitude admit a delay between the time a man loses one job and finds another. Few realize, because accurate data are not plentiful, how demoralizing this is to those who experience it. In the Journal of Political Economy for August 1929, R. J. Myers describes the results of machine displacement of garment cutters in Chicago. In 1926, conditions forced employers to reduce costs, a simple matter on the technological side because union regulations had restrained for some time the full operation of their labor-saving machinery. Three hundred and seventy cutters left the Hart, Schaffner and Marx plant, of whom 236 received a dismissal wage of $500 each. Twenty-nine per cent found work immediately, and of the remainder 11 per cent had not found work within a year. On the average it took more than five months for this group of skilled workmen to place themselves. Only one quarter found work at the cutting table. Multiple-ply cutting of garments had rendered their skill obsolete, and this in one of the great clothing centres of the world. The older men were particularly hard hit. The average loss in wages was $675. Desperate want appeared in many cases, and would have appeared in more except for the generous dismissal wage and other aids.

Another investigation revealed even longer waits for work. In Absorption of Unemployed by American Industry, Brookings Institute, May 1929, Isador Lubin reported on 754 unemployed workers in Baltimore, Chicago, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Seventy-six per cent of those investigated had been unemployed for more than two months, 65 per cent for more than three months, 41 per cent for more than four months, and 19 per cent for more than nine months. Thirty per cent of those over forty-five years of age had found no other job; 48 per cent of those finding jobs received smaller wages than before, 27 per cent received the same, and 19 per cent had bettered their condition. Some turned bootlegger.

How the jobless try to make both ends meet is shown in the Lynds’ Middletown. Of 68 families where the breadwinner had lost his job, 47 families reduced the clothing budget, 43 families reduced the food budget, 27 wives went out to work, 6 families moved to cheaper homes, 5 of 20 had telephones taken out, 4 of 35 removed a child from high school so that he might work, 14 of 60 were unable to meet insurance payments.

As one draws closer to the present, the privations are correspondingly greater. A survey of Philadelphia quoted by Rugg showed as unemployed one sixth of the normal working population, and 12 per cent of these had been without work for a year. The food allowance of one family of four was $4.00 a week.

These pre-depression figures indicate that unemployment on new high levels had become chronic before 1929. A few of the concrete reasons for this increase are set forth by President William Green of the American Federation of Labor in the New York Times: —

1. There were 32,000 razor blades made per operative in 1930 as against 500 in 1913.

2. Thirty men with ten machines in the shops of the Sun Tube Company do as much work as 240 men had done previously.

3. One man with a ‘gang’ of semiautomatic machines replaces 25 skilled mechanics.

4. Within five years the Bessemer process was improved so that it required 24 per cent less labor, and in pig-iron production 7 men did work which formerly took the labor of 60.

If, in practice, men were laid off in all lines at the rates indicated above as possible, American society would long since have shattered its present bases in search of relief. But, actually, more of us have been helped than hurt by these changes in industrial processing. Offsets have appeared. One man now makes as many electric light bulbs as six made before modern machine developments, the present output per man in eight hours being 10,000 as against 1600 previously. Mr. Green cites an increase much larger than this, and he takes for granted that every man so displaced immediately loses his job, but the demand must have risen, and some of the operators released from that sort of work would be put on another kind of work by the same employer the next day.

IV

If we could be sure that unemployment would increase no more than 1,500,000 during the prosperous years which intervene between cyclical depressions, we might dismiss the subject as minor, though perhaps we should still be troubled by the hardships of the victims. But all indications are that the great drive for industrial efficiency is just getting under way, and that hereafter jobs will become obsolescent at an even faster rate.

The imperatives of American life dictate change in industry. Among these are ambition, greed, admiration of system and order, belief in progress, lust for knowledge, and desire for the social applause which follows placing knowledge at the service of mankind. These urges compel the application of science to the production of goods in new ways which, through competition, soon become efficient. No longer is the innovator considered a heretic or a crank. The liaison between capital and invention, and between pure science and applied science, grows closer day by day. Corporations maintain staffs of highly specialized scientists to carry on, through continuous teamwork in excellent laboratories, researches likely to develop salable improvements in goods and services. As improvements appear, they are put into production with less delay than if the inventors had to cadge about for capital and improvise manufacturing and distribution facilities.

Further, the network of communications which crisscrosses the planet and brings news to the people makes for speed in rounding out new processes and disposing of their production. Consumers’ distrust of novelty has largely disappeared; advertisers can sell more goods by saying, ‘It’s the latest thing,’ than by saying, ‘It’s been standard for a century.’ Lay press and technical press spread the news of scientific achievement so fast that the public mind is dazed by the succession of discoveries, and the scientist is aware, though hidden in his laboratory, that he works under the eye of an expectant, appreciative world. A flood of congratulations poured in upon the Cornell physicist who described the last of the unknown elements. More meaningful, a metallurgist in Wyoming, soon after the physicist, described something never seen of mortal eye, announced that he thought he had run the quarry down in some ore then under process. He may be wrong, but we can be sure that no such delay between hypothesis and use will occur in this case as occurred with helium, named in 1868, found in 1890, but not placed in production for another quarter of a century.

While details of change in the near future remain hidden, some machines and tools cast their shadows before quite definitely. The Smith ‘dragon’ is a multiple automatic machine combining a considerable number of functions previously performed by separate machines, the parts so produced being later assembled. The ‘dragon’ does several hitherto separated tasks in a nicely synchronized operation, and assembles the completed whole. For years engineers have been looking upon a factory plant as a unit, and have been synchronizing various operations; they are now combining the functions of separate machines in larger mechanisms, the goal being a plant which functions by itself under the eye of a few supervisors. The engineering ideal is to reduce the amount of supervision necessary until, at long last, the manless factory becomes a reality. The process, of course, will be so gradual that when the announcement finally comes it will create no more stir than the recent announcement that, after years of effort in the oil industry, the first 10,000-foot well had been sunk.

So much for giantism in industry. Turn now to the other extreme — the photo-electric cell. Here is a small and delicate device, rather like a large electric light bulb, so sensitive to wave vibrations that it lends itself well to remote controls. By means of it an operator on one end of an ordinary telephone wire can start and stop machines at a distance and receive reports on their movements. At this moment photo-electric cells are being used to control electric substations, water reservoirs, and auxiliary stations on oil pipe lines. These buildings may house large capital investments, yet human attendance is seldom necessary. Not only does the photo-electric cell ‘hear’ and ‘speak’; it can also ‘feel’ and ‘smell.’ That is to say, it reacts to the various stimuli which we segregate under those senses. If you want a tunnel or room ventilated, it will start a blower whenever a given saturation point of gas is reached. It will automatically direct a stream of fire-quenching gas toward a flame originating at any point within a given radius. It will open a traffic lane, by switching a red light off and a green fight on, whenever the shadow of an automobile approaching the light falls upon it through a tough glass plate set in the pavement. Some of these applications are still laboratory demonstrations rather than practical uses; indeed, the very sensitiveness of the device sometimes necessitates long and patient adjustments to industrial machines, but enough has been done to prove its ultimate utility.

Thus, in color-sorting operations the photo-electric cell seems likely to sweep the field. It can pick out in a flash the unlabeled yeast cake in a moving line and start the mechanism which separates it almost instantly from its fellows ready for packing. It is the champion kidney-bean and cigar sorter, more discriminating than the human eye, faster than the human hand.

Watching the photo-electric cell at work under the best conditions, one can easily believe that here is a control mechanism which will go far to relieve machinery of routine guidance. On most machines there is a switch or lever, a handle or pedal, with which an operator can stop the machine in case of mishap. Though the machine may be ordinarily started and stopped from a distance, the nearest hand holds a potential veto over its operation. In years to come it is probable that this cell can be so applied to machines that it will automatically stop operations, in case of any deviation from normal procedure, more swiftly than the smartest human being can act. It will then be a chief reliance in accident prevention.

There are staggering possibilities in the union of this delicate controlling unit and giant multiple machines. So sensitive is the photo-electric cell that an intruding shout or shadow may influence it, yet it can control the force which drives a Smith ‘dragon.’ Before this awesome combination one is moved to ask whether, in the fullness of time, a chief problem of industry may not be that of keeping man at some distance from the machines which make the goods he uses. The factory of the future may well be as completely controlled, as definitely shut off from random interruptions, as is a laboratory where a precision experiment is under way. If this seems a wild leap in the dark, compare it with the prophecy of Philip Livingston in 1831 that a steam locomotive would wreck itself at seventeen miles an hour.

V

In R.U.R., the play which introduced the mechanical man or robot, human beings declined in number as the robots increased. An illogical escape from reality! Unless plenty of consumers are on hand to use the production of machines, why improve the machine processes? So far, machines and population have increased together, and probably will continue to do so. Man can adjust himself to anything, even to living with less work; but in the process various institutions considered sacrosanct are likely to perish.

Taking continued life and growth for granted, what adjustments can human society make to continuing technical advance? Certain restraints have already been set up by organized groups. While union labor in America has never definitely set its face against inventions, in practice it often adopts a policy of delaying the full application of improvements, to protect ‘ the boys ’ until they have had time to adjust their lives to changed conditions. When the linotype made its appearance in the office of the small-town newspaper where I worked thirty years ago, the public opinion of the shop bore down hard on the ‘swift,’ an itinerant operator out to set all the copy on hand. Usually the ‘swift’ was soon put in his place. This discipline seemed unAmerican and all that, but from the vantage point of more experience I can see that homes were being protected from want through a transition period. Some of the more recent reactions of union printers to technical improvements seem hardly as sensible, yet when type can be set in Rochester from copy in New York, through gearing the teletype to the linotype, the struggle to keep jobs alive becomes too pressing for strictly logical procedures.

That group controls are merely temporary is indicated by the crisis which developed in the unionized Chicago clothing trades in 1926. There the full impact of technical advances had been avoided by mutual consent. Costs, therefore, remained relatively high in the union shops, while costs fell in open and competing shops. The market could find cheaper clothes, and did, so that the Chicago unionized firms, losing trade, found it necessary to use their labor-saving tools to full efficiency.

Employers also put on the brakes sometimes. Holding patents out of use is a commonplace. Occasionally the fear that the market is not ready for a change in design delays the production of novelties. Years ago a great automotive engineer told me, along with many other prophecies which have since come to pass, that eventually automobile motors would be carried in the rear instead of at the front of the chassis, a change against which consumer habit seemed to be the chief argument. Now that the Prince of Wales has bought a car so designed the ice may be considered broken. A leading electrical company is said to be holding back some startling innovations out of consideration for the effect they might have on unemployment if brought into use suddenly. This is perhaps the high point in the development of soul, or at least of social conscience, in American corporations. But these lags, like those set up by labor unions, are temporary. Patents expire eventually, and stockholders can rightly protest against any managerial policy of hoarding patents which may return profits in use.

Of course it might be possible to stiffen these brakes. The unions would do so if they could, and a good many industrialists in preferred positions are not averse to a stabilized system. But the line between a stabilized world and a static world is faint, and the question fairly shouts itself, ‘Who is to do the stabilizing?’ Most Americans prefer flowing life, surging energy, pressing innovations, come what will. Yet there remains the stern fact that some suffer through innovations, and the prospect that the number of those idle because of occupational obsolescence will increase. What, if anything, can be done about them?

The usual answer at this point is state unemployment insurance. A major difficulty is that the risk eludes accurate, actuarial measurement. There is the attitude of the insured toward job hunting to consider, and also the possibility of novel factors coming in after the plan is set up. The British system was designed as an insurance measure and functioned as such until the postwar situation forced a change of procedure, turning it partially into a government dole. Any system of that sort is so at the mercy of events as to make it a danger to national solvency, since, once it is started, government cannot let it drop, but must come to the rescue when the planned sources of revenue become inadequate. Short of state aid, however, a good deal can be done by corporations which build up reserves for unemployment benefit and so manage their affairs as to keep their workers busy as steadily as possible. The fund created in the Chicago clothing trade by employers and their unionized employees is an excellent model of industrial self-government in this field. Yet there is grave need for introducing a control effective over the whole domestic market, in order that goods produced under an adequate relief plan shall not be at the mercy of competitors refusing to meet the situation as fairly. The Wisconsin plan seems to be one of the best unemployment relief measures ever written, but if it raises Wisconsin’s costs of production it may handicap that state’s industry.

Mr. Hugh Frayne, labor leader, told members of the New York Senate Committee, holding hearings on unemployment, to tax machines. They might have replied that: (1) machines are already taxed through income taxes on their earnings, and also as personal property; and (2) to place unusual tax burdens on New York machines would penalize New York machine owners and operators as against those of other states free to sell their produce even in New York. Nevertheless the phrase took hold and has echoed through the Valley of Doubt and Despair down which the world has been traveling.

In favor of the idea is the fact that, under ordinary conditions, machines pay for themselves quickly, usually within three years. Their power to pay out far exceeds that of other forms of capital. Against this must be set the fact that many a machine becomes obsolete or obsolescent long before it is worn-out, and has to be junked merely because a better machine has been invented. In a year the economic value of a considerable investment may be destroyed. Yet government, in its wisdom and majesty, arbitrarily fixes 10 per cent as normal machine depreciation. Consequently, if a machine becomes obsolete after a year, 90 per cent of its cost cannot be charged off as a loss, but instead becomes a charge against the new machine substituted for the old one or against the total machine equipment of the plant.

Management’s ability to progress rapidly in one direction depends upon having machines at work in other lines which have paid for themselves and yet are still working, their production affording a cushion into which obsolescence losses sink without causing undue financial strain to the enterprise. It follows that machine innovations require shrewd calculation in advance, and a machine tax might shift industrial trends in unforeseen directions.

Something might be done by issuing patents subject to tax when, in the opinion of some duly constituted board, the articles or processes so covered seem likely to kill jobs faster than they create new jobs, the proceeds to be used toward financing the unemployed. But here again would arise marked difficulties in administration. If the tax were levied on sales price at time of sale, it would discourage improvements; if levied on output, a tremendous amount of accounting and inspection might be necessary.

VI

Nevertheless, with 6,000,000 or more persons unemployed and likelihood that even in normal times unemployment totals will exceed those of previous periods of normality, we must continue the search for some adjustment. As one industrialist said to me: ’What I want to know is, where’s the breaking point? Say we now have 6,000,000 unemployed persons. Apparently America can support that many. How many more can it support? Can it support ten million, twelve million, fifteen million? We engineers know that everything has a breaking point, and I suppose our social and political system likewise has a breaking point. What is it? And some materials which can stand a severe strain for a short period give way under a continued strain at a lower level. How long can we stand 6,000,000 unemployed — six months more, a year more, forever?’

None of these questions, though they get at the heart of the matter, can be answered definitely. It all depends on intangibles — the extent to which the well-to-do provide relief and the skill with which they organize its distribution, the vigor of the national ideal taught in the schools for many years, the extent of education in the masses, the faith of the common man in the nation’s leaders. The breaking point is pushed ahead in the United States because under universal suffrage all adults can join in government. Moreover, the breaking point probably changes from year to year. Before we discover just where it is, by harsh experience, it might be well to experiment with economic planning under which the hills and valleys of unemployment and goods production might be leveled somewhat, since they can hardly be smoothed away entirely. It seems inevitable that economic planning on a broad scale will become the alternative to which big business will turn if, and when, it decides that unrestricted competition is played out. At present, large-scale planning appeals more to engineers than to business men.

A planned national economy involves some surrender of freedom of action by producing groups. It implies the existence of a government strong enough to hold producers to the plan and its quotas, and financially able to carry all or part of such surpluses as result from error in calculating consumption. Government may eventually have to assist in financing consumers. State capitalism would be likely to follow as a matter of course. These possibilities are enough to frighten conservative persons, yet there is no reason why a capitalist state cannot make important advances toward a planned economy without doing the institution of private property serious damage. Already government has declared certain forms and activities of private property to be vested with a public interest, and as such subject to control; economic planning on a national scale would mean the extension of that description to new varieties of private property. Unless extreme wisdom and caution were used, the experiment might easily be ruinous, yet in some fashion, either now or later, America is altogether likely to make the effort, as it is in line with what appears to be the desired trend and dominant aspiration — quick wealth, widely distributed. Probably we shall delay taking the leap until another crisis is upon us, though perhaps soon making some tentative steps forward along the lines of the Swope plan.

Economic planning requires a closer union of business and government. At present, business does not trust government, because the latter is inefficient and wasteful. There are too many tax-eating governmental divisions in America, too much duplication in government functions, too much politics in the administration of what should be scientifically ordered activities. To ask American corporations to bind themselves to the tail of American government at present is like asking Einstein to waste his time on first-form algebra. On the other hand, our people still fear business because of its concentration of authority and its too frequent disregarding of the social responsibilities incident to its exercise of power in the fundamentals of daily life. Helpful in this direction would be the growth of closer relations between employers and their employees, organized and led not only to defend their rights, but also to defend the industry on which their wages depend. However, necessity forces the partnership. Advisory committees of bankers now have the final word on public policy in many insolvent American cities. They pass on budgets, dictate salary cuts, and otherwise exercise the final authority of the purse. And union chiefs are thinking less about rates and rules than they arc about continuity of employment.

Those who look upon large-scale economic planning as the salvation of this industrial nation can prepare the ground in two ways: first, by cleansing and modernizing government so that business will respect and trust it; second, by bringing managers of large and socially significant enterprises to an appreciation of their social responsibilities. The second movement is already further advanced than the first. Many corporate plans for unemployment relief are in operation, and more will come into operation when managers again have surpluses to fund for that purpose. The idea is growing that the corporation should take care of its own in sickness and health, in adversity as in prosperity. In many other good works of a social nature certain corporations are notably forward. When government puts its house in order, it will have earned the right to enforce a plan of business operations in defense of social stability; until then, extension of its influence over business would be a blight instead of a blessing.

Democracy, as we know it, appears to be taxing itself out of existence. Government can really do very little for the apple vender when the machine takes his place. Of course it can give him, at perhaps a ruinous cost in the aggregate, enough calories of nourishment to keep him alive, but hardly enough to keep him fit. In the long run, and disregarding near developments, the noose of job obsolescence can best be broken by national economic planning in which an able government coöperates with understanding business managers. To do this the nation must sacrifice some of its traditions and throw into the rag bag a good many time-honored shibboleths which at the present stage of the nation’s industrial maturity represent merely so many infantile ideas of the Horse-and-Canal Age.