One day while I was sitting in a Santa Fe coach at Lawrence, Kansas, waiting for a branch line train to arrive, so that our train could go on west, I watched a section hand shoveling cinders into a flat car. He was alone. He seemed to have much trouble with his pipe. Between walking around the cinder pile and caring for his pipe he put just ten small shovelsful of cinders in the car in the first twenty minutes during which he was under my observation.
Then a small red-headed Irishman puffing on a short-stemmed cob-pipe came around the end of a string of cars hopped up on a pile of ties and sat there smoking. As long as the Irishman sat there, fifteen shovelsful per minute of those cinders went into that car.
The red-headed Irishman did not say a word, or do any work so far as I could see; but as long as he sat on that tie pile close to the cinder pile, the cinders went into the car thirty times as fast as when he was not there.
In railroading they call him a section boss. In chemistry it is a catalyst.