Westinghouse-Schneider

To the second largest U. S. electrical manufacturing company and the largest individually owned French steel & electrical manufacturing company came last week an alliance. For Westinghouse Electric International Co., subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co., joined with Schneider et Cie to form a Westinghouse-Schneider company. The new company has not been named, nor has it been stated whether control will lie with the Westinghouse or with the Schneider portion of the combination. The laws of France, however, require that the majority of the directorate shall be French citizens and Eugene Schneider, head of Schneider et Cie, will be Board Chairman. Westinghouse International's President L. A. Osborne will be vice-chairman.

Schneider et Cie was established more than 100 years ago, has been under management of the Schneider family for 86 years. Important electrically, Schneider's chief industrial activity is in locomotives, steam turbines and in continental production of iron, coke, steel. Chief competitor of Westinghouse-Schneider will be Alstrom, formed in 1928 as a union of French affiliates of International General Electric and the Societe Alsacienne de Constructions Mechaniques. Thus Westinghouse and General Electric, long U. S. competitors, have extended their competition through international alliances.

Westinghouse. Main products of an organization such as Westinghouse are turbines, dynamos, circuit-breakers and many another mechanism readily comprehensible only to persons who can casually refer to a slide-rule as a "slip-stick," and to whom kilowatts, volts and amperes are commonplace phenomena of everyday existence. In addition, however, to an extensive line of products concerned with the making and transmitting of electric power. Westinghouse also make many a household electrical device. Westinghouse built the world's first broadcasting station (KDKA, Pittsburgh) and shares with General Electric (on a 40-60 basis) in the making of all equipment for Radio Corp. of America. Westinghouse also has contracts with Baldwin Locomotive Works for the building of electric locomotives, owns an electric elevator company, and has supplied the equipment for many a municipal street railroad and street lighting system.

One current Westinghouse activity, of particular interest to city-dwellers, is the development of welded v. riveted steel structures. Most immediately noticeable difference between the welded and riveted building is that on the welded building no automatic hammers beat a machine-gun fire on the neighborhood's peace and quiet as beams are welded, not riveted, together. But Westinghouse also maintains that the welded building is lighter and stronger. Thus far only a few welded buildings have been erected, partly because building codes almost always specify riveted structures; but in such buildings and bridges as have been welded instead of hammered together results have been uniformly satisfactory. An early example of the welded structure is found in the 18-story-high book stacks in the library of Yale University.

Westinghouse v. General Electric. Potent as is Westinghouse, it is somewhat overshadowed in actual size and much overshadowed in popular imagination by General Electric, much as Founder George Westinghouse-- is overshadowed by Thomas Edison. Relative sizes of the two companies is best indicated by the following figures:

General Electric

1928 Sales $337,189422

1928 Net Income 54,153,806

1929 Net (1st quarter) 14,506,000

Westinghouse

1928 Sales $189,050,302

1928 Net Income 20,814,940

1929 Net (1st quarter) 5,631,700

Meanwhile Western Electric, great subsidiary of even greater American Telephone & Telegraph, showed a 1928 net income of $19,707,889.

Board Chairman Robertson. Many a competent executive has Westinghouse had since its reorganization in 1908, but never a man who has caught the popular imagination like Owen D. Young, Board Chairman of General Electric. After the death of General Guy Eastman Tripp (TIME, June 27, 1927) Manhattan's Paul Drennan Cravath became Acting Chairman. He, able lawyer, sought for an able electrical man to become Westinghouse tycoon, found in Andrew Wells Robertson a likely candidate. So, last January Lawyer Cravath retired from Acting Chairmanship, Mr. Robertson became Board Chairman.

Modest, unsensational, Chairman Robertson took office with no broad statement of policies, no announcements of what he would speedily and efficiently do. "I want to sit across a desk with the men and women who make Westinghouse what it is today until I know them . . . only then can I attempt some of the things that a chairman of the board ought to do," said he.

Interest in personnel relations has been the outstanding characteristic of Chairman Robertson's career* not personnel in the sense of brakemen and janitors, but with reference to the junior executives. While still a very young man he met people while selling aluminum pots and pans from door to door. He met more people while working in a sawmill, keeping books, deckhanding on a lake steamer, writing for a newspaper and running a bathhouse. After teaching school for four years, he entered Allegheny College, where he paid his way by running a boarding house. While studying law in Pittsburgh he started a private school, taught boys in the morning, studied law afternoons and evenings.

Said Mr. Robertson: "There is an unconscious tendency in business not only to fail to give credit to junior members of the organization . . . but actually to take it away from them. I have found that there is an unbelievable magic in frankly tendered credit and praise."

*George Westinghouse is probably best known not in connection with electricity but for his airbrake, which, patented in 1869, made possible the modern fast train. It was also Westinghouse who discovered how to send gas through long distance pipes. Chief electrical accomplishments included the making of dynamos for the power plants of Niagara Falls and for the London and New York rapid transit systems.