Scales & Things

Last week the directors of Fairbanks Morse & Co. declared a $3.50 dividend of their preferred stock--first in three-and-a-half years. The venerable Chicago industrial concern is largely a producer of durable goods. From 1929 to 1932 annual sales dropped from $31,500,000 to $8,500,000, and total Depression losses footed up to $8,000,000.

Diesel engines are the most important product in the long Fairbanks, Morse line normally accounting for about one-half of total sales. Electric motors, generators and appliances rank second. Fairbanks Morse is one of the biggest pump-makers in the U. S. It supplies railroads with inspection cards, water-tanks and coaling stations. But for every person who has seen a Fairbanks, Morse municipal power plant or a Fairbanks, Morse oil pipe-line pumping station, thousands in every corner of the civilized world have seen Fairbanks scales.

Thaddeus Fairbanks invented the platform scale in St. Johnsbury, Vt. in 1830. It was the first substantial improvement in the art of weighing since the Romans developed the graduated steelyard. Before he died, the taciturn, ingenious Vermonter was honored as one of the great inventors of the 19th Century. He was knighted by the Emperor of Austria, awarded high Saracenic orders by the Bey of Tunis. In the U. S., Fairbanks scale were used in every general store, post office and coal yard. Their accuracy was proverbial. Huge freight car scales were supposed to respond to the weight of a wandering chicken. In 1876 Josh Billings described a school mistress as "precise in everything, az a pair ov Fairbanks' improved platform scales."

Fairbanks, Morse still makes every conceivable variety of scales and distributes them throughout the world. But the great scale plant at St. Johnsbury has long since been overshadowed by the main Midwest plant at Beloit, Wis.

There are no Fairbankses in Fairbanks, Morse today--only Morses. President Robert Hosmer Morse is the son of the founder of the Midwest division, which outstripped and later absorbed Vermont's old E. & T. Fairbanks & Co. Tall, heavy, hard-driving and a judge of good whiskey, President Morse started for college but dropped out of Hill School at the suggestion of his business-minded father, who set him to work as a molder's assistant in the Beloit foundry. During the War, President Morse was chief procurement officer for the U. S. Signal Corps, is still called "Colonel." Now 56, he loves to hunt big game in India, likes to drive fast cars to work from his home in Lake Forest out-side Chicago.

Though Colonel Morse is a remote figure to most of his staff, he insists on having his research director in an adjoining office. Not a penny has been scrimped on research during Depression, for the Colonel's passion is mechanical improvement of his products--a stronger selling point for industrial goods than for consumer goods, in which style, color, packaging are often all-important. Fairbanks, Morse always tries to sell the pump that goes with the windmill for the generator that goes with the Diesel engine, so that it will have undivided responsibility for the engineering of the complete installation.

About two years ago Colonel Morse decided to balance his line of heavy industrial products with radios, refrigerators, washing machines, ironers, airconditioning units. No figures on the household appliance division have yet been divulged, though it is reported to have more than justified the investment. It may have helped persuade the directors to resume dividends, for Fairbanks, Morse earned its preferred payments last year (profits: $563,000). The company announced, however, that it wanted to accumulate cash for an expanding volume of business. Still to be paid are back dividends now amounting to $21 per share of preferred. "Business," says Colonel Morse, "is optimistic."

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