Profits & Secrets

Rearmament has so far meant much to only a few U. S. industries--chiefly those which make war machinery for air and sea. One U. S. company which makes war machinery for both air and sea is Sperry Corp. What rearmament has meant for Sperry was told in part last week in that company's report for the first half of 1939.

No slump but a record year was 1938 for Sperry Corp. This year working overtime to turn out antiaircraft equipment, searchlights, airplane instruments, and deep-sea gyro equipment, Sperry netted a thumping $2,469,576 ($1.23 per share), up 12% from 1938's record first half, up 49% from the first half of 1936 when the armament boom began. Buttressed against wartime demands for working capital, it had $5,768,158 cash, 31% more than last summer.

Sperry Corp. owns Ford Instrument Co. which makes naval gunfire control devices in its closely guarded plant at Long Island City, N. Y., recently bought Waterbury (Conn.) Tool Co. and Vickers, Inc., of Detroit, which manufacture hydraulic pumps and variable speed transmissions. But it is proudest of its biggest and oldest subsidiary, Sperry Gyroscope Co. of Brooklyn and of its English brother, Sperry Gyroscope Co., Ltd., which has just set up a new factory in the English Midlands, to carry on if its London plant is bombed.

President and operating boss of the two Sperry gyro companies is lean, blue-eyed Annapolis-man Reginald Everett Gillmor, who was commissioned an ensign in 1909 just in time for assignment to U. S. S. Delaware, the Navy's first dreadnaught. Delaware was also the first battlewagon to be equipped with a Sperry gyroscopic compass and before he had walked many tours on the quarterdeck, Ensign Gillmor knew as much about it as the two electricians who had installed it: Thomas A. Morgan (now president of Sperry Corp.) and O. B. Whitaker (now Sperry Gyro's marine manager).

While the world was at peace, Sperry plugged away at its gyros, turned out compasses for surface ships and submarines, stabilizers for seagoing craft from yachts to liners, automatic pilots and gyro instruments for aircraft. It also got many a confidential job from Army and Navy, soon branched out into the design and manufacture of complicated fire control devices, antiaircraft searchlights. Prize Sperry antiaircraft product is the Sound Locator-Searchlight, which picks out flying raiders by sound, focuses the lights on them, trains antiaircraft guns so that they "lead" bombing flights as a duck-hunter leads a flying mallard.

Operations in Sperry Gyro's 11-story Brooklyn plant are romantically secretive. Sperry employes (all U. S. citizens) wear colored badges (a different color for each division), come and go under the vigilant eyes of watchmen. Except for a few top officials, no Sperry employe knows much about what is going on outside his own division.

In a spy-fearing industry, most of them would rather have it that way.

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