Waiting in Line

Through the noisy aisles of U. S. machine-tool plants last week rubber-tired food wagons glided. Whenever it pleased them, overalled machinists, black-lipped and pasty-faced under the flourescent green lights, stopped their work for between-meal snacks of milk, sandwiches, crullers, pie. Yankee toolmakers are brought up through a long apprenticeship to have a religious reverence for millionths of an inch, but food is a necessity, for precision suffers when a worker's stomach begins to twinge.

Last week the food wagons rolled 24 hours a day, because the machine-tool industry is in mid-boom. Few of its 350 plants do not work around the clock. Big toolmen say in a spirit of cheerful frustration: "We can't make a dent on the back-log." The industry makes possible modern assembly lines--it makes the machines that make machinery, machines that make parts so accurately that they can be used interchangeably in any one of a series of airplanes, automobiles, cannons, egg beaters. When a manufacturer develops a new model or expands his productive capacity he has to wait for machine tools, handmade by skilled artisans, before he can turn his plant loose on mass production with relatively less skilled labor.

Yet the machine-tool industry is no monster economic unit. In a big year like 1937 it may gross $200,000,000, about as much as the automobile industry (cars and trucks) may gross in a month. When other industry stagnates, it stagnates too, and its grey-haired veterans switch their diamond-studded long-service pins from their overalls to the lapels of their best blue suits. The companies that make machine tools are as individualistic as their workmen. Most of them started as small family enterprises, and have not far outgrown that stage. Because of their independence, no man can say with certainty what machine tools' backlog is. Even the Department of Commerce last week had to content itself by saying that, like the aircraft industry, machine tools' business had resisted the declining trend during the first two months of 1940.

But typical of the business on hand was the backlog of one of the big machine tool makers, Niles-Bement-Pond Co., which last fall got out of its antiquated 23-building plant in Hartford, Conn., and moved across town to a new factory under a single roof. N-B-P, which operates the Pratt & Whitney* tool works, last week had a backlog of $8,700,000, up 400% from last year. Its bulky president, 65-year-old Clayton Raymond Burt, who served his toolmaking apprenticeship with big Brown & Sharpe back in the early 19005, like the rest of the industry found his plant unable to keep up with his orders. The company's backlog was still growing, and tough C. R.

Burt ("Cold-rolled" to his employes) was telling customers they would have to wait their turns. Since the industry has a wholesome fear of overexpansion, many a plant--like Monarch, Sundstrand, Van Norman, Ex-Cell-0--told purchasers that their wait might be a year or more.

For this boom in machine tools, the U. S. aircraft industry, with a backlog of $750,000,000 and $1,000,000,000 more in sight in Allied orders, was chiefly responsible. But many other domestic orders were keeping toolmen on the hop. The automobile industry, which spent handsomely for 1940-model tooling, is already handing out fat orders for 1941 models. Army and Navy have been buying heavily and secretly for their industrial mobilization plans. Topping all is an expanding export trade for aircraft plants and arsenals in Europe, particularly France, Great Britain and Sweden. In normal times exports take up 20-25% of machine-tool output. What part export business is now playing no one can say until the year's work is finally totted up. But best guess last week was that it was close to 50%. Toolmen talked of allotting 60% of production to domestic demands, no matter what orders came in.

*Not to be confused with the Pratt & Whitney airplane engine plant, sold to United Aircraft by N-B-P in 1929.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.