Diesel Gambler

Into full production last week went one of the first new plants built especially for defense. It is long, low, windowless. air-conditioned, fireproof and allegedly bombproof, cost $1,000,000. Its site: Harvey, Ill. Its builder: the 60-year-old Buda (pronounced bewda) Co., a Diesel-building pioneer. Its product: a Diesel for U. S. Army tanks. The reason this plant reached full production last week was that an oil wildcatter was willing to take a chance.

Samuel Allen Guiberson, 67, is a ham-handed Texan who struck it rich in his early 205, built a sowell oil business and a drillers' equipment company in Dallas. In 1929, a bright young Austrian named F. A. Thaheld (now Guiberson's chief design engineer) presented him with a new design for a Diesel airplane engine. Guiberson sank $1,500,000 in it, has been trying to sell it for airplane use ever since. To his bankers, willing to back him in oil, lis engine was just a crackpot scheme.' Once, when he borrowed $2,500,000 for his oil business, they made him promise not to use any of it on the Diesel.

Last spring S. A. Guiberson got his chance. With big Army & Navy orders in the air, most U. S. businessmen hesitated to expand their plant & equipment. Scores of manufacturers were worried about what the 1940 tax score would be, hung around the Army and Navy grousing. "S. A.," ingenuously, went to the Treasury instead. He asked the Treasury's lawyers point-blank if they knew what the new investment write-off tax schedule would be, was told they did not. His ears full of other men's groans, Guiberson then asked whether that meant he could not bid on Army tank engines. Assured there was no law against his bidding, Guiberson then spoke approximately as follows:

"Hell, that's good enough for me. All the money I ever made, I made gambling. In the oil business, nobody ever saw his profit in the bank when he started to drill. I'll take a chance on this one and see if I can get the Army to put my Diesel into ipo or so tanks. I don't care' how the tax bill ends up because it's a cinch that in six months the Army will want more than 100 tank engines, and I will be in production, with a head start." He got a $600,000 order.

Meanwhile Guiberson had made a licensing deal with Buda. For Buda, which has less than $2,000,000 in other defense orders (generator sets and Diesels for the Navy), the Guiberson business soon became the biggest thing on its horizon. Last August they broke ground for the new "bombproof" plant. This month it had $8,000,000 of Guiberson tank engine orders, and 350 men worked three shifts daily to get production up to a promised eight per day.

Big S. A. Guiberson had the head start he wanted. Tank talk was turning to Diesels. The British Army, having gone into production on a 350-h.p. gasoline engine, was already designing a Diesel to replace it. Encouraged by such talk, S. A. Guiberson had Inventor Thaheld at work in Dallas on a bigger Diesel for heavy tanks.

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