Technological Revolutionist

(See Cover)

One drizzly afternoon last week Patrick Morgan O'Laughlin pressed a buzzer. Workmen at the Dravo Corporation, on Neville Island near Pittsburgh, knocked the blocks out from under a squat, flat-bottomed craft perched on the ways in Dravo's west yard. A tank landing ship slid down the smoking ways into the Ohio River.

Workmen on the 8:30 a.m.-to-4:30 p.m. shift cheered, picked up their lunch pails, went home. Workmen on the next shift were already swarming around a second, identical craft perched on the ways. Paddy O'Laughlin, swearing lustily, pressed another buzzer. Down to the river slid the second ship. Chortled tough, wiry Mr. O'Laughlin, who started his career as a rivet "cooker," rose to become general superintendent of the Dravo yards: "I'm so happy I feel like going home and beating up my wife."

All over the U.S. last week, superintendents, foremen, brass hats, workmen in the shipbuilding industry shared Mr. O'Laughlin's elation. Last week Donald Nelson announced that U.S. war production had increased 350% since Pearl Harbor, but his figure does not apply to the shipbuilding industry. Since Pearl Harbor, shipbuilders have increased production roughly 700%.

In 1940 U.S. yards delivered 53 cargo ships, a total of 634,234 deadweight tons; in 1941, when the Liberty ship program got under way, 95 cargo ships, 1,088,497 deadweight tons; from January to April 1942, as much as during the whole of 1941; by the end of August, 367 ships, 4,882,415 deadweight tons. (By contrast, in World War I, U.S. yards, building smaller, poorer ships, delivered not a single cargo vessel of the wartime program until after the war was ended.)

This huge increase is not due merely to huge effort. It is due primarily to a technological revolution. The most interesting figure in that revolution is a dour-visaged man who watches it with gloomy satisfaction from a waterfront office in Manhattan. His name is William Francis Gibbs--known solemnly to his friends as William Francis. Lawyer, engineer and head of Gibbs & Cox, he is the top U.S. naval architect and marine engineer. His firm designed Paddy O'Laughlin's landing ships. It designed the Liberty ships. It has designed merchant ships, destroyers, tankers, cruisers. It designs means of building them swiftly and efficiently. It lays down their specifications and in many cases orders the materials.

The job that William Francis Gibbs's firm does is titanic. A destroyer requires some 20,000 tracings. Every day Gibbs & Cox turns out from 8,000 to 10,000 blueprints, 26 acres of blueprints a month. On one multiple order of ships they may issue 6,700 purchase orders daily. Not a day goes by that the company does not contract for at least $1,000,000 worth of materials.

The Year One of the revolution was 1940, when the Maritime Commission asked Designer Gibbs to draw plans for a cargo ship that would be as simple as an iron pot, that could be mass-produced. Gibbs & Cox was supervising the construction of nearly such a ship for the British at two U.S. yards. Gibbs & Cox adapted it for the Commission. This was the Liberty ship and the beginning of the Gibbsian revolution.

Ships had always been custom-built. To mass-produce ships meant teaching a whole industry new tricks. Every ship had to be an exact replica of her sister. A State of Washington propeller had to fit on a shaft made in Wisconsin for a hull launched in Oregon.

As logical as this was, it was not easy at first to convince U.S. shipbuilders. Old-line plants with cramped space (and cramped habits) lagged a little. But newer-comers like Henry Kaiser and California Shipbuilding Corp. took to the revolution like hairy radicals, shucked their coats and went to work.

In the mold lofts, men cut templates (wooden patterns like the paper patterns of a dress) to Gibbs & Cox specifications.

In fabricating shops as big as armories and filled with the din of metal pounding on metal, men laid the templates on steel plate, cut out precise pieces which they bent into precise shapes.

In thunderous assembly shops men welded the shapes into ships' bows, sterns, houses, sections of hull -- 35-50-ton assemblies which giant cranes lifted and placed on trucks.

Giant cranes, like a lady longing sugar, delicately lifted the huge assemblies and set them down in the ways. Ships took shape in the space of a few hours.

On long racks were hung hundreds of twisted pipe lengths ready to be placed in their special places in the ship's belly. In warehouses were stored valves sent from Massachusetts, winches from Ohio, the thousands of small parts which manufacturers had faithfully fashioned to minute specifications, ready to be carried aboard, bolted or welded into place.

There is an Ideology behind this procedure. It consists of reducing the total number of man-hours that go into a ship, while at the same time increasing the. number of man-hours that can be worked in one day--fewer man-hours but more at a time.

Gibbs set out to cut the amount of labor that goes into a ship by the usual methods of mass production--designing parts that are easier to make, devising easier methods of putting them together. Shipbuilders, shown the way, figured out how to weld joints from one side instead of both, for example: built small ships upside down, etc.

To make it possible for more men to work on a ship at one time, operations are subdivided and spread widely over a shipyard. Thus more men can work on a ship at once than if most of the work had to be done on the ways and in the crowded interior of a ship under construction.

The two principles of construction go hand in hand. Both make it possible with simple training to make butchers and bakers into shipbuilders because each man has to learn only one operation instead of the dozen or more operations which an old-fashioned shipwright had to master.

In little over a year after the first contract was let, Yankees--and their brethren in the South, on the Gulf, on the West Coast--had become expert again at sending ships down to the sea. Production time for a Liberty ship seemed to be coming down to almost nothing flat. In the far more complex construction of naval vessels, production time also had been drastically cut. Destroyers, formerly built in 27 to 28 months, can now be built in a little more than eight. Naval and other private designers have more than halved the time on heavier types. This week a new aircraft carrier Lexington, namesake of the carrier sunk in the Coral Sea, will be launched more than a year ahead of schedule.

Whether the U.S. shipbuilders, who have done a magnificent job, can fulfill their assignment (8,000,000 tons of cargo and tanker ships by the end of the year, unrevealed numbers of naval ships) is still open to question. But the answer depends on whether enough materials are available to feed the unheard-of production schedules which this technological revolution has made possible.

Core of the Apple. Gibbs & Cox, who are responsible for some 70% of the ships abuilding, have to sweat to keep ahead of the onrush. Their job is one of mass production: of the plans, specifications, purchase orders. In their offices chief engineers and architects direct the work of some 2,000 employes. Row upon row of draftsmen bend over drafting tables. Each chief is boss in his own bailiwick. Tall, cadaverous Mr. Gibbs is the overall coordinating genius.

On one of the 13 floors which Gibbs & Cox occupies craftsmen make scale models in brass of the machinery space of each type of ship to be built. Models are exact even to the scaled-down thickness of plates. Errors on paper come to light, can be corrected before it is too late. One small error in a design from which dozens or hundreds of vessels are to be built would be catastrophic.

There have been no catastrophes yet. Ship designers and shipbuilders, among whom the acidulous William Francis Gibbs has plenty of enemies, are willing to give him plenty of credit. Whether he was the sole inspiration for the new technology or not, he was certainly the designer of it.

Artist & Lawyer. In 1939, Mr. Sam Carp appeared before the Dies Committee to explain, by invitation, how William Francis Gibbs had once designed a battleship for the Russian Government. Carp had acted as a purchasing agent. He had told Gibbs that the Russians wanted the finest battleship in the world, something about 35,000 tons. Gibbs asked no more. He went to work and produced a one-ship navy, a battleship with a flight deck for some 60 planes, a behemoth which would dominate any naval engagement as easily as a shark dominates a school of mackerel. She was to weigh some 85,000 tons. The Russians took a look, were so flabbergasted that they turned it down. Explained Mr. Carp: "Gibbs is a very peculiar man, you see. I mean, he is like an artist. He likes his work."

Gibbs's liking for his work dates back to the age of three, when he began drawing boat pictures. When he grew up he went to Harvard. His father, a Philadelphia industrial promoter who had once been worth some 15 millions and had lost and recouped several fortunes, lost another one at about that time, leaving Willie stranded. But William Francis put himself the rest of the way through college, then took a law degree at Columbia, which was later to come in handy in preparing ironbound contracts.

During World War I his connections and budding ability got him a job on the Shipping Control Committee, along with Brother Frederick. From there the Brothers Gibbs launched out into the field of ship designing, finally set up an office on lower Broadway. Some years later they formed a partnership with Daniel Hargate Cox, well-known yacht designer. Mr. Cox lent luster then. Now 70-year-old Mr. Cox's forte is no longer the firm's mainstay. He is now busy with Navy maintenance work. Business head of the firm is still Frederick.

Old-line shipbuilders frankly resented Gibbs. Mr. Gibbs did not care. He was frankly critical of their methods and the ships they were building. One of his firm beliefs was the necessity of multiple compartmentation and automatic sliding doors in bulkheads to make ships as unsinkable as was humanly possible. He was deeply impressed by the tragedy of the Empress of Ireland, which had collided with a Norwegian collier in 1914 and with water pouring into her hold had capsized. He thought such accidents need not be.

He got his chance to prove it when he designed the Malolo, a luxury ship of the Matson Line, and a heaven-sent chance to watch a test case of his theory. On the Malolo's trial run, 26 miles off Nantucket, another Norwegian freighter appeared out of the fog and, as the fascinated Mr. Gibbs watched, crashed into the Malolo amidship. Into the pilothouse rushed Gibbs. He pushed the buttons to operate the sliding bulkhead doors, which should close off the shattered compartment and keep the sea from flooding and sinking the Malolo. Down into the hold he plunged. Green water was pouring in. He waded to the bulkhead door. It was still open. As he got there it began to close. It shut tight. The Malolo triumphantly floated.

There were some lean years for the firm in a land that had apparently forgotten all about ships and shipping. Gibbs & Cox designed the world's largest yacht, the Savarona, for the late Mrs. Richard M. Cadwalader, equipped it as ordered with public-address system, mother-of-pearl inlaid bathrooms, gold-plated doorknobs. They also designed the Santa boats for the Grace Line. But not until the U.S. Government decided to embark on a destroyer program did Gibbs & Cox really get under way.

High Pressure. William Francis was an advocate of high-pressure, high-temperature propulsion. The Navy squinted at his plans for its proposed 364 class of destroyers, finally gave him the order. Many a Navy man is ready to admit now that Gibbs was years ahead in his thinking. Many a Navy man admits now that if the high-pressure steam propulsion, which Gibbs had worked out with five U.S. manufacturers,* had not been adopted, the U.S. would have to fight its naval battles today with outmoded warships.

Standing now at the top of his profession, in which, curiously enough, he holds no degree, William Francis Gibbs is a profound skeptic. Young Son Francis is an enthusiastic horseman, but Father Gibbs hates the sight of horseflesh. Said a member of his family: "He always suspects they're ready to bite him." In the same way he is leary of success. When a man begins to think of himself as successful, according to the Gibbsian philosophy, "he gets to thinking he is so goddam bright that it just paralyzes him."

William Francis also shies from publicity. He thinks that the war-production show is being run too much by junior executives while seniors spend the major part of their time making speeches, holding interviews, instead of tending to their knitting. He thinks publicity is treacherous. He does not want to get bitten.

William Francis, 56, long and stringy, contrives to look more like an undertaker than a real one. But his friends recognize this as a mannerism which they suspect is partly affectation. It includes wearing shiny, patched clothes and shocking dinner parties with sardonic comments. Married to Manhattan Socialite Vera Cravath Larkin, daughter of the late, great lawyer Paul Cravath, he avoids society, but pops into it every once in a while, throws himself into a chair like an old rug, often turns out to be the lion of the party.

But there is no affectation about his passion for his job. Three years ago, at the launching of the America, which he designed for the U.S. Lines, officials looked everywhere among the gathered celebrities for William Francis. He had vanished. They finally spotted him. Bored by speechmaking, he was perched like a bald eagle at the top cf a scaffolding to get a better view of his ship when she hit the water.

* General Electric, Westinghouse, Babcock & Wilcox, Foster Wheeler, De Laval Steam Turbine.

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