Vortox

Last week as U.S. tanks charged across northern Africa, a short, bespectacled, white-haired man working in a small cluttered office in Claremont, Calif, (outside Los Angeles) had reason to feel particularly proud.

His name is Herman Hastings Garner, president of the Vortox Manufacturing Co., inventor and by far the largest builder of a complex carburetor air cleaner, without the like of which tanks would bog down in the desert, their engine cylinders irreparably scored by sand and dust.

Garner invented the basic design for the filter while working on an experimental tractor during World War I. Later he sold filters to C. L. Best, big California tractor builder, which subsequently was merged into Caterpillar. Though Caterpillar changed to another filter, Garner kept as his peacetime customers such firms as Cleveland Tractor, John Deere, Allis-Chalmers, Case.

When war came Vortox soon got orders from builders of both light and medium tanks. Made in several designs, the commonest form of filter looks like a glorified five-gallon oilcan painted Army green. Inside is a complicated mechanism whereby incoming air is subjected to centrifugal action and to a violent cleansing oil spray before being passed along to the carburetor.

In a normal peacetime year Vortox, which is wholly owned by Garner and his wife, does a business of about $15,000 per month. Now it is grossing about six times that, with employment up from a few dozen men to 150 working on three shifts. Said Garner last week: "Our stuff has been in Africa right along. But this is bigger and better."

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