Automatic Factories

At its sprawling plant in Bridgeport, Conn, last week. Columbia Records Inc. made phonograph records in two surprisingly different ways. On the third floor, 250 men in grimy work clothes labored amid the ear-shattering hammer of hydraulic presses and the stench of burned rubber. On the floor below, four neatly dressed men stood by 16 softly purring machines. The four seemingly did nothing but watch the machines work. Yet in an eight-hour shift, each turned out about five times as many records as the sweating men on the floor above.

The new Columbia record line is the latest "automated" production line in U.S. industry and a prime example of the trend toward automatic factories. For Columbia, it means that skilled press operators no longer need go through six steps to make a record. The new machine does the job in an uninterrupted flow; it automatically feeds the right amount of plastic into a mold, cools it, and ejects the records. Each of the machines costs $25,000 (v. $3,000 for an old-style press), but they make better records about 30% faster, and four men can watch over the entire operation.

The record industry is only one of hundreds turning to automatic production.

Such industries as oil, chemicals, and atomic energy, where materials are dangerous for men to handle but easily adaptable to machines, have necessarily become almost completely automatic. Some are even using TV to keep an eye on remote-control processes. The Army is building a completely automatic TNT factory in Joliet, 111., while work on an atomic engine for the AEC includes such contraptions as General Electric's "O-Man," a 15-ton remote-controlled claw to handle radioactive material. (It can screw a nut on a bolt, and can even be made to pick up an egg.) Oil refineries, which used to crack oil by laborious batch methods, now do it in one steady, automatic flow; a few skilled workers sit at a master-control panel, guide the crude oil through many intricate steps to high-octane gasoline, or any one of a dozen other major petroleum products.

Other new automatic processes: P:A push-button hide-tanning process developed by the Colonial Tanning Co. and just installed at its Milwaukee plant. Instead of curing hides by a great deal of manual work, Colonial-now has a conveyor belt to carry hides past splitting and shaving machines, uses automatic controls to mix acids and oils in correct proportion to tan them, and still more automatic controls to circulate just the right amount of warm air in drying rooms to finish curing the hides. In the past, it took six men eight hours to tan 50,000 square feet of leather; now two men do a better job 20% faster.

P:A new Ford Motor Co. plant in Cleveland, where rough engine-block castings are fed into one bank of 26 linked machines which hone, broach, drill and prepare the blocks for assembly, all automatically. Then the machines feed the blocks out the other end on conveyor belts, where still other machines and workers install pistons and carburetors. Formerly 117 machinists needed 4^ hours to finish an engine block; now with 41 men, the machines do the work in less than three hours.

P:A "record-playback control" developed by General Electric, which promises to cut much of the time required for fine machining. The control works something like a home recorder. A skilled operator records all the machine motions required for a machining process on a tape that is hooked up to the machine. When the tape is played back, the machine faithfully repeats the original motions down to the last detail. The first such unit will go to the Giddings & Lewis Machine Tool Co. at Fond du Lac, Wis., where it will be used to turn out self-reinforced skins for jet planes.

The greatest immediate new field for automation is in electronics. Raytheon Manufacturing Co.'s radio and television division in Chicago already has an automatic radio chassis assembly line geared to 1,000 units a day, runs it with two workers instead of the 200 formerly needed. General Electric, Motorola and RCA are all working toward more automatic production. Instead of turning out radio circuits assembled with wires and solder, they are working on printed circuits which can be manufactured much more cheaply and rapidly.

G.E.'s new tape and the Navy's Project Tinkertoy (TIME, Sept. 28) are some of the keys to the factory of the future. But it will be a long time before most U.S. industries are generally automatic, their operations run by a whole new group of controls such as "servo-mechanisms," which not only correct their own errors but perform a series of logical operations. Machines run by such controls are often fantastically expensive to produce; M.I.T. has developed a servo-controlled milling machine, so flexible that it can make 150 different products, but it costs $400,000. In many industries, the volume of production is too small to make such machines pay. In others, products must be completely redesigned before they can be turned out automatically. Furthermore, labor unions worry about the effects of automation on employment. Actually, the effect would be small, at least in the near future; only a fraction of the 17 million Americans who work in manufacturing industries are in any immediate danger of losing their jobs to machines. And the business of making and servicing the new machines themselves would take up most of the slack.

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