Subway of the Future

In Manhattan last week, the New York Transit Authority put its pen to a $3,881,000 contract to build an entirely new system of transportation. The jammed, jolting old subway shuttle train between Grand Central Station and Times Square, half a mile crosstown, will be replaced by a gigantic conveyor belt carrying an endless chain of lightweight passenger cars. Riders will step onto a belt moving at 1 1/2 m.p.h., and from there into cars which will then speed up to 15 m.p.h. for the two-minute trip to Times Square and slow down again to let them off. Builder of the new shuttle: Akron's Passenger Belt Conveyor, Inc., a newly-formed affiliate of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the world's biggest rubber company.

Rock & Commuters. The conveyor-belt shuttle, which will be ready in three years, is a direct result of the success that Goodyear has had building huge industrial conveyor belts (e.g., a $1,750,000 belt to carry rock ten miles during the building of California's Shasta Dam). Since 1949,

Goodyear has been working on the idea as a safe, fast method of travel in overcrowded cities. Last spring, with the Stephens-Adamson Manufacturing Co. of Aurora, Ill., its partner in the new belt company, Goodyear installed its first project: a $75,000 "speedwalk" to carry New Jersey commuters 227 ft. from the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad's Jersey City terminal up an incline to the Erie Railroad station.

Besides Manhattan, half a dozen big U.S. cities may soon be customers for the Goodyear passenger belt. Cincinnati is considering a belt-car system to serve 80 congested downtown blocks. So are Montreal, Cleveland, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, which is thinking of a web of conveyor-belt sidewalks.

The new passenger conveyor belt is the latest example of the canny diversification that has kept Goodyear at the top of the industry. Last week Goodyear brought out its nine-month earnings report, and though sales were down 14% (largely due to a seven-week strike) from 1953's record $1.2 billion, profits of $32 million were good enough for the company to declare an extra dividend of $1 and a 2-for-1 stock split.

Blimps & the Atom. Goodyear's Board Chairman Paul W. Litchfield, the company's boss for 28 years, has always been a strong believer in diversification. When he arrived in Akron in 1900, as Goodyear's new plant superintendent, he was just out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the first real scientist on the young company's staff. He also had a penchant both for production and for trying unexplored fields. In those days U.S. tiremakers produced solid, iron-hard rings of rubber. Litchfield soon learned a better way. In 1902 he took Goodyear's tires to a reliability test in the British Isles, paying his own way across on a cattle boat. "We finished last," recalls

Litchfield, "and I found out why. The winning tires had flexibility. Ours didn't. We were trying to overpower the bumps. They were just bouncing over them."

Back home, Litchfield designed the first successful U.S. pneumatic tire, got a patent, and put Goodyear in production. By 1906 he was back in Britain, and this time Goodyear won. Says Litchfield: "That's when we really started to go." By 1916 Goodyear's sales overtook its biggest competitors, Goodrich and Diamond, even though they merged to fend off Goodyear. With the tire business booming, Litchfield soon started exploring other fields, made the first U.S. Navy blimps and balloons in World War I, later tried its hand at dirigibles. In World War II the company was one of the most diversified in U.S. industry, turned out everything from Navy fighter planes to tank parts, gas masks, powder bags and artillery shells.

Brains & Plastic. With peace, Goodyear has pushed its diversification even harder. It now does a booming plastics business with a whole line of products for shoes, luggage, floor coverings and furniture. Goodyear also makes rubberized asphalt, has gone into the electronics business, and turns out an electronic computer called the "Geda" for the Air Force. And in Pike County, Ohio, Goodyear is slated to run a $1.2 billion gaseous diffusion plant for the AEC.

Goodyear Chairman Litchfield, now 79, and President E. J. Thomas, 55, who moved up to take over the operating end, have no worries about too much diversification. Chairman Litchfield is confident that the management team he has brought up over the years can carry the load and make any product set in front of them. Says he: "We will branch out just as far as we can go. Good management can make any business grow."

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