At Low Tide

The first fully automated ship ever built in the U.S. steams into Manhattan harbor on her maiden voyage this week. Launched by Mississippi's Ingalls Shipbuilding for the Moore-McCormack Lines, the $10 million, 12,100-ton Mormacargo has an electronic system that enables one officer on the bridge to control the main engines and boilers, move the ship from a dead halt to top speed of 24 knots within five minutes.

Ingalls is building five more such ships, and New Orleans' Avondale Shipyards is working on twelve highly automated freighters for the Lykes Bros, line, the first of which was christened last week. An automated tanker, the Texaco Rhode Island, has just completed sea trials off Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point yards in Maryland. Several other companies are also building pushbutton vessels. This full turn to automation represents a brave effort by the $2 billion private U.S. shipbuilding industry to regain the seagoing supremacy that it has lost to foreign competitors.

Inflation from Wages. Once first, the U.S. has sunk to tenth place among world shipbuilders, barely ahead of Yugoslavia. Since the end of World War II's building boom, 20 U.S. shipyards have folded, leaving only 21 private yards and eleven Navy yards; the private operators have orders for fewer than 50 merchant ships a year. Meanwhile, world-leading Japan is working on orders for more than 200 merchant ships, and Britain, Sweden and Germany have more than 100 each. Not a single foreign-flag ship is being built in the U.S.; the U.S.'s 15 subsidized lines place their orders at home only because the Government obliges them to do so.

High cost is the principal cause of the U.S. troubles, and wages are a major factor. They average $3.16 an hour in the U.S. v. about $1 in Europe and 73-c- in Japan. Expenses have swollen so fast that a ship such as the United States, built in 1949 for $70 million, would run to some $130 million today. Some U.S. shipyards, including Maine's venerable Bath Iron Works, accept orders at a loss just to keep busy. One result: stocks of U.S. shipbuilders have dropped 40% since 1961.

Invasion from Space. Despite these gloomy figures, Edwin Hood, president of the Shipbuilders Council of America, finds "one development that makes me optimistic." The development: a surprising number of aerospace, electronic and other technically oriented companies are branching into shipbuilding, figuring that their scientific talent and sharp cost accounting can bail out the industry. Ingalls Shipbuilding got a technological fillip when it was acquired three years ago by Tex Thornton's Litton Industries. Aerojet-General recently bought Jacksonville's Gibbs Shipyards, and General Dynamics last January picked up Bethlehem Steel's huge yard at Quincy, Mass. Lockheed's highly efficient subsidiary in Seattle, Puget Sound Bridge & Dry Dock, has raised its payroll from 600 to 4,000 since 1960, expects that its sales will rise 75% this year, to $76 million.

One proof that builders who are shrewd and careful can ride high in spite of low tides has been provided by the Avondale yards, owned by Manhattan Financier Charles Allen's Ogden Corp., a widely diversified industrial complex (scrap iron, mining equipment, etc.). Avondale has developed a unique mobile assembly line for ships, even builds them upside down so that a welder can work in "downhand" comfort instead of a back-aching "overhead" position. In bidding for orders, Avondale's treasurer, Mrs. Hettie Dawes Eaves, employs a computer that figures the costs of 4,000 operations, is far more efficient than the usual method of calculating only 30 different costs. Thanks to its imaginative methods on the line and in the office, Avondale has won 15 of the 39 major ship contracts awarded in the U.S.'s current rebuilding program, has doubled its backlog to $250 million.

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