And we were in Detroit, and so, they just said, the Chrysler Company in its annual report, it was the report of the Chairman of the Board of Directors, has never done anything more than show balance sheets and what the profits and losses are, and told the stockholders nothing. But they said, we'd like to, we're really getting up a propaganda unit war is coming and we'd like to have the Chairman of the Board write a very exhaustive explanation of the Chrysler Company, and how powerful that Chrysler Company is, what extraordinary controls it has, and how very suited it is, then, for enormous amounts of war work. And this was very much of a propaganda undertaking, and they had spent a million dollars, which is not so much money today, but which was quite a lot at that time, they spent a million dollars setting up a research department. Research departments in Detroit up to that time, Henry Ford had them and so forth, but the other boys, would simply, their research was a "spying" department to find out what Henry is doing, or whatever it is. And, the, so they set up a research department and they asked the engineering department at the University of Michigan to design a research department for them. So they developed a generalized research department, and being a scientific a very, very powerful university, they were then able to find all kinds of scientific tools which could be used in research, and they built a building, with beautiful glass rooms, and tiled each one of these separate rooms, so you could look through the glass and see this laboratory, and then they put all these machines testing everything incredible number of things X-ray diffraction machine, whatever it may be. And they had in, you could walk through the isles of this thing. It was just a showcase, and then there were scientists, obviously, in white coats, and so these scientists in white coats were taken on from the university.

So when I was asked then, to write this book, incidentally, they bought some really very beautiful research equipment. And, so, it turned out, when I wrote my book, I did really write about the comprehensive undertaking of producing cars, and so forth, and got down then to getting tooled up, and I found they had a term out there in the automobile world after you get your tools they start smashing metal that 's the expression they use "smashing metal." Like a farmer says "I'm going to go out hoeing," well you're smashing metal now your tooled up. And, that is really the general picture you get, you have such beautiful tools just smash it and it comes out alright anyway.

Now, the, I wrote my book, and you can get that book, and it was called NEW WORLDS IN ENGINEERING. But, I don't, I never had anything I took pride in I had more of a sense of shame about, at any rate. I wrote as earnestly and honestly as I could about this whole thing. Then, their public relations department, and the name I will not necessarily give you, but the man who founded it also had been very privy and part of that Dillon-Reed business I spoke to you about of getting to the air brush and industrial design, and deceiving the public. At any rate, their public relations people sat on top of they had arranged with FORTUNE MAGAZINE to loan me, and they sat right on top of Larry and myself very hard. I had, I got a beautiful light photographer, on LIFE MAGAZINE, George Kaga and we did make incredibly good indoor photographs. It was difficult to do in those days. The blackness, the absorption of light inside of the big factories was such that you had to have, when he wanted to go he had a whole carload of klieg lights brought from California, from Hollywood to make pictures, and we did really get superb pictures. Years later in LIFE MAGAZINE they published the whole of that story, because we did get as good a picture as you could possibly get of really the manufacturing of automobiles, and what all the controls are.

Now, I wanted to identify the functioning , they wanted me to do something about this research department, I was identifying the function of the researcher in relation to all the production there, and in my story, then, I said that this man, I showed the things he could do, and I explained exactly how the tools and the instruments worked, and what kind of information you could get, and I showed that he could really save the Chrysler Company millions of dollars and so forth. I said so, and they, the public relations department said, they red penciled that, they said "You can't possibly say that or this man is going to ask for a raise." We can't have any such thing as that! The whole of management was absolutely all the workers and everybody absolute enemy. They treated them as enemy. And they really detested their workers, and I could not say a worker was doing anything good, or out it went. And every time they came to something that I said that they didn't like, they would just cross it and they left a space there, and in the middle of my text it would say, Chrysler also sells Diesel Marine Engines. They kept putting little advertising skits leaving out my words, not trying to make the sentence get together again, just in would come this nonsense, so, at any rate, this really was quite an insight into a great corporation, and within the Chrysler Company, they did not admit there was even a Ford Company. Let alone that Walter Chrysler might ever know that I had a car, that he was my friend, nobody else ever invented a car except Walter Chrysler, that's all. There was only one invention of the automobile. He invented the automobile. And that's the way it was as a public relations dictum.

I went out to the different executives houses, they asked me to go out and see them, and they wanted a write up of those executives and so forth and they were out at Grosse Pointe, and they had great big stone houses, very fancy, and as we were driving up, I see a man out there cutting the lawn, and when I rang the bell there was quite a little wait, and suddenly a man appears at the front door, and he and his wife, they had no servants, but they put on the act as though there were a great many servants around, and I got into their library, and I found that all the libraries were just printed backs of books there were no books behind them and so forth. They simply, literally, were doing the whole idea of Detroit thing had gone that bad. It was a complete sham.

Now, being as intimate as I really was with producing cars myself and having had Walter Chrysler and during the days of the big automobile companies wanted to make my car and then discovered they couldn't make it, that the banking system wouldn't allow them to do it, I did complete that for you alright didn't I? I did really see a great deal of those automobile companies, and I would guess as Science and Technology Consultant for FORTUNE MAGAZINE, and then my job as Head Mechanic of Engineering of the Board of Economic Warfare, I think I have possibly for one reason or another, had to inspect more manufacturing establishments than anybody you've ever known. And I really got to see the evolution, or feel the evolution of the tools come along. And incidentally, at the present time you really can't the invisible revolution you just see green boxes now. You used to be able to really see and feel what the tool was doing, but you can't anymore. So now, that really gets you into this kind of education that we're getting into, where a man gets to be a physicist and so forth, and he has become very much of a specialist inside that green box, and society is not seeing it, so this is all the more reason why society has to have the kind of insights I am trying to give you and that is one reason why I feel a terrific responsibility in doing this picture with you. To have to try, to have to feel this thing what happened before it went invisible.

So I said to you, I realize that once the computer is there, people will not have the advantage I had of actually seeing the figures go round. I wouldn't have made many of the discoveries I had if I hadn't had to do it long hand. Doing it long hand was a tremendously valuable experience.

Now, this brings me then to, I did it in FORTUNE MAGAZINE in 1940, the same year that I was doing Sperry Company and doing Chrysler and doing things like that. I worked on did the story of Glenn Martin of Martin Aircraft down in Baltimore, which is no more, and they were producing Sikorsky I was up at Bridgeport, and I got to know Sikorsky quite well. When I was producing my car, then he liked my car very much. At that time all Sikorsky made were amphibious, they were flying boats, and he made the flying boats for Pan American Airways they were, there was a great deal, pretty much all the transoceanic such as it was, was all in flying boats. You got bigger and bigger boats, and then Sikorsky was purchased by United Aircraft, and the Pratt and Whitney, United Aircraft owned Pratt and Whitney, and produced the Sikorsky they were flying boats. It was not until 1944, that Sikorsky demonstrates his helicopter. So that helicopter of Sikorsky's is in a sense a very new venture. They were flying boats, but the best of the big flying boats were made by Glenn Martin down in Baltimore, and so there was a great thought that W.W.II is looming, and so the boats are going to be terribly important. There was no idea of the kind of advance we were going to have in airplane engines and so forth where you wouldn't have to worry about the short water hops, and nobody knew we were going to build the kind of airports that we built during W.W.II, so the water was very important up to that time.

Now Glenn Martin's factory in Baltimore, Glenn Martin himself was, he was during W.W.I, the one who began to make bombers that was big planes in contradistinction to fighting planes and just observation planes. And Glenn Martin was a very great designer great friend, incidentally, of Starling Burgess who I then had done much work with, and Glenn Martin, when I came down with FORTUNE to do that story on Martin Aircraft and the reason that FORTUNE was doing it was that W.W.II is looming, and there was great talk on the part of Detroit about they are now going to take this enormous production capability they had, and the Chrysler Company, for instance, they wanted to turn out the airplanes. They said everybody is going to have it's going to be an air war and you're going to have that. So Chrysler actually became diverted into tanks. They became the great tank makers, and other companies got into the airplanes General Motors and Ford and so forth.

Now, we have the Glenn Martin did everything possible to show me during our research work at Glenn Martin's plant that it would be absolutely impossible for the automobile companies to ever the Detroit kind of production to ever enter into the production of an airplane. So he gave us all the arguments why it can't be done. He showed us then the sheet metal worker. And sheet metal workers, by the way, are, at my Bridgeport plant when I was producing my car, that was an aluminum body. That aluminum body is hammered out of sheet aluminum. It is possible to hammer steel or aluminum sheet and make it into curvature. You start hammering here and you start stretching it here just keep spreading out a little. These men don't know it, but what happens is they are pushing atoms around because the atoms have critical proximity one with another, you can push them around and they still hold onto the other atoms, so one of the things that really surprised me and I really got into working metals that you can take metal and "gather" it, you can start with a sheet and make it dump into a chunk, or you can spread it out.

Now, the atoms could roll around on one another to get stacked up or to be thinned out again. Now, in the producing my car in Bridgeport, the great hammer man I had was a Pole. And the Poles were THE hammer men. In Bridgeport things were supported it was really one of THE great mechanics towns of America in the early days, at the time of W.W.I, it was THE great ammunition area, and inland we have Springfield Guns and things like that, but Bridgeport was an enormous war town.

I found, Sikorsky used to lend me people at Bridgeport when I needed I'm making my car, I'm using flexible steel cables, and I want to splice them. To really have strength you have to know to splice flexible aircraft steel wires together is really an extraordinary art. And, again, only a Pole could do that. Somehow or other the Poles have very special metal work, and my hammer man, all the hammer men were Poles. And this became, we can find, from the old armor making came through ages of making the breast plates and things like that. They were the great experts the Polish craftsmen. I found that this was really a very interesting thing, as I began to know my industry, and do prototyping work. After the time I built my car in Bridgeport all those tool men and metal workers all moved west because they were needed in prototyping of research in Detroit got a lot, and they went even further into California they went wherever the airplane companies were, but a certain amount were used in Detroit. And very few were making experimental cars. My friend Bill Stout who produced the first tri-motor aluminum airplane for Henry Ford, then built his Scarab car I told you, after being very excited by my Dymaxion Car, and he had at his little plant beautiful sheet metal workers. And I needed to have some sheet metal work done later on, which we will come to my bathroom, because I wanted then to develop prototypes in copper sheet, and copper sheet is particularly good because, steel will get harder and harder and more difficult to anneal. Copper you can anneal it if you just keep working and working it, just a little bit of heat and it goes practically back into jelly form, and it just never gets tired. Many of the other metals get tired, and they build up a fatigue, and after you've worked them enough they are going to just crack apart. But copper would not do it, so it was a particularly good metal for doing prototyping work, if you wanted to get something shaped out, or maybe if you were going to produce it in plastic or something, but for your main shaping copper is ideal. So I did develop my first mass production bathroom in copper sheet. But I had to go to Detroit for hammer men, whereas there were available in Carbon in Bridgeport Connecticut in the '30's. By the time it got to the early '30's Late '30's they had all moved west.