Now, the I spoke Glenn Martin, and Glenn Martin showing me then that the sheet metal workers understood then that the that the same piece of metal can have twice the tensile strength this way than it has that way at 90 degrees, just precessionally. And he said these sheet metal workers know that, but nobody else knows it, so see in Detroit, people start manufacturing steel and think they are going to throw metal in, smashing metal, and they'll put it in the wrong way and the plane is going to come apart. So for every single objection Glenn Martin could get up, FORTUNE also was really just caring about the tycoons and the money makers and so forth they got some scientists to look at the things Martin had said, and the scientists said, "Well, I've got X-ray diffraction, now, I can look at that metal," and tell you exactly where the grain is. And we can have then a tool such as was developed in the making of the razor blades the Gillette Company found they could take sheet, continuous strip metal and they could keep running it through, sharpening it at both edges, so it was a continuous thing, and then chop it into separate pieces, and when they chopped it into separate pieces they needed to do more honing and things like that, so that they then developed the mass production the little pneumatic cups, little tiny tubes that just sucked, that kept picking this thing out of the machines and so forth, so that they saw they could take the machine that would pick up the piece of metal, and with x-ray diffraction know exactly how to orient it to put it into the machine the right way.

There was not a single thing that Glenn Martin and his engineers could say to me, that were reasons that Detroit could never get into mass production of airplanes, that they couldn't find a scientist that would give them some trick that could be played that would make it possible. So for one reason and another the automobile world then was able to convince the American Congress and all the representatives there that Detroit was ideal to produce airplanes. And as I say the Glenn Martins and all these people just shaking their heads it never could be done they thought.

So, we have, Air Force then was forced by the Congress and by the propaganda of Detroit into agreeing that they were going to have Detroit produce their airplanes. So Detroit said, alright Air Force, you've got to have some bombers and fighters, we all know that. And so we want you to design the most modern fighter absolutely go way out, and the most modern bomber and so forth, and then we're going to tool it up.

Now, one of the things I learned in Detroit, in doing the Chrysler Company story, really a very astonishingly important matter. When they, then, do go through all these enormous getting ready of a car with the checks and balances of these people who do have to be satisfied, I say, whether it's the sales departments or the banks so many people involved, finally you get to where you say, "This is the way the car is going to be." So there has to be an absolute cut-off, and now we are going to really tool and the tooling is very, very expensive. So after tooling up, they, incidentally, Detroit allows three years after the design is finished before they produce, so that their cars are always way behind the times by the time they come out, because evolution is much more rapid than that today. At any rate, they had if a car comes out, and something begins to go wrong people find something wrong in it, and they say so then to the distributors they did everything to get the distributor some kind of way he can modify and make the thing alright, but if they found that it really couldn't be done, they really then had to change the production. The Chrysler Company, and all the other automobile companies, had a set of scarlet stationery, and nobody wanted to see that scarlet stationery get out the scarlet stationery called a change order, a change order and they ring bells everywhere, and they fire 10,000 people, literally, there is just an explosion in the automobile game a change order. As I said, everything is done on the scarlet stationery, and so everybody just fears this thing. It is one of the things they breed them they must absolutely fear any change order it must be so thorough before it is done. So, and we learned that, about, because in the end they didn't want any overtime you know overtime costs much too much money, so it's going to take three years to tool up because you must never have one second of overtime, and they do nothing, really, looking out for labor. So, when I then began to combine my experience in what I knew about Chrysler and so forth, and with my own automobile development and getting into the aircraft plants and so forth, and their production needs. I can then tell you a set of events that took place that were very important.

America, then, didn't come into the war right away, but by the time they came in the English and the Germans had been battling for several years, and everything was "who has the air control?" Which was the bombing control of because you couldn't get back if you bombed you could bomb all the production capabilities of the other side, so this air supremacy was the very essence. And the English and the Germans fighting each other saw that if you changed the design a little bit like this, then you could get a little better, so the experience was lethal, but also taught them how to design so both in Germany and in England, design began to really change in a hurry. And they had to develop, really, new tools. One of the things that happened was that Germany and England both realized that you'd better deploy your factories I'm telling you more or less as a side thing here, but I'll come back to the Germans and English deploying their factories but one of the things I learned on the Board of Economic Warfare, because I studied photographs, and photographs and reports photograph after photograph and reports on the bombings of great industrial manufacturing plants.

The walls were an absolute mess just ruined them, and they tumbled down all over everything. You get them cleaned up and then the machinery was usually in very, very good shape. The machinery is not so destructible, but what you simply hurt was the building, so they cleaned the rubbish away, and moved the machinery and put it out in barns, and then they deployed all their operation, so they got little farming families to work at night with the lights all obscured, and they built out in this barn running the punch press. And they had trucks then go round and pick up this and pick up that, and then they had assembly plants. Well you could move the assembly plants pretty rapidly. You had an assembly line under any kind of a barn, some sort of a big building, and you could move that around so anybody wouldn't really know where you were, where you were producing it. Deployment by subcontracting became absolutely fundamental in production, and particularly in that airplane game.

Now, but the big thing was the invention by the Germans and the English of tools that you could make quick changes. They kept inventing ways to change a design rather than producing them exactly the way that they had been, because I said to you, in the great fundamentals of economics and there had been the steel maker who said "the more it rusts, the more I like we don't change" I'll tell you in the great corporations of the world, up to the time of W.W.II, any executive said "We'd like to make a change here, would get fired." The only company where you could do it was Henry Ford's, and he's the one who made the changes. And he loved it, and someone would give him a good idea, he really went after it. But the other companies, no, because you wanted to make money, you didn't want to be spending all your money on all these changes. So this was an anathema in the idea of making money, but essential if you really are going to get somewhere that there would be change. So this freeze up of the Chrysler Company and all the other companies that change order being an anathema, was typical really of sort of a death point of a service to humanity.

Now, so, I said, it brought about all kinds of changes, the deployment of the manufacturing, and they then began to develop the most extraordinary trucks because you are going to have a section of a wing, and this wing could get so all readily hurt. And so then the trucks had there was jig shipping. You didn't have to put the beautiful wing piece in a heavy crate. All shipping up to this time had been there was a great shipping art, anybody who produced any machinery had to learn how you put it together so that it's not going to be hurt while it is being shipped. But suddenly then, designed the trucks themselves, this truck did nothing but carry that airplane wing, it was a beautiful jig shipping that things came into and took care of the loads in exactly the way you could tell, even on the bumpiest road it didn't put that thing into any jeopardy at all, so jig shipping it is called.

Now, there are two things that I speak about, and I'm going to get into a sort of evolution of things that go on here that are very, very important which I think you will find very exciting. The Congress had been persuaded by the same kind of nonsense as that book that I had to write for Chrysler, and they used enormous propaganda, I think they got 125,000 copies distributed right away, and this got then the Congress to make the Air Force give the orders to Detroit. And, I said, Detroit had gotten then, the Air Force had to get out this design of the bomber and this kind of a fighter. So, they tooled up for it, and the kind of planes, then, that the United States was making, to go to Europe to go for our armed forces, that we were then training our armed forces and so forth, and we were going to have to fly these things in Europe. So much was being learned by the Germans and the English in the evolution of the plane was so very rapid, that these planes that were being made in the United States became absolutely obsolete. So they developed in America Detroit would say "we'll take care of that, we'll just have a modification line," so they'd build a second production line and the minute that plane was finished, they brought it up to the head of the production line and it got all rebuilt again. Then by the time they got to England they still were out of date, so in England they set up a new production, the re-modification plant again. And then by the time they literally got into the war, when the Americans came then and did their first bombing strikes and so forth, so many planes were lost that it was absolutely lethal to fly the damn things. And so Detroit said, "that's alright we're just going to we absolutely out-produce those people anyway, so planes are going to get lost, so we'll just out-produce them. Well, at this point, American mothers began to get to the American Congressmen and said "We can't out-produce the kids."

And the Congress, then, suddenly began to become really alarmed at the rate of the killings, and if we were not really ending this there was going to be incredible slaughter. So they simply said to the Air Force, well what should we do. We have been forcing you all the time. So the Air Force said, they found that the contracts had been made the lawyers and people who had worked to get all these contracts for Detroit, there were so many contracts that were so absolutely unbreakable, and all the lawyers by this time were busy on other kinds of war problems, nobody could undo them, so they just simply let Detroit keep manufacturing this junk, and about a quarter of the Air Force, it was said, just to fly them out to the Kansas fields and let them stand there. Get rid of them get them out of the way.

So what the Air Force said, is "We'll move west of the Mississippi all of this was east of the Mississippi. We'll move west of the Mississippi, and they went to where the airplane world had been anyway, where it had been moving to, and so there was Oklahoma, and particularly Wichita, Kansas. And Wichita, Kansas had fourteen aircraft plants, and had them there for a very long time, and they had fourteen air fields. And so they were well known names like Beech and Cessna and so forth, and the Boeing Number Two was there and so forth. So Boeing Number Two got the contract for the new B-29, which really, you had to forget everything, and get something new and get it out in a hurry.

During the design and building of the B-29, the first 100 B-29s that were flown, engineers, scientists and everybody working on them, one million change orders were written, between number one and number 100. One million change orders were written! This was quite a change in industry where you can have a million change orders against one and you're going to fire everybody. This was a very abrupt thing, so that everything that we had inherited, the British were finally able to get America to come in, we were able to inherit an enormous amount of information on the information the intelligence information, what the tools were that the German's were using, and what the English were able to tell us themselves. So that what we did was, at that point, industry was designed to accommodate change. This is a fantastically important point, economically. I know, our American society doesn't know it, World decided it. You really have to be in there in that kind of a game to realize, and also to be as old as I was, to see complete change. Now I saw that change starting, and all these things I am talking about are DESIGN SCIENCE. I saw this changing when I came into Phelps Dodge as Assistant Director in the Research Department after finishing doing my cars. After I finished doing the cars in Bridgeport, I then wrote Nine Chains to the Moon and I was still writing Nine Chains to the Moon when I went into the Phelps Dodge as Assistant Director of Research. I had mentioned to you that in W.W.I, was the first World War, because in dealing with these metals rather than in the vegetation. It was a very different world, and it was to do then with the alloys and particularly then, inanimate energy, waterfalls and so forth, and the ability to generate power and to bring it from here to there by copper. And I mentioned several times now that in one year, 1917, we produced, mined, and refined and put to work more copper in one year than cumulatively had been produced by all of humanity in the whole history of man before. So that copper then being produced this way was very highly feasible due to two inventions that had occurred just before W.W.I. One was FLOTATION and the other one was ELECTROLYTIC REFINING OF COPPER. Flotation made it possible to very quickly refine, and the refining then by electrolysis and depositing the pure copper over here, very great but you had to have a lot of energy for it obviously.