Since Knudsen had, until recently, been president of the General Motors Corporation, we saw little hope of interesting him in diverting Buick or Chevrolet to aircraft-engine production just yet. For our automobile manufacturers still remembered the treatment given them back in 1918 when, after the Armistice, their war contracts had been ruthlessly canceled—torn up like so many scraps of paper—and their “war profits” had vanished from view except in the news headlines of the next twenty years. It would take some doing to persuade Bill Knudsen to our cause, and even Bill Knudsen would have his work cut out to get his automotive friends on the beam. As a matter of fact, without Bill Knudsen it could never have been done in time.
For Bill was animated throughout his wartime service by a great motive. He had come to the Land of the Free a penniless immigrant, and had there won not alone riches but the respect and esteem of the great men of the land. And whatever the generation which had inherited liberty might think about it, Bill Knudsen knew what liberty meant; his whole being was imbued with a love for the country of his adoption, with a devotion to the spirit which animated it and an intense zeal to pay back in part some of the privileges it had extended him. And so deeply was this zeal imbedded in his character and so honestly did he seek to pay back his debt that even men grown cynical under the lash of government were impelled to go along. His simple fundamental character combined with his native wit and intelligence gave Bill Knudsen such qualities of leadership at the very moment they were most needed.
The day Fred Rentschler and I walked in on him, we found him leaning over a plain table pawing around among some engine parts with George Mead and Henry Crane. “Uncle Henry” Crane, one of the great engineers of the automotive industry, had been called in for a conference over the failures of the Allison liquid-cooled engine. While Fred and I cooled our heels waiting for experts to decide upon what design changes were necessary to make the Allison run, before they could discuss policy with us, we thought we saw a certain irony in the situation. For the Allison engine was the power plant that had taken the business away from our 1830 engine in the critical months of 1939 when that one contract meant so much to Pratt and Whitney.
When, finally, it came our turn, we broke the news to Bill Knudsen that, with the completion of the new American addition in Hartford, we would reach a saturation point in Hartford and must look elsewhere for new facilities. Bill knew that Wright Aeronautical planned to build a big new shop somewhere in Ohio and presumed, of course, we would go and do likewise, but when we explained the differences in our two situations, he understood. Wright Aero had been formed out of the consolidation of two big engine companies, Curtiss and Wright, and had more topside staff than Pratt and Whitney. Guy Vaughan was still its president, but Don Brown had died. Now when we mentioned licensing the automotive companies, Bill’s first question was who did we have in mind. When we told him Ford, he at first shook his head, but when we stressed the point that selling Uncle Henry was his job and that no one except he and George Mead could do it, Bill Knudsen reluctantly agreed to try.
And Bill and George succeeded. Within a few days we received word that Ford Motor would send a group of shopmen to look over the job and see what could be done. Bill Knudsen, familiar with the Ford setup, had suggested that the machinery in the great Ford tool room, along with some six thousand men employed there, would take the Pratt and Whitney job in its stride. To automotive men, the aircraft industry still looked something like the ancient “carriage trade,” and they discounted our insistence that our standards of quality and precision were not easily come by in the mass-production industries.
Edsel Ford and Charles Sorenson met with Fred Rentschler and me in the boardroom in East Hartford. Sorenson did most of the talking, though Edsel Ford was president of the company. A rough-and-tumble shopman of the Ford school of give and take, Sorenson wasted few words. His men had looked the shop over and found nothing complicated about it—nothing they didn’t savvy. The machine tools seemed standard and the processes excellent. At first his boys had thought the job looked easy, but the more they had seen of our precision, the more they had become impressed with the task before them. At first they had thought we might be overdoing the quality but after a look at the test-shed running and studying the high demands for durability and dependability, they had changed their minds. They realized it was a tough racket but were prepared to go ahead on two conditions.
First, they would have to adopt our technique in every detail and even have to build a complete new aircraft-engine shop; the idea that their tool room would serve was fantastic, the machines wouldn’t do at all. Second, they would have to have access to our suppliers and subcontractors for parts; they could not find other sources of supply. He presumed, of course, that we would give them every assistance and even detail our foremen and leading men to duty in the Ford shops as necessary.
Sorenson’s requirement as to our suppliers posed a problem; most of them were already overloaded. Some like Wyman Gordon, of Worcester, source of our crankshaft and other forgings, were already suppliers to the automotive industry, and could shift their production from autos to aircraft. This had been a long-time feature of our war plans and it applied to many of our parts. On the others we would share the output with Ford and join him in creating new sources. With that decision we all shook hands and it was a deal.
One thing that had impressed the Ford people was the vast difference between the aircraft and automotive processes. Our production was based on the use of standard machine tools; we had few of the special single-purpose machines designed for low-cost volume production of automobiles. Our practice had been deliberately adopted for several reasons. In expanding for war-emergency production we could expect machine tool builders rapidly to expand delivery of standard machines, where special machines would require much longer. Again, whereas automotive production could be standardized for reasonable periods, in aircraft engines we must be able to incorporate every new design change without seriously retarding production. To accomplish this, we had fitted special jigs and fixtures to our standard machines; for a design change we could scrap the fixtures but keep the machines running. No such flexibility as this could be had with the special machines of the automotive shops, and Sorenson’s crew had spotted this right away. In fact, if anyone thought we could learn much about production from the automotive boys, he soon found it was the other way around. They learned from us our secret of aircraft war production, the revolutionary idea of flexibility in volume.
Along with this idea we had developed the aircraft-type assembly of components. Instead of using a conveyer to regulate production rates, we used it to transport materials to the assembly points. Here the workers built up complete units or subassemblies and inspected them on the spot. Aside from the flexibility thus introduced, the idea had an impact on our production workers. We did away with the deadly monotony of repetitive processes, by feeding to the operators such precisely machined parts that even the unskilled could assemble finished devices and test their functioning. And now as we lost our experienced workers to the armed forces and began replacing them with recruits from the white-collar trades, we found this gave a tremendous boost to shop morale. In the development of this process, I found myself thinking frequently of the scene in Charlie Chaplin’s picture where he finally uses both hands and both feet to feed nuts and washers into the ever-moving and compelling assembly.