Perfect Hedge

When the Liberty ship James Otis made her trial run off San Francisco's Golden Gate last February, broad-shouldered, 6-ft.-5 Charles E. Moore was in her engine room. His newly acquired Joshua Hendy Iron Works had built the two-story-high, 271,000-lb. reciprocating engine, and Moore was aboard to see how it performed. At the end of the trip he beamed, said: "When it's neither too tight to smell nor too loose to hear, then you can bet a ball of wax it's a damn fine engine."

Moore had reason to beam for he had orders for over 100 such engines. But last week Moore could beam for two other reasons: 1) at his Hendy plant the first of a batch of soft-purring turbine engines was ready for delivery--almost two months ahead of schedule; 2) he is about to spread out to the East through a $3.2-million purchase of substantial Crocker-Wheeler Electric Manufacturing Co. of Ampere, NJ. With this new plant he acquired electric motors and generators essential for turbo-electric drives.

Moore got into ship-engine building after years as a successful West Coast distributor of machine tools and a short stretch spent in Washington as a $1-a-year man in the machine-tool section of OPM. Stifled there by red tape and bungling, he soon left, bought the venerable Sunnyvale (Calif.) Joshua Hendy Iron Works, whose physical assets consisted chiefly of a dilapidated foundry, an assortment machine tools, 35 acres of pear orchard's and some skilled machinists. One of them, Peter McKeand, ground the shaft for the old U.S.S. Oregon. In the spring of 1941 Moore got a contract for twelve reciprocating marine engines. By midsummer, after the shipbuilding program was trebled, Maritime Commission's Jerry Land telephoned Moore and asked if the Hendy works could double its output. Moore boomed: "You might as well ask for 100."

Land did, and Moore hopped a plane for Britain to study engine-building methods. Though the engines he saw there took four to six months to build, he believed he could make them in three and one half days. The British were skeptical. But Moore is now delivering the engines at a rate of one per day. Equally skeptical were old-line turbine builders when Moore decided to branch into that field. But so successful has Moore been that in December two additional turbines of the 48 on order will be delivered.

At this rate one out of every eight merchant ships from U.S. yards next year will be engined by one of Moore's products. But this is not all. By making two kinds of engines Moore believes he has a perfect hedge against the future. For while reciprocating engines are useful now because they are relatively easy to build, they will some day have to be replaced by turbines which yield higher speeds and greater efficiency. Hence Moore figures that his peacetime backlog will be nearly as big as his present one--$125,000,000.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.