Diesel Dazzle

General Motors, whose car-studded Motoramas have become one of the brightest offerings in auto showmanship, decided last February to bring belated glamour to the plain-Jane diesel engine. Beside Soldier Field on Chicago's lake front, the company strung out eight miles of electrical conduits, laid 500,000 sq. ft. of reinforced paving, built a permanent, 204-ft.-long bridge over busy Lake Shore Drive. This week General Motors was ready to raise the curtain on "Powerama," a $7,000,000, 26-day, seven-day-a-week diesel opera.

In rainbow-colored Dieseland, divers will splash into four feet of water in the world's biggest dump truck (50 tons), and the public will tramp around a host of diesel-propelled attractions ranging from an 85-ton atomic cannon to a 63-ft. shrimp boat. The star of the show: G.M.'s new, 10-car, 400-passenger Aerotrain, which is twice as light and less than half as expensive as conventional passenger cars. To make the diesel debut complete, the company has built a grandstand where 7,000 spectators can watch an hour-long musical (title: "More Power to You"), featuring a top-hatted elephant in a test of strength with a diesel bulldozer (the diesel wins), French acrobats performing from a 70-ft. crane, 35-ton bulldozers doing the mambo, girls posturing on a fishnet held aloft by two giant cranes.

The First Challenge. The diesel has never been big box office before, but, as the world's most efficient internal combustion engine, it has revved up more horsepower in less time than any industrial engine in history. Patented in 1892 by Germany's Rudolf Diesel (who committed suicide in 1913 because he thought his engine had backfired), the first diesel was brought to the U.S. by Beer Baron Adolphus Busch for use in his St. Louis brewery.

Cumbersome and sluggish in its early years, Diesel's engine did not seriously challenge steam until General Motors in Z933 produced the first modern, lightweight diesel. It took World War II to ignite the real development of diesel power. G.M. turned out diesel trucks, tractors, power plants and locomotives by the thousands, provided the U.S. Navy with more diesel power than the entire horsepower of the prewar fleet. Since the war. the diesel has completed its conquest of U.S. railroads. Diesel locomotives now haul 86% of all rail passengers, 84% of all freight, save the railroads $600 million a year in fuel and maintenance. Fifty Class I railroads today are without a single steam engine.

The Second Hundred Million. G.M., which did not start breaking even with diesels until 1940, today is the world's largest maker, has turned out 100 million diesel horsepower, more than the capacity of all the steam-generating plants built by industry during the same period. Burning low-cost oil, diesel engines today propel 49% of all U.S. merchant ships afloat, handle most of the. nation's roughest construction jobs, from road building to rock-crushing. Predicts G.M.'s Harlow H. Curtice: "Within ten years we shall have duplicated the efforts of the preceding 22 ... It took G.M. from 1933 to 1955 to build 100 million diesel horsepower. By 1965 we shall have built the second hundred million."

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