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He has thoroughly obfuscated his history prior to 1918. At that time, according to testimony put in the Congressional Record, he was working in a cement pouring gang at Muscle Shoals. His superintendent accused him of wartime sabotage He continued to drift around the construction camps, persuaded the chief engineer of Air Nitrates Corp., a subsidiary of the American Cyanamid Corp. that he could build an efficient electric carbide furnace. After dawdling for months he was dropped for nonproduction. (His rodomontade imagination transmutes his Muscle Shoals experience, makes him "chief technician" of the whole project.)