(See Cover)
One drizzly afternoon last week Patrick Morgan O'Laughlin pressed a buzzer. Workmen at the Dravo Corporation, on Neville Island near Pittsburgh, knocked the blocks out from under a squat, flat-bottomed craft perched on the ways in Dravo's west yard. A tank landing ship slid down the smoking ways into the Ohio River.
Workmen on the 8:30 a.m.-to-4:30 p.m. shift cheered, picked up their lunch pails, went home. Workmen on the next shift were already swarming around a second, identical craft perched on the ways. Paddy O'Laughlin, swearing lustily, pressed another buzzer. Down to the river slid the second ship. Chortled tough, wiry Mr. O'Laughlin, who started his career as a rivet "cooker," rose to become general superintendent of the Dravo yards: "I'm so happy I feel like going home and beating up my wife."
All over the U.S. last week, superintendents, foremen, brass hats, workmen in the shipbuilding industry shared Mr. O'Laughlin's elation. Last week Donald Nelson announced that U.S. war production had increased 350% since Pearl Harbor, but his figure does not apply to the shipbuilding industry. Since Pearl Harbor, shipbuilders have increased production roughly 700%.
In 1940 U.S. yards delivered 53 cargo ships, a total of 634,234 deadweight tons; in 1941, when the Liberty ship program got under way, 95 cargo ships, 1,088,497 deadweight tons; from January to April 1942, as much as during the whole of 1941; by the end of August, 367 ships, 4,882,415 deadweight tons. (By contrast, in World War I, U.S. yards, building smaller, poorer ships, delivered not a single cargo vessel of the wartime program until after the war was ended.)
This huge increase is not due merely to huge effort. It is due primarily to a technological revolution. The most interesting figure in that revolution is a dour-visaged man who watches it with gloomy satisfaction from a waterfront office in Manhattan. His name is William Francis Gibbs—known solemnly to his friends as William Francis. Lawyer, engineer and head of Gibbs & Cox, he is the top U.S. naval architect and marine engineer. His firm designed Paddy O'Laughlin's landing ships. It designed the Liberty ships. It has designed merchant ships, destroyers, tankers, cruisers. It designs means of building them swiftly and efficiently. It lays down their specifications and in many cases orders the materials.
The job that William Francis Gibbs's firm does is titanic. A destroyer requires some 20,000 tracings. Every day Gibbs & Cox turns out from 8,000 to 10,000 blueprints, 26 acres of blueprints a month. On one multiple order of ships they may issue 6,700 purchase orders daily. Not a day goes by that the company does not contract for at least $1,000,000 worth of materials.
The Year One of the revolution was 1940, when the Maritime Commission asked Designer Gibbs to draw plans for a cargo ship that would be as simple as an iron pot, that could be mass-produced. Gibbs & Cox was supervising the construction of nearly such a ship for the British at two U.S. yards. Gibbs & Cox adapted it for the Commission. This was the Liberty ship and the beginning of the Gibbsian revolution.