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The sellers of electricity, despite their owners' troubles, had another record year. Total kilowatt-hour sales were 11% over 1939; industrial sales were up 16½%, rising weekly. The industry spent more money on new capacity ($580,000,000) than in any year since 1930 ($919,000,000), increasing its installed kilowatts by 1,380,000 net to 40,330,000. It also planned 6,076,000 new kilowatts for 1941 and 1942. The defense-conscious Federal Power Commission wanted them to up that by 1,500,000 kw. But the question was whether Westinghouse and General Electric, already swamped with defense business from a dozen other sources, could find enough skilled labor for such utility expansion.
An executive of U. S. Steel, left out of a fishing trip because he snored, invented an anti-snorer to wake him up when he rolled on his back.
By the time the Great Lakes opened for ore traffic last March, steelmen had made their forecast of the year's demand by letting the price of ore crack (the cracker: Henry Ford) for the first time in steel history. A month later, they dropped the price of steel by $4 a ton too. Their hope was to stay above their break-even point of 55% of capacity. By November they were not only at 96% of capacity, but confronted by an unfamiliar shortage in their coke and ore supplies. They even found themselves accused of not having capacity enough.
For ten years steel's most spectacular moneymaker was cigar-chewing Ernest Weir, whose modern mills put competition back into the steel business. In 1940 he yielded his news value to others. Mr. Weir is a salesman, and in 1940's market all the salesmen went fishing. It was a productionman's show. Shrewd Old Dealer Eugene Grace opened his mouth just wide enough to lap up the cream of the business. He also took the lead in cooperating with the New Deal's exhortations to expand: $100,000,000 worth, half of which was Government money. On the rest, he got a favorable amortization deal from the Treasury for tax purposes.
More remarkable was the case of Republic Steel's Tom Girdler. During the campaign his name was used by Candidate Roosevelt as a synonym for enemy-of-the-people. At year's end, tough Tom Girdler's emissaries were in Washington and Wall Street, working on a deal to carry out one of the President's pet ideas: an integrated steel company on the West Coast (there is none) to supply booming Pacific shipyards.
In a war of planes, the key material is not steel but aluminum. Already harassed by an anti-trust suit that predated even Thurman Arnold, Aluminum Co. of America faced a much more important test of social responsibility in 1940. It entered 1941 with a 380,000,000-lb. market, enough to keep it at capacity. But latest forecast for 1942 is that aircraft alone would need 300,000,000 Ib. It was announced that Aluminum Co. by then would have 825,000,000 Ib. of capacity.