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A. B. See Co. was founded as an elevator repair company in 1883, when elevators were still a rarity, by Alonzo Bertram See, an upstate New Yorker with exceptionally downright opinions even in his teens. He worked for Otis for a while, then set up his own shop in a basement on Manhattan's Centre Street. Thence he moved to Brooklyn and started manufacturing A. B. See elevators. By 1909 Mr. See had a $1,000,000 business, still largely consisting of carriage lifts (for storing carriages in stables) and genteel elevators for four-and six-story brownstone houses. About that time Alonzo See began one of the most distinguished careers among U. S. writers of letters-to-the-editor.
Twin bugaboos of Mr. See were modern trends in education and modern trends in womanhood. In many a testy paragraph he inveighed against 1) the stupidity of school superintendents and pedagogs, who overtaxed their pupils' brains with useless study; 2) the brazen influence of women who demanded equal rights for an inferior sex. So copious and infuriated did Mr. See become that at length he composed a book, published it in 1928 with a bitter title: Schools. Sample thoughts of Mr. See:
"Those in charge of the schools act as if they thought the children had committed some heinous crime which could be expiated only by long years of sadness, mental strain and physical injury."
"If the world had had to depend on the inventive and constructive ability of women, we should still be sleeping on the plains."
Not until he was past 70 did Anti-Feminist See begin to mellow. Last year one of his female cousins persuaded him to give a dinner for 15 leading Manhattan women, with the result that Mr. See announced his conversion, at least to the extent of approving women's colleges.
Meanwhile the A. B. See Co. kept on making elevators first in Brooklyn and then in Jersey City, prospered in its quiet way. Son Alva B. See entered the business after graduating from presumably the least punishing prep school the Sees could find (Blair Academy), worked up to succeed his father as president in 1930. Biggest job the company ever handled was the installation of 24 elevators in New York County Courthouse, cost: $400,000. Its biggest job at present is being done for the Library of Congress. First disclosure of the company's financial status occurred last week when Westinghouse bought it from the Sees for 10,000 shares of common stock, worth $1,490,000 at the market price. Assets of the company were estimated at $1,068,000. Sales in 1936 were $1,650,750, compared to $1,262,293 in 1935. After a loss in 1935 of $73,945, the company made $3,348 last year.
* Navy fliers launched by catapults at an acceleration of five times "gravity speed" temporarily weigh five times as much backward as they ordinarily weigh downward.