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A serious, studious youth, young Alfred got more pleasure out of telling other children how to play than playing himself.
He disliked such things as fishing because he hated to put the worm on the hook. As a student in a Brooklyn public school he gained a reputation as a minor prodigy.
Special tutoring got him into Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 17, hard work won him his degree in three years instead of four. With the help of his father, he got a job as draftsman in the Hyatt Roller Bearing Co. at Harrison, NJ. John Wesley Hyatt, who had invented celluloid, was trying to make a go of a new bearing, with little success. When the company was about to go on the rocks, Sloan Sr. bought a controlling interest in it, put in his son to run it. For months, it was touch & go whether the company would continue to run.
Helped by a steady stream of checks from Sloan Sr. for the weekly payroll, Sloan Jr.
got through the shirt-losing stage. Then A. P. Sloan Jr. got the mushrooming auto industry interested in his bearing for its axles — automakers had been using an ordinary wagon axle, heavily greased. Soon, Hyatt Bearing was making money hand over fist.
As the auto industry stretched and soared, so did Hyatt. By 1916 Hyatt had a gross capacity of $10,000,000 worth of bearings a year. But A. P. Sloan was worried. His biggest customer was General Motors, which brilliant, mercurial William Crapo Durant had put together by merging a number of auto companies several years before. What if G.M. should decide to make its own bearings? So when Billy Durant offered to buy Hyatt, Sloan jumped at the chance, sold out to Billy Durant for $13,500,000. At 41, with $5,000,000 in his pocket, he might have retired. Not Mr. Sloan. He stepped in as vice president of another Durant creation, United Motors Corp. When Durant merged U.M. with G.M., Sloan became a G.M. vice president.
The Top. He got there just in time to cash in on the 1920 depression, which swept Durant out of the company, almost sank it. The Du Fonts saved it by buying Durant's stock, got bankers to guarantee the payment of the loans. When Pierre du Pont, after acting as president for two and a half years, stepped aside, Sloan slid into his chair. But the Du Fonts kept their stock, now hold 22.7%, virtually a controlling interest. In 1937, Sloan moved up to board chairman.
As head of the biggest U.S. corporation, Sloan has always been an apostle of bigness. He believes that a vast organization, with its money and talent, can make things better and cheaper than a small company. Under his direction, G.M., which had been vast when he moved in, became even vaster. But expansion was not hit or miss. Part of it was something new in the auto industry : a big staff to get all the facts on anything G.M. wanted to do, a bigger research laboratory, under famed Charles F. Kettering, to find out the best way to do it.
Under this spur of research, G.M.
brought forth a string of major auto improvements — four-wheel brakes (which Sloan first saw on a European car), fast-drying Duco paint, Knee-Action springs, etc. They all paid well. As auto sales, notably those of Chevrolet, soared, so did G.M.'s profits. G.M. became the most profitable manufacturing enterprise in U.S. history, paying out to its 400,000 stockholders some $2,700,000 in dividends alone.