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In measuring his success, IBM's new president must stack himself up against his father's impressive record. Since 1929, IBM sales have jumped an average of 14% each year. On his personal score card, Tom Watson Jr. has done even better, with an average gain of 19% for his three years. It is estimated that IBM's gross this year will hit $500 million, and profits will climb to $56 million.
To the Justice Department, International Business Machines is already too big, too successful. It has had a suit pending against the company since 1952, charging it with a 90% monopoly of the tabulating-machine industry; the Government charges that IBM restrains trade through its 1,500 patents and by the fact that it leases its accounting machines instead of selling them. Nevertheless, President Tom Watson Jr. intends to keep on expanding at top speed. By 1960 he confidently expects IBM's sales to climb over the magic $1 billion figure.
The Roads Ahead. In the coming age of automation, unlimited areas for electronic machines will open up for IBM. For office work alone, Tom Watson Jr. sees a vast new field in swift baby computers for small companies. He envisions them in airline and train stations to handle the repetitive job of reservations, in offices to write business letters by drawing on prewritten paragraphs stored away in the brain's memory units.
Beyond office paper work, the entire horizon of factory automation is beginning to open up for electronics. While U.S. industry has always had automatic machines, a whole new family of "feedback" controls is growing up which not only run the machines, but also correct their mistakes, order the machines to rework defective parts until they are perfect. Such feedback controls are the forerunner of real automation. Linked together, they will make automated production lines. A form of the new automation is already at work making telephone relays for Western Electric, acetylene gas and carbide for the National Carbide division of Air Reduction Co., aircraft engines at Curtiss-Wright. Other firms, such as American Smelting & Refining, General Mills, Dunlop Tire & Rubber, have turned to automatic controls to produce everything from bronze castings to printed circuits and foam-rubber mattresses. In the oil industry, automation has advanced to the point where a handful of technicians can run an entire $40 million plant by remote control from a panel of instruments. In some of the newer refineries now under construction, there will even be controls to watch the instruments, run the cracking processes from start to finish without human help. Among the new developments:
¶ Detroit's $250,000 "transfer" machines operated by Ford, Oldsmobile, Chevrolet and Packard, which can turn out a complete engine block on an automated line 100 yds. long and carry it through 500 separate processes. Whenever any part of the machine makes a mistake, a special sensing device halts all work until the mistake is corrected.
¶ A West Coast aircraft company's $1,128,000 contour milling machine, which will soon be built to work any known metal into as many as 18 shapes automatically, correct itself with a feedback control keyed to magnetic tape.