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¶ The Army's ordnance plant at Parsons, Kans., which turns out 2,400 shell fuses each hour on a production line run by automatic controls. As each part flows onto the assembly line, special controls check the part to see that it is positioned perfectly, then send it on for automatic assembly of the parts into shell fuses.
The Golden Age. Total automation is a long step away. But the prospects for mankind are truly dazzling. Automation of industry will mean new reaches of leisure, new wealth, new dignity for the laboring man. The coalpit worker, the steel puddler, and those who do many maintenance jobs on an assembly line can surrender to self-controlled electronic machines the hazards and dullness of backbreaking menial work. Thus liberated, the world's laboring man can find a new pleasure and culture in life.
Actually, automation is not a threat against jobs, but a real necessity for an expanding economy. Despite the progress towards office automation, businessmen must move even faster to keep up with the mountain of paper work growing out of the increasing complexity of production and industry. To date, only 5% of office work is done by automatic machines. There is no reason in IBM's mind why businessmen could not mechanize more than 35% of their office work. This would not only speed it up but save billions of dollars.
In the same way, industry must speed up automation in factories. By 1965, if the standard of living is to keep on rising, the U.S. will require at least a 50% increase in gross national product. By then, the U.S. population will hit 190 million, but since much of it will consist of school-age children and oldsters, there will actually be relatively fewer effective workers in the labor force. To keep up with production requirements, U.S. industry must rely on more automation. Can the breach be filled? IBM and its team of Watsons have no doubt it will be. Says Tom Watson Sr.: "In the next 40 years we will accomplish so much more than in the past 40 that people will wonder why we didn't do more in the first 40."
*Sample Lines: With hearts and hands to you devoted, And inspiration ever new; . . . We will toast a name that lives forever, Hail to the IBM.
*Among his 168 activities: trustee of Columbia University and Lafayette College, International Commissioner of the Boy Scouts, member of the Carnegie Fund, National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, Y.M.C.A., a director of three other corporations.