Yankee ingenuity in the war

Front matter

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Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The mobilization of science and industry ... i

II. The Liberty motor 14

Author's Preface

In presenting this report of some of the more striking and inspiring examples of the technical achievements of America that went so far toward the winning of the Great War, the author wishes, first, to point out that the omission of any mention of the great scientific and engineering feats of the Entente Allies, except incidentally, is due not to any desire to disparage the magnificent work of those European masters of pure and applied science whose service in the cause of humanity was surely no less fruitful and even more arduous than that of their American confreres. But the whole scope and plan of this book, by its nature, excludes from present consideration all but distinctly American enterprise in this field.

Even within this comparatively narrow range, there is no pretext that the whole field has been covered, or that what has been covered might not have been dealt with more in detail and with greater scientific precision. Eventually that will be done; beyond a doubt the complete history of science in the war, yet to be written, will reveal a thousand wonders much more marvelous than any that have yet been set down. This volume, however, has not been written for the scientist or the technologist, but for the average American, neither skilled nor interested in technical details, but susceptible, the author believes, to the thrill of patriotic pride that comes from the recital of the story of a winning fight against heavy odds.

Since the signing of the armistice there has developed a marked tendency among Americans to disparage our country's part in the war, to accept as true slanderous statements and inuendoes, set afloat by the country's enemies and those traitors of our own people who never really desired the defeat of the Central Powers, and repeated

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

and kept alive by the unthinking who love to roll juicy bits of gossip under their tongues. On every hand one hears it stated, and accepted as fact, that America's whole participation in the Great War was a huge failure; that our military and naval machine failed to function, and that our equipment, from airplanes to submarines, was worthless and insufficient.

If this book shall prove in any slight degree an offset to such falsehoods and distortions of truth and a counterblast to the calumniators of our country and our countrymen's achievements, the author will feel amply repaid for the time and labor that have been expended upon its preparation. It has been a labor of love, in which he has felt the same patriotic pride that he hopes his work may inspire in every true American, and especially in those Americans of the future — the boys of to-day — to whom our country must look for the fulfilment of its great destiny in the reshaping and rebuilding of the world.

The author takes this occasion to express his thanks to the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, the chairman of the Committee on Public Information and the members of its staff, all of whom, throughout the period of the war and afterward, so freely provided him with the keys and passwords that enabled him to penetrate behind the scenes, as it were, and see for himself what Yankee ingenuity was really accomplishing. He acknowledges his indebtedness, also, to the many officers of the army and navy who so fully and freely aided in every possible way in the collection both of information and of illustrations. He owes a word of appreciation, also, to the editors of Harper's Magazine, The World's Work, Popular Science Monthly, Motor Life, The New York Herald, The Sun, and The New York Times for courteous permission granted to include in this volume several chapters and parts of chapters which have previously appeared in the pages of their publications.

Frank Parker Stockbridge.

New York, March 3, 1920.

THE MOBILIZATION OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY

THE war that came to an end with the signing of the armistice on November n, 191 8, differed from all previous wars principally in that it was a contest of brains much more than it was a contest of brute force. Machines counted for more than men; minds for more than muscle; the only really doubtful question, after the first surprise shock had been successfully resisted by the Allies and the war settled down to a life-and-death struggle, was whether the technical resourcefulness of England, France, Italy, and America, and the ingenuity of the scientists and engineers of these countries, could match and overmatch the scientific and technical resources of the enemy.

The beginning of the war marked the climax of an era of scientific research, discovery, and invention that had made the half -century that ended in August, 1 9 14, the most marvelous chapter in the record of man's conquest of the forces of nature. It was the half -century that gave to the world the electric light, the telephone, the bicycle, the automobile, the motion picture, the phonograph, the X-ray, the wireless telegraph, the airplane, and the submarine. And for forty or more of the fifty years Germany had been cunningly appropriating, adapting, and exploiting these and a thousand other inventions and discoveries, the fruits of the research of the world's greatest intellects, until she had convinced herself and had all but persuaded the rest of the world that she, and she alone, held the master-key that would unlock the treasure-house of science and render its riches available for the service of mankind. So steeped were the Germans in their own conceit that they believed no material resources competent to cope with theirs could be marshaled against them; theirs was the last word in mechanics, in chemistry, in engineering; of what they did not have the rest of the world must be in ignorance.

It is a source of tremendous satisfaction to be able to record the completeness with which Germany's vaunted leadership in the world of science and invention has been overthrown, shattered, and demolished. What literally and actually happened was that Germany was crushed and broken by means of scientific discoveries and inventions so far superior to her own that she could not cope with nor resist them. Germany had for forty years been marshaling her technical resources for the conquest of the world; what Germany did not realize was that, instead of being exhausted, the technical resources of the rest of the world were practically inexhaustible and needed only the stimulus of necessity to be called into action, with overwhelming consequences to those who first provoked the war.

The war was won, in fact, by Yankee ingenuity in the application of scientific knowledge and technical skill to military and naval ends. From the very beginning of the struggle in 19 14, nearly three years before the United States became a belligerent, the Allies relied upon America for their entire supply of many kinds of munitions of war and for a large proportion of almost all of their essential weapons. When America came into the war our government mobilized, not only an army of fighting-men, but a scientific, technical, and industrial army the like of which had never before been assembled.

We had everything that Germany had and one thing that Germany did not have, the organizing and directing genius of American manufacturers, which had found its highest expressions in peace times in the method of making standardized articles of high quality in huge volume and at low cost, the peculiarly American method known as "quantity production."

When America finally entered the war and threw its gigantic resources into the scale the seat of war shifted from the Hindenburg line to the factories of Bridgeport, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, and a thousand other American cities. The war became a contest of machine power as much as of man power. It was not only a question whether the Allies could hold Verdun, but whether Squantum could build destroyers faster than Hamburg could turn out submarines, Bridgeport produce more cartridges in a given time than Koln. The outcome of the war was the direct result of American quantity production applied to the manufacture of munitions.

Quantity production is the manufacturing method that educates the tool as well as the mechanic and puts the power of a thousand horses and the skill of a thousand brains at the command of a single pair of hands. We have all seen the result ; I have tried to tell in these pages something about many of the more interesting and spectacular achievements in the way of quantity production, as well as to describe specific and particular inventions and applications of scientific knowledge that helped us to defeat Germany. But even such an impressionistic picture, painted, as

A THREE-INCH GUN IN ACTION

So rapidly did Yankee artillerymen learn to shoot the three-inch gun that the

discharged shell did not reach the ground before the next charge was ready to fire.

"Let me see your three-inch machine-guns," a captured German requested. He

could not believe they were single-shot guns.

it must necessarily be within the limits of a single

volume, in the broadest of brush strokes, cannot

convey an adequate sense of how big the job we did

really was, how terrific the strain of the battle against

time, without at least a peep behind the scenes, as it

were. 2

I went to Detroit in the summer of 1918 to see for myself how American manufacturers were conducting their part of the war. I chose Detroit rather than Bridgeport or Cleveland or Chicago because Detroit is the foremost exponent in its industries of quantity production. I found Detroit performing mechanical miracles. One who could have looked unmoved upon the marvels of creative achievement then already in being must have been lacking in imagination or sensibility, or both.

Probably the business men of Detroit would resent the imputation if one were> to call them poets, but if the essence of poetry be the power to conceive grandly and to express grand concepts with rhythmical force, no other term fits them. There was no escaping the sense of titanic fancy, expressing itself in Homeric measures, in the face of what I found these business men doing. Dollars do not drive men to such heights of accomplishment ; war, not business, was the source and mainspring of these vast projects and their still vaster execution. Detroit was not thinking or talking of profits. "It is not fashionable to make money out of war," one of her business leaders expressed it. Many expected to come out millions poorer than they went in, and were glad that it was so.

Detroit's story could be duplicated in many cities. Wherever munitions were made men threw themselves and their enterprises wholly and unhesitatingly into the war, placid pastures were changed overnight into clangorous cities. The things Detroit showed me I could have found, or their parallels, in Bridgeport or Newark or Dayton. They would have pointed the same moral, for everywhere the story was the same. Miracles were performed everywhere, but at terrific cost in money, in labor, in strain and effort to make up lost time.

- Take, as an example, the case of the Dodge Brothers,

THE AMERICAN THIRTY-FIVE-TON TANK PROPELLED BY A LIBERTY MOTOR, BALANCED ON THE BRINK OF AN EMBANKMENT merely because their experience and achievement are typical of what occurred everywhere. They have been building automobile engines for years, cars complete for some years. Their big organization is geared to quantity production in all that that implies. When we went to war they went to Washington and offered themselves and their organization. "We can make anything," they said. "What do you need?"

Washington didn't know what it needed that the Dodge Brothers could make. It was autumn before they were sent for.

' ' Can you make recoil mechanisms for one-hundred-and-fifty-five-millimeter howitzers?" the War Department asked.

' ' Yes, ' ' said the Dodge Brothers. ' ' What are they ?"

"They are something like this," replied the War Department, showing them a French piece, "only we've improved them. Here are our drawings. You work from these. Give us so many thousand by such a date."

They did not wait to ask questions, but hurried back to Detroit to evolve a plant out of nothing, to create designs for machines and build them.

That was on November i, 191 7. In early June, 1 9 1 8, I went through their ordnance plant and saw them turning out the first of the finished pieces. Let me try to convey a faint impression of the miracle the Dodge Brothers had worked in the intervening seven months.

First you must realize that the recoil mechanism of a modern field-gun or howitzer is not only one of the most ingenious devices ever conceived in the mind of man, but it must be more accurately fashioned to precise dimensions than any other object of its size and weight. To make one you take a ton and a half of steel in a single billet eight feet long. Lengthwise of this you bore four holes from about three to more than four inches in diameter; two run all the

YANKEE INGENUITY IN THE WAR o

way through, two half-way. Then you shape the outside of the billet, carving it down at some places to a thin wall around the holes, leaving it in a rigid mass at other points. You hew out of its side a recess the size of a soap-box. You fashion grooves and lands, channels and projections, on various surfaces. By this time you have six hundred pounds of metal left; the rest has gone into the scrap-heap. Now you must finish this, grind it smooth, polish it inside and out, and when it is all done every dimension must register to within one two-thousandth of an inch; the bore and the line of the eight-foot holes, the angles of the recess, the thickness of the walls, must be accurate to the infinitesimal fraction of a hair!

The Dodge Brothers owned a vacant piece of pasture-land on the outskirts of Detroit; and there they decided to erect their plant. They could only guess at the size, for they couldn't tell offhand how many or how large the machines and tools would have to be and there was not a second to lose. It is a saying in Detroit that they have but three seasons — ■ July, August, and winter. Unless the building could be put up before the heaviest frosts it must wait till spring — and our army needed six-inch guns. So the Dodge Brothers staked out twelve acres and on November 19th began to lay a foot of concrete over the whole of it; they couldn't get a contractor to accept the job. With the thermometer most of the time many degrees below zero, there was finished in four months a huge building, 850 by 600 feet, steel-framed, brick-walled, concrete-roofed; roads were graded and trolley lines extended, a new electricpower substation built — a million dollars or so of the Dodge Brothers' own money spent merely for the housing of a plant that so far existed only in the mind's eye, for a factory building is not yet a manufacturing plant.

Machinery was scarce and hard to get. One officer of the company spent three months and five and a half million dollars buying machinery and getting it moved toward the new plant. To bore the four holes in one operation a machine had to be devised. Mechanical engineers and draftsmen worked it out, and seventy-two machines were built — huge devices costing many thousands each. Nobody stopped to estimate cost; speed was what counted. Then came the most delicate and difficult work of all, the designing and making of the tools, the actual cuttingheads for fashioning the steel into shape. All the machinery does is to serve as the mechanical hands to hold and operate the cutting-tools. Every tool must be drafted to the exact size and shape of the cut to be made in the steel, then fashioned from high-speed steel by the highest paid and most skilful mechanics, the toolmakers. I saw a milling-machine cutting-head in operation that cost nearly one thousand dollars in labor alone, and there were dozens exactly like it. This tool performs only one of the forty or fifty operations necessary to fashion the rough billet into the recoil-mechanism bed.

Have I made it clear what quantity production involves in money, time, brains, and labor before a single finished article can be turned out? It took seven months and seven million dollars before the first recoil mechanism could be delivered. Yet its manufacture involved no new principles, no methods with which Detroit (and I include all American manufacturers) had not been perfectly familiar for years .

YANKEE INGENUITY IN THE WAR n

What the Dodge Brothers did hundreds, possibly thousands, of other American manufacturers did in as- many other items of the vast number of things that had to be made to carry out our war program and equip our fighting forces.

Through this sort of co-operation, there has come about a better understanding between the government at Washington and the business men of the nation. Washington has a clearer comprehension of the difficulties and the problems of the business man, and the business men of the country have acquired new knowledge and respect for Washington's point of view and ways of doing things, and for the men of science who played so important a part in our war preparations. In a hundred different fields of applied science, business men who had spent their lives in particular lines of industry found, when they undertook to do war work for the government, that the methods they had found good enough for business purposes were not good enough for government purposes, but had to be adapted, refined, and improved to meet specifications drawn up by the scientific experts from the universities and research laboratories, who had been called into the service of the nation, put into uniforms, and given the opportunity to make practical application, in uncounted instances for the first time, of the principles which their research and experiments had demonstrated to be in advance of current knowledge in the trade.

At first the theories of the business man and the facts of the scientists, who are seldom concerned with theories, but who do insist upon facts, frequently clashed. The scientists were in uniform, however, with bars and oak leaves and eagles on their shoulders, and when they gave orders they had to be obeyed.

And before very long a good many thousands of "practical" men began to discover that a lot of the things they had always done had been done very badly indeed; that a lot of things they had always maintained couldn't be done could be done, and were better than the old ways. They began to have a new respect for the men whom they had f ormerly addressed somewhat contemptuously as "professor," but whom \_they now saluted as "captain"!

The whole wonder-story of our country's scientific and technical war achievements may never be told; fragments of it will continue to be told, piecemeal, for a generation to come. In the perspective of history these things that American industry, inventiveness, and ingenuity accomplished in the brief space of eighteen months will rank with our most glorious achievements by land and sea; they were no less essential to the winning of the war and hardly less heroic. The full disclosure of these things, many of them among the most carefully guarded military and naval secrets while hostilities were in progress, will furnish also the final convincing, clinching proof that German claims to scientific and technical leadership are based on nothing but egotism and moonshine.

Enough can now be told to make it clear that we have taken forward steps in the application of science to the uses of humanity, forced by the pressure of war necessity, that might not have been taken in fifty or a hundred years of the slow and orderly processes of peaceful development. We cannot measure the cost of the war in dollars and cents alone, but, on the other hand, its profits, great as they are in their spiritual values, have material aspects in the new tools and instruments which have been put in the hands of man a generation or two earlier than they otherwise might have been available for his use; the methods and processes by means of which life may be made easier and better, even though these methods and processes were devised under the stress of conflict to make the taking of life easier and swifter; the new knowledge of ourselves and our resources, our possibilities and our limitations, too costly to seek out in time of peace, but which, once disclosed by the emergency of war, is of imperishable and incalculable value in rendering easier and more swift the progress of the race toward the goal of the ultimate absolute liberation from every form of bondage, physical as well as spiritual, of every human being.

II The Liberty Motor

BEYOND question America's biggest single war achievement in the application of scientific knowledge and technical resources and methods is the development and production of the Liberty motor. In spite of all that has been written and said about this wonderful engine, it is probable that the full extent and importance of what was accomplished in its production can never be grasped except by the technical men who took part in the work. Let me try to visualize what this war production meant.

On the day the armistice was signed there had been built and delivered 15,131 twelve-cylinder Liberty motors. The total horse-power developed at Niagara Falls is about one million. These Liberty motors had the power of six Niagaras — -6,052,400 horse-power !

Engine production at this speed, unprecedented as it was, was not fast enough. Not only our own Air Service, but the aviation corps of Great Britain, France, and Italy were clamoring for Liberty motors, and when the armistice was signed orders had been placed for 51,100 Liberty twelves and 8, coo Liberty eights, as part of a total program of 95,993 aviation engines which the United States would have contributed before the end of 1 9 1 9 ! Engine production was going on at the rate of 200 complete Liberty

Working drawings of the liberty motor, showing details of the internal construction of this wonderful engine twelves daily when the war was stopped. By April it would have reached io ; ooo a month, with no limit in sight.

All this was accomplished in eighteen months. On May 29, 191 7, the first drawings of the design of the Liberty motor were made. On July 4, 191 7, the first engine built from these designs was flown. Less than nine months later six great plants were producing Liberty twelves in ever-increasing volume. In between there was a heartbreaking interval of preparation for quantity production that literally strained the industrial and technical resources of the nation. Everything was new. There was a blank sheet of paper on which could be written either success or failure.

When the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 191 7, there had not been made in America a single high-powered aviation engine suitable for use under war conditions. There were several manufacturers producing low-powered engines suitable for training- 'planes; a great many of these engines had been built and placed in American-built training- 'planes made for the British and Canadian governments. One American company was just getting under way on a contract with the French government for the production of the Hispano-Suiza motor, one of the best European types of aviation engine, but developing only 150 horse-power. Another American company was prepared to build the nine-cylinder rotary Gnome engine, a type which had been popular for exhibition flying before the war, and which could be used on advanced training-'planes. We had nothing in America, however, to compare with the British Rolls-Royce, the high-powered Hispano-Suiza or the Lorraine-Dietrich of the French, the Italian Bugatti and Fiat, or even the German Mercedes. We did not even know what was needed, either in airplanes or aviation engines, to meet the conditions as they then existed on the western front. Aviation was then a part of the work of the Signal Corps of the army. The books of the Signal Corps showed that in the nine years between the first public flight of a heavier-than-air machine and our entrance into the war only 118 'planes of all types had been delivered to the army; most of these had been destroyed or were obsolete in pattern. Sixty-six engines had been ordered ; fifty -four had been delivered. The army had practically no material, personnel, or experience in the designing, producing, or use of aeronautical equipment.

The first thing we had to do was to ascertain the needs. A commission of officers and civilians was sent to Europe to study the engines used by the Allies. A survey was made to find out what was being done by American manufacturers in the building of aviation engines for European governments with the idea that such production could be increased for the benefit of the United States. But while these two investigations were going on it was decided to marshal the engineering talent and facilities available in America to design and develop a suitable engine of our own.

It was found that the time that had been required to adapt American manufacturing methods to the production of such European engines as the Hispano- Suiza and Gnome indicated the impossibility of adopting a European design in the hope of any considerable production under two or three years. It was a much more logical and practical undertaking to design an American engine, with reference in the construction

AN END VIEW OF THE LIBERTY MODEL A, THE ARMY TYPE OF MOTOR of every detail to American manufacturing methods and facilities. It was, obviously, the quickest way to produce results, since such an engine would not require radical changes in prevailing American shop practice, tool design, or the training of American mechanics.

There was not among the Allies any well-proved engine of a horse-power sufficiently large to insure its continuing suitability for two years to come. Several were in process of development over there, but up to May, 191 7, none of these had been demonstrated to be an assured success, with the possible exception of the British Rolls-Royce. The highest power aviation engine then in use by the Allies, except the twelve-cylinder Rolls-Royce, which developed 250 horse-power, was the Lorraine-Dietrich, a French engine of about the same power. England at that time was manufacturing or experimenting with about thirty-seven different kinds of engines, and France had no less than forty-six different types, necessitating almost innumerable quantities of repair parts.

As soon as this situation became known to our army authorities, in May, 191 7, it was decided to proceed at once to design and develop a single type of engine with unit cylinders capable of various combinations and which in either four-, six-, eight-, or twelve-cylinder engines would perform nearly, if not all, the duties which war requirements would exact, and which could be kept in repair cheaply and easily.

The designing of the American aviation engine, the Liberty motor, was a story so romantic that when it was first told to the American people, in the summer of 191 7, it was received with incredulity. It was a characteristic American conception, carried out in a thoroughly American way; it stands as the most perfect example in recent technical history of that Yankee ingenuity which has for so many years excited the admiration and aroused the amazement of our European cousins, and which has furnished the theme for many romantic tales by writers like Jules Verne. It was a fresh proof to the doubters

STEEL CYLINDERS FOR LIBERTY MOTORS

Showing how the thin-steel water-jacket is attached by electric welding. This is a "Yankee trick" that puzzled the Germans.

on this side and the scoffers on the other side of the Atlantic that America had lost none of its timehonored resourcefulness, that the Yankee of to-day is as ingenious as the traditional Yankee of half a century ago; it was also a demonstration and a warning to Germany that the subjects of the Kaiser had no monopoly of technical and scientific ability.

The two best qualified mechanical engineers in America for this task were called to Washington early in May, 191 7. They were J. G. Vincent, vice-president and chief engineer of the Packard Motor Car Company, of Detroit, and E. J. Hall, president of the Hall-Scott Motor Company, of Berkeley, California. Mr. Vincent had for two years been working on the development of aviation engines and had built two, of approximately ioo horse-power and 200 horse-power. These engines had been designed primarily for durability and weighed about three and a half to four pounds per horse-power. They had been developed and tested in racing automobiles, but had not yet been tested in the air. Mr. Vincent had, however, made many airplane flights and had been personally for a number of years a close student of aviation and the requirements of aviation engines.

Mr. Hall had for eight years been building various types of aviation engines for foreign governments, chiefly in the Orient, and had patiently and painstakingly developed an engine which he had made in four-cylinder, six-cylinder, and twelve-cylinder sizes, having a cylinder bore of five inches with a seven-inch piston stroke.

The first requirement of the aviation engine which these two men were told to design as speedily as possible was a maximum of power and efficiency combined with the minimum of weight; the average automobile motor weighs from six to ten pounds per horse-power, while the new aviation engine must weigh two pounds or less per horse-power. Second, the new engine must be able to run as required at practically its maximum power or speed during a large percentage of its operating time; automobile motors, except in racing, rarely, if ever, run at maximum power or speed for more than a few minutes at any one period. Third, the consumption of fuel and of lubricating oil must be as limited as reasonably possible, in order to conserve space occupied in the 'plane and weight to be carried in the air.