Word: goodyears
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Besides Manhattan, half a dozen big U.S. cities may soon be customers for the Goodyear passenger belt. Cincinnati is considering a belt-car system to serve 80 congested downtown blocks. So are Montreal, Cleveland, San Francisco, Atlanta, and São Paulo, Brazil, which is thinking of a web of conveyor-belt sidewalks...
...passenger conveyor belt is the latest example of the canny diversification that has kept Goodyear at the top of the industry. Last week Goodyear brought out its nine-month earnings report, and though sales were down 14% (largely due to a seven-week strike) from 1953's record $1.2 billion, profits of $32 million were good enough for the company to declare an extra dividend of $1 and a 2-for-1 stock split...
Blimps & the Atom. Goodyear's Board Chairman Paul W. Litchfield, the company's boss for 28 years, has always been a strong believer in diversification. When he arrived in Akron in 1900, as Goodyear's new plant superintendent, he was just out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the first real scientist on the young company's staff. He also had a penchant both for production and for trying unexplored fields. In those days U.S. tiremakers produced solid, iron-hard rings of rubber. Litchfield soon learned a better way. In 1902 he took Goodyear...
Back home, Litchfield designed the first successful U.S. pneumatic tire, got a patent, and put Goodyear in production. By 1906 he was back in Britain, and this time Goodyear won. Says Litchfield: "That's when we really started to go." By 1916 Goodyear's sales overtook its biggest competitors, Goodrich and Diamond, even though they merged to fend off Goodyear. With the tire business booming, Litchfield soon started exploring other fields, made the first U.S. Navy blimps and balloons in World War I, later tried its hand at dirigibles. In World War II the company...
Brains & Plastic. With peace, Goodyear has pushed its diversification even harder. It now does a booming plastics business with a whole line of products for shoes, luggage, floor coverings and furniture. Goodyear also makes rubberized asphalt, has gone into the electronics business, and turns out an electronic computer called the "Geda" for the Air Force. And in Pike County, Ohio, Goodyear is slated to run a $1.2 billion gaseous diffusion plant...