Word: johansson
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Sweden's two-man Davis Cup team-lean Lennart Bergelin and stocky little Torsten Johansson-finally reached the end of the line. Mostly hothouse trained on flossy indoor courts, they had managed with luck and Nordic determination to cop the European crown. Last week in the interzone final at Forest Hills, the U.S. squad blew the Swedes off the court, 5-0. U.S. Singles Champion Jack Kramer and ex-Champion Frank Parker breezed through their singles matches with the loss of just one set; National Doubles Champions Bill Talbert and Gardnar Mulloy just squeezed out an 8-6 fifth...
Died. Carl Edwards Johansson, 79, Swedish-born father of hair-splitting precision gauges; in Eskilstuna, Sweden. Be ore he was 32, the shaggy-browed toolmaker hand-forged and hand-polished blocks of steel so internally stressless, externally flawless that they could detect a machinist's error to within 2,000,000ths of an inch (a 2,000,000th is to an inch as an inch is to 31.6 miles). Nicknamed "Jo" blocks, they made possible mass production's interchangeability of parts...
Carl Edward Johansson, working in a Swedish arsenal, cracked the accurate-measurement nut in the 1890s. He knew there was nothing so accurate in the hands of a toolmaker as a simple block of steel. Assuming that the average shop needed measurements for every ten-thousandth of an inch from 1/10 of an inch to 12 inches, a complete set of block gauges would number well over 100,000 pieces. But he found that every one of these measurements could be obtained by a combination of only 81 pieces, the smallest being 1/10 of an inch, the largest four inches...
...study of steel's molecular characteristics, of the effects of temperature on it, and by secret methods of lapping steel by hand, Johansson created blocks so near to absolute flatness that the error was less than four-millionths of an inch. In 1923, when Jo blocks were standard throughout the machine world, Johansson came to the U.S., hooked up with Henry Ford who set him up in the Ford Motor...
...shop only the boss had a Jo set-they cost around $1,500 then-and kept it so much to himself that Webber could not get the use of it in time to check his work. He decided he could make a million dollars by cracking old Johansson's secret. Later he decided he could make accurate gauges by machine...