Word: knudsen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week Detroit and the Automotive Council celebrated the second anniversary of cooperation for war production. It was a far cry from the day, two years ago, when William S. Knudsen, as National Defense Advisory Commission head, begged his fellow automakers to take on $500,000,000 (25%) of the nation's first big bomber program. When Big Bill (now Lieut. General) Knudsen got to Detroit again last week, it was hammering away at a $15 billion backlog, had pushed its war production rate to $6 billion a year, 70% above its peacetime peak...
...Curiously enough," William Knudsen holds no degree as a mechanical engineer; "curiously enough," neither does Henry Ford, nor do most of America's industrial revolutionists. "Curiously enough," Arthur E. Morgan (TVA) became a genius of flood control without an engineering degree; still without degree he became a college president (Antioch, 1920) to promote the educational philosophy that a degree in theory hampers the success of many a man by limiting his imagination to the record of accomplishment certified on his roll of parchment: "the textbooks you've digested have told you how things have been done which...
...letter found its way to the then Council of National Defense, and a reply came back over the signature of Bill Knudsen suggesting that Jake go to Michigan Pipe Co. in Bay City. Jake got a contract for making steel flanges for wooden pipes. On an old and almost outmoded lathe he started turning out the flanges-slowly, laboriously. Jake was happy; he had his self-respect...
Everything was haywire. Last week, Big Bill Knudsen, now happily working for the Army (TIME, Aug. 10), said happily that there is no shortage of steel-"but there is maldistribution." Said C. E. Wilson, his successor as president of General Motors: "If the Government will review its requirements carefully, it will find the shortages not as bad as feared. The pinch has been exaggerated." Yet last week, for lack of materials, WTright Aeronautical had to shut down one 3,000-man department of its huge Paterson (N.J.) engine plant for two days; last week WPB admitted that the available supply...
...conserve scarce materials or how to use them to the best advantage. But the least encouraging aspect of this new solution is that, like all the earlier ones, it is not a master plan but a way to implement one. Until there is a plan itself, what Bill Knudsen called "maldistribution" will turn out to be a euphemism for "shortage...