Word: nelson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...metal, of flux, was dumped on the plate and fused by electricity to attach the "stud." But on perpendicular plates there was no way to keep the flux in place. Instead, a small square of "welding pad" had to be laboriously welded, then the stud welded to that. Ted Nelson wearied of doing this, finally worked out a crude welding gun to make the job easier. But when he got "no thanks nor extra dough" he quit, and set to work perfecting his gun in a shop behind his home at Vallejo. His simple solution: encase the flux...
California-born Ted Nelson started slowly. After graduating from high school, he spent some 15 years picking up mechanical know-how in machine shops. He finally landed in the Mare Island Yard as a welder. There he fell afoul of a problem that had puzzled the best welding minds for 20 years: the problem of conveniently welding short, pencil-like pieces of metal to perpendicular or overhead surfaces...
...Inventor Nelson began to make guns in his garage. At once he found a feverish market for them in the coast's mushrooming shipyards-at $500 apiece. Reason: with the old method, a fast worker could weld 40 studs in eight hours; with the rocket gun, 1,000. (A Liberty ship has 10,000 studs to hold hangers for wireways and pipes, plastic decking, etc. in place...
Collect the Profits. The gun soon blasted out of its garage home, forced Nelson to incorporate as the Nelson Specialty Welding Equipment Corp. He borrowed $95,000 from RFC, put up a new plant in a San Leandro cornfield. Soon he was supplying guns to 120 shipyards...
...soon found that the big profit was in selling his patented studs. He began to hand out a new model of his gun to old customers on a replacement basis for $50 -the actual cost of materials. In the last 19 months, Ted Nelson's profits have been a fat $407,000, all plowed back into plant expansions and repayment of loans...