Word: thompsons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Thompson's boss, Frederick C. (for Coolidge) Crawford, 62, onetime (1943) president of the N.A.M., is as full of zip and noise as a racing engine. In the head-cracking '30s, he defeated every attempt of the C.I.O. or A.F.L. to organize his plants, damned unions and the New Deal. His tart tongue often got him into other trouble; on a World War II visit to France he denounced resistance forces as Communist bandits...
Frozen Mercury. Fred Crawford, civil engineer (Harvard, '14), joined Thompson as a millwright's helper in 1916. Under one of its founders, an ex-welder named Charles E. Thompson, the 15-year old company had already built a tidy business making auto valves. In World War I, its business almost doubled, and Thompson branched into aircraft, making valves for France's Spad fighters. By 1929, when the Thompson Trophy was created for Cleveland's National Air Races, Crawford had moved up to vice president and general manager. At Thompson's death* in 1933, Crawford took...
...growth was due to World War II, when Thompson doubled its size almost overnight with a new $30 million government-built plant. But it was also due to the fact that engineer Crawford proved himself an expert manager. He brought in able young men, gave them room to grow, encouraged initiative. New President Wright, for example, started in with a Cleveland law firm as a legal consultant to Thompson, soon won a $100,000 tax refund for the company. Impressed, Crawford took him on as his own assistant when he became president, gave him ever-growing responsibility...
...Thompson kept adding to its products now makes 80, boasts that the only one it ever had to drop was the automobile crank. It has helped develop such things as aircraft valves containing liquid sodium inside as a coolant; an engine valve cap that turns slightly with each strike, thus eliminating warping and pitting; an alcohol-water injection system to get more power out of gasoline; simplified valve tappets; improved fuel pumps and piston rings...
...brought Thompson's biggest opportunity. The company's long experience in machining tough metals to fine tolerances made it a natural to turn out such small, exact and tough parts as the thousands of tiny blades needed for every jet engine. Through a big advance in metallurgy, Thompson now makes such blades out of powdered iron and a copper alloy, eliminating a great deal of waste. It has also succeeded in casting incredibly intricate parts by pouring mercury into a die, freezing it and dipping the mercury pattern in liquid ceramic to form a mold. Then the mercury...