Word: ton
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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What Pilot Bill Wheatley had to say when he landed confirmed Designer Davis' calculations. Consolidated's new 25-ton Model 31 had a high speed of 275 m.p.h. (75 miles faster than Boeing's four-motored 314 clipper), handled nicely in the air. Gasoline consumption showed that she had a range of 10,000 miles with a light passenger load, that she could lug 28 passengers in Pullman accommodations across the Atlantic at a speed unprecedented for commercial flying boats...
...that no more dreary months of 25% and 30% operations lay ahead-October would start the 1939 auto model year off with a bang. Soon all steel-peddling haunts buzzed with reports that auto production schedules called for 1,000.000 1939 cars by year's end. At a ton of steel per car, Detroit would have to buy 1,000,000 tons. Buick had just bought 35,000 tons. Ford was shopping for 50,000 tons. For the steel industry the days of on & up were coming back...
Then Ford bought his 50,000 tons, at $4 a ton below what steelmen quickly realized had been the price, but was the price no more. There started a week's orgy of price cutting. Steel price quotations fell as rapidly as stock quotations on a Hitler-speech day. The independents (staying in the black) offered to lay steel down in Detroit for $8 a ton less than the U. S. Steel Corporation, and the U. S. Steel Corporation (going into the red) met the cut. Little Steel's Girdler and Big Steel's Stettinius traded punches...
...week later, when it was all over, Big & Little Steel were yoked to a new price structure at $50.51 instead of $56.27 a ton and they had enough orders for five months of operations at 50% of capacity. Their week of war had sold not just 1,000,000 tons to feed Detroit from October through Christmas, but something like 2,000,000 tons-enough to tide auto production over until the 1939 model year was nearly over. Result: the 1939 model cars were about $25 cheaper than the 1938, and $10 of that...
Last week, this bit of history was memorable for Ford was again dangling an order before the trade, an order for only 5.000 tons, only an hour's run for the industry's continuous mills. But such was the state of the steel industry that the offer was demoralizing. Youngstown Sheet & Tube allegedly nibbled first, offering Ford a $2 a ton cut. He held out, won a reduction twice as big, added insult to injury by splitting the bone he was throwing seven different ways, so that no plant got more than a sniff of business...