misc Industry Parade segments

Industry on Parade drops in at the Johnston Pump Company of Pasadena, California for a visit with some of the craftsmen who are helping to transform vast arid regions of the world into flourishing garden spots. They achieve this admirable feat of course with the pumps turned out here. Pumps to tap underground water deposits and make the desert bloom. [Music] The precision tool parts which must be as rugged as they are exact for years of service under the worst possible conditions are assembled for shipment to such distant points as Iran where a widespread land reclamation program is in progress based almost entirely on water brought up by pumps turned out in America. But even here at home, there are extensive areas that require only water in order to produce tremendously luxurant harvests. In fact, much of California, now one of the two or three leading agricultural states in the nation, is artificially [Music] irrigated. Here in the Imperial Valley, installations like this bringing up water to moisten top soil many feet deep, explain why this richest farmland in the country, possibly in the world, can bring us fresh fruits and vegetables out of season. Why the valley can produce not just one but many crops each year. Permanent stand pipes pour out water from pumps remotely controlled. Water flows as needed down long canals that feed into ditches criss-crossing the fields of alalfa, lettuce, cotton, and any number of other crops that grow here the year [Music] around. Almost desert land a generation or so ago, this valley 60 mi wide and 65 mi long, this valley alone gives us more essential farm products than are grown by the average sovereign nation. No wonder those pump manufacturers back in Pasadena and other plants who may never see a growing vegetable can take pride in their part in making us the best fed people on [Music] Earth. An Ozark Mountain farmer prepares one of his crops for market. Black walnuts losing their tough outer hulls. And this is what the nut looks like when the truck tire is through with it. By the tongue, hauled black walnuts are brought to the Hammonds Products Company plant at Stockton, Missouri. Here to receive additional processing that will transform them into a battery of inspectors will be consumed by livestock. From here, the good meats will go to a pasteurization room where 2 hours at 200° will knock out all bacteria without damaging taste or texture. Then, automatically weighed and funneled into cardboard containers, they're ready for shipment, now providing nutrition and greater employment thanks to one small company's ingenuity. [Music] In the no longer wild and woolly west at Bonanza, Utah, our cameraman looks in on the mining of a mineral that's found nowhere else in the world. At least not in quantities sufficient for commercial development. Coal? Not at all. What this minor is going down for is gilsonite, a form of solidified petroleum. It was named after an early settler named San Gillson, who foresaw widespread uses for the slick, shiny rock. His neighbors thought they were making a big joke when they called the material gilsonite. But little did they know that today it would be used in the making of asphalt tiles, storage battery cases, paints, inks, building paper, and a variety of other products with industrial research just now revealing the prospect of important new uses. Research at a pilot plant indicates gillside can be processed for gasoline, propane, and other byproducts, not to mention the valuable residue [Music] coke. This is metallurgical coke. It's used in the production of aluminum. Another use for Gilsonite, perhaps the biggest, is as an insulator, highly resistant to temperature changes, water, acids, alkalies, and electrolytic corrosion. Sam Gillson's neighbors never suspected his dream would lead to the founding of a town and a whole new industry. Careful with that paint, little girl. Your daddy helped produce one of its important ingredients. [Music] spectacles for a 19th century siren. Let's see how they used to make the lenses for the glasses that grandmother wore. It's a method that's persisted right up to the present and still is widely used. For the accuracy required in a lens, long resisted efforts to put it into mass production. A wooden block was covered with pitch and after the excess was trimmed off, molded glass blanks were pressed into its surface, being held in place by the pitch. Great skill was required in thus preparing the blanks for the grinder. And even so, a large percentage were rejected because they weren't placed perfectly and consequently were not ground [Music] true. Into the grinder they went, there to rotate for 15 minutes. [Music] At regular intervals, abrasive powder mixed with water was squirted on these thinning lenses. This 15-minute rough grinding was only a beginning. It was followed by 4 hours of intermediate and final polishing. All very painstaking and all for nothing if there was a slightest miscalculation. But now at the Rochester, New York plant of Bow and Loan, let's see how they've licked this costly production problem. cutting the operation from hours to minutes while increasing the accuracy of the lens and reducing the number of rejects to a fraction of what they were under the old method. And oh yes, eliminating the film of jeweler's rouge that used to coat everything and [Music] everybody. First of all, here the lenses are milled individually with the abrasive, the cooling agent, the degree of pressure, and all other factors automatically controlled. The 15-minute rough grind now takes 10 [Music] seconds. The hours of intermediate polishing are no longer necessary, and final polishing now takes about 5 minutes. So instead of requiring half a day, production of a lens is accomplished in less than 6 [Music] [Applause] minutes. For many decades, the Germans had a virtual monopoly on the manufacturer of good lenses. But the restrictions of a dictatorial government and the long strides taken by our own optical industries operating under a system of free enterprise put an end to that. And advances like those we've just seen make it highly unlikely that we'll ever be outdistanced again in style, in quality, or in [Music] [Music] cost. Kerath Manufacturing Company, a Detroit jet factory. Not jet airplanes, jet boats. Does this look like a conventional marine engine? Well, that's what it is. A powerful marine engine. And this is a not so powerful one. Only 5 horsepower. But here's the unit that transforms both of them into jet engines. It impels water with tremendous thrust through a nozzle. Not only pushing the boat along, but steering it as well. Thus eliminating propeller, drive shaft, stuffing boxes, and bearings. Even the rudder. [Applause] Run a boat equipped with hydrojet right up on shore and it doesn't matter. You just reverse the nozzle and she backs right off washing away the sand and you might say digging its own channel. Since the nozzle projects only 3 and 1/2 in below the bottom of the hull and there's no rudder or screw, it romps right off into shallow weed-filled waters. A heavy dew on the lawn is about all it [Music] needs. Industri Parade cameraman Russ Carrier was most impressed by the lack of vibration, which at more than 20 m an hour allowed him to take films much smoother than he could get from an automobile, traveling the same speed. Fortunately, Russ wasn't aboard when they made this stop, or he'd still be diving for his camera. The nozzle is just reversed, and the boat stops in its own length. Still, another unusual aspect of the hydrojet is the fact that all that water shooting out the stern can also be pumped through a hose to put out fires. Let's assume we're answering a fire alarm. There's no siren, but we really don't need one. [Music] Hail Colombia, call out the reserves. No, we don't need the reserves. Our one-man volunteer forces here with all the pumping power we require. There's a special attachment to hook up a hose. And while ordinarily it's used for pumping billes, cleaning nets, or washing down the boat, in an emergency it can be used to help out fire fraud land lovers. For it throws out a stream of water at the rate of more than 600 gallons a [Music] minute. Fireboats in big port cities have been using the same engines for both propulsion and putting water on fires for more than 10 years. And now smaller communities and private citizens can do the [Music] same. Here's a power shovel gathering the main ingredient for the oldest building material known to man. The ingredient is shale. And the building material, of course, is brick. By actual written records, we know that man was patting clay into cakes and drying them in the sun 4,000 years before the birth of Christ. And yet, in the 20th century, architects consider brick as modern as tomorrow. Of course, some important changes have transpired in recent years, both in bricks and in the way they're made, as demonstrated at the plant of the Glengary Shale Brick Corporation in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A blend of finely ground shale of various types made plastic by the addition of water is extruded in an endless ribbon from the pug mill. But though much thought and effort have gone into bringing the shale to this stage, the job of making bricks has only just begun. Next step, cutting the ribbon into brick size, accomplished by a machine that gets in step with the ribbon, as it were, then whips wires through it as they both move along together. And now they must be carefully stacked for their first visit to the [Music] oven. At a temperature of 250 to 300°, the bricks will dry for about 24 hours. This is only to drive out excess moisture and control the shrinkage. The real baking comes later. Here's another method of forming bricks by what's known as the soft mud process in which the pugging is shaped in molds. These two get a 24-hour drying before they're burned, as the expression goes. That means sent through a long tunnel kill in which the temperature gradually builds up to very high but very closely controlled levels. and is just as gradually brought down again. It's in the burning even more than in the choice of ingredients that they achieve the wide range of brick colors now available. 60,000 tons of coal are consumed here each year. Some of it burned directly, some used to make gas that creates even greater heat. Structures of brick are noted for their durability. But as someone has said, unless mankind loses its love of beauty, regardless of durability, we'll go on laying brick on brick for another 6,000 years. [Applause] [Music] Out of the world's smallest harbor, 6 acre Deepo Bay, Oregon, into the world's largest ocean, the Pacific, goes one of a fleet of small boats seeking one of the world's strangest crops, kelp. In these waters are caught no less than 287 different varieties of fish. But these anglers bring back none of them, only that giant Pacific kelp. [Music] It's a messy looking plant and you might think it was the last thing in the world you'd want to touch. And yet, chemical research has uncovered characteristics that have made kelp the key ingredient of a soap and shampoo. Many other highly useful elements like iodine are derived from it. So many, in fact, that it's been called nature's most useful vegetable, and we might add, nature's ugliest. brought back to Depot Bay, it will be given preliminary processing at the local plant of the Soil Renewal Products [Music] [Applause] [Music] Company. The preliminary processing consists of grinding up the kelp, allowing the mash to stand, then straining it to separate the pulp from the juice. The pulpy residue is valuable as a fertilizer. The juice or jelly is shipped to Portland where at the plant of the Kelpen Products Company, it is mixed with water, heated, and agitated by a high-speed mixer to form the basic solution for soap and [Music] shampoo. Other ingredients will be added, the mixture chilled and filtered, and before you know it, a product of the sea is raising an active lather in somebody's quaffure. And the people who developed it say this is just the first of many new applications they're finding for a seaweed that used to be little more than a bother to fishermen and for which industrial research is finding new uses every [Music] [Applause] [Music] day. Waddling through the coastal swamps near Cutoff, Louisiana, comes a vehicle which, though it may never win any fashion awards, has opened up vast areas formerly considered to be absolutely impenetrable. The Ungainainely Buggy's hollow metal wheels carry it with equal ease over dry land, tall marsh grass, deep mud, or open water. Because the wheels on each side are powered by separate motors. By going ahead on one and reversing the other, the swamp buggy can be turned around in its tracks. This is also the way the vehicle is steered. The little factory in which the buggies are made is located right here in the Bayou country. The Andrew Sheram Company has been in business for 5 years, turning out the unusual wagons for oil companies, which use them for exploration and drilling in areas that otherwise couldn't be [Music] reached. The platform high above the wheels will hold up to six tons of tools, pipe, and personnel. The buggies are rented out rather than sold and periodically are brought back to the plant like this one for overhaul. The engines are taken out and gone over and the wheels checked for dents or leaks. They don't have to worry though about flat tires. The marsh buggy will do only about 5 m an hour on dry land, 8 m an hour on open water, and 10 in the marshes. In other words, the tougher the going, the better it operates. [Music] The strangelooking craft is doing a lot to open up natural resources that here to four could not be utilized. [Music]