San Antonio light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1911-1993, 1926-04-27
Industry Finds 1t Hard to
Break Away From Old
Traditions.

~ 10 HOC easy W get ava y
from tradition. That is why
all our new operations are
always directed by men whs
have not had a chance to get
on really familiar terms with
the impossible. We call in
technical experts to aid
whenever their aid seems necessary
but no operation is ever directed by q
technician, for always he knows far
too many things that can't be done
Our invariablc reply to st can't be
done" is: "Go do it,"
Take this matter OF making plate
glass. In the last chapter were de-
'scribed the methods in use at on:
Glassmere factory. Essentially those
methods used centuries ago. Glass
making is very old; it has traditions,
and those traditions center around the
clay pot in which the mixture is
melted into glass. That pot, as has
been said, must be made by hand. The
clay is tanped and kneaded by the
bare feet ofsmen and then the pot Is
built by hand. .-
OF course, machinery has come in
to carry these pots to and from the
furnaces, there are conveyors to DO
the handling and machine grinding
and polishing has replaced the old
hand work, but the operation itself
has not been fundamentally changed.
Machinery has been brought in to do,
in so far as possible, what was for
merly done by hand.
But the whole operation had never
been thoroughly studied to discover
what was really fundamental. The
easy course is always to, substitute
machine effort for a hand effort, and
the full value of power is not then
realized. The hard course is to start
at the beginning and evolve a method
which. instead of substituting the ma
chine for the hand. takes it for grant
ed that a method can be discovered by
which the entirety maybe done by
machinery and the man considered
only as an attendant upon the ma
chine. This is the machine concept Of
industry as opposed to the hand con-
cept.
Plate glass seemed to US to be
something which it ought to be" pos
sible to manufacture continuously III
a big ribbon and with no hand work
at all. The glass experts of the world
said all this had been tried and that II
could not be done. We gave the task
Of doing ID to men who had never been
in q glass plant. They started expert
menting at Highland Park. They ran
up against every trouble that had
been predicted and number that bad
not been, but eventually they achieved
their result. The little plant at High
land Park is producing two aud u
half million square feet a year, and
the big plant at the River Rouge,
which we built as soon as we knew
that We could make first-class plate
glass, is producing twelve million
square feet a year.
This River Rouge plant occupies
about one-half of the space of the
Glassmere plant, although it has near
ly double its production and also 1t
employs only about one-third as many
men as Glassmere. Although we have
not been able 10 expand our plants
sufficiently to care for our needs, we
are already saving about three million
dollars year on the glass that we dc
make as compared with what We have
TO pay outside.
A MOVING SHEET OF GLASS.
Here is the new process. The batch
is melted in huge furnaces, each with
a capacity Of .4OS tons of molten glass,
The temperature maintained in a
melting heat OF $500 degrees Fahrcn,
heit and refining heat of 2300 de.
grecs.
The furnaces are charged every
fifteen minutes with sand, soda ash
and other chemicals. The glass flows