MR DODGE’S COUP.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue 7719, 13 May 1916, Page 1

MR DODGE’S COUP.

AMERICAN ARMS FOR THE ALLIES. NEW YORK, March 1. Get a map and look at Bridgeport. You will find it “ somewhere’’ in Connecticut. Then let your finger travel through the. State of New York until —but it will have to be a very good map—it lights upon Uion, not far from Utica (writes Sydney Brooks in the ‘‘Daily Mail”). When you have found these places you may not only make a note of them, hut you may confidently count upon them as part and parcel of the Great Alliance. v • For at Bridgeport, Conn., and at Uion, N.Y., are situated the works of the firm of Remington. And this famous house, known the world over for its sporting weapons and ammunition, and now on the point of celebrating its hundredth birthday, has since the war* flung itself into the business of supplying the Allies with rifles, shell cases, cartridges, and bayonets. > Will anyone, I wonder, ever trace the ramifications of this war? Here is one that seems to me full of the very stuff of drama and romance. The German Emperor starts a war in Europe. Instantly the sequence of cause and effect begins to work. It spreads across the Atlantic. It lays its transforming hand on one placed townlet in New England, on auotlier in Upper New York State, thousands of miles away from the scene, the policies, and the atmosphere of the conflict; and beneath its touch huge plants are erected, new industries come into being, dollars are poured out by the million, great staffs and organisations are gathered together, localities double and treble their population, and Bridgeport and Ilion find themselves on a sudden industrial combatants in the war. But there is something absurd in stating the case thus impersonally. Remington’s even now might be merely looking on but for the nerve and foresight of its proprietor, Mr Marcellus Hartley Dodge, and the accident that found him in Europe at the outbreak of war. THE WORLD’S LARGEST SMALLARMS PLANT. In Germany, in France, and later on, for a few days, in England, he studied the situation at first hand and through bis agents’ reports. The conclusion he came to was that the Allies would very quickly he suffering from a shortage of rifles, shell cases, and small arras ammunition. Remington’s, lie was equally confident, could do something to fill the gap. He sailed at once for America, and proceeded to back his opinion for not far short of twenty million dollars. I have met Mr Dodge but once—we chatted for half an hour or so in the train going down to Bridgeport—but I think I know his type—the clean run, “live” American type, rather pale, with intent eyes, firm lips, and highly executive nose.

He is a young man, and lie is also, one need hardly add, prodigiously wealthy. Not only lias he succeeded to the ownership of the vast Remington business, hut he also married a daughter of Mr William Rockefeller. If anyone ever had inducements to take life easily he had. Yet it is characteristic of the man and his country that not one of his 30,000 employees works harder than lie does. I am not sure, indeed, as I look back at it, that there was anything at Bridgeport or at Ilion which interested me more than its young, thoughtful proprietor. He had no shareholders to consult, no hoard of directors to restrain him. Without waiting for the Allied Governments to place any orders at all commensurate with the scheme lie was meditating, lie went straight ahead. “Build me,” he said, “the best and largest small-arms plant in the world, and build it in record time.” He spoke, and it was done. “GOING SOME.” So that when you go to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and to Ilion, New York, you will see, side by side with the old works that still carry on the sporting business, huge new factories given up solely to the war. Those at Bridgeport are the biggest, a row of thirteen five-storied main buildings, each over (50ft wide and 270 feet in length, connected through their centres by twelve “service buildings” of the same height, hut some 10ft narrower and slightly under 80ft long. The result of this arrangement is that you can stand on any of the floors, in any of the service buildings, and look up and down the whole length of the plant for a third of a mile or so, with bicycle boys and handcars hurrying past you. The statistics of the works are for those .with a head for figures. A floor •area of a million and a half square feet, 20,000,000 bricks, and 12,000 tons of steel, 350,000 square feet of glass, over 18,000,000 feet of timber, 100,000 pounds of putty, 20,000 cubic yards of concrete, and 95,000 of Portland cement —I write them down hut I do not pretend to grasp them. But any layman can form an idea of what is conveyed by the fact that this colossal plant was completed and 75 per cent of the machinery installed in eight months from the time constructional work was begun on the buildings, and in eleven months from the time the first sod was turned. That, as they say over here, is certainly “going some.” But it does not exhaust the tale. There are five forge shops, each of them with one exception over a hundred yards in length. There is a power house that could supply a city of 150,000 people with heat and light. There is an employment building where some 500 applicants for jobs are examined and sifted every day.

And there is a three-storied, spick-and-span building which serves as living quarters for the guards. Mr Dodge, you may be sure, had not sunk £2,500,000 in this plant merely to see it blown skywards by a German agent. A force of 300 guards, most of them old Army and Navy men, watch over it day and night. A WAR OF CHEMIST AND MECHANIC. The real difficulty came later. The manufacture of military arms, remember, has hitherto in the United States ,been almost a Government monopoly. You may roughly say that before the present war no private firm in America was engaged in it. Remington’s had therefore to draw on the Government arsenals for men of the necessary knowledge and experience. 1 nev.er realised so clearly as at Bridgeport and Ilion the truth or the statement that this is a war of the chemist and lie mechanic. It ceases to he a mere figure of speech, and becomes a very pertinent reality as one watches the complicated processes that go to the making of a modern rifle and follows the transmutation of a steel bar into barrel and bolt. Take, for instance, the rifles, to the manufacture of which the new plant at Ilion is almost exclusively devoted. They are said to be the best rifles in the world—the rifles we were just on the point of manufacturing for ourselves, when the war broke out. Each weapon consists of about 100 different parts; some 3000 distinct operations have to he gone through in making each one of them; each in the course of being manufactured is tested by, about 1000 gauges; each is inspected in its component parts, and as a whole more than 1000 times; the stock alone requires 62 separate operations; and on some of the most delicate parts you have to work almost as close as on some of the rougher parts of a watch. I was not, therefore, surprised when the manager estimated that even with everything in his favor he would not care to build a factory and guarantee an output of a thousand rifles a day in less than eighteen months. He ought to know. For at Ilion they received the order for the rifles one November day in 1914; they purchased the property on which to erect the new plant the day after; a week later work began on the foundations; and five months after the first contract was signed with the British Government, workshops covering a floor area of 700,000 square feet, employing upwards of 3000 men, and equipped with the latest machinery, had been added to the industrial resources of America and the Allies.