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Kaiser building thousands of miles of roads in the west. Early adopter of innovations. Steve Ballmer type seems like. Hard driving and hard working but subtler than Ballmer... not a bull type. Seems like he elevated roadwork from mostly manual labor to mostly machine.
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Now we have Kaiser orchestrating the Six Companies to build Hoover Dam. He spent most of the time in DC managing the political bosses.
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Huh, Kaiser apparently pioneered the internal competition model with Grand Coulee dam, which he later used in WW2 work. I guess that’s where the X/Y flyoff model originated perhaps?
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Interior secretary Harold Ickes skeptical of Knudsen; “I have heard that Knudsen even makes his own notes in handwriting” (presumably as opposed to a secretary transcribing shorthand into typewritten notes) Moron. If you aren’t taking your own notes you’re not thinking.
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Knudsen pulls together a sort of fellowship of the ring from across industry. They have to figure out what the military needs and tell them, because the military if 1940 doesn’t know.
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Finally into the war production story proper. We’re talking tanks, airplanes, engines. Building for US, British, and French needs all at once, 1939-41. Just a vast amount of action getting underway.
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Nice anecdote: a banker who has to transfer top secret Merlin engine plans meets the battleship bringing them from the UK with an empty suitcase. The captain laughs: the plans occupy a whole railroad-car sized crate of paper (would be a container today... or a largish USB stick)
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When the Americans got a look at the plans - hands up in horror, tolerances all over the shop. Engines were handbuilt by craftsmen at Rolls Royce. Plans had to be redrawn to achieve interchangeability and all the other mass production virtues.
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