How Big Is an Inch?

by SENATOR RALPH E. FLANDERS

1

A FEW months ago I traveled westward by rail from Washington to the Pacific Coast. In the course of that journey I was transferred through the trunk lines of four great railroad systems: the Pennsylvania, the Burlington, the Denver & Rio Grande, the Western Pacific. The third transfer was made during the night. There was no confusion and no delay. No change from one car into another was necessary, for the rails of the lines were fortunately the same 56½ inches apart, and their cars automatically braked and coupled with each other. In fact, I continued the sleep of a tired traveler and did not even realize the change had been made.

It occurred to me a few days later that this is a remarkable circumstance in American life which all of us take entirely too much for granted. We ship an electric washer across the country with our household goods with never a conscious thought but that it is sure to meet the same voltage and current wherever it is plugged in. Our incandescent lamp finds the same socket in Springfield, Vermont, and Springfield, Illinois. The 15½-34 shirt we send as a present from Iowa will fit the neck and arms that grew up to size in Virginia. We drive an automobile from coast to coast under uniform traffic signals. In Chicago we buy a tire that was made in Akron, and it will fit the wheel (made in Pittsburgh) of the car (built in Detroit) that we bought in New York.

This simplification and workable interchangeability of parts and practices is known as standardization.

The fact that we have a high degree of standardization has made life simpler for us in ways so basic and so obvious that we do not even realize they exist. It has given us the free national market which we take so casually. To you as end man, the American consumer, it has given lower prices and better quality, more safety, greater availability, prompter exchange and repair service, and all the other material advantages of mass production. Is this something to be taken for granted?

Standardization is economically and socially desirable at any time, but in time of war or preparation for war it becomes nothing less than a requisite for survival. Now we are compelled again to realize the consequence where standards are lacking — where the bullet does not match the rifle, where the nut does not fit the bolt, where the spare part does not drop correctly into place in the machine or lies idle and wasted on the shelf. The most eloquent plea for standardization I know was uttered in wartime. A U.S. Eighth Air Force mechanic said bitterly: “We can’t borrow plane parts from the British. We can’t even steal them. They don’t fit.”

Throughout World War II we had a higher degree of industrial standardization than any nation, including our own, had ever applied to the winning of a war. American mass production, made possible by standardization, was our number one weapon in that war. And yet we cannot possibly estimate the loss we suffered in men and money, in time and resources, because of lack of certain proper standards. Our losses really began in the spring of 1940, when 400,000 Belgian troops might have fought better and longer if British ammunition had fitted their empty rifles. The losses continued at the first battle of El Alamein, where a contributing cause of the British defeat and retreat was the lack of standard interchangeable parts in the radio and other auxiliary equipment of the British tanks. At home we lost the services of thousands of small companies which would have participated in war production if there had been a comprehensive system of national defense standards to which they were accustomed to work. Others would have participated more effectively. The whole complicated relationship of prime contractor to subcontractor would have been simplified.

At one moment early in the war, lack of a standard almost caused disaster on the grand scale. A part broke in one of the radar units protecting the length of the Panama Canal. Those in command were dismayed to discover that no replacement part was in stock. They put through a rush call to Washington to have the part flown from the factory to the Canal. Long before it arrived, however, the officer in charge of stores made a foot-by-foot search of his warehouse. He found eight full bins of the needed part, all marked with a different stock number. “Stock duplication caused by lack of or deficiency in a standard parts catalogue,”standards men call it.

Very probably it was a screw thread that cost this country its greatest losses in time, money, and materials. The screw thread is a simple device, but it ties together the whole mechanical skeleton of our civilization. Throughout World War II we desperately needed the mechanical coördination that an international screw thread system would have provided. The British Whitworth Standard and our own American Standard differed only slightly in their dimensions, but the difference might as well have been as wide as the Atlantic Ocean.

William L. Batt, American chairman of the Combined Production and Resources Board, has estimated that because of lack of interchangeability in screw threads we shipped about 600 million dollars abroad in the form of extra screws, nuts, and bolts as spare parts. When Packard took over the manufacture of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine in the summer of 1940, it first had to spend ten months redrawing 2000 blueprints American fashion and translating the Whitworth thread forms into the American Standard on 3200 nuts, bolts, and studs.

2

How do we stand today? Both press and President have stressed the fact that we are in some ways, notably in industrial productive capacity, far ahead of where we were at the start of the last war. As far as standardization is concerned, that is remarkably true. We are much better prepared in standards today because of things learned, of men trained, of work done in standardization over the past ten years, both during the war and in the phenomenal post-war industrial expansion.

The Panama Canal incident, for example, started widespread reforms in the purchasing habits of the armed forces. As a direct result of it, the Army Signal Corps made a three-month analysis that eliminated 63,000 duplicate or nonstandard items out of 220,000 pieces of Signal Corps equipment. When the results were published, the other technical services of the armed forces made the same analysis, and with pretty much the same astonishing results. In 1945 the Navy — which had spent 55 billions during the war for the goods of industry — called in Remington Rand to help it survey its 50 million stock numbers. Of the first 15 million checked, only 2 million represented parts actually in use. Because some identical parts were listed under as many as 630 different numbers, this 2 million in turn was reduced to 80,825. Today the project of simplifying and standardizing the stores of the entire military establishment is well under way.

In 1943 Britain, Canada, and the United States held the first international conference on screw thread unification. As chairman of the American Standards Association Screw Thread Committee, I presided at the meetings. Five years and five conferences later, on November 18, 1948, these three countries agreed on a Unified Standard. The screw thread systems of the United States and the United Kingdom are now interchangeable. That fact, I think, is of tremendous importance to the security of the Western world.

In the meantime, standards activities that will give us quicker, cheaper, and more efficient economic mobilization and rearmament have been continuing, some of them speeded up by the events of the past six months. Last summer a conference of military, government, and industrial representatives from Britain, Canada, and the United States formulated a program leading to an agreement on bolt and nut dimensions. When a new unified standard is developed, American and British users of equipment will be able to use English and American bolts and nuts interchangeably and another critical bottleneck in the production of war material will be eliminated. A major effort is under way to resolve the differences between government practice and private industry practice in the making of engineering drawings. Requirements in radio and radar equipment are being standardized so that the military can obtain uniform and interchangeable products from many suppliers.

Whether or not we Americans appreciate standards, whether we examine them in peace or in time of war, standardization is a fundamental characteristic of our economic system. It got us where we are today. But we have cashed in on only a fraction of what peacetime standards can give us in almost any field.

House construction, one of the least standardized of our industries, is a perfect example of what standards could do if given the chance. I hasten to add, however, that I am not proposing rows of identical houses under uniform trees. Standardization is an engineering technique and it has nothing to do with unaesthetic uniformity.

Just a glance at a sash and door catalogue, with its fifty or more bastard sizes of doors and windows, gives a hint of how many dollars might be saved per dwelling by an industry-wide program of simplification and workable interchangeability. Except as necessary replacements in houses already built, the odd sizes represent waste. They perpetuate and compound an ancient evil. They add nothing to the appearance of a house, they clutter up warehouses, and they cost everyone money.

Or consider tubular locks for interior doors. Door manufacturers could easily produce their doors with holes drilled and ready to receive these locks. A few of the different lock manufacturers, however, make their tubular locks with slight variations. Consequently a carpenter must measure, drill, and chisel a mortise for the particular tubular lock which is to go into each door. We have been building about 100,000 houses per month, each with perhaps ten such doors. If standardization of these locks saved $1 per door, the saving to the home-buying public last year would have been around 12 million dollars.

3

STANDARDS to remedy these conditions do not come about by accident. They are born in a conscious effort; they are developed with organized machinery. Today the question of who is to control this machinery is a problem of our internal economy that is at once unrecognized, obscure, and crucial.

The problem has not been with us for long, for in our industrial beginnings our standards were written by only two men. The maker and the user alone were concerned, and perhaps their only exchange was that oldest of specifications, “Like the last one.”Early in the present century, however, the situation became involved with the growing complexities of our industrial society. The federal government joined producer and user as the third partner in the making of standards.

This intervention by government began as a means of curbing abuses in capitalism’s iron age, of regulating standards affecting public life, health, and safety. Large government purchases in and between wars, all of them carrying specifications, next made federal agencies a directly interested party in many business and industrial fields. Centralized government buying according to purchase specification began to cut deeper and deeper as a standardizing influence on industry. A half-dozen federal standardizing agencies were created.

Now the federal government has an important role to play in the writing of our standards. Historically, the federal government has an admirable record in formulating standards, in supporting the principles of standardization, and in promoting their knowledge and use, particularly in the field of health and safety. Government obviously has the right to set standards for the goods It buys. It is an interested party, and should be an active and watchful one.

So much is granted. But there is a wide difference between some and much, and an even vaster distinction between much and all. I am for the spoonful of vinegar in the salad dressing, but I am against a cupful. There are trends, plans, and proposals currently under way that would make standardization wholly or mainly a function of government, and I am opposed to them. I do not want my talented, capable, and sincere friends in the federal agencies in Washington to write the industrial standards of this country. Too much is at stake.

Standards are now built into the very structure of American industry. They are the controls that management employs to direct smooth and efficient company operation. The standards a manufacturer uses in operating his plant, the control of the quality of his product, the specifications under which he sells that product — all these are fundamental functions of business management.

If you control an industry’s standards, therefore, you control that industry lock, stock, and ledger. On the day that standards become a governmental function and responsibility, as is now being threatened, the government will take a very long step toward the control of American industry. That is a step which will reach into every manufacturing and operating company, big and little, and consequently will affect every consumer in the country.

In such a setup, government personnel will decide when and what standards should be developed and what the provisions of the standards should be. That method is inflexible. It leaves little room for the manufacturer to experiment with products which do not comply with a standard. It does not allow for improvements in standards and their consequent revision. It does not permit the single manufacturer to depart from a standard in order to develop a specialized and useful business.

Standards made under such conditions tend to become limitations, controls, and restrictive procedures. They reduce consumer choice. The manufacturer obeys an order he had no part in formulating. Whether he thinks those orders are good or bad, right or wrong, he follows them, and expends effort to make sure he follows them correctly and within the law. Or he resorts to political pressures to get the standards he wants.

I am opposed to government control of standards activities, however, for a much simpler reason. No government planner knows enough to write the standards for the rest of American industry and all other American people. Even if he and his advisers were its wise as Jupiter, he would still stand helpless before economic forces which are too powerful, delicate, and complex for individual control. In 1933, when such ideas did not have their current acceptance among our best thinkers, I wrote in an Atlantic Monthly article entitled “Business Looks at the NRA” as follows: —

The enormous extent of our operations in manufacturing and distributing material goods, their unimaginable variety, the incalculable complexity of the courses they take, the innumerable final desires and satisfactions they reach and serve, are beyond the comprehension or calculation of any planning board.

In the words of a great modern English statesman on a totally different subject, “I was rather pleased with this when I wrote it, and I don’t mind the look of it now.”

4

Now the situation certainly alters when people begin to shoot at us. In time of war we must quickly take special measures to save materials and manpower, to bring maximum efforts and resources to bear on production and mobilization. Under such pressure there are naturally tendencies and a will to give full authority to a planner or a group of planners, to hand down standards by decree. A point to remember, however, is that they must still be effective, workable standards. The planner, of course, is no wiser simply because bullets are flying or because he has put on a uniform. Those are just people moving around up there, and they are as fallible as ever. ‘The standards, the thousands upon thousands of purchase specifications they hand down, are as likely as before to be unrealistic, uncreative, and unnecessarily expensive. With this added difference: their errors can now be a thousand times more serious.

Nazi Germany practiced standards by decree and paid the price for it, notably when it standardized its military airplanes too much and too soon. Our own experience in World War II demonstrates that we worked best when industry was not only consulted in the development of the standards of the goods it was to manufacture, but also participated in decisions as to what the contents of the standards should be.

If an illustration is needed for an obvious truth, the case of the portable projector for training films may be briefly cited. One branch of the armed forces handed down specifications to the manufacturers that were quite out of line with the rigorous use for which the machine was intended, with the result that it frequently broke down after two or three uses. After the war a number of companies in the photographic equipment industry, working with a technical standards association, drew up specifications that harmonized the requirements of the machine and the ability of the industry to produce it. It is now in full military use.

If the answer to the problem of standardization is not to be found in standards written by the manufacturer alone, or by the consumer, or by federal agencies, where then is it to be found?

It lies with no one of them, I think, and with all of them. The solution lies in consensus. Where everyone is affected by standards, everyone should make the standards. Every group substantially concerned emdash; manufacturer, designer, distributor, seller, consumer, the government — should have the right to participate in deciding what the provisions of a standard shall be, and none should dominate the decision at the expense of another. For if a standard is to be of any value, it must be generally acceptable to all who use it. Industries, like people, are most willing to abide by regulations which they set up themselves.

Voluntary standardization on the consensus principle works. The fact that it works because of the businessman’s desire to stay out of trouble and make a profit is incidental. The businessman, just like every other individual, is motivated primarily by self-interest. We hope that self-interest is enlightened, but whether it is or not, if he directs his business in such a manner as to give a good economic performance and produce goods of the greatest value, then he promotes the public interest whether or not he intends it, wants it, or even knows it.

The thirty-year record demonstrates that voluntary standardization is an entirely workable and practical system. The American Society for Testing Materials, for instance, has cut across industries to write hundreds of useful voluntary national standards. The trade associations and technical societies of private American industry have written thousands of voluntary and socially beneficial standards. Many of these standards have been industry-wide and national in scope and have included varying degrees of government and consumer participation. Because they have been written under the pressure of competition, they must please the customer or flop, and they must therefore be periodically revised.

The American Standards Association, with headquarters in New York, is unique in the field of voluntary standardization, and may be called private industry’s primary answer to the challenge of government control of standards activities. It was founded in 1918 by five of the country’s leading engineering societies and three government departments — War, Navy, and Commerce — to bring order to the confused field of standardization. It now comprises 106 technical societies, trade associations, and groups of such organizations, and some 1800 private companies.

It works to simplify developments of engineering, commercial, consumer, and safety standards; to eliminate duplication, overlapping, and variables of standards activities by other standardization bodies in the country; to promote knowledge and use of standards; and to serve as a clearinghouse for information on all standards in the U.S. It serves as the channel of coöperation with the standards bodies of the twenty-nine other nations which belong to the International Organization for Standardization. About 4000 executives and technical experts are now serving on committees which are developing and constantly revising American Standards under the clearinghouse machinery of the ASA.

Those standards range from traffic signals to electric wiring, from specifications for fire hose to recent safety specifications for circus tents. They include standards for gear sizes: for the carat content of articles made of gold: for electric ranges, water heaters, and gas-burning appliances; for refrigeration equipment; and for eliminating variation in the shades of gray on industrial machines. There is an American Standard that fixes the musical note A in the treble clef at 440 cycles, and one that eliminates variation in kitchen measuring cups, pans, add spoons. An ASA committee is now seeking to complete an American Standard which will set minimum standards and informative labeling for rayon fabrics.

In none of these cases did the American Standards Association initiate a standard or hand it down to others as a finished job. It simply provided the machinery by which those who are concerned developed the standard. In drawing up the proposed 160-page rayon fabrics standard, over thirty national organizations participated. Producers, distributors, consumers, service industries, and federal agencies helped in its development.

Since 1948, and particularly since the attack on the Korean Republic, the American Standards Association has been engaged in an increasing amount of work directly concerned with or related to the country’s program for rearmament. In working with the federal government for more than thirty years with a notable degree of harmony, it had already developed a formula for an effective coöperative relationship. As many as ten federal departments and agencies at one time were ASA members, and as many as sixty-four agencies have participated in the work of its sectional committees. Three directors and an associate director of the Bureau of Standards have sat on the board of directors of ASA, the Bureau itself helping to write nearly half of all American Standards.

During World War II, ASA helped to develop about 500 standards which contributed to the war effort. Of these, 160 were specifically requested by government agencies such as the Army, Navy, War Production Board, and Office of Price Administration. These introduced safety procedures and protective clothing (28 War Standards); set specifications for radio components, electrical instruments, and photographic equipment; drew up standards for quality control in production; and by specific measures conserved materials and manpower.

Enforced government standards entered our private lives in ways that would have been unthinkable and, I hopefully presume, unacceptable in time of peace. The government standardized tubes for civilian radios and the thickness of leather permitted in a half sole; bicycles (twenty types reduced to two) and working clothes (six types); the number of pockets on women’s coveralls (two); the style of pants cuffs (none) and the length of your shirttail (shorter).

While these War Standards were compulsory, the consensus principle, nevertheless, was maintained to a marked degree in writing them. The area of agreement was narrowed to those directly participating. At the consultation table, private industry retained its position of the responsible producer and the government, with the war effort absorbing nearly half the national economy, assumed the position at once of buyer and user. When properly carried out, this procedure developed War Standards that did not unnecessarily depart from current industrial practice and made good use of the technical and creative abilities of American industry.

In its rearmament program of the past two years, the military establishment has achieved notably successful results where it has continued to follow the consensus principle in writing standards. But there is now a heightened danger that the intensified pressures of war preparedness will cause the consensus principle in standards to be thrown out and War Standards to be handed down by dictate. There is a greater danger that the government, using the war emergency as an opportunity and an excuse, will not only take over full powers in standards activities but will fail to relinquish them when the emergency ends. There is a group, both in and out of government, who feel that standardization is properly a government responsibility. In two, five, or ten years when, God willing, we begin again to take up life in a post-war economy, the cry will be louder than before that our standards should be written in the government offices.

I think that neither now nor later can we afford such a reversal of our economic and technical processes. Our standards are now basic to our industrial economy. They will be more important than ever as we organize resistance against aggressive forces. When this crisis ends, we must work to achieve a higher degree of harmony and order in our world; to relieve the strain of modern living by simplification; to increase the standard of living through more efficient, production of interchangeable parts in a free market. We must use standards as “ the liberator that relegates the problems that have already been solved to the field of routine, and leaves the creative faculties free for the problems that are still unsolved.”

I say that this is not work for the master planner. Creative dynamic standards are not composed on the higher levels and handed down by decree and proclamation. They are formulated by the voluntary agreement of all groups concerned. They must be worked out by the people themselves.