"Inside Out," Feature Article, August 2005

Celebrating ASME's 125th Anniversary

inside out

The nation's engineers turn their attention from conquering the Axis to colonizing the suburban frontier.

by Jeffrey Winters, Associate Editor

As ASME celebrates its 125th anniversary this year,
Mechanical Engineering will run articles each month highlighting key influences in the Society's development. This, the eighth in our series, looks at the 1950s and the onset of the suburban lifestyle.

At the end of the landmark 1946 movie The Best Years of Our Lives, Fred Derry (played by Dana Andrews) wanders a surreal landscape of surplus aircraft scheduled for scrapping. Metal from the planes was to be used in making prefabricated housing. Fred, despondent just minutes before over his fall from decorated bomber pilot to cosmetics sales clerk, suddenly brightens. He lands himself a job and joins the postwar building boom.

Like Fred Derry, a nation of engineers and workers made the tough transition away from wartime production of the Arsenal of Democracy. The need for fleets of ships, tanks, and airplanes created virtually full employment in the United States. For the first time since the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the American industrial heart was racing.
But with the war over, what would the nation do with that industrial capacity? Some worried that peace would bring a return to the Depression.

To keep new housing affordable, the builders of suburbs such as Levittown, Pa., constructed row upon row of houses using similar designs. By 1960, the suburbs had exploded.

Instead, the economy of the 1950s boomed. And the nation's engineers led the way, reapplying wartime technology to civilian needs and developing new tools and products for conquering a new challenge: the suburban fringe.

In 1940, the United States was still a nation of renters. The census that year found that 56 percent of American families were renting their dwellings. There were only 15 million owner-occupied housing units for a country of 132 million people.

But that was all about to change. Thanks to provisions in the G.I. Bill, single-family homes became more desirable than ever. A nation that had been split between cities and countryside discovered a new kind of landscape—the suburbs. From a base of just 20 million in 1940, the suburbs ballooned to more than 55 million people by 1960. Not only did some three-quarters of the population growth in that span occur in the suburbs, but by 1960, the population of the suburbs just about equaled that of the central cities. For a generation of Americans that had been raised in rural shacks or urban tenements, the suburban subdivision made up of single-family ranch houses must have seemed like a promised land.

That new landscape required new ways of doing things. For instance, most of these houses were stick-built, using techniques that had changed little over the previous decades. But new homeowners were expecting their new suburban houses to have amenities that had been relatively rare just two decades earlier, such as complete plumbing, which requires extensive excavation to run pipes to either mains or septic systems. Nearly 20 million housing units either added full plumbing or were built with it between 1950 and 1960. Who dug the ditches to lay the service lines?

Over the course of the decade, the backbreaking work of trench-diggers was turned over to machines. The Ditch Witch DWP service line trencher, invented by Ed Malazhan in 1949 and put into production in the early 1950s, consisted of a series of small buckets attached to a conveyer chain that would dig into the soil, scoop up a small load, and dump the spoils along the edge of the trench. Thanks to the seven-horsepower engine, a single operator could dig a four-inch-wide, 30-inch-deep trench in a fraction of the time it would take a team of laborers. (A 1952 model of the Ditch Witch is an ASME landmark.)

By automating the task of running service lines to houses, the trenching machines helped bring down the costs of new tract houses and fueled the rise of the suburb as the new American ideal.

The building explosion led to an overall boom in consumer products. Not only had years of depression and war shortages led to pent-up demand, but also all the new housing had to be filled with gewgaws and gadgets. Thanks to television, which had zoomed from a World's Fair-style wonder to a central fixture of the American living room in a few short years, workers were being transformed into consumers.

And don't forget the baby boom. Thirty-nine million children were born in the 1950s, boosting demand for everything from school desks to coonskin caps.

According to figures from the U.S. Federal Reserve, production of consumer goods rose 67 percent from 1948 to 1959. Car registrations more than doubled over that period, and the number of two-car families jumped by 750,000 a year.

Booming car production led to an increased demand for high-quality steel. The open-hearth process, which had begun to replace the Bessemer converters earlier in the century, was hard-pressed to provide steel in sufficient quantity and quality for the automotive industry. The other source of steel at that time, electric furnaces, accounted for a small percentage of the U.S. production and were limited by a dependence on scrap metal, which had become expensive once the war armaments had been exhausted.

The 1950s economy demanded lots of high-quality steel—a need met by the use of the basic oxygen process. This 60-ton vessel was part of the first mill in the U.S. to use that technique.

The management of a small Detroit-based mill, McLouth Steel Corp., realized in 1952 that they had to move beyond electric furnaces. They adopted a new technology—the basic oxygen process—that had been developed in Austria just before the war.

The key point in the new process was the introduction of a stream of pure oxygen through a water-cooled lance just above a pool of molten metal. The pure oxygen environment helps carry away more impurities—and yields lower nitrogen levels—than other processes, leading to superior steel that is better suited for automotive uses. What's more, the basic oxygen process was found to require much less up-front capital expense than an open hearth and could produce steel nearly three times as fast.

Now, some 50 years later, most of the steel produced in the United States is made by either the basic oxygen process or in electric steel furnaces.

Steel wasn't the only material undergoing a revolution. The postwar suburban household was home to Formica counters, Tupperware containers, and plastic Hula-Hoops. Once-exotic materials moved from the laboratory to the store shelves with amazing speed. Indeed, the 1950s saw an explosion of all manner of former luxuries that became mass consumer items.

Take simple orange juice: Once upon a time, it was a rare treat, served up in tiny rations. But demand for juice from concentrate exploded in the postwar era, and engineers responded with an advanced juice extractor. Automated juicers had been at work for some time, but they worked only on fruit that had been halved or quartered. Extraction from a piece of whole fruit would make for a more streamlined operation, enabling faster and cheaper production. It could make the difference between juice meted out in three-ounce glasses and O.J. cheap enough to drink by the tumbler.

Developed by the Central Engineering Laboratories of FMC Corp. in Lakeland, Fla., the whole fruit juice extractor receives an orange or grapefruit and places it in a flexible cup. A tube punctures the peel from below, and fruit is squeezed from both top and bottom. In about a second, not only is the juice flushed out, but the oil from the peel is extracted separately.

After some testing of prototypes in the late 1940s, FMC began manufacturing hundreds of units, starting in 1950. (One of the early test units was made an ASME landmark in 1983.) But engineers didn't stop there. The suburban kitchen was home to other wonders. Frozen "TV" dinners, frost-free refrigerators, and electric clothes dryers all helped to transform life in tract housing.

The relative affluence of 1950s suburban households led to the creation of a consumer culture that learned about new products from television. Many TV shows also were set in the suburbs.

Another advanced technology was containerized shipping, which was first developed in 1956 by Pan-Atlantic Steamship Co. (now Sea-Land Services Inc.) of New Jersey. The traditional longshoreman's method of handling cargo—involving the loading and unloading of individual sacks or crates of goods—was so time-consuming that ships often spent more time in port than they did at sea. Packing cargo into standardized containers that could be moved from ship to either rail or truck in one or two crane lifts cut the turnaround time in port from as much as three weeks to as little as 18 hours. This mechanization also slashed labor costs for shipping, with the operator of a crane such as the Paceco container crane (another ASME landmark) replacing a gang of stevedores. In time, containerization would profoundly transform the shape of American manufacturing.

In the 1950s, the civilian application of technologies developed by the military helped transform air travel. The first jet airliner, the DeHavilland Comet, began commercial operation in 1952. Although the Comet itself was ill-fated (its square window design led to catastrophic depressurizations), other makers—especially Boeing and Douglas—came out with their own jet airliners by the mid-1950s. Due to the speed of these planes, the entire globe would soon be within reach of a growing class of "jet-setters."

Another technology that made the transition from military to civilian uses was nuclear power. Part of a famous crash program during World War II, atomic power (as it was called then) was seen by politicians and industry as emblematic of a new and improved technological era. Researchers worked to turn radioactive decay into a viable energy source, and by 1958, the Shippingport Nuclear Power Station in Pennsylvania became the first reactor to be used as a central generating unit.

What's more, the promise of nuclear power was so great at that time that the United States sought to export it to the world. President Dwight Eisenhower established the Atoms for Peace program early in his administration and delivered nuclear technology and material to nations such as India, Pakistan, and Israel—countries that later used these imports to help kick-start weapons programs.

Indeed, such weapons, another outgrowth of the wartime industrial effort, were the dark clouds over the 1950s suburban boom. In addition to black-and-white televisions and tail-finned Cadillacs, many suburban households contained another sign of the times: a bomb shelter.

People like Fred Derry from The Best Years of Our Lives may have helped turn America into a suburban nation. But had they stayed in the Air Force, they no doubt would have been busy throughout the 1950s.