MANUFACTURING: Life Savers

When President Roosevelt last week invoked the provisions of the Neutrality Act (see p. 9), U. S. aircraft makers were unable to export any more fighting planes. They still had nearly half of recent $160,000,000 British and French orders to deliver but they did not worry. They had stipulated in their contracts that in just this event they should be paid when the planes were delivered to Allied agents within the U. S. The Allies have to take the chance that the Neutrality Act will be modified so that they can use their property.

But when the Neutrality Act stopped the export of airplanes it did not stop the export of several other necessities of war—necessities that are life savers instead of life takers. Among them are: Pharmaceuticals (big makers: Parke, Davis & Co., Abbott Laboratories), surgical dressings (big makers: Johnson & Johnson, the Kendall Co.), gas masks (big maker: Mine Safety Appliances Co.),parachutes (world’s biggest maker: Irving Air Chute Co.).

Last year Irving Air Chute had net sales of $1,928,400 (retail cost of parachutes: $180 to $300) and netted $398,321. After that record year’s business it still had a record backlog of $1,000,000 in unfilled orders. Last week its backlog was a secret but the litter of cablegrams and war orders on the desk of its pink-cheeked, spectacled President George Waite was evidence that last year’s sales and Jan. 1’s backlog were marks that had long since been erased by the incoming tide.

In Irving’s six factories—at Buffalo, N. Y.; at Glendale, Calif.; at Fort Erie, Canada; at Bucharest, Rumania; at Stockholm, Sweden; at Letchworth, England—Irving’s 2,000 employes were sewing on silken war orders. Airmen of 45 foreign countries now ride on Irving silk—even the Germans who confiscated an Irving plant and bought its patents three years ago.

There is no “Mr. Irving” to profit from all this. A round-faced studious onetime parachutist named Leslie L. Irvin, tried to give his name to the company in 1919, but a stenographer added a final “G” on the incorporation papers. Leslie Irvin, now vice president of the company, was in the midst of things last week, at Letchworth on the active British front.

In 1911 he had begun jumping from balloons in parachutes that opened automatically. In 1918 he was the first man to try using a parachute in a pack that had to be opened after the jumper left the plane. It worked. Les Irvin’s first pack parachute was made of cumbersome cotton. Later he aroused the interest of Silk Dealer George Wake in making better silk chutes. They incorporated just in time to get a 500-chute order from the U. S. Army, soon found a market when pilots began leaping from ailing planes into the Caterpillar Club (Star Member Charles A. Lindbergh; four emergency jumps).

Today, no U. S. military or naval airman may go aloft without a parachute and the same rule is generally observed in Europe’s air forces. Last year, while the world was busy at rearmament it spent generously on parachutes because a pilot is a fighting asset well worth saving even if his plane is lost. Now the world wants more chutes than ever, for war means wear, tear and crashes—high mortality for life savers.