Word: builders
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Like all the others, it mushroomed during World War II. At the peak, Northrop had 10,000 employees, turned out $280 million worth of planes and parts, including 1,000 of his P-61 Black Widow night fighters. Like many another builder, Northrop also lost millions on postwar ventures into nonaircraft projects (among Northrop's bad bets: motor scooters and calculating machines). He also bet on a three-engine transport plane and his long cherished Flying Wing. The transport was behind its time, the Flying Wing ahead of it. The Government, which had staked both to $80 million worth...
...been complaining that he would need an order at least that big to justify the expansion necessary to put Comets into volume production (current production: one a month). But Rickenbacker's time limit was hard for the leisurely Britons to meet ("Really now," commented one British aircraft builder, "you cannot suddenly swell an industry to twice its size, you know"). De Havilland's bosses promised Rickenbacker a firm answer within a week...
...Khufu, builder of Egypt's mightiest pyramid, never dreamed of a structure like the Russian Communist Party. Communists like to make it seem like a pyramid in which power rises from the grass roots up through local and regional committees to the top. The West, on the other hand, usually sees the party as a "monolith," in which Stalin has only to crook his little finger to produce a purge in Krasnoyarsk. The Russian version is nonsense, but the Western idea is not quite right either. The party is in fact a highly complex mechanism which must be kept...
Britain last week showed off a delta-wing plane, the Gloster Javelin, which its builder thinks is the fastest, longest-range, all-weather day & night fighter ever built. Nobody needed to guess who the builder was. It was T. O. M. Sopwith, the first lord of British aircraft and a big name in British aviation for nearly 40 years. When Germany's top World War I ace, Von Richthofen, was finally shot down, Canada's ace Captain Roy Brown, in a Sopwith Camel fighter was credited with the kill; when the Germans came back...
...Contractor Kiewit (pronounced key-wit), whose builder father left a small company with $25,000 in assets to three sons, has been moving mountains of earth since he took over the company in 1931. He got up from a hospital bed to do so. Young Kiewit, who learned bricklaying in high-school days and quit Dartmouth as a freshman to become a builder, had been stricken by phlebitis followed by serious complications. After lying on his back in a hospital for nine months, he decided: "If I'm going to die. I might as well die working...