Chapter 46

Slabbing the doughlike mixture of carbon and spreading it on screen-bottomed trays at carbon plant No. 2.

Chemical laboratory showing apparatus for testing the absorbent power of the carbon and gran powder.

Retort house. Discharging machine drawing out the nearer half and pushing out the far half of the hot carbon.

Carbon plant No. 3, showing treater room and west side batteries of Dorsite treaters.FOUR VIEWS OF CARBON PLANT AT ASTORIA, L. I.

Carbon plant No. 3, showing treater room and west side batteries of Dorsite treaters.

FOUR VIEWS OF CARBON PLANT AT ASTORIA, L. I.

Zigzagging and combing work on masks.

Doping the masks.

Assembly department.

Final inspection department.FOUR INTERIOR VIEWS OF GAS MASK PLANT.

Final inspection department.

FOUR INTERIOR VIEWS OF GAS MASK PLANT.

All of the masks produced in the fall of 1917 were still regarded as experimental and not yet up to the standard of masks which we were willing to supply for actual service at the front. Consequently, not one of them was exported, but the entire 1917 production, after the first order of 25,000, was sent only to the training camps in this country. By January 8, 1918, we were producing masks which we were willing to put into actual service, and on that date the manufacture of masks for export was started.

In January we exported 54,000 masks, which was 16,000 less than the schedule which we had set for ourselves. But by February 20 we had wiped out this deficit with a little over, for our schedule by that date called for the production of 141,000 gas masks, and we had produced 142,000.

Late in the fall of 1917 the requirements of the Expeditionary Forces were reanalyzed in the light of information gathered abroad and in accordance with the new military program. Requirements were multiplied almost fourfold. Let us see how these requirements were met, and what difficulties were solved in the course of the effort.

Experience had already shown that for many reasons the Government needed its own mask factory, where improvements could be adopted as soon as made and where inspections and the storage of parts could be more centralized than in private plants.

With the necessary expansion then confronting us, any other policy would have meant making face pieces in half a dozen or more private plants, all starting at once with organizations untrained for this work. This would have been fatal, for even with the Goodyear and Goodrich companies manufacturing face pieces in Akron and the Kenyon Manufacturing Co. making them in Brooklyn, we found it most difficult to maintain uniform standards in all the plants. As new points came up, it was constantly necessary to interchange inspection personnel and to send men from one plant to another to teach manufacturing wrinkles. Such practices consumed more personnel than we could train in the time available. Moreover, it was impossible under the conditions that we were then facing to build up more than barely adequate supplies of gas mask parts and such raw materials as special fabrics. To have operated many more face-piece plants would have meant to divide these stocks of fabrics, elastic, tape, etc., still further. To have kept each ofthese plants properly stocked, under the existing traffic conditions, would have been impossible. A big central gas-defense plant was the only solution of our difficulties.

The order approving the establishment of the gas-defense plant was signed by Secretary Baker on November 20, 1917. The officers of the Gas Defense Division found in Long Island City, not far from the new chemical plant at Astoria, a group of modern concrete factory buildings which had been put up in this newly developed section by several different concerns, among them the Ford Motor Co., the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., and the National Casket Co. One of these buildings, known as the Stewart Building, was taken over by the Government and modern machinery was installed. Mr. R. R. Richardson, of Chicago, was appointed plant manager with a salary of $1 per year. He quickly set to work organizing the factory and its staff. On January 9, 1918, the first few factory operators were hired. Five days later the executive offices at the plant were ready for occupancy. The plant grew apace. One by one the other buildings were absorbed and added to the establishment—first the Goodyear Tire & Rubber building, then the National Casket building. Next a long storage building was built between the Stewart and the Goodyear buildings. Runways were built which connected up the various buildings, and, finally, in July, the Ford Motor building was taken over and connected up to complete the group.

Thus by the summer of 1918 we occupied five large buildings, with a total of over 1,000,000 square feet, or 20 acres, of floor space, connected up to make the gas-defense plant. Of the 12,000 employees in this plant, 8,600 were women. Endeavors were made as far as possible to hire those who had near relatives with the American Expeditionary Forces. The degree of care required in the manufacture of masks was beyond anything known in normal industry, and we rightly believed that this personal interest in the work would bring about greater care in manufacture and inspection. Since the factory was working at top speed a great deal of attention was paid to welfare work. Women employees were given 12-minute rest periods both in the morning and the afternoon, and completely furnished attractive rest and recreation rooms were set apart for women in the factory.

GAS-DEFENSE PLANT AT LONG ISLAND CITY.

EMPLOYEES OF GAS-DEFENSE PLANT LONG ISLAND CITY, NOVEMBER 11, 1918.

The plant was unique in more than one respect. At the very start it attempted the supposedly impossible, for it combined in its staff and in its working organization civilian and military personnel. The manager was a civilian, the assistant manager was Lieut. Col. Coonley. Below them on the next tier of the organization were Army officers in charge of several departments and civilians in charge of others. Throughout the plant were certain groups of women workers or inspectors in charge of civilians were others; in charge of sergeants or even privates. The arrangement worked out well and the whole organization pulled together as one team, without reference to civilian or military status. Again, at the start there was laid down a policy of inspection at every single stage of manufacture. The incoming parts, though already inspected at their source, were reinspected and retested. After every operation in the manufacture of the face piece there came an inspection by specially trained women set apart from the operators. Then again, there was a special control inspection. After the face piece was finished, and when assembly was complete, the entire mask went to a final inspection where it was looked over by several trained women, who worked in dark closets and inspected the face pieces over a bright light to make sure that no pin pricks had been made, either maliciously or otherwise. Furthermore, wherever there was an inspector there was a system of checking his or her accuracy, for 5 per cent of every inspector's work was periodically selected at random and checked over by other inspectors.

Hand in hand with this went many of the latest developments of factory operation. The best machinery was employed, conveyors were used wherever possible, and, when changes in the size of the operation or the design of the mask made it advisable, the factory was at once rearranged in order that the flow might always be orderly and continuous.

From all of this the reader might judge that the operation, lasting, as it did, for only a little more than eight months, was a costly one. Such, however, was not the case, for a well-ordered and accurate cost system, kept from the very start in accordance with the best practices of factory accounting, showed that after charging in all equipment changes and overhead, the plant made complete masks which cost the Government about 50 cents per mask less than it cost to get complete masks by purchasing parts and assembling them under private contracts.

Along with this manufacturing development went the building up of an elaborate procurement force charged with the responsibility of providing parts to be assembled at the gas-defense plant and the Hero Manufacturing Co. This section faced a hard and intricate task, but though there were instances where a shortage of parts temporarily slowed down production, these were remarkably few. Many were the difficulties of buying new parts; many of the parts were the product of elaborate die work; die makers in the country were overworked. Specifications had to be written, checked, and approved, and a field inspection first had to be organized and trained so that the product from all the different plants could be relied upon as satisfactory for the assembling plants. But this problem was still further complicated by ever-recurring changes in design, made necessary as improvementfollowed improvement. Officers had to be trained in a day and then sent out to train inspection corps in manufacturing plants in many parts of the country. Inspection and procurement detachments were maintained in most of the eastern industrial centers. There were over 100 enlisted men and 9 officers in Akron, 30 enlisted men with 6 officers in Boston, and men and officers in over 60 cities. Here again the civilian and Army officer worked hand in hand; for Mr. Robert Skemp, a volunteer civilian from Pittsburgh, was in charge of this procurement, reporting to Lieut. Col. Besse and directing an organization made up almost entirely of officers and enlisted men.

The March output of masks was 183,000; that of April, 363,000; May, slightly less than this figure; that of June, 504,000; that of July, 671,000. In all, between January 1 and November 11, 1918, we built more than 5,000,000 gas masks.

In February, 1918, shortly before the German drive commenced, we received requisitions for sample lots of oiled mittens and oiled union suits as protection against mustard gas and also for chloride of lime to neutralize poison-impregnated earth. In their March drive the Germans used gas in much more protracted concentrations than before. Originally the masks had been worn only during the sporadic gas alarms, and then only for a brief period at a time.

The double-protection mask which we had been building had been admirable in its day, but it was no longer adapted to the sort of use to which it was evident it must now be put. In long-continued wear the mouthpiece would irritate the gums and lips of the soldier, and the face-piece band would cause excruciating headaches after a few hours. It had now become frequently necessary for men to wear their masks for eight hours at a stretch. The word discomfort is a weak description of the feelings of a man wearing one of our masks for that period.

Our authorities in France decreed for a single-protection mask and more comfort, even at the expense of a little safety. The result of these new conditions together with the establishment of closer relationship with our Expeditionary Forces, through a visit of Col. Dewey to France, was the determination to build masks in this country which should give the protection of the masks which we had been turning out and at the same time be comparatively comfortable. There had been brought out in France a single-protection mask, that is, a mask in which the inlet tube entered directly into the space between the mask and the face, with the orifices so arranged that the fresh air was drawn across the eyepieces. This was known as the Tissot mask. The principle of the Tissot was correct as far as comfort was concerned, since it did away with the irritating mouthpiece, but the chief danger in this mask arose from the fact that it was made of thin, pure gum rubber. We took the Tissot and endeavored to produce a mask of this type which should be gas-tight and yetrugged. In this work we experimented on hundreds of subjects to determine face and head sizes and shapes. It is interesting to note in this connection that the size of a man's face has nothing to do with the size of his head, as large heads with small faces and small heads with large faces occur not infrequently.

We made two developments of the mask without mouthpiece or nose clip. Both were ready for field tests in August, 1918. The one produced in Akron and assembled at the Philadelphia contracting plant was known as the Akron Tissot, or Type A-T.

At the start of operations in Long Island City Mr. Waldemar Kops, of New York, a manufacturer of corsets, came to the Government, asking an opportunity to do his part in the war. He was assigned to the gas-defense plant, and later, with the commission of major, took charge of the gas-defense Long Island laboratories. Maj. Kops had no experience with gas masks until he came to the gas-defense plant, but his experiments soon led to an improvement in the design of the Tissot mask. It was called the Type KT mask—the Kops-Tissot. Only a few hundred thousand were produced, though the latest model was scheduled for enormous production beginning in December, 1918. It possessed much of the protective efficiency of the old uncomfortable mask, the cut of the face piece insured a gas-tight connection with the head, it was relatively comfortable, and it was durable.

The call of the allies in the spring of 1918 for American troops in as great numbers as the ships could carry them to France resulted in still further increases in our mask requirements. At the height of the drive we were making over 40,000 masks a day. Approximately 35,000 employees were engaged in the manufacture of various gas-mask parts. Our carbon requirements were expanding at a rate that would have needed 400 tons of raw materials a day by December, 1918. We built 336,919 KT masks and approximately 200,000 A-T masks. In exact figures the total production of masks of all types was 5,692,499. Of these 3,666,683 were built at the gas-defense plant and 2,025,816 were assembled by the Hero Manufacturing Co. In addition, we furnished 3,189,357 extra filled canisters for the replacement of those used up by 40 hours of field service.

Hand in hand with this procurement and manufacturing achievement went the development of the technical section of the Gas Defense Division. This was known as the Long Island laboratories, manned by a personnel of several hundred men and officers. Here in its laboratories were solved the knotty problems that bridged the gap between experimental work and production. Many new designs were worked out, only to be rejected when tested. Here there were workrooms that could make sample lots of 1,000 masks, and here were located the chemical laboratories and the gas chambersin which the product of the gas-defense plant was tested daily by control chemical analysis and by actual breathing and wearing tests.

In spite of this elaborate technical section, the testing of masks did not stop with it. There was a special field-testing section of the Gas Defense Division, composed of about 150 men who were trained to the minute in field maneuvers and did most of their work in gas masks. They were constantly in and out of gas with regular production and experimental masks, they played baseball in them, they dug trenches, laid out wire, cut wire, and fought sham battles at night, both with and without actual gas. This section was not organized until July, but it should have been one of the first of our units. It was there that we learned all the fine points of gas mask comfort and durability. The work of this section even went so far in the case of the later designs as to include a test where six men worked, played, and slept in the masks for an entire week, only taking them off for 30 minutes at each mealtime, and each day entering high concentrations of the most deadly gases, without any ill effects whatsoever to the wearers. When it is remembered that eight hours was the limit of time which a strong man could wear the old-type mask, something of the efficiency of the new mask may be realized.

We also built 377,881 horse masks. Investigation showed that a horse's eyes did not shed tears in the presence of even strong lachrymatory gases. Moreover a horse never breathes through his mouth; and it was, therefore, necessary only to cover his nostrils. Furthermore, horses proved to be more resistant to the toxic gases used in Europe than were men, and his mask, accordingly, needed to be only a bag of many layers of chemically treated gauze. The horse masks were all manufactured by the Fifth Avenue Uniform Co., of New York City, under the supervision of a detachment of the Gas Defense Division.

We furnished 191,338 dugout blankets to be used at the doors of dugouts to make them gas proof. These were specially woven all-cotton blankets which were treated in France with a special heavy oil, shipped from the United States.

Toward the end of the war we received large requisitions for protective suits and gloves to safeguard men against mustard gas burns. The suits were made of oiled fabric and the gloves were of cloth impregnated with chemicals. As a work just starting, we produced 2,450 suits and 1,773 pairs of gloves.

A total of 1,246 tons of a new ointment known as sag paste was made and shipped. This was an ointment to protect the skin against mustard-gas burns.

Gas warning signals were of several types, watchmen's rattles and Klaxon horns being the most commonly used to sound the gas alarms. We shipped 45,906 of these special hand horns. The rattles were secured in Europe.

THE AKRON TISSOT MASK. AN IMPROVEMENT OVER THE MASK THAT WAS IN GENERAL USE AMONG OUR TROOPS.

THE KOPS TISSOT MASK. OUR LATEST DEVELOPMENT AND CONSIDERED TO BE THE BEST OF ALL MASKS.

GAS MASK OF FLANNELETTE TYPE FOR HORSE.

Trench fans, for fanning out gas from trenches and dugouts, were produced, to the number of 50,549.

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