2009.006

Lukacs, Claire

Gift

Museum Collections. Gift of a friend of the Museum.

1967 - 1967

Date(s) Created: 1967 Date(s): 1967-1967

Good

Notes: Archives 2009.006.0022 ==== page [1] Partners in Creating /The First Century of K+E 1867/1967 EDITOR: William Franklin CONSULTING EDITOR: Elliot Schrero DESIGNER: Earl Livingston PICTURE CREDITS — All photos and drawings from K&E archives unless otherwise credited. The Bettmann Archive, pages 4, 8, 17, 16, 34; Culver Pictures, pages 4, 11, 24, 27, 30; Underwood & Underwood, page 32; Worldwide Photos, page 21. © 1967, KEUFFEL & ESSER CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ==== page [2] full page photo, caption as found on page 3: On this street, four flights up, the partners started in business for a month's rent of $5.50. ==== page 3 A New Idea It was a few weeks after midsummer, 1867. In a tiny office at 79 Nassau Street in lower Manhattan, two young men were opening a business. William J. D. Keuffel and Hermann Esser were starting out to sell drawing materials and draftsmen's tools. ---- [captioned portraits] William Keuffel Hermann Esser ---- Their first month's rent, paid in advance, was $5.50. Such space as this sum commanded was soon crammed with exotic materials and instruments needed by engineers and architects. There was an assortment of finely machined ruling pens, compasses, and dividers. There were protractors of horn and nickel silver, trammels of rosewood and mahogany, ink in small glossy cakes from India and China, and even triangles and curves cut from recently invented hard rubber. Here was a new idea. Until then, drafting tools and engineers' supplies had always been sold with more commonplace articles by hardware and mill supply dealers. No company had ever tried to specialize in them. Despite their limited capital the partners were convinced they could make a success of the venture. They were energetic and young — only 22 and 29 that first summer. William Keuffel was the elder. A newcomer ---- [caption for full page photo on page [2]] On this street, four flights up, the partners started in business for a month's rent of $5.50. ---- to the United States, he was still learning the language and ways of the country. He had an advantage, however, that few men in New York except his own partner could match. He had trained for a dozen years in the hardware business in Magdeburg and Hannover, two of the most advanced industrial centers of Europe. His partner, though younger, also knew the business well and after three years in the United States was accustomed to the hard-driving New York commercial world. The tempo of that world was quickening. The end of the Civil War had released the country's energies. Construction projects of all kinds were mushrooming, creating a need for more and better engineers' and architects' instruments. William Keuffel had the knack of foreseeing such developments before others did, and he was an optimist. From the start, the young firm planned its stock of drafting supplies to meet a swiftly rising demand. [caption illustration bottom right] Ornate cartons of India ink . . . among the first imports. ==== page [4] illustrations captioned on page 5: New York City, an exciting place in the 1870's as work began on the Brooklyn Bridge and Third Avenue "El" ==== page 5 A Changing America New York was an ideal place for young Keuffel and Esser to begin. At that time it was a ferment of engineering and architectural enterprise. New York was headquarters for the country's boldest industrialists — the railroad builders. They were breaking records, and sometimes other men's backs or fortunes, to double the country's track mileage between '65 and '73. Manhattan itself was being transformed into the Gotham of J. P. Morgan and William Randolph Hearst — a melting pot that would soon stream underground in subways and shoot skyscrapers toward the clouds. The first multi-family dwelling with enough light, ventilation, and heat to be called an apartment house, as distinct from a tenement, went up on 18th Street in 1869. The next year, the first passenger elevator in a major building began running at 120 Broadway. New York's permanent high-rise boom was underway. Brooklyn already was a commuters' town, the "bedroom of Manhattan." Less than half a mile from 71 Nassau Street, where the new firm soon moved into larger quarters, the first pier of Brooklyn Bridge was beginning to rise in 1870. Meanwhile, a revolutionary new transportation system was pushing uptown from the Battery. It was the awesome El, an entire railroad on stilts. The first section of elevated track was demonstrated to a somewhat nervous public in July, 1868. By 1870, the El was running as far as 30th Street, under steam power. Fearful mothers still refused to take their children aboard, but already there was talk of reaching 110th Street, and transportation buffs were preaching the need for a subway. For that matter, it would have been easier and pleasanter for the partners to stay at their homes across the ---- [caption for full-page illustration on page [4]] New York City, an exciting place in the 1870's as work began on the Brooklyn Bridge and Third Avenue "El" ---- [caption illustration top right] Hoboken, across the Hudson River, was a bustling port. ---- river in Hoboken. The town had some of the graciousness of an earlier day when it was the resort of rich and famous New Yorkers. John Jacob Astor, no less, had built a villa fronting the Hudson there, and the summer colony had been ornamented by such literary lions as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant and even a former President, Martin Van Buren. Hoboken's distinction as a resort was so secure that nobody thought it funny to name one of its recreation areas the Elysian Fields. On those grounds, in fact, baseball had its start as an organized sport, in a contest between Hoboken's Knickerbocker Giants and a New York team, about 20 years before Keuffel and Esser started in business. Hoboken already had its industrial side, too. Under the auspices of Col. John Stevens, the chief landowner and developer, it had seen the first successful American railroad demonstration, a locomotive running on a circular track. Stevens also had sponsored the world's first regular steam ferry, the "Juliana," to connect Hoboken and New York. By the late sixties, waterfront activity was transforming the town into a shipping and manufacturing center. ==== page 6 Under Way Getting the business started in its cramped New York quarters wasn't easy. Customers had to climb four flights of stairs, and there was no show room. But the partners knew their business. If their customers couldn't or wouldn't come to them, Messrs. Keuffel and Esser would go to their customers. Each armed himself with a large basket of assorted drawing materials and instruments. Day after day, they carried their products into the office of every architect, builder, and engineer they could find in Manhattan. It was hard, exhausting work. But by pounding the pavements and making call after call, the partners began to establish a clientele. Their products were the best, and purchasers found the firm kept its promises. The partners soon invented a new way to attract customers. Although they lacked a show room, in 1868, little more than a year after founding their enterprise, they brought out a catalog. Never before had a catalog been devoted exclusively to draftsmen's materials. Twenty-four pages in length, the K&E publication created a stir in the hardware trade. The new firm was acquiring a solid reputation. Before long, K&E tools and materials were being used to draw the plans for many of the important construction projects dotting Manhattan. One of these was the Brooklyn Bridge itself, destined to take another 13 years in the building. In 1870, the year that work on the Bridge got under way, K&E took another major step. Already, at this early stage, the partners realized that soon the growing, vibrant industrial society around them would require precision instruments produced in abundance within the United States — not abroad. They foresaw that their imports from Europe would have to be supplemented — and eventually replaced in large measure — by products of their own manufacture. Accordingly, they moved to larger quarters at 116 Fulton Street. Here there was room for William Keuffel to start making the firm's own hard rubber draftsmen's curves and triangles, which he painstakingly cut by hand. William Keuffel's first manufactured items, surprisingly enough, won an award for excellence at the American Institute in 1869. It was the start of a long tradition, maintained by strict quality standards, for every subsequent enlargement of the company's product line. The new department of K&E began to grow almost at once, and manufacturing became a primary activity of the company. With it came an increasing range of design, development, and ultimately research activities. Within a year the first venture into manufacturing outgrew its original quarters and required additional space at No. 3 Dutch Street. By 1872 the young business was in urgent need of a retail store with a spacious show room. The store opened in 1873, at 111 Fulton Street. It was soon relocated at No. 119, where for the next four years it occupied the entire ground floor between Fulton and Ann Streets. By 1875 the partners had to concede a point to Horace Greeley: they transferred their manufacturing operations west across the Hudson to an old loft building at Third and Grand Streets in Hoboken. Three years later, the firm reached another milestone: its own four-story office building and show room at 127 Fulton Street. And then, in 1880, came the biggest step of all. K&E built an entire three-story factory at Third and Adams Streets in Hoboken. It was an early example of what was to become a familiar trend, the flight to the suburbs. ==== page [7] [captions for five illustrations] One of the first editions of the K&E catalog. An early drafting room in the 1870's. Employees shared a devotion to precision. Hard rubber curves and triangles, the first K&E manufactured items, won excellence award in 1869. After two decades the company erected this imposing factory building to house its manufacturing operations. [uncaptioned illustration of American Institute gold medal] ==== page [8] full page illustrations captioned on page 9: (Top) Making Gunter's chains . .. the device that measured the West. (Bottom) A big day in railroading — the Promontory Point meeting of 1869 — launched a boom in surveying. === page 9 Breaking New Ground The range of technical instruments handled by K&E grew until, in 1876, it swelled the fifth edition of the catalog to 123 pages. One section listed a new category: surveyors' compasses, levels, transits, and theodolites. To most laymen today, surveying is an occult art; but in 1876 its terminology, at least, was familiar to anyone who owned land or a share of stock in a railroad. All through the '70's and '80's, the advance guard of railroads through the plains and mountains west of the Mississippi was the surveying crew. By the time K&E added surveyors' instruments to its product line, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines had been joined to create a coast-to-coast railway. Yet there was more for surveyors to do than ever, on railroad lines and elsewhere. A billion acres of public domain lay west of the Mississippi, and 160 of them were available free to any citizen who hadn't fought for the Confederacy. They were his, if he just lived on them or farmed them for five years. As expected, news that the U.P. and C.P. lines had linked up, at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, touched off the longest sustained land rush in American history. The push for land created a tremendous demand for surveying of new farms, mines, grazing lands and timber tracts. Town surveying was badly needed too. Wherever the railroads went, they sowed cities. Farm and town population together soared to nearly 17,000,000 persons west of the Mississippi by 1890. In 20 years the population of California doubled, Texas' trebled, Kansas' quadrupled. The process went on and on as the new century approached, and over a million new farms were laid out between 1890 and 1900. Back East, immigrants were pouring in from Europe. The populations of Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh had each doubled in the first ten years after the Civil War and were continuing to expand. Surveyors had to meet strict standards regardless of hazards to their health and equipment. Where fences were few, there was always a chance that some stray cow would kick over a transit, and it was extremely unlikely, on the treeless and rockless prairies, that a pit or a mound marking a corner could last through the first ploughing. Nor, until the 1870's, was a surveyor's life made any easier by the fact that the best linear measuring device available was the old Gunter's chain. It was not a restful contrivance, with its hundred iron or steel links to be dragged up hill and down dale. Its construction was ingenious, to be sure; each link measuring 7.92 inches, and joined by a metal ring to its ---- [captions for two illustrations page [8]] (Top) Making Gunter's chains . .. the device that measured the West. (Bottom) A big day in railroading — the Promontory Point meeting of 1869 — launched a boom in surveying. ==== page 10 neighbors, so that a chain of a hundred links measured 66 feet between the outside ends of the terminal handles. That length fitted nicely into both the mile (80 times) and the acre. But there were 600 wearing surfaces between the links and connecting rings. As the surfaces wore away with use, the chain lengthened. Engineers and surveyors wanted something better, and in the '70's, they got it. The improvement was the continuous steel tape. It was lighter, could be wound on a reel, and its variation in length had a measurable relationship to temperature, provided it wasn't stretched or kinked by careless handling. Early steel tapes had their markings impressed on small brass plates soldered or riveted to the steel. The K&E Catalog of 1876 listed several types of steel tapes, including "Fine Steel Tape for very accurate measurement. Largely used on valuable grounds in the cities of New York and Brooklyn." This tape, the ancestor of today's K&E City Engineers' steel tapes, came equipped with a spring balance, spirit level, and thermometer for adjusting all measurements to standard tension and temperature. By the nineties, K&E was making steel tapes with markings etched in relief on the steel. One was exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and was described in an article on the evolution of mine surveying equipment in the 1898 Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers. It was 500 feet long, 0.2 inch wide, and graduated at every foot. The attention paid to this tape indicates that K&E was leading the industry with a product of superior characteristics. (Yet today we take a steel tape for granted.) In addition to steel tapes, K&E also made and sold woven linen tapes and metal reinforced or "metallic" tapes—but 1887 literature for K&E Excelsior brand measuring tapes somewhat loftily warned that the company disapproved of the metallic type then manufactured. "We offer Metallic Tape Lines only in deference to popular prejudice. ... Our improved 'All Linen' line is stronger and more durable than any 'metallic' line." Present-day woven tapes, incidentally, are not vulnerable to the same criticism; they have dimensionally stable plastics woven into the fabric. ---- [caption illustration lower right] Wherever people were heading, surveying crews preceded them. ==== page 11 The Day the Slide Rules Arrived Hermann Esser, who was prone to see gloomy possibilities where his partner was all cheer and ebullience, often found his patience sorely tried. He would never forget the day the slide rules arrived. After the first factory was safely launched in 1880, William Keuffel made a trip to Europe to select instruments and materials from manufacturers in Switzerland, Germany, and England. Hermann Esser remained at home to guide the firm's growing activities. The first shipments of William Keuffel's selections began to arrive at 127 Fulton Street in New York — fine drawing tools, precisely divided protractors and measuring scales, brushes, pens, special draftsmen's pencils. One shipment gave Hermann Esser an unpleasant surprise. It contained, to all appearances, a set of engineers' scales, or "rulers," but they were like none ever seen before in the K&E showroom. The central section of each rule slid back and forth between the two outer sections. What good was that arrangement for laying off lengths on a drawing? Even worse, the graduations were not equal. This was too much. His partner had completely lost his judgment! Hermann soon learned otherwise. The device, of course, was a slide rule, and its strange graduations were not for measuring lengths, but for computations. Virtually no one in the United States in 1880 would have known how to use one. Only a few university professors had ever heard of them. In Europe they were better known and had undergone a revolutionary improvement at the hands of a young French artillery officer, Amedee Mannheim. K&E made the Mannheim type of rule available in the United States, and in 1886 began importing instruments with the scales engraved on white celluloid bonded to mahogany. Good legibility, plus the Mannheim scale arrangement, resulted in an upsurge of interest in the slide rule. In later years, a professor at Washington University, Calvin M. Woodward, recalled in an article for Engineering News, that he had never seen a slide rule at all before the 1870's but that by the '80's some engineering students already were being required to use it. The real popularity of the slide rule began after 1890. William Cox, a well-known instrument designer, invented the duplex type of construction, which permitted scales to be placed on both the front and back faces of the rule. A dual indicator, with a glass-enclosed hairline on each face, made it possible to use all the scales together. K&E began making its own slide rules, using Cox's duplex construction, in 1891. For many years thereafter, a major K&E activity was the acquisition of mahogany for slide rules. In those days before modern materials-engineering was known or dreamed of, quality of materials depended on meticulous selection of what nature produced. The supervisor of the K&E woodworking department would visit the Hoboken and New York City docks to inspect incoming cargoes of logs. Those he considered acceptable he branded with the K&E mark. The chosen few were then brought to the factory, sawed into slabs, and subjected to a five-year long seasoning process. ---- [caption illustration right] Mahogany tree. ==== page 12 But more important than materials, which were to remain virtually the same for half a century, were the scale arrangements. The duplex rule continued to evolve. Engineering students in the 1930's, and for over three decades thereafter, learned to use and roll off the tongue that wonderfully complicated trademark, the log log duplex Decitrig.® And the slide rule reached a new stage of development in 1962, when K&E introduced the Deci-lon® Slide Rule, with new and more powerful scales for computation, made of a new amazingly durable synthetic. The slide rule had entered the space age. ---- [captions illustrations lower left and right] K&E advertisements of the mid-1950's suggested the fringe benefits of becoming a slide rule expert. ---- One of the earliest slide rules, made in the 1880's and one of the newest, the DECILON, introduced in 1962. ==== page 13 From William Keuffel's Notebooks For many operations, the partners and their associates had to devise their own methods, which William Keuffel carefully recorded in a small, calf-bound ledger. One of the achievements of the manufacturing department was the design of ingenious dividing engines for graduating linear scales or circles on various instruments. William Keuffel's ledger, which has survived, records the settings of a machine probably used for graduating engineers' scales as early as the 1880's. [photos of notebook pages] [photo of W.L.E. Keuffel] A Pioneering K&E Engineer W. L. E. Keuffel, a second cousin of the company founder, became one of the guiding lights of K&E precision, and a beloved friend and counselor to generations of employees. As head of manufacturing, he helped develop many of the company's custom-built dividing and calibrating machines. For generations the "dividing rooms" were top-secret. Even a future K&E president (A. E. Busch) was once refused admission beyond their outer doors early in his career. ==== page [14] [caption for photograph upper left] The first building at 127 Fulton Street, with blueprint racks showing on the fourth floor. ---- [caption for two photographs bottom left and to right] Rebuilt in 1892, the new headquarters building was 8 stories high, boasted an imposing show room. ==== page 15 Moving Out As various problems were solved, the firm of Keuffel & Esser kept breaking new ground, figuratively and literally. Like the original factory in Hoboken, the four-story headquarters office at 127 Fulton Street in a few years proved too small. K&E was growing in every way: in sales, manufacturing, breadth of product line, and number of employees. Its name was known all over the United States and in Europe. The partners had brought their enterprise a long way from the original little room, four flights up, in the old building on Nassau Street. To administer what was now a national and even international business required space for a sizeable office force. At the insistence of William Keuffel, the company in 1892 took a bold step. It entirely reconstructed the four-story headquarters building at 127 Fulton Street and enlarged it to eight stories. The size of the new headquarters dismayed the more conservative executives. There was ample space for several times the number of employees the company had that year. William Keuffel cheerfully built for future needs—yet even his optimism underestimated the developments to follow. In the same year, 1892, it was necessary to add two floors to the manufacturing building in Hoboken. Meanwhile, expansion also took place geographically. The first branch office began operations in Chicago, 1891; a second opened in St. Louis in 1894; and in 1900 K&E reached the Pacific with a branch in San Francisco. Again it was necessary to enlarge the manufacturing departments—they had to be considered in the plural by this time—with two additional factory buildings and the simultaneous conversion of an old iron works nearby. With branches established from coast to coast, manufacturing departments steadily broadening their scope, a widening sphere of business reaching even overseas -— the first K&E catalog in Spanish had appeared in 1892 — both partners might have rested from the increasing demands on their enterprise. They had trained able and hard-working successors who already were taking many responsibilities. W. L. E. Keuffel, a second cousin of William, supervised manufacturing; and both W. G. Keuffel and Carl M. Bernegau, William's son and son-in-law, were active in the business. Hermann Esser retired in 1902 to enjoy a leisurely old age. William Keuffel remained, if anything, more active than ever. His vigor was soon tested. On December 8, 1905, fire broke out in buildings the company had taken over from a former iron works on Adams Street. Fire companies, called in even from Jersey City, could not save the old wooden buildings. William Keuffel reacted to this misfortune as if to an opportunity: why not rebuild the destroyed part of the factory far larger than it had been, using the most [uncaptioned photo lower right of ruins of Hoboken factory ruins after fire] ==== page 16 advanced type of construction, reinforced concrete? It had been tried in only eleven buildings in the United States, but French engineers had achieved many successes with it. Construction was still proceeding when fire again struck part of K&E. The first tremblors of a violent earthquake rocked San Francisco before dawn of April 18, 1906. Three days of fire and destruction left 700 dead and four-and-a-half square miles of the city destroyed, including the K&E branch office. A new San Francisco quickly rose from the ashes, however, and with it the K&E branch was soon rebuilt. At almost the same time, in 1907, the new concrete, fireproof buildings in Hoboken were completed. They provided 152,500 square feet of additional floor space, room enough for many manufacturing operations as well as the general office, which had outgrown even the eight stories at 127 Fulton Street. K&E now had the best and largest factories in the world for manufacturing engineering and drafting instruments and supplies. William Keuffel lived until 1908. His firm was thriving; it was contributing to technical and industrial progress wherever American engineers were at work. Admiral Peary used a K&E transit to survey the North Pole. Other products would be used in the vast construction required to cut a canal through the Isthmus of Panama. Unrest in Europe, however, threatened the growing prosperity of the new industrial society that had transformed both Europe and the United States since 1867. World War I was in the making, yet America still depended to a large degree on the craft secrets of the Old World. K&E would soon be called on by the United States Government to manufacture precision instrumentation in prodigious quantities. ---- [uncaptioned photo top left of construction of new fireproof Hoboken offices and factory - the West building] ---- [caption photo lower right] Admiral Peary and the K&E transit he used to survey the North Pole. (The instrument is now preserved in the Smithsonian Institution.) ==== page 17 A National Emergency In the summer of 1911, the National Bureau of Standards in Washington acquired a new research assistant in the field of optics. He was Carl W. Keuffel, the elder son of W. L. E. Keuffel. Carl Keuffel was fresh from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, where he had graduated in mechanical engineering. He had come to the Bureau to do research while taking graduate studies in optics and mathematics at the Johns Hopkins University. The Bureau, in those years, just before the First World War, was an extremely busy and sometimes worried organization. It was the only government agency with responsibilities reaching across the entire field of pure and applied science. It seemed to be the only agency equipped to advise the government about scientific and technical needs that might affect the national interest. One area in particular worried its Chief, Dr. Samuel W. Stratton. Before coming to the Bureau, he had done research on light at the University of Chicago. No one knew better than he that the United States depended on European manufacturers for the entire supply of high-grade optical glass. What would happen should anything cut off that supply? Almost at once, the country would face shortages of optical equipment essential for scientific, technical and military uses. When Carl Keuffel left the Bureau in 1913 to work at K&E, he retained his interest in optics. He also kept in mind Dr. Stratton's concern about developing sophisticated optical-glass technology in the United States. To create it would mean rediscovering the most tightly guarded trade secrets of German optical instrument makers. It meant, further, developing completely new formulae and equipment for using American sands and ---- [caption photo upper right] World War I . . . technology began to gain momentum. ---- clays, which differed chemically from those available in Europe. The clays were important, because they would furnish new material for high-temperature crucibles. The sands, of course, would provide the glass melt. K&E already was making optical equipment for the U.S. Navy. More than ninety-five percent of the periscopes for American submarines came from K&E. When Carl Keuffel returned to Hoboken, the factory was also turning out eighty torpedo directors for the Navy, plus four more for the Argentine Navy. Carl Keuffel at once took a hand in the optical design of these specialized instruments. By the Fall of 1914, Europe was at war, and Dr. Stratton decided the U.S. could wait no longer to start optical glass manufacture. He ordered furnaces and ==== page 18 apparatus for experimental glass manufacture at the Bureau of Standards Laboratories in Pittsburgh. Within a year, data from the experiments were flowing to pilot facilities at a number of companies, including K&E. Carl Keuffel was assigned the responsibility for K&E's effort, and on January 4, 1916, achieved a successful melt. Reviewing the optical glass projects of this period, the office of the U.S. Navy Chief of Ordnance later commented in an official document: "... optical glass was made by Keuffel & Esser in quantities sufficient to supply their own needs. Much credit is due Mr. Carl Keuffel, who, on his own initiative, and before we entered the war, erected a glass melting furnace, made suitable products, and produced some glass of good quality without outside help." K&E, in fact, was already a leading manufacturer of specialized optical instruments in this critical period of the United States war effort. The war was perhaps the first in history to feel the impac... [truncated due to length]