PUSH-BUTTON FACTORY — SHALLENBERGER 243 



progressive dies, and for grinders which feed and eject stock and 

 adjust themselves automatically for wheel wear. We have machines 

 guided automatically by templates and even some guided by a line 

 on a blueprint. During the war we witnessed the development of 

 the transfer-type machine, which combined both machining and ma- 

 terials handling. Raw forgings or castings enter at one end and 

 emerge as finished products at the other. These are actually a num- 

 ber of machine units automatically coupled together and centrally 

 controlled. 



As machines become more automatic, emphasis shifts to materials 

 handling. The word "automation" as originally coined at Ford, 

 means automatic transfer of parts between machines. Ford has had 

 an automation department since 1947, and one has only to look at 

 the "iron hands" which load and unload mammoth presses, conveyors 

 which carry cylinder blocks through complete processing without 

 human direction, hoppers and chutes which load grinders or other 

 machines, and transfer devices which carry forgings through succes- 

 sive press operations, to realize the effectiveness of this department's 

 efforts. Machine time seems destined to be greatly shortened by cur- 

 rent developments in metal-cutting techniques and in many instances 

 has been eliminated altogether by die casting, investment casting, 

 shell molding, and powdered metallurgy. The result will be an even 

 greater relative emphasis on the automatic handling of materials. 



Inspection has also been automatized extensively. Automatic de- 

 vices count, inspect, and sort by weight, color, or dimension much more 

 rapidly and reliably than any human could do. They check perform- 

 ance, seek foreign metals or internal defects, detect overfilling or 

 underfilling of cans and bottles. Both Ford and De Soto have crank- 

 shaft-balancing machines which measure out-of-balance condition, 

 then automatically drill out enough material from the right spot to 

 remedy it. This will be characteristic of the automatic plant — 

 inspection devices will not only detect defects but will remedy them 

 or pass the information back to previous machines to avoid repeating 

 the error. 



Assemtly operations have not been so extensively mechanized, al- 

 though we have continuous brazing, welding, automatic riveting, nail- 

 ing, cementing, filling containers, packaging, painting, plating, and 

 the like. Leaver and Brown described in general terms a machine 

 to assemble a telephone receiver automatically. 



The great dream of the future is electronic control. Why, we are 

 asked, cannot the electronic devices developed by the military to 

 control the flight of aircraft, to guide unpiloted missiles, to direct 

 the firing of guns, be used to control industrial processes ? We have 

 devices which can see better, hear better, measure better than humans. 



