372 
THE A MER1CAN-SCANDINA VIA N RE VIE W 
Books 
F. L. Smidth & Co.: 1882-1922. By Knu- 
dage Riisager. Langkjaers Bogtrykkeri. 
Kobenhavn: 1921. 
On January 2, 1882, the firm of F. L. 
Smidth & Co. began business in a single room 
of an unpretentious house in Frederiksberg 
near Copenhagen. The annual output of the 
cement they manufacture to-day would fill a 
freight train reaching from the North Pole to 
the Equator. This great volume, printed 
from the. best of type on the best of paper, 
richly and intelligently illustrated, a real 
work of art in itself, gives a graphic and 
informative account of the firm’s activity from 
the days of its humble origin to the present. 
It is now a world concern with factories in 
every country where cement is used, and that 
includes all civilized territory. 
To each man in his own line, it is a pleasing 
book. And more pleasing to none than to 
architects in so far as architecture and civil¬ 
ization go hand in hand. On page after page 
it gives photographs of the F. L. Smidth 
cement factories in the lands of the earth— 
Finland, China, Austria, Turkestan, France, 
Russia and so on and on through the whole 
geography. Each has its own style of indus¬ 
trial architecture. And, it is odd, the worst 
looking factories are those in Utah, Montana, 
and Texas. The entrance to the factorv in 
%/ 
China is a delight to the eye. The ensemble 
of buildings at Devil’s Slide, Utah, is an eye¬ 
sore. But all this is another matter. The 
F. L. Smidth & Co. furnished 11,000 barrels 
of cement for the foundation of the Cathedral 
of St. John the Divine so that, even if behind 
in esthetics, we are well up in trade. 
If the volume merely advertised the firm 
whose history it gives we could pass over it 
with the observation that as an advertisement 
it is quite bulky and must have entailed an 
unusual outlay of ready money. But it is in¬ 
finitely more than this. Apart from the light 
it throws on the general development of 
cement, it is a reasoned explanation of indus¬ 
trial success and how it may be obtained 
whether in little Denmark or in great Brazil, 
whether in cement or plaver-pianos, whether 
organized and managed by F. L. Smidth & 
Co. or by Roe and Doe. 
What has made this phenomenal success 
possible, aside from the energy, team-work, 
ingenuity, honesty, and farsightedness of 
Verner Frederik Laessoe Smidth, Poul Lar¬ 
sen, Axel Foss, and the great host of men 
and women who have been associated with 
them? Three incidents in their business his¬ 
tory will help to answer the question: (1) 
In the early nineties, the business done in 
the United States became enormous. The 
machines used were imported from Denmark. 
Then came (1897) the Dingley Tariff which 
increased the tariff on imports from 25 to 45 
percent, with the result that F. L. Smidth & 
Co. made arrangements with the American 
Clay Working Machinery Co. at Willoughby,. 
Ohio, for the manufacture of the necessary 
machinery. The prohibitive tariff was in 
this way rightly^ avoided, and both countries 
profited by this act of international co-opera¬ 
tion. (2) Concentration, without running 
amuck of trusts, rings, or fusions, has been 
carried on and out to the very n’th power by 
developing a perfectly unified organization 
and turning out precisely the same article 
whether it is produced at Elizabeth, New Jer¬ 
sey, or at Bangkok, Sofia, or Moscow—the 
place does not matter. (3) When the war 
broke out, F. L. Smidth & Co. believed, with 
the rest of the world, that it would last but & 
short while and be followed probably by a 
period of industrial prosperity. They ac¬ 
cordingly set everything in motion to have- 
the new factory at Hermannsberg near Narva 
on the Narova, 100 miles south of Petrograd, 
completed. What have they to say now? 
This: “The factory-was built as rapidly as 
possible, men den er endnu den Hag i Dacg 
ikJce sat i Gang ” If then the Narva factory 
has been built but never operated, much 
money has been lost. Of course, but a price¬ 
less lesson has been learned so thoroughly 
that there is hope even now of realizing on it. 
Near the close of his volume, Hr. Riisager 
comments on the statement that the technique 
of cement is a bastard: The father was the 
grain mill, the mother the primitive brick kiln r 
and the child, consequently, “ceremonious,, 
expensive, impractical, and dusty.” Tech¬ 
nically this is true, but it is the present status 
or standing rather than the remote genesis or 
genealogy of an indispensable ware that in¬ 
terests the world’s industrial leaders. This 
being the case, it is an unmitigated pity that 
there can not be an English edition of this 
w r ork, for the principles that have gone ter 
make the F. L. Smidth & Co. a success admit 
of, indeed cry for, more nearly universal 
application. Allen W. Porterfield. 
