Or, why I should stay away from thrift stores.
I was going to typecast this, but judging by the stack of unscanned Project 88 pages, you’d likely not see it for weeks if I did.
I was doing my usual weekly-or-so sweep of the thrift stores. In the back of one, in the area where the typewriters usually get dumped amongst the computer keyboards and broken scanners, I came upon this:
Now, you should know that I was an English major. Like most English majors, numbers and I don’t get along well. In fact, we find most numbers–especially large, hairy formulas–downright frightening. Only unlike large, hairy spiders, we can’t squash numbers underfoot before they scrurry into the dark, paranoid recesses of our minds and give us a case of the shuddering willies. So you’d think that a machine bristling with figures and arcane numerological functions would send me prancing to the safe confines of the Broken Records Dept at the other end of the store.
Ah, but I’m also a technerd and a retrophile. That means that I am irresistably drawn to all things with levers, knobs, buttons, and gears. I assure you that that is the only reason I bought it. I don’t even know how to work the damn thing. Oh, but you turn the crank on the front, and the carriage thing moves back and forth! And you push this big red button and something happens! And you press this lever and something else happens! Technerd joy!
It was only after I got it home and was looking it over in search of a model number that I noticed the two prongs hiding in the hole on the back. The one where a power cord goes. A bit of semi-fruitful Googling identified this as a Monroe LA5-160 adding machine. An electric model. More accurately, an electromechanical or electric assist model. Bother. That means that unless I can find or fashion a power cord, I can’t even play with it. And that’s only if all the electrical components still work, something I’ve had spotty luck with in other contraptions.
But here’s the neat thing: See that metal plate on the back? “Property of Defense Plant Corporation, an instrumentality of the United States Government”. Ooh, sounds mysterious! I hadn’t heard of the DPC, so I did some research.
The Defense Plant Corporation was an offshoot of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an entity created in 1932 to umbrella the various departments developed to rebuild and stabilize the US economy in the midst of the Great Depression. Its main function was facilitating loans to businesses and financial institutions.
With the national emergency of impending war succeeding the national economic emergency, in 1940 Congress granted the RFC unprecedented powers to purchase or build essentially anything the President asked it to. It immediately set about forming a number of new “instrumentalities” to handle wartime materials and production. One of the largest of these was the Defense Plant Corporation, created in 1941. The DPC coordinated supplies and equipment between the various branches of the armed forces and the factories that produced those goods. For instance, the Army would tell the DPC, “We need ball bearings”, and the DPC would contract with a ball bearing factory to get the Army what it needed. Everything from tiny screws to entire bombers passed through the DPC this way.
The DPC also helped companies and individuals build new factories. There was a concern by factory owners that once the war ended they would be left without a market for their production. The DPC acted as sort of a guaranteer of the factories. The way it worked was that an individual would work through the DPC to build a factory at their own cost. The DPC then agreed to incrementally buy back that factory over five years. At the end of that time, the factory owner had the option to buy back the factory at fair market value.
As an interesting aside, it was a DPC contract for a new, enormous cargo aircraft that led to the construction of Howard Hughes’ (in)famous Spruce Goose. It seems that Secretary of Commerce (and thus head of the RFC) had been friends with Howard Hughes’ father, and had known Hughes since he was a child. The $23 million Spruce Goose, which flew only once–long after war’s end–became symbolic of government waste. Another DPC contract with Hughes Aircraft was for a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft dubbed the XF-11. It was during a test flight of the XF-11 that Hughes crashed into a Los Angeles neighborhood, damaging or destroying three houses and nearly killing Hughes. It’s thought that the trauma of the crash and Hughes’ subsequent addiction to painkillers from his injuries were catalysts for his later mental instabilities.
When the war ended in 1945, the Defense Plant Corporation was dissolved.
Somewhere in all of that, this adding machine was there, tirelessly cranking out calculations to help our boys on the front.