The Factory That Marches With the Army

I have spent the better part of two decades proving one principle above all others: bring the means of production as close to the point of need as you can manage, and you will beat every man who ships his goods from afar. My phonograph works, my lamp factory, my dynamo shops — I built them within shouting distance of one another at Menlo Park and then at the new West Orange laboratory precisely because distance is waste, and waste is defeat. Now a rumor reaches me — fantastic, I grant you — that men in some distant year have contrived to place an entire manufacturing operation inside a shipping container and haul it to the very edge of a battlefield. Not munitions alone, mind you, but flying machines, small unmanned craft of a kind I can scarcely picture, assembled where the smoke still hangs. Eighty-two million dollars committed to the venture, if the report is honest. That is a staggering sum, nearly what the whole Edison General Electric enterprise has consumed in capital, and these fellows mean to spend it on portable workshops. I confess the idea thrills me even as I doubt half the particulars. I know something about miniaturizing production. When we were perfecting the bamboo filament, I had carbonizing ovens, vacuum pumps, and glass-blowing stations all crowded into rooms no bigger than a railcar. It can be done — but the discipline required is ferocious. Every tool must earn its square foot. Every process must be sequenced so tightly that one man's output feeds the next man's input without a minute's idleness. If these future manufacturers have truly solved that puzzle for complex flying apparatus, they have accomplished something I would respect. What strikes me most is the military logic. In any war, the side that replenishes fastest wins. I learned that watching how telegraph wire was strung and re-strung during the late conflict between the states. If you can make your weapon where you fight, you have abolished the supply line — and the supply line is the throat your enemy most wants to cut. I would want to see the thing work before I praised it further. Show me the container. Show me the finished product emerging from its doors. I do not invest in drawings; I invest in demonstrations. But if the concept proves sound, I would sooner buy into it than compete against it — and that is the highest compliment Thomas Edison pays to any invention.