Business & Finance: Masonite

Last week was a notable one in the life of President Ben Alexander of Masonite Corp. On his desk in the wallboard company's executive offices in Chicago's Conway Building appeared a big bouquet of red roses from his wife, marking his tenth wedding anniversary. The roses also served as a remembrance for his 42nd birthday. Meantime Mr. Alexander's Masonite published its annual report for the fiscal year through August showing record profits, celebrated its tenth business birthday, announced a refinancing plan and split its stock 2-for-1.

Only for the stock split was there a strict precedent. Masonite enjoyed another split in 1928, that time 10-for-1. The shares that resulted sold as low as $3 during Depression, as high as $101.50 this year.

Masonite was not named for the benefit of the building trade but for the inventor of the basic processes—William Horatio Mason. A broad-shouldered, white-haired Virginia-born engineer who spent 17 of his 59 years working for the late Thomas Alva Edison, Inventor Mason went to Laurel, Miss, after the War to work out a method of removing and recovering rosin and turpentine from Southern pine lumber. He was more impressed by the waste of wood in normal sawmill operations, however, than by the possibilities of naval stores. As the price of naval stores declined after the post-War inflation his interest in waste rose. Starting with the common knowledge that wood can be softened and bent by steaming, Inventor Mason finally arrived at the explosion process for reducing wood to pulp. The process :

Small chips are loaded in a "gun" 20 in. in diameter, about 7 ft. long. The gun is then sealed and steam introduced until the pressure is 1,200 Ib. per sq. in. Softened, the wood becomes so saturated with steam at that terrific pressure that when the gun is "fired" the wood simply explodes, leaving a mass of brown fibre.

At first it was thought that the pulp could be made into paper but insulating board soon promised a better use. Backed by a group of Wisconsin lumbermen, Inventor Mason began to experiment with methods of forming and pressing his pulp. Once when he went to lunch he left a wet slab on a hot press, hurried back, when he remembered, to remove it. Meantime a cranky steam valve had permitted the press to grow hotter and heavier with the result that Inventor Mason found, instead of a fibrous board, a dense, grainless, rigid sheet of material, which, in its present refined form of "Presdwood," accounts for 70% of Masonite's business. The other 30% is in fibre insulating board.