CORPORATIONS: Atomic-Power Men

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The star appliance salesman in the U.S. is a blonde named Betty Furness. In her TV apartment, a kind of electrified Utopia, she shows the American housewife how wonderfully easy life can be—if she has the right gadgets. Fashionably dressed to look the way a housewife would like to look if she only had time, Betty crawls into bed to show off her electric blanket, washes clothes and dishes, plays How Dry I Am on her electric dryer, and peers into ovens—all without disturbing a lock of Her carefully curled hair. Betty does this for $50,000 a year and Westinghouse.

Betty is casual, direct and commonsensical. She gives women viewers a quick, feminine briefing on the products' best points; she does not offend men by gushing. And she knows, as does Westinghouse, that the only way to stay in the appliance business is to bring out something new every year. When a new product comes out, Betty immediately forgets about the product it supersedes; in fact, she acts as though she never heard of that old-fashioned knickknack she had plugged just the week before.

This week Betty will have some new products to display. One is a range which will preserve even the newest bride from cooking disasters. An "electronic-eye" thermostat, controlled by the heat of the cooking pan, automatically turns off the burner when the water boils away or the food begins to scorch. Westinghouse's new refrigerator has a "magic door" which pops open at a finger touch.

Betty's new automatic dishwasher is designed for apartment dwellers; it's on rollers, so that it can be moved along with the rest of the furniture. As for deep-freezers, Betty wouldn't think of the low, chest-type any more; the new Westinghouse is upright, with "drop-down doors" and "rollout drawers," so that Betty can get at all her frozen foods easily. Her new steam iron eliminates the old pressure method of spreading steam, since it has a mass of little gullies on its bottom which lead the steam across the entire ironing surface.

To advertise these and its other appliances, Westinghouse this week began spending $28 million—the biggest promotion splurge in its history. It even began giving appliances away on a new TV quiz show about its products called Freedom Rings. Contestants will be out of luck unless they have called at their Westinghouse dealers to pick up clue sheets.

Man of the House. Though Betty Furness is the star of its kitchen, the man of the Westinghouse is its $203,250-a-year president, Gwilym Alexander Price. It was he who took the gamble two years ago of spending $2,000,000 on the football telecasts that made Betty's face more familiar than the players'. It was he who staked another $3,000,000 last year to telecast the Chicago conventions, where Betty was shown oftener than Eisenhower or Stevenson. Price thinks the money well spent, modestly jests: "That girl's worth more to this company than I am."