Corporations: An Appetite for the Future

• Share

(9 of 10)

Eyes on the Sea. Litton has its share of space projects: it made the first space chamber and spacesuit, is making a relief map of the moon so that astronauts will know what they are in for, has created a wind tunnel that simulates the problems of re-entry by speeding up gases. But Thornton is convinced that "there isn't room in space for all the companies trying to get there," has turned the company's eyes downward into the sea. Ingalls has five contracts worth $145 million to build the Navy's new nuclear-powered attack submarines, which may be the destroyers of the future. Litton's Western Geophysical Co., with its fleet of 20 ships, is the world's largest explorer of the ocean depths for minerals. It is currently searching the oceans for the best site for Project Mohole, a much-delayed attempt to bore deeper than ever before into the earth's crust; Western won the contract to test at four sites after other companies made an initial boring off Lower California to test equipment. "Oceanography* is as challenging as space," argues Thornton, "and it may have even greater potential."

Litton is making plenty of other bets on the future. It is at least two years ahead of the field in making portable command and control systems that can be airlifted by helicopters to act as battlefield operations centers. It is working on a device to control the weather, on an electronic retrieval system for libraries, and on quick-cooking microwave ovens—Litton's first real consumer product—for the potentially big electronic-cooking field. Though Litton is now selling thousands of electronic and computer projects individually, it is quietly gearing up for a massive entry into complete electronic systems that will make a business as fully automated as its owners want it to be.

Such technological changes worry many economists and sociologists. They fear that the unskilled worker, the artisan and the office worker will more and more find their jobs disappearing or changing radically. They see extra leisure for workers as at least a partial answer to the problem, but then they worry about how people will be able to use that extra leisure creatively. Almost everyone agrees that the U.S. is entering what University of California President Clark Kerr calls "the age of the knowledge industry," when men and women of all ages will have to be continuously educated through their lifetimes to adjust to continued technological changes.

Science Fact. The men at Litton are aware of the problems, but they are optimistic about the long-range effects of technological revolution, believing that great new industries will arise to create even more employment. Thornton sees technology as eventually "freeing man's intellect for decision making, and freeing his creative powers for the contemplation, theorizing and development of yet newer technologies that can put into use the great abundance of energy available to mankind." For a man like Thornton, who wants to "build and keep building," the exciting possibilities ahead far outweigh any possible hazards.