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.

Different as they are in appearance, the only real difference between the two boards in manufacture is in the amount of heat and pressure applied. In neither case is there anything added to the pulp, the natural lignins in the original wood serving as the sole binder. In its early days Masonite used to sell more insulating board than hard board but a steady accumulation of new uses for Presdwood has changed the story. Last year 100 carloads of Presdwood were sold to Hollywood producers for scene sets, 200 carloads to the automobile industry, another 200 carloads to trailer makers. A relatively new outlet is for concrete forms. Twelve manufacturers fabricate it as artificial tile, and the toy industry takes it in hundreds of carloads. But the building industry is the big market, Presdwood being particularly adaptable to modernistic design. The Masonite house was one of the architectural high spots of Chicago's Century of Progress, was inspected by 3,000,000 people. Latest Masonite product is a laminated plastic, pressed innumerable sheets of thin Presdwood. An addition to the Laurel, Miss, plant to turn out this plastic will be ready early next year.

Far from Laurel, however, is the Masonite ownership. Majority of the stock is still in the hands of the original Wisconsin lumbermen who backed the inventor. These include such potent paper and lumber names as Clark Everest (Marathon Paper Mills Co.), Aytch P. Woodson (B. C. Spruce Mills), Cyrus Carpenter Yawkey, dean of Wisconsin lumbermen. Biggest stockholder at last report (33,000 shares) is President Ben Alexander.

Tall, bald, genial President Alexander was a lumberman's son, studied forestry in the U. S. and Germany, worked in the woods in Wisconsin and Oregon, where he once walked out on strike with IWWorkers. He married a lumberman's daughter, still has big lumber and paper interests. Until last year Ben Alexander ran Masonite from Wausau, Wis., his home town. There he gave the city an airport, was rated First Citizen, bore the distinction of having installed the first home bar in Wausau. Now Ben Alexander lives in Chicago's Drake Towers with his dark, slim wife and two adopted children.

One reason his fellow lumbermen-capitalists picked Ben Alexander to run Masonite was that he could make it a full-time job. Another was that in a young company they wanted a young man. Measured in plant capacity. Masonite has grown fast. It is now able to turn out more than 23,000,000 ft. of board per month as against about 2,000,000 in 1927. Measured in profits, Masonite has grown even faster. After a small loss the first year its earnings mounted to $411,000 by 1929, dropped into the red in only two Depression years, jumped to the record figure of $1,400,000 in the fiscal year just ended. All bonds have been paid off, more than one-half its total assets of $4,800,000 are current and its 7% preferred stock will be converted into a 5% issue under the refinancing plan announced last week.

Masonite was jockeyed into a fine position for revival in building by winning a patent infringement suit in 1933 against Bror Dahlberg's Celotex Corp., No. 1 U. S. wallboard makers. Mr. Dahlberg makes his board of sugar cane fibre. He found, as Inventor Mason did, that hard board could be made from materials other than wood. By giving his sugar cane a little more heat and pressure, he too got a dense, rigid board. But Masonite sued and won, which meant that if anyone wanted hard board they had to buy Presdwood.

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