Corn-Belt Edison

In Columbus, Neb. (pop. 13,000) the mayors of 39 nearby communities gathered this week to break ground for an addition to Behlen Manufacturing Co. and pay their respects to its president, Walter Behlen, 53, a corn-belt Edison. Inventor Behlen, a man given to loud sport shirts and a pink Cadillac, made a gross profit of exactly $194 his first year in business in 1940; last year he earned $3,309,000 by ceaselessly following a simple inventor's rule: "Ideas are a dime a dozen--it's doing something with them that counts."

Behlen, a self-taught engineer who never got beyond high school, wasted few ideas. While working for the Railway Express by day--and turning out metal toe-caps for shoes, dental bridge clasps, and clock hands for ice delivery cards in the family garage with his father at night--he noticed that egg crates were being ruined when pried open. He invented removable metal crate clamps that sold so well, for 32-c- a pair, that he set up a full-time business in a building he bought for nothing down. (He promptly rented out the upstairs for $40 a month, his entire carrying charge.)

H-Bomb Plan. During the war Behlen noticed that rubber conveyor rollers for mechanical corn huskers were unavailable. He devised a substitute from old auto tires--and in 1944 netted $40,000. The next year Nebraska was soaked by rain, and farmers needed dryers for their piled corn. Behlen designed long pipes that could be thrust into the corn, hooked up hot-air fans to blow through them. Farmers snapped up the simple dryer,* and such other Behlen inventions as auxiliary gears to make old tractors go faster.

His tinkering never ceased. (In 1947 he even dashed off a note to Los Alamos suggesting how to build an H-bomb.) What he could not learn from encyclopedias Behlen picked up by sending postcards to big manufacturers to learn their methods--and most cooperated. Says he: "I never could have stayed in business without Thomas' Register of American Manufacturers."

Paper Plan. Behlen's big break came in 1947, when he designed a frameless corn crib made of corrugated wire mesh. Farmers jumped at it because it was so simple to assemble. Behlen borrowed from the RFC to pay for a bigger plant, netted $305,000 that year and paid off the loan in six months. Then the corrugating idea really blossomed. One day he devised a new way of double corrugation by folding a piece of stationery in an unusual pyramidal form. It was so much stronger that he decided to use the principle for building. Panels of the metal proved so strong that buildings as wide as 120 ft. could be put up without frames or trusses. To demonstrate the strength of his first frameless building he hung tractors weighing 40 tons from the ceiling. (In 1955 one of the buildings survived an atomic bomb test in Nevada with only a dented roof, while two rival types were blasted to bits.)

Today Behlen's frameless buildings are used for everything from grain elevators to supermarkets and churches. The buildings can be raised by 20-man crews in two or three days. A Behlen supermarket including interior costs $7 per sq. ft., about half the cost of a conventional structure. With his bigger plant, Behlen expects to boost his gross from about $16 million this year to $25 million in 1959. But he deprecates his inventive skill, feels he only applied old principles to new uses. Says he: "Any engineer can design a complicated gadget that can't be produced. What we need are more engineers with simple minds."

* Farmers have a choice of 80 to 100 dryers made by 20 different companies.

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