Henry Kaiser
- born in NY - to Spokane 1907 - built highways in CA 1920's - cement - Oakland
- Hoover Dam built 1928-35 by Six Companies (including Bechtel) - dedicated 1935 by FDR as Boulder Dam
- built Boulder City, Nevada, as model city for 5000 to house workers for the construction of Boulder Dam
- 1931/05/26 - Boulder City map completed - Interior's Bureau of Reclamation decided to build complete town itself because did not trust corrupt and immoral Nevada to do it. "Boulder City was the first planned city of the twentieth century." The federal government changed the expensive 1930 plan of Denver city planner S.R. DeBoer and instead used more conventional designs: rectangular residential blocks. Added landscaping to alleviate desert environment (image of house today) and several plazas and parks (earned nickname "Nevada's Garden City") and monuments. Political power was given to a city manager chosen by Secretary of Interior .
- 4 bypass tunnels 50 ft. diameter
- refrigeration plant to cool concrete as it was poured
- world's largest dam with the world's largest power generators after Sep. 11, 1936 and the world's largest reservoir Lake Mead named after Reclamation Commissioner Elwood Mead
- Later, Kaiser would builddams at Bonneville, Grand Coulee, would build the San Francisco Bay Bridge
- founded Permanente in 1939 - world's largest cement plant
- 1939 joined with Todd Shipbuilding Co. and A.P. Giannini of Bank of America to build ships according to standard types C1, C2, C3 of the 1936 U.S. Merchant Marine
- "Ships-Strikes-Seamen" issue from the March of Time, Dec. 27, 1937, praised Joseph Kennedy and the Maritime Commission
- "Alaska's Salmon War" issue from the March of Time, Nov. 26, 1937, was critical of the Japanese threat to the American fishing fleet
- 1940/12 - built 60 freighters for Britain
- 1940/12/22 - Defense Plant Corp. awarded funds to Kaiser, Alcoa, Reynolds in 1941 for 9 aluminum plants on Pacific coast , broke the Alcoa monopoly on aluminum
- map - new shipyards at Richmond CA and Portland OR - used workers from recently completed Grand Coulee Dam - daycare - precooked food 24 hrs available
- new methods included welding rather than slower 4-man rivet crew, but fractured in sever cold
- 1941/09/27 - first Liberty Ship Day - 15 launched across U.S. - took 197 days to build
- 1942/10 - took 14 days to build - Booker T. Washington launched in Sept. by Marion Anderson and with black Capt. Hugh Mulzac
- record 4 days, 15 hrs, 30 mins to build Robert Peary ship
- 27% of total WWII shipping was Liberty ships - 200 lost of 2710 built - SS Jeremiah O'Brien in San Francisco
- In 1942 Kaiser built the "Miracle City" of Vanport near Portland, Oregon, for his shipyard workers, but was destroyed by flood in 1948 and became Delta Park
- built autos after war
1942 Timeline page | more WWII links | Pictures | Maps | Documents | Bibliography | revised 11/6/00
