Allegheny Ludlum Steel Company Shirt

 Allegheny Ludlum Steel Company Shirt                                           

• Printed on Front
• 100% Cotton
• Shirt Color - Light Yellow Comfort Color

Allegheny Ludlum's genesis can be traced to the 1938 merger of Allegheny Steel Company of Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, and Ludlum Steel Company of Watervliet, New York. Both companies were manufacturers of specialty steel, and each desired facilities the other possessed; for example, Allegheny wanted to enter the bar business, and Ludlum wished to get into the flat business. Consequently, the merger produced scarcely any duplication of facilities and enabled the newly formed corporation, named Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation (ALSC), to move to the forefront of the specialty steel market by virtue of the combined product lines of the two companies. W. F. Detwiler, a former night-shift apprentice for Allegheny Steel Company, became the corporation's first chairman of the board, and Hiland G. Batcheller, president of Ludlum Steel Company, was appointed its president.

At the completion of ALSC's first full year of operation in 1940, the demand for specialty steel had shown a steady increase for the past decade. ALSC reported more than $37 million in sales for the year, 58 percent of which were made in the final quarter. The United States' entry into World War II took the steady increase of the market to unprecedented heights. As the demand for jet airplanes and armaments spiraled upward, research engineers at ALSC intensified their search for metal materials that would answer the growing demand. ALSC developed heat-resisting alloys for use in the construction of aircraft turbine engines. By 1944 the number of employees had ballooned to 17,000, almost three times the number at the outbreak of the war. Sales had climbed to more than $114 million, and ALSC parlayed this wartime-induced success toward an $80 million expansion and modernization program in 1946. The expansion program focused on increasing ALSC's production capacities of stainless steel--which had more than quadrupled in use since 1920--and the burgeoning demand for flat-rolled silicon electrical steel, used in the manufacture of electrical transformers and communication equipment.

The 1950s, a decade of vast growth for the steel industry as a whole, occasioned only a marginal gain in sales for ALSC. At the conclusion of 1950, sales were just below $190 million and by the end of the decade had grown to only $230 million. But during those ten years, ALSC's sales figures fluctuated wildly, reaching a peak of $286 million in 1956 and a nadir of $170 million two years earlier. Although part of the blame for the vacillating sales was attributed to slackening demand, ALSC nevertheless remained steadfast to its long-term policy of expansion and modernization. By 1956 it had spent more than $100 million on such programs since the merger of Allegheny Steel and Ludlum Steel and continued to fund further programs. ALSC's capacity for melting and refining special steel alloys was doubled in 1956, and, in the same year, $30 million to be spent over a two year period was allotted for expanding its production of stainless, electrical, and other high alloy specialty steels.

 

*Image is a representation and may not be exact