Kansas City Star, January 9, 1905.
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THE ARMOURDALE PLANT.
The Procter & Gamble company owns twenty-six acres surrounding its Armourdale plant. The main building, known as No. 1, is of brick, four stories high, with a large basement, 400 feet long by 100 feet wide. It contains the offices, warehouse and soap factory proper. Building No. 2, north of the first building, is of brick, also, and is 432 feet in length and 100 feet wide. The engine and boiler room and the cotton seed oil refinery occupy this building. The boilers represent 3,000 horse power and are operated throughout by three men. It is safe to say that, excepting possibly in the Metropolitan Street Railway company’s new power house at First street and Grand avenue, there is not another so completely up-to-date boiler room in Kansas City. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine anything of the sort wherein more labor saving devices are used.
Coal for the plant is received only in cars having collapsible bottoms. These cars are sent into the yard over one of the six sidetracks connected with the Kansas City Belt railway. Pulling a lever releases the coal into a carrier which takes it up an incline on an endless belt and discharges it in any bunker desired. These bins empty into a traveling hopper which passes along on a track and dumps the load into any of the furnaces in front of which the operator may touch a lever. His coal falls on a grate which is constantly moving, so that the ashes do not accumulate, but drop into small cars in a tunnel beneath the furnaces. These cars are run along to a cross-tunnel, where they pass over a turntable and out to an electric elevator, in a tower. Being taken to a height of twenty-five or thirty feet they are emptied by a slight pressure on a small level, the ashes falling into chutes leading to railway cars on the tracks below. From the time the coal arrives until it leaves again in the form of ashes, only three men are employed. The plant will consume fifty tons of coal a day.
Under ordinary circumstances there is hardly anything more prosaic than soap making. When you enter a plant, however, where every room or department contains some wonderful piece of machinery, enough in itself to furnish material for profitable study for a week, the industry takes on a new appearance and you begin to wonder where the inventive genius of man will lead or end. In the Procter & Gamble company’s plant there are marvelous engines with automatic oil feeds, with foundations so solid that a silver dollar placed on edge on one of the cross beams was not disturbed by even the slightest vibration.
MANY ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES.
There are wonderful electrical engines, motors, switchboards of brightest nickel with marble bases; air compressors that pump water from the four wells 150 feet deep to the 1-million-gallon reservoir a hundred feet north of the boiler room; oil refiners; a laboratory where everything used in soap is tested “going and coming,” as the soap men say; miles, it seems, of rubber belting that carries the products from department to department, from one place to another until the packed boxes are dropped into a spiral chute, like the fire escape at the Central High school, and slide away to the freighthouse or wareroom on the ground floor. There are sixteen soap kettles, each thirty-eight feet deep and eighteen feet in diameter in building No. 1. There are eight or nine immense steel tanks for the storing of cotton seed oil, each on a scale, so that it may be weighed at any time.
The rooms in which the operatives work are bright, scrupulously clean, well lighted, splendidly ventilated, and will be kept cool during the summer by revolving fans.
It is believed that soap can be manufactured in the Kansas City plant at less expense than at Ivorydale. The operations are centralized better at Kansas City than at Ivorydale. There is no lost motion from the time the raw materials are assembled in the kettles until they leave the factory—everything proceeds in an orderly and systematic manner. Glycerin, which is a by-product of soap, will also be produced in large quantities.
THE MEN WHO DID THE WORK.
All the machinery in the new plant was installed under the direction of R.S. Woodward, mechanical engineer, who has charge of all the Procter & Gamble machinery here at Ivorydale and in the company’s eight cotton seed oil mills in Southern states. He was assisted by Robert Anderson, chief engineer. F.F. Skillman, the superintendent of the plant, had charge of the construction work and will be the head of the Kansas City branch. The plant has already made 300,000 pounds of laundry soap. The annual output of the plant will be about 1 million boxes. The first shipments will be made this month. The plant cost approximately 1 million dollars. The floor space is about ten acres. Protection against fire is provided by a reservoir with a capacity of 1,300,000 gallons and supplied by wells on the premises.”
1910 KCK Map KCK Street Name Changes