When Kevin Brown sent me the link to this video, I noted gigantic metal parts and instantly had to click. So what if the footage is in black-and-white, if there’s large-scale engines and machining going on, we want to see what the story is. And there’s a story here: this is a 1984 Sulzer video that looks back to the life of workers at the Winterthur, Switzerland plant back in the 1930s. While Sulzer now primarily makes pumps, back in the day they made just about everything, it seemed: ships, large-scale engines, friends in Japan, and much more. It looked like a solid place to work, as well: Up in the morning, prepare for the day, eat a hearty breakfast, hit the factory floor in an OSHA inspector’s nightmare. Whether you were in the silence-is-enforced draftsroom or were one of the lads busting your hide around the machining portions of the place, two things can be certain: there was always a high likelihood that the number of fingers and toes you entered with might not be the same amount as when you leave after your shift, and somebody nearby was tanking up on schnapps, vodka or some other very potent spirit. What, water wasn’t good enough for you? It’s Switzerland, for crying out loud…mountain runoff water back then had to be great for you, right?
Hit play below and take a trip into the past, where factory work wasn’t just about pushing buttons and monitoring machines as they did the work for you. You know these guys went home absolutely aching every night!
now you have ask yourself……how BIG were the machines that made these machines and/or parts so they could be a BIGGER machine to make the big parts.