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Inspecting the Expanded Facilities

WHAT an impressive sight the new four-million-dollar factory is! On entering it, those who had just attended the dedication program were directed to the left into a 65-foot-long, 25-foot-wide Kingdom Hall, which is already being used as a regular meeting place by two local congregations of Jehovah’s witnesses. How beautiful are the deep-blue carpeting, the gold-colored drapes and the light-brown wood paneling!

Further surprises were in store on the floor above, where the shipping department had been moved. How different it is! Attention is immediately drawn overhead, where a 115-foot track circles. It has a moving, motor-driven chain to which boxes, specially shaped for handling the various sizes of literature, are suspended. Then, all around beneath, is a maze of waist-high roller tracks, a total of 450 feet of them, upon which the specially shaped boxes and cartons of literature are moving along.

Located right at hand, with a roller track before them, are shelves of literature from which the orders are filled. Once this is done, a conveyer belt takes the filled orders upward several feet, and then gravity carries the literature down over roller tracks to one of the five packing tables. There the orders are double-checked, and the cartons are sealed and labeled for shipping to various ones of the 5,317 congregations of Jehovah’s witnesses in the United States. Some 45,000 orders consisting of nearly ten million Bibles, books and booklets were shipped to these congregations last year! Now, with this improved method of handling orders, even a much greater number of them can be taken care of with ease.

But this is only part of the story, for from another section of the department even a greater amount of literature is shipped. Yes, more than eleven million Bibles, books and booklets were sent to ninety-five foreign branches of Jehovah’s witnesses in every part of the world last year! Bible literature is stocked in a total of 115 languages in the shipping department. As they saw cartons of literature labeled for shipment to all corners of the globe, those making the tour were impressed by the fact that the Kingdom message is indeed being distributed “in all the inhabited earth.”—Matt. 24:14.

The tour then moved up to the third floor, which is used principally for the storage of literature. One thing that everyone noticed was how clean and fresh everything looked. The factory walls are an attractive two-tone green, a gray-green around the lower part and a lighter green above. And the ceilings are an off-white. How pleasing!

THE BOOK BINDERY

What a change there is in the bindery, on the fourth and fifth floors! Why, some $500,000 worth of new machinery has been installed in just the past year! How impressive is that battery of thirty-three sewing machines! Then there are the five casemakers, five embossers, and five complete lines, including rounder, backliner, casing-in machine and standing press.

Truly there is a lot involved in the binding of a book! It is no simple process. Yet, here finished books are being turned out by the thousands every hour! Last year over one million Bibles and more than seven million other books in more than a score of languages were bound. Now, with expanded facilities, including two complete new lines of rounder, backliner, casing-in machine and standing press, production should increase considerably.

An average day’s production is now about 50,000 books, and already a peak of 82,464 was reached in one day. If this peak day’s production of books, of the size of the book “Things in Which It Is Impossible for God to Lie,” were stacked up, it would reach a mile into the sky, some four times the height of the Empire State building! In a recent month, 1,140,459 finished books were turned out.

THE PRINTING PRESSES

To produce literature in such quantity a great deal of printing must be going on, and it is. But to what extent are there plans to expand the printing facilities?

With anticipation aroused, the tour moved up to the spacious, high-ceiling sixth floor of the new building, now totally empty. Here they were reminded by a spokesman that on the adjoining sixth floors of the other factories, which are interlinked by bridges, there are presently eighteen large rotary presses.

However, it was explained that on this specially reinforced floor of the new factory, and on the one above like it, there is space for twenty-three more of these large rotary presses. Four of these are scheduled for delivery this summer, and four more next year, so that by the end of 1969 the total number of rotary printing presses should be increased to twenty-six! The Society also has sixteen smaller flatbed and job presses that are used for printing handbills, tracts, programs, forms and other such items.

THE PRINTING ACCOMPLISHED

Since floors seven, eight, nine and ten in the new factory are presently empty, the tour proceeded across the sixth-floor bridge into the sections of factory built in 1927 and 1949.

Here they were surrounded by massive printing presses, the largest of which weigh over fifty tons and consume 1,600-pound, fifty-nine-inch rolls of paper in forty minutes. The eighteen presses use an average of about 100 rolls of paper each day. Together, these weigh about forty tons and cost some $10,000. This clearly is no small printing operation!

Three of the larger presses can produce an average of 25,000 completed thirty-two-page magazines an hour, or well over a half million a day between the three of them! The other fifteen smaller rotary presses can average about 12,500 magazines an hour. Last year the Society’s pressroom produced a total of 154,681,710 Watchtower and Awake! magazines, more than double the production of 1955.

It was explained that the reason why so many printing presses are required is that the Watchtower Society prints in such a great number of languages. Why, over the years, printing has been done here in 146 languages! The Watchtower is regularly printed at the Brooklyn factories in about thirty languages each issue, and the Awake! in more than a dozen languages each issue. Printing in so many languages requires much extra time and effort.

It is noteworthy, too, that the Watchtower Society is a pioneer in one feature of the printing industry. And that is in the matter of printing Bibles on rotary presses. Back in the early 1940’s it was an unheard-of thing to attempt to run thin Bible paper on these fast-moving rotary presses. However, the Society made an arrangement to get experimental rolls of lightweight paper, and, in time, a satisfactory type of paper was developed. Now other printing establishments, too, have gone to printing Bibles on rotary presses, instead of the slower flatbed presses.

By this time the tour had crossed a second sixth-floor bridge into the factory completed in 1956. Here the rest of the rotary presses are found. Many could not help but think what a big operation it must be to mail out the more than 150 million magazines printed each year.

SUBSCRIPTION AND MAILING DEPARTMENTS

Appropriately, an elevator at hand transported the tour to the thirteenth floor, to the subscription department. There they stepped out into a spacious, well-lighted office, where many desks and some ninety dark-green cabinets for filing subscription stencils are arranged to receive a maximum of natural light from the windows.

The visitors were informed by large signs that about 1,250,000 individual English stencils were filed in the larger battery of cabinets on one side of the floor. And over on another side, a sign explained that some 350,000 stencils for magazine subscriptions in thirty-three other languages were filed in the cabinets located there. Featured prominently on the floor is an appealing display of The Watchtower in the 74 languages in which it is printed, and the Awake! in its 26 languages.

Below, on the tenth floor, the ones on tour were fascinated by the speed at which the bulk rolls of magazines were prepared for mailing to the congregations of Jehovah’s witnesses. The magazines come up to the floor from the pressroom on large skids, 32,000 magazines to the skid. From the skid they are fed into a trimmer, at a rate of about 40,000 an hour, to be neatly trimmed.

They come out of the trimmer on a conveyor belt in stacks of about eighty magazines, which pass by a battery of six persons rolling magazines. These persons pick up the passing magazines, roll them in wrappers with amazing speed, and toss them onto another fast-moving conveyor belt. At the end of this belt, labels are put on the wrapped magazine rolls, and they are placed in mailing sacks for delivery to the post office. What a speedy operation!

On the other end of the tenth floor, magazines are individually wrapped for mailing to the more than a million and a half subscribers. To accomplish this operation, the Society has four wrapping machines that can each wrap and address magazines at the rate of about 6,000 an hour. The tour was reminded that these complex machines were designed and built by the members of the Bethel family who work in the machine shop.

PAPER STORAGE AND THE MACHINE SHOP

Passing through the eighth floor, filled with rolls of paper, the tour noted a large sign that explained that the Society carries more than a six-month inventory of paper. This means that there are over 5,000 tons of paper stored, or more than 200 train carloads of 25 tons each!

There was one more department that most of the visitors did not want to miss in this factory. That is the machine shop down on the fifth floor. The forty ministers who work here do a fine job of keeping all the machinery in the factories running smoothly. Among their major projects have been the complete overhaul of several of the older rotary presses.

Returning to the sixth floor, and traveling back across the bridge to the 1927-1949 factory, the tour walked upstairs to see the linotype machines, and the composition and plate-making departments, all located on the seventh floor.

PREPARATION FOR PRINTING

A first step in preparing written material for printing, the visitors were reminded, is to set it up in lines of lead type. This is done on a linotype machine. The Society has thirty-two of these, exactly four times the number they had in 1948, twenty years ago.

After watching the lines of metal type being cast by these machines, the tour proceeded over to the composition department. Here the compositor takes the lines of metal type, and, with spacing material, makes this up into a page for printing. When these pages are clamped tightly together in a steel frame, they can be used just as they are to print on a flatbed press. However, other steps are necessary to make a curved metal plate for printing on a rotary press.

First, heavy dampened cardboard-like paper is placed over the metal chase, in which the pages are locked, and these are put under a mat press. Here, under heat and pressure, the metal pages of type are impressed into the cardboard-like paper, and an exact duplication of the printed page is reproduced in it.

On the other end of the floor, in the plate department, this heavy mat, or cardboard-like paper, then is placed in a curved casting box. The visitors watched with fascination as hot liquid metal was pumped into the top of this box. This liquid, some eighteen pounds of it, settles into the impressions in the mat and solidifies to form a curved rotary printing plate. Then, after this plate has been coated with a thin layer of nickel in the nickeling tanks, it can be used to print over a million impressions.

INK ROOM AND CARPENTER SHOP

The tour had yet to visit the ink room and carpenter shop, located on the lower floors of the building. The Watchtower Society annually saves tens of thousands of dollars by manufacturing its own printing ink, just last year producing some 140 tons of it. Ink, however, is not the only product manufactured in the ink room. Last year over 20 tons of soaps and detergents were produced for keeping the Bethel home and factories clean, about 1,000 gallons of paint were made, and some 95 tons of adhesives were produced for use in the bindery and mailing departments.

The more than two-and-a-half-hour tour reached its conclusion down on the second floor in the carpenter shop. Here, too, the Society saves tens of thousands of dollars by building their own furniture for the Bethel home. Since 1960, 422 beautiful formica dressers, 381 formica desks and 293 formica bookcases have been built.

What a grand tour! What a memorable day! That was the feeling of all who had attended the dedication program and had now just completed an inspection of the factories. How wonderfully the facilities have been expanded for printing the Word of God! But the expansion has not been limited to Brooklyn.

PRINTING FACILITIES WORLD WIDE

When passing the ink room and seeing a large shipment of ink prepared for Germany, many of the visitors were reminded that printing has also expanded tremendously in Watch Tower Society branches outside the United States. All together, last year over 96 million Watchtower and Awake! magazines, in more than forty languages, were printed in other countries. Why, that is more than the total number printed in Brooklyn less than twelve years ago!

The two rotary presses in Germany turned out nearly 27 million magazines last year, and their bindery produced over a quarter of a million books. In England, 21 million magazines were printed; in Canada, over 16 million; and in Switzerland, nearly 11 million. The three Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden and Finland also produced over 10 million Watchtower and Awake! magazines last year. And down in South Africa these magazines were printed in ten languages.

Truly, Jesus’ prophecy is having a remarkable fulfillment in these last days, for, without question, the message concerning God’s kingdom is being printed and distributed “in all the inhabited earth.”—Matt. 24:3, 14.