Revolution No. 2

Bendix Home Appliances Inc., which revolutionized the washing-machine industry eleven years ago with its automatic home washer, was all ready last week to do it again. As a starter, it cut prices 7%, the first postwar reductions by a major producer in the automatic-washer field. Then it announced that it had bought Cleveland's H. J. Rand Washing Machine Corp., along with the rights to a "radically different" machine, which it hopes to put on the market next fall. With price cuts and new machine, Bendix hopes to fend off the score of new washers which have tried to break Bendix' tight grip on the market.

Biggest difference between the present automatic washer and the new machine is the drying system. The tank of the Rand washer is lined with rubber. To dry clothes, the water and air are sucked out by a motor-driven pump, creating a vacuum which 1) causes the rubber to collapse, squeezing the clothing dry, and 2) lowers the boiling point of the water that remains until it turns into steam and passes off.

Barn-Bred Shaver. The new machine is the invention of scholarly, stocky James H. Rand III, 35, son of the president of Remington Rand Inc. (typewriters, adding machines, etc.). Young Rand turned down an offer to work for his father, preferring to dabble in medical research. He studied at the University of Virginia, Vienna University and the University of Berlin (he never got a degree), before he set up a laboratory in a barn behind his Westport (Conn.) home.

He made it pay by branching out, developing an electric shaver, an oxygen regulator for aircraft, a plastic shoe sole. As an Army major, he worked on guided missiles during World War II. At war's end, he set up the H. J. Rand Co. (the initials were reversed to avoid confusion with his father) with a capitalization of $80,000, to develop his washer.

Air-Conditioned Mattress. His father did not get in the company, says young Rand, because "he didn't think much of it.'' But the washer has already paid off handsomely. All told, Bendix will pay $500,000 down, plus a royalty of $2.50 apiece on the first 100,000 washers. (It will scale down to $1 apiece after 500,000.)

Inventor Rand is now working on another idea--a pneumatic mattress. He hopes that the mattress, now being tested in a Cleveland hospital, will eliminate bedsores. For home use, Rand inflates it with refrigerated air in summer, hot air in winter.

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