ThyssenKrupp Magazin

EDWARD G. BUDD 65
superior to a wooden one in every respect, and now he had fresh capital
to show the advantages of stainless steel carriages for railroads.
Throughout his entire professional life, Budd was a stubborn advocate
of replacing traditional materials with modern ones, but several years of
training and working for other companies had shown that if he wanted
to follow his own approach he would need his own company.
When Fortune wrote the 1934 report, the Budd company was
more than two decades old, Budd – who did not attend a college or
university – having founded it in 1912 with $250,000. Even then that
was not a large amount for a capital-intensive business, and when his
first press would not fit into his one-story factory building Budd could
not afford to rent new premises and had to move the machine into a
circus tent.
WOOD THAT HAD TO GIVE WAY TO STEEL
Yet despite his shortage of cash, Budd had managed to lure away the
best brains from his previous employer, Hale & Kilburn, to brave the
new beginning together with him. This applied in particular to the engineer
Joseph Ledwinka, who came from Vienna and whose inventions
became indispensable to Budd.
Budd also had contacts with the automotive industry that helped
open doors. The first customer to buy the young company’s all-steel
body was Charles Nash, who headed carmaker General Motors, al-
The potential offered by
the new material – steel – was
little recognized in the beginning,
and the first all-steel car bodies
were still strongly influenced
by their wooden forerunners.
Even revolutions take time.
With steel to success