The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

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NEW YORK—Those who had the time to watch television Sunday afternoon probably saw the show describing the new General Motors technical center. General Motors also published a beautiful booklet which gives one a good idea of the way in which this technical center is trying to look into the future.

The opening paragraph of the booklet tells the story pretty well: "More than half of the 20th century is behind us—nearly half ahead of us. From the past 50 years have come miracles—the automobile, the airplane, motion pictures, radio and television, and the splitting of the atom. But this is history, and all of us should be more interested in the future because, as C.F. Kettering puts it, 'There's where we are going to spend the rest of our lives."'

And so General Motors now has dedicated this new technical center where research will go on in all lines affecting technical developments of the future. And there will be a great need there for hundreds of young scientists and engineers, well-trained men with lots of curiosity and imagination.

The company does a good job in looking after the needs and comforts of those who work in this remarkable research establishment. There is even a Technical Center Service Section, which operates and maintains site facilities. "Research, Styling, Manufacturing Development, and the Engineering Staff group function as independent units and as tenants on the site maintained for them by the Service Section," the company explains.

The center includes a central restaurant and supplies food to cafeterias in other buildings. There is a medical department, with branches in buildings of the other operations. And in this section is one of the largest private communication boards in the world, designed to handle telephone and teletype services for all of the technical center's operations.

This Service Section supervises fire equipment, plant protection facilities and ambulance service. It produces and distributes heat and power to all the units and must maintain an adequate water supply and 11 miles of road as well as watch over 25,000 trees, plants and shrubs of more than 200 varieties.

Actually, this section's operations cover almost all of the activities undertaken by the government of a small city, with a few that are peculiar to the highly technical nature of the center's operations.

If you can obtain a copy of this booklet, it will interest you. I am sure it will stimulate your imagination and set you to wondering what the future has in store for all of us. As human beings, we will be more interested in how it will affect each of us personally, but it is well for us to know about all these technical developments, since without any question they will change the tenor of our lives.

E.R.

(Copyright, 1956, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, May 23, 1956

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

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MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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