Navy Bean Soup

The phone jangled in the Pennsylvania farmhouse at 2 a.m. A sleepy man answered it, snapped wide awake. The Navy needed more bean soup. Soon, from a nearby factory, a truck loaded with big black cans rolled out, sped to the Philadelphia airport. The cans were hustled into a plane, flown to San Francisco, then on to Pearl Harbor. There they were dumped into a waiting boat. It chuffed out to sea, met a ship that had been burning for three days. The cans were tossed to the exhausted crew. Quickly, the bean soup in the big black cans snuffed out the fire.

Since World War II began, such emergencies have become routine for Philadelphia's National Foam System, Inc. Its stocky, energetic president, Fisher Longstreth Boyd, 57, rolls out of bed in the bleaker hours like any fireman to dispatch his fire-fighting foam, which the Navy calls "bean soup," to fight fires around the globe.

New Tricks. Back in 1821 the first fire fighter in the family, James Boyd, invented the first rubber-lined cotton hose to replace the riveted leather hose then in use. He proudly received a patent signed by President James Monroe himself. Ever since, the Boyds have been inventing and manufacturing equipment to fight fires. To learn the tricks, unbookish Mr. Boyd left the University of Pennsylvania (he was having too much fun to bother about graduating anyway), and went to work in his father's businesses, James Boyd & Brother, and National Fire Protection Co. He decided to think up a few tricks of his own. He concentrated on chemical foams which, when mixed with water, form a thick, snowy blanket of carbon dioxide bubbles, cutting off oxygen and thus smothering fires.

Although such foams had been in use for 50 years, Boyd thought he could invent a better one—and did. To manufacture and sell it, he formed National Foam, soon was doing a tidy worldwide business selling foam and equipment to protect oilfields and refineries in Ploesti, Hamburg, Tokyo, Yokohama. Later, aided by his chemistry-smart vice president, George Gordon Urquhart, he turned a second trick: creation from soybeans of a new super-efficient foam, which he called Aer-O-Foam.

More Production. A war-hating Quaker, Mr. Boyd did not think of his foams as war materiel until the Army gave him a sizable order. Early in '42 the Navy swamped him with an order for 200,000 gallons, almost a year's production for his small, old-fashioned factory.

Promptly, National Foam broke ground for a new plant outside Philadelphia, turned out its first batch of bean soup seven weeks later. The Navy piled on orders. It put a generous supply aboard its fighting ships and stockpiled it all over the world. In one Pacific sea fight 118 warship fires were reportedly snuffed out by foam. And Foam's gross fizzed up from less than $500,000 into $6.000,000 this year.