Robert C. Stanley

Robert Crooks Stanley is the rare industrial founder whose name attaches less to a company than to a metal. When he joined the New Jersey works of the International Nickel Company in 1902, nickel was essentially a single-purpose substance: hardened into armor plate and gun steel, it lived and died by the world's appetite for war ^[5][1]. When Stanley died as Inco's chairman in 1951, nickel was in stainless cutlery, automobile bumpers, jet engines, kitchen sinks, and the five-cent coin that bore its name, and Inco produced roughly nine-tenths of the world's supply ^[4][1]. The distance between those two facts is, in large part, the work of one man.

He was a metallurgist before he was an executive, and that order mattered. In 1905, working at Inco's Orford refinery, Stanley developed Monel, a tough, corrosion-resistant nickel-copper alloy smelted almost directly from Sudbury ore, and it became the first great commercial argument that nickel had a life beyond the battlefield ^[2][9]. Named for Inco's then-president Ambrose Monell (an "L" dropped because trademark law barred family surnames), Monel was the seed of an idea Stanley would spend three decades scaling: that the way to make a cyclical, war-dependent commodity safe was to manufacture demand for it in peacetime ^[9][1].

Stanley took the presidency in 1922, the first chief executive in Inco's history to rise from nickel rather than from the U.S. Steel side of the J. P. Morgan house that had assembled the company in 1902 ^[5]. He inherited a wreck. The post–World War I collapse had cut nickel production by half in 1919 and then by some seventy percent over the following two years; cash was low and the Sudbury mines stood shut ^[5]. Company lore holds, with justification, that Stanley saved Inco, not by cutting, but by building a Development and Research division whose entire purpose was to invent new uses for the metal and then sell them ^[5][1]. By the mid-1920s the automobile industry alone absorbed more than a third of all nickel; production soared more than sixfold between 1922 and 1929 ^[5].

The defining corporate act of his tenure came in 1928. Inco and the British-based Mond Nickel Company each owned half of the richest nickel deposit on earth, the Frood, in the Sudbury basin, and rather than fight over it they merged through an exchange of stock, creating International Nickel Company of Canada and a near-total world monopoly ^[5][7]. In the same stroke the firm re-incorporated in Canada, a move its lawyers at Sullivan & Cromwell are said to have urged precisely so that the Morgan-descended giant would sit beyond the reach of the U.S. Sherman Antitrust Act ^[5][3]. Stanley had effectively engineered a global monopoly and then walked it out of the jurisdiction most likely to break it up.

That monopoly was tested in fire. Inco rode the Great Depression brutally, its stock fell more than ninety-four percent between 1929 and 1932, worse than almost any major Canadian issue, but Stanley used cheap money to expand, and the rearmament of the 1930s pulled the company back ^[5]. By World War II, Inco and its Mond subsidiary refined essentially the entire Allied nickel supply outside Cuba, some 1.5 billion pounds in all forms, the indispensable stiffening in armor, aero-engines, and gun barrels ^[5]. Yet the same dominance drew Washington's fire: in 1946 the U.S. Justice Department sued Inco's American arm under the Sherman Act, settling by consent decree in 1948 ^[5].

Stanley's contradictions are the contradictions of the metal itself. He was a brilliant alloy chemist who became a "supersalesman," a man who genuinely diversified nickel away from munitions yet built a monopoly that the U.S. government and Fortune magazine alike regarded with deep suspicion ^[5][6]. He relinquished the presidency in 1949 and remained chairman until his death two years later, having compiled the longest and most consequential run of any leader in the nickel industry's history ^[4][5].

He was born August 1, 1876, in Little Falls, New Jersey, and grew up in Montclair, where he played football at the local high school and, by some accounts, taught manual training there before his own schooling was finished ^[3][2]. His was an engineer's education, taken in two stages: a degree in mechanical engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken in 1899, followed by the rigorous Engineer of Mines degree from Columbia University's School of Mines in 1901 ^[3][2]. The pairing, the machine shop and the assay furnace, fixed the cast of his whole career; he would always be as comfortable with a smelting process as with a balance sheet.

His first work took him far from a boardroom. For the S. S. White Dental Manufacturing Company he went prospecting platinum-bearing placer sands in British Columbia, learning metallurgy in the field ^[3]. In 1902 he joined the International Nickel Company, newly assembled that January out of the Canadian Copper Company and the Orford Copper Company by J. P. Morgan's U.S. Steel, as a superintendent at the Orford works in New Jersey ^[5][3]. It was there, in 1905, that the young engineer made the discovery that would launch both the metal and the man: Monel, a corrosion-proof nickel-copper alloy that could be reduced almost directly from Sudbury ore ^[9][2].

From that bench he climbed steadily and entirely from within. He became general superintendent of the Orford works during 1914–1918, vice-president of all Inco operations from 1918, and in 1922, on the death of president W. A. Bostwick, the company turned to the metallurgist rather than to another financier, the first time it had done so ^[3][5]. He had married Alma Guyon Timolat in 1912; he was an avid salmon fisherman; and by 1922 he was, at forty-six, in command of a company that was nearly broke ^[3][5].

Stanley's monument is not a building but a habit of thought: that a commodity producer's job is to create demand, not merely to dig and refine. The Development and Research model he built, a metals company that behaved like a manufacturer hunting end-uses, became standard practice across the materials industries, and it carried nickel from armor plate into the ordinary furniture of modern life ^[5][1]. Harvard Business School later named him among its "Great American Business Leaders of the 20th Century," crediting him with spearheading technological innovation in metals and growing Inco into the world's largest nickel company, producing roughly 90 percent of global supply by 1951 ^[4][5]. Canada inducted him into its Mining Hall of Fame in 1990 as the man who built Inco into the largest nickel enterprise on earth ^[4].

The shadow is the monopoly. Stanley's Inco was an unregulated near-monopoly that, by Canadian re-incorporation, sat outside the Sherman Act even as its offices stayed on Wall Street, a structure that drew a 1946 Justice Department suit and pointed criticism from Fortune, which judged that the company could "do just about anything it pleased" ^[5][6][3]. His tolerance of the upstart Falconbridge, which O. W. Main argued may not have served Inco's long-term interest, and the wartime export of Canadian nickel that critics linked to German rearmament in the 1930s, complicate any simple celebration ^[5]. He was, in the end, the grandfather of the nickel industry: the metallurgist who freed nickel from war and the monopolist who made it indispensable ^[4][5].