High Voltage

In Atlantic City this week, 3,000 U.S. public-utility men, members of the Edison Electric Institute, heard a prediction that sent their voltage up. In the next 20 years, estimated Elmer Lindseth, outgoing institute president,* the growing U.S. economy will require three times as much electric power as the industry's present capacity. "That," said Lindseth, "will mean raising $30 billion of capital . . . [a sum] equal to the total investment today in the nation's iron and steel, automotive, petroleum and coal industries."

Coming from anyone else, such a prophecy might well have made the institute's hardheaded members blow a fuse in surprise. But as president of the $250 million Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., bustling, ruddy-faced Elmer Lindseth, 48, has made a habit of winning big bets on an expanding economy.

Crossed Wires. Five years ago, when many businessmen were preparing to cut their switches in expectation of a "reconversion" slump with mass unemployment, Lindseth took the bold course. He foresaw a boom which would need an ever-expanding supply of power, and backed his bet with a $90 million expansion program for his own company. Then Lindseth went out after business. By offering advice on factory sites, suppliers and markets, he helped lure 536 new plants (including $50 million in chemical plants alone) to the five-county area that C.E.I.'s national ads call "the best location in the nation." To supply the power.

Lindseth increased C.E.I.'s capacity to 984,000 kilowatts, almost double its prewar level. Last week, just before he left Cleveland for the convention, Lindseth announced that C.E.I. would double its capacity again, with a new $100 million, 1,000,000-kilowatt installation, scheduled for completion after 1965.

Dynamo. Elmer Lindseth calls himself "a beneficiary of the capitalist system." The son of Swedish immigrants (his father was a blacksmith), he won scholarships to Cleveland's Case Institute of Technology and Ohio's Miami University, later a teaching fellowship to Yale. He worked summers as a helper in one of C.E.I.'s boiler plants, got a full-time job as a "junior tester" in 1926. Within a year he became a production engineer, later moved up as an assistant to C.E.I.'s President Eben Crawford, stepped into his shoes (and an $80,000 salary) at Crawford's death in 1945.

As president of the Edison Institute, Lindseth has been a leader in the utility industry's fight against encroachment of public power. Four years before C.E.I. was divorced from North American Co. under the Utility Holding Company Act's "death sentence," Cleveland's Cyrus Eaton led a movement to bring C.E.I, under public ownership as a part of Cleveland's existing municipal power plant. Lindseth helped drum up an opposition which united management, labor and newspapers on C.E.I.'s side. Private ownership won. But Lindseth isn't letting his guard down. Says he: "The cold war against freedom of enterprise here in America is being waged without letup. We can't afford to become complacent."

* The new president: Louis V. Sutton, 61, president since 1933 of Carolina Power & Light Co.

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