Political Quotes

“Madam President, earlier today I toured Alcoa's Cleveland Works plant. The plant houses an engineering and manufacturing marvel of a 50,000-ton Mesta forging press. It stands 87 feet high; 36 feet below the surface, 51 feet above the surface. The press has enough steel to lay 42 miles of railroad track. That is roughly here to Baltimore or Akron to Cleveland. It is massive, and one of only five heavy closed-die forging presses in the United States. It is officially considered by the Mechanical Engineering Association a national historic engineering landmark. Its original purpose was to build components for large airplanes during World War II. During the war, we discovered that German aircraft were being built with structural elements that could only be made by large forging processes that we thought had not yet been invented. So only as it could do, our government, through the Air Force, initiated the Heavy Press Program to compete with the Germans and to show that advanced manufacturing matters to our country. After the war, we brought the Mesta supergiant forging press to America and to Cleveland, where it remains critical to the commercial and defense aerospace industries. It formed the basis of a public- private partnership, it stamps the ``Made in America'' label on some of the world's most advanced technologies and products. Today Alcoa is investing $100 million to complete and restart its redesign of the massive press.…”