The production bureaus were organized for their salvage operations precisely as they had been for manufacturing the supplies and, later, for liquidating the business arrangements with the contractors. Those which had created manufacturing districts before the armistice, afterwards established district salvage boards to take over and dispose of the surpluses accumulated by the district claims boards in their settlements with the contractors. These district salvage boards, in turn, were subsidiary to the main bureau salvage boards, which, in turn, reported to the Sales Branch of the Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. The surpluses of ordnance materials, for instance, were handled by the Ordnance Salvage Board through its district salvage boards, and the same system obtained in the Air Service and under the Director of Purchase. The other bureaus disposed of their surpluses through central salvage boards in Washington. Perhaps the chief challenge to the ingenuity of the government salesman was that offered by the ordnance surpluses, for these were probably the most highly specialized of all military supplies; yet it was often the task of the Ordnance Salvage Board to find civilian needs to which these supplies could be adapted. Great commercial successes have sometimes been scored by those able to develop new uses, and therefore new markets, for the goods they manufactured. In like fashion the ordnance salvers, by taking thought, could sometimes convert what had been regarded as junk into merchandise for which there was a brisk demand at good prices. These activities took the salesmen far afield. They disposed of lumber to the Panama Canal operators, sold nitrate to the Government of Holland, converted the great ammonium nitrate plant at Perryville into a hospital operated by the Public Health Service for the benefit of disabled ex-service men, transferred tin to the Navy Department, and demonstrated to the Department of Agriculture that the containers in which it had been intended to ship trench mortar shell could serve equally well as containers of dehydrated vegetables. They disposed of rope to the Department of Agriculture. They sold a thousand revolvers to the police force of Washington. To the federal road-builders they turned over trucks and smokeless powder and trinitrotoluol to be used as blasting explosive.