Across the near side of the room, on either side of two doors, stood three engines on wooden horses. The bigger one was a Liberty, the smaller a Hispano-Suiza, and the third a new star-shaped contraption on which hung a label, “Lawrance J-1, single-row, air-cooled radial.” The first two I recognized as war surplus, but the third I suspected to be the pride and joy, the hope and fear, of the Engine Section of BUAERO. Here was the Navy’s first promising postwar development, a project destined to exercise a controlling influence on the future of aviation.
Around the room, marred woodwork and grease-spotted floors joined with a musty smell to give the room the down-at-the-heel appearance of all those temporary wartime structures, themselves so expressive of the popular hope that war itself is but temporary. Drab enough at best, the old tenements had deteriorated swiftly with the slashing of appropriations for defense. Now as I stood in the doorway, someone slapped me on the back and I turned to find Lt. Comdr. B. G. Leighton, retiring Chief of the Section, greeting me like a long-lost brother.
“Am I glad to see you,” he whooped, saluting me with an exaggerated flourish. Under his enthusiasm the drabness faded out like a morning fog under a warm sun. Waving an airy hand at each of his secretaries, Leighton introduced me to them with, “Ladies, meet your new boss.”
Tossing an armful of homework on the right-hand desk, and waving me to a battered chair, he slid into a swivel-seated one behind it. There he sat grinning like an ape, peering at me around three mountains of paper work heaped up in trays marked, “Incoming,” “Outgoing,” and “Hold.” Though still in his early thirties, Leighton had gray splashes around his temples with laugh wrinkles twinkling at the corners of his eyes—those early-bird aviators tended toward premature grayness. Now, clasping his hands behind his head and hoisting long legs so as to rest his feet on the battered old desk, he grinned his pleasure.
“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” he quoted, “but now that I’ve finally got you here, I hardly know where to begin.”
“Begin at the beginning,” I countered. “It’s all Greek to me.”
“Well, in the beginning of power-driven flight,” he commenced, “before the Wrights could take the hurdle from the glider to the airplane, they had first to find an engine whose weight was light enough, in proportion to its power, to get the contraption into the air. And since nothing suitable existed, they had to design and build their own. Thus from the beginning,” he went on, “the power plant has been the heart of the airplane. Subsequent progress has been almost entirely a matter of getting more horsepower for less weight. When you want to lift yourself up by the bootstraps,” he added with a grin, “you start reducing, and begin exercising your muscles. The history of aviation can be measured by that ratio, pounds per horsepower.”
At the turn of the century, Leighton pointed out, gasoline engines were just coming into use. The Wrights, in designing their little 20-hp 4-cylinder model, had naturally followed the current automotive practice. They had arranged the cylinders in line and had cooled the engine with circulating water.
“It is only now,” Leighton explained, waving a hand in the direction of the Lawrance air-cooled radial near the door, “that we are spreading our cylinders like the petals of a daisy and cooling them directly by air. And this section,” he added with obvious pride, “is the foster parent of an innovation but recently classified by the engineering intelligentsia as ‘impossible.’ As for that obsolete term,” he went on, “we have a saying in the Section that goes like this: ‘The impossible we do today; the fantastic may take a little longer.’” He grinned as he watched me for the effect of another one of his phrases.
Leighton went on to point out, however, that back in 1914, the year the war broke out in Europe, this country had practically no military aircraft engines. The Wrights had not thought of the airplane as a weapon carrier. Over in Europe, however, where men had long been accustomed to look at things through military binoculars, the Germans, the French, the Italians, and the British had concentrated on military power plants. In the commercial field, the United States had a fair-to-middling engine in the Curtiss OXX, rated at less than 90 horsepower. This one later went into wide war use in the Curtiss Jenny training planes. But when, in April, 1917, the war had engulfed the United States, it caught us with our britches down around our ankles. We had no high-powered military engines of any kind, nor had we any designs for them. And even had we had the designs, there were no production facilities in this country nor the know-how for using them.