“There she is,” he remarked. The big engine was being torn down after a full-throttle run. She was up to rated horsepower but still scuffed her pistons. They were trying one more “fix” and if this one worked, they intended to go back on an endurance run. No suggestion of doubt entered Mead’s cheerful voice.
Rentschler stood noncommittal. An engineer must needs be an optimist; his job is a creative one. Day after day he has to bow his head against an avalanche of grief, from failures either in his own shop or the field, yet still press on to correct the faults. There were no margins for error in this aircraft-engine business; the machinery was stressed right up to the limit. The trick was to keep it from going beyond, and the penalty for failure might be somebody’s life. Management had plenty of worries, too; Rentschler, there, must wangle the financial problems and try to reconcile the conflicting interests of the several departments of a complex organization.
Now while Leighton and Mead discussed the teething troubles of their new baby with all the intense interest of a couple of young mothers, I tried to pick out the fundamental factors of the situation at Wright Aeronautical. BUAERO had taken the decision to stake its future on the trade. Wright Aero was our best bet. We were committed to air-cooled radials and the management of Wright was still committed, subconsciously at least, to liquid-cooled in-line. It wasn’t a matter of sentiment with them; they had a big investment in their prior art. The big job from the point of view of the Engine Section was to instill some of our own enthusiasm into Wright Aero, and this would take some doing. As we left the factory to go to a hotel for lunch, I realized I had my job cut out for me.
Next day we ran down to Keyport, New Jersey, for a look at the Aeromarine Airplane and Motor Corporation plant. It was a discouraging picture, acres of idle machine shops and a powerhouse smokestack that gave out no smoke. The one bright spot there proved to be Roland Chilton, the chief engineer, a keen Englishman whom I mentally clothed in a costume for the Midsummer Night’s Dream. He had the inventor’s talent for innovation, with the engineer’s knack for making ingenious mechanical contrivances work and he had created for Leighton the new Aeromarine Inertia Starter. This device, which utilized energy stored in a fast-running flywheel to crank over obstinate engines, had proved an outstanding success in the limited quantities Leighton had bought. Leighton had tried to keep Aeromarine alive in the hope that times might change for the better, but the air-cooled radials would obsolete the Aeromarine liquid-cooled in-line engines, just as they had set aside the Wright Hispano E-4.
A train ride to Boston took us to the plant of the Kinney Manufacturing Company. Their main product was heavy-duty pumps, a far cry from aircraft engines, but the management had shown a willingness to gamble on the remarkable ingenuity of its aircraft engineer, Warren Noble. His forte, like Chilton’s, was a unique capacity for accomplishing the impossible through little-used mechanical devices and principles. If anything, he was even more ingenious than Chilton, but by the same token a little less productive; once he had made some contraption work, experimentally, he lost interest in it. Production for profit seemed to bore him. But at Leighton’s request, he had undertaken to build a tiny, five-cylinder, air-cooled radial engine for a miniature airplane—one intended to be folded up and parked in a steel cylinder mounted on the deck of a submarine. The job, which imposed every known restriction on the already complicated airplane-design problem, intrigued Noble no end. His engine, with its oil-operated valve gear, incorporated every other unconventional device Noble’s fertile brain could conceive, and it ran. Beyond that point, Noble’s interest faded.
We left Boston stimulated by talking far into the night with Noble, exploring the realms of engineering fancy, but down in our hearts we knew the little engine would never get anywhere. After all the airplane itself was highly experimental and might never fly; the outlook for quantity production of air scouts for submarines was not encouraging. But it was worth the trip just to listen to the conversation of one of the most facile engineering minds in the business.
From Boston we moved out to the Army Engineering Division, then at McCook Field, Dayton, Ohio, one of those government arsenal-type establishments and about as far apart from Warren Noble as it was possible to get while still remaining on the same planet. The chief of the Engine Branch out there was Ed Jones, a former Air Service major, now in civilian clothes, and a good solid citizen. He displayed none of the usual Air Service antagonism to naval aviation, and received us warmly.
His assistant, Sam Herron, was, like Chilton, a clever Englishman, one who had done highly useful research in air-cooled cylinders under Professor Gibson, in England, then the outstanding man in his field. Sam Herron was probably better informed on this important subject than anyone in this country and had done some good work even under the handicaps of a government establishment like McCook Field. Among other things “The Field,” as it was called by the Air Service, had designed a 300-hp air-cooled radial engine which it had turned over to the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company, of Buffalo, after competitive bidding, for construction of the first experimental model.
Leighton expressed lack of confidence in this procedure, which had carried over from the war. When disorderly reconversion had forced the automotive people out of aircraft production, “The Field” had determined to establish a great engineering division at Dayton, and to undertake its own design. After the government wizards had dreamed up their pet projects, a manufacturer would do the rest. Leighton argued that this procedure just divided the responsibility for a development between the government and the industry.
“The government,” he remarked, “will claim all the credit for everything that turns out well, and will hang the contractor for all mistakes, especially its own.” That, he insisted, was not the road to success.