Meanwhile, after taking over the Sikorsky job, I had felt the need of a new assistant in Hamilton-Standard and had learned through George Wheat, our public relations counsel, that Raycroft Walsh, a former major in the Air Corps who had resigned to go into business, might be interested. Ray had had an active Army career and, during the Mitchell controversy, had served in the Office of the Chief of Air Corps, Maj. Gen. Mason M. Patrick, as Finance Officer where he had performed some of the functions I had performed for Admiral Moffett. I liked him the moment I met him, and immediately recommended that he be brought into the company.
When Ray took the new propeller to the Army, he encountered a similar lack of interest. Even though he carried his case to the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, Mr. F. Trubee Davison, and finally to his friend Pat Hurley, Secretary of War, stressing the fact that refusal to help develop the new propeller would prove disastrous to the Army and fatal to Hamilton-Standard, he made no more progress than had I with my friend “Spuds” Turner. It was a kind providence which, taking us by the hand, led us out to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and a new milepost in history.
For prior to the crisis in the affairs of Hamilton-Standard, United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, having in mind the need for building new transport aircraft designed to carry passengers and mail on a profitable basis, had initiated a joint airplane development headed up by Boeing. Based upon the performance of the Boeing “Monomail,” a single-engined low-wing monoplane itself partly derived from the earlier work of Jack Northrup, Boeing had taken in hand its new ten-passenger, twin-engined, low-wing monoplane to be called the “Boeing 247.” Designed around a new Pratt and Whitney Wasp engine and equipped with Hamilton-Standard propellers, it was intended as a replacement for all other assorted models in use on the line. Boeing, confident of its engineering ability, had released for production a full order of some sixty airplanes without first testing out a prototype. This procedure, if successful, would put the airplane company far ahead of any competitor and would give the transport company a big jump on other airlines such as it had earned by creating the earlier model, 40-B.
At first everything had gone swimmingly, but the day the first ship to fly over the lines essayed to take off with full load from the high-altitude field at Cheyenne, serious trouble developed; the airplane just could not handle full load satisfactorily from such elevations. At first, Boeing had been inclined to blame Pratt and Whitney and the Wasp engine for insufficient horsepower, but when that attempt failed, both parties shifted the blame onto Hamilton-Standard propellers, claiming faulty propeller design. This was the old Indian game of passing the buck around the eternal triangle of engine, propeller, and airplane. When we sent Frank Caldwell to Cheyenne to investigate he went quietly about a demonstration that, we hoped, would prove convincing.
First he adjusted the duralumin blades at best setting for take-off to show how well the ship would perform even at high altitude. This setting, however, was so inefficient at cruising speeds that the nearby mountain peaks echoed and reechoed the whining complaint of whirring blades. To meet this defect, Frank reset the blades to the best angle for cruising, where the airplane, its load having been reduced for take-off, performed perfectly. After this convincing demonstration, he unwrapped his drawings of a controllable-pitch propeller for the 247. While no such prop had yet been air-tested, Boeing brushed the objection aside, confident now that between the two companies, the airplane could be salvaged.
So it was that Frank Caldwell’s controllable-pitch propeller not only saved the whole string of Boeing 247’s, but in doing so, it opened up the new era of “three-mile-a-minute” air passenger travel and started air transport on its way. After that, even the Army and Navy began to recognize the potentialities of the new propeller; it paved the way for low-wing monoplanes with their high-wing loadings and thus marked the passing of the biplanes.
But prior to the Cheyenne demonstration, Hamilton-Standard propellers dragged bottom. Ray Walsh, who had taken over its management, closed the Pittsburgh plant, reduced the organization to a handful of the ablest men, and moved the shop into a corner of Pratt and Whitney’s ample building in East Hartford. Later, when success acclaimed the genius of Frank Caldwell, Ray began expanding his organization to meet new demands and finally built an additional wing on the Pratt and Whitney building to house his new shop. Still later, we moved Chance Vought Aircraft down to Stratford to bunk in with a much deflated Sikorsky, and turned the whole Vought shop over to Hamilton.
Meanwhile, when Ray undertook to sell the rights to manufacture the new propellers in England, he encountered problems both at home and abroad. The British Air Ministry, like our own services, discounted the propeller—this was a time when most Britishers discounted everything American—and our own armed forces threatened to refuse us the right to license them under our patents. Since our government had contributed precisely nothing to the development, and especially since my classmate, Kelly Turner, had broadcast his decision to the whole aeronautic establishment, they were hardly in position to claim much equity or any right to control a device of such obvious interest to commercial air transport.
However, it was in a totally different role that the Hamilton-Standard controllable-pitch propeller attained immortality. The manager of the propeller branch of the de Havilland Aircraft Company, Ltd., our English licensees, was John Parkes, himself a fighter pilot, an Englishmen who retained some of the ancient enterprise and love of innovation. Today he is managing director of Alvis Limited, Coventry, but then he was the moving spirit in the adaptation of the Hamilton-Standard propeller to the British Spitfire fighters, the planes that helped win the Battle of Britain. The Germans had developed their own controllable-pitch propellers and, save for the curious chain of circumstances outlined here, would have hopelessly outclassed the British. When Mr. Churchill paid tribute to the “so few” to whom Britain owed so much, he probably had in mind the courageous fighter pilots but behind them stood, among others, Ray Walsh, Frank Caldwell, and John Parkes.
And so we trace the living process through which our struggle to survive created new devices and exercised profound influences that no human mind could have imagined. The miscalculation of one engineer saved the creation of another engineer just in time to give air transport the necessary fillip, and to provide British fighters with the winning punch. And there is a final point to keep in mind: it was the performance of Hamilton-Standard’s controllable-pitch propellers in Boeing transports copied by the Germans that impelled them to develop their own propellers. The moral seems to be that leadership in scientific research and technological development is the key to military security. A laggard faces extinction.