A great plane manufacturer, having more defense work than its crowded shops could handle, looked around for some company with experience in the fabrication of light metal, to whom it could farm out some of the details.
Goodyear Aircraft Corporation, the aeronautic subsidiary, was asked to build tail surfaces for Martin bombers. A curious thing happened. Men whose work had been primarily with airships, rather than airplanes (omitting the quite different field of airplane tires, wheels, and brakes) found themselves on familiar ground when they swung over to heavier-than-air construction.
Here was the same problem of getting maximum strength with minimum weight, of selection and treatment of light alloys, of intricate stress calculations, and a hundred ingenious devices to measure those stresses, enabling designers to turn out a scientifically designed structure. The background was there—not to mention their experience and studies in streamlined design—to reduce resistance, get maximum performance from power plants.
The difference was that in the case of the airship savings in weight mount fast, because of size. The importance of light weight and high strength had come home to airship designers years before.
Their experience was directly applicable to the new field. Other orders came in, from Curtiss, Consolidated, Grumman, and soon the huge plant was humming with the production of parts for fighters and bombers.
Then a four-company arrangement was set up by the government to expand airplane production still further, and after that an order for complete planes. The original plant was now jam-packed with lathes and drills, jigs and presses, and three huge new plants were built alongside and across the road, and Goodyear Aircraft Corporation found itself with thousands of men, building not only airships, but airplanes and airplane parts as well.
Every large company took on new tasks in defense, but in this case Goodyear was able to move quickly, and give unexpected support to the airplane program by reason of its long research in a different field. This result, it is true, grew chiefly out of research in rigid airships, rather than non-rigids, but both played a part in another instance—barrage balloons.
England was using them, might ask this country to supply some. The American government too might have use for them. So, long before there was even any hint of orders, Mr. Litchfield threw a new problem to the engineers at Goodyear Aircraft and the operating men at Wingfoot Lake—the job of designing an efficient barrage balloon. They were not to make Chinese copies of foreign balloons, but draw on their experience in lighter-than-air and see if principles and technique established there could not be applied to design balloons which would ride with maximum stability in gusty and unstable air. Men went to work, designing, building, flying, observing, rejecting, altering, improving, week after week, month after month, until several satisfactory types were evolved. One of these was capable of flying at 15,000 feet, twice the usual height. Orders began to come in, and the little group of men and girls in the balloon room quickly grew into a large organization. The department outgrew its quarters, took over room after room, expanded to subsidiary plants outside Akron.
One instrument developed illustrates how the airship men were able to utilize past experience in a new project.
Mounted alongside the winch on the ground, it gave exact information, as often as was wanted, as to what the barrage balloon was doing, a mile or three miles up.