USA > Connecticut > History of Connecticut, Volume III > Part 11
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Ahead lay new fields yet to be fully explored and developed-
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electronic communications systems more compact and speedy than ever known before-such newborn devices as transistors and solar batteries, waveguides and dataphones.
In just eight decades, Connecticut had seen its telephone service grow from a shoestring enterprise to a household and business neces- sity, dependably serving every part of the state, every hour of the day. Its record of past accomplishment foretold still greater service in the years ahead.
UNITED AIRCRAFT CORPORATION
United Aircraft Corporation is one of the principal manufacturers of aeronautical products in the United States. From its beginning its entire engineering and manufacturing skill has been devoted to the advancement of the aeronautical art.
The corporation is a Connecticut organization and all of its five divisions and its Research Laboratories have their offices and major facilities in the state. Connecticut was chosen as the site for this high precision industry primarily for the metal-working skills which had been developed here through generations of practice and which had remained supple to the demands of a swiftly changing civilization.
Each of the manufacturing divisions of United Aircraft is a pioneer in the design, development and construction of aeronautical products, and each is the product of a handful of men whose careers began in the very early days of manned flight.
The corporation was organized in 1934 and is younger than any of its divisions except the Missiles & Space Systems division, estab- lished as an entirely new group in the summer of 1958.
The divisions of United Aircraft Corporation are the Pratt & Whitney Aircraft division, whose head office is in East Hartford, Con- necticut, and whose plants are in East Hartford, North Haven, and Southington, Connecticut, and at the Florida Development Center near West Palm Beach, Florida; the Hamilton Standard division whose head office and main plant are in Windsor Locks, Connecticut: the Sikorsky Aircraft division, whose head office is in Stratford, Con- necticut, and plants in Bridgeport and Stratford, Connecticut; the Norden division with its head office in Norwalk, and operations in Milford, Connecticut, Commack, Long Island, White Plains. New York, and Gardena, California. The Missiles & Space Systems divi- sion, the only non-operating division, is located in East Hartford. A substantial Research Group in East Hartford serves all divisions.
UNITED AIRCRAFT CORPORATION, AND ITS MAJOR DIVISION, PRATT & WHITNEY AIRCRAFT, EAST HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT
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United Technology Corporation, in California, is conducing advanced propellant research. Canadian Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company, Limited, a subsidiary of United Aircraft, is located in Jacques Cartier, Quebec, Canada.
The Pratt & Whitney Aircraft division has devoted its entire energy, from its inception in 1925, to power for flight. Its first design, the 400-hp Wasp, was brought through when the country's military air arms were generally judged as third-rate. That engine and its more powerful successors, matched with airframes from American industry, took the United States to a position of world leadership in military air power within a decade. Simultaneously, the increased power and effi- ciency the engines offered were utilized to launch this country's com- mercial aviation.
The Hamilton Standard division, organized in 1919, was acknowl- edged as the world leader in aircraft propellers. Through the history of commercial aviation, Hamilton Standard's propellers have equipped nearly every propeller transport. More than seventy-five per cent of all the propellers used by the combined United States Air Forces in World War II were of Hamilton Standard design. The division's pool of knowledge in hydraulic and electronic engineering was put to use in the postwar years in the development of essential aircraft equipment such as jet engine starters and fuel controls, and aircraft air-condi- tioning systems.
The Sikorsky Aircraft division, founded in 1923, pioneered the helicopter and built the only helicopters that were used in World War II. Their unmatched versatility was amply demonstrated in the Korean conflict, notably in the rescue of literally thousands of wounded or isolated troops and airmen, and they are widely used by every arm of our defense establishment, including the Coast Guard. The use of the helicopter as a commercial vehicle has been pioneered by Sikorsky machines both here and abroad.
On July 1, 1958, the Norden division began operating the business, laboratories, and other facilities acquired from the Norden-Ketay Cor- poration. The Norden organization is widely remembered for the fa- mous Norden bombsight of World War II. It has since become known throughout aviation for its bomb-director system developments, its advanced work in radar and electronics, and for instruments and com- ponents used in many missile systems and aircraft.
The Missiles & Space Systems division was established July I, 1958, to increase the corporation's ability to contribute in a major way to missile and space-flight technology.
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Canadian Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, which was founded in 1928, has for many years been engaged in manufacturing an increasing variety of Pratt & Whitney engines and Hamilton Standard parts. The Canadian company also sells Sikorsky helicopters and services and overhauls the corporation's products used by Canadian customers.
The organization which became United Aircraft had its start at different unrelated places and times. Its parts were drawn together, to emerge as a vital force in world aviation, through the vision and determination of Frederick B. Rentschler and a small group of ener- getic and inventive men.
Frederick Brant Rentschler was a man so capable of self-efface- ment that he was a myth even in his own lifetime. The shy but warm man had many gifts, not the least of which was his ability to gather around him capable men and, whatever was accomplished, give them the lion's share of the credit.
Mr. Rentschler was a 1909 liberal arts graduate of Princeton University, perhaps the only one who stowed away his diploma and went to work as an apprentice molder and mechanic. This was in his family's Hamilton, Ohio, oil and steam turbine manufacturing plant. His father briefly got into the motor car business with the design and production of the four and six-cylinder Republic automobile. Young Rentschler had a hand in that venture. Years later, recalling that time, he used to say : "I longed to do something new and on my own account." For forty years men around him became aware of a basic creed that stemmed from the Republic experience. "Let's stick with our own things," he declared time after time. "We know them best and we have only scratched the surface."
He enlisted shortly after the United States entered World War I and was assigned to supervise the production of aircraft engines for the Army in the New York district. Once he had seen an aircraft engine tick over and examined with his trained eye the scrupulous precision, for that time, with which the components were machined and finished, he knew his destiny.
As the war ended, he told his younger brother George that the aircraft powerplant had become a consuming passion. "Come hell or high water." he said, "I'm going to stay with it."
Out of that resolution came Rentschler's organization and leader- ship in establishing, first Wright Aeronautical Corporation, then Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, United Aircraft & Transport Corporation, and United Aircraft Corporation.
In the spring of 1925, Rentschler organized Pratt & Whitney
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Aircraft as a completely private enterprise. He had left the presi- dency of Wright Aeronautical a few months before. If he found success, he could plow back profits into facilities, tools, laboratories, and research to steadily accelerate the art toward that maturity of performance which he was convinced was possible.
Rapid achievement is a stimulating thing; and the small Pratt & Whitney Aircraft band came into being just as both the military and commercial phases of this nation's air power were ready for the swift swing upward that marked the late 1920s. Mr. Rentschler had precisely what he had longed for-complete control to exercise the management he believed essential; an opportunity to build something on his own account; and the nucleus of men who shared his ideas and, indeed, his consuming absorption in the aircraft powerplant.
The first design laid down was the radial, air-cooled Wasp with its 1,340 inches of displacement. The radial was re-emerging in some aeronautical quarters as potentially a more efficient, economical, and durable powerplant than the liquid-cooled engine that had been ascen- dant for many years. The Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics particularly judged this would be so if someone were to come up with a fresh and modern air-cooled version in the high-power range of that day- around 400 horsepower.
The design met each of those qualifications. Moreover, it proved clean and durable. It delivered 415 horsepower for its 650 pounds of weight. With its sister engine, the Hornet, displacing 1,690 cubic inches, and originally delivering 525 horsepower for its 750 pounds of weight, the Wasp established altogether new criteria in the aircraft engine field.
It set a host of records in every conceivable category-speed, alti- tude, and distance. It became the standard powerplant for both the Navy's carrier-based aircraft and the Army Air Corps' fighters and bombers. All of aviation then was accelerating rapidly, and the air- frame manufacturers came up with cleaner, more versatile designs which, together with the advances made in powerplants, propulsion, electronics, and other components, swiftly took this nation from its lagging third-rate position in world air power to the point where its equipment was qualitatively first by a wide margin.
Foreseeing phenomenal growth in aviation and realizing that the radial air-cooled design was capable of considerable development on its own, which would lead in turn to larger, more efficient transports, Mr. Rentschler began picturing in early 1928 an aviation group under a single management that could design and produce all the equipment
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needed for the new transports and then operate them over its own airline. William Boeing and Chance Vought joined him in organizing, United Aircraft & Transport Corporation.
In its final form this organization was made up chiefly of Boeing, Vought, and Sikorsky as airframe manufacturers; Pratt & Whitney Aircraft in engines; Hamilton Propeller Company and Standard Steel Propellers, which were merged to cover the propulsion field, and five airlines which were put together and later became United Air Lines. United Aircraft & Transport Corporation existed as an entity until 1934 when airmail contract cancellatons and subsequent Senate in- vestigations resulted in the shearing off of equipment builders from transport operators.
Then United Aircraft Corporation emerged in the form it has known through most of its years-Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, Hamil- ton Standard, Sikorsky Aircraft, and Chance Vought. Vought was spun off to become an independent company in 1954, and Norden, which has pioneered in airborne bombing systems and other electronic aeronautical devices, joined the three operating divisions and the new Missiles & Space Systems division in July, 1958, to complete the present structure of the company.
Those years from Pratt & Whitney Aircraft's birth until Pearl Harbor form a remarkable era in aviation. They were telescoped by achievements that came with great rapidity.
Men and incidents in aviation became a part of the company story : Charles Lindbergh, Bernt Balchen, Jimmy Doolittle, and Clyde Pang- born walking through the shop; the usually taciturn Wiley Post exci- tedly saying that if his Wasp were a race horse, he would hang a floral offering on it for running like a clock on his two flights around the world; the legion of eager military pilots-Arnold and Spaatz and Eaker and Hunter and Vandenberg; Radford, Mitscher, Ramsey, Soucek, and Champion, suddenly out of their cockpit environment and now in the shop watching with fascination a master rod being machined or a nose section being assembled. Or there would be the days when housekeeping chores were given just a little extra lick. The ladies were coming-Amelia Earhart, Jackie Cochrane, Ruth Nichols, or any one of a dozen others whose contributions to flight played a vital part in its ultimate broad public acceptance.
When World War II came at the close of the decade, virtually every design in airframes, engines, propellers, and other major com- ponents that was to bear importantly on the outcome of the conflict existed either in actual metal or in the design stages.
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In a historical way, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft's position in its field and the enormous work it did from 1941 to 1945 are singularly clear if those years are considered as a distinct era.
In the fifteen preceding years, just as Mr. Rentschler had fore- seen, the radial air-cooled engine demonstrated its early promise.
The Wasp series had been developed from the original single- row prototype to double-row configurations; from deliveries of 400 horsepower to 2,000 horsepower; its efficiency and dependability were without parallel. Then, with war, the division's facilities were expanded time and time again. An engine facility almost as large as the total East Hartford home facilities was constructed in a cornfield outside Kansas City, Missouri, and there a handful of Pratt & Whitney Air- craft veterans directed 25,000 Midwesterners in the highly successful production of the latest model of the Double Wasp, the most powerful engine to engage in combat. An array of licensees famed for skill at quantity production was put together, including Ford, Chevrolet, Nash, Buick, and others; but even so, there was always more and more de- mand for the various Wasp models to power trainers, fighters, bombers, and transports both for the Air Force and the Navy.
The R-2800 Double Wasp became the aerial workhorse of the war, and its power, under incessant refinement, had increased from a prelimi- nary 1,800-horsepower rating in 1939 to the point where advanced models with water injection delivered 3,400 horsepower in the final stages of combat. The four-row R-4360 Wasp Major design was started, promising a basic rating of 3,500 horsepower, but since its design was only undertaken at the onset of the war, there was faint chance of making it a going article for use during the war.
Altogether, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft and its licensees delivered over six hundred million horsepower to the war effort, just half of all the horsepower the combined American forces used in the air.
When V-J Day came, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft was in this para- doxical position: it had a stable of powerplants ranging from the 450-horsepower Wasp Junior to the 3,500-horsepower Wasp Major, which was being readied for volume production ; it had a unique, high- ly trained engineering and production team; it had the finest privately owned aircraft engine facilities in the world. But with the wartime appearance of the jet turbine, the whole engine field had been levelled and Pratt & Whitney Aircraft faced a future in which nearly all first- line military procurement ultimately would go to the gas turbine and where blue-ribbon commercial transportation would certainly in time be jet-powered. Moreover, in this new field where Pratt & Whitney
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had been precluded through the war because of its need to concentrate on the requirements of its own products, it faced new competitors at home who had been brought into the picture during the war, and Rolls- Royce in England, had been hard at work on jets since 1941.
As the Cold War developed, Russia became a formidable factor, too. No nation or race has a corner on talent. The Russians his- torically have been great innovators and inventors; their artillery in the First World War and their unmatched tank forces in the Second World War were examples of their superlative ability long before Sputnik I. The advent of the gas turbine as a fresh article meant that they could start almost abreast of the Western World, and with their skills and their high talent in mathematics, to which the jet yields more readily than the piston design, they rapidly could bring their own avia- tion to the forefront if they chose-and they did.
Mr. Rentschler was emphatic. He wanted another Wasp, this time in a modern jet configuration. And as it had happened through the Wasp era, he and the other members of the board of directors were willing to provide the tools and the climate of faith to get the job done. They made company funds available for the many-million-dollar Will- goos Turbine-Engine Test Facility ; in a time of comparative austerity, the engineering staff was increased substantially.
The technical staff came up with the concept of a split-compressor jet turbine that in its mature design phases would more than double the 5,000 pounds' thrust of existing production jets and, even more important, offer a fuel economy thirty per cent better than anything then in service use. It was a bold design; but it was accomplished in fairly quick order. The engine was brought along under the sponsor- ship of the Air Force. Its achievements now are history. The Collier Trophy was awarded for it for 1953, three years after it first began flying, and it is noteworthy that aircraft powered by the J-57 won the award three times in the four subsequent trophies. Like the Wasp, the J-57 was the progenitor of a family of engines. It set many of the criteria for performance in the modern jet age.
The J-57 and its sister engine, the J-75, power about ninety per cent of the Boeing and Douglas jet transports. The airlines came in little more than a generation, from their real beginnings to the point where thousands of people use them every day on domestic routes alone, and other thousands each day are aloft in them flying interna- tional routes.
It was once thought a production engine producing 400 horsepower was the last word. But by 1958 pilots were taking the equivalent of
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100,000 shaft horsepower from our J-75 and flying their production aircraft at speeds twice that of sound.
The roots of Hamilton Standard, as specialists in the dynamics of propulsion, go back almost to the birth of flight. Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that in the jet age, a great share of its work has been in designing and producing turbine and missile equipment-jet fuel controls and starters, refrigeration units, air-conditioning systems, and other important accessories.
The propeller had its basic concept in ancient times, but as the Wright brothers had found, the science of air propulsion was an almost unexplored art when they put together their first powered airplane.
Much of that art was gathered and refined at Hamilton Standard by the able handful of engineers and leaders who guided it for so many years. As aircraft performances and engine powers accelerated, Hamilton Standard and its products became known wherever men flew. It devised metal blades and it became justly famous for matching aerial progress with refined products of its own-the adjustable-pitch propeller ; the feathering Hydromatic. The Controllable pitch propeller was a vital mechanical element in establishing modern aviation as we know it today by offering the pilot a true gearshift in the air, and its significance was recognized in 1934 by the awarding of the Collier Trophy for the previous year's greatest achievement in aviation.
The inventive genius of its team of crack engineers was particular- ly important to Hamilton Standard's fine performance throughout the 1930s and again in meeting the requirements of the Second World War. In 1938 they took the Controllable onward to the celebrated Hydro- matic propeller which, by adding a simple, constant-speed control mech- anism, eliminated manual control. Thus, blade pitch was adjusted to give maximum engine efficiency at all times under all conditions; in short, an automatic gearshift.
Almost simultaneously, another group of engineers perfected the highly important method of measuring propeller vibration in flight, which practically eliminated blade failure from vibration and led to thinner, lighter, and stronger blades. All these advances were being swiftly incorporated into aircraft throughout the world. In those dark summer days of 1940 when England saw death riding her skies, British- built Hamilton Standard Constant Speed propellers were in the small band of Spitfires and Hurricanes that outflew and outfought the Ger- man Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.
Subsequently the British Air Ministry officially stated that the margin of superiority its fighter aircraft had over the Messerschmitts
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was essentially due to the better climb and ceiling performances given by the Constant Speed propeller manufactured by de Havilland under its license arrangement with Hamilton Standard. Later, in our own country's array of wartime aircraft, Hamilton Standard propellers served in every category and saw more aerial combat action than any other single major component throughout the conflict.
Few men have made so many vital contributions to aviation as Igor Sikorsky. His first invention, in 1909, was a helicopter-a fine machine, Sikorsky has explained, except that it would not fly. He perfected the world's first multi-engined aircraft in his native Russia; he materially pioneered water-based aircraft in his early days in this country, and his famous amphibious Clippers pioneered commercial trans-oceanic flight in the 1930s over both the Pacific and the Atlantic.
But a year after he first joined United in 1928 and throughout the course of his intensive, brilliant work in the next decade on fixed- wing projects, Sikorsky kept coming back at odd moments to the heli- copter. Finally in 1938 he sought and was granted United's permission to re-embark on a helicopter development. He designed his famous VS-300 in the spring of 1939, built it that summer, and flew it himself that fall. Essentially, the maturing designs from the Sikorsky division are bigger, more powerful, and more efficient versions of that original prototype.
Sikorsky helicopters were the only ones to see service in the Second World War, there demonstrating the unique versatility that they later fully pioneered in Korea as vehicles with a thousand uses. With their ability to land anywhere, to hover, to back, and to sidle, they are be- coming the workhorse of the air : short-range transports that will take over a very high proportion of our present area and district ground traffic; flying cranes in the handling of freight and construction equip- ment; and utility aircraft whose standing assignment, apart from their day-in, day-out work, is to serve in all great emergencies and disasters as rescue vehicles just as they have in thousands of incidents in recent years.
The challenges of missiles development and space exploration brought about three major steps in the expansion of United Aircraft in the summer and fall of 1958.
On July 1, the assets of the Norden-Ketay Corporation were ac- quired, and the Norden division was established. On the same date the Missiles & Space Systems division was formed. A few months later United Technology Corporation was created.
Astronomical speeds and distances lie ahead in the true meaning
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of astronomy. The surface has only been scratched. It has taken long years and hard work to get this far. United Aircraft looks to those tasks that make up the future.
THE UNITED ILLUMINATING COMPANY
Two years after Thomas A. Edison invented the electric light in 1879, a group of New Haven businessmen launched the New Haven Electric Light Company, forerunner of the present United Illuminat- ing Company. The beginning was far from impressive, but it was one filled with the vision of the future when electricity would be a vita! dependable community service. The city's leading grocer, H. P. Frost, lawyer Morris Tyler, machinery and boiler manufacturer H. P. Bige- low, and Simeon E. Baldwin, who was later elected governor of Con- necticut, and sixteen other residents joined forces to found the New Haven Electric Light Company as a fifty-thousand-dollar corporation.
The new company's dynamos, which produced direct current for the noisy, sputtering arc-lights, were installed on the ground floor of the C. Cowles and Company plant at 27-29 Orange Street near Crown. The Cowles Company boilers furnished steam for the dynamos after business hours at a cost of eight dollars per night. Within a few months the first business was secured by the company-a customer installing four lights of two thousand candle-power each, "the lights to be burned all nights and Sundays, at a cost of $.40 per lamp per night and 8 cents per lamp additional for each hour burned." One of the first uses of electricity for lighting was a spectacular demonstration of its use- fulness. During the construction of the New Haven Steam Heating Company plant at the foot of Temple Street, two powerful arc-lights enabled work to continue during the evening, and thousands of New Haveners came to gape at the new and thrilling lights. By March, 1882, fifty lights, all in nearby stores had been installed and the com- pany changed its name to Connecticut Electric Lighting Company. The struggle for business survival continued, but the company was forced to shut down in August, 1883, and admit failure.
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