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Inscribing Aeronautic Production, 1912-1930

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On 10 May 1912, Glenn Martin, flying from Newport Harbor in Orange County to Catalina Island, and back again, set a world record for over-water flight with his self-built seaplane.  He covered 66 miles, longer than the previous record set across the English Channel.  Shortly thereafter, Martin set-up the first Los Angeles aircraft production facility in a converted Methodist Church.  To raise money for his fledgling industry, he flew and acted with Mary Pickford in the Lasky-Famous Players movie, A Girl of Yesterday (1915).

After founding the LA aircraft industry, Martin moved his production facilities to the America's industrial center: Ohio.  He set-up permanently in Cleveland, absorbing the remains of the Wright Brothers' company in 1916.   Boeing, founded by lumberman William E. Boeing, initially specialized in sea-planes, and stayed in Seattle, near its supply of spruce wood. Despite these major exceptions most of the industry settled in Los Angeles.  (Lockheed, the largest of the LA-based corporations, eventually brought Martin home when the two corporations merged in 1995 to form Lockheed-Martin, the largest aerospace contractor on Earth).

As part of his “crusade for industry,” Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler sent his reporter Bill Henry to Cleveland in 1919 “to investigate the possibilities of the aircraft industry” for Los Angeles. Henry, essentially an industrial spy, got a job at Glenn Martin’s factory and, while working there for a full year, met and wooed the company’s vice president, the MIT graduate Donald Douglas.Note Douglas (1892-1981) was full of dreams and plans of his own, but had zero capital, so Chandler underwrote 10% of a $15,000 initial investment, and gave Douglas access to nine “other prominent Angelenos to contact for the rest of what he needed.”Note This capital backing was enough to set Douglas up in Los Angeles, first in the back of a barber shop on Pico Boulevard.  Significantly, Douglas found more suitable space in a spacious movie studio recently abandoned by the Herman Film Corporation at 2345 Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. Douglas won his first military order in 1921 to build torpedo bombers for the U.S. Navy. He delivered six DT-1’s (Douglas Torpedo, First) in 1922, for $130,890. By 1928 the Douglas Company was worth $25 million.Note

Shortly after Douglas was lured to Los Angeles, the Loughead brothers, Allan and Malcolm, relocated in 1926 from Santa Barbara to Hollywood, naming their company Lockheed Aircraft.  They moved again to in 1927 to Burbank, constructing an airfield where Sherman Way meets the San Fernando Road. After some rocky years, in 1936 they won from the British Royal Air Force “the largest contract ever placed with an aircraft company,” for 250 reconnaissance bombers. By 1938, Lockheed employed 2,500 workers and by the end of the Second World War Lockheed was the largest aircraft producer in the world. They had produced 19,000 aircraft with a workforce of 60,000.

Douglas established spin-off plants in El Segundo in 1932 and in Long Beach in 1941. By 1939 Douglas employed 11,000 workers and by 1941 the company held $78 million in military orders.Note  North American Aviation, headed by former Douglas vice president J.H. “Dutch” Kindleberger, relocated from Baltimore to Inglewood in November of 1935 with 75 employees. By January the following year North American had 250 employees, building their first Army Air Corps NA-16 trainers. North American continuously increased its military contracts and output over the next few years, so that by 1941 more than 14,000 employees labored in one million square feet of factory space to produce 325 units per month.  Similar stories could be repeated for Vultee Aircraft (later General Dynamics Convair), which began production in Downey in 1936, and Northrup Aircraft--headed by Jack Northrup, another of Douglas’s star production chiefs--which began production in Hawthorne.Note

 

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