Horsepower

ate had set apart a place for Fred Rentschler in the Age of Aviation that was just begin­ning. Today, his is not a name that springs to mind as central to the development of commer­cial aviation in the United States, but it should be. He changed the aviation world. Almost single – handedly, and certainly single-mindedly, his vision and dedication made the military air forces of the United States the strongest in the world, for the longest time, and at the time they were most needed for survival of western civilization because of the advent of World War II. The giant airliners of the pre-jet world were mainly pow­ered by his designs.

Fred Rentschler (see Figure 11-1) came from solid German stock. His father, George Adam Rentschler, an immigrant from Wiirttem – berg, established a foundry in Hamilton, Ohio, where pig iron and machine castings were the mother’s milk of his upbringing. The Rentschler family also owned the Republic Motor Car Company, which built automobiles until 1916. Hamilton is but a stone’s throw from Dayton, not only the home of the Wright brothers, but also in the early years of the 20th century the locale of the National Cash Register Company, its biggest business. The Rentschler foundry supplied the company with castings for its cash registers, and

George A. Rentschler became a friend of Edward Deeds, NCR’s vice president.

Fred Rentschler grew up in Hamilton around the foundry and automobile business, graduated from Princeton University in 1909, and returned
to Hamilton to work in the family businesses. In addition to NCR, Hamilton was a center of man­ufacturing of different types, including machine tools, steel products, railroad rail and steam engines, reapers, threshers, gun lathes, and many other heavy industry products. It was the home of Niles-Bement-Pond Company, one of the world’s largest machine tool companies, which would later acquire the Pratt & Whitney Tool Company of East Hartford, Connecticut, and it was home to many powerful executives, bankers, and engi­neers. The social network of Fred Rentschler and his family was extensive.

Edwaixl Deeds had the idea to fit NCR cash registers with electric motors in order to replace the mechanical finger-force needed to ring up of the register. He brought into NCR Charles Ket­tering, an inventor and engineer (he would have 186 patents in due course) to create the electric motor application. Soon afterwards, Deeds and Kettering started a little company by the name of Dayton Engineering Laboratories to manu­facture an innovation thought up by Kettering, an electric self-starter that could be applied to automobiles. DELCO, as the company was to be known, was to be credited with taming the horse­less carriage, eliminating the need for the manly and strenuous art of hand cranking required at the time. The first starter was one of 5,000 installed in the 1912 Cadillac, and the idea rapidly spread throughout the automobile industry. DELCO forged close ties with the automobile industry. In 1916, Kettering and Deeds sold DELCO to United Motors Corporation for the whopping sum of nine million dollars.

With the profits from the DELCO sale, Deeds and Kettering formed the Dayton Air­plane Company and then brought in Orville Wright as consultant. The name was changed to the Dayton-Wright Company with the idea of producing airplanes for private use. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Deeds volunteered for work on the Aircraft Production Board in Washington. He was placed in charge of all aircraft procurement for the United States and given the rank of colonel in the Army. The Dayton-Wright Company thereby received con­tracts from the government to produce 5,000 De Havilland warplanes under license.

The state of the art of American airplane and aircraft engine design was represented by the out-classed Curtiss Jenny and the OX-2. As discussed in Chapter 9, the redesigned Packard automobile engine became the Liberty engine that would be installed into the De Havillands, and it was Deeds who engaged his automobile industry contacts to effect that redesign. The Liberty engine became America’s greatest con­tribution to the war materiel effort. The Dayton – Wright Company also produced a pilotless “flying bomb,” another of Kettering’s innova­tions, but too late for use in the war. The device was kept a military secret after the war, but the Nazi German government employed the same technology in the V-l rocket, used with some success against England in World War II. These were smart and dedicated men.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Fred Rentschler came to Edward Deeds. Deeds found a place for him at the Wright-Martin plant in Brunswick, New Jersey, where the French Hispano-Suiza aircraft engine was being produced under license for shipment to Europe. When Rentschler arrived at Wright-Martin, pro­duction and inspection of engines was the job of a French Commission, and it was Rentschler’s job to replace the Commission. The Hispano 180, followed by the 300, were the dominant power plants of the final years of the war and gave the Allies superiority in the air. At the end of the war, Wright-Martin was turning out 1,000 engines a month under Rentschler’s direction.

After the war most of the assets of Wright – Martin were sold to the Mack Truck Company. Fred Rentschler accepted an offer to manage the remnants of the company, under the name of Wright Aeronautical, for the production of postwar aviation engines. Starting from scratch, he located another plant site in Paterson, New Jersey, to refine and improve on the Hispanos, and to design an American product based on both liquid and air-cooled experimentation. During the postwar days of plentiful engines and planes, these engines were not for personal or private use, but for the military and the government mar­ket. The trouble was, no one knew if there would be such a market. Many of the Wright-Martin engineers and technicians returned to the auto­motive industry, but a few stalwarts remained with Rentschler at Wright Aeronautical. As it turned out, these were the most dedicated and gifted of the group, and soon the company was profitable and had established a credible reputa­tion against the other two aircraft engine produc­ers, Curtiss and Packard.

In the early 1920s, the aircraft engines of choice, for both the Army and the Navy, were the 500 horsepower liquid-cooled engine, the D-12 and the Liberty. These were produced by all three companies (Wright Aeronautical, Curtiss, and Packard), but it was the air-cooled engine that had caught the attention of Rentschler and, as it turned out, the United States Navy.