The Marquardt Story
Chapter One
-Roy Marquardt-
An entire book could be
written about the Marquardt Company’s experiences with Ramjet technology,
another perhaps, about its involvement with the Space Shuttle Program, and even
a third book about the Apollo Project and lunar expedition support. This book is only an overview of the
Marquardt Company and its rise to the rarified air of a space technology
provider to the Government and the plummet to earth when the cold war ended in
the early 1990’s. This is by no stretch
of the imagination a complete history because most of that story died off with
the old timers that lived and worked for Roy Marquardt as he built the company
from scratch with only an idea and a few friends to support him.
Roy
Edward Marquardt was born on Christmas Eve, 1917, in the town of Burlington,
Iowa. Burlington is located in the
southeast corner of the state on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River that
forms the border between Iowa and Illinois.
The family’s home was at 1604 Osborn Street in the north end of town, a
ten-minute walk to the river and even closer to the open countryside to the
west.
It can only
be imagined what growing up in that area at that time held for a young boy, but
Roy must have been some sort of mix of Tom Sawyer, Tom Swift, and Harry
Potter. As a young man Roy designed and
flew model airplanes powered by rubber bands.
His enthusiasm for the model planes was infectious and he soon had
established a model club among his aviation minded friends. A boyhood friend, Jack Johnson, treasures
the framed blueprint on his wall of a model plane called, “Special R.O.G.”
(R.O.G. = Rise off ground) designed by Roy before he was 14 years old. The intent of the plane’s design was to
provide for indestructible landings. In
addition to a balsa wood stick fuselage, slivers of bamboo were used in the
wing and tail assemblies and then covered by tissue paper, which was steamed to
shrink it tight over the frame. He
entered one of his designed model planes in a St. Louis Model Airplane Meet and
won the sweepstakes prize when his entry made the longest flight on record,
some 30 miles. His design for a folding
propeller for model airplanes was first introduced in 1934 when Roy was 17
years old and is still used by builders today and can be found on the Internet
under his name. By the time he reached
High School, Roy was teaching model airplane construction and aeronautics both
at school and the YMCA and produced a plan for a glider kit, which became the
class project. He constructed a wind
tunnel at the old Burlington High School building at Central and Market streets
where students such as Frank Broeg and George Bied learned to make model planes
and later on helped produce World War II bombers. Another friend, Dan Bied, remembers Roy carrying his full size
glider atop his Studebaker sedan to the airport just south of town, where, it
is assumed, he hitched a tow from someone’s open cockpit biplane to get him up
in the air.
Roy
finished High School and stayed at home to finish Junior College in Burlington,
teaching the same aeronautics course he had established four years earlier and
enjoying the substantial income brought by his model airplane business. By 1938 he was ready to follow his dream and
left Iowa for the sunny climate of Southern California. He enrolled at the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena, turning his back on aviation (except for the model
business) and enrolling as a Liberal Arts major. His tussle with the world’s social problems lasted just one year
and in his senior term returned to his first love, where two years later, in
1940, he received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Aeronautical
Engineering. He stayed at Cal Tech and
helped himself financially by building and selling model airplanes and writing
magazine articles. During his studies
for a master’s in Aeronautical Engineering he also taught mathematics and
aerodynamics at Cal Tech and the University of Southern California. In 1942 Roy received his Master’s Degree and
moved to the Northrop Corporation as Engineer-in-charge of Navy research. His evenings were filled teaching “Jet
Propulsion” and “Helicopter Design” at USC.
While
working at Northrop on engine cooling and exhaust problems on the XB-35 “Flying
Wing”, Roy was trying to find a way to cool aircraft engines so that they could
be mounted within the wings, thus reducing drag and increasing range and
speed. He accomplished his task and in
the process, he rediscovered the ramjet principle; a principle of propulsion
that had been brought to light sometime around 100 B.C. through the inventive
genius of the Alexandrian philosopher, Hero.
He found that there was energy galore in the engine-warmed cooling air
and properly handled, this could be used to augment the thrust of the prime
power plant. Furthermore, a tremendous
thrust would result from burning additional fuel with this engine-warmed air.
The interest in ramjets as a practical means of propulsion had
been around since 1913 when a French engineer named Lorin first published an
article describing the “flying stovepipe”.
The Germans experimented with jets in the 30’s and even flew a jet plane
in 1939 but sacrificed jet engine development to concentrate on the pulsejet
that powered the V-1 buzz bombs.
Pulsejets and ramjets operate on similar principles except that ramjets
have no moving parts to break or wear out.
Roy’s interest was probably sparked by the sudden appearance of
jet-powered aircraft while he was a student at Cal Tech. The British had flown their first plane with
a turbo-jet engine in 1941, which developed, ultimately into the Rolls-Royce
jet engines and General Electric’s first U.S. models. The British “Meteor” jet fighter was in service by 1944 to fight
the V-1 buzz bombs and Germany’s Me-262 fighter appeared about the same time in
the skies over Europe.
The
sudden development of jet engines during World War II, while Roy was an
engineering student, led to great leaps in thinking about aircraft engines and
the speeds they could attain. In ten
short years aviation had progressed from cloth covered bi-planes to 500-mph
fighters and the ramjet seemed like the perfect answer to reach speeds
heretofore thought unattainable. Roy
preached the vision of ramjet technology to anyone who would listen and eventually
the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics became enthusiastic over his proposals for
ramjet research and development and, since Northrop wasn’t interested, it
awarded USC a contract to develop a subsonic ramjet engine with a 20-inch
diameter. Since USC had no manufacturing
facilities, the Marquardt Aircraft Co. was incorporated to provide hardware and
test equipment on a sub-contract. Roy,
at the age of 26, and nine friends, including; a stockbroker, a salesman, an
attorney and six fellow engineers put together $1,000 in capital and opened for
business on November 3, 1944. Roy
received 51 percent of the stock, 19 percent went to the six other young
engineers and 30 percent was sold to some philanthropic businessmen who gambled
$100 each.
Originally,
Marquardt shared space with the Wilton tool Company in what had once been a
real estate office on Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles. When more space was needed, the company
moved to a 20-by-20-foot stall in the old Los Angeles Ranch Market on Third
Street. The previous occupant, an apple
peddler, had gone broke. Primary reason
for their choice of this particular stall was that the Wilton Tool Company’s
shop was just across the patio, and arrangements were made for Marquardt to use
Wilton’s lathe, welding machine and other pieces of equipment. Roy invested about $700 in benches, drill
presses and other small tools, later augmenting these with other bits of
equipment borrowed from Wilton.
The first factory on
Robertson Blvd. Making a wind tunnel
for USC.
It was
at this time that Marquardt Aircraft hired its first full-time employees –
Robert A. Calkins, Sig Caswell and Dale Lentz.
Calkins, who had known Roy since their Northrop days, left the Harlow
Aircraft Company to join Marquardt and brought Caswell and Lentz with him. “Roy said he thought the job might last only
four months,” Calkins recalled, “but the work sounded fascinating, so I decided
to take it anyway.” The Marquardt
Company’s first contract was to build a wind tunnel at USC capable of producing
airflows up to 600 miles an hour. It
was to be about 60 feet long and up to 12 feet in diameter. Conveniently, the work on this project was
done outside during the summer months, which solved the problem of building a
60-foot tunnel in a 20-foot shop.
A
second wind tunnel or some source of high velocity wind – more exactly, the
lack of one – was an early problem for the Marquardt Aircraft Company. When the first hand-formed ramjet model (the
earliest engines were formed by shaping the metal over the curvature of a
curbstone with a tire iron or sledgehammer) came out of the shop, a tremendous
air supply was required to simulate the ramjet’s high-speed movement through
the atmosphere.
Roy
located a 13,000 horsepower standby compressor at the Kaiser Steel Mill in
Fontana, California, and gained permission to set up a test area on the roof of
the powerhouse. Within a week, a
makeshift work area had been rigged up and tests were being run. However, broken windows and meetings
interrupted by the racket created by the high velocity wind soon proved to be
even too distracting for a steel mill, and it was suggested that the Marquardt
Aircraft Company find another test site.
Evicted
from the steel mill, Marquardt moved his test operation to the USC campus. If anything, this was an even unhappier
situation. Roy’s fellow professors
complained bitterly about the noise; and one irate resident of the neighborhood
threw a pail of water on him.
By
November 1945, a year after the company was incorporated, Marquardt’s operation
had grown to such an extent that it had to seek larger quarters for the second
time in less than 12 months. An
arrangement was made with Aviation Products at 4221 Lincoln Boulevard in
Venice, California, for Marquardt Aircraft to occupy about 4,000 square feet of
their facility. At about this same
time, the owner of Wilton Tool Company was called into the Armed Services and
Marquardt bought him out. All of Wilton’s
tools, many of them remarkable in their antiquity, were included in the transaction.
The Venice Plant Employees- December
8,1947
There
were 12 people on the Marquardt payroll at the time of the move to Venice. With the increase in workspace and business,
more people were added on a daily basis.
Roy resigned his post at USC to push along the ramjet program and the
development of a pulsejet helicopter – the first of its kind in the world.
This became
known as the Marquardt M-14 or “Whirlajet” (N4107K), a one person, open
cockpit, experimental, first of its kind, pulsejet-powered helicopter with 29’
blades. It flew its test flights in
1948 but was never commercially built.
The “Whirlajet” with
pulsejet rotor tips - 1948
Before the end of 1945,
Marquardt Aircraft delivered its first ramjet engine to the Navy for
flight-testing, and immediately began a development program for a newer and
more advanced version. By the summer of
1946 the Navy had begun manned flights of the Marquardt 20-inch ramjet with
engines installed on the Grumman F7F Tigercat.
The Air Force, not to be outdone by the Navy, took delivery of a 20-inch
ramjet at the end of 1945 and began flight-testing at Wright field. In early 1946 two Marquardt ramjets were
installed on the wing tips of a P-51 Mustang and created an increase in maximum
speed of 40 miles per hour. Although
this was not phenomenal, the 20-inch Marquardt engine, which weighed slightly
more than 100 pounds, could provide as much thrust as a turbojet engine that
weighed 10 times more. Continued
testing in the 20-foot wind tunnel at Wright Field further advanced knowledge
and design of ramjets, which allowed larger and more powerful models to be
built. Roy Marquardt was quickly
becoming known around Washington D.C. as “Mr. Ramjet”.
In
November of 1947 Roy invested money with a struggling company owned by James B.
Lansing that made audio speakers. As
part of the agreement, Marquardt Aviation agreed to furnish manufacturing space
for a cost to Lansing of 10% of net sales, with the Marquardt Company receiving
the right to take assignment of accounts receivable to satisfy at any time the
amount due. Marquardt further agreed to
lend money to Lansing for working capital in such amounts as would not be a
burden on the Marquardt Corporation itself.
The Marquardt Company was further given an option on 40% of the stock of
the Lansing Company. William H. Thomas,
an original partner in the founding of the Marquardt Company and its present
Treasurer and General Manager, represented the Marquardt Aircraft Company on
Lansing Sound’s board of directors.
Lansing relocated its offices and manufacturing facilities from its
factory in San Marcos, near San Diego, to the Marquardt plant on Lincoln
Boulevard in Venice. In late 1948 the
Lansing enterprise moved once again to the new Marquardt facility at 7801
Havenhurst Avenue in Van Nuys, California.
Lansing Sound Inc. occupied the western mezzanine of building 3 for its
short time at the Van Nuys plant.
By
December of 1948 Lansing’s debt to the Marquardt Aircraft Company had reached
almost $15,000, and it was inevitable that the company would have to be taken
over by Marquardt with Lansing continuing as an employee. In early 1949, Marquardt was purchased by
the General Tire and Rubber Company of California, which was not interested in
continuing the relation with Lansing and the tie between the two companies was
consequently severed. At that point,
William Thomas left Marquardt and assumed ownership of Lansing Sound Inc. JBL speakers are still one of the premier
brands on the market today.
It
is rumored that during the company’s sojourn in Venice, a beautiful young woman
in her early twenties by the name of Norma Jean Baker went to work for
Roy. She was an aspiring actress and
later became known as Marilyn Monroe.
The
Navy continued its testing with different airplanes in 1947 and mated the
20-inch ramjet to a Bell Aircraft P-83 and the North American F-82 Twin
Mustang. The big story in 1947,
however, was the Gorgon IV test missile produced by the Glenn L.Martin Company. Four Gorgon flights with the new advanced
Marquardt engines were made that year at the subsonic speed of Mach 0.85 at
10,000 feet altitude. The following
year, 1948, a fourth model engine flew several tests reaching a speed of Mach
0.9 with no flameouts. The sound
barrier was quickly being approached with the aid of the Marquardt ramjets.
Gorgon IV
Meanwhile,
the Air Force was going for bigger and faster models of the ramjet. In 1948 Marquardt delivered their latest
creation, a 30-inch model that weighed 300 pounds and developed approximately
4,000 pounds of thrust. The Air Force
installed two of them on the wing tips of a new Lockheed F-80 Shooting Star jet
fighter and took off from the Burbank Air Terminal, Lockheed’s home field,
accelerated to 400 miles an hour, fired up the two ramjets and idled his main
turbojet. The F-80’s rate of climb
doubled and the ramjets provided a level flight speed of nearly 600 miles per
hour – the first flight of an aircraft powered solely by ramjets. The residents around the airport lit up the
police switchboards with reports of flying saucers, airplane crashes and other
disasters caused by the noise of the overhead ramjets.
A
48-inch ramjet was built by Marquardt in 1948 and test flown under Air Force
sponsorship. The engine was designed as
an expendable auxiliary thrust unit for a new interceptor airplane. Although neither the 30-inch nor the 48-inch
engines were produced in quantity, they clearly demonstrated that the ramjet
could be scaled up or down in diameter.
In four short years, ramjet engines had progressed from an oddity to a
practicality, and helped the Martin Company secure a Navy contract to convert
the Gorgon missile to the Plover KDM-1 target drone. Marquardt produced more than 600 engines for the KDM-1 at an
average price of slightly more than $1,000 per engine, or about 50 cents per
ramjet horsepower.
All
of Marquardt’s advanced subsonic ramjet accomplishments and technology paved
the way for the transition to the supersonic era of ramjet flight. Marquardt’s substantial efforts in 1947 and
1948 were related to supersonic activity on Grumman’s Rigel flight test vehicle
and an Air Force 20-inch supersonic ramjet engine. By 1948, supersonic ramjet technology showed such promise and the
demands from the military services became so great, that Marquardt found itself
riding the crest of a wave that threatened to inundate it unless some means of
immediate aid for expansion was forthcoming.
The Venice facilities were too small, test facilities inadequate, and
working capital requirements such that outside help was mandatory.
Roy’s
answer to the problem was to offer a share of the company to investors. General Tire and Rubber Company bought up
50% of Roy Marquardt’s stock (17,000 shares at $1.00 per share) and all the
shares owned by others to gain 75% control of the company and Marquardt became
a subsidiary, along with the Aerojet Company which was already controlled by
General. With fresh capital in hand the
company moved to new quarters in the San Fernando Valley, next to the Van Nuys
Municipal Airport, to a World War II plant owned by the Timm Aircraft
Company. This plant facility, comprised
of 3 large aircraft hangers and several smaller buildings, had 110,000 square
feet of floor space, (compared with an original 4,000 feet at Venice), with 28
acres of land for future growth.
Otto Timm founded the Timm
Aircraft Corp. in about 1922. He was a
barnstormer and went around the country giving rides to people for a nominal
fee. In 1922 he gave a young college
man named Charles Lindberg Jr. his first ride in an airplane. Lindberg quit college, bought an airplane
and taught himself to fly and became a barnstormer himself before his famous
transatlantic flight in 1927. Timm went
on to build custom aircraft for customers in the 1930’s and eventually bought
out the Kinner Aircraft Co in 1939 which owned the plant in Van Nuys next to
the airfield known as Metropolitan Airport.
Timm purchased the airport in 1941 to use as a testing area for the
2-seat trainers which the Navy had contracted with Timm in 1940. This led to
additional contracts to build gliders that were used in the D-day
invasion. After the war ended Timm sold
the airport to Aetna Aircraft Corp. of Los Angeles and in 1947 leased the plant
to Gary Davis for his automobile business.
By the time Marquardt moved
to Van Nuys the company had backing from the Air Force, which wanted the ramjet
to power a long-range supersonic missile.
Employment doubled within a year after the move, and construction of the
multi-million dollar test facility known as the Marquardt Jet Laboratory began
in earnest, eventually becoming one of the largest airbreathing test facilities
in the country.
The Van Nuys Plant - 1949
The
contrast in facilities was staggering.
In Venice, the employee roster had grown to 170 engineers and
technicians who were rather compactly situated in an area of 10,000 square
feet. Equipment and supplies from the
entire Venice plant were moved out to Van Nuys in one weekend with no
interruption in production. One crew of
men actually accompanied a boilerplate engine on the truck, started up their
work on it as soon as the engine was set on the floor.
With
new facilities and new business, employment at Marquardt doubled in the year
following the move to Van Nuys. Machine
tools were added to the shops, and the Marquardt Jet Laboratory began to take
shape. New facets of the ramjet field
accelerated the expansion as afterburners, control units and accessory
powerplants, came out of engineering and into production.
The
Timm Aircraft Factory in Van Nuys was leased to Gary Davis from 1947 until
Marquardt moved in at the end of 1948.
Bldg. 3 was the site of the “Davis Car” assembly plant which produced
two prototypes of it’s 3-wheel vehicle in 1947 and went into production in
1948, building an additional 13 cars before being forced to move across the
airport when Marquardt moved in. It was
rumored that Marquardt employees help push the last Davis Car out the front
door as the moving trucks arrived from Venice.
The Davis Car 1948
The
first five years of the Marquardt Aircraft Company’s existence had seen
remarkable progress. It was the leader
in ramjet development and technology and annual sales had reached nearly $2
million dollars, establishing a pattern of profitability, which was to
characterize the Company’s operations in the future. The new decade of the 50’s promised to be even better for the
32-year-old Roy Marquardt and the Company, with the development of the
supersonic ramjet.