Our difficulty at Pittsburgh sprang primarily from the fact that the consolidation of the two manufacturers of metal propellers had created a potential monopoly; and there is no business more vulnerable than a monopoly. Our two steady customers, the Army and the Navy, wasted no time in slapping us down; they turned their propeller business over to fly-by-night competitors, and worse still, to government arsenals. My first venture in business was now threatened by unfair competition from sources that contributed nothing to engineering and development and charged their overhead to a government appropriation. It was somewhat as if Uncle Sam had pirated a manuscript of a best seller and had had it printed in the Government Printing Office or a sweat shop at public expense, and then left the author to starve. The policy is hardly designed to advance the writing art and, in the long run, is sure to prove bad medicine for the government, that is the people, itself. This fact we endeavored to point out to both Army and Navy, urging that it was to their interest that we continue to live. After all, we were the only organization in the world capable of continuing the development of metal propellers; foreign aircraft still clung to their archaic wooden props, and foreigners were still convinced of their superiority. We tried to point out that the consolidation had been forced by patent considerations and for no other reason, that the new management had been drawn from Army and Navy and had no intention of monopolizing anything but was determined to foster progress in new design. Their reply was to ask to see the color of our new designs. With survival dependent upon the creation of something new and better, I went upstairs to the engineering department to put the problem before its chief, Frank Caldwell. Frank, a big cinnamon bear of a fellow with a slow Tennessee drawl, had forgotten more about aircraft propellers than most engineers would ever know. While Chief of the Army Propeller Branch at Dayton, he had suggested to Harry Kraeling, then a salesman of the steel alloy Vanadium, that he give up trying to build propeller blades out of welded-steel sheets, and use instead the new aluminum alloy, duralumin. When I put the problem up to Frank, he hoisted his bulk out of his chair and ambled toward a drawing table in the corner of his office. Pushing aside a T square, he peeled the cover back from a large drawing and looked at the black lines with modest pride.