Meanwhile, when Ray undertook to sell the rights to manufacture the new propellers in England, he encountered problems both at home and abroad. The British Air Ministry, like our own services, discounted the propeller—this was a time when most Britishers discounted everything American—and our own armed forces threatened to refuse us the right to license them under our patents. Since our government had contributed precisely nothing to the development, and especially since my classmate, Kelly Turner, had broadcast his decision to the whole aeronautic establishment, they were hardly in position to claim much equity or any right to control a device of such obvious interest to commercial air transport. However, it was in a totally different role that the Hamilton-Standard controllable-pitch propeller attained immortality. The manager of the propeller branch of the de Havilland Aircraft Company, Ltd., our English licensees, was John Parkes, himself a fighter pilot, an Englishmen who retained some of the ancient enterprise and love of innovation. Today he is managing director of Alvis Limited, Coventry, but then he was the moving spirit in the adaptation of the Hamilton-Standard propeller to the British Spitfire fighters, the planes that helped win the Battle of Britain. The Germans had developed their own controllable-pitch propellers and, save for the curious chain of circumstances outlined here, would have hopelessly outclassed the British. When Mr. Churchill paid tribute to the “so few” to whom Britain owed so much, he probably had in mind the courageous fighter pilots but behind them stood, among others, Ray Walsh, Frank Caldwell, and John Parkes. And so we trace the living process through which our struggle to survive created new devices and exercised profound influences that no human mind could have imagined. The miscalculation of one engineer saved the creation of another engineer just in time to give air transport the necessary fillip, and to provide British fighters with the winning punch. And there is a final point to keep in mind: it was the performance of Hamilton-Standard’s controllable-pitch propellers in Boeing transports copied by the Germans that impelled them to develop their own propellers. The moral seems to be that leadership in scientific research and technological development is the key to military security. A laggard faces extinction. CHAPTER TWENTY Igor Sikorsky Spans Two Gaps On the ninth floor of the New York Central Building, at 230 Park Avenue in the city of New York, Frederick B. Rentschler, president of the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, sat behind his desk in a corner office that looked out on the Biltmore Hotel, and welcomed me with a grin. It was a May day in 1930. “We’ve got a problem in Bridgeport,” he began. “It’s Sikorsky Aviation Corporation. They need management, and I thought you might like to take it on in addition to Hamilton-Standard.”