This added up to the fact that in trying to do both jobs we were compromising our ability to discharge our responsibility with respect to air-cooling. We must get back on the beam at the first favorable opportunity and devote our resources to continuing to build the best air-cooled engines in the world. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE A Yankee Peddler In the spring of 1938, Tom Hamilton, our United Aircraft representative in Europe, came home on one of his periodic visits, to bring himself up to date on new products and to let us in on the low-down in his territory. Ordinarily a buoyant optimist, Tom was much depressed by the developments in Germany. Adolf Hitler had got him down. Tom had first taken over the European territory at my suggestion back in the early ’thirties. His aviation interests had always been predominantly commercial. While he had built propellers for both Army and Navy at his Hamilton Aero Manufacturing Company, in Milwaukee, he had built only commercial aircraft at his other establishment, the Hamilton Metalplane Company, of the same place. His “Hamilton Metalplane,” a high-wing metal monoplane with a single Pratt and Whitney Hornet engine, had been used extensively by Canadian bush flyers and The Isthmian Airways had operated them with signal success across the Isthmus of Panama. This plane, according to Tom, had been the prototype from which the Ford Trimotor had evolved. At the time Tom had first gone abroad there appeared little likelihood of any real business for United in Europe. European aircraft were considered by Europeans to be vastly superior to the American, and their strong nationalism caused them to prefer to buy at home in support of their own industries. But there was one item in which we had attained leadership—metal aircraft propellers—and even though we might not sell the articles themselves, I thought we might dispose of the right to manufacture under our foreign patents for a good price. The money would come in handy in the development of the controllable-pitch propeller.