The day Fred Rentschler and I walked in on him, we found him leaning over a plain table pawing around among some engine parts with George Mead and Henry Crane. “Uncle Henry” Crane, one of the great engineers of the automotive industry, had been called in for a conference over the failures of the Allison liquid-cooled engine. While Fred and I cooled our heels waiting for experts to decide upon what design changes were necessary to make the Allison run, before they could discuss policy with us, we thought we saw a certain irony in the situation. For the Allison engine was the power plant that had taken the business away from our 1830 engine in the critical months of 1939 when that one contract meant so much to Pratt and Whitney. When, finally, it came our turn, we broke the news to Bill Knudsen that, with the completion of the new American addition in Hartford, we would reach a saturation point in Hartford and must look elsewhere for new facilities. Bill knew that Wright Aeronautical planned to build a big new shop somewhere in Ohio and presumed, of course, we would go and do likewise, but when we explained the differences in our two situations, he understood. Wright Aero had been formed out of the consolidation of two big engine companies, Curtiss and Wright, and had more topside staff than Pratt and Whitney. Guy Vaughan was still its president, but Don Brown had died. Now when we mentioned licensing the automotive companies, Bill’s first question was who did we have in mind. When we told him Ford, he at first shook his head, but when we stressed the point that selling Uncle Henry was his job and that no one except he and George Mead could do it, Bill Knudsen reluctantly agreed to try. And Bill and George succeeded. Within a few days we received word that Ford Motor would send a group of shopmen to look over the job and see what could be done. Bill Knudsen, familiar with the Ford setup, had suggested that the machinery in the great Ford tool room, along with some six thousand men employed there, would take the Pratt and Whitney job in its stride. To automotive men, the aircraft industry still looked something like the ancient “carriage trade,” and they discounted our insistence that our standards of quality and precision were not easily come by in the mass-production industries.