When we saw the R-1454, we were impressed. Herron’s cylinder was an advance over anything we had seen at Wright. The valve-gear rocker boxes enclosed the valves and provided forced lubrication for them in place of the old Alemite fittings of our P-1. And the Curtiss had a single carburetor in place of the triple type on the Wright, an improvement made possible partly by the use of a gear-driven blower that sucked the mixture from the carburetor and pushed it up to the cylinders. This was geared low for rotary induction, and gave fine distribution; someday it could be geared high for supercharging. That evening we were dinner guests of the company at a hotel overlooking Niagara Falls. Afterward, Arthur Nutt, chief engineer, gave us a sales talk on the D-12. Roy Keyes, president of the company, expressed no fear of competition from the air-cooled radials. Curtiss, he confided in us, had bid in the Army 1454 just to keep it under their control. He considered it unlikely that any radial rock crusher could replace the D-12; in fact, he had no intention of letting it. That night, Leighton and I sat on the edges of our twin beds in the hotel room and, smoking a last cigarette together, sized up the situation. Curtiss, a good manufacturer, had a fine engine but was keeping it under wraps. Wright, also a competent producer, had an inferior engine and no enthusiasm for air-cooling as such. The problem was to get the best features of the Herron-designed 1454 into the second engine of our P-series at Wright. If we could sell them on that and build up their enthusiasm, we might put a new set of valves in the heart of the airplane and even build up its muscles. That called for another visit to Paterson. But when we returned to Wright Aero we found that a change had taken place. Fred Rentschler had resigned from the presidency, leaving Charles Lanier Lawrance, the daddy of the American air-cooled radial, in his place. There was nothing left to worry about on the score of air-cooled enthusiasm, though the company had lost an able executive. Guy Vaughan, a dynamic and personable fellow, had moved up from quality manager to factory manager. A former automobile racing driver, Guy had plenty of zing. With George Mead to do a finished engineering job, we could release the P-2 engine with all the latest wrinkles in it.