In dilemmas of this kind, resort might be had to what was politely called “memoranda for file” but known privately as “the cover-up.” A letter was prepared for the file covering the details of the proposed transaction and carried through the whole system to be finally approved by the Secretary of the Navy himself. Then, after the Great Seal of the Navy Department had been attached, and the author had privately retained a copy for his own use, the document was carefully filed away against the day when some Congressional investigation might be looking for a noteworthy scalp. When the spirit of cover-up gets into a business organization, the evil finally shows up in the financial results; in government it is just absorbed by the taxpayer. It was through such a time-consuming process that we finally succeeded in transporting a part of the Swiss company bodily to the town of Sidney, New York, where it continued to be this country’s source of dependable magnetos. And the time even came when I had to flash the Great Seal of the Navy Department to keep from being crucified for bringing it here. Later, when Charles A. Lindbergh arrived in London, after having flown the Atlantic behind a Scintilla magneto, it turned out that the General Electric Company had all along had the license to manufacture the British Thompson Houston Company’s magneto, but no one in Schenectady had recalled the fact. Meanwhile, in addition to concentrating on the job of keeping engines running, we had not neglected the other task of getting them started. The Aeromarine Inertia Starter, created by Chilton under Leighton’s initiative, though employing a quite novel principle—the utilization of energy stored in a flywheel—had developed into the most dependable and efficient device in our gear locker. When, therefore, Messrs. Charles Marcus and Raymond P. Lansing of the Eclipse Machine Company called on us with a view to interesting us in a line of electric starters they had developed for the Army, we presented them with an affable but none the less impenetrable front. Things electric not only involved heavy lead storage batteries, heavy copper motors, and everything else designed around “base metals,” but they always proved undependable and difficult to maintain. My years as engineer officer on a man-of-war had generated in me a sales resistance of many ohms. On the day when we were honored with the visit from Charles Marcus and Ray Lansing, I bolstered my disinterest with a glowing and somewhat detailed account of the virtues of the Chilton starter and was somewhat taken aback by Charles Marcus’s suave remark that Aeromarine had infringed an Eclipse patent involving the fundamentals of the Bendix drive. Marcus doubted that Eclipse could let Aeromarine live at all, and his inference was that I should shift my enthusiasm over to the Army-type starter.