The reason why it never got into production appeared nearly a year later in the person of Mr. Frederick B. Rentschler, former president of Wright Aeronautical Corporation, who walked in on us one morning carrying a dilapidated cowhide brief case and looking even thinner than when I had first met him on that visit with Bruce Leighton, a year earlier. I recalled that in his argument with Leighton over air-cooled versus liquid-cooled he had shown dogged singleness of purpose and ability to reason logically. He had resigned from the presidency of Wright Aero shortly afterward, and for reasons which I had not learned. Now he began to tell me. It seemed there had been some disagreement on financial policy between him and Dick Hoyt, chairman of the board. Hoyt had wanted to declare a dividend out of earnings from the Army contract for Hispano H engines; Rentschler had insisted on retaining earnings for investment in engineering development. Finally Rentschler had resigned. It had been rumored that he and Hoyt had disagreed over the acquisition by Wright of the Lawrance engine, but Rentschler now made no reference to this. After his resignation from Wright he had intended going back to Hamilton, Ohio, to his father’s foundry business, the firm of Hooven, Owens, Rentschler. His father had been certain that the aviation business held no future, but aviation had got into his blood. During a spell in the hospital, he had made up his mind to stay in the game and had given consideration to what he might do to help out. It was his considered opinion that we needed more competition than we could possibly get under present circumstances. The Curtiss company had no serious interest in air-cooled engines; on the contrary, they were committed to liquid-cooled. Wright, he thought, was unlikely to progress as rapidly as we required, especially under its present management. He knew the inside thinking of both Curtiss and Wright, and was certain that an ultimate merger of the two companies was not an impossibility; as a matter of fact, if the Wright air-cooled engine got threatening, Curtiss might move toward merger and control. The import of his remark was not lost on the Engine Section. For in taking the decision to support the air-cooled program in competition with the more advanced liquid-cooled development, we had counted heavily on competition in private industry as the vital spark. This merger idea, somewhat new in that era of private initiative, was of course wholly unexpected by such business amateurs as then comprised the Engine Section. The threat to our whole air-cooled program was so immediate, however, that we listened with rapt attention to our visitor.