One day George and I, feeling happy about this, decided to take a walk through the Smithsonian Institution museum. And there we saw something that cut us back to size. It was the Manly engine, one designed by Charles M. Manly, the pilot and engineer of the Langley airplane, the craft Professor Langley had tried to fly off a catapult years earlier. And marvel of marvels, it was a five-cylinder, single-row, air-cooled radial that antedated the original Wright engine and all the other liquid-cooled in-line engines that had followed it. Charles Manly, having no prior art to befuddle him, had reasoned out the rational form for an aircraft engine and created one forthwith. As we stood looking at the museum piece that included the fundamentals we had used to obsolete years of automotive practice, George grinned sheepishly and remarked, “It all goes to show that every time you think you have discovered America, you find that Columbus was here back in 1492.” With the completion of many flight tests, the Wasp was now ready for production. But Rentschler found himself in a quandary as to what price he should ask for the engines in quantity. He had no experienced costs, for no engine had yet been built in production. We had asked for six engines on the first experimental order and Kraus had paid Pratt and Whitney the $90,000 he had set aside for them. It was estimated that this amount covered about half of the experimental costs, and Kraus was willing to add the remainder to the first production order so as to write off this expense. But no one knew nor had any way of guessing what the unit price should be for the order of some two hundred engines now required for Vought Corsairs and Boeing and Curtiss fighters. And so the price was fixed by that which Kraus had previously paid for a similar number of Packard 1500’s—a liquid-cooled engine we had earlier prescribed to replace the Curtiss D-12’s in the Boeing FB-5’s. For while we had promoted the air-cooled vigorously we had likewise developed the 500-hp Packard as a successor to the 400-hp Curtiss D-12. Rentschler was not too happy about having the price for his air-cooled engines fixed by that of another contractor for liquid-cooled; he insisted there was no relationship between the two. But in government business, price may be fixed by anything else but merit. The ever-present threat of a Congressional investigation made it impossible to write into the Pratt and Whitney contract any figure higher than the Packard price even though the circumstances might be entirely different. This was but one of the things that made it hard to interest private manufacturers in risking either their equities or their engineering talent in a government speculation; none of the business fundamentals with which they were accustomed to measure their risks applied here.