Word: garretts
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Last week this clumsy business was on its way to becoming as obsolete as the automobile crank. At his Inglewood plant outside Los Angeles, 43-year-old John Clifford Garrett, boss of flourishing AiRe-search Manufacturing Co., jubilantly demonstrated what he claimed was the first practical U.S. self-starter for jet engines. The U.S. Navy was just as happy to sign a $36 million order to put the starter into mass production...
...Garrett's starter, no bigger than a fat suitcase, is a miniature gas turbine engine. It is started at the press of a button by its own storage battery, runs on kerosene, and has enough power to start a big jet engine in 30 seconds. It is light enough (150 Ibs.) to be carried in bombers, can be easily detached to save weight for combat missions. A smaller version ("The Baby") will be made for fighters...
Thin Air. Cliff Garrett's associates like to say that "he built a business out of thin air." He literally did. His Garrett Corp. (AiResearch is a manufacturing division) grew by making devices to cool, blow and compress air, is now outranked only by Bendix and Sperry in the aircraft accessory business...
Oregon-born Garrett got into aircraft in 1928 as a 50?-an-hour stockroom clerk, became the "purchasing department" for Jack Northrop, a fellow worker, when Northrop started his own company. But Garrett wanted to be his own boss, too. In 1936, when West Coast plane builders were having trouble getting the kind of tools they wanted, he set up shop as a middleman supplier...
...soon realized that higher altitudes and higher plane speeds would require pressurizing and cooling mechanisms. With Engineer Walter Ramsaur, he started AiResearch, marketed a device to cool engine oil at high altitudes, and began working with Boeing on pressurizing cabins. Garrett built the pressurizers for the B29, World War II's only pressurized aircraft, began supplying virtually all pressurizing equipment for U.S. planes (except for Douglas, which makes its own). Garrett's company branched out into superchargers and electronic equipment, turned out $112 million of World War II equipment and had 5,000 employees at its wartime peak...