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8 UMass Donahue Institute onset of World War II, Pratt’s dominance was ce- mented.14 Pratt & Whitney, along with its li- censees, built engines whose aggregate horsepow- er amounted to 468,222 between 1940 and 1944. The figure represents close to half the total horse- power delivered by the industry during wartime.15 Despite the strength of the production skill base in the area, the development of jet propulsion during the 1940s presented a fundamental com- petitive challenge to Pratt & Whitney and its re- gional suppliers. During these early years, the company was kept out of government-initiated aircraft gas turbine research and development ef- forts and was ordered to concentrate on produc- ing existing piston engine designs in volume to sustain the war effort. As a result, “By war’s end, Pratt was the clear leader in a technology with no future. What was worse, it was nowhere with the technology that did have a future—the jet tur- bine.”16 Unfortunately for Pratt & Whitney, the science underlying jet propulsion was based on fundamentally different principles than that of pis- ton engine designs. History is replete with examples of technological revolution in an industry leading to the demise of a region’s competitive advantage in that industry. It is interesting that New England remained at the center of aircraft engine manufacturing even in the face of this technological revolution. The importance of the region’s scientific skill base en- ters the story at this juncture. Once again, though, technological events can be traced back to the nineteenth century. THE LEAP TO JET PROPULSION: TURBINE TECHNOLOGY AND THE SCIENTIFIC SKILL BASE The aircraft gas turbine is a technology truly in- digenous to New England. The application of the principle of using a turbine to generate power by capturing the energy from a flow was what made possible America’s earliest manufacturing indus- try, the Lowell textile mills. The pioneering work of James B. Francis, whose system of locks and canals provided power to Lowell’s factories in the middle of the nineteenth century, is an important technological ancestor of the propulsion systems that shuttle millions of air travelers across the world today. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as the water turbine gave way to the steam turbine with the evolution of electrical power, New England re- mained at the center of developments in turbine technology. Thomson-Houston, main rival to Edi- son General Electric in the early days of electricity, was based in Lynn, Massachusetts. When those two companies merged in 1892, the Lynn “River Works” came under the General Electric umbrella and became the site of a corporate industrial re- search laboratory that was not only a key resource in contributing to the success of the company in electrical power generation equipment, but one that would lay the foundations of the company’s eventual entry into the jet engine business.17 During the early decades of the twentieth centu- ry, GE’s steam turbine division in Lynn was head- ed by a man named Sanford Moss. An engineer who had been active in gas turbine research since his graduate school days, Moss continued with this research after joining the company. He exper- imented with various compressor and turbine de- signs in an attempt to perfect functional compo- nents that would eventually allow efficient gas turbines to become a reality. That work finally bore commercial fruit as a small but successful business building aircraft turbo superchargers for piston engines for the U.S. military during the 1920s and 1930s.18 The relationship between the company and the U.S. government developed further when the Air Force selected GE’s gas tur- bine division to build the power plant for Ameri- ca’s first jet aircraft in the early years of World War II. The engine would be based on the British-designed Whittle engine, which had al- ready been demonstrated and proven airworthy. GE’s selection by the Air Force to do this work was partly based on GE’s corporate connections with British Thomson-Houston, which had been involved with the Whittle engine project during its development phase. In fact, during the late 1930s, Moss himself visited Britain to learn about the engine. Without the experience GE hadPDF Image | JET ENGINE MANUFACTURING IN NEW ENGLAND
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