Glenn L. Martin Company

Glenn L. Martin Company
Industry Aerospace
Fate Merged with American-Marietta Corporation
Successor Martin Marietta
Founded 1912
Founder Glenn Luther Martin
Defunct 1961
Headquarters Santa Ana, California
Products Aircraft
The Martin B-26 Marauder, a bomber produced by Martin during World War II.
The Vanguard rocket, designed and built by Martin for Project Vanguard, prepares to launch Vanguard 1.

The Glenn L. Martin Company was an American aircraft and aerospace manufacturing company that was founded by the aviation pioneer Glenn L. Martin. The Martin Company produced many important aircraft for the defense of the United States and its allies, especially during World War II and the Cold War. Also, during the 1950s and 60s, the Martin Company moved gradually out of the aircraft industry and into the guided missile, space exploration, and space utilization industries.

In 1961, the Martin Company merged with the American-Marietta Corporation, a large sand and gravel mining company, forming the Martin Marietta Corporation. Then, in 1995, Martin Marietta merged with aerospace giant Lockheed to form the Lockheed Martin Corporation.[1][2]

Origins

Glenn L. Martin Company was founded by aviation pioneer Glenn Luther Martin on August 16, 1912.[3] Martin started out building military trainers in Santa Ana, California, and then in 1916, Martin accepted a merger offer from the Wright Company, creating the Wright-Martin Aircraft Company in September.[1] This new company did not go well, and Glenn Martin left it to form a second Glenn L. Martin Company on September 10, 1917. This time it was based in Cleveland, Ohio.[3] (Later, its headquarters would be moved to Baltimore, Maryland.)

World War I

Martin's first big success came during World War I with the MB-1 bomber,[4] a large biplane design ordered by the United States Army on January 17, 1918. The MB-1 entered service after the end of hostilities, but a follow up design, the MB-2, was also proved successful[4] and 20 were ordered by the Army Air Service, the first five of them under the company designation and the last 15 as the NBS-1 (Night Bomber, Short range). Although the War Department ordered 110 more, it retained the ownership rights to the design and put the order out for bid. Unfortunately for Martin, the production orders were given to other companies that had bid lower, Curtiss (50), L.W.F. Engineering (35), and Aeromarine (25).[5] The design was the only standard bomber used by the Air Service until 1930 and was used by seven squadrons of the Air Service/Air Corps: four in Virginia, two in Hawaii, and one in the Philippines.

Inter-war years

In 1924 the Martin Company underbid Curtiss for the production of a Curtiss-designed scout bomber, the SC-1, and ultimately Martin produced 404 of these. In 1929 Martin sold the Cleveland plant and built a new one in Middle River, Maryland, northeast of Baltimore.

During the 1930s, Martin built flying boats for the U.S. Navy, and the innovative Martin B-10 bomber for the Army.[6] The Martin Company also produced the noted China Clipper flying boats used by Pan American Airways for its transpacific San Francisco to the Philippines route.

World War II

During World War II, a few of Martin's most successful designs were the B-26 Marauder[7] and A-22 Maryland bombers, the PBM Mariner and JRM Mars[8][9] flying boats, widely used for air-sea rescue, anti-submarine warfare and transport. The 1941 Office for Emergency Management film Bomber was filmed in the Martin facility in Baltimore, and showed aspects of the production of the B-26.[10]

Martin ranked 14th among United States corporations in the value of wartime production contracts.[11] The Martin Company built a total of 531 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses and 1,585 B-26 Marauders at its Omaha, Nebraska, plant at Offutt Field. Among the B-29s manufactured there were all the Silverplate aircraft, including Enola Gay and Bockscar which dropped the two, war-ending atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.[12]

Postwar

On April 22, 1957, the company name was formally changed to The Martin Company.[13]

Postwar efforts in aeronautics by the Martin Company included two unsuccessful prototype bombers, the XB-48 and the XB-51, the marginally successful AM Mauler, the successful B-57 Canberra tactical bombers, both the P5M Marlin and P6M SeaMaster seaplanes, and the Martin 4-0-4 twin-engine passenger airliner.

The Martin Company moved forward into the aerospace manufacturing business, and it produced the Vanguard rocket, which was used by the American space program as one of its first satellite booster rockets as part of Project Vanguard. The Vanguard was the first American space exploration rocket designed from scratch to be an orbital launch vehicle — rather than being a modified sounding rocket (like the Juno I) or a ballistic missile (like the U.S. Army's Redstone missile). Martin also designed and manufactured the huge and heavily armed Titan I and LGM-25C Titan II Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). Martin Company of Orlando, Florida, was the prime contractor for the U.S. Army's Pershing missile.[14]

The Martin Company was also one of two finalists for the Command and Service Modules of the Apollo Program. Unfortunately for Martin, NASA awarded the design and production contracts for these to the North American Aviation Corporation.

The Martin Company went further in the production of even larger booster rockets for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Air Force with its Titan III series of over 100 rockets produced, including the Titan IIIA, the more-important Titan IIIC, and the Titan IIIE. Besides hundreds of Earth satellites, these rockets were essential for the sending to outer space of the two space probes of the Voyager Project to the outer planets the two space probes of the Viking Project to Mars, and the two Helios probes into low orbits around the Sun. (closer, even, than Mercury (planet).

Finally the U.S. Air Force required a booster rocket that could launch heavier satellites than either the Titan IIIE or the Space Shuttle. The Martin Company responded with its extremely large Titan IV series of rockets. When the Titan IV came into service, it could carry a heavier payload to orbit than any other rocket "except" for NASA's Saturn V rocket — which was no longer in production and thus was a machine from history. Besides its use by the Air Force to launch its sequence of very heavy reconnaissance satellites, one Titan IV, with a powerful Centaur rocket upper stage, was used to launch the heavy Cassini space probe to the planet Saturn in 1997. The Cassini probe has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004, successfully returning mountains of scientific data.

The halting of production of the Titan IV in 2004 brought to an end production of the last rocket able to carry a heavier payload than the Space Shuttle, which itself ended in 2011.

The Martin Company merged with the American-Marietta Corporation, a chemical products and construction materials manufacturer, in 1961 to form the Martin Marietta Corporation. In 1995, Martin Marietta, then the nation's 3rd-largest defense contractor, merged with the Lockheed Corporation, then the nation's second largest defense contractor, to form the Lockheed Martin Corporation, becoming the largest such company in the world.[2]

The Martin Company employed many of the founders and chief engineers of the American aerospace industry, including:

Martin also taught William Boeing how to fly and also sold him his first airplane.

Products

Training aircraft

Bombers and Attack aircraft

Reconnaissance and observation aircraft

Military seaplanes

Martin P3M-2

Civil aviation airliners

Other types of aircraft

Aircraft engines

Missiles and rockets

Booster rockets

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Lockheed Martin History." lockheedmartin.com. Retrieved: July 30, 2011.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lockheed Martin Company history." fundinguniverse.com. Retrieved: July 30, 2011.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Rumerman, Judy. "The First U.S. Aircraft Manufacturing Companies." U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission, 2003. Retrieved: July 30, 2011.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 , "Glenn L. Martin Co." The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Retrieved: July 30, 2011.
  5. ↑ Rumerman, Judy. "Glenn L. Martin Company." U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission, 2003. Retrieved: July 30, 2011.
  6. ↑ Herman, Arthur. Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, p. 6, Random House, New York, NY. ISBN 978-1-4000-6964-4.
  7. ↑ Herman, Arthur. Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, p. 238, Random House, New York, NY. ISBN 978-1-4000-6964-4.
  8. ↑ Herman, Arthur. Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, p. 277, Random House, New York, NY. ISBN 978-1-4000-6964-4.
  9. ↑ Goebel, Greg. "The Martin Mariner, Mars, & Marlin Flying Boats." Air Vectors. Retrieved: July 30, 2011.
  10. ↑ "National Archives and Records Administration". archive.org. Retrieved 2012-11-21.
  11. ↑ Peck, Merton J. & Scherer, Frederic M. The Weapons Acquisition Process: An Economic Analysis (1962) Harvard Business School p.619
  12. ↑ Herman, Arthur. Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, pp. 330-1, Random House, New York, NY. ISBN 978-1-4000-6964-4.
  13. ↑ Harwood, William B. (1993). Raise Heaven and Earth. Simon & Schuster. p. 333. ISBN 0-67-174998-6.
  14. ↑ Jolliff, Elizabeth C. (20 May 1974). History of the Pershing Weapon System. Redstone Arsenal, Alabarrla 35809: U.S. Army Missile Command. p. 288.

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