The Rise
of United Technologies
By
Herbert F. Janick
During
the 1920s Connecticut's economy was in flux. The manufacturing
of textiles and metal products such as hardware, guns, and machinery,
the traditional backbone of the economy, declined as a result
of high transportation and labor costs. Forty thousand fewer people
were engaged in manufacturing in the state in 1929 than in 1919.
At the same time, however, Connecticut factories began to produce
specialty parts for the automotive, electrical power, and aviation
industries, items that required precision work and took advantage
of the state's reservoir of skilled workers, able managers, existing
factories, and established machine-tool fabricators. The United
Technologies Company, for example, begun in 1925 in a Hartford
machine shop, was on the way to becoming the major employer in
Connecticut and the world's largest manufacturer of airplane engines.
Until
Frederic B. Rentschler (1887-1956), president of the newly
organized
Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company, came to Hartford in 1925
to build a 350-horsepower, radial, air-cooled, airplane engine
that would earn a contract with the United States Navy, little
aviation activity had taken place in Connecticut. Within three
years Pratt & Whitney was turning out thousands of durable
Wasp engines, had increased its work force from the original thirty
craftsmen to over 600 people, and required a larger plant. In
1929 Pratt & Whitney and Boeing Aircraft merged into United
Aircraft and Transportation Company, becoming one of the four
major aviation conglomerates in the United States. In the same
year United Aircraft transformed a huge tract of farmland in
East
Hartford into an efficient, one-story, manufacturing facility
that was so spacious that foremen needed to use bicycles to move
from one spot in the plant to another.
World
War II stimulated airplane production. United Aircraft Corporation,
to comply with Federal anti-trust regulations, was organized
in
1934 into four divisions: Pratt & Whitney (engines); Hamilton
Standard (propellers); Sikorsky (flying boats); and Chance Voight
(fighter planes). The Company benefited from the emergency, operating
three shifts throughout the war, training new workers—many of
them women, farmers, and French-Canadian immigrants who were new
to the factory routing—and constructing satellite plants in four
Connecticut towns and Longmeadow, Massachusetts. More than half
of the engines used by the Allies during the war were made by
Pratt & Whitney.
In
recent years two innovations have maintained the firms' dominance
and have strengthened the Connecticut economy. Recognizing that
piston engines would soon be outmoded, the company developed turbo-jet
propulsion engines in the early 1950s for commercial and military
use. Since 1975, when the corporate name was changed to United
Technologies, an effort has been made to lessen dependence on
military contracts by diversifying into the production of electronics,
electric cables, elevators, and industrial power plants.
For
Further Reading
Despite
the importance of the industry to the state there is little
written
on the subject of aviation in Connecticut beyond the outdated
public relations-style history of Pratt & Whitney: The
Pratt and Whitney Aircraft Story (East Hartford, Connecticut,
1950).
*
Entry under revision.
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