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As vice president of Curtiss-Wright Corp., Charles Lanier Lawrance was always happiest when duty took him to the Wright factory where he might get his hands grimy, bury himself in blueprints, fuss with engines. Last week Mr. Lawrance provided himself with endless excuse for just such pleasure by announcing the organization of Lawrance Engineering & Research Corp. with himself as president. The company has no connection with Curtiss-Wright (in which, however, Researcher Lawrance continues an officer). It has been "undertaken in order to provide a laboratory in which scientific research may go forward in that leisurely atmosphere so necessary to sound progress. The company will be unlimited in its scope in aeronautics. In other words we shall be interested both in engines for aircraft and in aircraft themselves," said Researcher Lawrance. To Mr. Lawrance, famed as the man who has done most to develop air-cooled engines and as father of the Wright Whirl wind, the new arrangement is really a return to laboratory and workbench. As a youngster at Groton, school for rich men's sons, Charlie Lawrance neglected his language classes in favor of mathematics, started building an automobile. As a Yale freshman in 1901 he and a class mate and a Harvard friend completed the car and drove it—the second ever seen in Cambridge, Mass. Because he did riot have to work for his living, young Mr. Lawrance could devote the years after graduation to research, experiment with motors and study in Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1911 he presented the result of his first work in aerodynamics to the French engineer and towerman, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. It was an original type of high-lift wing section later to be embodied in Allied and German planes, and still known as Eiffel No. 32.
When the War began, Mr. Lawrance was already attacking the problem of reducing the weight of aircraft engines, then all water-cooled. He enlisted in the Navy as a machinist's mate, was soon commissioned ensign and assigned by the Navy Department to aeronautical research. There he evolved the radial air-cooled motor which was to be the basic pattern for today's Whirlwinds.
After the War, no longer rich (but he is rich again today) Researcher Lawrance secured the help of friends and relatives and founded Lawrance Aero Engine Corp. While his wife, the former Emily Dix (granddaughter of famed John Adams Dix, onetime governor of New York) disposed of part of their Long Island estate to raise funds, he completed his nine-cylinder models. By that time Wright Aeronautical Corp. foresaw the collapse of the market for water-cooled types which it had been building. In 1923 Wright bought out Lawrance Aero Engine Corp. and acquired the founder. Soon afterward the Whirlwind series was born.
Flights & Flyers