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After three years he switched to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He finished the grueling four-year course in two years. While at Tech he helped design one of the first airplane wind tunnels in the U.S.—and wind tunnels are to airplane research what the Bunsen burner was to chemistry. On the strength of this he got a job with the up-&-coming Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Co. By the time he was 28 he was 1) a vice president and chief engineer, and 2) unhappy. He wanted to make his own planes.
With $600 in his pocket, he quit, went to California, set up office in a Los Angeles barbershop. His backlog: one plane.
Soon after, a Douglas-designed torpedo plane turned out so well that the Navy gave him a $120,000 order. With cash borrowed from Los Angeles businessmen, he set up shop in an abandoned studio, and later bagged an Army order. It was for only four planes, but they shot him to the top of the aviation world. For those planes were the famed DWCs, which were the first to fly round the world (1924).
Then in 1932 Transcontinental & Western Airlines came to Douglas with a proposition: they needed a new two-motored passenger plane that would outfly, out-carry and "outeverything" every plane in the commercial air. Douglas had kept strictly to military craft because Uncle Sam's credit was good. Would he break this rule for T.W.A.? In a week the designs were whipped out. The plane turned the aviation world upside down, with Douglas on top. The plane was the DC-1, the first of the famed broad-winged DCs that eventually carried 95% of all U.S. air traffic, and are now as familiar in the U.S. sky as sparrows.
When war clouds rolled up in 1939, Douglas was a middling-sized company with plants at Santa Monica and El Segundo. But he had a big-company backlog of $69,000,000. Cautious Donald Douglas did not want to grow any bigger and did not intend to. All this planemaking interfered with his engineer's urge to design planes. But the Army changed his mind.
One day late in 1940, General Arnold phoned from Washington, saying: "Don, you're going to Tulsa to run a plant." "The hell I am," said Mr. Douglas.
"The hell you aren't. You're there now." From then on, the company did not expand. It exploded.
Conservative Mr. Douglas, who never wanted to get any bigger, soon found himself not only in Tulsa, but all over the globe. He says, mournfully: "We were shanghaied."
His shanghaied company now operates:
» A $36,000,000 plant in Tulsa, employing 16,000.
» A $45,000,000 plant in Oklahoma City, employing 20,000.
» A $33,000,000 plant in Chicago, employing 11,000.
» A $30,000,000 plant in Long Beach, employing 40,300.
» A $30,000,00 plant in Santa Monica, employing 44,000.
» A $20,000,000 plant in El Segundo, employing 21,000, and more than 100 other small plants and repair stations tucked away in worldwide spots from Persia to China. The Santa Monica and half of the El Segundo plants represent Douglas Aircraft investment. Government money built the others.