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Most airmen thought that the future lay in liquid-cooled engines, like the Hispano-Suiza, and in flivver planes. But Rentschler staked his poker player's bet that the future lay with big engines, big military and commercial planes and air-cooled engines. An engineer named Charles L. Lawrance began experimenting with an air-cooled engine in which the Navy was interested, but he was having trouble with production bugs. Rentschler bought out Lawrance, eliminated the bugs and perfected the engine as Wright's Whirlwind. By 1924, he was making engines for both Army & Navy planes, and Wright was one of the few engine builders making profits.
But Rentschler, who wanted to run a one-man show even then, quarreled with his directors because they wanted to pay dividends instead of plowing money into engines. He resigned and decided to go into competition with Wright by building an air-cooled engine far more powerful than the 200 h.p. of Wright's. An old friend, Chance Vought, the brilliant pioneer plane designer, told Rentschler he could build a new naval plane that would win them contracts if Rentschler could provide a 400-h.p. engine weighing no more than 650 lbs.
Rentschler persuaded Niles-Bement-Pond Co. (precision tools), which had plenty of war-earned surplus cash and unused war-built factory space, to bet its cash on Rentschler's know-how. The company staked him to $250,000 and a factory to develop his first engine. Because Rentschler got his factory space and tools at Hartford, in the plant of Niles-Bement-Pond's tool-building Pratt & Whitney division, the new company was called Pratt & Whitney Aircraft.
Rentschler's group held half the stock. Rentschler persuaded several of his old associates at Wright—including Wright's top engineers, George Mead and Andrew Willgoos—to quit and join him. While stored tobacco was being cleared from the idle Hartford plant, Willgoos set up a drawing board in the garage of his New Jersey home. With George Mead directing, they designed a new engine with a lot of weight-saving and power-boosting tricks. Seven months later, on Christmas Eve 1925, the engine was ready for the big test; it developed 425 h.p., well over the 400 expected, weighed 650 lbs., and sounded so angrily powerful that Mrs. Fred Rentschler called it a Wasp. The Navy promptly ordered 200.
Empire Building. In Chance Vought's first Corsair observation-fighter, and in William E. Boeing's fighters, the engine proved itself so conclusively that the Navy almost entirely abandoned liquid-cooled engines, and the Army also bustled to get Wasp-powered planes. Bill Boeing, quick to grasp what the Wasp would do to commercial air transport costs, grabbed the first Chicago-San Francisco airmail contract by underbidding everybody else by nearly half. To everybody's amazement, he made money doing it, and gave commercial flying a tremendous boost. Explained Boeing: "We would rather carry more mail than a radiator and water for cooling."