HISTORY
General Dynamics traces its ancestry
to John Philip Holland's
Holland
Torpedo Boat Company.
This company was responsible for
developing the U.S. Navy's first
submarines built at Lewis Nixon's
Crescent Shipyard, located in
Elizabethport, New Jersey. The
revolutionary submarine boat
Holland
VI
was built there, its keel being laid
down in 1896. Crescent's
superintendent and naval architect,
Arthur Leopold Busch, supervised the
construction of this submarine.
After being launched on 17 May 1897,
it was eventually purchased by the
Navy and renamed USS Holland. The
Holland
was officially commissioned on 12
October 1900 and became the United
States Navy's first submarine, later
known as SS-1. The Navy placed an
order for more submarines, which
were developed in rapid succession
and were assembled at two different
locations on both coasts. These
submarines were known as the A-Class
or
Adder
Class, and became America's first
fleet of underwater craft at the
beginning of the 20th century.
Due to the
lengthy and expensive process of
introducing the world's first
practical submarines, Holland, short
on funds, had to part with his
company and sell his interest to
financier Isaac Leopold Rice,
renaming the new firm as the
Electric Boat Company
on 7 February 1899. Electric
Boat gained a reputation for
unscrupulous arms dealing in
1904-05, when it sold submarines to
Japan's Imperial Japanese Navy and
Russia's Imperial Russian Navy, who
were then at war. Holland submarines
were also sold to the British Royal
Navy through the English armaments
company Vickers, and to the Dutch to
serve in the Royal Netherlands Navy.
The new pioneering craft
(originally) developed by the
company was now legitimized as
genuine naval weapons by the world's
most powerful navies.
Canadair purchase
In the post-World War II wind-down,
Electric Boat was cash-flush but
lacking in work, with its workforce
shrinking from 13,000 to 4,000 by
1946. Hoping to diversify, the
president and chief executive
officer, John Jay Hopkins, started
looking for companies that would fit
into Electric Boat's market.
They quickly
found that Canadair, owned by the
Canadian government, was suffering
from similar post-war malaise and
was up for sale. Hopkins bought the
company for $10 million in 1946.
Even by the Canadian government's
calculations, the factory alone was
worth more than $22 million,
excluding the value of the remaining
contracts for planes or spare parts.
When they
purchased Canadair, its production
line and inventory systems were in
disorder. Hopkins hired
Canadian-born mass-production
specialist H. Oliver West to take
over the president's role and return
Canadair to profitability. Shortly
after the takeover, Canadair began
delivering its new Canadair North
Star (a version of the DC-4), and
was able to deliver aircraft to
Trans-Canada Airlines, Canadian
Pacific Airlines and British
Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC)
well in advance of their contracted
delivery times.
As
defense spending increased with the
onset of the Cold War, Canadair
would go on to win many Canadian
military contracts for the Royal
Canadian Air Force, and became a
major aerospace company. These
included Canadair T-33 trainer, the
Canadair Argus long-range maritime
reconnaissance and transport
aircraft, and the Canadair F-86
Sabre.
Between 1950 and 1958, 1,815 Sabres
were built. Canadair also produced
200 CF-104 Starfighter supersonic
fighter aircraft, a licensed-built
version of the Lockheed F-104.
In 1976
Canadair was sold back to the
Canadian Government, which sold it
to Bombardier Inc. in 1986.
General Dynamics emerges
As the aircraft production at
Canadair became increasingly
important to the company, Hopkins
argued that the name "Electric Boat"
was no longer appropriate. On 24
April 1952 the name was officially
changed to
General Dynamics.
General
Dynamics was still cash-flush after
the Canadair purchase, and, given
the success of that company, they
continued to look for new aviation
purchases. In March 1953 they
purchased
Convair from the Atlas
Group. The sale was approved by
government oversight with the
proviso that General Dynamics would
continue to operate out of Air Force
Plant 4 in Fort Worth, Texas. This
factory was set up in order to
spread out strategic aircraft
production and rented to Convair
during the war to produce B-24
Liberator bombers. Over time, the
Fort Worth plant would become
Convair's major production center.
As was the
case with Canadair, Convair worked
as an independent division within
the General Dynamics umbrella. Over
the next decade the company
introduced the F-106 Delta Dart
Interceptor (the earlier F-102 Delta
Dagger being designed before the
takeover), the B-58 Hustler and the
Convair 880 and 990 airliners.
Convair also introduced the first
U.S. operational intercontinental
ballistic missile, the Atlas.
Aviation powerhouse
During the early 1960s the company
bid on the United States Air Force's
TFX (Tactical Fighter, eXperimental)
project for a new low-level
"penetrator". Robert McNamara, newly
installed as the Secretary of
Defense, forced a merger of the TFX
with U.S. Navy plans for a new
long-range "fleet defender"
aircraft. In order to bid on a naval
version successfully, GD partnered
with Grumman, who would build a
customized version for aircraft
carrier duties. After four rounds of
bids and changes, the GD/Grumman
team finally won the contract over a
Boeing submission.
The
F-111
first flew in December 1964. The
F-111B flew in May 1965, but the
Navy said that it was too heavy for
use on aircraft carriers. With an
unacceptable Navy version, estimates
for 2,400 F-111s, including exports,
were sharply reduced, but GD still
managed to make a $300-million
profit on the project. Grumman went
on to build the F-14 Tomcat, an
aircraft that used many of the
innovations of the F-111, but
designed solely as a carrier-borne
fighter.
Reorganization
In May 1965, GD reorganized into 12
operating divisions based on product
lines. The board decided to build
all future planes in Fort Worth,
ending plane production at San Diego
(Convair's original plant), but
continuing with space and missile
development there. In October 1970,
Roger Lewis left and David S. Lewis
from McDonnell Douglas was named
CEO. Lewis required that the company
headquarters move to St. Louis,
Missouri, which occurred in February
1971.
F-16 success
In 1972, GD bid on the USAF's
Lightweight Fighter (LWF) project.
GD and Northrop were awarded
prototype contracts. GD, whose F-111
program was winding down,
desperately needed a new aircraft
contract. They organized their own
"Skunk Works" group, the Advanced
Concepts Laboratory, and responded
with a new aircraft design that
incorporated more modern equipment
than the Northrop contender, mainly
fly-by-wire flight controls.
GD's
YF-16
first flew in January 1974, and
proved to have slightly better
performance than the
Northrop YF-17 in
head-to-head testing. It entered
production as the F-16 in January
1975 with an initial order of 650
and a total order of 1,388. The F-16
also won contracts worldwide,
beating the F-17 in foreign
competition as well. F-16 orders
eventually totaled more than 4,000,
making it the largest and most
successful program for GD, and one
of the most successful western
military projects since World War
II.
Land Systems focus
In 1976, General Dynamics sold the
struggling Canadair back to the
Canadian government for $38 million.
By 1984, General Dynamics had four
divisions: Convair in San Diego,
General Dynamics-Fort Worth, General
Dynamics-Pomona, and General
Dynamics-Electronics. In 1985 a
further reorganization created the
Space Systems Division from the
Convair Space division. In 1985, GD
also acquired
Cessna. In 1986 the
Pomona division (which mainly
produced the Standard Missile and
the Phalynx CIWS for the Navy) was
split up, creating the Valley
Systems Division. Valley Systems
produced the Stinger surface-to-air
missile and the Rolling Airframe
Missile (RAM). Both units were
recombined into one entity in 1992.
Henry Crown,
still GD's largest shareholder, died
on 15 August 1990. Following this,
the company started to rapidly
divest its under-performing
divisions under CEO William Anders.
Cessna was re-sold to Textron in
January 1992, the San Diego and
Pomona missile production units to
General Motors-Hughes Aerospace in
May 1992, the Fort Worth aircraft
production to
Lockheed in March 1993
(a nearby electronics production
facility was separately sold to
Israeli-based Elbit Systems, marking
their entry into the United States
market), and its Space Systems
Division to Martin Marietta in 1994.
The remaining Convair Aircraft
Structure unit was sold to McDonnell
Douglas in 1994. The remains of the
Convair Division were simply closed
in 1996. GD's exit from the aviation
world was short-lived, and in 1999
the company acquired
Gulfstream
Aerospace. The Pomona operation was
closed shortly after its sale to
Hughes Aircraft.
Having
divested itself of its aviation
holdings, GD concentrated on land
and sea products. GD purchased
Chrysler's defense divisions in
1982, renaming them General Dynamics
Land Systems. In 2003 they purchased
the defense divisions of General
Motors as well. It is now a major
supplier of armored vehicles of all
types, including the M1 Abrams, LAV
25, Stryker, and a wide variety of
vehicles based on these chassis.
Source:
Wikipedia
|