Marquardt Corporation was an aeronautical engineering firm started in 1944 as Marquardt Aircraft Company and initially dedicated almost entirely to the development of the ramjet engine. Marquardt designs were developed from the mid-1940s into the early 1960s, but as the ramjet disappeared from military usage, the company turned to other fields.
In 1968 Marquardt was merged with CCI Inc. of Tulsa, OK. The newly merged firm became known as "CCI-Marquardt, Inc.". That name changed back to "CCI Inc." after a few years. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s pieces of Marquardt were sold off or merged with other firms. By the 1990s, one of the remnants of the company, called Marquardt Manufacturing Inc. (MMI) was embroiled in a legal suit with its predecessor organization, which had become principally a landlord who owned the buildings and land where MMI was located. By then, most of the remaining pieces of Marquardt were part of Ferranti in England which was in bankruptcy. MMI subsequently declared bankruptcy and sank into oblivion. The remaining piece, Marquardt Jet Laboratories was sold to Kaiser Aerospace. Kaiser-Marquardt was later sold to Primex in Florida.Jacobsmeyer, Jon Wallace, The Marquardt Story, Appendix A, "The ISC/Ferranti Scandal", p. 3 Primex finally became part of Aerojet Rocketdyne.
History
Roy Edward Marquardt was a 1940 aeronautical engineering graduate of California Institute of Technology who was employed at Northrop during World War II on the YB-35 flying-wing bomber project. While working on problems cooling the engines of the YB-35, which were buried in the trailing edge of the wings, he found that the engine heat could be used to provide useful thrust. This created an interest in the ramjet principle, and in November 1944 he started Marquardt Aircraft in Venice, California to develop and sell ramjet engines. In the late 1940s, the company relocated to Van Nuys, California, adjacent to the Van Nuys Airport.
Marquardt's initial products were wind tunnels, but by the end of their first year they had delivered an experimental ramjet to the United States Navy for testing. The United States Army Air Forces purchased two of the same design early in 1946, and fitted them to the wingtips of a P-51 Mustang fighter for in-flight testing. By this time the Navy had installed theirs on an F7F Tigercat; flight tests commenced in late 1946. Later, the Navy tested the same engines on an XP-83 and F-82 Twin Mustang.
Another early product developed by Marquardt Aircraft was a pulse-jet powered helicopter which was assembled and flown, but never put into production.
Marquardt also provided space and capital for the James B. Lansing Company, a manufacturer of high-quality audio speakers known by the brand "JBL". In the late 1940s, Marquardt took over JBL operations, but the firm was divested when Marquardt was acquired by General Tire and Rubber Company in 1949. JBL speakers are still in production.
Growth and acquisitions
In 1947 Martin built the Gorgon IV missile testbed, powered by the 20" engine. Four Gorgon flights with the new engines were made that year at Mach 0.85 at altitude, and in 1948 a newer engine pushed the speeds to Mach 0.9. Martin eventually won a contract to convert the Gorgon design into a target drone, becoming the KDM-1 Plover, and delivering Marquardt a contract for 600 more 20" engines.
In 1948 the newly created United States Air Force took delivery of several larger designs and fitted them to the wingtips of a P-80 Shooting Star, which became the first manned aircraft to be powered by ramjets alone. An even larger design was built as a booster for a new interceptor design, but not put into production.
The same year the company also started conversion of the existing engine designs to operate at supersonic speeds. This requires the airflow to be slowed to subsonic speeds for combustion, which is accomplished with a series of shock waves created by a carefully designed inlet. Starting with the existing 20" design from 1947, work progressed until the new engine was ready for use in 1949.
At this point the company had outgrown its Venice plant, and lacked the resources to fund a larger facility. Roy Marquardt sold a controlling interest in the company to General Tire and Rubber Company in 1949, and used the funds to move to a new site in Van Nuys, the former Timm Aircraft factory. The purchase wasn't a happy one for General Tire due to management differences, and after making "only" 25% return in one year, they agreed to sell their share of the company to another investor. Eventually, such an investor was found, and General Tire sold their stake to Laurance Rockefeller in 1950 for $250,000.
In the early 1950s supersonic cruise missile and target drone projects for various roles were quite common. Many of them were designed to be shot down as target drones, or simply crash or explode at the end of their mission, so simplicity and low cost was as important as high-speed performance. This made the ramjet ideally suited to those roles. By 1952 Marquardt was involved in a number of projects, including the Navy's Rigel missile, and the Air Force's CIM-10 Bomarc anti-aircraft missile. To test the new engine design for the Bomarc, the Lockheed X-7 high-speed radio control test aircraft was built.
Over the next few years, the X-7 missile broke many records, and led the Air Force to award Marquardt a contract for the BOMARC missile engines. Originally they had intended to award the production to a larger company with better manufacturing abilities, as the Van Nuys plant wouldn't be able to build the 1,500 engines quickly enough. Instead, the Air Force and Marquardt collaborated on a new plant on the shores of Great Salt Lake just outside Ogden, Utah. The plant opened in June 1957 and delivered the first engines a month ahead of schedule. By 1958 the engine was in full production, leading to an additional engine contract from the Air Force for an equally large run of a more advanced version for the IM-99B "Super BOMARC". Meanwhile, the X-7 continued to break records, eventually setting the speed record for air-breathing vehicles at Mach 4.31.
In 1958 Marquardt purchased the assets of Associated Missile Products Company in Pomona, California (AMPCO), part of AMF Atomic, and named it the Pomona Electronics Division."Destinies Rest With Marquardt", Pomona, California, The Pomona Progress Bulletin, September 3, 1958, p. 15 The Pomona Division designed and manufactured radar simulators used to train navigators, bombardiers, and radar systems operators. In the years following the Marquardt purchase, the Pomona Division created radar simulators for the 412L Weapon Control System in Europe; the GAM-72 (Quail) decoy missile; the GAM-77 (Hound Dog) nuclear missile; the AN/APQ T-10 Simulator for the B-52 Navigator and Bombardier; an Atlas Missile launch simulator; the AN/GPS T-4 air defense radar simulator; and other weapon systems trainers. By 1963, the electronics division accounted for ⅓ of Marquardt's total sales."Pomona Plant Marks Fifth Year As Part of Marquardt Corp.", Pomona, California, The Pomona Progress Bulletin, October 1, 1963, p. 30
Also in 1958, Marquardt purchased the Cooper Development Corporation of Monrovia, California (CDC). Clifford D. Cooper, the founder and president, became a Marquardt vice-president."Marquardt Aircraft Company Acquiring Monrovia's Cooper Development Firm", Pomona, California, The Pomona Progress Bulletin, November 3, 1958, p. 13 CDC manufactured high-altitude solid-fuel sounding and weather rockets. Cooper Development had been the company responsible for the upper stages of the missile used to place the first U.S. satellite in orbit - the Explorer I.Cooper, Clifford D., The Runt Pig Principle, Balboa Island, California, Alliance for Progress Publishers, 1992, pp. 175–178
By 1959 the company had sales of $70 million (equal to over $600 million in 2020 dollars), and had purchased several other smaller aerospace firms. One of these purchases, Power Systems, led to a number of designs for small rocket motors used as positioning thrusters. This would eventually become one of Marquardt's biggest and most important product lines in the 1960s. During this period the main Van Nuys plant was also involved in research into new systems, including a nuclear-powered ramjet for Project Pluto and a liquid air cycle engine (LACE) for the Air Force's Aerospaceplane efforts. Another new product line started with the introduction of their first ram-air turbine, small air-powered generators for providing aircraft with electric power if the main engine failed. Marquardt also developed and produced thrust reversers for jet engines, as well as afterburners (which are functionally the same as a ramjet). With this diversification came a name change, to Marquardt Corporation.
In 1960, Marquardt established a small research laboratory in Maryland named "Marquardt Special Projects Laboratory" (MSPL),"Marquardt Special Projects Lab", New York, New York, The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 1960, p. 23 whose principal scientist was Dr. Oleg Enikeieff. Enikeiff, a 1943 graduate of California Institute of Technology, had joined Marquardt after being a research engineer for the Harry C. Miller Lock Company, the owner of Sargent Locks. Oleg's expertise was centered on security devices, and some of his unclassified work while at MSPL included patents for an ID card identification system that would scramble its coded contents after each use so it could not be copied, as well as a system to jam microphones in rooms being used as secure locations, so they could not be 'bugged'. Other work at MSPL was classified.
In 1962, Marquardt was licensed by the Southern Pacific Railroad to design and produce a device called the "Grade Crossing Predictor", developed at Stanford University. Marquardt formed a subsidiary, Marquardt Industrial Products Company (MIPCO), as part of the Pomona, California electronics operations, and began selling the computer to major railroads across the country, and eventually world-wide. It enabled the warning lights and gates at grade-level crossings to be lowered based on the speed of an approaching train, rather than at a fixed distance, reducing grade-crossing congestion in populated areas like Chicago.
In 1964, Marquardt purchased a small aerospace firm in Mineola, New York named Automation Laboratories, Inc. (ALI),"Marquardt Acquisition Approved", Los Angeles, California, The Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1964, p. 49 principally to use their television broadcast expertise in developing a missile launch simulator for the Sheridan Battle Tank. Marquardt had invented a hemispherical photographic system it named VueMarq,"Volume II - Report of a Study on a Virtual Image Out-the-window Display System", New York, New York, Farrand Optical Co., Inc. for National Aeronautics and Space Administration Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas, January, 1966, pp. 11–12 and the marriage of the VueMarq system with the ALI TV technology produced a very advanced Sheridan/Shillelagh gunnery simulator. Marquardt was not the successful bidder on the program, and later in 1965 after the GASL merger was completed, ALI was absorbed into GASL and disappeared as a stand-alone entity.
In 1965, Marquardt merged General Applied Science Laboratories, Inc. (GASL), of Westbury, New York, into the company."Marquardt, GASL Groups' Proposed Merger Approved", Van Nuys, California, The Valley News, April 6, 1965, p. 14 GASL had been founded in 1956 by Antonio Ferri and Theodore von Karman.
Von Karman was a Hungarian-born scientist who had emigrated to the United States in 1930. It was von Karman who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology in 1944.