The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Brooklyn, New York • Page 56

BROOKLYN EAGLE MAGAZINE, He Sold Ois Engine for $500,000 Long Island Man Designed Plane Motors Which Conquered South Pole and Atlantic Ocean fSr' rv I jri before the war ended. So well was it made that several of those first models are still in the service. Lawrance was mustered out and went Charles Lanier Int ranet L-o wont uu raise imius aui uic unw-rance Aero Engine Company. One man put $15,000 into the company. Engines were built for the Army and Navy at the company's Brooklyn factory, but sales were scarce at first.

The borrowed capital shrank. This is where Mrs. Lawrance enters the story. to give me $4,000 to buy a new car, but I took the money and built one myself. It cost twice that amount before I got through with it." Lawrance completed his studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and returned to the United States.

He fussed around as an architect and an engineer, but his heart was still in engines. He married the daughter of Morgan Dix, famous clergyman, and granddaughter of John Adams Dix, one time Governor of the State of New York. Mr. Lawrance's own family landed in America in the Seventeenth Century. Converting everything he could into ready cash to carry on his experiments with engines, the Lawrences went modestly to housekeeping in an apartment.

Children came and he opened a repair shop with his old college chum, Arthur mere was a iamny estate at nasi Islip on the Island. The wife of the inventor laid out lots, gardens and walks on it, built homes and sold them. The real estate venture netted enough to tide the Lawrance "Aero Engine Company over the last of the rough spots. Lawrance persuaded the Wright ex Below Lindbergh, ByrJ and Chamberlin, all of whom used the engine of Lawrance's design in their historic flights. perts to loott over ms engine.

-'AY'. Vtfc'-VV'--f By Harold C. Burr EVERYONE has heard of Charles Lindbergh, Commander Byrd and Clarence Chamberlin and their exploits of the air. Not so many know the man who made those flights to the South Pole, Paris and other European points possible. Yet each of the famous aviators used the Wright Whirlwind motor, the invention of Charles Lanier Lawrance of Meadow Brook, Babylon, L.

I. But Lawrance doesn't mind. He has heard the song of songs, the hum in the heart of a plane, put there by himself. Upon Lindbergh's triumphant return some newspapermen were sympathizing with the engine builder for not receiving any public credit for his share in the feat. "Pshaw, that's all said Lawrance in his happy, chuckling manner.

"Who ever heard of the name of the horse Paul Revere rode?" Lawrance is a four-square sort of man, rugged and with gray eyes and crisp dark hair slightly shot with gray. He's very honest with himself. Unlike the inventor of song and story, he readily confesses a liking for making money. He sold his motor to the Wright people for half a million of dollars and a block of stock in the Wright Aeronautical Corporation. Today he radiates achievement and success, but it wasn't always so.

There were the almost inevitable years of disappointment, delay, failure and self-sacrifice. Twice he. sold all that he had, even borrowed heavily on one occasion. Once his wife kept him going by executing a master stroke of business. The Whirlwind motor is a three-cylinder, air-cooled, sixty-horsepower affair that runs without heating.

But there have been other Lawrance inventions. When this son of an old New England family was eleven he designed plans for a complete submarine. At the fashion- -able Groton school he started to build an automobile. Before it was finished Lawrance moved on to Yale. Before he graduated the automobile was finished.

Young Lawrance had an assistant mechanic in the person of a schoolmate. The car cost the boys The experts liked the sweet roar of it, the light weight of it and its practical advantages. So the half-million-dollar sale was consummated, and the man who had invested $15,000 in the venture received back $90,000. That's what Lawrance means when he says he wants to make money. He wants to make it for himself and protect his stockholders.

In the fullness of time Charles Lawrance was elected president of the Wright Aeronautical Corporation. He has seen fit to resign that fat job and start out again for himself alone. But he wants it understood there was no friction with Wright. For proof of that he's still their technical adviser and a director. "I'm getting older all the time," objects this man in the very prime of his power, "and I want to do something once more." The new concern is the Lawrance Engine Research Corporation.

"Its object is to make better engines," explains the moving spirit of the company. In his moments of relaxation Mr. Lawrance dabbles with water-color painting. But it's to be suspected that when he hears the of a plane in the sky he looks up from his hobby, because that is the voice he has Moulton, to make his income meet his expenses. But he was still listening for the song of the engine, and he wasn't discouraged.

The World War broke out in Europe and people began turning their thoughts to aviation and the part flying was going to play in it. Charles Lawrance saw the handwriting in the sky with the rest and turned his inventive genius to the making of a wing to give the plane lifting power. This wing was used extensively by England and Germany. He also experimented in aluminum cylinders and pistons, and put a stump-pulling machine of his own devising on the market. America entered the great furnace mouth of France with gleaming bayonets, and Lawrance enlisted as an ensign, despite the fact that he had a wife and two children to support.

He became a machinist's mate. After a while he was assigned to research work in the air service. He made -a small two-eylinder engine for midget planes to be carried by submarines, at once sensing the old type engine the United States Government had been using was impractical. From two cylinders he went to three. Then came the first model for the three-cylinder, air-cooled, sixty-horsepower engine.

It was accepted and fifty sold $1,000. That gave them the idea of going into the manufacture of automobiles in a big way. Three of them Sydney Breese, Arthur Moulton and Lawrance formed a company under the name of the B. L. M.

Company. "One of our first products we planned to enter in the Vanderbilt Cup race," Mr. Lawrance harks back through the years. "It was finished the day before the race, but the castings were too thin, and she blew out a cylinder head and couldn't start. It was a funny thing about that car.

It would only run backward." The fledgling concern went on turning out cars. The modest total output had reached twenty when the panic of 1907 hit the country a staggering blow, and the B. L. M. Company became just a memory.

Lawrance went to Paris to study architecture. It was while he was in Paris that his grandfather made an appointment for the youngster to meet the elder J. P. Morgan. But Charlie Lawrance scandalized the old gentleman by driving up to that rendezvous in a di-" lapidated old relic of a car that looked as if it might shake itself to pieces every time the engine turned over.

"Grandfather was pretty mortified, but Mr. Morgan just laughed and kidded him about it," LawTance went on with the incident. "My grandfather offered.