Glenn L. Martin Company

Origins

Glenn L. Martin Company was founded by aviation pioneer Glenn Luther Martin on August 16, 1912. Martin started out building military trainers in Santa Ana, California, and then in 1916, Martin accepted a merger offer from the Wright Company, creating the Wright-Martin Aircraft Company in September. This new company did not go well, and Glenn Martin left it to form a second Glenn L. Martin Company on September 10, 1917. This time it was based in Cleveland, Ohio. (Later, its headquarters would be moved to Baltimore, Maryland.)

Mexican Revolution

In 1913 Mexican insurgents from the northwestern state of Sonora bought a single seater Martin Pusher biplane in Los Angeles with the intention to attack federal naval forces attacking the port of Guaymas. The aircraft was shipped on May 5, 1913 in five crates to Tucson, Arizona via Wells Fargo Express, and then moved through the border into Mexico to the town of Naco, Sonora. The aircraft, named "Sonora" by the insurgents, was reassembled there and fitted with a second seat for a bomber position.

The "Sonora", armed with rudimentary 3 inch pipe bombs, performed the first known air to naval bombing runs in history.

World War I

For the Dutch East Indies a number of planes were delivered, with the first flight on November 6, 1915. It involved 2 types TE, 6 types TT and 8 types R. Martin's first big success came during World War I with the MB-1 bomber, a large biplane design ordered by the United States Army on January 17, 1918. The MB-1 entered service after the end of hostilities, but a follow up design, the MB-2, was also proved successful and 20 were ordered by the Army Air Service, the first five of them under the company designation and the last 15 as the NBS-1 (Night Bomber, Short range). Although the War Department ordered 110 more, it retained the ownership rights to the design and put the order out for bid. Unfortunately for Martin, the production orders were given to other companies that had bid lower, Curtiss (50), L.W.F. Engineering (35), and Aeromarine (25). The design was the only standard bomber used by the Air Service until 1930 and was used by seven squadrons of the Air Service/Air Corps: four in Virginia, two in Hawaii, and one in the Philippines.

Inter-war years

In 1924 the Martin Company underbid Curtiss for the production of a Curtiss-designed scout bomber, the SC-1, and ultimately Martin produced 404 of these. In 1929 Martin sold the Cleveland plant and built a new one in Middle River, Maryland, northeast of Baltimore.

During the 1930s, Martin built flying boats for the U.S. Navy, and the innovative Martin B-10 bomber for the Army. The Martin Company also produced the noted China Clipper flying boats used by Pan American Airways for its transpacific San Francisco to the Philippines route.

World War II

During World War II, a few of Martin's most successful designs were the B-26 Marauder and A-22 Maryland bombers, the PBM Mariner and JRM Mars flying boats, widely used for air-sea rescue, anti-submarine warfare and transport. The 1941 Office for Emergency Management film Bomber was filmed in the Martin facility in Baltimore, and showed aspects of the production of the B-26.

Martin ranked 14th among United States corporations in the value of wartime production contracts. The Martin Company built a total of 531 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses and 1,585 B-26 Marauders at its Omaha, Nebraska, plant at Offutt Field. Among the B-29s manufactured there were all the Silverplate aircraft, including Enola Gay and Bockscar which dropped the two, war-ending atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

Postwar

On April 22, 1957, the company name was formally changed to The Martin Company.

Postwar efforts in aeronautics by the Martin Company included two unsuccessful prototype bombers, the XB-48 and the XB-51, the marginally successful AM Mauler, the successful B-57 Canberra tactical bombers, both the P5M Marlin and P6M SeaMaster seaplanes, and the Martin 4-0-4 twin-engine passenger airliner.

The Martin Company moved forward into the aerospace manufacturing business, and it produced the Vanguard rocket, which was used by the American space program as one of its first satellite booster rockets as part of Project Vanguard. The Vanguard was the first American space exploration rocket designed from scratch to be an orbital launch vehicle — rather than being a modified sounding rocket (like the Juno I) or a ballistic missile (like the U.S. Army's Redstone missile). Martin also designed and manufactured the huge and heavily armed Titan I and LGM-25C Titan II Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). Martin Company of Orlando, Florida, was the prime contractor for the U.S. Army's Pershing missile.

The Martin Company was also one of two finalists for the Command and Service Modules of the Apollo Program. Unfortunately for Martin, NASA awarded the design and production contracts for these to the North American Aviation Corporation.

The Martin Company went further in the production of even larger booster rockets for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Air Force with its Titan III series of over 100 rockets produced, including the Titan IIIA, the more-important Titan IIIC, and the Titan IIIE. Besides hundreds of Earth satellites, these rockets were essential for the sending to outer space of the two space probes of the Voyager Project to the outer planets the two space probes of the Viking Project to Mars, and the two Helios probes into low orbits around the Sun. (closer, even, than Mercury.)

Finally the U.S. Air Force required a booster rocket that could launch heavier satellites than either the Titan IIIE or the Space Shuttle. The Martin Company responded with its extremely large Titan IV series of rockets. When the Titan IV came into service, it could carry a heavier payload to orbit than any other rocket "except" for NASA's Saturn V rocket — which was no longer in production and thus was a machine from history. Besides its use by the Air Force to launch its sequence of very heavy reconnaissance satellites, one Titan IV, with a powerful Centaur rocket upper stage, was used to launch the heavy Cassini space probe to the planet Saturn in 1997. The Cassini probe has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004, successfully returning mountains of scientific data.

The halting of production of the Titan IV in 2004 brought to an end production of the last rocket able to carry a heavier payload than the Space Shuttle, which itself ended in 2011.

The Martin Company merged with the American-Marietta Corporation, a chemical products and construction materials manufacturer, in 1961 to form the Martin Marietta Corporation. In 1995, Martin Marietta, then the nation's 3rd-largest defense contractor, merged with the Lockheed Corporation, then the nation's second largest defense contractor, to form the Lockheed Martin Corporation, becoming the largest such company in the world.

The Martin Company employed many of the founders and chief engineers of the American aerospace industry, including:

Martin also taught William Boeing how to fly and also sold him his first airplane.

Training aircraft

Bombers and Attack aircraft

Reconnaissance and observation aircraft

Military seaplanes

Civil aviation airliners

Other types of aircraft

Aircraft engines

Missiles and rockets

Booster rockets