Robert E. Gross

Robert Ellsworth Gross did not invent an airplane, draw a wing, or fly a mission. He was a Boston-bred investment banker who understood something most engineers did not: that an aircraft company is, before it is anything else, a perpetual financing problem, and that the firm which could keep raising money through the lean years and bet it boldly in the fat ones would inherit the sky. On the morning of June 21, 1932, at the bottom of the Great Depression, the thirty-five-year-old Gross stood in a U.S. district court in Los Angeles holding a single white envelope and bought the assets of the bankrupt Lockheed out of receivership for $40,000 ^[4][1]. The judge looked at him and said, "I hope, young man, you know what you're doing." Gross answered, "I do," and over the next twenty-eight years he was proved right ^[4].

The company he bought was a husk, a famous name attached to the wreckage of the Detroit Aircraft Corporation, maker of the wooden Vega and Orion that had carried Wiley Post and Amelia Earhart, but with no cash, few orders, and a market for civil aircraft that the Depression had simply erased ^[3][1]. Gross's first and most important act was not technical but human: he assembled and kept a team, Hall Hibbard as chief engineer, Carl Squier in sales, and a brilliant, headstrong twenty-three-year-old named Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, and turned them loose on a single audacious idea, a fast, all-metal twin-engine transport called the Model 10 Electra ^[1][9]. It was a young Johnson, sent back to the University of Michigan wind tunnel, who solved the airplane's stability problem with the twin tail that became a Lockheed signature, after seventy-odd tunnel runs ^[10]. The Electra flew in February 1934 and sold roughly forty in its first year, enough to put the reorganized Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, with Gross as its driving force, onto its feet ^[1][9].

Gross's gift was nerve disciplined by arithmetic. He bet repeatedly on aircraft his company had no business building. In 1937, when daring blueprints for a radical twin-boom fighter came across his desk, he backed them despite Lockheed's near-total lack of military experience; the result was the P-38 Lightning ^[8][4]. In 1938, when a British Purchasing Commission led by Sir Henry Self arrived in America shopping for warplanes, Lockheed had no bomber, so Gross's men built a full wooden mock-up of a bomber version of the Super Electra, rebuilt it overnight to the RAF's specifications, and signed on June 23, 1938, a contract for up to 250 Hudson bombers, the largest foreign aircraft order an American firm had ever taken ^[5][1]. "I was entirely convinced," Sir Arthur Harris later wrote, "that anyone who could produce a mock-up in twenty-four hours would indeed make good on all his promises, and this Lockheed most certainly did" ^[5].

The boldest gamble of all came in 1939, in secret. Howard Hughes, who had just bought control of TWA, summoned Gross, Hibbard, and Johnson to a Beverly Hills meeting and demanded a pressurized airliner that could cross the country nonstop. Gross committed Lockheed to it on Hughes's terms, exclusivity, total secrecy, and TWA placed an order for forty of the planes for roughly $18 million, the largest commercial aircraft order in history to that point ^[1]. The airplane became the triple-tailed Lockheed Constellation, the most beautiful airliner of the propeller age, and it nearly defined the company ^[1]. "Up to that time," Hibbard said, "we were sort of 'small-time guys,' but when we got to the Constellation we had to be 'big-time guys'" ^[1].

World War II turned Gross's bets into a torrent. Lockheed and its Vega subsidiary built some 19,000 aircraft, about six percent of all American wartime production, and the Burbank work force swelled to roughly 94,000 men and women at its 1943 peak, the whole sprawling complex hidden under a famous painted-canvas "camouflage" of fake suburban streets ^[8][4]. By the time TIME put Gross on its cover on January 14, 1946, Lockheed had vaulted from a $40,000 courtroom curiosity to one of the great industrial enterprises in America ^[6]. Through the Korean War and the dawn of the jet and missile age, Gross, president from 1934 to 1956 and then chairman until his death, kept the company at the forward edge, sponsoring the Shooting Star jet fighter and the secret world of Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works that would produce the U-2 ^[8][4]. He had grasped, before almost anyone, that aerospace was a business of capital and conviction, and that the company willing to look farthest ahead would win ^[4].

Robert Ellsworth Gross was born May 11, 1897, in Newton, Massachusetts, into a comfortable New England family; his father, Robert Haven Gross, was a businessman ^[1]. He was schooled at St. George's School in Middletown, Rhode Island, graduating in 1915, and went on to Harvard, where in his senior year he was elected captain of the ice-hockey team, a hint of the cool competitiveness that would later mark the boardroom ^[1]. He came out of Harvard not into a workshop but into the world of money, learning the trade of investment banking and underwriting in Boston and New York ^[1][4].

It was finance that drew him to aviation rather than the other way around. In the booming late 1920s, when aircraft stocks were the dot-coms of their day, Gross helped underwrite and organize aviation ventures, and he founded his own, the Viking Flying Boat Company, building a French amphibian under license ^[1]. The Depression destroyed it; the market for private aircraft evaporated almost overnight, and Viking failed, taking Gross's first independent venture down with it ^[1]. The lesson stuck. He had watched a sound little company die not for lack of a good airplane but for lack of capital and a market, and he resolved that whatever he built next would be financed to survive the bad years ^[4].

That resolve led him west. When the Lockheed name came up for sale out of the bankruptcy of the Detroit Aircraft Corporation, Gross, together with his younger brother Courtlandt, the airman Lloyd Stearman, and the investor Walter Varney, pulled together $40,000 and made his move in the Los Angeles courtroom in June 1932 ^[4][1]. Stearman was named the new firm's first president and Gross its treasurer and guiding hand; by 1934, with the company reorganized as the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, Robert Gross had emerged as its undisputed leader ^[1]. He was thirty-seven years old, once-failed, and now responsible for a famous name and a few dozen anxious employees in Burbank ^[1][4].

Robert Gross took a $40,000 courtroom curiosity and, in less than a decade, made it the leading aircraft manufacturer in the world, and by the 1950s the largest defense company in the nation ^[4][8]. The institutions he built outlived him completely: the Burbank works that armed the Allies, the Constellation that crossed oceans, the P-38 and the Shooting Star, and, most enduringly, the culture of audacious engineering embodied in Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works, which under Gross's patronage produced the U-2 and set the pattern for secret American aerospace development for the rest of the century ^[8][4]. The modern Lockheed Martin descends in a straight line from the team he assembled in a half-empty Burbank hangar ^[1].

He is the rare founder remembered chiefly for nerve and judgment rather than invention. His exhortation to his employees, "Look ahead, where the horizons are absolutely unlimited", captured a management philosophy of forward conviction that became the company's self-image ^[4]. When he died of pancreatic cancer in 1961, the family torch passed to his brother Courtlandt, and Gross was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame as the man who, more than any engineer, willed Lockheed into being ^[9][1]. His papers, preserved at the Library of Congress, remain the archival record of how a banker's discipline and a gambler's nerve combined to put much of the free world in the air ^[7].