Malcolm Lockheed

Background

Malcolm Loughead was born Malcolm Loughead in 1887 in Niles, California, United States, the son of John Loughead and Flora Haines.

Education

He received limited schooling.

Career

Lockheed worked in garages in San Francisco with his brother Allan Haines Lockheed. Allan persuaded Malcolm to help him build an airplane, the Model G, so named so that people would not think it was their first. On June 15, 1913, the aircraft made its first flight, over San Francisco Bay. Malcolm ran the ground side, and Allen flew. Soon they were taking passengers up at $5 a ride. For the next two years the brothers worked as mechanics and sporadically prospected for gold. Malcolm then served briefly as "chief engineer" of the Carranzista air force in Mexico in 1914.

When World War I broke out in August 1914, he was on his way with a Curtiss biplane to Hong Kong to establish a sales and service agency. But off the China coast a British warship stopped the freighter and confiscated the Curtiss as contraband. Lockheed returned to the Bay area, where he and Allan found a wealthy Alaskan backer for their Model G. They obtained the flying concession at the Panama-Pacific Exposition and grossed $6, 000 in fifty flying days with a charge of $10 for a ten-minute ride. When the exposition closed, the family moved back to Santa Barbara, where they had once lived, with the Model G being shipped down in crates.

In 1916 the brothers founded the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company with Malcolm as secretary and treasurer and Berton R. Rodman of Santa Barbara as president. (A successor company that emerged in 1934 was the forerunner of the Lockheed Aircraft Company. ) John K. Northrop, a new addition, was at once put to work on the stressing of the wings of the F-1, a twin-engine flying-boat of seventy-four-foot span that could carry ten persons.

In early 1917, with America's entry into the war imminent, the Lockheeds offered to make their services available to the government. In April 1918 the navy asked that the F-1 be flown to North Island, San Diego, where it was tested, but it was rejected because the navy wished to standardize on the Curtiss HS2L. The Lockheeds were given a contract to build two variations, on which they lost $4, 000 or more. In August 1918 they decided that the F-1 should be converted to a landplane and demonstrated in Washington. Unfortunately it crashed at Tacna, Arizona, because of engine failure. In the meantime the Lockheeds had developed and patented a molded plywood system first used in the S-1 biplane of 1918, which did not sell.

Lockheed left the company in 1919, and it was dissolved in 1921. Many details of his later life are obscure, and after 1925 he became a recluse of whom almost no trace exists. He died in Mokelumne Hill, California.

Achievements

• Malcolm Loughead was the founder of the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company along with his brother, Allan Loughead. This company went on to become the Lockheed Corporation. In 1918 he had designed and patented (no. 1, 288, 944) the Lockheed four-wheel hydraulic automobile braking system, which had been conceived in 1904; it was sold to Chrysler in 1922 for a million dollars.

Connections

Father:

John Loughead

Mother:

Flora Haines

Brother:

Allan Haines Lockheed

References

• Airplane Stories and Histories