Glenn L. Martin Company

• 1. Introduction

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  The Glenn L. Martin Company once built the planes that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, and then turned around and sent probes to Saturn. Founded on the 16th of August, 1912, by Glenn Luther Martin, the company spent nearly half a century at the center of American military and aerospace ambition. It outlasted two world wars, helped win one of them decisively, and then reinvented itself entirely for the Space Age. Along the way, it trained or employed some of the most consequential figures in aviation history. Who were they? What did Martin build that nobody else could? And how does a company that once made biplanes end up putting a spacecraft in orbit around Saturn?

• 2. First Blood and Biplane Bombers

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  In 1913, a single Martin Pusher biplane purchased in Los Angeles by Mexican insurgents from the state of Sonora became the instrument of the first known air-to-naval bombing runs in history. The aircraft, shipped on the 5th of May, 1913, through five crates via Wells Fargo Express to Tucson, Arizona, was then smuggled across the border into the town of Naco, Sonora. The insurgents named it the Sonora, added a second seat for a bomber position, and armed it with rudimentary three-inch pipe bombs. No military doctrine existed for what they were about to attempt.

  Glenn Martin's early work for the Netherlands East Indies followed, with the first deliveries flying on the 6th of November, 1915. His real breakthrough with the American military came with the MB-1 bomber, ordered by the U.S. Army on the 17th of January, 1918. It entered service after World War I had already ended. The follow-up MB-2 fared better in terms of orders; the Army bought 20, with the first five designated under the company name and the remaining 15 as the NBS-1. The War Department then ordered 110 more but stripped Martin of the production rights, putting the contract out to lower bidders: Curtiss received 50, L.W.F. Engineering received 35, and Aeromarine received 25. Despite losing that revenue, the MB-2 design remained the Air Service's only standard bomber until 1930, operating across seven squadrons in Virginia, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

• 3. Flying Boats and the China Clippers

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  Martin moved its headquarters from Cleveland, Ohio, to Middle River, Maryland, northeast of Baltimore, in 1929, after selling the Cleveland plant. The Maryland facility became home to some of the company's most celebrated peacetime work. During the 1930s, Martin built flying boats for the U.S. Navy and developed the Martin B-10, an innovative twin-engined monoplane bomber for the Army that represented a genuine leap in speed and range over its predecessors.

  The company also produced the M-130 China Clipper flying boats used by Pan American Airways on its transpacific route from San Francisco to the Philippines. Only three of those massive four-engine flying boats were built, and they opened a new era in long-distance commercial aviation. Glenn Martin's younger cousin Jonathan "Jack" Martin departed the company during this period, remaining in Ohio to eventually establish what became the Martin Collier Phillips Corporation.

• 4. The Arsenal of World War II

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  Martin ranked 14th among all U.S. corporations in the total value of wartime production contracts during World War II. The company's most celebrated aircraft from those years included the B-26 Marauder and A-22 Maryland bombers, as well as the PBM Mariner and JRM Mars flying boats. The Mariner and Mars saw wide service in air-sea rescue, anti-submarine patrols, and transport roles.

  A 1941 film produced by the Office for Emergency Management, titled Bomber, was shot inside the Martin facility in Baltimore and documented the B-26's production line. The company built 5,288 B-26 Marauders in total. At its dedicated bomber plant just south of Omaha at Offutt Field in Nebraska, Martin also assembled 531 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses. Among those B-29s were all of the Silverplate aircraft, the specially modified planes designed to carry atomic weapons. Two of them, Enola Gay and Bockscar, dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

• 5. Rockets, Missiles, and the Space Age

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  After the war, the Martin Company moved aggressively beyond conventional aircraft. It produced the Vanguard rocket as part of Project Vanguard, notable for being the first American orbital launch vehicle designed from scratch as a space rocket rather than adapted from a ballistic missile. The company also designed and built the Titan I and the LGM-25C Titan II intercontinental ballistic missiles. Martin Company of Orlando, Florida, served as the prime contractor for the Army's Pershing missile.

  Martin was one of only two finalists when NASA sought a contractor for the command and service modules of the Apollo Program. NASA awarded those contracts to North American Aviation Corporation instead. Martin then channeled its energy into a series of larger booster rockets: the Titan III family, which produced over 100 rockets including the Titan IIIA, the Titan IIIC, and the Titan IIIE. Those rockets launched both Voyager probes toward the outer planets, both Viking probes to Mars, and both Helios probes into solar orbits closer to the Sun than Mercury. When the U.S. Air Force needed a booster capable of lifting heavier payloads than either the Titan IIIE or the Space Shuttle, Martin answered with the Titan IV. At the time it entered service, the Titan IV could carry a heavier payload to orbit than any other rocket in production. One Titan IV, fitted with a Centaur upper stage, launched the Cassini probe toward Saturn in 1997. Cassini orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, transmitting scientific data back across billions of miles. Production of the Titan IV halted in 2004.

• 6. A School for American Aviation

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  Beyond its own products, the Glenn L. Martin Company functioned as an incubator for the men who went on to shape American aerospace. Donald Douglas, who founded Douglas Aircraft and whose lineage runs through to Boeing today, worked there. Lawrence Dale Bell founded Bell Aircraft, now Bell Helicopter, after leaving. James S. McDonnell went on to found McDonnell Aircraft, which eventually merged with Douglas to form McDonnell Douglas, itself later absorbed into Boeing.

  J.H. "Dutch" Kindleberger became CEO and chairman of North American Aviation. Hans Multhopp developed concepts that were later used in NASA's Space Shuttle design. Dandridge M. Cole moved on to General Electric as an aerospace engineer. Glenn Martin also personally taught William Boeing how to fly and sold him his first airplane. The company's Plant No. 2 was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2023, the physical remnant of a facility that shaped who built American aircraft for generations.

• 7. Mergers and a Long Legacy

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  On the 22nd of April, 1957, the company officially changed its name to the Martin Company. Four years later, in 1961, it merged with American-Marietta Corporation, a manufacturer of chemical products and construction materials, to form the Martin Marietta Corporation. By 1995, Martin Marietta had become the nation's third-largest defense contractor. That year it merged with Lockheed Corporation, then the second-largest, to form Lockheed Martin Corporation, which became the largest defense company in the world. The thread running from Glenn Martin's Santa Ana workshop in 1912 to the present-day Lockheed Martin is unbroken, passing through every major conflict and technological leap of the twentieth century, and leaving in orbit probes still studied by scientists today.