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[[image No. 61 - black & white photograph of Bill Gwinn in engine shop]]

[[image No. 62 - black & white photograph of Bill Gwinn in front the Northrop XA-17]]

[[caption]] Bill Gwinn has worked with four decades of engine manufacturing, from current super jets, back in time to famed Wasp engine, shown in the Twin Wasp Junior design of the Northrop XA-17 (62), a plane of the late 1930s, and not a World War II production item. [[/caption]]

William Persons Gwinn

"I just wanted to get into the business," Bill Gwinn said. So he came to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1927, and filled out a form at Pratt and Whitney Aircraft Company, a new outfit that was building engines. P&W, founded in 1925, looked worthwhile - after all they had expanded twice, and had nearly 250 people on the payroll. Gwinn was asked what he could do - not much, he said, for he hadn't been to college. He was hired as a stock boy, and took a room at the YMCA.

Today as president of United Aircraft Corporation, of which Pratt and Whitney is a division, Gwinn oversees more than 70,000 employees and an industrial complex that is one of the world's most important partners in our aerospace century. (More than 80 airlines throughout the world use P&W jet engines.)

Gwinn has spent his business life with the corporation he heads. Once he worked his way out of the stock room, he moved into the service department, then spent ten years in sales, fie as the division's West Coast representative. At the age of 36, he was elected the division's general manager, and in 1946 was named vice president of United Aircraft. He was elected president at 49, still in time to think about the future! "In the year 2,000," Gwinn foretells, "I don't think it out of the real of possibility to see transportation of goods and people by rocket."

[[image - small drawing of a propeller]]

William Persons Gwinn: born New York City, September 22, 1907.