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84 [[photo - Emil Laird]] [[caption]] Matty Laird (84), and his well known manufacturing symbol (85), as it would appear on such racers as the Solution (86), winner of the 1930 Thompson Trophy. [[/caption]] [[image - L D AIRPLANES logo]] 85 [[image - drawing of "Solution" plane]] 86 Emil M. Laird Thomas Edison once observed, "There is a better way. Find it." Matty Laird has sought solutions all his life, and his quest has provided a career of distinguished airplane design and manufacturing. His beginning was typical of the teenage impetuousness of the early days of flight. In the fall of 1910 he built a pair of wings onto his bicycle and roared down a hill. On September 15, 1913, his engineering skills had advanced; he flew his first airplane at Cicero Field, Chicago. By the summer of 1915, another Laird, the Baby Biplane and its creator, was flying exhibitions. The following year, Laird obtained his first order for an aircraft of his own design. His star rose higher when Katherine Stinson, one of America's great and gracious early pilots, took a Laird plane on her historic 1917 tour of China and Japan. That plane is now on exhibit at The Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan. In 1919, with the aide of business associates, his company built the famous Laird Swallow, a craft that is considered to be the first commercial single engine plane manufactured after World War I. In the 1930s Laird was creating outstanding racers for men like "Speed" Holman and Edward Ballough. On Sept. 4, 1931, James H. Doolittle, in a Laird, established a new cross-country record from Burbank to Newark in 11 hours, 16 minutes. The name of the plane? The Super-Solution. [[image - propeller]] Emil M. Laird: born Chicago, Illinois, November 29, 1895. 35