Dowty Equipment
Dowty Equipment Ltd, aircraft components, of Cheltenham
In 1931 George Dowty set up the Aircraft Components Co, his own one-man company while still employed at Gloster Aircraft Co. This was was a shell company with no staff, capital and operated from an accommodation address in London.
1931 On the 10th March he received his first order from the Civilian Aircraft Co of Hull but this company went bankrupt before they paid for the struts. He resigned from the Gloster Aircraft Co at the end of June. In May he received his first order for six internally sprung undercarriage wheels, worth £1500, from Kawasaki in Japan, to fit Dowty internally sprung undercarriage wheels to its Type 92 aircraft. With one order and no factory, using subcontract manufacture and the help in the evenings of two friends, Dowty designed, ordered, and assembled two of his wheels and within nine weeks shipped them to Japan, being paid on shipment. He established premises at 10 Lansdown Terrace Lane in Cheltenham. Dowty resigned from the Gloster Aircraft Co at the end of June.
He recruited his first two employees in November 1931.
A major breakthrough occurred in 1934 when he offered H. P. Folland at Gloster a pair of oleostruts of new design for the Gloster Gauntlet aircraft. This gave him his first large production order and was followed by a similar order for the Gladiator. Dowty leased a factory and bought Arle Court, Cheltenham.
1936 The firm went public with George Dowty holding only a small percentage of the equity. Thanks to the concurrent technical revolution in aircraft design to include retractable undercarriages, brakes, and flaps, his work and knowledge expanded rapidly.
1940 Name of the company changed to Dowty Equipment Ltd[1].
WWII During the Second World War Dowty's inventive and creative engineer's mind was fully unleashed. Twenty-eight different types of aircraft were fitted with Dowty equipment, which included 12,900 sets for the Hurricane, over 90,000 other undercarriage units, and more than a million hydraulic units. Plants were set up throughout Britain and in Canada and the USA.
After the Second World War, Dowty applied his new approaches to hydraulics to wider fields—motorcycle forks, hydraulic pit props and a prime support system, industrial pumps, and hydraulic control systems.
By 1952 Subsidiary companies included Dowty Seals, Ltd., Dowty Auto Units, Ltd., Dowty Mining Equipment, Ltd., Dowty Fuel Systems, Ltd., The New Mendip Engineering Company, Ltd., Coventry Precision, Ltd., Dowty Equipment of Canada, Ltd., Dowty Corporation in the United States, and Dowty Equipment (Australia) Pty., Ltd.
1954 Dowty Group was established as a holding company[2] to hold the shares in Dowty Equipment; the Canadian operation generated 50 per cent of the total turnover.
1959 Rotol Airscrews was acquired and merged with Dowty Equipment to become Dowty Rotol
1960 Advert for Roofmaster fully mechanised hydraulic roof support by Dowty Mining Equipment of Ashchurch
See Also
Sources of Information
- The Dowty Story by L. T. C. Rolt. Published 1962
- AA. [1] Image coutesy of Aviation Ancestry