Glenn L. Martin - He Put America in the Air

Glenn L. Martin in his biplane, 1911

Out in Macksburg, Iowa, the wind has an attitude. It never really stops; it just slides across the fields, looking for something to push around. It found Glenn L. Martin in the 1880s—a skinny kid with quiet eyes and a mind that hummed louder than the weather.

The Martins didn’t spend much time in Iowa. They headed south to Kansas, where the land stretched flat and the wind came in wide, hard, and honest. Glenn liked it that way. The wind was a teacher. It made things move. It refused to quit.

He started small—building kites in the kitchen. He sold them for a quarter each, which was exactly what it cost to make another one. His mother, Minta, stitched the sails while he made a mess of her flour bin. “She thought I was curious,” he said later. “Not crazy.”

He was already both.

Glenn L. Martin in 1916

Martin liked motion, not theory. He didn’t write about flight—he chased it. He watched the wind bully wheat fields and thought maybe it could be harnessed, maybe it could be built into something that lifted. When people later asked him how he got into aviation, he shrugged: “You can’t learn anything sitting still. You’ve got to make something move.”

By the time he hit his twenties, the Wright brothers were already legends. That didn’t matter. Martin figured if two bicycle mechanics from Ohio could get off the ground, so could a kid from Kansas. He pored over newspaper photos of their machines, guessed at what the blueprints might’ve looked like, and went to work.

His first airplane came apart on takeoff. His second managed a few seconds of flight before the ground decided otherwise. He climbed out, dusted himself off, and built a third.

“I didn’t know how to fly,” he said later. “So I made a machine and taught myself.”

Flying in those days was less an art than an act of faith. The planes were made of wood and linen. Engines sputtered, wings snapped, pilots prayed. Martin crashed, fixed what broke, and flew again. The crowds called it barnstorming. He called it testing. “Every flight told you something,” he said. “If you lived through it, you learned.” If you didn’t, well—that was just part of the game.

Then came 1912. Martin climbed into a homemade seaplane in Newport Bay, California, pointed it toward Catalina Island, and took off over open water. Sixty-eight miles of blue sky and doubt. Reporters called it suicide. Martin called it Tuesday. He made it there and back, hauling a small pouch of mail to prove it could be done—the first over-water airmail in the country.

After that, he set up shop in Los Angeles in an abandoned church. The pews came out; the engines went in. His mother sewed the fabric for the wings. Neighbors peeked through the doors at the clatter of hammers and the smell of gasoline. “A church for flying machines,” one said. They weren’t wrong.

Glenn L. Martin and Lynn C. Buxton in Los Angeles, 1928.

The Glenn L. Martin Company grew fast. His airplanes stayed in the air longer than most, and that grabbed the Army’s attention. By 1916, it was big enough to merge with the Wright Company. It lasted a year. “Too many people talking, not enough building,” Martin said, and walked away.

He opened a new factory in Cleveland in 1917, just as America joined the war. The Army needed bombers. Martin built them. His MB-1 was all business—sturdy, fast, reliable. “There’s no trick to building airplanes,” he said. “The trick is to make them work.”

When the war ended, he moved his operation to Maryland and built a factory so big it swallowed the horizon and a town to keep it running. Middle River became his private experiment in industry and order. The place buzzed with life, sparks, and the smell of oil. Workers said you could tell Martin had been on the floor by the scent of pipe smoke and the sound of wrenches hitting metal.

In 1934, the Martin M-130 “China Clipper”—took off across the Pacific for Pan American Airways. It carried mail, passengers, and the idea that the world was smaller than everyone thought. “It’s a big ocean,” one pilot said, “but Martin built us something that could skip across it like a stone.”

The B-10 bomber came next. All metal, sleek nose, enclosed cockpit. It looked like the future and flew like it, too. The Army called it “the first modern warplane.” The Collier Trophy followed, along with a flood of contracts.

Then came World War II, and Middle River exploded into a city of sweat and light. Fifty thousand workers built planes in shifts, day and night. B-26 Marauders. PBM Mariners. Rivets and coffee, smoke and thunder. “We build them fast,” one worker said, “but we build them right. Mr. Martin wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Martin walked the floor, sleeves rolled, pipe clamped between his teeth. “Everyone of you,” he told them, “is part of this machine. Not just the airplanes—the whole thing.”

When peace came, he turned his eyes upward again. Rockets. Missiles. Space. “The only real frontier left,” he said, “is up.”

Glenn L. Martin died in 1955. He didn’t live to see his rockets launch, but they did—brighter and louder than anything he could’ve imagined. His company transformed into Martin Marietta, then Lockheed Martin—and is still leading the way into space.