The U-21 designation first appeared in 1949 on Henry J. Kaiser's ALUMINUM FIRST.
Henry J, unfortunately, knew just enough about hydroplane design to be dangerous.
The industrialist founder of Kaiser Permanente and his son Edgar loved racing boats at Lake Tahoe, and in 1955 their boat’s heart was a 24-cylinder Allison V-3420 capable of putting out a staggering 2,885 horsepower.
For comparison, the triple-expansion steam engines that powered Kaiser's World War II Liberty ships put out 2,500 horsepower.
This boat began as Henry J. Kaiser’s Scooter, powered by two powerful Cadillac engines and described as a “real plush boat.” But when Scooter was smoked by a “little kid with a B-class hydro” Henry resolved to amp it up.
After World War II, many kinds of military airplane engines were readily available, but this was an experimental design built by General Motors, a Frankensteinian jam-up of a two Allison V-1710 12-cylinder engines with a common crankcase.
One challenge was the single drive shaft, because the torque was enormous. After several shafts broke, Kaiser ordered one made out of titanium.
this beast never performed as hoped. She threw propellers, sank six times, was derisively nicknamed "the submarine," and never won a race.
The Kaisers sold her in 1957 to Stanley Adams and John Owsley for $4,500 and she was trailered to Pasco, Wash. The sale include numerous spare parts, including 72 pistons, 18 connecting rods, and an incomplete second engine. The external oil tank was pulled from a P-51 Mustang.
Rich people race stuff, and Lou Fageol was racing an 800hp boat, "So Long"
Henry J Kaiser Jr was racing the Hornet II
in the July 1938 Lake Tahoe race https://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/510/files/Mercury_Interpretive_Plan_1.pdf
Lou’s father, Frank Fageol, was the head of the Fageol Twin Coach Company, which manufactured buses. After the war, Lou became President of the company and, together with Dan Arena, started the 7-Litre Class. The engine of choice in the 7-Litre Class was the 404 cubic inch Fageol bus engine.
With Fageol at the wheel, Slo-mo became the first craft in history to average 100 miles per hour in a heat of competition around a closed (5-nautical mile) course. it was 1950
In winning the 1951 Gold Cup, Lou became but the third competitor in history to capture both of power boat racing’s crown jewels: The Harmsworth Trophy and the Gold Cup. The two previous double champions were Fred Burnham and Gar Wood.
The result was the Kai won two of four races and nearly missed winning the National High Point Championship.
Kaiser deserves credit equal to anyone with stars on their shoulders when it comes to winning World War II for the Allies. He started out in Portland, Oregon, before setting up a massive network of shipyards in Richmond, California. The enormous yard was the first “integrated” fabrication facility on the West Coast, as Kaiser built his own steel mill there, taking a page from Henry Ford’s playbook when he built the sprawling River Rouge complex.
Welsch continued to race Hawaii Kai for Kaiser in 1957, winning the High Point Championship by sweeping the last five races of the year. After the season Hawaii Kai set a mile straightaway record of 187 m.p.h. including a run through the kilometer trap at 200 m.p.h. The team then retired. However, in the ten years of Kaiser participation in Unlimited racing, they never won a Gold Cup. This factor led to a Kai comeback for the 1958 Gold Cup. In the short period of three weeks a winter's work was done and the Hawaii Kai III became Gold Cup champion, scoring a perfect 2000 points. This was Kaiser's last hurrah.
If you want to look up other racers and owners, see http://hydroplanehistory.com/personalities/
in 1949 Kaiser's boat, designed to go 160 to 180 mph, was to
be piloted by the famous bandleader and speedboat racer, Guy Lombardo.
Kaiser maintained a summer home at Lake Placid, where he pursued racing with his neighbor and friend band leader Guy Lombardo.
In 1949 the Ticonderoga Sentinel noted: “For the second successive week end, Henry J. Kaiser has visited Lake Placid to check on the progress of his two big speed boats. Guy Lombardo also appeared here Saturday to try out the massive 32-foot Aluminum First, with which he will try to break the world’s mile straightaway record in the time trials.”
For the 1949 Harnsworth
International Speed Boat Race, first prize was a four-door Chrysler sedan.
A bit of history of Kaiser, which I've never looked into:
Though he admitted never having seen a ship launched previously, Kaiser did the impossible, building Liberty and Victory ships on an assembly line basis, something never previously attempted. To speed construction, Kaiser specified that the ships be welded together from steel sheet rather than using time-consuming hot rivets. To the astonishment of many, it worked. Kaiser employees (including hundreds of women) sent 1,490 ships down the Richmond ways through the end of the war, providing crucial ocean transport for war matériel as the invasion of Europe drew closer. In another advance, their hulls served as the basis for some of the U.S. Navy’s first light aircraft carriers.
demand for cars would explode after World War II ended. This, of course, became Kaiser-Frazer, formed in 1945 after Kaiser had not-too-subtly teased the public about getting into the car business. The actual partnership between the men was unconventional, Kaiser being the do-it-all business mogul and Joseph Frazer, a former protégé of Walter P. Chrysler who had run Willys-Overland before buying a controlling interested in the staggering brand that was Graham-Paige, which gave the new firm its first dedicated assembly facility in Detroit. That changed soon as Kaiser took over the gigantic assembly plant at Willow Run, Michigan, where Henry Ford had been building B-24 Liberator bombers during the war.
Joseph Frazer left the company in 1953, the same year that the now-redubbed Kaiser Motors acquired Jeep from the remnants of Willys-Overland.
Kaiser did continue to build his cars successfully for some time thereafter in venues that ranged from Argentina and Brazil to Israel. The firm kept manufacturing Jeeps as Kaiser, before his death in 1967, contemplated leaving the auto business entirely. The deal that sold Jeep to American Motors was consummated in 1970. In addition to his civil engineering triumphs, Kaiser’s greatest legacy is Kaiser Permanente, the health-care consortium that he founded for his workers in 1945. It grew by the 21st century to become the largest managed-care provider in the United States.
It’s not commonly known that years earlier, at the end of 1942, Henry J. Kaiser paid Bucky Fuller to engineer and produce a ¼ scale model Dymaxion, to be completed in early 1943. At that time Henry Kaiser was committed to various wartime vehicle projects under federal support, including building cargo ships and “baby flat top” aircraft carriers, prototyping lightweight jeeps, and even experimenting with giant flying wings. So it should come as no surprise that, with the support of the Board of Economic Warfare (on which Fuller served as staffmember), he explored the advantages of Fuller’s Dymaxion.
demand for cars would explode after World War II ended. This, of course, became Kaiser-Frazer, formed in 1945 after Kaiser had not-too-subtly teased the public about getting into the car business. The actual partnership between the men was unconventional, Kaiser being the do-it-all business mogul and Joseph Frazer, a former protégé of Walter P. Chrysler who had run Willys-Overland before buying a controlling interested in the staggering brand that was Graham-Paige, which gave the new firm its first dedicated assembly facility in Detroit. That changed soon as Kaiser took over the gigantic assembly plant at Willow Run, Michigan, where Henry Ford had been building B-24 Liberator bombers during the war.
Joseph Frazer left the company in 1953, the same year that the now-redubbed Kaiser Motors acquired Jeep from the remnants of Willys-Overland.
Kaiser did continue to build his cars successfully for some time thereafter in venues that ranged from Argentina and Brazil to Israel. The firm kept manufacturing Jeeps as Kaiser, before his death in 1967, contemplated leaving the auto business entirely. The deal that sold Jeep to American Motors was consummated in 1970. In addition to his civil engineering triumphs, Kaiser’s greatest legacy is Kaiser Permanente, the health-care consortium that he founded for his workers in 1945. It grew by the 21st century to become the largest managed-care provider in the United States.
It’s not commonly known that years earlier, at the end of 1942, Henry J. Kaiser paid Bucky Fuller to engineer and produce a ¼ scale model Dymaxion, to be completed in early 1943. At that time Henry Kaiser was committed to various wartime vehicle projects under federal support, including building cargo ships and “baby flat top” aircraft carriers, prototyping lightweight jeeps, and even experimenting with giant flying wings. So it should come as no surprise that, with the support of the Board of Economic Warfare (on which Fuller served as staffmember), he explored the advantages of Fuller’s Dymaxion.
Re: homes and such
A retreat in Lake Tahoe,
A summer place in Lake Placid
The shipyards of Richmond Ca, in San Francisco bay,
A home in Lafayette Ca, which is nearby San Francisco Bay, and where they started a school for nurses
the Kaiser Foundation School of Nursing,
the Oakland Medical Center is commemorating the school and its graduates at the Oakland site because the new facility campus encompasses the site of the old hotel that served as the school for nearly 30 years.At the end of World War II when the health plan opened to the public, qualified nurses were in short supply. Kaiser Foundation established the nursing school in 1947 to train more nurses and help alleviate the shortage.
With approval from the California Board of Nurse Examiners, Henry J. Kaiser and founding physician Sidney Garfield, MD, purchased the Piedmont Hotel at 3451 Piedmont, a block away from the hospital.
The accredited Permanente School of Nursing graduated its first class in 1950 and offered tuition-free education and training for its first seven years. In 1953 the name of the school was changed to Kaiser Foundation School of Nursing
What the hell is the word Permanente? and what does it have to do with Kaiser? Well, it's his cement co.
Kaiser claimed he could cut loading and unloading times by as much as 80 percent by pumping bulk, dry cement from ship holds into storage silos in Honolulu. Cynics said the cement would be ruined, but Kaiser guaranteed the product “…from our San José plant to the wheelbarrow in Hawaii.”
In October 1940, Kaiser purchased an aging freighter (the Ancon) from the Panama Canal Company and converted it to a bulk cement carrier. The ship went into service as the Permanente in March 1941 under contract with the U.S. Navy.
The Permanente was moored at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. The ship was not damaged and had already offloaded its holds when the attack came. Within a few days the silos holding the offloaded cement were emptied for the emergency rebuild of the harbor.
Kaiser built a cement plant on Oahu in the 1950s.
At age 84, Kaiser went on to build a new empire in Hawaii, including the elaborate Hawaiian Village hotel complex in Waikiki (now owned by Hilton) and Honolulu’s Hawaii Kai residential community. Kaiser married Alyce after the death of his first wife, and after Kaiser’s funeral, she moved to Greece. She sold all of the properties she shared with Henry.
So he, in essence, gave up close to $200 million of his own shares in Kaiser Aluminum and other companies to repay Kaiser Motors’ debts and make its shareholders whole. Contrast this with Studebaker. When Studebaker shuttered its auto operations in South Bend, Indiana, the company did not fund its pension liabilities, costing Studebaker employees and retirees their retirements.
Nice history of Kaiser here. There's a lot I didn't know about.
ReplyDeletethank you! Me too! Nearly all of it was a revelation to me. I really did that the nurses school was free!
DeleteOnce again, you treat us to fine history. Thanks.
ReplyDelete