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| Donald Wills Douglas was born April 6, 1892. He designed and manufactured the Douglas World
Cruisers. After attending the Naval Academy he registered as the first student of Aeronautics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He graduated in 1914 and went to work designing aircraft for the Glenn
L. Martin Company. In 1920 he started his own aircraft company with $600 of borrowed money in back of a
barber shop. As a new and unknown company, Douglas believed he had to do something spectacular to establish
credibility. Knowing that Mitchell planned an Army non-stop flight across the United States, Douglas designed
the Cloudster, a rugged biplane carrying huge fuel reserves powered by a 400 H.P. Liberty engine. Mitchell
rejected the fledgling Douglas Aircraft proposal preferring to use Fokker, a proven manufacturer with many
years of experience and a long history of building outstanding airplanes for Germany during the war. With the
Army's rejection and no civilian market, Douglas Aviation turned to the Navy for survival. The Cloudster was
modified into the DT-1 for use with torpedoes, and eventually into the DT-2 with pontoons - which became very
popular as a float plane. With Navy contracts in hand for 80 aircraft, Douglas relocated to an abandoned movie
studio in Santa Monica in 1921. Fokker's transcontinental prototype, the T-2 proved barely up to the task and
it wasn't until 1923 that the flight was finally completed after several failed attempts. Disappointed with
Fokker for designing world flight airplanes for competing countries, Mitchell sent Erik Nelson back to Douglas
in 1923 to modify the original Cloudster for his world flight attempt. Risking the wrath of the Navy and the
loss of all his contracts, Douglas agreed to work with Erik Nelson to design and build the World Cruisers for
the Army, knowing that the survival of his company would depend upon its success. | ||
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