AFTER 1936 it was a question of survival. An old and honorable firm had been overtaken by history. Cunningham might have allowed itself to be absorbed by a larger corporation. Its name would have conferred prestige. Or it might simply have closed its doors. The Cunninghams of the third generation, Augustine and Francis, and their cousin, James Dryer, had worked hard, and for the most part successfully, for more than a third of a century. They were no longer young, and it was plausible to argue that family firms were anachronistic, like carriages and the 'carriage trade.'

But the tradition of persistence was strong. Until the coming of the second World War, these men improvised. The firm made a variety of odd products: safety belts for aircraft, diving helmets, even belt buckles for Boy Scout uniforms. At times the payroll consisted of a small group of machinists and model-makers and a single night watchman.

With the coming of the second World War, Cunningham found a temporary role in defense production. The role was not new to the firm: during the Civil War it had made carriages for the Union armies; in the first World War, ambulances and automotive windlasses for observation balloons. More significant had been its experience of producing armored and tracked vehicles.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, the United States customarily neglected its military establishment between wars. Congress made appropriations grudgingly, and material was allowed to become outdated. Moreover, military thinking tended to become cautious. Generals and admirals were apt to envisage the next war as a repetition of the last. Forward-looking young career officers needed considerable courage to buck the trend; they needed, as well, convincing, tangible means of demonstrating their new ideas.

In the nineteen-twenties a small group of officers in the Cavalry branch of the Army foresaw that the next war would be mechanized and, unlike the first World War, one of maneuver. Chaffee, Patton, and Levin Campbell are the most familiar names.

In 1927, members of this group, armed with a small appropriation, arranged with Cunningham to produce experimental tanks and other armored vehicles. What they wanted most was a fast light tank. The lumbering Christies of the first World War had been suited to trench warfare, but they were too slow for a war of maneuver. Their function had been to batter holes in a heavily held line. Light tanks, in contrast, would make rapid encirclements. They would have to travel long distances rapidly and without breaking down.

Cunningham went to work, and in March, 1928, its first tank was tested at Aberdeen, Maryland. Equipped with a revolving turret and armed with a 37 millimeter cannon and a .30 caliber machine gun, it traveled twenty miles an hour, more than three times as fast as any tank that had been produced up to that time.

This was only a beginning. By 1933, Cunningham had developed a tank track, with light-weight rubber-block treads that allowed for greater speeds. In 1935 one of its tanks attained a cross-country speed of fifty miles an hour.

Cunningham also developed experimental half-tracks, cargo-carriers, armored cars, and a weapons carrier for a 75 millimeter howitzer. Then appropriations for this purpose ceased, and when the firm resumed defense production five years later, it was no longer equipped to make vehicles.

NINE-TON CALVARY TANK, MOUNTING A
37mm CANNON AND 30 CAL. MACHINE GUN

FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE T4 ARMOURED CAR, 1930

Nevertheless, it had made an important contribution. The strategy for the reconquest of North Africa and Europe in the second World War was predicated on the employment of fast-moving armor. Cunningham had helped to demonstrate its feasibility.

In 1940 James Dryer retired. The corporation was dissolved the next year and replaced by a partnership, with Augustine and Francis Cunningham as co-partners.

Their first big job in the second World War was making mounts for .30 and .50 caliber machine guns. A defense production force that had consisted of six men in January, 1940, expanded to 360 in two years, and Cunningham won the Army-Navy "E" award. It was not done easily. In five years of relative inactivity the plant had begun to slip into obsolescence; the Cunningham brothers and the employees who had stayed with the firm during the lean years lost track of time as they struggled to re-equip and re-tool. Survivors of those days at the factory still recall them with a sense of wonder at the intensity of the effort they made.

By 1943 Cunningham was employing eight hundred men in a variety of war jobs. Most of its work consisted of sub-contracts for other producers, notably gear boxes operated by servo-motors for controlling wing surfaces, canopies, gunners turrets, and tail surfaces in bomber planes. Aside from their military value, these had some significance for the firm; they were forerunners of its present electro-mechanical products.

When the war ended in 1945, Cunningham had the satisfaction of having made an honorable contribution, but essentially it was in the same situation it had been in during the late thirties. It lacked a product suited to its special talents.

Hopefully, in 1946 the firm produced small farm and garden machines: sickle-bar mowers, tractors, and rotary tillers. Fractional horse-power engines were in short supply at that time, existing machinery in the plant was suited to making them, and there was a post-war revival of interest in gardening; but by 1948 there were more than ninety other companies in the overcrowded field.

MODEL GA-36 LOW WING TRAINER, 1934

SIX-PLACE ALL-METAL CABIN BIPLANE, 1929

The next venture was more promising. Although trailer living had become a standard feature of the American scene, the internal arrangements of trailers tended to be clumsy and haphazard; apparently no manufacturer had given serious consideration to them. Cunningham made a survey and then designed and produced a complete line of plumbing fixtures for house-trailers.

By 1950 the company was enjoying a modest success, but an outsider might have been excused for regarding Cunningham as essentially a survivor from a more ample past, condemned to play a losing game: each success it scored would only attract the attention of larger competitors, better equipped to exploit the markets it had discovered. Already competition from mass-producers of plumbing fixtures was beginning to make itself felt, but even as this was happening Cunningham, almost by accident, found the product that it was suited by temperament and tradition to make.

This was the crossbar switch.