circa 1893-1949
Bill Swanson. "Nautical Quarterly" 1985
John Jacob Astor owned a pair of them. Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, attending a naval review in New York in 1893, wanted one so badly he insisted on buying the one already ordered by the Captain of the newly launched cruiser USS New York, who then had to wait for a new one. When the Grand Duke's cousin, Czar Nicholas II, saw Alexander's, he liked it so much he bought one too. Admiral Dewey owned one, and so did Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild. Charles Lindbergh had one customized for his honeymoon. Actors Wallace Beery and Reginald Denny each had one, as did comedian Ed Wynn. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison kept theirs at their adjoining Florida estates. John F. Kennedy got his "used" and it nearly cost him his life. Lt. John Bulkley saved the hide of General Douglas MacArthur in one, and later won the Congressional Medal of Honor with it.
Not only did Elco set the pace in design and construction, it pioneered marketing, sales, advertising, and customer-service techniques that are taken for granted today.
The special thing that each of these men owned or operated a boat built by Elco, the Electric Launch Company, one of the world's premier builders of power boats. In its stellar 57 years of boatbuilding, Elco produced more than 6000 pleasure boats and more than 1500 military vessels, from the 55 electric launches introduced to the world at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, to the 399 PT boats of World War II.
There were boatbuilders who built faster boats- although Elco built an early "planing" hull, the Elcoplane Bug, in 1911- and there were boatbuilders who built larger boats. A few companies built more expensive boats, and many companies built cheaper boats. But pound for pound and dollar for dollar, nobody built boats like Elco. Elco's two crowning achievements were its WW 1 production of 550 80' sub-chasing "motor launches" for the British Admiralty in 488 working days, and the construction of 399 PT boats- one every sixty hours- for the U.S. Navy ans for Allied navies in World War 2.
Many Elco customers put their prized possessions in winter storage at the Elco yard in Bayonne, New Jersey, where full winterizing and other services were available. Need to ship your new 60-footer to Lake Tahoe? Elco arranged shipment of yachts almost anywhere in the world, by freighter, by specially equipped railroad car, or on their own bottoms.
Although Elco advertised heavily in the voting magazines, its reputation for service and discretion was spread by word of mouth among the very wealthy. Well-heeled customers asked for custom work, and they got it: Czar Nicholas II ordered his 37' gig's oak hull sheathed in brass. Velvet carpets in the cockpit were required to soothe Romanov feet, and no royal buttock could sit in a wicker chair that wasn't first upholstered in Russian leather. It was unthinkable for a peasant to share the Czar's cockpit, so two small circular walls were installed fore and aft for the two crewmen aboard the gig. In a later era, the H.J. Heinz family requested that a logo representing a jar of one of their 57 varieties of pickles adorn each side of the false smoke stack of their Elco. Insurance executive George Stoner needed a red brick fireplace in the main salon of his 57' deckhouse cruiser. Elco, as always, obliged.
When Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic in May of 1927, he became overnight "the most famous man in the world," The Lone Eagle spent much of his time flying over water, about which he was ignorant, and he decided to learn something about seamanship. He chartered a 38' cruiser from Elco in 1928, and spent the summer learning how to maneuver a powerboat, with Elco executives as instructors. The following winter, Lindbergh met his bride-to-be, Anne Morrow, and set a secret wedding date for May 29, 1929. He approached his friends at Elco, advised them of his secret plans, and bought a 38' cruiser in the condition that his purchase be kept confidential. Elco's chief designer, Glenville S. Tremaine, drew up a modified aft-cabin arrangement with a double berth in lieu of the standard pair of single berths. The alterations were made secretly, and Elco General Manager Irwin Chase delivered the completed boat, named Mouette, to a deserted stretch of beach on Long Island on the evening of the wedding. That night, the Lindberghs came aboard and then "disappeared" for their honeymoon. Only a few Elco executives knew how they had made their escape from the press and the public.
Long after the Lindberghs sold their Elco, it was acquired by a New York advertising executive, who renamed the boat Abel Hand. In the early 1970s, he had Abel Hand restored at Dutch Wharf Boatyard in Branford, Connecticut, at a reported cost of $150,000. Lindbergh had only paid $10,750 for her, brand spanking new. The ad exec's motive was simple: he remembered going into New York with his father diring the 1920s and 1930s and standing at the window of the Port Elco showroom dreaming about owning an Elco someday. Such was- and is- the magic of these boats. Today, Abel Hand is cruising Michigan waters, and is owned by a descendant of pharmaceutical magnate Eli Lilly.
The extended famly of financier Bernard Baruch owned five big Elco cruisers at the same time, and the whole Baruch clan- aunts and uncles, children, brothers and sisters- went cruising together in their fleet. Had their Elcos been equipped with a time machine- one of the few pieces of equipment Elco was unable to provide- one wonders what other Elco customers they might have encountered on their voyages. Fellow philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, perhaps? The several members of Alfred DuPont's family? (Alfred liked to experiment with new types of paint on the engineroom sole of his Elco.) Distillery tycoon Hiram Walker or textile king George Drexel? Mrs. George Westinghouse, out for a spin in her launch? Lord Aberdeen, taking an afternoon of as Governor general of Canada? Perhaps ralph Waldo Emerson, Jr., with one eye on the helm and the other in one of his father's books? What a splendid raft-up they could have assembled. Too bad the DeBeers family couldn't attend- they kept their Elco near their diamond mines in Kimberly, South Africa.
The launches made 66,975 trips during the six and a half months of the exposition, carrying 1,026,346 passengers 200,925 miles and earning $314,000 for the World's Fair organizers.
Elco's corporate origins were something of a mystery. Few records from the early days deal with who founded Elco and who the key employees were. The first papers of incorporation were filed on March 12, 1892, in Trenton, New Jersey, by Philadelphians John Parker and Ralph Gihon, and John Holloway of Camden, under the name Electric Launch and Navigation Company. Then, on November 10, 1892, the General Electric Launch and Navigation Company was incorporated. The founders of this firm included Henry R. Weston, who was the attorney for the first filing on March 12. The two companies existed simultaneously and appeared to have had overlapping ownership. The personnel are unknown.
The event that sparked these incorporations may have been a small notice that appeared in Thomas Fleming Day's monthly magazine Rudder, Sail, and Paddle (later to become Rudder magazine). In February, 1892, Rudder noted that "Launch and boat builders are requested to send to Chief Burnham, Marine Division, Transportation Exhibits Department, World's Fair, Chicago, bids for suppying fifty 34-foot boats to be propelled by power of any description, and to be able to carry thirty people. Lieut. A.C. Baker, U.S. Navy, has been placed in charge of the marine division of the transportation exhibits department." Chief Burnham and Lieutenant Baker scheduled demonstrations for four companies in July of 1892. Willard & Co. and Meeker & Co. each brought a steam launch, while the Columbian Launch Company and the new Electric Launch & Navigation Company demonstrated electric-drive launches. According to Scientific American (then a weekly magazine), Columbian's Volta was thought to be superior to the others, including Electric Launch's Electra.
Nevertheless, Electric Launch & Navigation Company won a contract to supply 55 electronic launches, each 36' long, to the Chicago exposition. As Rudder noted, these launches were designed by Charles Mosher, partner of William Gardner, and apparently were constructed under Mosher's supervision by Charles Seabury & Co. of Nyack, New York, as well as by the Racine Hardware Mfg. Co. of Racine, Wisconsin. What role the Electric Launch & Navigation Company played in this isn't clear; a good guess is that Elco acted as the general contractor, farming out the design work to Mosher and the construction to Seabury and Racine. These electric launches were a resounding success, and they established Elco's reputation. The launches made 66,975 trips during the six and a half months of the exposition, carrying 1,026,346 passengers 200,925 miles and earning $314,000 for the World's Fair organizers. Not bad for a company that incorporated a month after the first bids were requested, and which had no plant, no equipment, no staff of boatbuilders or designers, and no track record.
A year and a half after the world's fair closed, the General Electric Launch Company- whose role in the exposition is still unknown- filed papers to change its name to the "World's Fair Electric Launch Company." Henry Weston, attorney for the Electric Launch and Navigation Co. , and a founding partner of the General Electric/World's Fair Launch Co., signed the papers, as did several other executives who had a leg in each camp. Five months later, World's Fair Electric Launch company changed its name back to General Electric Launch Company. Two months later, on January 25, 1895, the firm solved its identity crisis by changing its name one last time- to the Electric Launch Company. Simultaneously, the stockholders of the initial firm- the Electric launch & Navigation Company- voted to dissolve their corporation. At last there existed a single corporate entity, and it existed under the name it kept for the next half century.
To advance this story, we must first go back to 1880, when a Philadelphian named William Woodnut Griscom received a patent for a small electric motor intended for sewing machines. Griscom then created the Electro Dynamic Corp. to manufacture those motors, along with a growing variety of products from voltmeters to switchboards to storage batteries, as well as lighting systems and steering gear for ships. Griscom's company might have rivaled Westinghouse or General Electric had not a series of disasters struck. One of his subsidiaries went bankrupt, an electric power station that griscom built in Haverford in Philadelphia burned down, and Griscom himself was killed in a hunting accident in 1897. At the time of his death, Griscom was negotiating the sale of patent rights for his electric motor with Isaac Leopold Rice, the man who put together the foundations of an empire today known as the General Dynamics Corporation, builder of nuclear submarines and the world's largest defense contractor.
Rice was born in Bavaria, came to the United States with his family when he was six years old, and graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1880. In 1886 he became a railroad corporation lawyer during the years of financial turmoil that led to the Depression of 1892 and the Panic of 1893, and helped reorganize the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad after its 1893 bankruptcy. Rice was a chess expert, and is remembered today as the inventor of the Rice Gambit chess opening. In addition to his other pursuits, Rice dabbled in electrical inventions. In 1888 he acquired the patent rights for Clement Paysen's "chloride accumulator" battery- the electric storage battery as we know it today- and he founded the Electric Storage Battery Company (later known as Exide) in Philadelphia. Rice immediately plunged into a series of "patent wars" with other battery manufacturers until, by 1897, he held a monopoly on all battery manufacturing in the United States. The only patent Rice needed to maintain a lock on battery-powered transportation was Griscom's "master patent" on the electric motor. Rice had offered Griscom a million dollars in cash for those patent rights, and negotiations were in progress when Griscom died in the hunting accident. So, instead of buying Griscom's patent rights, Rice bought the entire Electro Dynamic Company from Griscom's heirs.
Rice's battery company had been selling batteries to the Electric Launch Company, and Griscom's Electro Dynamic (now owned by Rice) had been selling them motors. Rice purchased the Electric Launch Company- presumably from the group of investors mentioned earlier- and merged it, on February 7, 1899, with another recent acquisition, the famous Holland Torpedo Boat Company, developers of America's first submarines. Electro Dynamic Co., Electric Storage Battery Co., Electric Launch Co., and the Holland firm were then consolidated into the Electric Boat Company. This was the birth of General Dynamics (renamed in 1952).
The man who managed Elco for Rice was Henry R. Sutphen, a minister's son from Morristown, New Jersey, and an electrician by trade. It appears Sutphen joined Elco as early as 1892, and may have been the brains behind the World's Fair project. By 1902, Sutphen's list of Elco customers included Admiral Dewey, the two Romanovs, Mrs. Westinghouse, Hiram Walker, John Jacob Astor, Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild, and a host of other luminaries. In April, 1902, Sutphen was named General Manager, and in June, 1904, he became a director of the Electric Boat Co. In 1905, Rice named him a vice president and put him in charge of the Elco division.
In 1906, Sutphen obtained a contract- possibly through the assistance of Rice's Electric Boat Company contacts in Washington, DC- to build the first six of an eventual 120 self-bailing, self-righting 34' lifeboats for the Life Saving Service (later to become part of the U.S. Coast Guard). The designer of these life boats is not known; from about 1900 to sometime in 1906, Elco's staff naval architect had been Alfred "Bill" Luders. In 1905, the University of Michigan graduated a naval architecture student named Irwin Chase. There are two versions of what happened next. One version has it that Luders committed the unpardonable sin of signing his own name to an Elco design, and that Sutphen fired him. The second version contends that Sutphen wanted to hire Chase anyway, and had to get rid of Luders to do it. In any event, in 1906 Chase was in and Luders was out. Competence doesn't seem to have been an issue; Luders moved to Stamford, Connecticut, formed his own boatbuilding firm, and went on to become one of America's top designers. Either Luders or Chase could have designed the lifeboats. Chase stayed with Elco for the next 43 years, was chief designer from 1906 to 1923, and was general manager from 1923 to 1949.
Irwin Chase was a poerboat man to the core. He particularly loved to experiment with high-powered boats, and is credited (at least by Elco) with designing one of the world's first "planing hulls", a 20' "Elcoplane" named Bug, in 1911. Chase spent countless hours on the water developing high-speed small boats, and like other designers of his time his experiments involved "stepped" hulls. He designed a 20-footer with a perfectly flat bottom, and then corrugated metal sheets to the after half. Using special shims, Chase could alter the angles of the boat's steps, and he also experimented with step angles to correct the boat's tendency to slip sideways on high-speed turns.
At a dinner at the New York Yacht Club one evening, Sutphen and Chase got into a discussion- possibly with a member of the Vanderbilt family- over the merits of Chase's "hydroplane." One thing led to another, and a wager was made for $5000 as a reward. This small fortune unexpected but welcome; the money allowed Chase to get married- to Sutphen's secretary, Theresa Sprecht.
The submarine business was not especially lucrative prior to 1915. Rice made to by selling licenses for the Holland submarine for any foreign firm that had the cash. One such customer was Vickers Sons & Maxim of England, at that time vying with Krupp as the world's largest defense contractor. Vickers' famous managing director, Sir Trevor Dawson, bought a submarine license in 1900 and began building subs for the Admiralty at the Vickers yard in Barrow-in-Furness. Vickers' relationship with Rice and Electric Boat continued through World War I, and Vickers was even a major holder of Electric Boat Company stock. This relationship led to the construction of the sub-chasing motor launches.
"It was in February, 1915, that we had our initial negotiations with the British naval authorities," Sutphen later wrote. "A well-known English shipbuilder and ordnance expert was in the country, presumably on secret business for the Admiralty, and I met him one afternoon at his hotel." The Admiralty representative was Sir Trevor. Sutphen and Dawson discussed the German submarine menace, and Sutphen recommended that the Admiralty purchase "a number of small, speedy gasoline motorboats for use in attacking submarines. My idea was to have a mosquito fleet big enough thoroughly to patrol the coastal waters of Great Britain."
Whether the idea originated with Sutphen was not clear. Dawson had been dispatched to America by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill, in turn, seems to have been prompted by the First Sea Lord, Admiral John "Jacky" Fisher, the man credited with dragging the mighty British Navy- kicking and screaming most of the way- into the 20th Century. In a handwritten note recently unearthed in Admiralty files and dated February 3, 1915, Fisher wrote to "Dear Winston":
"I earnestly press you to hire Sir Trevor Dawson at once to go to America as our Buyer...we want a 'pusher' like Dawson...send him and then arrange afterward the necessary authority (to negotiate)...'Munitions are the breath of war!' What use millions of Russians without rifles or our monitors without cordite. This is a Big War! So send Sir Trevor Dawson by the (steamship) Adriatic sailing tomorrow from Liverpool to New York."
It appears that Dawson's mission was to purchase rifles from a source in Brazil, as well as nitroglycerine. There is no mention of sub-chasers or Elco, so it is conceivable that Sutphen did originate the anti-submarine "mosquito fleet" idea, and that he obtained an interview with Dawson to propose it. How Sutphen knew Dawson was In new York has not yet been explained, nor is it clear why so important a man as Sir Trevor was necessary to negotiate the purchase of Brazilian-made rifles. It is not even clear why Fisher and Churchill were interested in rifles and nitroglycerine in the first place; while neither man could ever be accused of minding his own business, rifles and chemicals were a long way from Fisher and Churchill's designated responsibilities.
Using code sent through the Office of Naval Intelligence, Dawson cabled the details of Sutphen's proposal to the Admiralty, along with details of the Brazilian arms deal. The cable traffic was couched in the formal language of the era, and has the tone of Hornblower's correspondence:
"The Director of the Intelligence Division presents his compliments to the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and begs to request that the attached telegram may be sent, if no objection is seen, to Sir Trevor Dawson, c.o the British Ambassador, Washington:
"Your telegram of (March) 21st Admiralty will take 50 torpedo launches provided that the speed of 19 knots can be guaranteed...the boats must be thoroughly sea-worthy and strong enough to carry a 3 pounder gun forward. Torpedo tubes are not required...Do not forget that all purchases must be made through Messrs. Morgan (J. Pierpont Morgan's bank) with whom you should keep in close and harmonious relation. Dispatch is necessary."
The contract for these 50 motor launches was signed on April 9, 1915, and by the first of May Elco had the first boat's frames erected. This boat would be used to create standardized patterns for the remainder of the order. The speed with which Elco prepared the drawings and patterns strongly suggests that Chase and Sutphen had been working on this project well in advance of the authorizing order, and possibly as far back as the initial negotiations in February.
On May 1, 1915, the Lusitania sailed from New York, to be torpedoed by the Krupp-built U-20 on May 8, with great loss of life and considerable international repercussion. Dawson was scheduled to return to England on May 8, and was treated by Sutphen to a farewell lunch at Delmonico's restaurant when the news of the sinking arrived. Sutphen later wrote that Sir Trever was "much depressedm as indeed was natural enough, and also very thoughtful. Before he said good-bye he intimated to me that he intended advising the admiralty to increase the number of 'chasers'; he asked me if I thought I could take care of a bigger order. I told him I would guarantee to build a boat a day for so long a period as the Admiralty might care to name."
Shortly after Dawson's arrival in England, Elco received a telegram ordering 500 additional Sutphens- their code name for the motor launches- and the supplemental contract was signed on July 9, 1915. Terms called for completion of 550 boats by November 15, 1916; excluding Sundays, Elco was being asked to build 550 80' boats in 501 working days, an unprecedented assignment. Elco fulfilled this $22 million contract in 488 days, two weeks ahead of schedule.
How many Krupp submarines were sunk by Elco motor launches is not known, but sinking submarines was not the only chore performed by these tough little boats and their volunteer reserve crews. Ele Elco launches put in hundreds of thousands of hours on patrol in the nastiest waters of the North Sea. Their finest hour came when 62 motor launches accompanied the blockships at Admiral Sir Roger Keyes' famous Zeebrugge and Ostend raids. In this action of April, 1918, several obsolete cruises attempted to block the canal entrances at the two Belgian ports that served as major outlets for German subs and destroyers. The action was not entirely successful, for the channels were hardly blocked, but the commando-style raids were a tremendous morale booster in England. Eight Victoria Crosses, England's highest decoration, were awarded for gallantry that day, along with dozens of lesser citations. Three Victoria Crosses went to motor launch skippers who evacuated crews under the withering enemy "mentioned in dispatches" for their efforts.
The period between the two World Wars was Elco's golden age, for during these two decades the company built the cruising powerboats for which it is best remembered today. The world's most popular cruising powerboat was the Elco Cruisette, first drawn up by Irwin Chase in 1915. Only one Cruisette from before World War I is known to exist today, although a hundred or more of the Cruisettes built after 1919 are still around. The first of these boats was a 32-footer with the famous rounded "hunting cabin" forwaqrd and a small cuddy cabin aft, with allocation for no less than nine "sleeps," as Elco designers referred to berths. After the Great War, the Cruisette was lengthened to 34', then 35'. (For many years, Elco kept the Cruisette named sacred, and used it to refer to only one particular model; but the tradition broke down in the 1930s when Elco began to use the name to refer to many types and sizes of boats.) The hunting cabinet was gradually phased out in favor of a more conventional house, and the aft cabin never survived the war. These boats were built in lots of 50 as early as 1919; the pre-war Cruisettes were the world's first "standardized" yachts. In some years, Elco built three and four "lots," and instituted the unique idea of installment purchasing: a $2450 Cruisette could be had for only $915 "down" and payments of $135 a month for 12 months.
In 1923, Elco opened its famous "Port Elco" showroom in downtown New York, and for the first time customers could walk in off the street and browse among a selection of yachts from 32' to more than 50' in length. Henry Sutphen not only borrowed standardized construction from the auto industry but began to adapt Detroit marketing techniques as well. In that year, Sutphen also shook up Elco's management. Before leaving town on a business trip, he had assigned Elco General Manager Thomas Hanson the task of preparing new boats for the 1923 Motorboat Show. When Sutphen returned to Elco, he found out that little or nothing had been done for the show, so he fired Hanson. Sutphen then promoted Irwin Chase to the position of general manager, and named Glenville S. Tremaine chief designer.
Tremaine had been a shipfitter's apprentice at the Bath Iron Works in his native Maine, and he took correspondance courses in draftsmanship at the same time. He studied yacht design under Henry Douglas Bacon and was "loaned" to naval architect Morris Whitaker for a brief assignment to New York in 1912. When work at Bath slowed down, Tremaine answered a newspaper ad for a draftsman and was hired by Elco in March, 1913, on the day Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated. The following day, Tremaine turned 21.
Tremaine was Chase's apprentice and assistant draftsman until the 1923 shake-up; after his promotion, Chase never again set foot in the design office "unless he was dragged in" to solve a problem. He was no longer much interested in design problems. Tremaine carried on the Elco design traditions that Chase began in 1906, and he drew wonderful cruisers and motor yachts through the Roaring Twenties, aided by his new assistant, Alfred "Bill" Fleming. Tremaine loved to create new boat designs, and he loved tinkering with new ideas; he had little patience with details, however, and left that to Fleming. In time, Fleming became Elco's premier stylist, while Tremaine remained the conceptualist. Significantly, the sales department had nothing to say about the new designs; these always originated in discussions among the design team.
To many an eye, the prettiest Elco ever built was the 42' "deckhouse cruiser," the famous Elco "flat-top" that often featured a "Cleopatra's couch" mounted on the aft-cabin roof. The deckhouse cruiser was a developmental design that had seen many an adjustment since well before World War I. Perhaps more than any other boat, this design was influenced by shifts in American society. At the turn of the century, only the wealthy could afford yachts, and as a consequence pleasure boats were large and had accommodations for paid crew. From that day in pre-history when the first caveman crossed a stream on a floating log to many centuries after Columbus, the helmsman stood in an exposed position, steering the boat while wind and rain lashed him mercilessly. It was a little different in 1900; the wealthy yacht owner could retire below to his warm and luxuriously appointed cabin, while his poor helmsman peered through fog and sleet.
World War I helped to change that in two ways. First, experience conning motor launches through English Channel gales showed that it was no longer necessary to subject helmsmen to these conditions: give the blighter a proper roof over his head and a windshield in front of his face. Second, the war economy and the boom years of the twenties produced a new social class of American, the "middle" class. It took a few years for these things to develop, but in time Elco was building powerboats for middle-income families, and these boats featured a new and controversial device: the windshield. It seems so simple and obvious now, but during the 1920s the windshield was a controversial item. Of course, high-speed runabouts had windshields as early as 1910; low freeboard and vertically driven spray required them. But the notion of a windshield in a slow-speed, highboard cruiser- well, only a sissy needed such protection. That was easy to say when you were rich enough to hire a helmsman; but when you were the operator as well as the owner of the yacht, you were the one getting wet. Thus, the birth of the enclosed deckhouse. Elco led the way, and geared its advertising to family-oriented boating.
Tremaine developed a flotilla of Elcos from 26' to 56' to meet this new market for cruising-size stock boats: Cruisettes and cruisers (the distinction between these two designs was that the Cruisette had a single sheer line while the cruser had a broken sheer line), Veedettes, Marinettes, and flat-tops. In 1924, while on vacation at his summer cottage on the New Jersey shore, Tremaine fought boredom one afternoon by sketching on the back of a large envelope his ideas for a new 26-footer that would become the "Model T" of the boating industry. If his calculations were correct, this model might sell for the unbelievably low price of $1750 each. The following year, Tremaine and Bill Fleming overhauled the entire Elco fleet, designing the flat-top, the new Cruisettes and cruisers, the Veedettes and Marinettes, and the 50' and 57' deckhouse cruisers.
Elco was not alone in its design changes; everybody built boats for the middle and upper middle income family. Dawn, Consolidated (the old Charles Seabury/Gas Engine & Power outfit), Matthews, Wheeler, Richardson, Mathis, Chris-Craft and a host of others turned out boats as fast as trees could be felled. While it is grossly unfair to say these companies all copied one another, there is a remarkable similarity in many of their designs. It was just as tough then as it is now to distinguish one company's boats from a competitor's at 100 yards.
If World War I created a new boatbuilding market, Prohibition certainly created another- and much faster- clientele. Many firms made their mark building rumrunners; Elco, as a rule, built few high-speed votes for this somewhat unusual trade. Had Irwin Chase stayed in the drafting room, perhaps Elco would have continued its work on planing hulls and racing hydroplanes. As it was, the company made its mark with cruising powerboats, and left the speedboats to Gar Wood and Chris-Craft, among others. There is a tendency to compare Elco and Chris-Craft, America's two biggest and best-known boatbuilders, but the comparison should be resisted. Chris-Craft certainly built more hulls, although these hulls were invariably both smaller and faster; Elco certainly built more cruisers. Chris-Craft and Elco had different clientele and different markets, and seldom competed boat-to-boat, even during the 1930s when Chris-Craft began to produce cruisers in quantity.
The Depression hurt Elco, as it hurt most boatbuilders, but the effects of the Depression didn't make themselves felt right away. Elco continued to build boats and pay for eight-page advertising spreads in boating magazines well after 1929. The low point came in 1933, when Elco was reduced to only three full-time employees: Chase, Tremaine, and general foreman Charles Lamont. To keep busy, they personally fulfilled orders for spare parts, answered correspondence, and ran exhaustive dynamometer tests on new engines, just for something to tinker with. Gradually, over several years, the old employees were rehired and boatbuilding resumed.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's relationship with Elco dated back to the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, when Roosevelt's father took him to the fair. Young Franklin took one of his first boat rides in one of the electric launches, and may have developed his lifelong interest in things nautical from this experience. During World War I Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and had worked closely with Sutphen and Chase on the motor launch project. Sutphen and Roosevelt maintained their friendship through Roosevelt's Presidency. In 1937, General Douglas MacArthur asked Roosevelt for a fleet of small, fast boats to help carry out defensive maneuvers in the Philippines; as it happened, the U.S. Navy had been looking into this subject- although without much funding or enthusiasm- since World War I. Roosevelt, through Assistant Navy Secretary Charles Edison, whose famous inventor-father owned Elco, asked Sutphen to go to England to investigate patrol boats being built by Hubert Scott-Paine's British Powerboat Co.
Sutphen and Chase left Tremaine in charge of the store while they sailed to England aboard the Queen Mary on February 10, 1939. They spent two months talking to Scott-Paine, as well as to officials of Thornycroft and Vosper. On his own initiative (but with the U.S. Navy's blessing) Sutphen purchased a new Scott-Paine motor torpedo boat for $300,000, and had it shipped to Electric Boat's Groton plant. Dubbed PT-9, America's first PT boat was subjected to numerous sea trials, alone and against other PTs in prototype stages. Over the next two years, PT-9 and subsequent Elco-improved PTs won a series of comparison "plywood derbies," and Elco emerged along with Higgins Industries as the prime contractors for PT boats. By the end of World War II, 399 Elco PTs had been built. Higgins built 199 or 205 PTs depending on which figures are used.
Lt. John Bulkley (whose father had worked for the company that supplied uniforms to Elco workmen back home in Bayonne) won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his PT boat exploits during the opening days of the war. The book and the Robert Montgomery-John Wayne movie They Were Expendable remain as testaments to Bulkley's achievements, not the least of which was spiriting MacArthur out of the Philippines. (MacArthur returned several years later, as he'd promised, aboard Elco's PT-525.) Lt. A. Murray Preston also won a Congressional Medal of Honor for his daring rescue of a downed flier 200 yards from enemy gun positions in 1944; Preston's two Elcos had been under fire for more than two hours on that occasion. Twenty-two Navy Crosses were awarded to PT crewmen, along with hundreds of lesser citations. Of the PTs built by Elco and Higgins, 48 were lost in combat (Lt. John F. Kennedy's Elco PT-109 was one of only two rammed and sunk by the enemy), while antother 21 PTs were lost to non-combat causes (seven were sunk by Allied forces by a variety of mistakes and accidents). Casualties aboard these U.S. Navy PTs were 306 dead and 438 wounded; PTs build by Elco, Higgins and British firms, and operated by other Allied navies, probably sustained an equal casualty and combat record.
At the height of its PT-boat production, Elco employed more than 3000 men and women working three shifts a day for six days a week. They produced, on average, one PT boat every sixty hours. This brough Elco six consecutive Navy "E" Awards for defense contracting excellence, and earned the company $10 million in profits on a cost-plus basis. Laying off some 2000 of these employees when the war work ended was the worst job Elco ever asked Glen Tremaine to do. In 1939 he had been promoted to works manager and had day-to-day charge of Elco plant operation, including PT-boat design, throughout the war.
Sutphen, Chase, and Tremaine scrambled to find virtually any kind of work to keep the remaining 1000 workmen gainfully employed. In addition to new boat designs, Elco used extensive woodworking equipment to produce the hardwood trim for special-edition Plymouth station wagons; they built bowling lanes and bowling pins; they even produced baseball bats field-tested by the Chicago Cubs during one spring training. It didn't matter; the war had killed Elco. In 1939 Sutphen had doubled the size of Elco's plant and tripled its capacity in order to build PTs; now he had to carry that useless overhead. The market for pleasure yachts wasn't promising, since GIs returning from the war were more interested in raising families and resuming or starting careers. There wasn't much discretionary income for buying top-of-the-line cruisers.
Elco's parent company management was no help. In 1947, John Jay Hopkins became president of Electric Boat, and he envisioned a defense contracting empire that would have made even Isaac Rice and Sir Trevor Dawson envious. Electric Boat had built most of the submarines bought by the Navy during World War II; its corporate branches included major shipbuilding as well as submarine construction, aircraft manufacturing, electronics and much more. Elco, still building wooden pleasure boats, was a low-tech dead-end as far as Hopkins was concerned. He told Tremaine that the $10 million profit on PT boats was "water over the dam." The new motto of Electric Boat Company was grow or die, he said. In 1948 Hopkins gave Elco a year to grow; in April, 1949, the unhealthy limb was pruned. Tremaine was given the task of laying off the remaining employees- an even more sorrowful task than previously- and of organizing auctions to sell the plant, equipment, and inventory. On the last day of 1949, Glenville Sinclair Tremaine padlocked the gate of the Electric Launch Company, handed the keys to an Electric Boat Company security guard, and drove home.
Henry R. Sutphen died in 1951- of a broken heart caused by Elco's demise, some say, Irwin Chase transferred to the Electric Boat Company's Groton plant after the 1949 Bayonne closing, and died in 1974. Bill Fleming died in 1971. Glen Tremaine lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. As this article went to press, he celebrated his 93rd birthday.
In late 1949, when Tremaine and his staff culled through 57 years of Elco records, drawings, and blueprints, they threw out all but the most important papers. They tried to keep one copy of each design and many advertising brochures. The records they kept were placed in a two-story fireproof building at Elco's sister firm, William Woodnut Griscom's old Electro Dynamic plant not far from the Elco facility. This fireproof building burned to the ground in 1963, turning to ash the history of one of America's proudest boatbuilders.
The number of Elcos that have survived is unknown. The best guess is about 400 out of the more than 7500 boats the company built. About a dozen electric launches built prior to World War I are known to exist; perhaps there are two or three more stowed away in long-abandoned boathouses. Only one pre-WWI Cruisette is still around, although its date has not been proven. There are about two dozen PT boats in the United States, some built by Elco and some by Higgins. None of the WWI 80' motor launches are thought to remain in Europe. The most common survivors are Cruisettes, cruisers, and "flat-top" deckhouse cruisers built between the wars; there are also a number of post-WWII Elcos, like Abel Hand, are in mint condition, and many are in serviceable shape; many others, however, are in need of expensive attention.
For a number of years, there has been a rumor that one of Elco's original 1893 World's Columbian Exposition launches still exists- nobody seems to know quite where, or who the owner might be. If she could be found...
