English brothers in the Finger Lakes

Thomas-Morse began with two English immigrants, William and Oliver Thomas, who founded Thomas Brothers in Hammondsport, New York, in 1910, a few miles from Glenn Curtiss, and copied his idea of a flying school on a lake. In December 1914 they settled in Ithaca. Their designer, another Englishman named Benjamin Douglas Thomas, no relation, had worked for Vickers, Sopwith and Curtiss. His T-2 tractor biplane won an order for 24 from Britain’s Royal Naval Air Service.

The Tommy

Engine shortages pushed the brothers into building their own, which drained their finances, and in January 1917 they merged with Frank Morse’s Morse Chain Company to form the Thomas-Morse Aircraft Corporation. The timing was perfect. B. D. Thomas’s S-4 single-seat trainer first flew in June 1917, 577 were built, and pilots nicknamed it the Tommy; it became the favourite single-seat trainer of the American war effort.

Designed here, built in Seattle

His MB-3 fighter, ordered to replace the French SPAD XIII, first flew on 21 February 1919. Thomas-Morse built the first 50, but for the big follow-on order it was heavily underbid by Boeing, whose mass production let it profit at a lower price; the MB-3A became the Air Service’s mainstay fighter from 1922 to 1925. The company’s last design, the O-19 observation biplane, sold 176. In 1929 Consolidated bought Thomas-Morse, which ran as a division until 1934.

Fábricas

• Ithaca works · Ithaca, New York — Home from December 1914
• Conesus Lake flying school · McPherson Point, Livingston County, NY — Thomas Brothers School of Aviation, 1913

Pessoas

• William T. Thomas · cofundador
• Oliver W. Thomas · cofundador
• Benjamin Douglas Thomas · chief designer — Ex-Vickers, Sopwith and Curtiss; S-4 and MB-3
• Frank L. Morse · president, Morse Chain Company — 1917 merger