At the time he taught himself to fly in 1909 and 1910, Glenn Luther Martin was a youthful businessman, the owner (at age 22) of Ford and Maxwell dealerships in Santa Ana CA. Although he had taken courses at Kansas Wesleyan Business College before his family moved west in 1905, he lacked a technical background. His first planes were built in collaboration with mechanics from his auto shop, working in a vacant church building that Martin rented. In 1909 Martin made his first successful flight; by 1911 he numbered among the most famous of the pioneer aviators.

Never forgetting his original business training, he was not content with simply performing. In 1912, he set up as a manufacturer, incorporating his operation as the Glenn L Martin Aircraft Co. Unlike companies launched by the Wright Brothers and Glenn Curtiss, which soon came to be managed by people other than their namesakes, Martin Co remained for 40 years under the direct control of its founder. During these four critical decades, Glenn Martin was the senior aircraft manufacturer in the United States.

From the early years of the company, Martin hired trained engineers to design his planes and talented managers to run his factories. The Martin Company provided training and experience to a remarkable number of other aviation manufacturers who later struck out on their own. William Boeing, Donald Douglas, Lawrence Bell, and James S McDonnell founded companies that bear their names. Charles Day, chief designer for Standard Aircraft in World War I, and Charles Willard, co-founder of L-W-F Engineering in 1917, were both former Martin employees as were J H "Dutch" Kindleberger and C A Van Dusen, who ran North American and Brewster, respectively, during WW2.

Martin had a penchant for large planes, and his company came to depend on military orders — this meant bombers. The vast majority of the more than 11,000 planes built by the company before it ceased producing aircraft in 1960, Martin bombers pioneered the doctrine of airpower in the ’20s and ’30s and served in all theaters in World War 2.

Enshrined in National Aviation Hall of Fame 1966.(Glenn L Martin Aviation Museum)