Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight
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— Malcolm HarrisBert’s model was to get the federal government to set flight paths, research weather patterns, license pilots, and otherwise facilitate development in a general way. After some hemming and hawing about the “Air Dictator,” Congress gave him the go-ahead in 1926 with the Air Commerce Act. He worked with the Guggenheim family—Hoover had almost turned down the cabinet seat offered by Harding to join them in a mining partnership—after patriarch Daniel Guggenheim offered a $2.5 million fund to train aeronautical engineers, improve the technology, and push the industry as a whole forward in full cooperation with the Commerce Department in light of the agency’s new powers.18 They were the airplane Gianninis, bankrolling the industry’s shared expenses out of a combination of public and private interest, no government coercion necessary.
Replicated under Fair Use from Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris.