Industry History | RTX — The Wasp Finished on Capitol Avenue
· 1925-12
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Industry History | RTX — The Wasp Finished on Capitol Avenue
kevin
People treat RTX as a Virginia contractor that always built jet engines behind a glass campus in East Hartford.
The first air-cooled radial was assembled in a borrowed machine-tool plant in Hartford.
In July 1925 Frederick B. Rentschler formed Pratt and Whitney Aircraft with 1.25 million dollars from Pratt and Whitney Machine Tool. The team took space at 450 Capitol Avenue, a brick works that had already housed Pope-Hartford automobiles.
On 24 December 1925 the first R-1340 Wasp was completed in that building. The Navy had asked for a reliable air-cooled engine. The Wasp delivered one. Production soon outgrew Capitol Avenue and moved across the river to East Hartford in 1930.
United Aircraft, later United Technologies, folded the engine book into a larger group. In 2020 the parent became RTX. Pratt and Whitney remains the engine division, still headquartered at 400 Main Street in East Hartford.
The original Capitol Avenue complex is now state offices. A plaque put up for the 2025 centennial marks the room where the Wasp left the bench. The public view is the Frog Hollow street front, not the test cells.
Photo: public view of Hartford, via Wikimedia Commons.
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