General Dynamics

  General Dynamics as we know it today was formed out of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures.  Started by John Philip Holland as the Holland Torpedo Boat Company it built America’s first modern submarine.  Holland sold the company to Isaac Leopold Rice, who on 7 February 1899 renamed it, the Electric Boat Company.  After WWII, John Jay Hopkins was the company president and diversified the operations when he bought Canadair from the Canadian government in 1946 for ten million dollars.  To reflect the diversification of the company, Hopkins reorganized the operations as General Dynamics on 24 April 1952; and a year later bought Convair, which started their presence in San Diego.  Over the next decade, the Convair introduced the F-106 Delta Dart Interceptor, and the Convair 880 and 990 airliners.  The Convair Division of General Dynamics also introduced the Atlas missile platform, the first operational intercontinental ballistic missile.

  The Atlas missile program became operational as an ICBM in October 1959 and was used as a first stage for satellite launch vehicles for half a century.  The General Dynamics missile operations at the Kearny Mesa assembly plant on the north side of San Diego supplied the nation’s ability to go to the moon, put satellites into space, and maintained the balance of power in the nuclear age of the cold war.  The sheer size of the operations had a ripple effect throughout the San Diego aerospace community through a vast network of subcontractors, spin-offs, or related startups (for instance, General Atomics, GDE Systems, and Cubic).