War Copter, Peace Train

How guitars became an aerospace innovator’s great side project

When a founder with a ton of success chooses to moonlight in other industries, frequently they choose fields that might give him a chance to spread their wings.

Think Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin, or Richard Branson’s own shifts into commercial flight and spaceflight.

But what if the thing you developed was already in the aerospace industry? Well, your tale might not be unlike that of Charles Kaman. Kaman, an engineer whose father supervised the construction of the modern day Supreme Court building and Washington D.C.’s Union Station, was an aviation nut at a time when aviation was becoming a very important industry. After graduating from Catholic University in 1940 and spending a few years working with early helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky, he launched his own company, Kaman Aircraft, which also specialized in helicopters and other forms of rotary flight.

He was early enough to be considered a groundbreaking figure in the space; the above video of the Kaman K-190 shows just how experimental some of his early craft were. Many of Kaman’s designs relied on an intermeshing rotor approach, in which two sets of rotors, set at different angles, rotate around one another, in a style reminiscent of how gears work together. The result allowed more maneuverability, a good thing when it comes to helicopters. As Flying Magazine noted in 1952, Kaman was the only manufacturer of this type of aircraft in America, and the company was already mass-producing planes for the Navy.

Soon enough, its role came to the Vietnam War, for all its faults, helped to raise the profile of the helicopter in the public consciousness. While Kaman Aircraft wasn’t the only military contractor making helicopters during the war, it was making some of the more prominent models—particularly the Kaman HH-43 Huskie, which was synonymous with rescue missions.

The result of this was that Kaman Aircraft was king of its niche. Within just a decade of its founding, it had more than 1,200 employees. Kaman’s namesake company is still around today, by the way, producing both helicopters and maintenance products for the aviation industry. These days, it has more than 3,000 employees and revenue in the high nine figures.

Kaman founded a hugely successful company and was seen as a major innovator in the aerospace field. But interestingly, the company felt a desire to expand beyond aerospace in the mid-1960s. Kaman himself contained multitudes, and one of the multitudes he contained was his sheer skill at playing guitar. Kaman was a talented enough guitar player that, before he started his aerospace career, he turned down a request from Tommy Dorsey to go on tour.

It also helped that it made economic sense—an article in the Springfield, Massachusetts-based The Morning Union noted that Kaman was looking into consumer industries such as boating and skiing. Musical instruments made the most sense because, besides Kaman’s own personal interest, they were peaking in popularity. With more than 9 million players around the country, getting even a small portion to buy a high-tech model could be highly profitable.

Plus, all the knowledge of acoustics and vibration that came with designing helicopters came in handy. The Kaman company was able to translate that knowledge into a rounded fiberglass back that allowed the sound of the instrument to carry further. Kaman also developed a piezoelectric pickup, a technology that allowed the guitar to plug into a standard PA system. Plus, the fiberglass material allowed the company to make the back thinner, which meant that the guitar was easier to play upright in a concert setting.

The Ovation guitar line allowed musicians to go electric without losing their acoustic tone. If Bob Dylan went electric with an Ovation, he likely wouldn’t have pissed off the folks at the Newport Folk Festival.

Now all Charles Kaman needed was a promotional coup, and his company found one in the form of country star Glen Campbell, whose reliance on acoustic guitars meant that he ran into the natural limitations of the era. The sound of acoustics just didn’t reach very far, and had to be miced carefully, limiting a performer’s range of motion. The Ovation helped solve that—and Campbell was among the first to notice.

Campbell played Ovations on his television show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, constantly. It was the first place people became familiar with these unusual devices with the sloped headstock—and it was just the kick Kaman needed to turn the Ovation into perhaps the most prominent acoustic guitar of the 1970s.

In fact, Campbell suggested many of the key innovations that made Ovation stand out—in particular the lighter weight and shallow bodies. It’s perhaps for that reason that when it first went on the market, they were sold as Glen Campbell Ovations.

(Side note: I’ve been on a Glen Campbell kick lately. If you’re not deep into country, he’s deeply underrated. I don’t need an excuse to share “Wichita Lineman,” but I have one.)

Ovations are great. I used to own one. There was just one problem, though.

Cat Stevens, the second-most-famous Ovation player, playing “Peace Train” on a guitar developed by a military contractor.

How did Kaman square being a military contractor with making a symbol of protest?

But as one might notice, Kaman’s move into musical instruments came with an inherent tension. At the time the Ovations first came out, guitars were a symbol of peace and protest.

Many of the musicians who came to play his company’s instruments, like Cat Stevens, leaned into this perspective. It’s not hard to find video of Stevens performing live with an Ovation strapped over his shoulder. (Because this is Tedium, I must note that Jesse Welles recently rocked an Ovation on Colbert.)

There were also the Ovation electrics, which were popular with artists like KISS’ Ace Frehley and Peter Tosh. Those devices, the Breadwinner and Deacon, were made of wood, not fiberglass, but had an unusual shape I would describe as a half-teardrop, half Gibson SG. Ovation was on its way to becoming a major guitar seller.

However, Kaman was at its heart a military contractor, and his helicopters were closely associated with the fighting in Vietnam. As far as I can tell, this wasn’t a situation where this was an inherent “playing both sides” thing or anything like that. Kaman had a legitimate interest in both objects and he had reason to lean into both.

But Kaman seemed aware almost from the beginning how this contradiction might look. During a 1966 interview with the Hartford Courant, he specifically spoke to this situation where his company made most of its money from aircraft used in wartime but was effectively developing a symbol of peace.

“It’s a very delightful thing, because it’s a happy business … instead of killing people or rescuing people who are almost dead,” Kaman said in the interview.

He went further to note that the guitar, developed from “the same materials that we use in our rotor blades,” was part of an explicit attempt to move into recreation. He added, “What do we do after they’ve shot our planes down as happens after every conflict?”

There’s a term for this, called “military contractor conversion,” which refers to the idea of a company known for generally developing military goods switching over to a commercial market. In an essay from the 1995 compilation The Socio-Economics of Conversion From War to Peace, author Domenick Bertelli compared Kaman’s move into guitars to other similar moves by other defense contractors. Other contractors that came into being before and immediately after World War II were developing goods like tennis rackets, golf clubs, diapers, and canoes.

“Some companies have also succeeded with quirky projects, often driven by personal connections and interests, which have little relation to prior markets,” Bertelli wrote. “These cases, in particular, deflate the myth that any commercial opportunity will already have someone exploiting it.”

That last one offers a great example of this dynamic in play. If you hear the phrase Northrop Grumman, you likely think of stealth bombers and drones. But in the 1940s, in the midst of World War II, Grumman decided to take its skills in forging aluminum and applying them to, of all things, canoes. Skilled paddlers may look down on aluminum canoes today, but Grumman canoes were seen as game changers for their time.

Seen in this light, Charles Kaman’s later-in-life embrace of the guitar as a way to translate his innovations to something the average consumer could benefit from is inspired. But it turns out, it was not a totally unique move for its era.

In fact, it’s likely that it was a product of necessity. It later came out in a 1993 Associated Press piece that the move to start building Ovations actually came about as a result of Kaman losing an important military contract. Kaman’s success with guitars stood out after the first Gulf War, in part because there were military contractors that suddenly had to adapt to peace time.

“It’s a tough job, and there is no easy answer,” Kaman said in the piece. “Anybody that thinks you can do it—bingo—in a year or two, is just wishing on a star.“

I don’t think Kaman was attempting to pull one over on its target audience by going into guitars. I think, instead, it is a reflection of a company built around the image of one man who knew a lot about two objects—helicopters and guitars. But the tension was ultimately there, even if it wasn’t a front-of-mind discussion.

Does it make you less of a peacenik to play an Ovation? Does the audience care? Clearly it wasn’t actually a big deal when Cat Stevens used ’em for “Peace Train.” And it’s not like anyone’s giving you hell for using a microwave.