Allison Transmission: From the Speedway to the Sky
Near Indianapolis, Indiana
Just west of downtown Indianapolis sits the sprawling complex of Allison Transmission, a company whose history moves in a straight line from the roar of the Indianapolis Five Hundred to the skies of the Second World War.
In nineteen fifteen, James Allison, one of the co-founders of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, set up a precision machine shop in the nearby town of Speedway to maintain his racing cars. He called it the Speedway Team Company. When the United States entered the First World War in nineteen seventeen, the shop pivoted almost overnight. Allison's machinists began producing parts for the Liberty aircraft engine, the main powerplant of American military aviation. They also manufactured components for Whippet tanks and high-speed tractors. The war taught Allison's operation that aviation was the future, and the company changed its name to the Allison Engineering Company to signal the shift.
After James Allison died in nineteen twenty-eight, General Motors purchased the company for five hundred ninety-two thousand dollars. GM kept it in Indianapolis and poured resources into developing a new engine: the V-seventeen ten. This liquid-cooled, twelve-cylinder powerplant first ran in nineteen thirty and became the most widely produced American aircraft engine of its type in the Second World War. The V-seventeen ten powered the Curtiss P-Forty Warhawk, the Lockheed P-Thirty-Eight Lightning, and the Bell P-Thirty-Nine Airacobra. More than sixty percent of American Army pursuit aircraft in that war flew on Allison engines. The company built more than sixty-nine thousand V-seventeen ten units across dozens of variants.
After the war, Allison shifted to jet engines and then to automatic transmissions for heavy vehicles. Today the company is best known for building transmissions for buses, military trucks, and commercial vehicles, and it has been publicly traded since two thousand twelve.
The arc from a racing machine shop to war production to heavy industry is in many ways the arc of Indianapolis itself, a manufacturing city that has always been shaped by engines.
