TALE OF THE TIN GOOSE
“I SHOULD LIKE A THOUSAND DOLLARS, AND I CAN ONLY PROMISE YOU ONE THING: YOU’LL NEVER SEE THE MONEY AGAIN!”
The request, penned by Bill Stout, a Dearbornbased engineer with a flair for promotion, landed on the desks of more than 100 influential Detroit businessmen in mid-1922. Stout was looking for enough money to finish an experimental airplane. He didn’t have a particularly clear idea of what he was going to do after that.
William Bushnell Stout was born in Quincy, Ill., in 1880. After graduating from high school in St. Paul, Minn., he briefly attended first Hamline University and then the University of Minnesota. Stout didn’t graduate from either university, but he did take some engineering courses at Minnesota.
After a stint at the Schurmeier Motor Car Company, which went bankrupt in 1912, Stout took a job as the auto and aviation editor for the Chicago Tribune. That same year he started Aerial Age, the first aviation monthly in the United States. The newspaper business proved ill-suited to Stout’s mercurial personality, and by 1914 he was again working for an undersized auto manu facturer, the Scripps-Booth Automobile Company. In 1916 he was employed by the Packard Motor Car Company as a sales manager before somehow becoming the chief engineer of its aviation division.
While at Packard, Stout oversaw the construction of several experimental planes under Navy contract toward the end of World War I. In 1919 he started his own engineering company in Detroit, and the following year he completed the Stout Batwing Limousine, an unusual-looking airplane with an enormous cantilevered wing (the plane was a shade under 23 feet long, with a 360-square-foot wing). It was built primarily of wood and was powered by a single Packard
