General Dynamics grew out of a 19th-century submarine start-up
The US Navy paid $150,000 in 1900 for a submarine designed by John Philip Holland's small firm. That firm, renamed Electric Boat, later swallowed a Canadian aircraft maker and an American bomber builder, and emerged as General Dynamics, one of Washington's biggest suppliers of warships, tanks and jets.
Isaac Leopold Rice bought Holland's torpedo boat company in 1899 and kept the inventor on as chief engineer. Under its new name, Electric Boat built the USS Holland for the Navy and sold modified boats to Britain through Vickers, as well as to Japan and Russia. After Holland died in 1914, his successor Lawrence Spear redesigned the craft with a conning tower, a periscope and novel torpedo tubes. The company turned out 74 submarines and 398 PT boats in the Second World War, with women filling welding and riveting jobs, then cut its staff from 13,000 to 4,000 once peace came.
Diversification followed. John Jay Hopkins bought the Canadian government's aircraft maker Canadair in 1946 for $10 million, although the factory alone was valued at over $22 million. As planes came to dominate, Hopkins decided the old name no longer fitted and in 1952 created a holding company, General Dynamics, with Electric Boat and Canadair beneath it. A contract won in 1951 produced the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1954.
Buying Convair brought more aerospace work, including the Atlas missile, the first operational American intercontinental ballistic missile, and an abandoned attempt at a nuclear-powered bomber. In 1959 Electric Boat built the first fleet ballistic-missile submarine, the USS George Washington, by inserting a missile section into a hull begun as an attack boat. The company even commissioned designer Erik Nitsche, whose Atoms for Peace posters became classics of mid-century modernism.
Based today in Reston, Virginia, the firm also builds Gulfstream business jets. It ranks third among federal contractors, and in 2024 the US government supplied 69% of its revenue.
Source: General Dynamics
