UNITED TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION

formerly (193475) United Aircraft Corporation, major American manufacturer of aviation and aerospace equipment and industrial equipment. Headquarters are in Hartford, Conn. The company was formed as United Aircraft and Transportation Company in 1928 by the merger of a number of aviation companies, including Pratt & Whitney, manufacturer of airplane engines; Boeing, airplanes; Chance Vought, airplane design; and several small airlines that were combined into United Airlines. In 1934, however, the merger was broken up by an act of Congress. The three resulting companies were Boeing, United Airlines, and United Aircraft Corporation, which became United Technologies Corporation in 1975. In addition to Pratt & Whitney and Chance Vought, the new company retained Hamilton Standard, the propeller-manufacturing division, and Sikorsky Aircraft, the company created by Igor Sikorsky, who built the world's first helicopter. Following World War II, United Aircraft began making jet engines and then spacecraft and missiles. Hamilton Standard diversified, developing and building environmental and fuel controls. In 1958 the company acquired Norden, a manufacturer of radar and advanced electronics, and that same year formed a chemical-systems division to develop solid-propellant rockets. The company has played a major role in U.S. spaceflight; it developed the first successful liquid-hydrogen rocket engine and the life-support systems for the Apollo spacecraft and lunar modules. It also designed much of the Space Shuttle. Through 1972, more than half its sales were to the U.S. government. In the mid-1970s the company began to acquire nonaerospace companies, such as Otis Elevator (elevators and escalators) and the Carrier Corporation (air-conditioning systems).