Reginald Denny was an actor producer in the early days of silent movies. He owned a hobby shop on Vine St. In Hollywood and was an avid modeler with a passion for model airplanes. A few years into his business he wanted to build his own model engines for sale but did not have the experience or capability.
He published an offering for model engine makers to produce samples of engines with one requirement; the engine had to run for a 50 hours without any maintenance or repair. Of the companies who submitted samples Denny chose the samples built by Walter Righter who was manufacturing Righter Drone engines for the military war effort.
Walter Righter produced a couple prototypes in his early days of manufacturing drone engines but he rejected them because they did not perform to his satisfaction. He admitted he over-designed the prototypes with too many new features that had never been attempted before; however, his Dennymite prototypes were very successful and paved the way for the Dennymite line of model engines.
It took many years for Jim and Sally Duncan, of Missouri, to accumulate and organize this display. It portrays the history and progression of the Dennymite engines that began with the Sky Charger in 1937 (upper left corner) through the final Dennymite engines produced in 1946.
As a tribute to Walter Righter, Jim added a Righter prototype (lower right corner) from the earliest days of Righter’s model engine experiments.