In the fall of 1949, a small engine left a factory in Herkimer, New York, and changed the shape of an entire hobby. It sold for $4. 95, about $70 in today’s money, and it ran on something most modelers had barely heard of: a glow plug. For anyone who flew model airplanes in those days, this was the newest thing that existed.

The age of the glow plug had just begun, and this engine, the OK Cub . 049, stood at its very front. Before Cox became a name on every shelf in every hobby shop in America, the OK Cub was the engine doing the job. If you mention the OK Cub today outside of collector circles, you will likely get a blank stare.

Even inside those circles, it is not the engine that people remember. Cox is the name. Cox is the name that passed from generation to generation, worked into the fabric of American childhood. One of these two engines became part of growing up in America.

The other faded out of existence. How does that happen when both started at the same starting line? How does an engine that got there first get forgotten? And what exactly made Cox win?

It is a bigger question than the engine itself. To understand the OK Cub, you have to start with who made it: the Herkimer Tool and Model Company of Herkimer, New York. By 1963, the hobby press was calling Herkimer the oldest name in American model engines. Think about what that phrase means.

It means they had been in the business longer than almost anyone else. They were not newcomers who noticed a trend and decided to jump in. They had been building engines since before most of their competitors even existed. When Herkimer put its name on an engine, it carried real history behind it.

Smaller companies came and went while Herkimer kept working. That kind of staying power does not happen by accident. So the OK Cub was not a gamble. It was an extension of what they already knew how to do.

Before the glow plug, small model engines ran on spark ignition. This system was adapted from full-size fuel engines and miniaturized for the hobby. It meant a battery, an ignition coil, and a set of contact points. More parts, more weight, and more things that could go wrong.

It worked, but it was not simple. Then the glow plug changed everything. Instead of all that equipment, you had one small plug and the right fuel. For a weekend hobbyist who did not want to become an electrician, that mattered enormously.

A glow plug uses a catalytic coil inside the plug head. The fuel, a mix of methanol, nitromethane, and castor oil, reacts with that coil to keep combustion going. No battery needed in flight. No ignition timing to adjust.

This opened up an entirely new class of flying. Hobbyists called it the ½A class: engines with a displacement of less than 0. 51 cubic inches. Smaller planes, smaller flying fields, and a much lower cost to fly.

The OK Cub . 049 was built specifically for that moment. The ½A class attracted buyers who could not afford the larger models, or who did not have the room for them. Herkimer had been around long enough to build exactly what those buyers needed.

By September 1949, the OK Cub . 049 was already appearing in the hobby press. Air Trails magazine published an article by Joe Musciano that referenced the control-line plane called the Cub, built around the OK Cub engine. By June 1950, Model Airplane News listed the engine as a retail product at $4.

95. That price put it within reach of ordinary hobbyists, not just competition plane builders. And the . 049 was not the only one.

A . 074 version appeared in the same advertisement in December 1949. By January 1950, a . 099 was also available.

Herkimer was not playing small. They were building an entire family of engines, with the . 049 as the entry point and the larger ones for more experienced hobbyists. By November 1950, a design called the WB, created by Lloyd Hunt, was published in the hobby magazines.

The WB was a serious competition plane, and it had competed. The design officially recommended the OK Cub . 049 or . 074 by name.

That was not a paid advertisement. It was a recommendation from a plane builder who had tested the engines, compared them, and flown them. If a competition design trusted the engine within a year of its debut, the OK Cub had real credibility. You do not get a competition design recommendation within twelve months without deserving it.

So the OK Cub was America’s first . 049 engine, right? Case closed? Not quite.

This is the part that complicates the picture. In the same year, 1949, two other men were working on their own glow-plug . 049. Bill Atwood and Bob Holland.

Their engine was called the Wasp . 049. Atwood had been working in the world of model engines for years before that, and he and Holland had a working . 049 by the same year.

The records of the Academy of Model Aeronautics, the AMA, list their engine in 1949 alongside the OK Cub. So who got there first? The honest answer is that we cannot say for sure. Both were real, working engines, not concepts or prototypes.

The documentation places both in 1949, and no record establishes the time difference between them. So let us call things what they are. The OK Cub was one of the first American glow-plug . 049s.

Not the crowned champion, but it was in the conversation from day one. The Wasp and the OK Cub both targeted the same class, the same market, in the same year. The OK Cub was the prominent name in advertisements and manufacturer recommendations. It reached hobby shop shelves by December 1949.

Two companies, two engines, the same year. That is what the historical records tell us. If either company knew what the other was building in 1949, nobody wrote it down. Neither of those two companies became the name everyone remembers.

A third company did. That answer begins with understanding what Cox actually built. Leroy Cox. His company was L.

M. Cox Manufacturing. Cox’s first . 049 airplane engine was called the Space Bug.

It appeared around 1952, about three years after the OK Cub had been on the shelves. So Cox was not first. But Cox had something Herkimer did not, and it showed in the numbers. In August 1955, a test of the Cox Thermal Hopper .

049 showed a weight of 1. 35 ounces and a brake horsepower of 0. 066 at about 17,200 rpm. Those were strong numbers for 1955.

But numbers alone do not explain why Cox became the name people handed down to their children. Cox made a spring starter. That sounds simple, but it was not. Before that, you flipped the propeller by hand to start a glow engine, which always carried the risk of kickback, where the propeller spins the wrong way.

Kickback could cut your hand or break a prop blade. Most people had the scars to prove it. The Cox spring starter was wound up and built into the engine. You pull it, the propeller spins, and the engine starts.

With the Cox spring starter, that problem was gone. No hand flipping, no kickback. The same result every time you pulled the cord. For someone new to the hobby, that removed a real barrier.

A beginner who can start the engine easily becomes attached to the hobby. One who breaks a propeller does not come back. But the real change was something else. Cox did not just sell an engine.

Cox sold a complete system. Everything was designed to work together: the engine, the fuel tank, the starter, and the airframe. One complete package. You bought the kit, assembled it, and flew.

When you bought Cox, someone had done the thinking for you. Herkimer sold you the engine only. Everything else was up to you. That difference, simple on paper, was enormous in practice.

Herkimer did not give up when Cox appeared. By May 1959, seven years after the Space Bug, Herkimer was still advertising the . 049A and . 049B models.

The complete . 049B kit sold for about $4. 95. The power package alone went for $3.

95. The price had dropped below its original $4. 95. In a market that Cox was reshaping, that kind of price cut was Herkimer fighting for survival.

And the . 049A still promoted claims about its performance: a die-cast crankcase, hardened steel crankshaft, clear nylon fuel tank, replaceable glow plug, and 360-degree ports. They were not surrendering. They were competing.

By July 1961, Herkimer was advertising its full line of engines, from 0. 024 up to 0. 35 cubic inches. Herkimer kept publishing full-page advertisements while Cox was redefining what this hobby looked like for a new generation.

Cox had a trainer plane called the Cadet Trainer. They had a car, the OK Cub Kart. And a company called Comet was packaging OK Cub engines into ready-to-fly products. The Tri-Pacer kit came with a built-in wire cord starter.

The guided missile kit, a control-line rocket, came with a recoil starter. Ready-to-fly packaging was Comet’s answer to what Cox was doing. Herkimer was adapting. Herkimer was still advertising its products in 1961, twelve years after the OK Cub first appeared in the hobby press.

Twelve years is a long time to hold your place when the market has changed. So if Herkimer was still competing in 1961, what actually settled the matter? Three things settled it. The starter.

The spring starter made starting a Cox engine easy and identical every single time. Pull the cord. The engine runs. You did not need to be an expert to start it.

For a novice hobbyist or a child, that changed everything. The Cub engine required more care and more experience to run reliably. That is the kind of detail that decides whether a person stays in the hobby or walks away from it. The system.

Cox sold everything together: engine, tank, starter, and airframe in one box. Think about the difference between figuring out how things work on your own versus getting a package that simply works. When you control the entire experience from the moment the box is opened, you control how people feel about flying for the rest of their lives. That first impression stuck.

The child who flew a Cox in 1955 was still talking about it in 1975. For many American families, buying a Cox product was a rite of passage. The child who got one in 1958 was showing it to his own child in 1972. The memory.

Cox products were woven into American childhood. The P-40 Warhawk, the Baby Bee engine. These were planes and engines that children received for birthdays and special occasions. It was not just control-line flying, not just small engines.

They were Cox engines. When people say, “I had a Cox engine,” they are describing an experience, not just an engine model. Cox sold the feeling of flight, at a price families could accept. Herkimer made a good engine.

Cox made it easy for anyone to become a pilot. That is the difference. The hobby community still comes back to talk about the OK Cub . 049.

It comes up in places like the Cox engine forum and radio-control flying groups. These are the people who put OK Cub engines into planes and actually tried to fly them. Their opinions are remarkably consistent. The needle valve was finicky.

The fuel draw was weak at times. Getting the engine to run well in the field required a patience many people did not have. A retrospective report from 1982 described someone running a Cub engine on a test stand. The engine ran well there.

But on a real flying day, the engine was stubborn. Stubborn is not the same as broken. Adjusting the needle valve on a Cub engine required experience. And when you set it correctly, it ran.

Larry Davidson, through the AMA’s historical records, remembered that his first model was powered by an OK Cub . 049. He actually flew it. William Pickel switched to Cox after trying the spring starter and finding it more consistent.

That is a fair comparison from someone who used both. The OK Cub rewarded the person who was patient with it. The Cox did not demand that patience. If you knew how to adjust it, it would run.

But if you were new to the hobby, Cox made your life much easier. Both things can be true at the same time. The OK Cub . 049 was there from the beginning.

One of the first American glow-plug . 049s, made in Herkimer, New York. It became available in 1949. It stayed in the competition for twelve years after that.

A company that appeared before the class even had a name and kept going until the generation that grew up on Cox had no reason to look for it. It was outsold by others. Not because it was junk, but because Cox understood something important. You do not win by having the best engine.

You win by making your engine the easiest thing in the room for anyone to pick up and use. If you were there at the time, if you ever smelled methanol and castor oil on a Saturday morning, you know. That high-pitched buzz cutting through the open air. The smell of exhaust burning in the open.

The propeller pushing against your fingertips when the engine finally woke up. Loud for something that small. Fast for something that light. And when Cox was the door that people walked through, Cox was the name they carried with them.

But Herkimer got there first. That is the real story of the OK Cub. Not that it lost, but that it existed.

And most people never knew.