Robert P. McCulloch: The Man Who Bought London Bridge

History is replete with famous inventors. Usually, they are known for their most successful inventions—Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone, Johannes Gutenberg for the printing press, and so on. Not so, however, for Robert P. McCulloch, inventor of the handheld chainsaw. An engineer by training, McCulloch dabbled in a wide range of industries throughout his life, from property development to aircraft manufacturing. But he is not remembered for any of these things. Instead, he is remembered for making one of the most audacious purchases in American history.

McCulloch went into business in his mid-twenties after inheriting the fortune of his grandfather, John I. Beggs (an early adopter of Thomas Edison’s electrical inventions and a streetcar magnate).¹ McCulloch could have retired young, but he decided instead to put his newfound fortune to productive use. He started the McCulloch Engineering Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, building engines for racing cars. He sold that business a few years later and started McCulloch Aviation in California, which built engines for unmanned military aircraft known as target drones. It also produced the McCulloch MC-4, an early tandem-rotor helicopter. Keen to keep his businesses growing, McCulloch broadened the scope of the company, renaming it McCulloch Motors Corporation, and branching into building small gasoline engines for a variety of household and industrial uses.

It was through this business that McCulloch developed the handheld chainsaw. He identified an unserved market for a single-operator mechanical saw for felling trees and set himself the task of designing an engine lightweight enough to power such a saw. Although McCulloch Motors was unsuccessful in competing against established manufacturers of other small-engine devices such as lawnmowers, the chainsaw business was a massive success, and McCulloch Chainsaws remains a respected brand to this day.

But gasoline engines were just one of McCulloch’s many interests, and he was keen to develop other technologies. To that end, he started the Paxton Engineering Division (Paxton being his middle name) within McCulloch Motors. This generated a number of interesting projects, the most unusual of which was the Paxton Phoenix, an automobile powered by a high-pressure steam engine. McCulloch hoped the steam engine would provide a more efficient power source for private cars than gasoline engines, but the prototype was expensive to develop, and the company dropped the project after several years of development. (McCulloch attributed the project’s demise to a change in the tax code that removed an exemption for research and development projects, increasing the cost of innovation.)²

Keen to continue expanding his activities, McCulloch looked for other industries to enter. Building on the financial success of the chainsaw, he started McCulloch Oil Corporation, which conducted oil and gas exploration and other energy-related projects. This included land development, which led McCulloch to his next area of interest: the property industry. He set up McCulloch Properties in the late 1950s, but he was not content with simply building new districts in and around existing cities like other property companies. McCulloch had a much grander vision.

In 1958, he purchased thirty-five hundred acres of barren desert in western Arizona, adjacent to Lake Havasu, an artificial body of water that had been created by damming the Colorado River at the border of Arizona and California. There he decided to create a new city, which he envisioned as a beautiful waterfront resort, a “desert paradise” deep in the Sonoran Desert.³ He bought another thirteen thousand acres in 1962 and formally founded Lake Havasu City the following year.⁴

He brought in Disneyland designer Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood Jr. to plan the new city. But they struggled to convince investors that the project was realistic, especially given the remote location and summer temperatures of more than 120°F (50°C). But McCulloch was undeterred. When one man looked at the empty desert and said, “I don’t see that city,” McCulloch answered, “You will, I promise you, you will.”⁵ To encourage investors, McCulloch offered free flights to the site, with guests being picked up from the plane by luxury buses and taken to a brand-new resort hotel for their visit.

However, the site he had chosen for his new city had another problem. The flow of water through Lake Havasu was obstructed by the Pittsburgh Peninsula, which jutted into the lake from the Arizona shore, causing the water to stagnate. McCulloch wanted his city to face a clean, glistening body of water, not a stagnant pool, so he decided to drive a channel through the peninsula to allow the water to flow freely.⁶ This created the need for a bridge to connect the part of the city that would be built on the peninsula to the mainland. What had begun as a problem became the motivation for the most ambitious of McCulloch’s endeavors.

While traveling, Wood and McCulloch learned that the London Bridge, built in 1832, was for sale.⁷ The century-old structure was too narrow for the heavy vehicle traffic of 20th-century London and, unable to handle so much weight, it had begun to sink into the bed of the River Thames. The City of London Corporation decided to replace it with a new bridge but, not wanting to destroy a major London landmark, put the old bridge up for auction. Seeing the potential to create a unique attraction that would put Lake Havasu City on the map and convince people to move and invest, McCulloch decided to make an unbeatable bid for the bridge: He doubled the $1.2 million cost of dismantling it, then added an additional $1,000 for each year of his life. His final bid of $2,460,000 ($22 million in 2023 dollars) secured his purchase of the bridge, which was recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest antique ever sold.⁸ The bridge was dismantled, and each stone block was numbered, then shipped from London to California via the Panama Canal, trucked to Lake Havasu City, and painstakingly reassembled around a newly built hollow concrete core, making it significantly lighter than it had been in London.

The bridge made Lake Havasu City a triumphant success. “There were lots of articles that came out,” recollects McCulloch’s grandson Michael McCulloch, “that basically described my grandfather as crazy. . . . Then once [the bridge] got erected and it was open and the city flourished, then they changed it to ‘crazy like a fox.’”⁹ Today, Lake Havasu City is home to two hundred thousand people and attracts more than one million tourists annually.¹⁰

Lake Havasu City was not McCulloch’s only planned city with a distinctive central feature, however. In 1970, McCulloch Properties started work on Fountain Hills, a short distance outside Phoenix, Arizona. The city takes its name from a powerful fountain installed in an artificial lake in the center of the city. When built, it was the tallest fountain in the world, spraying a jet of water five hundred feet into the air hourly throughout the day.¹¹ The fountain still operates today, and although it is limited to 320 feet in normal operation, it is still the second-tallest fountain in the United States.

McCulloch’s distinctive creations made him a noteworthy figure, but he had much grander plans in mind. Convinced that Americans should have “an airplane in every garage,” McCulloch set about designing his own flying car, the McCulloch J-2 gyroplane. A kind of half-plane, half-helicopter hybrid, the J-2 was a technical success, demonstrating that a small personal aircraft could take off from a domestic driveway and fly horizontally at high speeds, like an airplane. The December 1972 issue of Flying magazine notes how the J-2’s development achieved the long sought-after goal of producing “an extremely safe and relatively inexpensive point-to-point flying machine.”¹² The same article called McCulloch an “astute and highly successful businessman responsible for many profitable ventures.” Unfortunately, the J-2 did not turn out to be one of his successful ventures, as the mass market McCulloch had envisaged for private aircraft didn’t materialize, and only one hundred were ever built.

McCulloch worked constantly to grow his wealth and create new things, even when others couldn’t see the potential in his ideas or dismissed them as impossible. Sadly, his life was cut short in 1977 when he died from an accidental overdose of alcohol and barbiturates, one year before Lake Havasu City was formally incorporated. Although he is best known today for the purchase and relocation of London Bridge, he deserves to be remembered as a productive businessman, a pioneering inventor, and, most of all, a visionary.

About Thomas Walker-Werth

Thomas Walker-Werth is associate editor at The Objective Standard and a fellow at both Objective Standard Institute and Foundation for Economic Education. He is currently writing his first full-length book, Reason for Living: A Rational, Fact-Based Approach to Living Your Best Life. See more of his work at walker-werth.com.

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