William Gorham

William Reagan Gorham was an American-born automobile engineer who emigrated to Japan and became a Japanese citizen. Born in San Francisco in 1888, he founded Gorham Engineering there with his father in 1911, making hot bulb engines, fire pumps and motorboats. He moved to Japan in 1918, first hoping to work in aviation, then turned to cars. As chief designer for Gonshiro Kubota he designed a three-wheeled automobile sold as the Gorham and a four-wheeled car called the Lila, built by Jitsuyo Jidosha, a firm that later merged into a predecessor of Nissan. He worked with several Nissan predecessors before founding Kokusan Seiki in 1936, and after naturalising as Japanese in 1941 he worked at Hitachi on machine tools and jet engines. He died in 1949.