G. Harry Stine and Orville Carlisle are generally credited with being the "fathers of model rocketry"... G. Harry Stine was experimenting with small solid propellant model rockets in the late 50's, and Orville Carlisle, an amateur pyrotechnician, was experimenting with making small black powder rocket motors. Carlisle perfected the motor making process of pressing various types of black powder into paper casings to create the thrust, coast, and ejection phases of the model rocket motor, and Stine developed aerodynamically stable airframes built of frangible (non-metallic) materials and recovery devices, and the model rocket was born. Stine created a company, Model Missiles, Inc., and soon after was one of the founders of the NAR. Soon afterward, Vern Estes, who was another pyrotechnician and who had been hired to produce more model rocket motors since demand had exceeded supply, invented the first machine to produce model rocket motors mechanically, the "Mabel" as it was called. With the greater output and labor savings (as well as safety improvements) of machine-produced model rocket motors, the hobby really took off. Estes became a household name. Model Missiles went under, but Lee Piester started a new company that would become a powerhouse and main rival to Estes-- Centuri Engineering, out of Arizona. For most of the 60's, Estes and Centuri were THE two big names in model rocketry... A number of other manufacturers of "large model rocket motors" came and went, like Coaster Corporation (among others) and later Centuri started producing their own large black powder motors and the first composite motors, the "Enerjet" line... Later on, Harold Reese and his family (more about this on YORF-- I'm not really familiar with this part all that well) started producing their own motors and kits under their company name "Flight Systems, Inc." After the merger of Centuri and Estes (which Estes had controlling influence, but basically became "Centuri" due to better corporate business terms in Arizona IIUC-- it was basically the same old Estes; they absorbed the Centuri product lines and produced and sold a lot of Centuri stuff side-by-side for awhile, but slowly the Centuri stuff was either absorbed completely as an Estes product (like the BT-56, which was a Centuri tube size, not an Estes one, but which came into use in several Estes products and thus was kept as an Estes part and given an Estes part number designation). At any rate, after the merger of Centuri and Estes, Flight Systems, Inc. (FSI) was the main competitor to Estes during the 80's... Quest Aerospace came along somewhere in there, and is run by G. Harry's son Bill Stine. Quest has had an up-and-down rather confusing history-- for a time Quest produced their own rocket motors competitive with Estes (LPR) but after a fire and accident that killed a worker, Quest stopped producing their own motors and outsourced their motor production, buying motors first from Germany, and now from China.
FSI eventually stopped production, and in the late 80's what was to come to be known as "high power rocketry" was born... well, not exactly born-- lets say "legalized"... some experimenters had been flying motors with far more power than typical black powder motors are reliably capable of for decades, but the largest motors commercially produced and available at that time were some of the old Coaster Corp. black powder "F" motors, and the FSI "F100" motor, (which wasn't really an F, and not really particularly reliable from all I've heard-- they were about as likely to blow up as rocket off from what I've heard). The Enerjets had introduced composite propellants and larger motors into the F range, but they didn't last but a few years and production ceased. With the approval of "HPR" and the raising of the impulse and weight limits on what was defined as a "model rocket" or "high power rocket", new companies started producing the composite motors we see today, with companies like Aerotech and North Coast leading the way. North Coast was bought by Estes and produced their HPR motors and rockets for a time before being phased out. Aerotech has been a main motor producer for decades, and has offered some kits for nearly that long... other smaller, more specialized composite motor manufacturers have come and gone, and a large number of kit manufacturers as well.
That's basically it in a nutshell... I'm sure if you posted this on YORF you'd get enough input from "the old timers" to fill a half-hour talk easily... Of course I didn't come around until the mid-80's, but I was fascinated by the history of it all and I've recounted it as best as I can remember, might be a bit fuzzy on some of the dates...
Later and hope this helps! OL JR
