When engineer Sam Williams first envisioned a small, simple turbofan based on high-technology materials and manufacturing methods, no class of airplanes existed to provide a market for an engine generating less than 2,000 pounds of thrust. It was the mid 1970s, and few outside the defense industry had ever heard of Williams International, the Walled Lake, Michigan company that Williams had founded two decades earlier to build small gas turbines for missiles, drones and APUs.