A Day at NASA’s Dryden Research Center (#NASASocial) May 9, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Space Exploration.Tags: Dryden Flight Research Center, Museums & Archives, Space Shuttle, WWII
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For more than seventy years, a dry lakebed in Southern California’s interior has been a hotbed of aviation research, development, and testing. During that time, the nearly five hundred square miles of flattened high desert, situated in the Antelope Valley and bordered by the Tehachapi and San Gabriel mountain ranges, has been home to a series of military bases and government research centers. Presently, Edwards Air Force Base, home to the Air Force Flight Test Center, and NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC) inhabit the lakebed, each having their own buildings and hangars, but sharing the runways.
Doug visited the Dryden/Edwards complex this past Friday. Doug and Anna had previously visited the area in November 2008, in order to watch the completion of STS-126, when space shuttle Endeavour landed in California. The occasion of Doug’s most recent visit to DFRC was a NASA Social event. A NASA Social—previously known as a NASA Tweetup but now extended to include other social media platforms—is by invitation only, and Doug was selected in a lottery.
NASA has made a big commitment to social media in an effort to tell its story, and #DrydenSocial was the thirty-seventh event that they have held since their first, a Tweetup at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in January 2009. This is the second such NASA event that Doug has attended; he was at Tweetup for the GRAIL launch in September.
The Dryden/Edwards area first became a home to military aircraft in the 1930s as a bombing range for pilots flying out of March Field in nearby Riverside. During World War II, the bombing range became Muroc Army Air Base. The facility added test flight and engineering to its repertoire during the war; it was the place where America’s first jet fighter, the Bell XP-59A was tested. Those aeronautical engineering and development activities became a focus for the facility in the post-war years. This change in emphasis reached its logical conclusion when the Bell X-1, piloted by Chuck Yeager, ushered in the era of supersonic flight by breaking the sound barrier there on October 14, 1947. Muroc was renamed Edwards Air Force Base—honoring test pilot Glenn Edwards—in 1949.
HL-10 Lifting Body
NASA’s predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, first began flying from the lakebed just after the war’s end in 1946. Over time, DRFC has been known by a dizzying array of names. For a catalog of its previous names, consult the Introduction in Images of Aviation: Edwards Air Force Base by Ted Huetter and Christian Gelzer.
If you’ve read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff or seen the movie, as soon as you arrive at Edwards you expect to hear the air-shattering cracks associated with sonic booms or to catch a glimpse of a fast-moving, yet improbably shaped, aircraft. Instead, what you notice is the scale of the place, the distances involved. In order to reach DRFC’s front door, you have to drive nearly ten miles after you leave the Air Force guards and gates in your review mirror. The entire drive, save the last hundred yards, is spent on a single road, Rosamond Boulevard. On a map or from the air, Rosamond Boulevard arcs through the landscape, a bite mark carving out a quarter of the facility.
The road that leads from Rosamond to the DFRC parking lot is named for another test pilot, Howard Lilly. Lilly was NACA’s first test pilot assigned to Muroc, third to break the speed of sound, and first to be killed on the job. After a while, it becomes clear that having something bear your name at this site is a mixed-bag. Unless you’re lucky enough to see an aircraft in flight while driving in, the next thing you notice after parking your car is the wind. It comes at you from every direction, all the time.
X-29A
Near Dryden’s parking lot is a display area of former NASA test aircraft. Prior to beginning the day’s event, DFRC Chief Historian Dr. Christian Gelzer (co-author of the book mentioned above) was in the display area describing the assemblage of test vehicles: the HL-10 lifting body, used to validate ideas that would later be used in the shuttle; an SR-71 Blackbird; the F-8 Crusader used to develop fly-by-wire, a technology that eliminated the mechanical connection between the pilot and an aircraft’s control surfaces; another F-8 Crusader, this one used for Super Critical Wing studies; the X-29, whose flight on forward-swept wings was made possible only by computer control; and one of the eleven F-104s that served as a chase planes at DFRC for almost forty years (1956-1994).
Among the topics that Gelzer discussed in his pre-event tour through static display aircraft was the concept of Armstrong’s Line, or sometimes called Armstrong’s Limit. As Gelzer described it, Armstrong’s Line, named for physician Harry Armstrong (not to be confused with Neil’s famous spoken line), is that height above the earth’s surface beyond which the air pressure is not sufficient to maintain your corporeal liquids. In other words, above approximately 62,000 feet, the air pressure is so low that your body’s own natural temperature is enough to boil the water in your blood, your tissues, and even your bones. Given the impulse of Dryden’s test pilots to fly ever higher over the years, it isn’t much of a surprise that Armstrong’s Line is common banter around and above the dry lakebed.
We’ll have more about DFRC and Doug’s Dryden Social-izing soon.
Guest Blog: Claire Robinson May April 16, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Guest Blogs, Science.Tags: Nobel Prize, Nuclear Weapons, Physics, WWII
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Claire Robinson May
We just never know whom we’re going to find for our next guest post. Today, we’re featuring the granddaughter of Kenneth T. Bainbridge, the director of the Trinity nuclear test. This guest post is a great complement to our In the Footsteps series, which you can find HERE.
Claire Robinson May is a playwright in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) program. Her ten-minute performance piece, The Trinity Project, is being produced this month by the Oddy Theater Lab. Her full-length plays Mother/Tongue and Standardized ChildTM have been performed at Cleveland Public Theatre. She teaches Legal Writing at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and lives in Cleveland Heights with her husband, two sons, and a few other animals.
KENNETH BAINBRIDGE, IN HIS GRANDDAUGHTER’S WORDS
“Now we are all sons of bitches.” That’s what my grandfather, Kenneth T. Bainbridge, said after the successful Trinity test of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945. Not a grand soliloquy like J. Robert Oppenheimer’s—Ken cut right to the heart of the matter.
Kenneth T. Bainbridge (LANL)
Ken Bainbridge directed the Trinity Test. He always said he was glad the test was a success because otherwise he would have had to climb the tower to investigate what had gone wrong.
Ken was forty at the time of the test and a married father of three. He was a Harvard University physics professor who had relocated his family to Los Alamos, New Mexico, so that he could work on the Manhattan Project, one of the most top-secret endeavors in history.
Ken and his nine-year-old son, Martin, drove from Cambridge to Los Alamos in early July 1943. In late August, after Ken had arranged for their housing, my grandmother, Margaret Bainbridge (Peg), brought daughters Margaret (Margi) and Joan out to Los Alamos on the train. Joan was six. My mother, Margi, was fourteen months old. She learned to walk on the train to New Mexico. They lived at Los Alamos for the next two years.
The Bainbridges moved into a two-family house on the coveted Bathtub Row (so named because the street had the only housing units with bathtubs). Physicist Norman Ramsey’s family lived on the other side of the house. (Ramsey would go on to share a Nobel Prize in 1989.) Joan and Martin explored the new landscape, distressing the patrol guards with their utter disregard of the security fence.
Bainbridge Family, 1944
Oppenheimer managed the gasoline rations so that scientists and their families could take the occasional day trip. There were picnics, mineral collecting outings, and visits to the pueblo. Joan remembers weekend fishing trips and other adventures with her father, writing, “I have some childhood memories with Dad at Los Alamos—I still have the trout rod he made for me, hand wrapped with silk . . . but, thinking about it, there are not as many as I might have imagined. He was very absorbed and then gone much of the time in the spring of ’45.” The test blast would occur on July 16, 1945.
After the war, my grandfather joined the numerous physicists who spoke out against nuclear weapons. But he never wavered in the conviction that developing the bomb was necessary. He later wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that he had “a somewhat bloodthirsty viewpoint on the war” when he decided to join the Manhattan Project because he’d already heard first-hand accounts of Nazi atrocities from some of the European scientists he knew.
Claire Robinson May, Ken Bainbridge's Granddaughter
When I studied the history of science as an undergraduate at Harvard University in the early 1990s, I invited my grandfather to come to campus to hear a panel discussion that took place each year in one of the core science courses. Scientists such as Hans Bethe and Victor Weisskopf spoke to students about the development of the bomb and the decision to use it against Japan to end the war. Ken’s Los Alamos friends would wave from the stage, delighted to spot him in the Science Center auditorium. I was always proud to be with him. It was hardly a coincidence that my undergraduate studies focused on the history of twentieth-century physics.
Ken Bainbridge didn’t want to be remembered only for the bomb. He had many other achievements, both before and after the war, including his work on the Harvard cyclotron and the first experimental verification of E=MC2. When he chaired the Harvard University physics department in the early 1950s, Ken staunchly defended colleagues against the blacklisting attacks of Senator Joseph McCarthy. My grandfather was widely respected in his field as a careful and conscientious experimentalist and as a mentor to younger physicists. He was beloved by his family and many friends.
My grandfather died in 1996, shortly before his 92nd birthday. His wife, Peg, had died suddenly in 1967, several years before I was born. With both of them gone, I can’t help but wonder what transpired between my grandparents in the days after the test, when the families finally knew what really had been going on at Los Alamos. I wonder what role the experience may have played in Peg’s decision not long after the war to become a Quaker, a faith that wholly rejects violence. I now find myself drawn to the point where human history and family history intersect, in a blinding desert sky.
The Jet Engine’s Diamond Jubilee April 11, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation.Tags: WWII
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Frank Whittle
Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of an achievement that has shaped the world in which we live: the jet engine. On April 12, 1937, Sir Frank Whittle’s nearly ten-year quest to build a working gas turbine engine culminated with a test run of the eponymous WU (for Whittle Unit). During that first lab experiment, the minutiae of WU turbine’s operation were thus: rotated at 8,000 rpm, sucked in 13,000 cubic feet of air per minute, and burned four gallons of fuel per minute. It also nearly destroyed itself as the turbine spun out of control, flames escaped from every crevice, and Whittle’s lab mates ducked for cover. Whittle shut off the fuel valve and waited for the shrieking machine to slow to a halt.
Whittle first joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a sixteen year old and was accepted into a program that trained mechanics. Before long, his mechanical aptitude and mathematical prowess asserted itself, and he was selected for training at Cranwell, the RAF’s officer’s candidate school. At Cranwell, while working on a thesis that addressed high-speed, high-altitude flight, he first had the insight that piston engines and propellers were inadequate to the future of flight that he envisaged. As a direct outcome of that thesis, Whittle applied for and was granted a patent for jet engines in 1930.
Whittle's First Jet Engine
The computer scientist Alan Kay has said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Whittle’s patent is a perfect model of that quote in that, in addition to setting out the basic parameters for the jet engine, he also described the techniques that underpin afterburners and thrust vectoring. More importantly, his patent and design reduced the complex allocation of moving parts that exist in a piston engine to a single spinning shaft with a compressor or one end and a turbine wheel on the opposite end.
Like many stories of technical breakthroughs, Whittle’s path to the jet engine was not trouble free. He faced fierce skepticism from his RAF colleagues, financial difficulties (Whittle’s patent expired when he could not afford the renewal fee of £5), and the engineering challenges associated with doing something wholly original. In the end, it was Whittle’s design—the W.1 engine—that thrust the first British jet airplane into the sky on May 15, 1941.
Gloster E28/39
However, by the time that Whittle’s engine successfully flew in the British Gloster E28/39, a German jet, the Heinkel 178 with an engine designed by Hans von Ohain, had flown two years previous. Though Whittle produced the first jet engine, the German military produced the first successful jet aircraft. After the war, both Whittle and von Ohain would ultimately come to reside in the United States (von Ohain in 1947 and Whittle in 1976). See more about the two engineers HERE.
As an aside about experimental aircraft and test pilots: in April 1941, the Gloster E28/39 was being put through a series of taxiing tests using a non-airworthy engine, the W.1X. Much like Howard Hughes’s famous 1947 taxiing test of the Spruce Goose, where he “accidentally” lifted off to an altitude of 70 feet above the ocean near Long Beach, the non-airworthy version of the W.1X took to the skies in a series of six- to ten-feet-high hops above its grass runaway. After all, if you put a pilot in something with wings, what do you expect to happen? NASA knew how pilots behaved. The lunar module for Apollo 10 had just enough fuel to carry out its intended mission of almost landing on the Moon, and it’s been suggested that NASA management didn’t authorize a full fuel load out of fear that crew might make an unscheduled “emergency” landing. NASA higher-ups removed a temptation that earlier test pilots hadn’t been able to resist, the urge to be the first.
Whittle Jet Turbine
A return to today’s main topic: Whittle’s engineering legacy has had far reaching consequences. Gas turbines provide the power for an enormous range of vehicles (tanks and ships in addition to aircraft), and they are also used to generate electrical power. Globally, the size of the civilian aerospace market is $275B. In the United States alone, the value of the airline industry was $180B in 2011.
As soon as you finish reading this post, go outside and look up into the sky. The FAA reports that at any given time, there are as many as 7000 aircraft in the sky. As we write this post, Flightaware, a lovely website for aviation geeks, is reporting that there are 6394 planes in the sky. Using Flightaware’s type tracking feature even allows you to see the types of the airplanes that are flying. A quick glance at that tracking page makes it obvious that the vast majority of the aircraft flying above our heads are powered by some form of jet engine.
Irish Scientists March 14, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Science.Tags: Beer, Chemistry, Computers, Math, Museums & Archives, Nobel Prize, Physics, WWII
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This coming Saturday marks St. Patrick’s Day, a cultural and religious holiday and general celebration of Ireland with which we grew up. In fact, more than 34 million (some say 41 million) Americans claim Irish heritage, which is roughly nine times the population of Ireland and, somehow, reason enough itself for a party. What better way for Lofty Ambitions to celebrate this week than to note some contributions to science by the Irish.
Robert Boyle, who was born in Lismore back in 1627, may be the most famous of the Irish scientists. Boyle is, after all, considered the father of the field of chemistry. He considered chemistry’s goal to be investigating what substances are made of, and he claimed the then-popular field of alchemy was not science. In fact, though Francis Bacon advocated inductive reasoning and experimentation, Boyle worked out the particulars of the scientific method still in use today. If you remember your science classes, you probably have at least a vague recollection of Boyle’s Law and also an implicit trust that, at a constant temperature, the pressure and volume of a gas are inversely related. If the volume of gas increases (more space), the pressure goes down.
William Rowan Hamilton (TCD)
William Rowan Hamilton is Ireland’s version of Leonardo DaVinci, for Hamilton knew 13 languages by the time he was nine years of age. Born in 1805, Hamilton started at Trinity College, Dublin when he was 18 and was awarded an honor in classics that first year, a recognition doled out only every two decades. As the story goes, his personal life was excruciating because, as a student, he couldn’t afford to marry the woman he loved, so she married an older, wealthier man, leading Hamilton to write some poetry, drink heavily, and consider ending his life. Luckily, he mustered on and rewrote Newton’s Laws of Motion with his own theory of dynamics. But his eventual marriage was riddled with strife, and his drinking caught up with him; he died at 60 years of age. You can find his papers, along with several other Irish scientists’ archives, at Trinity’s library and his grave at Mount Jerome Cemetary in Dublin.
George Boole (UCC)
Another father of a science that the Irish can claim is George Boole, who was actually born in London in 1815 on what would later become Doug’s birthday. Boole moved to Ireland in 1849 for a professorship and kicked off the field of computer science with Boolean algebra while at University College, Cork (then called, for various reasons we won’t go into, Queen’s College, Cork). He wasn’t the only one dabbling in such things, of course, for folks like Charles Babbage and Augusta Ada Lovelace (poet Lord Byron’s daughter) were laying the groundwork for computer programs and software, but Boole’s the Irish one in the lot, and we’re celebrating St. Patrick’s Day this week. For Boole, differential equations, logic, and probability were passions, though he took time to father five daughters with Mary Everest, a mathematician and education reformer in her own right. Boole remains an Irishman, buried in Blackrock, outside of Cork City.
Kathleen Lonsdale (UCC)
In the days of yore in which these three Irish scientists made their contributions, few women made inroads in fields like chemistry, mathematics, and physics. Kathleen Lonsdale, born in 1903 in Newbridge, was part of a changing world for women. Her family moved to England when she was young, and she attended Bedford College for Women there and was then offered a position in W. H. Bragg’s research laboratory at University College, London. She began studying molecular structure using X-rays, eventually demonstrated that the benzene ring is flat, and eventually was appointed to head the Department of Crystallography in 1949. Earlier, by the time World War II began, she opposed war altogether and spent a month in prison for refusing civil defense tasks and the fine for not registering, after which she worked on peace and prison-reform issues in addition to science. Lonsdale was the first woman to be elected to a Fellowship in the Royal Society of London and the first woman to serve as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (NASA)
More recently, Belfast native and astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell should have shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974. She was the second author of five, behind Antony Hewish, her thesis director, on a paper documenting their discovery of pulsars. Since then, she’s been lauded with honors and academic posts, including becoming a Fellow in the Royal Society and serving as Dean of Science at the University of Bath. In 2008, she co-edited Dark Matter: Poems of Space. Of this project, Jocelyn Bell Burnell says, according to the Gulbenkian Foundation, “When I started ‘collecting’ poetry with an astronomical theme some twenty years ago, I kept very quiet about my hobby. It is only in the last few years that I have dared to ‘come out’ so it has been heartening that so many of my colleagues have been so willing to take part in this unusual exercise, as well as delightful to see the results of the collaborations.”
Collaborations. Innovations. Art and science. Sláinte!
Readers may also be interested in our post about “Beer!” that was inspired by reminiscences of a visit to the Guinness factory.
Guest Blog: Tom Zoellner February 20, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Guest Blogs, Science, Writing.Tags: Books, Nuclear Weapons, Physics, WWII
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Today, we feature our colleague Tom Zoellner. He’s part of Anna’s panel called “Fallout & Facts: Creative Nonfiction in the Nuclear Age. Check out the rest of the panelists in our other recent guest posts: KRISTEN IVERSEN, JEFF PORTER, and M. G. LORD. And if you’re at AWP, join us for the panel on Friday, March 2, at 1:30p.m.
Tom’s latest book is A Safeway in Arizona, part memoir, part history, part cultural commentary, all an exploration of Arizona as the context of the shooting rampage that injured Gabrielle Giffords, his friend. But we asked him to be a guest blogger at Lofty Ambitions because his previous book is Uranium, which won the Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics and garnered him a spot on The Daily Show.
IN THE PALM OF MY HAND
Here is an experience that will make you want to wash your hands immediately—holding a stick of pure uranium. It was about the size of a small mechanical pencil, pure ebony in color, and it left dusty smudges on my hands. I was standing among mill workers at the Ranger Mine, which is located in the midst of some spectacular outback jungle in Australia. The stick of uranium was used in the mill’s lab for assaying purposes. I wanted to look like a tough guy so I inspected it like any other rock and casually handed it back to the technician. But more than anything, I really wanted to wash my hands.
That uranium wasn’t dangerous by itself. The number of unstable U-235 atoms that create the famously explosive critical mass was present at a perfectly safe ratio of 1 to 140, and the stick was not about to catch fire in the way that uranium can spontaneously self-combust when sliced thinly (an interesting state called “pyrophoricity”). The dust on my hands was radioactive, but the signature was small and only hazardous if I put my fingers to my nose and inhaled deeply. From there, it would get caught in fragile lung tissue and emit alpha, beta, and gamma particles at a constant rate. This is what slowly killed so many miners in the dusty adits of the American Southwest and the East German mountains during the Cold War.
I had been writing about uranium for several months at that point, relearning matters of basic atomic physics that had been long forgotten from high school. I had traveled to old mines in Utah and the Czech Republic and interviewed UN diplomats in Vienna. I had visited the site of a deserted mine in Africa once described as a “freak of nature” by a Manhattan Project official because it held ore at a purity level of 62%, which had never been seen before and hasn’t been seen since. That mine, named Shinkolobwe for a particular kind of thorny fruit, gave up most of the material used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts and continues to leak unknown quantities of ore to local buyers.
But holding this stick of 99% pure concentrated uranium—far better than anything Shinkolobwe yielded in the raw—was my first up-close experience with the subject that I had been chasing for months. It was sort of like a biographer of an elusive subject who talks to multiple friends and acquaintances and then unexpectedly gets introduced to the person in the flesh.
I wanted the moment to be more special than just being passed a lab sample. But after all, this was just an inanimate object. It could not talk. It could only sit there in my palm and chuck off (I couldn’t help but envision it) little packages of protons and neutrons at a rate far faster than the speed of sound, fast enough to travel around the earth’s equator in about two seconds. These alpha particles could be blocked with a barrier as thin as a sheet of paper and my bare skin was adequate protection. But still. This little wand contained a power unlike anything else in nature. It had an instability about it which could be exploited with the proper application of massive industrial force—the immense cascading rows of centrifuges and gaseous diffusion chambers which we had built in secret cities during the war and which Iran was now hiding underneath mountains to shield from American and Israeli spies and bombers.
I felt as if I should have spent more time holding this stick, thinking about this weird little trick of the universe that it held inside. Here was a small sliver of the rock buried in the earth’s crust that had the power to end all life on the planet. One that posed an overwhelming moral test for humanity ever since World War II ended with a uranium-powered exclamation point. There is much we don’t know about uranium and much we don’t know about our future with this mineral after just under seventy years of coexistence with its concentrated form.
Has the scientific genius of mankind outstripped our abilities to take care of the planet, and each other? Have we learned enough not just to crack open an atom, but how to get along despite our racial and political differences? Will we be able to keep our species alive in a world where we have access to such awesome means of destruction?
These thoughts didn’t come in that moment. Other things were on my mind. I wanted to look like a tough guy in front of the miner and chemists, and I handed the uranium back, keeping my faintly dusted hands casually at my side. And when a safe amount of time had passed, I found a reason to excuse myself to the men’s room and there I washed my hands twice with soap.
Update from Ragdale and A Nuclear Birthday February 11, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Science, Writing.Tags: Books, Einstein, Nuclear Weapons, Physics, Radioactivity, WWII
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On Thursday evening, after dining on walnut burgers, chipotle sweet potatoes, and sautéed spinach, we built a fire in the fireplace and settled in for a long editing session. We spent more than four hours working our way aloud through the two chapters we’ve drafted since our writing residency began.
Yesterday, it snowed in big clumps. From our second-floor windows, we watched the snow fall. Anna went outside for a short walk and to take some photos. Then, we tried to outline the rest of the chapters, doling out our ideas to the remaining chunks of pages we imagine. We try to outline the next two in more detail, put the ideas in the order they should appear. We have an idea of how long the chapters will be so we move a few things to a later chapter. But because of our experience drafting this project over the last week, we aren’t estimating the number of words or pages we expect an idea to take.
We have a sense of what we want to accomplish before we leave, and we’re pretty sure that, even if everything goes well, we would need three more days than we have. That said, we’re appreciative of the time we do have remaining here at Ragdale.
Today, we also pause to consider Leo Szilard, who was born on this date in 1898. As a Manhattan Project physicist, perhaps the first one, he fits into our “In the Footsteps” series, and he’s someone who’s long interested us.
Born in Hungary, he attended the Institute of Technology in Berlin, where he hung out with the likes of Albert Einstein and Max Planck. With that kind of company, it’s no wonder he ended up thinking, by 1933, after fleeing the Nazis and landing in London, about how a sustained nuclear reaction might work. There are several stories, most told at one time or another by Szilard himself, about how his idea that fission might lead to a bomb came to Szilard, but it’s clear that he was at least partly inspired by reading H. G. Wells’ The World Set Free. By the late 1930s, he was teaching at Columbia University, thinking uranium would be the right element for such a nuclear reaction, and soliciting Einstein’s endorsement of a letter he wanted to send to President Roosevelt. The letter from Einstein to Roosevelt led to the development of the Manhattan Project, and hence the suggestion that Szilard was the first physicist on the project.
Szilard moved on to the University of Chicago, where he helped Enrico Fermi build the first controlled nuclear reaction and held the patent with Fermi for that first nuclear reactor, which they referred to as a “pile.” In this coming week’s regular Wednesday post, we offer a sneak-peek of Anna’s AWP presentation on creative nonfiction in the nuclear age, which mentions this historic event of December 2, 1942, an event that, in a real sense, marked the beginning of the nuclear age.
Metallurgical Lab (Fermi on left in first row, Szilard in light coat second from right)
As the United States grew closer to having a useable nuclear weapon, Szilard became concerned about its use against Japan and pushed unsuccessfully for a test demonstration. He was also disturbed that the military would have control over nuclear weapons and that scientists were not being involved in policy.
Shortly after the war, Szilard gave his attention to biology and even fiction writing, with a collection of short stories related to his experiences and the Cold War and in which dolphins tell the story of our demise. He also met with Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev and suggested a hot line between the White House and the Kremlin and, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, rushed to Geneva in hopes of establishing a dialogue between the president and the premier. Only a few months after joining the Salk Institute in 1964, Leo Szilard died in his sleep from a heart attack.
Enrico Fermi, Szilard’s partner in the first nuclear reactor, died of stomach cancer at age 53. Szilard later developed bladder cancer. Szilard’s cancer didn’t kill him, though it might have if he hadn’t undergone radiation and then, much to his doctors’ chagrin and by his own treatment design, more radiation. He had radioactive silver implanted in the tumor. Such implantation radiation treatment was highly unusual then but has since become one common way to treat prostrate cancer.
Szilard’s unconventional thinking didn’t stop with his science. He was known for soaking in a hot bath in the mornings to think and to take breakfast. Taking a hot bath today, perhaps with a glass of wine, might be the most fitting way to celebrate Szilard’s birthday. In 1951, he married Dr. Trude Weiss after they had been pen pals and confidantes for more than twenty years. We like this part of the story especially, in large part because we, too, knew each other twenty years before running off and doing something foolish like that. Szilard and Weiss, though, would spend most of the marriage living apart, something with which we’re not unfamiliar.
Szilard’s legacy, then, as a nuclear scientist and a human being is, like so many of the people about which we are drawn to write, a complex one. He was the Humanist of the Year in 1960, mingling in the ranks of Margaret Sanger and, later, Linus Pauling, Carl Sagan, Helen Caldicott, Margaret Atwood (who will be at AWP in a few weeks), and Bill Nye. Not a bad group overall and certainly eclectic.
In the Footsteps (Part 12) February 8, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Science, Writing.Tags: In the Footsteps, Museums & Archives, Nobel Prize, Nuclear Weapons, Physics, WWII
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Lofty Ambitions is going to AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference. Doug will present on a panel called “Purloining the Letter” on Thursday, March 1, at 10:30a.m. in the Chicago Hilton. As we’ve peeked at letters and telegrams written in bygone days, we’ve learned a lot about archives and how to read these documents. Doug’s expertise as a scientist and as a librarian continues to be a great asset for us, and he’s sharing some of that here at Lofty Ambitions as well as at AWP.
To read the rest of our “In the Footsteps” series, click HERE or on that tag in the tag cloud in the sidebar. To read posts by those presenting presenting at the AWP panel “Fallout & Facts: Creative Nonfiction in the Nuclear Age,” click HERE or on the Guest Blogs category in the menu up top, then scroll for Tom Zoellner, M. G. Lord, Jeff Porter, and Kristen Iversen, whose forthcoming book will be featured in Barnes & Nobel’s Summer Great New Writers program.
PURLOINING THE LETTER: DOCUMENTS OF THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
Doug & Enterprise at NASM
I’m currently working on an espionage novel, set during the Manhattan Project. the Lofty Duo has done a fair bit of research, including working in the archives of the Library of Congress, where we’ve read through some boxes of the papers of J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of Los Alamos laboratory during the Manhattan Project. Although I’d taken away several fascinating tidbits from that research project, after hearing Alan Furst discuss methods for building a vocabulary that authentically recreates a historical period, I silently admonished myself for not being more methodical in my own use of the letters, memos, notes, and other ephemera in Oppenheimer’s papers. All these types of documents—letters, memos, telegrams, notes, and other ephemera—play the same role in my research because they, unlike a private journal or a publication intended for the general public, are written for a specific audience.
Since that realization inspired by Furst’s talk, I’ve been more focused in my research use of letters and other materials. I think about my usage as fitting a few primary categories:
- Language and vocabulary development. This aligns with Furst’s suggestions in recreating a time period but has also helped me in creating verisimilitude by learning the military and scientific jargon of the era.
- Events confirmation. This helps me align my novel’s plot with the recorded events.
- Character development. Each document reveals aspects of the person who wrote it and also of the person who was intended to receive it.
Samuel Goudsmit to Robert Bacher (CalTech Archives)
A concrete example of the type of historically accurate vernacular that I needed to develop in my novel is the list of codenames assigned to important Manhattan Project scientists. Nobel Laureates Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr, for example, were assigned the names Farmer and Baker respectively. The use of code names, primarily for communications and travel purposes, is described in a number of books and biographies about the era. In the richly annotated book Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, authors Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner include a letter from Oppenheimer to the project’s military head, General Leslie Groves, wherein the left-leaning academic encourages the security-obsessed military man to consider assigning code names by saying, “it would be preferable if such well known names were not put in circulation.” Not only do I better understand the practice of codenames, but also the way in which the practice was discussed.
From Max Planck (CalTech Archives)
The second way in which letters have played a role in my novel has been to develop my understanding of the sequencing of events associated with the Manhattan Project. The beginning of the project itself is associated with a specific letter, signed by Albert Einstein in October 1939 and hand-carried to President Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s response was to create a committee to investigate the feasibility of this research. For a program that would ultimately consume $2B dollars, the Manhattan Project got off to a very modest start, spending in the neighborhood of $5K in 1939 and 1940. The papers of Robert Bacher in CalTech’s archives detail the extent of this work. Even more important, by the letters’ very nature—one-to-one communication between the involved scientists—the documents point to the fact that none of the involved parties anticipated the scope of what was to come. That in-the-moment record can be even more important than the hindsight of a historical text that looks back long after the events.
The third letter-use category that I have defined for my own work has been their use in character development, both fictional and historical. Of particular interest to me, for instance, was a recommendation letter written by Richard Feynman, which I encountered in the papers of Robert Oppenheimer in the Library of Congress. Much has been written about Feynman’s quirky, non-conformist character (including much in his own voice, in books that he penned). And yet, after making my way through most of Feynman’s books and several books where Feynman appears, nothing could make his unconventional ways as tangible as a single letter—written for a single person, Oppenheimer—wherein Feynman suggests that a candidate for a job (at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies) will make his greatest contribution by being fantastic at parties.
Other aspects of working with letters in archives can be helpful as well. Recently, I listened to Knox College Professor Doug Wilson discuss how Abraham Lincoln’s predilection for producing multiple drafts of letters has actually influenced the course of scholarship. In a somewhat unusual situation, the final copies of Lincoln’s letters have been archived at the Library of Congress, while the drafts are at the Huntington Library. By comparing the two collections, Wilson discovered that the Library of Congress actually had gaps in its Lincoln Collection, that drafts existed where there was no remaining final copy in the Library of Congress. My research thus far indicates that this tendency to produce multiple drafts of letters (usually one or two handwritten versions that were then typed up, sometimes with a carbon copy, perhaps by a secretary) is also common in the papers of Manhattan Project scientists. While this hasn’t been consciously reflected in my novel by characters writing drafts of letters, it has provided me with an insight into how these people thought, how they planned and revised. It has also caused me to wonder on several occasions about how many of my colleagues draft and revise emails before sending them, as I often do.
Letter from Albert Einstein, 1913 (Huntington Library)
I’ll conclude this post as a librarian myself, with some practical advice regarding working with letters in archives. First, call ahead and make an appointment. Particularly in these times of economic uncertainty, archives are overworked and understaffed. During our most recent archival visit to CalTech, drop-ins were turned away. In addition, librarians and archivists are best able to help those who help themselves. By contacting them prior to your visit, they will probably ask you for specifics regarding the materials that you wish to see. In larger archives, materials are often stored offsite. By planning ahead, those materials can be brought to the work area prior to your visit.
Also, think ahead about copyright. In some collections, statements about copyright are included. In others, not so much. Ask questions so that you know the extent to which you can quote or otherwise use documents and how you should credit that use. Depending on the date it was written, the copyright holder of a personal letter, for instance, is usually the writer of that letter, not the recipient or whoever happens to have it in her attic.
Lastly, be cognizant of the age of the materials that you handle. Tearing a letter in half as you pull it out of the box is a rotten way to start a research visit. Holding thin, fragile letters conveys a sense of the preciousness of these materials and their contents and a sense of proximity to the time in which they were written, as if you can hear the letter-writer’s footsteps receding down the hallway.
Update from Ragdale & Today’s Birthdays February 4, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Collaboration, Science, Writing.Tags: Nobel Prize, WWII
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The flight from Long Beach to Chicago was a breeze. It took some time to rent the car because folks, including Tom Brady’s dad, were flying into the Windy City and drving down to Indianapolis for tomorrow’s Super Bowl. Coming from L.A.-area traffic, the drive from O’Hare Airport to Ragdale was amazingly smooth. Does Chicago not have rush hour anymore, or have our standards changed?
Ragdale is nestled in Lake Forest, a luxurious northern suburb perched on Lake Michigan. Upon arrival, we had a glass of wine, a tour of the Barnhouse, and a delicious home-cooked dinner with our six fellow residents and three enthusiastic staff. Several of the residents are from the area, and one is a fellow Knox College alum. Our rooms are comfortable, quiet, and warm.
Books by former residents, including Scott Turow, Sara Peretsky, Mary Gaitskill, Jennifer Haigh, and Alice Sebold, line a wall of shelves by the front door. Anna started reading the uncorrected proof of Jesse Lee Kercheval’s Space this morning. Finding a memoir about growing up on the Space Coast was just the sort of serendipity we like to use as encouragement.
Yesterday, on our first full day, we found the gym at Lake Forest College, where Ragdale residents can work out at no cost. It’s the nicest gym we’ve ever seen. The Metra station is nearby, as is the beach, though we haven’t traversed there yet. The Whole Foods was a little farther than we thought, but we picked up a few essentials and got our bearings in case we need to get out for a meal or stop at Barnes & Noble.
And we wrote. For hours. We had pizza with the other residents last night. And then we wrote some more. Some of our drafting is from scratch, and some is drawn from things we’ve already written, though not cut and pasted because we don’t want to inadvertently shape our big project by the structure or language of previous work. We’re rethinking and trying to figure out something new.
This morning, Anna admitted that she’s sick with a cold. Doug will travel into Chicago for dinner with family and friends without her. Today is a break in the routine. We’re not writing as much, but we’re still writing.
And we’re quietly celebrating two birthdays. Charles Lindbergh, who made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, was born on this date in 1902. If you don’t know the story of Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, we recommend The Spirit of St. Louis, starring Jimmy Stewart, himself a pilot and a WWII veteran who trained B-17 bombardiers in the United States, flew B-24s overseas in the war, and even managed to earn a Mach 2 pin by flying a B-58 Hustler—one of Doug’s favorite aircraft—to twice the speed of sound.
Lindbergh’s life, of course, was far more complicated than the film portraying the accomplishment that brought him instant fame both in the United States and abroad. He was interested in a lot of things, including Robert Goddard’s work in rocketry and Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrell’s work in organ surgery. In fact, Charles Lindbergh invented a perfusion pump that contributed to the development of heart surgery. He was given unprecedented access to German and Soviet aviation facilities before WWII and began publicly opposing the war. Some of his statements smack of anti-Semitism, and there are stories (including his daughter’s book) of affairs and secret children in Europe. The story that garnered worldwide notoriety, though, was the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s young son in 1932. The boy’s remains were found a couple of months later, and a perpetrator was convicted and executed.
Charles Lindbergh’s story is a lesson in complexity for us as writers and seems to be, like any life, the weaving together of several stories that may not be seamless. We strive for narrative arc, cause and effect, a beginning and middle and end, but we don’t want to jerry-rig our story.
That brings us to the second birthday. Clyde Tombaugh was born on this date in 1906. We wrote about him briefly in “Happy Birthday, Neptune!” Tombaugh was a fellow Ilinoisan who made his way out West. While working at the Lowell Observatory, he discovered the ninth planet, Pluto. For a long time, that was a good story. But Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, though even before that, museums had started opening displays of the Solar System without Pluto. The story changed—or rather, the facts remained the same (Pluto is still out there), but the interpretation changed as time passed.
So Clyde Tombaugh’s story is a lesson for us too, as we’re figuring out how to tell our story. The story may change, the details rearranged to lead to new ideas, and that’s okay.
Blue Sky Metropolis December 14, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Science, Space Exploration.Tags: Airshows, Museums & Archives, Physics, Space Shuttle, WWII
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Yakir Aharonov
Today’s post is going up a little later than usual because we spent part of today listening to Yakir Aharonov, our colleague at Chapman University, explain quantum mechanics and Alice in Wonderland. We’ll get back to Aharonov and the Aharonov-Bohm effect at some point at Lofty Ambitions.
Time is running out, though, on the Blue Sky Metropolis exhibition at the Huntington Library, so we wanted to share our recent viewing of that while there’s time for area residents and visitors to catch it before it closes on January 9, 2012. Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in California was one of our happy accidents. Our colleague Jana Remy invited us to present in the Past Tense series at the Huntington Library on November 18, and we hung out afterward to see some of what there was to see there, including this exhibit, which is tied to a forthcoming edited essay collection by the same title.
The first international air meet was held in Dominguez Hills, California, in 1910, thus beginning California’s aerospace history. Like air shows today, it was incredibly popular, attracting 226,000 watchers during its ten-day run. During the 1920s, commercial aviation took off, and Southern California became a hub for that industry with 28 aircraft manufacturing companies in 1928.
Word War II made aviation the largest industry in the world, and Southern California remained a go-go and a region for building aircraft. As the placard script noted, “Southern California aircraft factories employed 2 million people; some individual plants had 100,000 workers each, with shifts working around the clock.”
JPL Computers (people who computed), 1940s-1950s (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Of course, by 1957, with the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik I, the industry expanded its notions and helped put an American satellite into orbit in 1958. Though it was launched from Florida, Explorer I was built at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as part of the International Geophysical Year (see our photo of a geodetic in a previous post HERE). Of course, the recently retired space shuttle orbiters were born and took their first, albeit tentative, steps in Southern California (see the shuttle’s first flight video below).
The boom-and-bust cycle of space exploration and Cold War defense programs kept the California aerospace industry a dynamic, ever-changing part of the regional economy. Now, California’s aerospace industry is expanding into commercial space exploration.
Blue Sky Metropolis covers this aerospace history with a roomful of selected artifacts, including many photos, letters, and memos. In fact, though it’s no surprise at a library, this exhibit is one of the more text-heavy displays we’ve seen in our travels to archives and museums. That makes sense, of course, because these letters and memos articulated the decision-making throughout the growth of the industry.
Kelly Johnson
Kelly Johnson, who grew up in Ishpeming, Michigan, where Anna’s grandfather was raised, is featured prominently. A course notebook from his Aeronautics course at the University of Michigan in 1931 documents an assignment to analyze a “performance problem” by calculating characteristics from an aircraft blueprint. He writes, “In general, the performance of this plane is good. The Clark Y wing is a speed wing, and the speed for this plane at sea level is probably from 120-125 m/p/h. All computations in this report are given at 5000 foot altitude and with empty tanks.” While still at the University of Michigan, Johnson performed wind tunnel tests on Lockheed’s Model 10 Electra. (See our Lofty post about the Electra Junior HERE.) Those early assignments led Kelly Johnson to a four-decade career in the aerospace industry, in which he contributed to the design of aircraft like the P-38 Lightning, the family of Constellations, the F-104 Starfighter, the C-130 Hercules, and the U-2 spy plane.
Also featured in the exhibit is Willis Hawkins, another engineer educated at the University of Michigan whose career at Lockheed spanned decades. Some of his more philosophical writings are included. He writes, “One group of men can be blamed however, if there is cause for blame, and that group goes by the name of engineers. An engineer is fundamentally a mechanic whose dexterity with the tools of physics has made it possible for him to create inanimate machines which propelled by some form of thinking pilot can produce material miracles of transportation or creation.”
A memo from D.A. Shields about “a satellite and space exploration program” asserts, “The feasibility of the proposed program is probably the most exciting part of the entire idea.” That’s dated 29 September 1959. Less than three years later, President John F. Kennedy thought going to the Moon was indeed feasible.
H-4 in (Only) Flight
The tidbits mount up and are worth seeing: a wall-sized blueprint of the Spruce Goose HK-1 from 1944 (read Spruce Goose curator’s guest post HERE and our original HK-1 post HERE), a photo of Kelly Johnson and Amelia Earhart working together in ta Lockheed hangar during the 1930s, a letter from Willis Hawkins in 1992 replying to a middle-school student who asks how something can fly, and a one-way ticket for Transcontinental Air Transport dated October 19, 1929 (a year later, TAT would be bankrupt).
Blue Sky Metropolis is worth a flyby! And of course, there’s lots more at the Huntington Library, including the Beautiful Science exhibit in the same building.
There’s No Business Like Air Show Business (Part 4) November 30, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation.Tags: Airshows, Museums & Archives, WWII
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We’ve sung the praises of serendipity—that chance occurrence that connects a single, unanticipated event to our larger projects—on a number of occasions (HERE and HERE and HERE). But we’re also big believers in preparation, doing the research, and being ready to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. Our recent trip to the Eighth Annual Jacqueline Cochran Air Show provided just such an opportunity. We’ve already described some of the events that took place at this air show, but the signature moment for us took place shortly after we arrived.
After making our way through the gate, we headed towards the C-17 transport sitting at the southern end of the flight line. Its gigantic wings offered shade from the desert sun, giving us the chance to pull our thoughts together. We then walked the length of the flight line in order to reconnoiter the aircraft, the crowd, and the vendors, a standard tactic to get the lay of the land.
Long before we reached the end of the flight line, we began see occasional flashes of bright, reflected sunlight. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence at air shows. Many WWII-era aircraft are displayed unpainted, finished in their original aluminum skin. But this was different. The reflected light was vibrant, more intense. When we arrived at its source, we saw why: a 1939 Lockheed 12A Electra Junior.
This aircraft’s owner is Les Whittlesey. He spoke with us about the aircraft’s lifespan, gave us a tour of this magnificent piece of aviation history, and showed us various Lockheed ephemera he’s been collecting, often finding something on eBay. (Click here for another article about Les and his plane.)
A product of aviation’s Golden Age in the 1930s, the Electra Junior, so named for its relationship to the larger Lockheed 10 Electra, is a living exemplar of architect Louis Sullivan’s form follows function maxim. Many of the aircraft of the late 1920s and early 1930s were still boxlike structures, covered with fabric, dope, and paint. Recently developed aluminum-based manufacturing techniques gave aeronautical engineers like Kelly Johnson, a native of Ishpeming, Michigan, also Anna’s grandfather’s hometown, the ability to experiment with a new design language which emphasized spare, streamlined shapes. The Electra Junior, a twin-engine, six-passenger plane, was just such a new aircraft shape.
It’s often assumed that the era’s defining architectural and design style, Art Deco, was deeply influenced by the aviation industry and developed its love of curves and shining metal surfaces from the era’s aircraft. In reality, the relationship among aviation, industrial design, and art deco is a more complex, symbiotic one. Art deco had always been a reflection of modernism with its roots in machines and mechanisms. As the ne plus ultra machine of its day, it was only natural that the speed and dynamism of the airplane would influence art deco and that designers steeped in the vernacular of art deco would turn that knowledge back on the flying machine.
Les Whittlesey’s Electra Junior was originally built in 1939 for aviation and automotive magnate Errett Lobban “E. L.” Cord. Cord, as owner of Auburn Automobile Company (in addition to the Stinson Aircraft Company, Lycoming Engines, and several others), was no stranger to futuristic designs. The Auburn Boattail Speedster, designed in the early 1930s by Al Leamy, was an aggressively streamlined shape. Cord took delivery of the Electra Junior in 1940, but he was only able to enjoy it briefly.
In 1941, the U.S. Treasury Department commandeered the aircraft (Cord was paid for it) in preparation for the coming war. The Electra Junior was given the military designation of C-40 and shipped off to England as a part of the Lend-Lease program. As a transport during the war, the aircraft survived a friendly-fire incident over Belgium (the damage was uncovered during its most recent restoration), and there’s a “rumor” (Whittlesey’s word) that Prime Minister Winston Churchill flew in the aircraft. The January 2012 edition of Aviation History contains an article about Churchill learning to fly. Who knows, perhaps Churchill even graced the co-pilot’s seat of this aircraft.
The Electra Junior evokes a different era, one of, as the sales brochure announces, “real comfort when you fly.” In fact, an Electra Junior (and a cutout of one) was used as the Air France aircraft in the penultimate scene in Casablanca (see the video clip below). Although Air France never operated the Lockheed 12A, Hollywood’s artistic license led to the correct choice of style over accuracy in this case.
The Electra Junior’s indisputable style plays a leading role in the Cal Aero Aviation Country Club at Chino Airport, an events venue owned and operated by Les and his wife Susan. During our interview, Les related the fact that aviation-themed country clubs—think standard country club but with runways instead of golf greens—were popular in Southern California in the 1930s. Yes, as we sat in the passenger seats aboard the Electra Junior, we could almost hear the strains of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”
One of this particular aircraft’s greatest achievements was winning the 2006 Grand Champion award at the AirVenture in Oshkosh. It turns out we were there that year, which serves to remind us of a great value of air shows. These events are traveling archives, and each artifact has its own knowledgeable docent. This time, initially attracted by its aesthetic appeal, we grew to understand the story of an Electra Junior.
ALSO SEE OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES for more info on the people and the aircraft & lots of photos: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3
