THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN dates from 1817 as a territorially-chartered college in the then-frontier town of Detroit. The present campus was established at Ann Arbor in 1837. It is one of the early great universities, and a beautiful one—its big brick buildings of classical design, ivy-covered, amid neat lawns bordered by trees that flower in season, on a spacious, sprawling campus. It can be at once formidable and welcoming to an incoming student.
But the real beauty of it for me when I enrolled in 1929 was the distinguished faculty. Many had impressive national, even international, reputations in their fields. I thought I never could be so smart as these men. I couldn’t wait to begin my classes.
At that time, in order to get a degree in aeronautical engineering you had to study all the different fields of engineering—civil, chemical, electrical, mechanical—leading to the study of aeronautical engineering. It was an excellent curriculum because it provided a very good basic education in everything it took to design and build an airplane.
My first professor was Felix Pawlowski, teacher, pioneer aircraft designer, and philosopher. The Polish and Russian universities had been into aviation early and were in the forefront of aeronautical knowledge at that time. Pawlowski, a Pole, had worked in Russia with Igor Sikorsky on the world’s first four-engine airplane in 1913. He had been trained by Professor Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Paris tower, and worked with him on a wind tunnel. Professor Pawlowski was responsible for bringing the first wind tunnel and the first aeronautical engineering curriculum to the University of Michigan.
He taught my first course in aerodynamics and helped me get the first engineering jobs that would pay my way through school. He, like some of the other professors, had contracts outside the college. In the wind tunnel, I worked for him on design of the Union Pacific streamlined train, on a smoke-removal project for the city of Chicago, and on one of the very early proposals for generating energy with a wind machine.
The professors were broadminded people, with interests and contacts outside the university. They took a personal as well as professional interest in their students. One day Professor Pawlowski taught me an important lesson in keeping an open mind. He took me down to a bank vault where he had some wax impressions of hands, “spirit” hands, he had from a seance. They were entwined in a manner that could not be explained. This eminent scientist was willing to consider their validity. He wanted me to learn to keep an open mind.
“Don’t automatically write anything off,” he said. “Anything.” I’ve remembered that.
Professor Edward A. Stalker, author of a basic text on aerodynamics and an outstanding mathematician, was head of the aeronautical department. He, himself, not some registrar, helped me plan my course of study.
After I had shown enough academic progress he selected me as student assistant and I was able to earn enough money to quit the lowly job in the fraternity kitchen.
As head of the aeronautical engineering department, Professor Stalker operated the wind tunnel and got me involved in wind-tunnel testing.
One day I asked Professor Stalker, “Could I rent the wind tunnel when it’s not needed by the university and get some jobs on my own?”
“Sure,” he said.
So for $35 a day, plus the power charges, my best friend in college, Don Palmer, and I became part-time proprietors of the University of Michigan wind tunnel. The money didn’t mean anything to the university; renting the tunnel afforded them a chance to see what the students could do.
Immediately, I approached the Studebaker Motor Company. It was obvious that the wind tunnel could be very useful in designing streamlined automobiles. We got an assignment to test the Pierce Silver Arrow, which was to become one of the early “totally-streamlined” cars. We knew all the tricks on how to reduce drag caused by air resistance. We found, for instance, that the big ugly headlamps on Studebaker cars were eating up 16 percent of the power the engine developed at 65 miles an hour. We managed to get them shaped into the fenders. We worked on a lot of other problems and ran many, many tests.
So we worked not only for Professors Pawlowski and Stalker but for ourselves. Tutoring in calculus also brought me $7.50 an hour.
Some of the courses, seemingly not much related to aircraft, turned out to be especially useful to me later.
Mechanical engineering, for example. For our final examination, we students had to make a heat balance evaluation of the university’s power plant, a large steam facility with four big boilers, that provided not only heat but power. I, an aeronautical engineer, was put in charge of the other mechanical engineers for the three-day continuous test, measuring coal input and then accounting for all the energy through the entire process down to the ashes. It was a valuable lesson in energy balance.
Professor O. W. Boston was a pioneer in the field of machining metals, and the author of a book on the subject. He also worked with the automobile industry on methods of cutting such materials as high-strength steel and other metals to improve machinability and thereby improve efficiency in automobile production.
He was, I believe, the first to imbed thermocouples in a tool on a lathe or milling machine to measure tool temperatures. He also worked on the design of tools to remove metal rapidly. Much later I was to apply his methods in the approach to machining new metals, specifically, titanium and stainless steel.
The two Timoshenko brothers, Russians, were professors of structure. The study of vibration and structure was very important, basic for me, in learning how to make aircraft wings and tails that wouldn’t flutter. That was a bugabear of a problem in those early days.
There was Professor Milton Thompson in aeronautics, Professor Walter E. Lay for engines, others whose names escape me now, each an expert. This was heady stuff for the kid from Ishpeming who wanted to be like Tom Swift. It was an exciting adventure, associating with some of the best minds in every field important to a would-be engineer.
Respectful though I was of the great experience and knowledge of my professors, I yet was not so deferential that I would not argue back if I disagreed. And I did.
With Professor Pawlowski, who had given me a B grade on my computation of wind-tunnel tests on a little biplane—I didn’t like to get less than an A— I argued that my numbers were correct. I proved it, and he changed the grade to A. He kept an open mind himself, as he advised.
When Professor Stalker published a new text, I had the temerity to write out all the answers to all the problems and proposed to publish them. I was persuaded not to do this since it would undermine the book and considerably diminish sales.
These men were not only my mentors but my friends and companions, and not because their losses at poker gave me another small added income.
But most of the time I was working or studying, correcting papers or tutoring. I completed three years’ university work in two. There was little time to play. I knew I had to work hard to become a good engineer, and I enjoyed it.
There were lighter moments. Like the time Don and I were cleaning the wind tunnel and became so high on gasoline fumes and so noisy that we disrupted nearby classes.
And lonely times. Trudging back across campus after dinner—which cost perhaps as little as fifty cents or as much as $1.25—for more wind tunnel work or correcting papers for the professors.
Those were the days of Prohibition and home brew. I was very much against drinking then, believing the stories of my hard-drinking Swedish ancestry, but my colleagues in the boardinghouse imbibed the stuff they brewed—fermenting fruit juice in a can. Returning from campus on a winter evening, I found one fellow sitting outside in the snow wearing only his shorts, and mumbling to himself. Another convincing argument against drinking.
I had my first ulcer in high school, but in college I had one all the time. I’ve always been a worry wart. I discovered that if I kept something in my stomach all the time I felt fine. I did that with repeated ingestion of two doughnuts and a glass of milk—at a cost of twenty cents. One semester I computed that I had consumed 647 doughnuts—at five cents each.
In all my time at the university, I went out on dates just twice. Once to a good movie—I don’t remember what it was. And to a class dance. Dancing came easily to me, fortunately. When would I have had time to practice? I had learned in high school. But I didn’t have time for romance either, and I deliberately avoided any entanglement. There would be no detours from my goal.
The year 1932, when I was graduated with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, was not a propitious year for job hunting. My friend Don and I investigated opportunities on the East Coast—Sikorsky, Martin, Curtiss—with no encouragement. We decided to join the Army Air Corps and become aviation cadets. We would learn to fly and test airplanes and learn all about them. I had passed every other entrance requirement and then took the eye examination. My left eye, the one nearly lost to the arrow in a childhood game of cowboys and Indians, was not up to the standard required by the Air Corps although it never had given me any trouble. Once again, an accident changed the course of my career. If I’d been accepted as an aviation cadet, I would have taken that route and stayed with it.
Don and I then borrowed Professor Walter Burke’s Chevrolet and set off to tour the aircraft plants in the West looking for work as engineers.
We were short of money, of course. Our earnings in the tunnel and elsewhere had gone toward school expenses. To get better mileage from the professor’s car and save money on fuel, we drilled a one-eighth-inch diameter hole in the manifold inlet and inserted a valve, so while driving we could open it and lean out the fuel in flight, so to speak. We did get three or four more miles to the gallon.
To hold down expenses, we’d buy milk, bread, and sandwich meat to make our lunches. We camped out in schoolyards, by the side of streams, in fields, wherever we could, and nearly ended our careers early when we picked a site in the dark one night and were awakened by a passing railroad train uncomfortably close. We decamped hurriedly.
That was the most excitement we encountered until we got to Lockheed in Burbank in the San Fernando Valley of California. The company had been purchased from receivers by a small group of aviation enthusiasts just that June for $40,000.
The company was in the process of being reorganized. Lockheed already was a big name as designer and builder of fast plywood aircraft flown by many of the famous names in early aviation. There were no jobs for engineers yet, but Richard von Hake, chief engineer at Lockheed when it was part of Detroit Aircraft and who was to become production manager of the new company, suggested:
“Look, something is going to come of this. Why don’t you go back to school and come out again next year. I think we’ll have something for you.”
Well, there were no other job opportunities that year; we’d tried all the principal companies.
So, we returned to the University of Michigan for a year of graduate study. To afford this extra year to get my master’s, I applied for and was awarded the Sheehan Fellowship; the $500 paid my expenses. I majored in supercharging of engines, to get high power at high altitude, and boundary layer control, how to control airflow around fuselage, wings, and tail. It later proved a fortunate choice. Of course, aerodynamics is basically boundary layer control. And I always loved engines and aerodynamics. It was a natural choice, as well.
In our graduate year, Don and I did much more wind-tunnel testing on our own as well as for the university.
The local newspaper reported, “Five of the qualifying cars which will race at Indianapolis Memorial Day have bodies designed by two University graduate students, C. L. Johnson and E. D. Palmer. All of the cars are semi-stock Studebakers and all qualified for the race at speeds ranging between 110 and 116 miles an hour.…”
We managed to improve the miles per gallon on these cars from seven to 11.6 at 113 miles an hour. That was important, because in those days fuel-tank capacity was limited.
A few proposals we explored, such as streamlining wheels, the drivers refused to accept. I was given a demonstration of the argument against that one day when we were at the track for tests.
It was very exciting circling the track at speeds of 130 to 140 miles an hour; but if you had solid-disc streamlined wheels, the wind across the track would just pick up the car and set it down again about four feet off course.
Another idea I tried to sell was dive brakes on the side of the car, because the streamlined cars would reach such high speeds on the straightaway that they would lose all their advantage by having to brake at the turn. This was a difficult effect, too, because if one brake opened a bit earlier than the other, the car would just swap ends. They still don’t use dive brakes today to my knowledge; but many other ideas from aerodynamics have been incorporated in the design of racing autos.
The experience was a liberal education for me in the practical application of aerodynamic theory.
Among the airplane models tested by the university was a new design from the recently-reorganized Lockheed company. The chairman of the board, Robert Ellsworth Gross, 35, had decided that the company’s future was not in the single-engine wooden aircraft that had been so successful in the past, but in the newer all-metal designs with twin engines and the capability of carrying more passengers.
The new model was the Electra. It developed some very serious problems, I thought, from what I then knew of aerodynamics. It had very bad longitudinal stability and directional-control problems. But most aircraft of that day had similar failings. Professor Stalker, in consultation with Lloyd Stearman, already a recognized top-notch designer at age 33 and first president of the company, decided the figures were acceptable.
When I left college with my master of science degree in 1933, I owed only $500 and had enough money to buy a used Chevrolet sedan to try again for a job in California. Don went with me, and once again we modified our car to stretch gasoline. Thanks to our work in the wind tunnel and the Sheehan scholarship that last year, I was relatively wealthy. We didn’t try to continue our consultancy work with the wind tunnel because it now was so lucrative that it was attracting the professors’ attention. Besides, at the university we certainly weren’t going to design aircraft—and that was my goal. But I didn’t make that much money again until 10 years later.
When we got to California in 1933, I was hired at Lockheed by Cyril Chappellet, one of the original investors and now secretary of the company, assistant to the president, and personnel officer, and by Hall L. Hibbard, chief engineer. Both were young men themselves. I think an important reason for my being hired was that I had run the wind-tunnel tests on the company’s new plane. I was to receive $83 a month to start in tool design until they could assign me as an engineer. There were five engineers at the time, counting Hibbard. Don Palmer was hired at Vultee Airplane Company in Glendale.
Practically the first thing I told Chappellet and Hibbard was that their plane was unstable and that I did not agree with the university’s wind-tunnel report.