CHAPTER 4

Howard Hughes Supplies the Props

I NEVER MET HOWARD HUGHES—few people did—but I knew him as an icon. To us young, male, snowbound, easterners about to graduate from engineering schools in the fifties, Howard Hughes was the personification of Los Angeles. A man of both inherited wealth and creative genius, Hughes was making movies, building airplanes, running an airline, dating movie stars, and organizing the future. He was doing all that in a place where it never snowed, gas cost twenty-five cents a gallon, houses cost $20,000, and you could park anywhere. What follows is a story about a few people who did know Howard Hughes, about the miraculous technology he spawned as casually as a bull plays at pasture, and about the resulting industrial climate that blossomed in post–World War II southern California, when the technology of instant nuclear warfare took shape in the United States.

THE YOUNG TEXAN

Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was born in Houston, Texas, on December 24, 1905, the only son of a talented inventor, the man who founded the Hughes Tool Company. The senior Hughes’s contribution, the source of his great fortune, was the rotary rock drilling tool, an odd-looking conical instrument with multiple and hardened cutting edges mounted on rotating subassemblies. Rights to the Hughes tool were protected throughout the industrialized world by a solid wall of patents.

The younger Hughes’s mother died when the boy was sixteen, and death claimed his father two years later. With the help of a court order, Hughes took full control of the company on his nineteenth birthday. He did not meddle in the company’s operations, preferring to leave them as both a monument to his father and as a cash cow to fund his own more diverse interests. He picked good people to run the place, and he displayed an immediate understanding of the business by continuing to lease, not sell, rock bits to Hughes’s customers. These leases included the services of an on-site engineer to recommend the right tool as different formations were encountered at each well. Those men built personal relationships with drilling contractors that withstood the expiration of patents. In the mid-1950s the Hughes Tool Co. still controlled half the world’s market for drilling tools, earning profits of over $300 million, in year-2000 dollars. Young Howard Hughes owned it all.

In the fall of 1925, having installed management that he trusted, and blessed with one million of today’s dollars in daily cash flow, Howard Hughes departed for southern California. On arrival in Los Angeles, he hired CPA Noah Dietrich to serve as his financial adviser. Hughes then set about doing what he wanted to do: making movies and airplanes. During the ensuing twenty years, Hughes produced one hit movie after another, acquired a pilot’s license, and set world speed records in aircraft of his own design. During World War II his airplane company developed a flying boat, helicopters, and reconnaissance aircraft, all unique. Some were lethal to their crews; none were produced in volume. This was a time when many of the established aircraft manufacturers, then headquartered in Cleveland or Dayton, were opening new facilities in southern California, where the pleasant, rain-free weather facilitated construction, the outdoor assembly of aircraft, and the flight of those new planes. When the war was over, Hughes Aircraft was an innovative but chaotically run spinoff of Hughes Tool, set in the heart of that new landscape.

THE POSTWAR YEARS AND MIDLIFE CRISES

The postwar chaos of 1946 produced two milestones in Hughes’s life. One was his attempt to pilot his new F-11 Navy reconnaissance plane on its first flight on July 7. It crashed just short of the Los Angeles Country Club golf course. He suffered broken ribs, heart and lung damage, and third-degree burns. Doctors administered morphine to ease what were thought to be his last moments, but Hughes pulled through. On leaving the hospital he demanded increasing doses of morphine, in time cut back to codeine, but it was the beginning of a drug addiction that stuck with him to the end of his life.

The second milestone came a few months before the F-11 crash, when Si Ramo, a young scientist from General Electric in Schenectady, New York, came to call. His visit had been organized by the staff at Hughes Aircraft, eager for some competent leadership. Ramo already had a national reputation in the field of electricity and magnetism. Within a few years he would coauthor a textbook on those subjects, one that became a standard for young engineers. Hughes Aircraft had grown to be a rich man’s plaything, building racing planes and unflyable behemoths like the Spruce Goose. ¹⁴ The staff wanted Hughes Aircraft to become a world-class participant in the postwar technical boom. They thought Ramo could pull it off.

For his part, Ramo was looking for an opportunity to build a large military electronics business. After graduating from Cal Tech in 1936 he went to work on radars for GE in Schenectady. He felt that World War II had lifted the U.S. to a higher technological plateau, that there was room for new firms in the military electronics field. The wartime industrial giants had left that playing field to pursue the postwar consumer products market. The weather in California was an attraction, but it was the intellectual climate that closed the deal. Stanford, Cal Tech, and the University of California at Berkeley were always on any list of the top ten scientific schools in the nation. Theodore Von Karman, head of the Aeronautics Department at Cal Tech, was in a class by himself. And on a more fundamental level, California was a new society. Everyone was from somewhere else, so there were no established customs and taboos to worry about.

Ramo wanted to create his own company, but he knew that his kind of electronics giant could not be started in a garage. The U.S. Army Air Corps had money to spend, and Wright Field, its research and development center in Dayton, Ohio, made it clear that it would fund good, new, high-tech firms. The United States could not and would not abandon its lead in technology. Ramo saw in Hughes Aircraft a company running out of control. He wanted to take it over, to start within it a new electronics division that in time would outstrip the airplane-oriented parent. For his part, Hughes had come to understand the importance of communications and navigation in the operation of his global airline, TWA.

These two men met and had a meeting of the minds. Ramo now thinks Hughes’s amiability reflected the freebie nature of the deal. Mellon Bank would fully finance the new electronics division once Ramo had in hand a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract from Wright Field. Hughes would not have to part with any serious cash, just floor space and office support. With that, the new Hughes Aircraft Company was born. Since Ramo’s project did not involve airplanes, Hughes had little further interest in whatever Ramo was doing. The two men did not meet again until it became clear, seven years later, that Ramo and several of his associates were getting ready to leave the Hughes nest. During those seven years, Hughes Aircraft moved to the forefront of military electronics. The “Aircraft” part of the company’s name became a misnomer.

RAMO AND WOOLDRIDGE

One of Ramo’s first recruits was a man he had known since their graduate student days at Cal Tech. Dean Wooldridge had “one of the greatest technical minds” Ramo ever knew. Wooldridge helped Ramo with his homework at Cal Tech. They double-dated, but after graduation they parted ways, heading east to pursue their own careers wherever they could find work in those prewar, Depression years. Wooldridge went to Bell Labs, Ramo to General Electric. But when Wooldridge heard that Ramo had been recruited by the Hughes staff to build a new electronics business, he asked to join the new firm. Ramo was delighted, and the technical partnership of Ramo and Wooldridge was born.

These men and their expanding pool of technical wizards designed and developed the nation’s first airborne fire-control system. It became the standard for every interceptor in the U.S. Air Force. Ramo and Wooldridge were there at Hughes when the transistor was invented at Wooldridge’s alma mater, Bell Labs, and they were the leaders in its exploitation for military purposes. They recruited the brightest and the best, men like Allen Puckett, who helped develop the Falcon air-to-air missile, guided by an active radar located in the missile itself. Later, in the wake of Sputnik, it was Puckett who promoted the technology for the first synchronous communication satellite. Puckett went on to become president, then chairman and CEO, of Hughes Aircraft, although he never actually met Howard Hughes. Other future stars included Harper North, an early expert in those new semiconductors. He built the first solid state diodes at Hughes and in time headed up Pacific Semiconductors. In the mid-fifties, at Hughes, Ted Maiman built the first crystal to resonate microwaves. He called it a “maser.” Subsequent light-resonating devices, descended from the Maiman device, became known as lasers. Henry Singleton worked in the Hughes Research Lab on new digital computers. In time, he left Hughes to join Litton, then started his own company, a firm that became Teledyne. Milt Mohr worked computers at Hughes too. He started Quotron. Jim Fletcher was recruited early on to do electronic theory and analysis at Hughes. Two decades later he was administrator of NASA. Rube Mettler left Hughes for a short stint at the Department of Defense. He would eventually become chairman and CEO of TRW.

Tex Thornton was an early Hughes recruit. Thornton and Ramo wanted Hughes to acquire a small manufacturer of vacuum pumps, a firm owned by an ailing Charles Litton, but Hughes would not hear of it. He never parted with cash to buy a business, and there was no Hughes stock to use in acquisitions. When Hughes Aircraft began to disintegrate in 1953–54, Thornton left Hughes to seize the Litton opportunity himself. With the backing of investment bankers, he bought the little manufacturer and turned it into Litton Industries, one of the first of the electronics conglomerates. Litton’s subsidiaries went on to blaze new trails in radar tubes, printed circuits, and small computers.

Surrounding Hughes, and eventually its spinoffs, were a plethora of small specialty electronics and aerospace shops. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the market for military electronics exploded. Howard Hughes’s Los Angeles became the Silicon Valley of the early postwar years. In 1954, when Ramo and Wooldridge left Hughes Aircraft, its revenues were approaching $1 billion per year, in 2000 dollars. It had become bigger than the parent tool company.

LOS ANGELES IN THE MID-FIFTIES

Los Angeles was very different in those days. In 1955 only 2.25 million people lived in that county. The surrounding counties—Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura—were virtually empty, home to orange growers and ranchers, but not much else. The bicycle shops of Dayton and the auto parts manufacturers of Cleveland provided fertile ground for the Wright Brothers, but serious flying required better weather. In the thirties the airplane manufacturers began to open up their shops in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and San Diego. Then came World War II.

Military thinkers with foresight understood the importance of airpower, but Hitler’s use of dive bombers in the Spanish Civil War and Churchill’s victory in the Battle of Britain made it clear that control of the skies was essential to victory, even survival, on the ground. The Allies needed airplanes—lots of them. The U.S. government began to contract with airplane manufacturers for quantities and delivery schedules incomprehensible to the conventionally minded. As the tides of war began to turn, components for military aircraft were being assembled in the open fields along Wilshire Boulevard. When finished, these pieces were loaded onto trucks or towed along the highway to the Douglas plant in Santa Monica. From there they emerged as combat-ready aircraft. By V-E day (victory in Europe, May 8, 1945) Los Angeles was the aircraft capital of the United States.

By the mid-fifties Howard Hughes was king of this mountain. The Hughes Aircraft Company had reinvented itself, creating and dominating the world of airborne electronics. The Pentagon was spending more on electronics than on ships or guns, but Howard Hughes, the man, was being left behind. He began to protect his privacy in a manner that was extreme but understandable, given the scope of his assets and the progress of his hearing problems, both physical and professional.

All was not well at Hughes Aircraft. New opportunities were knocking, but Hughes was deaf to their rhythm. In June 1953 the new Eisenhower administration began its review of all U.S. guided missile programs. Howard Hughes could not be part of those reviews because he protected his privacy to the point of paranoia. For instance, he would not submit to the fingerprinting necessary to gain a Secret clearance. As the postwar years unfolded, Hughes had to be excused from, or could not be admitted to, meetings with the military that were defining the future of his company. Nor would Hughes let Ramo and Wooldridge run Hughes Aircraft in a way that was acceptable either to them or to Hughes’s principal customer, the U.S. Air Force. In the autumn of 1953, Ramo and Wooldridge decided to leave Hughes to form their own company.

The U.S. Air Force wanted Ramo’s full and undivided attention on the ballistic missile program. They did not want him distracted by radar, computers, corporate development, or anything else. Wooldridge’s calm and less aggressive personality made him a better “Mr. Outside,” more acceptable to bankers, investors, and the officers of the Air Force. So Ramo assumed the title of Executive Vice-President of the new company, and with it full oversight of the Guided Missile Research Division. The more intellectual and less driven Wooldridge became president of Ramo-Wooldridge. The new company was financed by Thompson Products, an old-line automotive manufacturer based in Cleveland. Within days of leaving Hughes, Ramo-Wooldridge was selected to oversee the conceptual design of the U.S. Air Force’s family of ballistic missiles.

Ramo and Wooldridge’s departure from Hughes was the beginning of a major explosion that scattered technical talent all over the Los Angeles basin. As a patriotic American, Hughes might have been pleased with all of this, but he certainly did not profit personally. Talent was fleeing his control in droves.

Now, a half a century later, it is hard to get an accurate picture of the reclusive Hughes. His friends from the aviation industry, men like Jack Real of Lockheed, would come to describe Hughes as smart, self-educated, and fully informed on subjects he thought were important; that is, aviation. He was very tight with money but personally generous to a fault. These friends, and other employees who never actually met the man, all agree that Hughes Aircraft was the defining postwar incubator of the military electronics industry. Others, like Si Ramo, had disagreements with Hughes. They describe him as eccentric, uneducated, uninformed, out of touch, and impossible to work for. The same things were also said about Hughes’s knowledge of the electronics business— that he tolerated it because it was a good investment, though the business did not interest him personally, nor did its executives, whom he did not care to meet. Like the blind men and the elephant, people were describing different parts of the same man. But whoever he was, there can be no doubt that Howard Hughes was a giant of the fifties, setting the stage for what was to come.

Ramo and Wooldridge were enormously successful. Their colleagues, the Hughes alumni, enjoyed similar prosperity. At the end of the fifties, Ramo-Wooldridge merged with its financial backer, Thompson Products. Their names have been reduced to initials now: TRW. Hughes himself became a drug-clouded recluse, moving from one overseas redoubt to another until his death, on April 5, 1976, while en route home to Houston.

I worked briefly in Los Angeles for Ramo-Wooldridge while awaiting entry into the U.S. Air Force. When called to active duty, I first served at Edwards Air Force Base, learning how to salute and to wear the uniform. Then, in July 1957, I was reassigned to the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles. The Soviet launch of Sputnik was only three months away, although we did not know it at the time. That launch was a complete surprise, a declaration of technological war by the Soviet Union. What I did know was that as a young lieutenant I was headed for the front trenches of the Cold War, to serve under brilliant leadership, and I knew it would be interesting.