There is a telling image of American power in the Cold War era. It is
1963, and Jack Kennedy, the pin-up president with the year-round tan, is
honouring a beaky, sallow, Central European professor with the National
Medal of Science, the first to be awarded. The recipient is the aerodynamicist
Theodore von Karman. Among the luminaries looking on is Curtis LeMay, Air
Force Chief of Staff and one of the architects of American strategic nuclear
power, best remembered for his threat to bomb the Reds ‘into the Stone Age’.

We take it for granted now that science was an integral part of the
development of American air power, but it was not always so. Before the
Second World War scientists had certainly played a role through agencies
such as the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, but they were journeymen,
advising on specific problems such as blind flying, instrumentation, stability
or the octane ratings of fuels. The new feature of the science-based military
power was the emergence of ‘statesmen of science’ like von Karman, urbane,
prescient, at home with members of congress, Air Force generals, even presidents,
and helping to steer the long-range development of weapons. A former commander
of the USAF Ballistic Missile Division, General Schriever, called von Karman
‘the greatest single continuing scientific influence on the qualitative
growth and development of our present day Air Force’.

What wrought this change? According to one popular view of the 1960s,
it was the intake of secret-weapons scientists scooped from occupied Germany
at the end of the Second World War – a group caricatured by the celluloid
antihero Dr Strangelove, fighting down a reflex Hitler salute. The reality
was rather different: this deeper penetration of scientists into US strategic
planning arose from European scientists fleeing the threatening atmosphere
in pre-war Europe. The experiences of these refugees differed. The atom
bomb scientists John von Neumann and Edward Teller came from middle-class
Hungarian families who had experienced Bela Kun’s short-lived Communist
government of the years following the First World War. Others, like von
Karman, had been repelled by the rise of Nazism in Germany. Ideological
bullying from both ends of the spectrum left scars on these immigrants,
who arrived in the US determined to place their scientific powers at the
service of their new country. The first fruit of this was the Manhattan
Project.

Von Karman was born into an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family and
was educated at the Minta, a model gymnasium on the German pattern set up
by his father, a noted Hungarian educationalist. Other brilliant pupils
included Teller, von Neumann, and Leo Szilard. Von Karman eventually progressed
to the Gottingen Academy of Sciences, initially to study mechanics with
Ludwig Prandtl in the department of applied physics. The German army was
becoming interested in the Zeppelin, and Prandtl, who was already interested
in fluid mechanics, was able to get funding for a new tool for airflow research,
a wind tunnel. So it was that studies initiated on the ungainly airship
led soon to Gottingen’s pre-eminence in aerodynamics and to Prandtl’s immense
reputation as the father of aerodynamics. Von Karman also became involved
in the new work of the department and, in 1911, made his reputation with
an analysis of the way vortices are shed by fluid flowing over a solid body,
a phenomenon which came to be known as the Karman vortex street.

By 1913 he was professor of aeronautics at the Technische Hochschule
in Aachen, leaving for a time during the First World War to become an engineer
in the service of the Austrian army. The experience provided useful lessons
in dealing with the official mind, and in selling scientific or technical
concepts, even by sleight of hand. He recounted how, during the First World
War, the Austrian Archduke Joseph Salvator (‘an arrogant and pompous fellow’)
paid a visit to the Austro-Daimler works, where Ferdinand Porsche showed
him his first six-cylinder aircraft engine. ‘Is this a four-cycle engine?’
asked the Archduke. ‘Yes, Imperial Highness,’ Porsche replied. ‘Then why
are there six cylinders?’ With a wink, Porsche countered: ‘The last two
are reserves.’ ‘Of course,’ said the Archduke, ‘why didn’t I think of that?’

After the war von Karman became an acknowledged international expert,
globe-trotting on various consultancies, and in 1926 the US physicist Robert
Millikan cabled him from Pasadena, California, asking, ‘What is the first
boat you can take to come here?’ Millikan’s mission was to make CalTech
the national centre for aeronautics, supported by funding from the philanthropist
Daniel Guggenheim, who bought Millikan’s vision that California, by virtue
of climate and geography, would be the major national centre of aircraft
production. Von Karman visited and designed the new 10-foot wind tunnel,
the centrepiece of the new laboratory and a research tool of unparalled
size and efficiency; but he returned to Germany. For a time he resisted
taking up the full-time post offered by Millikan – the directorship of what
was now christened the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at CalTech (GALCIT)
– but by 1929 became increasingly alarmed by the political situation and
growing antisemitism at Gottingen. Eventually, by observing aeronautical
developments, he deduced that there was a secret military aviation programme.
‘I knew that the much-discussed illegal army of Germany was a reality and
I had a terrible foreboding for the future.’

He left for GALCIT and Pasadena where he established, with his mother
and sister, a legendary lifestyle that is hard for a modern, low-cholesterol
American to understand. Von Karman set up a fantastical salon decked out
with ottomans and rugs, where, as the epitome of an urbane Central European,
he stimulated intellectual and aeronautical discourse until all hours of
the night, lubricated with goulash, whisky and black cigars.

Michael Gorn’s book gives a useful overview of von Karman’s life, but
the fun and vitality of the man does not really shine through. For that,
The Wind and Beyond, co-authored by von Karman and a journalist, Lee Edson,
reveals his authentic voice more clearly. It gives glimpses too of his teaching
style. This was imaginative and inspirational, revealing formidable mathematical
skills as he improvised breathtaking analyses, or devised graphic examples
– as in the case of two monkeys he pictured hanging on either side of a
rope over a pulley to help to explain the concept of inertia. If one monkey
climbs slowly, he overcomes his own weight, whereas if he climbs fast, he
overcomes both his own weight and the inertia; so the monkey on the opposite
side rises too and gets a free ride, though he is lazy and exerts no energy
on the rope. Von Karman would point out ‘how striking it was, and how reminiscent
of daily affairs, that the one who does little or no work will rise higher
and higher if he has the proper connection’.

In the US von Karman came into contact with the Air Force officers and
policy makers; he also supported Frank Malina and the Suicide Club in their
initially unpopular rocket research, which led to JATO (rocket assisted
take-off) units and Aerojet – the first commercial rocket manufacturer
in America. When the Second World War began, von Karman was already well
placed to be consulted by the military. In late 1944 his friend, General
Hap Arnold, threw him a challenge, declaring, ‘We have already won this
war, and I am no longer interested in it. What is the future of aerial
warfare? What is the bearing of the new inventions, such as jet propulsion,
rockets, radar, and other electronics devices?’. Von Karman’s initial study
for the Pentagon, ‘Where We Stand’, proved a prophetic and accurate analysis,
predicting supersonic combat aircraft, missiles for long-range attack and
anti-aircraft defence, and the integration of radar and communications technology
into air operations.

This was followed by a monumental analysis by his team, amounting to
32 monographs bound in 11 volumes. The introductory tome, by von Karman
himself, bore the clarion title Science, the Key to Air Supremacy. He then
devised, instituted and led the Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research
and Development, an organisation devoted to the qualitative improvement
of NATO hardware. Through these efforts, von Karman held out the promise
of decisive military superiority and, some might say, laid one foundation
stone of the Cold War, with its endless leapfrogging weapons systems and
its menacing warhead stockpiles. I hope that the scholarship now possible
in the former Soviet Union will reveal the extent to which Soviet arms development
in the Iron Curtain era was a symptom of Stalinist supremacism, or a response
to the perceived threats from NATO and the US.

It certainly seems that the acceptance of von Karman’s tempting proposition
for air supremacy led to the immense load of competitive spending on exotic
technological developments. Was it this economic distortion which, in the
end, pulled down the old Soviet Union? If so, science drafted into the service
of defence did ultimately bring about a kind of victory – and a new world
order – but not at all in the way von Karman and Arnold foresaw.

Andrew Nahum is the curator of aeronautics at the Science Museum, London.

History is a competitive business. Participants in great events, whether
they are politicians or engineers, are naturally keen that their own version
should be recorded and, indeed, should become the orthodox account for
posterity.

Angle of Attack is overtly revisionist, describing the Apollo space
programme from the perspective of Harrison Storms of North American
Aviation, the man who launched the company into the space business, and is
based partly on interviews with him. But in this contest NASA has had the
edge on North American, the contractor for both the Apollo spacecraft as
well as for its second stage booster (S-2).

Joe Shea, the engineer who drove the programme for NASA in the crucial
years, expresses his view forcibly in these terms: ‘I do not have a high
opinion of North American and their motives in the early days. I think they
were more interested in the financial aspects of the program than in the
technical content of the program. I think Storms was a very bad general
manager. I think Atwood (North American’s president) had dollar signs in his
eyes. Their first program manager was a first-class jerk . . .’

But there are two sides to every story, they say, and in this version,
Storms is a hero. Growing up in Chicago between the wars, his dream of
modernity was expressed through building intricate model aeroplanes. In
1940 he arrived at the California Institute of Technology to take his
second degree in aeronautical engineering and took a part-time job running
the wind tunnel during the night shift.

This tunnel was, in itself, a seminal piece of equipment. It had been
created by Theodore von Karman who had come from Gottingen, as a former
student of Ludwig Prandl, to enable Cal Tech to become the pre-eminent
aerodynamics centre in the US. His tunnel was used in the development of
both the Boeing 247 and the Douglas DC 1 – the revolutionary, smooth,
all-metal aircraft which are the ancestors of the modem airliner. One of
Storms’ night jobs was to run tests on models for the new P-51 Mustang
fighter, and he was soon spotted by its makers, North American.

By 1957 Storms was chief engineer of North American’s Los Angeles division,
with responsibility for many of the fighters bought by the Air Force, and
for the X-15 research aircraft – one of the series of rocket-powered
aircraft which followed on from the Bell X-l in which Chuck Yeager had first
‘broken the sound barrier’ in 1947. The X-15 was designed to approach Mach 7
and fly into space, achieving re-entry under pilot control.

At this time American aerospace research was running in an incremental way,
as craft like this which were basically aircraft, not space capsules,
reached higher. Trials even showed that they could be glided back
accurately, without power, from 100 kilometres above the Earth to a
designated landing field.

What caused this rational programme to be abandoned was the shocking
arrival, in October 1957, of Sputnik transmitting its taunting, though
technically trivial, electronic bleep over American skies. More significant
was the launch, a month later, of another Soviet satellite containing a live
dog. But did Storms, as this version tells it, really look into the sky one
night from his Thunderbird, and seeing it overhead, exclaim ‘Shit. Got to
do something about that.’ And during a launch of the X-15 ‘as Storms stood
at the edge of the lake bed that fall morning watching the seven contrails
of his high armada climbing overhead’, was ‘his mind already miles on down
the road’? Read this coloured account, by all means, but check it against
the far more definitive Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and
Catherine Bly Cox (Secker and Warburg, 1989).

As the American space programme gathered pace, Storms manoeuvred to take
over North American’s missile division and get a share of this new NASA
business, though ‘Dutch’ Kindelberger, the legendary head of North American,
hated research contracts. Originally the chief engineer at Douglas when the
DC 3 was born, and subsequently the manufacturing genius behind the Mustang
fighter, Kindelberger preferred meaty production runs to specialised
one-offs. Putting a man in space to Kindelberger was a stunt – ‘Shooting the
goddam lady out of the cannon,’ he called it – but there was a wall of money
waiting to fall on America’s aerospace contractors as a result of President
John F. Kennedy’s commitment to beat the Soviets in space. Storms led a team
into Kindelberger’s boardroom to make a presentation entitled ‘Why We Should
Bid on Apollo’. Finally the Old Man pronounced: ‘I guess I’ve got to allow
you to bid it, but if you spend more than a million bucks I’ll fire you and
all those bozos with you.’

The Apollo programme became one of the most impressive pieces of systems
engineering in history, pulling almost every high quality aerospace
manufacturing company in America into an intricate subcontracting network of
meshing crafts. A management technique was evolved to cope with a
manufacturing and design task of unprecedented complexity. (As an indication
of the problems of designing to meld the latest technologies from many
different sources ‘on the run’, note that North American needed a rule that
any drawing with more than a hundred changes on it had to be redrawn.) New
philosophies for assessing the safety of intricate aggregates of
subassemblies were developed as were exotic fabrication techniques.

But all this extraordinary engineering was to be called into question by the
fire that killed Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee during the
ground test of Apollo 1. Its investigation included ‘the most excruciating
technical dissection of a machine’ anyone had ever seen and while Senator
Walter Mondale wanted to pursue NASA engineers for ‘criminal negligence’ the
report put substantial blame on North American for poor standards of
workmanship, particularly in the installation of wiring. This may not have
been fair.

Part of the evidence for this alleged bad practice came from a study of the
next capsule delivered, Spacecraft 17, which was intended for the first
all-up flight of the Saturn V and in which the inspectors found untidy
criss-crossed wiring rather than neat looms and bundles. What was not
emphasised was that the intended mission for Spacecraft 17 had been changed
from manned to unmanned when the capsule was half built and that North
American had installed an additional 15 miles of wiring to fly the craft on
automatic systems.

North American considered that the real culprit was the capsule’s pure
oxygen environment which they had often warned against. Furthermore, they
had wanted an explosive escape hatch, but had been over-ruled by NASA who
feared an unintended detonation. North American do not seem to have been
responsible for the spread of combustible Velcro and netting in the capsule
to locate equipment and neither is it clear that they were to blame for the
operational fact that the capsule, designed for oxygen pressure of 5 lbs
per square inch in space, would contain oxygen at around atmospheric
pressure – 16 lbs per square inch- – during the launch. The plastic from the
capsule which had been tested for flame speed at 5 lbs of pure oxygen burnt
like a firecracker at the higher pressure.

The company did not fight back at the inquiry. They could hardly get into a
slanging match which could endanger the very continuation of the space
programme. At a time of grief and shock dignified restraint was the only
option. Storms was sacrificed after the inquiry – moved to another division
of North American. So too, from the NASA side, was Shea who ran the Apollo
Spacecraft Program Office – the brilliant systems engineer, who could
intersperse his thoughts on research and development with quotations from
Shelley, Milton and Montaigne.

Thereafter Apollo proved almost unbelievably safe, considering the enormity
of what was dared. The missions went on to do most of what Kennedy had hoped
they would and the venture proved a tremendous boost to American technology.
But sadly Apollo was not really evolutionary for, with the Shuttle, the
space programme returned to the kind of flown re-entry pioneered all those
years ago with craft like the X-15. The Moon mission is remembered as an
exotic, extravagant shot at the very limit of what was attainable. All that
fabulous hardware had but a single, ephemeral, purpose.

Andrew Nahum is the curator of flight at the Science Museum, London.

It is fascinating to reflect now that the programme to develop the Boeing
747 seemed as risky at the outset as that for Concorde. Both were natural
extrapolations of clear trends in aviation – towards greater speed and greater
capacity – but to critics each aircraft seemed a step too far. Concorde
threatened to be too small and far too expensive. The 747 would also cost
a lot and might have a disastrous impact on airline profitability and on
long-term orders for new aircraft, by soaking up passenger demand.

Of course, civil airliner development is inevitably risky, requiring
enormous development programmes that cost more than the entire net worth
of the companies that undertake them. But an unwillingness to gamble is
risky too; James Smith McDonnell, who for many years directed the fortunes
of the McDonnell Douglas company, had been disillusioned by the fate of
his own company’s Jumbo, the DC-10, and stalled development of the DC-11
with the wry pronouncement: ‘There may be a hole in the market. But why
should I fall into it?’ McDonnell Douglas has now slipped from the front
rank of the airliner builders of the world.

Boeing’s 747 was the gamble that paid off. The definitive wide-body
helped to grow the market for international air travel as no other aircraft
has ever done. It is good that the story has at last been told in a full
and most readable way by Clive Irving, a founding member of the Sunday Times
Insight team.

Irving has immersed himself in the curious and particular culture of
Boeing, has talked to many of the protagonists and offers a revealing glimpse
of the ethos of the world’s most successful civil aeroplane maker. He has
understood the achievement of Boeing structural engineers and aerodynamicists
in exploiting the swept wing to allow high flight speeds with the new jets
in the postwar era, leading to the epochal 707 and extending this expertise
to new generations of airliners. He also shows the power politics and rivalries
that are the natural result when talented and justifiably self-confident
engineers clash in the design and production of a new machine.

Boeing’s first investigation of super-sized aircraft came from its bid
for the giant C-5A military transport intended for the rapid deployment
of US troops and equipment. That contract went to Lockheed, because, some
thought, political interests manoeuvred to bring the work to its plant in
Georgia. (Lockheed had bid about $300 million less than Boeing for the
contract to build 80 aircraft. The programme cost about $3 billion more
in overruns and rectification work.)

Out of the frustration at losing that contract came the desire at Boeing
to pitch for the new big airliner that the legendary autocrat of Pan Am,
Juan Trippe, wanted, though the hoped for spin-off from the C-5A design
study proved illusory. Trippe’s desire was for a twin-decked craft with
resonances of the stately postwar piston-engined Stratocruiser using a fuselage
with a ‘double bubble’ cross section. At Boeing some engineers did not believe
that passengers on the upper deck could be evacuated quickly or safely enough.
Furthermore this fuselage design would require a heavy ‘crease beam’ between
the decks.

The issue was resolved in a piece of theatre when Trippe and Pan Am
big shots were led up rickety stepladders to the top deck of a mock-up in
the Boeing plant, partly to reflect on the scary prospect of an evacuation
by escape chutes from the upper deck, 8 metres above the tarmac. Then the
team were led into the alternative single-deck concept, the wide-body, with
a cabin that no longer felt like a tube, but a room. The pitch succeeded.

But this cavernous and now familiar monolithic 747 fuselage came about
partly from the realisation that freight was to be as important as passenger
traffic to the economics of the new airliner – indeed Trippe believed that
this large subsonic would become a ‘tramp steamer of the air’, relegated
to hauling cargo around when his other dream, the supersonic transport (SST),
entered service. For a while the SST engineers at Boeing believed it too,
nursing giant egos, and proclaiming that theirs was the ‘glory machine’.
‘How ya doin’, Joe?’ a bunch of them called out one night from a Washington
hotel bar as Joe Sutter, the chief engineer for the 747 passed. ‘Sure hope
you’re making that 747 a good cargo airplane. You hang in there, Joe . .
. then we’ll get you a job on the SST.’

By February 1969 the test crew of test pilot, copilot and flight engineers
(curiously named Waddell, Wygle and Wallick) were ready for the first flight
of the prototype. Development money of $900 million was riding on the plane.
Boeing was enmeshed in a network of claims from Pan Am as the aircraft promised
to be over contract weight and consequently down on payload, while Boeing
in turn was pursuing Pratt & Whitney for failing to meet the performance
targets on the new JT-9D high bypass engines. Indeed, so sensitive were
the early engines to flaming out in a crosswind that Waddell feared that
simply rotating the aircraft on takeoff might stall all four. He insisted,
as an alarming piece of bootstrapping for the first flight, that an improvised
rack of heavy-duty batteries be installed for backup electrical power to
maintain control functions and give him a chance to put the thing back on
the ground in such an event.

Pratt & Whitney was finally induced to cure the engine stalls when
Waddell took its president, the engineer Art Smith, on a flight to show
him that the problem did not arise from unsympathetic engine handling. At
31 000 feet Waddell pulled the throttle on an engine back steadily, commenting
‘I want you to watch my hand movements; you’ll notice they’re very normal.’
A sheet of flame shot from the engine exhaust and the shock of the stalled
flow rattled the cockpit and shook the aircraft. ‘To show you that’s not
an unusual engine, I’m going to try number two,’ Waddell said, but when
he reached for the number three throttle Smith shouted ‘Stop! I get the
point. We’re going to fix that. We’ll worry about how the hell it gets fixed
from a business standpoint, but we’re gonna fix that.’

In fact the business side of the enterprise seemed startingly flaky
and went far beyond any rational financial analysis. It came about because
Bill Allen, head of Boeing, was prepared to gamble that the aircraft would
define its own market and because Trippe at Pan Am saw no need for market
analysis but sat in his corner office, made plans and made them come true.
And it came about because of the vein of poetry in engineers and their love
of creating some new thing. On the day the 747 first flew, Trippe was cut
off in New York by a blizzard and couldn’t ride with Allen in the 727 chase
plane. Allen wrote to him ‘It was a beautiful sight . . . it is truly majestic
. . . I wished for (you) many times’.

No aircraft will ever be born again in such an atmosphere of financial
danger. With the 777 the partners are spread around the world, from Italy
to Japan. Indeed, the whole balance of power in world airliner development
is changing. When Boeing engineers went to Japan to see the facilities established
by the Kawasaki-Mitsubishi-Fuji alliance for subcontract work (on the flaps)
they realised that the plant they had built could handle much more – and
came away wondering about its eventual purpose.

Andrew Nahum is Senior Curator, Aircraft Collection, at the Science
Museum.