BOOK MARK : Air Power: The Early Geniuses Relied on ‘Cut-and-Try’ Guesswork
In August, 1915, Glenn Martin navigated his green Stoddard-Dayton, with the nickel trim and mohair top, through the Los Angeles heat to pick up an engineer he had hired. Martin’s star was higher than ever following his role as the roguish pilot in a Mary Pickford film, “The Girl of Yesterday.”
Playing an aspiring aviatrix, America’s $1,000-a-week sweetheart is compromised by Martin after they crash in the hinterlands. But mere kissing had posed real-life problems, forcing the 29-year-old daredevil to plead off-screen, “I don’t think my mother would like it.”
Today his difficulties seemed less intractable. As the design and production of flying machines had become more rigorous with the military issuing its own specifications, Martin reluctantly admitted he could no longer slip by on cut-and-try. When his best designer quit the company to work for Glenn Curtiss, he wrote to one of the leading American aviation technologists, Jerome Hunsaker.
Hunsaker was not optimistic about the career outlook in airplane building. He nonetheless recommended the raw young man now waiting in the Baltimore Hotel at Fifth and South Los Angeles Street, a dewy 23-year-old graduate named Donald Wills Douglas.
“I knew Glenn from seeing his pictures,” Douglas recalled many years later. “I stood around the lobby until he walked in, then went up to him and said, ‘Mr. Martin?’ He looked surprised and said, ‘Yes?’ I said, ‘My name is Douglas.’ He looked at me and sort of blanched. I think he had the idea that anybody who came out of school, from MIT, would have a long beard. I was said to be very youthful-looking then.”
The meeting of Martin and Douglas brought together a single-minded mercantile ambition with one of the nation’s first trained aeronautical talents. Martin, especially, was lucky. The professional union would not last long, but it would produce one of the few significant U.S. warplane designs of World War I and put both young men firmly on the course of weapons building. Their personalities were vastly different, but their talents melded fortuitously at a pivotal moment.
“Nobody persuaded me to go into aeronautical engineering,” Douglas claimed. His interest was sustained by a fascination with the subject he termed “mystical,” a not uncommon reaction in those days to the prospect of flying.
Following his intuitions, Douglas graduated from MIT in the spring of 1914, then stayed another year as Hunsaker’s research assistant at an annual salary of $600. According to Hunsaker, Douglas was broke and took the job only because it was a ready source of cash. They operated the institute’s first wind tunnel--copied from the British National Physical Laboratory--and did consulting work for the Connecticut Aircraft Co., a small firm in New Haven that was making dirigibles.
Some of Hunsaker’s wariness about the aviation industry’s future may have come from dealing with the company’s management--an old-time carnival balloonist and tightrope walker called “Capt.” Tom Baldwin and an Austrian eccentric who had sunk his family fortune in zeppelins. After helping them win a $45,636 contract for the U.S. Navy’s first dirigible in mid-1915, Douglas left New England for the West.
What he found there was in every way a new world. At the Martin company, the neophyte engineer confronted what must have seemed to him a bizarre enterprise after Hunsaker’s erudition--a technical manufacturing operation based entirely on empiricism and almost completely naive about the theoretical mechanics of motion.
“At this time, there was practically no engineering; it was all done by good judgment,” Douglas recalled. “When I got there, they made no detailed drawings of anything. So when I told the people I was going to give Martin detailed drawings, they all said ‘The boy is crazy--it can’t be done.’ They just drew a picture--no real stress analysis or anything like that.”
In other words, it was a cottage industry where no wisdom held sway beyond the direct experience of its craftsmen.
Douglas was also perplexed by the personal oddities of his new boss, who lived at home with mother, Minta. Behind the public persona of daredevil pilot and cinema rogue, he found Martin to be “a strange chap, very meticulous,” with “no female interests, as we understood such things.” But a few student years in worldly Cambridge must have prepared him for the existence of such strange chaps, because Douglas quickly acknowledged Martin’s talents. “He was not an engineer, but he had good instinctive ideas. Glenn’s greatest strength was that he was amazingly well coordinated physically. Most of the fellows who flew in those early days had to be. The airplanes were not very stable or controllable.
“But you could see it in Glenn in other ways--he was a marvelous bowler, billiard player and duck shot. He was a very strange chap, no question about that. Lots of people found him difficult to get along with. I haven’t the foggiest idea how he got interested in aviation.”
Hunsaker summed up Martin with more impatience: “He was pretty close to being described as inventor, experimenter and experimental flyer. His engineering knowledge was zero, and in the early days he had no idea that he needed any or that anybody could help him.”
1991, by Wayne Biddle. Reprinted with permission from Simon and Schuster.
BOOK REVIEW: “Barons of the Sky,” by Wayne Biddle, is reviewed on Page 1 of today’s Book Review section.
