Even Wernher von Braun made representations to the [219] Army command, who replied that Mott was merely one more civilian whose job had been completed, and he must go. Frantic calls to universities and other learned institutions proved that the scientific explosion which was about to overtake America had not yet begun. “We can’t even find jobs for our doctoral candidates,” one graduate school reported. “We’re advising them to go into high-school teaching.” Mott, with only an M.S., had little bargaining power.
To his surprise, Rachel was remarkably philosophical about his dismissal. “You know what the old general told us when he was ousted: ‘War promotes, peace demotes.’ ” She assured Stanley that if they did have to settle for a high-school job, no matter where, she was sure that she and the boys could adjust, and without knowing where they were to go, she started packing.
It was Dieter Kolff who saved them, or rather his wife, for Liesl heckled her husband incessantly: “You cannot allow these good people who saved our lives ... how many times...” At this point in her sentence she would stand with her heavy arms cocked at an aggressive angle, her stubby hands on hips that grew broader year by year, and demand to know what he proposed doing.
What he did was use the telephone at the base to call General Funkhauser out at Allied Aviation: “General, the wonderful young man who saved us both, he’s being fired.” When Funkhauser established that the man was Professor Mott he exploded, causing the phone to rattle, and three days later, in the Allied four-engine plane, he came roaring in to Huntsville. Within minutes he was meeting with the Motts and Kolff in the latter’s office.
“I can’t give you a job right now with Allied,” he said as he stalked about the room. “But if we did have a job opening”-he pronounced it chob-“I thought you might like to know how highly we prize a fine engineer like you. Guess what our salary would be?”
Mott was too humiliated to play games, so he gave an abrupt, absurd figure: “Fifteen thousand?”
“Eighteen,” Funkhauser said in volatile German. “And I assure you of this, young man. There is going to be a scientific awakening in this country-aviation ... atomic power ... space. Things you and I haven’t dreamed of yet. [220] And when that happens, men like you are going to be at a premium.”
He dropped into a chair, grasped the arms, and stared at Mott as if he were a horse to be traded. “You’re a commodity. What can we do today with a commodity?”
Suddenly he jumped up, pointed an accusing finger at Kolff, and cried again in German, “Stupid, why didn’t you think of it?”
“Of what?”
“Those fellows in Hampton, Virginia! They’re always looking for men exactly like Mott.” He grasped Mott’s arm and said, “You are of enormous value, young man, we’ll prove it.” Grabbing for a telephone, he arranged a meeting for that afternoon, then told Dieter, “You’re flying with us.”
During the short flight to Virginia the two Germans reminded Mott of the extraordinary group of people he was about to meet: “The National Advisory Committee for Aero-nautics-NACA, with each letter pronounced-is like nothing else in America. A board of twelve leading experts who serve without pay. They hire eight thousand extremely bright engineers and theoreticians to investigate flight-airplane engines, airplane design, airport facilities, new metals, new fuels. If America is preeminent in aviation, it’s because of NACA”
“Would I fit in?” Mott asked. “I’ve never had advanced courses in aviation.”
“You’d be ideal, Stanley,” Dieter said, patting him on the knee. “From what I’ve heard of NACA, it doesn’t go looking for aviation experts. It hires the most brilliant engineers it can find and turns them loose. Your wide background is what they’re looking for.”
Funkhauser interposed an additional consideration: “Stanley, we’re entering the age of space. We need people who can think about bold new horizons. Americans equal to Germany’s Oberth and Russia’s Tsiolkovsky. You know who they are?”
“I do.”
“Good. You’re far ahead of the others.” He winked at Kolff. “NACA doesn’t know it needs this young man, Dieter, but we know it needs him.”
Mott’s introduction to NACA was disarming: a clutter [221] of unimpressive buildings not far from the James River, a panel of four intense specialists, a series of penetrating questions. “You come highly recommended,” the spokesman said. “Was it really you who saved the Peenemünde documents?”
“It was,” Funkhauser said. “I searched all over Germany for him, and he searched for me.”
“And what were your main courses of study?”
“Mechanical engineering, materials, structures.”
“Excellent,” and the spokesman explained the philosophy of NACA, a philosophy which had enabled the agency to pioneer far more than half the discoveries that had made flight possible, profitable and safe: “We like to bring in engineers who’ve had wide experience in general principles. Who know what a vector is, a slide rule. And we put them to work on every conceivable type of problem until they appreciate the complexity of flight, trusting that they’ll apply what they know to what we don’t know.”
“I’d like that.”
“When can you start?”
“Tomorrow,” General Funkhauser said.
“We could use you tomorrow,” the NACA man said.
“That sounds wonderful, sir, but I have to close out my duties at Huntsville.”
“Why? They fired you, didn’t they?”
“I can’t just walk out.”
The NACA men nodded, almost approvingly; if this man was loyal to people who had fired him, he would certainly be loyal to those who hired him. “Agreed,” the chairman said. “Start work as soon as you can get here. But by the way, where did you say you were educated?”
“Bachelor’s, Georgia Tech. Master’s, Louisiana State.”
With spontaneous enthusiasm the chairman rose, reached across and shook Mott’s hand. “That’s a spectacular combination. We have seven superbrains in NACA. Three from Louisiana State, two each from Purdue and Georgia Tech.” When he led Mott toward the door, he added, “We don’t want you to come here just to work. We want you to become one of our next superbrains.”
Mott halted and his throat choked up, but after a moment he asked, “Could I call my wife?” The NACA men heard him say, “Better than you could have dreamed, [222] darling. They’re shifting us into the fast lane.” She must have responded with a question about opportunities in the new job, for he replied, “Unlimited,” and hung up.
When Mott reported to NACA he was assigned to the operation that stood at the very heart of Langley’s contribution to the nation, the vast wind tunnel in which models of the best airplanes in the world were tested and improved upon. It was a huge white building, two blocks long, of astonishing shape: “Looks like a monster doughnut covered with confectioner’s sugar that somebody squashed from two sides so the hole almost disappeared.”
The speaker was a white-haired engineer named Harry Crampton, who had worked in the smaller Langley tunnels for thirty-one years and who now supervised the masterpiece. “We call it the Sixteen-Foot Tunnel,” he said, pointing to a diagram of the multimillion-dollar center, “because here, where the wind reaches its maximum speed, beyond Mach 1, the cross section is sixteen feet. That’s enormous. You can place your model in the center and it will avoid turbulence occurring along the walls.”
He led Mott into the tunnel itself, a cavernous affair with enormously thick and polished walls. Its crushed-doughnut design meant that it had two fairly long straightaways, four abrupt 90° corners, and two short connecting arms. “A very narrow capital O might be a better description,” Crampton said, and Mott, in his desire to be cooperative, made his first mistake: “Some scientist did a good job here.”
Crampton stopped, stiffened, and in the gloom of the great tunnel, said, “Scientists are men who dream about doing things. Engineers do them. This was designed by engineers, built by engineers, and is run by engin
eers. You’re an engineer, young fellow, and you’re to be proud of it.”
“I’m sorry,” Mott said.
“You thought that if an engineer was real good, he became a scientist. It’s the other way around. If you want to be an engineer but find you have ten thumbs, you become a scientist.”
He led Mott on a walk-through of his tunnel, counterclockwise from where it narrowed. At the first squared-off bend stood an axle from which protruded twenty-five [223] huge wooden propeller blades, so exquisitely shaped that they cleared the tunnel walls by less than an eighth of an inch. When they revolved at furious speed they created a massive movement of air, and only a few feet farther on, a second set of blades caught this moving air, accelerated it, and whipped it down the back straightaway at a speed of over five hundred miles an hour.
“Twenty-five blades in the first set, twenty-six in the second,” Crampton said. “Why?”
“To avoid resonance,” Mott answered quickly, and the old engineer was pleased, for if the sets had been identical, and rotating at their enormous speeds, the moment would come when they would spin in harmony and set up a vibration that would tear the building apart. With a 25-26 ratio, that harmonic resonance could be avoided.
The propeller blades were made of a handsome white spruce, and Crampton asked why, but Mott could not answer. “I’ll give you time to think about it,” the older man said as he led Stanley between the stationary blades and into the long straightaway. “Here’s the secret of any wind tunnel. The air comes roaring off the propellers, and you gradually broaden the diameter of the tunnel so that a huge mass accumulates, traveling relatively slowly but at high pressure. Now, here you suddenly constrict the diameter, so that the same mass of air has to rush through a sharply diminished opening. It must go faster. It reaches the speed of sound, and then as the diameter opens up, the speed of the air actually becomes supersonic.” And when Mott studied the interior of this great twisting worm, he realized that in no portion did the diameter remain the same for long; it was always either expanding or contracting.
“What we’re doing is playing games with our mass of air. Slow it down, rush it ahead. The result? When it comes past the critical point, it’s a monster gale.” Like a proud parent, Crampton looked at the test section, then laughed. “But at the same time, the air is playing games with us.”
“In what way?”
“You understand what the sound barrier is?”
“Mach 1. About seven hundred and sixty miles per hour at sea level.”
“It varies according to temperature.”
“I thought temperature and altitude,” Mott said.
[224] “Many people do. Only temperature. Now think a moment. The higher you go close to Earth the colder it gets. But the governing factor is temperature.”
Crampton leaned against the tunnel wall, polished like a jewel to allow the air to pass with minimum friction, and pointed to the handsome metal pylon to which vehicles to be tested were attached. “Seems incredible, but three years ago we could move air past that stand at Mach 0.9, just under the speed of sound, or Mach 1.1, just over. But the tunnel would not allow us to study what happened close to Mach 1, which was where the mysteries happen in high-speed aviation. Breaking the sound barrier it was called. Many judged it to be impossible. Too many planes went haywire when they attempted it.”
“Three years ago you couldn’t do it. Can you do it now?”
Crampton ignored the question. He tapped the carefully tapered sides and said, “They must not allow any of the high-speed air to escape, because that’s how we build up our miles-per-hour. But as the air approaches Mach 1 in this final constriction, so much accumulates in such a little space that it begins to vibrate, choke, flutter. It allows us to photograph nothing.”
“But just beyond Mach 1 it calms down?”
“Yes. We knew that if we could get the plane through that barrier, supersonic flight would be more predictable. This wind tunnel proved that. So the barrier became a terrible psychological and physical problem. I have some old schlieren photos in my office showing you how terrible. The whole tunnel seemed to vibrate and we honestly believed that no airplane could pass through and survive.”
“How was it handled?”
“Simple. A determined pilot named Chuck Yeager took his X-1 up to a great height, where the atmosphere wasn’t too heavy, and flew right through the barrier, but in our tunnels we still couldn’t analyze the science of it, and when other pilots tried to break through it, they crashed.”
“I always thought the English broke the sound barrier. I saw this movie in which Ralph Richardson’s son ...”
Crampton groaned and lowered his head, as if bearing a savage burden, one often borne before. “Movies are going to destroy human intelligence. That damn-fool movie dealt with crazies who took their planes up and dived them, without control, until they accumulated speeds that tore [225] them apart. Chuck Yeager took his X-1 up and flew it, under perfect control. All the difference in the world.”
“Did you get the wind tunnel straightened out?”
“Not me. A genius named John Stack.” He paused to consider how he could best explain to Mott. Then pride captured him. “At NACA we solve everything, eventually. That’s our job, and now it’s yours.”
“This time, how?”
“Stack reasoned that if the tunnel was choking at Mach 1, it must be because it was receiving too much air. He concluded that we were feeding in much more than necessary, and it was his brilliant idea to come in here just before the throat and bleed off just enough of the supercharged air to allow the remainder to pass through without creating turbulence. Look at this photo.” And he showed Mott a high-speed schlieren photograph of an unsatisfactory model perched atop a narrow steel pylon, more than a hundred minute wires leading from a hundred sensors mounted on various interior parts of the plane. It stood in the midst of a wind roaring past at Mach 1, with the air eddies magnificently depicted as they swirled about the uneven protuberances. Even Mott, untrained in wind-tunnel analysis, could see that the wing on this model created far too much turbulence. And what was remarkable, the general body of air, even at Mach 1, was orderly and in no way turbulent. Mr. Stack, whoever he was, had solved his problem and opened the pathway to the development of airplanes that could break through the sound barrier almost as undisturbed as a horse-drawn carriage heading for a country picnic in 1903.
“At NACA,” the instructor said, “There are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.”
And then as the two men stood in the throat of the tunnel, where the walls narrowed like the digesting portion of a python, Crampton placed his hand upon the chrome-steel pylon and said, “You must treat Langley with reverence. It’s a holy place, really, because without it we couldn’t have proved that engine nacelles should be fused into the wing of the plane rather than stand exposed so that mechanics could service them more easily. We gave he plane forty additional miles an hour with that one. It was at Langley that we proved wheels drawn back into the fuselage after takeoff added another sixty miles. And [226] it was here that we improved the bombers that subdued Hitler.
“The tunnel must be protected. And if you ever bring in a model with a loose bolt or a fragment of metal that might break off, you can destroy this tunnel.”
From his pocket he took a coin and placed it against the pylon. “Let’s imagine that you, Engineer Mott, have brought in a model which is defective. This little piece of metal is going to break loose. Now follow me,” and he walked swiftly down the darkened tunnel to the first set of twenty-five blades. “We’re traveling at six hundred miles an hour and we smash into these wooden blades. We shatter three, and their rubbish flies through here to strike the twenty-six blades, and the whole tunnel is rendered useless.”
Mott studied where two blades in the first set had been adroitly repaired, as if a jeweler had inserted small pieces of wood to fill the holes caused by some break-away piece of metal. “Now you understand why we u
se wooden blades? If we used steel, which would in many ways be better, when a flyaway bolt struck them, their pieces would become bullets.”
Crampton touched the gigantic blades as a father might touch a son who had done well in games. “When you work here, Mott, you work in a cathedral.”
It was a year before Mott got into the tunnel, for he was so good at designing models that Crampton kept him in that part of the operation. “You’re a real engineer, one of the best. You know materials and how to handle them. If I’d had you as my model builder fifteen years ago ...”
“I’d like to start work in the tunnel.”
“And you should. I’ve been selfish, keeping you over here in the shops. But you’ll be a better tunnel man for it.
When he moved into the tunnel, one of seventeen creative engineers supported by twenty-three highly skilled model builders and mathematicians, he launched a series of experiments to identify the sometimes minute modifications that pinpointed improvements to be made in the full-scale prototypes of the aircraft before they were sent up the Chesapeake Bay for testing at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River. He found his work totally [227] absorbing, for it utilized all that he had learned at Georgia, Louisiana and New Mexico.
His life with his family, ensconced in a small white bungalow on the banks of the James River, with a small boat of their own, was the happiest he had ever known. His elder son, Millard, having been expelled from an exclusive school in New England, was idling his way through an ineffectual public school education, but he was behaving himself, and Christopher reveled in the waterfront, competing with other youngsters in one-man small-boat races. Rachel, indefatigably concerned about the problems of her society, had no Germans to teach English, so she directed her enthusiasm to black playgrounds around Hampton, where she served as a voluntary teacher’s helper, taking over whole areas when regular supervisors called in sick.