The Dream Machine

by Richard Whittle

  Since World War II, the military’s “patient capital” has led to innumerable, often stunning advances in technology. It also spawned and sustains what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower was referring to the web of political and personal relationships between industry representatives and military officials that germinates when they do business or collaborate on projects. As institutions, defense companies and the government are often at odds over the costs and capabilities of weapons and other equipment; there is plenty of friction in the relationship. On a personal level, though, friendships and alliances spring up between individuals on either side of the divide, whether as a work by-product or by calculated cultivation. In the end, those who work for the contractors and those who manage their programs for the military share a compelling interest in making the project succeed. That tie can blur the line between the best interests of a company and the best interests of “The Customer,” as defense contractors call the government. Sometimes it can blur the line between the best interests of industry and the nation. Eisenhower, who as a five-star general had led the Allies in defeating Nazi Germany, warned of this larger danger in a farewell address as he left the White House in 1961. “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower declared. He also noted that the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.”

  During the Great Depression, the U.S. military wasn’t immense and the aircraft industry was tiny. Both would grow rapidly with the approach of World War II, but for most of the decade preceding that conflict, America’s armed forces numbered around 250,000 active-duty personnel, compared to roughly 1.4 million today, and the entire military budget was under $1 billion—less than one five-hundredth of its size in recent years, without adjusting for inflation. The Pentagon didn’t exist and there was no unified Department of Defense. The Army was overseen by the War Department, the Navy and the Marine Corps by the separate Navy Department. Many aircraft companies whose names are now famous—Boeing, Douglas, Lockheed, McDonnell, Northrop, Grumman—already were in business or getting started, but commercial aircraft accounted for most of their work in the 1930s.

  Even so, from its earliest days the U.S. aircraft industry relied on military contracts. The first recorded sale of an airplane for profit in the United States came when Orville and Wilbur Wright were paid $25,000 to provide the Army Signal Corps one airplane and pilot training in 1908. (This first military aircraft crashed, less than a month after the Army bought it, because of a defective propeller, severely injuring Orville and killing a young lieutenant he had been training to fly.) Until the late 1930s, however, the Army and Navy were conservative in their airplane purchases and shied away from most experimental aircraft. The military didn’t make progress payments of the sort Dick Spivey would one day cite as key to developing leading-edge technologies. The armed services paid for airplanes when delivered and didn’t reimburse companies for development costs. Moreover, observed Donald M. Pattillo in his detailed history, Pushing the Envelope: The American Aircraft Industry, “there was no cohesive structure for dealings between the industry and the government. Contracting and procurement were largely on an adversarial and ad hoc basis.”

  This was a problem for Harold Pitcairn.

  The youngest son of a Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company co-founder, Harold F. Pitcairn was a pilot and entrepreneur who in the late 1920s owned various aviation businesses, including airmail routes, based near Philadelphia. During a trip to Europe, Pitcairn saw Cierva’s Auto-giro. Certain it was going to replace the airplane as the preferred means of flight, Pitcairn bought the U.S. rights to the invention and sold off his other aviation businesses in July 1929. His timing was bad. Three months later, the stock market crashed, starting the Great Depression.

  Pitcairn nevertheless got off to a good start with his Autogiro venture. He used test flights of the first Autogiro his company built not only to get government approval for this new type of aircraft but also to generate publicity. He took deposits on Autogiros his own company would build and licensed two other companies to build Autogiros as well. The National Aeronautic Association awarded Pitcairn’s team the Collier Trophy for 1930, aviation’s equivalent of the “Best Picture” Oscar, for demonstrating the Autogiro as a form of “safe aerial transport.” President Herbert Hoover presented Pitcairn the trophy on April 22, 1931, at the White House. During the event, test pilot James G. Ray—the same James G. Ray who later envisioned a convertiplane in every garage—landed an Autogiro on the White House lawn and took off in it again. For a while, Pitcairn’s and his licensees’ Autogiros looked like they might take off financially, too. To gin up congressional support for military purchases, Pitcairn arranged for Jim Ray to set an Autogiro down one day on the parking lot that existed in those days on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol. Ray picked up Senator Hiram Bingham, a Connecticut Republican and former Army aviator, and whisked him off to the exclusive Burning Tree Club in the Maryland suburb of Bethesda for a round of golf. The Army later bought a few Autogiros to test as artillery spotters and observation aircraft. Celebrity aviators including Amelia Earhart tried Autogiros in those years. A couple of newspapers bought them as photo planes. An Autogiro was used to haul mail from Camden, New Jersey, to Philadelphia, where the aircraft landed and took off from the roof of the city’s main post office. An Autogiro even made a cameo appearance in the 1934 Clark Gable movie It Happened One Night. That same year, however, the Depression reached full force and the demand for Autogiros dried up. By 1938, Pitcairn was desperate for business and having trouble persuading the Army to buy more Autogiros from him and his licensees. Pitcairn turned for help to his congressman, Representative Frank Dorsey, a second-term Democrat from Philadelphia.

  Dorsey didn’t need much persuading. He had been interested in safer aircraft ever since a hair-raising flight over Ohio a few years earlier in a plane that had barely skirted a tornado. “After dropping about two thousand feet, and then about twelve hundred in a pocket, and not knowing whether I was going to land safely or not, and looking down and seeing nothing but trees below me, I thought there surely must be some kind of an aircraft can keep you in the air, or let you down on top of a tree somewhere without cracking everybody up,” Dorsey later recalled. In 1938, Dorsey also was up for reelection, and Pitcairn was an important constituent. His business provided jobs in Dorsey’s district, and jobs were scarce. Pitcairn was delighted when Dorsey introduced a bill to provide $2 million to the War Department to buy Autogiros for Army research and testing. That was a lot of cash back then—about a third as much as the Army’s entire research budget.

  Despite Dorsey’s lack of seniority in the House, the atmosphere for such a move must have seemed ripe. War with Nazi Germany was looming. Hitler had absorbed a largely willing Austria into the Third Reich in March and was threatening to take over Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland by force. Congress was beefing up the military budget. When the House Committee on Military Affairs held hearings on Dorsey’s bill that April, though, the lawmaker and his constituents got an unwelcome surprise.

  Dorsey tried to inspire his colleagues to vote for his bill by wowing them with the promise of the Autogiro. Appearing as a witness before the 26-member panel, he conjured up a vision remarkably similar—in fact, nearly identical—to the one that would enthrall Dick Spivey and other tiltrotor advocates decades later. “Contemplate the military and civilian advantages of a giro able to transport, say, twenty passengers or the equivalent in weight and with a cruising range of over a thousand miles,” Dorsey urged. “A giro with this cruising range and pay load, able to rise or descend vertically, would revolutionize aviation both military and commercial.”

  The military already had tried the Autogiro, though, and was unimpressed. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison—the son of inventor Thomas Edison, who had unsuccessful
ly tried to invent a helicopter in the 1880s—testified that the Navy Department was “really not interested in this bill” because of the Autogiro’s limited speed and endurance. The head of research and development for the War Department, Army Major E. N. Harmon, had two objections to Dorsey’s bill. First, his department disliked Congress earmarking money for special projects (a habit House and Senate members would never break). Secondly, the Army had bought three Autogiros already and “the results have been unfortunate,” Harmon reported. All three “cracked up in a very short time.” Of course, he added, “With any new type of aircraft like that, there is always the danger that one of them is going to have an accident and crack up.”

  To make matters worse for Pitcairn, revered aeronautical engineer Alexander Klemin counseled the committee to fund not just Autogiros but “any machine having a rotating wing.” That meant the helicopter, which unlike the Autogiro would have a powered rotor that could lift the machine into the air as well as set it down gently. In Germany, a helicopter with two rotors side by side, the Focke-Wulf 61, or Fw 61, had just been demonstrated, Klemin noted, suggesting that this form of aircraft likely would be the next stage in the conquest of the air. “If you will read imaginative works you will see conceptions emerging of craft which would be capable of leaving a roof top and landing in a back yard,” Klemin advised. “Besides my scientific knowledge of the subject, I have the subconscious feeling that that will be the next step.”

  Klemin turned out to be right—partly due to Pitcairn’s scheme to get the Army to buy more of his Autogiros. By the end of two days of hearings on Dorsey’s bill, the promise of the helicopter was outshining that of the Autogiro, and Dorsey was in full retreat. When the legislation became law that June as the Dorsey-Logan Act, it authorized the War Department to spend $2 million, but not just for Autogiros. The money was to go for research, development, purchase and testing of “rotary-wing and other aircraft.”

  * * *

  Suddenly a pot of real gold beckoned at the end of the rotary-wing rainbow. Excited by the prospect, visionaries from the competing rotary wing tribes—Autogiro, helicopter, and convertiplane—gathered to debate how it should be spent. They met at the Franklin Institute, a renowned engineering school and museum in the heart of Philadelphia, the de facto capital of rotary wing experimentation. The Autogiro companies were in Philadelphia. Key figures in what would become the helicopter industry lived and worked in or near the city. It was Congressman Dorsey’s hometown. Registration for the “Rotating Wing Aircraft Meeting” of October 28–29, 1938, was held in the institute’s Hall of Aviation—an apt choice of rooms, given the unanticipated result of Pitcairn’s attempt to get Congress to shoehorn his Autogiros into the armed forces. Hanging from the ceiling was the first Autogiro built in the United States, already a museum piece.

  One of Vertaplane inventor Gerard Herrick’s kindred souls, E. Burke Wilford, organized the meeting, which would prove a seminal event for what became the rotary wing aircraft industry. An engineer and manufacturer by profession, and a wealthy man, Wilford was another free-thinker and aviation entrepreneur who bubbled with enthusiasm for the idea of rotary wing aircraft. He had been drawn to aviation by a contest to develop safer aircraft in 1927, the year Charles Lindbergh became the first to fly across the Atlantic solo in his Spirit of St. Louis. Since then, Wilford had built a gyroplane, a machine similar to an Autogiro, based on a design he had bought during a visit to Germany in the 1920s.

  Now Germany’s Fw 61 helicopter was causing a sensation among the rotary wing crowd. The Fw 61 bore a strong resemblance to the future tiltrotor. It had the fuselage and tail of an airplane, but instead of wings, the craft had two big vertical rotors held out to the sides by outrigger pylons. The Nazis were using it for propaganda. Earlier in 1938, their famous female test pilot, Hanna Reitsch, had flown the revolutionary machine—indoors—for six minutes each evening during the big annual auto show at Berlin’s new Deutschlandhalle arena. This was the helicopter Klemin had told the House committee about, and it was much on the minds of others at the Philadelphia conference.

  Wilford gaveled the meeting into session in the Franklin Institute’s Lecture Hall, an auditorium in neoclassical style with theater seating in sharply rising rows. “As this is probably the first rotary wing aircraft conference occurring in the world, we hope to make a little history here, and the only way that we can do that is for everyone to say what he thinks,” Wilford told the nearly full auditorium. He was looking up at 242 engineers, inventors, aviation industry executives, and military officers. Looking down on them from niches on the wall to their right were murals of Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus—reminders of what scientists with iconoclastic vision can achieve. There was also another mural, this one depicting an alchemist and the ill-destined medieval quest to turn base metals into gold—a reminder that not all iconoclastic scientific theories pan out. Seated in the audience was nearly everyone who already was somebody or someday would be somebody in this avant-garde cohort of aviation. “Don’t be afraid of hurting anybody’s feelings, or departing from the conventional procedure,” Wilford counseled.

  “That’s what this meeting is for, and we hope that it will be the start of a real boom in the rotary wing aircraft industry.”

  Shortly into the first day’s meeting, rotary wing guru Klemin took the chair. He was in a buoyant mood. The previous evening, Klemin had spoken to a special meeting at the Franklin Institute to kick off today’s conference. His remarks had made the front page of this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer under the headline “Rotary Wings Touted For Fool-Proof Plane.” The second speaker Klemin called on was Vertaplane inventor Herrick, who frequently had sought Klemin’s advice, and whose quirky personality and ideas clearly amused the professor. Klemin seemed to view Herrick as a sort of alchemist of aviation. He introduced him as “a man who is captain of his own soul.” When Herrick finished speaking, Klemin called his ideas “refreshing,” then added, drawing a laugh from the audience, “The only thing I don’t approve of are his mathematics. I think his mathematics are of the type of which the college professor, in marking down a paper, says, ‘I think I shall give him a C, minus.’ ”

  Seven years after the crash of his first Vertaplane, Herrick was now calling his dream machine the “Convertaplane.” Klemin teased Herrick as the inventor began his talk. “I would like to know whether it is ‘Convertoplane’ or ‘Convertaplane,’” Klemin demanded.

  Herrick walked to a blackboard, picked up some chalk, and wrote: CONVERT ible Air PLANE. “I represent a hybrid, an occupant of the aviation stables that more closely resembles, perhaps, the mule than anything else,” the amiable inventor began. “We are all interested to find out whether or not it is the start of a new and important breed.” Then he told a joke. Then he read a poem. Then he recalled how he had once explained to “a Southerner” how he had spent ten years working on his invention, to which Herrick said the man replied: “It is a pity that you could not have bred an airplane to a helicopter and let nature take its course; it takes less than a year to foal a mule.”

  Finally, Herrick described his Convertaplane in some detail, at times sounding a bit self-conscious. At one point he mused that, “Every very radical research needs an eccentric person who, by a certain amount of freedom from convention is not too afraid to go far afield for solutions.”

  One man in the audience who probably agreed was Arthur Middleton Young, a fellow Princeton alumnus thirty-two years Herrick’s junior. Young had grown up on his financially comfortable family’s estate in the Philadelphia suburb of Radnor, amusing himself by making models and mechanical toys and tinkering with radios. While studying mathematics at Princeton, Young decided to become a philosopher. He wanted to found his own new philosophy, but after trying for a while at school, he decided he knew too little as yet about how the real world worked. To fill that void, he set out after graduating in 1927 to invent a helicopter—not because he wanted to fly but “to determine if I was learning how n
ature works,” he explained after succeeding and moving on to found the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, California.

  Art Young was a genial young genius with brown hair, a widow’s peak, and a fit build. He loved to Indian wrestle. After finishing at Princeton, he had spent more than a year traveling to public libraries in major cities to read up on helicopter theory. Then he set about his task like any respectable mad scientist might: he turned a corner of the stable on his family’s estate into a workshop. There he spent nine years obsessively designing and building and redesigning and rebuilding a remote-controlled model helicopter with a rotor about six feet in diameter. His materials were wood and scrap metal foraged for him from junkyards by boys in the neighborhood. His engines, at first, were rubber bands and electric motors. He designed and built gauges to measure lift and calculate stress on metal parts. He tested and retested rotors of various shapes. By 1938, Young was working on a large new model with a 20-horsepower engine. He hadn’t yet succeeded in making it even stay in one piece once the rotor started spinning, much less fly, but he felt he was making progress. So he used his modest inheritance to buy a farm at Paoli, Pennsylvania, where he rebuilt an old barn into a big workshop to construct and test his models. Then he went to the Rotating Wing Aircraft Meeting in Philadelphia.