The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed

by John McPhee

  Belial did not always back away so quickly—as when trouble came to Aereon in the form of the Securities and Exchange Commission. There are three ways to float stock: by private offering; publicly, through full registration with the S.E.C.; and, also publicly, under an S.E.C. exemption from full registration, known as Regulation A, which allows companies to issue a maximum of three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stock without incurring the avalanchine legal fees that go with full registration. Early in 1965, Aereon had applied for a Regulation A exemption. It was granted in the spring of 1966, almost on the exact day that Monroe Drew’s airship, the triple-hulled Aereon, was blown over by the wind and bulldozed back into the hangar, never to emerge again. That summer, a computer created the deltoid Aereons, and the computer was paid with money from sale of the new stock. Just after the turn of the year, without warning of any kind, the S.E.C. telephoned and told the officers of Aereon to appear in Washington the following afternoon with the company’s books. Sale of stock was halted while the S.E.C. gathered facts. The S.E.C. took depositions in Trenton. What or who had triggered this investigation has never been revealed. The strain of it cracked the company to pieces. Board meetings were dipped in savagery. John Fitzpatrick, who, in addition to his engineering functions, had for the past three years been playing president to Drew’s founder, quit. “I have long felt that ministers get between man and God,” he explained. “Drew has a monstrous ego. He has demonstrated consistently over a long period of time that he is incapable of living with reality. In selling the stock, he talked the moon. Everyone in the organization at one time or another has tried to put a wet blanket over him. In his approach to investors, he has never failed to be Reverend Drew. If you really want to know what I think of Monroe Drew, get a copy of Moby Dick and read Father Mapple’s sermon. Jonah was a man who tried to flee from God. ‘Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty. Woe to him who while preaching to others is himself a castaway.’ I wanted to build an airship that could maneuver when landing or taking off, that wouldn’t blow away in the first big wind. Meanwhile, Drew was talking about ‘G-power,’ saying it was ‘something mystical.’ He was going to revolutionize aviation transportation. He overstated the credentials and qualifications of everything. He embarrassed me until I wanted to slip through a crack in the floor.” Drew, for his part, said he was sincerely sorry, and surprised, that Fitzpatrick felt this way. “When we got into trouble with the S.E.C., John turned against me.”

  The S.E.C. compiled a list of particulars, and the general drift of it was that Aereon had misled its investors in various ways—for example, by not properly informing them that the entire triple-hull concept was being scrapped in favor of the deltoid configuration, by failing to disclose that no engineering data existed to support certain engineering theories, and by using false and misleading sales literature and making false and misleading oral statements, such as the following claims: “the proposed aircraft can deliver four to six times the average truckload, at ranges up to four thousand miles, at a cost of less than one and a half cents a ton-mile; the issuer is proceeding as rapidly as possible toward manufacture of a commercial aircraft; and rapid progress is being made toward a commercial prototype aircraft.” All the company actually had at the time was a computer’s description of a deltoid rigid airship. John Kukon’s flight of a twenty-inch Aereon was still many months away. The company had no president. Its treasurer had also quit, and its other engineer, Jiirgen Bock, would soon go home to Germany. About a hundred and fifty thousand dollars had been raised from sale of the Regulation A stock. Most of it had been spent. The S.E.C. permanently suspended the Regulation A exemption, and Aereon could raise no further money by public sale of stock. Lazarus at his worst had had a stronger pulse.

  IN AERONAUTICAL CIRCLES around Princeton, Aereon was viewed with, among other things, cruel amusement.

  “I don’t think it is generally understood that technological advances are not made by back-yard inventors anymore.

  “There could be something about it that no one at present knows. It could be beyond the man of ordinary skill in the art. I doubt it.”

  “The man of ordinary skill in the art used to be Thomas Jefferson inventing a better plow, but now it’s a man with a master’s degree and twenty years’ experience in the business.

  “A bright-eyed minister of theology and a gung-ho airship man do not add up to technical competence.”

  “Oh, you’re just one of those theoreticians who can prove a bumblebee can’t fly.”

  “I get a twinge of sadness whenever I think about Aereon.”

  “Drew is wild. He is a fighter-pilot type. You need them, sometimes. If I had a product to make, I’d want Drew to raise the money. I think he can get blood out of a turnip.”

  “He should have been a pitchman in a carnival selling patent medicines.”

  “Fitzpatrick was an energetic, shirt-sleeve, self-trained engineer who got over his head in a technical field in which he was not really qualified.”

  “No serious student of aerodynamics would believe that that triple-hulled airship was an efficient configuration design. The big question now, with the delta configuration, is: Is this an efficient design for the purposes for which it is intended?”

  “You can make anything fly. You can make the George Washington Bridge fly if you put enough engines on it.”

  “What I was taught is that if you want to pick up a big load off a field in a short distance you build a long, straight, thin wing. A high aspect ratio (span over chord) on a conventional airplane is the way to do this. Aereon may have a fantastic invention here that nobody understands, but I think that is unlikely.”

  “There is real merit in putting bags of helium into the structure. You can calculate this. There is no mystery about it. For engineering purposes, Newton, on buoyancy, was right. You can calculate whether to extend wings or add helium. Aircraft configuration is not an exact science, but it’s somewhere near it. Thus, if this were such a Goddamned good idea, it would have emerged long ago.”

  “It’s just part of the American dream. You know—‘Your boy, in a bicycle shop, can invent something that will change the world.’ The finest scientific minds in the country told the Wright brothers they couldn’t do it.”

  “Two wrongs make a right. Two Wrights make an airplane.”

  WILLIAM SWORD, by the oddest of ironies, may have resurrected the Aereon Corporation, if only indirectly, catalytically. For when Sword told William Miller to beware, and to watch his investment, Miller had begun to attend Aereon board meetings, and had changed from a passive investor to an active participant. Slow to commit himself to anything, Miller had a capacity to be a passionate believer, and once he believed in something, he would characteristically devote himself to it with a loyalty and an expenditure of energy that could obscure almost everything else in his life. Miller believed in Aereon. He believed in the word of the computer when it said that the form in which to make a big rigid airship that could carry huge loads and land like an airplane and fly under aerodynamic control was to hunt for the optimum compromise between an airfoil and a sphere. A sphere has the greatest possible volume relative to surface area, but a sphere has too much drag. A sphere is a bluff body as opposed to a fair body. So you elongate it, make an ellipsoid. A conventional airship is an aborted ellipsoid. Keep on flattening it, toward the airfoil. Press down on it. Shape it. Widen it aft. Make it as broad in the stern as it is long. A triangle with a deep belly and a vaulting back should do. No reason the thing should not fly on its own. Helium, however, would add free lift. A deltoid Aereon filled with helium and trailer trucks could fly on sixpence and a song. So the computer said.

  Miller believed. Aereon galvanized Miller, and salved his need for a sense of direction. Among all officers and stockholders, he was about the only one left with much of anything that could be called a sense of direction, as far as Aereon was concerned. He was also roughly the only person on earth who at that time had money he was w
illing to put into Aereon. Surveying this otherwise unpopulated wasteland, Drew and the board asked Miller to become president. He accepted. Some stockholders put up collateral so Aereon could obtain bank loans, but after a time no one was willing to do even that. For more than a year, Miller paid all operating costs himself. His relationship with Drew, warm at first, gradually formed crystals and then froze solid. Miller initially had felt compassionate toward his fellow-theologian, sympathetic as Drew absorbed the causticities of Fitzpatrick and the affronts of the S.E.C., but ultimately Miller grew wary of the founder’s overleaping style. It would not do—not in the new and cautious Aereon that Miller wanted to build. The founder sat, as ever, at the boardroom table, but Miller gradually encased him in clear plastic. A showdown at length came, over some minor point of company policy, and in a vote by the shareholders Miller was endorsed and Drew defeated. Drew had become founder non grata, and he was not invited when the tests of the 7 and the 26 were conducted by Miller’s consultant engineers.

  “Miller would like to wish out of existence the whole previous existence of Aereon,” Drew said. “He thinks of himself as the father of the company. He hates to have to refer to me as the founder.”

  “Drew has his own particular filter of fact and fantasy,” said Miller. “Understanding him is like trying to adjust the color on a television set.”

  “I can still bring into this thing money that doesn’t like Miller. Trucking money, as a matter of fact. To get Miller out of the way. For a time I tried to block everything he tried to do. I was a real s.o.b. Then I was quiet for a while. Now I am ready again to attack him. He just will not include me in inner management. He won’t give me a single picture of the aerobody. He is a great enigma to me. He has a rich boy’s education. He has lived as a rich man all his life. He is an unusual brand of churchman—very narrow-gauge.

  Aereon was costing as much as fifteen thousand dollars a month. To raise money—his personal fortune having long since run out—Miller had to go into a slow and meticulous waltz with the overreaching shadow of the S.E.C., abiding, and then some, by the rules of private offerings. He could not talk to anyone except “sophisticated and knowledgeable investors.” He could not call on a large number of people. He could not call on people over a long period of time, or it might be found that he had made a “continuous offering,” which he was not permitted to do. He behaved as if the Securities and Exchange Commission were a guillotine and his neck were permanently on the block. He talked only to sophisticated and knowledgeable millionaires, several of whom came through with money to keep him going. In his approach, he never mentioned Faith Fleets or Christian Freight Lines. He did not suggest that the basic purpose of the development of the Aereons was to advance dramatically the image of God.

  I once found myself wondering, though, how Miller might articulate his deeper purposes, if he would agree to do so at all. Personal profit could hardly be the radical motivation of a man who had poured away three hundred thousand dollars without apparent qualm. Monklike, frugal, denying himself every sweet in the box, he had spent (by then) several years singlemindedly struggling to preserve this checkered company. I asked him, around 4 A.M. one night on the way to a flight test at NAFEC, what he saw as his ultimate goal. He sighed unhappily and said he had scruples about keeping his private aims separate from his corporate objectives. He said, “However, if people probe me as to why I’m doing this, I’ll tell them, and it always reaches to ultimate values—but I don’t ordinarily go into it. The Faith Fleet was not a theological matter but a straightforward sales device—a gimmick. Should the Body of Christ run schools, highway departments, police forces, transportation companies? I don’t think so. Christians are supposed to be yeast and salt, the church in the world, people among people. The computer in Valley Forge was a tool created by man, not by God, and the computer created the aerobody, which is also a thing—a neutral object. It could be used for anything. The aerobody itself cannot be good or bad. It’s the use of it that can be bad. That is what sin is all about. Like any other gift, an aircraft can benefit man. I see the theological dimension of the aerobody as bringing a means of transportation of general benefit to man. The aerobody would benefit more people than high-speed aircraft do. An executive jet isn’t something a small town in Ghana could afford. But unit cost and utilization possibilities would make it possible for a small town in Ghana to afford an Aereon. Could Nigeria afford an SST? No. But Nigeria could use a flexible means of transport carrying many people and a great deal of produce cheaply. We can give developing countries a chance to become more effective in trade. We don’t want people to be dependent on us. This is a product they can buy and use in their own commerce. They need no fixed capital investment in a right-of-way. There are broad social concerns, you see, in the national interest—good for the free world.”

  Miller was so absorbed in what he was saying that he almost negotiated a traffic circle on the diameter rather than the circumference. Fighting the wheel, plunging on through the darkness, he continued, “I want to be a good steward of what has been entrusted to me in Aereon. I give it my life, my time, my money (money is life translated into exchangeable value), my abilities. I’m not the possessor but the trustee of these things. I see purposefulness in investing time, money, and ability as God has given them to me. I don’t see meaninglessness. I assume there is a point to life: discovering God’s purposes in one’s life. The ultimate value spot is God himself. If you have an ultimate value short of that, you have an idol. Paul said, ‘I know how to be abased and how to abound.’ In Aereon, we sure have been abased. I wonder how we would do if we were to abound. We would have a new means of transportation, and we would have seen the project through a period of great technical skepticism. The basic scheme is to produce a three-hundred-and-forty-foot aircraft capable of enormous lift. Then, later, at the thousand-foot length, we could replace ocean freighters. If the project succeeds financially, I will feel grateful because the Aereons will produce money that I, in turn, will be called upon to administer. Stewardship, faithfulness, quality, integrity, hope, responsibility, trust—these are key concepts with me. I would like to give the profits of Aereon to Christian agencies that serve the Body of Christ—for example, to the Scripture Union, an agency that promotes the strengthening of the infrastructure of the church through daily input in people’s lives of meditation on the Scriptures. I would also like to create scholarships for theological students in other countries. I would also like to buy books for theological libraries abroad. And I would like to give as much as I can to the American Bible Society. If I ever get married and have children, I would plan to pass on this stewardship to them. If the company outdistances my talents, I’ll try to be a good steward, and not be a possessor. No one is infallible. Meanwhile, to break new ground—to break new air, let us say—is possible because of hope. The reason for my hope is the Resurrection. If the Resurrection is true, and if God does create life out of a dead situation, the Resurrection is God’s ultimate solution to man’s problem of sin. With God, all things are possible. It is possible that, despite your own frailties and weaknesses, anything can be achieved—if this is God’s purpose. God has created us as creators. God has created us as responsible to our brothers. I have been called to this now. If this project fails, I will existentially be questioning my stewardship. If the project fails, though, I know that I will have something for which to give thanks—for character development, if nothing else. I couldn’t enter into a vocation unless I felt it was something that God wanted me to do. In this sense, I think of it as a calling, a form of obedience to God. If the air were full of gigantic machines, it might not be good, but, on the other hand, it would be a relief from congestion on the ground. As a Christian, I feel a sense of mission about this. Not everyone in the company shares my trust in Christ.”

  This was true enough. Some of the others actually worried about Miller’s religion. One of them had once said to me, “No one who folds his hands and says prayers at a business-
lunch table is ever going to raise enough money to keep Aereon going.”

  I asked Miller why he did not have a church, since he was qualified to be an ordained minister, and why, instead, he had chosen such a novel form of mission. “I went to divinity school to learn how to help people spiritually,” he said. “And not necessarily in a church. All my life, people had said, ‘Are you going to be a missionary like your daddy?’ My dilemma was: If I did what I wanted, he wouldn’t be happy, and if I did what he wanted, I wouldn’t be happy.”

  When Miller was ten years old, in 1936, and his family was in the United States on furlough from Iran, he wrote to T.W.A. and suggested that they build a chain of floating airports, like lily pads, across the Atlantic—a concept that Rutgers University would advance, with concomitant publicity, in 1966. In military school, in Chattanooga, in 1941, Miller frequently daydreamed about an all-freight airline with him as founder and president. At Choate School, in 1943, he got interested in rockets and helicopters. He thought out a way to overcome torque in helicopter rotors: hot exhaust channelled through the blades and out the tips as jets. Sikorsky Aircraft finally did just that in 1965. At Choate, he also did an engineering drawing of a projectile that could be fired from a gun and then turn into a rocket. The projectile was wrapped in plastic containers holding liquid fuels. The spin of the projectile would force liquid oxygen or liquid hydrogen out of plastic sacs and through tubes in the axis to a chamber at the rear. The liquid fuel would combust in the chamber, blow out a plug, and turn the projectile into a rocket. He actually explored getting a patent. In 1944, aged eighteen, he went into naval aviation—Patuxent, Olathe, Ottumwa, Pensacola. He shot colored bullets through banners. He paused before recruiting posters that showed Navy pilots over the words “Rough,” “Tough,” and “Smart.” He found this “ego-building.” He became an award-winning dive-bomber. “Pointed at the ground, you know, you pick up tremendous speed. We dived from twenty thousand feet at an eighty-degree angle. It felt perpendicular. Winds would vary at different altitudes. You released your bomb at twenty-five hundred feet, then pulled out at a thousand feet. I lost one of my good friends that way—really a terrific fellow. Afterwards, I circled around and saw nicks in the ground that had been made by his prop—he had been that close to pulling out of the dive. That was a shock.” At the end of his Navy experience, Miller was flying Phantom jets in the Reserve. The first place he ever landed one was at NAFEC. He was in college by then, an overage undergraduate in the Class of 1953 at Princeton. If anyone had ever wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, it was Miller, but he felt inexorably drawn to a higher calling. “I thought I was a Christian, but I didn’t have the Peace of God. I prayed, ‘God, show me more of your truth.’” God answered this prayer at the Campus in the Woods, an enclave of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, on Fair-view Island, in the Lake of Bays, Ontario. Having felt that he was only a “nominal Christian,” who had “no real fellowship with Christ,” Miller went to Fairview Island to get it. The Campus in the Woods was a nest of fundamentalism. Miller at first looked upon the others there as “people who couldn’t make it socially and had collected for solace.” They sang hymns and talked about Christ all the time and, in his own word, disgusted him. They had an air of smug certainty about their relationship with God and what He wanted them to do. Miller found this presumptuous. In Iran, Miller’s father was praying for a positive outcome of his son’s experience in Canada. Lecturers at the Campus in the Woods explained that Christ is a bridge on which man can cross the chasm between himself and God. “God forgives,” they said. “And Christ died not only for the sins of the whole world but for your sins.” Miller found himself becoming interested. “It all built up in three days. Someone said to me, ‘By the way, Bill, would you be willing to do God’s will in your life?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I realized I’d said something pretty momentous. The hymns began to mean something. It all got to me. I no longer felt a dichotomy between my will and God’s will. I felt, ‘He will put into me a desire to do what I must do—whatever it is.’ In the third chapter of John, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. Christ says to him, ‘Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.’ That was my autobiography, written two thousand years ago. Now my life became Technicolor. Before, it had all been shades of gray. A letter came from my father saying that he had been praying that this would happen. Wowl Fantastic! A clear case of how God answers prayer! By Grace you are saved, through Faith.” Back at Princeton, he spent a high percentage of his time trying to encourage his classmates to follow Christ. He organized eleven Bible-study groups-antagonizing the Presbyterian chaplain, because the groups had not been organized under the chaplain’s aegis. He considered flunking out so he could proselytize full time, but decided at the zero hour that “flunking out would be bad witness to the faculty,” so he took and passed his examinations. He also worked as campus recruiter for naval aviation. He combined aviation and religion in his persuasive approach. When he found a prospective jet fighter pilot, he would tell him, “What Christ means to me is something far more wonderful even than flying.” For the History Department, he wrote his senior thesis on “The Origins, Manifestations, and Products of Presbyterian Missionary Efforts in the United States, 1789—1837.” In 1956, Miller was the president of the student body at the Biblical Seminary, on East Forty-ninth Street, in New York, becoming a Bachelor of Sacred Theology. For the rest of that year, he studied the stock market. Then, for four years, he worked with foreign students at Columbia University. He was not part of the university staff but operated out of a small office on Morningside Heights paid for by the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. His aim was to enable “friendships in depth” to arise between foreign students and commuters. Miller defined commuters as “Christians who live in suburbia.” He went out into “the hinterlands” and scouted, and found a hundred and fifty families ready for friendship. The Protestant chaplain of Columbia cried foul, because Miller was not operating under his aegis. Miller characterized the chaplain as “a Protestant oaf.” The chaplain said Miller was insufficiently ecumenical, because he did not seek out Hindu or Muslim families. “Gosh,” Miller said. “I had Baptists, Lutherans, Plymouth Brethren—but quality control was everything. I couldn’t control the quality of a Hindu or Muslim family, because their outlook was so very different.” Miller began to see himself as a revolutionary forever fighting the establishment in the form of academic chaplains. He would feel that way about his struggle for the survival and growth of Aereon. He felt that way about his adviser while he was working for his master’s degree at Princeton Theological Seminary. He described his adviser as a Marxist theologian who believed that structures must be taken down, that the status quo is evil, and that sociopolitical action was where the Kingdom of God was at. The professor looked upon Miller as a nineteenth-century missionary. He denied him admission to the Th.D. program and thrust upon him a terminal master’s. Not long thereafter, Miller saw the sketch of the three-hulled Aereon and met the Reverend Mr. Monroe Drew.