also mentioned the Roots supercharger, though he left it unclear whether this was a military or a commercial development. In fact, almost all the work he cited was equally applicable to all kinds of aviation, and Lewis's division into military or commercial categories seems to have been arbitrary. His real message was that the NACA's work had meant rich returns on the dollars invested by the government.48

Among NACA researches applicable to both military and civilian aviation were these 1933 tests to determine the best location for engine nacelles with respect to wings. (LaRC)

The NACA clearly intended to please its entire constituency, not only in the substance of its work but also in the style of its operations. Here again the Americans had found in the British copybook another example of what to do and what not to do. The Royal Aircraft Factory-roughly an English counterpart of LMAL-had reportedly "got into very considerable disrepute" within military and manufacturing circles in Britain in World War I, causing a decrease in support of aeronautical research. The British engineer brought in to remedy the situation reported to Joseph Ames in 1919 that he had turned things

around by exploiting his "personal acquaintances" with manufacturers and army officers "and inviting everyone I met to come down quite freely and welcoming them in every possible way." 49 The NACA had formalized this type of contact by means of its annual industry conferences, but it kept up an informal liaison as well. After the Committee got its own airplane in the 1920s, Lewis flew to the Langley laboratory once a week and was more than happy to take influential people with him.50 Victory was constantly inviting congressmen and important executives from government and industry to tour the laboratory and see the NACA at work.

The Committee's courtship of influential friends reached its most blatant and controversial heights at the "N.A.C.A. Shore Camp," known more familiarly as just "the camp." Located on the Back River about two miles from the laboratory, the camp was openly and explicitly created, as John Victory said, "first, to provide an inducement for government officials to visit the laboratories of the Committee and become familiar with the work of the Committee; second, to promote the morale of our own employees at Langley Field." Laboratory members-using time and materials they claimed were their own-built a small lodge on a piece of waterfront property apparently owned by Lewis, Victory, and three laboratory officials. The NACA launch Retriever provided passage to and from the camp. Annual rental came out of the Laboratory Camp and Entertainment Fund. 51

In the humdrum environs of Hampton the camp was a real boon to the morale of the Langley staff, but that was not its chief value to the NACA. The most frequent non-NACA visitor to the camp was Congressman Clifton A. Woodrum of Roanoke, Virginia. "Judge" Woodrum championed the interests of his state-and of the Langley laboratory in particular-from his powerful position as chairman of the independent offices subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, where the NACA received annual increases in operating expenses throughout the 1920s. In 1930 for the first time the total NACA budget passed $1 million, a far cry from the $5000 with which the Committee had begun only fifteen years before. True, the 1930 budget was swelled by the first installment of construction funds for the fullscale wind tunnel, but that tunnel was itself a testimony to the ability of the Committee to convince Judge Woodrum and the rest of Congress that its work was worth the nation's while. 52

If there were any clouds on the NACA's horizon in the late 1920s, they warned of personnel problems. These were of two kinds. First was the problem of obtaining qualified engineers. From the earliest days of recruiting Edward Warner from MIT, the Committee had made it an unwritten policy to bring in promising young engineers and train them to the NACA style. Formal credentials in aeronautics mattered less than

a fundamental grasp of engineering and an ability to learn and adjust. Many felt that the NACA offered a better education than graduate school, especially after the Committee began to establish a reputation and acquire its unparalleled research facilities. One bright young MIT graduate who joined the NACA in 1929 turned down a full scholarship for postgraduate work at Göttingen and fifty firm employment offers from industry to take the lowest-paid alternative because of the opportunities he perceived at Langley. “I was going down there," he said, "strictly for what amounted to a post-graduate course in aeronautical research because I figured that was the best place in the world to get it." 53

Not everyone was as pure, however; by the end of the 1920s, industry was buying up many of the young engineers who in earlier times would have gone to the NACA. The industry's recovery after 1926, which the NACA had so promoted and desired, now boomeranged on the Committee and created a major problem. As Ames explained to the House Appropriations Subcommittee in 1927:

We used to be able to get young men from the universities, but now they can go to work in commercial aviation as soon as they are out of school. If they were to come to us, they would have to take a civil service exam and there would be quite a delay before they got in. That is one of our difficulties which the prosperity of the aircraft business has brought about.54

The Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics eased this problem somewhat, but it also created problems of its own. Formed in 1926, the multimillion-dollar fund was intended to promote aeronautical education throughout the United States, to advance aeronautical science, and to further the development of commercial aviation. Universities receiving grants from the fund did in fact institute or expand programs in aeronautical engineering, and these in turn increased the supply of trained aeronautical engineers. However, some of the best of these engineers went on to pursue graduate work and later to teach in these same schools; others were drawn off by the industry that the Guggenheim Fund was also helping to expand. Furthermore, the fund was liquidated in 1930 and its impact attenuated over the years. While the net effect of the fund was surely to help the NACA deal with its personnel shortage, it never sufficed to fill the Committee's continuing needs. George Lewis put the issue clearly and directly in 1927: “. . . the industry and the educational institutions are too much for us in the way of offering high salaries." 55

Nor was the shortage of engineers the only personnel problem faced by the Committee. Max Munk was gone, and the prospect of

finding another like him dimmed with each passing year. It was not that Munk was smarter or more creative than others who succeeded him at Langley. Rather, he had brought to the Committee a rare synthesis of theory and experiment, a seemingly intuitive sense of what were the most important problems in aeronautics and how they might be solved in the laboratory. Munk took giant steps, bold and heavy, and if occasionally he leaped to false conclusions, still he made enough right guesses to outweigh the wrong ones.

In his wake came a succession of scientists who may properly be called theorists, but none of them had as much impact on the Committee or on the course of aeronautical research as Munk had had in his five years with the NACA.56 What they contributed instead—what they had that he lacked-was the ability to work as part of a team, to subordinate their own intuition to the needs of the NACA, to confine serendipity within the limits of a rational program. This made for harmony and teamwork, but it deprived the NACA of the genius and vision that had established the Committee's reputation in the first half of the 1920s. The NACA had to learn to sustain that reputation by other means.