NASA Archivist Lee Saegesser shared with me his files, his institutional memory, and his keen knack for ferreting out elusive information. Others who helped unearth information were Lee M. Pearson, former historian of the Naval Air Systems Command; the research librarians at the Federal Aviation Administration library; the librarians and archivists at the National Air and Space Museum; and the staff at the Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Richard Layman of Langley Research Center has been a constant source of encouragement and assistance. Largely through his efforts, Langley has developed a program that promises to preserve and disseminate the rich history of the oldest NACA research center. My research at Lewis Research Center was facilitated by Paul Bohn, and by staff members at both Lewis and Plum Brook, where most of the center's records are stored.

Duane Reed, chief of the Manuscript Division of the U.S. Air Force Academy library, opened up to me not only the rich collection of John F. Victory papers, but also his home and his infectious brand of backcountry charm.

The complete draft of this manuscript was read by Ira H. Abbott, David K. Allison, Frank Anderson, John V. Becker, John Duberg, Richard P. Hallion, James R. Hansen, I.B. Holley, Pamela Mack, Axel Mattson, Homer Newell, Frank J. Rowsome, T.K. Smull, Walter Vincenti, and Monte D. Wright. All of them made significant contributions to my understanding and explication of the NACA. Some of them take strong exception to many of the interpretations in the book; by helping me to improve the manuscript, they have not assumed responsibility for the errors that have defied their counsel.

The same may be said for my editor, Eleanor Ritchie, who strove mightily to save me from myself, or rather to save the reader from my writing style. Whatever clarity has been achieved here owes much to her; for the residual murkiness she is blameless. Marion Davis typed the manuscript and prepared most of the index with quiet efficiency and patience.

ALEX ROLAND

Durham, North Carolina January 1983

1

The Quest for a National Aeronautical Laboratory: Progress, Preparedness, and Progressivism, 1910-1915

Twelve years separated the first powered flight of the Wright brothers in 1903 from the creation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Had Americans appreciated and understood the Wright accomplishment more fully, they might have institutionalized aeronautical research more quickly. Instead, Americans ignored and then discounted the Wrights and their achievement, embroiled them in a petty but far-reaching dispute with the Smithsonian Institution, and allowed the Europeans to take the lead in aeronautical development. When the NACA was finally created in 1915, it had to catch up with the rest of the world.

Wilbur and Orville Wright had mastered flight in a wind tunnel before they powered off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Their achievement flowed as much from broad study and scientific method as from their natural intuition and genius. But this was not widely known at the time; instead, the Wrights were viewed by many as mere bicycle mechanics, and their achievement as a fortuitous victory over their nearest American rival, Samuel Pierpont Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and scientist of flight. By extension, the Wright success was a victory over science itself, or so it seemed. Langley had studied the flight of birds for years and in the late 1890s had flown a model of an "aerodrome" almost a mile in powered heavier-than-air flight. Nine days before the Wright brothers' first flight, Langley launched his full-scale aerodrome, with a pilot aboard, from a houseboat in the Potomac River. It crashed ignominiously into the water. Langley and his enterprise were roundly ridiculed in the press, overshadowing for a while the unheralded success of the Wrights a few days later. 1

Not until 1908 was the achievement of the Wrights fully appreciated, though even then not their method. In that "annus mirabilis in aviation history," a turning point from which heavier-than-air flight followed a more or less straight course to the present, the Wrights performed what they had been rehearsing and refining for almost five years. They flew faster and farther, and with greater control, ease, safety, and grace, than any of their awkward imitators and competitors. Their achievement was consummate, its impact on the aviation world overwhelming and definitive. In their wake, the memory of Langley's doused and discredited aerodrome seemed even more ridiculous. To a public yet unaware of the Wrights' scientific research, it appeared that science had been bested by mechanics, scholarship and erudition humbled by mere cleverness and inventiveness. Langley seemed to contemporaries "a professor wandering in his dreams"; the Wrights were "known merely as practical mechanics.”2

That was the impression in the United States, at least. University research in aeronautics was virtually nonexistent. No private contributors had come forward to endow laboratories. The government avoided any more investments that might remind the public of the $50,000 it had sunk in the Langley enterprise. Not even the Smithsonian Institution seemed willing to venture again into these troubled waters: Dr. Langley's laboratory was closed down, to stand behind the Castle building on the Mall as a silent monument to the political hazards of aeronautical research.

About the only island in the empty sea of American aeronautics was the Aerial Equipment Association of Baddeck, Nova Scotia, and Hammondsport, New York. Funded by Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell, the A.E.A. was founded in 1907 to test the ideas of her husband and four other aviation pioneers about how best "to get into the air." Bell's tetrahedral lifting body proved a disappointment, as did the other experiments attempted by the association. The group disbanded in 1909, having contributed little to aeronautical progress beyond advancing the ideas and experiences of the executive officer and director of experiments, Glenn H. Curtiss.3

Aviation in the United States fared as badly in its first five years as did research into its principles. Not until 1907 did the military services let their first contract for an airplane, and even when Orville Wright flew one at Fort Myer the following year, meeting all the army's specifications, the government was slow to follow up. The first regular appropriation in the services did not materialize until 1911, when the navy received $25,000. Most other flying in the United States was barnstorming and stunt-flying for show and profit, not the sort of thing to advance the state of the art.

The European experience in the decade after the Wrights' first flight differed dramatically from the American. The Europeans appreciated the achievement of the Wrights and drew no distinction between researches done in a bicycle shop in Dayton and those done in a laboratory at the Smithsonian; they brought to aviation a strong scientific tradition and a predisposition to institutionalize scientific endeavors. They saw sooner than did the Americans that progress in aviation flowed from aeronautical research, and they created a variety of institutions to support this research. In some cases, they merely expanded upon research institutions already in place.

Most of Europe's early aeronautical laboratories were in France, but by the opening of the twentieth century such institutions existed throughout the continent. Work at the Central Establishment for Military Aeronautics at Chalais-Meudon near Paris was complemented by the researches of Gustave Eiffel, working at his famous tower between 1902 and 1906, then in laboratories at the Champ de Mars and in Auteuil, and after 1912 at the privately endowed Aerotechnical Institute of the University of Paris located at St. Cyr. Like similar organizations to follow, the Institute had a director supported by an advisory committee composed of scientific and aeronautical experts from the University of Paris, the Aero Club of France, and government departments concerned with aviation. A similar privately owned universityconnected laboratory was established in Russia in 1904 when the Aerodynamic Institute of Koutchino was appended to the University of Moscow. The aerodynamical laboratory of the University of Göttingen, established in the year of Wilbur Wright's first European flights, was also funded from external sources, including government, industry, and private associations, and was directed by Professor Ludwig Prandtl, with the advice of prominent scientists and engineers.*

The laboratory that was to reflect most clearly the impact of Wilbur Wright's demonstration of 1908 and to influence most directly the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was the British Royal Aircraft Factory, formed in 1909 as an adjunct to the National Physical Laboratory. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith announced before the House of Commons 5 May 1909 the creation of this research center, describing it as one step in a major policy initiative "looking toward placing [the government's] organization for aerial navigation on a more satisfactory footing."5 In short, the British planned to keep pace with the Americans and continental Europeans by officially sponsoring aeronautical research of their own.

The last step taken by the British in the spring offensive of 1909 was the appointment of an Advisory Committee for Aeronautics "for the superintendence of the investigations at the National Physical Laboratory and for general advice on the scientific problems arising in

connection with the work of the Admiralty and War Office in aerial construction and navigation." Distinguished scientists and engineers from public and private life were appointed to the committee, which included representatives of the armed services, the Meteorological Office, and the National Physical Laboratory, the government agencies most directly concerned with aeronautics. While many European powers were institutionalizing aeronautical research, the British were characteristically superimposing a central committee on an existing network of institutions.

Advances in aviation came quickly. In July 1909 Louis Bleriot flew across the English Channel and added national security to the other rationales for Britain's new aviation policy. The following month, the Rheims aviation week provided, as historian Charles H. Gibbs-Smith has observed, "the greatest technical stimulus to aviation," contributing to the emergence of aircraft types distinguishable from, and in some ways superior to, the Wright flyers. Bleriots, Farmans, and Antoinettes became familiar sights in the skies over Europe. Inherent stability, monoplane design, and ailerons began to win acceptance over the Wright characteristics. Competition among scores of serious designers and manufacturers spurred a rate of progress faster than that in the United States, where only Glenn Curtiss seriously challenged the preeminence of the Wrights.6

LIKE-MINDEed Men

A small group of like-minded men in the United States found it a national embarrassment-not to say a danger-that the country where aviation began should trail so far behind the Europeans. They saw aviation as an infant Hercules with boundless potential for national defense, commerce, and even melioration of the human predicament. They were what Eric Hoffer would call true believers: enthusiasts and visionaries deeply committed to a cause in which they believed passionately, at time irrationally. They wanted to see the United States lead in every phase of aviation, and they believed with Langley and the Wright brothers (as well as with the Europeans then funding laboratories and institutes) that the advance of aeronautics would come with scientific research. Though they also wanted to see larger budgets for military aviation, the encouragement of commercial aviation, and the nurturing of an aircraft-manufacturing industry, they wanted first and foremost a national aeronautical research laboratory to rival those of Europe.

The campaign of the enthusiasts for a national aeronautical laboratory first captured public attention early in 1911, when their club, the Aeronautical Society, announced that at its first annual banquet (to be held in April) it planned "to announce definite arrangements for the