THE LANGLEY LABORATORY

The Committee's research laboratory got off to a shaky start. Its first decade was filled with problems that threatened at times to remove the laboratory to a different location, at times to bring all its operations to a standstill. Poor relations with the military services, especially the army, accounted for some of the trouble; difficulties with its own management and administration accounted for most of the rest. 19

Problems with the military arose quickly. The NACA wanted its laboratory to be located at a site shared by the aeronautical research establishments of the army and navy, in fact with all government agencies concerned with aviation. This would have fostered cooperation, minimized duplication, and given the young Committee some much needed prestige by association. The navy, however, never went for the idea. It agreed to assist the NACA in selecting a site but never formally agreed to join the enterprise.20

The NACA initially had somewhat more success with the army, but only by accepting the army's judgment as its own. In the fall of 1916, the NACA, the army, and the navy were all looking for suitable sites and exchanging information on possible selections. The NACA Subcommittee on a Site for Experimental Work and Proving Grounds for Aeronautics, appointed 9 October, participated in the search but played a less active role than the military services. On 23 November 1916, the subcommittee reported to the NACA that the site recommended by the army's selection team-1650 acres of flat land at the mouth of the Back River near Hampton, Virginia-also suited the NACA better than any other location known to the committee. Thereupon, the NACA wrote the army a letter endorsing the site for a joint. experimental station and recommending purchase of the land as soon as possible, listing such favorable characteristics as climate, proximity to industry, accessibility, and local labor force. These criteria, however, seem to have been less important to the NACA than joint occupancy with the military services.21

The army quickly purchased the land, agreeing to set aside a corner of it for the NACA. Construction delays, however, plagued the army from the first groundbreaking in 1917, leading the chief signal officer to characterize the base as "the neck in the bottle of the aircraft program." Pressed by the demands of war, the army established an airplane-engineering department at the already functioning McCook Field near Dayton, Ohio. With that, the handwriting was literally on the wall. In August 1917, the name of the new Hampton base was changed from "Aviation Experimental Station and Proving Grounds" to Langley Field. This was both a tribute to the aviation pioneer and a hint that McCook Field was to be the real center of army experimental research.

Shortly after the armistice the army's experimental activities at Langley were transferred to McCook and Langley became a general-purpose flying field, home to a heterogeneous variety of army and later air force units. It was never to be the joint aeronautical research center the NACA had wanted. The Committee constructed its first buildings as a disappointed tenant having little in common with its landlord. 22

As a NACA staff began to form at Langley to supervise construction of the laboratory, disappointment quickly turned to friction. Abstract notions of cooperation in the advancement of aeronautics might sound well around a committee table in Washington, but to the men who actually staffed the army base at Hampton the NACA personnel were so many interlopers whose very presence complicated the business of establishing a flying field. Working conditions at the site were by themselves enough to shorten tempers and preclude harmony. One new arrival at Hampton reported: "Nature's greatest ambition was to produce in this, her cesspool, the muddiest mud, the weediest weeds, the dustiest dust and the most ferocious mosquitoes the world has ever known. Her plans were so well formulated and adhered to that she far surpassed her wildest hopes and desires. . . ."23 For at least the first decade of its history the nascent Langley Field would exist under these adverse conditions, which affected NACA and army personnel alike. Furthermore, many in the army air service were resentful of the NACA's opposition to a separate air force and the friction at Langley Field gave them more than one opportunity to vent their hostility.

The most serious, or at least the most acrimonious, dispute was over housing.24 The town of Hampton was several miles from the field and no public transportation came closer than four miles. On-base housing was almost a necessity. But the army had built what housing there was, and the army wanted to keep it for itself. These were the very years when the NACA headquarters was itself being bounced from office to office within military buildings in Washington. What the Main Committee could not wring from the army, the small staff at Langley surely could not.

Housing was not the only problem. The construction firm under contract to the army to erect the buildings at Langley Field proved so unsatisfactory that the army took over construction, using its own. personnel. As the contract had included buildings for the NACA, army personnel found themselves constructing the NACA's laboratory. While this arrangement was very much to John Victory's liking, for it meant that the Committee got free labor, it caused problems of its own. For example, promoting and rating the men assigned to work for the NACA raised questions of fairness, and the NACA was finally led to request a separate detachment for its exclusive use. The tail was trying to wag the dog. Even the operation of the Committee's facilities, when

they were finally completed, created problems. The NACA plot at Langley Field was next to the officers' club; when the staff of the engine-dynamometer laboratory worked late, to take advantage of offpeak-hours electrical power, the noise considerably upset the ambiance of the club.25

The dissatisfaction of both parties at Langley Field reached a crisis in 1919. That summer John H. DeKlyn, the first technical assistant hired by the NACA and the man assigned to oversee construction of the laboratory, wrote to Ames recommending that the Committee abandon Hampton in favor of another site. “Langley Field can never be an efficient or satisfactory place for the Committee to carry on research work," said DeKlyn, primarily because the NACA would continue to be dependent on the army for quarters, power, transportation, roads, lights, and so on and so forth. Furthermore, he thought the Hampton area lacked an adequate labor force and recreation facilities, 26

DeKlyn's recommendation was seconded by Edward P. Warner, a young aeronautical engineer recently hired away from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become the first chief scientist of the NACA. With the Air Service deciding not to establish its principal research center at Hampton, argued Warner, the only reason for the NACA to remain was that its facilities were already under construction. Militating against remaining were the isolated location and inadequate power. John Victory sent these memorandums on to Ames with the notation: “. . . the conclusions are obvious."

Victory visited Langley in September 1919 and reported that, before the base could become a satisfactory site for the Committee's laboratory, provision would have to be made for room and board for the staff, a new powerhouse, and regular research trips by the staff to other government laboratories. The alternative was removal of the laboratory to another site, assuming the army and the Congress could be persuaded to agree. He suggested Bolling Field, a new air base under construction on a strip of land along the Anacostia River in southeast Washington, D.C.27

The Committee's Annual Report for 1919 echoed Victory's recommendation. The reasons for having the laboratory at Langley Field had evaporated, and Bolling Field would place the research staff nearer to Committee headquarters, visiting scientists, and adequate libraries. Furthermore, the report argued, the army was going to need all of Langley Field for its own purposes. "Much direct effort is wasted," concluded the report, “in striving to accomplish results in the face of the difficulties encountered at Langley Field."28

With the formal admission that conditions at Langley were unsatisfactory, the NACA seemed resolved upon a move. However, Congress

showed no enthusiasm for abandoning the buildings already erected for the Committee, and the site at Bolling turned out on further consideration to have shortcomings of its own. There seems no clear moment when the Committee consciously abandoned its resolve to leave Langley Field, but over the next two years it became apparent that the laboratory staff would have to make the best of it.29

The NACA Langley Memorial Laboratory was formally dedicated 11 June 1920. During the ceremonies, Admiral David W. Taylor prophesied that the facility would one day become an aeronautical Mecca. 30 Consisting of three modest buildings-a wind tunnel, an engine-dynamometer laboratory, and a research laboratory-encroaching on a none-too-friendly army base, the NACA laboratory appeared unlikely to live up to such promises.

Langley laboratory's wind tunnel #1, shown here in about 1921, was part of the very modest facilities with which the NACA began its career in aeronautical research. (LaRC)

Further darkening the laboratory's prospects as it was being dedicated was the second of its main problems in the early years: internal management. Until 1926 the NACA did not specify how its laboratory would be administered or how it would work with the headquarters. Continuing friction with the army and unsatisfactory living and working conditions only exacerbated what was really an internal problem within

the NACA. At first the Main Committee had expected that George Lewis would take up residence at the laboratory to perform as executive officer from there. But Lewis soon concluded that he could best carry out his duties in Washington. So the Committee still needed a man to run the laboratory, a man who could get along with the army, provide for the staff, and meet the demands of Victory and Lewis in Washington. This was no small order, and the NACA spent several years and considerable unpleasantness filling it.

The first head of the Langley laboratory, John H. DeKlyn, took over in 1917 with the title of engineer-in-charge of buildings and construction. He had more than his share of problems with the army, and all too soon he ran afoul of John Victory as well. Before George Lewis's appointment as executive officer, and even before DeKlyn took up the campaign to relocate the laboratory to Bolling Field, the young engineer-in-charge was involved in the kind of petty dispute with Victory that would infuriate future laboratory directors. Some routine correspondence between DeKlyn's staff and Victory's had been mismanaged, and Victory concluded that the Langley staff showed a lack of "courtesy and sympathetic cooperation" in righting the matter. So he undertook to lecture DeKlyn not only on the mechanics of submitting travel vouchers but also on the etiquette of interoffice relations. Victory was nothing if not efficient, and probably had cause for reprimanding DeKlyn, but there was always something officious and condescending in his tone when he undertook to correct those whom he considered his subordinates. Such letters from him read more like papal bulls than constructive criticism, and they never failed to rankle. DeKlyn, after all, ranked above Victory in both salary and prestige. The head of the laboratory was, in DeKlyn's mind and the minds of many of his successors at the NACA field centers, an engineer doing the Committee's real work, whereas Victory was merely a bureaucrat doing a purely administrative job. DeKlyn was not about to be scolded by a pompous place-filler in Washington; yet getting along with Victory was a sine qua non for running Langley. Some time in 1919, DeKlyn simply gave up.

31

Within a year the situation was critical. After a visit to the laboratory in February 1920, just three months after George Lewis's installation as executive officer, Victory reported:

The station is operating with poor efficiency, morale is low, and effective cooperation . . . does not exist on other than routine matters requiring a minimum of interest or active effort by Mr. DeKlyn. He has subordinated the Committee's best interests and neglected his duties. He has failed to competently supervise the workmen or the administration of his own office, and is undermining the loyalty of the workmen to the Committee.