Parents and Early Years

[3] I was born on May 31, 1918, in Port Sunlight, Cheshire (now Merseyside), England. This city, a so-called model village across the River Mersey from Liverpool, was built by the Lever Brothers Company as a place for their workers to live. My father, William Phillips, was employed by this company. His background was in chemistry and prior to working at Lever Brothers, he had been employed in several chemists shops (the British name for drug stores) in which he had obtained a good knowledge of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and perfumes.

My mother, Bertha Pugh Phillips, prior to her marriage had been headmistress of the Evelyn Street School, a large infants school in Warrington where the students were children in what would, in America, be called grades one through three. Her employment in such a position at the early age of about 28 was most unusual in England at that time and indicates her leadership and educational ability. She had already written articles and a book and gained some note in England in the field of infant education. My parents, I am sure, gave considerable thought as to whether such a promising career should be interrupted by marriage. In those days, the wife was expected to become a homemaker after marriage.

My birth was shortly before the end of World War I, and my mother told how she pushed me in my carriage waving a flag on Armistice Day. Soon after, in 1920, my father was sent to the United States by Lord Leverhulme, founder of Lever Brothers Company, to introduce a new line of cosmetics. Unfortunately, in 1920 came the postwar depression, and the business climate was not right for introducing a new product. My father was given a job at the Lever Brothers Plant in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was given the choice, after three months, of returning to England or staying in America. He elected to stay in America. He returned to England to arrange for the movement of the family and belongings. We all sailed to the United States and resided first in an apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. Later we moved to the first floor of a two-family house near the Charles River in Watertown, Massachusetts (figure 2.1).

My father became the chief perfumer at Lever Brothers Company and was responsible for the perfume in the Lever Brothers products such as Lux Toilet Soap, Lifebuoy, and Rinso. Although his work did not involve mechanical knowledge, his hobby was in the field of electrical and mechanical devices. He had acquired a metal-turning lathe (a Drummond lathe, especially intended for hobbyists) while still in England [4] and had constructed a steam engine machined from commercially available castings. He acquired this interest from his father, Thomas Phillips, who also did lathe work. Thomas Phillips must have had a remarkable interest and ability in technical matters. He started life as an uneducated coal miner in Yorkshire, but was taught to read by his wife and continued to improve his knowledge through reading and hobbies. My father, before he died, wrote a brief biography of Thomas Phillips which also gives an insight into my father's own interests and early life. After coming to this country, my father made an electric generator to be driven by the steam engine. The combined model is still on display in our home. My father was also a pianist of moderate ability.

Another model made by my father was a steam-powered torpedo boat destroyer that was about four feet long. One of my earliest memories is the test of this model, when I was five years old, in the Charles River near our house. The model, pulling a piece of string for its retrieval, sailed off with unexpected speed and soon became a speck in the distance. The model was pulled back against the full thrust of the engine and shipped water over its low sides. It eventually swamped and sank with a spectacular cloud of steam about 20 feet from shore. The model was brought up from the bottom of the river about a week later, but after that, my father lost interest in the steamboat and it was kept in our basement for many years. I restored the model and equipped it with radio control a number of years ago, before....

[5] ...my father's death and it is now on display in my living room (figure 2.2).

Immediately after his test of the steamboat, my father became interested in crystal radio sets, which were just becoming popular about 1923. The construction of successively more complex radios occupied his interest for a number of years.

My recollections of life in Watertown are rather sketchy, but I do recall playing with wind-up trains and learning to balance on a scooter. My sister, Hilda, was born there. The family made a visit to England during the summer of 1923. In 1924, we moved to a single-family house in Belmont, Massachusetts. I started in the public schools there in the second grade at the age of six, having been taught to read by my mother. I was therefore a year younger than my classmates throughout my schooling.

This review of my childhood is not by any means intended as a complete account of my activities, but I will mention a number of things I did that illustrate my interest in aviation and some of the factors that influenced the growth of this interest. The decade of the 1920's was a period of unusual development in aviation with new designs and records for endurance and speed being reported frequently in the newspapers. In Watertown, I had seen the dirigible Shenandoah fly over and in Belmont, airplanes like Curtiss Jennies were observed, sometimes performing stunts such as loops and spins. Lindbergh's flight in May 1927 made a deep impression on me, as it did on young people throughout the country. I was particularly influenced by the suspense caused by the length of time Lindbergh was in the air with news of the takeoff coming one morning; sightings of the plane over Newfoundland that evening; the plane appearing over Ireland the following day; and finally, the...

....landing at Le Bourget reported in papers the day after that. I had never had any idea that an airplane could stay in the air that long. Somewhat later, when I was in junior high school, the Army Air Corps put on a very large demonstration in which practically its entire fleet of aircraft was in the air at the same time. The sky was filled with formations of 50 to 100 airplanes such as Keystone Bombers and DH-4 biplanes. My diary entry for that day says "782 planes flew over." The sound of scores of Liberty motors droning away simultaneously will never be forgotten.

My first model airplanes were paper gliders with about a 5-inch wing span that were patterned after Lindbergh's airplane. Our family rented a small cottage at Long Beach, near Gloucester, Massachusetts, for about a month in the summer, with my father coming up on weekends (figure 2.3). On rainy and foggy days, I would fly the paper models in the cottage where the high, unfinished room with a peaked roof gave plenty of space for the models to perform stunts. I learned a lot from these models, as I have described in an article (ref. 2. 1).

Back in Belmont, we were fortunate to live in a house across the street from the Underwood playground that had a large grassy area with a good slope down from the top, a level area, and then another slope down to the bottom. The playground contained swings, rings for gymnastics, improvised ball fields, and at the bottom, a swimming pool, which was open all summer. This land had been given to the town by Mr. Underwood, a descendant of one of the earliest families in Belmont and head of the Underwood Deviled Ham company. The pool, established in 1906, was the first outdoor public swimming pool in the United States. I used all these facilities, but the aspects that really helped my hobbies were the ability to glide models down the hill and to sail model boats in the pool (figure 2.4).

At the top of the street lived a boy that I played with whose father, a research doctor at Harvard, also was interested in aeronautical experiments and had a supply of balsa wood. He built solid balsa gliders of two- to three-foot span with long, slender wings and short fuselages. When these models were launched from the top of the playground, they would glide quite a distance. When they were thrown harder, they would do a loop and continue the flight with a series of oscillations. I built a number of these gliders.

My grandmother Phillips in England sent me a pocket line-a-day diary for 1929. As might be expected at the age of 11, my entries in this diary were rather brief, but among other things I did make a note of what models I was building and of the number of airplanes that flew over each day. This diary also started me in the habit, beginning in 1930, of getting 5-year line-a-day diaries that I have kept, with some breaks, throughout my life. These diaries, which recounted mainly my....

[9] ....hobby and social activities rather than my professional work, are useful in establishing the dates and sequence of various activities that I would otherwise have forgotten.

I had little guidance in my modeling activities, but I did find in the children's section of the Belmont Public Library a book entitled Model Airplanes of 1911. I read this book numerous times, not realizing that the technical material in the book was largely incorrect or that the models described were obsolete. Model airplanes in 1911 were mostly rubber-powered twin pushers that were constructed of spruce and pine and braced with music wire or bamboo. I made a model like those pictured in the book. The propellers were carved from blocks of soft pine obtained by my father from the carpenter shop at Lever Brothers. The wing had a frame of music wire with ribs soldered in and the canard tail was a piece of cardboard curved to a cambered airfoil shape. The model made a very successful flight in the playground and covered about 100 feet in stable flight in a straight line. Naturally, this flight gave me great encouragement and the incentive to build more models.

My interests were not solely confined to models. I participated in all the sports offered by the playground, including sandlot baseball and swimming in the summer and sledding, skiing, and ice hockey in the winter, though I was at this age rather small and never much of an athlete. By the age of 13, I had learned to use my father's lathe. I made a solenoid-operated electric motor (still in existence), a cannon that shot a cork when loaded with a firecracker, and a crude but workable compressed-air motor. Later, as I devoted more effort to model airplanes, not much use was made of the lathe because model airplanes do not require precision machined parts.

In 1929, a large model airplane club, the Jordan-Traveler Junior Aviation League, was started in Boston. The club was sponsored by the Jordan Marsh Company, a department store, and the Boston Traveler, a newspaper (ref. 2.2). My mother enrolled me in the club, but I did not immediately take part in the activities because at the age of 11 I was too young to travel into Boston by myself on the street cars and subways. I did, however, get some information on more current model designs and materials, such as balsa wood strips and sheets. I subscribed to the magazine Model Airplane News, a McFadden publication, starting with the first issue in June 1929.

On my eleventh birthday I received as a present an Ideal Every Boys Airplane, an ingenious but heavy rubber-powered flying model kit first marketed in 1922. Later, I received a Silver Ace, a potentially better flyer. The Every Boys Airplane flew about 100 feet, like my twin pusher. I got very sick for a few days after building the Silver Ace, probably from inhaling the banana oil fumes in a closed room and I never got it to fly. Soon, however, I was building balsa models of my own design that flew much better. I also built small rubber-powered models with about a seven-inch span that I would fly in the living room. I sold some of these models, now called parlor planes, to my classmates in junior high school for 25 cents a piece. This price was a real bargain since each model had a hand-carved propeller.

By 1932 at the age of 14 I was able to travel into Boston by myself and started to attend regularly the Junior Aviation League meetings and activities. The club held weekly meetings during the winter and monthly contests indoors in winter and outdoors in summer. A building contest was also held each year for a specified nonflying scale model. I built a Bellanca Skyrocket in 1933 and a Pitcairn PA- 18 Autogiro in 1934 (figure 2.5).

The autogiro, in particular, was a very complicated scale model subject. These projects were very time-consuming, but I learned a lot about full-scale aircraft construction and about how an autogiro flies. I also built indoor and outdoor rubber-powered models and by 1934, I was competing on even terms [10] with the best flyers in the League. In 1935, I was selected as one of a team of four flyers from the League who were given all expense-paid trips to the National Model Airplane Contest in Saint Louis, Missouri. This contest is an annual event called by model enthusiasts the Nationals, or Nats for short. The winners, after returning from this trip, were each given one of the newly developed small gasoline model engines for powering model airplanes. I also was on the team to attend the Nats in Detroit in 1936 and 1938. My main accomplishments in these contests were winning second place in the gasoline-powered Texaco event in 1936 with a flight of 30 minutes 12 seconds and first place in the Stout event for indoor stick models in 1938 with a flight of 21 minutes 56 seconds. I was flying in the Senior category for flyers under age 21. The Open Class for flyers over 21 did not exist in the early days of the League. Nowadays in the large contests, almost all the flyers are grown-ups or senior citizens. Young people are now typically more interested in computers and other hobbies than in model airplanes. This lack of interest in model airplanes is due partly to the advanced state of development of models produced by senior citizens through a lifetime of experience. The lack of interest could also be due to urban growth in cities, which eliminated suitable flying sites within a reasonable distance from club activities.

Building and flying model airplanes, particularly indoor models, does involve many technical considerations, almost to the same extent as full-scale airplanes. One of the great incentives for the young people engaging in this hobby was that the design of models was in a stage of rapid development and the young people in their teens could contribute to this development with their own efforts. The record flights of indoor models increased from about 7 minutes around 1928 to 21 minutes in 1938 and has since increased to 30 minutes in 1945 and to 52 minutes in 1979. The latter record stood for 15 years, but was increased to 55 minutes in 1994. The long-awaited goal of a 1-hour flight was exceeded in 1995 with a flight of 63 minutes 54 seconds. A unique situation existed in the early stages of model development in that the teenagers building and flying the models knew much more about model design and construction than their adult advisors who organized the sport.

The Director of the Junior Aviation League at the time of my participation was Willis C. Brown, a manual arts instructor in the Arlington, Massachusetts schools and an amateur radio hobbyist. He was always interested in the technical aspects of model airplanes and in 1936, he organized a project for the League members to build a wind tunnel for testing indoor model airplanes. At that time, I was attending MIT and became the chief participant in the project (ref. 2.3). The wind tunnel was unique in design and had a diameter of 5 feet and a length of 16 feet with a airspeed ranging from 2.5 to 4 feet per second. This wind tunnel required two years to construct followed by a year devoted to testing and research. I learned much about aerodynamics and instrumentation from this work, particularly since almost all the problems were encountered a year or more before my MIT courses gave information about the same problems.

In my schooling, a few recollections may be mentioned that have a bearing on my subsequent career. In grade school, I was very shy and teachers would have had a hard time detecting any unusual ability. I do have a recollection that by the end of the third grade, I could remember just about everything that had happened in school up to that time, something that I think the average student could not do. This ability started to disappear after that time, however. I was very shy and studious as a child. My marks in grade school were just average, but in the first year of junior high I started to get all A's and this performance continued with a few exceptions through high school and college. Though neither of my parents knew anything about model airplanes, they were always very supportive of my interest in this hobby.

[11] I had a room to use as a workshop and all the supplies required to furfill my relatively small demands.

The Belmont schools had some excellent teachers. In the class in ancient history in junior high school, I had a project to build a Ballista, an ancient war machine used for bombarding walls. My model was beautifully built and used some parts manufactured on the lathe. It could be cranked up and would fire small stones or blocks of wood.

In high school, the first scientific course was in physics, which I followed easily and once got in trouble with the teacher for trying to correct a mistake that he made. I really appreciated Euclidean geometry in the senior year in high school, which opened up for the first time the methods of scientific logic. One particularly difficult problem was given out by the teacher with no expectation that anyone could solve it. I managed to give a proof of the proposition involving 45 steps. I have always kept this proof and it is reproduced in appendix III. This problem was given in the Mathematical Puzzles section of the MIT magazine Technology Review many years later. It can be solved by a much simpler and more elegant proof, but my brute force approach is equally correct.

I graduated from the Belmont High School in 1935. I was salutatorian and prepared an address that the teacher thought lacked interest or inspiration. She encouraged me to write about the subject closest to my heart, aviation. I wrote an essay on this subject in the style of the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, writings that I had admired in English class, and managed to overcome my stage fright enough to present my carefully rehearsed and memorized talk. The main speaker at the graduation, a Belmont lawyer, gave a talk very similar to the one that I had originally proposed.

College Years

I started at MIT in 1935 while still living at home to save money, but as a result, remained shielded from the social life of the college. In general, the MIT courses were excellent with the exception of the mathematics courses. Perhaps this opinion resulted from my lack of natural ability in abstract reasoning. I was always able to visualize solutions, a useful ability for engineering problems, but generally contrary to the requirements of rigorous mathematics. I had had very little calculus in high school and the problems in the physics course at MIT always required the use of calculus techniques two weeks before they were taught in the mathematics courses. I hope that this scheduling problem has since been corrected at MIT. Later in advanced calculus, the need to define a small quantity e [greek letter epsilon] "no matter how small" was not clear to me, nor was it ever explained by the professors. In the problems encountered, I could visualize what happened as a quantity approached zero.

I was able to do the mathematics problems, but the lack of basic understanding has always prevented me from making much use of the methods of higher mathematics, for example, vector analysis and linear systems theory, that find many applications in aeronautical work. I can recall one problem presented in a physics class that I solved using a method of solution that I had not been taught previously. The problem had to do with the distribution of velocity of a fluid between two parallel plates. The method I used was later taught in the mathematics course in graduate school as the method of undetermined coefficients. The paper was corrected by a graduate student who expected the solution to be obtained by a different method and who did not recognize that I had "invented" a known mathematical technique.

At MIT, most students took the same courses the first two years and did not start to work on their specialty until the junior year. In this year (1937-1938), I took a general theoretical course called Aeronautical Dynamics [12] under Professor Manfred Rauscher. Unlike the later courses which were mostly of a practical nature, Professor Rauscher's course was devoted entirely to the theories of dynamics of rigid bodies and of hydrodynamics. Professor Rauscher was a natural born teacher. He taught the course in a very thorough manner so that no steps in derivations were omitted. As a result, the material and the reasoning behind it were well established in the students' memories. To accommodate the state of the mathematical knowledge of the undergraduates, however, the entire course was taught without the use of vector analysis. A follow-up course to show how the same results could have been obtained with vector analysis techniques would have assisted the students in understanding material encountered later in more advanced textbooks, but I never took such a course or at least not one so clearly presented. In the senior year, courses I took included aircraft structures under Professor Joseph Newell, aerodynamics under Professor Shatswell Ober, stability and control under Professor Otto Koppen, and automotive engineering under Professors E. S. and C. W. Taylor. These professors are mentioned because they taught a whole generation of aeronautical engineers who graduated and entered the aeronautical industry at the time of the tremendous development of aviation that occurred during and after World War II (WW II). These students were very influential in the development of American aviation during this period. I also took a graduate course, Introduction to Theoretical Physics, which gave me a background in dynamics problems that required more advanced techniques than those taught in the undergraduate years. The objective of the Aeronautical course at MIT was to give students a sufficiently broad practical background so that they could design a complete airplane or any subassembly thereof. In addition, a bachelor's thesis was required.

My thesis was on the subject of boundary layers, under Professor Heinreich Peters. The objective was to make measurements of the development of the boundary layer in a special boundary-layer tunnel in the basement of the aeronautics building. The pressure gradient down the tunnel could be varied as desired. The data were analyzed to determine the variation of friction drag coefficient in the tunnel, especially during the transition from laminar to turbulent flow. This calculation was performed using the Gruschwitz method, which required graphical integration of the boundary-layer profiles. Professor Peters was also busy designing the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel at MIT and was rarely available for consultation. In addition, he was a native of Germany and when WW II broke out, he left to cast his lot with the Germans. Nevertheless, the thesis was completed and copied on microfiche (ref. 2.4). In Germany, Professor Peters designed the large pelton-wheel-powered wind tunnels in Modane, France that were taken over by the French after the war and are still in use.

In addition to the required work, I devoted considerable effort to running tests in the Junior Aviation League wind tunnel. In 1939, I took summer employment at the Pratt and Whitney Aircraft Company in East Hartford, Connecticut. I was given a job as a draftsman in the Installation Department. The main project in this group was the installation of the new R-2800 engine in a Vultee YA-19 attack bomber for its first flight tests. This work involved some designing as well as drafting and was finished in time for me to get a flight in the airplane. This engine was later used to power many of the military airplanes in WW II, including the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighter and the Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber. A photograph of the Vultee attack bomber, produced by the Vultee Aircraft Division of the Aviation Manufacturing Corporation with the R-2800 engine installed is shown in figure 2.6.

A comparison with a photograph of the original airplane with a Pratt and Whitney Twin Wasp engine developing 900 horsepower would show little apparent difference. It is remarkable that the R-2800 engine, capable of developing 2000 horsepower (later 2800 horsepower with full supercharging),....

....would fit in the same cowling as the smaller engine. In the modified configuration, the cowling and engine were moved backward about a foot to aid in balancing the airplane with the heavier engine. The crew of mechanics in the Installation Department stand in front of the airplane in figure 2.7 along with me in shirt and necktie in the right rear.

When I first went to work, I had a talk with John M. Tyler, the vibration expert at Pratt and Whitney. He presented me with a problem concerning design of the engine mounting pads to decouple vertical and pitching oscillations of the engine. I worked on this problem in the evenings during the summer, inasmuch as there was not much other activity to occupy me. By the end of the summer, I had performed quite a lot of analysis, but the final answer appeared to be incorrect. After discussing these results with Mr. Tyler, I put this work aside, but I was always worried about getting the incorrect result. Many years later, after I retired, I got out the problem again and this time obtained the correct answer. The results were published in a NASA Technical Memorandum (ref. 2.5).

Unfortunately, by this time, the interest in the results had disappeared because the analysis applied to radial piston engines, which have been replaced by gas turbine engines on most high-speed airplanes.

I was involved in several other projects at Pratt and Whitney, including design of an installation for a proposed in-line vertically opposed engine, design of an installation of an R-2800 in a British Vickers Wellington bomber, and preparation of an exhibit of a futuristic engine installation for the New York 1939 Worlds Fair. Most all of these projects were behind schedule and had to be finished during the summer.

After my work at Pratt and Whitney, I concluded that I was not suited for the work at an industrial concern, with its rushing to meet deadlines and its lack of time to study problems in depth. At MIT, I had become acquainted with the research work at the NACA and decided to try to work there. Before leaving MIT, however, I stayed an additional year to obtain a master's degree.

The graduate year included aeronautical courses of a more theoretical nature. In addi-...

...-tion, there was a course in instrumentation by Professor Charles Draper. Dr. Draper was already noted for his work on aircraft and engine instrumentation. Later, he became famous for the invention of the inertial navigation system and for his work on gyroscopic gun directors. This course perhaps more than any other helped prepare me for research work because the subjects he taught were those that he was working on as research problems. He also brought in some aspects of electronics and physics as well as aerodynamics.

The master's degree also required a thesis. I wrote a thesis Exhaust Gas and Radiator Propulsion under Professor Rauscher, who was also unavailable for much consultation. This thesis could have provided an inspiration for the then unknown jet engine, but I was discouraged from considering such developments by statements made in earlier courses that metals could not withstand the high temperatures required. This thesis was later published, with small changes, in the Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences (ref. 2.6).

An option in the graduate year was to perform an independent research project in addition to the thesis. I was still interested in boundary layers and made studies of the effect of air velocity on an electric arc with the object of using these effects to measure air flow in the boundary layer. I was again entirely on my own and obtained a large 30, 000 volt transformer from the electrical engineering storeroom to produce the arc. The voltage drop across the AC arc was measured with an electrostatic voltmeter, which inherently rectifies the AC voltage. This was a bulky and delicate instrument, which was also borrowed from the electrical engineering storeroom. I was afraid of damaging the expensive instrument. I therefore built one of my own that worked on the same principle. My electrostatic voltmeter had attracting plates and chambers made from tin cans and a suspension constructed from the tungsten wire used for bracing indoor models in place of the quartz fiber in the professional instrument. This constructed instrument worked as well as the professionally built one. The results were put out in a paper that received a high grade from Professor Draper, but....

[16] ....apparently has since been lost. I was fortunate, probably, to escape electrocution in this project because the transformer stores a large amount of energy and could easily kill a person. I did receive one pretty sharp shock from it. I was quite naive in handling high voltage equipment and should not have been allowed to work alone with it.

I also became interested in automatic control of airplanes. The theoretical methods for analyzing such systems were just being developed and were presented in theses by two other MIT graduate students, Herbert K. Weiss and Shih-Nge Lin. I knew from my childhood model glider experience that models with short fuselages and small horizontal tails would have a poorly damped longitudinal oscillation (the so-called phugoid oscillation). I devised a method using a spring-mounted weight and a viscous damper to operate the stabilizer in a way that I thought would damp out this oscillation. I made an analysis of the system that indicated favorable results. The system was then installed in a model towline glider of about a 40-inch wing span with a very tiny stabilizer. When I tried the model, it was difficult to get convincing results because of the difficulty of towing a glider up and launching it in a wind in a consistent attitude.

I did, however, feel confident enough to give a demonstration to Professor Koppen on the MIT athletic field. The model performed perfectly. On the first launch, with the stabilizer locked, the model went into a continuous phugoid oscillation. On the next flight, with the system operating, the oscillation damped out immediately and the model made a smooth glide. These results showed the advantages of using model airplanes to study stability problems. Today, such tests are called dynamic model tests and utilize modern equipment such as radio control and telemetering to obtain the data. In 1940, however, such tests were quite rare. Later, a drawing of my phugoid damper and an article describing its operation was prepared by Herbert K. Weiss. The article was submitted to the editor of a modeling publication, but so far as is known, was never published. A copy of Weiss' drawing of the phugoid damper is given in figure 2.8. Incidentally, I have kept in touch with and often obtained advice from Mr. Weiss throughout my career. He is a brilliant engineer who became noted for his work in automatic control, missile guidance, and operations research.

My interest in the scientific aspects of model aviation continued with a series of tests exploring the drag of fuselages, which I made in an old MIT wind tunnel that dated from the early 1920's. The tunnel and its balance were copies of the early wind tunnel in the National Physical Laboratories in Teddington, England. The tunnel was long outdated for research on full-scale airplanes, but it was quite suitable for tests on outdoor, gasoline-powered model airplanes. An article publishing these results was presented in the magazine Model Airplane News and recently in the Twenty-Seventh Annual Symposium of the National Free Flight Society (ref. 2.7).

During the graduate year at MIT, I went to Boston to take the Civil Service Exam for Junior Aeronautical Engineer. Though I was anxious to work for the NACA, they were not overly anxious to have me. The exam was quite tough. I later learned that the questions had been supplied by Eastman Jacobs, perhaps the most noted aerodynamicist at Langley. I waited a long time to get the results, but just as I was starting to think about looking into other job opportunities, I received a notice to report for duty. I entered duty at the NACA at the Langley Memorial Laboratory on July 1, 1940 and was assigned to the Flight Research Division.

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