ROCKETS and BOMBS

As mentioned elsewhere, in the summer of 1945, after completing an eventful cruise to the south pacific, my draft board summoned me and scolded me for running off to sea. They ordered me to return to Cal Tech to do research work. As an undergraduate in my junior year, I was hired by the university along with two other undergraduate assistants on the Eaton Canyon Rocket Project. Our duties were in Bridge laboratory, but the main work was in Eaton Canyon, above Pasadena, where extrusion presses pushed out rubber-like tubes of explosives to go into rockets. Actually, the Cal Tech project physically manufactured 60% of all the rockets used by the allies in World War II.  A project of that size today would require a whole department of engineers and scientists. In my case I was a single electronics engineer for the project along with my two assistants.  We designed and assembled various equipment needed on the project for telemetering and safety.

One serious event was when an extrusion press exploded and was destroyed. We were assigned to figure out some solution to prevent further explosions. We found an old huge electric motor under one of the student housing basements. By abandoning the rotor, we ended up with the stator, which served our purpose beautifully as a sensor.  We designed electronics to sense any magnetic material moving through the rotor, which was mounted on the extrusion press.  Any time an iron particle passed through the rotor, the electronics sensed it and shut down the press.  We had no more explosions.

We were under terrible 24-hours-a-day pressure and during the wee hours of the night we often blew off steam with various pranks. Walt and Bill took apart the lock on our laboratory door and mapped all the wafers in it. Then they used that to further catalog the lock for the building. By assembling all this information, they were able to recreate the master key for the entire campus.  If the FBI had discovered this, we no doubt would have had our security clearance canceled, besides other penalties.

The next door laboratory to ours had a graduate PhD student named Abe Zarom, who later, with associates, created a company that was sold to Zerox, making them multi-millionaires.  Abe became senior vice president of Zerox, but he was prankster along with the rest of us. We found that if one person was stationed on the first floor and another on the third floor, we could keep pushing the call buttons and the elevator would go up and down but the door wouldn’t open.  We stopped that prank when the person we trapped was Robert A. Milliken, president of the university.

We worked closely with the scientists at what was the beginning of NASA. One of our problems was the difficulty of getting materials we needed through the red tape. We decided to leave Cal Tech and start up a company called “Standard Engineering Laboratories”. In our naivety, we started with $200 capitol.  Our first contract was with Cal Tech building more of the electronic equipment that they needed, but we had numerous other defense contracts and were able to acquire  various other additional equipment and expanded to a couple of dozen employees.

Under heavy pressure from our customers who desperately needed equipment that we could provide, our employees were under the gun. In the view of one hopeless deadline we had, I told the employees that if they could finish and meet the deadline in time we would take a one day holiday and have a party at the beach.  They took the challenge and really performed. 

Toward the end of the war, we had an extremely high priority contract manufacturing metal housing of two different types with an order of 100 or 200 of each type—I can’t remember which.  When the Hiroshima bombing was announced, I called up our contracting officer and asked if that was one of the things we were working on. He answered, “yes, that was one of them.”  When Nagasaki bomb went off, he admitted that was the other one.  So, without knowing it we were working on parts of future atomic bombs of two types in quantities of 100’s.  Thankfully, the hundreds of atomic bombs didn’t need to be deployed.

After the war, my mentor, professor Potapanko, and his partners were closing down a factory they ran in downtown Los Angeles. He encouraged us to take it over and make use of its extensive metal working equipment. We took over the company and incorporated under Amoran Manufacturing Corp. Its history is yet another story. Bill Haynes became my vice-president. He was extremely clever in designing things.