NACA Research Culture
The NACA Research Culture
The personnel at LRC were classified according to their functions. There were the professional research engineers and the non-professionals. The engineers were of two types: experimentalists and theoreticians. The support personnel consisted of technical support (wind tunnel mechanics, machinists, typists, etc.) and infrastructure support. There were also a couple of non-research professional positions: technical librarians and “mathematicians”. These mathematicians were not, in any sense, like the mathematicians that taught math at UVA, nor were they like the theoretical physicists (which was to become my classification). They performed some of the computational tasks that were subsequently performed by electronic computers. Although the librarians and mathematicians often developed a certain familiarity with some of the technical terminology, they didn't have the scientific background for research.
The professionals wore dress shirts and ties, with the work made bearable by the use of electric fans because most of the buildings were not yet air-conditioned. LRC was in a process of growth, both in personnel and in facilities, mostly wind tunnels. The new field of electronic computing was getting a start under a group of women with math degrees, using vacuum tube computers, as the semiconductor had not yet come into use.
Even though I did my initial research under the direction of Dr. Katzoff, who was an assistant division chief I needed a position in the organizational chart. Consequently I as assigned to a small branch entitled Full Scale Analysis. That title didn't mean that we only analyzed full scale things. It meant that we were a part of Full Scale Division. Our offices were in a building mostly occupied by experimental engineers who conducted tests in a new invention, the transonic wind tunnel, which was attached to the office building. Consequently, most of my informal relationships were with wind tunnel engineers; and they were, on the whole, pleasant. I sat at the table with them in the lunch cafeteria, and chatted with them around the coffee pot.
I was surprised that so many of the engineers were young. I was not quite 26 years old when I came on duty, but several of the engineers who had entered immediately after completing a four year degree were younger than I. Many of them had taken courses in drafting, welding, slide rule use, etc. They had a penchant for fixing things. If someone mentioned that he had a problem with his automobile engine, within a few minutes there would be a half-dozen engineers gathered around the vehicle with several heads stuck under the hood. And almost invariably they found the source of the trouble.
If one of them were considering buying a new device, whether an automobile or a simple toaster, he would often go to great lengths to determine which kind was the best buy. A couple of them subscribed to Consumer Reports magazine, and they would bring their issues to work for the others to read; and there were often animated discussions about the magazine's ratings of a certain device.
A few of them who had enough property to grow some grape vines bought kits for making wine for their own use; and in my opinion (based on a few modest samples) they were pretty successful at it. At that time, the local population tended to think of the NACA engineers as a kind of peculiar species of humankind. But that was a step up from the previous generation, when there was such a disparity between the natives and the NACA professionals, that the engineers were often called NACA Nuts, pronounced: “Nacka Nuts”. However that generation is not part of my past, and I only know of it from the many stories that I heard from some of the older engineers - with one exception. The single engineer, that I knew personally, to which the appellation “”Nacka Nut” might be appropriately applied was my first Branch Head, Ray Wright.
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