Ray Wright
Ray Wright
By the time NASA was formed the era of the “Nacka Nuts” had pretty much ended. One of the few exceptions was my first branch head, Ray Wright. He was my direct supervisor, my branch head, although my initial research was conducted for Dr. Katzoff.
Our branch offices were located in the building that also housed the offices of the engineers of the 8’ Transonic Tunnel Branch. The building faced Back River, a minor inlet of the Chesapeake Bay. At our building Back River was probably about a third of a mile across. Ray Wright lived on the opposite side, directly across from our building. Consequently, he rowed to work – which wouldn’t have been an exceptional decision if he had limited that practice to periods of reasonable weather. However, he doggedly stuck to it, summer and winter, rain or shine, the only exceptions being major storms, heavy surf (actually on one occasion in high wind and strong tide he rowed for more than an hour to get across the water), or blinding snow. Once we watched from an upstairs window while he used an oar to break through the ice to get his boat close enough to his mooring post to tie up.
But when it was absolutely necessary, he would drive his old car to work. It was old, but it ran well, because he would always have it repaired when necessary. He protected the car body from the deleterious effect of the salt air by keeping it painted. He performed this chore himself with a paint brush and black paint. Eventually, however, the black machine wore out and had to be replaced. He toured the used car lots, seeking the optimum combination of price and running condition, and finally settled on one that satisfied him. All of us were unaware of this activity until one day a strange car appeared in the parking lot. It didn’t occur to any of us that it would belong to Mr. Wright. We assumed that it belonged to some visiting engineer. But it remained a topic of conversation because, for some reason that I never quite fathomed, the 8’ Tunnel engineers had a real fixation on cars. When that car appeared again some days later one of the engineers kept a close watch on it at the end of the day and saw Mr. Wright climb in and drive away. This revelation would not have been such a sensation if it had not been for the appearance of the car, which seemed so completely out-of-character with its owner. It was a full size Chevrolet (they made them big in that day) and its color was either lavender with a pink cast or pink with a lavender cast. I remarked that I had never seen a car that color before; that, in fact, I probably had not seen that color anywhere before. But one of the engineers said that he had seen that exact color – on an Easter egg.
Mr. Wright was a devout Christian; so much so that at times other engineers would have to endure one of his lectures on personal salvation. He was faithful about writing up promotion requests for me whenever my research justified a promotion. And he made a huge contribution to aeronautical research – one that was never properly recognized. He initiated the concept of the slotted wall wind tunnel, which became our much needed means of testing at high subsonic and transonic speeds. He requested approval to build a small pilot model slotted wall tunnel. Finally, John Stack, one of his supervisors gave the approval to proceed with the slotted wall tunnel concept, and Stack got the credit for the invention.
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