Success – Upside & Downside
Success – Upside & Downside
When I presented the solution to Dr. Katzoff, he was visibly pleased and impressed. He wrote up a technical paper on the problem and made me second author. I think that he felt as much relief as I did. The novice that had worked on the problem before being replaced by me had spent several months on it, and Dr. Katzoff had begun to fear that all of the time spent on it would go to waste. It felt great to have a publication to my credit, and it wasn’t too long before I had another.
But this bit of research taught me an unexpected, and somewhat unpleasant, lesson. In the course of my studies of boundary effects on wind tunnel flows, I had come across two publications that analyzed the interaction of an acoustic wave with a slipstream, which occurs at the boundary of a steady flow through a stationary gas. The two authors had attacked the problem in very different ways but had arrived at the same result: at the intersection of the wave with the boundary, part of the wave is reflected, and part transmitted, as expected, but there is a complicated relation between the wave energy and the steady state energy of the flow. In one of the two journals there was also a paper that analyzed the wind tunnel wall effects on a fluttering model when the walls are slotted. In solving this problem, the author had made the mistake of using the boundary condition for steady flow, where there is no complicated wave-slipstream interaction. The boundary condition wouldn’t be the same as for a conventional slipstream but since a slotted wall is partially open there would be some interaction. With a few days’ effort I managed to derive the correct boundary condition. But before submitting it for publication I sent a copy to one of the professors who had written one of the articles on wave interaction with a slipstream to see if he could find any flaw in my analysis.
I was in for a surprise. When he wrote back he informed me that he had been the faculty adviser for the author of the paper that I was criticizing. He was embarrassed that he had not seen the problem, the author was embarrassed, and one of my NACA colleagues was upset because he had made the same mistake in one of his publications. His branch head, obviously upset, called Dr. Katzoff and assured him that there must be something wrong with my analysis. Dr. K. told him that we would get together and talk it over. He hung up the phone, picked up my paper, and with the slightest smirk said, “Let’s go beard the lion in his lair”. We did. The discussion was carried out on a professional basis in spite of some strong feelings. In the end, all agreed that my analysis was correct, and it was published (with a ridiculously long pretentious title, which later proved to be an embarrassment to me.) I felt good about having another publication, but terrible about causing so much trouble and possibly making an enemy of an entire branch of engineers and at least one British scientist.
Unfortunately, this was not a one-time occurrence. I was to find throughout my career that success in research often arouses resentment in someone. And at times that someone wasn’t even another researcher. There was a variety of reasons for that resentment. Some were obvious and to be expected: solving a problem that had defied another, or discovering a superior solution to a problem, or simple envy.
The career of Dr. Richard T. Whitcomb provides an appropriate example of this problem. He made several outstanding contributions to aircraft design for high speed flight, was nationally recognized, and received numerous rewards. And yet I don’t recall hearing, in private conversations, anything good said about him. Everyone seemed to be searching for some way to minimize his contributions, to find some mistake that he may have made at sometime in his life or even something about his private life that could be nit-picked. He was an experimentalist, working smoothly and efficiently with a crack team of experienced wind tunnel technicians, and his contributions were revolutionary. He was a national treasure. I had several chats with him, and found him to be an interesting, and not unpleasant, conversationalist. But within a few years after I met him, NASA had absorbed NACA. A new wave of managers moved in and took away his wind tunnel, dismantled his team of technicians, and even excluded him from meetings where his expertise would have been invaluable. He soon retired, aged rapidly, and lived out his life a sad, lonely man.
NASA was created in the summer of 1958, just two years after I began my career at Langley. The rapid changes that took effect over the following decade were exciting to say the least. They offered great potential for LRC, and for me as a part of it. But before describing these changes, I should digress briefly to mention how this new career was affecting my personal life.
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