Engines and Innovation: Lewis Laboratory and American Propulsion Technology by Virginia P. Dawson

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968 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Engines and Innovation: Lewis Laboratory and American Propulsion Tech­ nology. By Virginia P. Dawson. Washington, D.C.: National Aero­ nautics and Space Administration, 1991. Pp. x + 276; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (paper). The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the federal research and development agency for aviation prior to 1958, has long had an unqualified reputation for the successful develop­ ment, through research, of advanced technologies that were smoothly transferred and made into military and commercial successes by industry. That reputation was based on the success which, in fact, was achieved in the aircraft design field, especially in the development of airfoils. We now have the superb study by Virginia P. Dawson which chronicles NACA’s work in the field of aircraft power plants, and which tells us that the relationship between government and industry also can be complex, disputatious, and not necessarily successful. In the case of aircraft engine development by NACA, it was not the simple progression of laboratory advances making their way into new, better, and larger engines built by industry. Rather, it was a series of complex interactions between a government laboratory struggling to define its proper role among the broad range of activities from basic research to hardware development and an industry group with a small number of highly competitive companies that were struggling to survive, but which, unlike the airframe builders, resented and fre­ quently opposed the research and development activities by NACA’s engine laboratory. During the two decades preceding World War II, NACA conducted its laboratory activities at a single location at Langley, Virginia. With the rise of Hitler’s Luftwaffe, the need for a separate, focused effort on engine research was recognized, and in 1941 ground was broken for an Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory near Cleveland, Ohio, now NASA’s Lewis Laboratory. Dawson reviews the laboratory’s initial work of troubleshooting the existing reciprocating engines, involving work on cooling fins, fuel additives, and improved superchargers. With the end of the war came the realization that the jet engine had been invented and developed in England and Germany. The staff of the engine laboratory sought to emulate Langley laboratory’s success in airframe research. Defining basic research in their field as work on “general problems common to a particular class of engines,” they initiated a broad range of research efforts in areas such as combustor design and combustion dynamics, and turbine blade cooling and the associated heat transfer and supersonic flow problems. Funding, Dawson notes, “depended on the laboratory’s ability to demonstrate its substantive contribution to aviation” (p. 70). But the engine companies were run by conservative managements that resisted any kind of government interference. They thought that the NACA engine laboratory might produce results that would find their way TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 969 into unrealistic specifications and performance demands by the military and the airplane companies. They resisted plans for the engine labora­ tory to build wind tunnels for full-scale engine tests that they thought should be done by industry in order to protect proprietary interests. Dawson goes on to deal with the laboratory’s efforts, partly in response to its earlier lag in thejet engine field, to pioneer in other areas of flight propulsion such as nuclear propulsion and rocket engines using uncon­ ventional propellants such as liquid hydrogen. Writing institutional technological history of this sort requires the weaving together of many factors. They include the developments in government policy and agency management, the role of strong personalities in engineering research and administration, the often very different perspectives that are found in government and in the private sector, and not least the story of the actual technological developments themselves, whether of the cut-and-try kind or based on scientific data and analysis. Dawson has interviewed a large number of the engineers who participated in Lewis’s evolution; she has conducted a thorough search of the highly diverse and scattered literature on the subject; and she has located sources as varied as the FBI files on espionage in the 1950s and a graduate student’s master’s paper dealing with the original site selection process for the...