Lytle S. Adams, the Apostle of Nonstop Airmail Pickup

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The Cover Design LYTLE S. ADAMS, THE APOSTLE OF NONSTOP AIRMAIL PICKUP WILLIAM F. TRIMBLE AND W. DAVID LEWIS The picture on the cover of the December 1928 issue of Popular Mechanics has a compelling look (see fig. 1). A red biplane soars over a verdant landscape; off in the hazy distance are a lake and mountains. The pilot of the plane waves to two coveralled workmen, one of whom lifts his arm in acknowledgment. This was not an unusual sight in the late 1920s as the airplane assumed greater prominence in American life. But in this instance, something out of the ordinary is depicted, for the plane is trailing a long cable, the end of which is about to enter a large panlike apparatus on the ground and haul aloft a sack plainly marked “U.S. Mail.” No airport is evident—nor any of the usual equipment associated with landing fields or aviation support facilities. It is obvious that the plane intends to pick up the mail and fly on without landing. The work of Lytle S. Adams in perfecting the nonstop airmail pickup system is illustrative of patterns of technological change in America by the beginning of the 20th century. Adams was a self-styled inventor who saw technology as a means of adding to the common weal and invention as most useful when it could be made available to the ma­ jority of the American people.1 Yet before he could realize that vision, Dr. Trimble is assistant professor of history at Auburn University and the author of High Frontier: A History of Aeronautics in Pennsylvania (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982) . Dr. Lewis is Hudson Professor of History and Engineering at Auburn University and the coauthor (with Wesley Phillips Newton) of Delta: The History of an Airline (Uni­ versity of Georgia Press, 1979). This article is derived from the authors’ The Airway to Everywhere: A History ofAll American Aviation, 1937—1953 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988). ’For useful perspectives on the democratization of technology in America, see John A. Kouwenhoven, The Arts in Modem American Civilization (New York, 1967), and Hugo A. Meier, “Technology and Democracy, 1800— 1860,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (March 1957): 618—40. The democratization theme is applied to aviation in Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900—1950 (New York, 1983) , pp. 91-111.©1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/88/2902-0003$01.00 247 248 William F. Trimble and W. David Lewis DECEMBER YourTelevision Receiver-Pafce 1004 25 CENTS POPULAR MECHANICS Fig. 1.—Airmail pickup as depicted on the cover of the December 1928 Popular Mechanics, after which the Technology and Culture cover design was drawn by Nancy E. Lewis. Lytle S. Adams, the Apostle of Nonstop Airmail Pickup 249 he had to shepherd the pickup through a complex development stage until the invention attained a level of perfection that assured its mar­ ketability and financial success. During the final phases of this process, Adams could not accept the necessary changes to the pickup and lost control of the system he had worked with great persistence and com­ mitment to develop. Historians of technology have identified development as a distinct and sometimes neglected stage of technological change. Following the first act of individual creative activity, or invention, technological change requires development, a painstaking period of transformation during which the new technology assumes a functional state. The process concludes with innovation, whereby the fully developed invention finds a niche in the marketplace. During the development phase, especially, external forces influence the design of the technology; not infrequently, the device must be literally “reinvented.”2 So it was with the Adams airmail pickup. As it evolved through the development phase, economic and political as well as technical variables affected Adams’s approach to the design of the pickup, which in the end became a much different mechanism from the one with which he had started. Dr. Lytle S. Adams was a native Kentuckian who earned a degree in dental surgery in 1905. A restless genius, he roamed from place to place in the Midwest and West, inventing a rotary...