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Charles Stark Draper: The Man Who Set the World Straight
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18347 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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10 / 1990 |
3,630 Words |
| Author
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Elizabeth J. Sherman
Elizabeth J. Sherman is editor of the Biographical Memoirs of
the National Academy of Sciences. |
Last year the national Academy of Engineering presented its first Charles Stark Draper Award. Engineering's answer to the Nobel Prize, this $350,000 award is named after a man whose inventions permanently changed the world and whose ideas transformed engineering. Though he died three years ago at the age of 85, his influence continues through the hundreds of Draper-trained disciples in top military and industrial posts.
Draper was a small bulldog of a man, and his flattened nose and burly shoulders bespoke his six years as a collegiate boxer. Ever day for nearly forty years, students and colleagues gathered in his office at four to wrangle over a proposed change in the Apollo spacecraft or possible flaw in the design of a missile guidance system. Far from smoothing over differences, Draper deliberately fanned rival passions, pitting one colleague against another until tempers grew short.
Only when the discussion was no longer productive did he intervene. Carefully preserving the rule that no one in his lab stopped work before five, Draper would ignore the line of watches up his arm (which gave the correct time from Moscow to Muncie) and push a button beneath his desk. The clock on the wall obligingly jumped forward, and he would pull out a bottle marked Nonlinear Damping Fluid - a bottle whose contents bore a striking resemblance to Plymouth gin.
Draper insisted that his engineers get to know the whole of a project before dealing with the parts. But when it came to his own life, he dismissed the idea of a master plan. Circumstances, he insisted, not man, shape what we do.
"I saw a series of situations that needed attention and acted," he said in an unpublished interview in 1970, "…doing jobs that were of importance to someone at the time - gun-sights to protect battleships, inertial guidance, ballistic missiles - all new things."
I'm from Missouri - Show me!
Charles Stark Draper was born in the small country town of Windsor, Missouri, on October 2, 1901. His ex-schoolteacher mother had high standards for education, but the town's 120-student high school offered no physics, chemistry, trigonometry, or solid geometry. Thus, Draper's early formal education in science was rudimentary at best.
Too busy to pay much attention to school, he
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