The name Jack Silverman has come up only once during the course of my eight years of research. There was a landmark paper given at a technology conference sponsored by the American Rocket Society (ARS) in September 1955. I own a copy; it's titled “The Theoretical Specific Thrust of a Rocket Motor for the C-H-N-O-F System.” This paper had nothing to do with hydyne or its invention, and the authors are listed (in this order) as: M. S. Morgan, J. Silverman, and W. T. Webber. My copy has been in my archives for more than ten years, so I am very familiar with it. During my work on the Caltech play of Rocket Girl, Bill Webber discussed the paper with me and mentioned that “J. Silverman” was Jack Silverman and that he had been my mother's supervisor for a short time. That was it, and I never pursued the lead further.
But now, because of Mrs. Silverman's article, pursue it I must. I call Bill Webber and set an appointment to meet with him at his house. A few days later, I drive to his home in Thousand Oaks, and he ushers me into his den.
“What's so urgent?” he asks.
“Who is Jack Silverman?”
“He was one of the supervisors at North American. Why?”
“His wife has written an article for Wikipedia. In it, she claims it was her husband, not my mother, who invented hydyne.”
Bill's word-for-word reply: “She's full of shit.”2
He says a few things that lead me to believe Jack Silverman, though perhaps a brilliant man, was a consummate credit-grabber. Then I remember the ARS article from 1955 and I ask about it.
“Did his name really belong on that 1955 paper as a coauthor?”
“No,” said Bill. “He was just her supervisor. As such, he took advantage of his position and slapped his name on it. But your mother and I did all the work.”
“So he was a credit-grabber.”
“Yes.”
This makes perfect sense; in all the work I've done over eight years researching and reassembling the jigsaw puzzle of my mother's life, the name Jack Silverman was never once brought up by anyone I interviewed. His name wasn't even mentioned in passing. Not one single time. Only as a coauthor of the ARS paper did I ever see his name on anything. It could be that he, like many supervisors at that time, put his name on the projects of those working under his supervision, regardless of whether or not credit was actually due to him. Despite the dearth of evidence suggesting Silverman was the inventor of hydyne (and the wealth of evidence I've accumulated over years, researching my mother's life), according to his wife's Wikipedia “Talk” tab, he sent “items” to NASA's archives listing himself as hydyne's inventor. If Mrs. Silverman's claim about submitting information to NASA is true, then I begin to think that the reason my mother is not as well known as she should be is that the man who had the responsibility for giving her credit for her invention chose instead to grab it for himself. And it would seem that he did it in a most unprofessional manner: by putting it into a written record and, without telling the other people involved, sending it to NASA to be permanently engraved in aerospace history marble.
I ask Bill to put the truth in writing and affix his signature to it. He readily agrees. Meanwhile, I head back home to determine how I can set the record straight about Jack Silverman.
As soon as I'm in front of my computer, I take a closer look at the identity of the wiki editors on my mother's main page. None of them appear to have the credentials to weigh in on a subject as esoteric as the invention of hydyne. One of the editors, according to Wikipedia’s “View History” link, is someone named Will Beback. It sounds like a whimsical alias, as in “Will Be Back.” Here's the good part: a Wikipedia administrator has added a note that says “Will Beback” will not be back, that he or she has been “indefinitely banned from English Wikipedia” by the Arbitration Committee.3
The next day, I fire off a letter to NASA to request copies of the alleged Silverman hydyne files. Two hours later, the mailman arrives and delivers a book that I've been waiting for: Robert S. Kraemer's Rocketdyne: Powering Humans into Space. During my interview with former Rocketdyne engineer Bill Vietinghoff, he highly recommended it. As I casually read through it, I come to page 44 and a description of the invention of hydyne. To my surprise, Kraemer gives credit for its invention to, of all people, Irving Kanarek. In 2004, the LA Times had refused to publish my mother's obituary because they could find no written record of who was the actual inventor of hydyne. Now the number of “written record” claimants is starting to lengthen like a bread line in a Soviet Moscow winter.
My concern disappears, however, when I read that Kraemer lists the formula for hydyne as “75% unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, 25% diethylenetriamine.”4 That mixture ratio is obviously wrong; every hydyne source available lists it as 60/40, not 75/25. Plus I have had three in-person, in-depth interviews with Irving Kanarek (one on video) in which he acknowledges that hydyne was the brainchild of my mother. Even so, Kraemer's error is good news because it points the genesis of hydyne in my mother's direction; Kanarek was her immediate supervisor and even had his desk adjacent to hers. Kraemer may not be completely accurate, but at least he refutes Jack Silverman's claim.
Even so, the competing claims are disconcerting, and they become a distraction to my writing. I convince myself that my research is more than sufficient, but as I continue the work, all I can think about are those Silverman files percolating like overheated fluorine in the NASA archives. Weeks go by, then months.
The requested files from NASA never arrive.
By 5:30 in the afternoon on the first day of the contract, almost everyone had left, providing the cavernous engineering building a whisper-quiet atmosphere. Mary had spent the day reading over the contract requirements and gathering all the materials she knew she would need: chemical reference books, catalogs on commercially available chemicals and their purity levels, and a box full of reports on prior propellant studies (some of which she had written).
Fresh on her mind was a conversation she had overheard during a coffee break in the cafeteria. A group of engineers at a nearby table were in a huddle, trying hard to keep their voices from being heard. Once in a while, one of them would turn and glance at her. That would have been clue enough that Mary was the topic of conversation, but she had overheard much of the discussion.
“Better her than me.”
“I wonder if they're setting her up for failure.”
“Clever way to get rid of our only female engineer.”
“She's an analyst, not an engineer.”
“Whatever.”
“I agree—I say it's a setup.”
“The mucky-mucks upstairs must know it's impossible.”
“Everybody knows it's impossible.”
“Even von Braun and his best engineers couldn't solve it.”
“She'll fail, then what?”
“Pink slip.”
“Better her than me.”
Their feelings were understandable. Though the development of liquid-propellant rocket engines was still in its infancy, certain design aspects had already been solidified into axioms. One of those axioms was that liquid rocket engines had to be designed around a specific fuel and oxidizer combination in the same way an automobile engine is designed for a specific species of petroleum. Switching one or both of the propellants after the rocket had been built was like putting diesel into a gasoline engine. What made the Redstone contract especially pernicious was that it not only required a change of propellants that would work with the existing design and hardware, but the change had to yield a major improvement in performance. From an engineering standpoint, it was an exceptionally egregious demand—no rocket system had ever been called upon to do this. The contract simply had no precedent. In the minds of the von Braun–worshipping engineers, if Wernher couldn't solve a rocket-engineering problem, no one could. In all the world nobody knew more about the subject than he. Now here was a farm girl from North Dakota, with nothing more on her wall than a high-school diploma, being told she had to succeed where experience, education, and geni
us had all failed.
Mary had watched the huddle out of the periphery of her vision. She could see the pity in the eyes of her coworkers. But the pity was mixed with relief—relief that they had dodged the bullet—that none of them had been chosen for an assignment that could well be described as engineering suicide. Under Kindelberger's “5 percent rule,” anyone who failed at such an important task would almost certainly get pink-slipped.
After lunch, her immediate supervisor, Irving Kanarek, had approached her desk with some advice.
“As you know, the Redstone uses liquid oxygen. There are several oxidizers out there we could use much more powerful than LOX. I recommend you focus on keeping the existing fuel but switching out to a different oxidizer. I talked to Tom, and he agrees with me on this.”
She had considered his suggestion all afternoon, making a list of oxidizers that might provide a specific impulse of at least 305 with alcohol. There were only a few, and all of them had problems of the worst kind. She even considered FLOX (fluorine/oxygen mixture), but the plumbing and turbopumps of the Redstone engine were not designed for an ultra-corrosive, ultra-reactive chemical like fluorine. Upon firing, she estimated the engine would run for approximately 250 milliseconds before exploding. Fluorine was out, even in a diluted mixture form.
And so, without telling anyone, she quietly turned her attention to the fuel side. The odds of finding a superior fuel were much higher, given that the natural world of atoms and molecules allowed for the creation of only a handful of good oxidizers but hundreds of fuels.
Mary took out a pad of paper. At the top she wrote “Properties and Characteristics.” Beneath that she wrote a column of numbers; 1 through 10. To the right of number 1 she wrote “Commercially Available.”
There are ten properties and characteristics our new propellants must have, she thought. First and foremost they must be commercially available. The world's greatest fuel and oxidizer do us no good if we can't buy them someplace.
Next to the number 2 she wrote “Physical Data.”
We have to know its physical data. We can't work with a chemical we know nothing about. That's obvious.
Number 3: “Vapor Pressure.”
Our fuel has to have a low vapor pressure; it must be a liquid at ambient temperatures and pressures. The fuel side of the system is not designed to work with a cryogenic liquid like the oxidizer side. The fuel valves would freeze right up.
“Freeze right up—just like a North Dakota prairie winter.”
Frightened, Mary stood up. “Who said that!?”
She looked around the engineering floor, flat as the side of a barn. There was a janitor sweeping that floor, but he was two hundred feet away. Other than that, she was alone. She felt a cold breeze from somewhere, and then the smooth concrete floor of the building disappeared, and in its place was the cold prairie grass of North Dakota. She was wearing her knee-high dress; her legs and feet were bare. The arctic wind made goose bumps rise on her arms and legs.
Clarence was standing nearby, holding a switch.
“You should never have left the farm, Mary. Mother and father are angry.”
He came at her fast, grabbing her arm with his free hand while swinging the switch at her legs with the other. His swipes were swift and violent and many. Liquids poured from her body; tears from her eyes, blood from her thighs.
“You should never have left the farm, Mary! Mother and father are angry!”
“Please stop!”
“Mother and father are angry!”
“Please stop!”
“You should never have left the farm! You should never have left the farm!”
I should never have left the farm.
A low-frequency hum intruded, and slowly Mary lifted her head from her folded arms and rejoined the concrete world. Mary opened her eyes to see a second janitor maneuvering a floor polisher nearby. The man was looking at her, a strange expression on his face.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Mary nodded. I must have fallen asleep.
“Hey!” she heard someone shout. Mary turned to face the sound. It was Richard, a wide smile on his face, about fifty feet away and walking toward her. Between the two of them they had only one car; he was here on schedule to pick her up.
“Ready to go?”
Mary shook her head and sat back down as he arrived at her desk. “No. I have to finish my list.”
Richard looked over her shoulder. “Properties and characteristics. Working on a new propellant combination?”
“Yes, but I don't know what it is yet.”
“You don't know what it is? Isn't that the opposite of the way it normally works?”
“Yes. It's sort of a reverse-engineering project.”
“Need some help?”
“No. Sit down and don't interrupt.”
Richard sat down in Kanarek's chair. “Okay. But we have to pick up George pretty soon.”5
Mary nodded. She had seven more properties and characteristics that needed her attention, and she wanted to get them down on paper while they were fresh in her mind.
Availability. Physical data. Low vapor pressure. Let's see…
Number 4: “Mixture Ratio.”
The mixture ratio is already set by the Redstone's plumbing and design—it can't be changed. The engine is designed to use about 1.75 pounds of oxidizer for every one pound of fuel. Our new propellant must optimize at something close to that or we won't get the maximum energy from combustion, and we won't reach the magic number of 305.
Richard found Kanarek's deck of playing cards and started laying them out for a game of solitaire.
Number 5: “Stability.”
If at all possible we want to avoid unstable chemicals due to all the problems with handling and storage.
Richard put a red four over a black five.
Number 6: “Controllable toxicity”—for the same reasons.
The black jack went over the red queen.
Number 7: “High Heat of Combustion.”
The hotter the flame, the more energy we gain.
Richard was stuck. He started going through the deck. “If this propellant is going to be used in a regeneratively cooled engine you'll want to list ‘good heat-transfer properties.’”
Number 8: “Good Heat Transfer Properties.”
Numbers 9 and 10: “Low Molecular Weight, and a High Ratio of Reactive Atoms”—such as hydrogen, in the molecule. That's it; that's the list that determines our work.
Mary put a heavy chemical reference book atop the list to make sure it didn't grow legs and walk off during the night, then grabbed her purse.
“Okay. Let's go get George.”
“I'm not done with my game.”
Five minutes later, as the 1953 green VW with the small rear window was negotiating the streets of the San Fernando Valley, Mary could not shake the feeling that she had forgotten something on her list.
Properties and characteristics. There's something I'm missing.
Mary dragged herself and two cups of coffee to her desk. It had been a long night, and she hadn't slept much. Thousands of specific impulse and propellant performance formulas had been racing through her thoughts. The more she considered the problem, the more she had come to agree with the lunch gossipers; everything about the contract requirement seemed impossible. Alcohol was a damn fine fuel, and every pipe and valve and injector in the Redstone was designed specifically for it. On the way home from work, she asked her heat-transfer-specialist husband's advice.
“What if we simply changed the alcohol from a seventy-five percent mixture with water to ninety-five percent, or one-hundred percent. Anything wrong with that?”
Richard had considered the suggestion carefully, then rejected it.
“That would raise the temperature of combustion substantially, but that's not a big problem. I'm sure the A-7 engine could handle it. The real problem is you wouldn't get a three-oh-five isp doing that. Even pure alcohol is under three hundred, I
believe.”
She checked his answer, and it turned out to be correct.
If the solution to the Redstone power problem were that simple, the Von Braun boys wouldn't need us.
She set one coffee cup down and started drinking the second. It was the morning of Day 2 of what Mary had started calling MUPP: the “Mysterious Unknown Propellant Project.”
Tom arrived at her desk just as she sat down.
“I've recruited two engineers to assist you. They're getting some paperwork squared away, then I'll bring them over.”
“Good,” said Mary, “because this is going to be a massive amount of work.”
“I know.”
“In fact, I could probably use eight or ten.”
“Ya got two.”
He was about to leave, then added, “Did Irving tell you what we talked about? That we both feel you should be focusing on the oxidizer side?”
“Yes, he told me.”
Then he left.
Immediately after deciding to focus on the fuel side, Mary had chosen not to tell her supervisors that she intended to go down a different path. One thing she had learned since working side by side with nine hundred men was this: Never tell them they're wrong until you can prove it. And she was far from proving it. From her experience with engineers, she knew they hated being told they were wrong, but didn't seem to mind being proven wrong. In the final analysis, all engineers and scientists really cared about was the discovery of truth; you just had to be ready to prove your position.
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