Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

AUTOMOBILES AND AIRCRAFT 283
From a theoretical point of view, he said, fuel consumption would be
so much greater than that with the motor-driven screw that there was no
prospect of using jet propulsion. (The petroleum industry was still experi-
menting with the cracking of oil, and Buckingham could not foresee better
fuels than those available.) Moreover, said Buckingham, in what seems
now masterly understatement, no further fundamental work on the subject
was needed, since the principles of jet propulsion were "all well known." Only
the engineering problems remained, and these could be better done by the Air
Service than by the Bureau.183
A member of the Bureau who followed Buckingham's work at the time
has a distinct impression that "jet motors may not have got off the ground
because the idea of airplanes spouting 2,0000 F flames on an airport was a
far from welcome thought."184 Even into the next decade top-flight engineers
considered jet propulsion impractical, in the belief that no material but fire
brick could be used for facing the combustion chamber of a jet engine. The
weight alone would keep it earthbound.
The real interest of the military in the l92O's was not so much in air-
planes as in lighter.than.air craft. Bemused by Count Zeppelin's invention
and totally undismayed by their poor record of survival—of some 80 built
by the Zeppelin Co. during and after the war, 66 were destroyed by enemy
action, burned, broke up in flight, or smashed in landings—the Army began
building its RS series of semirigid airships, the Navy its nonrigid dirigibles
and ZR series of rigid airships. Considerable research for these ships, espe.
cially in instrumentation, was supported at the Bureau with NACA and Navy
funds. Designed originally for ship navigation but adaptable to dirigibles
and airplanes as well was the earth inductor compass invented in 1922 by Dr.
Paul Heyl and Dr. Lyman J. Briggs. Equipped with this compass, the naviga-
tor after presetting his compass course had only to keep the galvanometer
needle of the earth inductor at zero to stay on course. In an airplane, the
compass, an armature driven by a cup propeller projecting through the fuse-
lage and responding to the magnetic field of the earth, was housed in the rear
of the fuselage, its indicator in the cockpit. But the career of the compass
Letter, SWS to Engineering Division, Air Service, Dec. 2, 1920, and attached report
by E. Buckingham, June 28, 1920 (NBS Box 12, INA). Even stronger was Bucking-
ham's conclusion in a restudy of jet propulsion made 2 years later, in which he said
that publication of his calculations by the NACA might "prevent engineers or inventors
from attempting impossibilities" (NBS Annual Report 1922, p. 168). Cf. George W.
Gray, Frontiers of Flight: The Story of NACA Research (New York: Knopf, 1948), p.
276. The fuel problem is discussed in NBS TNB 189, 10 (1933).
Interview with Howard S. Bean, Apr. 24, 1962.