Questions? Call 888-624-8373

PAPERBACK
list:$78.25
Web:$70.42
add to cart

PDF BOOK
your price: $60.00
add to cart

Rights & Permissions

topleft topright

Biographical Memoirs V.65 (1994)
National Academy of Sciences (NAS)

Page
144
bottomleft bottomright

The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.


Biographical Memoirs: Volume 65

problem, this contract was quietly shifted to Air Force control.

Inertial guidance evolved in much the same manner as most of our technology. We are technologically Darwinian. In 1923 a German, Max Schuler, explained in satisfying engineering detail the essentials of dynamic vertical indication. He tuned theoretically his pendulous element so that it had the earth's natural period, 84.4 minutes. A minor detail prevented his physical realization of the concept—the pendulous arm had to be equal in length to the earth's radius! Dr. Walter Wrigley, a student of Draper and with Draper's encouragement and help, wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1938 at MIT, ''On Vertical Indication From a Moving Base." The technology had evolved so that the servo loop closed around a gyro stabilized pendulum instrument of physical dimensions that could be electronically tuned to the required periodicity. Schuler was, as is often the case, before his time. The war intervened but FEBE, the MIT stellar-aided system, was flown in 1948 as noted above. German engineers during the war did not "close the loop" around the pendulous instrumented range axis with the crude V-2 guidance system. They had most of the idea but not the technology. The Russians apparently understood the principle too, but like the Germans did not have the technology to create practical systems.

Walter Huesserman, J. M. Kooy, and Reisch appear to have been the "systems" thinkers in the field in Germany. Schuler and Boykow, though earlier in the field, were instrument-oriented rather than systems designers. In Russia, A. Y. Ishlinsky, a friend and correspondent of Draper's, and B. V. Bulgakov and L. I. Tkachov seem to have had the same systems concepts at approximately the same time. The difference was Draper himself. He believed. He also carried with him a team of his own fashioning. Financially main-

Page
144
[ Top of Page ] [ Home ] [ Contact Us ] [ Help ] [ The National Academies Home ]