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HARRY ~ ULIAN ALLEN
1910-1977
BY NICHOLAS }. HOFF
HARRY JULIAN ALLEN, retired Director of the Ames Research
Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA), died at the age of sixty-six in Stanford University Hospital
on January 29, 1977. He had joined the research staff of Ames
Research Laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics (NACA) at the time of its founding in 1940 and con-
tinued carrying out most original research there until his retire-
ment, in 1969. It is not an exaggeration to state that no man has
had as much influence on the work of this great research center
as Harry Julian Allen.
Born on April 1, 1910, in Maywood, Illinois, "Harvey" Allen (as
he was known to all his friends) received a Bachelor of Arts degree
in engineering in 1932 and the professional degree of Aeronautical
Engineer in 1935, both from Stanford University. The following
year he was appointed to the staff of NACA'S Langley Memorial
Aeronautical Laboratory near Hampton, Virginia (now NASA'S
Langley Research Center), as a Junior Aeronautical Engineer. In
1940 he moved back to California as an Aeronautical Engineer at
Ames Research Laboratory (now NASA'S Ames Research Center) at
Moffett Field. From 1941 he was Chief of the Ames Theoretical
Aerodynamics Branch, in 1945 he became Chief of the High-Speed
Research Division, in 1959 he was promoted to Assistant Director
for Astronautics, and from 1965 to 1969 he was Director of the
Ames Research Center.
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Harvey Allen was much honored for his professional accomplish-
ments. He was a Fellow of the American Institute of Aero-
nautics and Astronautics, the Royal Aeronautical Society of
Great Britain, the American Astronautical Society, and the
Meteoritical Society. In 1966 he was elected a Member of the
National Academy of Engineering. Among the honors he received
were the Sylvanus Albert Reed Award of the Institute of the Aero-
space Sciences (predecessor of the AlAA) in 1955, the Wright
Brothers Lectureship of the same Institute in 1957, the Distin-
guished Service Medal of' the NACA in 1957, the Airpower Trophy
of the Air Force Association in 1958, the Medal for Exceptional
Scientific Achievement of the NASA in 1965, and the Daniel
Guggenheim Medal awarded by AlAA, ASME, and SAE in 1969.
Throughout his career, Harvey Allen combined the funda-
mental curiosity of' the natural scientist with the practical thinking
of the engineer. He devoted himself to the study of aerodynamics
in the broadest sense and made original contributions to the
theories of subsonic, transonic, supersonic and hypersonic flow.
When after World War II the United States became interested in
the construction of ballistic missiles, he began a study of reentry
dynamics and thermodynamics, and of the effects of' radiation and
meteorite impact on space vehicles.
Among Harvey Allen's most original contributions to science and
engineering was the development ol' the concept of' the blunt nose
I'or reentry vehicles. As is well known, the first ballistic missiles,
both in the Soviet Union and the United States, were built with long
nose cones having very small apex angles. They were designed to
reenter the atmosphere at very high Mach numbers, and everyone
knew that the drag ol' bodies traveling at hypersonic speeds is very
high unless the body is thin and slender. With his typical combina-
tion of' engineering common sense and superb scientific knowl-
edge, Harvey Allen I'reed himsell'ol' this preconceived notion. He
showed that the slender cone receives much more heat from the
attached shock wave than the blunt body from its detached shock
wave, even though the latter has the higher drag. But in the design
of' the early ballistic missiles the greatest worry of' the designer was
not drag, but the protection ol' the body from excessive
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aerodynamic heating, which can melt and burn the surface of the
missile. Harvey Allen's blunt-body approach has been accepted as
the solution of the problem all over the world; it has made possible
such achievements as the flight of the Apollo to the moon.
Harvey Allen also found an ingenious new way of studying
hypersonic aerodynamics when he observed the flight of meteor-
ites. These objects are ballistic missiles of a nature that become visi-
ble when they begin to radiate light in consequence of aerodynamic
heating following entry into the atmosphere of the earth. To obtain
a correlation between astronomic observation and terrestrial work
at Ames, Harvey Allen designed and built a most original piece of
equipment. It consisted of a shock tunnel into which the model of a
meteorite or of a reentry body could be shot upstream out of a gun.
The superposition of the speeds of the airflow and of the specimen
resulted in relative speeds as high as M = 45.
Aeronautics was Harvey Allen's lifework, but by no means his
only interest. He was a fancier of old cars and owned at various
times a Duesenberg, a Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes-Benz, an Isotta-
Fraschine, and a Cadillac. He was also an accomplished ar-
cheologist and a great admirer of Far Eastern art. The house in
which he lived alone in Palo Alto was a veritable museum contain-
ing beautiful furniture, statuary, and paintings from East Asia.
Harry Julian Allen's scientific and engineering achievements are
best documented by his numerous publications, but his influence
on aeronautical and astronautical development is much more {ar-
reaching than the list would indicate. His successor as Director of
Ames Research Center, Hans Mark, said that time and again when
he talked to members of research groups in the laboratory he was
told "Oh yes, Harvey started us out on this work ten or more years
ago and we have been going strong ever since along the lines he
had suggested."
This statement shows that the work of Harvey Allen, a very
informal man revered by all his collaborators, has not reached its
end yet. It will continue to produce useful results for many years
alter his death.
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