Not long ago, Gerald Edelman, the director of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, was explaining to me that most scien- tific discoveries are serendipitous: Researchers stumble upon them while searching for something else.
“Do you know what the definition of serendipity is?” Gerry asked when he was through. “It’s when you go looking for a needle in the haystack and find the farmer’s daughter.”
That’s what happened to me. I was looking for some way out from under my father’s expectation that I would join Cullman Bros. and begin learning the tobacco business—a realneedle in the haystack, as far as I was concerned—and I found Cecil Driver, Athelstan F.
Spilhaus, and the United States Navy. To me, no farmer’s daughter could have been more beautiful. Of course, Germany and Japan also helped out.
World War II was already raging in Europe when I graduated from Yale in the spring of 1941. The Pacific theater was nearing a boil, too, but I can’t lay claim to any great patriotic fervor at the time. Like a lot of my classmates, I had joined the Naval Reserve at Yale—the Navy, after all, was the “gentlemen’s service”—only to drop out when some mandatory weekend drill interfered with a party I had wanted to attend. It did occur to me, though, that the military was going to need meteorologists and that this might be a chance for me to turn my avocation into a vocation, at least for the duration of the war.
About the same time, I stumbled across a graduate program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that seemed just right for the pur- pose so I polished up my senior thesis on the U.S. Weather Bureau
and sent it off to Cambridge, hoping MIT would be so dazzled by my insights into the bureaucracy of weather that it would ignore my al- most total lack of training in math, physics, and other relevant disci- plines. Alas, MIT didn’t, but just as I was beginning to despair, my older brother Joe, who had already signed up with the Naval Reserve, sailed to the rescue.
From his posting in Washington, D.C., Joe heard that the Navy was launching a program to train meteorologists for the war effort through the New York University College of Engineering. I followed up on Joe’s information with some calls of my own and soon found myself at NYU being interviewed for admission by none other than Athelstan F.
Spilhaus, one of the most interesting men I’ve ever run across.
Today, Spilhaus is known mostly by geophysicists for having invented the bathythermograph, which measures the temperature of the ocean depths and has been used for everything from mapping sea beds to hunting submarines. For several decades after World War II, though, Athelstan Frederick Spilhaus was perhaps the leading popular visionary among American scientists.
Born in South Africa, Spilhaus came to the United States in 1931 and quickly established himself as an extraordinary out-of-the-box thinker. Spilhaus conceived of a new world built around cities with state of the art communication and waste management systems, and much more. He set the population of his cities at 50,000 people, the optimum number for a participatory democracy. Beyond 50,000 citi- zens, he argued, people began to feel lost and powerless. Some of his cities actually got constructed, in Europe. Others—the ones that were to float at sea or even be built under water—didn’t. He was an advocate of global birth control and proposed creating ski slopes by covering towering mounds of discarded automobiles.
At the University of Minnesota, where Spilhaus ran the Institute of Technology from 1949 to 1967, he pioneered the idea of connecting buildings with covered skyways and underground tunnels to protect against the frigid winters of the northern plains. He also oversaw a
popular comic strip, “Our New Age,” that explained the wonders of the scientific future to over 5 million readers every Sunday, and he put together the American science exhibit at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.
(The site is now the Pacific Science Center, just under the famous Space Needle.) He had a wonderful practical side, too. I went to see him one day and found him puzzling over some problem; so I asked what was up.
“I’m trying to figure out another kind of cable I can use for my bathythermograph that will break more often. They’re not losing enough of them!”
Although Spilhaus didn’t become a U.S. citizen until 1946, five years after I met him, he was named America’s first ambassador to UNESCO in 1954.
Like Cecil Driver, Athelstan Spilhaus didn’t think I was deranged when I told him how interested I was in meteorology. Nor did he seem to find it particularly odd that I had taken so few courses to prepare for the field. Instead, when the interview came to an end, he said to me, “You want to take this program?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Show up Monday.” And so I did.
Until then, I had always thought of education as a process of accretion: You learned a little each course, each year, each school—
sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the quality of the instruction—but in time it all got piled together until you could con- sider yourself a competently intelligent adult. At NYU, I came to understand how much the intersection of interest, opportunity, and just the right moment can accelerate the learning curve exponentially.
I was far from the most prepared or able student in the program.
There were math and physics majors to contend with, from schools every bit the equal of Yale. Most of the eighty people in the program were also basically under contract to one of the armed services, mostly the Navy. They were competing against each other for future slots in what was bound to be a fairly limited meteorological corps. I had
every expectation that I would end up in the military, too, but al- though I had been given a provisional Navy ranking as an “aviation specialist probationary,” I had signed up for the NYU program as a straight civilian, through the back door and paying my own way. If anyone was more motivated than I, though, I would still be surprised.
In truth, I can’t think of a period of my life that I enjoyed more.
The NYU engineering school was up in the Bronx. At first, I com- muted by car from our summer home in North Stamford. I always liked it out there, and in those days the drive into the Bronx took half an hour to 45 minutes at the worst. But the work was too interesting, too all-consuming to waste time on transportation. While I was at Yale, my parents had bought an apartment at 910 Park Avenue, near Eightieth Street. I thought about moving there—at that point it was still unoccupied—but that would have meant doing my own cleaning and cooking; so I took a dorm room at the engineering school instead and worked until very late every night.
I remember looking forward to every single class. Maybe because I had bottled up my interest in meteorology for so long, my appetite for learning about it was absolutely voracious. Consequently, I was able to learn all the math and physics and other sciences I needed with a speed that never would have been possible in some other venue.
Speed turned out to be important, too. On December 7, the Japanese air force bombed Pearl Harbor, and what was supposed to be a two year program became, for me, a six-month course of study. Under the new wartime pressures, the thesis requirement for a degree was waived for the top ten students in our class. As I was among them, I suddenly found myself an active duty Navy ensign, with orders to report to the Lakehurst Naval Air Station on the central coast of New Jersey.
Everyone knew about Lakehurst back then. On May 6, 1937, the German passenger zeppelin, Hindenburg, the pride of the fleet, her- alded as still further proof of Nazi technological prowess, burst into flames while attempting a mooring at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station.
At more than 800 feet long, the Hindenburg was the largest aircraft ever to fly, yet by modern standards, the loss of life was minimal: Only 36 people died in the conflagration. But the film footage of the 34 sec- onds it took for the Hindenburg to burn and crash to the ground remains riveting to this day, and the radio broadcast by a horrified Herb Morrison of WLS in Chicago—actually a tape being made for later rebroadcast—is unforgettable:
It’s burst into flames . . . . Get out of the way, please, oh, my, this is terrible, oh, my, get out of the way, please! It is burning, burst into flames and is falling on the mooring mast and all the folks we . . . this is one of the worst catastrophes in the world! . . . Oh, it’s four or five hundred feet into the sky, it’s a terrific crash ladies and gentlemen . . . oh, the humanity and all the passengers!
For rigid airships like the Hindenburg, the Lakehurst crash was the end of the line. None would be built again. The nonrigid, lighter-than- air ships, or blimps, were the wave of the future. (The word “blimp,” by the way, was born on December 5, 1915, at Capel Air Station south of London when a Royal Naval Air Service lieutenant flicked his finger against the side of the airship and described the ensuing sound as blimp.) By the start of the 1930s, Goodyear Tire and Rubber—the same people who would later make the TV-blimp a standard at American sports championships—was crisscrossing the country with a small fleet of airships to advertise the company’s wares. The Navy noticed and began experimenting with the basic Goodyear model at Lakehurst in 1931. When war broke out a decade later, Congress authorized Goodyear to build 200 of the blimps for military purposes and designated Lakehurst on the East Coast and the naval air station at Moffett Field, California, as the principal centers for the blimp fleets. (One hundred sixty-eight of the “K series” blimps, as they were designated, actually got made before war’s end.)
A little smaller than a football field at 253 feet long and 60 feet wide, powered by twin 425 horsepower engines, and manned by crews of a dozen or more, the K-ships crept along at a top speed of maybe 100 miles an hour, but they could stay aloft for 60 hours at a time, which made them extraordinarily useful for search-and-rescue mis- sions, photo reconnaissance, and especially escorting convoys. Using what was known as MAD, magnetic air detection, the blimps scanned below the surface of the ocean for submarines. They also carried prim- itive depth charges, just about enough explosive to turn a canoe over, but the blimps weren’t meant to be combat-worthy. As soon as they spotted a sub, they radioed in its coordinates and left the kill up to heavier-than-air planes. Of the roughly 89,000 U.S. ships that crossed the Atlantic and Pacific under airship escort during World War II, not one was sunk by enemy fire. Amazingly, only one blimp was lost—No.
K-74, shot down by a surfaced German U-boat in the North Sea.
Our job at Lakehurst was to provide sufficient weather information to launch the airships successfully and to bring them back in when they came home. We tried to do just that, and we succeeded most of the time. But the place was a zoo, and I arrived knowing next to nothing about Navy procedures.
Lakehurst ran under a dual command structure. The station itself, to which I was assigned, had its own commanding officer. So did the squadron that flew the blimps. The plan might have made sense if there was any chance of our working at cross-purposes or if there had been a great divergence in our ultimate ends. As it was, we had two bosses barking (sometimes conflicting) orders, even though we all worked and lived together and pursued a common goal.
My own immediate boss, a Navy old-timer named Kellerman, knew very little about meteorology, but that didn’t stop him from trying to forecast wind speed and direction every 15 minutes during morning take- offs. Predicting the wind in 2- to 3-hour increments is hard enough—
then and now—but my guess is that Kellerman had been ordered by
some commander who knew even less about the weather than he did to produce predictions on the quarter hour and he had lacked either the sense or the fortitude to tell the brass that it just couldn’t be done.
Kellerman and I alternated taking the early trick. I remember coming down one morning when it was his turn on duty and finding the hanger doors wide open even though the wind was howling at maybe 40 knots with big black clouds streaming overhead, just waiting to bust open. Why the heck did they let those airships out, I won- dered; so I walked over, picked up the forecast form that the blimp people had been relying on, and there was the answer: “Southeast 5, gusts to 7; southeast 7, gusts to 9, with a little bit of escalation,” and so it went every 15 minutes for the entire 90-minute take-off period.
Just as I was checking the anemometer to find out what the wind was really doing—40, gusting to 60, out of the northeast—Kellerman came roaring in.
“Cullman, why the hell weren’t you here earlier?” he shouted. “I could have blamed this goddamn thing on your inexperience!” At least he had a sense of humor.
The Navy showed it had its own sense of humor by insisting that aerological officers such as myself take free-balloon rides so we would have a better feel for what our blimp crews were facing. (A blimp is really just a free balloon with motors.) We would pile into the basket, the ground crew would let loose the mooring ropes, and away we’d go, suspended under a huge bag of highly volatile hydrogen. In time, the Navy would switch over to the more stable and expensive helium, but not until the Hindenburgexploded.
To go up, we would break open a sand bag and begin trickling sand out through our fingers. To come down, we’d vent gas. The balloons were remarkably sensitive to the most minute adjustments. To hold ourselves at an even altitude, we would drag a hawser, maybe fifty feet of big ship’s rope, on the ground below us, which posed no problems as long as the wind was light or we were flying above some remote
stretch of sand. Sometimes we would be careening along at ten knots or so; and our trailing hawser would knock over a chimney, or punch a hole in a barn, or scare a brood of hens so badly that they wouldn’t lay eggs for a week thereafter. If things really got slow, we would call down to the people in the fields below us, as if the Creator himself were summoning them from on high. When it was time to land, we’d simply
“rip” the bag, the hydrogen would go flying out, and down to the ground we would thump. That wonderful military acronym “snafu”—
situation normal, all fouled up—is said to have been coined just about the time I was at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station. It’s no surprise.
I might well have remained at Lakehurst for much of the war, caught in the mess with Kellerman and all the rest, knocking over chimneys left and right, if I hadn’t gotten to know the commanding officer of the squadron there. Although I wasn’t under his authority, he would frequently pop in and ask me what I thought the weather was going to do. One day, five months after I had arrived at Lakehurst, he showed up at the door with a different message:
“You know,” he said to me, “we’re going to open up a new naval air station, in South Weymouth, outside of Boston. You want to go?”
“When do we leave?” I asked.
“How about tomorrow? You want to fly up with me tomorrow?
You’ll be in charge up there.”
Thus it came to pass that a still-wet-behind-the-ears Navy ensign who a year earlier had expected to be dragged kicking and screaming into the tobacco business (and who was prepared to enlist to avoid that!) ended up instead starting his own weather shop from scratch, performing a public good while doing something he loved. Isn’t war grand?
I feel guilty saying this because I was so far from the front and all
its dangers, but if wartime service can be delightful, my time at the South Weymouth Naval Air Station was just that. I arrived there in May 1942 and didn’t leave until the fall of 1944. Along the way, I
gleaned more practical knowledge about the weather than a classroom could ever teach, got a first-rate technical education, had the first glim- mers of how I might try to make a peacetime profession out of this, and met and married a lovely woman. For a while, I also became the fair-haired boy of the commandant of the First Naval District. As so many things do in the military, that came about more by fluke than anything else.
Constructed in a great hurry at the start of the war on a large swath of unused marshland, the South Weymouth Naval Air Station would eventually have two hangars: a metal one, followed by a huge wooden one—almost a thousand feet wide, two hundred feet high, and covering eight acres—that was for a time the world’s largest such structure without a center support. The doors alone weighed 250 tons apiece and opened on railroad tracks. To discourage heavier-than-air craft from landing, the two hangars were placed at right angles to each other, with a narrow slot in between for a runway, hard enough to hit in good weather and even worse in a storm. (We were blimp people, after all.) But all that was in the future when I first arrived at South Weymouth. Back then, in its earliest days, the naval air station con- sisted of nothing more than an administration building, a bachelor officers quarters, some barracks for the enlisted men, and a few houses for key officers. The blimp—there was only one then—was simply moored on the field. And the aerological department, my end of the operation, was tiny: one aerographer’s mate, one aerologist (I), and just enough equipment to do our job.
One afternoon, the petty officer and I were jawing away when we heard doors slamming around and scrambled topside for a look. The anemometer pole was bent over at a 45-degree angle—a bad sign.
Worse, we were in the middle of a very big, very black, very turbulent cloud. When it cleared away, the blimp that was moored was gone, disappeared into the woods. A tornado had ripped through South Weymouth and carried our airship away with it.
Not more than a week later, I was looking at the weather map when I noticed what seemed to be the same configuration of circum-