Remembering Doc Draper - MIT AeroAstro Dept. 1998

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SEAMANS: He was really interested in people.

HOLLISTER: He didn't ever told you what to do. He sort of said, just do it well.

SEAMANS: And he knew all the machinists and--

HOLLISTER: He coined the term instrumentation.

SEAMANS: The room was just packed. You knew you were dealing with a power.

HOLLISTER: He was really excited by space.

SEAMANS: He said, I guarantee, if you stay with us, you'll have a lot of fun. He had his degree from Stanford, I think in psychology. And he came here almost as a tourist, and was intrigued by it. And I've heard, and I can't prove this, that he took more courses for credit at MIT than anybody has ever taken.

BARON: He was the man responsible for the beginning of the supersonic era in the department.

HOLLISTER: Draper's excitement, although he was a pilot and liked to fly, he was really excited by space. And so under Draper's tutelage, the department moved in that direction a lot further than it had ever been.

DRAPER: I am a fellow who was a teacher at MIT, and probably always sort of a low-ranking teacher.

SEAMANS: I was there in what was called 1641-- Basic Instrumentation. The room was just packed. You could just sort of feel the tempo of it right off the start.

And he said, I'll give you a little philosophy first. He said, if you guys are really interested in a lot of nightlife and so on, you're in the wrong place. He said, you're never going to make over $10,000 a year in this field. But he said, I guarantee, if you stay with it, you'll have a lot of fun.

And I went down with Doc Draper to the Sperry Gyroscope Company. And he stood up in front of a whole bunch of engineers in the little auditorium there and sketched out how you could put in a so-called target acquisition system. And afterwards, I said, that was a pretty complicated chart.

And Doc said, look, when you're giving a talk, he said you always want to make most of the charts simple so people think they understand it. But I always throw in one that's so complicated, they think, this guy must be really smart. And we don't understand it. We know he knows what he's talking about.

[LAUGHTER]

And then he became interested in airplane instruments. He was a pilot. And he used to fly. He used to fly out at Logan Field, before it was called Logan, I think.

Hunters know about trying to lead the target, the right amount. And Doc felt that the way to go about it was to make use of the fact that in tracking a target, he had to obviously follow it. And that great motion of following should help you predict what the lead angle is, so that when the bullet got out to the vicinity of the target, it would actually be a hit, and you'd actually knock the target down.

Doc's site was being used at just about the time that the kamikazes were really raising the devil with our Navy out in the Pacific. The kamikazes were getting smart enough. They were always coming in with the sun behind them. Doc had put in a system for tracking-- the radar was just becoming available-- where you put the antenna on the gun mount, so if all of a sudden the kamikaze has the sun behind, you can close off the optics, and you could still track with a radar signal that was with a mirror and so on put right in the line of sight of the tracker.

HOLLISTER: When I was an undergraduate here in the electrical engineering department-- this is now in the sort of the early '50s, '49, '50, '51, kind of-- they used to talk about this crazy guy in the aero department who was going to make a measurement of acceleration with an accelerometer, a mechanical instrument that had a little spring in it and a mass in it. And he was going to integrate that to get velocity, and then integrate that again and find out where you were.

And everybody went, ha, ha, ha. Everybody knows that if you make a little error in that measurement, you're going to integrate it twice and have a huge error. Of course, Draper knew that, and figured you'd have to make extremely precise instruments.

DRAPER: We still have to make this equipment cheaper than it is now. But I am sure that as time goes along, you will find inertial guidance equipment not in the advanced military weapons, but you will find it in commercial vehicles, on the land, in the sea, in the air, and in space. And I'm also, I believe on firm grounds if I say that 10 years from today, inertial guidance will be such an ordinary thing that it will not be even remarked by the people who are using it.

EZEKIEL: Every time I would mention ring laser gyroscopes or laser gyroscope, what have you, he always said that you're wasting your time.

SEAMANS: But was Draper's power so strong that he could just say, OK, we're not going to investigate?

SEAMANS: He had a lot of power because all the gyro work, or most of the gryo work, going on at MIT went on in the instrumentation lab, and he was the director of it.

SEAMANS: Yeah.

SEAMANS: So he was not a person to take lightly. I mean, even if, say, Ziggy had gone in there with other funding, when you sit there with Doc at his desk and explain what you're doing and see him explode and so on--

EZEKIEL: No messing around with him.

SEAMANS: You knew you were dealing with a power.

DRAPER: My facilities consisted of a broom closet somewhere in which I could keep my little pieces of paper and the second-hand equipment I had.

SEAMANS: Usually the first thing he did when he came in in the morning was to go down to the machine shop. He loved to go down and see what was going on. And he knew all the machinists. And maybe there was a test going on of a gyro. And he'd go in and see how the tests had gone all night.

He was really interested in people, even though he was working a lot of mathematical areas and a lot of fussy mechanical electromechanical areas. And then he would take people out to dinner. And then very often, he'd come back in the lab and do his serious thinking, his serious mathematical work, the writing he was doing on umpteen books that were written.

He would purposely start a rumor in his lab. Well, this was a pretty good-sized lab. And then he'd go down and prowl around. And he would measure the time it took for one of his rumors to spread to some other part of the lab. And he did this knowingly. What?

BUCCIARELLI: Did he have a purpose?

SEAMANS: Sure. He wanted to know who was talking to whom in the lab.

HOLLISTER: But there was always this undercurrent of should it be aero, as in airplane, or should it be space? And this kind of went on and on. And I can't remember the year, but Doolittle was on the visiting committee. And he was famous and he was starting to age a little to where he was certainly a senior person with a great deal of respect. And he had listened all day through this talk on the state of the department, the directions it was going to move in and so forth.

And in front of the podium where Doc had been most of the day-- he had some of the others talking but he was doing most of it, and most of it was about the activities that were going to happen in space-- there was a sign that said Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. And it just sort of fit in the scene almost the whole day.

Towards the end of the day, Doolittle stands up and he says, you know? You've gone so hard over for space, you've completely forgotten about an aeronautics, and to the extent that it's misspelled on that sign. And it was the first time the rest of the group had even seen this misspelling. And it just broke the whole place up.

Draper coined the term instrumentation. History seems to say to us, maybe that wasn't the right word, because it always got confused with medical instrumentation. But it was a good word, because it was new and it was exciting, and people associated it with Draper.

SEAMANS: Doc himself realized that instrumentation, the word needed to be sort of expanded. And he came up with a word, informatics I think was his word he coined, feeling that--

HOLLISTER: That's very interesting, because he coined the word for informatics, and now we're saying that there are these new thrusts in information and in humans and automation.

SEAMANS: Exactly, yeah.

HOLLISTER: And he already had them together. And there certainly, in our department, will be strong links between those two.

DRAPER: So they asked me if I could make equipment that would take them to the moon and back. And I said, yes, I could. They said, how would I guarantee this? And I said, I would go along and run it myself.

BUCCIARELLI: What's the count now of astronauts that have passed through the aero department?

SEAMANS: I don't know. The total count from MIT is equal to any other institution except the Naval Academy.

HOLLISTER: Well, I would say a milestone was when the Institute divested the Draper Lab.

WACHMAN: I think that was a major shock to the department.

HOLLISTER: The divestment of the Draper Lab--

WACHMAN: The divestment of the Draper Lab.

HOLLISTER: --separating away from the department.

WACHMAN: Yeah, that's right.

DRAPER: The laboratory has followed a trail that I suppose I started, probably by accident, I don't know, that had, as its primary idea, that human beings should be allowed to work on anything that seemed to be worthwhile and they had enough steam to want to do by themselves.

And their success or failure was always judged on one thing and only one thing. And that is whether they made something that was of enough use to somebody on the outside so that we could get some money paid into our resources to keep us going.

HOLLISTER: People asked me, what do you like about the aero department? Why have you been here all your life? And I think it was the standard that he set for camaraderie. He didn't ever told you what to do. He sort of said, you know, you just do it well. And he gave you a very free rein.

INTERVIEWER: What did you do differently from what other people were doing at that time?

DRAPER: I simply made things that worked.