TRW Inc. was an American corporation involved in a variety of businesses, mainly aerospace, automotive, and credit reporting. It was a pioneer in multiple fields including electronic components, integrated circuits, computers, software and systems engineering. TRW built many spacecraft, including Pioneer 1, Pioneer 10, and several space-based observatories.
The company was founded in 1901 and it lasted for more than a century until being acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2002. It spawned a variety of corporations, including Pacific Semiconductors, the Aerospace Corporation, Bunker-Ramo, Experian, and TRW Automotive, which is now part of ZF Friedrichshafen. TRW veterans were instrumental in the founding of corporations like SpaceX.
In 1953, the company was recruited to lead the development of the United States’ first ICBM. Starting with the initial design by Convair, the multi-corporate team launched Atlas in 1957. It flew its full range in 1958 and was then adapted to fly the Mercury astronauts into orbit. TRW also led development of the Titan missile, which was later adapted to fly the Gemini missions. (Wikipedia)
“Am I smart?” I mused—a question more floated balloon-like onto the air than asked. Jack Cherne, our grand old man, chief engineer of the NBCRS (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Reconaissance System) was the object of my question. TRW (Thompson Ramo Wooldridge) had just successfully completed the DOD (Department of Defense) top secret program and we were heady with success. He gave me a smirk, leaned back, hands cradling the nape of his neck, crossed his ankles, and proceeded to pontificate.
“Not bull-dozer intelligent—but clever. I’ll grant you that. A clever girl you are.”
It was the kind of sexist, ageist, grandfatherly benevolent expression I should have expected, but given all that had so recently occurred I hoped for more. Jack had seen it all, knew it all, and helped us get through it all. If I could get a straight answer from anybody, it would be from him. I was forty-seven, hardly a girl, and more of me had adhered to the NBCRS sampler concept than any other program participant. But I was a long way from being sure of myself.
NBCRS for me, a very small fish in this ocean, started with announcement of the program, to be proposed as a bid package to TACOM (Tank and Automotive Command) of the US Army. When Bill King our department manager announced the proposal, everyone was jazzed. He framed it as a design contest. Any and all of us were welcome to submit ideas. The task was to gut and refurbish an M-113 APC (Armored Personnel Carrier) so as to render it capable of entering a contaminated environment, collect samples, test them, and mark safe routes through the suspected death zone.
A well-connected whiz-bang design engineer, Colin Hartwell, had been posted to our team, with the assumption he would control the concept phase of the work. But even so, King assured us that our input was solicited and would be given the credence it deserved. Our group, always responsible for hardware design, caught the cresting wave of his excitement. All of us departed the meeting deep in thought. The next few weeks went by with several preliminary layouts rising to a level of interest but eventually set aside. I thought a lot about the problem, spending many hours digesting the customer specification from TACOM that weighed nearly four pounds on the mail-room scale. With all those requirements and parameters swimming in my head, any possibility that fit seemed too complicated. I played with the problem but scribed not a single line. Some guys drew up a storm but were disqualified because they hadn’t internalized the spec.
Colin jumped right onto a computer terminal and began his layout, making the most of our CADAM (Computer Augmented Design and Manufacturing) system. His layout took shape, looked impressive, and eventually usurped a table in the design bay as a full scale prototype. I watched him assemble what seemed to be coming together as a Rube Goldberg joke, with way too many parts, that relied way too much on what produced falling apples. This machine was to traverse a battlefield environment. Gravity was not assured to be ever on our side in a conflict. Finally a simpler better solution began to swim into my clever girl consciousness.
On the day of our PDR (Preliminary Design Review), I woke up early, buzzing with an idea that seemed like it could do the job and would leave nothing to the vagaries of falling fruit. It was not yet committed to paper, but I was full to bursting with “possible.” The breakfast meeting started on time. I lucked out with a seat next to the old man. Getting the ear of such a power broker was something that didn’t happen to me—to people like me—a woman. Maybe I gave that luck an assist, grabbing that chair before somebody else could. I don’t even remember. But there I was; there all of us were. The meeting played itself out. We ate our eggs and Canadian bacon, drank a good many cups of Hyatt coffee, and commenced listening to a litany of tech-speak. Even so, my eyes did not glaze over. During the entire presentation, I was hard at work.
My breakfast napkin, flattened and smoothed, served as a platen for a coalescing concept. A Hyatt logo pen sketched this graphic: Two gear-rotated garage door style springs, protruding from the back of the M-113, drag through a dirty battlefield and trail two flexible smooth silicone rubber ropes that protrude from inside the springs and acquire contaminants as they slide along the terrain. When one spring is up, presenting the sample to the on-board spectrophotometer for analysis, the other spring is down, trailing along possibly contaminated ground. The cycle assures that one spring or the other is always down, assuring that no opportunity to sample contamination is missed. The rubber rope is fed from two pre-wound cassettes, unrolling from their pockets recessed in the floor of the vehicle, played out continuously through the two reciprocating-arc spring arms. After each sample is processed, an automatic cutoff severs each length of rope and jettisons it. The entire cycle is automated under on-board command and control.
I tapped Mr. Cherne on the shoulder and pointed to my inked napkin. He looked, raised his eyebrows, leaned in, and began puzzling it out, thoughtfully scratching his beard. He took the napkin and spread it flat between our eggy plates. Nobody seemed to notice our whispered conversation. Then he pocketed the napkin and went back to following the blow by blow of the PDR.
I sat, mentally castigating myself for being so late to the table of bright ideas. Colin was all set to present his layout, and I was literally nowhere. After several more managers had their say, it was Jack’s turn. He rose, bounded up to the speaker’s platform, his gait belying any assumption he might be past his prime. He pulled my napkin out of his pocket and announced what was going to happen next. His eyes sparkling, he waved the napkin and told his story of a girl with a winner of an idea. He described the concept we had just hashed out over bacon, eggs, and hash browns.
The Bird Colonel, who was the planned recipient of all this information, seemed to enjoy the nerdy irony of it all, and approved the change in plan. Poor Colin never even got to mount the stage. His klunker disappeared and was never heard from again. I was left to suffer with my guilt for having disadvantaged a good engineer who just happened to have a bad day. Then I had to deal with the hypocrisy of “suffering” a turn of events about which I was secretly ecstatic. Why can’t things just be simple?
The entire program was similarly and delightfully fraught. It was concept development of the sort inventors dream about. Every problem encountered was but an opportunity for another wild ride. One of many examples was handling flag emplacement from within the sealed interior environment while dressed in Mop IV Gear (ie. sort of like a space suit.) My gadget presented a single flag staff directly into the gloved hand of the operator so he could then poke that staff into a cleverly constituted base that when deployed would hopefully self-right onto rough terrain. The flag shaft slid through the phallus-shaped shaft of my clever flag-pole presentation device and was the source of much ribald humor.
It’s interesting how often sexual ideation enters production of creative hardware design. Male and female screw threads have ever been the subject of lascivious palaver. I don’t know if this is a universal. I can only attest to my own odd proclivity to see the connection and suffer attendant embarrassment. My introduction to such inappropriate invention started in an organic chemistry class at the University of Dallas. The professor insisted on investing every atom with a male or female gender identity depending on its plus or minus charge status. He then would describe in excruciatingly prurient detail just what happened during the subject exchange. That was one over-sexed professor. Perhaps he needed a date. Who knows?
The NBCRS Surface Sampler was detailed precisely from my coffee-stained napkin sketch, which I quickly turned into a complete CADAM scale layout. It was an education for me, a designer who was used to managing development of my inventions all by myself. Working in support of production always offers opportunities for building bright ideas into hardware while shepherding the entire project into completion and implementation. NBCRS was my first time stepping into design of actual product, not just tooling, for the military industrial complex.
It was a different world. Every item no matter how inconsequential had to be documented, specified, enumerated, sequenced, and controlled, as part of the system of military specification. I had no idea how complex this was. When my Dad and I had worked an idea, we just drew it, built it, tested it, and let it fly. This was something else entirely.
Every system, every assembly, every component, no matter how small, had its own drawing and number that defined and controlled it, positioning it in the overarching tree of military/industrial graphics. Such stringent detail wasn’t my cup of tea. They knew it; I knew it. I didn’t complain when they gave me a quiet corner for dreaming up new ideas, more exciting stuff to prototype. I was happy. Some days I didn’t lay a single line—just stared down a blinking screen. They didn’t mind, as long as those wildebeest kept stampeding across my river. Bill King let me change my schedule, coming in at six am while the city slept, and I made the trip from Orange County to Space Park in a mere thirty-seven minutes. The security guard got to know me as the lady who couldn’t tell night from day. Was I the first person to arrive every morning in that massive high-rise? I don’t know. I should have asked him.
I soon understood the drill. I was to produce scale layouts of concepts. The detail drafting got swiftly assigned to drawing experts who had been generating military specs since they hired on as career drafters. They were amazing! They grabbed my sampler machine layout and ran with it. I, on the other hand, accepted the obvious: TRW was willing to let me do what I do. I began managing the sampling piece of the NBCRS program. Being involved at that level opened the way to a panoply of afterthoughts. CADAM and I drew them up, and they were soon prototypes. I was having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have. At 2:30 every afternoon I got to leave for the day. Life was good.
It was too good to last forever. We turned NBCRS over to the Army. I would never know how it fared in the world of war. Just because the sampler was my baby doesn’t mean I should be allowed to monitor its career. My Top Secret clearance wasn’t enough. “Need to Know” was also a requirement. I had absolutely no need to keep up with its exploits on the modern battlefront. I dutifully filled out the Invention Disclosure form, relinquishing forever whatever perceived interest I may have had in the machine, and that was that.
Other programs came and went. For a while I had to figure out why the doors fell off the Peacekeeper missile every time it was fired. It involved digging deep into controlling documents, analyzing the hardware they described, and proving how parts were failing to properly interact. The U S of A cannot have the doors falling off their missile deployments. I ended up with a box of drawings and an answer. A letter to my department manager finalized the assignment, and I was on to the next thing.
Proposals were the best. Assignment to a proposal was opening a door to creative possibility. It was new and undefined. That was understood. A customer specification controlled, but it said what it must do, not how. That was up to us. We hashed that out among ourselves. Each team member was expected to bring a certain area of expertise to the endeavor, but that didn’t confer any power. The strength of any idea was inherent. I hung my concepts on the wall, in the spot designated for my part of the effort. Once every day, the entire cohort “walked the walls.” Anyone could ask questions. Anyone could answer them. Anyone could suggest changes or explain why something could be a problem. I, a mere BS, could take to task a PhD or any level of manager if I could marshal my facts.
I will never forget the specter of a proposal manager consoling a BSEE (Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering) as she sobbed and rubbed her eyes following a walking of the walls. She was protesting that I shouldn’t have prevailed in my concept for an electrical network. I had no right, certainly no electrical creds, but my concept was better. I won. It made me feel bad that this work was so often a zero-sum-game, identifying a winner and a loser. There ought to be a way to define it as just progress. Even though I complain, we should celebrate such an argument between two assertive educated women on such a once forbidden platform.
What goes up must come down. A concept well accepted in aerospace. Politics change. Money disappears. RFP’s (Requests for Proposal) dry up, and people like Bill King must spend their days conjuring make-work to keep their people busy. Erstwhile program managers are spied pushing brooms down hallways. I was given stacks of drawings to be itemized as alpha-numeric lists on computers also being kept mercifully busy. It’s hard to be patient with make-work. Even harder to be grateful, since it was a sign they wanted to retain—not lay off. Weeks might go by while I drew my regular salary but did essentially nothing to earn it. And I wasn’t learning anything.
If I had been smart, I would have hung in there, been patient, where they liked my work and were willing to let me be just a little bit eccentric. But, like Jack Cherne maintained, I wasn’t smart, just clever. After only five years at TRW, I decided to throw it all up and buy a book store—another adventure entirely.