I was on top of the world. At least that’s what it felt like, having gone as high as I could go in my chosen career field without more impressive credentials. I poured myself a cup of engineering room brew, filled a chair in the Project Manager’s office, and settled down for a chat.
“Am I smart?” I muttered—a query more floated on the air than asked. Jack Cherne, our grand old man, chief engineer of the NBCRS (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Reconnaissance 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 shot me a smirk, leaned back, hands cradling the nape of his fuzzy old neck, and crossed his ankles. Comfort arranged and assured, he proceeded to pontificate.
“Not bull-dozer intelligent—but clever. I’ll grant you that. A clever girl you are.” He elaborated his contention, but I wasn’t listening. I was busy fuming. It was the kind of sexist, ageist, grandfatherly benevolent statement I should have expected, but given all that had so recently occurred, I had hoped for more. Jack had seen it all, knew it all, and helped our team 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 development of the NBCRS sampler concept than any other program participant. But I was a long way from being sure of myself. I wouldn’t be arguing with Jack that day—or any day.
NBCRS as it relates to me, a very small fish in that pond, started with announcement of the program, to be proposed as a bid package to the US Army’s Tank and Automotive Command (TACOM). 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 any suspected death zone.
A well-connected whiz-bang design engineer, Colin Hart, had been posted to our team, with the assumption he would control the concept phase of the work. But even so, King assured all of 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. We 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 tome, even just paper bound, weighed nearly four pounds on the mail-room scale. With all those requirements and parameters swimming in my brain, any possibility that fit seemed too complicated. I futzed with the problem but scribed not a single line. Some guys drew up a storm but were disqualified because they hadn’t read 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— 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 produces 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” cranium.
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 scored 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 luck an assist, grabbing that chair before somebody else beat me to it. 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 endless tech-speak. Surrounded by colleagues, I defended my well-positioned seat, and 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, mounted at the rear of the M-113, drag through a dirty battlefield. Two flexible smooth silicone rubber ropes pass through the springs protruding to acquire contaminants while sliding along suspect terrain. When one spring is up, presenting its sample to the on-board spectrophotometer for on-the-move analysis, the other spring is down, trailing along possibly contaminated ground. The cycle assures that one spring or the other is always down, guaranteeing 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 that length of rope and jettisons it. The entire cycle is automated under on-board command and control.
Satisfied with my sketch, I tapped Mr. Cherne’s shoulder and pointed to my busy napkin. He glanced down, raised eyebrows, leaned in, and began puzzling it out. He took the napkin and spread it flat between our two breakfast plates. Nobody seemed to notice our quiet whispers. Then he nodded, pocketed the napkin, and went back to following the blow-by-blow of the PDR. I had no idea what he was thinking but he seemed mellow as he sat there smoothing his beard hairs.
The prepared PDR mostly described the plan to place a soldier in survival gear on his belly and working with gloved hands that protruded from the back of the unit, manually sampling what was passing below. It seemed a cumbersome even dangerous way to do the job, and I hoped they would stir about for something more elegant.
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, as Program Manager, to make a summation. He rose and bounded up to the speaker’s platform, his gait belying any assumption he might be operating past his prime. He pulled the inked napkin out of his suit coat pocket and announced what was going to happen next. His eyes sparkling, he waved my scribbled napkin and told a story of a girl with an idea—one he called amazing. What he described was what we had just whispered about over bacon, eggs, and hash browns. Had he called me a woman instead of a girl, I would have been ecstatic.
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 of plan. Poor Colin never even got to mount the stage. His clunker disappeared and was never heard from again. I was left to suffer with my guilt for having disadvantaged a good engineer who simply had a bad day, as well as delighting in my glee from selling my own bright idea. Things are never 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-staff presentation device and became an excuse for 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 grasp the connection and suffer attendant embarrassment. My introduction to such inappropriate confabulation started in a 1968 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 prurient detail just what happened during the subject exchange. I cringe in remembrance.
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 personally. Working in support of production always had offered opportunities for building bright ideas into hardware while shepherding the entire project through completion and implementation. NBCRS was my first time stepping into design of actual product, not just tooling, for the military industrial complex. I had to move over and share clout. It wasn’t my baby—only my invention.
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 to be. When my Dad and I had worked an idea, we just drew it, built it, tested it, and let ‘er rip. 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. TRW 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 were OK, 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 Redondo Beach and Space Park in a mere thirty-seven minutes. The security guard got to know me as the lady who just couldn’t wait to get to work every morning.
I soon understood the drill. I was to produce scale layouts of concepts. The detail drafting was swiftly assigned to drawing experts who had been generating military specs since first they hired on as career drafters. They were amazing! They grabbed my sampler machine scale 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 string 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 very, very good.
It was too good to last forever. We turned s completed NBCRS prototype over to the Army. I would never know how it fared on the field of battle. 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 battlefield. 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, generating a CAD scale layout that proved how parts were failing to properly interact. The U S of A cannot have the doors falling off its missile deployments. I ended up with a box of drawing copies and an answer. A letter to my department manager finalized the assignment, and I was on to the next thing.
Proposals were the best. A group of creatives were chosen, isolated under security detail, and given budget and time to dream up a proposed design. Proposal assignment was opening a door to possibility. It was 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 or assign any territorial imperitive. 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 might be a problem or how it might be done better. 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 wiped her eyes following a walking of the walls. She was irate that I had prevailed in my unique concept for an electrical network. I had no right, certainly no electrical creds, but my concept was better. I won. It’s too 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 altercation between two assertive educated women on such a once forbidden platform. In spite of ourselves, we remained friends.
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 machine-busy and budget-justified. 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 full salary but did essentially nothing to earn it. And I wasn’t learning a thing. That was the hardest part.
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 more than a 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.
******** THE END *******
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)
Read Full Post »