“Why,” I retorted, “that’s just what a navy is for—to keep peace.”
“Yassah, yassah,” Aunt Lucy persisted, fingering the gold pin on my best blouse, “but it jes’ seem to Aunt Lucy dat, now de Lord done gib yo’ wings, maybe yo’ might find better use for dem dan jes fightin’.”
The telephone jingled. Western Union had a wire for me. My wife was thrilled by the news of my gold wings; she had left for Washington to reopen the apartment.
CHAPTER TEN
The Take-off
Back in Washington, the admiral welcomed me with a grin and promptly assigned me a new job as Chief of the Airplane Design Section. This was a naval constructor’s stronghold, and even though we line officers had pretty well dominated design down in the Engine Section, I could have been made to feel like a blacksmith in a glassworks, had it not been for my new wings and my postgraduate engineering course under Dr. Lucke. But by now the vision he had foreseen had begun to come to pass: the “professors” and the “practical men” had got together in the person of the engineer, and the world was already on fire with new developments.
Among other things the great engineering societies, like the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Institute of Electrical Engineers, the Society of Civil Engineers, and others, had joined hands to build a new Engineering Societies’ Building on 39th Street in New York City, where they had their several offices and conducted their technical sessions. One of these societies extended an invitation to Admiral Moffett to address a joint session on naval aviation and the admiral passed the job of writing the screed on to me. But when I handed the finished product over to him, he glanced at the title “Power Plants for Aircraft,” and grinned.
“You read it,” he directed.
I read it at a session at Pennsylvania State College and afterward, to my surprise, learned that it had won some kind of award. To receive this prize, I attended a session in the New York auditorium of the society’s building and in the course of a little talk, told the story of how George Mead and I, after the “invention” of the air-cooled engine, had discovered its prototype in the Smithsonian Institution in the power plant of the early Langley airplane, the Manly engine. There was a disturbance in the back of the auditorium and a member stood up to remark that Mr. Charles M. Manly was right there in the audience. Amid the shouts that followed, Mr. Manly was belatedly revealed as a great pioneer.
In addition to the journals and technical papers of the booming American societies, we received the best articles from foreign countries. Among these, the Royal Aeronautical Society of London furnished almost world leadership, while the English magazine, The Airplane, edited by an outspoken character, C. G. Grey, published stimulating news and comment. Articles in German and French were translated and distributed through BUAERO in such profusion that it required a lot of homework just to keep up with the ever-changing nomenclature of a rapidly growing art. The most scientific writings came to us from the British National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, but gradually our own committee with the same name began to forge to the front with selected articles and digests of the best laboratory reports from all over the world.