A S S E S S I N G    T H E    2 0 T H     C E N T U R Y

---

1940-50: WWII - A Leap Forward in Technology
There's not any doubt about what was the major event of the decade of the 1940s. World War II dominated this decade as no event dominated any other decade in the century.

This was the only all-out war in which the United States has been involved during the century. While the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Desert Storm Operation involved substantial numbers of people, they were not all-out efforts involving the entire population, and not every citizen was impacted.

During World War II, we stopped production of consumer goods -- people simply had to do without. We rationed gasoline, limiting people to just enough fuel to drive to work. We rationed meat, and many other food items were in short supply. Only those who lived through it can remember how difficult it was. Nothing like that happened during any of the other wars.

Also there were some very big wartime development projects, such as the Alcan Highway. The Japanese landed on a couple of islands in the Aleutians and there was concern that they would move down the Aleutians and capture Alaska and perhaps land along the Pacific coast of Canada and move south.

At that time we had no infrastructure in place to support an army defending Alaska. Thus, the Alcan Highway was built along an interior route across Canada as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska. It was a crude gravel road just barely adequate for delivering military equipment and supplies and men. In subsequent decades the highway was greatly improved and has provided great economic benefits that were not envisioned at the time.

Again motivated by wartime conditions, the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway was developed, which allowed ships to move along the Texas-Louisiana coast without going out into the open sea, where enemy submarines lurked. In later years the waterway was extended and was a vital factor in the development of the petrochemical industry from Texas to Florida.

Another big wartime development was called "the Manhattan project." This was a huge top-secret construction project that was located near the little town of Oak Ridge, Tenn. All the public knew about the project was that it was very large and very expensive. That secrecy continued throughout the war. Later, it was revealed as the production facility for our new atomic bomb.

There were many other spectacular technological developments during World War II. Wars accelerate technical progress, and nowhere is this more evident than in the field of aviation.

I just happened to be in a rare position to see that. As a young aeronautical engineering graduate, I had been assigned to the headquarters office of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), a quiet little agency that later would become NASA. We had as advisors such legends of aviation as Orville Wright -- yes, that's the real Orville Wright -- Howard Hughes and Jimmy Doolittle.

While at NACA, I saw an interesting paper by a young scientist named Arthur C. Clark, who suggested the possibility of a communications satellite. That proposal in the 1940s attracted absolutely no attention. In the 1990s I had an opportunity to visit with Arthur Clark in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where the famous science writer lives and works. We enjoyed talking about the technological ideas that when first aired attracted little or no attention but which later turned out to be pretty important.

This was the pattern with the jet engine. The first units were so feeble that few saw their potential. The Germans were first to put a jet-propelled airplane into combat service. They were followed by the British. The USA came a little later with an army aircraft.

The U.S. Navy was in a difficult position. With the early jet engines, it was impossible to launch a pure jet from a carrier. The Navy thus authorized the development of a fighter-type airplane that had two engines -- a conventional propeller engine in the nose and a jet engine in the tail. That airplane was the Ryan FR-1 Fireball.

I had the pleasure of being a project engineer on that airplane when it was tested in the world's largest wind tunnel at the NASA Ames Laboratory in California. It was an interesting airplane, but World War II ended before it went into service; so we'll never know how it would have performed in combat. Also, toward the end of the war, the Germans introduced rocket weapons, most notably the V-2, which caused great damage to London. This German technology would later be employed to launch the first U.S. space vehicles.

The immediate post-war period brought back into production the consumer goods that had been lacking during the war, and there was a great rush to get to market. I bought one of the first automobiles off the assembly line. It was a 1946 Ford just like their last pre-war model and cost about $900.

Electronic breakthroughs began to flow. Bell Laboratories invented the transistor. There were demonstrations of something called "television," and soon TV stations were being set up around the country to broadcast the new signals. We didn't fully appreciate it, but we were witnessing another revolutionary process of discovery and development.

One of the least significant events of the post-war period was the publication in 1947 of our paper "Geographical Distribution of Engineering Research and Related Industries in the United States." A crude piece of research by present standards, it was, however, the first attempt at documenting the new concept of "geo-economics." In later decades, this would become an important tool of development executives.