Spruce Goose

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This past weekend my youngest daughter and I flew to the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville Oregon. McMinnville is a small town in the Willamette Valley approximately 30 miles south west of Portland. The Evergreen Museum (they Tweet!) is a world class aviation museum and is the home of the Hughes H-4 better known as the Spruce Goose.

We were in the massive cargo area of the Spruce Goose listing to a volunteer, who happened to be a retired engineer. He was explaining to a young person in our group that all the calculations to design the massive plane were done with a slide rule. A 12-year-old girl asked what a slide rule was and the guide was attempting to explain what a slide looked like and how it worked. The more he talked the more confused she looked. Finally, I stepped in and said the best way to find out was "Just Google It." Later I saw her with her Smartphone looking on Wikipedia to find out how the slide rule worked.

Later in the day my daughter and I were looking at a SR-71 Blackbird and I mentioned that this plane was developed by Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works crew (See my November Blog) once again only using slide rules. Being a daughter of an engineer she had already listen to one of my demonstrations with a real slide rule in her youth so she had a better understanding of the accomplishment.

Later in the space portion of the museum, we saw the keyboard for the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) that was developed to program the computers on the Apollo command module and Lunar Excursion Module. It had 19 keys and weighed in at 21 pounds. The keyboard had a Verb key and a Noun Key. The Verb key instructed the computer that the next number sequence being entered by the astronaut was a computer instruction, and the noun key instructed the computer that the next number sequence was data. The information could be entered in either octal or decimal. No mouse, no screen, no window, just hard-core computing. The term user interface had not been invented yet. When using early computers you had to think like a computer and enter data like a computer. I would imagine that the astronauts spent many hours learning about and practicing using the Apollo Guidance Computer for their moon mission. The AGC was one of the first computers based on integrated circuits with over 2,800 individual integrated circuit chips connected to form the 2848 words or erasable memory and 36,000 words of read only memory. It was a marvel of science at the time, but now a computer like that would reside on a single chip and you would be hard pressed to find a single chip with so little memory.

After a day at the Evergreen Museum, I got into my airplane for the flight back to Olympia, WA. It is equipped with a Garmin G-1000 integrated glass cockpit. I started up the system, programmed my flight plan into the GPS, checked the current weather using satellite radio, activated my terrain warning and aircraft collision warning systems and then set off. Once I got to cruising altitude, I displayed the moving map, complete with the current satellite weather, and activated the autopilot to fly the plane back to Olympia. At Olympia, I loaded the instrument approach into the G-1000, set the autopilot to fly the approach and all I had to do was fly the last 200 ft until touchdown. This is far from the drama that Neal Armstrong experienced in the first moon landing.

No matter how old you are, it is amazing how much progress has been made in your lifetime.

As engineers we are able to perform very involved calculations on our computer (desktop, laptop, netbook, or smart phone), search the internet to select equipment from manufacturers supplied data, and then e-mail the design to the client for their review. All this without the need to use a slide rule (pre 1970), pocket calculator (circa 1974), programmable calculator (circa 1978), or microcomputer (circa 1980).

So next time you use your smart phone to, take a picture, create a video, video conference with your kids, get directions, access the internet, update Facebook, send a tweet, play a game, or even make a phone call think of the intrepid Apollo astronauts with their 22 pound AGC and their moon landing.

What common technology that you use everyday are you most astonished by, grateful for or just plain can’t live without? Let me know by leaving a comment or sending me an email to blogger @ eng-software.com.

Or better yet, maybe you have some gadget or technology that you’d like to tell everyone about in a full blog? We are welcoming guest bloggers. Just send us a message if you would be interested in becoming a guest blogger.