Last year the national Academy of Engineering presented its first Charles Stark Draper Award. Engineering's answer to the Nobel Prize, this $350,000 award is named after a man whose inventions permanently changed the world and whose ideas transformed engineering. Though he died three years ago at the age of 85, his influence continues through the hundreds of Draper-trained disciples in top military and industrial posts.
Draper was a small bulldog of a man, and his flattened nose and burly shoulders bespoke his six years as a collegiate boxer. Ever day for nearly forty years, students and colleagues gathered in his office at four to wrangle over a proposed change in the Apollo spacecraft or possible flaw in the design of a missile guidance system. Far from smoothing over differences, Draper deliberately fanned rival passions, pitting one colleague against another until tempers grew short.
Only when the discussion was no longer productive did he intervene. Carefully preserving the rule that no one in his lab stopped work before five, Draper would ignore the line of watches up his arm (which gave the correct time from Moscow to Muncie) and push a button beneath his desk. The clock on the wall obligingly jumped forward, and he would pull out a bottle marked Nonlinear Damping Fluid - a bottle whose contents bore a striking resemblance to Plymouth gin.
Draper insisted that his engineers get to know the whole of a project before dealing with the parts. But when it came to his own life, he dismissed the idea of a master plan. Circumstances, he insisted, not man, shape what we do.
"I saw a series of situations that needed attention and acted," he said in an unpublished interview in 1970, "…doing jobs that were of importance to someone at the time - gun-sights to protect battleships, inertial guidance, ballistic missiles - all new things."
I'm from Missouri - Show me!
Charles Stark Draper was born in the small country town of Windsor, Missouri, on October 2, 1901. His ex-schoolteacher mother had high standards for education, but the town's 120-student high school offered no physics, chemistry, trigonometry, or solid geometry. Thus, Draper's early formal education in science was rudimentary at best.
Too busy to pay much attention to school, he hardly noticed. He was a born tinkerer whose real education came from machines. "Things that interested me," he said, "were problems of physics and mechanics - things not found in books at that time."
He repaired old farm machinery and worked on the new four-cycle Model Ts and Dodges in the neighborhood. He kept his dentist father's office equipment running. He worked as a plumber's assistant and was a self-taught electrician. By the time he entered the University of Missouri at fifteen, he was well on his way to knowing how things work.
At a time when few could afford the luxury, his father paid for his schooling, not even balking at his wish to transfer to Stanford after two years at Missouri. With notions of becoming a medical doctor, Draper left for Palo
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