High tech 60 years ago

But where's your calculator??

 

Slide rule...

 

The supervisors were STILL dressing like that when I hired on in the 80's.

 

I like it.

Serious look for serious business.

 

When I started in 1974, the only difference from that photo is that the shirts were no longer white. Ties, nice pants and nice shoes were still standard at the time, and we still worked at drawing boards, though all but the diehards now had calculators.

By the time I got to Boeing in 1979, "casual Fridays" were becoming common, with jeans, sneakers and no ties. At Boeing, though, by the time I left in late 1980, that was almost becoming everyday for some. I still wore nice pants and shoes but had ditched the ties by then. And button-down shirts were increasingly being replaced by polo shirts. Oh yeah, the first CAD systems (CADAM at Lockheed and Grumman, Gerber IDS at Boeing) were coming on line, but they were in separate "scope rooms", away from our desks.

Today I wear polos, jeans and sneakers almost exclusively, as do most others, though a very few insist on white shirts, ties, and nice pants and shoes, but those guys look rather out of place today. And we all sit in cubicles with our computer on our desk. Only the engineering checkers still have drawing boards.

 

I worked in the 10-16 building in Renton (which I believe Boeing still occupies), but my group at that time moved to one of the new office buildings built for the program (40-87 or 40-88) in Everett.

The funny thing is that on the day I was packing my stuff to leave and return to Grumman, all of my cronies were packing their stuff to move to the new building in Everett! So what I was doing wasn't any different from anyone else around me. This was in January of 1993, by the way.

If I had stayed long enough to make the move to Everett myself, I figure that I would have kept my apartment in Factoria and taken the bus to the Everett plant from the Wilburton park-and-ride, which was about a mile north of my apartment just off I-405. Although a long bus ride every day doesn't really sound like fun, I would at least have liked to have tried it for a while.

 

Here are a couple of columns that I wrote about 11 years ago for the newsletter of the Atlanta section of the AIAA. I describe what it was like to be a new aerospace engineer fresh out of college back in 1974!

What's particularly amusing concerns the first task I was given to do: making a 3D model. Today we would do that on a computer, but in 1974? Cardboard and clay!
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Actually the man in the photo looks quite up-to-date with 2015. Cuffs and skinnies. Hair is slightly hipster though

 

Now THAT's funny!
I had breakfast with him this morning and he is still rocking the "hipster" hair.
I guess he was a little ahead of his time.

 

+1

I'm also struck by how small the turbine looks.
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Not as much difference if the big fan is removed...

 

Remember, the JT3C was only good for about 13,000 lb of thrust (which is why they had to use water injection on takeoff). Today's high-bypass engines beat that by over 100,000 lb!

 

Core power goes as a square of diameter x the fan pressure ratio change......

If the core diameter is twice that of the JT-3 the power is 4 times, and then multiply that by the fan pressure ratio.. (the old turbojet didn't have a fan).. If the FPR is 1.3 and the core is twice the diameter (which it probably is close to), then the fuel burn for the same temperature is almost 5 to 6 times that of the older engine...

Add to that the fact that the fact that modern engines have much higher pressure ratio and expand the gasses more, (a gain of close to 50% likely) as well as having much higher temperature (better thermal efficiency) and you could easily see that the big fan engine would make somewhere near 8 or 9 times the power of the early turbojet... Which it probably does..

 

I agree! That was one of the better tech explanations I have read in a while.

 

Don't worry, the hair style will be given a new name inside of 5 years.
The "hipster" trend is dieing out.....

 

Pictures, got to have pictures!

 

There is a good one in the back of his book.

 

Bob- Good looking family.