Charles Stark Draper

Charles Stark Draper (born Oct. 2, 1901, Windsor, Mo., U.S.—died July 25, 1987, Cambridge, Mass.) was an American aeronautical engineer, educator, and science administrator. Draper’s laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was a centre for the design of navigational and guidance systems for ships, airplanes, and missiles from World War II through the Cold War. Combining basic research and student training and supported by a network of corporate and military sponsors, the laboratory was one of the proving grounds for post-World War II Big Science.

Draper received a B.A. in psychology from Stanford University in 1922. He then enrolled at MIT and earned a B.S. in electrochemical engineering in 1926. He remained at MIT to do graduate work in physics and soon demonstrated his precocity as both a researcher and entrepreneur. As a graduate student he became a national expert on aeronautical and meteorological research instruments. The Instruments Laboratory (I-Lab), which he founded in 1934, became a centre for both academic and commercial research, a combination that was not unusual at the time. It was through the I-Lab that Draper established a relationship with the Sperry Gyroscope Company (now part of Unisys Corporation). Though they would later become competitors, Sperry provided critical support for the fledgling laboratory and jobs for Draper’s graduate students. Draper also operated a consulting business that further extended his academic and industrial connections. Appointed to the MIT faculty in 1935, he was promoted to professor after receiving his Doctor of Science degree in 1938.

With the start of World War II, Draper turned to developing antiaircraft weapons. The airplane had emerged as a critical weapon of modern warfare, and fighters proved too fast and agile for traditional fire-control systems. With support from Sperry and MIT, Draper and his students designed and built the Mark 14 gyroscopic lead-computing gunsight. Based on a radical new spring mechanism, the gunsight calculated an aircraft’s future position, taking into account gravity, wind, and distance. Overcoming the problems posed by the production of the sight demanded that Sperry hire Draper’s students to oversee the manufacturing process, while Draper trained naval officers in the newly renamed Confidential Instruments Development Laboratory on the use of the new sight. By war’s end more than 85,000 Mark 14 sights had been built and installed on American and British warships, making it by far the most popular sight of its kind used by Allied navies during World War II.

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After World War II Draper’s interests expanded beyond the development of antiaircraft fire-control systems for capital ships and gunsights to the development of self-contained navigation systems for aircraft and missiles. During World War II radar and other radio- and microwave-based technologies had greatly increased the ability of aircraft to navigate to their targets under various weather conditions and with an unprecedented degree of accuracy. However, these systems were vulnerable to enemy jamming and provided foes with an electromagnetic phantom to track and attack. Other methods of aerial navigation, such as celestial navigation, produced no signals but depended upon the skillful use of instruments and the cooperation of the weather. As the Soviet Union became the main enemy of the United States in the postwar period, the development of a navigation system for aircraft and missiles that did not need external referents or trained humans became a national research priority. Working first with gyroscopes insulated in a climate-controlled viscous fluid and later with accelerometers, Draper developed entirely self-contained inertial guidance systems. These machines were so precise that they could compute a vehicle’s exact position from its initial position and acceleration; needing no further inputs, they were invulnerable to enemy countermeasures. The first experimental systems for aircraft, Projects FEBE and SPIRE, were tested in 1949 and 1953. Production systems were installed in aircraft and submarines beginning in 1956 and in the Polaris missile in 1960. The “black boxes” of spinning gyroscopes and integrating circuits developed by Draper and his students were eventually deployed in the Air Force’s Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles and the Navy’s Poseidon and Trident missiles, placing them at the core of the U.S. thermonuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

Inertial guidance provided a solution to critical technical problems in Cold War nuclear strategy. Equally important to its popularity and success was Draper’s training of civilian and military engineers, who learned his methods, became disciples of self-contained navigation, made his systems work in the field, and awarded the I-Lab contracts. With the creation of the Weapons System Engineering Course in 1952, Draper institutionalized one mechanism for the development of a technological intelligentsia within the armed services and made the lab a centre for producing both guidance systems and the people to use them. Graduates of the program were among inertial guidance’s most enthusiastic supporters and sources for Laboratory contracts, and they supervised the development of the nation’s intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic systems that used inertial systems. It was a Draper graduate, Robert Seamans, who gave the I-Lab the contract for the development of the Apollo program guidance system that successfully guided Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon and back.

Students, precision machinery, personal relationships, and federal patronage in civilian and military form made Draper a towering figure in 20th-century engineering and engineering education. Ironically, at the height of his success, in the late 1960s, both he and the I-Lab became the focus of inquiry into the effects of military patronage on MIT. After much protesting by antiwar activists and internal discussion among faculty and administrators, MIT decided in 1970 to divest itself of the laboratory. It was renamed the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc., and moved off campus in 1973. For a man who was first and foremost a teacher, it was the most undeserved of fates, especially at the institute whose modern form he had done so much to shape. Nonetheless, Draper’s career reflected one of the fundamental changes in 20th-century academia: the transformation of academic research into big business supported by the armed services and major corporations. In partial recognition of the scope and significance of Draper’s career, the National Academy of Engineering established the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 1988 to honour “innovative engineering achievement and its reduction to practice in ways that have contributed to human welfare and freedom.”