Strange Angel (15 page)

The Rocket Research Group continued their experiments throughout the fall of 1936. On November 15, using a spark plug instead of a fuse, they managed to light the rocket for five seconds. But it burned with a high yellow flame, indicating incomplete combustion, and there was little noise. Seconds later the oxygen line caught fire, again clogging all the motor's parts with burnt rubber. By the end of November the rocket motor was repaired and ready for another test. New nozzles had been made and copper tubing replaced the rubber. This time the motor fired with a great noise for a full twenty seconds, straining against the stand. The rocketeers could hardly believe their eyes or ears. When the rocket finally sputtered to a halt, Parsons, Malina, Forman, and Smith crawled from behind their sandbags and cheered wildly.

On January 16, 1937, amidst an epidemic of flu at Caltech, the exhausted rocketeers made their fourth test. It was the best yet as the rocket motor fired for forty-four seconds straight. They prepared their results—listing the fuel and oxygen pressures, the varying pressures inside the motor, the height and color of the flame, the different thrusts gained with different nozzles—and placed them in front of Kármán. The Hungarian professor was impressed. Since they seemed to be serious about experimenting, he said he would allow them to conduct small-scale rocket motor tests on campus, rather than far away in the Arroyo. It was a decision he would come to regret.

 

As the rocket group rejoiced in their first success, Parsons received a visit from a man he had never met—his father, Marvel Parsons. In the immediate years after leaving Los Angeles, Marvel had lived a picaresque life. He had joined the army, becoming a champion shot, and had been part of the United States force that had chased the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa across Mexico. He had worked his way up the ranks to become a major in the coast artillery corps, a branch of the army responsible for setting up defensive forts at strategic points along the United States coast. He had also remarried and had another son, Charles. Along with his family he had been sent to serve in the Philippines for two years. When he returned to the United States, Marvel felt he should reintroduce himself to his long lost son.

Up until this point the fourteen-year-old Charles Parsons had never been told of his father's other family. “[It] came as a total and complete surprise,” he remembered. This visit was the only time that Charles would meet his half brother. Parsons showed Charles and their father his home laboratory and introduced them to Helen (though Marvel's former wife, Ruth, did not make an appearance). It was an awkward visit. “We didn't even stay for a meal,” remembered Charles. Helen remembered how Jack seemed strangely unaffected by meeting his father. “He wasn't touched by the visit. I don't think he was touched by anything that wasn't the moon.”

What Marvel thought about the meeting is unknown, for it was not long after this visit that he fell victim to a strange psychosis that would cloud the last years of his life and prevent any further reconciliation with his son. He suffered a heart attack and, because of a mistaken diagnosis, was given twenty-four hours to live. Marvel physically recovered within several weeks, but his mind was forever colored by what the doctors had told him. His date with death postponed, Marvel became fixated on his own mortality. His hospital record reports that he “persisted in the belief that his death was imminent ... He showed considerable emotional instability, would cry very readily, had ideas of unworthiness, felt himself incapable of discharging his duties ... He believed something was escaping from his chest ... He suffered from marked mental depression and exhibited definite delusions and hallucinations.” He attempted suicide and was committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., suffering from “melancholia.” He would spend the rest of his life there, sharing the wards with 7,000 disturbed others—among them the poet Ezra Pound—in a permanent state of depression. He was not even given the satisfaction of an accurate prophecy. He finally died from meningitis in 1947 and was buried in Arlington Cemetery.

Parsons would see his father once more when he traveled to Washington, D.C., on business in 1943. The experience would not be a pleasant one. “I have seen my father,” he wrote to Helen; “he was sadly ill. It was a bit of a shock.” He would not have appreciated the fact that the sole legacy left him by his father was the specter of mental illness lurking deep in the recesses of his imaginative mind.

 

Back at Caltech, the rocketeers were celebrating their coup. Their work could hardly be ignored by the scientific establishment once it was happening on campus. They would now try to build bigger and more powerful rocket motors; perhaps they might even impress someone enough to gain some funding, for the project was still being paid for entirely out of the rocketeers' own pockets. They were cutting back on all but necessities. Cigarette butts were being carefully hoarded and the tobacco rerolled; trips to classical music concerts were completely curtailed. But the privations did not seem to touch Parsons. As he would later write, his rocketry work was the only thing he was willing “to go without food and sleep, work like hell, throw money and cut throats for.” When she could, Helen, who continued to work at her stepfather's business, would bail out the rocketeers with cash advances. At one point Parsons even persuaded her to pawn the diamond engagement ring he had given her for a few hundred dollars. Helen's finger would be intermittently lighter for years to come.

Once, when the ring was in the pawnshop and Parsons was still short of the money for a particular rocket part, Helen got her revenge. Refusing to lend him any more money until her house was cleaned from top to bottom, she forced Parsons and Forman to tie on pinafores and do the dusting and sweeping to earn their money. Helen made sure that every part of the house was spotless before she handed them the five dollars they needed for their rocket part.

When Helen had no more money to give, Parsons was forced back into extended stays at the powder companies. He would spend weeks at a time away from Pasadena, working twelve-hour shifts. In the evenings he would sit, with his pipe in hand—a new affectation—and write long melancholy letters back to Helen in Pasadena, telling her how “fed up + disgusted” he was with his life.

He began suggesting “more practical + remunerative ways to make money” and listed new businesses that the two of them should start up together: an exclusive lending library, a perfumery, a pipe shop, a restaurant, or a garden supplying florists. The list seemed to reflect Parsons' own favored inclinations rather than the practicality of such ventures. “Am kicking myself for a prize sap. I could have looked for any kind of job in a perfume—cosmetic or drug plant—or book store ... If I had worked on that like the rocket we would probably be on top now, and I would be farther with the rocket.”

Despite the complaints and his grim surroundings, there was still room for his usual lyricism. “I saw the sun set over the ocean. It was gold, + the clouds were black + fringed with gold, + black and gold rays streamed up across the sky; it was as though alchemistic doors were ajar briefly during some Tremendous Transmutation.” And there were still words of gentleness to Helen. “Goodnight—dear—live as I do in the time when we will be together—work with me to make it soon.”

 

By April 1937, the group had attracted a new member, a Chinese graduate student named Tsien Hsue-shen. Slight, short, and impeccably neat, Tsien arrived at Caltech in 1936. His remarkable aptitude for mathematics prompted Kármán to take him under his wing immediately, and Tsien swiftly became one of his star pupils. However, his aristocratic manner—he was descended from the tenth-century emperor Qian Liu Tsien—rankled the other graduate students. “He was [a] very stubborn, very individualistic fellow,” remembered his roommate at Caltech, Shao-wen Yuan. “He always thought he was right, and usually he was. But he made a lot of enemies.” This air of superiority gained the twenty-five-year-old Tsien the nickname “Son of Heaven.”

Tsien shared an office on campus with Apollo Smith, who had himself grown tired of Tsien being “not talkative” and “really arrogant.” Nevertheless, when Malina came to talk to Smith about rockets, Tsien could not help but be intrigued. Some of his haughtiness resurfaced when he found out that two untrained, non-Caltech members had initiated the project, but he managed to work with them as best he could. “His attitude to Parsons and Forman would have been...'they couldn't understand what he was doing anyway', but he didn't ostracize himself from them,” remembered Malina. Although Tsien shied away from experimentation, he could be found working feverishly on the project in his study, making calculations and developing theories on the technical aspects of rocket flight, such as the air resistance on a rocket moving at high speed and the effects of exhaust nozzle angles on motor thrust. The group's research, their correspondence with the other rocket groups, and the results of their previous experiments were incorporated into a bulky, loose-leaf volume which they called the “Bible.” They were beginning to build a sizeable background of original material to work with, even if the operation was still destitute.

 

There are times in the struggles of scientific pioneers when something akin to divine providence plays a hand. In late April, Malina gave a talk on the rocketeers' findings to Caltech's weekly seminar program for engineers and science students. He thought nothing more of it until two weeks later when he was approached by Weld Arnold, an assistant from Caltech's astrophysical laboratory. Arnold had been fascinated by the talk, he said. Then he coolly offered Malina the unbelievable sum of $1,000 to aid the rocketeers in the continuation of their work. There was one condition: He could join the project as official photographer.

Malina and the others were amazed, not only by the size of the donation but by its source. None of the rocketeers seem to have known Weld Arnold in the slightest. He was, after all, twenty years older than them. What's more, Arnold was hardly a typical benefactor. He rode his bicycle the five miles from his home in Glendale to Caltech every day, and his job as a laboratory assistant was hardly well paying. That did not keep the rocketeers from accepting the gift with alacrity. Mindful of endangering this mysterious windfall, they decided not to ask questions about its provenance. And Arnold did not even hint at the money's source. A week after his proposition, he returned to Malina with the first five hundred dollars in a bundle of one-and five-dollar bills wrapped in newspaper. The other five hundred, he said, would follow shortly.

Malina immediately took the money to Clark Millikan, nonchalantly placed it on his desk, and asked how he could open up a fund with the institute for the use of rocket research. Millikan, who had spurned their project a year before, was “flabbergasted.” The money became known as the Weld Arnold Rocket Research Fund. The Rocket Research Group was now officially recognized by GALCIT not only as an affiliated project, but as a fully financed one as well. Its first members were Parsons, Malina, Forman, Tsien, Smith, and Arnold, their mysterious benefactor.

Their newfound solvency, however, did not do much to legitimize them in the eyes of many of their scientific peers. When Malina went to speak to Dr. Fritz Zwicky, a professor of physics and one of the most feared teachers on campus, about some of the theoretical problems their rocket research had posed, Zwicky erupted. Malina later recalled, “He told me I was a bloody fool, that I was trying to do something that was impossible, because rockets couldn't work in space.” It was the same erroneous argument that the
New York Times
had used to discredit Goddard back in the 1920s. Malina was chastened by the virulence of the attack, but not put off. Every other university in America still ignored rocketry as a legitimate science. Although the rocketeers had been brought into the fold, they were by no means part of the established scientific flock.

Arnold's beneficence allowed the group more time in between paid work to concentrate purely on constructing a new rocket motor and test apparatus. “The work is great fun,” wrote Malina to his parents; “we are looking forward to three weeks of head scratching.” They now planned to test various oxidizer-fuel combinations inside the venerable GALCIT building itself. The suspicious university authorities had been somewhat mollified by the rocketeers' insistence that they were only going to use a miniature motor to run the tests: Crafted by Forman, it had a nozzle less than an inch in diameter. Little did the powers-that-be know that the rocketeers had an uncanny ability to cause trouble, no matter the size of the rocket.

On a Saturday morning in August, when the GALCIT building was almost deserted, Parsons and Forman met in front of its imposing copper doors. Malina and Smith were off siphoning nitrogen tetroxide, to use as an oxidizer, from a cylinder that had been left for them on the lawn in front of the chemistry building. After extracting about a liter of the highly corrosive liquid, they tried to shut off the valve but found it jammed. Smith and Malina frantically tried to stop the fuming fluid from gushing out, but, overcome by toxic vapors, they were finally forced to retreat to a safe distance. They watched as the cylinder emptied its entire contents onto the prim green lawn, the grass wilting and turning brown in front of their eyes.

While Malina and Smith were discoloring Caltech's prized turf, Parsons and Forman had been erecting an extraordinary apparatus within the GALCIT building. It consisted of a fifty-foot pendulum which hung down the side of a narrow open staircase, from the third floor down to the basement. At the bottom of the pendulum, they bolted the tiny rocket motor, attached by tubes to the tanks of nitrogen tetroxide and methyl alcohol. When the motor fired, its thrust could be measured by gauging the distance the pendulum swung. The apparatus and procedure were an ingenious idea. However, almost as soon as the rocket was lit, it misfired—a seal broke, or a fuel line sprang free—and released a cloud of highly toxic, highly pressurized nitrogen tetroxide and alcohol. Once again the choking and spluttering rocketeers were forced to flee, and it was agreed that experiments should be halted for the day.