Strange Angel (9 page)

 

Underneath the seventeen signatures, representing the senior graduating class of the University School, he wrote, “Drawn by J. Parsons at the request of several students.” Parsons presented the letter to the headmaster as a direct challenge to his authority. The letter was not one to be taken lightly. With so few pupils, the departure of even one of the “young gangsters” (as Mrs. Richardson described them) would have had devastating consequences on the school's finances. But the rebellion appeared in another light a few days later when a penitent Parsons confessed to the Richardsons that Captain Miles had “forced” him to write the petition. Instead of being the head of the rebellion, he had merely been a pawn in someone else's power play. In her journal, Mrs. Richardson writes of certain of the signatories as “problem boys ... glad to gang-up. Others easily led by these toughies.” Parsons avoided the “problem boys” tag, but his tendency to be easily led by unscrupulous others would remain an indelible character flaw.

 

By 1932 the depression was at its worst. Twelve million people were unemployed in a country of 123 million, and the middle class were in danger of being completely wiped out. No new mansions had been built on Orange Grove since 1929, and now the giant homesteads were groaning under the weight of their domestic staff. Maids, butlers, cooks, washerwomen, chauffeurs, and Japanese gardeners were all reliant on the dwindling fortunes of the mansion owners. As the money disappeared, a slow trickle of unemployed workers began to flow out from Orange Grove.

Parsons, eighteen years old and the sole man in a family of two widows, had one more year of school to go, but the family's finances spurred him into action and out of the dreamworld he had been occupying for much of his childhood. “The loss of family fortune developed your sense of self-reliance at a critical period,” he wrote about himself in later life. “The contact with reality at this time was essential.” He found the perfect part-time job at the office of the Hercules Powder Company in Los Angeles. Hercules offered a treasure trove of explosives information and Parsons' curiosity was boundless. The company made ammonium nitrate for coal stripping, nitroglycerine for ditch blasting, gelatine for shaft sinking, and ammonia dynamite for road building; there had been a strong powder industry in California ever since its mining heyday, and every type of explosive, from firing caps to powder kegs, was on display and easily accessible.

Learning explosives lore from the other workers, Parsons soon discovered such essentials as the difference between a high explosive and a low explosive. A high explosive such as nitro-glycerine (the base constituent of dynamite, made by treating a natural by-product of the soap-making process, glycerine, with sulphuric and nitric acids) decomposes into gases in a few millionths of a second, about a thousand times faster than a low explosive such as black powder or gunpowder (traditionally made from a mixture of potassium nitrate, sulphur, and charcoal). Because of their rapid and violent detonation, high explosives are better suited to demolition work, while low explosives such as black powder are better used as a propellant, pushing projectiles out of gun barrels. Parsons was taught that making a good propellant is much harder than making a good high explosive, just as it is more difficult to sing softly or dance slowly, and he learned what ratio of ingredients, powder grain size, and density of packing would obtain the most powerful and the most reliable black powders. Parsons' discoveries were extremely important if he was to work out the best fuel for his rockets, and indeed it seems he often appropriated some of the company's explosives for his own private use. As he worked at the company on weekends and during the school holidays, his hobby slowly became a profession.

When he was not working at Hercules or going to class, Parsons would continue his experiments with Forman. Their working partnership was flourishing. Parsons would sketch drawings of the rocket and prepare the fuel, while Forman, his skills as a mechanic growing by the day, would build the rocket's outer shell. “Ed created Jack's thoughts,” recounted Helen Parsons; “he manifested what Jack would say.” Their aims were as lofty as any of the rocket societies: they wanted to create a rocket that could get to the moon. This ambition was often replaced by their enthusiasm to see the rocket fly regardless of what progress might be gained by it. The Parsons' backyard rapidly became as scarred and pockmarked as the lunar surface itself, and the two young men frequently drove out to the desert or wandered down into the Arroyo Seco to execute their tests.

Parsons graduated from the University School in the summer of 1933. In his yearbook he listed his theme song as “You Rascal, You.” In the immediate months after his graduation, he helped his mother and grandmother move to a modest new house on a street that ran parallel to Orange Grove. The portly, shy young adolescent who had left Orange Grove four years earlier had been transformed. Standing six foot one, he was solidly built. His brown hair had begun to curl and he now kept it cut short. He was handsome, easygoing, and increasingly self-reliant. He still read classical literature voluminously and had also begun writing his own poetry. He would often declaim his favorites, in stentorian tones, to anyone who would listen. Robert Rypinski, an automobile dealer in Pasadena, struck up an instant friendship with Parsons when he came in to buy a used car.

 

I wouldn't call his a forceful personality, you just felt that there was something ... I've read about people who burn with a hard gem-like flame. Jack was that kind of a person to me, except it was ... a warm gem-like flame.

 

Parsons enrolled in Pasadena Junior College in the autumn of 1933, hoping to earn an associate's degree in chemistry and physics, but he was forced to drop out after just one term. With the Whiteside family fortune in a perilous state, he could not afford to continue. It was a time when the majority of young people went to work after high school, or left high school to work full-time as Forman had. But a university education was essential if Parsons was ever to progress in the field of chemistry and explosives. Fortunately, however, he had impressed the management of the Hercules Powder Company in Los Angeles and, with the help of an old family friend, he got a job at Hercules' main explosives manufacturing plant in Pinole, on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, eight hours to the north of Pasadena. It would be a dangerous, exhausting job, but it would pay Parsons the significant sum of $100 a month: enough, if he was careful, to pay for a university education. What's more, he could see if the nearby Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley might be interested in his skill.

The Hercules plant was a community cut off from the outside world, and the buildings were constructed in a series of gullies and ravines. It was a desolate place. “At night the landscape around looks like a scene in Hell,” he wrote in one of his many letters home, “muddy molten slag flowing downward—fan-like flames reddening the sky.” It had been the largest TNT production plant in America during the First World War, when it produced over seven million pounds a month, but such work did not come without its risks. On average one worker died each year, usually in the devastating blasts that occasionally ripped through the nitroglycerine and dynamite buildings.

Regular work was a new experience for the eighteen-year-old. “The job started this morning, hard work—pushing four-ton dynamite cart, over acres and acres,” he wrote in a letter home. But he was happy. “I'm glad it's hard—the iron must come out.” Soon he was boasting of being able to “throw 100-pound dynamite boxes around all day.” There were, however, unpleasant side effects to the work. When absorbed through the skin, nitroglycerine dilates the blood vessels, causing severe headaches. It was not long before Parsons was suffering from one. “I've got one of those damned nitro-glycerine headaches,” he wrote on his second day at the plant; “they claim [it] will wear off in about a week.”

Parsons took to the treacherous work environment with something approaching nonchalance. “Somebody fell into the jelly mixer today but due to the grace of God and his extreme rotundity they fished him out before he got stamped into a cartridge and sold for a stick of dynamite.” He seemed unflappable even when averting a near catastrophe, as he did when preventing an unattended vat of high explosive from overheating: “Wandering into clouds of smoke I shut off the machine and sat down to an uninterrupted hour of rest until the crowd came mournfully back to collect the pieces.” Although Parsons may have seen this danger as amusing, his mother soon became frantic with worry over her son's work, leading him to try and placate her as best he could with a mixture of humor and self-assurance. “No accidents ever happen here except when someone gets powder under his nails and lights a match,” he wrote. “But that usually turns out to be a good thing—excavating as it does a two year vegetable garden.”

It was obvious that Parsons was a different type of worker to the others who worked at the plant, “tough-hardboiled-but good guys.” Soon his knowledge of chemistry, his good manners and educated demeanor saw him playing contract bridge with the chief chemist and the superintendent of the plant. Parsons claimed his preferment was the result of “hard work and the old personality apple polisher.”

His future, though, was uncertain. It had been suggested he could be a superintendent of the plant, but his ambitions were higher. “I don't want to be superintendent—I'd rather do the work I've always aimed for—research and college. How do I get there from here?” He became disillusioned with working sixteen hours a day. His car proved to be his only means of escape, and he often drove up into the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay, where he watched the sunsets and the stars and longed for home.

Parsons was delighted when his promise was recognized by the nearby Stanford University and he was offered a place to study chemistry, but his joy was short-lived. He found the expense “higher than I first estimated.” The money he had saved from his Hercules job could not possibly pay for him to study there for any amount of time, especially not with his mother and grandmother to think about. He decided to return to Pasadena, where he could save money by living at home. “Farewell to Hercules,” he wrote, “but the seven labors aren't completed yet.”

 

One of the benefits Parsons took from Hercules was a near-encyclopedic knowledge of chemicals, of explosives in particular. He had an affinity with chemicals—what his friend Robert Rypinski called “that genius way of feeling ... the substance of what went on in a chemical reaction.” He now read chemistry books as keenly as he read the increasing number of science fiction magazines that were appearing on the market, and he was developing what a scientific colleague would later term a “global” grasp of chemistry theory. While Parsons had been away, Forman had worked as an apprentice to the machinists at Hercules in Los Angeles, creating shells and repairing gun machinery. The two now began fashioning their rocket engines from metal as opposed to the wood and cardboard rockets of before, correcting flaws in the rocket and the fuel through trial and error.

Nevertheless, they seemed to have hit a brick wall. To evaluate the different strengths and weaknesses of Parsons' fuels, they needed to measure the rocket's thrust, but they hadn't the equipment or the mathematical wherewithal to do this. They were amateurs, just “technicians in the powder business.” Parsons confided to his friend Rypinski that they had “gotten out of their depth” and they needed someone “who could do some calculating for them.”

Parsons and Forman were realizing that the rocket was a much more complex machine than either had first assumed. In its simplest form, the rocket resembles the internal combustion engine—that is, an engine powered by the explosion of gases in a cylinder. The combustion unit in a rocket, called the engine, or as Parsons would call it, the motor, is usually a metal cylinder distinct from the shell that surrounds it. It is supplied with a fuel, for example charcoal or gasoline, and an oxidizing agent, like potassium nitrate or liquid oxygen, which gives the fuel oxygen with which to burn. (Unlike jet engines, which burn oxygen from the atmosphere, the rocket carries its own oxygen within it, making it capable of traveling beyond the atmosphere.) When the fuel is ignited, large quantities of very hot gas are produced, expanding until they rush out of the back of the rocket, causing thrust. Anything that slows the exhaust slows the rocket, so a nozzle is attached to the rocket engine to direct the exhaust outward as efficiently as possible. Unlike the internal combustion engine, the heated gas acts upon no moving parts. As seen before, this property of the heated gas is in fact the purest expression of Newton's third law of motion. In the case of a rocket, the action is the backward-streaming flow of gas and the reaction is the forward motion of the rocket. Thus, the movement of a rocket does not depend on anything outside the motor: A rocket is not propelled forward because its exhaust pushes against air. In fact, a rocket actually works
better
in a vacuum as there is no air to impede the exhaust.

While a rocket's reaction principle is simple, its application is not. It is not just a crucible into which elements are thrown and set alight. Its success depends on understanding variations in the nature of the fuel—the speed and power at which it burns—the ability of the rocket motor to withstand the pressures inside it, and the overall design of the motor. Making a rocket that will fly where one wants it to at the speed one chooses demands a firm grasp of mathematics, chemistry, and engineering.

What Forman and Parsons wanted above all was the chance to build a rocket resembling the most recent work of the American Interplanetary Society and the VfR. The AIS by now numbered over one hundred members. Some were engineers who joined out of their enthusiasm for a challenge; other members signed up out of a profound despair brought on by the depression. “It was a lousy planet,” remembered one member; “the rocket ship was the only way to get off it.”