_Girdles, Brassieres, and Shattered Sinuses_
At sea level, where most of us live, man breathes a mixture of twenty
per cent oxygen and eighty per cent nitrogen. As man moves up higher
into the thinning air, the percentage of oxygen and nitrogen remains
the same, but the amount in each breath diminishes and breathing
becomes more difficult. Most of us have experienced this sensation at
high-altitude mountain resorts or retreats, where the breath becomes
“short” and campfires or cigarettes which thrive on oxygen are
difficult to keep going. Nowadays man carries his own oxygen to high
places. Mountain climbers, seeking new and more dangerous heights,
pack lightweight oxygen flasks so that they can continue climbing at
near-normal rates. Pilots flying above about 15,000 feet must, by
regulation, wear rubber “oxygen masks” to keep themselves constantly
supplied with pure oxygen from a tank in the airplane. These masks
are fitted to the jet pilot’s crash helmet, or “hard-hat,” which he
wears to protect his skull against a rough landing.
In high-flying passenger airliners designed specifically for
transporting large numbers of people it is impractical to supply
each person with an oxygen mask. Instead, the whole cabin is
“pressurized,” meaning that the thin air through which the plane
flies is scooped up, compressed, and fed into the cabin under
pressure. In this way the airplane cabin moves through its hostile
environment like a submarine hull through the ocean, and like
submariners airline passengers may walk about the cabin freely and
unrestrained, just as at low levels. At higher altitudes where
the jets fly economically, cabin pressurization for commercial
airliners is complicated by the fact that the cabin must be tougher
and the compressed air demands are high. This introduces new weight
and structure problems which must be balanced against payload and
safety factors. The “mysterious” crashes of the first British Comet
jet-airliner series were caused when the cabin structure failed under
pressure. The Comets, of course, have been beefed up since then. In
light of the Comet experience, our own jet airliners were subjected
to exhaustive structural analysis and test before they were put
into service. Today they are a much safer means of travel than the
automobile.
In the unlikely event of cabin-pressure failure on a commercial jet
airliner there is little cause for concern. Individual oxygen masks,
stowed in the service compartment over each passenger seat, would
pop down virtually into the laps of the passengers. The passengers
would breathe through these devices until the pilot brought the plane
down to an altitude of, say, 7000 feet, where no artificial breathing
devices are required.
At altitudes above 45,000 feet the human body requires more than a
supplementary supply of oxygen. In an unprotected environment the
water and blood of the human body, held back only by human skin and
accustomed to sea-level pressure, seek to “boil” or “explode” into
the thinner air outside the body. The skin is not strong enough to
contain this force. At present there is no reason for a commercial
airliner to exceed an altitude of about 40,000 feet, so for ordinary
passengers this factor is no problem. But for the military pilot
or test pilot who flies above 45,000 feet some additional means of
protection must be provided in case the cabin pressurization of the
airplane fails. And, incidentally, the chances of a cabin-pressure
failure in a single-engine combat or test airplane are much greater
than those in a multi-engine airliner or bomber.
For want of a better name the emergency devices supplied to pilots
who fly at extreme altitudes are called “pressure suits,” simply
because they exert a restraining pressure on the skin and chest,
which helps keep the blood and breathing in a normal state. Even
under the best of circumstances the best of pressure suits is
uncomfortable and restricting--clumsy, like a deep-sea diver’s
outfit. The pilot must go aloft with his suit completely rigged,
ready to operate the instant it automatically senses a cabin-pressure
failure. This is somewhat comparable to a diver who must sit inside a
submarine hull in full deep-sea rig.
Pressure suits are infinitely complex. Not only must they be made
sensitive to pressure, they must also be cooled at all times;
otherwise, the pilot would faint from the heat generated by his
sealed-in body. The windshield on the sealed pressure-suit crash
helmet must be designed so that it does not fog or frost over when
the pilot exhales against it. The suit must contain an independent
oxygen supply, a parachute, and floatation capability, in case
the pilot has to bail out at high altitude, possibly over water.
Since the pilot wears the suit during the complete flight, it must
support his radio earphones and mike. And it must have rubber
bladders--anti-G devices--which automatically inflate when G’s are
pulled on the airplane, to keep the pilot’s blood from draining from
his head and causing a blackout. To complete the pilot’s protection,
the suit must be worn with special gloves, boots, and insulating
layers against heat and cold.
Indeed, as I think about it, the pressure suit is far more complex
than the deep-sea diving rig. And for the high-flying pilot it is as
important and necessary as the diver’s suit. Without it he cannot go
aloft.
* * * * *
The history of the pressure suit in this country is long and
tortuous, paralleling the history of the modern airplane. For the
benefit of posterity it should be the subject of an exhaustive study.
All spacemen will wear some type of pressure suit, and they might
want to know its origin. Meanwhile, my knowledge of early work on
the suits is hazy. The first pressure suit I know of was built for
aviator Wiley Post before World War II by Goodrich Tire and Rubber
Company. It was a monstrous thing of rubber, closely resembling the
analogous deep-sea diving rig. I don’t think it was ever used more
than once or twice in flight. During World War II the armed services,
absorbed with more vital matters, advanced the pressure suit not a
whit. But after the war, when it was obvious that airplanes would
some day fly routinely above man’s tolerable limits, the Air Force
and Navy both embarked on low-key, back-burner types of pressure-suit
research and development programs, funded on shoestring budgets.
The Air Force and Navy experts differed sharply then on the
approach to the pressure suit. Eager for quick results, the Air
Force contingent at Wright Field, sparked by Dr. James P. Henry,
believed the best solution was a partial-pressure suit, that is, a
cloth-rubber suit which would cover not the full body but critical
portions of it--originally only enough to enable the pilot to get
back down in a hurry if the plane’s cabin pressure failed. The Navy,
eying future space travel and capability to stay on target for hours,
chose to go to a full-pressure suit, one that would support a human
being on the face of the moon. In 1947 a young lieutenant named Paul
Durrup, at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia, drew up the
Navy specifications which served as the basic full-pressure suit
guide-lines for a decade.
In spite of the shortage of money, the Air Force’s
partial-pressure-suit program inched ahead significantly. By 1949,
when Pete Everest was ready to try for an altitude record in the X-1,
Wright Field had produced a partial-pressure suit which, amazingly
enough, worked. This suit, in fact, saved Pete Everest’s life. On
one flight above 60,000 feet the X-1 cockpit canopy cracked and
the cabin-pressure gas escaped. The laced partial-pressure suit
automatically came into play, squeezing Everest along the torso,
arms, and legs, supporting his skin. He landed, uncomfortable but
unhurt. When Bill Bridgeman later flew the Skyrocket to 79,000 feet,
he wore a similar suit with an improved helmet.
Just prior to my NACA assignment to the all-rocket Skyrocket in late
1951, I naturally developed more than a casual interest in pressure
suits. The Air Force issued me a partial-pressure suit, which I
used in the NACA airplanes. Eventually I wore out two Air Force
partial-pressure suits during my many Skyrocket and X-1 flights. The
Air Force had done the best job possible, considering its budget,
but as a pilot who anticipated close association with pressure suits
during prolonged high-altitude flight in the X-1-A and X-2 series, I
was looking for something a little better.
This search took me to the Navy’s pressure-suit lab in Philadelphia
in 1951 and shortly thereafter into the strange and wonderful world
of a brassiere and girdle manufacturer.
* * * * *
“I’m Scott Crossfield,” I said, extending a hand to the Navy group at
Philadelphia. The laboratory was a small loft crowded with manikins,
sewing machines, plaster of Paris molds, regulators, airbanks, and
all the novel tools of this arcane trade. Lieutenant Commander
Harry Weldon, who had inherited the project from Lieutenant Durrup,
introduced me around.
“I’m going to be doing some high-altitude work at Edwards and I want
to check around and see what you fellows have for me to wear,” I
said. “I have an Air Force partial-pressure suit. But there are some
things I don’t like about it. I understand you fellows are working on
full-pressure suits which would better suit our plans.”
“That’s right. But our approach is a long-range one here, looking
toward the future. We still have a long way to go with this program.
We don’t get much money from the Bureau. They say: ‘Who the hell
wants to walk around on the face of the moon?’”
“We might be walking around on the moon before you know it,” I said.
“That’s what we believe. Here, have you seen this suit? This is a
David Clark suit, model number 7. It’s the most advanced thing we
have. It was designed for me.”
Commander Weldon proudly displayed Clark’s latest creation. I noticed
in the rear of the building an altitude chamber, a heavy tank from
which air could be drawn to simulate the vacuum of high altitude.
“Mind if I try this thing in the chamber?” I asked.
Weldon hesitated. Then after glancing at his co-workers he said, “Why
not?”
I put on the suit. It was made of rubberized nylon over which was
stretched a layer of flexible white cloth. When the suit expanded,
the cloth would hold the rubber in place close about the body,
something like the principle of the inner tube and tire on an
automobile. The helmet was attached to the suit the same way.
I climbed into the chamber and closed the heavy steel door. The
mechanics drew air out of the tank until I had reached an “altitude”
of 90,000 feet. The suit worked well. I thought it far superior
to the uncomfortable partial-pressure suit, and with improvements
I thought it could be better. After the chamber was “lowered” to
earth-atmospheric level, I climbed out and removed the suit, rattling
off comments.
I learned much later that my stint in the altitude chamber was the
first time the suit had ever been tested under extreme conditions. I
was surprised. I had simply assumed that the suit had been wrung out,
perhaps hundreds of times. In later years Weldon and I often laughed
about my being his “guinea pig.”
I went directly from the Navy laboratory to the factory of the suit
manufacturer, the David Clark Company in Worcester, Mass. David
Clark, the owner and president of the company, turned out to be
one of the most interesting men I have ever met in the aviation
world. He was a stocky man of about fifty-five, with bushy eyebrows
and delicate hands which, like his mind, seemed to be always in
high-speed motion. He was a chain-smoker, shifting from cigarettes to
cigars without missing a beat. He was proud and stubborn, but gentle
by nature, the patron and father confessor of the David Clark Company
family of employees, who were as loyal and hard-working a group as I
have ever seen.
Clark had begun his career in New England as a young man in the
garment trade. Right off, he invented a knitting machine that would
automatically make a seamless, one-piece, two-way-stretch girdle
which, for its time, was considered fantastic. (The structural loads
imposed on a girdle, as we all know, can be tremendous, and a machine
that can build a good one automatically is an amazing engineering
accomplishment, believe me.) With his ingenious machine Clark had
all but cornered the important, expanding girdle market. Braving
new frontiers, Clark moved into manufacture of brassieres, which,
considering _those_ structural loads, was even more awesome.
During the war Clark became interested in the military field,
inventing and making boots, shoes, helmets, goggles, anti-G suits,
ear-muffs to protect crewmen from engine noise, and other specialty
items. Since 1941 almost every piece of pilot “soft goods” has
been pioneered by Dave Clark. The brassieres and girdles were his
bread-and-butter business, but he was a compulsive gadgeteer and thus
found himself in the pressure-suit line, not because there was money
in it but because it was a new challenge to his inventive mind.
I returned to Edwards immensely impressed with the David Clark
operation. In late 1951 I wrote a letter to NACA headquarters,
recommending that we encourage the Navy-Clark pressure-suit effort.
This letter was forwarded routinely to the Navy. The Navy lab in
Philadelphia was encouraged by this show of interest and immediately
set to work on a “crash basis.” Clark, investing his own money
in the project (there was little official contract money behind
the work), built several suits by hand. He sent some men to NACA,
Edwards; I worked with them, welding and gluing various pieces of
the complicated suit into place. This work went on for months and it
gave me solid groundwork in pressure suits that later paid handsome
dividends.
It also led indirectly to one of the most agonizing physical
experiences of my life. We had no chamber at Edwards for tests,
and I decided to use an airplane if I could get high enough. So,
wearing the tried and true partial-pressure suit, I took off one day
in a war-weary P-51, one of NACA’s miscellaneous test planes, and
climbed as high as it would go. When I reached 43,000 feet, the suit
automatically pressurized. Then for the next twenty minutes or so I
tried to go higher, nursing the complaining airplane to 44,000 and
then 44,500 feet, finally to 45,000 feet, reporting by radio to the
ground.
The flight seemed to go perfectly, but the next day I had an awful
headache. The pain was indescribable. It forced me to bed, where
I remained for twenty-two days, my first illness since childhood.
No amount of drugs, not even morphine, would ease the pain. Then,
thank God, it went away. The doctors were baffled. No one could ever
explain it. Some said it was the suit; some said I had contracted the
“bends”; they later said “sinus.” The mystery remains unsolved to
this day.
Little by little, we brought the Clark full-pressure suit to a state
of near-perfection. We switched regulators, experimented with new
cooling systems, and a dozen different helmet-defogging devices. When
Marion Carl came out briefly to borrow the Skyrocket for his altitude
record, he wore the new Clark full-pressure suit. We stayed up half
the night before his flight working out last-minute adjustments to
the suit and making parts on a lathe. In my view, the fact that he
wore this untried, jerry-rigged suit to 85,000 feet on his third
flight made his record all the more remarkable. (When Kit Murray
broke Carl’s altitude record about a year later, he wore an Air Force
partial-pressure suit.)
A ludicrous piece of journalism temporarily derailed our efforts
to bring the Clark suit to operational perfection. The new money
allotted the Navy lab at Philadelphia had naturally generated public
interest in the pressure suit. A national magazine, now defunct,
sent a writer to Philadelphia who composed a story describing the
Clark suit in glowing terms. This pleased Commander Weldon, the Navy,
and the Clark Company. But when the magazine photographer arrived
in Philadelphia to take pictures, he was not impressed by the dirty
khaki-colored Clark suit. It didn’t seem glamorous enough to be a
“space suit.” To satisfy the photographer’s demands the Navy people
pulled out a big, bulbous, experimental pressure suit that was years,
if not decades, old, and dead from a development standpoint. But it
was photogenic. The photographer was satisfied; his editor selected
the picture of the hopelessly obsolete concept for the cover of the
issue containing the article.
This misguided publicity unintentionally touched off a minor but
bitter pressure-suit battle between the Navy and the Air Force or,
rather, brought the long-standing feud over the approach to the suit
into the open. The ins and outs of this flap are much too complicated
to relate here. The upshot of it all was that the pressure-suit
people--both partial and full--got new and unprecedented
appropriations. The Navy’s Philadelphia lab, for example, received
what in that poverty-ridden field was considered a small fortune,
$250,000. As the battle rolled on, alas, not the David Clark Company,
but the firm whose suit had been on the magazine cover, received the
contract to build the Navy’s full-pressure suit. All the money David
Clark had spent out of his own pocket availed naught. The knowledge
we had gained in years of pressure-suit work was turned over to a
competitor. Such are the breaks of the aviation trade. Typically,
Clark never complained. He is a true patriot and sporting competitor.
The Clark suit was too good to die. When the Navy lost interest,
the Air Force at Wright Field began to eye it with considerable
excitement. A foresighted Wright Field technician, Ernie Martin,
awarded Clark a small but encouraging contract to continue work
on the suit, even though it was competitive with other Air Force
projects. Clark kept on, spending large sums of his own money.
Feeling somewhat responsible for his deep and profitless plunge into
the pressure-suit field, and convinced that his suit was the ultimate
answer for the Air Force and specifically the X-15, which I would
fly, I urged Clark on and helped him with experimental work as best I
could. I believe that during my five years at Edwards I logged more
time in pressure suits than most of the pilots put together. This
time the intense pressure completed the destruction of my sinus
cavities. When I left Edwards they were shattered.
In 1953 and 1954 during the preliminary studies on the X-15 at
NACA, I had urged the incorporation of a full-pressure suit in
the ejection-seat concept. The helmet and full suit would provide
additional blast-protection for the pilot in the event of bail
out, an argument I effectively used against the capsule. The
suit I proposed had all the best features of the Clark suit. The
North American X-15 bid included the Clark-type suit, listed as
a contractor-furnished item. Because of my long background in
pressure-suit work in general, and past association with the David
Clark Company in particular, the X-15 pressure suit naturally became
one of my special projects at North American. In time, the Air
Force’s Wright Field lab took over the development work on the suit
and supervised the altitude-chamber tests. But the final product was
a direct outgrowth of the old NACA-Navy-Clark suit which I first saw
at Philadelphia.
Knowing much of the discouraging history of pressure suits, I tackled
my new responsibility with grim determination. But I was unaware then
that during those early days of the X-15 Dave Clark had a whopping
surprise up his sleeve. It was a new “break-through” (and here I mean
that overworked word in its literal sense) that would revolutionize
the full-pressure suit business. In time the Clark-X-15-Air Force
suit would become the standard full-pressure suit for the Air
Force. A copy would be worn by the Mercury Astronauts, the seven
men scheduled to orbit the earth in a capsule. It would serve as a
prototype for suits to be worn by the first U. S. spacemen to land on
the moon.