Total change

Total change

NEW DELHI, Jan. 27 — “As our knowledge grows the more one gets convinced that he is ignorant” says Blair Fowler, an aero-jet engineer who worked on the first liquid propulsion rocket in the United States that ulti- mately became the Saturn rocket with several million pounds thrust. On a brief holiday in India, Mr. Fowler told this correspondent at the Taj Palace, New Delhi that his life had now undergone a total change. At the peak of his career ten years ago he and his wife, who too had a prosper- ous medical practice, simply gave up their jobs and money and retired to a Californian ranch “to work with our bare hands”

Mr Fowler holds out his hands, now toughened and also rough by physi- cal work like wood cutting, carpentry, blacksmithy, etc. “When I was in the rocket propulsion group my hands had become soft through constant paper work designing and redesigning.”

At 65, Mr Fowler looks quite young and strong. “We do a lot of wood cutting for firewood in our home which is heated by log fire”. There is a furnace and forge also in his ranch where he hammers iron into shape like the blacksmiths used to do in the olden days. Looking back at the development in rocketry which now has put man on the moon and done several extraordinary things, this aero-engineer re- calls the way they worked to develop the liquid hydrogen and oxygen burn- ing rocket motor under Theodore Von Carman, a well known rocket expert. There were no electronic instruments at that time even though they had to work with pumps with speeds of 40,000 rpm. Kryogenics, the science of supercooling, was still in its infancy. How liquid hydrogen and oxygen would behave was also not known. They worked behind three feet concrete walls and lived in constant fear of explosion. In fact there was one such explosion “but we escaped”. To obtain even a few litres of liquid hydrogen, repeated cooling using liquid nitrogen and dripping techniques under high vacuums had to be utilised. “We leant later that the Soviet scientist Kapista was also developing these engines parallelly.” Subsequently, Mr Fowler worked on nuclear rocket de- velopment but the project was given up as unpracticable. Why did he and his wife give up their practice and money to go back to ranch life? He says: “Though we were quite well off, we were not living, each one busy in his own work. We did not have time to talk to each other. Today we are a happy couple as we share our work. My wife kneads the dough and bakes the bread and we have much time for mutual communication”. Mr Fowler is very much influenced by Gandhian thinking like hard phys- ical work and its elevating nature, the need for man to be self-sufficient and simple living. He thinks that there is lot of sense in that philosophy. The Hindustan Times, January 28, 1986