IN 1946 THE NORDBERG MANUFAC turing Company, of Milwaukee, contracted with Mr. Doble to design and manufacture at Nordberg a steam engine to replace the diesel engine in the rear of a bus. It would have the same fuel consumption as a diesel, and the operation would be fully automatic. The design had two vertical high-pressure cylinders and two horizontal lowpressure cylinders. The exhaust would pass through a high-speed 50,000-rpm single-stage reaction steam turbine, driving a fan through the double reduction gearbox. The air from the fan would condense the steam in the condenser, which was mounted in the location of the radiator in the diesel bus.

I had joined Nordberg as an engineer in January of that year, and when Mr. Doble learned that I had turbine experience, he asked me to design the exhaust turbine. I then ran into some of Mr. Doble’s failings. When he showed me his design with the turbine connected to his gearbox, there was only one seal between the turbine and the gearbox. When I remonstrated that if the seal leaked, steam would mix with the oil in the gearbox, so we should have two seals to prevent this, he insisted that his seal wouldn’t leak. But it did. Water from the condenser caused the oil in the crankcase to emulsify.

Meanwhile, the automatic control system kept surging and didn’t work automatically. A study of the system indicated that one of the springs in the system was too stiff, but Mr. Doble wouldn’t let us change it. One week he was out of town, so we had the stiff spring coils ground down, and the system worked automatically for the first time. A final error was that the steam cylinders were of high-temperature steel while the crankcase was aluminum, and the thermal difference in the two materials caused the cylinders to distort, so the pistons rubbed hard against them.

These problems aside, Mr. Doble’s idea for a steam bus was quite ingenious. What happened next was the Korean War, and Nordberg gave up on the steam bus engine.

John C. Georgian
Professor of Mechanical
Engineering Emeritus
Washington University
St. Louis, Mo.

The Bet-a-Million Story

IN “THE WIRE THAT WON THE WEST,” by Scott S. Smith, in the Fall 1998 issue, passing reference is made to a salesman named John W. Gates who sold barbed wire. There is more to be said about Mr. Gates.

John Warne Gates was far more than a gifted salesman. His ultimate acquisition of numerous competing barbed-wire companies made him the country’s leading source for the product. When J. Pierpont Morgan assembled the pieces, including Andrew Carnegie’s steel company, that became United States Steel in 1901, the banker bought Gates’s American Steel and Wire for $110 million.

Wagering large sums on the most improbable contests earned Gates the nickname Bet-a-Million. His most famous bet involved a race between raindrops down a pane of window glass—at $1,000 a drop.

Wily as Gates was, if anyone had wanted to bet in 1900 that his barbed wire would sell for $100 a foot by the end of the century, he probably would have bet a million that it wouldn’t. And lost. How could anyone have guessed what nostalgic collectors would be willing to pay for a scrap of rusty wire?

Frank E. Wrenick
Cleveland Heights, Ohio

The Things Howard Hughes Did

I REALLY ENJOYED “HOWARD HUGHES the Innovator” (by T. A. Heppenheimer, Winter 1999) and find his visionary accomplishments in aviation fascinating. However, I feel there was a serious omission from the summary of his aeronautical pursuits. He started Hughes Helicopters as one of his personally financed aeronautical undertakings, and the company operated for many years to satisfy his interest in rotary-wing aviation. Hughes funded many advanced design concepts and the flight testing of some very unusual helicopters through many years of financial losses. A significant milestone in the company’s history was its winning of a contract for the OH-6 “Loach” observation helicopter in the early 1960s. Its basic airframe is still flying today as several different commercial models. The company went on to win a contract for an advanced attack helicopter for the U.S. Army, and the AH-64 Apache is the very successful result. The company was ultimately purchased by McDonnell Douglas and then absorbed by Boeing after they merged. The history of Hughes Helicopters serves as yet another example of a money-losing aeronautical passion of Hughes’s that didn’t become commercially successful until his personal influence was removed.

Denis M. Wolowiecki
Hudson, Ohio

The Things Howard Hughes Did

ANOTHER AREA WHERE HOWARD Hughes’s legacy lives on is in the writing of large government proposals. As the article suggests, Hughes was a beneficiary of the growth of the militaryindustrial complex and won many government contracts. His innovation was to use the Hollywood Storyboard technique to prepare a detailed outline for a proposal so that different people could work on the proposal separately until the very end and the proposal could then come together seamlessly. This approach still has not become obsolete.

Ravi Nadkarni
Wrentham, Mass.

The Things Howard Hughes Did

I WORKED AT THE HUGHES AIRCRAFT Company in the early 1970s with two engineers who had been on Hughes’s Spruce Goose design team, and they told me about going to a predawn meeting of designers at his office in Culver City. By the time dawn was approaching, everyone was getting hungry, so Hughes sent his secretary out to a canteen truck that had driven up to serve his justarriving plant employees. Hughes directed her to get an egg sandwich and an orange juice for each person in the room. Then, as she was exiting, he revised his order: only one beverage for every two men. “We can share the juice,” he said.

John S. Waldrip
Monrovia, Calif.

The Things Howard Hughes Did

ON PAGE 38 OF THE HUGHES ARTICLE , you mentioned “William Byrd (who later became Hopalong Cassidy of B-movie fame).” Not so, pardner. His name was William Boyd.

Robert L. Blair
Bristol, Tenn.