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Dr. Joseph Ames
Date: 1 Jan 1920
Dr. Joseph Sweetman Ames at his desk at the NACA headquarters.
Dr. Ames was a founding member of NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), appointed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915. Ames took on NACA's most challenging
assignments but mostly represented physics. He chaired the Foreign Service
Committee of the newly-founded National Research Council, oversaw the NACA's
patent cross-licensing plan that allowed manufacturers to share technologies.
Ames expected the NACA to encourage engineering education. He pressed
universities to train more aerodynamicists, then structured NACA to give young
engineers on-the-job training. Ames gave the NACA a focused vision that was
research-based and decided that aerodynamics was the most important field of
endeavor. He championed the work of theorists like Max Munk.
The world class
wind tunnels at Langley Aeronautical laboratory reflected his vision as well as
the faith Congress put in him. Ames became chairman of the NACA main committee
in 1927. Two years later he accepted the Collier Trophy on behalf of the NACA.
He kept the NACA alive when Herbert Hoover tried to eliminate it and transfer
its duties to industry.
Ames accepted a nomination by Air Minister Hermann
Goring to the Deutsche Akademie der Luftfartforschung. Ames then considered it
an honor, many Americans did, and was surprised to learn about the massive Nazi
investment in aeronautical infrastructure, then six times larger than the NACA.
Ames urged the funding for a second laboratory and expansion of the NACA
facilities to prepare for war.
A stroke in May 1936 paralyzed the right side of
his body. He immediately resigned as chairman of the NACA executive committee
and in October 1937 he resigned from the NACA main committee.
On June 8, 1944
the NACA officially dedicated its new laboratory in Sunnyvale California to
Joseph S. Ames. Ames died in 1943, having never stepped foot in the new
laboratory that bears his name; the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory (known today as
the Ames Research Center).
In a letter to William Durand who led the dedication ceremony, Henry H. "Hap" Arnold called "Dr. Ames the great architect of aeronautical science.... It is most appropriate that it should now be named the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, for in this laboratory, as in the hearts of airmen and aeronautical scientists, the memory of Joseph S. Ames will be enshrined as long as men shall fly."
Image Credit: NASA
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