Research Man

A great shaggy bear of a man rose this week in Washington before a distinguished audience of hypersonic-flight experts to deliver the prestigious Wright Brothers Lecture. For Speaker H. Julian Allen of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the honor was well timed. That morning Avco Manufacturing Corp. announced that it had devised a blunt-nose cone for the Air Force ICBM Titan. Originator of the blunt-nose concept: Dr. "Harvey" Allen, one of the most brilliant and colorful of the nation's flight scientists.

The Wright Brothers Lecture was the latest honor for jovial Bachelor Allen, 47, a dedicated NACA scientist for 21 years. When Allen suggested in 1952 that the heating problem caused by the re-entry of a ballistic missile into the earth's atmosphere might be solved by a blunt-nose cone, highly resistant to the air, many of his colleagues were skeptical. The prevailing theory backed a needle-shaped cone that would offer minimum aerodynamic drag. Allen's blunt shape built up temperatures in the tens of thousands of degrees, but it saved the cone from melting away by creating a wide-angle shock wave that carried away much of the heat. Allen's design has since been adopted by missilemen throughout the industry.

Long before his blunt-nose idea, Allen had become famous among flight scientists. A Stanford graduate (class of '32), he joined NACA in 1936, became known as a hustling young man with solid, but unconventional, ideas. Too busy to remember names, he took to calling everyone "Harvey," soon had the nickname tagged back on him. No great shakes as an office manager, he watched his desk disappear under piles of paper, often had to whistle in the janitors to dredge his work out of the wastepaper. But somehow Allen got his job done, e.g., the laminar-flow air foil of the P-51 fighter of World War II, a supersonic freeflight wind tunnel in which a model plane is fired into a blast of air.

Harvey Allen has finally managed to clear up his desk. But away from his shrieking wind tunnels, he is still a spectacular citizen. He tools around Palo Alto in a 1936 Mercedes-Benz touring car, or a 1931 Dusenberg (original price: $19,000), lives alone in a bungalow that looks like a highbrow junk pile. Some items: five aquariums for tropical fish, antique Oriental sculpture, a reed organ, a library on Mayan architecture. There, looking like an outsize Dylan Thomas, he delights in cooking dinners (Creole, French, Italian, Scandinavian or Oriental) for as many as 35 guests.

Allen could easily increase his budget for tropical fish and Oriental sculpture by following the path of so many of his colleagues: leaving low-paying Government work for high-paying private industry. But Harvey Allen (salary $16,000 a year) has no such plans. "I'm a research man," he says. "The NACA gives me freedom to work. I'm sticking with them."

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