This sort of tale is one I’ve heard many times, from many sources, describing many companies:
http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,9708.msg89638.html#msg89638
Doing this digging reminded me of how I even was able to even have the drawings I have today. Back in 1994, when Rockwell moved from El Segundo (sold all the buildings and land to either developers or Northrop) to Seal Beach, we were asked to just take what we needed to get started (immediate drawings, papers, etc), and pack or throw out the rest. I packed all my old drawings and notebooks in boxes and labeled them. The company threw out any drawings that weren’t claimed into a big dumpster. I remember Marty Crehan going though the dumpster and getting the original B-70, X-15, F-100, P-51, etc drawings!!!! Marty was the biggest collector of old aircraft drawings and books that I had ever met! I don’t know what became of those drawings!When we arrived in Seal Beach, all of our “historical boxes” of material had mysteriously disappeared! All my drawings for the last 20+ years were gone! I think Rockwell had just wanted everything to “go away”. Two years later, when Rockwell was bought by Boeing, Marty Crehan made another great discovery. In an empty factory building, the new Boeing team had found hundreds of boxes of drawings and notebooks that Rockwell had “misplaced” in 1994. Boeing had dumped the contents of these boxes (this pile had to be 50 ft in diameter and 10 ft high!) onto the factory floor, and gave the Rockwell employees one week to claim anything they wanted, and then it was all going into the dumpster! Marty came running into my office and told me to get my butt over to the factory, as all my old notebooks were in that pile! Sure enough, there were all my notebooks and drawings! The scene of Rockwell employees going through this big pile was like people finding their belongings after an earthquake or flood! Boeing never made an official announcement about the pile, so you had to find out about the pile by word of mouth. If Marty had not stumbled on the pile and came and got me, I wouldn’t have ANY of my old drawings!
The last days of United Technologies, Chemical Systems Division, saw somethign somewhat similar. Went into the cafeteria one day, and there was a huge pile of promo glossies dumped on one of the tables; someone had emptied out part of the PR department for the employees to pick through. But most of the historical stuff was simply *gone.* The *vast* bulk of the paperwork, drawings, notebooks and whatnot that had been generated over the years was regularly boxed up and shipped off to an Iron Mountain storage facility; what happened to it after CSD folded, I’ve no idea. The very nice tech library was, IIRC, shipped off to the CPIA… except for the books that managers came in and took off the shelf for themselves (annoying the hell out of the librarian).
It was the tale of the sad fate of the Bell archive (essentially the same as the Rockwell story above, at least as related to me) that spurred me to start scibbling Aerospace Projects Review in the late 1990’s.
9 Responses to “The Fate of Aerospace Archives”
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Thank you for preserving what you have.
Ditto. It’s not why I come here, but I’m glad that what you have is still alive.
How much you want to bet that at least one person’s genius invention (SSTO, ion drive, whatever) was sitting in that or a similar pile of thrown-away stuff and was simply thrown away when the company was clearing house?
> How much you want to bet that at least one person’s genius invention … was simply thrown away…
Almost certainly happens *many* times. The lack of a properly catalogued archive has caused many a company to duplicate prior efforts. Another CSD story: When I worked there, there was a meetign between the business development people and some Navy people (at least one Admiral, think) to discuss the development of a hand-held solid rocket motor for use underwater as a one-shot cutting torch. Go ahead and use your imagination as to what use the Navy would have for such a thing. i was not involved, just heard about it second-hand; but everythign I heard suggested that it was a brand-new notion, and nobody was entirely sure that it would work, but gee, it’s a neat idea.
A week or so later I was fighting my way past the Black Widow spiders in what was laughingly referred to as the “museum” (a delapidated mobile home trailer with some moldy and water-damaged old displays and random boxes of crap) when I came across a series of glossies from the 1960’s… showing firefighters weilding hand-held rocket motors used as cutting torches, demonstrating on chopping up a wrecked car. At least one photo of the thing being used under water as well.
I took the photos back to my co-workers, and showed them to one of the gray-hairs… who immediately recognized it as something he’d worked on thirty or so years earlier. Nobody had asked him about the project… probably because nobody knew that it had ever existed or that he had anything to do with it.
Gah.
Once I knew that the thing existed, I was able to dig out the original drawings from the microfiche storage system and gave them to the business development people. Who were oddly unimpressed. Grrr.
I have seen things like this happen at companies and at people’s homes over the years. Vast amounts of valuable documents of all sorts just pitched. I have worked for remodeling and fire restoration companies where we were REQUIRED to throw things away. Actually quit one over that.
It never ceases to amaze me how unutterably stupid supposedly intelligent people can be. Damned glad there are other packrats out there who are saving all manner of things.
The past is a vast treasury. I collected some frowns from my last employer — the local power company — by suggesting that they avoid duplicating research by going to the local universities and searching for thesis on the engineering they wanted to explore. As it turns out, most of the guys who wanted to do that work were really in it for the MS in electrical engineering — not for any value it might have to their employer. That’s probably why the CSD development folk didn’t grin a lot when you provided the original work: they were going to hire someone to do the same stuff, and you provided the best reason not to hire their brother-in-law.
Reynolds Aluminum (1940-1999) apparently discarded almost all of its engineering data on the submarine “Aluminaut.”
I think there is something in archives that is hated by managers. Something like destroying the proffs that they are not the best and brightest, to destroy a comparison. I have the basement of my house full of everything I could save from the companies I worked for (mainly IT), and I am SURE tht some of the official docs in there survive in that only copy. It is frightening.
And I think is a sort of miracle that we KNOW anything from the past at all. In this respect digitalization is really dangerous.
Worked for a major, Mid-west electric utility. We had one set of original, T. Edison Christmas lights made by the man himself. Tossed in the 1970s because the company felt it didn’t reflect their modern thinking.
Fortunately, a dumpster diver in the company retrieved them, along with other valuable artifacts, and they survive today. Kills me whenever I see someone destroy a book for art or hack apart a typewriter to make jewelry with the keys. Maybe that’s how I justify hanging on to all those old mobos and CD-drives.
> We had one set of original, T. Edison Christmas lights made by the man himself. Tossed in the 1970s because the company felt it didn’t reflect their modern thinking.
That literally boggles the mind. I cannot comprehend *anyone* tossing *anything* made by Edison his own self. That’s akin to tossing an old book into the trash because you’re only interested in mint-condition books, and this one was scribbled upon by some fool name of “Abraham Lincoln.”
I am not a packrat with anything, except when it comes to books and information. Whenever I move, somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of what gets shifted from one apartment to another is my book collection and aerospace stuff. Digitalization is great because it makes things easier to carry, but really there’s nothing like a book.