Edward Forman

Edward Seymour Forman (December 3, 1912 – February 12, 1973) was an American engineer and inventor known for his pioneering work in early rocketry in the United States. Forman, along with his collaborators in Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), demonstrated the first practical jet-assisted take-off (JATO) of an aircraft in the United States. and the GALCIT Rocket Research Group itself became the precursor of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Early life and education

Forman was born in Gillespie, Illinois, the youngest of four brothers. The family moved to Pasadena, California and Forman attended Washington Junior High School, where he met Jack Parsons, who would become his lifelong collaborator and friend. Forman found Parsons, who was two years younger than he, being bullied at school and rescued him. Soon after that, the two boys grew a strong bond over their common interest in science fiction. Forman was an avid reader of the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inspired by science fiction, Forman and Parsons started building model rockets in their backyards and adopted the Latin phrase Ad Astra per Aspera (through rough ways to the stars)

During high school at John Muir High in Pasadena, Forman and Parsons continued with their experiments in their backyards and out in the deserts. Forman left high school before getting a degree and enrolled in Pasadena Junior College. With his overriding interest in rocketry, Forman took on an array of odd jobs to make ends meet. He worked as carpenter, chauffeur and postal worker as well as airplane mechanic, sheet metal worker and apprentice machinist in aircraft and ammunition factories. Meanwhile, Parsons found part-time work in Hercules Powder Company, an explosive manufacturer, where he taught himself to be a chemist. The pair used their newfound skills to improve the design of their rockets and, as the tests grew more complex and explosive, moved their testing site into the nearby Arroyo Seco, a dry canyon wash at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains.

GALCIT Rocket Research Group In the early 1930s, Forman and Parsons began to realize that the rocket technology was a more complex subject than they had first assumed. In 1935, a Los Angeles Times article titled “Rocket Plane Visualized Flying 1200 Miles Hour” caught the pair's eyes. The article covered a paper by William Bollay, an aeronautics graduate student at Caltech, on the works of Austrian engineer Eugen Sänger. When they approached Bollay, he directed them to Frank Malina, another graduate student, who was pursuing studies in rocket propulsion. Nevertheless, when the proposal was submitted to Caltech, it was turned down and derided as impractical.

The test results impressed von Kármán who allocated laboratory space on the third floor of Guggenheim for further experiments. He hired Forman and Parsons as part-time employees and added Qian Xuesen, a mathematician working on his Ph.D. at Caltech, to the group. But soon after, a rocket fuel leak caused extensive damage to the building which happened to house the largest wind tunnel in the world at the time. The incidence got the group evicted from the laboratory space. A few months later, a thrust balance they had installed on Guggenheim's outside wall exploded and propelled a piece of a gauge into the building. These accidents earned the group the moniker "suicide squad".

JATO: development and test flight Take-off on August 12, 1941, of America's first "rocket-assisted" fixed-wing aircraft, an ERCO Ercoupe fitted with a GALCIT developed solid propellant JATO boosterIn May 1938, Chief of the Army Air Corps General Henry A. "Hap" Arnold visited the laboratory to investigate the possible use of rocketry for the Army, in particular the possibility for a solution for the problem of heavily loaded military planes having to take off on shorter runways. This later turned into a $10,000 contract to develop Jet-Assisted-Take-Off units for the Air Corps.

In the summer of 1941, GALCIT research led to a successful flight test, when Army test pilot Captain Homer Boushey flew a light Ercoupe monoplane with two 50-pound JATO units attached, and made several flights. For the last attempt, they removed the propeller, and on 23 August 1941, Boushey made the first unassisted rocket propelled flight with six JATOs under the wings.

In 1943, the Army Air Forces asked GALCIT to study the possible use of rockets to propel long-range missiles. The response sent in reply, dated 20 November 1943, was the first document to use the Jet Propulsion Laboratory name, even though as far as Caltech was concerned, the JPL did not yet formally exist. According to Malina, the work of the JPL was considered to include the rocketry research carried out by the GALCIT Rocket Research Group from 1936 on.

Aerojet's first two contracts were from the U.S. Navy; the Bureau of Aeronautics requested a solid-fuel JATO and Wilbur Wright Field requested a liquid-fuel unit. The Air Corps had requested two thousand JATOs from Aerojet by late 1943, committing $256,000 toward Parsons' solid-fuel type. Despite this drastically increased demand, the company continued to operate informally and remained intertwined with the GALCIT project. Caltech astronomer Fritz Zwicky was brought in as head of the company's research department.