Professor William Gould Dow (B.S. and E.E., University of Minnesota in 1916-17) served as an engineer in the U.S. Army during WWI. In 1926 he came to the University of Michigan as an instructor in the Electrical Engineering Department, and completed his M.S.E. in 1929. During WWII, Professor Dow went to Harvard Radar Research Laboratory to research radar counter measures for the United States Army, where he helped design and install devices that effectively jammed German radar, allowing Allied bombers to fly undetected over German targets. While working on this, Dow was sent to London, where he was exposed to German V-2 rockets. (One rocket that landed in London missed him by less than ¼ of a mile.) At the close of the war, Dow returned to Michigan and became a full professor. Returning at the same time was Professor Emerson Conlon, Chair of the Department of Aeronautical Engineering. Conlon had worked in the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics during the war, and shared Dowâs interest in Rocketry.
Dow and Conlon felt that the University would benefit from the emphasis the government was placing on scientific and technical research as a result of the onset of the Cold War. Along with that, the government and the military were interested in not only how things work, but also why they work -something that was of extreme interest to the professors. In 1946 the government deeded the laboratory at Willow Run Airport to UM, which would become home to many important research projects, including Project Wizard, a million dollar contract through Wright Patterson Air Force Base that explored the development of guided missiles. Through this project, Conlon made important contacts with the Air Force, which he then used to try to obtain telemetering (radio signaling) equipment in the Department of Aeronautical Engineering and to attract a man named Myron Nichols to the University. Nicholsâ expertise in telemetry would be an invaluable addition to the Aeronautical Department. In January 1946, Dow and Conlon attended a telemetering conference hosted by Myron Nichols at Princeton University. It was there that Nichols told them about the Army and Navy joining together to make use of the captured V-2 rockets for research purposes.
The Army and Navyâs ãRocket Panelä provided an outstanding opportunity for those wishing to become involved in rocket research. When the Rocket Research Panel was formed, organizations could become involved by having a representative on the panel. Naturally, the Air Force, which had been excluded from the planning of the panel, was interested in its research, so Professor Dow made use of his Air Force connection and made them an offer they could not refuse. He proposed to represent the Air Force on the Rocket Panel in exchange for its support of his research. As a result, Professor Dow became an official member of the Rocket Research Panel and launched the University of Michigan into an exciting new era of research. The Air Force contracted the Department of Electrical Engineering to design instruments to be launched aboard the August 22, 1946 flight of a V-2. They wanted to measure the atmospheric temperature and density, and Professor Dow added to the experiment the measurement of electron and ion temperatures in the ionosphere.
When the Department of Aeronautics was contracted by the Army Signal Corps to develop instruments to be flown on a V-2 rocket, the project was taken over by Dr. Myron Nichols, who came to U of M in July of 1946, bringing with him a group of engineers and physicists from Palmer Physical Laboratory at Princeton. Nichols, before coming to the University of Michigan, had directed a project from 1943 to 1946 which developed and flight tested the first high speed time-division telemetering system and one of the early multi-channel telemetering systems for rockets. At UM, the Aerospace Departmentâs interest in upper atmosphere research stimulated further development of radio telemetering systems in order to transfer the measurements to the ground as they were made. Nichols began courses at UM in the science of telemetry and instrumentation. During the 1946-47 school year, four graduate courses were introduced in the dynamic and random responses of instruments, wind tunnel and flight test instrumentation, automatic control, and engineering applications of the electronic differential analyzer, which was the first course of its kind taught in the US.
In 1949 Lawrence L Rauch, who had worked under Professor Nichols at Princeton, came to the University of Michiganâs Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering Department. The following year, Robert M. Howe, from M.I.T., also joined the staff. By 1951, courses had been added in the areas of nonlinear systems, missile guidance, advanced feedback and control, and radio telemetry. In 1953, a graduate program in Instrumentation Engineering was created.
Persuaded by Nichols, Leslie Jones, B.S. in Engineering Physics, 1940, joined the Aeronautical Engineering Department in 1947 in order to take part in its upper atmosphere research. Jones became the director of the High Altitude Engineering Laboratory (HAEL) and represented it on the Rocket Panel. He helped design scientific payloads for not only the V-2, but also several of its successors. He helped develop the Nike-Cajun rocket, which was to be used by several nations for research during the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year. Jones helped start a course in upper atmosphere physics in the early 1950âs, and by 1963 he had added 3 more courses. These formed the basis for an Aeronomy and Planetary Atmospheres graduate degree program, which was to later become part of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. By 1964, Michigan was offering several courses in Aeronomy, or ãknowledge of the physics of the high atmosphere.ä
Dow also hired Nelson Spencer to help prepare
his V-2 experiments. Spencer eventually assumed responsibility for
both conducting the experiments and acquiring new funding, and when he
did so, he named his operations the Space Physics Research Laboratory (SPRL).
Spencer represented SPRL on the Rocket Panel, and accumulated many successful
results from his experiments. He was instrumental in pushing the
nation to develop a national civilian space establishment, and eventually
advanced from the University of Michigan to NASA, where he became the manager
of the Planetary Atmospheres Laboratory at Goddard Space Flight Center.
