Chapter 25: ►

_Girdles, Brassieres, and Shattered Sinuses_

At sea level, where most of us live, man breathes a mixture of twenty per cent oxygen and eighty per cent nitrogen. As man moves up higher into the thinning air, the percentage of oxygen and nitrogen remains the same, but the amount in each breath diminishes and breathing becomes more difficult. Most of us have experienced this sensation at high-altitude mountain resorts or retreats, where the breath becomes “short” and campfires or cigarettes which thrive on oxygen are difficult to keep going. Nowadays man carries his own oxygen to high places. Mountain climbers, seeking new and more dangerous heights, pack lightweight oxygen flasks so that they can continue climbing at near-normal rates. Pilots flying above about 15,000 feet must, by regulation, wear rubber “oxygen masks” to keep themselves constantly supplied with pure oxygen from a tank in the airplane. These masks are fitted to the jet pilot’s crash helmet, or “hard-hat,” which he wears to protect his skull against a rough landing.

In high-flying passenger airliners designed specifically for transporting large numbers of people it is impractical to supply each person with an oxygen mask. Instead, the whole cabin is “pressurized,” meaning that the thin air through which the plane flies is scooped up, compressed, and fed into the cabin under pressure. In this way the airplane cabin moves through its hostile environment like a submarine hull through the ocean, and like submariners airline passengers may walk about the cabin freely and unrestrained, just as at low levels. At higher altitudes where the jets fly economically, cabin pressurization for commercial airliners is complicated by the fact that the cabin must be tougher and the compressed air demands are high. This introduces new weight and structure problems which must be balanced against payload and safety factors. The “mysterious” crashes of the first British Comet jet-airliner series were caused when the cabin structure failed under pressure. The Comets, of course, have been beefed up since then. In light of the Comet experience, our own jet airliners were subjected to exhaustive structural analysis and test before they were put into service. Today they are a much safer means of travel than the automobile.

In the unlikely event of cabin-pressure failure on a commercial jet airliner there is little cause for concern. Individual oxygen masks, stowed in the service compartment over each passenger seat, would pop down virtually into the laps of the passengers. The passengers would breathe through these devices until the pilot brought the plane down to an altitude of, say, 7000 feet, where no artificial breathing devices are required.

At altitudes above 45,000 feet the human body requires more than a supplementary supply of oxygen. In an unprotected environment the water and blood of the human body, held back only by human skin and accustomed to sea-level pressure, seek to “boil” or “explode” into the thinner air outside the body. The skin is not strong enough to contain this force. At present there is no reason for a commercial airliner to exceed an altitude of about 40,000 feet, so for ordinary passengers this factor is no problem. But for the military pilot or test pilot who flies above 45,000 feet some additional means of protection must be provided in case the cabin pressurization of the airplane fails. And, incidentally, the chances of a cabin-pressure failure in a single-engine combat or test airplane are much greater than those in a multi-engine airliner or bomber.

For want of a better name the emergency devices supplied to pilots who fly at extreme altitudes are called “pressure suits,” simply because they exert a restraining pressure on the skin and chest, which helps keep the blood and breathing in a normal state. Even under the best of circumstances the best of pressure suits is uncomfortable and restricting--clumsy, like a deep-sea diver’s outfit. The pilot must go aloft with his suit completely rigged, ready to operate the instant it automatically senses a cabin-pressure failure. This is somewhat comparable to a diver who must sit inside a submarine hull in full deep-sea rig.

Pressure suits are infinitely complex. Not only must they be made sensitive to pressure, they must also be cooled at all times; otherwise, the pilot would faint from the heat generated by his sealed-in body. The windshield on the sealed pressure-suit crash helmet must be designed so that it does not fog or frost over when the pilot exhales against it. The suit must contain an independent oxygen supply, a parachute, and floatation capability, in case the pilot has to bail out at high altitude, possibly over water. Since the pilot wears the suit during the complete flight, it must support his radio earphones and mike. And it must have rubber bladders--anti-G devices--which automatically inflate when G’s are pulled on the airplane, to keep the pilot’s blood from draining from his head and causing a blackout. To complete the pilot’s protection, the suit must be worn with special gloves, boots, and insulating layers against heat and cold.

Indeed, as I think about it, the pressure suit is far more complex than the deep-sea diving rig. And for the high-flying pilot it is as important and necessary as the diver’s suit. Without it he cannot go aloft.

* * * * *

The history of the pressure suit in this country is long and tortuous, paralleling the history of the modern airplane. For the benefit of posterity it should be the subject of an exhaustive study. All spacemen will wear some type of pressure suit, and they might want to know its origin. Meanwhile, my knowledge of early work on the suits is hazy. The first pressure suit I know of was built for aviator Wiley Post before World War II by Goodrich Tire and Rubber Company. It was a monstrous thing of rubber, closely resembling the analogous deep-sea diving rig. I don’t think it was ever used more than once or twice in flight. During World War II the armed services, absorbed with more vital matters, advanced the pressure suit not a whit. But after the war, when it was obvious that airplanes would some day fly routinely above man’s tolerable limits, the Air Force and Navy both embarked on low-key, back-burner types of pressure-suit research and development programs, funded on shoestring budgets.

The Air Force and Navy experts differed sharply then on the approach to the pressure suit. Eager for quick results, the Air Force contingent at Wright Field, sparked by Dr. James P. Henry, believed the best solution was a partial-pressure suit, that is, a cloth-rubber suit which would cover not the full body but critical portions of it--originally only enough to enable the pilot to get back down in a hurry if the plane’s cabin pressure failed. The Navy, eying future space travel and capability to stay on target for hours, chose to go to a full-pressure suit, one that would support a human being on the face of the moon. In 1947 a young lieutenant named Paul Durrup, at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia, drew up the Navy specifications which served as the basic full-pressure suit guide-lines for a decade.

In spite of the shortage of money, the Air Force’s partial-pressure-suit program inched ahead significantly. By 1949, when Pete Everest was ready to try for an altitude record in the X-1, Wright Field had produced a partial-pressure suit which, amazingly enough, worked. This suit, in fact, saved Pete Everest’s life. On one flight above 60,000 feet the X-1 cockpit canopy cracked and the cabin-pressure gas escaped. The laced partial-pressure suit automatically came into play, squeezing Everest along the torso, arms, and legs, supporting his skin. He landed, uncomfortable but unhurt. When Bill Bridgeman later flew the Skyrocket to 79,000 feet, he wore a similar suit with an improved helmet.

Just prior to my NACA assignment to the all-rocket Skyrocket in late 1951, I naturally developed more than a casual interest in pressure suits. The Air Force issued me a partial-pressure suit, which I used in the NACA airplanes. Eventually I wore out two Air Force partial-pressure suits during my many Skyrocket and X-1 flights. The Air Force had done the best job possible, considering its budget, but as a pilot who anticipated close association with pressure suits during prolonged high-altitude flight in the X-1-A and X-2 series, I was looking for something a little better.

This search took me to the Navy’s pressure-suit lab in Philadelphia in 1951 and shortly thereafter into the strange and wonderful world of a brassiere and girdle manufacturer.

* * * * *

“I’m Scott Crossfield,” I said, extending a hand to the Navy group at Philadelphia. The laboratory was a small loft crowded with manikins, sewing machines, plaster of Paris molds, regulators, airbanks, and all the novel tools of this arcane trade. Lieutenant Commander Harry Weldon, who had inherited the project from Lieutenant Durrup, introduced me around.

“I’m going to be doing some high-altitude work at Edwards and I want to check around and see what you fellows have for me to wear,” I said. “I have an Air Force partial-pressure suit. But there are some things I don’t like about it. I understand you fellows are working on full-pressure suits which would better suit our plans.”

“That’s right. But our approach is a long-range one here, looking toward the future. We still have a long way to go with this program. We don’t get much money from the Bureau. They say: ‘Who the hell wants to walk around on the face of the moon?’”

“We might be walking around on the moon before you know it,” I said.

“That’s what we believe. Here, have you seen this suit? This is a David Clark suit, model number 7. It’s the most advanced thing we have. It was designed for me.”

Commander Weldon proudly displayed Clark’s latest creation. I noticed in the rear of the building an altitude chamber, a heavy tank from which air could be drawn to simulate the vacuum of high altitude.

“Mind if I try this thing in the chamber?” I asked.

Weldon hesitated. Then after glancing at his co-workers he said, “Why not?”

I put on the suit. It was made of rubberized nylon over which was stretched a layer of flexible white cloth. When the suit expanded, the cloth would hold the rubber in place close about the body, something like the principle of the inner tube and tire on an automobile. The helmet was attached to the suit the same way.

I climbed into the chamber and closed the heavy steel door. The mechanics drew air out of the tank until I had reached an “altitude” of 90,000 feet. The suit worked well. I thought it far superior to the uncomfortable partial-pressure suit, and with improvements I thought it could be better. After the chamber was “lowered” to earth-atmospheric level, I climbed out and removed the suit, rattling off comments.

I learned much later that my stint in the altitude chamber was the first time the suit had ever been tested under extreme conditions. I was surprised. I had simply assumed that the suit had been wrung out, perhaps hundreds of times. In later years Weldon and I often laughed about my being his “guinea pig.”

I went directly from the Navy laboratory to the factory of the suit manufacturer, the David Clark Company in Worcester, Mass. David Clark, the owner and president of the company, turned out to be one of the most interesting men I have ever met in the aviation world. He was a stocky man of about fifty-five, with bushy eyebrows and delicate hands which, like his mind, seemed to be always in high-speed motion. He was a chain-smoker, shifting from cigarettes to cigars without missing a beat. He was proud and stubborn, but gentle by nature, the patron and father confessor of the David Clark Company family of employees, who were as loyal and hard-working a group as I have ever seen.

Clark had begun his career in New England as a young man in the garment trade. Right off, he invented a knitting machine that would automatically make a seamless, one-piece, two-way-stretch girdle which, for its time, was considered fantastic. (The structural loads imposed on a girdle, as we all know, can be tremendous, and a machine that can build a good one automatically is an amazing engineering accomplishment, believe me.) With his ingenious machine Clark had all but cornered the important, expanding girdle market. Braving new frontiers, Clark moved into manufacture of brassieres, which, considering _those_ structural loads, was even more awesome.

During the war Clark became interested in the military field, inventing and making boots, shoes, helmets, goggles, anti-G suits, ear-muffs to protect crewmen from engine noise, and other specialty items. Since 1941 almost every piece of pilot “soft goods” has been pioneered by Dave Clark. The brassieres and girdles were his bread-and-butter business, but he was a compulsive gadgeteer and thus found himself in the pressure-suit line, not because there was money in it but because it was a new challenge to his inventive mind.

I returned to Edwards immensely impressed with the David Clark operation. In late 1951 I wrote a letter to NACA headquarters, recommending that we encourage the Navy-Clark pressure-suit effort. This letter was forwarded routinely to the Navy. The Navy lab in Philadelphia was encouraged by this show of interest and immediately set to work on a “crash basis.” Clark, investing his own money in the project (there was little official contract money behind the work), built several suits by hand. He sent some men to NACA, Edwards; I worked with them, welding and gluing various pieces of the complicated suit into place. This work went on for months and it gave me solid groundwork in pressure suits that later paid handsome dividends.

It also led indirectly to one of the most agonizing physical experiences of my life. We had no chamber at Edwards for tests, and I decided to use an airplane if I could get high enough. So, wearing the tried and true partial-pressure suit, I took off one day in a war-weary P-51, one of NACA’s miscellaneous test planes, and climbed as high as it would go. When I reached 43,000 feet, the suit automatically pressurized. Then for the next twenty minutes or so I tried to go higher, nursing the complaining airplane to 44,000 and then 44,500 feet, finally to 45,000 feet, reporting by radio to the ground.

The flight seemed to go perfectly, but the next day I had an awful headache. The pain was indescribable. It forced me to bed, where I remained for twenty-two days, my first illness since childhood. No amount of drugs, not even morphine, would ease the pain. Then, thank God, it went away. The doctors were baffled. No one could ever explain it. Some said it was the suit; some said I had contracted the “bends”; they later said “sinus.” The mystery remains unsolved to this day.

Little by little, we brought the Clark full-pressure suit to a state of near-perfection. We switched regulators, experimented with new cooling systems, and a dozen different helmet-defogging devices. When Marion Carl came out briefly to borrow the Skyrocket for his altitude record, he wore the new Clark full-pressure suit. We stayed up half the night before his flight working out last-minute adjustments to the suit and making parts on a lathe. In my view, the fact that he wore this untried, jerry-rigged suit to 85,000 feet on his third flight made his record all the more remarkable. (When Kit Murray broke Carl’s altitude record about a year later, he wore an Air Force partial-pressure suit.)

A ludicrous piece of journalism temporarily derailed our efforts to bring the Clark suit to operational perfection. The new money allotted the Navy lab at Philadelphia had naturally generated public interest in the pressure suit. A national magazine, now defunct, sent a writer to Philadelphia who composed a story describing the Clark suit in glowing terms. This pleased Commander Weldon, the Navy, and the Clark Company. But when the magazine photographer arrived in Philadelphia to take pictures, he was not impressed by the dirty khaki-colored Clark suit. It didn’t seem glamorous enough to be a “space suit.” To satisfy the photographer’s demands the Navy people pulled out a big, bulbous, experimental pressure suit that was years, if not decades, old, and dead from a development standpoint. But it was photogenic. The photographer was satisfied; his editor selected the picture of the hopelessly obsolete concept for the cover of the issue containing the article.

This misguided publicity unintentionally touched off a minor but bitter pressure-suit battle between the Navy and the Air Force or, rather, brought the long-standing feud over the approach to the suit into the open. The ins and outs of this flap are much too complicated to relate here. The upshot of it all was that the pressure-suit people--both partial and full--got new and unprecedented appropriations. The Navy’s Philadelphia lab, for example, received what in that poverty-ridden field was considered a small fortune, $250,000. As the battle rolled on, alas, not the David Clark Company, but the firm whose suit had been on the magazine cover, received the contract to build the Navy’s full-pressure suit. All the money David Clark had spent out of his own pocket availed naught. The knowledge we had gained in years of pressure-suit work was turned over to a competitor. Such are the breaks of the aviation trade. Typically, Clark never complained. He is a true patriot and sporting competitor.

The Clark suit was too good to die. When the Navy lost interest, the Air Force at Wright Field began to eye it with considerable excitement. A foresighted Wright Field technician, Ernie Martin, awarded Clark a small but encouraging contract to continue work on the suit, even though it was competitive with other Air Force projects. Clark kept on, spending large sums of his own money. Feeling somewhat responsible for his deep and profitless plunge into the pressure-suit field, and convinced that his suit was the ultimate answer for the Air Force and specifically the X-15, which I would fly, I urged Clark on and helped him with experimental work as best I could. I believe that during my five years at Edwards I logged more time in pressure suits than most of the pilots put together. This time the intense pressure completed the destruction of my sinus cavities. When I left Edwards they were shattered.

In 1953 and 1954 during the preliminary studies on the X-15 at NACA, I had urged the incorporation of a full-pressure suit in the ejection-seat concept. The helmet and full suit would provide additional blast-protection for the pilot in the event of bail out, an argument I effectively used against the capsule. The suit I proposed had all the best features of the Clark suit. The North American X-15 bid included the Clark-type suit, listed as a contractor-furnished item. Because of my long background in pressure-suit work in general, and past association with the David Clark Company in particular, the X-15 pressure suit naturally became one of my special projects at North American. In time, the Air Force’s Wright Field lab took over the development work on the suit and supervised the altitude-chamber tests. But the final product was a direct outgrowth of the old NACA-Navy-Clark suit which I first saw at Philadelphia.

Knowing much of the discouraging history of pressure suits, I tackled my new responsibility with grim determination. But I was unaware then that during those early days of the X-15 Dave Clark had a whopping surprise up his sleeve. It was a new “break-through” (and here I mean that overworked word in its literal sense) that would revolutionize the full-pressure suit business. In time the Clark-X-15-Air Force suit would become the standard full-pressure suit for the Air Force. A copy would be worn by the Mercury Astronauts, the seven men scheduled to orbit the earth in a capsule. It would serve as a prototype for suits to be worn by the first U. S. spacemen to land on the moon.