Ignition! Quotes

“And there is one disconcerting thing about working with a computer – it's likely to talk back to you. You make some tiny mistake in your FORTRAN language – putting a letter in the wrong column, say, or omitting a comma – and the 360 comes to a screeching halt and prints out rude remarks, like "ILLEGAL FORMAT," or "UNKNOWN PROBLEM," or, if the man who wrote the program was really feeling nasty that morning, "WHAT'S THE MATTER STUPID? CAN'T YOU READ?" Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don’t mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

“Joe? You know that stuff you sent me to test for thermal stability? Well, first, it hasn't got any. Second, you owe me a new bomb, a new Wianco pickup, a new stirrer, and maybe a few more things I'll think of later. And third (crescendo and fortissimo) you'll have a couple of flunkies up here within fifteen minutes to clean up this (-bleep-) mess or I'll be down there with a rusty hacksaw blade..." I specified the anatomical use to which the saw blade would be put. End of conversation.”
― John D. Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“Most of the Navy work on peroxide was not directed towards missiles, but towards what was called "super performance" for fighter planes -an auxiliary rocket propulsion unit that could be brought into play to produce a burst of very high speed- so that when a pilot found six Migs breathing down his neck he could hit the panic button and perform the maneuver known as getting the hell out of here.”
― John D. Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“a molecule with one reducing (fuel) end and one oxidizing end, separated by a pair of firmly crossed fingers, is an invitation to disaster.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

“Their guess turned out to be right, but one is reminded of E. T. Bell's remark that the great vice of the Greeks was not sodomy but extrapolation.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“In general, everybody got respectable performances out of peroxide, although there were some difficulties with ignition and with combustion stability, but that freezing point was a tough problem, and most organizations rather lost interest in the oxidizer.

Except the Navy. At just that time the admirals were kicking and screaming and refusing their gold-braided lunches at the thought of bringing nitric acid aboard their beloved carriers; they were also digging in their heels with a determined stubbornness that they hadn't shown since that day when it had first been suggested that steam might be preferable to sail for moving a battleship from point A to point B.”
― John D. Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“The only possible source of trouble connected with the acid is its corrosive nature, which can be overcome by the use of corrosion-resistant materials.' Ha! If they had known the trouble that nitrid acid was to cause before it was finally domesticated, the authors would probably have stepped out of the lab and shot themselves.”
― John D. Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“The Air Force has always had more money than sales resistance, and they bought a one-year program (probably for something in the order of a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars) and in June of 1961 Hawkins and Summers punched the “start” button and the machine started to shuffle IBM cards. And to print out structures that looked like road maps of a disaster area, since if the compounds depicted could even have been synthesized, they would have, infallibly, detonated instantly and violently. The machine’s prize contribution to the cause of science was the structure, to which it confidently attributed a specific impulse of 363.7 seconds, precisely to the tenth of a second, yet. The Air Force, appalled, cut the program off after a year, belatedly realizing that they could have got the same structure from any experienced propellant man (me, for instance) during half an hour’s conversation, and at a total cost of five dollars or so. (For drinks. I would have been afraid even to draw the structure without at least five Martinis under my belt.)”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

“Came the day of the first trial. The propellants were hydrazine and WFNA. We were all gathered around waiting for the balloon to go up, when Dr. Milton Scheer(Uncle Milty) warned,
"Hold it - the acid valve is leaking!"
"Go ahead - fire anyway!" Paul ordered.

I looked around and signaled to my own gang, and we started backing away gently, like so many cats with wet feet.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“The engineers had been guilty of a sin to which engineers are prone—starting their engineering before doing their research.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“And the KNO3 solution had another disadvantage, which had not been anticipated. When it was fired, the exhaust stream contained a high concentration of potassium ions and free electrons—a plasma, in fact –which would absorb radio waves like mad and make radar guidance of a missile quite impossible.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“The farthest-out expedient that I heard of was tried at Bell Aeronautic. Somebody had the bright idea that the sonic vibrations of a rocket motor might promote combustion. So he made a tape recording of the sound of a running motor and played it back at the interacting propellants in the hope that they might be shaken—or shamed—into smooth combustion. (Why not? He’d tried everything else!) But alas, this didn’t work either.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“Now, what is jet fuel? That depends. A turbojet has a remarkably undiscriminating appetite, and will run, or can be made to run, on just about anything that will burn and can be made to flow, from coal dust to hydrogen.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“And finally he surpassed himself with something that had a dimethylamino group attached to a mercaptan sulfur, and whose odor can’t, with all the resources of the English language, even be described. It also drew flies.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“There was a small ignition chamber, with high-speed valves and injectors for the propellants under investigation. Viewing ports, a high-speed Fastex camera, and about forty pounds of lenses, prisms, and what not, most of them salvaged from German submarine periscopes, completed the setup.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“red-blooded young Americans all, with larceny in their hearts, they liberated every milligram of hydrazine hydrate and high-strength hydrogen peroxide that they could find in Germany.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“And then the war was over, and the German work came to light—and things started to get really complicated.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“And it is a nerve-wracking experience to put your ear against a propellant tank and hear it go "glub" -long pause- "glub" and so on. After such an experience many people, myself (particularly) included, tended to look dubiously at peroxide and to pass it by on the other side.”
― John D. Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“The cleanliness required was not merely surgical—it was levitical.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

“And the moral of this story is that it’s always worth trying an electrical discharge on your mixtures when you’re hunting for new compounds. You never know what will happen. Almost anything can.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants