PROFESSOR MOORE - 6/8/94 11
balloons out of a Goodyear film called pliofilm. It was a vinyl
chloride that just went to hell when exposed to sunlight. It
really came apart. So I'm very proud that we began pushing them
for polyethylene balloons. With some difficulty we got Otto
Winzen who was the entrepreneur cmd promoter, working with Get,
and we got him to make these balloons you see here in the design
that was being planned for Project Helios, with the pliofilm
balloons. At the same time we got an entrepreneur who was even
faster acting, and that was this fellow A.J. Smith. A one-man
shop. He would do anything for money. He, indeed, did. With no
great technical background, he made a number of these balloons
for us.
Q: Kind of a garage type of affair where he would sit down
and make them one by one and ...
A: I don't know. He got some girls and got some assembly
workers, for a contract from us. Anyway, we got these balloons
going, made visits to Minneapolis to push General Mills. The
pressure from the Air Force was enormous. There was a similar
problem, of course, in developing microphones that would pick up
low frequency sound waves with Columbia. There was much
enthusiasm, in testing these microphones.
Q: How did you come to join the Army Air Force?
A: When World War II broke out I applied for pilot
training, and so did everybody else. Because I was a senior at
Georgia Tech in a chemical engineering course with a fair amount
of thermodynamics and other things, I got diverted into the
meteorological cadet program. I still wanted to be a pilot but I
got diverted into the meteorological cadet program, and the next
class that I could join didn't start until December of 1 42. I
joined up sometime in '42. So I went through the meteorological
cadet program and found I was a lousy forecaster, but I did end
up, when Spilhaus came recruiting for people with engineering
background, I got recruited into Colonel Duffy's liaison office.
Q: Was that directly for General Arnold's staff?
A: I was assigned, believe it or not, to Headquarters, Air
Force .•• I still have the Headquarters Air Force (rondelles]. I
ended up being assigned to Headquarters, Army Air Force. I was a
second lieutenant.
Q: So you got recruited by, at that time, Captain
Spilhaus.
A: Right, and I got sent to the Weather Equipment
Technician School in Spring Lake, New Jersey, essentially Fort
Monmouth. When I finished the training course for radiosonde and
for maintenance of equipment, I was headed for North Africa, and
I had a medical problem. When I got out of the hospital, I was
assigned back to Colonel Duffy. I remained there. I finished