The young man stood at the edge of the drill field and felt his entire being-heart, body, soul-lifting into the air as the fragile, box-like aeroplane clattered past, making first one and then another turn around the grassy area at the center of Fort Myer, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. He knew he was seeing the future-not just the future of America, but his own. "I will build something better than that!" Donald Wills Douglas told himself. "That is what I am going to do!"
Young Douglas had come to Washington that drowsy early summer of 1909 for a prep course before entering the U.S. Naval Academy later in the year. Like his older brother, Harold, he had been a good student at Trinity School in New York City. But his mother, a strong-willed woman of German descent, thought he would benefit from extra tutoring in math and science. So he had come to the nation's capital to visit Harold, already a midshipman at Annapolis, and to do some boning up for the Academy. And that trip to Fort Myer, where he witnessed Orville Wright soaring overhead in a Wright Model B Flyer during U.S. Army flight trials, affected the course of aviation history just as surely as the flight at Kitty Hawk had done six years earlier.
"Not over 200 army and civilian personnel were present," Douglas later recalled. "It seemed to me that the cavalry horses in the nearby post corral were more excited than the people." From that point on, Douglas' energy was directed toward designing and building airplanes.
Life at the Academy
"Dirty mirror: One demerit."
"Articles adrift: One demerit."
"Non-military bearing: Three demerits."
Thus began Donald Douglas' Naval Academy experience. If he was suited for and thrived on the rigorous academic and physical discipline, Douglas had some problems with the military aspect of life at Annapolis. As he later told a group of grads, "I had the usual brushes with the authorities on disciplinary affairs-an occasional trip over the wall when denied a town visit . . . [but] smoking was my big trouble. . . . I found the studies exacting, but I was fortunate during my three years in getting by well-neither at the top nor at the bottom of my class."
Reviewing Douglas' records from the Academy, it's obvious that "getting by well" was something of an understatement. In his second year, Douglas ranked number 30 of 160 midshipmen, putting him well into the top quarter. He did "very well" in mathematics and mechanics, physics and chemistry, and, surprisingly, languages. At the second class examination in 1911, he stood number five in his class in mechanical processes.
Comments about Douglas from one of his former roommates, Kirkman O'Neal, are even more enlightening:
He had a brilliant mind, especially in mathematics. He spent much of his time reading aeronautical books and designing small planes. He had a small plane that he had built which he kept on top of his locker. One Sunday morning . . . the Superintendent of the Naval Academy inspected our room. Seeing the plane, he . . . said, "Mr. Douglas, do you think you could ever build a plane that could fly?" Doug said, "Yes, Sir."
Douglas had been bitten hard by the airplane bug and was surprised that not everyone shared his enthusiasm.
Despite occasional reprimands for "evidence of use of tobacco," Douglas enjoyed life at Annapolis. His brother, Harold, had entered the Academy two years earlier, so Donald had someone to clear a path for him. He related that it was Harold's summer cruise in the square-rigger Chesapeake that had finally convinced him to seek an appointment to the Academy. Harold was tall, popular, and a four-sport letterman. His picture in the Lucky Bag, the Academy yearbook, shows a darkly handsome young man with keen eyes and a quiet smile. The write-up says, in part: "Doug [Harold Douglas] is the Eiffel Tower of the Class and is girthed in proportion. . . . His athletic career has been a gradual crescendo."
Donald Douglas worked hard, studied hard, and in his spare time built model airplanes, experimenting with designs, airfoils, shapes, and propellers. Once a plane was finished to his satisfaction, during off hours (and probably somewhat clandestinely), he took his craft to the armory, which served as a drill field during inclement weather and was suitably large for his purposes. He later recalled:
I built a few rubber band-driven models and flew them in the Armory when I was able to slip in there alone and unobserved. I was attempting . . . to determine the effect of changes in the aerodynamic characteristics of the model. I would launch the model by means of a rubber band catapult and measure the length of flight. The rubber catapult was hooked to the model landing gear at one end, and to a nail that I had forced between the wooden blocks of the armory floor at the other.
One day at drill, indoors in the Armory, I was shocked to see a midshipman near me stumble and fall in ranks. I had carelessly failed to remove my launching pin the previous day!
Between Douglas' first and second years at the Academy, he and his brother were shipmates on board the battleship USS Indiana during the three-month summer practice cruise to Europe. While the ship was at Portsmouth, they took the opportunity to travel to London. Kirkman O'Neal recalled that the midshipmen were granted three days' leave to visit the capital city. "We had a great time there," he said, "and we visited the Tower of London where Don Douglas found the armor of his ancestor, the Black Douglas."
Being from Clan Douglas was always important to Donald, and discovering the armor of the early-13th-century patriot Sir James Douglas may have been the trigger for his embracing Scottish traditions. In later years he would learn to play the bagpipes and several of his dogs would have Scottish names.
Annapolis, meanwhile, became the center for U.S. naval aviation in 1911 when the first naval air station was established across the Severn River. Watching Lieutenant Theodore G. "Spuds" Ellyson, Naval Aviator No. 1, fly Curtiss seaplanes off the Severn outside his dormitory further inspired Douglas to work on new airplane designs. He described one of his drawings from that era, of an "aquaeroplane," as "merely a sketch of what I then thought a seaplane should be."
The Decision to Leave
It is not surprising that Donald felt a sense of loss when Harold graduated in 1911, especially since, failing the Navy eye exam, Harold was forced to take a commission in the Coast Artillery. At an Academy reunion many years after his days on "the Yard," Donald Douglas reminisced, "In my . . . second class year, with my brother gone, I commenced to feel that, while I still loved the Navy, I really had a terrific desire to resign . . ."
Finally, in May 1912, he could resist the challenge no longer. According to Douglas, he longed to
go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and acquire an engineering degree. I felt that with this education I should be able to find a place in aircraft manufacturing where I could share in the development of the airplane. I rationalized that the first three years at the Navy school were good pre-engineering, but the fourth year would be wasted if I eventually expected to become a civilian engineer. Also, I was not sure from what I could pick up that aviation was going to become, for some time at least, a very important part of the Navy.
It was not true, despite a long-standing "fable," as Douglas called it, that he was requested to resign because one of his model airplanes had hit an admiral on the head while he was testing it. His only aviation-related brush with Navy officialdom while he was at the Naval Academy came when his talents were requested by an upperclassman to help him design and build an airplane.
According to Douglas:
I did have one embarrassing meeting with a really fine captain as a result of my undeserved reputation as an aeronautical expert. A First classman came to me and insisted that we could get permission to build an airplane at the Naval Academy. I tried at odd moments to rough out a design. To my horror one Sunday, I was called below to talk to this grand naval officer who had stopped the project before it could be submitted to the Secretary of the Navy by the First classman's congressman. I was treated very gently by the captain, but never heard how he treated the First classman.
It is interesting to speculate how different aviation history might have been if the Navy had pursued the project and Douglas had stayed on at the Academy.
Serving the Navy in Civilian Life
Douglas left Annapolis in May of 1912 with $500 in his pocket, a spring in his step, and great hopes for the future. It had been only three years since he had seen Orville Wright fly his Model B at Fort Myer. He worked that summer for a marine engineer in New York and then went up to Boston to enroll at MIT.
Much later, the aircraft designer recalled:
I entered MIT . . . and started what I had been warned was going to be the hardest grind of my life. I was taking the course in Mechanical Engineering-there was no Aeronautical Engineering course at that time-and was shooting to graduate in the spring of 1914. Everyone, including the Dean, said it could not be done. But I had a drive?an urgency . . . [to] finish engineering school by the spring of 1914.
Now here is where I first realized what the Academy had done for me. I found that I could hit good grades at MIT easier than at Annapolis. I found that the training that I had received, that had taught me to depend on my own efforts, stood me in good stead in Boston. I found that the marvelous good health my three years as a midshipman had given me came in handy in my new life . . . with little but study for relaxation.
Although he missed the physical discipline, friendly competition, and camaraderie of the Naval Academy, Douglas continued to excel, earning his engineering degree from MIT in two years. And then he rejoined the Navy, although not in uniform. Douglas' first job after graduation was as an assistant to Commander Jerome C. Hunsaker, designing and building a wind tunnel at MIT for the Department of Naval Architecture as a part of the new course in aerodynamics and aeronautical engineering.
In classic Douglas manner, having been given the rough sketches of the wind tunnel by Hunsaker and asked to make finished drawings, Donald instead built a model of the tunnel from the rough draft and calibrated it by successive trial and error. Hunsaker recalled: "The ordinary assistant would have been fired, but Douglas was not the ordinary assistant. His apparatus was a lot better than my suggestion, cost less and was all done!"
From Hunsaker's lab, Douglas went on to work for the Connecticut Aircraft Company, designing and building the Navy's first non-rigid airship, the DN-1. He next traveled to California to work with Glenn L. Martin, where the bomber he designed helped sink battleships during the 1921 naval bombing experiments off the Virginia Capes. Once he had his own company, Douglas designed and built the DT-1 torpedo-bomber for the Navy, followed by such renowned naval aircraft as the TBD Devastator, SBD Dauntless, AD Skyraider, F3D Skynight, F4D Skyray, and A3D Skywarrior. Not a bad contribution for a resigned midshipman from the U.S. Naval Academy.
Donald W. Douglas Sr., academic records, Nimitz Library, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD.
Donald W. Douglas Sr., private notes, collection of Donald W. Douglas Jr.
O'Neal Steel, Inc., Memoirs of Kirkman O'Neal (Nonesuch Press, n.d.), p. 8.
Richard P. Hallion and the Editors of Time-Life Books, Designers and Test Pilots, The Epic of Flight (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1983).