<Begin Segment 6>

TI: This is the wind tunnel on campus?

HM: Yeah, on campus.

TI: Right.

HM: And it just happened that that wind tunnel is exactly the same tunnel as the small tunnel at Boeing, and the same tunnel at Convair, which I didn't know at that time. But anyway, it came in handy because when I went, did go to work for Convair I knew all the equipment, and I knew how what, how things worked. And they used the same IBM computer system. It was a archaic computer system, and you really can't call it a computer now, but that's what it was called at that time period.

But anyway, I worked in the tunnel in the summertime. And then the senior year we, we helped the people in the mechanical engineering shops. And they were doing things like overhauling some of the test equipment that they used to use for the classes. So anyway, that became the start of the second, well, it's the second patent at the U of W. But when you're at U of W and you have the working function it's all turned over to the university. You don't have any proprietary rights. But we did it, in the senior year we did a -- they used to have this very low speed engine that mechanically, you could determine the pressure volume -- they used to have a PV indicator thing, used to call it.

TI: Right.

HM: And it was a very slow RPM engine because if it was any faster the mechanical systems couldn't follow it. And it was a mech -- mechanical plotting of the pressure volume as a function of where the cylinder was. And you can determine the mean effective pressure, and in turn, you can determine the horsepower output and what changes when you change the spark setting. So you can get some idea as to how to tune up a engine properly for a given load. The problem was that you couldn't apply the same principle in high speed engines, the normal engines that you have for internal combustion processes because it's too fast, and the mechanical system being hooked to the mechanical pressure system wouldn't allow itself to follow it accurately. So anyway, this, there were three of us working on this thing. And we says, "Hey, all we have to do is put a pressure transducer in here and put a real tiny model airplane spark plug to replace the real spark plug, and then we could put a rotary potentiometer in the front of this crank, and we could do this thing, whole thing electrically. All we need is a good scope." And so the problem was where to get a good pressure transducer. Well, my brother was in the instrumentation group.

TI: Oh, at Boeing.

HM: Boeing, yeah. So I says, "Hey, how about borrowing one of these dinky pressure transducers." So anyway, we made that arrangement. It was really a -- he charged it out, and he said it was going to be used for the purpose of the university. So it was legally done. But --

TI: And this was the basis of another patent or --

HM: Yeah. Anyway, so we stuck -- I mean, it was 18-millimeter spark plug that this engine used, a big one. And so we made a plug for that, and put that tiny model airplane plug in that one area. We kind of counter-bored the hole. And then we put the pressure transducer in there, and we put a baffle in there so we won't get high spike pressure rates. And we put the thing on there. And the dumb thing worked. We could see the pressure rise. And Mike Guidan, who was a head of the SAE group, Society of Automotive Engineers, well, he was going through the lab one day, and he says, "What have you guys got there?" And we started looking at the scope, and he says, "Well, this is a PV diagram." And Mike was my professor for a couple of courses. And, and I thought a great deal of him. He was, he was a very nice person. So he says, "Hey, you guys got something here. And I'm going to see that you guys get some recognition for this thing." So anyway, he took it upon himself to -- well, he asked for a write-up of what we had put together. And he sent a letter to the three automotive companies, Chrysler and Ford and GM, and said, "Here's a student SAE demonstration of advanced instrumentation for pressure volume indicator," and all that... he had a long title...

TI: Higher RPM and all this?

HM: Yeah.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.