Background
Charles Draper was born on October 2, 1901, in Windsor, United Kingdom. He was the son of Arthur, a dentist, and Martha (Stark) Washington Draper, a former school teacher.
Charles Draper was born on October 2, 1901, in Windsor, United Kingdom. He was the son of Arthur, a dentist, and Martha (Stark) Washington Draper, a former school teacher.
Draper graduated from the Windsor public school. After that he enrolled in the University of Missouri in Columbia in 1917 with intentions of studying medicine.
When Draper’s parents moved to California, Draper transferred to Stanford University, where he obtained his bachelor of arts degree in psychology.
But instead of scrolling in medical school, Draper decided to become a ship’s radio operator and enrolled in Herald’s Radio College. After finishing at Herald’s, he traveled back East with a friend who was going to Harvard University.
Draper liked Cambridge, Massachusetts, and decided to enroll at MIT.
In 1926, Draper earned his bachelor of science degree in electrochemical engineering at MIT.
Still, he hesitated to commit himself to one field of study. His wide-ranging interests included mathematics, chemistry, physics, metallurgy, and aeronautical engineering.
In 1928, despite not having earned enough credits in any one field for a master’s degree, the university awarded him a master of science degree without departmental specification.
In 1938, he received his doctor of science degree, twenty-one years after he first enrolled at a college.
In 1929 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology appointed him as a research assistant in aeronautical engineering. Draper was first drawn to engineering by his navigator’s interest in flight instrumentation. During World War II, Draper and colleagues in his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed the Mark 14 gun sight for use on U.S. battleships. Using gyroscopes to correct for target motion in flight, the gun sight is credited with successfully thwarting attacks of Japanese Kamikaze pilots. Draper spent almost his entire career at MIT and took great pride in his role as an educator who spurred his students on to significant scientific research efforts.
Despite his stolid appearance as a bespectacled engineer, Draper was, at least academically, a free thinker. His interests in a variety of subjects gave rise to an MIT legend that he had taken more courses for credit than anyone else in the school’s history.
As Charles became more focused, Draper’s superior intellect began to shine. Continuing his studies in pursuit of a doctorate, Draper took a new course in hydro- and aerodynamics conducted by Julius A. Stratton.
Draper continued to pursue a wide range of interests and gained renown at MIT as the person to take the most credits ever at the school without receiving a doctorate. Eventually, MIT insisted that Draper finish his doctoral studies.
In addition to Charles's studies at MIT, Draper had gained his private pilot’s license through the Army Air Corps reserve flight school in 1926. Draper’s early interest in flying combined with his diligence and “bulldog” tenacity in thinking a problem through led him to make many inroads into aeronautical engineering. In Air, Space, and Instruments, Stratton recalled one particularly harrowing demonstration in which Draper finally convinced his instructor to fly with him in an open cockpit as he demonstrated how more sophisticated airplane instrumentation could prevent stalling and spinning in blind flying. To prove his point. Draper nosed the plane up to make it stall and then took it on a nose dive. “It occurred to me that I had left a good many things undone and that the Department would be hard put to find someone to teach mechanics,” Stratton recalled. Fortunately for both men, Draper’s “practical demonstration” was a success as the plane leveled out and the two safely concluded their flight.
The year after he received his doctorate, Draper was appointed a professor and given the helm of MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory. Working with Jimmy Doolittle, Elmer Sperry, and the Sperry Gyroscope Company, which provided support for his research, Draper completed a project to develop a new gyroscopic rate of turn indicator for navigational purposes. Despite the project’s success, the indicator did not seem to have immediate practical applications. However, when the United States entered World War II, Draper’s rate-of-turn indicator proved to be the stepping stone for a high-tech gyroscopic gun sight. In The Eagle Has Returned, Brigadier General Robert Duffy wrote that Draper’s “gun sight would correct for ‘Kentucky Windage’, or target motion in flight, and became the basis for the new technological field of aided tracking fire control.”
Based on high-precision rate-measuring gyros, Draper used “damping,” or rotors immersed in viscous fluid, to develop the Mark 14 gun sight, which semi-automatically adjusted for range, wind, and ballistics relying on deck coordinates as reference axes rather than complicated gyro-stabilized references. Draper’s “black box” gun sight with moving cross-hairs proved to be an effective antiaircraft gun sight for ships and was used on a wide variety of antiaircraft weaponry. Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory was staffed by several hundred people at the height of World War II.
After the war, Draper continued to work on control systems for military purposes, including a sight control system for U.S. Air Force F-86 fighter planes during the Korean War in the early 1950s; he later also worked on missile fire control systems.
As Draper systematically improved upon his control systems, primarily through advances in gyroscopic instrumentation, he began to pursue his long-held belief that these gyroscopic-based systems could be used to develop a revolutionary guidance system.
Working with the Air Force Armament laboratory, Draper and his colleagues at the Instrumentation Laboratory began work on an inertial guidance system. This ultimate navigational system would require no outside reference points, such as radio signals or celestial guides. In addition to increasing safety by effectively eliminating many aeronautical guidance problems due to such circumstances as bad weather conditions, the system would become a vital development for space exploration.
Draper’s diverse background at MIT served him well as he oversaw a group of researchers and doctoral students in interdisciplinary research that combined geometry, kinematics, and dynamics with aerodynamics, electronics, and mechanics. Based on his gun sight systems of World War II, which used the single-degree-of-freedom integrating gyro floating in a viscous fluid, Draper developed an improved gyro accelerometer that could accurately measure acceleration and velocity, as well as distance, or position.
Draper’s career in MIT included an appointment as chairman of the aeronautical engineering department from 1951 to 1966. He was appointed a senior scientist at the laboratory in 1973.
Draper set out on a flight from Bedford, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles, California, using only his inertial navigation system to guide the plane on its journey. With an Air Force piloting crew and seven other MIT engineers, Draper took off on February 8, 1953, in a B-29 for a twelve-hour flight that amazed all those aboard. Without anyone touching the controls, the plane flew across the continental United States, adjusting for altitude and direction as it sped across the Midwest, over the Rocky Mountains, and to within ten miles of the Los Angeles International Airport, where the crew took over.
Because of the significant military applications of his system, the general public did not learn of the historic flight until 1957. But during those intervening years, the military supported Draper as he developed more sophisticated inertial guidance systems for submarines, missiles, and manned aircraft. The submarine inertial navigation system (SINS) was unveiled in 1954 and was eventually used to guide the Navy’s Polaris submarines as well as the Polaris missiles. Further development of SINS and SPIRE (Space Inertial Reference Equipment) brought about even more sophisticated inertial guidance systems for use in military craft, including bombers, jet fighters, and submarines. By the 1970s commercial aircraft were also being equipped with inertial guidance systems.
The most dramatic use of Draper’s guidance system, however, was initiated in 1961 when Draper and colleagues in his laboratory at MIT began designing a guidance and control system for the Apollo spacecraft missions to the moon. Despite his success with the system so far, many doubted Draper’s ability to devise such a system for space flight. Despite his advancing years, Draper proposed that he would be the logical choice to go on an Apollo mission, since he had the most intimate knowledge of the system. Although NASA turned down his offer to go along on the flight (reportedly arousing Draper’s anger), the entire world was witness to Draper’s engineering genius as millions watched the televised landing of a man on the moon and the safe splashdown of the capsule that returned the astronauts to earth.
Draper was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the French Academy of Sciences. He was a president of the International Academy of Astronautics, and was a member of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Draper married Ivy Willard on September 7, 1938, and had four children: James, Martha, Michael and John.