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The Gas Turbine an Internal Combustion Primemover;
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As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Sanford Alexander Moss was an American aviation engineer and a former Cornell University instructor, who pioneered in the field of superchargers for airplanes and automobiles.
Background
Sanford A. Moss was born on August 23, 1872, in San Francisco, California, the eldest of three children (two sons and a daughter) of Ernest Goodman Moss and Josephine Sanford. His father's English forebears came to the United States before 1800. His father, Ernest Moss, a mining engineer, followed that profession with indifferent success until a tropical fever in Mexico led him, on his doctor's advice, to move to San Francisco, where he became a language teacher.
Education
At sixteen, Sanford became a San Francisco machinist's apprentice and later a draftsman for a specialist in compressed-air engineering, whom he remembered as having used an impulse waterwheel to drive an air compressor. Similar work in several gas-engine shops and a course in thermodynamics taught by Frederick G. Hesse at the University of California at Berkeley in 1895 strengthened Moss's fascination with the gas turbine.
After receiving the bachelor's degree in 1896, Moss wrote his master's thesis on gas turbines at Berkeley in 1900 and continued research on them as an instructor and doctoral candidate at Cornell University's Sibley College of Engineering.
At Cornell in 1902 Moss developed what he later called "the first turbine wheel actually operated by products of combustion in the United States, and possibly the first such ever operated" ("Gas Turbines and Turbosuperchargers"). Although the turbine lacked the power even to run its own compressor, it served as the basis of Moss's 1903 doctoral thesis.
Moss received his Bachelor of Science degree and Master of Science degree in engineering from the University of California, San Francisco.
Career
In June 1903 Moss went to work for the General Electric Company, first under Charles Steinmetz in Schenectady, New York, and then, from 1904 on, in the Thomson Laboratory at Lynn, Massachusetts.
From 1904 to 1907 Moss and other company engineers worked to develop a gas turbine. Materials then known could not stand the high temperatures required, and "creep" - permanent blade distortion under prolonged stress - was unrecognized. Consequent turbine inefficiency led to abandonment of the project. But it had spawned a centrifugal compressor - a sort of turbine in reverse, imparting peripheral velocity convertible into pressure - which found a good market in blast furnaces and elsewhere.
Moss continued working in steam-turbine and centrifugal-compressor operations. World War I brought Moss into the related field for which he would later be best known: aviation turbosuperchargers. If the fuel-air mixture is compressed at intake, more oxygen can be crammed into an engine cylinder, so that more fuel can be burned and thus more power generated: this process is known as "supercharging. " For lightness and compactness, airplanes use centrifugal (rather than reciprocating) compressors, either geared to the engine shaft or driven by a turbine powered by engine exhaust gases. The latter type is the turbosupercharger. The turbosupercharger concept can be found in a Swiss article of 1909 and a German patent (for sea-level engines) of 1911. In 1917 the French engineer Auguste Rateau proposed it for airplane engines at high altitudes (where the air is thin) and successfully tested it on a mountain peak. Informed of this by the French, the American government enlisted General Electric on the strength of its large steam-turbine business.
Moss, in cooperation with United States Army Air Force engineers, designed a turbosupercharger, and, in August 1918 on Pike's Peak at 14, 000 feet, used it to raise a Liberty engine's horsepower from 230 to 356, slightly above the engine's sea-level power. This success led the army to finance a program of turbosupercharger research and development under Moss at General Electric through the 1920's and 1930's. Among the problems solved were those of minimizing the drag of protruding elements, propeller and airframe design for high altitudes, prevention of exhaust leaks, carburetor design, fuel-pumping systems, and such aspects of the turbosupercharger proper as materials and turbine-wheel design for high temperatures and devices for cooling the compressed air. Meanwhile the British had committed themselves to the geared supercharger. By the beginning of World War II, its efficiency had been so far improved that nearly all military aircraft, British and otherwise, used it. Nevertheless, the turbosupercharger remained more flexible in adjusting to varying atmospheric pressure. It also weighed much less and used no engine shaft power. In the 1930's an alloy used for dentures solved the problems of hightemperature turbine blade operation.
Moss retired from General Electric in 1938, but after the Munich crisis, he came back as a consultant for further turbosupercharger work. A triumphant test in 1939 vindicated the army's faith.
By 1943 turbosuperchargers were giving American fighters and bombers, such as the P-38, P-47, B-17, and B-24, a significant advantage over the enemy in high-altitude operations. This contribution to Allied victory in World War II would in itself have entitled Moss to historical notice. After the war, moreover, the turbosupercharger remained important for reciprocating aircraft engines of 200-500 horsepower. Moss himself wrote that he "always considered the turbosupercharger as merely a step on the way to the gas turbine" ("Gas Turbines and Turbosuperchargers"). He recognized, however, that its use of otherwise largely wasted power from the exhaust tended to divert attention from the improvement of its efficiency and that consequently its chief contribution to gas-turbine development was in the materials and techniques of high-temperature operation. He died on November 10, 1946, of a heart attack in his Lynn home and was buried in Puritan Lawn Cemetery in Lynn.
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Membership
Sanford A. Moss was a member of many scientific societies and an officer in several, including the International Electro - Technical Commission, American Society of Mechanical Engineers and a fellow of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences.
Personality
Sanford A. Moss was a small, nervously energetic man who wore eyeglasses and a pointed beard. As might be surmised from his persistence in following what for many years seemed a blind alley of mechanical engineering, he was often pertinacious and sometimes truculent. But his opponents were usually disarmed both by the clarity and precision of his argument and by his keen humor and appreciation of it in others.
Connections
On August 23, 1899, Sanford A. Moss married Jennie Edith Somerville Donnely in Chicago, Illinois. They had four children
The Collier Trophy is an annual aviation award administered by the U.S. National Aeronautic Association (NAA), presented to those who have made 'the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America, with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air or space vehicles, the value of which has been thoroughly demonstrated by actual use during the preceding year'.
The Collier Trophy is an annual aviation award administered by the U.S. National Aeronautic Association (NAA), presented to those who have made 'the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America, with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air or space vehicles, the value of which has been thoroughly demonstrated by actual use during the preceding year'.