Ramo-Wooldridge, Systems Engineering, and the Information Age
The story of Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge between the end of the war and the creation of the Western Development Division wends through the core of the new regional complex of economic and state power. The first element was knowledge. Ramo and Wooldridge were classmates in physics at Cal Tech, both completing their PhDs in 1936. By 1945, Ramo, who had spent years at General Electric, felt that “General Electric was distinguished by Depression-dominated leadership, conservative, pretty much out-of-date.” They didn’t appreciate that “the A-bomb was going to change everything.” On assignment to Cal Tech for GE’s part in the V-2 recovery program, Ramo recalled that “the "California" factor zoomed with my wife and me, and it was clear I was going to start a company in California, or I was going to go work for one of the existing companies, or go to one of the universities that had extended offers to me.”
Working on guided missiles, Ramo saw the need for a new, more integrated “systems” engineering: “this field of guided missiles, weapons systems dominated by electronics but including flying pieces of equipment as well as equipment on the ground--systems engineering became a very dominant part of it. Those of us who understood this well could see there was a opening.” Ramo took that opening with Hughes Aircraft, building its “Radio Division” from scratch, beginning in 1946.[18]
Howard Hughes was down on his luck in 1946 and needed all the help he could get. In July of that year he had crash-landed his company’s experimental high-speed reconnaissance spy plane, the XF-11, into an exclusive neighborhood of Beverly Hills. Trying to reach the Los Angeles Country Club, he fell about 300 feet short, and “the gigantic photographic plane, both its engines whining, tore more than half the roof from a two-story dwelling at 803 N. Linden Drive, occupied by Dr. Jules Zimmerman, a dentist. Simultaneously, the plane’s right wing sliced through the upstairs bedroom of the home next door...narrowly missing the occupants, Jerry De Kamp and his wife Elizabeth, who were in the room at the time.” Hughes suffered massive injuries, but survived.[19] He managed to lose $770,000 on only $1.6 million in sales that year, and by 1947 he was being investigated by the U.S. Senate for war profiteering on the XF-11 and the notorious “Spruce Goose” transport plane.[20]
Starting with just 10 employees, Ramo began the Hughes Radio division by hiring his Cal Tech classmate Wooldridge and soon secured an Air Force contract to develop airborne radar-guided “fire control” systems. Brilliant scientist-engineer-administrators, Ramo and Wooldridge rapidly produced the Falcon (GAR-1, GAR-4, etc) air-to-air guided missile, a 6-foot by 6-inch guided rocket spear with a range of 5 miles, which easily shot down two retired, remote-controlled B-17 Flying Fortresses in its first test. The Falcon became standard equipment and “sales to the military rose from $8.6 million in 1949 to $197 million in 1953”[21] To deliver the deadly darts, Hughes built a huge production facility in Tuscon, Arizona and then sold it to the Air Force at cost. Owned by the Air Force but operated by Hughes, the Tuscon plant typified the military-industrial complex. By 1953 Hughes Aircraft Company was no longer struggling, nor were Angelenos. In large part to supply 26,000 Falcon missiles, Hughes now employed 17,000, 4,000 of whom worked in Culver City for Ramo in his state-of-the-art Electronics Division. In his autobiography, The Business of Science, Ramo boasted that his division “came to house the largest concentration of technical college graduates, including Ph.D.’s, in any single industrial facility of that period, except for Bell Telephone Labs...” On “cost-plus” contracts typical during the Second World War buildup, Ramo recalled, “it was essentially impossible to lose money.”[22]
By the late 1950s, the former aircraft industry had been totally transformed, into the “aerospace industry,” dominated by the “Big Five” prime contractors for military missiles, satellites, aircraft, munitions, and electronics systems: Convair (Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation) Douglas, Lockheed, North American, and Northrup Aviation. Through 1953, production for “space” (missiles, satellites, and associated electronics) accounted for less than 1% of Lockheed’s sales. By 1960 these product lines accounted for more than half of its massive volume of $1.3 billion (in 1960 dollars).[23] Together the Big Five had $5 billion in sales in that year, employing more than 200,000 in California alone, and most of those jobs were in Southern California. By then, aircraft had become “almost a sideline.” In fact, Lockheed, Douglas, and Convair actually lost money on their commercial aircraft in 1960. Convair Astronautics was the largest of Convair’s divisions, employing nearly 25,000 workers at its San Diego plant alone, where workers produced the Atlas ICBM, which became operational at Vandenberg Air Force Base in September 1959, and the Atlas-Centaur spacecraft, designed for the first landings on the Moon, slated for 1962-3.[24]
At Douglas, missile and space programs by 1960 accounted for 72% of the company’s outstanding orders. The prime contractor for the Thor intermediate-range nuclear missile—deployed by NATO in the U.K.—Douglas had converted its Santa Monica Division to space and missile programs, employing 18,000 workers in that single facility and 35,000 throughout the metropolitan area.[25]
