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Touch of Gray - February 2001
Tom
Purcell remembers moon shots
Fred Kilgour speaks at 200th Anniversary
Library of Congress Celebration
Tom
Purcell remembers the moon shots
Carolina Meadows resident is eighty years young
Carolina
Meadows residents gathered for their annual Christmas party
in the Club Center on Saturday, December 16. As they entered
the Club Center, under the towering decorated tree, they saw
CM resident Tom Purcell, complete with his railroad cap, operating
a realistic scale model, complete with bells and whistles,
of one of America's most famous trains, the Burlington Zephyr.
On
that day - and only on that day - Tom Purcell, an active eighty-year
old bespectacled resident who looks more like a College professor
than a world-renowned aeronautical engineer, is on the floor
operating his model railroad. He lovingly tends his train
all day long for the enjoyment of residents and employees
alike.
And
this is not just an ordinary store-type model railroad. No,
it is an accurate to scale fully working model built by Tom.
It is a reproduction of one of America's most famous trains
from the glory days of American railroading. The Zephyr was
built in 1934 of stainless steel and was the first diesel-powered
train ever built. It set records for speed and fuel economy.
It traveled from Denver to Chicago in thirteen hours at a
fuel cost of $17. A steam locomotive on the same run would
have burned 85 tons of coal, at $3 a ton! Tom recalls the
awe he felt at the age of fourteen when for the first time
the Burlington Zephyr "flew" by him in his home town of Petersburg,
Va.
Sixty-six
years later, when he retired, he wanted to purchase a model
of the Zephyr. None was available, so he obtained drawings
from Burlington Lines and made his own. He recreated the Zephyr
in a 1:32 scale scratch built radio-controlled model. As well
as building the engine he built model cars on the same scale
to make up the complete train. It runs at two speeds and requires
long radius curves to accommodate the closely articulated
cars. Batteries and a modified airplane RC unit control the
engine. Except for this special day once a year, you will
find the model Zephyr resting on its gleaming track behind
the living room couch in his Carolina Meadows villa retirement
home.
Modeling
fascinated Tom as a boy and he carried his interest and skill
in all kinds of miniaturization into his varied career as
an aeronautical engineer. Following service in the Air Force
in World War Two he was in on the ground floor in creating
and using models to design helicopter rotors where the blades
meshed. Resulting stability problems were solved by adding
fins on the back of the craft. He was in on the design, construction
and testing of many of the leading helicopters of that period.
In
1949 he began to experiment with an alternative form of power
for Free Flight jet model aircraft: He felt that propellers
spoiled the models' scale appearance, and pulse-jet engines
were expensive and hazardous to operate. He came up with the
idea of a high-powered electric motor, a fan and ducting to
simulate jet power.
On
December 29, 1949 his first ducted-fan model flew successfully.
Although it
was only capable of level flight, it encouraged him to continue
development. His next model, a de Havilland Venom, also had
limited success in flight and was used primarily for static
testing. But Tom was determined that the fan design would
work and experimented with other types of fighter aircraft.
In
1951, his third aircraft, a Lockheed F-90, flew very well.
He followed this with the F-86D Fighter. The original of this
model plane is now on permanent display in the National Model
Aeronautics Museum in Muncie, Indiana. Ducted fans quickly
became a popular power source for modelers interested in building
jet aircraft, and that popularity has continued.
Real
airplanes and not only models have always been a part of Tom's
life. Originally hailing from Hope Mills, NC, he won his BS
degree with Honors from NC State in 1943 and his Master's
from Michigan in 1947. Though his work has taken him to many
states, he spent many of his later working years in Raleigh.
Life
is quieter for Tom now that he has retired. He moved into
Carolina Meadows in 1995, to be near his son who lives in
Chatham County and works in Chapel Hill and his daughter who
lives in Raleigh.
He
has flown over Carolina Meadows in a Cessna 152 and likes
to takes aerial photographs. Tom asked Marketing if CM would
be interested in using blow-ups of these views of the campus.
CM liked the idea and incorporated one of his overall aerial
views of the campus in the opening page of its multi-page
Web Site, which you can reach on the Internet at www.carolinameadows.org.
Carolina
Meadows Web Site is a much visited site and well worth a visit
as it includes a home page, a map, information about the community
and various resident activities and allows the viewer to scan
through excellent photographs of campus villas, apartments
and public rooms.
Blow-ups
of two other bird's eye views of Carolina Meadows now hang
in the community's Maintenance Department's conference room.
Tom is an active and enthusiastic member of CM's Building
& Grounds committee, and when he and his colleagues discuss
problems they can, he points out, zero in on the exact locations
with the help of his aerial maps.
But
that's not the only time Tom looks skyward. Moonlit nights
are of special interest to Tom. Why? Because of the more than
twenty years Tom spent working in Raleigh on missile and spacecraft
batteries. Remember Surveyor, the first unmanned spacecraft
to make a soft landing on the moon in the mid-sixties? Tom
had the task of coming up with a terminal seal for the battery
to power this vehicle on the moon's airless surface under
great extremes of heat and cold.
"Every
time I look at the moon," Tom says, " I think of my batteries
still up there, and the patent covering their manufacture
has my name on it."
Tom
remembers other space exploits too from those early flights
when returning spacecraft landed in the ocean. He was involved
with the batteries needed to power the parachutes that opened
to soft land the spacecraft into the waters off Florida. What
if the batteries failed to work on the landings? That was
the thought that crossed his mind each time our astronauts
returned to earth from the Apollo missions.
Tom
still very much likes to fly. In summer, it's in the Sea
Sprite, the ultralight seaplane he built ten years ago,
and still maintains at his summer home on Lake Gaston. The
rest of the year, in his villa right by CM's Golden Pond near
the golf course, he works on a late model ducted fan aircraft.
His wife, Barbara, who ran a successful catering business
in Raleigh, likes to cook, and enjoys reading when not tending
the flowers in their garden.
Tom's
latest interest is in developing flight simulator programs
for big commercial jets on his home computer. Just because
Tom is retired, surely you don't expect him to sit around
and just take it easy, do you? -- Desmond Reilly
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Fred
Kilgour speaks at 200th Anniversary Library of Congress Celebration
Long-time
Carolina Meadows resident Frederick Kilgour spoke on January
12 at a joint celebration of the 20th anniversary
of the Library of Congress and the 30th anniversary
of OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), which Fred founded
in Columbus, Ohio. He is also the author of "The Evolution
of the Book," published by the Oxford University Press
in 1998.
At
the Celebration, which was held in the Library of Congress
with about 1,k000 in attendance, Fred spoke on the unpredictability
of the character of the book over the next 30 years as advancing
computer technology makes information available to readers
in new ways.
OCLC
currently provides cataloging and inter-library lending service
to 38,000 libraries in 76 countries around the world. Its
online catalog contains more than 45 million entries for books
and journals, and over the last 20 years in the system processed
103,449,884 inter-library loans.
Pressed
by a neighbor for a guess about the book of the future, Fred
pointed out that in the late ‘70s, when the main OCLC
building, now named for him, was undertaken, 30,000 square
feet of space were allotted for the processing computer. Today,
with activity having more than tripled, they occupy only 1,600
square feet — a dramatic example of the unpredictability
in his field.
Fred
came to Carolina with his wife, Eleanor, in 1990 and in the
same year became Distinguished Research Professor at the School
of Information and Library Science, UNC-CH, where he has continued
through teaching and research to advance his interest in providing
users with access to published information ever more speedily
whenever and wherever they need it. In extending OCLC, Fred
and his wife traveled widely in this country and abroad and
in the 80’s made a point of looking at retirement communities
where he could continue his career. By the time they came
to Carolina Meadows they had considered some thirty possible
future homes.
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