Author Archives: Paul Ceruzzi

The Museum, the Udvar-Hazy Center, and Tysons Corner, Virginia

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“You wrote a book about Tysons Corner? Isn’t that a shopping mall?”

Tysons Corner, Virginia circa 1957. Photo courtesy of Fairfax County Library, Photographic Archive.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve gotten this response from colleagues when I tell them that, yes, I wrote a book about Tysons Corner, Virginia, a suburban crossroads about ten miles west of the National Air and Space Museum. What’s more, I wrote it on “company time,” as part of my duties as a curator in the Division of Space History. Tysons Corner is home to Tysons Corner Center, one of the largest malls on the East Coast, and Tysons Galleria, an upscale mall that is a little beyond my budget. It is also home to “Fairfax Square,” where one can buy Hermes scarves, Gucci loafers, and Tiffany… whatever they make (way beyond my budget).

Tysons Corner, VA in 2005. Image courtesy USGS

Tysons Corner, VA in 2005. Image courtesy USGS

But that’s not why I wrote the book. What private company is the largest single employer in Northern Virginia? The answer: Northrop Grumman, which in 2004 had 19,000 local employees, scattered throughout the Dulles Corridor. General Dynamics has its headquarters in nearby Falls Church, and Boeing and Lockheed Martin are also major employers in the region. True, they do not make airplanes or spacecraft here. What they do is the vaguely-defined “systems integration,” or that catch-all phrase, “IT” (Information Technology). The CEO of Northrop Grumman recently said that Northrop Grumman is fundamentally an IT company that also happens to build air and space craft. The company was formed in 1994 by the merger of Northrop, whose “Polar Star” is on display in National Air and Space Museum’s “Golden Age” exhibit, and Grumman, which built the Lunar Modules that took twelve astronauts to the Moon 40 years ago. Let’s hope that U.S. aerospace companies continue to build flying machines of such beauty. I wrote Internet Alley because, as I drove to and from the Udvar-Hazy Center during its construction, I wanted to find out what was going on in all the buildings that I passed on the way.

One final note on the title: “Internet Alley” refers to the Dulles Corridor, where historically the management and overall design of the Internet took place, even if its engineering was done elsewhere. For many years the primary switch for all East Coast Internet traffic was located in the parking garage of a modest building in Tysons Corner, and to this day the “root server” that keeps track of all the dot-com addresses is located near Dulles Airport.

So there you have it, and perhaps you may think of all this the next time you go to the mall.

Paul Ceruzzi is a curator specializing in aerospace computing and electronics in the Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum.

Don't Know What a Slide Rule is For

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That’s a line from the song, “Wonderful World,” sung by Sam Cooke back in the 1960s. Forty years later, it turns out that Sam Cooke was not alone: very few people know about slide rules. At Space Day, held at the National Air and Space Museum last May, I had lots of fun standing in front of the Apollo 11 Command Module, explaining to visitors that, indeed, it and the rest of the Apollo-Saturn hardware were designed by engineers who relied on slide rules for calculations.
Paul Ceruzzi demonstrates the use of a slide rule to Museum visitors.

Paul Ceruzzi demonstrates the use of a slide rule to Museum visitors.

Of course the designers also used digital computers, but in the 1960s computers were giant machines that you programmed with punched cards, and they were strictly reserved for only the most complex mathematical calculations. As the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission approaches, we are constantly reminded of how incredible that voyage was. Add to the incredulity the slide rule: the basic mathematical tool that helped get the astronauts to the moon and back.

The visitors who gathered around the Command Module on Space Day generally fell into two camps. Older visitors told me that they used a slide rule in school but hadn’t seen one in years, and they had completely forgotten how it worked. The younger visitors (i.e., those under 40!) had never seen one before, although a few had heard of them. I belong to the former group, having once been quite proficient while in high school. For this presentation, I got out the manual and taught myself all over again how to use it. It was not easy.

The National Air and Space Museum has preserved a few slide rules, including one carried by Apollo 13 astronauts on their April 1970 journey. The Museum also has on display the slide rule owned by Wernher von Braun, who headed the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama during the Apollo era. It shows signs of heavy use. One other favorite of mine is the “Space Vehicle Pocket Designer,” a specialized circular rule that computes spacecraft payload and range, based on fuels and rocket engine efficiency. It was given to me by a mathematician who had just retired from a northern Virginia technology firm. When he gave it to me, the retiree said, “Congratulations, Paul, you are now officially a rocket scientist!” If only it were that easy.

Apollo astronauts carried slide rules, but by the time of the last mission to the Moon in 1972, the pocket calculator had been invented. On the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975, the last to use Apollo hardware, the crew carried a Hewlett-Packard pocket calculator that had more power than the on-board Apollo Guidance computer.

Paul Ceruzzi is a curator specializing in aerospace computing and electronics in the Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum.