The Man from Mars

The old professor was a stocky little man who wore wild eyebrows, bushy hair, a hearing aid and a German-Hungarian accent like a certified eccentric. Nothing about him seemed remotely in tune with military men or the military mind. But through much of his long life, professional soldiers of many nations courted him, coaxed him, hung on his every word. For the intelligence of Professor Theodore von Karman was devoted to unlocking the powerful secrets of air and space. Born in Budapest in 1881, when air was hardly more than something to breathe, Von Karman was the son of a famous Jewish professor of philosophy. At six, he could multiply five-digit numbers in his head, and his father shunted him away from precocious mathematics for fear that he might develop into an infant prodigy. But even by then it was too late; the youngster was already hooked on science. He graduated from the Royal Technical University at Budapest and was an assistant professor there when Orville Wright and his frail, kitelike airplane made the first 120-ft. flight in 1903. Von Karman promptly turned his attention to aerodynamics. Only eight years later, he worked out a basic aerodynamic principle to explain why eddies whirl in the air behind a moving object. By 1912, Von Karman became director of the Aeronautical Institute of the University of Aachen, where men who were the leading airplane designers on both sides of World War I got their technical training. During that war, Von Karman served as lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Aviation Corps, then returned to his institute and made it the unchallenged world center of aerodynamic science. But trouble was abroad in Germany, and Von Karman seems to have sensed it sooner than most. In 1930, when economic depression was helping the Nazis' grab for power, he left Aachen to become director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at California Institute of Technology. Flood of Discovery. Seldom has a nation welcomed a more valuable immigrant. From Von Karman and his laboratory came a flood of aerodynamic discovery. Wind tunnels, helicopters, propellers, wing shapes--there was hardly anything in the field he did not study and improve. During World War II, his lab produced the first practical U.S. rockets and fathered Caltech's great Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After the war, Von Karman turned to the baffling problems of supersonic flight. By then, he was past the age at which most scientists stop having fresh ideas, but he became a challenging prophet. He not only urged U.S. airmen to think in terms of speeds up to 2,000 m.p.h., but he also taught them how to start toward that fantastic goal. And all the while he was looking toward space, which called for still newer theories not yet dreamed of. Lost in the infinite variety of his scientific accomplishments, Von Karman became the archetype of the absent-minded professor. Everywhere he went, he left a trail of mislaid hats, coats, secret documents. Once he carelessly spoke German for 20 minutes to an English-speaking audience. When he crossed a street, he never looked right or left, trusting to the traffic to stop with screeching brakes. He drove his crumple-fendered cars with the same careless abandon, but managed somehow to survive. He was intensely curious, poking into everything like a wide-eyed child. "When he comes to my house," said a colleague, "he reads all my books on all subjects, and he even picks up my private mail and reads that too." Like a Love Affair. His wit was as well known as his eccentricity. Once when talking to a pretty girl pilot he explained a tail spin as "something like a love affair; you don't notice how you get into it, and it is very hard to get out of." He liked to quote the definition of a Hungarian as "a man who goes into a revolving door behind you and comes out ahead." When asked why so many top scientists are Hungarian, he explained: "We are all from Mars originally. We decided to infiltrate the U.S. and were sent to Hungary -- where some queer people live anyway --to be conditioned for human life." Though addicted to pretty women, as well as to slivovitz and strong cigars. Von Karman never married. He lived with his sister Josephine (Pipo), who managed much of his personal life until she died in 1951. Intimates expected the shock of her loss to kill him, but he continued his work with undiminished vigor. By his casual count, he had earned 24 honorary degrees, 10 decorations. 32 awards, and belonged to 33 scientific societies. Last week, while visiting Aachen, the city where he made his mark in the Kaiser's Germany, the old professor died of a heart attack. He was 81. He had lived with aviation since its infancy and had woven the bright thread of his thought through every strand of its history.

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