Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (76 page)

And always forward-thinking, Stephenson made a bold recommendation, one that would have changed history but was rejected by the British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax. He proposed that British agents assassinate Hitler while they still had the chance. Halifax didn’t see what Stephenson saw—he preferred to take a diplomatic approach.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

As predicted, Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Churchill was elected prime minister the following year, and one of his first acts was to appoint Stephenson station chief for the British Secret Service (SIS) in New York City. Why New York? Because in 1940, that’s where Stephenson saw the greatest need. Britain’s ambassador had reported that 9 out of every 10 Americans were determined to keep the United States out of the war. The Britons needed the Americans, so Stephenson used covert tactics to change their minds.

• He furnished the media with news bulletins and prepared scripts that spoke of Hitler’s brutality.

• He worked to break up the American isolationist groups that had been growing in numbers since the first world war. One such group, led by Senator Gerald Nye, held a rally in Boston in September 1941. Thousands of pamphlets created by Stephenson’s organization were handed out, accusing Nye of being a German sympathizer.

• After a speech by another isolationist, Congressman Hamilton Fish, Fish received a card that said, “Der Führer thanks you for your loyalty,” and was secretly photographed while holding it. The photographs were then handed out to his supporters.

Dog with the best eyesight: the greyhound.

• An isolationist rally was to be held at Madison Square Garden, but Stephenson printed up hundreds of phony tickets with the wrong date to ensure a low turnout.

INTREPID AND CAMP X

If all that didn’t change the Americans’ minds, the invasion of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 surely did. With war declared, both Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt knew that solid intelligence would be key to winning the war. To that end, they assigned Stephenson the job that he had unknowingly been preparing for his entire life: spy trainer.

Under the code name “Intrepid” and the cover “Passport Control Officer,” Stephenson ran Camp X, a secret facility somewhere near Toronto, Ontario. Camp X was a top-secret training ground where operatives were taught unconventional warfare techniques: how to kill with their bare hands; make lethal weapons out of household items; and blow up industrial installations. Others were trained in lock picking, safe blowing, infiltration, explosives, listening devices, and Stephenson’s favorite, codes and ciphers.

Once their training was complete, agents were flown into occupied Europe on “moon planes” (plywood aircraft painted dull black to be nearly invisible at night), to conduct sabotage and spy operations. It was a perilous assignment—many agents did not return alive. But they were able to perform some of the war’s most crucial covert missions, including the murder of Reinhard Heydrich, the brutal German commander who ruled Czechoslovakia.

ENIGMA

But nothing Stephenson did was more important to the Allied war effort than his assistance in cracking the “Enigma” code, Germany’s primary method of transmitting secret messages. An Enigma machine looked like an ordinary typewriter; an operator would type a message, then an internal set of rotors would translate the message into code. This code would be transmitted to another operator, who would use a corresponding Enigma machine to decipher it. Because the Nazis believed that Enigma was impossible to crack, they made widespread use of it, and Stephenson saw this reliance as their greatest weakness. Crack Enigma and the Germans would be helpless. When Polish agents stole an Enigma machine from a German convoy, they sent it straight to Intrepid at Camp X.

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ENTER CYNTHIA

Stephenson teamed up with Elizabeth Thorpe, a beautiful agent who went by the code name “Cynthia.” To crack Enigma, they needed to intercept a coded message and then see that same message after it came out of an Enigma machine. So Stephenson instructed Thorpe to seduce some high-ranking diplomats who had received messages. Through a combination of guile and feminine prowess, Thorpe acquired a set of codebooks from her unsuspecting lovers. These codebooks unlocked the secrets of Enigma and helped turn the war against Germany in favor of the Allies.

Stephenson and his agents had many other covert successes during the war, including rescuing Niels Bohr, a leading atomic researcher in German-occupied Denmark. Had the Germans gotten to Bohr, they may have had the A-bomb first. But thanks to the rescue, Bohr was able to work on the Manhattan Project and help the United States build the weapon that would end the war.

INTREPID’S LEGACY

For his efforts, Stephenson received a knighthood from the British and the Presidential Medal of Merit from the Americans (the first non-American to be given one). Ironically, he did not receive recognition from his native Canada until Prime Minister Joe Clark presented him with the Companion of the Order of Canada in 1980. Sir William died in Bermuda in 1989 at 93 years old, outside of the public eye, just the way he liked it.

But Intrepid’s legacy goes even deeper. An aide to the chief of British Naval Intelligence during World War II, a young man named Ian Fleming, had the opportunity to observe Intrepid in action and was very taken with him. After the war, they became friends. While both were living in Jamaica, Stephenson would recount spy tales to his friend. That’s when Fleming started writing a book about a spy called James Bond. Many of Agent 007’s characteristics—his suaveness, brilliance, and slight cockiness—were lifted straight from Stephenson. In fact, Fleming described his secret agent as a “highly romanticized version of the true spy—and Bill Stephenson was the real thing.”

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BIRTH OF THE HELICOPTER

It can fly almost anywhere in almost any kind of weather. It can hover like a bee or speed as fast as a falcon. But it took more than 2,000 years to figure out how to make it work
.

A
MARVELOUS TOY

The desire to fly has inspired inventors for thousands of years. Most of them designed winged aircraft that imitated the flight of birds. But a few put their energies into creating a vertical flying machine, known today as the helicopter.

The Chinese invented one around 400 B.C. It was just a stick with feathers tied to one end like a bouquet, but when the stick was spun quickly between the hands and let go, it flew up in the air. This ancient toy is the first known example of a vertical flying machine.

So where did the Chinese get the idea for their toy? Most likely from watching seeds of the maple tree flutter to the ground. The maple seed has a single leaf attached to it, which acts as a rotating wing. When the seed drops off the tree, the wind spins the leaf like a propeller, thus carrying the seed far from the tree.

INTO THE AIR, JUNIOR BIRD MEN

About 2,000 years later, in 1754, Mikhail Lomonosov of Russia launched a large, spring-powered model resembling the Chinese toy. It was reported to have “flown freely and to a high altitude.” More importantly, it proved that vertical flight was truly possible. All that was needed was the right engine.

Englishman Horatio Phillips thought the steam engine might be the solution. In 1840 he built the first vertical flight machine to be powered by an engine. His model aircraft weighed in at 10 kilograms (22 pounds) but it was still a toy. He discovered that the steam engine was much too heavy to be used in a full-scale machine.

Ponton d’Amecourt of France also made some steam-powered models in the 1860s but he’s remembered more for the name he gave his machines than the machines themselves. He combined the Greek word
heliko
(spiral) with
pteron
(wing) to create the word
h
é
licopt
è
re
.

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GENTLEMEN, START YOUR ENGINES

When the combustion engine hit the scene in the late 1800s, piloted vertical flight became possible. The breakthrough year was 1907. In Douai, France, brothers Charles and Louis Breguet built the first helicopter to lift a person up in the air. They only got a few inches off the ground, but they were flying!

That same year another Frenchman, Paul Cornu, flew his version of the helicopter to a height of almost six feet. His double-rotored craft looked like a pair of room fans mounted horizontally at each end of a giant bicycle, with a lawnmower-sized engine behind the seat. The craft was so unstable that it had to be tethered with sticks, held by men on the ground.

SPIN DOCTORS

Torque.
They had the right engine, but there were new obstacles. One was the problem of
torque
. That’s the tendency of the spinning rotor to make the body of the aircraft turn in the opposite direction. Early choppers would spin up and around like insane tops. But a Russian engineer named Boris Yuriev came up with the solution in 1911. He suggested adding a vertical tail rotor off the rear of the fuselage to counter the unwanted spinning. He built one in 1912, and it worked, sort of: it didn’t spin—but it didn’t fly either—it lacked a powerful enough engine. Though it would need refining, Yuriev had solved the problem of torque.

Dissymetrical lift.
When a helicopter is moving forward, one side of the rotating blades is advancing into the wind, and the other side is going backwards, away from the wind. The advancing side creates more lift, which caused the early helicopters to flip over during forward flight.

Spaniard Juan de la Cierva solved this problem. He was working on a helicopter-airplane hybrid called an autogyro when he came up with the concept of the “articulated blade.” This blade was attached to the rotor with a flexible hinge. Called “flapping,” this allowed the advancing blade to lift slightly, decreasing lift on one side, thus balancing the opposing forces. And it worked. He made his first successful flight in 1923. Ironically, the technology would be used for helicopters, and the autogyro never “took off.”

At the same time great advances were being made on the
swash-plate
, another very important piece of the puzzle. The swashplate was a system of adjustable rods and plates that allowed the pilot to control the angle of the blades—both simultaneously and individually. Simultaneous adjustment, called
collective control
, makes the chopper go up or down. Individual adjustment, called
cyclic control
, makes the helicopter go forward, backward, right or left. Now to put all the pieces together.

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GOING THE DISTANCE

Using all the up-to-date technology, in 1924 Etienne Oehmichen became the first man to fly a helicopter and actually control it. The Frenchman flew his homemade helicopter just over half a mile. It took 7 minutes, 40 seconds to make the flight. Average speed: 4.9 mph.

Corradino d’Ascanio of Italy set helicopter world records for altitude and flight duration in 1930. He got his chopper up to 57 feet and stayed aloft for 8 minutes, 45 seconds. Six years later, a German Focke-Wulf Fw-61 was flown to an altitude of 11,243 feet and a distance of 143 miles at a speed of 76 mph, making it the world’s first fully practical helicopter.

But it was visionary aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky who was most responsible for getting the helicopter accepted as a full-fledged aircraft. He perfected the design of the helicopter that we know today, with its main rotor and single–tail rotor configuration. He called it the R4, and in 1941 it became the first helicopter to be put into mass production. Later models saw heavy service in the Pacific during WWII. By war’s end, the helicopter had won over all skeptics and taken its legitimate place in the aviation community.

MOST VERSATILE FLYING MACHINE

Today there are more than 40,000 helicopters in use around the world. No modern military is without them—they do everything from minesweeping to troop transport to antitank missions. Civilian applications of the helicopter are even broader. They are used for police surveillance and traffic news, and work as super taxis for the wealthy. Choppers rescue sailors from sinking ships, pluck lost hikers from the wilderness, and put out forest fires. It’s estimated that since their widespread introduction in the 1940s, helicopters have helped save more than a million lives.

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CHOPPER FACTOIDS

• Three things a helicopter can do that a plane can’t:

1. Fly backward

2. Rotate as it moves through the air

3. Hover motionless

• It takes both hands and both feet to fly a helicopter, which makes it much more complex than flying a plane.

• The helicopter pilot has to think in three dimensions. In addition to cyclic control (forward, backward, left, and right), and collective control (up and down, and engine speed), there is rotational control (spinning in either direction on the axis).

• In 1956 Bell Aircraft Corporation introduced the HU-1. The “Huey” became the best-known symbol of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.

• The first U.S. president to fly in a helicopter: Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1957.

• In 1969 the Russian Mi-12 became the largest helicopter ever flown. It could lift a payload of 105,000 kilograms (231,485 pounds).

• In 1982 a Bell 206 completed the first solo crossing of the Atlantic by a helicopter.