Oral History Interview
Dick Bowser (Engineer and Inventor of the Arch Transportation System)
Interviewed by Bob Moore, Historian, JEFF
October 8, 1993
MOORE: This is an oral history interview with Dick Bowser, designer of the Gateway Arch transportation system, conducted on October 8, 1993 in the Old Courthouse, St. Louis, Missouri by Bob Moore, park historian of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. -- Dick, I'd like to start out first by asking you if you could tell us just a little bit about your background, even your date and place of birth, and especially about your early elevator experience and your work for your dad.
BOWSER: A good place to start an interview is in the beginning. I was born in Detroit, Michigan, on September the 15th, 1921. My parents were Ruth and Virgil Bowser who were brought up on farms in southern Michigan, and as a young man my father served an apprenticeship as a pattern-maker, and later, about the time I was born, he had his own machine shop in Coldwater, Michigan. Before I was born, my mother was a schoolteacher there. Some of the things that my father did in his machine shop were that he built elevators as well as a lot of repair work on farm equipment, and that sort of thing. That was in 1921; and later in that year there was sort of a depression, as a hangover from World War I, and he had to leave his shop and go to work for some other companies. Somewhere, not too long after that, my father went to work for the Warner Elevator Company out of Cincinnati, and he sold elevators in the state of Michigan, and was very successful at it, and so forth. My father was a very capable man. He could make anything work. He could make or find a way to do anything. I was brought up in that type of an atmosphere.
I can remember (and this has something to do with later getting involved in the Arch), in Birmingham, Michigan, there was a Catholic church. It was the Shrine of the Little Flower; Father Coughlin of radio fame was the main force promoting the structure. It seems that when they were building the church, his [Father Coughlin's] call for contributions had so far exceeded what his original plans were, that he wanted to make the tower a couple of stories higher. The architect (who really didn't pay too much attention to elevator hatchways) [had] put a beam right across what was going to be a dumbwaiter shaft that would carry the mail up to the office. So he [the architect], to bypass the beam, built an additional dumbwaiter shaft that didn't line up with the original shaft. They were looking for somebody to make a dumbwaiter to go up the lower hatchway and slide over into the other hatchway. Sooner or later it boiled down to my dad being the only elevator man who would do this. For twice what a normal dumbwaiter would cost, he built a dumbwaiter that had swivel shoes and double rails on it that would go up the original hatchway and just slip over into the new hatchway — In other words, the dumbwaiter didn't have to run vertically or in a straight line. I can remember my father going out to Birmingham to supervise work on this special dumbwaiter. It was an early elevator experience that I had; a unique elevator experience, just watching him do that job.
When the depression hit in 1931-32, I was about ten years old. The elevator company my father worked for closed the Michigan office, and there he was, no job, right as the depression was starting. He took over a great many of the service contracts that Warner Elevator Company had, when they closed the office. He personally did all the service work, and opened another machine shop in Detroit. He had to lease it, because he didn't have the money to buy it, since things were pretty rough. He leased a machine shop, the machines and tools, and he went into things like he was doing when I was born; machining things like special parts, and he built some elevators again. Some of my earliest elevator experiences were with the service contracts; my father had to do things on elevators that required a helper. At ten years old, I became the helper. I would run the elevator, and my father would be on top, to inspect the cables and grease things, and so forth. If he had to get down into the elevator pit, I was the one who would run the elevator up while my father tripped the interlocks and went down into the pits to inspect and service the equipment. This used to cause a bit of excitement, because in those days most elevators had at least a small window in the hatch doors where you could see into the elevator cab. One of our clients was a hospital, several of them were apartments, and some of them were office buildings. People would want an elevator, and see this kid running the elevator, and they'd go to the manager or they'd bang on the doors and holler and so forth, because this kid was playing with the elevator. I'd have to drop down so that my father could explain to them that he was working on the elevator and I was running it for him. This was a pretty early start in the elevator business, to be only ten years old.
As time went on, I went to high school. When I graduated from high school, my father contacted (he was with another elevator company by then) — I kind of got out of sequence here — As the depression cleared up, my father wanted to get out of the machine shop business, because it was kind of a dead-end situation. He heard that somebody wanted a salesman for gasoline pumps. So my father contacted these people, and they hired him as a salesman for the Wayne pumps. Wayne had the first gasoline pumps in the United States that computed the dollar amount, as well as gallons. This made it possible to buy gasoline for exact money. My father was quite successful selling those pumps, because he could practically guarantee a 15% increase in the gallons that people would pump, because five gallons of gas was 85 cents, and that's what most people bought; but when they got the computing pump, invariably, the people would go ahead and take a dollar's worth. He sold an awful lot of pumps in Michigan, and got transferred down to Florida, and instead of just counties he had almost the whole state as his territory.
MOORE: So you lived in Florida for a while?
BOWSER: So we lived in Florida, and then we got transferred up to North Carolina by the Wayne Pump Company. By 1936, my father got a job with the American Oil Company as a divisional engineer, out of Charlotte, North Carolina, and we moved there, and that's where I got most of my high school education. A couple of years later, the American Oil Company transferred him to Philadelphia to practically redo a big bulk station they had there. Sometimes when he was driving to work, he'd go by an elevator company. Once you've got elevator blood, you always want to be an elevator person. He stopped in and talked to them, and they hired him right on the spot to be their representative in the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore areas. So we moved down to Washington the day after I got out of high school. My father was working for the Atlantic Elevator Company.
MOORE: Where did you graduate from? A school in North Carolina?
BOWSER: No, I graduated from High School in Upper Derby, Pennsylvania. I don't have any great tie with my high school life, I transferred around too much. We moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, and I commuted to the University of Maryland. However, I was big enough, and old enough then, that I was able to get a temporary work permit through the elevator construction union, and I worked as a full-fledged helper installing elevators. Back in those days, it was different than it is today. There was a very tight control on the tools you were allowed to use. The unions were protecting the amount of labor needed. I can remember when I was seventeen years old, pulling chain falls because we weren't allowed to use power lifts to hoist elevator machines up to a penthouse in a multi-story building. So I got some good heavy elevator experience in that line of work that summer. I went to the University of Maryland that fall. I was in the engineering school, and I was a lousy student. I made the dean's list both semesters, but it was not the good dean's list, it was that other kind of dean's list.
Fortunately, another semester later World War II came along, and I had a chance to go in the Navy. I joined the Navy, and was trained to be a fire controlman, which is a rather technical rating in ordinance (gunnery). I was a specialist on these great big mechanical/electrical computers, not a little hand thing you walked around with; those things were as big as refrigerators lying on their back. They computed the ballistics problems for the proper alignment of the guns. In those days, gun control was based on predicting where the target would be, and what it was going to take to get there, and you figured that out on the fire control computer. The equipment automatically set the fuses on the shells for how long they should fly before they exploded, and so forth. I ran that machine, and I maintained all that kind of equipment. It's pretty precise mechanical equipment. I did pretty good at it, because I came out of the Navy just three and a half years later as a first-class petty officer.
MOORE: Was it just "luck of the draw" that you did that, or was it some of your past experience?
BOWSER: When I went in the Navy, I didn't know what a fire controlman was. When they told me they were going to send me to fire control school, I was thinking more about fire-fighting than I was anything to do with naval guns. I thought maybe I was going to have a shore job, that I wasn't going to have to go to war. It turned out that the reason I got selected for fire control was due to some mechanical aptitude tests, and they selected a few people out of each company in the boot camp. This was in Newport, Rhode Island, where the Navy started a preliminary fire control school. For some reason, being in the Navy, and thinking about things like being in line for potential promotions and so forth, I was an excellent student. All my grades were near the top of the list. I never was the number one man, but I was never below the third man in the class. For this I was rewarded with another assignment to an advanced fire control school in Washington, where I got additional training on computers, and all the intricate equipment that's in the fire control system, radar and so forth. I did quite well in that class. My biggest problem was being in school with a bunch of chief petty officers and first-class petty officers, who wondered why all these recruits were getting this really good shore duty. The civilian sailors had an unfair advantage over the regular Navy sailors, in that they came off of ships that didn't have any modern fire control equipment, just preliminary fire control equipment. These civilian-type sailors, some of which had a little bit of college, and so forth. It was an advantage with all the mathematical courses, which we just breezed through, and the regular Navy was having a terrible time with the math. And, again, fortunately, I did well enough to be one of the top graduates of the advanced school.
MOORE: Do you have any thoughts when you think back, on the contrast between your Navy experience and the college experience? Do you have any thoughts on why you did so poorly in college and so well in the Navy?
BOWSER: I did poorly in college. My big interest when I was going to college was what kind of a car did I have to drive? In my case, it was an old model-A Ford, and I sure wished it was something better. After working those summers, I ended up with a nice yellow Packard convertible to drive. Also, I was courting this girl that —
MOORE: So you had outside interests?
BOWSER: — just recently we celebrated our fifty-first anniversary. By the time I was in the Navy, I was married, and getting that $54 a day, once-a-month pay didn't set too well with me, and if I got to be a petty officer I'd get more. There was a whole new set of rules here that was all I needed in college. Maybe I should have been in the Navy and then gone to college, I might have made out better. But I have to give the Navy some credit for my whole change in attitude — that and a little age — but anyhow, I went aboard a destroyer [U.S.S. Wadsworth], and I served on that same destroyer clear through the war, and after the war was over I was honorably discharged as a first-class fire controlman.
When I finally came back to the United States, I went to the elevator union, but they just didn't have any place for all the veterans coming back. So I had other jobs. One job was I went to work for the Capitol Transit Company in Washington. I worked there a year or something like that, and this was rebuilding streetcars. I got a little bit of an education there about rails, and railroad wheels running on steel rails, and so forth. Amazingly, the modern streetcars that were made here in the United States happened to be made at the St. Louis Car Company. They were quite the thing just before the war. There were a lot of them in use. The pre-war cars were being updated, and the new type of controls were very similar to elevator controls. I advanced quite rapidly at Capitol Transit Company, however, transit companies didn't give vacations like the government did, and with my experience in the Navy, I went out to the Naval Ordinance Lab in White Oak, Maryland, and I was hired on the spot. When I started working for the government I had a lot more time for vacations and the pay was 5 cents an hour more; it was only a slight gain, but the work was very close to the house, and I didn't have to go clear across Washington, D.C. to work every day. The experience with the transit company and the experience at the Naval Ordinance Lab were all adding up to something. Thinking back now, some 60-70 years later, you can see why it all happened. I was going to need the experience to work on the Arch. I worked at the Naval lab about 4 years. The lab had a cooperative education program that offered the math courses which later helped me with my work on the Arch.
In the meantime my father, because he couldn't find a parking place in downtown Washington, was looking at a lot where they'd torn down two row houses on K Street. He was thinking that there must be a way to park cars in small lots. He came up with a concept of a freight elevator in a hatchway that was supported by a crane bridge. The elevator traveled up and down while the hatchway moved horizontally, providing access to parking spaces without ramps and driveways. This made very efficient use of space in small structures. At his own expense, he got patents on this concept. It was a unique application of elevator principles, it was a standard freight elevator; he adapted the controls of an elevator to control for the crane, so it moved to the tiers for parking stalls. With the same push-button that would go up to the floor you wanted, you could make it move horizontally to the desired tier of stalls. Since this was a long structure hanging down, there was a problem about the swaying, when it would accelerate and decelerate horizontally. Sitting there looking at his drawing board, that straight edge on his drawing board was pretty well stabilized, so he used steel cables to stabilize the hatchway, so it could move sideways without swaying. He was also granted patents on this. After the war was over, his whole life was devoted to building a Bowser Parking System Garage that had horizontal and vertically traveling elevators. The first sale that was made was in Des Moines, Iowa, and he went out there to establish the business, and produced his first 3 elevators. He bought the standard elevator components and things that were special he made in his own shop. The first elevator garage was a tremendous success.
By 1953, he was getting orders from Houston, Dallas, Denver, Houston, and Oklahoma City. He needed some help, and the only person that he knew that was young, and had some elevator experience and that he felt he had confidence in was me. My mother talked me into going to work for my father. I was not too anxious to do this. When I got to Des Moines, it was a great relief to my father. All the things that he didn't want to do, I got stuck with. All the accounting, keeping track of the financing, shipping the equipment, going out in the field and writing specifications, because no cities had a building code for mechanical parking garages. So I'd help city officials write a building code that could accommodate these new types of garages. We were quite successful. There were about 35 Bowser System garages built. My father was into his '60s by then, and I knew that he was thinking about retiring.
The only real disagreement my father and I ever had was over selling that business. We had an offer to sell it, and I wanted to sell it, and he wanted to keep it. He wanted to keep it in the family. He wanted my little boys to have the Bowser Company Parking System to work for when they got older. I had no intention then of making the decision of what my kids were going to do when they grew up. I wanted to see my father retire. We finally negotiated the sale and we sold the business. One of the things that I had to do to sell this business (this was late in 1955), was to sign a contract to work for them for four years, as a vice president of this new corporation that they were forming. I signed the contract, and I put in my four years, which was going to end in December of 1959; November or December, something like that. I had to give a 60-day notice on this contract. So I gave them my resignation in February of 1960, I finally left there, and that's where I was [when the opportunity to work on the Arch came up]. I'd saved up a little money, so I wasn't hurting — I didn't have to go to work the next morning, but maybe within a month or so.
At that time I decided that I knew the parking business, and there were ramp garages on the east coast. One in particular in Washington, D.C., was coming up for a new operator to lease and operate it. I had considerable experience with the parking garages, with the Bowser Parking System, so I thought I'll go back East and see if I can lease that garage, or find out about and investigate it. I left Des Moines, Iowa, on my way back to Washington. I had some appointments for the following week. On the way back, I stopped at the Montgomery Elevator Company in Moline, Illinois to see a friend of ours who we'd done a considerable amount of business with over the years with the Bowser Parking System. Many of the standard elevator components we used, such as hoisting machines and some of the controls we had purchased from Montgomery Elevator Company. We had a very nice relationship with them. I stopped to see John Martin, who was vice president in charge of sales. I didn't have an appointment. I just walked into his office, and his secretary told me to go on in, that he had just finished a telephone call. I walked in, and he took a look at me, and his expression was something like "Holy cow, why didn't I think about you?" I had no idea what he was referring to. He told his secretary to call somebody back. While she was placing the call, he was explaining to me who Eero Saarinen was, and that they were looking for somebody to design a transportation system of some kind that would go to the top of the St. Louis Arch. My own knowledge of the St. Louis Arch was that it was something that everybody in St. Louis was talking about, but they didn't want to buy parking garages (because I had been down there trying to sell parking garages).
Eero Saarinen — I'd been so tangled up in the garage business that I didn't keep track of architects — I didn't know who this was. There was a very short telephone conversation introducing me to one of Saarinen's partners. When we started talking to each other, their first questions were, "did elevators have to go vertically?" And I told them I didn't think so, because I'd seen my father make a special dumbwaiter that traveled in one hatchway, and at the third floor moved sideways to another hatchway, and I thought you could do that with elevators too. At that time, I didn't know where Eero Saarinen's office was, all I knew was I was just calling somebody up in Michigan. Come to find out, his office was within one mile of the building that had the special dumbwaiter in it.
MOORE: Father Coughlin's church?
BOWSER: Yes. So in the conversation I told him about that, and the next question was "when could I meet with Eero Saarinen?" — I was talking with two of the partners. I started hemming and hawing around — I wasn't looking for that kind of a job, and so forth. In fact — and this is all in hindsight — if somebody had told me the St. Louis Arch wanted somebody to design an elevator, or some transportation system, to go in the Arch, it was the last thing that I would have attempted to do. I couldn't imagine somebody would even consider me for such a task. I'd been around big construction jobs and so forth, with the parking business and other elevators. But an individual, with no organization and no college degree, in my own mind stood no chance for a design contract. I would have laughed if somebody had said that I should try to get such a contract. It was another world that I just never even thought about.
However, I think John Martin had a lot more confidence in me than I had in myself. After talking very briefly with the Saarinen people, [we had a meeting] on a Saturday morning — can you imagine somebody telling Eero Saarinen if he wanted to talk to them that he'd have to come in Saturday morning! This whole thing was just beyond my comprehension, even what happened. And I was there on Saturday morning and I went over there [to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan] and I talked with them for several hours, they seemed very interested in what I had to say, and they said that they'd give me a call. I left there and I finished my trip to Washington — I really didn't want to lease the garage when I saw it and the mess that it was in; they had terrible labor problems, and it was no wonder that they were trying to get rid of it! But I had this Arch thing in the back of my mind, and I told my wife on the telephone, "I don't know what I'm into, but there's something going on."
I drove back to Iowa, and the next weekend we decided to take our three children out of school, and go to Florida for a week or so to see grandpa. We drove down to Florida. I was trying to tell my dad about this, and I'm sure that he was — it wasn't that he had too much doubt in what I could do on this, but he just couldn't believe some individual could get tangled up in such a project. He thought it would be a wild goose chase. And I had to agree with him. It was very interesting and very flattering that somebody was even thinking about letting me do this.
When I returned to Des Moines, Iowa, the first telephone call I had — I don't know whether they'd been trying to call me or not — but the first ring on that telephone was Saarinen's office. And they wanted to know if I could put some kind of a concept together for some elevators in the Arch. They told me about how high — it was only 590' high then — and the walls far thicker than they are today, and so forth. But there was only a preliminary outline of what some of the problems were going to be. And there were some pretty high figures on daily visitation that they'd like to achieve, and I said, well, I'll try and do this. They said we want to have you make about a 45-minute presentation, and we'd like to have this in two weeks. I went down to the basement on my drawing board, and I started in trying to figure out how to transport visitors to the top of the Arch.
It soon became apparent that nobody was going to put a square box up through the triangular Arch legs, that would carry much more than a midget. You wouldn't be able to carry anything. At the bottom of the Arch, you could use a large elevator, but up at the top you couldn't get a small elevator through the space. In fact, it was so restricted, escalators couldn't be used as you got near the top of the Arch, everything was at the wrong angles for escalators. So I really reached a point where I was pretty discouraged. I thought I was pretty smart on elevators, but to try to do it in that triangularly-shaped space that was not plumb, it got to be quite a problem.
I called up Saarinen's office, and I said something to the effect that "how would you like to have a Ferris wheel going up there?" They said, "Anything that you think could do it, you've got an open hand, you can do anything you want to." I said maybe I'll run a plastic ball up over the outside; that was a joke, and they were laughing about it, but that's how much freedom they gave me.
Then I thought about Ferris wheel seats on chains, and running them all the way around; and then when I started to think about a chain that would go between the Arch legs and all the way up one and down the other, there would be about a quarter of a mile of some real heavy chain. Things were just getting all out of proportion. So that's when I stopped. First of all, the elevator had to be able to fit into the top of the Arch, not the bottom. The bottom had lots of room. And then I thought surely they would like to have a stairway up there, and they had mentioned that they would like to have another mode of access up there, besides any equipment, for maintenance reasons, or for emergencies. So then I started thinking, what can be done in half of the cross-section of the Arch at the top? And another thing I thought was that there was no need to try to get all the way to the top, because there had to be room up there for an observation platform, so people could get off of the conveyance system and at their own leisure get back on it and go down. [That way], they wouldn't be forced to take a thirty-second look out a window, and have the train system start up again and take them away from the windows [as they would if it were a Ferris wheel set-up].
Then I thought about the Ferris wheel seats, people would have to be protected while traveling, so the seats would have to be enclosed so the visitors couldn't stick their arms out into the structural steel or equipment. This was more and more looking something like a cement mixer barrel. I was also trying to figure out how small a barrel we could make. I had a Ford Motor Company ad of a Falcon Sedan. The Falcons were the newest thing — a small car with a big inside. They happened to have a sketch in the ad of a Falcon sedan, with all the head clearances and leg clearances and so forth, and it appeared that the front seat and the back seat could be made to face each other, inside of a five-foot barrel. So this five-foot barrel was the starting point. A train of these barrels could provide the passenger-carrying capacities that they'd like to have. So I knew it had to take more than one barrel. I started looking at that stairway, and I thought that it would be nice if we had these barrels; when they got to the upper load zone, there could be a landing on the stairway right in front of every door, so that people could step out of the barrels and onto the landing. And this didn't interfere or anything with maintenance access so forth.
The stairway was a minor consideration now; I was already committed to taking up just half of the cross-section of the Arch at the top, and one thing just led to another, and that's where the train concept started, and then the lower load zone would have to resemble the top load zone with the landings. And the big advantage of having these eight openings was having eight capsules with [five] passengers in them (originally it was ten capsules with four passengers) that could all load and unload simultaneously without having to stop the whole train just for three or four people to get on. This would be a tremendous operational advantage; it would make a fast turnover in the loading areas.
And the more I thought about it, there's no reason why this couldn't be driven by an elevator machine; a standard elevator machine, with the cables and everything, and they could probably be made to meet the whole elevator code, and every aspect, every safety feature in an elevator. And by the way, elevators are a mode of transportation, that handle more people every day than all the other transportation systems put together. They have an excellent safety record that is better than any other mode of public transportation. To get all that combined into this thing would be, I thought, quite a presentable factor.
My two weeks were up, I made the presentation in Saarinen's office. And I was so naive, I thought I was going there to talk to the architect, and when I got there, the whole world was there! The meeting was in Saarinen's office, and there were all kinds of consulting engineers for structures, and air conditioning, and all the people who would be involved in this thing, the landscape architects, even the artists for the interior decorators, and I couldn't believe the assortment of people that were there. To say nothing about the politicians; either the governors or their representatives, there were senators or their representatives, and congressmen, and the mayor of St. Louis, who fortunately was Mayor [Raymond R.] Tucker, who was an engineer. When I found this out, I thought at least there's one guy there that's going to know what I'm talking about. Somehow, I was scheduled to make my presentation last.
[Break.]
Being scheduled as the last presentation of the meeting, I had all day to sit there and worry. I had my notes, and you would have to laugh if you could have seen those notes. They were long-hand notes with free-hand sketches. The things that I did early in that two week period, my wife, (in between making coffee so I could work all night), was able to type up. The rest of the notes were just scribbled. I had a notebook full of them, and it was a terrible-looking thing, because it had all sizes of paper in it and so forth. (I hope I can find it in my files somewhere). I had this all prepared. When it was my turn I went through the process of how I arrived at the Ferris wheel/train concept, and the features that I thought my concept would be able to provide, and so forth. There was a great deal of attention to my whole presentation. When I got finished, there were several hours of questions-and-answers. Almost all of it was positive. I could detect a little heckling in a few places, and some questioning of my abilities and a few things like that. Inside, I've always carried a regret that I didn't have a college degree. And I remember right towards the end of this discussion, one man got up and I knew just from the way he asked the question, he wanted to know how much education I had. His question was: "Mr. Bowser, what are you?" And something told me, don't get in an argument with this man, so I just told him I was 38 years old, and everybody laughed, and that was the end of my credentials as far as being able to do the Arch. I still laugh about that, and I think it's the most appropriate answer I could have given. I was quite pleased.
[Break.]
When the meeting was finally terminated, and we were getting ready to go over to a restaurant that had been waiting two hours for this whole crowd of people to come, [and] one of Saarinen's partners came over and he said "we're not going to have any trouble getting you a contract to do that." And I thought "what have I done?" (laughs). Anyhow, that was how I got started in this thing.
I went back home, and I went back down in the basement and I started working on the Arch trains, and I let my father know I was getting the design contract, and I believe he was scared to death. I don't think it was a fear that I wouldn't be able to do it, or anything like that, I think his great fear was that somewhere, someone would object to letting me have this great opportunity, and that I putting so much confidence in getting the contract that I would be very disappointed. My father didn't have a college degree, he didn't even have a high school education, and there was always somebody killing something he was trying to do, or trying to knock him out of it because of his lack of education. That's what his fear was — that I would be terribly deflated before I could get it finished.
Fortunately, that never happened. I also think that John Martin and Montgomery Elevator Company, the partners Joe Jensen and John Dinkeloo and Eero Saarinen; as a group, they had more confidence in what I was going to do then I had in myself. Because if I'd had that much confidence, I'd have gotten a lot more money for doing this job. This was an unbelievable thing, and it's still unbelievable. And I say this now, thirty something years later, where this contraption has been running for 26 years, and carried millions and millions of people, and gone hundreds of thousands of miles, and it's still cooking over here. (I think we're going to continue this talk at a later time).
[Break.]
Everything we've talked about so far is trains, and elevators, and this concept of a transportation system, and I'll tell you my next tremendous surprise in this thing was that Arch had no square corners, no perpendicular walls; everything leaned, and was in triangles. Just the complications of trying to locate a place in the Arch to put a track, and things like that. Nobody told me it was going to be a mathematical nightmare to just get this thing going. But fortunately, (and I didn't mention this earlier), but while I was working at that naval ordinance lab in White Oak, Maryland, they were promoting after-hours, adult-education programs, and any course that they had enough interest in to make a full class, the University of Maryland, through Montgomery Junior College, would send a professor from the school to the Naval Ordinance Lab.
We didn't have to drive to the University of Maryland or anything, we just did it right on our job. And the government let us have an extra half hour early, on the days that the classes were [held]. So I signed up for everything available. I didn't know particularly why, except that I knew I was a lousy student, and if nothing else, I'd have to cover my tracks from all those Ds I got over at the University of Maryland before the war. As luck would have it, the kind of courses they offered were college algebra, solid geometry, analytical geometry, and descriptive geometry. I took these courses just because they were available; it didn't cost me very much to go, and it was a good thing to do for my employment with the Navy, and so forth. Over a period of about two and a half years, my grades were never below 98. And I got new kinds of dean's letters, every semester I got dean's letters, because I was listed right up on the top of the dean's list, not that other dean's list I used to be on. I got all this mathematical training without knowing what I would do with it. I didn't know about the Arch. When I got into the actual design of the Arch, I found that I could not have touched that job without the descriptive geometry and the analytical geometry. I was able to give exact locations within the Arch where every dimension was given, as the coordinates from a center line and the ground, and angles. Again in hind sight, those night school courses I took; working for the Transit Company in Washington, D.C.; the education my father had given me as a little kid; and later into the parking garage business, it appears that I was supposed to design this transportation system [for the Arch]. The math courses were almost like my post-graduate degree that I was going to need to work on the Arch. It's almost unbelievable that all of these factors had piled up. I got the contract to do the Arch transportation system and didn't even know what I was getting into. I didn't stop to think of all the complications of saying where the track would be located, and so forth. I went into this kind of blind, but I had a lot of support.
I started on the Arch Transportation System by trying to locate the train up through the more restricted parts of the Arch, and Eero Saarinen was refining the shape of the Arch, [first] to meet the building codes or the building heights in St. Louis, and [second] to try to eliminate any optical illusions that the Arch was bent, or anything like that. And he found that the parabolic curve — his original concept was a parabolic curve — was really kind of too flat to have the graceful appearance that he was trying to achieve there. Eero Saarinen was a stickler for this kind of thing; everything had to be the right proportions, and everything had to flow, and so forth. And the shape of the Arch changed. It changed from a 590' arch to a 630' arch. The shape of the Arch changed so that the stairways that the capsules were going to unload at the top — where I thought we could get ten 4 passenger capsules became too steep. The train had to be cut back to eight capsules. At the same time that happened, the actual structural design of the Arch had advanced to a point where the walls at the top of the Arch were going to be something like ten inches thinner than the original concept. There was another ten inches on each half of the Arch in the upper load zone. So the eight capsules ended up with five seats in them instead of four. There was also more room for the stairway, and the passenger capacity did not change. It's kind of amazing that it came out this close to the original concept. Actually, it was one of the biggest departures from the original concept, evolving to the trains that occurred.
I got around to trying to lay out the track in the Arch, and that's where a lot of this mathematical stuff that I had been so well-prepared for, (and didn't know it), back in 1950, came into play. The Arch structure was a catenary curve with a constantly changing angle. A track that followed this curve would have a special jig for each piece of track. Mainly to simplify the fabrication of the track, the whole track was laid out with a series of arcs and sloped areas. Starting in the upper load zone, where the cross sections of the Arch were the smallest, a radius of 181° closely matched the curvature of the Arch. This 181° radius arc of track was "matched" with a straight track that had a 30° slope. When the sloped track became too flat for the Arch curve, the end of the straight track was "matched" with a second 181° radius curved track that matched with a long straight run of track that was 12° off vertical to the base of the Arch.
At the base of the Arch the track curves back under the Arch. The total turn is 90°. Most of the turn is a 35° radius arc. To match the 12° slope in the lower load zone there is also a short section at the 181° radius.To fabricate the track only two sets of jigs were necessary, one based on the 181 ft. radius and one on the 35 ft. radius. A major consideration was trying to retain a maximum unbalance 1.5 to 1 between a loaded or unloaded train and the counterweights. This is a typical approach from an elevator standpoint, to insure good traction on the tracks for the cables and not overload them; it makes for a constant load.
In a normal vertically traveling elevator, the balance between the car (loaded or unloaded) and the counterweight always has the total effective load on each side of the drive sheave, that is the same anywhere in its travel. Gravity is your friend and the total weight is supported by the elevator hoist machine. In the Arch, especially in the curved upper load zone and the almost horizontal lower load zone, much of the train and counterweight load was supported on the rails. Every time the train position changed the effective weight on the cables changed. I used the six foot spacing of the capsules as the increment of change and computed the effective cable weight for both the counterweight and the loaded or unloaded train for every six feet except in the straight runs. It became apparent that if the number of compensating cables were less than the number of hoist cables there would be a considerable amount of effective weight added to the train or the counterweight, whichever was in the lower load zone, and the weight of whichever was in the steeper upper load zone would be reduced. There are nine hoist cables (necessarily for the plus or minus 7 to 1 safety factor for elevators with the capacity, weight, and speed similar to the Arch trains). Through trial and error it appeared that only five compensating cables would greatly help the balancing problem. Compensating cables are cables attached to the underside of an elevator, loop down in the pit, and have the other ends attached to the bottom of the counterweight frame. The amount of cable weight remains constant no matter where the elevator is in the hatchway.The original concept had a horizontal lower load zone. The weight computations resulted in a need for some slope in the lower load zone. 12° appeared to be adequate, to provide enough effective cable load for balance and for hoist machine traction.There is a set of cable tension weights in the train pit. These weights keep the governor cables and compensating cables tight to prevent excessive sagging of the cables in the non-vertical track area, and the large compensating cable weight also increased the total weight of the system, so any changes represented a smaller percentage of the imbalance.All of these weight calculations in the 1990s don't seem like much of a problem. All you have to do now is program a computer, and the answers are available instantly. In the early 1960s, there were no small calculators. There were only large frame computers in colleges and big corporations. I had a used Freiden calculator that had about a hundred buttons on the front of it. You entered numbers on it which appeared on dials like the odometer in an automobile; and the answers also came out on these dials. This old calculator did not print a tape of inputs and answers. Every figure had to be written on data sheets. Fortunately I saved a few pages of the results. I still have the old calculator, which ought to be preserved as an example of how it was in 1960 as compared to the computers that everyone has in the 1990s.After going through the original weight calculations it became apparent that the lower load zone area could not be horizontal, like shown in the conceptual presentation. [The load zones would have been flat, horizontal hallways, according to the original plans]. The tracks had to be sloped, I think it was 11°. This meant that the lower load zone had to have steps between the landings at each capsule door. The loading area for that last capsule, is 50' below the grade. This track slope resulted in having about 10% of the weight of the train or counterweight (whichever was in the lower load zone), as an effective cable weight that helped balance the system.
MOORE: So originally it was a real horizontal configuration.
BOWSER: Yes, any concerns about the stairs going down into the lower load zone should be explained by saying that mechanically it had to be that way for the trains to operate. The slope on the lower load zone was also a major change from the original concept. That and the fact there are only eight capsules now. I can say this with a certain amount of wonderment now. I was working on this thirty years ago; it's 1993, so it was 31 years ago, and the trains have been running for some 26, 27 years, and carried millions of people, and they're still going. There's been some minor changes — I'll cover that in a later discussion. But there was nothing as severe as changing to eight capsules and the steps of the lower load zone. Neither one of which was a terrible problem.
This does bring back another memory I have about working on the Arch. The foundations, under the Arch legs, were huge; I've forgotten how many thousands of yards of concrete were used to support the Arch. One of the first criteria I had to provide for the transportation system was, what kind of a hole had to be put in the foundations for the transportation system to go through into the loading zone. I had to do provide the information before I knew that the lower load zone had to be sloped, and all kinds of other unknowns; but the heat was on me to identify the size of the hole. I worked on it, did the very best I could, and bit the bullet, and told them what I wanted for this curved hole with this little narrow stairway on the side. If I had it to do over again, I would have made that stairway wider; because it's pretty close in there. Anyhow, they didn't have to take a jackhammer and cut any more concrete out or anything to get the trains in. And there was enough space left so the large air conditioning ducts could go through the hole. The ducts were installed after the train was in.
I suppose that's about enough story for now. I'm running out of steam.
MOORE: That's a good stopping point for today. We really got a lot of information down. I'd like to thank you for doing this for us today. We'll be anxious for part two.
