Jun 29, 2016
Barefoot Innovation has been in hiatus in recent weeks
because my father passed away. I was in San Francisco and got a
call saying he was suddenly ill and might not live through the day.
I rushed for a redeye and flew all night home to Boston, where my
son Matt met me and we drove to Harford in the wee hours. My
brother and sister had rushed to our Dad too, and he had held on.
In fact he began to do better, regaling us with stories in the ICU,
bringing his sharp engineering mind to analyzing his medical
situation, and enjoying us singing to him (we’re a singing family).
We had hopes he would recover, but a few days later, he worsened
and ultimately did not pull through.
He was 95 years old. His name was Glidden Sweet Doman. And he
was a remarkable innovator. He’s being widely remembered as the
last of the great helicopter pioneers, and he was
also an important inventor in wind energy. Those two industries
share the same technology – the wickedly complex science of rotor
dynamics.
This very special episode of Barefoot Innovation is a
conversation I recorded with him last Thanksgiving but had not yet
posted. I got the idea of doing this podcast after watching a video
of a talk he’d recently given at the
New England Air Museum, which has two of his Doman
Helicopters on permanent display. Listening to his lecture, I kept
noticing parallels with the themes we discuss on Barefoot
Innovation. It occurred to me that it would be fun to do a show
inviting insights from someone who, nearly a century ago, began
innovating in a field that’s very different from finance, but that
was being similarly transformed by new, fast-changing
technology.
Glid Doman was born in the village of Elbridge, New York, in
1921. His father, Albert Doman, brought electricity to that part of
the state in 1890 (you can still see historic sites related to it),
and was an inventor of the electric starter and electric windshield
wiper. My Dad’s uncle, Lewis Doman, invented the player piano. His
half-brother Carl Doman pioneered both aircraft and automobile
engines and became a senior executive at Ford. His half-sister Ruth
Chamberlain was the first woman architect in the region. My family
is loaded with the genes for invention and
entrepreneurship.
For my Dad as a boy, the most exciting field of invention was
aviation. Airplanes were barnstorming farm fields. Airlines did not
yet exist. And my Dad, who avidly read Popular Mechanics, built an
airplane in his back yard (you’ll hear in the podcast whether he
ever made it fly).
Aviation was the new technology then, the way digitization
and mobile phones and blockchains are the tech frontiers today --
or genetics or robotics or 3D printing. Aviation was full of novel
engineering challenges that were not yet understood. Flight was
also inspiring bold predictions about how our lives were going to
change, some of which were hilariously wrong – a good lesson for
people like me who like to try to forecast tech impacts. For
instance, in clearing out our parents’ attic in recent days, my
siblings and I found a magazine cover story advising on women’s
fashion for the coming trend of traveling by helicopter.
This little podcast touches only a tiny fragment of what made
my Dad fascinating, and has nothing on his great life partner, our
late mother, Joan Hamilton Doman. They met because she was the only
woman in the 50-person University of Michigan flying club in World
War II – and she was its top pilot. They had an amazing six decades
or so, built around family and his work. He knew all the aviation
greats from Igor Sikorsky to Charles Lindberg. He was featured on
aviation magazine covers and traveled throughout the world. He was
enlisted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab to help design a “space sail”
to rendezvous with Haley’s Comet (ultimately not deployed). He’s
been honored by his alma mater, the University of Michigan
aeronautical engineering school. And when his helicopter company
didn’t reach scale, he pivoted to wind energy and invented a
superior rotor design for wind turbines, using the same insights
he’d developed working with helicopters. He led the design of two
colossal experimental turbines funded by the Departments of Energy
and Interior and installed in Wyoming. When he “retired” at age 65,
he and my mother moved to Rome where he led international
engineering teams in designing huge turbines in Europe.
And then, in his 80’s, he started a new wind energy venture
of his own. Right up to his death, he continued to be engaged
with an affiliated firm, Seawind
Technology, which is actively working to deploy
his “Gamma” rotor designs on offshore wind turbines in Europe and
other parts of the world.
Decades before computers could model the movements of rotor
blades, my Dad used a combination of intuition, math, physics and
relentless measurement to understand, correctly, the movement of
spinning blades. For both helicopters and wind turbines, my Dad
created massively simplified rotor designs and drastically reduced
the stress on the blades as they rotate. This captures huge
efficiency gains and virtually eliminates blade failure, the bane
of most rotor systems. As he explains in our talk, one key to this
was to realize that the commonly-used three-bladed rotor design is
inherently unstable. Wind turbines, he argued, should have
two blades and helicopters – because they have to fly forward –
need four.
Our conversation elicited a lot of my Dad’s thoughts about
how to work with young, little-understood technology, as both an
engineer and entrepreneur. While we didn’t cover all the ground I’d
hoped to, you’ll hear him imparting
Lean Startup-type wisdom. As a young engineer, for
instance, he used a jackknife to cut open the balsa wood of a
Sikorsky rotor blade to install measurement gauges on it and figure
out what it was doing. He bought a postwar helicopter body for a
dollar. He got hold of a Chevrolet clutch to use in his helicopter
engine. His team invented do-it-yourself wind tunnels. It’s an MVP
approach – a minimum viable product – in which they methodically
identified, isolated, and intensively tested issues and reaped what
today we call “rapid learning” and “fail-fast” lessons. As they
figured out answers, they quickly pivoted, trying to succeed in an
industry where, unlike today’s fintech, entrepreneurs needed huge
amounts of capital. (In our recording, he talks about how easily
his enterprise raised money, but that pattern did not hold over the
decades.)
Our conversation only touches on a few of these lessons (and
nothing about the wind business), but shining through it is his
defining trait, the one that made him most successful, which was
unbounded and insatiable curiosity.
Mainly, this episode shares his secret to being an innovator
– and to having a wonderful career. His advice: find
organizations that have a lot of interesting problems, and go there
and figure out how to solve them.
For those intrigued with the technology history of the
twentieth century, I’m attaching early chapters of a biography that
my brother, Steve Doman – also an aeronautical engineer -- is
writing about our father’s journey. Here, also, is an overview and
short video on Doman
Helicopters created by my sister, Terry
Gibbon (she too is an entrepreneur, with her own video
company). And here is a short video
of one of the wind turbines.
To prepare this episode, I re-listened to the recording just
a few weeks after his passing. One thing I notice is that, as we
had this conversation after our Thanksgiving dinner last fall, my
Dad’s comments kept making me laugh. Whenever he said goodbye to
people, he always added the advice, “keep smiling.” Words to
live by.
Let me share two updates about me and the
show.
First, I’ve become involved in a very significant project
aimed at helping prepare our U.S. financial regulatory framework
for the challenges raised by innovation. I’m going to stay in my
Harvard fellowship for a second year, still writing my book on
innovation and regulation, but will also be devoting much of my
time to this initiative, which I’ll tell you more about as it
develops. One result of the new project is that I’ve decided to
suspend the Regulation Innovation video series we launched earlier
this year. I expect to reactivate it when I have time to create the
videos. Meanwhile, they are still available, still for free,
at www.RegulationInnovation.com.
Please do check them out. As I said when we started the series, I
think the articles that accompany these videos might be the most
important writing I’ve ever done.
Second, we will soon be back from the Barefoot Innovation
hiatus, and what a line up we have! We’ll have CFPB Director
Richard Cordray; Digital Asset Holdings’ Blythe Masters; National
Consumer Law Center’s Lauren Saunders; the prize-winning founders
of Bee, Vinay Patel and Max Gasner; Harvard professor and
behavioral economics scholar Brigitte Madrian; Funding Circle’s
U.S. CEO Sam Hodges; QED Investors co-founder and venture capital
wise man Caribou Honig, and the chief compliance officers of both
Citi and Wells Fargo, Kathryn Reimann and Yvette Hollingsworth
Clark, together. And those are the ones we’ve already
recorded! We have many more exciting people in the scheduling
queue. This is why we ask you to send in “a buck a show” – the show
has turned into a major enterprise, just because we have so many
fascinating people to talk with.
We’ll try to speed up production as best we can, I’ll look
forward to your continued feedback.
Meanwhile, keep smiling. Jo Ann
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