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Library Collections

Aircraft Engine Historical Society Collection

The Aircraft Engine Historical Society (AEHS) is a national non-profit corporation founded in 2001 and dedicated to preserving the history of people, art and science associated with aircraft engine development, manufacture, and use.

The AEHS collection compiled by M. Louis Salmon Library archivist Anne Coleman, and library volunteer and retired electronics engineer David Hanning, contains many rare books, manuals, reports, photographs, papers, films and recordings, all related to aircraft propulsion. This collection is housed and available to the public at the Archives and Special Collections Department in the library.

The collection includes a total of 354 documents 16mm film and 35mm film clips as well as 33 documents added to the collection by private donors. The AEHS collection includes subjects on aviation training, aircraft research and design publications, aircraft component service manuals, aircraft operating manuals, aircraft engines, reference books, standards and publications.

The guide is organized into nine major subjects or series. Details on the documents are contained within each of the major subjects and can be found by accessing the on line data base http://www.uah.edu/library, or manually from the UA Huntsville library web site.

Hanning, who volunteers three days a week for four hours each day said a special finders guide serves as a pathway, and makes it easier for people to maneuver though the collection. He finished the aircraft engine guide two years ago.

"Everything is organized by subject. The ‘ancient part’ interested me. It (the collection) covers a lot of the early information on biplanes and WWI planes dating to the1930s," he said. "The number of manuals housed in the collection has to do with maintenance. There are some very old 16mm training films, and the booklets were simpler … telling people to avoid certain instances, such as like thunderclouds and birds."

Hanning spent six months just getting the collection in working order. He said those interested in the collection include individuals who fly their own aircrafts and people interested in the evolution of aircraft engines, and in papers written by NASA and before the conception of NASA. "It is a living collection," Hanning said. "We receive query calls from all over the U.S. about the collection. You know, when you put these collections together you don’t have time to sit there and read the all the documents. It’s a drawback not being able to read all the submissions. Putting the collection together is really a walk down memory lane."

Robert "Bob" E. Jones Papers

An opportunity of a lifetime led to a phenomenal political career for North Alabama Democrat, Robert "Bob" Emmett Jones, Jr.

Jones, of Scottsboro, went to Washington D.C., representing the eighth district of Alabama in 1947 after a special election for the seat previously held by John Sparkman, who moved on to the U.S. Senate.

Although Jones and Sparkman graduated from The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (UA), Jones bequeathed his congressional and office records, and memorabilia to The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) before he retired from Congress, in 1976.

"Obviously, he felt a special kinship to the citizens of North Alabama and to UAH," said Anne Coleman, archivist in special collections at UAH’s Louis Salmon Library.

Housed at the Louis Salmon Library are 250 boxes of archival material relating to Jones’ 30-year congressional career in Washington, D.C.

Jones was a champion of public works and served as a member or chaired some of the most powerful committees in Congress. As chairman of the House Public Works and Transportation Committee, he was instrumental in establishing the legislation that authorized more than $76 billion to build a 42,500-mile Interstate System.

Through the Tennessee Valley Authority, Jones provided electricity for Alabama. Other legislative achievements include overseeing projects dealing with rivers, harbors and flood control by sponsoring the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972. Jones was also instrumental in the passage of the 1965 Appalachian Regional Development Act.

Bob Jones High School in Madison, Ala., is named in his honor. Jones died June 4, 1997, in Florence, Ala.

Robert L. Forward Collection

Dr. Robert L. Forward was a man ahead of his time.

He was an early pioneer in the field of exotic physical phenomena, a prolific research scientist at Hughes Aircraft Company, science consultant for the Air Force and NASA, space and technology enthusiast and futurist, college professor, author and entrepreneur.

Before his death in September 2002, Forward made arrangements for his collection to be part of The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) archives at the M. Louis Salmon Library.

Forward left an astounding legacy as a gift to future researchers and pioneers in the fields of science and technology. The university library collection consists of journal articles and technical publications, artwork, science fiction, patents, personal papers, photographs, and background material about his work. The library also maintains Forward’s original website.

At the time of his death, Forward had more than 40 years of experience in the advanced space propulsion field and was a recognized expert on future technology. For more than three decades, he worked at Hughes Aircraft Company Research Laboratories. He built the world’s first laser interferometer gravitational radiation detector, published more than 200 technical publications and articles, 11 science fiction novels and held 19 patents.

In 1992, Forward formed the consulting company, Tethers Unlimited with Dr. Robert P. Hoyt.

Hermann and Reisig Papers

Rudolf Hermann’s refusal to comply with a direct order from the German military during World War II (WWII), greatly contributed to the successful launching of the first American ballistic missile in space and put rockets on the moon.

A physics professor, Hermann was a pioneer in the development of supersonic wind tunnels and their contributions to the aerodynamics of rocket vehicles. He was recruited to the United States with Wernher von Braun, German scientist and head of the German rocket team.

The German scientists surrendered to the American government at the end of WWII for the express purpose of science development and space exploration in the United States. This renunciation of German citizenship, or transfer to the United States was referred to as Operation Paperclip.

Physicist and aeronautical engineer Gerhard H. R. Reisig, was also recruited by Von Braun to work on the rocket team. Reisig’s expertise was in guided missile guidance and telemetry.

The Hermann technical reports and the Reisig research papers include NASA materials and reports of contractors and university research facilities dealing with rocketry and space science are all housed at The University of Alabama in Huntsville Louis Salmon Library Archives and Special Collections.

According to Hermann, before leaving Germany he ignored an order to destroy all technical documents and equipment as the Allied occupation swept across the country. The documents, he said, were hidden and then retrieved when the American military occupied the German town of Kochel.

While in Germany, Hermann was hand-picked to develop supersonic wind tunnels at the Aachen University Aerodynamic Institute — a site Von Braun had visited. After the American military occupied Kochel, the wind tunnel equipment was ultimately transported to a naval ordnance facility in the United States.

Hermann kept and used the technical documents during his academic and government positions in America. When he retired from the university, Hermann placed all the historic German documents in the UAHuntsville archives.

Hermann also gave the university books and files of reprints of scientific papers he collected in the course of his research.

The Lunar Roving Vehicle aka "The Moonbuggy"

The NASA Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle’s (LRV) ability to pitch, roll and negotiate countless obstacles on the moon earned the all terrain vehicle a reputation as the space agency’s "sweetest piece of hardware."

The LRV, also known as "the moon buggy," was used on NASA Apollo flights 15, 16 and 17. LRV special devices, including navigation, steering and braking systems allowed a "wall-to-wall" turning radius, and "free wheeling" on the moon’s rugged terrain.

The LRV document collection is housed at the M. Louis Salmon Library on the campus of The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). Wernher von Braun handpicked Saverio (Sonny) Morea for the LRV "car" project. Morea donated the historic collection to the university library.

The extensive LRV document volume consists of documents relating to the development, construction, and testing of the vehicle at the Boeing facility in Washington, and the chassis manufacturing and overall assembly at MSFC.

The moon buggy was developed in less than 18 months and could carry up to three times its weight (approximately 450 lbs). It also had to be somewhat portable — it folded and unfolded semi-automatically for flight, and the vehicle had to be operational for the extreme temperatures on the moon.

The LRV was first used by the space crew of Apollo 15 on their July 31, 1971, mission and it allowed the NASA astronauts to explore larger surfaces of the moon.

For 15 years NASA has been sponsoring "The Annual Great Moon Buggy Race," to motivate budding engineering students interested in aerospace careers.

Saturn V Project

It was a little more than four decades ago, in 1967, that Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first successful heart transplant in Cape Town, South Africa; the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine was published; and NASA launched Saturn V, a family of rockets developed by a team of German scientists led by Wernher von Braun.

Saturn V was the most powerful member of the family of rockets, producing as much power as 85 Hoover Dams and solved the United States dilemma of getting to the moon. The powerful rocket was built at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville and was nearly 40 stories tall.

The crowning achievement for the Saturn V rocket came when it launched Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon in July 1969. The Saturn V provided the capability for Earth escape and Earth orbital missions for Apollo and later for Skylab.

The UAHuntsville Louis Salmon Library holds more than 1,600 items pertaining to the Saturn V Project, occurring from 1940 -1976. These artifacts provide documentation for an official history of the Saturn Project, with materials ranging from working papers to published NASA reports, from early Army missile development to the Apollo moon landings. Through a NASA History Grant, the Saturn History documentation was collected to support the writing of the book entitled Stages to Saturn: a technological history of the Apollo/Saturn launch vehicles by Robert E. Bilstein.

A family of 15 Saturn V’s were built. The rockets are exhibited in NASA visitor centers in Alabama, Florida and Texas.

The Skylab Collection

Skylab was America's first experimental space station — it was a NASA project that left its mark in space technology. The space station was made from Apollo hardware. Designed for long duration mission, Skylab program objectives were twofold: To prove that humans could live and work in space for extended periods, and to expand our knowledge of solar astronomy well beyond Earth-based observations.

The UAHuntsville M. Louis Salmon Library houses a special collection of Skylab artifacts, including documents, books, awards and souvenirs that tell the story of the four missions from May 1973 to February 1974, involving nine astronauts and scientists from 28 nations.

A dedication ceremony held Nov. 10, 2003, at the UAHuntsville Library honored eight of the nine Skylab astronauts, and project scientists and engineers. Many of the artifacts in the UAH collection came from Huntsville residents who worked on the missions. It now contains more than 140 artifacts.

One of the Skylab mission retirees from NASA is Dr. Charles Lundquist, who served as the Skylab Space Science Laboratory director, located at Marshall Space Flight Center. He was responsible for all Skylab experiments. Lundquist recently retired as UAH's director of the Consortium for the Materials Development in Space and now serves as director of UAH's Interactive Projects Office in Von Braun Research Hall.

Skylab was constructed from the third stage of the Saturn V rocket. The four missions lasted for a collective total of 171 days and 13 hours. Mission experiments included: observing the human body's adaptability to microgravity, solar observations and Earth resources experiments.

Willy Ley: Space Publicist

German native Willy Ley is considered by many to be the first public relations agent for rocketry and space travel.

A prolific writer and lecturer on rocket research and space travel, Ley initially studied to be a paleontologist. Although considered to be a genius on rocketry and space travel, he never graduated from college. In 1960, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Adelphi University, 25 years after he immigrated to the United States.

Ley was also a confidante and mentor to Wernher von Braun. Von Braun designed the V-2 combat rocket during World War II, and was the developer of the family of Saturn V rockets that put Americans on the moon.

In 1969, the UAHuntsville Louis Salmon Library acquired the book and journal collection of space publicist Willy Ley (1906-1969). He was one of the founders of the German Society for Space Travel.

The Ley collection includes science-fact materials, in particular works in English, German, Russian, French, and Italian, many of them early imprints (perhaps the oldest is 1529), focusing on works by and about pioneers such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Hermann Oberth, Robert Goddard, Von Braun and Frederick Ordway III.

Ley wrote numerous science fiction and non-science fiction articles and books on space travel. He served as writer and scientific advisor for many early television projects including The Disney Sunday Movie, and Walt Disney presents segments.

Gravity Probe A

To test Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, or his belief that gravity slows the flow of time, NASA sent an atomic clock into space to measure the rate change of a clock in lower gravity with high precision.

The space-based experiment was Gravity Probe A (GP-A). It was launched more than three decades ago on top of a Scout rocket on Wallops Island located on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The GP-A crashed into the Atlantic Ocean after remaining in space for less than two hours.

The documents relating to Gravity Probe-A have been collected and indexed by Dr. Charles Lundquist and are housed at UAHuntsville M. Louis Salmon Library. Donations include Dr. R. F. C. Vessot's personal collection of documents relating to Gravity Probe A and from the collection of the late Dr. Rudy Decher of UAH.

GP-A was a joint program of NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center and the Astrophysical Observatory of the Smithsonian Institution. It was the first test in space to explore the structure of space and time, and was designed to test the "equivalence principle" part of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

The experiment was a significant step toward a better understanding of gravitational effects, since GP-A was expected to be about 500 times more accurate than any previous measurement using ground-based instruments.

In the GP-A mission, all payload systems appeared to have functioned properly, including the newly developed hydrogen MASER, NASA officials reported. Successful tracking was maintained throughout the mission.

NASA's Post Launch Mission Operation Report of GP-A dated February 14, 1977, states the following: The Principal Investigator, Dr. Vessot, began data reduction and has reported achieving 150 parts per million accuracy. The pre-launch accuracy objective of 200 parts per million from the data has thus been surpassed. Based on this report, the mission is adjudged as successful.

Peenemunde

During World War II Germans developed V-2 weapons, short for vengeance weapons. Specifically, the V-2 (also called A-4 by Adolph Hitler) rocket was the first man-made missile to achieve sub-orbital spaceflight. Germans used the rockets during the early 40s, because the peace treaty that ended World War I prohibited development of heavy artillery.

The V-2 rockets were developed at the Peenemunde factory, located in a small village in northeastern Germany, on an island off the Baltic coast. Peenemunde was the main site of rocket research and testing for Germans because the island was unpopulated. Wernher von Braun was hired to lead the German militarys rocket artillery division.

The V-2 rocket traveled faster than the speed of sound. It gave no warning before impact and there was no way for opponents to defend themselves against the flying bomb. The development of the V-2 began ballistic military rocketry in the U.S. and abroad. The Peenemunde factory was bombed in August 1943.

The UAHuntsville M. Louis Salmon Library houses notes, research reports and technical findings conducted at the German rocket and missile research facility. The Peenemunde collection is in German, and arranged numerically.

The Pennemunde papers also contain wind tunnel testing results, said Anne Coleman, archivist at the M. Louis Salmon Library. These papers were hidden by the Von Braun rocket team from the Germans at the end of the war (they had been ordered to destroy all paperwork). When the Pennemunde group surrendered to the Allies, they gave the papers to the U.S. Army, Coleman explained. There were several working copies and what is in the library archives are the copies that were in possession of Dr. Rudolf Hermann, who was the first director of the Research Institute at UAHuntsville. Hermann served as director from 1962 until his retirement in 1970.