Skunk Works Mailing List
Skunk Works Pioneer dies
From: "Allen Thomson"
Subject: Skunk Works Pioneer dies
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 12:21:35 -0500
Skunk Works' Irven Culver Dies
Los Angeles Times
Friday, September 17, 1999
By Elaine Woo
[EXCERPT]
Aviation: Self-taught engineer was a key member of Lockheed team and helped
design the nation's first fighter jet. He also worked with Albert Einstein.
Irven H. Culver, a self-trained aviation engineer who named Lockheed's
legendary Skunk Works division and whose ingenuity earned him many of his
field's highest honors, died Aug. 13 at a Bakersfield hospital. He was 88.
Culver was a member of the elite group of two dozen engineers chosen
during World War II to design the XP-80, the nation's first operational
fighter jet.
The top-secret design group initially was housed in circus tents next
to a Burbank plastics factory that sent noxious fumes into the engineers'
quarters. The stink made Culver think of the evil-smelling "Skonk Works"
distillery for Kickapoo Joy Juice depicted in the then-popular "L'il Abner"
comic strip by Al Capp.
One day during the war, Culver answered the division's telephone by
saying, "Skunk Works, inside man Culver speaking." The call was from a Navy
officer who "laughed and asked me to repeat it while he put on a loudspeaker
in his Washington office so everyone else could hear it," Culver once said.
Division chief Kelly Johnson did not laugh, however, and fired Culver.
But Culver, whose antics got him fired "at least twice a day," survived the
incident, as did the Skunk Works name. A few years ago, in fact, the
nickname was officially embraced by the Palmdale aerospace outfit, now known
as Lockheed Martin Skunk Works.
Culver worked for nearly three decades at Lockheed, where he helped
solve difficult design problems on a wide range of craft, including the
Constellation transport craft, the supersonic F-104, the Polaris missile,
the X-7 reentry test vehicle and helicopters, said Thomas Hanson, a former
Lockheed engineer and president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American
Helicopter Society.
He also was valued as an accident investigator for Lockheed, and he was
a guest lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Royal
Aeronautical Society despite his lack of a college degree.
Culver "was arguably the most brilliant of the behind-the-scenes
engineers who produced the great Lockheed aircraft of the 1940s through the
1960s," Hanson said.
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Created: Sat Sep 18 03:10:43 EDT 1999