Bill Graves had this to say about his older brother: “Gordon was always highly competitive, and not just in sports, but in everything, and he was a high achiever in most everything he did. When we were young, we were a close family and played lots of games, including dominoes and bridge. I could tell Gordon loved playing bridge for its challenge and need for determining a winning strategy, which also made him a good poker player. I believe my brother’s strongest traits, and I know this comes from our parents, are his sense of fairness, honesty and strong Christian ethic.”
Gordon Graves’s Career
When Gordon Graves was a freshman in high school, he decided to be an engineer. First, Gordon wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, but by the time he started college, he had switched his interest to electrical engineering.
Graves went to Tarleton State Junior College in Stephenville, Texas. Aside from his studies, he held an interest in playing football. Graves quarterbacked in high school and did the same at Tarleton, and his friend and teammate at Tarleton, Mike Myers, followed a similar path. When Myers had a chance to comment about Graves’s football prowess, he said, “Gordon was a good quarterback, but beyond that, he was the smartest guy on the team.”
Coach Sanford gave Graves a scholarship covering his tuition, books and room and board. He received spending money for sweeping the office of Coach Flory, the tennis coach. Graves said his sweeping effort was nothing to brag about. Coach Flory would see him on campus occasionally and say something to the effect of “Graves, you better get over and sweep out my office…cotton’s growing about a foot high in there.”
Following junior college, Graves went to the University of Texas in Austin. His extracurricular activity was grading papers, and during the summer, he worked various jobs. One summer, he was on a surveying team for the Texas Highway Department, and another summer, he worked as a draftsman for a steel company in Fort Worth.
In college, Graves learned about differential equations, Ohm’s law, and the strength of materials. He graduated in 1959 from the University of Texas with an Electrical Engineering Degree.
Engineering Days
Graves’s first electrical engineering job out of college, in 1959, was analyzing flight-test data for a new inertial guidance system for Litton Industries based in Beverly Hills, California. He started there in June. Gordon flew to Los Angeles from Dallas on a Sunday night, his first commercial airline flight.
On the plane, Graves sat beside Dean Smith. Smith had been a star running back at the University of Texas and had been a student of Graves’s Uncle Doyle in Breckenridge, Texas. When he found out about that relationship, Smith took Graves under his wing.
Smith was a stuntman and stand-in for Dale Robertson in his television series Tales of Wells Fargo. When they arrived in LA, the luggage delivery system had broken down, and Smith and Graves had to wait for more than an hour for their baggage. It was before LAX International came to be, and the baggage area at the old airport was outside. While standing around waiting, they met the cast from Gunsmoke, who were friends of Smith’s. Graves said he thought LA was going to be that way all the time—rubbing shoulders with the movie stars every day.
Litton Industries was a conglomerate founded by Tex Thornton. Thornton led General Arnold’s operations research team tasked with building aircraft for World War II, and Graves became part of the Military Systems Division, run by Henry Singleton and George Kozmetsky. Graves’s first assignment was to extrapolate flight-test data for an inertial guidance system by plotting the difference in measured position recorded from the inertial guidance system and the actual position determined from simultaneously recorded aerial photographs. Graves’s boss, Sid Shapiro, taught him how to analyze the error curves and postulate the root cause. The error model was known as the Schuler loop, and Gordon used Laplace transforms and old-fashioned intuitive pattern recognition to separate the expected causes. Then he would plan another flight designed to verify his suspicions. After a couple of iterations, Graves could narrow down the possible causes, design another flight test, and predict what the error curve was going to look like. Graves said that when the flight was over, and the results came out as he had predicted, the flight technicians would be in awe while he would be trying to hide his own amazement. He said he could then isolate the error, but not necessarily be able to recommend a fix; that was the hard part. Eventually, Graves found the fix. Graves was twenty-one years old at the time.
Dr. George Kozmetsky’s department designed the digital computer. When the system came off the drawing board, and the prototype finished, Shapiro turned it over to Graves and said, “Go make it work.”
Shapiro taught Graves how to isolate error sources, but Gordon also had to learn about floated gyroscopes, jeweled bearing accelerometers, closed-loop gimbal servomechanisms, analog computers, Coriolis, gyro compassing and a thousand other esoteric things. The analog computer needed was an untested prototype and had lots of design bugs, which allowed Graves to learn it well and do some fundamental redesign. Circuit design, gear train layout, electrical ground plane effects, and temperature impact on resistors and capacitors were all important considerations in designing a good analog computer. Graves was good at making systems work, and people began to recognize his creative intuition in solving technical problems.
Graves said that searching for solutions to design deficiencies was fun. The reason some systems did not function as well as expected was a mystery. He would set up a series of small tests to check out individual elements or subsystems within the overall system. He would stimulate the element and, based on the design specification, predict the response of that element. If the response were different than expected, he would calculate the actual way the element in question functioned and compare it to how it was supposed to work, thus explaining why the overall system did not function properly. When the test demonstrated subpar performance, it put Graves on a path to finding a solution. Gordon said that sometimes, when you are facing a very challenging mystery that has eluded you, and by accident, you see something that doesn’t look quite right, further investigation reveals more about the problem. The logic, mathematics and laws of physics are all confirmed with your discovery—this is the most satisfying type of mystery to solve. It would be as if you had been looking at a mosaic of meaningless patterns that suddenly turned into a beautiful mural masterpiece.
Grave mused that working in such an environment shaped his view of the world and his religious philosophy. It was, in many ways, an addictive situation. Since those days, Graves has understood why many people with powerful brains become scientific nerds. Time after time, Graves would see a system working in a way that seemed to defy the laws of physics. He saw that reconfirmation as a thing of beauty…something to rely on. Each time it happened, it felt for a moment to Gordon that through the fog of uncertainty and ignorance under which we all live our lives, he had caught a brief glimpse of the face of God.
Graves wrote a poem about this experience titled “Words of a Superstitious Scientist”:
God is the force. The force is M times A11,
As the earth gets hotter, man will try to get away,
And once man finds a place where they can stay,
Those selected to make that trip on that glorious day,
Will be those that follow Jesus’ words in every kind way
And once we learn to clone from using man’s DNA
Those selected to be re-created in that complicated way
Will find eternal life at last, just like the prophets always say.
Litton’s customers for the research system Graves was working with were Tom Sanders and Ron Vaughn of the US Naval Air Development Center (NADC) in Horsham, Pennsylvania. Once the system was working in the lab, Gordon took it to Pennsylvania to direct the field support of the system. Shortly after NADC had accepted delivery of the system and