Dandridge McFarlan Cole, aeronautical engineer, futurist, lecturer, author. 1921-1965
By W. Raithel
Published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 140,
article 1, December 1966.
Dandridge M. Cole was born on February 19, 1921, in Sandusky,
Ohio. He died on October 29, 1965, as a result of a heart attack, less than a
week before he was to deliver one of the papers published in this volume. He
graduated from Princeton University with the class of 1943 and secured his
Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1949.
He lived most of his life in Bryn Athyn, a suburb of
Philadelphia, and leaves a wife and six children. He wrote poetry and
children’s songs and was active in athletics. Between 1945 and 1953, he taught
at the Academy of New Church, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the University of
Pennsylvania. From 1953 to 1960 he worked for the Martin Company in Baltimore
and Denver, after which he completed five years of service with the General
Electric Company’s Missile and Space Division at Valley Forge, PA.
He was a director of the American Astronautics Society, a
member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a Fellow
of the British Interplanetary Society.
Dan Cole established an enviable record for himself as a
long-range planner and thinker, with a reputation in and beyond the United
States. Fortune Magazine, in August of 1964, in an article entitled “The Wild
Birds find a Corporate Roost,” described Dan Cole as part of a select group of
advance thinkers in industry who have "taken a leaf from Leonardo da Vinci.”
Dan’s many-faceted abilities are shown also by his having
been selected by the American Broadcasting Company for a leading role in their
national network documentary called “The Way Out Men.”
The British author Arthur C. Clarke believes that most people
trying to predict future technical developments are afflicted with either
"failure of imagination” or "failure of nerve." Dan had plenty of both:
imagination and nerve. In his thoughts he was bold, and without fear to think
the unthinkable. In his deeds he was gentle and considerate and never critical
of others.
Dan was offered a chance to appear in a series of national
advertisements sponsored by a tobacco company extolling the virtues of a
well-known cigarette. Despite the large fee, in four figures, and the national
exposure, Dan quietly and without fanfare declined, because he did not want to
encourage anyone, particularly youths, to start or continue smoking.
Dan was a deeply religious man and said in his book, Beyond
Tomorrow, “While no one can say what the future will hold, there are
indications that the next fifty years will see the emergence of a new religion
with beliefs consistent with the established principles of science. Thus,
religion will be affected by the new discoveries regarding behavior and group
interactions. It should also profit from the new realization of both scientist
and theologian that neither alone has the key to knowledge and happiness, and
from the new maturity of mankind.”
His philosophy was perhaps best expressed in the foreword of
this book, where he wrote, “While the future holds great stress and threat as
well as great challenges, we also see basis for expectations of the growth of
man to a state of greater wisdom, greater accomplishment, and greater happiness
in the wonderful world beyond tomorrow.”
As a strong individualist, he did not hesitate to speak out
on matters he considered important. He might be called on of those of whom
Thoreau spoke in his book Walden: “If man does not keep pace with his
companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to
the music which he hears, however measured and far away.”
Dan did hear a different drummer. His main contribution was
that he caused us to stretch our imagination, caused us to take issue with the
increasing rate of change that we are forcing upon ourselves, all too often
without much thought as to where we are heading, and he made us realize that
the greater the rate of change, the greater the penalty for not thinking boldly
enough.
For some time he had been studying artificial hearts and
other body organs, which led him to think that by the twenty-first century it
should be possible to remove all of the major organs of the abdomen and thorax
and replace them with superior artificial components. He even pictured man with
all parts of the body, except the brain, replaced by mechanical substitutes.
The asteroids were his favorite subject. He pointed out how
slight a change in velocity could cause close-approach asteroids to strike the
earth with tremendously destructive effects. For instance, the Arizona meteor
crater was formed by a meteor perhaps only 300 feet in diameter, but its explosive
energy has been estimated to have been in the order of 30 megatons – comparable
with one of the largest bombs known today. The South African meteor, with a
diameter of approximately one mile, delivered an equivalent of more than
1,000,000 megatons. He was deeply hurt when, as a result of bringing this to
the attention of the public, he was accused of promoting super-bombs. All he
had done was to bring a thought to a logical, if unpleasant, conclusion.
He also pointed out that close-approach asteroids are the easiest
extraterrestrial targets for soft landing in terms of velocity requirements.
Because of the extremely low gravitational fields and escape velocities of
these asteroids, the landing problem is reduced to a space rendezvous and
docking maneuver. The only reason why the moon will be visited sooner is that the
travel time is so much shorter. He showed that, with the present SATURN
technology, a manned landing on a close-approach asteroid is a distinct
possibility by mid-1970.
And again Dan thought the unthinkable: Why not capture an
asteroid into earth orbit? He showed that for asteroids with favorable orbits
the effort to do this would not be at all out of reason, particularly if other
planets were used to help make the necessary orbit changes. This possibility was
also suggested in a speech by Lyndon B. Johnson in Seattle in 1962.
According to all we know about our solar system and the law
of probabilities, a considerable number of asteroids with suitable orbits and
suitable sizes must exist. In recent years new asteroids have been discovered
and old ones rediscovered, largely by accident. It is surely in some measure a
result of Dandridge M. Cole’s work that a systematic search for asteroids has
now been undertaken. When a suitable one is found, it would be most fitting
that it be named after him.
