Framing figure — Theodore von Kármán
Theodore von Kármán was born on 11 May 1881 in Budapest, and took a doctorate in engineering at the University of Göttingen in 1908. Robert A. Millikan brought him to the California Institute of Technology to advise on the design of a wind tunnel, completed in 1928; von Kármán stayed on at Caltech's newly established Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) and became its director in 1930, drawing West Coast aircraft companies to test models in the Pasadena facility (NASA JPL).
In 1935 a GALCIT graduate student, Frank Malina, began rocket-propellant experiments encouraged by von Kármán. The work drew US Army Air Corps funding, and by 1944 it had become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with von Kármán as its first director (NASA JPL). He left Caltech and JPL in 1949 to advise the Air Force on military applications of air power, chairing the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board until 1954, and in 1963 President Kennedy presented him with the first National Medal of Science (NASA JPL).
The point for this readership is not the honours. It is that a wind tunnel commissioned to test aircraft models became, within two decades, a federal propulsion laboratory, and that laboratory became the anchor of a regional industrial base that a Boeing satellite line, an Edwards AFB test programme and a Southern California machine shop all still operate inside. Every solicitation in this issue sits downstream of a Pasadena wind tunnel built to answer one narrow engineering question.