The Last Helicopter Pioneer – Innovation Insights from my Father, Glidden S. Doman

Barefoot Innovation has been in hiatus in recent weeks because my father passed away. I was in San Francisco and got a call saying he was suddenly ill and might not live through the day. I rushed for a redeye and flew all night home to Boston, where my son Matt met me and we drove to Harford in the wee hours. My brother and sister had rushed to our Dad too, and he had held on. In fact he began to do better, regaling us with stories in the ICU, bringing his sharp engineering mind to analyzing his medical situation, and enjoying us singing to him (we're a singing family). We had hopes he would recover, but a few days later, he worsened and ultimately did not pull through. He was 95 years old. His name was Glidden Sweet Doman. And he was a remarkable innovator. He's being widely remembered as the last of the great helicopter pioneers, and he was also an important inventor in wind energy. Those two industries share the same technology – the wickedly complex science of rotor dynamics. This very special episode of Barefoot Innovation is a conversation I recorded with him last Thanksgiving but had not yet posted. I got the idea of doing this podcast after watching a video of a talk he'd recently given at the New England Air Museum, which has two of his Doman Helicopters on permanent display. Listening to his lecture, I kept noticing parallels with the themes we discuss on Barefoot Innovation. It occurred to me that it would be fun to do a show inviting insights from someone who, nearly a century ago, began innovating in a field that's very different from finance, but that was being similarly transformed by new, fast-changing technology. Glid Doman was born in the village of Elbridge, New York, in 1921. His father, Albert Doman, brought electricity to that part of the state in 1890 (you can still see historic sites related to it), and was an inventor of the electric starter and electric windshield wiper. My Dad's uncle, Lewis Doman, invented the player piano. His half-brother Carl Doman pioneered both aircraft and automobile engines and became a senior executive at Ford. His half-sister Ruth Chamberlain was the first woman architect in the region. My family is loaded with the genes for invention and entrepreneurship. For my Dad as a boy, the most exciting field of invention was aviation. Airplanes were barnstorming farm fields. Airlines did not yet exist. And my Dad, who avidly read Popular Mechanics, built an airplane in his back yard (you'll hear in the podcast whether he ever made it fly). Aviation was the new technology then, the way digitization and mobile phones and blockchains are the tech frontiers today -- or genetics or robotics or 3D printing. Aviation was full of novel engineering challenges that were not yet understood. Flight was also inspiring bold predictions about how our lives were going to change, some of which were hilariously wrong – a good lesson for people like me who like to try to forecast tech impacts. For instance, in clearing out our parents' attic in recent days, my siblings and I found a magazine cover story advising on women's fashion for the coming trend of traveling by helicopter. This little podcast touches only a tiny fragment of what made my Dad fascinating, and has nothing on his great life partner, our late mother, Joan Hamilton Doman. They met because she was the only woman in the 50-person University of Michigan flying club in World War II – and she was its top pilot. They had an amazing six decades or so, built around family and his work. He knew all the aviation greats from Igor Sikorsky to Charles Lindberg. He was featured on aviation magazine covers and traveled throughout the world. He was enlisted by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab to help design a "space sail" to rendezvous with Haley's Comet (ultimately not deployed). He's been honored by his alma mater, the University of Michigan aeronautical engineering school. And when his helicopter company didn't reach scale, he pivoted to wind energy and invented a superior rotor design for wind turbines, using the same insights he'd developed working with helicopters. He led the design of two colossal experimental turbines funded by the Departments of Energy and Interior and installed in Wyoming. When he "retired" at age 65, he and my mother moved to Rome where he led international engineering teams in designing huge turbines in Europe. And then, in his 80's, he started a new wind energy venture of his own. Right up to his death, he continued to be engaged with an affiliated firm, Seawind Technology, which is actively working to deploy his "Gamma" rotor designs on offshore wind turbines in Europe and other parts of the world. Decades before computers could model the movements of rotor blades, my Dad used a combination of intuition, math, physics and relentless measurement to understand, correctly, the movement of spinning blades. For both helicopters and wind turbines, my Dad created massively simplified rotor designs and drastically reduced the stress on the blades as they rotate. This captures huge efficiency gains and virtually eliminates blade failure, the bane of most rotor systems. As he explains in our talk, one key to this was to realize that the commonly-used three-bladed rotor design is inherently unstable. Wind turbines, he argued, should have two blades and helicopters – because they have to fly forward – need four. Our conversation elicited a lot of my Dad's thoughts about how to work with young, little-understood technology, as both an engineer and entrepreneur. While we didn't cover all the ground I'd hoped to, you'll hear him imparting Lean Startup-type wisdom. As a young engineer, for instance, he used a jackknife to cut open the balsa wood of a Sikorsky rotor blade to install measurement gauges on it and figure out what it was doing. He bought a postwar helicopter body for a dollar. He got hold of a Chevrolet clutch to use in his helicopter engine. His team invented do-it-yourself wind tunnels. It's an MVP approach – a minimum viable product – in which they methodically identified, isolated, and intensively tested issues and reaped what today we call "rapid learning" and "fail-fast" lessons. As they figured out answers, they quickly pivoted, trying to succeed in an industry where, unlike today's fintech, entrepreneurs needed huge amounts of capital. (In our recording, he talks about how easily his enterprise raised money, but that pattern did not hold over the decades.) Our conversation only touches on a few of these lessons (and nothing about the wind business), but shining through it is his defining trait, the one that made him most successful, which was unbounded and insatiable curiosity. Mainly, this episode shares his secret to being an innovator – and to having a wonderful career. His advice: find organizations that have a lot of interesting problems, and go there and figure out how to solve them. For those intrigued with the technology history of the twentieth century, I'm attaching early chapters of a biography that my brother, Steve Doman – also an aeronautical engineer -- is writing about our father's journey. Here, also, is an overview and short video on Doman Helicopters created by my sister, Terry Gibbon (she too is an entrepreneur, with her own video company). And here is a short video of one of the wind turbines. To prepare this episode, I re-listened to the recording just a few weeks after his passing. One thing I notice is that, as we had this conversation after our Thanksgiving dinner last fall, my Dad's comments kept making me laugh. Whenever he said goodbye to people, he always added the advice, "keep smiling." Words to live by.

Let me share two updates about me and the show. First, I've become involved in a very significant project aimed at helping prepare our U.S. financial regulatory framework for the challenges raised by innovation. I'm going to stay in my Harvard fellowship for a second year, still writing my book on innovation and regulation, but will also be devoting much of my time to this initiative, which I'll tell you more about as it develops. One result of the new project is that I've decided to suspend the Regulation Innovation video series we launched earlier this year. I expect to reactivate it when I have time to create the videos. Meanwhile, they are still available, still for free, at www.RegulationInnovation.com. Please do check them out. As I said when we started the series, I think the articles that accompany these videos might be the most important writing I've ever done. Second, we will soon be back from the Barefoot Innovation hiatus, and what a line up we have! We'll have CFPB Director Richard Cordray; Digital Asset Holdings' Blythe Masters; National Consumer Law Center's Lauren Saunders; the prize-winning founders of Bee, Vinay Patel and Max Gasner; Harvard professor and behavioral economics scholar Brigitte Madrian; Funding Circle's U.S. CEO Sam Hodges; QED Investors co-founder and venture capital wise man Caribou Honig, and the chief compliance officers of both Citi and Wells Fargo, Kathryn Reimann and Yvette Hollingsworth Clark, together. And those are the ones we've already recorded! We have many more exciting people in the scheduling queue. This is why we ask you to send in "a buck a show" – the show has turned into a major enterprise, just because we have so many fascinating people to talk with. We'll try to speed up production as best we can, I'll look forward to your continued feedback. Meanwhile, keep smiling. Jo Ann

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