BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY Born Oswald S. Williams on September 2, 1921, in Washington, DC; son of Oswald S. (a postal worker) and Marie (Madden) Williams; married Doris Reid Williams, 1943; children: Bruce, Gregory (died 1982), and Meredith.
Education: New York University, B.S., 1943, M.S., 1947; St. John's University, M.B.A., 1981.
Memberships: former member, chair, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Education: New York University, B.S., 1943, M.S., 1947; St. John's University, M.B.A., 1981.
Memberships: former member, chair, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Career
Republic Aviation, design engineer, 1942, steadily promoted to senior aerodynamicist, 1943-46; Babcock and Wilcox, design draftsman, c. 1947-48; U.S. Navy Material Catalog Office, technical writer, c. 1948-50; Greer Hydraulics, Inc., design group project leader, c. 1950-56; Thiokol Chemical Corporation, Reaction Motors Division, small rocket engine designer, 1956-61; Grumman Aerospace Corporation, propulsion engineer, 1961-c. 1973; Grumman International, marketing department, 1973, vice president, 1974. St. John's University, marketing professor, c. 1980s.
Life's Work
Inventor and engineer O. S. Williams was the second African American to receive a degree in aeronautical engineering and the first to be hired as a design engineer by Republic Aviation--one of the leaders of the industry in the 1940s. At a time when blacks were discouraged from the engineering field, Williams blazed many trails. His accomplishments over the years included heading the team that originated the first experimental airborne radio beacon for tracking crashed aircraft and managing the development of the control rocket systems for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Apollo missions, including the fateful thirteenth one in 1970. William's rockets are credited with saving the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts.
Oswald S. "Ozzie" Williams was born on September 2, 1921, in Washington, DC, to Oswald S. Williams, a postal worker, and Marie (Madden) Williams, a housewife. He grew up in New York City, graduating from Boys High School in Brooklyn in 1938. As a teenager, he loved making model airplanes and decided to become an engineer after a family friend explained that engineers design things.
Williams had hoped to enroll in the program offered by New York University (NYU), but he was discouraged by a dean. As he recounted in an interview with Notable Twentieth Century Scientists, the dean told him that "people of your race are not ready for engineering, and engineering is not ready for you. I warn you not to waste your ambition and training where you cannot get a job." Despite such advice, Williams matriculated at NYU, completing his bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering in 1943.
Around the same time Williams joined Republic Aviation's technical staff. Just as the NYU dean had warned, Republic Aviation had not wanted to employ a black, but Williams dazzled those met there, and he was quickly brought on board. Hired as a design engineer, Williams quickly rose through the ranks, becoming a senior aerodynamicist within four years. In that role--achieved as World War II ensued--he helped design the P47 Thunderbird, an escort plane used to protect high-altitude bombers. Via wind tunnel testing, Williams was responsible for estimating and calculating the lift of the plane's wings, its propelling forces, and its drag in order to determine how well the airplane would fly and its overall stability. The P47 aircraft proved to be pivotal in the U.S. war effort.
In 1947, the same year in which he earned his master's degree in aeronautical engineering from NYU, Williams moved to Babcock and Wilcox company, where he was a design draftsman. He then spent two years as a technical writer with the U.S. Navy Material Catalog Office, leaving in 1950 to take an engineering position at Greer Hydraulics, Inc. A group project leader, Williams was helped develop the first experimental airborne radio beacon, which was used to locate airplanes that had crashed. The beacon was fired by catapult and parachuted to the ground as an airplane disintegrated, potentially landing anywhere: in water, in a tree, on level ground, or on a mountainside. Thus the project was very challenging since the beacon had to operate equally well wherever it landed and whatever the weather conditions. Williams's team developed a beacon that could recognize where it had landed and transmit its position, but unfortunately, it was never produced commercially.
In 1956, Williams moved to the Reaction Motors Division of Thiokol Chemical Corporation, where he was responsible for pioneering work in the area of small rocket engine design. He had several papers published on the subject of rocket engines, and was quickly becoming a highly sought-after commodity in the field. One of his papers--"On the Feasibility of Liquid Biopropellant Rockets for Spacecraft Altitude Control"--was even translated into Russian by Dr. Leonid Sedov, the president of the Soviet Space Academy. In need of someone with expertise on liquid-fuel rockets, Grumman Aerospace Corporation, a NASA contractor, hired Williams as a propulsion engineer in 1961.
At Grumman, Williams managed the development of the Apollo Lunar Module reaction control subsystem. He was fully responsible for the $42 million effort for eight years. He managed the three engineering groups that developed the small rocket motors--they used 100 pounds of thrust in comparison to the 10,500 pounds of the lunar module's main engine--that guided the lunar module, the part of the Apollo spacecraft that actually landed on the moon. It was these engines that enabled the crew members of the Apollo 13 mission to make it safely back to earth after the ship's main rocket exploded in flight.
According to an account published in African Americans: Voices of Triumph, "With their chief source of propulsion gone and power for their life-support systems dwindling, the crew had to depend on the lunar module's small rockets to get headed back toward earth. Then they had to use William's 16 tiny steering rockets to maneuver the craft to reenter earth's atmosphere at a safe angle. Had the steering rockets not been up to the task, Apollo 13 might have struck the atmosphere at too shallow an angle and caromed off into space to be lost forever or come in too steeply and been incinerated from the friction of a too-rapid descent. Ozzie William's devices proved to be the little engines that could, and the Apollo 13 astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific [Ocean]."
Williams went on to a career in marketing at Grumman International (later Northrup Grumman International), including a market survey mission conducted in West Africa in 1973. The following year, he was made a company vice president. After leaving Grumman, he became a marketing professor at St. John's University in Queens, New York, where he had completed an M.B.A. in 1981. Working with students was natural for Williams, who had already been part of a task force that attempted to attract more black students into business- and technology-oriented fields.
The respect Williams has earned throughout his career has permanently enshrined him as one of the most important African American contributors to science and technology. He has received varied recognition from being featured on a U.S. Department of Energy poster featuring prominent blacks in science to being profiled on Queens Public Television in a one-hour program entitled "O. S. Williams, A Man of Three Careers." Williams has also been happily married throughout most of his career. Together he and his wife have raised three children, one of whom died in 1982. Now in his 80s, Williams is apparently no longer associated with St. John's University of Northrup Grumman International.
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