Otto Bock helped make Arnold's G-Range a national defense asset

  • Published
  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  Otto Bock of Brentwood, Tenn., is one of the few surviving engineers, scientists and technical specialists the U.S. military brought to Wright Field, Ohio from Germany after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip. 

Operation Paperclip was the code name given to the program under which military and U.S. intelligence services extracted German scientists from Nazi German during and after the final phases of World War II. 

Bock came to Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) in 1953, as the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was gaining momentum after the end of World War II in 1945. 

It was a period characterized by an ongoing threat of nuclear conflict and high-stakes technical competition between the two superpowers and their respective allies that lasted until the early 1990s. 

Bock said there wasn't much to AEDC other than a few buildings, blueprints and dirt when he first came to work. 

"AEDC was on paper mainly and some brickwork - that was the extent of it," recalled the 94-year-old research engineer. "Eventually, I was assigned to the von Karman facility, which was the Gas Dynamics facility at that time." 

The von Karman facility includes high speed supersonic and hypersonic wind tunnels with speeds up to Mach 12. 

Born in 1914 at Waltringhausen, Germany, it wasn't long before Bock had joined his brother and father working on a farm. After turning 14, he attended a school in Hanover, Germany specializing in agricultural science that included classes in chemistry, lab methods and photography. 

Unhappy about the prospect of going into the agricultural field, Bock found his professional calling shortly after he learned about an aerodynamic wind tunnel complex called the Luftfahrt Forschungs Anstalt (LFA) near Braunschweig, Germany. Bock said he was literally hired on the spot at the LFA, an aerodynamic research and development installation similar to Arnold, with subsonic and supersonic wind tunnels and gun ranges. His job at the LFA was designing and operating optical hardware for wind tunnels. 

The young man soon honed his technical skills to such a degree at the LFA he was able to convince his boss, Dr. Theodor Zobel, to incorporate his suggested system improvements to finally obtain optical measurements required for testing on military aircraft models and other test articles. 

During the eight years Bock spent at Wright Field he designed and operated various interferometer and schlieren systems and did pioneer work in color schlieren photography, an effort he continued at Arnold. 

Schlieren photography is an optical process used to photograph the flow of fluids, including air, water or glass, of varying density. The German physicist August Toepler invented the process in 1864 to study supersonic motion. Since that time, schlieren photography has been widely used in aeronautical engineering to photograph the flow of air around objects. 

At AEDC, Bock became a key figure in the development of major optical systems for the wind tunnels and aeroballistic ranges of the center's von Karman Gas Dynamics Facility. He combined optical, photographic, electronic and mechanical systems to provide data quality "stop action" photographs of projectiles moving at speeds of up to 14,000 miles an hour at AEDC's 1,000-foot underground hyperballistic range. He was involved in the design and implementation of shadowgraph, schlieren and photopyrometry systems for AEDC's aeroballistic ranges. 

"All of his major designs, and the successes achieved as a result of them, reflect Otto
Bock's unusual scientific skill and diligence," said Dr. J. Leith Potter, former deputy director of the facility. 

Bock's knowledge of optics and high-speed photographic instrumentation has been shared widely in the U.S. and abroad, through consultation work with industry and with other Air Force and government installations. His work also has been cited in a government textbook on high-speed photography. 

Bock was also a consultant with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development at L'Institut de Saint Louis in France and at the National Physical Laboratory and Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment in England. He did consultant work in his native Germany as well and has participated in several international congresses on high-speed photography. 

Bock retired from AEDC in 1976. His late wife, Luise, was a midwife in Germany and was a nursing technician at Baptist Hospital, Nashville. Their oldest son, George, is a medical school graduate of Vanderbilt University, Nashville. He also has a Ph.D. degree in microbiology from Vanderbilt. He teaches microbiology and medicine at Jackson Mississippi State University. 

Their daughter, Barbara, is a registered nurse who works with her husband, Dr. Richard Anderson, at his clinic in Franklin. Their son Gerhard has a degree in business and a master's degree from the University of Tennessee at Nashville.