The Paper Clip Procedure

In a previous post I mentioned that I had been an engineer at a company that designed missile guidance systems. It was my first job after college, so I was a very young engineer when I began the job, although I had studied electronics for much of my young life. I had begun studying electronics and reading the ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) manual when I was about age 8; I had been an amateur radio operator ("ham") when I was 14, which included building my own rig. A "rig" is an amateur radio transmitter. I erected an antenna in the backyard. It was a quarter wave dipole with ground-plane wires buried under the backyard soil.

At age 16, I attended radio-repair night school in Richmond. I was too young to enroll in the class (the minimum age was 18 for that) but the instructor allowed me to audit the class. He even graded my test papers, which was nice of him considering he wasn't making money from my attendance. I got good grades.

By the time I got to Virginia Tech I already knew more about electronics than the average graduate. A student-friend and I built an AM/FM "pirate" radio station that we operated from a dorm room. There are a number of stories connected to that project, but I'll have to tell them another day.

The day came when I graduated university and I moved to Burlington, North Carolina to begin a new job. I was working for the Defense Activities Division of a large corporation. The shop that built the guidance systems was in Burlington. The design engineers were in Burlington. But the guidance systems were used at our company launch facility at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

One day my boss told me that our Florida facility had received a shipment of used test equipment from another facility, and he wanted me to fly down to Kennedy Space Center and cable together these various pieces of equipment and make sure they worked. "Okay," I told him. "I'll get an airline ticket and a hotel reservation."

Let me assure my readers that I had no idea of what I was about to do. I had never seen or used these items of test equipment and I knew absolutely nothing about them. It was an assignment destined for failure. I assume the boss didn't want to send one of his experienced engineers to a job they were bound to fail. "Send the new guy—he doesn't have a reputation that could get damaged by failure," is what I imagined him thinking. Nevertheless, I flew to Florida and rented a car and drove to the Kennedy Space Center. One of our Florida employees met me and gave me a tour of the Space Center. I walked beside the giant "crawler" that carried the Saturn moon rockets out to the launch pad. The size of the crawler was very impressive. I saw other things: missiles of various sizes, including a Saturn V booster.

We ended our tour back at the company's facility, where I was shown a collection of equipment and a collection of cables. There were also some manuals, but it would have taken me days to read them. I thumbed through a few manuals to get a general idea of how to connect all these electronic boxes (at which I was successful) and then how to power them on and run through a test of the boxes. All went well except for one problem. One of the boxes contained a relay—a type of electro-mechanical switch—that was failing to operate. A spring inside the relay was old and well-used and was no longer strong enough to operate the relay. 

In a flash of inspiration, I got a paper clip and I pulled the two loops of the paper clip apart enough to make a kind of spring, and I inserted the paper clip into the relay. The extra help from the paper clip was enough to make the relay function. How long it would function, I had no idea. But it was working now. So, "Bye, guys, thanks for the tour. I have a plane to catch. Good luck!"

I drove to the airport and flew home. I don't know what happened to the test sets that I got working, but I never heard another word about them. Maybe they worked, and maybe they were never used. Either way, I called it a success.