Medicine: The Fastest Man on Earth

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The mechanical voice of the loudspeaker cracked across the clear, dry air of New Mexico’s Tularosa Valley: “Ten, nine, eight . . .”

Safe in a concrete bunker, tense men at a periscope window kept their eyes on Sonic Wind No. 2, a squat, steel sled with the menacing look of a robot spider. Beneath its red-and-white-striped cab, a string-straight rail track ran across the shimmering heat of Holloman Air Force Base. A patch of blue water dammed up between the rails stretched toward the end of the line, 3,500 ft. away.

“Seven, six, five, four . . .”

Overhead an F-94C jet fighter slanted down to make a run with the sled.

“Three, two, one, FIRE!”

From the sled’s tail end, nine rockets exploded; the Sonic Wind whipped down the track, shot forward by 70,200 lbs. of thrust. Trailing a 35-ft. tail of fire, it roared out from under the speeding observer plane. After 1.8 seconds, the rockets sputtered out. Metal scoops below the sled plowed into the dammed-up water. Spray exploded into a brief fountain as the Sonic Wind slammed to a stop.

In the dead silence, a fire crew inched toward the still monster to douse its blackened rocket chambers with a blanket of foam. The sled’s tail flared into a puff of flame, like a last gesture of defiance, and the test run was over. A quick check of the chronographs showed that Sonic Wind No. 2 had hit 995 m.p.h.

No man has yet moved that fast on the surface of the earth. But if all goes well, one man will. Lieut. Colonel John Paul Stapp, a 45-year-old Air Force surgeon with the deceptive paunch of a country doctor, the ramrod posture of a professional soldier and the relentless curiosity of a dedicated scientist, plans to ride the Sonic Wind even faster. Space Surgeon Stapp intends to ride at more than 1,000 m.p.h.

At that speed, the sled’s metal wind screen will be blown clear, and air blast will wallop Stapp with the same destructive force that would hit a pilot bailing out at 40,000 ft. and 2,000 m.p.h.

Man Among the Rivets. To Colonel Stapp, that hair-raising sleigh ride will be another day of body-jarring work in a career that has made him the No. 1 hero of Air Force men. Last year, riding an earlier version of the Sonic Wind, he reached a speed of 632 m.p.h., faster than the flight of a .45-cal. bullet, far faster than any earthbound man had ever traveled before. At the end of the run the sled went down from 632 m.p.h. to a dead stop in 1.4 seconds. As the sled decelerated, Colonel Stapp was subjected to more than 40 times the pull of gravity (40 gs); his normal weight of 168 ½ lbs. momentarily shot up to 6,740 lbs. The driver of an ordinary automobile colliding with a brick wall at 50 m.p.h. would be taking much the same jolt—yet Stapp survived it with negligible injuries.

Such rides along the brink of death are much more than a demonstration of daredevil courage; the data they produce are urgently needed in an age when man is opening up dreamlike new frontiers of space and speed.

Aircraft designers, forever increasing the capabilities of their planes, must constantly make expensive compromises to take care of the pilot. Until Medico Stapp came along with his cool scientist’s insistence on using himself as guinea pig, fighter-planes were built to stand an expected stress of nine gs. It hardly seemed worth while to make them stronger. The human body, the engineers insisted (and most doctors believed), could not take greater physical strain. Not the machine but man himself appeared to be limiting man’s conquest of the jet age. However the engineers tried, they could not evade, as Stapp puts it, “that one stubbornly unchanging item peeping forlornly from among the titanium rivets: man, M1, the same yesterday, today and forever; fallible, vulnerable, incurably addicted to errors, and, above all, pathetically mortal.” John Paul Stapp has dedicated his life to proving that mortal man is not half so vulnerable as the engineers would have him believe. Stapp thinks that many of man’s limitations are not imposed by the body but by the mind. Says he: “Why are we always underrating man? Take, for example, the four-minute mile. For years, we thought that was a physical limit just a bit beyond human reach. Well, it was a psychological limit, and once there was a breakthrough the barrier seemed never to have existed. So it was with the sound barrier—with man enduring Mach 1*— a falsely set limit.”

The Needed Proof. Stapp has already demolished some notable false limits on the durability of man’s mind and body. He has proved that if pilots are carefully strapped into beefed-up seats and cockpits they can walk away from a large majority of crackups. He has presented his proof with argument-killing logic: his own roaring rides. Having established the practical limits of human tolerance to g forces,† he is getting ready to prove his carefully calculated theory that a jet pilot can stand the wind blast of a bail-out at Mach 3 at 40,000 ft. (about 2,000 m.p.h.), provided he is properly helmeted and harnessed tightly to an ejection seat.

If Space Surgeon Stapp is right, military aircraft operating at that speed and altitude will not need complex and costly ejection capsules to protect escaping pilots. The saving in weight will greatly increase the planes’ performance, make them deadlier fighters, give their pilots a greater chance to survive a war in the air and furnish invaluable data for future space flight.

A Sleigh Ride. As far as Stapp is concerned, his theory needs one final bit of proof: a practical demonstration. He is waiting impatiently for the morning when he will get up, as usual, at 4:30 (after working till midnight), breakfast on coffee and an orange, and drive to the track.

First, before he takes one of his rides, he gets a thorough physical examination, including electrocardiogram and X rays. Then, well before blastoff, he begins his preparations for the run. The Fiberglas shell of his helmet is lowered over his head and its cloth neck-shirt zipped shut. Then he wriggles into a blue wool flight suit, puts on thin leather flying gloves and climbs into his seat.

A broad safety belt is buckled over his lap; shoulder straps are snapped to the safety belt and then to the seat to hold him in place when the water brakes grab. His elbows are cinched close to his sides by a strap running across his back. At 400 m.p.h. and over, wind blast can start a man’s limbs flailing uncontrollably with bone-snapping force.

His legs are strapped together above and below the knees; his wrists are lashed to the strap above his knees. A chest strap hauls him so tightly against the seat back that all breathing motion is confined to his diaphragm. A rubber bite block (equipped with a recording accelerometer) is slipped between his teeth; a helmet visor is latched down in front of his face; a cord is placed in one hand, ready to trigger a movie camera aimed at his face. Then sled and rider are left alone; all hands retire to the safety of the control building or smaller concrete bunkers placed at intervals along the track.

The high wail of a siren announces: 60 seconds to go. Stapp begins to tense his muscles, stares at the long white ditch of the track bed below him. He concentrates on the cord in his hand; he must remember to pull it when the countdown reaches five. One last breath to last him for the ride, then he is off. “It’s like being assaulted in the rear by a fast freight train.”

How does it feel? By the time the sled hit the water brakes, wrote Stapp about one of his recent rides, “vision became a shimmering salmon-colored field with no images … It felt as though my eyes were being pulled out of my head, about the same sort of sensation as when a molar is yanked . . . When the sled stopped, the salmon-colored blur was still there … I lifted my eyelids with my fingers, but I couldn’t see a thing. It was as though I was looking directly at the sun through closed eyelids . . .

“They put me on a stretcher and in a minute or two I saw some blue specks . . . In about eight minutes or so after the stopping of the sled the blue specks became constant and pretty soon they became blue sky and clouds. I saw one of the surgeons wiggling his fingers at me and I was able to count them. Then I knew that . . . my retinas had not been detached and I wasn’t going to be blind. I had two of the most beautiful shiners any man ever had.” The shiners were caused by his eyeballs shooting forward in their sockets.

Hope of Immortality. Not long ago a friend asked Colonel Stapp what he thought about as he sat there strapped in his sled, waiting for the countdown. The reply: “First I look around at the mountains and at the bright skies and I don’t think about anything. Then I say to myself, ‘Paul, it’s been a good life.’ ”

It has been a rich life, the success story of a frail, skinny kid who used to be afraid of automobiles but grew up to become the “bravest man in the Air Force.” It is the achievement of a physician with enough wit and wisdom left over to be something of a poet, humorist and philosopher as well.

Professorially absent-minded about most other things, Stapp at work is a man possessed. Hand, mind and eye move with tireless precision. His energy is a constant challenge to subordinates, for he is a man who knows what he wants to do and prefers to do it himself. He may well be the only happy “light” colonel in uniform. “A light colonel,” he argues, “can work with his hands. A full colonel gets carried around too much.”

No one carries Paul Stapp. Among men who make a business of dealing with danger, he is a legend. Stapp has won a file full of awards and citations, including the Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster and, last month, the Air Force’s Cheney Award for valor and self-sacrifice. He has ridden his roaring rocket sleds 29 times, personal proof that man is still master of the machines he builds. That is almost a faith with Stapp. Says he: “Man is capable of self-reproduction and even of occasional genetic improvements. He is capable of self-repair in case of damage to his structural integrity … He is mortal but not without hope of immortality.”

Biology & Hell. What sort of man is willing to risk himself habitually beyond the point of self-repair? John Paul Stapp’s extraordinary track to the rocket sled began in 1910 in Bahia, northern Brazil, where his missionary father was president of the American Baptist College. Eldest of four brothers, Paul (as his family preferred to call him) had a strange boyhood. He learned to speak Portuguese long before he was permitted to pick up English; he was seldom allowed to play with other children, and his closest companion was his parents’ Negro servant, a pro boxer from Barbados. When his mother tried to strap the unruly youngster into bed for his afternoon nap, he would shout at the top of his voice, and in Portuguese: “Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation!”

But life in Bahia had its compensations. The old castle that housed both the college and the Stapp family was said to be haunted; all night long, strange, squeaky noises sounded overhead. After a while, the nocturnal disturbance was traced to a nearby rum factory: opossums were sipping the mash, getting tanked up and scampering over the college roof. The Rev. Charles Stapp was outraged, but young Paul was entranced. Studying the opossums, he showed the first stirrings of the scientist, kept on studying animals and plants throughout his youth.

His father disapproved of his biological bent, and the mission doctor was warned not to show Paul the medical books he was eager to see. Instead, he was encouraged to read good religious books such as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. “What I read,” Stapp remembers now, “frightened the hell out of me. Sometimes I wondered if Methodists ever got to Heaven.”

Horace on Half a Dollar. When Paul was 13, the Stapps decided that it was time their oldest boy became an American, and he was enrolled in the San Marcos Baptist Academy in Texas. Young Paul, slight, nearsighted and a bookworm, found San Marcos a school for “displaced hellions.” The San Marcos kids lost no time in taking him apart, but he had enough energy left to join the school band and play the bassoon.

Bassoon-playing gave him the lungs of a cross-country runner, and later, at Baylor University, he made the track team. In those days Paul was an English major. He lived on 50¢ a day—his parents could not afford to send him more. Summers he peddled Wear-Ever cooking utensils in north Texas towns.

During Christmas vacation of his sophomore year, Paul visited an aunt and uncle in Burnet, Tex. One evening he got back from church to discover that his two-year-old cousin had crawled so close to an open fireplace that his clothes had caught on fire. He nursed the little boy for 62 sleepless hours, but the child died. “It was the first time I had seen anyone die,” Stapp recalls. “I decided right then that I wanted to be a doctor.”

Pigeons for Dinner. Back at Baylor, Paul switched to science courses, got a job as fieldman for a biological supply company. (“I was always turning over rocks for scorpions, and the sight of a snake gladdened my heart.”) More than once, Paul dined on pigeons caught on his boardinghouse roof, and when a course in histology required him to provide microscopic slides of guinea-pig tissue, he saw no reason to throw away the remains of the animals. He would cook and eat them. “If it breathed, it had protein, and if it had protein, I ate it.”

Unable to pay for medical school after graduation, Paul stayed on at Baylor for his Master’s degree in zoology, proctored and graded papers for a living. After a two-year teaching job, he moved on to the University of Texas, where he studied for a Ph.D. in biophysics. Five years later, at 29, John Paul Stapp, Ph.D., finally entered the University of Minnesota Medical School. In addition to studying, he taught and worked as a research assistant. Somehow, he managed to earn the degree he wanted most: Doctor of Medicine.

Meet the Future. In 1943, when he began his duty as an intern at St. Mary’s Hospital in Duluth, life took on a new dimension for Dr. Stapp. “I had only seen pure scientists before, the prima donnas in universities working in their nit-picking ways at academic doodlings to impress each other. Now for the first time I saw science and men of science working as a team, bringing everything to bear—the enormous facilities of the hospital, their own talents and devotion—to the saving of human life.”

In 1944 Stapp went on active duty as a first lieutenant in the medical corps, by V-J day had progressed, via half a dozen U.S. bases, to Randolph Field, Texas, known affectionately to those who served there as the “Worst Point of the Air.” At Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., in one day during the first flush of demobilization, Dr. Stapp examined the eyes, ears, noses and throats of 600 men—”a nightmare relieved only by the thought that I might have been a proctologist.”

At the Aero Medical Lab of the Air Materiel Command in Dayton, Dr. Stapp found his future. He had a few months to go before taking off his uniform, and he asked to see “something interesting.” He saw it. Jet planes were racing into areas that doctors had seldom bothered with before; jet pilots were flying into a skyful of trouble. Aviation medicine was faced with new and fascinating problems, and doctors were desperately trying to find the answers. Just 17 miles toward the stars, space, the new frontier, was suddenly within reach. All the resources of science were being thrown into a concentrated effort to keep the first explorers alive.

“Watta Whoomp!” Flight surgeons were doing their research while strapped in diving planes, sitting anxiously in decompression chambers, spinning in huge centrifuges. Sir Frederick Banting, the moody Canadian co-discoverer of insulin, had subjected himself to blackout forces in fast-maneuvering aircraft while developing a g-suit for the R.A.F., and he was killed in a crash while flying to England for a demonstration. In 1943 famed Flight Surgeon William Randolph Lovelace II had made a parachute jump from a record-breaking altitude (40,000 ft.), to prove that oxygen bail-out bottles were effective in high-altitude jumps.

It was not enough that engineers were learning how to pressurize cabins and build new oxygen systems to keep men alive when their planes climbed into the stratosphere. What would happen when these synthetic atmospheres failed, when pilots had to hit the silk? All that the U.S. Air Force knew about ejection seats, for example, was contained in a captured German handbook. The only American to try such a bailout (from a P-61 Black Widow flying at 285 m.p.h. at 15,000 ft.) had hardly been a mine of information. His entire report: “Jeez, watta whoomp!”

Crusade in Uniform. Dr. Stapp’s first assignment in aeromedical research: to field-test a liquid-oxygen emergency breathing system. For good measure, he was also to recommend preventive measures for high-altitude bends, chokes, gas pains and dehydration. He spent 64½ hours in the air, at altitudes up to 45,000 ft. For the first time he visited the frigid stratosphere, where, he remembers, “the landscape flattens out into geography, where the stars cease to twinkle, where shadows are darker and sunlight more burning, where at dusk it somehow looks as if a solar eclipse is about to begin.” Stapp’s next job: the first rocket-sled research program, at Edwards (then Muroc) Air Force Base on the Mojave desert in California. He had finished his reserve officer’s hitch, but one day he happened to attend a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. “Scientists in uniform,” he recalls, “were treated like debris by their civilian colleagues.” The scorn of the “mental Cadillac fleet” so irritated Stapp that he decided to stay in service.

“I didn’t know it at the time,” says he, “but I had stumbled into a crusade for the prevention of needless deaths.”

The End of Oscar. At Edwards, Stapp found himself in command of 2,000 ft. of rail track, the Gee-Whizz (a rocket sled built by Northrop Aircraft, Inc.), a bare barracks that was supposed to serve as a lab, and seven hard-working Northrop employees. His mission: to determine human tolerance to deceleration so that adequate aircraft safety harnesses could be developed.

It took Stapp a few months of spectacular scrounging and “moonlight requisitioning” to put together the kind of test setup he required. The lab needed water, so he “borrowed” 4,400 ft. of pipe, talked some civilian workers into doing the necessary welding, and paid them off with free medical care for their families. (Throughout his four busy years at Edwards, Stapp found time to give medical care to servicemen’s families and civilian workers, often made more than half a dozen night calls, never accepted a cent from what he called “my curbstone clinic.”)

Proceeding cautiously, Stapp sent his sled on 32 rocket runs carrying a dummy passenger. At least one of these experiments gave him pause. When the sled’s brakes grabbed, “Oscar Eight-Ball,” the anthropomorphic 185-lb. dummy, lurched forward in obedience to Newton’s second law of motion. He broke his harness, slammed through an inch-thick pine windshield as if it were tissue paper, and soared 710 ft. down the track bed.

Observing Oscar’s fate, Stapp calmly noted that he needed a stronger harness and, on Dec. 10, 1947, he took his first ride, a one-rocket spurt that reached 90 m.p.h. The next day he fired three rockets and went twice as fast.

No Sweat. Volunteers began to turn up, and selection became a problem. Stapp wanted no exhibitionists or thrill seekers. He was fanatically careful. No runs were permitted on Mondays or Fridays—a man with a weekend on his mind might not be completely reliable. Small sins, such as forgetting to wear a mouthpiece, drew mild but prompt punishment. Always, when a volunteer was being strapped in the sled, Colonel Stapp was on hand to make small talk, to mention something he wanted done later that day—”Routine talk to help make the man feel that everything was routine.”

By May of 1948, Colonel Stapp had himself taken 16 rides and had been subjected to g stresses up to 35 times the pull of gravity. Slowly, the impressive statistics were piling up. “The men at the mahogany desks,” says Stapp, “thought that the human body would never take more than 18 gs. Here we were, taking double that—with no sweat.”

As the runs got tougher, they began to take their toll. When one of his volunteers showed signs of shock after a 35-g deceleration, Stapp lost no time repeating the run himself. His vision blurred to a smoky green fog, and he wound up with a body full of bruises where he had slammed against his harness. His right hand slipped from its grip on the seat’s arm rest and his wrist broke as it hit against the hand grip. But he had discovered what he set out to find: the previous rider had failed to keep his head down while decelerating, and his helmet had been pulled off. With the new helmets, says Colonel Stapp proudly, “Your head may come off, but the helmet won’t.”

Home at Last. Since then, Stapp has lost six fillings, cracked a few ribs and suffered several retinal hemorrhages. He broke his right wrist a second time, late in 1950, while making a relatively mild 20-g deceleration to test a harness while sitting on a seat-pack parachute. The quick stop threw him forward, the weight of his body thrust against his palms where they rested on handholds. “A severe pain was felt [in] the right forearm,” wrote Stapp in his report. “The right wrist had been taped with adhesive because of a previous fracture . . . This tape burst . . . The pain in the coccyx and sacrum sprained in previous runs was renewed.

“The subject,” he continued drily, “was not in shock. The fracture of the right [wrist] was reduced by the subject while walking to the laboratory.”

By June 1951, Colonel Stapp had done just about all he could with the Edwards sled and track. After a tour of duty at Wright Field, he moved in 1953 to New Mexico’s Holloman Air Force Base, where he found no need for “moonlight requisitions.” He got a comfortable clutter of laboratory buildings, sufficient equipment and a good staff. Now, the nine officers (including their chief, Stapp) attached to Holloman’s Aero-Medical Field Laboratory hold 24 advanced scientific degrees among them.

For Autos, Too. Not all the work at Holloman is concerned with making the jet age safer. Stapp and his men have developed some important safety byproducts for oldfashioned, earthbound, combustion-engine man. Last year the Air Force lost some 700 men in plane crashes and 628 in auto accidents. Faced with this startling statistic, Stapp promptly started a car-crash study program, put dummies into salvaged autos and sent them hurtling into wood and concrete walls.

Bumpers, he discovered, are good only for scratching other cars, seats rip out too easily under impact, and the metal in the front half of cars compresses too easily. Dashboards, he feels, should be moved forward and “delethalized” with padding. Doors should be fitted with safety locks so they will not fly open in crashes. Rear-window shelves should be removed; objects on them have a horrible habit of spewing into passengers’ heads during crashes. Power brakes, he suggests, should be operated by hand; the eye-hand reaction is quicker than any foot movement. And safety belts, he thinks, are absolute necessities. This month Colonel Stapp will be traveling to Detroit to congratulate the Automobile Manufacturers Association for incorporating some of his suggestions in their 1956 models.

The aircraft industry has been slower to appreciate the Stapp research. Time and again he has advocated rearward facing seats in transports, argued eloquently that passengers riding backwards would stand a good chance of surviving many crashes. Although he talks with the authority of a man who has lived through such lethal decelerations, he has made surprisingly little headway among private airlines (though passengers in new Air Force transports face the rear).

A Ride with Godiva. Busy as ever at Holloman, Bachelor Stapp still manages to lead his private version of the good life. He has bought a three-bedroom home at 300 Lovers Lane in nearby Alamogordo, where he lives alone and lumps it. He refuses to own a television set (“I am not ready for intellectual suicide”). His principal indulgence is some excellent hi-fi equipment.

A great deal of his spare time is still devoted to his curbstone clinic, still without fee. What little is left, Stapp spends as a happy-go lucky gardener. His fig, tamarind, apricot and northern bamboo trees lean in splendid disarray among the devil grass. Never having fully recovered from his career as a Wear-Ever salesman, Bachelor Stapp is also an accomplished cook. Visiting Air Force brass, or important civilians such as Northrop’s Chief Mechanic Jake Superata (whom Stapp credits with much of the rocket research success), have learned to test their palates on Stapp-prepared specialties.* The Colonel himself can handle a man-sized portion. Most mealtimes, as he puts it in one of his famed “Stappisms,” find him “hungry as a woodpecker with a headache.”

Awaking each morning, he puts in a half-hour of concentration on his day’s work and an hour of study with his medical journals before he breakfasts and drives to the lab. For the short ride, he carefully straps himself into his 1953 Cadillac (called Godiva, because “it rides beautifully but keeps me out of new clothes”) with a lap-type safety belt. On the way home in the late afternoon, he does his own shopping at the base commissary. Time passes quickly. Says he: “Sometimes I feel beaten to death by a steady procession of Decembers.”

For the Future. A lot of people—including his brother Celso, also a physician—are urging Stapp to quit. They fear that, while he may pull out of each ride successfully, the cumulative damage to his system may be dangerous. Stapp pooh-poohs such talk, is determined to go on riding his rocket sled. He knows that what he is learning by pressing to the edge of inhuman endurance will hold true even when today’s planes are in the museums and tomorrow’s speeds have dwindled to slow-motion space crawling.

“The human body,” says Colonel Stapp, “comes in only two shapes and three colors. I don’t expect there will be any changes, so what we learn about it now will serve us for a long time to come.”

*Mach 1 is the speed of sound: 760 m.p.h. at sea level, 660 m.p.h. at 35,332 ft. (beginning of the stratosphere) and above. †50 gs for ¼ of a second, building up at a rate of 500 gs per second; 40 gs for 1/5 of a second, building up at 1,500 gs per second; 25 gs for one second; building up at 600 gs per second. * One of them: “Siberian Tiger Steak.” Recipe: “Take a one-vertebra thickness of Tbone, rub with sodium glutamate, powdered ginger, powdered mustard, garlic, thyme and cumin seed before broiling.”