8 Foot High Speed Wind Tunnel - NASA wind tunnel. Public domain image.

Description: (June 13, 1950) Because the slots he was designing opened directly into the 8 foot High Speed Tunnel's hazardous igloo-shaped test chamber, where high levels of pressure, temperature, and noise would be encountered, Ray H. Wright had to don a diving suit before venturing into the test section...In 1947, Langley was already trying out the slotted-wall idea in the test section of a small pilot tunnel, and had learned, apparently serendipitotisly, that the slots enabled smooth operation not just at very high subsonic speeds, but at low supersonic speeds too. By the time of Yeager's famous research flight that October, Stack had long since begun considering how to apply the slotted-wall results in two full-size high-speed tunnels —industrial-scale facilities with huge powerful fans and test-section diameters of eight feet and sixteen feet, sizable by any era's standards. With Ray Wright's specific design concept, Stack's vision and leadership, engineer Vernon G. Ward's technology-development contributions, and the NACA Langley technical staff's wind tunnel expertise and experience, the research-and-development effort relatively soon led to the conversion of these two national research facilities: the now-retired 8-Foot High-Speed Tunnel, designated a national landmark in 1985, and the 16-Foot High-Speed Tunnel, later called the 16-Foot Transonic Tunnel and still operational with slotted walls in 1998. The resulting Collier Trophy for Stack and nineteen of his colleagues was the first ever awarded outright for a research tool, and the only Collier ever awarded for a ground-based one-even though, as with particle accelerators and detectors for nuclear science, wind tunnels have been crucially important for American aeronautics. ..Still not satisfied? For more information regarding Ray H. Wright and the various test facilities he worked on, visit: history.nasa.gov/SP-4219/Chapter4.html ( http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4219/Chapter4.html ) ..Center: LARC .Image # : L-64110