Duct tape is about as ubiquitous as it comes in terms of a useful tool. I remember my father giving me a roll to take with me when he gave me his Morris Minor 1000 to drive from Southampton to St. Tropez and back when I was seventeen – I still can’t believe he did that! As a result, I have always held the mantra that a combination of duct tape and bailing wire can fix anything, anywhere. Experience of eighty years has proven me right…so far at least! All I’ve added to those two miracles is WD40!
However, what I didn’t realise until recently, when I read the obituary of Ed Smylie, was that duct tape was the main ingredient that helped him save the crew of Apollo 13 when their moon-mission came apart. Ed Smylie didn’t invent this wonder. That was the achievement of Vesta Stoudt from Illinois. Vesta was a World War II ammunition packer who worried that the paper seals on boxes were too unreliable for soldiers to open under fire.
Duct tape can do almost anything; it can seal up a box, mend a boot and reinforce a bumper; it can give a book a spine, and enthusiasts have shown that it can suspend a small car. It can replace the whole skin of a light aircraft and can be woven into a small, plausible raft. All without the need for scissors.
On April 13, 1970, Ed Smylie, a NASA engineer working in the middle of the crisis that could have killed the astronauts on Apollo 13 – an oxygen tank on the space craft exploded 56 hours into the mission – noticed that item 113 on the space craft’s stowage list said “Tape”. As soon as he read that word, he knew they were home free no matter how big the problem turned out to be, and the problem was huge. The explosion released all the oxygen in that tank, and the second one for the command module began to leak. The command module had to be shut down and the crew moved to the lunar module since that had a separate oxygen system. Unfortunately, the lunar module was not designed for three people since one of the crew would always remain in the command module while the lunar module descended to the moon. Ed Smylie then discovered another design glitch. The two carbon dioxide scrubber systems, the one in the command module and the one in the lunar module, were not compatible; one had square bricks and the other cylindrical bricks – no-one had anticipated that they might need to be interchangeable one day!
Once Ed found that the stowage list contained tape he checked further. Working through the list he found plastic bags, a spare spacesuit hose to connect a square scrubber to a round one, and a piece of cardboard (the cover of a flight plan) to stop the whole contraption collapsing as air ran through it. A sock came in handy as well.
Ed relayed his solution up to the astronauts – I can only imagine what they must have thought about this jerry-rigged system on which their lives depended – but Jack Swigert assembled it and held it altogether with duct tape. Without the tape, it would have been impossible. Everyone learned, for the first time, that the glue used on duct tape worked just as well in space as it did on earth, which was just as well. Looking back today, its almost impossible to imagine such a scenario although, if you have ever seen the lunar and command modules displayed in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC you quickly realise how flimsy they are and how “Heath-Robinson” the whole enterprise was back then. (The phrase “Heath Robinson contraption” perhaps most commonly describes temporary fixes using ingenuity and whatever is to hand, often string and tape, or unlikely cannibalisations.)
Amazingly, it worked, and the astronauts came home safe, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
Ed and his team of sixty individuals received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a public mention by then President, Richard Nixon. Twenty-five years later, Ed’s solution to the Apollo 13 problem was repeated in the film “Apollo13”. Hollywood, of course, glamorized the situation with a lot of hollering and screaming, which was totally absent in real life. Ed, himself, always refused to take individual credit for the rescue – he insisted it was the work of a team.
The rescue of Apollo 13 had taken 60 guys in the back room, all chipping in their ideas. Ed had organized them, true, but his real contribution was simply to spot, on a list, the word “tape”, and believe it could do anything.
