was adopted by more than a dozen major airlines. While waiting, TWA bought and put into use five of the 10 Boeing 307 Stratoliners. The era of commercial passenger travel was underway, just as Hughes had envisioned 15 years earlier.

Carl Babberger, Hughes’s chief aerodynamicist, told Barton years later, “We were not a big enough company and we were in full competition with the giants.” Hughes once said, “You know, Carl, we have to figure out, project, and prophesy where this industry is going to be ten or twenty years from now,” recalled Babberger. “It amounted to watching the straws to see which way the wind was blowing. At the time I thought it was crazy, but since I had to do it to get along with him, I learned the trick, and have been fairly successful in predicting way ahead,” concluded Babberger.

Some of us may also be largely self-taught engineers who are most comfortable around our colleagues. How many of us, initiating a project, overcome this to spend two months out of the office, alone, watching prospective customers and discerning their deepest concerns?

Staying Too Long

Time eventually overtook both men. Henry Ford concluded early on that for 95 percent of the public, car ownership was status enough; they were happy with identical vehicles. But as years passed, customers wanted differentiation, and General Motors came to dominate. In other respects too, Ford fell out of step with the times. Hughes became extraordinarily reclusive, a participant observer no more.

Once established, the careers of the two men drew considerable attention. Their methods were less closely examined. In getting started, these inventors took user-centered methods far beyond today’s typical engineering practice. And they succeeded spectacularly.

Participant observer: Howard Hughes working incognito as a baggage handler on a commercial flight (Courtesy Charles Barton).

A Tip of the Hat…

Henry Ford material and quotations are from My Life and Work, downloadable from Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7213. The book might be more widely read were it not for a disgraceful anti-Semitic passage, a prejudice Ford later publicly recanted. Howard Hughes material is from Charles Barton’s Howard Hughes and His Flying Boat (Aero Publishers, 1982; 1998 revision published by Charles Barton). Only the Hughes/Frye dialogue is from Martin Scorsese’s

2004 film “The Aviator,” but some automobile and aircraft details are from Wikipedia, so caveat lector! For early flight attendant qualifications see the nice video at http://www.unitedafa.org/res/nh/video/. Thanks also to Jon Sciortino, George Engelbeck, and photo archivists at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum, the Houston Public Library, the Benson Ford Research Center, Panda Lab, and the Yamhill County Historical Society and Museum. Thanks especially to Charles Barton.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jonathan Grudin is a principal researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research. His Web page is http://research.microsoft.com/~jgrudin.

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May + June 2008

DOI 10.1145/1353782.1353789