Sublime

But Rickover was also just a regular human being, someone with a temper, someone with colleagues and subordinates, a spouse, a son, parents, neighbors, bills to pay, traffic to navigate. What guided him, what he spoke about repeatedly in speeches and briefings, was the importance of this idea of a sense of right and wrong, a sense of duty and honor

“In recognition of your creative and original work on sophisticated rocket systems, for your contributions to the advancement of technology and ability to transform ideas into reality, and especially for your demonstrated courage and integrity for always standing on principles you know to be right and just.”

It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of the human breast or shoulder, there must be experimentation of several generations of craftsmen.

George Melville would serve as the Jeannette’s engineer. Said to be distantly related to the great author, Melville was an improvisational genius with machines—a greasy-fingered savant who seemed most at home among thumping boilers and sharp blasts of steam. The engineer, thirty-eight years old, had a booming voice, a stout physique, and an enormou

Engineers often have a particular mindset. The Los Alamos director J. Robert Oppenheimer was a highly principled man. But above all else he was a curiosity-driven problem solver.