Weird Island

67. MILLS: From Cotton Cloth to Space Age Textiles

Episode Summary

While researching RI mills, I came across this one little snippet about the Ashton Mill in Cumberland, and had to know more: “Owens-Corning Fiberglas Company bought the mill... They operated in the mill until 1983. They made tire cord, drapery, and beta cloth for spacesuits for the Apollo Moon missions.”

Episode Notes

Episode Source Material:

If you want to know more about: Playtex and Space Suits

The Apollo 1 & the Space Race:

Ashton Mill

Episode Transcription

On a warm, sunny day in September of 1962, about 40 thousand people gathered at Rice University in Houston, TX. Many were young freshmen, newly arrived on campus for orientation ahead of the fall semester, nervous and excited for their futures to begin. And they watched as the President, John F. Kennedy, settled himself before a podium to give what would become a historic speech.
The country was competing in a race, one that it appeared to be losing. But one that it couldn’t afford to give up on. The country was racing with the Soviet Union to dominate the exploration of outer space. The Soviets had secured a number of early wins. They’d launched the first artificial satellite into Earth’s orbit. They’d put the first living being, a dog, into space. Sent the first spacecraft to the moon. And put the person into orbit. But there was still one big win up for grabs. No one had put a man on the moon. Not yet. And the goal seemed just far enough away that maybe, just maybe, the US had a shot. And on that day in September of 1962, the President challenged the country to do it. To send a person to the moon and bring them back safely before the end of the decade.
“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?”
“We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”
He wouldn’t live to see his challenge fulfilled, but seven years later, the country would watch in awe as Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the lunar module and became the first man to walk on the moon. And among those watching would be, literally, hundreds of thousands of people who had some role in putting him there. Including a number of Rhode Islanders.
I’m Sara, and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of Rhode Island. And this week, we’ll turn our gaze towards the moon to find out about a Rhode Island mill’s role in the production of the Apollo Space Suit.
In order to fulfill Kennedy’s challenge of reaching the moon, the US would have to take a big swing. It would require a massive commitment of resources. That includes money, of course. But also intelligence and creativity. The United States would have to commit itself to achieving an incredible burst of technological achievement in a very short amount of time by focusing its resources and all of its best ideas and minds in one direction.
And those minds and resources didn't always come from the places you would expect. Take the space suit, for instance. Space suits are just these incredibly unlikely things. At least, I think they are. They’re not just clothing or outerwear. They aren’t like snow suits for outer space. They’re actually form fitting mini spacecrafts, designed to keep an astronaut alive in a hostile environment. They have to provide breathable air, and maintain the appropriate pressure. They insulate the body and keep it at a comfortable temperature, so it could be a boiling 200 degrees outside and a comfy 75 degrees inside. The suits need to protect against micrometeoroids–which are tiny little particles traveling faster than speeding bullets. And they need to do all of this while also providing freedom of movement and dexterity to accomplish complex tasks. The fact that human beings figured out how to make space suits that work–is insane to me.
Big defense contractors submitted spacesuit designs to NASA. But, at the end of the day, the company that managed to figure out how to solve all of these problems was Playtex. Yes, Playtex–famous at the time for producing bras and girdles in the 1950s and 60s. And their special sauce that they brought to the table–it was their skilled seamstresses, who could translate an engineer’s demands into precisely stitched textiles that fit and moved with a person’s body. These women weren’t experts in putting a man on the moon, but at the time–no one was.
This isn’t a story about Playtex, but there’s something about that story that reveals the monumental and often unconventional effort that went into each minute detail required to put a man on the moon.
So, when Neil Armstrong took that first step on the moon and said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” he meant it. That goal was one that could not be achieved alone. In fact, today it’s estimated that at its peak, the Apollo program employed roughly 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 universities and industrial firms from all over and from all fields. And it turns out that Rhode Islanders had their own role to play in that massive effort–one you don’t often hear about.
I found the nugget of this story while researching the Ann & Hope Mill, in Cumberland. If you listened to that episode, you know that the mill was built by the Lonsdale Company in the late 1800s, and they had also built a couple of other mills. One of those was the Ashton Mill–in Cumberland, and there was just this one little line at the very end of the mill’s written history on the National Park Service site that casually mentioned that at one point, the mill produced “beta cloth for spacesuits for the Apollo Moon Missions.” That’s all it said. I thought this would be a very small story, one that would be fun to research during the holidays, but it turns out it was actually a really fascinating one–albeit one that started with a tragedy.
In the years following Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon, a lot had to be figured out. Like what method would be used to get to the moon and back. And once the “how” had been figured out, a spacecraft had to be designed to accomplish the task. And new computing technology had to be designed to make it all work. And then, of course, there were those space suits that needed to be developed to protect the astronauts and keep them alive on the moon. Basically, every step of the process needed to be figured out. And nothing about landing on the moon would be easy.
In 1967, NASA planned to launch the first manned mission of the Apollo Program. They weren’t ready, yet, to send the crew to the moon–but they would be testing the new spacecraft in low Earth orbit. The launch was planned for February 21, 1967, but about a month in advance, the crew gathered for a rehearsal. This was considered a relatively safe test of the spacecraft’s ability to operate on its own internal power. But right away, things seemed a little bit off.
First, the Command Pilot noticed a strange odor. So the test was put on hold while air samples were taken and the cause was investigated. After no cause of the odor was found, test preparation resumed. Then the crew encountered some communications problems that again put the test on hold. Finally, those issues were resolved, and the countdown to the simulated launch began again. But suddenly, there was another, bigger issue. A fire sparked and spread rapidly through the command module. Pad workers rushed to rescue the crew, but it was too late. The fire took the lives of Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B Chaffee.
A NASA Review Board immediately investigated the cause of the fire, and identified a number of problems with design, engineering and quality control on board the spacecraft. First they identified an issue with the door hatch. The crew inside the capsule had tried to escape, but couldn’t open the hatch against the pressure within the cabin and the pad crew took five whole minutes to get in from the outside.
The review board then looked into the fire itself. The cause was most likely electrical, and there were a number of factors that made fire in the spacecraft incredibly dangerous. First, the environment in the capsule was composed of 100 percent pure oxygen, which was intended to reduce the weight of the vehicle. But it turns out that was very dangerous. Materials exposed to pure oxygen become highly combustible. And then, it was revealed that many of the materials within the cabin–like Nylon and Velcro–were inherently flammable and had accelerated the fire. In the race to put a man on the moon, things were moving very fast and these mistakes had been deadly.
This tragedy stopped the Apollo program in its tracks. Manned missions were suspended for 20 months while NASA redesigned the spacecraft and almost everything in it. The atmosphere was changed from a pure oxygen environment to a less dangerous mix of oxygen and nitrogen. Plumbing and wiring were covered with protective insulation. Quick-opening hatches were installed, as was a fire extinguishing system. And NASA demanded that any potentially flammable materials be removed from the spacecraft and the space suits.
This would be a major challenge, because there were something like 150 different textile configurations between the spacecraft and the space suits–from fabrics to tapes to webbings, braids, sleevings, sewing thread, nonwoven pads, filters… the list goes on and on. But there was a promising solution.
A few years prior, a company called Owens Corning had developed this unique yarn, which they called Beta Yarn, that was incredibly lightweight and strong. And early tests indicated it was 10x more fire resistant than the materials previously used in the spacecraft. Because the yarn was made of very fine glass fibers. And it was being explored and produced in the Ashton Mill in Cumberland, RI.
The Ashton Mill was built back in 1867, and at the time it was pretty cutting edge. It produced fine cotton muslin textiles using the latest technologies, including one of the first high-speed spindles developed in the United States. For nearly 70 years, the mill operated successfully–until it shuttered in 1936, at the height of the Great Depression.
The Lonsdale Company, who owned and operated the mill, wasn’t alone in feeling the effects of the Depression. For some companies, it meant the end of operations. But for others, hardship forced innovation. And that was certainly the case for these two glass bottle manufacturers–The Owens Bottle Machine Company and the Corning Glass Works. Now, producing glass bottles seems like a relatively stable business, to me at least. But that’s because I wasn’t thinking about what often comes in glass bottles–alcohol. In the 1920s and ‘30s, Prohibition hit glass manufacturers hard. And then just before Prohibition came to an end, the stock market crash brought on the Great Depression.
And it forced these companies to look at glass differently, to explore its other capabilities and find new markets. Owens and Corning both began experimenting with producing fine glass fibers. In 1935, they combined their efforts, sharing knowledge and costs to develop an innovative material that would become known as fiberglass.
Now, to make fiberglass, manufacturers heat glass until it’s molten and then turn it into thin glass fibers that can be used in a number of different applications. The threads can be left in a puffy, relatively unstructured form and used as insulation or soundproofing. Or the glass threads can be woven into swatches of material. Once the fiberglass is woven together, different resins can be added to give it increased strength or mold it into shapes.
The two companies spun off their Fiberglass corporation as its own entity, forming Owens Corning Fiberglas Corporation in 1938. Their first manufacturing plant was in Ohio, and their second plant was in Rhode Island–in the newly purchased Ashton Mill. Now, the old mill that had once specialized in making fine cotton fibers would instead be producing fine fibers made of glass.
And the timing couldn’t have been better. Owens Corning really hit its stride during WWII, when the Navy awarded the company a contract to produce the standard insulation for all ships. And the US Army Air Force partnered with the company to develop fiberglass reinforced composites that could be used in the structural parts of aircraft. Throughout the war, the Ashton Mill plant operated at full capacity producing, predominantly, woven fiberglass. Between the Ohio and RI factories, Owens Corning employed over 5,000 people.
After the war, nearly every industry in North America rushed to find uses for the versatile fiberglass. And Owens Corning continued to expand. The company established a Textile Research and Development lab at the Ashton Mill in 1948 where it continued to explore and test new fiberglass textile applications. In 1963, the company first developed an incredibly fine glass yarn they called Beta Yarn which was fire resistant and finer than silk. A few years later, in the wake of the Apollo 1 disaster, NASA commissioned Owens Corning to come up with a durable and non-flammable, yet thin and flexible fabric that could replace the nylon previously used in those highly complex Apollo space suits.
Under contract to NASA, the company wove the Beta Yarn into fabric. But it required some special solves to work in space. A 12 person team composed of employees from Owens Corning, Dupont, and NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center collaborated to develop Beta Cloth. The woven glass textile was coated with slick silicone (or Teflon) to reduce the fabric’s tendency to crease and tear. Beta Cloth had a number of useful properties. It was six times finer than silk and five times stronger, with 10 times the flexibility of nylon. And its melting point was incredibly high–over 1200 degrees Fahrenheit. So, heat, moisture, and physical stresses wouldn’t cause fires, shrinkage or stretching.
The initial version of Beta Cloth had the Teflon applied after weaving, but the team found that the textile still suffered damage at joints. So a second version of Beta Cloth was produced, with Teflon coating applied to the individual glass strands before they were woven together. This Super Beta Cloth became the distinctive white outer covering of the Apollo Space Suit.
Ultimately, the team developed and produced more than 125 different fabric applications, including textiles, mats, filters, braids, webbings and restraint harnesses. The material was used on medical kits, rucksacks, towel bags, tissue dispensers, oxygen hose covers, insulation, bags covering circuit breakers and connectors in the electrical system. And of course on space suits. In fact, beta fiber became the most-used textile in the spacecraft. The development of Beta Cloth was considered a major technical achievement and significant stride towards ensuring the safety of astronauts.
And the fibers were produced and then woven into textiles in a Rhode Island mill, not far from where the American industrial revolution got its start. Even the American flag, NASA logo, and mission emblems that adorned the iconic Apollo space suits were produced here in Rhode Island. The Beta Cloth was woven in Cumblerand by Owens Corning, who then contracted out the printing to the Screen Print Corporation in Coventry. There, the insignia was screen printed onto rolls of beta cloth using Roma Color pigments, produced in Fall River. These patches would later be hand sewn onto the space suits with a curved needle, to avoid puncturing the insulation of the suit, by those women who had previously manufactured bras and girdles for Playtex.
In the 1960s, the space race captivated the American public. There are few moments in history more iconic than the first moon landing. But most people just picture the astronauts when they think about that great achievement–and they probably picture them in their white Beta Cloth covered space suits. But the thing about the moon landing that’s incredibly moving and mind-blowing is actually that it might have been one of America’s best group efforts. And each piece of the puzzle, regardless of how big or small it may have seemed at the time, was so important.
In her book Resonate, author Nancy Duarte relates an anecdote about JFK visiting NASA headquarters and stopping to talk with a man who was holding a mop. “The president asked him, “What do you do?” The man, who was a janitor, replied, “I’m putting the first man on the moon, sir.”
Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode. I’m very behind in putting this one out, because I spent the holidays and the weeks leading up to the holidays with family, so thanks for your patience. I wanted to research this topic during the holidays because I thought it was one that might resonate with the family members I’d be spending time with. Sometimes the way I relate to people–I need to do it by taking an active interest in something at least tangentially related to what they’re interested in. I need to assign myself projects in order to connect with people on topics that I might not know about. And for whatever, I really didn’t know anything about space.
But I wanted to, because just before the holiday, my little brother–who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab–got to see a satellite that he’s been working on placed into Earth’s orbit. He doesn’t talk much about what he works on, and I think we all kind of have this tendency to minimize the things we do every day in our jobs, because they become mundane over time. So, when at 6AM to watch the live stream of his satellite launch, I was completely caught off guard and blown away by the magnitude of the project he’s involved in. I cried, it was so cool. Although, let’s be honest, I'm a big crier.
But, my takeaway was this. We all deserve to make a big deal out of the little things we do. Because they’re actually probably not very little at all. So, my New Years wish for you, listening, is that whatever it is you’re doing, you know that it’s important and it matters. And there are people who are grateful you’re doing it.
Happy New Year! And thank you for always being here with me. If you liked this episode, I hope that you’ll share it with family and friends. And if you have a topic you’d really like to hear about, you can send me a note at weird rhode island at gmail.com or on Instagram at Weird Island Podcast. See you next time as we uncover more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island.