Ozzie Williams

Ozzie Williams: Developer of First Airborne Radio Beacon

African-American Engineer Ozzie Williams was born September 2, 1921, in Washington, D. C.; his father was a postal worker and his mother was a housewife. Williams grew up in New York, graduating from Boys High School in Brooklyn in 1938. He became interested in engineering as a teenager, when he loved to make model airplanes; he decided to become an engineer after a family friend described an engineer as "a person who designs things." Williams went to New York University, where a dean discouraged him because he was Black. He completed his bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering at New York University in 1943; he received his master's degree in aeronautical engineering from the same institution in 1947.During World War II, Williams was a senior aerodynamicist with the Republic Aviation Corporation, where he helped design the P47 Thunderbolt, which was pivotal in the war effort. In 1947 Williams moved to the Babcock and Wilcox Company, where he was a design draftsman. He then spent two years as a technical writer with the United States Navy Material Catalog Office, leaving in 1950 to take an engineering position at Greer Hydraulics, Inc. At Greer, as a group project leader, he was responsible for the development of the first experimental airborne radio beacon, which was used to locate crashed airplanes.In 1956, Williams went to the Reaction Motors Division of Thiokol Chemical Corporation, where he was responsible for pioneering work on small rocket engines. Grumman International hired Williams as a propulsion engineer in 1961 because of his expertise with liquid-fuel rockets. He had published several papers on the subject, one of which—"On the feasibility of liquid bipropellant rockets for spacecraft attitude control"—was translated into Russian. At Grumman, Williams managed the development of the Apollo Lunar Module reaction control subsystem. Williams was fully responsible for the $42 million effort for eight years, during which time he managed the three engineering groups that developed the small rocket motors—which used 100 pounds of thrust in comparison to the 10,500 pounds of thrust of the lunar module's main engine—that guided the lunar module, the part of the Apollo spacecraft that actually landed on the moon. Williams went on to become vice-president of Grumman in 1974.After leaving Grumman, Williams became a marketing professor at St. John's University in Queens, New York, where he had completed an M.B.A. in 1981. Williams was a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, as well as an associate fellow and past chair of its Liquid Rockets Technical Committee. In 1993, he was the second African-American to receive a degree in aeronautical engineering.