Wizardly inventor Victor Strode was a real-life Tom Swift

On the morning of April 23, 1936, the city of Portland was proudly preparing to launch its new harbor-patrol and first-aid boat, the Jack Luihn.

It was a big moment for the city. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City was in town and had been invited to attend. Reporters were on hand, and photographers snapping pictures. And the boat’s inventor was there — it was his moment of triumph. His wife stood ready with a bottle of champagne for the christening.

The boat itself was a remarkably strange-looking thing. It looked almost as much like an airplane as a boat, like something out of a Buck Rogers comic. Nothing like it had ever plied the waters of Portland Harbor ... or, most likely, ever would again.

The Jack Luihn was the brainchild of a Portland attorney, aviator, promoter, and inventor named Victor Wiegand Strode.

Strode was a fascinating man. Looking over his life, his career is reminiscent of the early life of Howard Hughes — before he became insane, of course. And he really does give Thomas Slate, the Alsea-born inventor of all-metal steam-powered airships, some serious competition for the title of “The Nicola Tesla of Oregon.” For my money, he’s best described as a real-life Tom Swift.

Victor Strode was born in 1893, attended the old Portland Academy, and graduated from Northwest School of Law at Lewis and Clark College, graduating with his law degree just in time for the First World War.

The outbreak of war saw him enrolled in the United States Naval Radio School at Harvard University, and he served in the U.S. Navy as a radio operator. (Remember, this was before radio was thought of as a broadcasting tool; radio at this time was merely a two-way communication technology.)

He left the Navy in 1921 and went into practice as an attorney in Portland; but he had developed a strong interest in aviation, so he joined with some friends to organize the Hill Aeronautical School, as a part of the Hill Military Academy in Portland.

At roughly the same time, he and a partner, Ernest Hammer, bought the plans for a revolutionary heavy-lift cargo plane from the widow of aviator James D. Hill. Calling it the “Aeroliner,” Strode and Hammer worked the design over with some improvements and changes, which they duly patented, and tried to interest Boeing in it.

Boeing never bit, but it would have probably been a good thing for them if they had. The basic Aeroliner was a tri-motor design, with two tractor propellers at the front and one pusher at the back. The body of the plane was roughly wing-shaped, so that it would help provide lift, like in a “flying wing.” It was huge; the plane had a 94-foot wingspan, just 11 inches less than a B-17 Flying Fortress from 20 years later.

And in an innovation that would have saved lives if it had been adapted, the engines could all be accessed from inside the plane. In an age of low engine reliability, when forced landings were common, being able to fix a balky magneto or repair a broken fuel line in flight could have been a game changer.

The Aeroliner was far ahead of its time, but while it languished on the drafting table, the rest of the world relentlessly moved past it. By the mid-1930s, it was more or less obsolete compared with newer designs, although the aviation industry wouldn’t catch up with some aspects until decades later.

But by then, Victor Strode had turned his inventive mind onto other projects, which had led him directly to the Jack Luihn and the naval-architecture breakthrough it represented — the invention Strode called the Aerohydrocraft, and which he always considered to be his greatest creation.

The road to the Aerohydrocraft started when the famous explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins came to Portland to show film footage documenting his 1931 submarine expedition, on which he’d piloted the Nautilus, a mothballed submarine leased from the U.S. Navy, in an attempt to reach the North Pole under the ice cap.

Strode and Wilkins hit it off, and during their conversation, Wilkins asked if Strode could invent a robust landing gear system for an explorer’s aircraft, which could handle landings on water, land, and ice.

It was a tall order, but Strode had some ideas.

So he got together with aeronautical engineer Fred Jones, who had helped design DeHaviland airplanes during the First World War, and started drawing them out, tweaking them, building models ... and ended up creating a design for a flying-boat pontoon that would become the basis of the Aerohydrocraft.

The challenge, as he saw it — or, rather, the opportunity — was that although plenty of boats and pontoons were streamlined hydrodynamically below the water level, they typically weren’t designed with aerodynamics in mind.

Strode especially was fascinated by the opportunity to harness ground effect to lift a hull higher out of the water so that it could go faster.

“Ground effect” is an aviation term for the boost in lift that an airplane gets when it’s close to the ground. The wing, as it moves through the air, pushes air downward to support the airplane; when the plane is in the air, that air is pushing against air, so it doesn’t provide as much lift as it would if it were pushing against a solid mass such as the Earth, or the surface of a lake, or the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Would there be a way, Strode mused, to design the upper works of a boat so that it pushed air downward, like an airplane wing does, helping lift the hull out of the water or even bringing the whole thing entirely clear — literally flying an inch or two above the water with only the tip of the outboard motor touching it?

If it could be done, this would be a game changer. Above a very slow speed, pushing water out of the way is a very energy-intensive process even in the most well-designed hull. You know this instinctively if you’ve ever been on a dock pulling a boat toward you with the dock line. It only takes a very gentle touch to move the boat slowly toward you, but to get it to move faster you have to pull really hard.

That’s why speedboats are made to lift out of the water and plane across the surface — so that as little water is displaced as possible.

Strode tried a few different approaches, but the one that tested best in wind-tunnel models was an outlandish-looking thing that looked like several thick sections of airplane wings telescoping together. The cabin or cockpit sat in the middle section, which was the longest and thickest part. On each side of it was a short section of a smaller wing, following the exact same profile as the center but about 40 percent smaller. On the outboard side of each of these was another, even smaller section.

Basically, it was a boat made of seven slices of airplane wing glued together with the biggest one in the middle, stepping outward.

Another breakthrough was the power plant. Strode realized that a propeller moving air, as on an airplane, didn’t provide much thrust relative to the amount of energy it had to expend. But a propeller in water (a screw) was a wonderfully efficient thing. With his mostly-airborne boat skipping across the surface of the water on its cushion of air, an ordinary outboard motor dropping down into the water could provide tremendous thrust relative to its power output, by airplane standards.

By early 1933 Strode had a single-seat model of the Aerohydrocraft built, by the wood shop of the Ostlind brothers in Marshfield (today’s Coos Bay). When it was done, he fitted it with a 55-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor tucked down into a special motor well in the center, climbed aboard, and set out on Tenmile Lake to try it out.

Most likely he chose Tenmile Lake because Currier’s Village was there in Lakeside, with a first-class restaurant and marina and, usually, a bumper crop of Hollywood celebrities getting away from the crowds and the cameras.

“It was a thrilling experience for those watching to see the little 17-foot racer in its trial performance lift above the water surface at about 45 miles an hour to ride on its cushion of air,” Ruth Strode wrote, in her brief biography of her husband’s life and work. “It was airborne! An (airplane-style) rudder mounted aft on the craft was then used in auxiliary to the water rudder. It served the dual purpose of vertical fin and directional control with the boat at high speed.”

Even with just 55 horsepower, the little racer was overpowered, she added.

“Opened to only part of full throttle,” she wrote, “it could attain speeds of up to 70 miles per hour.”

Strode’s boat was a sensation, and for a few months everyone was talking about it. It was featured at Portland’s 1933 automobile show. The boat, trailered up to Portland and launched in Lake Oswego, got even more attention from the rich and famous there. A Pathe Newsreel crew showed up and did a newsreel story about it to play in movie theaters nationwide. And, best of all, Popular Science magazine featured the boat on its front cover in March 1933.

“It behaves like an ordinary craft until it attains a speed of 45 miles per hour,” the PopSci article notes. “At this velocity, which corresponds to the taking-off speed of an airplane, an abrupt change occurs. The pilot can feel the boat rise from the water as the fins take hold on the air. Only the propeller beneath the hull remains in the water where its full thrust is effective.”

Fresh from this success, the following year Strode applied for and got funding from the federal government’s Depression-era State Emergency Relief Agency jobs program to build a bigger version of the Aerohydrocraft — a high-speed ambulance boat for the Portland harbor.

And a year and a half later, the boat was there, finished, ready to launch. It was to be christened the Jack Luihn, after a popular civic leader.

Compared with the little prototype racer, the Jack Luihn was a hulking monster. It was 24 feet long, and powered with a flathead Ford V-8 engine. Most likely the craft was underpowered, because according to Ruth Strode’s biography, it topped out at 45 miles per hour — a lot by boat standards, but considerably less than the smaller single-seat prototype could do.

In the fuselage, there was a tight cockpit with seating for two people; behind them, there was an ambulance bay, with accommodations for two patients on stretchers. From looking at photographs of the launch, it appears the ambulance bay was open-air, like the back of a pickup truck.

And on that spring day, at the foot of Stark Street where a few dozen years earlier the ferry used to land, a group of city notables was there to launch what they surely believed was the future of high-speed motorboating. There had been plenty of coverage of the event in the Portland Morning Oregonian and Portland Journal, so a crowd of locals had come down to watch as well.

It was a proud moment for inventor Victor Strode. His wife and biographer, Ruth Hopkins Strode (a staff writer for the Portland Journal) christened the new service boat with a bottle of champagne, and the futuristic speedboat motored away across the river as waterfront factories celebrated and welcomed the new boat with whistle blasts.

So — was the Jack Luihn a success?

The answer seems to be a pretty firm “no.” However, its failure must have involved some embarrassing details, because there is simply nothing more about it in the Oregonian — until six months later, in January 1937, when a “year in review” article mentions that it was “noisily christened and then quietly retired from public view.”

Just seven days later, a three-inch-long article buried deep on Page 11 announced that the City Council had voted to officially release any interest in it.

“For some time the boat has been out of service,” the article read, “but it was said the boat might be salvaged if title were transferred to Mr. Strode.”

The obvious implication is that this larger version of the aerohydrocraft design suffered from some sort of design flaw that would require more than just repairs and reinforcement. It would have to go back to the drawing board entirely, so that the inventor could invent a solution.

But I was unable to find more details about what happened. The Oregon Historical Society has the Victor Strode papers, but they’re from Ruth, who was Victor’s number-one fan and not about to air any of his dirty laundry. All she mentions is that it was washed away and wrecked in the flood of 1948, many years later and after Victor’s death.

But at least one educated guess can be made, based on the laws of physics, as to why the aerohydrocraft didn’t work out for Portland.

At speed, this boat would be essentially skipping across the surface of the water like a skipping stone, half-hovering in the air, with the propeller shaft dropping down into the drink. Throw the rudder over to make a hard left turn, and what’s to prevent the centrifugal force of the turn from tipping the boat over until the outboard “wingtip” touches the water doing 60 mph? What would happen then? A jolt? A terrifying cartwheel crash? It’s hard to say. In the smaller racer, with less mass over the water, the airplane-style rudder was apparently effective enough to prevent this. Maybe — probably — with a larger, heavier boat, it wasn’t.

Or, maybe it was something as simple as the ride quality. Anyone who’s ever been in a flat-bottomed boat planing across even slightly choppy water knows it’s a rough enough ride to knock fillings loose. That might not be acceptable in an ambulance boat.

In any case, the Aerohydrocraft disappeared from the world of boat types almost as quickly as it vanished from the Portland waterfront. Today, few powerboat aficionados have even heard of them — or of the time Portland took a chance on the cutting edge of naval architecture.

In 1944, Victor Strode had one more crack at making the aerohydrocraft a success as a boat. This time, the boat had a cutwater bow rather than the flat airfoil shape, and would be made with fiberglass. The War Department was considering a big order to use as ambulance boats, and had a prototype being built at the Hughes Aircraft Culver City factory. Howard Hughes himself was very interested in the project.

Unfortunately, the war ended before that happened. The prototype worked beautifully — apparently Strode fixed whatever it was that ailed the Jack Luihn — but the War Department never placed the promised order, and that was that.

Victor Strode wouldn’t live to see it, though. He died in the late spring of 1944 at the age of 51.

(Sources: The Inventions of Victor Wiegand Strode, an unpublished biography written circa 1946 by Ruth Hopkins Strode, held by Oregon Historical Society; Popular Science archive, popsci.com/archive; Portland Morning Oregonian archives, 1934-1944)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.