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EDWIN ALBERT LINK
1 904 - 1 981
BY HAROLD E. EDGERTON
EDWIN A LINK died on Labor Day, September 7, 1981. He held
thirty-three patents for his inventions in aviation, navigation, and
ocean engineering. His reputation spans heaven, earth, and ocean;
he was best known for his 1929 development of the Link Flight
Trainer and his developments of lock-out submersibles of the John-
son-Sea-Link type.
Born in Huntington, Indiana, on July 26, 1904, he soon moved to
Binghamton, New York, where his father manufactured organs. The
young Link worked with the organ controls and began a lifetime as
the quintessential Yankee tinkerer. He saw the beauty in tools in
wrenches and drills and lathes and what they could fix and fashion.
He loved working alone, late at night, gnawing at a problem until he
had mastered it. Not for him the committee approach; he was
guided by the light of a singular flame, burning brightly within his
head.
Ed Link barnstormed with the aces of the Lafayette Escadrille and
passed the time of day with Orville Wright. He will always be
famous for the Link Trainer, which he developed in the 1920s when
he was determined to learn to fly but lacked funds for the airborne
hours flying required. The first Link Trainer was built in his father's
basement. With this device an aviator can be trained in instrument
flying without the complications introduced by an actual airplane.
There were few customers for the Link Trainer until 1934, when
the U.S. Army Air Corps was abruptly given the task of carrying
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
airmail. The Corps pilots, trained to fly by watching the ground,
could not handle the job. After ten pilots crashed, the Air Corps
turned to Link's invention.
During World War II the Link Trainer was used to teach more
than half a million airmen. Today Link Trainers are produced for
pilots, astronauts, and maritime vessel operators. A sophisticated
offspring, controlled by computers, rehearsed men for the Moon.
Visitors to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum can
take a five-minute simulated flight in one of three Link General
Aviation Trainers that are on display there.
Ed Link was two men: one with a tool box in his fist, the other
with dreams in his head. He never forgot his dreams. Even while he
was putting together the company that would build the Link
Trainer Link Aviation, Inc. and then guiding its expansion into a
large corporation that became General Precision Equipment Corpo-
ration and eventually part of the Singer Company, he never forgot
one of the dreams of his youth—to go to sea.
A vagabond at heart, he took off into the Caribbean with his wife,
Marion the pillar of his life- and his two young sons. He loved the
act of diving, of descending to marvel at the ocean's innermost
secrets. Like most visionaries, Ed Link had the capacity to hitch his
dreams to a purpose: He would design and build things so that men
could work beneath the sea to salvage sunken ships and survey
drowned seaports, to weld pipelines and study sea life.
He designed and built an oceanographic research vessel, Sea Diver,
which he used for many archaeological research expeditions in the
Aegean and Caribbean seas. In 1960 he commenced the task of
developing equipment that would "put man in the sea." In 1962 he
built the world's first submersible decompression chamber for
marine science. Lightweight and able to lock onto a deck decompres-
sion chamber, it would become the forerunner of the hundreds of
diving bells currently working in the Far East, North Sea, and Gulf
of Mexico.
Shortly after it was built, he took to the water to test it himself.
"The final test of a man's beliefs, . . ." he said as he settled into its
aluminum shell and closed the hatch behind him. In the clear blue
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EDWIN ALBERT LINK
175
waters of the Mediterranean off the coast of France, he stayed at 60
feet for eight hours, swimming outside while breathing a mixture of
oxygen and helium. Not bad for a fifty-eight-year-old man.
Over the years Ed Link did more than any other individual in
building the diving systems that would support man under water.
He designed pressure chambers, small manned stations, and a pair
of lock-out submarines known as the iohnson-Sea-Link class. Into
the last he incorporated a brilliant concept a transparent acrylic
shell. Scientists could sit on the seafloor at a thousand feet and have a
· .
panoramic view.
Much of the world was unaware of his tremendous contributions.
Unlike iacques-Yves Cousteau, whose fame was burning with its
own brilliance, Ed Link was shy in public and not deft with films or
self-publicity.
His younger son, Clayton, died in a diving accident when strong
currents swept the minisub into a tangle of cable and debris. Ed
Link led rescue efforts from the deck for thirty-one hours, but the
acrylic bubble was freed too late. He gathered himself up as best he
could and pressed on with his work. "We're not going to stop," he
vowed, and two years later he developed a submersible that would
prevent the kind of accident that took his son's life. The Cabled
Observation and Rescue Device (CORD) is an unmanned submers-
ible equipped with television cameras, hydraulically powered claws,
and cutters to rescue divers trapped under water. A man is measured
not only by his successes but by how he handles his tragedies.
Ed Link had a residence in Binghamton, New York, and at the
Harbor Branch Foundation near Fort Pierce, Florida. It was at this
latter location that he carried forth his remarkable developments of
underwater research projects. He helped direct a staff of 150 scien-
tists, engineers, and support personnel at Harbor Branch Founda-
tion, Inc., a unique oceanographic center where research and
engineering have united to create the hardware needed to explore
and study marine life.
His interest in technical education led to the establishment in 1953
of the Link Foundation to support research and education in the
fields of aeronautics and oceanography. Link Foundation grants
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
have been awarded to more than 120 universities and nonprofit
organizations Its first Ocean Engineering Fellowships were estab-
lished in 1962.
He received honorary doctorates from Tufts University, Hamilton
College, Syracuse University, and Florida Institute of Technology.
Numerous honors include the Franklin Institute's Howard N. Potts
Medal; Wakefield Gold Medal from the Royal Aeronautical Society
of London; Underwater Society of America NOGI Award for Sci-
ence; Matthew Fontaine Maury Medal from the Smithsonian Insti-
tution; and International Oceanographic Foundation Gold Medal
Award. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in
1965.
The 1980 Lindbergh Award was presented to Edwin Link with
this citation: "A truly Renaissance man: engineer, inventor,
explorer, philanthropist, businessman, pilot, archeologist, oceanog-
rapher, conservationist." Dr. Joseph MacInnis, President of Under-
sea Research, Ltd., of Toronto, Canada, and a recipient of a Link
Foundation Fellowship, said, "Some of us were fortunate enough to
work for him. Whatever task, he would bend his back to it, toiling
alongside us . . . he made us feel like we were young men on a young
frontier. Looking back, decades later, it was an apprenticeship to
genius. "
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
harbor branch
