The machines that made the Jet Age

By Tim Heffernan- Share this article

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This is a companion piece to Iron Giant: One of America’s great machines comes back to life, a feature by Tim published in The Atlantic

Germany, June 1945. The Nazi regime has been toppled; the war in Europe is over. But the Allied victory is largely the result of sheer overwhelming force, not technological superiority — and the victors know it. Most glaringly, while the Allies still rely on propeller-driven aircraft, the Luftwaffe has put three jets successfully into service.

A Messerschmitt Me 262, the first military jet to enter service. Brought to you by Krupp’s magnesium forging division. Photo: USAF

A Boeing B-29, the first bomber with pressurized crew compartments. Brought to you by Rosie the Riveter. Source: USAF

The reasons for German air superiority were several, of course, but a key one was their mastery of light-metal forging. While the Allies were still bolting together their planes out of steel plate, a slow, labor-intensive process ripe for error and unsuited to design optimization, the Germans were stamping and squeezing out complex structural elements from magnesium and aluminum alloys.

Not surprisingly, after Germany surrendered, both the U.S. and the USSR sought to take control of its forging facilities.

The Soviets got the good stuff.

In so doing they got a head start on the Cold War race for supersonic air superiority. Unwittingly, they also set in motion a larger, and largely forgotten, industrial revolution that shaped the second half of the 20th century and will shape the 21st. This is the story of the birth of the Jet Age — but it’s anchored firmly to the ground.

Photo: Library of Congress

The magnificent machine pictured above is a closed-die forging press, one of the biggest in the world. (For reference, check out the men standing at its foot, down there on the left.) It and nine other huge forges were built in 1950s by the U.S. government, in a long-forgotten endeavor called the Heavy Press Program. I wrote about the press and the program in the March Atlantic, and Maggie kindly invited me to write a bit more here, because — well, first of all, because just look at that thing. It stands nine stories tall (four of them are hidden under the floor), weighs 16 million pounds, exerts 50,000 tons of compressive force, and, like Vulcan’s own waffle iron, squeezes ingots of solid metal between its jaws until they flow like batter.

Here’s another picture for scale:

Each casting was loaded individually onto a specially built train car and carried from Pittsburgh to Cleveland. Photo: USAF Air Force Material Command

Those are just four of the 14 steel castings that make up the Fifty, as the press is known, and they aren’t even the biggest ones. Those would be the twin 250-ton upper stationary crossheads, shown in Figures 5 and 6 of this document— also a good source for more technical details about the press.

And here’s a before-and-after of the Fifty’s handiwork:

Press-forging minimizes waste metal compared to machining, and by realigning the metal’s internal crystalline structure along natural lines of stress, results in much stronger parts than casting would produce. Photos: Library of Congress

That’s a piece of titanium about 15 feet wide and a foot thick, in its raw state and after being forged in a single stroke between the Fifty’s hardened steel dies under 100 million pounds of pressure.

Though they were built nearly 60 years ago, the ten machines of the Heavy Press Program — four forging presses, the waffle irons, and six extrusion presses, basically giant caulking guns except the “caulk” is solid metal — are still among the most powerful ever made. Even more impressively, at least eight of the ten are still in use.

Extruded aluminum parts (not parts from Heavy Press Program machines). Photo courtesy Dalcio Metal

So, what do they do? Well, in strict terms, they make heavy components for aircraft, spacecraft, and power-generation facilities. That chunk of titanium, for example, became one of the bulkheads that anchor the engines, fuselage, and wings of an F-15. More familiarly, every time you fly on a Boeing or Airbus, you’re relying on parts made by the Heavy Press Program machines to keep you aloft—things like the wing spars, which connect the wings to the plane’s chassis.

But in broader terms, what the machines do is make the Jet Age possible. On a plane, a pound of weight saved is a pound of thrust gained—or a pound of lift, or a pound of cargo. A lighter plane also puts less stress on its chassis when it goes through maneuvers. Supersonic military jets are optimized for speed and strength. Subsonic passenger and cargo jets are optimized for fuel efficiency and load capacity. Without the ultra-strong, ultra-light components that only forging can produce, they’d all be pushing much smaller envelopes.

Dawn of the Military-Industrial Complex

Back to 1945 for moment. The Soviet acquisition of Germany’s biggest forges made it all but inevitable that the U.S. would build its own heavy presses—but it’s important to note that it did not make the Heavy Press Program inevitable. Private industry could have built its own machines. The government could have built them, too, and indeed early plans called for the military to construct a “pilot plant” and dole out chunks of time to the air industry to experiment on government-run machines. The idea that it was in the public’s interest to pay for the machines but cede their control to industry was a controversial one, and many leaders in Congress strongly resisted it as a dangerous blurring of private and civic concerns.

On the other hand, with millions of WWII servicemen and women being demobilized, mass unemployment was a threat, and shoring up the aerospace industry was an attractive way to stave it off and harness wartime technology to the peacetime economy. Cold War policy also encouraged massive defense spending, but (as ever) a secondary war was being waged by the military branches for funding, and heavy forging wasn’t of much use to the Army or Navy. It was a complex situation, and one that could have been resolved in several ways. But by 1949 it had been decided that the government would build a number of heavy forging machines and the factories to support them, and that these facilities would be leased to the great metals companies of the day on very generous terms. The Heavy Press Program had begun.

Nifty Fifty

The Fifty was installed at Alcoa’s Cleveland Works facility and began operations on May 5, 1955. A complementary 35,000-ton press was installed shortly after. I have their initial production list, and it reads like catalog of American military air power of the age: wing roots for the Republic F-105, wing spars for the Convair B-58, landing gear trunions for the Boeing B-52, bulkheads for the Lockheed C-130—in all, hundreds of items. From the start, the forges were busy machines.

The Heavy Press Program also supplied Wyman-Gordon of Grafton, Massachusetts, with a 50,000- and 35,000-ton pair of forging presses. Here’s their 50K, nicknamed Major (yep, the 35K is Minor), and again, note the man standing at its foot for scale:

The two 50,000-ton presses were of very different design — those interested can compare them here and here — but their dies were made to be interchangeable, so that production would not be disrupted if one of the machines broke down or was attacked during war. Photo: Library of Congress

To these four were added the six huge extrusion presses: a 12,000-tonner for Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo; twin 8,000-tonners for Kaiser in Halethorpe, Maryland; a 14,000-tonner for Alcoa in Davenport, Iowa; and an 8,000- and a 12,000-tonner for Harvey Aluminum in Torrance, California, just south of L.A. With stroke lengths of up to 92 feet, the extruders were used to produce long, hollow structures like aluminum missile bodies and wing struts in a single, seamless piece, saving time, weight, and material. Here’s the Harvey 12K, which went into service in August 1957:

Though it was nearly 300 feet long and weighed 8 million pounds, the maximum variance along the Harvey 12K’s chassis was just 0.004 inches. Source: USAF Materiel Command

This iron giant—which reminds me somehow of a steam train—is the one Heavy Press Program machine that definitely no longer exists: it was cut up for scrap in the 1990s. And I haven’t been able to confirm the fate of the 8,000-tonner at Harvey—though it may have been shipped to Korea or China.

As for the other eight machines, they’re still working. Curtiss-Wright’s extruder ultimately was bought by Precision Castparts and moved to Houston, and Kaiser’s pair was taken over by Alcoa, but their jobs haven’t changed. They make the things that make us fly, and they’ll be doing so for decades yet.

A Stamp on History

I see three main legacies of the Heavy Press Program.

First, of course, is the aeronautics industry as it now exists. We are accustomed to talking about the ways abstractions like “technology” or “Washington” have affected life the world over. But the machines of the Heavy Press Program are a concrete—well, an iron-and-steel—example of how industry and politics can collide with enormous yet unpredictable effect. The civilian air industry was an afterthought when the program was conceived, yet it is arguably the program’s signal achievement. Again, every Boeing and Airbus jet you’ve ever flown, every one that has carried mail or freight across the oceans, on was built around vital structural components made by these huge machines. Their impact on global society and commerce has been incalculably great. But every American military jet that has fired a gun or dropped a bomb in war was also built around Heavy Press parts—and thus the greatness of the program’s impact is morally blurred.

You can’t have this…

…without this.

Second is the military-industrial complex. I don’t believe it’s possible to place its origin in any single spot. But I am also not aware of any defense program since the HPP that was meaningfully opposed by Congress on the grounds that it threatened the functioning of American democracy. That a given project was “wasteful” or “bloated,” sure—but that’s just bookkeeping. The Heavy Press Program was in many ways the test case for the proper division between private and public interest, and it was decided in favor of what amounts to a mutual aid society between American industry, the American military, and Congress. The consequences are plain, and not often pretty.

Lastly is a legacy of absence. Today, America lacks the ability to make anything like the Heavy Press Program machines. The Fifty, to pick the one I’m most familiar with, was made by the Mesta Machine Company of West Homestead, PA, just outside of Pittsburgh. Mesta built the machines that built Steeltown — the furnaces, the blowers, the rolling mills and the forges. Mech-heads will want to check out this digitized Mesta brochure of 1919, a kind of Whole Earth Catalog for the iron industry. The less avid can just enjoy the picture below, from the same era. Then imagine what Mesta Machine could do by 1950, with three decades worth of further innovation under its belt.

Mesta could mold, cast, forge, machine and field-test huge components under one roof — literally — a full-service shop of the sort that no longer exists in the U.S. Photo: Carnegie Museum of Art.

The company went under in the mid-1980s. It is not unambiguously bad that it and the rest of American ultra-heavy manufacturing are gone. But it’s not unambiguously good, either. Conventional wisdom would say that the industry went to less-developed nations, freeing American resources for higher-tech pursuits. In fact, the only companies today capable of producing Heavy Press-size equipment are in the backwaters known as Germany and Japan, with companies in Russia, Korea, and China rapidly catching up and the UK actively rebuilding its top firm, Sheffield Forgemasters, through cheap government loans. Just last year four Japanese companies joined forces to build a new 50,000-ton press for the aerospace and power industries, and while I was working on this piece China Erzhong, a nationalized conglomerate, announced that it will build an 80,000-ton press — the biggest ever — to support its nascent aerospace industry.

Now is not the time for America to build new forges: eight really is enough. But the original heavy presses, which have lived far longer and spurred far more innovation than was ever imagined, set an example that I think might yet be followed. Big machines are the product of big visions, and they make big visions real. How about a Heavy Fusion Program?

If you’re one of the hordes whose Xbox 360 died the fiery death associated with the RRoD you may be wondering what to do with that multi-hundred dollar door stop you’re left with. Why not salvage the parts for other uses? If you’ve ever wanted to use your wireless controller with a computer here’s a way to pull out the RF module and reuse it.

The concept is simple enough, there’s a daughter-board in the Xbox 360 which hosts the RF module for wireless controller connectivity. Once you extract it from the carcass of the beast, you just need to find a way to read and push the data to your computer. Any USB enabled microcontroller will do, in this case an Arduino nano was chosen for the task. A bit of level converting was necessary to interface with the device, but nothing too involved.

It sounds like at first there was an issue with syncing a controller with the hacked module, but as you can see in the clip after the break that problem has been solved.

Popout[via Build Lounge]
Filed under: xbox hacks        

The Philippines’ National Power Corporation is offering tours and overnight beachside holidays at its Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, built in the 1980s but never fired up. It’s been “uranium-free” since 1997 and is now marketed as an ecotourism site. From National Geographic:

The trip back in time takes about three hours by car from the Philippine capital, Manila. The entry fee—150 Philippine pesos (about U.S. $3.50)—includes use of a nearby private beach.

The first part of the tour involves a presentation on the plant’s safety features, including its apparent ability to withstand an earthquake as strong as the one that shook Japan’s Fukushima plant on March 11, 2011.

The rest of the tour includes a guided walk through the guts of the unused plant. “Tourists can see the reactor, steam generators, control rooms, turbine-generators, etc.,” National Power’s Marcelo said.

 

 

“Nuclear-Resort Pictures: Come for the Reactor, Stay for the Beach”

Coming soon glow-in-the-dark “Radiation” badge. You learned about radiation and radioactivity! Adafruit offers a fun and exciting “badges” of achievement for electronics, science and engineering. We believe everyone should be able to be rewarded for learning a useful skill, a badge is just one of the many ways to show and share. This is the “Radioactivity and Radiation” badge for use at classrooms, workshops, Maker Faires, Hackerspaces, TechShops and around the world to reward beginners on their skill building journey! This special badge is white in the day time and glows green in the dark.

Should be in stock in a week or so! You can check out all the badges here and here.

I thought this would be a fun project to replicate with my 2 and 4 year old daughters, but I wanted to make a small tweak and display a picture of Frosty the Snowman. My two year old discovered the old Frosty the Snowman cartoons this year and is constantly asking to “watch a frosty”.

I downloaded John’s Arduino sketch and took a look at it to see what I’d have to do to change the picture displayed on the scope. His code is very well laid out and the picture is defined by the number of points and the X Y coordinates stored as two arrays.

Now how do I draw a picture of a snowman and get X Y coordinates out of it? I tried GIMP and Paint, but ended up using Scilab…… yes a fancy math program to draw a snowman! The nice thing about Scilab is you can plot pictures using the same X & Y arrays needed for the Arduino sketch.

I could have gotten all fancy and used sin & cos equations to get a nice smooth circle, but a line segment circle gets the job done too, and is equally impressive to a two year old

Once I got the X Y coordinates figured out I cut and paste them in to John’s sketch and loaded it into my ProtoStack Arduino Clone from a previous post.

Here is John’s sketch with my added X1 & Y1 coordinates for the snowman pic. link

We grabbed a bread board and I let my 4 year old insert the 10K Ohm and 0.1uF caps and hook up the scope probes.

With a few tweaks to the scope’s settings we got a nice picture of Frosty the Snowman.

My daughters had fun making him taller and shorter and skinny and fat all with a few button presses. Thanks John for the great idea; my girls and I had a lot of fun!

Hack a Day alum [Will O’Brien] recently upgraded his phone, and was trying to find a use for his old one. He always wanted a remote starter for his Subaru Outback, but wasn’t interested in paying for an off the shelf kit. Since he had this old smartphone kicking around, he thought that it would be the perfect starting point for an SMS-triggered remote start system.

He started off by jailbreaking his phone, which allows him to run some Perl scripts that are used to listen for incoming texts. Using a PodBreakout mini from Sparkfun he connected the phone to an Arduino, which is responsible for triggering the car’s ignition. Now, a simple text message containing the start command and a password can start his car from a anywhere in the world.

While [Will] is quite happy with his setup he already has improvements in mind, including a way for the Arduino to send a message back to him via SMS confirming that the car has been successfully started. He’s thinking about putting together a kit for others looking to add the same functionality to their own car, so be sure to check his site periodically for project updates.
Filed under: arduino hacks, cellphones hacks, iphone hacks, transportation hacks        

We’re giving away amazing kits from our new Make: Ultimate Kit Guide EVERY DAY — thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, including MakerBots!

To celebrate the release of our latest publication, the Make: Ultimate Kit Guide 2012 (and its companion website), we’re giving away at least one of the cool kits reviewed in the issue each day during the holiday season.

Today’s kit giveaway is the DIY Hologram Kit (a $100 value!) Here is MAKE Toolbox editor Arwen O’Reilly Griffith’s review from the issue:

Making holograms became faster and easier a few years ago when Litiholo introduced its Instant Hologram film. Like old Polaroids, these film plates require no developing after exposure, which means, in about an hour, you can make your own transmission hologram of anything that will sit still next to the plate. The kit also includes an LED darkroom light and the SafetyLight Laser Diode that you use to both make the exposure and view (or “reconstruct”) the hologram.

To be eligible for today’s giveaway, all you have to do is leave a comment below in this post. The entry period for today’s prize will be until 11:59pm PST tonight. We’ll choose one person at random, you’ll be notified by email, and you’ll have 48 hours to respond. The Winners List is kept on the Giveaway landing page. That’s it! No purchase necessary or anything else to do. Please leave only one comment per post. You can enter as many giveaways as you like until you win. This giveaway is for US residents only. You also must be 18 years old to enter (Kids: Ask your parents to enter). See the Kit-A-Day Giveaway landing page for full sweepstakes details and Official Rules.

Important Note: If you enter this drawing, when it’s over, please check the place where you registered to comment (eg. Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter). Some people are winning these kits and then not responding when we send them a message using the available means of contacting them. We want to make sure you get your giveaway!

The guys over at Rusty Nail Workshop have put up an Internet controlled robotic arm for your amusement. While you’re waiting for the turkey to be done (or, you know, working), try your hand at moving some LEGO pieces around with a remote-controlled robotic arm.

The build log goes through the parts needed for the build. The arm itself is a Lynxmotion AL-5D, a heavy-duty device that’s far more capable and looks a lot better than our old Armatron.

The arm is controlled by an Arduino Uno. The Arduino is connected to the arm’s servo controller. Movement commands are received by an Ethernet shield and translated into servo commands. The entire build runs independently of a computer just like this project’s inspiration, the Orbduino.

Of course you can imagine the mayhem that would ensue if multiple people tried to take control of the robot simultaneously. A bit of code on the project’s website makes sure only one person has control of the robot at any given time. Check out what somebody else is building out of LEGO blocks with a Waldo. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to knock that work down.

Lithium-polymer batteries are an excellent choice for portable projects. They are relatively cheap, hold a significant charge, and last for a long time. The drawback with these batteries is that they require rather complicated charging protocols. You have to watch out for overcharging, undercharging, overheating, etc…

We are looking for a standard part to use in our projects, so we decided to do a roundup of open source lithium polymer chargers from SparkFun, Seeed Studio, and Adafruit. With the exception of Seeed, all the chargers are based on Microchip’s MCP738xx family of battery management ICs that come in SSOP and DFN packages. They handle all the charging algorithms and usually only require a single external capacitor.

Lithium Polymer USB Charger and Battery from SparkFun is a basic charger designed around the MCP73831 IC. A solder jumper changes the charge current from 100mA to 500mA. LiPoly Fast Charger, also from SparkFun, supports currents up to 1A. This design uses the MCP73843 IC driving an external mosfet that handles higher current.

Seeed is up next with their Li-Po rider and Li-Po rider pro charger/power supplies. They are based on the CN3065 battery management IC. The charge current is 400mA when a powerful enough source is available. One thing to note is that Li-Po riders are not chargers but compact portable power supplies that deliver 5V at 350mA. Battery voltage is converted to 5V through a switching step up converter. The pro version delivers up to 1A of current.

Adafruit’s USB/DC Lithium Polymer battery charger uses the MCP73861 IC. A charging current of up to 1.2A can be selected through a resistor. This IC has thermal protection. A standard 10K thermistor can be added to the battery to shut down charging in case of overheating. Their USB LiIon/LiPoly charger uses the MCP73833 IC, and is similar to the previus product. This one doesn’t have the DC IN jack populated, and the maximum current is 1A.

After looking at what everyone is using we are going to add the MCP73833 to our part box. It is cheap, has programmable current, and thermal protection through a thermistor. We also liked Seeed’s use of a dc/dc converter for portable projects.

Arhi tipped us to a PID library for Arduino. If you require precision control of electro-mechanical devices like heaters, servos, water pumps, etc. PID is one  way to implement that control.

It is an algorithm that controls a device by constantly adjusting its control or power signals to keep the device at preset state. Using sensors to detect differences between the preset state and the actual state the device is in, the controller calculates which signals it should send to the device to eliminate the difference.

Via the forum.

A couple of months ago, I posted a design sketch for an SD-card floppy disk drive emulator for classic Macintosh computers. Recently I finally got motivated enough to start building it. Using one of the oh-so-rare DB-19 connectors that I purchased a few weeks back, I rigged up a cable to connect the Mac’s external floppy port to a breadboard. Then I dug out an old CPLD board I built for an early Tiny CPU test, and wired all the floppy lines to the board’s I/O connector. The board is powered by the +5V from the floppy port.

This particular board has an Altera EPM7128S CPLD, which is so old that it actually runs at 5V (newer CPLDs run at 3.3V or below). That’s great for this purpose, because 5V is what the Mac provides and is also the voltage level on the Mac floppy data lines.

So far, I’ve built a successful blank disk emulator. It identifies itself as an 800K drive to the Mac, initially with no disk. Reading and writing of the interval drive registers works, as well as stepping the drive head. The PWM signal that tells the Mac the current drive motor RPM speed also works. By pushing a button on the board, you can “insert” a disk into the drive, but the disk is blank (it contains all 1′s).

If you push the button while the Mac is waiting for a boot disk, it thinks about it for a minute, then “ejects” the disk and shows the X-disk icon on the screen. If you boot from a regular floppy disk in the internal drive, then push the button to insert an external disk, the Mac asks “This disk is unreadable. Do you want to initialize it?” If you say yes, the Mac responds “Initialization failed! The disk is write-protected!”

It’s not very exciting yet, but it’s a good start. The next step will be to add a microcontroller and an SD card reader. With those pieces in place, I can start passing actual disk data to the CPLD, so it can pass the data on to the Mac.

Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie is reported to have died at his home this past weekend, after a long battle against an unspecified illness. No further details are available at the time of this blog post.

Wikipedia biography here.

He was the co-inventor of the C programming language, and a central figure in the development of Unix. He spent much of his career at Bell Labs. He was awarded the Turing Award in 1983, and the National Medal of Technology in 1999.

“Ritchie’s influence rivals Jobs’s; it’s just less visible,”James Grimmelman observed on Twitter. “His pointer has been cast to void *; his process has terminated with exit code 0.”

Stephany Aulenback tried out a recipe for “Chemical Apple Pie,” a beloved science experiment that uses cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate) to trick the human tongue into tasting apples, though no apples are, in fact, used in the pie. The pie tasted pretty good, and Aulenback unearthed a lot of interesting history of the dish:

Further searching revealed that it is an even older recipe than that, dating back at least to the mid 1800s. Recipes for it have been found in the Confederate Receipt Book in 1863 and Mrs. B. C. Whiting’s How We Cook In Los Angeles (1894) in which she referred to it as “California Pioneer Apple Pie, 1852″ (if you follow that link, choose Mock Apple Pie from the menu on left). It’s certainly easy to imagine that, historically, apples were difficult to come by out of season, at the end of a long journey across the prairies, or in an poorly supplied army camp. (As Mrs. Whiting is quoted saying, “The deception was most complete and readily accepted. Apples at this early date were a dollar a pound, and we young people all craved a piece of Mother’s apple pie to appease our homesick feelings.”) Presumably crackers—or the cracker-like foods of the time—kept better, and one sometimes needed to dream up new, more interesting ways to force oneself to ingest them yet again.

Apparently, the Nabisco company appropriated the recipe in the 1935 when they printed it on the boxes of their fancy new Ritz crackers; today, most people who are familiar with Mock Apple Pie associate it with Ritz. You can still find the recipe on their site, where they warn you to watch your serving size. Probably because of the calorie and fat content, not the muscle toxin.

 

(via MeFi)

Reading this week’s ATtiny-themed builds, [Thomas] was reminded one of his coolest builds. His midi808project used an ATtiny2313 to sync a vintage Roland 808 drum machine to his Logic workstation.

Even though MIDI had been around for a few years when 808s were being made, the CPU in the 808 isn’t exactly up to the task of handling MIDI. Instead, the 808 used an interface known as DIN Sync that was designed to keep 808s, 707s, and 303s in time with each other. MIDI to DIN Sync boxes do did exist, but even the auxiliary equipment to use an 808 is getting hard to find.

The build takes a MIDI signal and passes it through an opto-isolator per the MIDI spec. The microcontroller reads the MIDI signal and passes it out through the DIN Sync port. The DIN Sync protocol is only 24 pulses per quarter note output with TTL voltages, and the project code is easy enough to follow. It’s a nice build for one of the greatest drum machines ever made. Listen to a track [Thomas] made with his new setup after the break.

 
Filed under: musical hacks         

Image: Universal Pictures, fair use.

Today is a special day for Star Wars geeks. Not only do the Clone Wars return for season four, but the original trilogy is being released on Blu-ray. You may not have heard (if you’ve been in hiding at the rebel outpost onRori), but there’s been a little controversy surrounding the Blu-ray release. We at GeekDad have our opinions on the subject, but instead of descending into the fray we’ve decided to take the high road and talk about something else that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the sacrilege that continues to affront us with each release of the Star Wars movies.

Nope, instead of Star Wars, we are going to talk about Steven Spielberg. It’s no secret that Spielberg has a love of aliens. Beginning with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, aliens have found their way into many Spielberg films including a wobbly, long-necked, peanut-butter-candy-eating other-world being who took center stage in 1982’s smash hit, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. But Eeeee-Teeeee and Elll-eeee-ott became embroiled in a bit of hullaballoo when, for the 20th anniversary edition DVD, Spielberg made some changes to the movie prior to its release. Some scenes of E.T. got the CGI treatment to enhance his expression, a certain description of Michael’s breath was removed and, most famously,  the police had their weapons replaced with walkie talkies.

This week, Spielberg screened Raiders of the Lost Ark to celebrate that movie’s 30th anniversary. At that event, Spielberg was interviewed in front of a crowd and asked if he felt the need to go back and change things in his movies. The director responded, “I tried this once and I lived to regret it. Not because of fan outrage, but simply because I was disappointed in myself. I was overly sensitive to some of the criticism E.T. got from parent groups when it was first released in ‘82 having to do with Eliot saying “Penis Breath” or the guns…and then there were certain brilliant, but rough around the edges close ups of E.T. that I always felt, if technology ever evolves to the point where I can do some facial enhancement for E.T., I’d like to.”

But he didn’t stop there. Spielberg continued “… it was okay for a while, but then I realized that what I had done was I had robbed the people who loved E.T. of their memories of E.T. and I regretted that.” (massive applause) “... the only contrition that I really performed was when E.T. came out on DVD for the first time, I asked Universal … when you release this on DVD you have to come out for the same price of one DVD, you have to put two movies in the box and one movie will be the 1982 version and the other will be the digitally enhanced version. I’d like to ask you this, let’s do a little poll here, cause I know we’re coming out with the Blu-ray of E.T., if I just came out with one E.T. on Blu-ray, 1982, would anyone object to that?” (loud NO from the audience.) “Okay then, so be it.” (huge applause)

That’s a refreshing opinion, wouldn’t you say, George?

via AllThingsFanGirl