Glennan, T. Keith

▪ 1996

      U.S. government official (b. Sept. 8, 1905, Enderlin, N.D.—d. April 11, 1995, Mitchellville, Md.), as the first director (1958-61) of NASA, coordinated and incorporated the spaceflight efforts of the various laboratories working in the U.S. armed services and merged them into one agency. One of Glennan's first actions was to recruit controversial German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, who was working on U.S. army missiles, to work on space projects. Glennan's vision was a cautionary one—he wanted to keep NASA small and did not want to compete with the U.S.S.R. in a race into space. A graduate of Yale University with a B.S. (1927) in electrical engineering, Glennan first used his technological training to convert the U.S. and British film industry to the emerging sound technology. During World War II he served as administrator of the U.S. Navy's underwater sound laboratory, New London, Conn., where he developed new methods of detecting submarines—later known as sonar. In 1947 Glennan became president of the Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University), Cleveland, Ohio, and turned the facility into one of the nation's premier engineering schools. He temporarily left Case in 1950 to serve as a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission but left that post on Oct. 30, 1952, one day before the first hydrogen bomb was tested in the Pacific. After retiring from Case in 1966, Glennan became the U.S. representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

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