Excellence in Teaching, Research on ‘Project Mohole’ Highlight Retiring Professor’s Career — William P. Schneider

By Brian Allen

The audience at this year’s Faculty and Staff Meeting gave a much-deserved standing ovation for Professor William P. Schneider, who is retiring from the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering after 37 years of teaching at the Cullen College of Engineering.

Schneider, a UH alumnus with bachelors degrees in both mathematics and engineering, received the ovation at the annual meeting held April 30 while receiving a plaque from Dean Raymond Flumerfelt honoring him for his years of service to the college. Schneider, whose original connection to the university goes back 57 years, has been recognized with numerous awards for his teaching excellence throughout his career.

One of Schneider’s many successful former students, Dennis Webb (1976 BSEE), remembers the professor’s helpful teaching style. “I took a couple of electronics classes form Professor Schneider in 1973 and ’74,” says Webb, who is now manager of NASA’s International Space Station Integration for Mission Operations, “I remember it as one of the most pleasant and productive courses I had while I was out there (at UH).”

Webb, who has been working on the space station for 17 years, says Schneider was special partly because he took the time to help students who were having trouble with difficult or new material.

“This was a time of great insecurity for most students because if we couldn’t master the electronics then electrical engineering might not be for us,” Webb says.

In addition to teaching, Schneider also pursued a high-profile research career that was highlighted by work in the 1960s on Project Mohole, a nationally funded effort to drill a hole through the earth’s crust beneath the floor of the ocean to reach the interior of the earth. His later research on the deep-sea drilling exploration vessel, the Glomar Challenger, helped confirm the theory of continental drift.

Paradoxically, it was the lure of the sky-not the earth-that originally propelled Schneider toward a career in engineering.

As a boy, he loved to build model airplanes, and growing up in St. Louis gave him the opportunity to cultivate his interest by visiting the airfield where aviator Charles A. Lindbergh’s airplane was housed in the 1930s.

As it turned out, those childhood experiences shaped Schneider destiny. In 1940 he joined the United States Air Force. He enlisted at the age of 18 and was sworn in at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, where he learned about airplanes.

“That’s the reason I went into the service,” Schneider says, “to learn how to fly.”

After serving for a year and a half at Randolph, he was transferred to Ellington Field in Houston, Texas. Shortly after coming to Houston, Schneider met his future bride, Mary, on a blind date on Valentine’s Day in 1942. By Sept. 5 of the same year the two were married at the chapel at Ellington Field. The couple will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary this fall.

“I was very lucky in being able to take my wife with me as we went to the various bases,” says Schneider.

Because of the aptitude Schneider showed for understanding the complex electrical working of the B-29, he was selected for training as a flight engineer and later became an instructor at a school squadron at Roswell Air Force Base in New Mexico.

“They sent me up to Boeing, where I went through about a three-month course in engineering,” says Schneider, who never saw combat but trained many of the pilots and flight engineers that did. “It stuck to me and I really enjoyed that kind of work. We would get the pilot, the co-pilot and flight engineers, and we’d get two groups of these people, and we would put them through intensive training.”

The B-29 was the first aircraft that had a flight engineer, who controlled all the instrumentation for the entire aircraft.

“We determined how much fuel we had left, what altitude we should take, remote control gun turrets, cabin pressure,” he says. “It was a really sophisticated airplane, and that’s why I chose electrical engineering. The airplane itself is what fascinated me.”

When Schneider left the service, he considered going to Rice but decided against it when he learned Rice only accepted new students in September. “I was anxious to go to school and the University of Houston allowed us to go in during the middle of the year. Some of the classes were being taught in old barracks. In fact, we had some rooms that would leak water when it rained. But one of the things that I’ve always said is that it’s not so much what kind of equipment you have; it’s who the professor is. And we had some excellent teachers.”

After graduating from UH, Schneider received a full scholarship from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was the first UH graduate to attend MIT. “I got my master’s degree in electrical engineering and then I came back to the University of Houston in 1951 as an assistant professor and started working during the summer for Schlumberger.” He went from Schlumberger to Brown & Root and the Project Mohole.

According to documents at the National Academy of Engineering, Project Mohole represented the earth sciences’ answer to the space program. If successful, the exploration of the intraterrestrial frontier would provide invaluable information on the earth’s age, makeup, and internal processes. In addition, evidence drawn from Mohole would be brought to bear on the question of continental drift, which at the time was still controversial.

The project lost political support and funding before the goal of drilling to the mantle could be reached, but two technologies developed during Mohole had significant impact on the offshore drilling industry: the dynamic positioning system and the sonar system for hole re-entry. As Brown & Root’s staff engineer in charge of downhole logging and scientific measurements, Schneider was intimately involved in the development of both.

Because the drilling operations on Mohole were to be carried out in deep water, conventional static anchoring was not an option. That meant Schneider and his colleagues had to devise a system for keeping the platform centered above the hole.

After consulting with Honeywell and General Motors Defense Research Laboratories, they developed a computer-assisted sonar system that employed a beacon at the hole and hydrophones on the base of the platform. The system was widely used by industry in deep-water drilling for many years before being replaced by even more accurate referencing systems using satellites.

“Everything we did had not been done before,” Schneider says. “They wouldn’t have had the dynamic positioning system as quickly as they did if it were not for the Mohole.”

In addition to solving the positioning problem, Schneider had to address the problem of re-entry. Studies indicated drilling a hole deep enough to reach the mantle (33,000 to 35,000 feet) could possibly require roughly three years of continuous drilling. The odds of maintaining contact between the platform and the hole for three years without interruption were very poor, so developing a means of accurately relocating the hole and positioning the drill pipe in the three-mile deep water was essential.

“That was when we developed the re-entering system,” Schneider says, “putting a funnel-type device on the floor where you start your first setting and start to drill the hole through that.”

After the Project Mohole, Schneider decided to return to teaching and began consulting for the National Science Foundation on the deep sea drilling exploration vessel Glomar Challenger.

Much of Schneider’s work on the Challenger focused on improving the dynamic positioning system. Two particularly difficult problems—both of which were solved—were perfecting how the beacon was detected despite engine noise and developing the technology to move the ship from side to side while positioning the ship over the hole.

“In order to stay in the correct position over the drilling site, we had to be able to move the ship sideways, so we installed two tunnel thrusters in the stern and two in the bow,” Schneider says.

“We were talking to the Navy, and we were trying to determine the precise amount of thrust we were going to need to move the ship sideways. We had stay within an area that was roughly the width of the vessel, so we asked them, ‘What do we need for the moment of inertia in moving port to starboard?’ There was a long silence, and they finally said, ‘We don’t move our ships that way.’”

© 2002 University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering