Gary Klein in Seeing What Others Don’t analyzed cases of innovation, and sought their sources. One source he came up with was necessity. His compelling example was the firefighter Wag Dodge who, with maybe 60 seconds until he would be engulfed in flame, lit a match to the grass around him, and then laid down in the still-hot embers. The roaring fire bypassed the patch he pre-burned, and his life was saved. The story is well-told in Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire.
Pondering more cases of necessity might be useful to help us understand, and encourage, future innovation. One candidate might be the kludge that Ed Smylie and his engineers put together to save the Apollo 13 crew from suffocating after an explosion blew up their command capsule oxygen tank.
Necessity may be part of it, but cannot be the whole story. Humanity needed to fly for thousands of years, but it took Wilbur Wright to make it happen. (This point is made in Kevin Ashton’s fine and fun How to Fly a Horse.)
I have ordered the book co-authored by Lovell, and mentioned in a passage quoted below, in case it contains insight on how the Apollo 13 kludge was devised.
(p. B11) Ed Smylie, the NASA official who led a team of engineers that cobbled together an apparatus made of cardboard, plastic bags and duct tape that saved the Apollo 13 crew in 1970 after an explosion crippled the spacecraft as it sped toward the moon, died on April 21 [2025] in Crossville, Tenn. He was 95.
. . .
Soft-spoken, with an accent that revealed his Mississippi upbringing, Mr. Smylie was relaxing at home in Houston on the evening of April 13 when Mr. Lovell radioed mission control with his famous (and frequently misquoted) line: “Uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
An oxygen tank had exploded, crippling the spacecraft’s command module.
Mr. Smylie, . . ., saw the news on television and called the crew systems office, according to the 1994 book “Lost Moon,” by Mr. Lovell and the journalist Jeffrey Kluger. The desk operator said the astronauts were retreating to the lunar excursion module, which was supposed to shuttle two crew members to the moon.
“I’m coming in,” Mr. Smylie said.
Mr. Smylie knew there was a problem with this plan: The lunar module was equipped to safely handle air flow for only two astronauts. Three humans would generate lethal levels of carbon dioxide.
To survive, the astronauts would somehow need to refresh the canisters of lithium hydroxide that would absorb the poisonous gases in the lunar excursion module. There were extra canisters in the command module, but they were square; the lunar module ones were round.
“You can’t put a square peg in a round hole, and that’s what we had,” Mr. Smylie said in the documentary “XIII” (2021).
He and about 60 other engineers had less than two days to invent a solution using materials already onboard the spacecraft.
. . .
In reality, the engineers printed a supply list of the equipment that was onboard. Their ingenious solution: an adapter made of two lithium hydroxide canisters from the command module, plastic bags used for garments, cardboard from the cover of the flight plan, a spacesuit hose and a roll of gray duct tape.
“If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape,” Mr. Smylie said in the documentary. “That’s where we were. We had duct tape, and we had to tape it in a way that we could hook the environmental control system hose to the command module canister.”
Mission control commanders provided step-by-step instructions to the astronauts for locating materials and building the adapter.
. . .
The adapter worked. The astronauts were able to breathe safely in the lunar module for two days as they awaited the appropriate trajectory to fly the hobbled command module home.
. . .
Mr. Smylie always played down his ingenuity and his role in saving the Apollo 13 crew.
“It was pretty straightforward, even though we got a lot of publicity for it and Nixon even mentioned our names,” he said in the oral history. “I said a mechanical engineering sophomore in college could have come up with it.”
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated May 18, 2025, and has the title “Ed Smylie, Who Saved the Apollo 13 Crew With Duct Tape, Dies at 95.”)
Klein’s book that I praise in my introductory comments is:
Klein, Gary A. Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights. Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2013.
Maclean’s book that I praise in my introductory comments is:
Maclean, Norman. Young Men and Fire. new ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Ashton’s book that I praise in my introductory comments is:
Ashton, Kevin. How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery. New York: Doubleday, 2015.
The book co-authored by Lovell and mentioned above is:
Lovell, Jim, and Jeffrey Kluger. Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.