Engineer an expert in carbon fiber

From designing parts of a lunar landing module to patenting prosthetic legs, John Merlette has had an eventful life.

The 68-year old Bigfork resident and semi-retired engineer is the king of carbon fiber, commonly — yet inaccurately, Merlette emphasizes — referred to as graphite.

His alma mater, Grove City College, is recognizing his accomplishments by giving him the highest award it gives to alumni, the Jack Kennedy Memorial Alumni Achievement Award.

Merlette graduated from the Pennsylvania school in 1968 and was recruited by engineering firms before he graduated.

“I took the lowest of paying jobs, but it turned out to be a gold mine,” he said.

The company he started with, Hercules Aerospace, gave him the opportunity to experiment with applications of carbon fiber. He designed a strut for a lunar module during the Apollo space program.

But he wasn’t always encouraged by his higher-ups.

Merlette invented the first carbon-fiber golf-club shaft, but after being turned down by Spalding Sporting Goods, his boss advised him to drop the idea. He never patented it, and another company snatched it up, going on to make obscene amounts of money.

“I was holding golf club shafts in 1973, several years later, made of carbon fiber,” Merlette said. “My boss told me no one would ever pay $500 for a golf club. He apologized for years after.”

But he doesn’t hold a grudge.

His co-workers in those early days were supportive and their creativity allowed him to work on his own projects such as the first carbon-fiber bicycle wheel.

Carbon fiber has the same strength as steel or aluminum but weighs considerably less, making the wheel he patented in the 1970s an ideal one for competitive cyclists.

Merlette, who slips in and out of engineering-speak effortlessly, then talks nonchalantly about jury-rigging parts for a satellite.

“We needed to make a stargazer,” he said, describing the triangulation method that orients manmade satellites. “I built it myself. I also built the ribs of spy satellites.”

The ribs had to be within 1/1000th of an inch accurate over a length of 20 feet, so Merlette had to construct them in a temperature-controlled room.

While not designing parts for spacecraft, he spends time at his computer in his gorgeous house on 70 acres north of Bigfork.

“I’ve never actually played a computer game in my life,” he said. “But I ‘play’ with engineering problems and that’s all the fun I want.”

Although graphite ski poles and other recreational inventions made Merlette plenty of money, one of his proudest achievements came when he was tasked with solving a serious problem for NASA.

The space shuttles had problems with ceramic tiles falling off the wings upon re-entry. Well before the Challenger and Columbia disasters, this was one of the biggest issues NASA was concerned with.

The hot metal of the spacecraft would expand when heating in the re-entry process, and the ceramic wouldn’t, creating chinks in the armor of the shuttle.

Merlette solved this issue by designing a graphite honeycomb that is epoxied to the metal and ceramic yet balances the two different natures of the types of shielding. This prevented chunks from flying off so easily and endangering astronauts.

He left Hercules in 1978 and moved to Salt Lake City to work for EDO Fiber Science, where he designed aircraft parts. Among these were anti-ballistic helicopter tanks, carbon-fiber helicopter blades and the vacuum waste-disposal system used on Boeing 767s.

He did all that in five years, then left to start his own company.

“We struggled until 1990,” Merlette said. “Our biggest contract was for the Brooks shoe company, and that was mostly a gimmick.”

Inspiration struck Merlette, as it had many times before, and he developed a prosthetic foot. He had hit paydirt.

The Springlite line of prosthetics allowed amputees of all varieties to participate in athletics. Oscar Pistorius, the South African “Blade Runner,” uses a different company’s version of Merlette’s prosthetic.

He sold the company in 2001 and has spent his time since then writing. He released a  trilogy of science-fiction novels called the Time and Space Trilogy and has been a frequent writer of letters to the editor in The Daily Inter Lake.

When not espousing his ideas to get America back to its roots, he spends times golfing, fishing on his own lake and skiing.

He has advice for students currently in college to follow a similar path.

“Take 3-D printers for example,” he said. “If your college has one, get some experience with it. It’s a great new technology with a tremendous upside. Try for an internship. A recruiter will just go ga-ga for a young person with hands-on experience.”

And who knows? Maybe in 45 years, that young person’s alma mater will fly him or her back to present them with an alumni award.

Reporter Ryan Murray may be reached at 758-4439 or at rmurray@dailyinterlake.com.