elville W. Beardsley MS ME '39, says he knows a simple and
inexpensive way of using the ocean's own force to rebuild
eroded beaches.He constructed a wave tank in his Carmel, Calif., backyard to prove his theory, and it worked: The miniature beach in the tank grew instead of shrinking.
Now he needs to convince somebody somewhere to try a full-scale demonstration on a real beach. A number of agencies have expressed interest in the process, but no tests have been arranged. Beardsley is not discouraged. An inventor who has received 22 patents over the years, he has faced disbelief before and can claim some unusual accomplishments.
He is one of the few pilots ever to fly a model of the experimental Flying Wing aircraft that Northrop tested after World War II.
He perfected the vacuum-cooling process that is still used in the Salinas Valley to keep lettuce fresh and crisp for market.
And he is co-inventor of the vehicle known as the hovercraft.
Beardsley, bright and enthusiastic at 80, lives in Carmel with his wife, Marie; they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary Oct. 31. When the couple moved to Carmel in 1981, Beardsley often found himself at the beach, watching the ocean with the eyes of a mechanical engineer.
"I'd always been intrigued with the way the waves worked," he says. "I had this grand feeling about what was happening with the sand."
He built his own wave tank to model the dynamics of sand and water, and he came up with what he calls the Beachbuilder Technique.
he method involves spreading a thin, flexible tarpaulin
over the sand in the surf zone. The tarp is anchored by a
line along the beach edge, and tethered more loosely at the
ocean edge. Incoming waves carry sand beneath the tarp, but
when the waves recede, the tarp prevents the sand from
washing out again. Eventually a mound builds up under the
tarp, which can then be moved down the beach to another
location.
Beardsley says the Beachbuilder Technique is much less expensive than hiring dredges and barges or installing breakwaters to restore eroded beaches.
He received a patent on the technique on Nov. 9. A paper he published about the process attracted a few nibbles of interest; he says his best current hope is an engineer for the state of New Jersey who seems to be interested in carrying out a test in a large wavetank there.
But no one has yet tried the technique on a beach.
"I hope I live long enough to see something come out of it," Beardsley says.
Born in Kansas City, Mo., Beardsley graduated from the University of Illinois in 1935 with a mechanical engineering degree and enrolled in the Army Air Corps, piloting Keystone biplane bombers and other aircraft for nearly three years.
He then earned a masters degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech in 1939, and worked for the Engineering Experiment Station, now Georgia Tech Research Institute. He also worked for several firms, including Chrysler Corp., before being called back to active duty.
After the war, he went to work for Northrop, which was developing the Flying Wing. Very high-tech for its time, the long-range bomber was all wing--no fuselage or tail.
eardsley was project engineer for a year or so, and
piloted a Flying Wing prototype on a test flight in the Los
Angeles area.
Then a friend told him about a man in Salinas who held a patent on a revolutionary cooling process for vegetables. Beardsley went to the Salinas Valley and perfected the process, which cooled crates of lettuce quickly and efficiently in a vacuum chamber, freeing growers from the need to layer the crates with ice.
The technique is still in use, but the Vacuum Cooling Co., which Beardsley helped start, dissolved in partnership disagreements.
Beardsley went back to school, earring an MBA at the University of Chicago. Between classes, he began thinking about flying saucers. In the early '50s, with sightings reported everywhere, flying saucers were on everyone's mind. Beardsley considered the matter and asked himself: How would you make a saucer-shaped craft fly?
He began fooling around with tin cans and vacuum-cleaner blowers, and eventually came up with a model that didn't fly, but scooted across the floor on a cushion of air.
He applied for a patent, but a British inventor, Christopher Cockerell, filed a patent application at the same time. Rather than fight the British action, Beardsley accepted a $70,000 settlement.
He spent the rest of his working years in the Navy's Marine Engineering Lab at Annapolis, Md., retiring in 1976.
While he waits for someone to catch the vision of his Beachbuilder Technique, Beardsley is making a little extra money as a salesman for a long distance phone-service provider.
But, he admits, "this type of work is definitely not what I want to do." Not while there are engineering problems to ponder and beaches to build.
Calvin Demmon is a staff writer for the Monterey County Herald in Monterey, Calif. This article is reprinted by permission.