Edward Hall helped develop rockets for U.S.

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, January 17, 2006

LOS ANGELES – Col. Edward N. Hall, the U.S. Air Force’s foremost rocket expert who is widely considered the father of the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile program that is the core of this country’s missile defense, died Sunday. He was 91.

The solid-fuel rocket technology that he helped develop was subsequently used in most other U.S. missiles, including the Polaris, the Titan III and IV and the boosters on the space shuttle.

Early U.S. rockets were liquid fueled, typically operating on a mixture of liquid oxygen and alcohol or kerosene. But these compounds were sufficiently unstable that the rockets could not be kept fueled and ready for launch.

A solid-fuel rocket, in contrast, could be kept safely fueled and ready for launch at a moment’s notice. But early solid fuels did not generate enough power to lift a rocket into space, they had a disturbing tendency to burn through the sides of the rocket casing, and they could not be shut down once ignited.

Working with engineers at companies such as Thiokol and the Boeing Co., Hall was able to overcome these problems.

Leonard South worked with Alfred Hitchcock

HOLLYWOOD – Cinematographer Leonard J. South, the camera operator on nearly a dozen Alfred Hitchcock classics such as “North by Northwest” and “The Birds” and later the director of photography on Hitchcock’s “Family Plot,” has died. He was 92.

South, who had Alzheimer’s disease, died of pneumonia Jan. 6 in a care facility in Los Angeles, said his son, film editor Leonard South II.

South began his three-decade association with Hitchcock as cinematographer Robert Burks’ camera assistant on the 1951 film “Strangers on a Train.”

South, who was soon elevated to camera operator, became part of what Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto called “the ongoing Hitchcock crew who came to know exactly what the director wanted and how to give it to him.”

“Hitch was always trying to push the limits on techniques and to be different,” South told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “The crew and actors went along, but I tell you, those (crop-duster and bird) scenes were some of the hardest I’ve ever been involved in. They called for absolutely perfect timing in situations that were really rather scary.”

The Los Angeles Times