B E N T L EY U N B O U N D
An Engine for Good THE STRANGE CONTRAPTION PICTURED HERE isn’t a time machine. It’s actually a “Seater-Meter,” invented by Engineering Professor Walter E. Lay in 1940 to improve automobile seats. A series of springs behind the back, and below the seat, measured weight distribution and pressure, and different components could raise, lower, and tilt. Lay’s eldest daughter, Eileen, grins behind the fake wheel. “Nobody had done fundamental work on seats, so we built a universal test seat,” Lay said of the device. Lay didn’t just spend his career sitting around, however; he inspired generations of engineers through years of work testing the aerodynamics of cars and taking early measurements of automobile noise pollution. Born to a farming family in Kalamazoo County, Michigan, Lay was fascinated by engines—their functions, their valves, and especially their “put-chug” noises, according to a newspaper clipping from his collection. He left the farm in 1910 and headed to the University of Michigan. After a brief 1912 interlude working at the Packard Motor Company, he returned to U-M in 1913, in time for the University’s first
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automotive course. Back then, automobiles were studied in the foundry area of the old West Engineering Annex, and an old wooden lean-to with a sloped roof, jokingly called “the cow shed.” Volume two of Lay’s scrapbooks at the Bentley describes him wearing galoshes and raincoats inside when it rained. The roof leaked. The wooden “lab” was also a fire risk: he remembered “running pell mell for the fire extinguishers.” (In 1937, the lean-to would partially burn down.) After graduating, and working as a teaching assistant, Lay became a Major in the Army Ordnance Corps at U-M, training mechanics during World War I. As a professor post-war, he was a student favorite, known for telling the “snazziest” stories in his classes. He was also known for his humor and kindness. In a letter, one student remembered him giving “argyle socks and fancy neckties” to his assistants for holidays. Lay even won the “Spoofun” cup, a tin funnel with spoons for handles, given to the professor who was the best sport about being mocked, or “roasted,” at an Engineering dinner.
Living with wife Thyrza, two daughters, his wife’s father, and his wife’s father’s hunting dogs (14 champion beagles and, later, six springer spaniels) meant that home was just as lively as work. Fun, for Lay, included reading the encyclopedia at breakfast, explaining mechanics at dinner, singing with friends, building rock gardens, and growing “the largest raspberries and radishes around.” His favorite pastime, though, was dreaming up a new, safer, automotive laboratory. The old lab’s 1943 addition wasn’t enough. He drew and redrew schematics for years. In 1956, a new lab was finally built on North Campus; volume two of Professor Lay’s scrapbooks called it his “baby in living concrete and steel.” A bronze bust of Lay was funded by his former students to decorate the space, sculpted by Carleton Angell. Lay’s daughter Eileen described her father as “powered by a spirit always driven to know the unknown—to cross another frontier—to look for a new and better way.” His name still lives on in the title of today’s Walter E. Lay Automotive Engineering Laboratory, and his life’s work can be perused at the Bentley in the Walter E. Lay papers.
HS4909
By Madeleine Bradford
