The facility was started as a private defense contractor in the home front of
World War II. As a part of its tax planning in the wake of the war effort, Curtiss-Wright donated the facility to
Cornell University to operate "as a public trust." Seven other east coast aircraft companies also donated $675,000 to provide working capital for the lab. The lab operated under the name
Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory from 1946 until 1972. During this same time, Cornell formed a new Graduate School of Aerospace Engineering on its
Ithaca, New York campus. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, universities came under criticism for conducting war-related research particularly as the
Vietnam War became unpopular, and
Cornell University tried to sever its ties. Similar laboratories at other colleges, such as the
Lincoln Laboratory and
Draper Laboratory at MIT came under similar criticism, but some labs, such as Lincoln, retained their collegiate ties. Cornell accepted a $25 million offer from EDP Technology, Inc. to purchase the lab in 1968. However, a group of lab employees who had made a competing $15 million offer organized a lawsuit to block the sale. In May 1971, New York's highest court ruled that Cornell had the right to sell the lab. At the conclusion of the suit, EDP Technology could not raise the money, and in 1972, Cornell reorganized the lab as the for-profit "Calspan Corporation" and then sold its stock in Calspan to the public. Calspan was the first in a series of corporate owners that have included Arvin Industries, Space Industries International, Veridian Corporation and
General Dynamics. In 2005, Calspan Corporation was returned to independent ownership when a local management group purchased the Aeronautics and Transportation Testing Groups of the Western New York operation from General Dynamics. Under the name of Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory were inventions of the first
crash test dummy in 1948, the automotive
seat belt in 1951, the first mobile field unit with
Doppler weather radar for
weather-tracking in 1956, the first accurate airborne
simulation of another
aircraft (the
North American X-15) in 1960, the first successful demonstration of an automatic
terrain-following radar system in 1964, the first use of a
laser beam to successfully measure
gas density in 1966, the first independent HYGE sled test facility to evaluate
automotive restraint systems in 1967, the mytron, an instrument for research on neuromuscular behavior and disorders in 1969, and the prototype for the
Federal Bureau of Investigation's
fingerprint reading system in 1972. CAL served as an "honest broker" making objective comparisons of competing plans to build military hardware. ==Airplanes==