6 Aerospace and JPL
6.1 Bland’s Scientific Journey
1: Carter Labs, Lattie Lamb, Bill Pilkington, JPL
Navy’s Vanguard, Sputnik, Explorer, Martian landing 40 years later
IBM 709, Fortran, Feller
4: Goldstone Dry Lake
Carter Labs carterlabs.1-3
Fuel Cell Patent carterlabs.2 Continuous Gas Concentration Cell Energy Conversion Patent 1-5
6.1.1 Carter Labs
I ended up working at Carter Labs. In fact, I ended up taking my best friend Lattie Lamb to work there, too. Carter Labs had an entrepreneurial crew of professors and students from Caltech. They struck out into the world of money and finance, trying to solve some of these complicated math problems. Carter’s own specialty was in physical chemistry and stuff.
My father got me working in there, OK? They were trying to make things for the Navy, like fuel based on aluminum because of the enormous weight. When you look at the activation reduction potential, it looked like you could make a wonderful fuel out of it. But in practice it turned out to be a problem because it oxidized so fast, you never really can do much with it. They were studying the thermodynamics, trying to stretch single crystals. I ended up doing the first high speed stretching things. I had a boss that was also a chemist from Caltech, graduated from there, and we used to carry on at great lengths about all sorts of different things.
At the time the ___ job that I got that where I did a ___ where I did some really interesting ___ work was kind of like a physical chemist who was working directly out of the group and was using students from Caltech. Guess what happened? All this teaching essentially ___ all the students ___ and ___ JPL and was my boss that was head of the chemistry lecturing and ___ labs and another Caltech student and he was the one ___ into the group that built that first Explorer satellites and ___ by coincidence was finishing his Ph.D. ___ too. Right in the middle of his ___ but talk about echoes ___ echoes, but again there was this whole style of doing ___ so it just was a way.
I remember being hired at Carter Labs and the first things that we did at Carter Labs was try to stretch single crystals to very high rates of speed to see what their reaction rates would be. Aluminum because in theory alone it should burst into flame and disappear. Oxygen developed such a __ scale that it didn’t have an interaction at all and we couldn’t devise any way of either deforming it at very high rates or anything. We could get a __ water so you can take the reaction from pure metal, say to make __ much along the way of reaction to say aluminum chloride and then the chloride __ sort of like sodium chloride you could have it __.
It turns out that aluminum chloride wants water so bad that if you take some aluminum chloride, spread it on water, it bursts into flame explosively. Reactionary. And then __ it’s aluminum chloride partially hydrogenated but the thing is for chlorinating the under side of your armpits to make real long lasting deodorants. That’s aluminum chlorohydrate that they stick in many deodorants. I’m too allergic to use it but many people __.
But it’s an incredible reaction so that you would think that aluminum would be . There was actually a whole study that Carter Labs did because their big thing was to do the consequences of that were being done say in the physical sciences, especially in physical chemistry which was at that time the place where mathematics was beginning to be applied more systematically.
At that time organic chemistry was still black magic soup making. At that time the physical chemistry had just sort of crossed over into being very quantitative. And as a result, it was getting all sorts of workers to investigate __ properties of all sorts of different combinations to see what reaction would go. In theory we should be able to try, torpedo, almost indefinitely with the combination of sea water and __. But it turned out that when you started studying single crystals and stressing with high rates of speed.
So we actually __ the first high speed photography equipment for searching single crystals, and so that’s what I mean. I was constantly being __ back in because at first I had to photographs of __ to see if it would shift at all if you did it in water, under __ reactants. And then finally the single crystal stretching to see if by breaking the __ edge were taking high speed photos you could see any reaction. It turns out the format of that __ resistance __ was a lot faster than we could stretch, regardless of how fast you tried to stretch. But that’’ the sort of things that I found myself always getting talked into. Sometimes I was working on things from the math point of view and sometimes doing from the biology point of view.
Fuel Cell Patent
You know he had a, has he talked to you about the patent he has?
*Yeah, he talked a little bit about it. I’ve got some notes in the car about that.
I was just thinking about that.
*The fuel cell.
Yeah, I mean you read the patent.
*Have you read the patent?
Yeah, I remember seeing it once. It like covers, it’s an incredibly broad patent. I mean thinking about it now it’s like I don’t know how anybody ever got away with this. But it seemed like it covered using the fuel cell from basically over anything you could conceivably do with it and then some things that only Bland would think of.
*Well my friend Dave is a patent lawyer and I was thinking on my drive up here of contacting him and asking him about that, because he could find it.
Sure. All that stuff is on, existing patents are all on-line now.
*Yeah, he could find it in about 5 minutes, so I’d like to get a copy of it anyway.
I mean even Bland thought it was fortuitous but basically ludicrous in terms of the uses that were proposed.
*But the patent would have run out by now. 20 years.
Probably.
*But it’s still, I don’t know if you can reapply for a patent, probably not, it runs out. But it might still be something interesting to bring forward. I mean if it’s ideas that people haven’t come up with yet, not let it get it back out there. It could blow some other patents out of the water but you know, you’d think they would look at that.
I have a couple of friends that either have patents or tried to get them on stuff and I don’t know anything in high tech. My impression is that it’s pretty arbitrary whether you get a patent or not, or whether, you know, what’s going on.
*I took all the interviews and organized them into chapters and sections. Some of it is still out of order but it’s a good start. Does this look familiar here? Continuous gas concentration cell energy conversion patent. Does that bring back any memories?
I’m starting to cry. That was a beautiful piece of work. I remember the person at Xerox that said, oh gee this won’t work. You can’t draw enough current and things and I said yeah.
*Now they’re making them.
Oh, that’s intriguing.
*Well I mean there are fuel cells.
They are closing the loop using hydrogen and hydrogenization reactions and also shifting color. It was the first device of five planned patents. There were 5 patents together. There were 4 that did things like put the things together in a layout, only a few thousandths of an inch thick, so that the whole current density got to run that way. The other one was weaving the stuff together in such a way that you could draw— even though it had only a few thousandths thick, it was never really far from the conductor by the way you wove it all together. The way it worked, it also gave a path for the gas and also for the reaction materials. Actually it was a group of 5 patents conceived, of which I did the first one. Xerox said oh gee, we bought Electro-Optical, the company that got the patent for me. Does it show you that stuff or anything?
*Let’s see. Yeah, it should have all of that information in here.
Is it Electro-Optical or something like that?
The patent was originally issued to, and then later on Xerox because they bought Electro-Optical out.
*Electro-Optical, no, it doesn’t have that.
It’s interesting that sort of a direction that indeed fuel cells. They were supposed to be thermally driven with moderate temperature differences too. It was a complete kernel loop. You can’t get any better than that. Kernel efficiency in the loop.
6.1.2 From Sputnik to Explorer
Explorer explorer.1-25
Present Time explorer.1 Mars Landing in 1997 explorer.1 Classified Work and Integrity explorer.2 Applying for a Job explorer.3 Sputnik explorer.5 Explorer Satellites explorer.6 NASA explorer.13 Skunk Works explorer.14 New Circuit Elements Group explorer.15 Early Computers at JPL explorer.17 Mathematics explorer.18 Running explorer.20 Tragedy explorer.24 Present Time explorer.25 Correspondence with Archivist 1-4 Notes on Explore I by John Bluth 1-5 Correspondence with Archivist 1 Notes on New Circuit Elements Group 1
6.1.3 Correspondence with JPL Archives
So at any rate, that stuff’s gone and also a lot, anyway that’s for redefining some of that JPL stuff and it makes sense so __. What also made sense, as more and more things like that are described, I can talk about the larger set of what actually happened, if you’re comfortable with that.
*Yeah. Well, let me see what I can find out about what’s declassified. Would you like me to send you copies of material?
No, because I’m overloaded so badly you can’t believe it but it’s the sort of thing I would eventually like to __ on but not now. This is too heavy duty a time.
*Right, so if I just do like we’re doing now, that’s a good way to do it.
From time to time, when you’re there and it’s convenient, pop out a few more things.
*Ok, sounds good. So that’s the JPL stuff. They are interested, this archivist would be interested at some point in the transcripts from this that are related to JPL. Now my thought is that once we put this together as a book, then we can give it to them that way but another possibility is they might, that might be a place to archive some of this material if you’re open to that kind of thing.
Yes, and I’m very easy to do that. That was a neat place.
Date: Tue, 09 Jun 1998 13:35:37 -0600
To: julie.a.cooper@jpl.nasa.gov
Subject: Bland Ewing, the original SkunkWorks, and Explorer 1
Julie,
Just tried to call you after finding your name on the oral history web page at JPL (please note that that page has your old area code). Here is an email I sent to the archives. Perhaps you can help?
Thanks,
Brian
Date: Tue, 09 Jun 1998 14:28:50 -0500
Subject: Bland Ewing, the original SkunkWorks, and Explorer 1
Folks,
I am writing a book about Bland Ewing, one of my mentors. First let me say
I got my BSc in math from Caltech in 1974, and am a member of the Gnome
Club. I am now a professor of Statistics and Horticulture at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. So much for credentials.
Bland’s father Frederick Ewing was a student of Linus Pauling in the
30’s/40’s when LP was developing his ideas on quantum chemistry. Bland
grew up around LP, Richard Feynman and others of that ilk. There is a
story that Albert Einstein would come over to their home, that of James
Frederick Ewing, Bland’s grandfather and the directory of the Pasadena
Symphony; AE would play the violin if it were handed to him.
In the mid 1950’s, Bland worked at Carter Labs in Pasadena, with “only” a
high school education and some courses at Caltech. Bland moved from this
to JPL, working under Henry Richter and with Bill Pelkington. They were
designing the Explorer satellites in 1957 when Sputnik went up. Henry
Richter was the director of their group, code-named “Skunk Works” and
hidden away in JPL. When the call came from the President for a response
to Sputnik, Skunk Works was. Bland and 3-5 others went to the Rand
Corporation to make it fly. Bland said he inscribed his initials BE on the
batteries of the first several Explorer satellites after he checked them out.
Bland did the telemetry calculations on an IBM 709 machine. Actually, he
did as much by hand and with geometry as he could because it was so hard to
program the computer. (As you probably know, the computer took up the
whole floor of a building, with a lower floor filled with people keeping it
running.) He did the Mercater projections, and helped design where to
place the “listening stuff” around the globe so that the satellite could be
tracked continuously. This proved very important because it allowed the
Explorer team to discover the van Allen belt, which the Soviets were not
able to do.
Hopefully, you find this interesting. It is only a fraction of Bland’s
life, but I would like to fill in the gaps on this chapter. Are the
records of the original Skunk Works open? Is there any expert on this time
whom I can contact? Please recall that this is all pre-NASA. It seems a
General Medaris of the Army was involved (based on his 1960 book,
“Countdown for Decision”), and the Army provided primary funding (as
opposed to the Navy’s ill-fated Vanguard program). Goldstone Dry Lake,
Mojave Desert, figures prominently in some of the testing and in the first
contact with Explorer 1.
Bland Ewing is still alive, but is suffering from Huntington’s Disease, the
same genetic neurological disorder that took his father and grandfather.
His memory of dates and names is intermittent.
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 09:38:03 -0700
To: byandell@facstaff.wisc.edu
From: John Bluth john.f.bluth@jpl.nasa.gov
Subject: Bland Ewing
Dear Mr. Yandell,
I am responding to your inquiry about information at the JPL Archives about a former JPL employee, Bland Ewing.
Ewing is not listed as an author of any documents published at JPL prior to 1970; he is not indexed in the Laboratory’s employee newspaper for the same period. I can confirm he was here in October 1959; a JPL telephone book lists him as a lab technician in Section 23, Guidance Techniques Research, with a home address of 112 E. Las Flores Drive, Altadena, CA. He is not listed in the June 1962 JPL telephone book nor later.
He is not shown by name on the organization chart for the project JPL mounted to prepare and launch Explorer 1 (“Project Deal,” November 20, 1957).
Robertson Stevens was the head of Section 23 in 1957. Henry Richter and William Pilkington both worked in the Section under Stevens. Pilkington is the spelling our records show.
Over 80 people worked on Project Deal, with Jack Froelich as Project head. Stevens was in charge of all antennas, both on the satellite and on the ground; Pilkington worked under Walt Victor (Satellite Instrumentation) in satellite electronics; Richter worked under Al Hibbs and Fred Eimer (Satellite Observation) on liaison and data acquisition. Karl Linnes, also from Section 23, was responsible for siteing the tracking stations for Explorer I.
To my knowledge, the term Skunk Works was never applied to any part of the activity at JPL nor was there any code name given to JPL’s preparing and launching Explorer I except Project Deal. Skunk Works was applied to the secret activities building aircraft at a warehouse next to the Burbank Airport operated by the Lockheed Corporation. Out of that Skunk Works emerged the SR-71 Blackbird in the early 1960’s.
All JPL records available are open for use at the Archives. Several people are still alive who worked on Explorer I. For a general review of JPL’s role with Explorer I I would suggest Clayton Koppes’ JPL and the American Space Program (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). I have also attached some on my own notes about this time period. In these notes I did not try to clarify the footnotes for you; they contain several shorthand references to sources in the JPL Archives which may be meaningless to you.
I’m sorry I can’t offer you more confirming information about Mr. Ewing’s role at JPL. If you have further interests, please contact me by e-mail or by telephone.
John Bluth, Archivist
626-449-1593
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 20:59:03 -0600
To: John Bluth john.f.bluth@jpl.nasa.gov
Subject: Re: Bland Ewing
John,
Thanks for your detailed response. I have read it over several times, and appreciate your thoroughness. A friend of mine will be visiting Bland this weekend with a copy of this material (I hope), and I will see him in early July. I hope I can then sort out some of the discrepancies and complementaries. In a way, I am not surprised that he did not appear on an organizational chart. He was quite young (26) and indicated in some way that he was squirreled away from the hierarchy. (Thanks for the correction on Pilkington – Bland and Bill were running buddies, and Bland has a sad account of his untimely death.)
It may be that Bland worked on the SkunkWorks project with Lockheed. He did say that he had worked on some very classified material, but would not divulge anything (nor did I ask). Is that project now declassified? Would it be possible to learn if he was on it?
I am positive that Bland did work on the Explorer I satellite. While I learned of it only recently, Jim Barbieri (copied on this) and others heard the stories in the 1970’s when Bland was smart as a whip and in full control of his faculties.
Later this summer, I would be willing to share a copy of my interview, provided Bland is agreeable and you are interested. However, I do intend to publish a book on this material, and wish to retain control of distribution at this time.
You mentioned that some of the folks involved in “Project Deal” were still alive. Is there any chance I could contact them? I am trying to locate Koppes’ book, which seems like it will be quite helpful.
Again, thank you for your generous time and careful notes.
Brian
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 07:52:33 -0700
From: John Bluth john.f.bluth@jpl.nasa.gov
Subject: Re: Bland Ewing
Brian,
I can’t tell you about the SkunkWorks or Lockheed or if its records are now declassified. That would require you to contact Lcokheed. I do know there are some books on the Skunkworks; Lockheed has since registered the name as a trademark.
I would be interested in a copy of your interview with Bland; I understand and would respect your control over it.
Yes, several people involved in “Project Deal” are still alive. I’m sure you could contact them. Koppes will include the names of the significant players in all of this.
John
Several people are still alive who worked on Explorer I. For a general review of JPL’s role with Explorer I I would suggest Clayton Koppes’ JPL and the American Space Program (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Out of print according to amazon.com[
Author: Koppes, Clayton R., 1945-
Title: JPL and the American space program : a history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory / Clayton R. Koppes. – New Haven : Yale University Press, c1982.
(ACN2129)
Location: Astronomy Library
Call Number: TL568 J47 K66 1982 (copy 2)
Circulation Status not yet available online
Location: Library Stacks Regular Size Shelving
Call Number: TL568 J47 K66 1982
Status: Not checked out.
Format: xiii, 299 p., [6] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 25 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN: 0300024088
OCLC Number: 08408957Subject Headings:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (U.S.) -- History.
Astronautics -- United States -- History. Other:
J.P.L. and the American space program. Monday, July 19, 1999
Dr. Henry L. Richter
Richter Group
2755 Alondra Way
Palm Springs, CA 92264
Dear Dr. Richter:
Thank you very much for the video “X Minus 80 Days” about the Explorer 1 satellite program. I enjoyed viewing it this morning, and am sure Bland will be thrilled to see it this next week. I trust it is OK to make a separate copy for him. Thank you in addition for the papers that document the telemetry system.
I am enclosing my notes on Bland Ewing’s experiences at JPL surrounding the Explorer program. They are somewhat condensed from interviews that span about two years. [The numbers in the margins refer to tape numbers and can be ignored.] The first few pages are summaries of material passed by John Bluth, the archivist with Sherikon that handles JPL material.
I would like to give you a day or two to read this and then call you to confirm and/or expand on events that Bland has discussed. I will try to reach you on Wednesday, 21 July. If you are willing, I would like to tape our interview.
As I mentioned, I will be visiting Bland during 23-28 July. Based on conversations with you and with former JPL Director William Pickering, we understand that Bland is free to talk about any aspect of the Explorer program and related JPL work. He intends to share more of his experiences during my visit. We may try to call you during that week, probably next Monday or Tuesday (or Sunday if you prefer).
Again, thank you very much for your generosity. I look forward to talking with you soon.
John Bluth
Notes on Explorer I, John Bluth, JPL Archives, June 1998
Sputnik 1 launched October 4, 1957: Sputnik syndrome (humiliation, wounded pride, an international challenge, a domestic political weapon, self promotion of institution)[1]
William Pickering-Cargill Hall 1975 Oral History Interview: Caltech as an institution wanted do get away from doing classified research and saw joining the space program/NASA as a way of leaving the military behind. Pickering was the Director of JPL.
Frank Goddard-Don Bane 1988 Oral History interview (p. 27): Pickering met in conference meeting with Jack Froehlich, Bob Parks, and Goddard, the 3 division heads of JPL (others such as Val Larsen and Homer Joe Stewart may have been there). They discussed going with NASA or staying with the Army. After the discussion stage of the meeting ended, Froehlich arose, went to the room’s blackboard and wrote in large block letters SPACE, and sat down. “. . . an imaginative space program was quite frankly something that was irresistible. Nothing comparable to it, even remaining with the Army.”
On October 11, 1957: James Hagerty, White House Press Secretary, stated US would launch a Vanguard satellite in near future (therefore not seen as test vehicle).
JPL responds to Sputnik with Project Red Socks proposal on October 21, 1957: a series of nine launches around the Moon to look at the backside using Re-entry Test Vehicle (RTV) rockets, the first by June, 1958 to send a 15 pound payload, a second to fly in January 1959 with 120 pounds (this specifically called the Red Socks configuration). To use a four-stage rocket 72 feet tall with Jupiter as first stage, and then 11, 3 and 1 Grand Central Rocket Company 33KS2800 solid motors for the second, third and fourth stages. To use Microlock communication techniques with increased 10 watt transmitter and increased Microlock helices to a 4 by 4 array. Temperature, pressure and light intensity would be the data telemetered in first flight; later flights to use 6 light scanners with an at-Moon resolution of far-side features of 2-10 miles. Would record data on a magnetic tape and played back at a slower signal transmission rate for Microlock stations.[2] The proposal received no support in Washington.
"In October, 1957" the Department of Defense asked the Army (specifically the Army Ballistic Missile Agency [ABMA] at Huntsville, Von Braun's group) to make a new proposal for an Army satellite. On October 29, 1957 Pickering met with Richard Porter, the chair of the IGY satellite panel and proposed the James Van Allen instrument package scheduled for the Vanguard be transferred to the JPL/ABMA satellite proposal. On November 6, 1957 the Porter Committee agreed to the transfer.[3]Sputnik 2 with the dog Laika aboard was launched November 3, 1957.
November 7, 1957: a meeting was called by the Navy at the Pentagon (with JPL’ers Pickering, Al Hibbs, and “a young, very junior JPL scientist” in attendance) to squelch in-fighting between Navy and Army. The young scientist, to Pickering’s chagrin, confronted the Navy with the Army’s readiness to launch a satellite versus the Navy’s problems with Vanguard and its resultant stalling (Chew article).
On November 8, 1957 Eisenhower showed on national tv a recovered Jupiter-C re-entry nose cone from the ABMA-JPL RTV test of August 8, 1957 (first object recovered from outer space, ablative nose cone feasibility proved).
On the same day the DoD authorized preparation by Pickering and John Medaris of the ABMA of the ABMA-JPL satellite[4] (prior to the December 6, 1957 Vanguard[5] failure of Viking first stage engine). At Medaris' request the Explorer Project was given a SECRET security classification.[6]
By December 1957 Jack E. Froehlich, a division director at JPL, had "Project Deal"[7] organized for satellite launch using the Army's Redstone missile as the first stage booster from the re-entry test vehicle program. JPL had built the satellite prior to the Army being given the go ahead; the working Explorer I was sitting in a cabinet at JPL and in the 80 Days to launch was only given a final check out.[8]
Capitalizing on his electronic communication experience, Van Allen[9] was able of getting the new transistors for Explorer I's electronics.[10] ABMA built the launch vehicle and transported it by air to the Cape on December 20, 1957. JPL built an additional Microlock[11] station in Ibadan, Nigeria.[12] Microlock equipment was flown to Cape Canaveral; this equipment used the existing Microlock logo.[13] In late 1957 two other Microlock stations were deployed, one in Earthquake Valley, CA[14] and one at the University of Malaya in Singapore.[15]
A "spin facility" was built at Patrick AFB, Florida to test the spinning of the clustered scale-Sergeant solid fuel motors. These motors, built by Grand Central Rocket Company for JPL, formed the second, third and fourth stages that launched Explorer I.
Explorer 1 was launched 1-29-58 with a Juno I rocket first stage (re-enters atmosphere over South Pacific 3-31-70).[16] Vanguard 1 launched 3-17-58 (tracked by Minitrack system, initially developed by Navel Research Laboratories (NRL) at White Sands and now enlarged and installed by Bendix[17]). Explorer 3 was launched 3-26-58; Explorer 4 was launched: 7-26-58.[18] And a modified Red Socks plan: Pioneer 4 (JPL and ABMA project[19]) launched 3-3-59 with 13.4 lbs to the vicinity of the Moon (within 37,300 miles) with Geiger counter, an "optical scanning device," a "germanium diode," and dead batteries.[20]
At a later time, in the early 1960's for an Explorer launch anniversary party as Explorer was about to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, someone wrote this limerick:
Each, in his separate way
Drinks to a bygone day.
The Explorer, in truth,
Was a part of our youth,
And not only orbits decay.[21]6.1.4 Henry Richter
(Side A)
This will be some notes concerning the interviews with Bland Ewing.
First of all, feel free to do anything you want with that videotape. Copy it or whatever, that’s just fine. There is certainly no kind of security classification associated with any of the early satellite work.
First, concerning the letter from John Bluth. Originally I was in the New Circular Elements Group. I was in section 8. Robertson Stevens mentioned on the first page of Bluth’s letter was head of the antenna branch, antenna group, and I headed the New Circuit Elements Group. William Pilkington, Bill Pilkington, did work for me, and neither of us under Stevens. Section 8 was headed by Eberhardt Rectin. There were 4 groups, one headed by Walt Victor. After the Explorer program got going, I was on assignment to the Advanced Research Project Agency representing NASA and setting up a worldwide satellite and deep space tracking network. The space science division was formed at JPL and I ended up as section chief for section 27. Bland may well have gone into section 23 under Stevens while I was on loan to ARPA. On his second page, Bluth mentions Frank Leehan, who was the division chief at the time. Yes, transistors were quite a new thing and my New Circuit Elements Group was charged with evaluating the usefulness and reliability of transistors. We had people quite skilled in what was available. That was very directly applicable to the building of Explorer I.
The Rand Corporation did not have any involvement. They belonged to the Air Force and were somewhat the enemy.
The notes from Karl Linnes are pretty accurate.
Looking at the comments on the bottom of page 3 concerning chronology, Sputnik I was launched on October 4 and Sputnik II on November 3. The next attempted launch was Vanguard, which was 6 December, lauched from the Cape and unsuccessful.
Explorer I was the next on 31 January 1958. The next attempt was Vanguard test vehicle III on 5 February, which was unsuccessful. Then Explorer II on 5 March, which was unsuccessful.
On 17 March Vanguard I was launched which was called a grapefruit. It was this little 6-inch sphere with only a transmitter in it, just to prove it went into orbit.
Explorer III was then launched on 26 March, which was successful and carried the van Allen Geiger counter and tape recorder. Explorer I of course had the original Geiger counter, which discovered the radiation belt.
Why Sputnik I didn’t discover it, I don’t know, because it also had a Geiger counter. The big Sputnik, Sputnik III was on 15 May, and it was a 3,000-pound device.
Ok, I’m just sort of filling in the chronology here. Back to your notes, the bottom of page 3 talks about the meeting with the Navy. Pickering, Al Hibbs, and a “very young, very junior JPL scientist” who was not a very junior scientist. That was Dr. Eberhardt Rectin, and he was very outspoken and always right. Jack Frolich was the project director for Project Deal and, as is pointed out, that came from the fact that we all played gin rummy a lot. After the satellite launch, Jack gave each of us a pack of playing cards with the picture of the satellite and Deal on the back of it. I still have most of my pack. I wish I had it all.
Now it says the working Explorer I was sitting in a cabinet of JPL and it was ready to go. That’s not true at all. We had done most of the work in developing the satellite. We had developed a temperature control scheme involving some ceramic stripes on it to change the absorptivity of the shell, but we didn’t have any instruments to go in it. Immediately after we had the go-ahead, I made a quick trip around the country and picked 3 external instruments to go in, one of which was van Allen’s Geiger counter. It was essentially ready to go. We just had to change the mounting holes a little bit and it fitted in very nicely. Van knew about our earlier work preparing the Explorer with a 5-inch cylindrical payload. Instead of building just for the Vanguard configuration, he also built it so it could fit a 6-inch.
Then it said, capitalizing on his electronic experience, van Allen was able to get new transistors. Van Allen was nowhere to be found and the work was done by one of his graduate students, George Ludwig, who I imported from Iowa to Pasadena with his family. He did the integration work. We essentially had all the transistors except for the high frequency radio transistors. We managed to get those from Bell Laboratories. They were very experimental and very expensive transistors, $10,000 apiece, and they claimed they were very delicate. I would fly back to Bell Labs and get two transistors from them, bring them home carefully packed in cotton. Two of them we sent to Picatenny arsenal to be given a 5,000 G shock test because we wanted to make sure they would survive, and they did. That’s what we used in the two radio transmitters in Explorer. Incidentally, I had the flight spare transmitter in my shop for a long time. It was going to be thrown out at JPL so I hung onto it. I refurbished it. The Smithsonian was interested in it, and I sent it to the Smithsonian last year, 1998.
The rest of what he has there is fine. We did all of the spin testing with the motors and the payload and the transmitter and that sort of stuff.
Ok, page 4, Bland Ewing interviews. Page 5 talks about the helicopter pilot who I presume was Pete Miller. I don’t remember who the chemist was at Carter Labs that he refers to. It might come to me sometime. Then he talks about Sputnik and the New Circuit Elements Group. We did a lot. The satellite just sort of fell out of it. We were evaluating new guidance devices as well as transistors. Dr. Walter Hega, mentioned in here a couple times, was working on maser research, a predecessor to the laser microwave amplification where it stimulated emission of radiation to Bill Loanoy’s front end for tracking station receivers as well as spacecraft receivers. I was trying to develop some new guidance equipment based on some electrochemical principles that intrigued me. We were doing quite a bit in the way of possible new circuit elements, and I did have a laboratory there. I had my own little chemistry lab and he helped set that up.
Bland talks about doing graphics with the original location of the first satellite, the first Explorer. We did the initial location orbit determination based on a measurement of the Doppler shift of the radio signals. We had what was called a SphereDop system combined with an interferometer antenna and based on the Doppler shift. We had some graphics that helped us do that. This was put together by a couple of my engineers. I just forgot his name. I’ll think of it sometime along the way.
Where he talks about the major amplification group, I guess he’s talking about Dr. Hega’s maser group.
Bill Pilkington was a free spirit I’ll tell you. He was a private pilot, had his own plane. He flew me down to Earthquake Valley one time when we were setting up the original tracking station down there for Explorer. He talks about the Goldstone tracking station which came along several years later after Explorer went up, and then he talks about me moving on. As I explained earlier, I was first put on loan to ARPA. When it appeared certain that the Department of Defense and NASA were not going to cooperate in a worldwide tracking system, I came back to JPL and the Space Science Division was formed. Al Hibbs and I essentially flipped a coin to see who was going to be the chief of the Space Science Division. Al won the toss and I became head of the Space Instrument Section which did all of the instrumentation for the Ranger, Mariner, and Surveyor spacecraft. That was Section 27.
Then Bland talks about Captain Madeiras. Well Madeiras was a Major General and he was the overall head of the program. Werner Von Braun worked for Madeiras.
Under receiving stations, Goldstone came along later on. We used Earthquake Valley just very quickly because it was a desolate area with absolutely no radio interference. Then we went about setting up the DSN (Deep Space Network) with 3 stations. One in Goldstone, one near Woorma, Australia, and one at Tortyhone just outside of Madrid. South Africa was an original temporary station for Explorer but not part of the Deep Space Net.
Bland talks about the D-sized Mercury cells and that’s true. He didn’t mention that we heard that these Mercury batteries would detonate if heated too high. We decided to find that out. Well no, we had one blow up in the lab. I remember that. One of the battery rings for a high power transmitter in Explorer had I think about 16 AA Mercury cells in it and it shorted out one day, which heated them up very rapidly. One detonated and put a little hole in the ceiling of the lab. We ran some more tests in one of the rocket test pits which were built for explosions to really understand that phenomenon.
The computing and graphics. Some of the orbital mechanics was there. I didn’t realize, thinking back, I wasn’t aware now that Bland was working on that.
He talks about the dish didn’t slew fast enough. We didn’t have dishes in those days. They came along later on when Goldstone was put in. The antennas for the early Explorers were simply large helical antennas. I put a copy of a JPL publication in with this that shows the antennas I guess at Earthquake Valley. They were hooked up in an interferometer arrangement so that we could measure angular movement through the sky.
Ok, Explorer satellite telemetry. It sounds like what he’s trying to do is locate tracking stations. He certainly wasn’t doing orbital calculations where he’s talking about flying these things all over the place on page 8. We did have roughly 120 degree longitude separation between the tracking stations.
Now this is where the imagination gets carried away. We really had nothing to do with the trajectory determination for the rocket. That was all done at Redstone. It might have gotten a wrong sign in determining the orbit from the tracking data, but certainly not with the rocket itself. One certainly did not go off in the wrong direction. And nobody ever disconnects the range safety button in the launching blockhouse.
Goldstone did not exist when we did the early Explorer satellites and the Redstone was pretty much gone by the time the Goldstone tracking station was in. The launch vehicle was in the Jupiter. Certainly no rocket ever went up in the New England direction. He might have been talking about Explorer II which failed. We had a rocket failure on it and some of the stuff fell into the ocean. Half of the satellite was the last rocket stage, the fourth stage, and the overall weight was 21 pounds.
The last paragraph, not quite sure what’s going through his mind there. He’s talking about the squibs. These are the little blasting cap igniters that ignite the solid rocket motors. That’s probably what happened was that the second stage was 7–I think it was 7, maybe it was 11–rocket motors in a ring. Inside of that, the third stage was 3 rocket motors, and then on the front of the third stage was the fourth stage which was a single rocket motor combined with a satellite. I think it’s the third stage that didn’t work right. Maybe one of the squibs didn’t blow and if the 3 rocket motors were not burning uniformly, then the thing would end up tumbling and come to pieces.
Yes, 4 out of the 18. Three of the 4 satellite Explorers did work and they had different experiments in them. We did get quite a bit more information than the Russians did from Sputnik. They didn’t lose that many Vanguards but they did lose several.
(Side B)
Vanguard used a dual liquid propellant system. They didn’t use liquid hydrogen that early. Most of these used hydrazine as a fuel and red fuming nitric acid as the oxidizer. I think that that’s what the first stage Viking used.
Second paragraph, everything was secret level. He says he had only a Q clearance. Now Q is higher than secret. It’s involved with atomic energy. Very possibly he went down to Rand because that’s where a lot of the Air Force orbital stuff was done. The Air Force of course was not in the satellite business at that point. They had been squeezed out by the Navy Vanguard program. The Air Force was working more on interplanetary stuff. They of course didn’t have any go-ahead to build or launch anything but we didn’t either before Explorer. We went ahead and did it anyhow. It was mentioned earlier, Eisenhower showed a re-entry nose cone that we put in the first test vehicle early in 1957 which was only a three-stage rocket. Instead of the forth stage rocket and the satellite, it had this re-entry nose cone which was recovered and was really a first.
18 dot 19 is all double-talk because all of the orbital and guide__ calculations were done at Redstone. We did some of the orbital calculations at JPL. That was primarily what Al Hibbs was doing which tied into the launch trajectory.
6.1.5 Mars Landing in 1997
JPL is doing this again. Boy does that bring back memories. 40 years to the dime, four decades from that first crack.
*I was totally floored by that. The Martian landing.
Yeah, wasn’t that wonderful?
*Oh, that was amazing. Amazing that it landed and worked.
And everything worked, everything beautifully designed, and that’s the way the first four satellites worked. And it was a maverick crew. They had a very informal style in how they operated as a team. No structure. It was all totally horizontal. They finally returned to that structure after 40 years. It took them 40 years to return to that structure. Boy, I’m starting to cry. Excuse me. It was a group just exactly like that that sent up the first Explorer satellites, OK? It was this completely horizontal structure of people that knew each other’s skills down to the last digit. The moment that some piece of work went out of somebody’s area, they would pass it over to the others.
40 years ago. 4 decades ago. That was a very busy year. I told you already all the mathematics and computing and putting the first Explorer satellite together. Even having my initials on some of the batteries in them.
I went into it in kind of ___ detail he couldn’t even believe. I wanted to say something about it because it was such a neat time and a part of a neat group. I wanted to be in ___ recreated again the ___ with this thing on July 4th It was like an equivalent of 40 years ago. 40 years ago interestingly enough.
6.1.6 Classified Work and Integrity
I’d like to go back and comment on a few things that I left over and came to mind and I’d just like to comment on because it wasn’t clear what I was saying before. What circumstances on those were. Are you recording?
*Yeah, it’s on.
Good. Part of the work that I did in the 50s was classified, ___ it was classified very, very high. Part of that has never been declassified and that work is in the ___ don’t exist. There are holes in my life in the 50s, in the only period that I worked on classified material. Before that I was too young, and starting in 1960 I moved away from that world and never went back to it again. ___ huge ___ worked on in the 50s that was classified and later it was declassified. Still, lots of it never has been, so I wanted to be very clear about that.
The stuff that I worked on that was classified and hasn’t been declassified I just haven’t discussed, doesn’t exist.
*OK, so there’s nothing on the tape that’s classified material?
Right. And it’s something that I always respect.
*OK, right.
OK, the next thing I want to clarify is that I want to be very careful about who ___ and whose ___ it came out of at the time. Many things that I did were paid for by government grants or by business support, that came to me by way of inheriting ___ where I don’t know the source was but certainly I didn’t buy it myself. Now later on, ___ were things ___ always seemed to be adding books and technical material and don’t, under my own power I can’t. That was now officially, usually not officially part of the program and also find that ___ would be moving off into areas that were completely outside of the usual funding. Even when I was in ___ company, I still found myself paying for lots of stuff out of my pocket because it was quicker and easier to get it done out of ___.
Yeah. So __ one very small piece or another of that being declassified and that’s why __ even though I can’t even begin to talk about hardly anything that was actually done on the project because it’s so many levels classified still. So the strict need to know and the feeling that you could be __ regardless. And life, have done that.
So that’s why I’ve had to say that part of the work that I did for Car5er Labs is still classified. That was where I did that first chemistry work that ended up getting me recommended to Henry Richter and the group there at JPL. This stuff is so far down and secrecy stuff that only now just a few little bubbles here and there __ so for the most part, I just can’t talk about most of the things I ever did at that time.
6.1.7 Applying for a Job
I had applied a couple of times at JPL. I was living in Altadena, in the north part, not very far from where the lab was. I went by three different times over the year to apply for a job and each time I didn’t get anywhere. Carter Labs had since gone under. It had been bought out and then not successfully expanded because the people that bought into it just didn’t understand how to run a small entrepreneurial, highly integrated, high technical startup. They ran it just like it was a conventional business.
I learned about a job from a friend that was the helicopter pilot for JPL while working on his doctorate there at Caltech. I went by and applied for this job. By that time Bill Pilkington was the second in command. He was trying to weed out people because we were having such a group of people who just didn’t work out at all. Bill gave me this test to sort out the people that had the real stuff from the people that were fakes. The problem was, I blew about half the test totally. About half the test I did spectacularly well on, and about half the test I totally blew. He wasn’t sure if JPL should hire me at all. I had already applied there several times. My records were there in the employment office and they didn’t want to hire me either because I didn’t have any degrees or anything. Almost all the people there came from different colleges, and they were advanced this or that or whatever.
I guess I got the job because of the friendship between the fellow who was my boss— I can’t think of his name, it won’t come to me, he was another chemist at Carter Labs– and Henry Richter, who was the head and a chemist. My former boss just said, “Hire him, I don’t care. Just hire him.” So they hired me into the group that ended up building the first Explorer satellites. I thought that was really neat, because a few years into it the Sputnik went up. Guess what? Surprise! Surprise, surprise.
I had applied a couple of times at JPL because at that time I had moved to Altadena. I was living in Altadena, in the north part, not very far from where the lab was. I went by maybe three different times over the year to apply for a job and each time I didn’t get anywhere.
The next time I had a friend that was in a group called the “New Circuit Elements” who was working on his doctorate there at Caltech. Dr. Richter, Henry Richter, was working on finishing up his Ph.D. there at Caltech at that time, and he was also Director of the group that was the “Skunk Works” for then JPL that produced the first Explorer satellite.
You’d never know from the name—it was hidden away, probably hidden away with a name that had nothing to do with satellites and things like that. He needed somebody to help him there in the lab to set up a better laboratory system.
It happened I knew the fellow that was the helicopter pilot for the lab, who used to work in the lab to sort of keep it in place. He essentially told Henry that he should hire me because Carter Labs had since gone under. It had been bought out and then not successfully expanded because the people that bought into it just didn’t understand how to run a small entrepreneurial, highly integrated, high technical startup. They ran it just like it was a conventional business.
*How old were you at this time?
Let’s see. This would have been mid-‘50s. This would have been right about ‘55 so I would have been—
*24 or something like that?
Yeah.
When Carter Labs went under, the guy that was my direct boss told Henry Richter, “Hire him”. I went by and applied for the job. By that time Bill Pilkington was the second in command. He was head of the cross-country team at Caltech that didn’t do all that well. But at least he was rather unusual for conventional people from there in that he really was into the cross-country running thing.
*You used to like to do that, didn’t you?
Yeah. That was my big thing, cross-country running. The loneliness of long distance running. It was really weird that Bill Pilkington, who later became the best friend I ever had in my entire life, was at that time the second in command in the group that was building the Explorer satellites. He was trying to weed out people because we were having such a group of people who just didn’t work out at all. Bill gave me this test to sort out the people that had the real stuff from the people that were fakes. The problem was, I blew about half the test totally. About half the test I did spectacularly well on and about half the test I totally blew. He wasn’t sure if JPL should hire me at all.
I had already applied there several times. My records were there in the employment office and they didn’t want to hire me either because I didn’t have any degrees or anything. Almost all the people there came from different colleges, and they were advanced this or that or whatever. I guess that because of the friendship between the fellow who was my boss and— I can’t think of his name, it won’t come to me, he was another chemist at Carter Labs. He was a good friend of Henry Richter, who was the head and a chemist. He just said, “Hire him, I don’t care. Just hire him.” And so they hired me into the group that ended up building the first Explorer satellites. I thought that was really neat, because a few years into it the Sputnik went up. Guess what? Surprise! Surprise, surprise.
Bill Pilkington
Bill P and I both loved long distance running. We loved to run. We’d go up behind his house and run in the mountains, and run and run and run. Which is neat. His wife and kids were just truly wonderful. One time we went up to Gold Stone and we were climbing all around. He showed me all the different ways the thing was— but that’s leading ahead. What happened was that he and I became best friends, the best friend I ever had in my whole life, and we participated in building those first Explorer satellites. It was so crazy to have that honor.
You just can’t believe what an honor that was. Mind-boggling honor to have been in the group.
Bill Pilkington, my best friend, became head of the New Circuit Elements Group when Henry Richter moved on. I’m not quite sure because there were two stages where Henry Richter sort of moved up in administration first and took me with him because I was also head of the lab.
6.1.8 Sputnik
The Navy was building and cremating one Vanguard after another on the launching pads. Other branches of the armed services were trying to get things going. We ended up putting together and designing the first Explorer satellites and actually had them ready to go into orbit. Our group was from the Army. This is before NASA, and all the different branches of the forces— the Air Force and the Navy and the Army— were trying to get into space in competition with each other. The President [Eisenhower] called and said “OK, this is top priority. Is there anybody out there that can put something in space? This is intolerable that the Russians put up Sputnik.” What was that? That was ‘57. OK, 40 years ago. 40 years ago exactly.
The president is depending on people. “This is totally unacceptable. Who can do something different?” So we said “Well, we probably can. We actually have four satellites all ready to go into orbit and not only that, but we have all the receiving stations in place.”
The Russian was 1500 pounds or 2000 pounds, something like that. They had to work with conventional batteries and vacuum tubes. They used the type of vacuum tubes used within battle ships. They’re ruggedized, that was the only way. Can you believe the amount of energy and time that took? Even though they put up all this weight, Sputnik was a monster. It couldn’t do much more than just go beep beep beep beep, beep beep. Didn’t measure, didn’t do anything else, but it did go beep beep beep beep.
*And it was first.
Boy did that get attention.
So there we were, because it was beep beep beep, like Sputnik, and ___ where Sputnik I think was 1,000 pounds or something like that because of all the vacuum tubes and the batteries they had to have in there. Gee, we claimed that we had put 2,000 pounds on our, of course it was all ___ it was 2,000 pounds, but it had as much, you know it went beep beep beep too.
You just can’t believe how the shit hit the fan. There’s no other way to describe it. But the President wanted to know why it was Sputnik that was up there and not one of ours. At the time the Navy had the full attention of Washington. It was just cremating one Vanguard after another with explosions of the first designed liquid gel systems. Those systems were terribly unreliable and they contain a lot of liquid oxygen and oxidizers and things like that, combined with lots of other stuff–liquid hydrogen and other fuels that were equally unpleasant to mix with oxygen.
There was a high level of secrecy with total need to know type of thing. Even though I had only a Q security clearance, I was the only one who had been doing all the graphics and laying out the first programming stuff. They asked me to be one of the two people that were going to be the verification team to see if you could put something in orbit. I went down to this secret place at Rand Corporation because it was Rand that was the super secret place. At that the time it was equivalent to Area 51 that nobody wants to claim exists, where all the Stealth planes are created. This is the equivalent to that sort of thing.
6.1.9 The Explorer Satellites
One part of the group was doing the specialized work on the first maser amplifier that was liquid nitrogen cooled. We had to get low enough noise level so that we could pick up these incredibly weak signals, and we had to lock on the signal. There was all this elaborate first tracking system to make the thing work in real time to track the signals. The thing would actually waver, partly because the on-board radios from the small satellites couldn’t be constructed that stable and you couldn’t reprogram a laser because it was weak. I’m proud as heck of those first ones.
We jammed more in that 12 pounds than the Russians did in their 1500 pounds. Our satellites were designed to measure all sorts of parameters, how much radiation was coming in, going out, what internal temperatures of the radiation, all sorts of things, and then encode it and send it down. The very first satellites that ever went up.
Receiving Stations
I was working on a thing that was sending out all the layout of the graphics and did the computation. I plotted all the original locations of all the satellite receiving stations like Goldstone Dry Lake and other places like that. We had some in Australia and in South Africa. I did all the graphics that line up the horizon lines and where things would pick up and get lost and so forth.
All the places like the Goldstone Dry Lake were scheduled around the world, places like Australia and so on. It was obvious you couldn’t conveniently put them anywhere. There was no place in Russia we could stick one. There were few tropical places at that time. So they went places like South Africa and places in Australia.
I had the good fortune, and because things were handed around, I had the responsibility of maintaining the big batteries that went in Explorer. Making sure they worked right, testing them. I had my initials BE inscribed in the ones I had tested. We tested them for destruction by heating them and by spinning them at different speeds. These were the big D-size mercury cells. At least a dozen of them went into the thing. But that was all that our system needed to do a whole range of different tests and things that it was programmed to do. It had a fold-up antenna on it. It was basically just spun. It was non-directional, a quad-fold type antennae. It was quite a privilege to be in the group that did that.
Computer Calculations & Telemetry
The machines have come a long ways from 1955 when I first started these damn things.
Even those first computers that were the IBM 709s, the vacuum tubes, we had to pre-calculate everything to make it work right. Most of the things that were done in real time had to be done graphically. At that time I was engulfed with trying to get the stuff in and out of the computer as I mentioned before.
We did the calculations slowly, but incredibly fast compared to what anybody else could do at the time on a 709 computer. We did all the calculations that it should be possible to launch a Redstone missile into orbit with enough energy to essentially put a beeper up there with a beeping thing with a mimic of the stuff that we’d already designed for our Explorer satellite. We could put that into orbit.
The only problem was the computer was so slow that (1) you had to graphically compute everything that was going to be done to the dot and (2) then you had to point onto the exact place on the horizon that it would be coming around there at the Goldstone facility. The dish couldn’t slew fast enough to pick up if it wasn’t aimed right to begin with. It had an enormous gain, but at the expense of a very narrow angle. That was also the place where we placed all the low-noise amplifier stuff using measures. As I mentioned before, there was no putting a measure obviously in the Explorer satellite itself.
The problem there was, “How do you track something in time? And pick it up?” There was no slewing around or anything. They used to reprogram the Redstone missile. Instead of doing the normal tests, we just reprogrammed it. We had the guy from the group, the cell block where things were set off. At this point there was 1, 2, 3, perhaps 5 people in the entire lab.
They were going to try to put it into orbit to see if we could get a beeper up there. We aimed it using all of the graphics that we had been calculating for spherical trigonometry. That’s where I picked up on a reverse sign in the spherical trigonometry that would have aimed the missile in the opposite, wrong direction.
You’ve got 180 degrees because the signs of things are very important. They got a sign wrong.
We put it in and fired the rocket, and it just went off in a totally wrong direction.
The self-destruct person there was pushing the self-destruct button to blow it up because it obviously had totally malfunctioned. Blow it up, blow it up. But the button had been disconnected, because we didn’t want to blow it up. We were hoping the things would work, and they had the Goldstone aimed right at the right place on the horizon.
The graphs we did graphically to tell it where to aim needed a few degrees tweeking. It also verified the fact that the Redstone would inject perfectly into our group, perfectly.
We followed Sputnik with the Explorer satellites, bang bang bang.
The third one went way up to the New England direction. At that time some of the stuff was raining down out of the sky. They had 12 pounds, pretty minor. No, it was a little more than that, but it still was very small. It was the last stage, with other things connected to it.
We couldn’t figure out what went wrong. We spread the output of the 4 satellites in the hall. Bill Pilkington and I looked at it and said, “Jeez, look at this thing. You can see the rates of this thing changing, and here was this thing glitching the speed that it slows down the cycle of the spin.” You can calculate that one of the scribs (?) hadn’t fired to completely separate it. From spreading this idea out to the fact that it was a quadrapole, you could see the amplitude thing from the original recordings. We did our own analog trip on the data to figure out what had gone wrong. They absolutely assured us all those squids (?) were all valid on the 4th one which went into orbit perfectly also. Each one carried some different load of subtests to be done.
The machines have come a long ways from 1955 when I first started these damn things. On my vacuum tube IBM 709 at JPL for the first Explorer Satellite. Oh, one thing I want to point out there on that thing, on the whole thing of the graph thing, the Explorer thing and stuff like that. I want to talk about how my work had a physical connection with the actual satellite itself.
The Director of the program at that time was Dr. Henry Richter, who was finishing up his doctorate at Caltech in chemistry at that time. He wanted someone that could help him directly with his own mathematics and keep his own lab clean. He was friends with a helicopter pilot who had been keeping his lab up to that time. It was about one-third of doing the graphics for all original location of the first Explorer satellites.
*Yeah, I tracked down some of the names from that project.
Pardon?
*I contacted someone at JPL about the Explorer program and an archivist, and he said that the project, that it was originally called Project Deal.
I’m not sure from the outside because you __ this stuff was so super-secret and so high level above even top secret that it just sort of blew your mind and here I was just an ordinary secret __ at the time.
*This fellow said that Robert.
But it was called the New Circuit Elements Group, to hide it within the regular company of JPL itself. Called the New Circuit Elements Group. How that __ name that you would never figure was building the first Explorer satellite.
*There was a guy named Robertson Stevens, he was the.
I think, that possibly into my head is the person who was way up at the top of the whole __ program.
*Yeah, he was the head of Section 23, so he was the head of the whole section.
Ok. Section head. So what I said when __ Richter finishing up his degree at Caltech in chemistry, I’m talking about is the New Circuit Elements Group itself within that.
*Right. And there was a guy named Jack Froelich, Froelisch?
I would have to look at the list of the employees at that period of time which I’m sure they have because, at some archive or another.
*Yeah, well this is the archiver who gave me this information. There was a guy named Karl Linnes and he was supposed to be responsible for siting the tracking systems.
Yeah, well you see again, what I was responsible for was getting the graphics up and running so the other people like Karl Linnes could actually look at the graphs all over the place and fly these things around. “Oh, gee. That one’s heading toward Russia. Probably not a reasonable place.” “That one’s heading out to the middle of Australia. Let’s go for that one.” “Oh gee, this one is heading down toward Cape Town in South Africa. Let’s go for that one.” That would space things out in some reasonable way. That’s what we were doing at that time.
*Then there were two guys on the satellite observation. Al Hibbs and Fred Eimer.
Again, long time.
*Doesn’t ring a bell. Walt Victor? Pilkington worked under Walt Victor in satellite instrumentation.
Yeah, Bill Pilkington, my best friend, he ended up when Henry Richter moved on, he became head of the new __ group and he was actually __ at the time. Yeah, I’m not quite sure because there were two stages where Henry Richter sort of moved up in administration first and took me with him because I was also head of the lab __.
*Well, he did find you on the list.
Did find me on the list?
*Yeah, yeah. In 1959 you were in the telephone book, and you were listed as a lab technician in section 23, guidance techniques research.
How is that for an absolutely no indication of exactly what I did?
*Yeah.
That’s why I meant this whole thing was, when there was that final injection of the thing and we went down, we had to down to incredibly secured __ there at, I can’t think of the government think tank.
Rand Corporation
Rand Corporation, to do the actual verifications because there is no secure line that would even begin to be secure enough to work out of JPL. So we had to work out of Rand to do the actual graphic verification. So talk about being secure and secret.
*Well my guess is that he just doesn’t have that information and that it isn’t in the official documentation but I imagine some of it is declassified at this point so.
*There was a guy from the Army named Medaris, John Medaris. He was the Army person who was on site when the first satellite went up on the 29th of January, 1958.
All I remember is when they had an army person there, paging Captain Bly, paging Captain Bly. Don’t know why Captain Bly is sticking in my head from reading books from as a teenager. But I don’t even remember who was the director because again, man does that ever __ what the lab was doing at that moment in time. Talk about a surprise. Talk about a huge surprise. They thought the Russians might be able to, they thought they would have at least a year to spare and there it was up there going beep beep beep. What was that called? Something one?
*Sputnik?
Yeah, Sputnik I.
Final Push
*One thing I read was that there was a real push to get the Explorer up before.
Boy was there ever.
*Before the end of January.
Yeah. That’s why we broke every rule in the game,
of which I can’t talk about 99% of. We had to break every rule in the game
to make absolutely sure,
they even __ and it’s a populated area
in the northern parts of New England setting. Oh gee, that’s just one of our planes malfunctioning. It’s a plane here or there malfunctioning
or really are misbehaving satellite __. And actually one of the three satellites
didn’t quite clear one of the squibs correctly
and we were able to figure out later on what had happened but so,
three of the four satellites __ logged different kinds of information
and radically more information than the rest of them did. Their system could only go beep beep beep,
while others actually measured temperature,
directions, and all sorts of other parameters like that.
*Like the Van Allen belt.
I’m not quite sure, was in that group, but very soon thereafter, yeah, that sort of thing.
*Yeah, I think the Van Allen belt was measured with one of the first Explorer satellites.
OK. Cuz we have the implementation __ and actually encode the information and send it back down.
*What?
Encode the information, send it back down to the various dishes around the world.
*That’s one thing that the Russians didn’t have. They didn’t have a way to monitor throughout.
Around the world.
*Yeah. They got some information but they weren’t able to get very much.
Yeah. That’s why we realized, particularly with the amount of information that we’d be throwing out, that there would have to be some pretty heavy duty computation. There had to be some pretty heavy duty satellite dishes all spaced out very nicely around the world that could pass on one to the next. So all that stuff was then in place before that first satellite went up including the one out here at Goldstone or Goldstar or Goldsun I guess.
Goldstone Dry Lake
I remember climbing all over that, satellite __.
*Yeah, so I found in a book, it said General Medaris was handed a message saying `Goldstone has the bird.’
Yeah, that’s what happened.
*Goldstone Dry Lake, Mojave Desert.
And it was our calculations from Rand that let them point in the right direction or they wouldn’t have had zip chance of getting the bird because they couldn’t slew around fast enough to turn arbitrarily. We had to pre-calculate from ejection on to things like that, exactly where it would be coming over the horizon so they could prepoint.
*So what I have here is that Explorer I was launched at 10:48 p.m. on the 31st of January. Somewhere else it said 29th, and it was under the Army Ballistic Missile Agency.
Yeah.
*And it was 10.5 pounds, and it had two micro meteoroid detectors, a Geiger counter, and telemetry material and it just discovered the Van Allen Belt.
OK, great.
*And the second one was launched on the 5th of March and/or maybe February. There’s some confusion there, and that one failed and then the third one was launched on the 22nd of March and the fourth one was launched on the 26th of July.
And all succeeded because we found out __ finding squib was our problem on __.
6.1.10 NASA
It was just absolutely evident that we had to get the military out of the game, total. So NASA was formed at that time to create a civilian space agency to oversee the stuff from their ___. The military was pulled totally out of the game of doing space. If they were going to do space, it had to do with what can I say, spy satellites or things like that. But that would be it.
*Yeah, observation.
Anything else would be civilian and coordinated through NASA. So that was the formation of NASA afterwards. So that was just truly a wonderful thing to have participated in that.
*Wow, the inner circle of getting the first satellites up. That’s pretty amazing. I didn’t realize that Bland.
So the thing was that that is, here can you realize how exactly 40 years later ___ amazing sight to ___ organization with no structure, to be able to do it again with the Rover and all the beautiful stuff that’s ___ designed and ___.
*Pretty amazing.
6.1.11 Skunk Works
So that was the ___ here and there ___ put together, I got the ___ these days.
The guy that put together the ___ worked out of Lockheed and help them with things like the U2 and stuff like that. One day he answered the phone and said this is “Skunk Works” and plants, manufacturers __ and it was sitting on a re___ and right next door to a brand new plastics place.
The guy that was head of the project picked up the phone, a big phone, red phone that can call anywhere. “Skunk Works here, Skunk Works.” That was the label that stuck for about ___ ever since the guy answered it. That was the name they used for that type of organization with another company. It stuck forever.
Anyway, so reminiscing, reminiscing, reminiscing, it’s weird twists and turns of life.
What’s happening with the __ is a whole lot of stuff, I mean that’s where the whole thing __ of skunk works came.
*Yeah, from Lockheed, at Lockheed.
Yeah. And the declassification __ at least __ little fragments of some like in Skunk work on the U2 and the Blackbird.
*Blackhawk.
Black bird, wasn’t it? Maybe Blackbird 81 pops in my head.
*71.
81, number. Blackbird 81, the plane’s name.
*Let me just check here.
You __ the Blackbird. The Blackbird was the all and still the fastest plane alive, incredibly enough. Still the fastest plane that can fly. Done by that group and they’ve brought it back from retirement so also what was looking like there might be some to them.
*Right, yeah, it’s R71. That’s R71 Blackbird. So you worked on that project?
No, hardly. I just, what I meant was that’s the sort of thing where the skunk works got named for the person who was doing that because he was the head of the group there at Lockheed.
*Yeah, what’s his name? I’ve got his name here somewhere.
Any rate, thanks. He answered the phone __ new plastic place that had gone in by the street down there in Glendale and “Skunk works here” __ forever.
*Kelly Johnson.
Yeah.
*Yeah, in 1943.
Ok, so the thing is that what I’m trying to say cuz it’s very interesting to have you echo that back because then it clarifies in my own way what actually happened and also makes it look sharper, the dates and people and stuff. Not only the stuff we’re saying, was all of the group there and Glendale had done the first __ to design and then what was it called, the Blackbird?
*Yeah, the Blackbird, yeah. That’s our 71 Blackbird. SR.
SR71? OK. Thank you for giving the rest of that. But at any rate __ back in active service again because it still is the fastest thing in the world so the thing of declassifying and pulling it out of the work . So done some kind of remarkable stuff to say the least.
*Yeah, I found a web site that had a bunch of pilots of the Blackbird and pilots and crew and different people talking about their experience with that plane and it sounded like, to them it was almost a religious experience to fly that plane.
New Circuit Elements Group
*Ok, the one thing I wanted to clarify is, when you talked about Skunk Works, was that just that what you were doing at JPL was similar to Skunk Works?
Similar to Lockheed’s Skunk Works, not THE Skunk Works. Look up New Circuit Elements Group within that division and you will find the group I worked in.
*Within what division?
Within the division that had the control of the 709 computer. Because that was also the first vacuum tube, we had a whole floor full of vacuum tube 709 IBM computers. Another whole floor for air conditioning and cables above it, another whole floor for engineers and machinists and such below it. Was that a labor-intensive device to keep that monster running? So computers have come a long ways from then. But even that computer was mind-bogglingly better at doing numbers and manipulating symbols than people were. So it was only much, much later. That’s what I meant by analogy to those type of things that surfaced much later when some of it was declassified.
*Lockheed is now copyrighted that phrase, SkunkWorks, and in fact I saw it in Discover Magazine. It was, one of the people who was involved with the Mars Pathfinder. And Lockheed in the Skunk Works division of Lockheed.
And probably JPL again.
*Yeah.
So talk about bringing back old memories. I would have loved to have watched more but so life goes. But at any rate, that’s what I meant. It was deeply embedded, given names that were totally unrelated to what people were really doing and to be as misleading as possible and to this day, most of them declassified.
*Well I can investigate and find out what is available.
Anyway, look for New Circuit Elements Group and it was in a building right adjacent to the building that actually held the computer.
You had to walk back 800 yards to another building where the actual Explorer satellites were built because the place where the computer was wasn’t secure enough either. They just had this separate little building back where we did all the original development of both the techniques for data compression and for major amplification. There was a major amplification group incredibly enough.
6.1.12 Henry Richter
Dr. Henry Richter, was working on finishing up his Ph.D. in chemistry there at Caltech at that time, and he was also Director of the “New Circuit Elements Group” at JPL that produced the first Explorer satellite.
You’d never know from the name—it was hidden away, with a name that had nothing to do with satellites. He needed somebody to help him set up a better laboratory system.
He wanted someone that could help him directly with his own mathematics and keep his own lab clean. It was about one-third of doing the graphics for all the original location of the first Explorer satellites.
Look for New Circuit Elements Group and it was in a building right adjacent to the building that actually held the computer.
You had to walk back 800 yards to another building where the actual Explorer satellites were built because the place where the computer was wasn’t secure enough either. They just had this separate little building back where we did all the original development of both the techniques for data compression and for major amplification. There was a major amplification group incredibly enough.
John Bluth Correspondence
Date: Tue, 02 Feb 1999 10:01:10 -0500
From: “John Bluth” JBluth@sherikon.com
To: byandell@facstaff.wisc.edu
Subject: Re: Bland Ewing, Explorer and JPL
Brian,
I have attached the two instances where the phrase New Circuit Elements Group appears in my JPL notes and in any of the JPL oral history transcripts.
Let me make a comment about secrecy at JPL: over 90 percent of Lab employees in 1953 had security clearances. This was due to the Lab working on the Corporal, Loki and later the Sergeant missiles for US Army Ordnance. I don’t believe this to be any more secrecy than was exercised in other missile and aircraft establishments in Southern CA at this same time.
You’ll note from the attachments that the driving force on the research was Frank Lehan. Transistors were a new thing and their use made great changes in the way JPL handled missile communications. That experience was directly applicable to the building of Explorer I.
Whether the RAND Corporation had any involvement is problematic. JPL was an US Army funded r&d facility; RAND played a somewhat similar function but exclusively for the Air Force which funded tit.
Good luck with your work; editing an oral history transcript to retain the flavor of the live interview is a task.
John
KARL LINNES, interviewed by Hallie Poore on July 31, 1974
Linnes: “Well, a few years later [after 1946] we ended up ahead. And what he [Frank Lehan] did, he set some of the guys like Bill Sampson and Henry Richter to work in what they call new circuit elements. They started investigating transistors. He set Eb Rechtin to work on new filtering techniques in application of communication theory. And he set Bob Stevens and myself to work on new kinds of antennas.
In the transistor business the fellows started figuring out what you could do with transistors and building digital circuits and shift registers and stuff and started transistorizing things. Of course transistors weren’t very sophisticated by modern standards but we were starting to dig into that. That work eventually led to working not only in the digital processing type of activity but also in higher frequency things. It turned out that about the highest frequency transistor that you could get any power out of was 108 megacycles which was a convenient spot as it turned out and Western Electric and somebody else had these transistors and the first ones were valued at around $40,000 apiece. We finally got them down to about two, three, four thousand dollars apiece at the time that we’d launched the spacecraft, Explorer 1 with those transistors as the transmitter tubes if you want to call them, ersatz tubes they used to call them. And now of course they make them like peanuts.”
An Antenna Group formed in 1951 with Robertson (Bob) Stevens and {Karl Linnes?} as engineers plus two technicians; later called Communications Elements Research Section. By 1960 about 12 people involved in four groups: Karl Linnes (followed by Phillip D. Potter) after 1957 directed an Antenna and Microwave Group on passive antennas; New Circuit Elements Group directed by William Pilkington (killed in 1960 air accident) and then Walter Higa. William Merrick directed Antenna Structures and Optics Group. Harold ‘Hap’ Richards led the Servo and Control Group. Loki, Corporal, and Sergeant work used radar beacon telemetry and doppler antennas; JPL antenna people went to White Sands and got field experience. After satellite proposed in 1955 phase coherent receivers worked with. Transistors needed for lighter transcievers; application of transistors to rf circuits meant that: September 20, 1956 a JPL Microlock station successfully tracked a ten milliwatt radar beacon on the first Jupiter-C re-entry vehicle to 3000 miles down range. This kind of transceiver modified for Explorer I.
Notes on Explorer I, John Bluth, JPL Archives, June 1998 (slightly edited)
Sputnik 1 launched October 4, 1957: Sputnik syndrome (humiliation, wounded pride, an international challenge, a domestic political weapon, self promotion of institution). On October 11, 1957, James Hagerty, White House Press Secretary, stated US would launch a Vanguard satellite in near future (therefore not seen as test vehicle). JPL responds to Sputnik with Project Red Socks (proposal on October 21, 1957 in 13-page report in a binder with an embossed title, copy Number 1 at HC 2-581B, bound item shelf): a series of nine launches around the Moon to look at the backside using Re-entry Test Vehicle (RTV) rockets, the first by June, 1958. This proposal was not supported in Washington.
In October, 1957, the Department of Defense asked the Army (specifically the Army Ballistic Missile Agency [ABMA] at Huntsville, Von Braun’s group) to make a new proposal for an Army satellite. On October 29, 1957 Pickering met with Richard Porter, chair of the IGY (International Geophysical Year) satellite panel and proposed the James Van Allen instrument package scheduled for the Vanguard be transferred to the JPL/ABMA satellite proposal. On November 6, 1957 the Porter Committee agreed to the transfer.
Sputnik 2 with the dog Laika aboard was launched November 3, 1957. On November 7, a meeting was called by the Navy at the Pentagon (with JPL’ers Pickering, Al Hibbs, and “a young, very junior JPL scientist” in attendance) to squelch in-fighting between Navy and Army. The young scientist, to Pickering’s chagrin, confronted the Navy with the Army’s readiness to launch a satellite versus the Navy’s problems with Vanguard and its resultant stalling (Chew article). On November 8, Eisenhower showed on national TV a recovered Jupiter-C re-entry nose cone from the ABMA-JPL RTV test of August 8 (first object recovered from outer space, ablative nose cone feasibility proved). On the same day the DoD authorized preparation by Pickering and John Medaris of the ABMA of the ABMA-JPL satellite (prior to the December 6 Vanguard failure of Viking first stage engine). At Medaris’ request the Explorer Project was given a SECRET security classification.
By December 1957 Jack E. Froehlich, a division director at JPL, had “Project Deal” (Washington Evening Star, 2-5-59, p. B-12: “‘When a big pot is won, the winner sits around and cracks bad jokes and the loser cries, “Deal!”’”) organized for satellite launch using the Army’s Redstone missile as the first stage booster from the re-entry test vehicle program. JPL had built the satellite prior to the Army being given the go ahead; the working Explorer I was sitting in a cabinet at JPL and in the 80 Days to launch was only given a final check out. Koppes reports Pickering’s pre-meeting {on 11-8-57?} negotiations with Army General Bruce Medaris to get the satellite role assigned to JPL and not to ABMA [Huntsville]. Koppes calls this “momentous” in shaping the future JPL role as satellite/probe maker. Medaris wanted the project completed in 80 days, Jack James suggests, because of Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days”.
Capitalizing on his electronic communication experience, Van Allen was able to get the new transistors for Explorer I’s electronics. ABMA built the launch vehicle and transported it by air to the Cape on December 20. JPL built an additional Microlock station in Ibadan, Nigeria. Microlock equipment (developed for tracking the RTV nosecone vehicles) was flown to Cape Canaveral; this equipment used the existing Microlock logo. In late 1957 two other Microlock stations were deployed, one in Earthquake Valley, CA, (located in San Diego County–the receiver that confirmed that Explorer I had in fact achieved orbit) and one at the University of Malaya in Singapore.
A “spin facility” was built at Patrick AFB, FL, to test the spinning of the clustered scale-Sergeant solid fuel motors. These motors, built by Grand Central Rocket Company for JPL, formed the second, third and fourth stages that launched Explorer I. Explorer 1 was launched 1-29-58 with a Juno I rocket first stage (re-enters atmosphere over South Pacific 3-31-70). Vanguard 1 launched 3-17-58 (tracked by Minitrack system, initially developed by Navel Research Laboratories (NRL) at White Sands and now enlarged and installed by Bendix). Explorer 3 was launched 3-26-58; Explorer 4 was launched: 7-26-58. And a modified Red Socks plan: Pioneer 4 (JPL and ABMA project) launched 3-3-59 with 13.4 lbs to the vicinity of the Moon (within 37,300 miles) with Geiger counter, an “optical scanning device,” a “germanium diode,” and dead batteries.
Early Computers at JPL
And so even those first computers that were the ___ the vacuum tubes, we had to precalculate everything to make it work right and the thing was mostly, most of the things that were done are real time, or had to be done graphically. At that time I was engulfed both __ with trying to get the stuff in and out of the computer as I mentioned before. There also was a thing of getting involved, I was, several years. I think it was around 55 __ math, and so two years, within two years we had all the Explorer satellite built ___.
I did all the graphics on the first computer that was there at JPL. I liked that machine and it was a 709 IBM machine. 709 if I remember the number right. It was a vacuum tube monster that filled an entire floor. They had another floor just with air conditioning above it, and then another whole floor underneath it of just millions, it seemed like millions, actually it was only a few dozen, scurrying engineers that were running around replacing tubes everywhere as they burned out. And some big machine shops everywhere. So that was the first computer I ever learned on, actually, it was a vacuum tube 709 and I guess each time I sort of got shoved into it.
What I ended up doing is laying out the mathematics for stuff, you know I would lay out the—What was it? I had to teach myself. Is it trigonometry that involves the projections of, for three dimensions of the space things like that?
*Yeah, OK.
I also did the transformation that would map things between what actual orbits were and the display of stuff around the world. I did computations and then put them out to slide around so that they would go on these big Mercater maps. Those Mercater maps were a beast because depending on where you put it, it would produce different kinds of distortion. So I would have to have different overlays depending on where the proposed location of the receiving dish would be. This had been going on already for a couple of years in parallel so we actually had all the listening stuff in place, interesting enough, by the time the Sputnik went up.
I was using rather crude tube-based software. The 7090 became the place that sort of won for the real transistors at that time. Well, the reliability and power and size and all those good things—refrigeration—wow, what a difference. And so the other job was to help build all sorts of things.
That old 709 computer was mind-bogglingly fast compared to anything that you could do on a desk calculator. You used to have to hire rooms filled up with women that did nothing, all day long but pound out numbers. The calculations used to be based on a room filled with manual calculators. And the thing is that one computer was equivalent to the entire women population of Pasadena pounding on Monroe calculators ___. But man, it was a long way from where things were up to that moment in time. But it meant that we had to solve everything graphically ahead of time and lay out kinds of graphs and other things because there was no way that that computer in real time could stay on top of what was going on. But on the other hand, it was unloading incredible amounts of work in terms of the math thing and other things like that.
I ended up being what would be called today a systems analyst in terms of the computing software. I worked as a system analyst but never really programmed the computer, and every time they tried to cut it, I’d just say no thanks. Too much of a beast, too hard to use, but what I did do was I would lay out all of the mathematics, then I would take them through all the first calculation, top right down to the final sets that could be directly programmed. They would generate miles and miles of tables. Printout, printout, printout, on the high-speed printers. That’s one thing they got to work pretty well, some super line printer, high-speed line printers. So back would come all this reams and reams of paper. Guess who got to plot it all? I remember one time writing this huge line integral across the end of the page, generating reams of stuff and saying “I quit!” Cuz I had had it with doing that kind of work. I had to plot so many numbers and I had plotted all the stuff and put all the stuff up on the boards for all the visiting firemen to come by with their old fancy epulets and stuff from the Army or the Navy or whatever. And so things went.
The thing that was fascination was that just 40 years ago, was also the invention of FORTRAN interestingly enough. FORTRAN was in ‘57 and was put on that machine and they told me what, they asked me if I had learned FORTRAN and I looked at it and it was too difficult an environment for it.
Mathematics
Another thing was that summer, I had taught myself statistics using Feller’s book on finite statistics when I was in high school. All through say, oh I would say about eleventh and twelfth grade mainly, I got off onto wanting to study mathematics, statistics, and I found Feller’s book on finite math to be the only thing that was really useful.
[Am I thinking in the right power and the right name and all that jazz? Cuz I was just pulling that out of nowhere, see one of my other things I used to use. I used to keep a library of stuff that I would just point to books and other things to jog my memory that___. ]
But the thing is, I looked at his book on continuous processes. Hah! Later on, I was part of my way through measure theory and I still couldn’t get to zip in that book. So it’s a continuous thing for statistics. Boy, what a difference, and here I was able to teach myself something useful in statistics out of Feller’s finite one because he put such a beautiful set of test problems and examples together. He leveraged it right out of finite mathematics that you could go get Schaumm’s ouline and teach yourself the right math to go for it.
*Yeah, I think the second, the continuous book was actually written in haste, that he was very sick.
Oh, I didn’t realize that.
*Yeah, he was in the process of dying so he was quickly putting that together.
I thought that was the third version of the finite one.
*Well, maybe you’re right, maybe you’re right.
The third version, the final one, came out with, he had loaded with problems. He made all sorts of errors.
*OK, well maybe that’s what it is. I know he was very ill when.
No that couldn’t be right, because they were almost in parallel over my entire history. I just remember I’m sure that, I’m almost sure that either at the very end of the 50s or the very beginning of the 60s is when the continuous one came out. The first edition of the continuous one. What a bear that was. I couldn’t get anywhere, so there have been all sorts of things all through my life where there are some books that people did that were such an incredible help and there were other ones that I just couldn’t work with.
But the thing is that was really amazing is it was in also 57, with Sputnik and the invention of FORTRAN, that he came out with the second edition and in the second edition of his book he decides to do some coin flipping experiments with his students. These were done with coin flipping. So you can remember that you can get into trouble when you generate pseudo-random numbers on a machine because you’re playing games.
You never really know what properties are inherent in the method of generation you’ve chosen with a vengeance. Remember the little things we used to do showing graphically that generators in the literature sucked in various ways? And remember that that pattern actually corresponded, that if you worked with a dimensional problem that matched what that was say 15 or something like that.
*17, I think it was 17.
17 or whatever it was, 17 because it had to interact with that pattern.
Running
Bill P and I both loved long distance running, so we loved to run. We’d go up behind his house and run in the mountains, and run and run and run. Which is neat. His wife and kids were just truly wonderful. One time we went up there to Gold Stone and we were climbing all around. He showed me all the different ways the thing was— but that’s leading ahead. What happened was that he and I became best friends, the best friend I ever had in my whole life, and we participated in building those first Explorer satellites. It was so crazy to have that honor.
You just can’t believe what an honor that was. Mind-boggling honor to have been in the group.
The other fascinating thing that happened to me at this time in my life would be Bland is dearly. I’m dearly indebted to Bland for is he at that point was still jogging and he’d go up in what he called the Open Space Preserve __ San Antonio above Cupertino and jog.
-No, run and walk. I could never jog because it tore up my knees and ankles.
OK, well, whatever you were still doing at that point.
-And all the young friends of mine that jogged, I had to stop doing it with them because if I went that pace it fouled me up so bad. Either I ran or I walked. I ___ I wanted to walk, both uphill and down, found it was a good exercise.
And where I could run and walk long distances. I developed a funny running-walk with my friend Loren James first and then I gave it to Latti Lamb. When Loren James was training for the pentathlon and going into the Olympics and all that stuff, we developed a way of running, half-running and half-walking, and doing a stride that was sort of. We copied the Black Feet Indian because we were using Black Feet moccasins a good deal of the time. It was the only way to develop the muscles and the coordination and everything so it wouldn’t damage your feet over a hard rock and stuff, or for long distances. But it turns out that you could run and do a half-run, half-walk, half-shuffle thing so if you hit a little piece of ice, you upright and you just slid in position upright.
All my friends took up jogging and I found that when I started to jog with my friends, my knees would immediately go or my ankles would immediately go with that pace. I could run OK or I could walk OK or I could do a marriage, a half-marriage of a run-walk. I never could jog. Tore a whole huge chunk of the __. I was supposed to go out and do my thing with the, I never did.
*Had your own pace.
A couple of times, what’s his name, that became a model there at Cal-Berkeley who was the engineer? Dave?
*Engineer or the entomologist?
He ended up in the entomology department but was a mathematician with engineering background. He’s the person that got very much into the same theory.
*George Oster?
Oster, right. Oster. He jogged a lot and wanted me to go along with him. I started to a few times and just found that I couldn’t. Just couldn’t jog. It would kill me. So when I said there were three forms of recreation that I did.
*As escapes.
One was mathematics, one was biology, and one was a hybrid of running and walking. And preferably in some areas that I wouldn’t be killed by oxidant air pollution or the other grass pollen I finally became really allergic to was the oat grass that was so common now, and the hoop grass. Just a few things like that but fortunately I had no, still have no allergy even to, tree pollen here can be laying on a __ and I have no reaction to it fortunately.
*That’s good.
But oxidant air pollution just would eat my lungs out so, and it was doing it again down in Chico, so I moved first up to McGill __ Paradise meant higher altitudes I’m really out of it, no problem. Is that the kind __ that you wanted?
*Well, whatever you want to.
No, but I’m really kind of, is that?
*Yeah.
I tell you __ brute force __ things to. It has to be able to ___ fit with what I can reasonably say and then my own things of value system ___ I tend to be brutally honest.
*Right, yeah.
So even though I keep my __ will I ever say it? And boy that got me into deep, deep shit if you will excuse the expression. I never say the word shit, but boy did that get me in deep shit a few times in the university, speaking my piece straight out. So there were some kinds of learning that I never really learned very well. Even to keep my own, boy.
*So full throttle or, so you’re either running or you’re walking. No in between for you.
That’s an interesting analogy, isn’t it?
*Yeah, that seems to go for a lot of aspects of your life.
That’s very intriguing. Boy, you made me cry. That’s an incredible insight.
*One comment that Hillary said yesterday morning was that you would either be incredibly involved in a project for days and just going incredibly fast or you might be sitting in a chair and just staring at a wall.
True.
*And there wasn’t a whole lot, you know, there was a pretty strong shift in between those.
That’s the truth though __. Yeah, never learned to hold my piece ever. So I don’t know, it’s wise thing to devote the time and effort and things to make it work or you can go well. I would really go for it and sometimes for months, sometimes for years. It was either fired up pace or flat out running or it would be bringing back into a walk, but I never could jog.
*Interesting.
It’s true.
The loneliness of the long distance runner. Wasn’t there a movie about that kind of a title, the loneliness of the long distance runner?
*I don’t know.
But at any rate, but I was saying that __ was captain of the long distance team there at Caltech. I’m almost certain that he was captain. That’s really a mind-blowing thing. He was the captain of the team that did long distance running. So then later on __ and then one of the things that we used to do was to run long miles on the days that weren’t as smoggy you could still breathe in the mountains behind JPL itself in the afternoon. Behind JPL right __ where JPL is.
And a light plane crashed in that area, right at that more or less at that time. It was along the same road where a friend used to run. We actually went up there to the plane and he wanted to talk to . He found where the guy had died upside down in a light plane crash in the bush. He was really spooked by it. It really bothered him and yet a little, just a few, was in just a couple of years when he was caught in a __.
And the thing is is that now __ they had a commercial program of plane, what was it? DC-something got into a cat type situation and they had to, it took all the __ smashed, shattered the windows for the pilot to see __. Did you see that one?
*No.
At any rate, when the pilot finally got back, he had to land with absolutely no instruments, no __ or anything, just be talked down to the ground. Nothing was left together with the wind blowing in the side window that had been popped and blown completely out of the plane, and totally shattered windows that he just couldn’t see. He landed that plane successfully and then described it. Later on he took another plane that other passengers were offered and he was offered to make a __ flight by because they had to fly. It turned out that he had been shot down twice in Vietnam. They said that that __ was severe beyond anything of being shot down in the military plane. So __ that happened to him twice and he got off to the ground successfully. But that was another, that was a cat again. Here it comes. They dismantled the commercial plane from mid-air. That happened just a few months ago.
*Just before I left, I got a copy of the Science News and the cover of it is about air tremors, so it’s about this very topic.
You know it was Science News that used to go up and into the thing, Scientific American, Science News. I used to really love them but it’s overload so I just can’t do that any more. It was really neat to follow the kind of articles. Science News used to produce the summary articles to stay on top. The broad sweep of things __ science summary thing that I ever had.
*Yeah, I like it a lot.
Tragedy
My good friend, Bill Pilkington, who was my boss in building Explorer satellites. At the end of the 60s, he decided to fly his family and brother. He decided to rent a light plane because he was a pilot. He always seemed to keep some hours going. Because he had his family and kids and wife and brother, he was being super careful. He was the kind of guy that sometimes sort of pushed the limits of what he could maybe do just for excitement. But this time he was playing everything by the rules, and he was flying into O’Hare Airport in Chicago.
There had been some thunderstorms that had just cleared. A large jumbo jet had just taken off. Bill went between the two places, the thunderstorm and in the wake of the jumbo jet, and hit a clear turbulence. The witnesses on the ground said they thought the plane just totally dismantled in mid-air, turned to shreds in mid-air. Sometimes clear turbulence can be dangerous, where you’re playing everything by the rules. He was just 10 minutes behind the take-off of a big jumbo jet at the time and was cleared to come in behind it. And he was doing the thing of staying away from the building thunderclouds.
There was very unstable air, where you just pop up and go to 40,000 feet instantly. Clear turbulence just dismantled his plane in mid-air completely, came down in shreds. His wife—who was neat—his children, who I used to love to crawl back and forth—three children, a girl and a newborn, and his brother—all killed. What a mind-boggling loss to his family. Just mind-boggling to everybody. I just decided I couldn’t deal with my grief. I broke up, I thought I had a disease. I just broke out with this nervous type thing where your nerves interact with your skin, and it just fell off in chunks. It was incredibly painful and everything. I’ve never known such pain in my entire life. That was the end of JPL.
Talk about ___ ever, ever, with anybody like if I described the satellite things . The other thing is Bill Pilkington’s death that go through in my life. It is really important and helpful to talk about him, and it’s real nice to have this stuff documented somewhere. He was such an incredibly neat guy.
OK, actually I talked about before, and now what I talked about it, and usually I have to re-emphasize the fact that Bill Pilkington who was my boss there, and I won’t do any more than just to mention the fact that I described the situations ___ before. But it also meant that, that was the end of JPL, his death, and never did return, never did.
They were nice enough to send on to me various and varied things that I had written and classwork type things that I did. JPL sent me a number of those from the lab later on, as sort of a keepsake. They didn’t make ___ where essentially I knew ___ skyline into Silicon Valley at that time.
As I said repeatedly, Bill Pilkington was the best friend I ever had in my life. His death and his family, kids, wife, daughter, everybody, was the most mindblowing experience I’ve ever had in my life. Boy that hurt and it’s funny. We had so much in common.
Present Time
And so live goes. And goes, and goes, and goes number on my toes. Did you ever read any of the books?
*By Feller?
No, no, no. Childhood books coming out. Nobody Knows How Cold My Toes are Growing.
*No, I don’t recall that.
Pooh Corner and things like that.
*Oh, OK, yeah.
Pooh Corner?
*But I don’t remember the words. My brothers would know, because they’ve been reading them over and over in the past few years.