JP rev. 1.00 1.

After meeting Jack Pierce in Weare, New Hampshire, and reading these

memoirs, my wife described Jack as "a man of parts". He was also a

fine storyteller, and here follow the stories, on radionavigation up

to Omega, time and frequency, and many other things. Jack said he

would like to see these circulated to those in the field of

radionavigation. That dinner pre-dated the Worldwide Web, though not

by much; perhaps he anticipated the Web as well.

This document is, by definition, one man's perspective, and it is an

interesting history of the interaction between understanding of the

medium in which we live, enabling technology and geopolitics, from

the mid-1930s to mid-1980s and from VLF to HF: that is, "time and

frequency". Jack made important contributions, bringing knowledge of

timekeeping, physics and propagation to a real need. He worked with

many familiar names which have now passed into history: this is his

personal account of those times and those personalities.

Sometimes one realizes the absolutely obvious several decades after

the fact: the number of informal discussions to which Jack refers in

chapter 26 gave me an intuitive feel for the nature of the Omega

"signal in lightning". It is doubtful this would have come out of a

Washington briefing, or in as enjoyable a manner as in Jack's living

room in Arlington with the sun having been declared over the

yardarm. This induced me to a multistage hard-limiting receiver

design which preserved signal phase, was simple to produce, and

which certainly did perform better than the others. More like an

audio system than a traditional radio, it suprised the production

line by not having any twiddle knobs. Without the chats with Jack,

the Marconi Canada Omega navigator would not have been as good. So,

we were able to validate one of Jack's many visions by equipping the

Pan Am 707 fleet, and be in pole position for the rest of the Omega

story.

I have added nothing; headers, pages, footnotes and a table have

been reformatted slightly to fit on a pure-text A4/letter (210mm x

11 inch, 68 character x 55 line page).* A few personal portions were

deleted, but the 30 chapter numbers are unchanged.

Yours Faithfully, Don Mactaggart Montreal, July 2001

mactag@total.net

This memoir was first conceived as a collection of anecdotes or

accounts of things that have interested or amused me, with the

idea that our grandchildren could read them whenever they might

reach an age that would allow some interest in the doings of

their ancestors.

After beginning with a few family stories and my own

earliest recollections, I became interested in the writing itself

and realized that the tales could not be told without a

considerable amount of biographical material. The telling has

therefore become roughly chronological so that later episodes can

benefit from some understanding of earlier backgrounds.

Because my own interests have been largely technical rather

than personal, most readers will consider that I have given too much

space to my scientific or developmental problems. I can only

apologize half-heartedly for this condition, as I must describe

the way things have appeared to me.

The sequence in this volume is essentially that in which the

various chapters were written, and is largely chronological

except that the chapter about Catherine was written as soon as I

could bear to do so after her death. The writing of that and later

chapters suffers from the absence of her editorial consideration.

My efforts to choose from a large quantity of recollections and then

the attempt to tell the stories in concise form have made this

the most interesting and pleasant of any writing I have ever done.

I have written very little before that did not demand my every

effort to stick to strict scientific truth. I have found myself

continuing, therefore, in a relaxed and personal way, and very

largely for my own enjoyment.

J. A. Pierce

Memoirs of J. A. Pierce February 4th 1989 iv

Father Harrington was the priest of a mixed Canadian-French and

Irish parish in Orono, Maine. His strong personality and aggressive

methods made him a focus of town gossip, especially among the

protestant youth. Much of this discussion dealt with rumors of his

hard tactics in extracting from his flock the support due the

church. In the face of these rumors, it was many years before I

realized that a parishioner in need always received a load of

groceries or a ton of coal when things were at their worst, and that

the protestant part of the town heard little or nothing about this

aspect of Father Harrington's mission.

My own acquaintance with Father Harrington was limited because he

did not serve until the time when I might have been able to maintain

an intelligent discussion with him. The great thing about Father

Harrington, to a young protestant boy, was that he had a motherly

housekeeper named Katie Mahoney who made better sugar cookies than

anyone. Throughout the neighborhood the recognized specific for a

bruise or a scraped knee was a visit to Katie Mahoney and her cookie

jars.

My earliest recollection of Father Harrington is that he came across

the street to our house one sunny morning, when I was idling on the

front steps, and gave me the first nickel I ever owned. I seem to

recall that I was curious, rather than impressed, until Mother

explained to me how many pieces of candy Miss Gee would give me for

the coin.

I suppose that Father Harrington had come to engage Grandpa in one

of the philosophical discussions that I am sure they both enjoyed.

Grandpa certainly rated as a pillar of the Congregational Church,

and I suspect that he stood almost alone as a protestant who would

allow himself to be seen talking with the priest, who was cordially

detested by many who were not of the Catholic faith, and perhaps by

some who were.

Grandpa's qualifications as a former college president and an

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy surely struck a chord in Father

Harrington and, unlikely as it seemed, a sincere friendship must

have existed between the two gentlemen. My strongest evidence to

support this belief came, when I was eight years old, in the short

interval between Grandpa's death and his funeral. On one of those

mornings Father Harrington called and was closeted with Grandma in

the big front parlor, with the sliding doors closed and Mother and

me both excluded. For what seemed an hour, the sounds of a violent

argument could be detected but not understood. I, at least, was

amazed, as I can recall no other occasion on which Grandma permitted

Father Harrington 2

herself to raise her voice. After Father Harrington had taken his

leave, with some formality, and after Grandma had recovered her

gentle speech, she told Mother that Father Harrington had been

determined to have the bell of the Catholic church tolled during

Grandpa's funeral service - an action that Grandma considered most

inappropriate. It seems that Grandma must have won the debate

because, although I recall few other details of the funeral (aside

from the novelty of riding in a carriage) I am sure that the

Catholic bell remained silent.

One of Mother's and Grandma's favorite stories concerned an incident

that must have dated from about the time of the first nickel. When I

was three, the Congregational Church called a new minister, the

Reverend Mr. Lyman. It fell to my family to offer our house for the

reception soon after his arrival. This function was held in two

parts, one in the afternoon and the other in the evening. Apparently

Father Harrington did not feel that he could call at a time when

many protestants were present, but thought that he should convey his

respects. Showing his diplomatic talents, which were frequently

concealed, and also betraying the sharp watch he must have

maintained from across the street, he arrived at the end of the

afternoon session when all the Congregational parishioners had left

although Mr. Lyman was still there. Mother and Grandma were busy

clearing the afternoon debris and preparing for the evening session.

I have no idea where Grandpa and Mrs. Lyman may have been at this

time. In any case, the two clergymen were introduced and, of

necessity, left much to their own devices. For the rest of her life,

Mother often recalled with glee that, on returning to the parlor,

she found me in the center of the black walnut sofa with the priest

on one side and the minister on the other. In my hand was a large

sugar cookie. It may have been one of Katie Mahoney's, although that

seems improbable. After taking a bite, I would hold the cookie for

Mr. Lyman to take his bite, and then extend it to Father Harrington.

This sharing continued long enough so that Grandma could be called

to help witness it. She and Mother never tired of referring to this

as the first and possibly the last time that these gentlemen broke

bread together.

Father Harrington coveted a field, almost across the street from our

house, that was owned by our neighbor, Dr. Mayo, who was perhaps the

chief of all the protestants in dislike of the priest. Dr. Mayo

declined forcefully to sell the field to the parish but, fairly soon

after the death of my grandfather, Father Harrington, by the adroit

use of a dummy purchaser, gained control of the field and proceeded

to build a parochial school. This action precipitated the most

violent protestant reaction that I remember, with opinions ranging

through various degrees of the immoral to the illegal.

When the school building was approximately finished a motto reading

Mother Raymond / Uncle Con 3

"Saint Mary's School / for God and Country" was incised over the

door. At first this slogan did not show clearly, as the building was

set back from the street, so the letters were filled in with black

paint. This was done on a morning when Mother and I were gardening

in front of our house. It happened that the painter had only

completed the C and the O in the last word at his lunch time. During

this interval two tiny Catholic girls stopped near us while the

elder spelled out the motto for the younger one. "Saint Mary's

School", she read, "for God and Company". Then, after a pause for

consideration, "I guess the Company must be Father Harrington".

This veneration for the priest was known not to extend to one member

of his flock, Mr. Maloney. Father Harrington's appreciation of this

fact was shown when Grandma asked him what statue would be placed in

the niche above the motto. "I have not decided", Father Harrington

replied, "whether it shall be a statue of Dr. Mayo or one of Mr.

Maloney". It turned out that the statue of an angel with extended

wings and with children at his knee, that Father Harrington had

actually ordered, was too large for the niche. It was then placed on

a pedestal in the middle of the schoolyard. The niche was ultimately

occupied, perhaps more appropriately, by a statue of the Virgin.

The Coburn house, directly across the street from us, between the

priest's house and the new school, became the convent of the

teaching Sisters. The Mother Superior was Sister Mary Raymond, whom

I eventually came to recognize as very nearly a saint. At first,

however, there was no communication between our house and the

convent, perhaps because of our being neighbors and friends of the

Mayos.

Seven years after the convent had been founded, and after Dr. Mayo

had died, there came an afternoon when Grandma said to Mother,

"Harriet, put on your hat. Let us pay a call on the convent". Mother

Raymond received the ladies graciously and presently took them on a

tour of the school. In one room they found a Sister who was

lingering to finish her chores. When Mother Raymond introduced my

folks as "our neighbors from across the street", the Sister looked

up with a twinkle and remarked, "It has taken you quite a while to

get across". In spite of this slow start, happy relations came

rapidly. The friendship between Mother Raymond and Grandma, in

particular, reminded me very much of that which had previously

existed between Father Harrington and Grandpa.

The Sisters, of course, always traveled in pairs, and could go only

where they had a proper errand. Despite this limitation, Mother

Raymond was often in our house. Frequently Mother or Grandma would

bake a cake, or some other goody, and send me across the street to

hand it in at the convent door. This naturally led to the need to

return the cake tin or plate, so in a day or two Mother Raymond and

Mother Raymond / Uncle Con 4

one or another of the Sisters would return the dish; usually full of

fresh eggs as the convent kept a flock of hens. If I had so much

sickness as a bad cold, word would get to the convent and Mother

Raymond and a Sister would call. After addressing a few appropriate

words to the Lord and to me, they would settle down for an hour's

happy chat with Mother and Grandma.

The memory of Mother Raymond will always be especially dear to me as

she, more than all others, found the right words to renew my courage

after the death of my mother. This event was perhaps particularly

hard because it happened after I had come to fully realize how much

Mother had sacrificed for me all my life and before I had become

able to do much for her in return. Without my finding the words to

say any of this very well, Mother Raymond seemed to understand.

Certainly her sympathy and support saved me from extreme depression,

if not worse.

The rapport between our rigidly Congregational household and our

Catholic neighbors may have been enhanced by the memories of a black

sheep in the family, of whom I think Grandma was somewhat proud.

This gentleman was her brother, Joseph Converse Heywood, who was,

until the age of forty or more, the dramatic critic and an essayist

on the New York "Sun". He also wrote immensely long epic poems on

biblical subjects, such as "Salome". These must be, today, totally

unreadable, but in the Victorian era they were favorably received,

possibly in part because of "Uncle Con's" position as a critic. Some

quotations I recall in publisher's "blurbs" might have made one

think that Heywood was a second Shakespeare. In that era Uncle Con

had the reputation, according to Grandma, of being the only man in

New York who knew every possible place where one could buy a drink.

This status came to an end when Uncle Con married a very wealthy

woman of the Catholic faith. Almost the first the family heard was

that the new couple had moved to Rome. The second surprising piece

of news was that Uncle Con had become American Chamberlain to the

Pope, which authorized him to wear a remarkable uniform, fortunately

only required on State occasions. He lived in the Palazzo Torlonia,

where he assembled what was reputed to be the finest private library

in Rome. His ring, along the lines of that of an archbishop, and a

magnificent portrait of him in his uniform, wearing the most

generous bifurcated beard I have ever seen represented, came to

Grandma after Uncle Con's death and were objects of veneration to

me.

There must have been some substance to these tales. Grandpa and

Grandma made their only trip to Europe a half dozen years after

Uncle Con's death. In Rome, Grandma mentioned his name to someone

with the result that the Vatican opened its doors for the visitors.

My grandparents were granted an audience with the Pope and were so

generously entertained by Cardinals whose names I no longer remember

Uncle Con "Aramaic" 5

that Grandma often referred to this episode throughout the rest of

her life.

* * *

My favorite story about Father Harrington came to me third hand,

through Grandpa and Grandma. Because my grandparents were both

personifications of honor, I cannot conceive of their having

modified this, or any other, story except perhaps by smoothing any

rough edges to forestall someone's hurt feelings.

It seems that after many years of his service in Orono a purse was

made up for Father Harrington to make possible a trip to the Holy

Land, followed by an extended visit to Ireland. I have heard that

the Father's wealthier parishioners found a way to suggest to him,

while in Ireland, that he would be maintained there permanently if

he cared to stay. This part of the story may well be apochryphal. If

there was such an offer, it was declined.

On his return, Father Harrington told Grandpa about a shipboard

encounter. One morning, after he had been pacing the deck reading

his prayers, he was approached by a young man in the garb of an

Episcopal curate. To open the conversation, the curate said, "I see,

Father, that you have been reading your prayers in Latin. I assume

then that you know that language well." Father Harrington agreed

that he was an excellent Latin scholar, so the young man enquired

about Greek, of which Father Harrington admitted to a perhaps

exceptional knowledge. The enquiry then proceeded through Hebrew and

a number of modern languages. Father Harrington claimed at least

adequate knowledge of all of them. At last the young man said, "You

are really an unusual expert in languages, Father. It makes me hope

that perhaps you may know some of the language that Christ spoke

when on earth. I have always longed to hear a few words spoken in

Aramaic". At this point Father Harrington exhibited some modesty,

but admitted that he had a slight knowledge of that language. "Would

it please you", he said, "if I were to recite the Lord's Prayer for

you in Aramaic?" The offer was, of course, gratefully accepted. In

telling Grandpa about the occasion Father Harrington concluded, "I

said it for him and sent him away perfectly happy". Then, after a

quizzical look (and in what Grandma later conveyed to me in a

somewhat exaggerated brogue), "I said it in Irish, but it did him

just as much good".

* * *

Father Harrington's Appreciation 6

I do not intend this anecdote to indicate any lack of respect for

the memory of Father Harrington. I can best restore the correct tone

by quoting the priest's "Appreciation" that was dated on the day of

Grandpa's death and published in a Bangor paper. It read:

"It is 16 years last October since first I met Dr. Fernald. I loved

and admired him then, and my love and admiration for him have

intensified and increased as years rolled by.

"He was a gentleman in the true sense of the word, noble in acts,

refined in manners, wellbred, educated, courteous, kind and

honorable, and carrying into public life the high standard of his

private morals. He was a true type of the gentleman of the old

school, which is unfortunately fast passing away but which has left

its impression in the generation in which he lived and its influence

even in the present. All, irrespective of creed or politics, revered

and loved him, for he was an upright citizen, than whom there was no

better in Orono: charitable, both in word and deed, whose good

works, in their entirety, are known only by Him who scrutinizes the

heart.

"He always helped to legislate what he considered best for the

benefit of the community, and as a neighbor, with all the

characteristics of a Christian gentleman. Dr. Fernald's memory will

be long and fondly cherished by his friend,

"John M. Harrington

"Orono, Jan. 8, 1916"

The Family in Orono

My maternal Grandfather died a few weeks after my eighth birthday,

so I directly recall relatively little about him. The best evidence

of his ability and devotion to duty is to be found in, or between

the lines of, his "History of the University of Maine". He was

called to the Professorship of Mathematics and the Acting Presidency

of the Maine State College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts in

1868, when the first class matriculated. An interesting footnote is

that he and the Farm Superintendent, Samuel Johnson, were the entire

faculty for the first year. I have never known what the duties of

the Farm Superintendent may have been, but he, like Grandpa, had a

Master of Arts degree from Bowdoin.

Before going to Orono, Grandpa had spent several years as a teacher

or principal at some of the better known academies in Maine. He

served the college (and, later, University) for nearly forty years

except for two or three in the 1890s when his health failed. An

indication of his trials is to be found in the fact that the total

of the state appropriations for the college in the first four years

of his presidency in his own right (beginning in 1879) was $6,500.

I always knew that Grandpa had lived to be greatly respected and

honored. Once when I was a boy I found an old trunk in the attic

containing diplomas attesting to nearly thirty honorary degrees. It

is interesting that, in his History he mentions only three of these,

two from Bowdoin and one from Maine.

Grandpa was of about average height for his era, but of an erect,

not to say proud, carriage. He was distinguished in his later years

by a glorious pair of snowwhite sideburns extending as low as his

chin, while the chin itself was clean shaven. I am sure that he

never appeared in public, even to walk to the Post Office for the

mail, without his frock coat and silk hat. He used to delight me in

church. After seating his family in his pew, he would settle himself

at the end of it and extract from somewhere a beautiful black

watered silk skullcap which he would adjust carefully to protect his

bald head. I used to suspect that the organist timed the first bars

of "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty", with which the service

always began, from the settling of Grandpa's skullcap.

One recollection is of my delight when on somewhat rare occasions

Grandpa 8

(possibly when I had been good) I was allowed to sit on Grandpa's

bed in the morning, or on his lap in the evening, and operate his

great, gold, minute repeater watch. I seem to remember that this

worked with a single bell ringing the hours, then double strokes for

the quarters, and finally single strokes again for the remainder of

the minutes; but my memory may be incorrect about this detail. The

memory certainly is aided by one of Mother's favorite photographs of

her father that showed Grandpa and me, complete with long blond

hair, on Grandpa's knee and looking at his watch.

I can understand not having forgotten the time when, returning from

a winter walk when I was about six, Grandpa and I broke through the

ice of the "frog pond" two or three hundred yards behind our house.

The water was about up to Grandpa' chest, but I think he managed to

keep me from submerging. Placing me on his shoulder and holding me

with one hand, he broke the ice with the other until we reached the

shore. I have never heard that there was any, witness to this

mishap. This is a pity, as I should treasure a description of

Grandpa, in his customary frock coat, coming dripping up out of the

pond.

In all probability this episode ended with my being dosed with

Mother's favorite specific for coughs or bronchitis: white of egg

beaten up with honey and, if the need were severe, a little whisky.

Grandpa would, of course, never allow liquor in the house, except a

bit for medical purposes. He could not, I suppose, forestall the

occasional gift of a bottle. After my folks were all dead, I found a

dozen or more excellent liquors in a remote corner of a cellar

cupboard. This collection included the only bottle of Napoleon

brandy I ever saw, so I deduce that Grandpa had instinctive good

judgment or had taken a bit of advice from someone.

One of the proud moments of my young life was when I stumped Grandpa

with an anagram. A frequent game at our house, probably to teach me

to spell, was to pass each other scrambled cardboard letters that

would form a word when put into the proper sequence. In one game,

near the end of his life, Grandpa admitted defeat in trying to

arrange the word "carrying" which I had given him. Possibly my

bedtime pressed upon him; it is inconceivable that he would have

deceived me by pretending something that was not the exact truth.

The only serious talk with Grandpa that I can recall was when he

told me that, because of the changing times and the spread of

education, I would know more when I graduated from high school than

he had had to know to graduate from Bowdoin College. Although I

readily admit the principle, when I compare my grandfather's ability

with my own I cannot help feeling that, for once at least, Grandpa

had made an error in judgment.

Grandpa 9

Often in the years after Grandpa died, presumably at times when I

displayed the somewhat violent disposition I had as a child, Grandma

would remind me of Grandpa's proud claim that he had never in his

life lost his temper. Occasionally she would thoughtfully amend this

statement by recalling that from time to time circumstances had

forced him into an intense state of "righteous indignation".

One of these occasions may have been when a small screw came out of

the rotary beater and was lost in the whipped cream topping for the

dessert for a dinner of the Conversation Club. Time did not permit

Grandma to do anything except serve the dinner and hope. Fortunately

nothing untoward happened until after the guests had left, when

Grandpa produced the screw from his vestpocket and demanded an

explanation of how such a thing could have been allowed to happen in

his house. GrandPa's indignation at this time may have been

accentuated by the partial elation of what Grandma often cited as

his favorite household dictum: "Anything really worth eating is

better with whipped cream on it".

My Fernald grandmother was born in a farmhouse in Weld, Maine. Her

middle name commemorated Elijah Lovejoy, a famous cousin of her

father who was called the first martyr in the abolition movement,

and is alternatively venerated for having lost his life in defence

of the principle of the freedom of the press.

After her mother died when she was six years old, Grandma was sent

to live with a favorite aunt, the former Harriet Converse, in New

Bedford, Massachusetts. The husband, Cornelius Howland, was a

relative of Henrietta Howland Robinson who later became famous as

the miser Hetty Green, a financier who left a fortune of a hundred

million dollars in the early part of this century. Grandma sometimes

referred to "having played" with Hetty Green when she was a small

child. Because my encyclopedia tells me that Hetty was ten years

older than Grandma, I incline to the happy thought that Hetty may

have been Grandma's babysitter.

Two years after his first wife died, my great grandfather married

Phebe (Kimball) Russell, a widow who brought two stepsisters into

the family. One of these, Susanna, later had a daughter Elizabeth

(Merrill) Hay who always remained a favorite "niece" of Grandma, and

who lived to be a member of her church in Portland for eighty-eight

years. I mention these geneological details only to support the

suggestion that Grandma returned from New Bedford in time to have

most of her schooling in Bethel, Maine, to which her father, a

former schoolteacher, had moved after his second marriage. This

question of where Grandma was educated interests me as she somehow

acquired a formidable amount of learning in her early years.

Grandma began teaching at the age of fourteen, presumably in Bethel.

Grandma 10

She once told me that it was in a typical one-room schoolhouse and

that her first pupils ranged in age from five to twenty-two. She was

proud of the fact that on her twenty-first birthday she was teaching

her twenty-first term of school. This claim I find barely possible,

on the assumption that Grandma taught in the first year after her

marriage, as she was presumably five months pregnant with my mother

on her twenty-first birthday.

I knew that Grandma had been a teacher as a girl, and even that she

had been able to help some now forgotten professor to prepare a

Latin grammar and, I think, dictionary. I also knew that she had

helped unofficially in any way she could in the early days of the

State College. I was, however, surprised, long after Grandma's

death, to find that she was listed among the faculty, in the third

year of the college, as Instructor in French and German.

Grandma and Grandpa met when she was teaching in the public school

at Bethel and he came there as principal of Gould Academy. A year or

two later when he had moved, or at least been appointed, to Houlton

Academy, Grandma finally chose a time when her father seemed to be

in a good mood, for an important question. The father was Winslow

Heywood, a taciturn man about whom I know only the detail that he

believed it best to eat only one kind of food at a meal. This meant

that his unfortunate wife had to prepare meat, potatoes, vegetables,

pies, and cakes so that, whatever he decided to eat, there would be

enough for his entire meal.

At the chosen time, Grandma approached her problem as follows:

"Father", she said, "Would it be all right if I should go to teach

at Houlton next year?" "No", said her father. "Well, Father, would

it be all right if Mr. Fernald and I were married first?" "Yes",

said Father, ending the conversation on that subject.

I gradually realized, as I was growing up, that Grandma had a

phenomenal memory. Much of this discovery came to me at Commencement

times when our house seemed to become a sort of secondary reunion

head quarters. For two or three days there would be a steady stream

of old graduates, many of whom had tears in their eyes as they

recalled, for example, how it had been Grandma, back in the 1880s,

who had managed to say the magic words that had prevented the young

men from dropping out of college. These and similar testimonials to

her mothering of the college interested me, but were not surprises.

What did astonish mG, as more and more evidence accumulated, was

that Grandma not only always recognized the old students but almost

invariably knew whom they had married and the names of their

children.

* * *

Grandma's Memory 11

My highest tribute to Grandma's powerful memory comes from the Fall

of 1922, in my third year of High School. When I had begun studying

Latin as a freshman, I had had great hopes of help from Grandma.

These hopes were in vain, because she believed that I had to learn

for myself, and she resolutely refused any help at all. The Latin

classes were quite small with the result that the third and fourth

years were combined into a single class. I happened to enter this

pattern in the "bad" phase and found myself leaping from last

Spring's "Gallic Wars" into this Fall's "Aenead". After a few weeks

it must have become obvious that I was floundering, for one evening

I succeeded in getting Grandma to take the book and explain a

construction that baffled me. Having done this without difficulty

she, of course, found the book in her hand and almost automatically

began to read, because we were a family that read out loud to each

other as a matter of course. Grandma read the Virgil in a beautiful

translation, without hesitating over a word, exactly as though it

had been a novel in English. I was astonished, because I had thought

that one read two words of Latin and then looked up the third in the

vocabulary. Grandma however, became interested in the story and read

aloud for nearly two hours while, after a partial recovery from my

amazement, I made notes as fast as I could. When bedtime approached

she finally closed the book and leaned back in her rockingchair.

After a few minutes thought she said, "Do you know, I believe that

it's fifty two years since I looked at a Latin book".

While Grandma's phenomenal memory and great intelligence certainly

were an asset in her social relations, as in everything else, I

think it must have been her gentle urbanity that endeared her to

most people. It seemed to me that she was seldom really surprised at

anything, least of all by my pranks and misdemeanors. She apparently

felt that these taught their own lessons, and did not often allow

herself to show that she had heard of them.

In conversation, Grandma invariably expressed the expected degree of

surprise, but in such a soft and courteous way that I felt that,

having foreseen everything, she was simply making the orthodox

replies to conversational gambits. For minor occasions of a totally

unexpected and private nature, such as the breaking of a dish, she

reserved her only exclamamation, "Great Jehosephat!"

Grandma got more pleasure out of a Victorian era joke or an amusing

happening than anyone I ever knew. It may be a hundred times that I

heard her chuckle when something reminded her of an occasion when

she had been enquiring for some part time help. She was called to

the door by a burly Irish woman who said, somewhat belligerently,

"You the woman what wants someone to do cleaning? Well, I'm the lady

what wants the job".

Grandma's Poetry 12

Grandma left a number of compositions, mostly poetic, that she had

written in various eras. A long poem in "epic" form, abounding in

classical references, is a clever and eloquent tirade called "The

Whole Duty of Woman". This is written in an accurate imitation of

the style of the women's magazines of the late Victorian period, and

deals with the ultimately overpowering weight of the myriad social

and familial obligations falling on the shoulders of a married

woman. Another composition, a long paper to be read to a women's

club, describes her summer in Europe with Grandpa after his

retirement. This is presented in exactly the tone of a travel book

of the 1910 era; a vastly different language from that of her

letters and other examples of her prose.

My favorite of her surviving compositions is a series of "charades"

in verse. These use, as do acted charades, "my one" or "my first" to

represent the initial syllable of an unknown word. I have copies of

more than a hundred of these written in assorted styles and meters,

many of them in recognized verse forms. A sample follows:

Time was when a big my one was well nigh filled

Each day with plenty like my whole, and we

My second but the biggest; in our scorn,

Our ignorant scorn, we deemed the little ones,

Which now are rare as pearls, as only fit

For casting before swine. How times have changed!

My last! yea double my last! O tempora!

O mores! fain would we now fill ourselves

With what in former days the swine did eat.

It may be helpful to remark that this charade, like most of

Grandma's others, was composed at the time of the shortages in the

World War I era. I suspect that this form of amusement was adopted

to keep her mind occupied in the years immediately following the

death of my grandfather in 1916.

Grandma apparently had fun in composing charades in various verse

forms, including one imitated from Victor Hugo which starts with a

verse of one line having one syllable, followed by the second in two

lines of two syllables each. The count builds up gradually to seven

lines of seven syllables and then descends in the reverse pattern to

end with a single syllable.

Grandma's Poetry 13

Grandma seems to have been especially interested in a number of Old

French verse forms, as she names them in several cases where she

employed them. An example is the Virelay:

It is a gala day. A mass

Of people, drawn from every class

Waits patiently along the street.

Upon the lawns, in the cool grass

Many a little lad and lass

Trips round on eager, restless feet.

Their questions older ears harass.

Ah! now is heard the blare of brass.

The fife's shrill note, the drum's loud beat

As these their joyous strains repeat,

My one appears with movement fleet,

But held in steady, firm control,

Adorned with flowers gay and sweet.

On my grandfather's farm complete

My two was builded by my whole,

A safe, though not a still retreat,

From which strange sounds the ear did greet

From what was then almost the sole

Source of my two; which now seems droll.

My three no meaning has t'unroll,

Unless to multiply by three.

A little child, whose wished for goal

Was Alice's queer rabbit hole

Or mirror's back, was taken to see

Stuffed beasts, from elephant to mole.

As on his sight the walrus stole,

"Where is my whole?", inquired he.

I am fond of these charades in part because they are the only two

that I am sure I recall reading in my boyhood. The second also is

remembered as it contains a reference to me in the last verse. Like

most of these charades, it is full of resonances, such as the

reference to the goosequill pen that spans the second and third

verses, The answers to the riddles are, of course, "Potato" and

"Carpenter".

* * *

Grandma's serenity was too alert and interested to be called calm or

placid. She was quiet and gentle, yet she never in her life missed a

Grandma's Poems 14

nuance. She had, in her day, done a great deal, helping with the

struggling college to an extent that can never be known; raising

five children and somehow getting them all through college without

any very recognizable financial resources; and most certainly

freeing my grandfather for his duties and interests to a truly

nineteenth century degree. In her old age, when I knew her, she must

have been more content with her life than is usual today.

Her end was very characteristic of Grandma. As nearly as I can

judge, she simply died of old age, perhaps accelerated by an attack

of sciatica. The sciatica put her to bed, from which she did not

recover the strength to rise, and she died quietly after a few

months. She spent much of the intervening interval composing

crossword puzzles for solving even the most difficult ones had long

been too easy to interest her and planning her funeral. She felt

that she could do this better than anyone else, because of her

unexcelled knowledge of local protocol and local animosities. She

left complete instructions: who were to be bearers and who honorary

bearers; what the minister might be encouraged to say and what ideas

he might be advised to avoid; the music and who should be asked to

play and sing it; and who should be invited to ride in the first

car, the second, and so on.

I suppose that this plan gave grandma her last feeling of

satisfaction with her work. She certainly wrote it with pleasure,

and I shall always remember the keen interest with which she read

and explained the plan to me. Fortunately, I have now forgotten the

reasons why certain pairs of gentlemen and, especially, of ladies

could not be asked to share a car.

At the end, I am sure she was ready and glad to join her husband in

the cemetery lot at the crest of the river bank, across the

Stillwater River from the campus. She had once told me, in a remark

I still find it very difficult to explain that Grandpa had chosen

the lot because from there "he could keep an eye on the University".

I know remarkably little about my father and his family because he

died before I was a year old and thereafter it always hurt Mother to

talk about him. His people, among whom the elder sons had been John

Pierces for generations, had moved south in the early 1800s and had

lived in North Carolina, where my grandfather had a nursery

business, until shortly before the Civil War. They then moved to

Father / Mother 15

Indiana, where Father was born, and then to southern Illinois, where

he grew up.

Father graduated from the University of Michigan and took his law

degree at Columbia University. While in New York he met Mother, who

also was studying there. Although they became engaged in that era,

he, in true Victorian fashion, had to establish himself before the

young couple could be married. He chose to go to the Washington

Territory so that his law office could grow with the new state. The

financial panic of 1893 cost him most of his savings so that it was

not until 1897 that he felt secure enough for marriage. As a result,

Mother told me sadly, they were engaged for ten years, in the last

nine of which they did not see each other until Father came east for

the wedding. I have always felt that this ten-year wait followed by

less than eleven years of marriage helped to explain why it was so

hard for Mother to talk about Father and their early days.

Father died of pneumonia in the summer of 1908. Somehow, within a

month, Mother managed to bring my sister and me to Orono to live

with her parents.

Like her parents, my mother must have been a remarkable person.

Unfortunately for me, because she was forty-one years old when I was

born and because of illness and tragedy, she had lost much of her

sparkle in the days when I knew her well.

Mother was two years old when Grandpa was called to Orono. She was

the first of five children, all the others being boys. She must,

therefore, have learned her homemaking skills early in life. She

graduated from the Maine State College in 1884, before she was

eighteen years old, and then went to New York where she became a

graduate of Melville Dewey's first class when he founded his library

school, which later became part of Columbia University.

This training qualified her for one of the first professions open to

ladies. She spent some time cataloging university libraries, among

them, I remember, Michigan and Pennsylvania State. She was employed

in the same capacity at Maine for a year or so and then, in 1890,

became the first fulltime librarian there. She also inaugurated and

taught a course in Library Science.

Mother retired from these duties to be married in 1897 and went to

Spokane, Washington, with my father. My only sister was born in 1898

Mother 16

and I made my appearance nearly ten years later. After father's

death in the following year, Mother, with the two children, returned

to Orono. My sister died just before her twelfth birthday in 1910.

After Grandpa died in 1916, Mother and Grandma devoted the rest of

their lives primarily to raising me; not an easy task as I was

headstrong and Father did not leave a very large estate.

Mother was an excellent musician. She had had, I was told, a fine

singing voice with a range of more than three octaves. She called

herself a mezzo-soprano but could sustain any quality from alto to

coloratura. Unfortunately she had lost most of this talent by the

time I was old enough to be interested. Mother was also a remarkable

pianist. She was the only person I ever knew who could

simultaneously sightread and transpose difficult music, so that she

could play in any desired key. She owned, for some reason, one of

the rare Norris and Hyde pianos with a transposing keyboard, a

device that slid the keyboard as much as half an octave in either

direction. She never used this feature her self, finding it better

to transpose the music mentally, but the piano was a great source of

interest to me.

Mother had a fine collection of sheet music, classical and romantic.

There was certainly nothing more "popular" than, say, Massenet or

perhaps Ethelbert Nevin. Because she liked variety and had such a

fine collection, she never troubled to memorize anything. I came to

grieve over this habit because, by the time I was in High School,

she was developing cataracts and could no longer read music. Rather

than try to satisfy herself with second rate playing, she simply

gave up the piano and never touched it again, although she kept it

meticulously tuned for my ineffectual efforts to learn to play it.

Mother, as befitted a former librarian, was an omnivorous reader and

either she or my grandparents, or both, had assembled an excellent

library with sets of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Stevenson, and so

on. There were also large numbers of reference works and

biographies, and Grandpa's books on mathematics and physics, from

which I practically learned to read. The nineteenth and early

twentieth century novelists were all there, as far as Joseph Conrad

and William J. Locke. I am sure that there were no speed reading

courses in those days. If there had been, Mother should have taught

them. I never knew her to spend more than an hour reading a novel

and, to keep from wasting time, she was always knitting as she read.

It seemed to me that she would turn a page after each dozen

stitches. I used to make a game of reading, much more slowly, the

same books and trying (by what I hoped was clever questioning) to

find some detail she had missed. The invariable result was that she

had not only appreciated everything that I found, but also learned a

few things that I had not.

Mother 17

I should mention "The Skimmers" as it was a book club that might

well have been more widely imitated. I believe that Mother and

Professor Stevens were among its founders in the 1890s. The club

consisted of forty families and was divided, for convenience, into

eight groups of five near neighbors. During the summer, a selection

committee would buy forty new books of current interest. In the

fall, each book was kept by a family for a week and then passed on

to the next family on the list. On every fifth Monday I (as a child

of a group leader) would collect the five books in the group and

take them to the next group leader, and also distribute the five

books that were passed to us. At the end of the college year, each

family had read, or at least had had access to, all forty books. The

year ended with a party and an auction at which the books were sold,

usually for about half of the purchase price. Thus, unless one

wished to buy some of the books to keep, the cost for reading all

forty was about half the price of the average book, or a dollar or

so. The list of subscribers and groups was kept on a bookplate in

each book, so that the sequence was available to all. The bookplate

was charming and I am sorry I do not know who drew the decorated

heading. It gave the name "The Skimmers", supported by a milkmaid on

one side and a cat with a bowl of cream on the other. Occasionally

someone would fail to pass on a book on Monday, so that it was

necessary for a child to go to extract it, but in general there was

little difficulty of this kind. The club was still operating when I

left Orono in 1933, and I still miss it.

Mother's cataracts, of course, ultimately brought her reading to an

end. One eye was finally operated on, but not too successfully. In

her last few years, she could read the spots on a deck of cards but

not much else. As a result she spent most of her time playing

solitaire. I think she once claimed that she knew 140 different

games. When I was available, we played thousands of games of

cribbage. This was her favorite and worked very well as I could do

the pegging for both of us. She was also very fond of Russian Bank,

but I never mastered its intricacies well enough to give her a

stimulating game.

Mother suffered severely from diabetes which greatly reduced her

weight from what it had been in her happily married days. I do not

think that she ever admitted this illness perhaps because, although

insulin had been discovered before she died, there was no real

treatment for the disease available in Orono. I, at least, only

learned the nature of her trouble at the time of her final illness,

which fortunately did not last long.

My grief at remembering Mother comes largely from having known her

only at this dull and uninteresting end of a life that must have

begun in, for its era, a very exciting and stimulating way.

Fortunately, after I had been away for much of the time for four

Mother / Sister 15 18

years, I, with my first wife and Mother's first grandchild, was back

in Orono with her for the last year or two of her life.

barely remember her, as she died of rheumatic fever when I was two

and a half years old. I do recall one or two things about Margaret.

The most distinct is an occasion when I was guest of honor (or, more

likely, a substitute for a doll) at a children's tea party with a

miniature tea set, at a little table on our front porch. I remember

that there was a total of four at the party, and I like to think

that the other guests were Elizabeth Chase and Barbara Dunn, as

these were the two of Margaret's friends whom I knew best in later

years.

3.

When I was four years old, Mother took me on a winter and spring

trip to visit various relatives, but I remember only a few

vignettes. My only recollection of this first visit to Cambridge

where Uncle Merritt was Professor of Botany, is of falling out of

the strange bed and rolling under it, thereby creating something of

a furor. In New York (where Uncle Rex was an executive of the Ginn

and Company publishing house and therefore the source of many fine

boys' books while I was growing up) I have a clear recollection of

playing in the park on River side Drive, close to the Soldiers' and

Sailors' Monument, and watching the ships in the Hudson River. I

also remember a very pretty scene, at the old Hippodrome, where a

complete sailboat rose slowly from the water in the stage pool, with

a number of bathing beauties clinging to the rigging.

We must have spent some time in Chicago, for I had my only taste of

Kindergarten there, and I remember seeing a tremendous sea turtle in

the Field Museum, as well as a giraffe most of which was on the

first floor but whose head extended up through a hole and could be

seen in an upstairs gallery. This must also have been the museum in

which I saw the walrus and asked for the carpenter. In Chicago we

were visiting two maiden sisters of my father, Mary, a

schoolteacher, and Imogene Pierce, who was the longtime secretary of

the Poetry League of America, or of some other institution with a

similar name. At Wausau, Wisconsin, we visited Aunt "Allie" Edmonds,

her husband, and my only paternal cousins. My only recollection

there is of wading and sailing a toy boat in a flooded area that

should have been part of the vegetable garden.

I remember very little of my early school years, except that I never

learned to write well. I was naturally left handed, at least in

writing, and I grew up in an unfortunate era when teachers could not

decide whether to convert me or leave me alone. The problem seemed

to be a matter of local option in each grade and, in the various

years, I was changed back and forth too much. I can at least testify

that left handed Palmer Method is a total failure.

I was supposed to be "delicate" and I surely did have more chest

colds and fevers than most of my friends. I recall several weeks in

a dark room when I had the measles. Fortunately this happened at

Christmas and sympathy with my being sick at that time brought forth

an unusual number of presents. It was arranged that every hour

Mother would bring in a clothesbasket of wrapped gifts. I could

Toys and Such 20

select one if I either took my medicine or drank a glass of milk.

The basket was replenished regularly and remained full, I think, for

my entire period of convalescence.

I had a protracted illness when I was in the fifth grade. I do not

believe that it was especially serious, but I am sure that Mother

and Grandma worried about rheumatic fever., In any case, I was kept

at home for two or three months and my school assignments were

brought to me. The studies went so well that I was encouraged to

skip a grade when I went back to school. This I still regard as a

serious mistake, for it brought me to college at too early an age,

when I was not ready to take full advantage of the opportunities. It

was an easy error to make as, growing up in a highly literate

family, I had learned to read before I started school and never

found my studies very difficult. My best lessons, outside of the

home, probably came from roaming the woods and fields, building toy

boats and kites, and helping friends who had the luck to live on a

farm. My finest boat was probably an alleged model of the America's

Cup defender "Resolute". My toy took to the name so well that on her

maiden voyage she sailed so straight and so sturdily up the river

that I never saw her again. At least she was a beautiful sight as

she disappeared in the distance.

The kite I remember best was related to the "Resolute". I made

mostly tailless bow kites, but this one was an old-fashioned

hexagonal model about eight feet tall and covered with brown

wrapping paper because I could find nothing else in large enough

sheets. I had to borrow a neighbor's barn floor to assemble it and

enlist a pair of friends to help fly it. After it had towed us

across two or three fields, with some damage to us at the

intervening barbedwire fences, we finally had to tie it to a fence

post as we could not assemble enough boypower to get it down. It

flew from the fence post for three days before it finally carried

away and disappeared during the night.

I soon developed a knack for originating toys that had some local

popularity. The earliest was probably a line of toy boats, and even

submarines, with rubber bands for power and with propellers cut out

of old tin cans. These, in general, were much more successful than

my attempts at model airplanes, and were widely imitated. A more

lethal device was a slingshot mounted on a narrow board with a

trigger mechanism and sights. Since this separated the problems of

stretching and aiming, it had excellent accuracy, especially when we

could find a supply of buckshot or steel balls for ammunition. One

of my friends who built an especially powerful version of this

weapon claimed that he saw a bird fly into a bush a quarter of a

mile away. He said that he let fly at the bush and killed the bird,

but he was recognized as the most stalwart liar in the gang.

Toys and Such 21

Another exaggerated toy was a broadbladed propeller launched from a

string wrapped spool. Our version was made of heavy gauge galvanized

iron that we found somewhere. These devices were a foot or so in

diameter and could fly 200 yards and still out a swath a dozen yards

long in a hayfield when they came down. Another unlikely toy was a

dart half an inch in diameter and twelve or fifteen inches long,

feathered like an arrow and with a darning needle inserted in its

nose. These could be thrown a hundred feet or more but with dubious

accuracy. Strangely, I can not recall any one being seriously

injured by any of these gadgets. Possibly providence takes special

care of children and fools when they are combined in the same

individuals.

One of my close friends, geographically as well as emotionally, was

Sam Clark. Sam was, in one era, cursed with having to come home from

whatever we were doing at 4:OO P.M. to feed a dozen or two of hens.

We never found out why the hens needed their food at four rather

than at some convenient time, but this fact forced us to devise an

electrical solution to the problem. We hung a board, pivoted at one

edge, along the roof of the small henhouse, with the other edge

supported by a catch that could be tripped by a solenoid. The

solenoid was actuated by a battery connected through the hands of an

old Ingersoll dollar watch set, of course, to trigger at four

o'clock. We could then arrange the feed for the hens along the board

so that it would drop into the middle of the floor at the required

time. We thought this was wonderful, but Sam's father vetoed the

idea because the food was supposed to be mixed with the chips on the

floor so that the hens would have to scratch for their meal. This

ruling required another burst of invention. We placed another wide

board against one wall of the hen house. This extended parallel to

the floor, which it almost touched, and was hinged at the top edge.

An arm, fixed to the board, extended horizontally out through a slot

in the wall. Fortunately that side of the hen house was supported on

posts and was several feet above the ground. We could then attach a

heavy weight (supported by another trigger mechanism we had linked

to the first board) through a rope several feet long to the outboard

end of the lever arm. Thus, when the food was dropped in the hen

house the weight also dropped but had farther to go than did the

food. The net result was that the food reached the floor and was

immediately covered by a flying cloud of chips that been piled

against the board along the wall. This device passed inspection by

Sam's father, but unfortunately the problem of reliability raised

its head within a few days. The heavy current for the solenoid

burned the hands off the watch and, since we could not afford

another watch and no one seemed to have an alarm clock that was not

needed, the experiment came to an untimely end.

My most enduring interest was radio, beginning when Harold Hamlin

let me listen to signals on a set he had made in 1916 or 1917.

Beginning with Radio 22

Thereafter I was always trying to make a receiver that would work.

There was, of course, no money for any such foolishness so my coils

were, at first, the traditional Quaker Oats boxes wound with wire

taken from abandoned Ford Model T spark coils. I tried many kinds of

detectors, none very successfully (partly, of course, because few

stations were audible in Maine before 1920). Fortunately our upright

telephone had the old fashioned receiver with exposed binding posts.

I could disconnect it and take it upstairs to try to detect a

signal, but had to be careful to hear the telephone if it rang so

that I could get the receiver back before Grandma tried to answer

the call. My explosive descents of the stairs with the receiver

eventually called attention to what was going on, and after a few

months (when it was clear that my interest had not subsided) money

was found for a secondhand set of head phones.

I somehow induced the old Federal Radio Commission to grant me an

amateur transmitting license before I was thirteen. This did not

really do much for me for two or three years, but by 1923 I had

amassed a little equipment that really worked. Between then and 1927

I was fairly active, making the "brasspounder's league" occasionally

by relaying a considerable number of messages and engaging in a

little of the excitement of the first amateur transatlantic

communications. I surely wasted far too much time and money on

amateur radio before I first left Orono, but I feel that it taught

me some interesting and probably useful things.

I had had to wear glasses to correct astigmatism from the time when

I was seven or eight years old. In those days, this alone

disqualified me for most sports. As a result, tennis was the only

sport I ever became at all proficient in, and I gave that up at

about twenty after a shoulder dislocation made it impossible to play

for a couple of years. Before I "retired" I became able to brag of

having played a set with Big Bill Tilden, the most famous player of

the era, who happened to visit the wealthy family of a friend.

Through Mr. Tilden's kindness, I won one game. I fenced for a year

in college finding, oddly, that the foil felt more natural to my

left hand although my tennis was righthanded. I had a pair of skis,

left over from an uncle, and spent much time on them. It was chiefly

cross country skiing, although I did steal some practice on the

college ski jump.

Through my high school years I had, like Tom Sawyer, a way of

getting out at night without disturbing my family. Mine was over a

shed roof and down an antenna pole. It was a great joy when I

discovered that I could climb up the outside of the little college

observatory, open the slide in the roof, and get in. Thereafter I

spent most of many nights there becoming fairly proficient at using

the telescope, although I really never did anything very useful with

it. Curiously, no one ever disturbed me at this practice. I have

Schooling 23

often wondered what, if anything, my family (or anyone else except

the occasional boy I took with me) may have known about it.

High School itself seems to have left very few noteworthy

impressions. I took the "classical" course with all the math and

science (except biology) I could get. I had four years of Latin and

three of French, neither of which has stood by me very well. At

least the inscriptional Latin I find on various walls at Harvard

seems to be a closed book to me, and although I read French well

enough for my scientific purposes I have never been able to maintain

a conversation in it. I feel sure that I knew more Physics than my

teachers, and probably made that fact evident, but they never seemed

to resent it.

One episode in High School amused me greatly at the time although I

have since become less proud of it. In our senior year one of the

major assignments in English was a composition in fictional form.

This seemed to terrify the ten or twelve others in the class. Being

goodnatured, or soft, I agreed to help someone and the news spread.

The result was that I eventually wrote all of the dozen stories

myself, varying the subject matter, style, and even orthography in

accordance with my estimates of my comrades' abilities. The effort

seemed to be successful, as everyone received about his normal grade

on the composition. Two of the best were, I think, used in the

school yearbook, and I never heard of any repercussions from the

management.

I was, as tacitly insisted upon by my family, class valedictorian. I

seem to remember that my speech must have been in the best

nineteenth century tradition, and I am sorry that I do not have a

copy of it. It would today, I am sure, be supremely funny. This last

minor triumph marked the end of the period when all my studies were

easy for me. Henceforth, it would be necessary to do more studying.

My well formed superiority complex actually lasted just a little

longer. Maine had recently adopted the "Freshman Week" idea, and I

took a number of placement exams in the hope of being excused from

freshman courses or at least of being assigned to advanced sections

of them. I remember receiving the highest score in the class in the

general intelligence test I think it was the old Army Alpha but this

did not please me as much as the results of my exams in English and

Math. In the Math I found everything relatively easy except for a

mental block that prevented my seeing how to attack the proposition

that two triangles are equal if the three sides of one are equal to

the three sides of the other. I left a blank page until I had

finished the rest of the exam, and then went, back with no relief

from the block. In some agony I wrote the first equation or two and

put down the correct final statement with several blank lines in

between. At the end of the examination period I quickly filled in

College and Troubles 24

several statements of identity that may or may not have had anything

to do with the problem, and wrote "Q.E.D." at the end. The English

exam was primarily composition under an assigned title. At the

moment I could produce nothing whatever except a love story that was

as torrid as could be put on paper in Maine in 1924. Both efforts

were successful, as I was admitted to Sophomore classes. I never

heard anything about the Mathematics but an English instructor later

told me that I was admitted to advanced standing not because of my

ability in composition but "because of my emotional maturity" a joke

if I ever heard one. In retrospect, of course, I realize that none

of these results could have been good for me. I would probably have

been better off if Freshman Week had not been invented until later,

and I had been allowed more time to mature and to think as I

progressed.

My freshman year in college went reasonably well. My grades were not

as high as they had been in high school but were quite satisfactory.

I do not believe that tennis could have been recognized as a sport

because, to avoid Physical Training, I tried to shoot on the

freshman rifle team and to run cross-country. In neither enterprise

did I enjoy conspicuous success. My cross-country was especially

discouraging because I would come in after my usual 30 or 31 minutes

and find that Ernie Ridlon, who was, I think, about to become ICAAAA

champion, had not only showered but might have gotten fully dressed

while I was laboring through the last half mile.

In the summer of 1925 I had an odd accident. While walking with a

friend one Sunday afternoon, he called my attention to something

unusual about the construction of a small culvert beside a telephone

pole. I swung around to the far side of the pole and collided with a

climber's spike that was set much too low on the pole. The

relatively sharp edge on the head of the spike caught me just at the

hair line. The wound bled copiously, ruining the best pair of white

flannel trousers I ever had, but otherwise seemed to do no great

damage. A few days later, however, I began to develop severe

headaches. I soon found that if I were exercising somewhat

strenuously I might have blank periods when I could not remember

what I had been doing for half an hour or more. These symptoms

brought my summer activities to an almost complete stop. The only

medical advice seemed to be "rest", so I did nothing memorable until

college opened in the fall. This started well but after a few weeks

I found that an hour's study would blur my vision until the words on

a printed page might completely disappear. This effect, with the

accompanying headaches, made college an impossibility, so I dropped

out after a few weeks of my sophomore year.

For a while, in the winter, I found a job sorting dowels in a small

woodworking mill in western Maine (at $12.00 for a forty-eight hour

week) but I was called back from this because Grandma had a serious

More About My "Small" Accident 25

attack of pneumonia. She surprised everyone by recovering, and I

stayed at home the rest of the spring and summer doing practically

nothing.

I tried college again the next fall, with much the same result as in

the previous year, except that the serious symptoms were slower in

developing. I think I lasted until December, this time. It was

obvious that I had to find an outdoor job, or at least one that did

not require much close eyesight. Grandma found me a place through

one of her friends among the Maine alumni, who was in charge of a

valuation survey for the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad.

As a result I reported in March, 1927, to a field group that was

working in New Haven, Connecticut.

4.

It seems that the Interstate Commerce Commission had finally forced

the railroad to make a complete physical inventory of its property,

including a number of street railway companies in Connecticut and

Massachusetts. I found myself to be a chainman in a survey group

that was beginning work on the Connecticut Company. This started by

measuring the lengths of the tracks, then estimating the weights of

rails, the number of ties, the amounts of steel and concrete in

bridges, and so on. The job was to operate one end of a hundred-foot

steel tape, always holding it accurately against a mark and applying

what was supposed to be a fourteen pound pull, for mile after mile

through the city streets and out to the end of each trolley line.

For this, I was paid $27.57 per week plus an allowance of $18.00 a

week for living expenses, as the group was theoretically based in

Boston. This was real luxury because one could live easily on the

$27.57 while the expense money was paid monthly. Thus, in the first

week of each month there was nearly a hundred dollars ready to be

blown. I remember well one of the first times this happened. Page

Sanderson, my closest new friend and later roommate, and I decided

to see Coney Island. We went down after work ended at noon on

Saturday and went through the amusement park in complete detail. If

the next concession was a game we played it, or if it was food we

ate it. The enterprise took until about sunrise and cost us (ten or

fifteen cents at a time) over a hundred dollars each. Somehow we got

home again before we collapsed, and I think we were able to report

for work on Monday. I have never, to tell the truth, cared much for

an amusement park since then.

One of the perquisites of this job was an all-station pass on the

railroad. These were rare, but were granted to us because, in

theory, there was no telling where we might be assigned next. Thus

we could freely roam between Boston and New York whenever time

permitted; and, at twenty years of age, time permitted quite a lot.

The "white" all station pass was very powerful, perhaps because

conductors tended to think that the youngsters who carried them had

to be relatives of directors of the railroad. The passes even worked

fairly reliably on other roads than the New Haven. The technique was

to display the pass prominently in a billfold from which one

halfheartedly offered to extract money to pay a cash fare. About

four times out of five the conductor would pass on to the next

passenger. Much the same thing would happen if one wished to take a

girl with him. The conductor would seldom collect for the girl's

fare, especially if she could be induced to wear a Woolworth wedding

ring. This pass meant that I could go to Boston or New York very

The New Haven Railroad 27

frequently and could often visit Mother and Grandma in Orono at

little or no cost, unless I were in funds and chose to go by

Pullman. It was, I seem to recall, seldom that I spent a weekend in

New Haven.

In Bridgeport I barely escaped a serious accident. We were surveying

an area where the railroad viaduct crossed over a street that had

trolley tracks. We needed to find the intersection of the

centerlines and determine the angle between them. Because there were

four busy railroad tracks we tried to work rapidly on the viaduct,

which led to my taking notes in a book on my knee while holding one

end of a steel tape. To keep the tape tight with one hand, I found

myself squatting in the depression between tracks and steadying the

hand holding the tape against the nearest rail. Because a long

freight train was thundering by on the furthest track, I failed to

hear the approach of a fast passenger train on the track against

which I was leaning. The first I knew of its presence was when the

cylinder of the locomotive knocked my hat off while the wheels

skinned three knuckles of the hand against the rail. I had no time

to be frightened but the others in the group, who had heard the

locomotive whistling at me and had been shouting warnings I did not

hear, were all in bad shape. The boss of the crew, Mr. Byron Nelson,

from a vantage point fifty yards away, had seen the situation

developing and claimed that he had had time enough to start drafting

a letter of condolence to my family. He, I think, sustained such an

emotional shock that he was unable to work for a day or two.

It was also in Bridgeport that I had the most instantaneous surprise

I ever had. Some trolley tracks ran through the yard of an abandoned

power plant at the edge of the harbor, and one or two tracks

extended into the building. At this time I was taking notes with two

of the other boys surveying for me. After an hour or more of writing

in the notebook in the brilliant sunshine, we went into the building

to see what tracks were inside. I was almost blind in the dim light.

One of my friends followed the caretaker and I followed a few yards

behind him, able to see only his white shirt. I realized later that

he had walked down the center of a large room and then turned to go

through a door at a corner. I suppose I unconsciously turned toward

the door too soon. Whatever the reason, at one instant I was walking

quietly on a solid cement floor and at the next I found myself

submerged in a foul tasting viscous pool. One good stroke with the

notebook brought me to the surface and my friends pulled me out in a

highly bedraggled condition. I then found that the large room

consisted mostly of two large pits that had previously underlain

engines and generators and that were now full of a mixture of old

engine oil and sea water. My "solid cement floor" was actually only

a catwalk between the pits. This episode did me no harm except to

ruin my clothes and keep me washing stains out of my hair for a day

or two. I had to launder my money before the bank would exchange it,

The New Haven Railroad 28

and fortunately the railroad bought me a new suit.

Near this old power plant was the yard where I had a chance to climb

over and through the "Nautilus". This was one of Simon Lake's early

submarines that had been acquired and modified by Sir Hubert Wilkins

for his abortive effort to reach the North Pole under the ice. I was

fascinated by some of Sir Hubert's devices, especially wheels that

would permit the submarine to creep along the bottom, and air locks

through which divers could get out to explore the environment,

exactly as in "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea".

* * *

I witnessed a very touching sight in 1930, when I was working in the

old South Station office building in Boston. In that year the

American Legion, then at the height of its numbers and enthusiasm,

held its national convention in Boston, highlighted by a great

parade. I walked up Summer Street in time to watch the beginning of

this. There was some delay in getting the cars for the dignitaries

properly organized, so an Army regiment was sent ahead, apparently

to give the crowd something to watch. This group was then formed

into a long line along the curb to allow the dignitaries to pass by,

and it happened that I found myself on the sidewalk just opposite

the colors. After a time the cars began to come past but again some

delay occurred up ahead. This forced the open car bearing General

Pershing and General Giraud, a French World War I hero, to stop

exactly in front of me. The generals had, of course, interrupted

their conversation to salute the colors just as the car stopped. I

was greatly impressed to see that the two old gentlemen held their

salutes, without the faintest sign of surprise or irritation, for

ten or fifteen minutes. When the car started again the generals

terminated their salutes and turned toward each other to resume

their talk. Ever since this sight I have felt it imcumbent upon me

to be meticulous in saluting the flag whenever I watch a parade.

railroad: one year in New Haven, one divided between Bridgeport and

Hartford, one in Boston, and a final one back in New Haven. As my

eyes gradually improved, I was promoted through the ranks of Rodman

and Computer to Recorder. The first two years required primarily

outdoor work but after that there was more and more done at the

desk. I became a skillful comptometer operator and for a long time

preferred the comptometer to an electronic calculator for some

operations. In 1930, as the depression deepened, I was notified of

my discharge. This did not actually take place for a rather

depressing reason. On what was supposed to be my last day I went to

General Pershing 29

the office to clear out my desk and found that one of the draftsmen,

depressed by investment worries, had committed suicide the night

before. Because I had had an excellent course in mechanical drawing

in high school, I did not hesitate to accept the management's

decision to convert me into a draftsman. Perhaps the financial

emergency became less acute, or perhaps my drawing was not very

good. In any case, after two or three months I found myself doing

about what I had done before.

Through a friend I had met in my freshman year at college, who had

dropped out and was working in the Boston area, I had met, in 1927,

Marion Rogers of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Thereafter I used my

railroad pass frequently for trips to Providence. We were married in

early 1929, stimulation that meant a great deal to me. A daughter,

Martha Jane, was born in 1930 and did much to keep her parents

together.

in West Haven, Connecticut. One of my clearest evidences of single-

mindedness or possibly of some less desirable characteristic comes

from this period. When Marion and I required a babysitter, our usual

one was a schoolgirl named Marian Bergeron who lived a few blocks

away. When we got back from a movie, it was my duty to walk home

with the sitter. This, I remember, I regarded as a nuisance, and I

am sure I never noticed the girl except as a convenience to whom we

paid small fees from time to time. My lack of normal male powers of

observation was revealed, a year after we left West Haven, when our

former baby sitter went to Atlantic City and became Miss America.

In 1930 and early 1931, my remaining symptoms of eye trouble cleared

up completely and quickly. It was easy to tell, after the fact, that

a blood clot had finally dissolved. This brought an intense desire

to finish my college courses, so in 1931 I left the railroad and

returned to Orono. The college career had another setback when a

major attack of quinsy kept me out of school for three months in the

fall of 1931. I had to drop part of my courses, and from then on it

was a question whet her the two years I had budgeted for, with my

meager savings and a thousand dollars I had borrowed from Mother,

would be enough to let me earn the necessary credits. The financial

situation grew worse with Mother's death in 1932, as she was able to

leave me almost nothing beyond the money I had borrowed. I finally

came to the end of that money and the little I had been able to

borrow from other sources, with about ten semester hours still

lacking. Throughout this period my wife declined to help by finding

a job or, so far as I can recall, by doing anything to make my tasks

easier. Her main interest in this period was in playing a great deal

of contract bridge, part of which required an amount of my time that

End of My Work for the Railroad 30

might better have been spent in study. This was the beginning of my

realization of a "law" I have often tried to teach my graduate

students and others: that a married man can successfully pursue his

studies only if his wife desires the degree at least as much as he

does himself.

I tried very hard to get some kind of a job at the University of

Maine, for I felt a great deal of loyalty to it, but President Hauck

took no interest in my hopes. The depression was at its worst and I

was unable to find a job anywhere.

5.

The friend who had introduced me to Marion had returned to western

Maine and had taken over a small independent telephone company. He

needed cheap help, so I went to work with him in 1933, receiving no

pay but with food and shelter provided for my family. Along with

acting as linesmen, telephone operators, bill collectors, and

whatever other servants the little company needed, we tried to

develop a small radio business. We sold vacuum tubes on consignment

and built transmitters for radio amateurs and similar things

whenever we could find a customer, which was not often.

The telephone business had its interesting aspects. In those remote

days, telephone operators were helpful. Especially in a small town,

the operator knew almost everything anyone needed to find out. Calls

were never placed by number. A customer would say, "I want to talk

to George Tibbett", and the operator would reply, "He went into the

feed store about fifteen minutes ago. I'll try there". The feed

store might answer, "No. George just left here. He said he was going

to ask Jim Healy about fixing his plow". A call to Jim would

probably provide the required communication all done in two or three

minutes.

Listening on party lines was commonplace, and often a trial to the

operators, especially when a long distance call came in so weakly

that it really could not operate several receivers. It surprised me

to discover that, with experience, "central" could usually tell who

was listening. There are, of course, different sounds in different

houses: clocks ticking, children crying, footsteps on bare floors,

and so on. One would not suppose that, with the limited sensitivity

and poor frequency response of a telephone circuit, these background

noises would make up a unique signature for each house. They do so,

however, usually without the operator being at all conscious of the

clues. It was often, though not always, possible to say firmly,

"Aunt Susie, get off the line!", and have the order promptly

followed by a bang of the receiver having all of the quality of

profanity.

The company had copper wire connecting it to Portland and Boston but

most of the lines, some of which extended forty miles back into the

country, were of iron wire which had much greater losses. I became a

good lineman from the exercise of my duties in removing tree limbs

and repairing broken wires. Some of these lines ran to hunting

camps. In the autumn, these camps would be full of wealthy hunters

The Repeater 32

who tried to keep in touch with their New York brokers. As they

could seldom hear their correspondents wall enough, these calls

became long and confused sessions with one or more operators forced

to repeat messages in a jargon they did not understand. We decided

that we had to build a repeater. The problem with a telephone

repeater is to send the signal from either end of the line onward to

the other end of the line in amplified form, but not to send the

amplified signal back toward its source.

This is done by having two amplifiers (one for each direction) and

by matching the electrical impedance of each line in an artificial,

or "dummy", line. These elements are connected in an electrical

bridge so that each amplified output is balanced out to nearly zero

on the incoming line. Under perfect conditions, this can be done

with great precision. In our case the line impedance changed with

the temperature of the iron wire, while the leakage varied

tremendously depending upon how many tree branches lay across the

line and how wet they were. The only workable mechanism was to

provide some adjustments in the characteristics of the dummy lines

and to have a gain control that could be advanced manually as much

as possible without creating an oscillation, or "singing", when too

much amplified energy was fed back toward its source.

We built such a device and installed it on top of the central

switchboard with the gain control within comfortable reach. When two

subscribers had difficulty in understanding each other, we would

switch in the repeater and increase the gain until we could

recognize the hollow and slightly reverberant sound that was the

last stage before the system burst into oscillation. It all really

worked very well, providing communication under conditions that had

never permitted it before. Unfortunately, however, we were not able

to keep this device in operation very long. Most of the cases when

we needed it were, of course, on long distance calls. It rapidly

became obvious that whenever an AT&T operator in Portland, Boston,

or even New York tipped her switch to monitor a call she spoiled our

delicate balance of forces and was invariably greeted by a loud

oscillation. We tried our best to convince the long lines department

that our repeater really worked very well and that everything would

be fine if they would only keep their operators off the line. This

could not be done, as we should have known, and by threatening not

to pay us our share of the toll charges they forced us to abandon

the repeater after two or three months. For at least one full

hunting season, however, our customers had had exceptional service.

One of the more powerful Maine politicians arranged to have the

Civilian Conservation Corps (a depression era effort to take boys

off the street and employ them under quasi-military conditions in

useful public works) build him an improved road to his hunting camp.

This reconstruction required us to move a quarter of a mile of

C. C. C. Boys 33

telephone line from one side of a road to the other. It was arranged

that the CCC would provide the labor. On the appointed morning I met

the crew which, for some reason, consisted of about fifteen boys

from Bridgeport, Connecticut, who, it soon appeared, could not even

climb a pole with a ladder. I therefore set them to digging. I went

down the road with a shovel and turned a sod at each point where I

wanted one of the dozen poles to go. I told them to make the holes

eight feet deep, which is usually by no means easy in the rocky

Maine soil. I then went off to climb the poles and detach the wires

from the insulators, so that the poles could be taken down when the

time came. This kept me busy for an hour or more. When I came back

to the first hole I found it a thing of considerable beauty. It was

a full eight feet deep and had absolutely smooth sides and bottom,

without a loose pebble anywhere. Its only defect was that it had

about the proportions of a twelve quart pail and looked large enough

to serve as a grave for an elephant. I read the boys a lecture about

how a hole should be fourteen inches in diameter and again absented

myself for a while. When I returned I found the later holes getting

better and better. The last hole of all was the best, but at that

time it was only three or four feet deep. At that level the boys had

encountered a rook. Dropping a crowbar on it, could tell by the

sound that the only wise move would be to abandon that hole and try

another a few feet away. The boys were, however, all full of

enthusiasm for their increasing skill, so I thought their training

would be best improved by leaving them to their own devices. When I

thought it safe to come back I found a beautiful hole of the proper

depth and no more than eighteen inches in diameter. The only anomaly

was that on the surface beside the hole was a boulder of nearly the

size and roughly the shape of an overstuffed arm chair. To this day

I cannot imagine how the boys got this stone out of the hole with

only crowbars and shovels. Even more amazing was the repair work on

the hole which was perfect, the sod around it looking as though it

had never been disturbed. I was sure I would lose face if I enquired

how they had done it all, so I complimented them on the diameter of

the hole and we went on to finish the job.

* * *

One April afternoon I acquired a totally undeserved reputation as a

swimmer. I had been searching for a short circuit on one of the iron

wire lines thirty miles from home. It happened that the line crossed

the Dead River (in a region now at the bottom of Flagstaff Lake)

midway between two bridges that were ten or twelve miles apart. I

made a resistance measurement in the neighborhood of the first

bridge and thought that the road up the eastern side of the river

would bring me to the location of the trouble. When I climbed a pole

near the river crossing I found that I had been wrong; the short was

C. C. C. Boys 34

only a hundred yards away, but on the other side of the river. As it

was nearing sunset I was in a hurry to finish, and I hated to think

of the tenmile drive to either of the bridges and back on the other

side. The river was only a hundred feet wide and looked placid

enough. A sloping granite shelf extended well out into the river,

and I thought that I could wade across. I stripped down to my

undershirt but kept my trousers and lineman's climbers on, because I

would need them as I would my belt full of tools, and waded into the

river. The water was fearfully cold, as it certainly had been snow

until a day or so before, and was flowing at a rate that was not

indicated by the placid surface. By the time I had waded in up to my

hips, the current swept me off the rocky shelf and deposited me in a

deep pool. My best efforts to swim did me little good because of all

the weight on my legs, and the current swept me rapidly downstream.

As my strength was about gone, the river brought me near a large

rock and, by a last strenuous effort, I got close enough to catch a

rough spot and swing into the lee of the stone. I gasped for a

minute or two, and then climbed on the rock and found myself more

than half way across. After resting as long as the cold allowed, I

made my best racing dive which carried me far enough to be able to

wade ashore on the other side of the river. My pride then forced me

to climb the river bank and then the pole and fix the trouble on the

line.

While on the pole I had time to consider what to do next. The road

on that side of the river was very little used and the chance of

meeting a car before I froze seemed very remote. There was one house

in that region, only a hundred yards away, but it was dark and, I

assumed, deserted. After some thought I worked my way upstream until

I was a quarter of a mile above my original starting point and in an

area where there were no obvious rocks and whirlpools. I searched

the bank until I found a nice four-foot piece of dried pulpwood and

took it down the bank of the river. My idea was to keep the log

under my arm and paddle across, letting the current take me

downstream as far as it cared to while I conserved my strength. I

had neglected to notice that the river curved, and I soon discovered

that the bank was just as steep under water as it was above it. I

was almost immediately in deep water and the current set in toward

the bank so strongly that I was carried a couple of hundred yards

downstream before I could get more than five or six yards from

shore. As this did not seem to be getting me anywhere, I decided to

paddle back to the "wrong" shore and study the situation some more.

This, I should have realized, did not work either, because my

equipment and pulpwood made for very poor swimming. By the time this

was clear, the river had taken me down into the region where I had

had my original troubles and, before I realized what was happening,

it swept me into a whirlpool and snatched my pulpwood away from me.

This left me trying to swim again, but in a much worse state of cold

and fatigue. It wasn't long before my legs went straight down and

The Dead River 35

fortunately touched a large rock. Before the current swept me off

this I had a moment to relax my cramping muscles and take a deep

breath or two. This surge of strength carried me for another

fraction of a minute. When my legs went down again they luckily

touched bottom enough to let me push myself toward the "right" shore

and then find that I could wade out. Back at the car, I put on all

the clothes I had and turned the heater up to maximum. By the time I

had driven to the nearest village, my teeth did not chatter too much

and I was. beginning to believe that I might not freeze to death. My

pride driving me again, I went into the general store to carry out

the usual routine of telephoning headquarters to report the trouble

cleared, and to enjoy the heat from the potbellied stove that was

fortunately running at dull red heat. The loafers sitting around the

stove of course showed some curiosity as I came in dripping. I

explained, as casually as I could, that I had just swum across the

Dead River to fix a fault on the other side. This claim was greeted

by a chorus of guffaws, as everyone knew that nobody could swim the

river during the spring flood. I stayed in the store long enough to

get warm again, holding up my end as well as I could in a battle of

facetious comments, and then went home for a late dinner.

Fortunately for my reputation, it turned out that an old man was

living in the house I had thought deserted. He had seen me come up

over the river bank to fix the line and then go back into the river.

He reported this at the general store the next day, and my local

status gained immeasurably from his verification of my story.

There was one much more painful episode when I was repairing a line.

I had climbed a rather short pole and had just driven my spikes in

firmly and attached my safety belt when I was attacked by a cloud of

hornets. Because my feet were not more than three or four yards

above the ground, I simply cast off my belt and jumped and, I

believe, was running by the time I hit the ground. Despite my speedy

reaction, I received thirty-five or forty stings and was sick enough

to stay in bed for a few days. Later investigation revealed a half-

bushel sized paper nest hanging from a pine branch just above the

pole, and also a colony of carpenter wasps living in the pole, with

their entrance on the side I had not seen when I climbed.

We had some interesting times trying to convince the Maine State

Forestry Department that they should use UHF radio for communication

between fire towers. In those days, the telephone lines to the

towers consisted of twisted pair dragged up through the woods;

generally neither on the ground nor far above it. Whenever a tree

fell or a bear or moose passed by, the line was likely to be broken,

and repairs were, of course, very laborious and time consuming. We

thought that the amateur five meter band offered excellent prospects

for a demonstration of improved service, so we built two or three

transmitters and receivers and carried them up various mountains;

most often Mount Bigelow, which was conspicuous beside the Arnold

Radios for the Fire Towers 36

Trail. This mountain was named for one of Arnold's officers who

allegedly climbed it to see if he could see Quebec, but one is

inclined to think that maps must have been better than that, even in

Revolutionary days.

The fire wardens dearly loved our radios, and would chat with each

other by the hour at a high cost to us in the labor of carrying

fresh batteries up to them, but we never succeeded in getting the

State to buy any radios. This was a fine example of the difficulties

inherent in trying to implement a good idea before the world is

ready for it. In any case, we got plenty of exercise carrying

seventy or eighty pound packs of equipment and batteries up

mountains. This usually involved about three hours of strenuous

climbing, after walking perhaps as far as ten miles to get to the

base of the mountain.

Early in this enterprise I was surprised to make contact, while on

Mount Bigelow, with an amateur station operated equally temporarily

on Mount Cadillac near Bar Harbor. This station belonged to Mr.

Henry S. Shaw who, I found later, was the cofounder and Treasurer of

the General Radio Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and who had a

summer home in Maine. Mr. Shaw was a dilettante experimenter, very

much interested in the new ultra high frequencies, and we were both

excited about the relatively long range at which we had communicated

some thing approaching a hundred and twenty miles. I perhaps had

spoken to Mr. Shaw once or twice more by radio in the course of our

experiments, and I once met him briefly at a gathering of amateur

radio operators in Bar Harbor. These contacts, casual as they were,

would have a powerful effect upon my future.

Among the dozens of importunate letters I wrote was one to Mr. Shaw.

By return mail I received a post card from him saying, "I have

received your letter and am doing some investigating. I will write

you tomorrow". Twentyfour hours later I received the promised

letter, which was so delicately phrased that it was almost

ambiguous. It seemed to say that there might be a minor temporary

job open at Harvard. Only upon careful reading did the last

paragraph make it clear that all I needed to do was to go to

Cambridge and (for some reason I never understood) report to Mr.

David W. Mann, who was a very talented instrument maker in the shops

of the Jefferson Physical Laboratory. Needless to say I was on the

next available train to Boston. Mr. Mann, without much conversation,

took me to Harry Mimno, who was then Associate Professor of Physics

and Communication Engineering. Professor Mimno hired me for a six-

month trial period at $20.00 per week, a tolerable and deeply

welcome wage.

Henry S. Shaw 37

Mr. Shaw deserves more praise and thanks than I could ever give him,

so I may as well testify to his admirable qualities at this point,

although it was a number of years before I found out how much he had

done for me. He was one of the finest type of Boston Brahmins

(although he lived in Exeter, New Hampshire when I knew him) who

had, I think, always been moderately wealthy and who, like many of

his kind, believed in doing good by stealth. Shortly before

receiving my letter he had given Harvard two or three thousand

dollars to support some research in UHF radio. Since this project

would require hiring a technician, who had not yet been chosen,

Harvard was in no position to decline when Mr. Shaw suggested that

they try me. At the end of my six months, Professor Mimno was

apparently satisfied but was, like most research directors before

World War II, without funds. Mr. Shaw stepped into the breach and,

without my hearing of it until much later, contributed my salary for

the next two or three years. I never knew Mr. Shaw intimately,

although I saw him at the laboratory from time to time. He never

showed, by word or attitude, that he had ever done anything for me,

but was always politely interested in my progress. I gradually

learned that I was by no means alone as a recipient of his

benefactions. It was ultimately possible to learn that he

occasionally had identified promising young men in the General Radio

factory and set them up in business for themselves. He was the

guiding spirit and at least partially a financial backer for the

early radio and weather research at the top of Mount Washington,

leading to the present observatory there. His contributions to

Harvard may not have been large, in today's terms, but were frequent

and always intelligently applied to advance knowledge in the fields

in which he was interested.

* * *

Mr. Shaw's character is admirably expressed, to those who knew him,

by the biography he supplied when elected a Fellow of the Institute

of Radio Engineers. These biographies used to be published, for the

hundred or two that held this honor, in the directory of members of

the Institute, and most Fellows seized the opportunity to puff

themselves up a little. Mr. Shaw's biography stood alone against

this background. In full, it said:

"Henry.S. Shaw, Graduate, Harvard College, 1907"

6.

I found myself, in the fall of 1934, employed in an organization

known as "Cruft Laboratory" which took its name from a small

building officially known as "The Cruft High Tension Electrical

Laboratory". George Washington Pierce, later the Rumford professor

of physics, had assumed charge of this laboratory when it was built

in 1914 and continued as its director until World War II. Under his

leadership, one of the first hybrids between physics and engineering

was formed; an early exploration of the idea of a department of

applied physics. Harvard then had an Engineering School, and the

members of the faculty in Cruft had dual appointments as, say,

professor of physics and Communication Engineering, thus having

footholds in the Engineering School and in the College of Arts and

Sciences, which is always called simply "Harvard College", as

distinct from the various graduate schools. The instruction in Cruft

was entirely at the graduate level.

Professor Pierce, always known as "G.W.", had been interested in

radio from the 1890s onward and had, in 1910, published a well-known

book on the principles of wireless telegraphy. Under his

administration, it would have been more appropriate if the title of

the laboratory had used the words "high frequency" instead of "high

tension". The stalwarts of the organization, when I came, were

Professor E. Leon Chaffee, the great expert on high-power vacuum

tubes; professor Mimno, whose field was ionospheric radio wave

propagation; Dr. and later Professor Frederick V. Hunt, whose

catholic interests centered in acoustics; and Dr. Roger Hickman, who

later became Director of the physics Laboratories and Assistant Dean

of Arts and Sciences.

Cruft Laboratory was built, in part at least, to house a 100,000

volt storage battery which was used to provide an unusually stable

source of power for x-ray diffraction studies and other researches.

This battery was kept operating until World War II, when it was

dismantled largely because Doctors Hunt and Hickman had perfected

the electronic voltage regulator and the expensive battery was no

longer essential.

In 1931 Harvard, through the efforts of professor Theodore Lyman,

the Director of the Jefferson physical Laboratory, had built the

Research Laboratory of Physics. When Dr. Lyman retired, this

building was most appropriately renamed in his honor. A large part

of the Cruft organization was actually housed in the R.L.P.,

although it was operated entirely under the Cruft name.

Professor Mimno 39

Professor Mimno was a capable and quiet gentleman who had some of

the characteristics of Kipling's cat who walked by his wild lone. He

seldom discussed his plans before finding ways to bring them to

fruition. Although an excellent teacher and able administrator, his

greatest interest, I think, was in planning experiments and

designing equipment for them. Some of these projects were never

completed as, at times, Harry seemed to lose interest when the

constructional problems had been solved. It is possible that a

distaste for data taking and the actual writing of papers

contributed to his extreme selflessness in claiming scientific

credit. He was always a complete antithesis of the professor who

wins advancement and reputation by putting his name on research done

by his students. He was anxious to push his students and colleagues

ahead and kept himself as far in the background as possible. I was

often to find myself the beneficiary of this policy.

In my first year or two at Harvard, I contributed a little analysis

of Harry's earlier data and drew figures and collected references

for a review paper he was then writing. So far as I can remember, he

never thereafter actually wrote a scientific research paper,

although he was a valued coauthor of papers by me and by others. He

always spent a large fraction of his time in the work of technical

committees and in various editorial posts. His criticism and advice

about technical writing were always of great value, and I especially

treasure his rule for giving a ten minute scientific report: eight

minutes establishing the background, one minute about what you

yourself have done, and one minute showing the implications for the

future. Would that more scientists knew and followed this rule!

I remember that my first assignment was to paste large numbers of

Coast and Geodetic Survey maps onto great sheets of wallboard, so

that we had detailed maps showing the altitudes along radio

transmission paths throughout much of southern New England. From

these I, and others, scaled and drew profiles showing the

obstructions on interesting paths such as between Cambridge and

Hartford, Connecticut. These were supposed to help explain why some

very high frequency radio circuits were better than others.

Having discovered that I could draw a little, Professor Mimno had me

sketch the plans for an experimental vehicle that a couple of other

technicians, a pair of graduate students, and I built during my

first winter at Cambridge. This was a relatively rectangular copper

covered van built on the chassis of a 1927 Packard roadster that

Professor Mimno contributed to the cause. It contained three relay

racks for equipment, a large number of storage. batteries in the

regions formerly occupied by running boards, with provisions for

recharging them when electric power was available, and a number of

antennas for various of what were then called the ultrahigh

Professor Mimno 40

frequencies. This van had only one operating defect: it was heavy,

weighing 8200 pounds. Because the Packard chassis, like all others

of its day, had only two wheel brakes, we drove it in fear that we

might come over the top of a hill and come face to face with a red

traffic light. My experience in driving this vehicle has stood me in

good stead for the rest of my life; I still pay great attention to

anything within a couple of hundred yards that might get in my way.

The two graduate students, Paul King and Harner Selvidge, and I

drove this thing to the spring meeting of the Physical Society in

Washington in 1935, just to show it off. It attracted a good bit of

interest and got rather bad pictures of us into the newspapers for

the first time. Professor Mimno hovered in the background with a

gentle smile on his face and let us show off to our hearts' content.

Somehow during this spring I also found time to build a sort of

primeval walkie-talkie. This was much like the radios built for the

Maine fire towers, but better constructed because of the fine shop

facilities available at Harvard. It contained a fairly powerful

transmitter and carried batteries enough to run it for several days.

As a result, the whole thing, which had about the size and something

of the shape of an Adirondack pack basket, weighed about 45 pounds.

It had straps so that it could be toted on the back, but fortunately

we could usually get it where we needed it by car. Both this device

and the "copper battle wagon" got their baptism in the summer of

1935.

"Doc" Selvidge, as part of the work toward his thesis, was trying to

show that the intensity of a radio signal is enhanced near the edge

of the shadow of an obstacle. This is an elementary principle of

optics and the result was clearly implicit in the equivalence of

radio and light waves that had been demonstrated by Heinrich Hertz

nearly fifty years before. There were, however, practical

difficulties in the measurement that made the problem a worthy one.

I had been assigned to help Doc with this work. We had tried

unsuccessfully to transmit a signal from the Arlington Heights water

tower and explore the shadow cast by the northern edge of the

Harvard Stadium against the upper seats on the southern side. As

might have been expected, there were too many reflections from

neighboring objects and, of course, the physical size of the

receiving antenna tended to blur the results. What was needed was a

much larger "knife-edge" and a bigger screen for the shadow to fall

upon.

We found a place for the experiment at Frenchman's Bay in Maine.

Here Mount Cadillac rises sharply about 1500 feet above the water

while, on the eastern side of the bay, the 400-foot crest of

Schoodic peninsula forms a fairly good knife edge. For a signal

transmitted from Mount Cadillac, the edge of the shadow of Schoodic

Bar Harbor 41

falls in the ocean about five miles east of the peninsula. We could

explore the diffraction pattern by receiving in a small boat from

close inshore behind Schoodic to a region fifty or sixty miles from

Mount Cadillac. The signals observed without the knife-edge could be

explored by taking a course along which there was no obstacle, some

twenty degrees south of the path across Schoodic.

In August, 1935, then, Doc and I found ourselves living in a cheap

room in Bar Harbor and "yachting" in the Gulf of Maine. It sounds

unbelievable now but, in those depression days, we were able to hire

an old lobster boat, complete with a young man to drive it, for

$25.00 a week. The technique was as follows. Each morning, when the

weather was fit, one of us would drive the copper truck up Mount

Cadillac and beyond the end of the road across a couple of hundred

yards of rock to the exact peak. In recent years I have walked over

this area and cannot imagine how we could have gotten the car there

without tipping it over. In 1935, however, we were young and didn't

know a serious obstacle when we saw it. The one of us not on the

mountain would have been dropped at the town pier and would go with

"Sonny" Tufts, our boatman, to explore either the shadowed or the

unshadowed course, and occasionally both in the course of a long

day's work. Communications between the boat and the truck were

through the walkie-talkie device, but were not often needed as the

schedule of transmission frequencies and polarizations was usually

established in advance.

Of course any number of things went wrong. Runs had to be repeated

again and again as equipment failed or peculiar effects were

observed. To our surprise, the whole experiment took two months,

running into October when the weather got fairly rough. While we

generally took turns on the mountain, luck saw to it that the most

interesting things happened when I was on the boat.

Our first vessel was the "OIC", always pronounced "oik" by us. She

was a venerable tub, 23 feet long and with a reliable motor, which

is to be expected among lobster boats along such a foggy coast. The

OIC served us well for three or four weeks until one pleasant

afternoon when, without warning, her sternpost and rudder fell off.

This left a considerable hole and she filled fairly rapidly. I

transmitted, using the walkietalkie, what I suppose was the first

SOS ever heard in the amateur five-meter band. To my surprise, I got

a response as my benefactor, Mr. Shaw, was in residence at Prospect

Harbor and heard my call for help. He rushed to the dock,

commandeered the first boat he came to, and chugged out just in time

to transfer all our equipment, except a set of batteries, before the

OIC sank. One of my pleasant memories is of stepping back, just as I

abandoned ship, to snatch the boat's bell as a souvenir. This bell,

suitably mounted and inscribed, was kept for years in the Cruft Lab

secretary's office. It finally came back to me, and now serves as a

Bar Harbor 42

dinner bell.

To my surprise, the owner made no fuss about losing the OIC.

Possibly he was grateful to have had a little income from her in her

last days. Her replacement was a longer boat, shaped somewhat like

an oversized batteau, whose name I do not remember. Her planking was

fairly good, but she suffered from a large number of rotten ribs,

which made her extremely limber. As the weather got worse and the

season later, we were more and more anxious to finish and get back

to Cambridge. We would usually start out in the boat every morning

and decide whether to continue or retreat when we got outside of the

protected waters of Frenchman's Bay.

One day I made the wrong decision and went on when I should have

given up. The outward trip was not too bad as we had a following

sea, but when we turned around we found it extremely rough. Our bow

would be flung high and would come down with a crash, opening seams

because of the bad ribs. After an hour or so we found that the boat

was becoming very heavy, which of course made her pound harder, as

the water was coming in slightly faster than we could pump it out.

It soon became obvious that we would not get to any of the towns on

the mainland. We were not far from Petit Manan light, but knew that

we could not land there because the tide was high and covered what

little beach there was. Everything else failing, we headed for Green

Island, a rocky outcrop near Petit Manan. To our surprise and

delight we found this to be rather like a tiny granite atoll,

obviously designed for distressed seafarers, with a "lagoon" fifty

yards or less in diameter and a narrow opening through which we

could enter. We drove the boat in, ran it aground on a gravelly

beach, and scrambled ashore over the bow and collapsed on the shore,

where we lay for some hours as both Sonny and I were, by this time,

extremely seasick.

We found the remains of a fisherman's hut which served for shelter,

as the weather was fortunately dry. In the morning the "lagoon" was

completely empty at low tide, so we set to work calking the open

seams in the hull. When the tide came in, we rolled the boat over so

that we could calk the second side after the water had gone down

again. Unfortunately the weight of the boat, coupled with the

badness of her ribs, made her spit out most of our first calking. We

had to wait for six tides, improving the calking at each

opportunity, before we judged the boat to be tight enough to get to

the mainland for more permanent repairs.

We were in intermittent communication with Doc Selvidge during this

interval. Each night and morning he would drive up the mountain far

enough to attain line-of-sight to our island and enquire how we were

getting on. He could, of course, have sent us help if we had needed

it. The only difficult part of this communication was to endure

Marooned / Harvard Football 43

Doc's cheery remarks about how good his latest meal had been at our

favorite restaurant. These comments were hard to take, as our food

supply was limited to one or two sandwiches we had not cared to eat

on the first day. We did deliberately skip work on the boat for one

tide, when we discovered that we could, at low tide, wade chest-deep

over to Petit Manan. The lighthouse keeper there had a wife who was

an excellent cook and who provided us with a superb dinner. As an

extra bit of good luck for us, there were two very pretty daughters

who helped greatly to while away the hours until, at the next low

tide, we could wade back to our hut.

This minor adventure brought our expedition to a close. It can go

without saying that the radio waves behaved as they should and the

results helped Doc to get his degree.

I had not been at Harvard long when I fell into the most absolute

sinecure I ever knew about. The Harvard Athletic Association

contracted with a commercial supplier for the main public address

system used during football games at the Harvard Stadium. The

Maintenance Department, however, had several loudspeakers installed

in the press box and owned a small amplifier and microphones that

were used to distribute items of information to reporters. A workman

brought this amplifier before each game and, thank goodness, carried

it up the many steps to the press box on top of the stadium. The

Department insisted that an electronics expert should always be on

hand in case something should happen to the amplifier during a game;

and further insisted that the expert should be backed up by a second

one, presumably in case the first one should have a heart attack

just as the amplifier failed. Ted Hunt easily secured the position

of greater responsibility and I fell heir to the second. For the

services each of us was paid eight dollars for each home game. We

occupied these sinecures for about five years in which nothing ever

went wrong.

It was a pleasure to sit in our shirt sleeves behind glass in the

heated press box (and on the fifty-yard line, at that) and watch the

snow falling on the faithful who had paid good prices for their

seats. It also did our morale no harm to find that a beckoning

finger would produce a steward with hot dogs or coffee as required,

all by courtesy of the H.A.A. It was my good fortune to sit beside a

gentleman named, I think, Whiteside, who ran the scoreboard. I was

told that he had once been the crew coach, unlikely as this seems.

He was, however, a genius in his understanding of football, and I

learned enough from him to acquire an interest in the game that has

persisted ever since. Mr. Whiteside would sit watching the field as

Football / "The Shadow" 44

the formations came into position for each play. At the snap of the

ball his fingers would play briefly over the many buttons on his

control box. By the time the whistle blew to end the play he had

called up the necessary data: the numbers of the men who had carried

the ball and made the tackle, the number of yards still needed, as

well as the position on the field. occasionally Mr. Whiteside would

carefully correct the yards gained by a unit or two after the play

was over, but in general he seemed to know exactly what would happen

before the play began. I was forever asking him why a play gained

thirteen yards when, as far as I could see, the same play had lost

ground a few minutes before. His explanations gave me an insight

into the complexities of the game that had hitherto completely

escaped me. I was sorry when the South African expedition and

subsequent events brought this era to a close. By that time I did

not need the money as badly as at first, but it was hard to give up

a "job" with such minimal and pleasant duties.

In the late fall of 1935, professor Mimno received a request from

the Federal Communications Commission, sent to many radio

experimenters, for help in identifying what had come to be called

"The Shadow". This was a curious form of interference that had

recently sprung up in the high frequency part of the radio spectrum.

Some guesses were wild enough to suppose the Ethiopians to be

jamming the Italian radios (in the only war that was going on at the

time) or vice versa. It happened that professor Mimno's suggestion

that Selvidge, King, and I should see what we could do about this

came just before he left for Europe. Harry had married a charming

girl in Germany in the previous summer, but Hitler had refused to

let her leave the the country without signing over her property to

the Nazi party, or something of that sort. Harry had had to come

back to Cambridge without her in September, and was devoting his

Christmas vacation to another, and successful, attempt to get her to

America.

Paul King and I attacked the new problem while Selvidge wandered off

into some other project. One of our first trials was to use an

oscilloscope in an attempt to decipher the peculiar wave form of the

Shadow signals, and we made the revealing discovery that a few of

the signals had a modulation that was synchronous with the Boston

power line frequency, while many did not. This, of course, proved

that there were a number of sources and the quite new diathermy

machines seemed to be possible culprits. By calling various

companies and acting like potential customers we identified one make

of machine that operated in the right frequency range and might have

the kind of modulation we had observed. It was especially convenient

that we found that the Harvard Athletic Department had recently

bought one. We took the copper truck over beside the Briggs Cage and

found that the suspected equipment put out a strong signal having

the observed characteristics.

"The Shadow" 45

The next steps were easy. Supposing that the radio frequency energy

from the diathermy machine leaked back into the electric power

lines, we borrowed the machine from the Athletic Department and set

it up at Paul's home in Watertown, because his electric power came

in through overhead wires that might perform as a fairly good

antenna. We borrowed a radio call, NDA-1, from the U.S. Navy and

arranged for the Navy to alert its ships and shore stations to

listen for this call at an agreed frequency and time. We modified

the diathermy machine only by installing a tape reader in the plate

supply lead to make it speak in Morse code, and draped the cable

carrying the radiofrequency current around the floor in Paul's

living room until we brought the frequency to the agreed value. The

results were spectacular. The Navy reported strong signals from all

over the North Atlantic and the eastern half of the United States.

The Shadow had been tracked to its lair.

The Federal Communications Commission promptly revealed the culprit

and we were attacked by numbers of reporters. At this point we could

not resist a practical joke. Having explained the experiment we

carefully emphasized that the work had been done under the direction

of Professor Mimno. The response was always, "Where is Professor

Mimno? We want to talk to him." To this we answered, "Oh, he is

arriving in New York tomorrow morning on the S.S. Bremen", and left

him to the mercies of the ship-news reporters.

Harry never admitted just how much he had been annoyed by this jest,

but I think he had his gentle revenge the next year when I was to

spend a week in London. He gave me a resounding letter of

introduction to Ralph Stranger of the British Broadcasting

Corporation. I presented this at my first opportunity only to find

that Mr. Stranger was not available that day. Other BBC engineers

were very kind in showing me around, however. I think I tried again

to find Mr. Stranger but not successfully although I was treated

with the most perfect politeness, by other people, and had an

excellent introduction into the ways and workings of the BBC. It was

not until several years later that I discovered that there was no

Ralph Stranger; that this was a pen name used by any of a group of

BBC engineers when they wished to write a popular article of less

than professional merit.

Weather Balloons 46

In my first year or two at Harvard I enjoyed a personal and

technical acquaintance with Arthur Bent, a neighbor and friend of

Mr. Shaw in Exeter, New Hampshire. Arthur also was a dilettante

experimenter and was helping Dr. Brooks of the Blue Hill

Meteorological Observatory to make the first trials with balloon-

borne weather reporting devices. The Observatory had developed light

and cheap measuring instruments and Arthur was making tiny radio

transmitters powered by small flashlight batteries. These devices,

being heavy by today's standards, were lifted by eight or ten

weather balloons in tandem. I helped to fill and launch these on one

or two occasions, but the time I remember most happily was when I

was not at Blue Hill but listening to the signal at the laboratory.

I had no equipment for deciphering the telemetered pressure and

temperature readings, but I soon discovered that the frequency of

the transmitter was drifting slowly but steadily as the balloons

rose into the colder and colder regions of the atmosphere. I

recorded and plotted the frequency against time and was able to tell

when the instruments reached the base of the stratosphere where the

temperature becomes constant. Since I knew this height

approximately, I had determined the rate of rise of the balloons,

and was able to call Arthur an hour or two later and congratulate

him on reaching a height of seventy-five or eighty thousand feet.

Arthur never could understand how I determined this altitude as soon

as he did.

My only contribution to this program was minor but mildly

interesting. The signals from most of the flights failed quickly in

the stratosphere or below when the batteries froze. By experimenting

in a dry-ice box, I found that it helped to wrap the batteries with

a couple of feet of resistance wire and surround them with cotton

batting. By "wasting" about half of the available power in heating

the batteries themselves, the signals could be kept alive two or

three times longer. This technique was used for a time, until better

overall thermal insulation was achieved.

7.

The Eclipse Expedition to the Soviet Union

At the end of 1935 Professor Mimno called Selvidge, King, and me

into his office to ask us, "Do you know where Ak-Bulak is?" When we

denied any knowledge, he said, "You had better find out. I think

you're going there". This was our introduction to the Harvardskaya

Ekspeditzia Solnechnovo Zatmenia (if my transliteration is accurate

enough), or the Harvard M.I.T. Solar Eclipse Expedition of 1936.

We soon found that Ak-Bulak is a small town in Kazakhstan, a section

of the Soviet Union that might be spoken of as southwestern Siberia.

It is on the rail line from Orenburg to Alma Ata, nearly south of

the Ural Mountains and barely over the line into Asia. It is in a

region picturesquely and accurately known as "the Hungry Steppe". We

found later that it is in a large alkaline plain where there is a

very sparse grass, but where any kind of crops or trees can be grown

only within a few yards of a stream and most of the streams are dry

in the summer.

A total solar eclipse is ordinarily observed where a rail line, or

some other mode of transportation for heavy equipment, crosses the

narrow path of totality. If there are several such intersections,

the place is chosen after a great deal of study of the probability

of clear skies in the various areas. It seems to be a general rule

that the selected site will be in a region where there are almost no

facilities for gracious living and all supplies must be imported.

The town in Russia had been chosen by the American astronomers and

physicists because it was to be the location for the expedition

conducted by Dr. Gerasimovic, who was the director of the famous

Poulkovo Observatory near Leningrad. Dr. Gerasimovic had worked at

Harvard for a year or two and was considered to be among the dozen

greatest astronomers in the world. He was also the head of the

organization charged with carrying out the Soviet Union's very

generous provisions for receiving and helping all foreign

expeditions.

Dr. Menzel, the leader of the Harvard M.I.T. expedition, had been

receptive to the idea of sending ionospheric sounding equipment to

observe the eclipse. The nominal reason was to see whether a

"corpuscular effect" could be detected. Because the sun emits heavy

charged particles that travel much more slowly than do light rays,

the corpuscular eclipse, if it existed, would occur at a somewhat

different place and a considerably different time than the visible

eclipse. It is, however, possible that a great attraction for the

48

astronomers was the presumed fact that the radio observations could

go on despite cloudy weather. They could then provide some results

for the expedition even if optical measurements should be

impossible.

It was at least three months before it became certain that funds

enough to send all three of us could be promoted. This interval was

filled with activity. I spent much of the time designing and

building a pulse transmitter that could be swept through a quite

wide frequency range to the ionospheric layers. This involved my

first real invention at Harvard: a variometer of new design that

provided a large variation in frequency while permitting the

transmitter to operate with nearly constant power output.

The eclipse was to occur on June 19th, 1936. Because no one knew the

normal characteristics of the ionosphere over Kazakhstan, it would

be necessary for us to operate our equipment for a couple of months,

obtaining control data to define the normal variations with the time

of day. While Cruft Lab was busy with all the technical details, and

with the packing, the State Department was finding out how to get

permission to use the equipment. We were assured, finally, that a

good source of electric power would be found in Ak-Bulak, and

authorization to import our gear was obtained. Radio transmitting

licenses, or the Russian equivalent, were to be given us when we

passed through Moscow.

We three boys, with half a dozen tons of equipment, sailed from New

York on the SS Washington in early April, along with Dr. Menzel and

other members of the first contingent of astronomers. The Washington

was the sweetest smelling ship I ever sailed on, as she carried a

cargo of fifty million Washington Delicious apples consigned to

Cherbourg. I spent part of the ocean voyage in the third class

lounge of the Washington writing my first scientific paper at

Harvard, about the design of the variometer. We spent a few days in

London and Doc Selvidge and I found time to hire a car and explore

the environs as far as Cambridge, Oxford, and Stratford on Avon. In

London we were received by Professor (later Sir Edward) Appleton, by

far the most famous man in ionospheric research, who was, a few

years later, to be awarded a Nobel Prize for his work.

It was also at this time that I made the acquaintance of the BBC, as

mentioned above. My happiest recollection there is of happening to

be in the main control room when teatime arrived. This room had an

immense console, with positions for fully a score of operators (when

so many might be needed) each of whom had a board full of mixing

switches and gain controls for sending any or all of several

programs to any or all of a number of radio networks. As I recall

it, about half of the positions were occupied when the clocks

indicated teatime. The double doors at the end of the room opened

Eclipse Preparations. 49

and stewards wheeled two large tea wagons into the room. Each

operator flipped up his control switches ("down" still means "on" in

England) and turned around on his stool to receive his tea and

scones. As far as I could tell, all radio broadcasting in Britain

stopped for twenty minutes or so. In those days, before advertising

appeared in the British air, it was assumed that everyone in the

country would be having his tea at the time and no one would be

interested in radio just then.

In our travels, Doc and I had happened to be in Stratford about

April 20th. I still remember, on every 23rd of that month, the

bulletin board we saw in front of the Shakespeare Theatre, which

said:

April 23rd

"Much Ado about Nothing"

Shakespeare's Birthday

We proceeded by train to Hull and took a Finnish ship to Helsinki,

with a stop of about twenty-four hours in Copenhagen. On this trip

Doc and I had the luck to become acquainted with two Finnish girls,

Lisa and Greta. They taught me, among other things, how to

disassemble an anchovy gracefully, and they were a great help in

giving us a quick introduction to the charms of Denmark. Copenhagen

was, as it still remains, the finest city in Europe in which to

amuse oneself. It then provided amazingly inexpensive entertainment,

although most other prices seemed comparable to those in the United

States. An afternoon movie, dinner at a good restaurant, a few hours

at Tivoli including a concert by Kirsten Flagstad, and supper at a

night club, with intervening taxis, cost us a total of about five

dollars a couple.

It was in Denmark that I first developed a distaste for trying

foreign languages. I had never before found myself faced with a

strange tongue. On our first walk in Copenhagen, I found that I

needed cigarets. I identified a tobacco store by the displays in the

window and went in, with the others in the group betting loudly that

I would not be able to get what I wanted. Not having any idea what

Danish sounded like, I went up to the counter and said firmly, "I

would like some cigarets, if you please". "Yes, sir!", said the

clerk, "Turkish or Virginia?" I am ashamed to say that since then

most of my conversations with foreigners have been conducted in much

the same way.

It happened that the Bell Telephone Company had only recently opened

the "first" ship-to-shore telephone service at a minimum charge of

$9.00. I was consequently greatly surprised, at breakfast on the

morning after leaving Copenhagen, to hear Lisa remark that she

The Trip to Russia 50

thought she would telephone her grandmother in Helsinki, and I was

especially startled when she said that the call would cost two

shillings. I presently followed her to the radio room where she

spoke to the operator, who used his morse key for a minute or two

and then motioned her to a small telephone booth in a corner. She

talked to her grandmother successfully and, when she came out, paid

the operator 20 Finnish marks, or 44 cents. I enquired into this

phenomenon carefully. It appeared that the practical Finns had

observed that very minor modifications would convert their

telegraphic equipment for voice operation. Since this service could

be provided cheaply, they charged little for it. No guarantee of

successful operation was offered, in case the ship were too far from

home or if transmission conditions were bad. This episode caused me

to question the American habit of waiting until highly professional

and reliable service could be provided and then charging a high

price for it. It still seems to me that there may often be good

reason to offer an inexpensive but useful service, even if it cannot

always be completely satisfactory. It may be of interest to compare

this story with the record, described above, of the tolerance of bad

service by the same telephone company, when we had tried to improve

it in western Maine. This experience on the Finnish ship, however,

remains the first of a number of instances in which I came to wonder

whether the American way was necessarily the best.

There had been the customary "last night out" party on the

Washington, but it was not nearly so memorable as the last night on

the A "Last Night Out" Finnish ship. The fun really started at

lunch, when Greta began questioning us about a gentleman we had met

in London. He was a Jesuit priest and wellknown astronomer, who was

leading an expedition to some other part of the Soviet Union, and

happened to be travelling on the same ship with us. We had been

carefully instructed to call him "Doctor" rather than "Father" in

the Soviet Union, and he had left his clerical garb in London and

was now wearing a business suit. Greta exhibited some shook at

learning that he was a priest, so we of course pressed her for the

reason for her interest. She explained that he had been offering her

a supply of American cigarets if she would come to his cabin to get

them; and she had some doubts about his intentions. Doc and I found

the opportunity too good to miss. We assured Greta that if, after

supper when the priest would be sitting with his expedition members

in the smoking room, she passed by on the outside and gave him what

was then known as a "come hither" look, he would be sure to join

her. She was then to agree to accept his cigarets and, after passing

by to give us a signal we invented, get into his cabin and close the

door. She would then scream and the rest of us would burst in and

"save" her.

This plot started very well. After we had all been in various parts

of the smoking room for a while, Greta slipped outside and presently

A "Last Night Out" 51

drifted past the windows, giving the priest a look that Doc or I

might have enjoyed receiving. The good father promptly excused

himself and disappeared. Then there was a long interval with no

signal from Greta. When we could stand the suspense no longer, Doc

and I took a turn around the decks to see what we could discover. We

saw Greta in a little cubbyhole called the music room, at a table by

the window. She was alone, but there were two drinks on the table

and she motioned us to keep away. Doc carelessly made some jubilant

remark about the two glasses just as the priest came around the

corner of the deck house, apparently headed for the door of the

music room. Doc, I think, made things worse by trying to pretend

that he had speaking of his eyeglasses. In any event, the highly

intelligent priest promptly returned to the smoking room and

barricaded himself behind the other members of his expedition.

Doc and I went back to Lisa and we waited a long time, but Greta did

not return. After a while we set out to find her, which we finally

did. She was in a dark corner at the aft end of the boat deck being

thoroughly kissed by a man we had never seen before. Her new friend

presently brought her back to the smoking room and spent the rest of

the evening pouring drinks into her. At the end of the evening, when

Greta had obviously taken as much as she could hold, Lisa rescued

her and took her to the girls' cabin. The entertainment did not end

even then, as Greta's new man and another, who also had had too much

to drink, spent much of the night trying to gain access to the

girls' room. When their intermittent visits to pound on the door had

created disturbance enough, this problem was solved. Dr. Menzel and

Wallace Brode, the two largest men in our party, changed cabins with

the girls. When the two drunks made their next visit, the

astronomers opened the door and scared the visitors into relative

sobriety.

We landed at Helsinki in the early morning. While I was waiting in

line at the customs shed, I was suddenly conscious of an alcoholic

aura creeping up about me. Turning, I discovered Greta weaving her

way across the floor, coming to claim a goodby kiss.

When I had administered this restorative, I realized that she was

followed by at least a dozen members of her family who had come to

meet her. They were individually introduced in correct not to say

prim Finnish form, and I still occasionally wonder what they must

have been thinking.

A Day in Helsinki 52

A day in Helsinki was a delight, the absolute cleanliness of the

city being a revelation. I had the feeling that I would not hesi

tate to sit on any curb in white flannels. Helsinki is known for its

excellent modern buildings. I was particularly impressed by the

Parliament building of pink Finnish granite, apparently growing out

of the top of a modest hill which was covered with green lawns

interrupted by outcroppings of the same beautiful stone. The city

seemed to have more and better statues than any other I have seen.

One disadvantage was the absolute strangeness of the Finnish

language. No advertising signs or inscriptions were in the least

intelligible to one with only traces of Latin, French, and German.

After a few hours of wandering around Helsinki, enjoying everything

but understanding nothing written, I came upon a large statue of

three nude blacksmiths working at an anvil, uncomfortable as that

may sound. The pedestal of the statue had a long inscription which I

had nearly deciphered to the end before I realized that it was in

Latin.

This lack of communication did not include the spoken word. Lisa and

Greta had explained to us that a Finnish child first learned (after

Finnish) Swedish, then German, and then English; and normally had

had nine years of English before graduating from high school. The

great department store Stockmann's, for example, had the largest

English bookstore in Europe and would hire no clerk who did not

speak English. Because of his shyness, it was often hard to get a

Finn to use English, but after this barrier had been broken we

usually found that he spoke the language more accurately than we

did.

The time in Helsinki passed all too quickly, aided by the first and

finest Finnish bath I ever had, and we found ourselves on the night

train to Leningrad. The examination at the border, which was then

much closer to Leningrad than it is today, was the most complete and

time consuming I have ever experienced. It seemed to require the

services of a dozen officers of gradually increasing rank, but

because the ceremonies were conducted entirely in Russian, we did

not understand either the problems or solutions.

Another hour or two on the train brought us to Leningrad, where we

were transferred to the Astoria Hotel. The Astoria was the Intourist

first class hotel and still had some of its prerevolutionary

elegance. The stone exterior was liberally pockmarked with wartime

bullet holes, and most of the draperies had apparently not been

changed (and some perhaps not dusted) since the revolution. It was,

however, except for a characteristic Russian lethargy in the

service, a fine hotel; and the dining room was actually the best I

have eaten in regularly. I must explain that one of the generous

concessions for foreign expeditions was to give us Intourist first

class tickets, which covered hotels, meals, and transportation, for

the third class price, which was then $5.00 per day. In a hotel

restaurant, our firstclass tickets gave us carte blanche, with no

limit on what and how much we ate. We enjoyed a game of trying to

Leningrad in 1936 53

eat, at the prices listed on the menu, $20.00 worth of food at a

meal. I still recall, with nostalgia, the "chicken cutlets", the

Souffle' Alaska, and the quantities of fresh Beluga caviar we ate.

Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg) is a beautiful and fascinating

city. It was founded in 1703 when Peter the Great decided to move

his capital to have access to the Baltic sea for the fleet he wished

to have. As the Grand Dukes and lesser members of the court moved

there, they built palaces as near that of the Tsar as their status

permitted. Leningrad is therefore more or less a city of palaces,

three or four miles in diameter, with a surrounding ring of wooden

cabins to house the necessary shopkeepers and other supporting

tradesmen. My favorite was St. Isaac's Cathedral, dating from 1820

and now an "antireligious" museum. At the time I saw it, the

cathedral contained the first of the frozen mammoths from Siberia.

St. Isaac's is built of the beautiful Finnish granite, with

monolithic columns sixty feet high and seven feet in diameter. It

has a dome in which the Soviets have hung a Foucault pendulum that

they claim is one hundred meters long. I timed it carefully and

could only give it credit for ninety-two meters but, even so, it

must be one of the longest anywhere. The building looks new. The

stone is meticulously polished and I could not find a crack in the

mortar. The eastern wall of the interior is especially impressive.

Except for a few mosaics of saints, it is completely panelled with

irregular polished sheets of malachite.

We visited many of the tourist attractions, being especially

fascinated by the contents of the Winter Palace and the Hermitage

Museum, which were then separate. The Soviets have a way of

collecting all the great art of a type in a single place. The

Hermitage was always one of the great art museums of the world, and

the addition to it of other collections has made it stupendous. We

also enjoyed a visit to the Summer Palace at Tsarskoe Selo.

Catherine's Palace there is especially magnificent. It was built

under the specification, "Make it like Versailles, but bigger". The

rooms occupied by the last Tsar and Tsarina are especially touching.

The Tsar's is highly functional, dominated by a large desk and an

immense bed, while the Tsarina's is cluttered in Victorian fashion,

with every inch of wall space covered by an icon. One can understand

how Rasputin could attain such dominance over her mind.

I am sorry that the room that pleased me most in Catherine's Palace

can no longer be the same. It was relatively small, possibly thirty

by forty feet, with walls fifteen or more feet high, and was

completely lined with a mosaic of amber. In this room the Soviets

exhibited all of the finest amber artifacts in the country, such as

punch bowls nearly two feet in diameter, each carved from a single

block of amber by one of the finest artists. Some of the carved

pieces were a curious form of pornography: beautiful sea shells

Leningrad in 1936 54

with, in the bottom of each one, two or three small nude figures in

the most indecent positions imaginable. Apparently there had been an

era in which the courtiers vied to see who could have executed the

finest example of this peculiar form of art. I am sorry to have

heard that the Germans, during the siege of Leningrad, destroyed or

carried away the entire contents of this room.

At Poulkovo Observatory we had our first experience with a Russian

party, given for two or three expeditions that were passing through

Leningrad at the time. The food and drink were supplied in copious

quantities, but the thing that most impressed us was the way a group

of people would suddenly be inspired to move to one end of the room

and form a chorus, singing beautifully. Or perhaps they would clear

the tables away from the center of the room to show us their amateur

versions of Cossack dances. Here we first saw evidence of a fact

that frequently impressed us; that the Russians could completely

forget their problems and show greater signs of enjoyment than most

Americans can.

We were in Leningrad at the right time to see the May Day parade.

Everyone assured us that this was not equal to the Moscow

celebration, but it was sufficiently impressive. We were given seats

in the reviewing stand in front of the Winter Palace, which may have

held two or three hundred of the specially favored officials, while

the parade poured in through the several streets opening into

Admiralty Square and joined to pass between us and the great

Nicholas column in the center of the square. Leningrad had a

population of about three million, and people claimed that there

were at least two million in the parade. They passed by at a fairly

rapid rate, usually forty or fifty abreast, for fully ten hours.

There must have been at least a hundred thousand "red" flags,

ranging from scarlet, maroon, and crimson, through cerise and orange

to pink. So far as I know, no one watched the parade except the few

in the reviewing stand. My favorite groups were a band that marched

by playing the "Maine Stein Song", and a factory soviet that carried

a tennis court with an excellent game of mixed doubles being played

on it.

The next day we took the train to Moscow, where we were to spend

about a week. I remember very little about that city, at this time,

because we spent most of our days at the American Embassy, or

visiting various officials with an Embassy representative, trying to

straighten out our authorizations.

On May third or fourth, we were taken to see Lenin's Tomb. Because

of the holiday season, the line waiting for admission wound back and

fourth the length of Red Square half a dozen times. It obviously

would have required waiting all day, except that our Intourist guide

spoke to one of the Red Army guards at the entrance to the tomb. The

May Day in Leningrad 55

guards then took their rifles off their shoulders and used them

horizontally to push back the crowd at the entrance so that we could

be bowed in. Lenin's body is displayed with impressive effect. One

goes down far underground, following the crowd step by step in

gradually fading light. On entering the burial chamber in almost

total darkness, one comes up two or three steps and passes by the

side of the glass sarcophagus, which is dimly lighted from the four

upper corners. Lenin lies there in a simple army jacket with his

hands folded on the outside of a crimson velvet coverlet that is

drawn up over his body. No one can see this without emotion.

All of our and the Embassy's efforts to obtain our radio licenses

failed. Every request we made, either through the Academy of

Sciences or through some other channel, disappeared into the "region

of darkness", the "gaypayoo", later OGPU, and never heard of again.

The ultimate opinion, informally agreed to by the Embassy, was that

no one dared say "yes" to the radical proposal to allow foreigners

to make Moscow to Ak-Bulak radio transmissions in the Soviet Union.

The result of this opinion was that we said to ourselves, "Here we

are, distinguished foreign scientists (by definition), invited by

the government and granted all sorts of assistance. Certainly no one

will dare object, no matter what we do". As time was running out, we

decided that we had to go ahead with our plans and see what

happened.

I remember little about the two and a half day train ride from

Moscow except the heat and the necessity of closing windows in our

compartments or otherwise protecting our belongings whenever the

train stopped. Without such precaution hands or long sticks with

hooks at the end would reach in the windows and grope around to see

what could be caught.

We arrived at Ak-Bulak quite early in the morning. My first shocks

were to find that most of the people resembled Mongolians while most

of the beasts of burden were camels. Somehow these ideas were

entirely new to me. Ak-Bulak was supposed to be a town of 9,000

people, but our private estimates were more like 2,000. There were a

few horses and oxen among the camels, but the only automobiles were

two Russian imitations of the Ford Model A that had been brought in

to support the two expeditions. I never thought to enquire where the

gasoline for these cars came from.

Provisions for our accomodation were simple. A temporary railroad

siding had been built at an angle to the main line. Onto this had

been pushed an old pre-revolutionary private car with a dining room,

a kitchen, and three or four bedrooms. There was also a regular

WagonLit, to supply extra bedrooms, and a baggage car. Later, as

more astronomers arrived, one or two more Wagons-Lit were added, and

finally even a bath car. Perhaps railroad switches were in short

Moscow to Ak-Bulak 56

supply that year. Whatever the reason, our siding was not connected

to the main line except on the occasions when our cars were to be

rearranged or additions made to our "train". At these times, spikes

were removed from a section of the main line so that the rails could

be bent around to connect to our spur. Each time this happened, the

rails seemed to kink in a different place so that, by the time we

left, the main line looked rather like the trail of a drunken snake.

Our train had an adequate supply of cooks, waiters, and stewards who

were attached to us for the duration. They were headed, thank

goodness, by Jerry Gourievitch who, when at home, was the manager of

one of the Moscow hotels, and who spoke good English with a Brooklyn

accent, as he had lived in that city for some years. The second and

major shock came within an hour or two of our arrival, when we

discovered that the 220-volt 50-cycle electric power we had been

promised did not exist. Installation of this had apparently been

part of an earlier five-year plan, and Moscow did not know that it

had never been done. Doc Selvidge got a magnificent photograph of

several of the expedition people with horrified expressions as they

received this bit of news. For many years a copy of this picture

hung on one of the bulletin boards at the lab, entitled "What! No

AC?" The only electricity in town came from a small DC generator

that was operated from sunset to one A.M., to supply a few lights at

the railroad station. We spent a few days in turmoil, the question

being whether we could improvise something or whether we radio

people would have to move to Tomsk or Omsk, where we would be out of

touch with the rest of the expedition and where no provisions had

been made for us.

We finally worked our way out of this difficulty. Someone found, in

Orenburg, an old six-kilowatt rotary converter that was intended to

change 150 volts DC to 220 volts AC. There was in Ak-Bulak one

accessible piece of power equipment; an old German diesel engine

that ran a small grain mill. This engine had one cylinder with about

22 inch bore and 24inch stroke, and a flywheel fourteen feet in

diameter. It operated at about 50 R.P.M. and was supposed to deliver

50 horsepower. The grain mill was called the Prosobdir and was a

mile or more from our railroad siding.

We induced the Russians, through our steward Jerry and the local

Communist Party leader, Sheegin, to drive the converter (as a

generator) from the diesel. They belted a three-foot wheel attached

to the flywheel up to a six-inch pulley on a countershaft and from a

thirty-inch wheel on the countershaft to a five-inch wheel on the

generator. This brought the speed up to 1800 R.P.M. and gave us an

average of 60-cycle frequency.

The Russian method for splicing belts bothered us a great deal.

There were various scraps of belting around the Prosobdir, but no

very long ones. These scraps were five or six inches wide and a

"What! No AC?" 57

large fraction of an inch thick. The Russian technique was to

overlap the ends of the belts a dozen inches and put six or eight

stove bolts through the overlapping parts. What happened when one of

these joints went around a five- or six-inch pulley was a shame. I

shall always remember that there were five splices in one of our

belts and two in the other. These beat out a kind of syncopated

Conga rhythm as they passed around our pulleys. Instead of a steady

60-cycle frequency we had something that jumped erratically from 50

to 70 cycles.

Unfortunately, our primitive radio sounding equipment depended on

the powerline frequency for its calibration of the heights of the

ionospheric layers. The situation was intolerable. We spent hours

pleading for new belts (we had not yet learned to scream and yell

and bang on the desk) but it appeared that belts were in short

supply that year and new ones were not even available in Moscow.

This stalemate lasted, while we were getting our equipment running

after a fashion, until Dr. Gerasimovic arrived at Ak-Bulak. Taking

advantage of his position as chairman of all the Russian eclipse

work, I met him on the station platform in the early morning with a

full account of our grievances. A few hours later, when time

permitted, he came to take a thoughtful look at the wild behavior of

our frequency meter and we all adjourned to the Prosobdir, with Dr.

Gerasimovic accompanied by a crowd of twenty-five or thirty yesmen

and flunkies. After watching our seven splices for a few minutes he

spoke about fifty words in Russian. At this signal, half a dozen

people broke out of the crowd around him and took off at a run.

Within thirty minutes we had new belts. They obviously must have

come from a small grain elevator that was very much out of bounds,

and about which I shall say more later. We found some leather to cut

up and laced these belts ourselves in American fashion. The results

were excellent as the frequency remained quite stable, except that

it dropped every time a sack of grain was thrown into the mill. This

did not bother us too much, as we arranged to have the exclusive use

of the diesel at critical times, especially during the eclipse.

The village of Ak-Bulak had a few wooden buildings, including the

Prosobdir and the railroad station. Some houses were of wood in the

conventional Russian country style with lots of gingerbread

decorations. They were not painted. The great majority were built of

sundried bricks. These started with a pit, usually about three feet

deep, so that the side walls were often no more than three or four

feet high. These were whitewashed, at least when new. The lifetime

of such a building, exposed to the Siberian winter, was apparently

only five or six years. Some houses consisted of three or four such

rooms, and a new room might be added each year or two while the

oldest rooms, at the other end of the house, gradually collapsed. As

a result, the houses tended to creep around the building lots,

rather like the pattern in a game of dominoes. The family and

Life in Ak-Bulak 58

whatever livestock it had all lived together, and the density of

smells and flies and other insects was so forbidding that we

practically never entered one of these houses, even in the rare

cases when we were invited.

We had the doubtful privilege of watching bricks made. The technique

was to dig a pit twenty or thirty feet in diameter and three or four

feet deep, or until a stratum of clay was exposed. Some water was

added and two or three horses were driven into the pit. Then fifteen

or twenty men would surround the pit and lash the horses for an hour

or two, until the clay was reduced to a suitable consistency. The

bricks were then formed and set out to dry, exactly as in other

parts of the world.

For reasons probably lost since the days of the caravans, the main

street in Ak-Bulak was fully a hundred yards wide. It was, of

course, all sand and was dense enough to drive on easily. Somewhere

near the middle was a single cart track marking the preferred path

to follow. This was a little firmer and smoother than the rest. One

day I had the pleasure of watching the drivers of the only two cars

within a hundred miles play "chicken" on this path. They happened to

be coming from the opposite ends and neither would consider turning

out for the other. They both began blowing their horns violently

when scores of yards apart and sounded them continuously until they

were forced to stop with the radiators within a yard of each other.

Then the drivers got out and shouted at each other for ten minutes,

to try to determine which should get off the beaten path.

The grain elevator stood beside this main street between our siding

and the Prosobdir. We often passed it several times a day, usually

either on foot or on bicycles. I have never seen an institution that

this part of Kazakhstan had been denied supplies during the famine

so obviously well guarded as this elevator. The reason was

presumably of 1932 and 1933, and many people had starved. The

members of our expedition were, I believe, the first foreigners to

be allowed to visit the area after that episode. The grain elevator

stood inside a solid wooden fence ten feet high with a single gate.

Inside the fence was a large pack of dogs -- or possibly wolves --

as well as we could tell from their appearance and their howling. At

each side of the gate was a bench on which sat a half a dozen

Mongolian guards. For the whole two months we were there, these

guards never showed any sign of relaxation. As we came within fifty

yards they would get up and cock their rifles. They would then keep

us carefully covered until we reached a safe distance beyond the

gate. Because these guards had the most unreliable look of anyone I

never saw on the "wrong" end of a gun, the tension we felt when we

passed them was extremely real.

The climate in Ak-Bulak was supposed to range from fifty or sixty

Life in Ak-Bulak 59

degrees Fahrenheit below zero in the winter to one hundred and

thirty degrees more or less in the summer. I could easily believe

this as the daily range in temperature was phenomenal, presumably as

a result of the alkaline soil and sparse vegetation. Near the middle

of May a thin layer of ice would form on a pail of water left out

overnight, and the temperature would reach a hundred in the

afternoon. When we got up in the morning we would put on all the

clothes we had, and then gradually remove them (or most of them)

before lunch time. In the late afternoon we would begin reversing

the operation. I had with me a maximum-minimum thermometer. Someone

stole it about the first of June, but before then it had reached a

hundred and twelve degrees in the shade. To add to our discomfort,

there would be a sandstorm every afternoon about four o'0lock. This

was driven by the strong wind that seems to prevail in such a hot,

flat, treeless area. I don't think anyone was caught out in it more

than once. We learned rapidly to keep track of the time, and

especially to get inside of some structure when we saw the brown fog

rolling across the desert.

The authorities had been kind and had sent to Ak-Bulak the first

bathtub that town had ever seen. This was installed in a steam

bathhouse that, so far as we saw, was little used, and we had the

place to ourselves twice a week. There were no proper faucets, but

hot and cold pipes with valves stuck straight out over the end of

the tub. The cold water behaved reasonably well, but the hot pipe

sent forth a horizontal geyser of about eighty percent steam and

twenty percent boiling water, because it came directly from the

boiler for the steam bath. This stream would shoot across the tub

from end to end with very little falling into it. Judicious

deflection with a bit of board would cause some of the hot water to

fall into the tub, and a suitable temperature could gradually be

attained. There was no stopper for the tub but someone had whittled

the end of a block of wood so that it served fairly well. At the end

of one's first bath, he got out and pulled the plug. He then found

that there was no drainpipe, as the dirty water gushed out over the

mud floor and over his feet. Washing them required at least part of

a second bath. A lattice of slats high enough to keep the bather

above high tide level presently solved this problem. On a twice a

week schedule in such a climate we really needed these baths.

Unfortunately, the walk back to our siding in the sand and the heat

often made us feel ready for another bath by the time we got there.

The Kazakh, Tatar, and Bashkir majority of the male population

apparently solved the problems of heat and cold by being sewn into

their sheepskins and wearing felt boots which they may, for all I

know, have taken off at night. Much of their clothing seemed to be

changed only when it fell apart. I dare say that if one is careful

not to move rapidly, the sheepskins may keep out heat as well as

cold.

Life in Ak-Bulak 60

These men were certainly, for their size, the strongest I have ever

seen. When we brought our equipment from the freight station to our

operating site, a low cart drawn by two oxen was, for some reason,

left thirty or forty yards away down a small grade from the

platform. The "Mongolian" porters, who averaged about five feet

three inches and looked as though they might weigh a hundred pounds

if divested of their sheepskins, then picked up our boxes and

carried them to the wagon. I had weighed these in Cambridge and knew

that most of them were in the range from two hundred to two hundred

and fifty pounds. One of our boxes was too much for them. It

contained a large relay rack and a heavy power supply and was built

into a box that looked like a privy. It weighed over four hundred

pounds. The solution for carrying this box was to have two of the

porters pick it up and lay it on the back of a third, who then

carried it to the wagon where two others unloaded him.

The local women usually wore long, heavy, and full skirts. We saw

them doing all kinds of work, but we ultimately decided that the

best wife must be the one who got out into the streets earliest in

the morning to collect, in her apron, part of the days accumulation

of camel and other dung, for drying and burning.

We occasionally walked a couple of miles to the bank of the Iletsk

River, the only body of visible water in the neighborhood. It was,

as will be imagined, flat and slow moving, but it did flow most of

the summer, and had some rushes along the banks. Here we saw many

birds that I took to be a kind of Arctic tern. They were, whatever

the kind, graceful and highly maneuverable. They darted around

rapidly in complicated patterns and were, as far as I can recall,

the only birds I noticed in the Soviet Union.

The only other non-domesticated creature that I remember seeing in

Kazakhstan was a European hedgehog that lived with us for a time. I

feel some doubt about the matter of domestication, but I incline to

believe that it simply recognized a good source of food and did not

object too strenuously to a modest amount of handling. I had never

seen such an animal and admired the almost perfect ball he could

form when he wished to indicate that he had had enough attention for

the time being. The ball was almost completely covered with spines

an inch or so long, but the spines were of uniform length and not so

sharp as those of a porcupine, so that the hedgehog could be held in

the hand without discomfort if no great pressure were applied. I

found the sensation quite different when someone induced Herkemish,

as we called the creature, to settle in my sleeping-bag before I

retired. I think Herky must have been carried at times between the

train and the astronomical site some ten miles away, as he was

certainly a pet of both astronomers and radio men; with some

assistance from the cooks and stewards. I recall seeing him drink

Communication 61

milk from a saucer, but somehow I have no recollection of what he

must have eaten. Where he was found I think I never knew.

Comrade Sheegin procured a lot of aluminum wire for us and we had a

"power" line run from the Prosobdir to our baggage car. We installed

our pulse transmitters, which constituted most of our power

requirement, in a small building beside the grain mill. The Russians

went so far as to whitewash the room and turn it over to us clean

and empty, save for a large print of Stalin in a bright red frame.

The power line had to carry only enough for our receivers, one small

communications transmitter, and a few lights. The line resistance

was high and the regulation bad, so we had to be careful to keep a

fairly constant load at the end of the line. The Russians also

installed for us, along the same route, two lengths of surveyed

Signal Corps twisted pair that we had scrounged from some Army

installation in the United States. We used these for our own

telephone and for control lines for the transmitters. After sampling

the Wagon-Lit beds while we were unpacking, we of the radio crew

settled for using our sleeping bags on the floor of the baggage car,

so this became our home.

We soon discovered that increasing the electrical load at the

baggage car would slow down the generator at the Prosobdir, lowering

its frequency and causing an apparent reduction in the height of the

ionized layers. We spent several hours one day making a photographic

record while throwing a load on and off on a time schedule, so that

the apparent height of the E layer was varied in the form of morse

characters spelling out "Hello Harry". We mailed this to Professor

Mimno but he never received it. I suppose the Soviets took it to be

a cipher message, which it really was, and censored it into the

nearest wastebasket.

Except for delays of a few days in our cabled messages to and from

Cambridge, censorship bothered us in only one way. Just to see what

would happen, I had subscribed to the New York Times for the period

of our stay in Ak-Bulak. Between half and two-thirds of the copies

arrived in reasonable time. The rest were never heard of, and we

deduced that the Soviets simply threw them out if they happened to

contain information that they did not wish to have circulated in

Russia.

Arthur Collins, of the young Collins Radio Company, had donated to

the expedition a fine amateur transmitter with about 250 watts of

power. We officially used this to communicate with the astronomical

branch of the expedition at its field site ten miles away. They used

a smaller transmitter, begged from the Bell Telephone Laboratory.

Since we had no licenses we simply invented our own call letters,

which began with U, the standard initial letter for Russian

stations. We used URAD for the call of the radio party and UAST for

Communication 62

the astronomers.

We soon discovered that we could communicate, even by voice, with

amateurs all over Europe and northern Africa, and could occasionally

get through to stations in the United States. One contact was

especially useful to us. Olof Rydbeck, a technical-college student

in Stockholm, soon became a good enough friend to take messages for

Cambridge and cable them to Professor Mimno, returning answers by

the same route. This cut the time to get a question answered down

from several days to a few hours, by eliminating the censors.

Incidentally, Doc Selvidge and I called on Olof on our return trip.

We expected to pay him for his cablegrams but he insisted that his

university had taken care of this. The interesting by-product was

that Olof came to Harvard for a doctorate a year or two later, and

wrote the best thesis ever submitted there in the ionospheric field.

* * *

Amateur radio operators are always interested in knowing who their

correspondents are, and usually exchange QSL cards, which are

decorated post-cards confirming the time and date of each first

communication with a new station. We began our amateur contacts

rather carefully, never saying exactly who and where we were,

because we were very conscious of the unlicensed nature of our

activities. We would say something vague such as, "We are members of

a scientific expedition, somewhere northeast of the Caspian Sea". We

had not had our transmitter on the air for more than a few days

before the mail began to bring us QSL cards, addressed to our

fictitious call letters "northeast of the Caspian Sea", or using

whatever loose description we might have adopted. Thus we learned

about "Big Brother" long before we ever read "1984".

* * *

Every town in the Soviet Union, so far as we saw, had a Park

Kultura, a term always translated as "Park of Culture and Rest". In

a small town, such as Ak-Bulak, the culture might be represented by

a bandstand and a few tables for chess. In the cities, the parks

usually had real cultural exhibits of one kind or another. One

feature that was sure to be present was a circular walk surrounding

some object, perhaps a flagpole or a fountain. The general evening

recreation seemed to be to walk in pairs or in groups round and

round these paths, always widdershins, or counterclockwise. The same

phenomenon was to be seen in theaters or concert halls, where there

was usuaUy a lobby nearly as large as the auditorium. During

intermissions the entire audience would adjourn to the lobby and

walk counterclockwise around a large pot of ferns, or a statue, or

Diversions in Ak-Bulak 63

some other object in the center.

In Ak-Bulak the Park Kultura covered an acre or two and was planted

thinly with bushes and small trees. In the center was the bandstand,

surrounded by a circular boardwalk ten or twelve feet wide and

perhaps twenty-five yards in diameter. Once or twice in a six-day

week the local band would play for most of the long summer evening,

and the young people would walk round and round. The band was fairly

bad and was not noticeably improved when Doc Selvidge took over one

of the trumpets.

Paul King had brought with him two or three cases of canned apple

sauce which he could not often be induced to share with the rest of

us. Late one evening, after walking in the park, Paul and I managed

to abstract a couple of local girls from among their friends. Not

being able to think of any other objective, we decided to treat them

to some of Paul's apple sauce. Our actions had not gone unobserved,

and we soon discovered that we were being trailed by Doc and one or

two other Americans and by a somewhat larger group of Soviet youths.

We dodged our pursuit well enough to reach the train and get a few

tins of apple sauce and a can opener, but it seemed counter-

productive (if I may use a more modern term) to try to stay there.

We dragged the girls down a side street and presently found a house

with a sort of courtyard surrounded by an adobe wall. This seemed

quiet and secure enough, so we slipped inside. Finding a mound in

the corner, we sat down and opened the cans just as it began to

rain. Because we had no alternate objective, and as the girls

obviously liked the apple sauce, we stayed until realization of our

silly situation began to dawn on us. Investigation quickly proved

our suspicion correct that we were sitting on a Russian dung-hill in

the rain, eating apple sauce.

* * *

In my limited experience, there is no deadline so severely exacting

as a solar eclipse. After months or years of arduous preparation,

and after travelling thousands of hot and dusty miles to work under

primitive conditions, no excuse for delay can be offered. One must

have everything operating well at exactly the right time. At home,

one never works so hard and so long. One of the irritating features

is that it is never possible to convince the folks at home of this.

It is always assumed that you were just away there, in an

interesting part of the world, having a high old time at someone

else's expense.

This pressure, assisted by the Soviet calendar which was then

arranged in groups of six days so that one soon lost track of the

Diversions in Ak-Bulak / Catherine Stillman! 64

day of the week, must account for the fact that I can assign no

dates to any happenings in that period, except for the day of the

eclipse itself. Thus I am unable to establish the date of the most

important event of the expedition, when one of the thrice-weekly

trains brought Catherine Stillman to Ak-Bulak. Catherine had had to

finish her spring term, teaching astronomy at Vassar, before coming

to Russia a few days before the eclipse. In spite of the pressure of

work on both of us, it did not take her long to make me begin to

reconsider my ideas about the desirability of the married state. It

must have been even before the eclipse that she granted me the first

of myriads of kisses (that become more and more important to me as

the years go by) in the only grove of willow trees anywhere in the

neighborhood of Ak-Bulak.

Most of our food in Kazakhstan was far below the standard of the

Astoria Hotel, occasionally descending as low as camel meat, which

is not to be recommended. One Russian custom bothered us greatly;

they liked to hang their chicken for weeks before serving it. After

many efforts we finally convinced the management that we were

serious, and a great day came when Peter, our usual waiter, brought

in a platter of chicken and, bending his head far to the side and

making a chopping motion at his neck with the opposite hand,

announced loudly, "Sevodnya" (today). Peter, incidentally, was

approaching his twenty-first birth day and was anxious to get back

to Moscow to marry his fifth wife. This was in the days when, in the

words of Will Rogers, one could get a divorce at the post office and

then send his spouse a card saying, "You aren't with us any more".

At times we were served a fine dessert, a rum cake, but

unfortunately the thick butter frosting suffered seriously on the

long hot trip from Moscow. We quickly learned to scrape off the

icing, leave it on the plate, and enjoy the cake. One late-arriving

physicist and his wife had this comestible served before it had

occurred to any of us to warn them. The cake was beautiful and the

husband took a large mouthful. He chewed more and more slowly with a

strained look developing on his face. After a long time and a final

gulp, he turned to his wife and said, "I say, Marian, do you suppose

they make this dressing with Roquefort cheese?"

* * *

These diversions notwithstanding, the eclipse was upon us. All of

the equipment was working well, although I was not. Everyone on the

expedition, I think, had a bout with dysentery at some time or

other. Mine chose to hit me the night before the eclipse. This had

one pleasant result. We boys exchanged jobs at the last minute to

give me the least demanding one, which was standing watch over the

transmitters at the Prosobdir in case there should be trouble with

Eclipse Day / The "Comradely Tea Party" 65

either of them. I could easily do this from outside the open window,

so that I had an excellent view of the eclipse instead of being

trapped inside the baggage car operating part of the receiving

equipment. It may be that my fever accentuated what I saw, but the

eclipse was surely one of the most beautiful and spectacular in this

century. I was amazed to see the corona, which conveniently arranged

itself in the form of a five-pointed star in honor of the Soviet

symbol, fully fifteen seconds before totality began. The pearly

light of the corona, the orange light around the horizon, the

visibility of stars and planets, and the shadow bands sweeping

across the desert were all the best I have ever seen, and more awe-

inspiring than any description I have read. When the eclipse period

was over, I allowed myself to collapse for a day or two.

Unfortunately, the radio observations suffered the equivalent of

poor visibility for astronomers, as a major magnetic storm began a

few hours before the eclipse. This meant that we could not be sure

whether the effects we measured were pure eclipse phenomena or

whether they were contaminated by erratic magnetic activity. As a

result, it was inadvisable to publish any results of the ionospheric

work until after 194O, when it was possible to mount a similar radio

expedition. It then turned out that most of the 1936 effects were in

fact caused by the eclipse. Before this confirmation, fortunately,

the work in Ak-Bulak had helped King and Selvidge to get their

doctor's degrees.

* * *

The next memorable event was a reception given by the Orenburg

Oblast (the equivalent of a state government, perhaps) for the four

or five expeditions in the Orenburg district. This was introduced to

us, in a masterpiece of inadequate translation, by invitations to a

"comradely tea party". I have a feeling that this was to be three

days after the eclipse although, as I have said, all dates are

nebulous during this period.

In accordance with our instructions, we took a train for the four or

five hour ride to Orenburg, in time to get there in the middle of

the afternoon. This trip and the return ride later were the only

times I was trapped in a Soviet third-class sleeping car, which can

be described as a box car with two layers of shelves eighteen inches

wide along the walls. There were no mattresses or blankets. On

arrival in Orenburg we were taken to what I believe was the city

hall, where we were supplied with soft drinks and cookies and had

appropriate speeches made to us. We were given to understand that we

were greatly honored by being allowed to shake the hand of the

Governor of the Oblast, who was credited with being the man who had

Eclipse Day / The "Comradely Tea Party" 66

shot the last Tsar at Ekaterinburg. After this honor, we were turned

loose for two or three hours to go sightseeing or, if we liked, to

try the parachute jumps in the Park of Culture and Rest.

We assembled at about eight o'clock in another hall, two or three

blocks from the first one, where we found a U-shaped table set for

dinner for two or three hundred guests. The table was a sight I

cannot forget. It was nearly five feet wide. Each place setting had,

in the Russian fashion, one knife and one fork and a stack of plates

several inches high. We found that after each course the top plate

was removed. This is an advantage, because one can, as distention

sets in, count the remaining plates and summon up the stamina to see

one through the rest of the meal. Arranged around the stack of

plates was a series of nine glasses, ranging from liqueur size

upward. At intervals along the table were vases of flowers and some

dishes of smoked sturgeon and caviar. Except for these few

decorations, every available decimeter on the table cloth had an

open bottle standing on it. I discovered that, without stretching to

an impolite extent, I could reach nineteen varieties of wines and

liquors, not counting duplications.

The dinner went on and on, with official toasts (in Russian,

English, French, and Czechoslovakian) proclaimed from the head table

every few minutes. I made a tactical error in deciding that it would

be courteous to drink all of the official toasts in vodka, and soon

became too stubborn to change my mind. I had, of course, secured a

seat beside Catherine. I thus found myself needing to sample the

other eighteen potables in private toasts to her beautiful brown

eyes, or to whatever other parts of her anatomy appealed to my

imagination from time to time.

We were all, naturally, overtired, especially the astronomers who

had been developing photographic plates and trying to pack for their

departure all at the same time. One of them, an Englishman from the

Greenwich Observatory (whom I had the pleasure of meeting in

Washington, years later, when he had become the great British expert

on de-gaussing ships to protect them from magnetic mines) exhibited

a remarkable ability to sleep through most of the proceedings

without ever losing his erect posture or nodding his head. Most of

us, although drooping to some extent, managed to continue our

drinking.

It was perhaps fortunate that our expedition had to abandon the

party in the middle, at about three A.M., as we needed to catch our

return train to Ak-Bulak. When we prepared to leave for the railroad

station, Catherine confessed that she had left her coat at the City

Hall, so we set out on foot to retrieve it, although I have no idea

why we thought we could even find the hall, to say nothing of

finding it open. I seem to recall that the big street we had to

Comradely Tea Party, continued 67

follow resembled Fifth Avenue in the Forties. I am more sure that

the space between the curbs was just about wide enough to contain

our meanderings as we held each other up and kept pointed in more or

less the right direction. In some unexplained way, we retrieved the

coat and got back to find a car that would take us to the railroad

station.

When we got into our train, it seemed good to me to lie down on the

nearest shelf. It had happened that on the way to Orenburg I had

occupied an upper shelf, with Catherine below me. Possibly as a

result of too much alcohol, Catherine's normal consideration for

others seemed to have been weakened. She took the position that I

was in her place and that I should get onto the upper shelf. Such an

effort was too much for me to consider at that time. Catherine sat

on the narrow edge of the shelf and annoyed me greatly. I could

never remember what she must have said to stir me to such a supreme

effort, but finally I got up, with whatever hauteur I could manage

under the circumstances, and I climbed into the upper berth.

Catherine had had to stand to let me perform this feat so that, when

I lay down on my proper shelf, I found her with her head only a foot

or so from mine. This stimulated an excellent idea, so I stretched

out a long arm and gathered her in for a good I night kiss. When I

had occasion to look up from this, I found that we were surrounded

by an admiring semi-circle of expedition members whom I do not

remember having noticed before. At this point I performed what I

have always maintained was the only possible action I could think of

for a gentleman under the circumstances: I passed out.

* * *

It is a virtue of vodka that it leaves no hangover. I awoke in Ak-

Bulak, after only a few hours of sleep, feeling fit and ready to go

to work. The only untoward effect of the party was that an English

couple came around later in the day to congratulate Catherine and me

on our engagement. What can have given them such an idea I cannot

imagine, for that milestone was not reached until a couple of years

later.

Immediately after the "tea party" the astronomers, including

Catherine, left Ak-Bulak, while we radio people stayed on for a few

days to finish taking our control data. This period is chiefly

memorable for our acquisition of rubles. It seemed that the staff of

our train and a few of the townspeople were avid to buy almost

anything. Doc had a lot of ten cent pens that he had brought along

as gifts. These he sold for the equivalent of about three dollars

each. I happened to have a pair of new Abercrombie and Fitch brown

oxfords that I had bought as a spare, in Filene's Basement for

Return from Ak-Bulak 68

$2.95. I had to stop the bidding for these at about fifty dollars

"worth" of rubles because my conscience hurt me. We sold everything

we didn't actually need, not considering that all our expenses in

the Soviet Union had been paid in advance and that the ruble was

worth nothing elsewhere. Paul did the best, as he had brought an

excellent collection of personal tools. My finest effort was to sell

Comrade Sheegin, for 850 rubles, our donated twisted pair wire, as

it seemed far easier to sell it than to take it down. In all, we

three had a fund of seven thousand rubles when we left Ak-Bulak.

It was now time to declare a holiday, so we took the train to

Kuibishev and embarked for a five-day trip up the Volga River. The

ship was a venerable side-wheeler, powered by another 1898 vintage

German diesel engine. This was far different from our old friend at

the Prosobdir. It had sixteen cylinders of four or five inch bore

and a stroke that seemed to be about four feet; it looked rather

like a grove of saplings. We judged that the toilets might have been

reasonably clean when the ship had begun its trip, but after a

couple of days they became totally unusable. Fortunately, there was

always the railing and, with care, one could often manage to wait

until nightfall. When we described this difficulty at the Embassy in

Moscow, we were told about an item in a recent issue of Krocodil.

the Soviet humor magazine. The article described the plight of a

Russian reporter travelling in Germany, where the public toilets had

to be flushed before the door of the cubicle could be unlocked. The

author described in harrowing terms the hours he spent shouting for

help before someone who spoke Russian came by outside and explained

to him how to get out.

The most interesting sights on the Volga were immense rafts of logs,

often half a mile or more in length. These had as many as three or

four log cabins built on them, where whole families lived for the

several months it took to drift down the whole course of the river.

Another interesting sight was the "Alabaster Mountain" somewhere

along the western bank. This is hardly a mountain, being perhaps

eight or nine hundred feet high, but it has smooth and elegant

contours, and stands out in a flat river valley. It was about half

grass-covered, but the other half was exposed alabaster that gleamed

in the sunlight. I was disappointed not to hear "the Song of the

Volga Boatmen" at any time during the trip. I remedied this defect,

as far as possible, by singing it myself from the stern of the upper

deck, to only moderate applause.

Our best sightseeing on the voyage was at Kazan, the old Tatar

capital. This is a city of beautiful old brick, largely built in the

fifteenth century. We had a queasy time when, after climbing nearly

two hundred feet up the inside of a brick minaret, we looked down

from the little balcony and found that the top of the tower was only

four or five feet in diameter and was warped several feet out of the

Along the Volga / Picnic 69

vertical. At Gorki, the former Nizhni Novgorod, we visited the old

cathedrals and a famous monastery and then took the night train to

Moscow.

It happened that we arrived in the capital on the morning of the

fourth of July. Being in sad need of American society, we made a

fast run to the Embassy, judging that there would be at least a

cocktail party on the agenda. We found, to our pleasure and

surprise, that some genius had decided that it would be appropriate

to have an old-fashioned Fourth of July picnic somewhere on the bank

of the Moscow River twenty or more miles out of the city. The

American colony at the time consisted of only forty or fifty people,

which was not regarded as enough for a proper picnic, so the British

Colony kindly joined in to make up a quorum for the celebration. The

picnic was to be a potluck affair, with everybody bringing

something, and the Embassy, I think, providing beer and lemonade.

When we asked what we could bring we were surprised to have everyone

say, "Oh, caviar". We had had so much of this delightful substance

that it had not occurred to us that the Embassy lived largely on

American canned food and regarded caviar as a rare treat.

We had, I may have mentioned, Intourist tickets for four meals a day

for our entire stay in the Soviet Union, while for nearly two months

in Kazakhstan we had had only three meals a day. We three boys

therefore went back to the Intourist desk at the Metropole Hotel. We

tore out whole handfuls of our unused "tea" tickets, saying to the

girl at the desk, "Please give us the value of these in caviar

sandwiches". She rose to the occasion and agreed to have them ready

at the appointed time. When we came for them, we found ourselves

well loaded. The sandwiches were made with large slices of excellent

white bread, and each one was filled with a half-inch layer of the

best black caviar. The sandwiches were stacked in rectangular

baskets, each of which held about a bushel, and there were six

baskets. When we staggered to the picnic grounds with this load, we

found ourselves the most popular people at the party. I doubt that

those who brought them ate any of these sandwiches. I remember

stuffing myself with baked beans, potato salad, and occasional hot

dogs; and seldom had anything tasted so good. When I could eat no

more, I found a pretty and complaisant girl who let me lie with my

head in her lap, dropping peanuts into my mouth whenever I cared to

open it. I seem to remember that she was enough of a contortionist

to bend down and vary the diet of peanuts with an occasional kiss; I

suppose because young American men, like so many other staples, were

in short supply that year.

The Russians at a neighboring beach interested us. 1936 was the

first year in which bathing suits were made and sold in any quantity

in the Soviet Union. About a third of those at the beach showed a

marked Moscow tendency to pose and strut, so that they could easily

Moscow 70

be admired. The nude majority went about their business, swimming,

playing, or eating, with complete nonchalance; but we fancied that

we detected a compulsion to fail to notice their comrades in their

bathing suits.

A Russian photographer was in attendance at the picnic. We had made

his acquaintance on our way to Ak-Bulak, when he had taken pictures

of us all at the Embassy. That was his favorite hunting ground, as

his chief occupation was photographing incoming visitors in the sure

knowledge that something would happen to some of them, in which case

he could sell his pictures to the news agencies. At the picnic he

was armed with an unusual Leica camera that had magazine and take-up

reels for two hundred and fifty feet of film. He operated this

device with remarkable rapidity, expecting that a few pictures in a

thousand would be useful. I watched him carefully and found that he

could easily take two or three pictures during the swing of a

softball bat.

Paul and Doc, who were camera buffs, and I, who was not, spent an

evening in this photographer's home and laboratory, with remarkable

linguistic effects. I, for example, knew some French and had a few

words of German, while his abilities were reversed. I would try to

find the key words in Russian with no success, then grope for German

ones, and perhaps find them in French. If all else failed I would

use English. Any sentence became a blend of two or three languages,

with little or no attention paid to grammatical rules. Surprisingly,

the overall communication was quite satisfactory, although slow. At

one point during the evening, after much thought, I produced a

triumphant statement that included at least traces of all four

languages. The photographer, on hearing this, set down his glass and

rose to his feet. With a click of his heels, he bowed deeply to me

and said, "Sie machen ein sehr gut salade!"

One evening Paul and I had an idea that it would be fun to visit the

Gypsy Theater. Time did not permit getting tickets and sending an

Intourist guide with us, in the ordinary way. An Intourist girl

telephoned the theater and told us which bus to take to get there.

She also gave us a slip of paper with, we understood, the address

written on it in Russian. We walked across the large square in front

of the Metropole Hotel and found a bus with the correct number

waiting at the expected corner. Before the bus started, the

conductress came to collect our fare. We presented our slip of

paper, but it did not seem to tell her all she wished to know. First

one, then two, then half a dozen passengers examined the paper with

puzzled looks. The discussion soon became general and continued for

several minutes. Finally it seemed that a consensus had been

achieved. The bus started up and drove around the square to the

front of the Metropole, where we were politely put off; we never

found out why. The bus then continued around the square to its

Seeds of Democracy / Equipment Inspection 71

original starting point, and immediately went off on its proper

route. Having found the bus unsatisfactory, Paul and I started out

on foot. We succeeded in finding the theater but, of course, were

late. The manager, an obvious Gypsy with a villainous Fu-Manchu

moustache, took us into the totally-dark auditorium and pushed us

into seats in the last row, where we sat and wondered what the

Pushkin play was about, through the remainder of the first act. At

intermission, when the lights came up, the manager came back and

beckoned to us. We followed him down the aisle while he looked

around in the crowded auditorium. Apparently deciding that the

center of the third row was best he went into that row and dragged

out two men by the collars of their coats. Motioning to them to go

up the aisle to the back of the theater, he bowed us into the

vacated seats from which we watched the rest of the play.

The bus episode had showed us an interesting tendency for a group of

Russians to assume that they had the right to decide a question by

majority vote. I later saw a beautiful example of this in Leningrad.

The trolley cars there were unbelievably crowded, and the rule I was

that one entered at the back and worked his way through to get off

at the front. The only exception to this regulation was in favor of

a pregnant woman, who could get on at the front provided that she

had the appropriate card certifying to her condition. I had the

great good fortune to be at the curb at a trolley stop when an

obviously pregnant woman tried to get on at the front of a car. She

did not, for some reason, have the required card, and a violent

altercation began between the woman and the conductor. As this

continued, the car gradually emptied until all of the passengers

surrounded the disputants. After fully fifteen minutes of general,

and loud, discussion, the problem was put to a vote. The majority

ruled that the woman should be allowed to get on at the front, so

the conductor yielded and she got onto the empty car. All the other

passengers obediently got on at the back, until the car was as

crowded as before and started up on its route, if not on its

schedule.

We had a feeling of having had enough of the Soviet Union, so we did

not stay long to see the sights of Moscow, but pushed on to

Leningrad. It was well that we did so, as it took us nearly three

weeks to get our equipment released and put onto a ship to England.

The chief difficulty was apparently that they were busy liquidating

Trotskyites that year and had, perhaps fortuitously, disposed of the

people who had I authorized bringing our equipment into the country.

About all we could do was to try to identify the officials who were

probably blocking our departure, and to scream and yell at them. We

had, by this time, I learned the Russian debating technique and did

not hesitate to make ourselves as loud and obnoxious as possible to

people who, we believed, had the power to set us on our way. Because

I had had this experience, Chairman Kruschev's performance at the

Seeds of Democracy / Equipment Inspection 72

United Nations in 1960 was no surprise to me.

It was finally arranged that the equipment would be released, but

only after it had been inspected. This annoyed us, as inspection I

had not been required when we came to the Soviet Union and we could

not see how they could determine that we were taking out only the

same things. The inspection was to take place at the dock, to which

our gear was transferred from the railroad station. I have already

mentioned the weight of some of our boxes. They were all

exceptionally sturdy, having been made expressly for the job by the

lab's excellent carpenter, Billy Kennealy. All the covers were put

on with large numbers of 3-1/2 inch wood screws, set up firmly by a

brace and screwdriver bit.

We spent part of a day watching a group of teen-aged youths

wrestling with these screws with only small hand screwdrivers. We

finally took pity on them and told them which box to open to find

braces and bits, chiefly because the operation was so time

consuming. In the end, every box had been opened. For each case, the

inspectors took out all the screws except one at a corner. Then they

pivoted the cover around and looked solemnly at the exposed surface

of the excelsior in which the contents were packed. After this

"inspection" the cover was returned and screwed down again. We could

only account for this performance by assuming that the inspectors

had received two conflicting sets of instructions. One must have

demanded "Open every box", while the other said, "Do not look at

anything". If this hypothesis is correct, the inspectors complied

with both orders. The operation took three days, because we did

little to help. On the last day of the inspection we had an

opportunity to see a Soviet air-raid drill at close hand. Before

this happened we had spent as little time as possible in the

warehouse because it smelled so bad. We would excuse ourselves

often, to get outside where the air was better. Apparently the

authorities had had trouble getting the dockyard workers to find and

wear their gas masks for a drill. They had solved this problem

beautifully. As the sirens sounded, a couple of companies of Red

Army soldiers swept through the dockyard area, setting off tear gas

bombs every few yards. The response was all that could be asked, but

it seemed that there were no gas masks for any foreigners who

happened to be in the area. For the rest of the drill, we were to be

found not only inside the warehouse but in the furthest and most

airless cubicles we could find.

When not occupied with these efforts to get our equipment released,

we were struggling with the problems posed by our stock of rubles.

We quickly found that we could not drink enough to make serious

inroads on the supply of money, and we could seldom find any

souvenirs worth buying. There were some nice things in the stores,

but at prices that shocked us. The Soviet system seemed to provide

Equipment Inspection / Air Raid Drill 73

the absolute necessities of life very cheaply, as was appropriate in

a society where the average wage was about one hundred rubles a

month, which was I officially equivalent to twenty dollars. Cabbage

and sausage cost only kopecks, and rent for the typical family

(usually sharing an apartment with others) might be $3.00 a month.

Beyond these necessities, the government stores sold "luxury" items

at completely fictitious prices. Cakes of soap, on the market for

the first time that year, cost two or three dollars each. I was

fascinated by the number of excellent silver cigarette cases

displayed in stores in all the cities we visited. These were

beautifully enameled with the hammer and sickle, the red star,

sheaves of wheat, and so on. The equivalent in the United States

would easily haye been worth twenty five dollars at that time. The

Russian price was $375.00. There were even plenty of diamond

bracelets and necklaces on display. We could not imagine who was

supposed to buy these at the prices quoted. We came to realize that

this was an ingenious system. The Soviet citizen could brag about

how low his taxes were, but if he had any money left after his basic

needs had been met, it found its way back into the hands of the

government. To get rid of our rubles, we sometimes resorted to the

unethical and illegal practice of catching incoming American

tourists before they had discovered that they had essentially no

need for Soviet money. We would get them into a corner of the hotel

lobby, behind the potted palms, and sell them almost any quantity of

rubles for a twenty dollar bill. My best idea for disposing of

rubles was to prepay our freight charges rather than to ship it

collect as had been previously arranged. I reasoned that I would be

reimbursed from expedition funds in dollars when I got home.

Unfortunately, the same idea had occurred to the leader of the

expedition and he also had prepaid the freight charges. I thus lost

my money. Even worse, I did not have enough rubles for the

transaction and was forced to borrow a few hundred from Paul. After

I got back, I had to scrimp for quite a while to repay Paul one

hundred dollars or so, American money.

It was probably in trying to get rid of rubles that I met an

American girl who claimed some understanding of art. There may have

been something defective about this pretension, as she had not

visited the Hermitage Museum although she was soon leaving for

Moscow. In any case, I insisted that she must see the museum, which

I had visited several times, so we went there together. It quickly

became apparent that I knew nothing about art, as I admired all the

wrong things. The attitude of my new acquaintance was so crisp and

superior that I quickly fell into a game of liking, or pretending to

like, the things that I thought would irritate her most. I did very

well by becoming ecstatic about Canaletti or some of the others who

painted with geometrically perfect perspective and microscopic

detail. My best (and last) achievement was when I chose to criticize

Rembrandt's "Prodigal Son". This is a lovely painting of the old

Understanding Art 74

man, having the doorway of the house just, suggested behind him and

with the son kneeling at his feet, back to the observer.

The whole painting is dark, except for the father's face which is,

without doubt, a magnificent study. I chose to criticize the picture

on the ground that the light on the face seemed to come in part from

above and in part from lights, or reflecting surfaces, near the

ground on both sides. There could, in my argument, be no natural

setting for the picture in which the lights could have fallen in

this way. Therefore it was a bad picture! This attitude about a very

famous painting was too much for the girl to stand. She left in a

huff and marched completely out of my life.

It happened that there had been one gentleman in that last gallery

with us. He had apparently listened to our argument with some

amusement and, when the girl departed, he took up the conversation

where she had left it. He seemed interested in my views about

illumination and we were soon engrossed enough in the subject to

spend two hours or so wandering around discussing the lighting of

various works of art. We got on so well together that we introduced

ourselves before leaving the museum. I felt proud that I had been

able to uphold my end of the conversation when I discovered that he

was Rene Clair, the famous French movie director.

Soviet propaganda was evident in many forms: "Workers of the World,

Unite!" in Russian, German, French, or English, across the facades

of innumerable buildings; pictures everywhere of a smiling "Uncle

Joe" Stalin, pipe in mouth and with children on his knee (this at

the height of the Trotskyite purges); loudspeakers in many public

places, booming out Party speeches and slogans. We never could

detect that anyone paid much attention to the latter, or perhaps to

any of these. Probably a continual bombardment of propaganda is like

much of our "background" music; it may impinge on the ears, but a

merciful barricade develops between the ears and the cerebral

cortex.

It seemed to me that censorship was much more important than

propaganda. Early in our lives we develop a strong feeling that our

home, or language, or country is best. Because anything strange

seems inferior, it takes self discipline as well as experience and

study before we can accept the fact that a foreign thing or idea can

be superior to a familiar one. I once spent a long. and interesting

evening trying to convince a group of young Russians (some of whom

spoke good English) that British railroad trains were cleaner,

faster, and generally better than Russian ones. The experiment was a

total failure, as none of them had ever seen or heard of a British

train and automatically "knew" that the Russian trains were the best

in the world.

Censorship or Propaganda 75

At some time in the past I believe the Russians held the world

record for the height of a balloon ascension. This record had been

broken most recently by Commander Settle in 1933 and again by

Captain Stevens in 1935. I spent a little time in several places in

the Soviet Union trying to find someone who knew that the Russian

record had been superseded, entirely without success. Everyone I

talked to exuded a serene confidence in the superiority of Soviet

aeronautics because of this and other records they were "known" to

hold. One cannot, of course, successfully argue about superiority in

art or literature. It was not impossible, however, to find instances

of practical things where the Russian way seemed better than the

ways we knew about. One was the simple matter of the postage meter.

The Russian machine would print the postage on anything put into it,

letter, newspaper, or parcel, avoiding the minor complication of

printing on a paper tape and then having to stick the tape to a

parcel. There also seemed to be much to be said for the traffic

control "lights" that we saw in Moscow and one or two other cities.

These were cubes nearly three feet on a side that were hung up over

the intersections of the street centerlines. They had lights inside

that shone through translucent red, yellow, and green segments of

circles that nearly filled each vertical surface. Big black

pointers, visible at a hundred yards or more, rotated in front of

these sectors. As one drove down the street, it was easy to tell

whether the "light" would still be green when one reached the

corner, or whether it would be necessary to slow down or stop. With

this little extra foreknowledge, the traffic flowed more smoothly

than I was used to seeing it do at comparable traffic density.

While idling away some evening hours in our baggage car in Ak-Bulak,

Joe Boyce, a physics professor from M.I.T., and. I had formulated a

double hypothesis. This suggested that, if one should plot the

sexual desirability of the average American woman against age, he

would find a curve with a double maximum. It would rise rapidly to a

peak at about age sixteen or eighteen; then it would tend to fall a

little, and rise again to a somewhat higher and broader maximum at

perhaps age twenty-six or twenty-eight. Beyond this latter age, the

curve would more and more rapidly, ultimately perhaps falling into

the negative domain. A disinterested critic might observe that the

age region to which we assigned the second and higher peak was just

a little less than our average age at the time we formulated the

hypothesis. The second part of the hypothesis proposed that if one

plotted the corresponding function for Russian women he would

develop a curve with only a single maximum. This would be (in our

eyes) not quite so high as the first maximum of the American curve,

and would occur a year or two earlier. Beyond this sixteen-year

maximum, the Russian curve would fall continuously, like the

American curve beyond the age of twenty-eight. We recognized, of

course, that there is a great deal of individual variation in

desirability, and that accurate assessment becomes very difficult if

Millimarlenes 76

the observer is in a state of deprivation, such as on a nineteenth-

century whaling voyage, or even on an expedition to Kazakhstan.

These considerations amused Joe and me, and others to whom we

revealed the results of our analysis, for two or three hours. The

subject was not explicitly considered again, however, until Doc,

Paul, and I were faced with killing time in Leningrad. It then

occurred to us that science demanded that we make at least visual

estimates designed to establish the form of the Russian curve; the

chief consideration being what the American curve could be

investigated at any time, while we might never be in Russia again.

I must explain that, of course, the absolute unit of feminine sexual

desirability in 1936 was the Marlene; this unit being too large for

practical purposes, one rated desirability in millimarlenes. As in

most scientific measurements, it was necessary to have a portable

reference standard because the absolute standard is not generally

accessible. In our case, this portable standard consisted in defined

ratings for several American girls we all knew; we agreed that Helen

Atwell, the only secretary at Cruft Laboratory in those days,

deserved the phenomenally-high value of 180 millimarlenes. After a

few preliminary trials, we established a standard operating

procedure which must be described for the benefit of future

experimenters. A day's run of data-taking began in the afternoon,

when we went to one of the appropriate emporia and bought two liters

of 140-proof vodka. Returning to the Astoria, we would drink one

third of the vodka, have some dinner and then drink a second third

of the vodka. This would bring us to about sunset, and we would

proceed to the public parks or some other region where we believed

that a suitable concentration of what we designated as horoshia

deavitchka (free translation: OK babes) might be found. Locating a

specimen, say one on a park bench with a sailor, we three would line

up at a respectful distance of eight or ten feet and assess her

charms. One of us might suggest, "Forty" (millimarlenes, of course).

The second might be more favorably impressed and. say, "No; at least

sixty or seventy". The third would usually establish the group

rating by saying, "All right, let's settle for fifty". I would

inscribe this number in my pocket notebook. We would then go through

a similar process in guessing her age. By this time, naturally, the

sailor might have decided to take part in the proceedings. After

order had been reestablished, in one way or another, we would move

on to the next bench, or wherever another specimen was to be found.

In the two or three hours of suitable illumination in the far

northern twilight, we might thus gather data on a couple of dozen

specimens. Returning to the hotel, we would drink the remaining

vodka and do a preliminary analysis of the day's numbers and prepare

a summary of all data acquired up to that time.

Surprising as it may sound, this simple diversion, under the

Millimarlenes / Depressing Things 77

influence of enough vodka, was very helpful in passing the time

until we were able to leave Russia. In all, we gathered data on two

or three hundred specimens.

After we had returned to the United States, someone decided that a

feature of a Department dinner, for faculty and graduate students,

should be my telling some of the stories of the eclipse expedition

that presumably would not be published in the scientific literature.

I told a number of yarns, and included among them a pseudo-

scientific study of the desirability of Russian women. By the time

of the dinner, in October, I had had the opportunity to reduce the

data to conventional statistical form, and I showed slides and

reported the appropriate values of the means, standard deviations,

skewness, and measures of the confidence to be felt in the results.

I spent perhaps fifteen minutes developing the hypothesis and

reporting on the "measurements". The discussion seemed to be well

received.

The next morning I was quietly working at my desk when Professor Van

Vleck stopped at my door. Van was a famous and powerful theoretical

physicist who, no doubt involuntarily, set a record for the delay

after which he received a Nobel Prize. It was finally awarded him in

1977 for work he had published about 1930. Particularly in those

days, Van seemed to live almost entirely in his own mind. It was

characteristic that only about once in ten times did he notice if

you passed him in a corridor and greeted him. On this occasion, he

spoke first, saying, "Good morning". I replied, "Good morning, sir",

and waited to see what he wanted. After long consideration, he said,

"I enjoyed your talk last night". After I had responded, "Thank you,

sir", he thought for what seemed at least a minute. Finally he said,

"Especially the part about the desirability of the Russian women". I

suppose I grinned or made some other appropriate response, and then

waited while he planned his next remark. He eventually volunteered a

statement, "If you are interested in the corresponding curve for the

Dutch, I can describe it for you, without your having to do any

research". Another pause followed,and finally he contributed the Van

Vieck hypothesis, "It passes through the origin and has a negative

slope".

* * *

One or two depressing facts about the Russian trip ought to be

mentioned. There were, by the time I left the country, five people

who had become good enough friends so that, had they lived

elsewhere, I should still be likely to correspond with them from

time to time. As it happened in this case, within a year four of

them had "disappeared". One or another of the expedition members

eventually received what was felt to be accurate word that two of

them had been shot. The other two simply vanished. It is hard, if

Millimarlenes / Depressing Things 78

not impossible, not to believe that their major, and perhaps only,

fault was that they carried out their assigned duties and thereby

had too much to do with foreigners.

In Ak-Bulak we had, about twice a week, been depressed by the sight

of prison trains that were, for some reason, often left standing

near our siding for a few hours before proceeding toward the east.

These were long trains of small box-cars, with sliding doors that

were chained open about four inches. These gaps must have provided

some ventilation as well as permitting the passage of downward-

sloping pipes that, we supposed, constituted toilet facilities. We

could see the faces of people looking out through these gaps, but

the number of armed guards pacing beside the trains discouraged us

from close investigation, or even from showing much obvious

interest. We always spoke of these trains as taking prisoners to the

salt mines, of which there were several in our neighborhood, but we

never knew what kind of labor camps or prisons might be their

destinations.

* * *

From many subsequent discussions I have learned that my emotional

reactions upon leaving the Soviet Union were not unique, but at the

time they surprised me. My first trip abroad had been a delight, in

part for reasons that have been mentioned. I had noticed no great

strain in Russia, although many things had irritated me and some had

been depressing. I was, naturally, glad to get the export

difficulties settled and to be on my way to Finland with Doc, Paul

having gone off through Poland.

At the time we saw it, the Finnish border was a small stream crossed

by a railroad bridge. The eastern half of the bridge was painted

red, and the western part was white. On the Soviet side, all trees

had been removed from an area of several square miles. The resulting

flat plain was nothing but an immense railway yard, obviously

intended for military purposes. Many of the areas between the dozens

of tracks were stacked with huge rolls of barbed wire. Spanning the

railroad line was a large wooden arch, decorated with the red star

and the hammer and sickle. A number of Red Army soldiers, aside from

those on guard, were standing around with field glasses, looking

across into Finland.

On the Finnish side, the first building was a neat white stone

railway station. Several large pine trees surrounded and shaded it,

and well trimmed flower beds provided a welcome note of color. An

official was raking the immaculate gravel paths. There were at least

a dozen young Finns, of both sexes, in the station yard. They looked

like high-school students and were all neatly and gaily dressed.

Several of them had field glasses and were looking across into

Finland Again 79

Russia. One could not help thinking of the only circumstances that

would lead to a crossing of this border, for the watchers on either

side.

The sensation I had not expected was one of seeming to expand about

two inches in each dimension when the train rolled slowly across the

bridge. I had had no idea of how much the awareness of continuous

surveillance had weighed upon me. There was also the remarkable

sensation arising from smelling pleasant fragrances for the first

time in months.

Doc and I had determined, on our former short stop in Finland, that

here was the place to take our vacation, because some quirk of the

monetary exchange made prices incredibly low. This was the deciding

factor because Doc, as a graduate student, had no extensive fiscal

resources while I was still earning $20.00 per week. I had drawn my

salary in advance for the duration of the expedition, but my funds

showed no probability of providing a surplus. As a matter of fact,

one of my first efforts was to telegraph our steamship agent in

England to see if I could advance the date of my departure for the

United States, but without success.

We left the train at Viborg, where we spent the night, and then we

went to Lappenranta, where we boarded a small boat for several days

in the Finnish lake country. This is a region where there are no

roads but thousands of small lakes, interconnected by canals where

necessary. All traffic in this district is, or was, by little

steamboats forty or fifty feet long. Each farm had a narrow pier, or

perhaps a narrow board walk, extending out into water deep enough

for the boats, which operated almost like trolley cars. A farmer's

wife might board one to take vegetables to a market a few miles

away. If no one in the family needed to go to the village, a

dairyman could leave a few cans of milk on his pier and the boatmen

would pick these up and take them to market for him. Boats like ours

had a dozen or more tiny staterooms. Because vibration would make

sleep impossible, these boats would tie up to a pier, or even a tree

stump, at ten or eleven at night. As no meals were served on board,

the boat would start up in the morning to bring it to the next

village in time for breakfast.

On our boat, as on others that had staterooms, there was a group of

students on vacation. They were almost all German, Polish, Estonian,

Latvian, or Lithuanian; all were good linguists, so that two or

three simultaneous translations would make any remark intelligible

to all. We did most things as a group and had a fine time. Our most

memorable stop was at Savonlinna, a sort of crossroads in the lake

country from which one could, if he were in a canoe, travel a

hundred miles or so in almost any direction, through one small lake

after another. Here is the old Swedish castle of Olavinlinna, which

The Finnish Lakes 80

comes the nearest of any I have seen to being the standard fortress

I used to imagine as a boy. The castle covers a rocky island at the

outlet of a lake. It can be approached only by boat, and the swift

current makes the approach a job for an expert. This must be one of

the finest moats in the world. The views from the top of the largest

round tower are unforgettable. There are twelve funnel shaped holes

through the thick stone walls; each one frames a different and

delightful landscape.

There was one beautiful night when I decided to stay on the boat

instead of going to the local beer garden with the students. It was

a quiet evening with a magnificent sunset; fortunately so still that

I could sit with my feet on the rail and envelop my body with pipe

smoke to discourage the arctic mosquitoes. The group from our boat

eventually settled on the shore several hundred yards away and sang

student songs for two or three hours. During this time, the flaming

reds, oranges, and yellows of the sunset gradually swung through the

north and became a sunrise, without ever losing any of their

brilliance. We stayed with our boat as far as Kuopio and then took a

train to Vaala, at the mouth of another lake, where we stayed in a

small country hotel resembling a hunting lodge. This was the only

place in Finland where, for two or three hours in the afternoon, we

found ourselves without anyone in attendance who spoke English. In

the early morning we embarked for a boat trip down the Oulujoki

River. This is a tourist trip made in the kind of boats that were

formerly used to carry barrels of tar down to the Gulf of Bothnia.

The boats seat two abreast, are forty feet long and very flexible. I

had found one pulled up on the beach in the morning before we left.

Its bow was a little higher than my belt. I put my hand under the

prow and lifted it above my head, but only the front half of the

boat moved. We were to find that this flexibility was a great help

as it let the boat "flow" around rocks in the white water. The crew

of such a boat consists of a rower, in our case a fourteen year old

girl, whose chief duty is to get the boat from the shore of the lake

into the fast water of the river; and a helmsman with a long

steering oar, who is usually very busy. I estimated the speed of the

river, in the parts we traversed, as nearly twelve miles per hour.

Sometimes the banks are gently sloping and decorated with pastures

and cattle; in other places the river runs through forests or cuts

through narrow rocky gorges three or four hundred feet deep. It is a

thrilling, albeit wet, ride. After a stop for lunch at a restaurant

clinging to the side of a gorge (and approached by more steps than I

like to think about at my present age) the river comes to a place

where it flows too smoothly to be regarded as fun for the tourists.

They are then put ashore to be picked up by the afternoon train that

runs parallel to the river. After an hour or more on the train

another stretch of rapids is reached, and the tourists embark on a

second tar-boat for another twenty or thirty miles before reaching

the city of Oulu, at the end of a long, tiring, and exciting day.

In Northern Finland 81

From Oulu, we took a bus toward North Cape, but the weather turned

cold and damp. We got as far as Rovaniemi, where we walked north for

two or three miles and crossed the Arctic Circle, but decided that

this was enough and retreated by way of the train to Helsinki. The

capital was as delightful as we had found it before. We stayed at

the Torni Hotel, where we succeeded in paying $1.10 per day. This

was the only place in Finland where we spent as much as a dollar for

lodging, the usual price in the villages having been the equivalent

of twenty or thirty cents. At these prices we did everything we

pleased, going to cabarets frequently and never stinting ourselves.

I found, when I left Finland, that the entire stay there, including

about three thousand miles of travel, had cost about $3.50 per day.

On leaving the Soviet Union Doc had become very Russian, in his

opinion. He had grown a bushy black beard and always wore a handsome

Russian blouse he had bought somewhere. In our travels in Finland he

had been forced to realize that, for some reason, he was always

taken to be Czechoslovakian. This hurt his pride, so in Helsinki he

finally gave up and shaved off his beard. He deposited the bush,

practically intact, in the waste basket in our room before we went

off on some errand. On our return he happened to look into the waste

basket. On top of the beard was a single square of toilet paper,

bearing the carefully printed word "Wonderful". This completed his

humiliation, but we could never find a chambermaid who would admit

to the editorial comment.

When we left Finland, we took the night boat from Turku to

Stockholm. This is a beautiful trip through the seagull-haunted

archipelago of the Aland Islands in the evening and through the

equally lovely islands outside of Stockholm harbor in the morning.

Our boat was again accompanied by a large and friendly flock of

seagulls. The passengers of course saw to it that the birds were

suitably rewarded.

In Stockholm we looked up Olof Rydbeck, who gave us the grand one-

day tour of the city, including a stop in the courtyard of the royal

palace so that he could exhibit for us the wire that was "His

Majesty's Antenna". We spent the evening in the Swedish Tivoli where

Olof touted me onto the most stomach-unsettling "amusement" I even

encountered. After this, Doc went off into Germany while I took the

night train to Malmo and Copenhagen.

The attraction in Denmark at this time was Catherine. After leaving

Ak-Bulak, she had gone to attend some kind of a summer school at

Helsingor. This fact was, to tell the truth, nearly all I knew about

where she was.

I registered at the Tourist Hotel, which had been recommended as

Elsinore and Copenhagen 82

inexpensive. I found it very posh, with porters in white ties, even

in the morning. By the time I had filled out the long Danish

questionnaire and been bowed into the elevator and then into my room

by no less than two flunkies in tailcoats, I found that my bags had

not only arrived there, but had been neatly unpacked. After

breakfast I applied myself to the telephone with little confidence

in my ability to make a long-distance person-to-person call in

Danish. To my considerable astonishment, I presently found Catherine

at the other end of the wire. I promptly invited myself to Helsingor

for that afternoon.

I recollect very little of what we did that day, but I know that we

visited the Kronborg for I have very happy memories of sitting on

the edge of the parapet where Hamlet's father's ghost walked and

dangling our legs over the edge of the strait that separates Denmark

from Sweden. Catherine agreed to come to Copenhagen the next day and

to spend the subsequent night at a hotel there, so that we would not

have to terminate the festivities too soon. I have no more detailed

recollection of how we spent the day in Copenhagen; all this

forgetfulness speaks well for Catherine's impact upon my powers of

observation. I do recall a curious incident when Catherine returned

to the Terminus Hotel to change for dinner. While waiting in the

lobby, I decided that I should take advantage of the opportunity.

Finding a door marked "Herren", I passed through it and found myself

at the top of a flight of stairs that went down to a small landing

with only one door that said "Privat", and another flight of stairs

with a sign pointing downward and saying "Toilet". At the

subbasement level, the stairs ended at a door that clearly said,

"Personnen verbjuden ingang". After studying this for a while, I

opened the door and found a perfectly satisfactory lavatory. I still

wonder about this, from time to time.

A similar episode later in the evening also surprised although it

did not puzzle me. At this time we were in the Valentsia (phonetic

spelling) Nightclub. Catherine excused herself to go to the powder

room, which she later reported to be normal and neat. I, following

unambiguous signs for the men's room, found myself out in the alley

behind the establishment. (While writing these lines, I am

interested to notice that these episodes that I remember happened

when Catherine had left me for a few minutes. Perhaps she can

explain this).

But the pleasantest of functions must end. In the morning I saw

Catherine onto her train for Helsingor, nearly missing my own train

in the process, because I failed to leave her before the car doors

had been locked. Fortunately, there was a suburban station where I

found a fast taxi. I spent the rest of the day crossing Denmark to

Esbjerg, a port that exists primarily for shipping breakfast

materials to England. When I arrived, I found a small village and a

London Again 83

fine concrete pier a hundred feet wide and nearly two hundred yards

long. On this was piled a mountain of eggs, butter, and bacon that

must have been fifty feet wide, twenty feet high, and as long as the

pier. After a while a thirty thousand ton ship pulled in alongside,

and the contents of the pier were transferred to the ship in a half.

hour or so. A modest number of passengers followed, and we were on

our way to Harwich. I found out on board that the pier was filled

and emptied twice a day, and that Esbjerg was only one of a half

dozen towns where the same thing was happening. It is no wonder that

British breakfasts are so good!

At Harwich I had great trouble with the customs inspector. During

the "comradely tea party" at Orenburg, each of the expedition

members had been presented an Orenburg shawl. These were famous

local products reputedly made from the fleece of young camels. If

they were not so soft and warm, I would think of them as lace. They

fitted the descriptions I had read in fairy tales as a youngster

because, although perhaps five feet by seven in size, they could

easily be drawn through a lady's ring. They were supposed to be rare

and valuable. I had taken this statement with a grain of salt before

reaching Harwich. There the customs inspector sprang upon my shawl

with a glad cry. He promptly demanded a deposit on the order of a

hundred pounds before he would let me take the shawl across England

on my transit visa. This was awkward, because I then had no money

even remotely resembling a hundred pounds. After a long discussion,

with many pleas of abject poverty and solemn promises to take the

shawl out of England again, the inspector finally decided to forget

the whole matter and let me go. When I got home, I felt it right to

present the Orenburg shawl to Professor Mimno's wife. Fortunately,

Catherine had one of her own (which she had transported across

borders by the simple expedient of wearing it) so that I still have

at least a small interest in one of these souvenirs.

I had two weeks to spend in England before my boat sailed, and very

little money left. I found two or three facilities that greatly

eased my problem. I located a little rooming-house near the British

Museum where I got my bed and an excellent (Danish?) breakfast for

two guineas a week. There was also a fine old hotel, the Thackeray,

nearly across the street from the Museum. One could walk into the

lounge in the afternoon, press a button and say "tea" to the

waitress, and receive a substantial meal for a shilling. With my

hearty breakfast taken late and a good tea, I required no other

meals during this period. I spent a great deal of time in the

British Museum, which then closely resembled grandmother's attic. In

more recent years they have relegated 95% of the collections to

storage and have displayed the best to excellent advantage. It is

now a far more attractive museum, but with not nearly so much to

look at. Occasionally, during this waiting period, I would treat

myself to underground fare to some other part of London to wander

London Again 84

for a while, but for most of this fortnight the Russell Square area

was my habitat.

On one memorable afternoon, Professor Appleton invited me to tea at

the Halley-Stewart Laboratories. I found, to my surprise, a group of

a dozen of the most eminent ionospheric researchers in England,

including Professor (later Sir Robert) Watson-Watt. Professor

Appleton promptly stood me up at a blackboard and they all began

asking questions about my views on various ionospheric problems, as

well as about the work in Russia. Possibly because I was the victim,

I found the interrogation rougher than any oral doctoral examination

I ever attended. The worst came when Professor Appleton, with a

malicious gleam in his eye, asked what I thought of the paper by

Watson-Watt and one of his students that announced the discovery of

a reasonably highly-reflecting "C layer" at a height of ten or

fifteen kilometers. I had to plead ignorance, for which I was

forgiven when it was recalled that the paper had been published just

as I went into Russia. Professor Appleton then gave me a one-minute

summary of Professor Watson-Watt's claims, and demanded an opinion.

It was fairly obvious that the reported reflections must have come

from hills or buildings or aircraft, or all three, but I dared not

suggest this simple explanation with Watson-Watt scowling at me. I

got out of my difficulty reasonably well explaining that many people

had measured coefficients of reflection of the higher layers that

would be impossible if the new lower layer really existed. The

afternoon ended without my having added much to the enmity that

existed between Appleton and Watson Watt. During and after World War

II, Sir Robert managed to acquire a reputation as "the father of

radar", which he claimed to have invented in 1934. I have often

wondered when the idea really came to him.

My ship was the "American Banker", one of the American Export Line's

one-class vessels. I had a pleasant crossing, except that I

hesitated to ask the staff for anything because I knew that my tips

would have to be far below standard. By being niggardly enough in

this respect, I succeeded in getting back to Cambridge with seventy-

five cents in my pocket.

8.

Throughout the four years that began immediately after my return

from Russia, I performed in at least a two-ring circus. The very-

high-frequency work having tapered off, I was more deeply engaged in

ionospheric problems, some of them being attempts to prove that

meteors contribute significant ionization in the upper atmosphere. I

was also drawn into a busy collaboration with Professor Hunt in

investigation of problems in sound reproduction from phonograph

records.

Professor Mimno insisted that I should complete the requirements for

my bachelors degree, and Harvard was more than generous in giving me

time and tuition grants for this purpose. I took Ted Hunt's

excellent course in acoustics and two or three cultural courses in

Summer School. Credit for these was transferred to Maine, which gave

me the B.A. in the fall of 1937. Passing this milestone brought up

the question of advanced degrees. It was financially impossible to

take full time for these, and it seemed grossly unfair to think of

stealing from my work as much time as would be needed. Under these

pressures, I decided that I must see what I could do at Harvard

without further degrees. I reasoned that if I could publish enough

scientific papers the University would find it difficult to explain

that I was just a minor technician and might appoint me to some kind

of staff status. I may say at once that this campaign worked well;

in 1939, after I had (with Professor Mimno, or Professor Hunt, or by

myself) published ten or twelve papers, the Corporation granted me a

minor annual appointment.

Before describing the phonographic work that took a third or more of

my time from 1936 to 1940, I must assign more credit to Professor

Mimno. I am sure that he was primarily responsible for finding, in

dusty corners of small budgets, enough funds to support my salary. I

surely felt that he had the right to direct my efforts, but he never

hinted at any dissatisfaction, even when my conscience nagged at me

for working as hard as I soon did in a field in which he bad no

special interest. It is, I suppose, true that I was generally

working at least ten or twelve hours each day in this era, as I had

little money or interest for other things, but my admiration and

gratitude for Harry's tolerance remain among my best remembered

emotions.

* * *

86

In August, 1936, then, I found Ted Hunt, with whom I was only

casually acquainted, overloaded in his efforts to finish building

some remarkably-advanced equipment for making phonograph records of

the proceedings of the Harvard Tercentenary Celebration. Ted had

induced the Tercentenary authorities to give him the financial help

needed for his desired instruments by suggesting the importance of

preserving for the fourth centenary celebration a complete audible

record of the activities at the third. While the idea of making such

records was exciting, I suspect that Ted's greatest interest was in

procuring equipment that he could use later for research purposes.

He had bought professional-quality turntables and other record-

cutting gear and had had high quality telephone lines run through

the steam tunnels to connect the important buildings with the

proposed recording room in the Research Laboratory of Physics. Being

dissatisfied with any recording amplifiers he could buy, he was

building his own to very advanced standards; it was in completing

the construction of these that he was falling seriously behind

schedule. It was to be expected that there would also be an

uncertain, but large, amount of testing and experimental record

cutting to be done.

The Harvard Tercentenary was by far the greatest academic

celebration in my experience, or perhaps in my lifetime. After two

or three weeks of Conferences on Arts and Sciences, the formal

proceedings lasted three days. It was like a glorified Commencement.

The whole Harvard Yard was decorated, among other things, by

hundreds of white poles carrying at their tops gilded Cambridge

lions. Sixty-two honorary degrees were awarded. Delegates from about

five hundred universities and colleges and fifty learned societies

marched in the academic procession in order of the ages of the

institutions, beginning with Al-Azhar which was founded in the year

970 A.D. The President of the United States was allowed a part in

the festival; John Masefield, the Poet Laureate of England, read a

poem; and musical portions were performed by the Boston Symphony

Orchestra. Seats were provided for 15,000 guests in the quadrangle

between the Memorial Church and the Widener Library. This

Tercentenary Theater was served by a remarkable sound system

contrived and supplied by the Bell Telephone Laboratories and the

Western Electric Company, allegedly at a cost of over $100,000. The

Theater has been used for Commencements since 1936, and the sound

reinforcement system has come down through the years surprisingly

won, with only occasional modifications and replacements of

equipment. The sound system for the Tercentenary was so free of

distortion and so artfully supplied from loudspeakers in the trees

and on surrounding buildings that most members of the audience did

not realize that electronic assistance was providing what they

heard. It was commonplace to hear people ask each other, "Why don't

they have a public address system?", not realizing that without one

they could have heard almost nothing from the rostrum at their

Phonography 87

distant seats.

With such a tempting program to be recorded, it is not surprising

that I volunteered and worked very hard with Ted to help complete

his equipment and learn how a recording was made. We slaved day and

night and, in classical fashion, completed the last changes and

adjustments within the hour before the ceremonies began. From my

point of view this rush had one bad effect. Ted claimed that I was

the only one who could be trusted with the actual cutting of the

records. I therefore spent the entire Tercentenary perched on a high

stool in front of the recording turntables and saw nothing of the

pageantry, although I must admit that I heard everything remarkably

well.

In the weeks following the Tercentenary, we cut more test records

and learned to make optical studies of the record grooves,

microscopically and in other ways. We discovered that we had,

perhaps largely by accident, made records of what was then

phenomenally high quality. This knowledge placed us in an

intolerable position because there was no phonograph pickup in

existence that could reproduce what we had recorded. Even worse,

there was no pickup that could be used without damaging the records.

We had had an instinctive realization of this tact, and had not

allowed any of the Tercentenary records to be played back, with the

exception of a few short sections at points where President Conant

insisted on finding out exactly what expressions had been used, or

where he wished to know whether certain off-microphone remarks had

been picked up and recorded, as they usually had been.

Knowing the excellent quality of today's phonographs and records, it

is hard to realize how bad nearly all of them were in 1936. In the

preceding decade, the old mechanical reproducers had been replaced

by electric pickups, amplifiers, and loudspeakers. The pickups and

the amplifiers, at least, followed the old designs because they were

intended to play the same records, which were, not to conceal the

truth, awful. To get enough acoustical power from the record groove

through a mechanical pickup, the stylus had to be pressed hard

against the record. In ordinary practice,the unbalanced weight of a

pickup was as nuch as four ounces. This weight rested on a needle

whose point had dimensions or only a few thousandths of an inch. The

resulting pressure was in the range of 20,000 to 50,000 pounds per

square inch, which exceeded the elastic limit of the record

material. The sharp point Of the usual steel needle would gouge out

the groove, erasing the higher recorded frequency components and

tearing the surfaces of the record groove so that random (scratch)

noise increased each time the record was played. Teddy's favorite

simile was to suggest that the effect was like dragging a cannon

ball along the furrow in a plowed field. To decrease the tearing

effect, abrasives were added to the record material so that a new

The Quality of Phonographs in 1936 88

needle would be ground to fit the groove after a few revolutions of

the turntable. This distributed the weight over a larger area of

contact so that the tearing was reduced, but it had two serious

disadvantages. The larger area of contact meant that the highest

frequencies could not be reproduced; while the roughness of the

abrasive produced unnatural, and unwanted, noise. It was therefore

common practice to limit the high-frequency response of the

reproducing system to about 3500 cycles per second, or little more

than the frequency range of an ordinary telephone circuit. The only

exception to this unfortunate situation was in the ease of

transcription records made for distribution of radio broadcasts.

These had recently been greatly improved by the Bell Telephone

Laboratories and the Western Electric organization. The

transcription records were in vertical cut on sixteen-inch lacquer-

coated discs that would play for almost thirty minutes. In

retrospect, it is clear that their virtues were the results of a new

order of care used in their manufacture.

Our records were cut in vinylite, without abrasive, so that they

exhibited even less noise than the transcription records. Because

this plastic was softer than the commercial shellac records, ours

were even more subject to tearing of the grooves and wearing off of

the high-frequency components of the sound. The obvious direction to

take in making a suitable pickup was to reduce the pressure on the

record to the point where all stresses were below the elastic limit

of the record material. This would mean that the entire mechanism

would have to be very light. It was clear that the power available

from a pickup would be proportional to the mass of material vibrated

by the modulation of the record grooves; making the pickup light

would reduce the power output. This fact did not disturb us, as good

amplifiers, were easy to make. We felt that even if the output

should be as low as that from a microphone we would still have a

useful device.

We began our experimenting with a simple hairpin of thin phosphor-

bronze ribbon. At the front, or closed end, of the hairpin the

ribbon's breadth was perpendicular to the record. This loop was

coupled to a sapphire stylus by a very light aluminum cone. Lateral

vibration of the stylus thus produced a rotary motion of the hairpin

in a magnetic field produced by a permanent magnet, so that the

front part of the hairpin was a single-turn coil and formed a small

alternating-current generator. The rotation of the hairpin was made

easier by twisting the ribbon in the rear part outside of the

magnetic field into the horizontal plane. A defect of this device

was that the front center of the hairpin had to be supported by a

block of viscous damping material to maintain the right pressure on

the record, and the acoustical characteristics depended in part on

the size and shape of the block of damping material. The pickup did,

however, show great promise. One inconvenience was that the

Pickup Design 89

impedance of the generator was very small, about 0.005 ohm, so that

heavy wires had to be used if the output were to be conducted very

far. We solved this problem by having a small transformer that

brought the impedance up to 500 ohms, and used the transformer

itself as a counterweight at the far end of the tone arm on which

the pickup was mounted.

We worked our way through many variations of this device. Each time

we made a major change in the design we increased the model number,

while minor variations were accounted for by letters, in

alphabetical sequence, appended to the number. By the time we

graduated from model HP-5G to HP-6A, we felt that we had a pickup

worth demonstrating and whose characteristics were worth publishing.

The hairpin had now become a little tube of phosphor-bronze about

three one-hundredths of an inch in diameter with walls two one

thousandths of an inch thick. The needed flexibility toward the

rear, where the hairpin was fixed, was provided by simply crushing

the tube into flat strips. This construction gave us good rigidity

in the coil part where it was needed, and flexibility where that was

essential. The electrical performance was sensational, for those

days, extending from 30 to 10,000 cycles per second. The power

output was admittedly very low, about one one-thousandth part of

normal, but this did not constitute a serious problem.

One of the most fascinating features was the light weight on the

record; about two grams. This produced pressures so gentle that it

was impossible to damage a record. We would astonish guests and

audiences by dropping the pickup two or three inches onto a fresh

uncut record. This would produce no visible or audible dent. An even

more startling test was to place a finger on each side of the tone

arm and scrub it back and forth across the grooves while a record

was being played. With any other pickup this would instantly ruin

the record. With ours, the noise from the loudspeaker during the

scrubbing was, of course, intolerable, but afterward the record

continued to play with no sign of damage. These characteristics and

the tonal quality of the reproduction were quite unheard of, and we

demonstrated them to any audience we could muster. Most experts

found it hard to believe that our audiences consistently voted Not'

when we inserted electrical filters and cut off the response to

frequencies above 11,000 cycles per second. Such a result was

contrary to the assumption that people did not want high frequency

response. We had proved that, if distortion and noise were

sufficiently reduced, the public really did like good sound

reproduction.

We had reached this state in November, 1937, and reported our

results first at the Acoustical Society meeting in Ann Arbor,

Michigan. This was an especially welcome opportunity for me, as

Catherine had left Vassar to pursue her graduate studies at the

Mr. Benner's Precise Machine Work 90

University of Michigan. I thus had a fine chance to visit her while

helping to amaze the acoustical experts of the country. Our paper on

HP6A was published in early 1938 and drew about two hundred fan

letters, a remarkable response for a scientific paper. Some of these

correspondents kept us writing letters for years; in fact, I think

the file was not closed until 1946.

We continued to improve our pickups until 1940; I think the last was

HP-23. We finally learned how to make them without any damping

material, which in reality had been needed only to control unwanted

modes of vibration. Although Teddy and I no doubt had the ideas

about what we wanted, most of the credit for these remarkably light

pickups must go to Harold Benner. Mr. Benner was the elderly chief

machinist at Cruft Laboratory. So far as I know, he could make

anything. I remember one occasion when one of the rich young men

around the lab had bought his wife a tiny Swiss watch. The works

were so small that if one had had two of them they could have been

placed side by aide on a dime without overhanging the edge. One of

the watch jewels had become broken, and a number of major jewelers

had refused to undertake repairs. When appropriately challenged, Mr.

Benner took the job home, where he had a more delicate jewelers

lathe than he had at the lab, and ground and drilled a new jewel

with satisfactory results.

The challenge was an important part of getting the best from Hr.

Benner. We learned to approach a delicate job by saying, "We don't

believe it can be done, but what we really need is . . ." An

excellent example is the kind of cone we used in our later pickups.

These were about two tenths of an inch long and one tenth in

diameter. At the top was a narrow cylindrical section to which a

thin silver band was later cemented, and there was a little button

at the end into which a sapphire or diamond stylus point was

inserted. Mr. Benner would start with a rod of duralumin. After

boring a cylindrical and then conical hole in the end, he would

cement this end to a correspondingly tapered arbor so the he could

reverse the rod in his lathe. He would then turn down the outside of

the cone until the remaining structure had a thickness of half a

thousandth of an inch, except at the little bump at the end. The

completed cones weighed an average of about four milligrams; it

would have taken 7,000 of them to weigh an ounce. I must admit that

occasionally one of these cones would be torn during the final

cutting but, even so, this remains one of the most remarkable

examples of fine machining that I ever watched. Certainly, without

Mr. Benner we could have done nothing important.

People never realize the combination of flexibility and internal

stiffness required in a phonograph reproducer. The acceleration in a

record groove can easily reach a thousand times the acceleration due

to gravity. If an automobile could tolerate such acceleration, it

Studies of Distortion 91

would reach a speed of fifty miles an hour after the first inch of

travel. For a pickup to withstand such forces, the effective mass

referred to the stylus tip must be a thousand times smaller than the

unbalanced weight on the record. For use with lateral cut records,

much of the mass of our pickups was concentrated relatively near to

the axis of rotation. We could then have a total mass perhaps as

large as ten milligrams and yet achieve a playing weight of only two

grams, or about one fifteenth of an ounce.

Our best proof of the value of light weight on the record was a

commercial Beethoven recording that we played over 2500 times in

tests and demonstrations of various pickups. After all of this use,

it still had the "gleam" of a new one. We used to annoy Briggs and

Briggs, the fine music store in Harvard Square, when we went to

choose a new test record. After listening to many, in an effort to

select passages that were hard to reproduce accurately, we would say

to the clerk, "This one is good; now go get us a new record that has

not been played". One of our finest and most difficult tests was the

"singing strings" passage in the third movement of Brahms' first

symphony. Any pickup that could reproduce these measures without

audible distortion was clearly of the first rank.

Consideration of the pickup behavior led us into a long study of the

geometrical relations between the stylus tip and the record groove.

The details of this research are too complex to be worth discussing

here. The important point is that we have to out a groove with a

very sharp-edged tool although we must play it back with a smooth

(spherical or ellipsoidal) stylus tip. For this reason, the motion

of a playback stylus is not the same as the motion of the cutting

tool with which the record was made. We realized that the center of

a spherical stylus traced a curve that remained at a constant

distance from each of the surfaces of a record groove, If, for

purposes of analysis, we took each wall of the groove as following a

sine wave, the stylus would move along a path that was completely

determined by the amplitude and wavelength of the sine wave and the

radius of the stylus. A defined curve of this sort seemed to deserve

a name. We originally called it the "Pierceoid", partly because I

first suggested the existence of such a family of relationships, but

chiefly because I made the extremely tedious calculations required

to determine the amount of distortion produced in this way. This

name seemed unduly awkward, however, and we shortened it to the

"Poid" before we used the term in print. I am still occasionally

pleased to find that this name is defined in a technical dictionary.

Ted and I came to the interesting conclusion that, in the matter of

distortion, lateral-cut records had a distinct advantage over those

that were made with vertical motion of the cutting stylus. Knowing,

by now, the physical requirements (the right amount of stiffness,

the small mass, and the capability to withstand high acceleration)

Useless Patents 92

for a good pickup, we were able to define the criteria for a

satisfactory reproducer and to establish the kind of groove that

might be used to make long-playing records. Because we could not

conceive of a cutting head that could simultaneously record both

vertically and laterally, we failed explicitly to predict stereo

disc recording. The paper we wrote about these matters was the most

important one in our collaboration. It was simultaneously published

in the Journals of the Acoustical Society and the Society of Motion

Picture Engineers; a somewhat rare happening that was possible

because both editors wanted the paper and did not feel that their

membership lists overlapped too much.

We gave the subject matter of this paper verbally at several

meetings of scientific societies. This became something of a road

show; wherever we went the Bell Telephone Laboratories sent two or

three of their engineers to try to refute our claims about the

superiority of lateral recording. This was a great deal of fun

because by the time of each meeting the opposition had thought up

new arguments in favor of their excellent vertical records. As their

new ideas were always presented in discussion periods after we had

made our exposition, we had to think fast to find satisfactory

counter arguments extemporaneously. Perhaps the most interesting

proof of the soundness of our work did not come until eighteen years

later, in 1966, when the Audio Engineering Society decided to make

me an honorary member. This surprised me, as I had had no connection

with audio engineering for fully fifteen years. I could not resist

going to the convention in New York to be awarded this honor. It

turned out that when the industry was getting ready to produce

stereo records, people had found the mathematical basis they needed

in the 1938 Pierce and Hunt paper. I was very lucky in this in

stance. Ted and I had a policy of alternately assuming the position

of senior author and this most important of our papers fell into my

share.

In the course of this work, Ted and I had secured two patents that

seemed to be very sound. They were fundamental, as we claimed the

physical features that would cover any phonograph pickup that could

trace a groove in accordance with our teachings; and these teachings

defined the criteria for satisfactory freedom from distortion and

record damage. We thought that these patents were valuable

properties, but most of the industry correctly judged that we were

academic types who would never know how to fight a patent suit. An

exception to this general policy was nearly provided by Columbia

Records, which got far enough to offer us each $3000 a year, for the

life of our patents, for the rights. I tried hard to get Ted to

accept this offer but, at the time, he had an inflated idea of the

value of a patent. It had happened that, some years before, Ted had

invented the electronic frequency meter. His friends at the General

Radio Company were interested in manufacturing it, and offered him

G.W.'s Advice / Psychology of Hearing 93

his choice of two deals: $1,000 outright, or a five percent royalty

on whatever they sold. It did not seem that the sales would be

large, and Ted had chosen the royalty chiefly out of friendship, not

wanting the company to pay too much in case the frequency meter

should not be a commercial success. Over several years, his receipts

were showing some signs of reaching the thousand dollar level. By

the time our phonograph patents were issued, World War II was

beginning, and the U.S. Navy decided to put one of Ted's frequency

meters in nearly every ship and shore installation. When the

Columbia patent deal was being negotiated, Ted was collecting

thousands from the frequency meter. This led him to feel that

Columbia would pay more, but his stubborn attitude outlasted

Columbia's patience. The deal collapsed, partly because Ted and I

were both deeply involved in war work and had little time or

interest for anything else. As a result, we never collected a penny

on our patents. It has always interested me that Columbia's Peter

Goldmark, after the war, emerged as the inventor of long playing

records. Dr. Goldmark did a magnificent job of development, reducing

our ideas to practice. I was to learn that this is usually a harder

and more critical part of bringing a new device before the public

than is the invention of the idea but, for a time, I sorely missed

having a share of the credit. I did not then know President A.

Lawrence Lowell's frequently repeated aphorism, "You may get results

or you may get credit for results; you can rarely have both."

* * *

In the early days of these patents, Teddy and I had felt that we did

not know how to make them show the most (if any) profit. As

Professor G. W. Pierce was known to hold many patents and to have an

aggressive patent attorney, we approached him for advice, saying, in

effect, "How do you decide what royalty to charge for the use of a

patent". After a moment of thought, G.W. explained that the trick

was to establish a rate such that the product of the rate and the

number of items sold would become a maximum. "Yes, yes!" said Teddy

and I eagerly, And how do you do that? Why, said G.W., flothing

could be more simple. One simply expresses the function,

differentiates it, and sets the result equal to zero. With this

profound advice ringing in our ears, Teddy and I retired to our own

quarters as least as wise as when we had come in.

* * *

It is hard to say whether it is good or bad that the human ear (or

more probably brain) easily adapts to what it is hearing. If one's

record player or radio is a little out of its best adjustment, this

fact must be noted and the error be corrected within seconds after

the machine has been turned on. If the fault be not readjusted

immediately, the ear will become used to it and the sound will come

G.W.'s Advice / Psychology of Hearing 94

to seem natural. The bigger the defect the longer it will take to

get used to it, but ultimately the ear will like the sounds it is

familiar with. There is a classical story about one of the most

famous audio engineers who, many years ago, bought a fine radio with

far better frequency response than the one he had had. The radio was

unquestionably superior, but his wife detested it because it

shrieked at her. Being a practical psychologist as well as a married

man, the engineer said he would fix it. He concealed in the cabinet.

fifty of the old two microfarad paper capacitors that every lab used

to have many of and connected them in parallel across the voice coil

of the loudspeaker. This reduced the quality of the sound to about

the level of the old radio and satisfied the wife. Then, every

Sunday morning before his wife appeared, he would reach behind the

speaker enclosure with his cutting pliers and disconnect one or more

of the capacitors. In a few months he brought the tone quality back

to what it should have been, and his wife still thought it was

wonderful.

When working in sound reproduction, one needs to be continuously on

guard lest, instead of continuing to make improvements, he come to

like what he has. It is too easy to improve things so that they be

come more like what he enjoyed last week or last month. This is, of

course, negative progress. Fortunately, Ted and I were able to adopt

a happy plan that probably had a great deal to do with the ultimate

quality of our work. It happened that the Hunts had season tickets

to the concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and that Kay, Ted's

talented and long-suffering wife, had entered a period when she was

caring for a small son and did not seem to care greatly whether she

went to the concerts or not. She effectively deeded her seat to me

so that, after working all week to the point where we began to be

satisfied with the music we were getting from our fine machinery,

Ted and I could go to the Saturday night concert and get our musical

taste recalibrated. By thus keeping the absolute standard of musical

excellence in the forepart of our attention, we were able to prevent

ourselves from becoming self-hypnotized and too satisfied with the

results of our labors.

The phonograph pickup is not the only important part of the re

producing system. Amplifiers and loudspeakers were subjected to

careful study, but we made no inventions in these areas. Ted

designed and the lab's best carpenter, Billy Kennealy, built for us

an excellent low-frequency speaker. This came in two halves, each

about three feet by six and five feet high, or as large as could

conveniently be wheeled through the various doors in the

laboratories. Each half consisted of a folded exponential horn which

was driven by a fifteen inch speaker. The high frequencies were

reproduced through a Fletcher horn, a multicellular speaker made by

the Western Electric Company for theater systems. The low-frequency

speakers were of complex construction inside, and it took us some

Loudspeaker phasing 95

weeks to add the necessary reinforcements in various places to

subdue unwanted resonances. During this interval, Frederick Saunders

wandered into the room. Professor Saunders was the chairman of the

Physics Department and an excellent violinist. He was blessed with

the rare talent of having absolute pitch and, being a good

physicist, he had taught himself to express this in either musical

or physical terms. After listening to the musical sounds our speaker

produced for a minute or two, he remarked, Your trouble is at 82

cycles per second. When we located the unwanted vibration in the

box, we measured the frequency carefully. It was at exactly 82-1/2

cycles.

It used to be dogma that "the ear takes no account of phase". This

statement is nearly true, but there are a few ears that are

especially sensitive. Two pairs of these belonged to Joe Maxfield

and Art College, the two stalwarts of E.R.P.I., the Western Electric

subsidiary that installed and maintained sound systems for movie

theaters. We had met Joe and Art in connection with the Tercentenary

and they kept an interested eye on what we were doing for several

years. When we set up our fine loudspeaker combination, they

complained that the phasing was not right. The high and low

frequency speakers crossed over (or radiated equal amounts of power)

at about 300 cycles per second. Because the component speakers were

effectively at different distances from the ears of the listener,

the 300 cycle sounds apparently arrived in different phases and

interfered in an unpleasant way, although Ted and I could hear

nothing wrong. Joe and Art assured us that it was only necessary to

change the high frequency speaker's position, on top of the low

frequency woofers, by a few inches to correct the trouble. We

decided to test this suggestion. Sending one of our visitors out of

the room, we let the other move the Fletcher horn, while listening

to good music, until he was satisfied. We then made a private mark

to record the position and threw the adjustment out. The other

expert then went through the same performance and amazed Ted and me

by settling on a position within about an eighth of an inch of that

selected by his colleague. Although we could hear nothing changing

as they made their adjustments, Ted and I had to admit that they

were hearing something real. After some months, I managed to train

my ears to detect a little of what Joe and Art had complained of; a

sort of "burr" when the music involved a tone at the crossover

frequency or near it, but I never attained much of their critical

ability.

Beginning as soon as we had suitable reproducing equipment, I became

involved in various minor recording activities, some of which had

entertaining aspects. In one of the early cases, the recording

served only as an introduction to the finest jam session I ever

attended. During the 1937 Summer School, I became acquainted with

several jazz aficionados, one of whom was a professor of history at

Jam Session / Jim 96

Columbia University. These friends were interested in several black

jazz musicians in Boston, whose talents they wished to advertise in

hope of getting them better engagements.

To advance this aim, I arranged an opportunity for the group to play

in the Music Building at Harvard, from which we had recording lines,

and made two or three records that my friends could use for

demonstration. This led to a happy Sunday when, soon after lunch,

five of us went to the hall of the negro musicians' union on

Columbus avenue. Each of us brought two one-gallon jugs of the

cheapest gin, and from then on we let nature take its course. Word

spread rapidly, and musicians and listeners arrived in great

numbers. I was astonished by the virtuosity of the players. When a

new man arrived he might take over the piano while the former

pianist would change to a trumpet or perhaps clarinet. The makeup of

the band changed in some such way every few minutes. The group could

play anything we asked for, but our ideas were soon exhausted and we

found it better to just sit back and listen. As the afternoon wore

on, followed by evening and night, it developed that the professor

had the fiscal resources to keep sending emissaries for huge trays

of sandwiches all the while, in some way. I did not understand (in

Boston, on Sunday), we were able to keep the gin flowing, at a

price. I have seldom heard jazz so well and spontaneously played,

even in the old days in Greenwich Village, and certainly was never

deluged by so much of it. I regretted that I had to leave at the

height of the party at about three A.M, and I was even more sorry

that the pressure of other things prevented me from keeping an

acquaintance with these remarkable musicians.

My fondness for Jim was of an entirely different kind. Jim was a

katydid coflected (by Dick Dow, who had been a friend of Catherine

since her college days) for Professor G.W. Pierce, in the early days

of his experimentation with the ultrasonic sounds of insects. G.W.

later wrote a charming book, called The Songs of Insects, that I

have always suspected of being the last book to be written in the

scientific style of the nineteenth century. The techniques for his

studies were a curious mixture of the new and the obsolescent. His

ways of picking up the sounds inaudible to the human ear were highly

modern, or even unique, but his methods for recording and analyzing

them would have been recognized by John Tyndall.

Most Insects had such low stridulation frequencies that they could

be recorded by G.W.'s crude equipment, but Jim modulated his high

frequencies so rapidly that the gear did not respond satisfactorily.

I earned myself a footnote in G.W.'s book by recording Jim's sounds

at 78 RPM and playing them back at 33 1/3 RPM, which brought them

into the range necessary for analysis.

Jim had a loud double chirp that was steadily repeated at night,

Jim / Walter Hampden 97

often for hours at a time. He was a favorite in the lab, where he

lived for several months while Paul Donaldson, the lab photographer,

took beautiful still pictures of him and tried hard to get high

speed movies that would reveal his stridulation technique. On one

occasion, G.W. arranged a radio broadcast about his insect noises

and I was drafted to run his sound effects. He wanted to use Jim as

an example, which worried me as the insect would often fall silent

without warning. By way of insurance, I kept a good record of Jim's

calls on a turntable, while I put Jim himself into a dark broom

closet with his own microphone. During the first part of G.W.'s talk

I spent most of my time monitoring him and running his other

exhibits, but kept nervously checking Jim's line to see if he was

still beeping. Fortunately, the katydid was highly reliable that day

and came through in excellent voice when called upon.

To change from silly to sublime subject matter, I must confess how

it happened that the world has no phonograph records of the

magnificent voice of Walter Hampden. A professor of public speaking

at Harvard, Freddy Packard, used phonograph records of his own in

his teaching, and he was fascinated by the quality of our records.

From time to time he would bring actors, who were playing in Boston,

over to Harvard and induce them to make a few private records that

he could use in his courses. Ted had, by this time, run microphone

and loudspeaker lines between our recording room and the Faculty

Room of the Physics Department. This was a pleasant, booklined room,

furnished as a living room, and we had determined that it had the

right acoustical properties to make it an excellent studio.

Walter Hampden was a famous Shakespearian actor. He could whisper or

shout or bellow with the most perfect clarity, and his range from

soft to loud was, we found, nearly equal to that of an orchestra. He

was quite correct in believing that no phonograph could do justice

to his voice, and he had never permitted a record to be made. In

some way Professor Packard overcame this reluctance and brought Mr.

Hampden to the Faculty Room. After a few minutes of talk, I went

upstairs to the recording room and warmed up the equipment while

suggestions for Mr. Hampden's readings were being discussed. Just as

I was ready for the performance to begin, the conversation in the

Faculty Room disclosed the fact that we had, the week before, made

records of Ethel Barrymore. Mr. Hampden insisted that he must hear

these before he would give his own readings. Accordingly, I quickly

undid my connections and put the Barrymore records on the

turntables. After playing these through the loudspeaker in the

Faculty Room, I reestablished the recording setup, and Mr. Hampden

began to recite. It was unfortunate that I happened to be monitoring

what went onto the records with a pair of crystal headphones. These

cheap devices had excellent high-frequency response but were very

deficient in the low frequencies. As a result I, being busy trying

to keep Mr. Hampden's glorious words from overloading or

Walter Hampden 98

undercutting the records, did not notice anything wrong with the

tonal quality of the sound until the time came for playing back the

records we had made. They sounded as one might imagine they would if

mouthed by a hippopotamus. By the time I discovered that, in my

haste to re-establish recording conditions, I had plugged the in

Faculty Room monitor speaker where the microphone ought to have

been, Mr. Hampden had departed in his very highest dudgeon. I was

never able to learn that he ventured into a recording studio again.

9.

The "radio" side of my life between 1936 and 1940 was fully as

fascinating as the phonographic work, but it was of far less general

interest and only indirectly of much importance. With one exception,

to be described below, the meagre results of the very-high-frequency

work led to the gradual elimination of that project. For some

reason, certain occasional bursts of skywave reception from an early

shortwave broadcast transmitter in Millie, Massachusetts, attracted

my attention. These, I felt, might be caused by reflection of the

signals from clouds of ionization produced by occasional large

meteors passing through the atmosphere more or less overhead. It had

been shown, in 1932, that a general increase in the ionization of

the E-layer could be observed at the time of a recognised meteor

Shower, but the fact was not widely known or believed. By studying

what was known about the relative frequency of large meteors and the

amount of energy dissipated by them, I was able to show that they

should be able to produce enough ionization about as often as was

needed to explain the effects observed.

This started a continuing interest in meteoric ionization, although

the study of it was somewhat frustrating. One never, of course,

knows when a large meteor may appear, while reflections from

ionization produced by smaller ones were not easily detectable with

the radar-like techniques and especially with the limited

transmitter power available before 1940. I used to dream of a

scenario in which I would observe the passage of a meteor which

actually fell to earth to be recovered. I could then, I thought,

give a lecture saying, "Here is the record produced by a meteor,

observed at a certain time; and, (reaching into a pocket), Here,

gentlemen, is the meteor". It is needless to say that such an

opportunity never came to me or, so far as I know, to anyone else.

It was gradually possible, in part before World War II and in part

in the first year or two afterward, to amass a series of records

showing reflections from meteoric ionization at times coinciding

with visual observations. This involved many tedious and chilling

hours watching for and counting visual meteors. The climax of these

efforts came one night about 1 A.M. when Catherine and I were

watching at the field station that the lab then maintained in

Weston, where we had a hut containing receiving equipment and where

the darkness of the sky made watching very productive. We had only

been there a few minutes, or long enough to get dark-adapted, when

the second-largest bolide I ever saw appeared almost overhead. It

Meteoric Ionization 100

was rather like a flaming full moon, except that it threw off sparks

of green and blue and left a trail in the sky that was visible for

about twenty minutes. As soon as I recovered from my surprise, I

rushed into the shack to see the radio reflection, only to discover

that the transmitter in Cambridge had failed. I dashed to the car

and drove to the laboratory, with little regard for speed limits,

and succeeded in getting the transmitter back on the air in time to

record the latter part of the reflection from the cloud of

ionization, which persisted for a total of forty-five minutes.

In 1946, the Draconid meteor shower of October 9th was predicted to

be exceptionally brilliant, as the earth would approach the orbit of

the parent comet soon after the comet had passed that point in its

orbit. This prediction was fulfilled by the biggest meteor shower in

my lifetime. Unfortunately it was cloudy in Massachusetts, but my

records showed at least four thousand "bright meteors in about three

hours", a number that agreed well with visual observations in other

places.

After the war, the availability of high-powered radar equipment made

meteor researches more rewarding, for other investigators, and the

results were often studied by far better physicists than I, so that

my early successes in the field were soon forgotten. It was,

however, an effort that greatly interested me and which has, in

other hands, led to many useful results. I do believe, however, that

I was the first to demonstrate that a radio (or radar) reflection

could be produced by a single meteor.

In June, 1938 there was a remarkable amount of sporadic E-region

ionization at the time when the season of the year and the cycle of

solar activity were both at their best. This sporadic ionization is

related to auroral activity, because both are produced by the

bombardment of the atmosphere by charged particles shot off from

active areas on the sun. Most patches of sporadic ionization are

small and seem to move in a way reminiscent of the motion of auroral

streamers. On several occasions in 1938 (and occasionally since

then) the ionization extended across areas a thousand miles or more

across and was also unusually intense. One result of this activity

was that hundreds of amateur radio contacts in the 56-megacycle band

were achieved across distances up to two or three thousand miles

instead of being restricted to a few tens of miles, as is usually

the case.

Through the courtesy of Ross Hull, the Technical Director of the

American Radio Relay League (an organization of radio amateurs), the

many reports of these phenomenal radio conversations were sent to me

for analysis. I was able to deduce the intensity of the ionization

as a function of geographical position and, besides plotting

contours to show the extent of the sporadic clouds, to show that

Meteoric Ionization 101

reflection had been possible up to a frequency of 150 megahertz, to

use the modern nomenclature. This means, in current term; that at

least the first few television channels should, if an equal

magnitude of sporadic ionization occurs again, be clearly seen at

distances of about a thousand miles. At the same time the FM band

might well have signals in hopeless confusion, for a short period.

In the 1938 case, there was at least one occasion when two large

clouds of ionization occupied the eastern and western halves of the

United States at the same tine, so that coast-to-coast 56-megahertz

transmission was possible for a few hours. I had the pleasure of

writing an account of this study in two contrasting styles, one for

publication in QST, the radio amateur periodical, and a second in

scientific language for the "Physical Review".

was exciting, as no one in this area had seen anything like it for

more than a century. There was little or no warning, at least in the

Boston area. For some reason I had left work in the afternoon and

gone to a movie in Harvard Square. The storm, which had not been

noticeably severe, surprised me by its intensity when I came out

near dinnertime. I did not know what the storm was, but damage was

clearly being done. After I had eaten and thought it over and, I am

sure, after the rain had subsided and the wind had gone down

somewhat, I took a flashlight and patiently climbed each of the

three antenna towers on the Physics labs to see that none of the

many wires had torn loose. None had, strangely and luckily, as

trailing wires on such a night could have been hazardous.

In the morning I was horrified to find the lawns near Memorial Hall,

close to which I passed on my way from the lab to my room, were

thickly strewn with slates from the roof of the hall. These were

large and heavy, perhaps eighteen by thirty inches in dimensions,

and most of them were standing nearly upright, buried to half their

length in the ground. I never heard that anyone had been injured in

the fall of these slates, probably because few idiots would have

been abroad during the worst of the storm. On that morning after the

hurricane it became obvious that many towns in eastern and central

Massachusetts had been more or less cut off by high water, and some

of them had not been heard from as almost all wires were down. Doe

Selvidge and I then took the radio truck, that was liberally

supplied with batteries, and set out to see what "lost" towns we

could discover and assist by sending out messages if help were

needed. This was a largely useless effort as people were more self-

sufficient in those days and usually seemed to deal with their own

emergencies. We did, however, spend two nights and a day in this

humanitarian enterprise. Our greatest success was in finding a boy's

school in or near Ware, that was full of people anxious to get

The 1938 Hurricane 102

messages of reassurance to their families. We got all of these all

off by amateur radio (even though we were licensed as an

experimental station) and hoped that most of them got through. This

trip was sporting as many of the roads were under water and

intensive map study was needed to find ways to go in the directions

we thought necessary.

Brattle Street, the old Tory Row in Cambridge, was a sight of

desolation after the hurricane. It had been lined on both sides by

stately elms, most of which were uprooted by the storm. I fail to

remember how many days it took to clear the street enough for cars

to use it. This was my first experience with nature's wonderful

power of regeneration, helped in this case by man. After twenty

years I am sure that no stranger would have realized that any

disaster had occurred along Brattle Street. It is unfortunate that I

must also conclude that these beautiful trees would have been lost

to the Dutch elm disease in the next decades in any case. Few

villages and even cities were ever more beautiful than these old New

England towns with streets shaded by complete arches of these.

magnificent trees.

summer home in Brookfield, New York. This was the house in which