On a summer day in 1935 I stood on the “New Bridge” peering over the rail at the flooding Chemung River dividing the north and south sides of my hometown, Corning, New York. It was the biggest flood the locals remembered. It certainly impressed me as I walked along the north dike of the river watching trees, pieces of cottages, and occasional cows, dead and alive, float by.

On that summer day I was starting work on the 2 to 10 shift in the packing and shipping department of Corning Glass Works in its large plant right by the flooding river. When I got to the plant I found intense flood control under way, using as many pumps as could be found, including fire trucks, to keep ahead of the rising waters. The desperate work had two aims: to keep the water from the huge molten glass furnaces, where it would have instantly and explosively produced live steam, and to save the immense glass casting for the 200-inch telescope for the Mount Palomar Observatory. The telescope mirror was saved through extraordinary efforts to shift the large heating elements from below to above the mirror. These heaters controlled the slow annealing of the glass to prevent strains.

I was then 18 years old, an undergraduate at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, with ambitions in science. And that flood and the

people fighting desperately to save the mirror added a powerful and durable memory to the many I had of Corning. My first memory was Armistice Day, 11 a.m., November 11, 1918, when I was just a bit over two years old. Church bells rang, factory whistles blew, cars honked, and my father, Ralph, came home with his friends to borrow grandfather’s open car so they could join the parade, men hanging all over the fenders and hood. They shouted that they were going to burn the Kaiser in effigy. I’d burned myself by then, knew how much it hurt, and wondered why they would burn a person. Other memories before starting school were of my grandmother, Mattie, my grandfather, Horton, and my sister, Margarette, a year and a half older. Our mother, Alma, was hospitalized before I was a year old and later died of tuberculosis, then a dread disease. Our father continued to live with us at our grandparents’ home, but he died before I started school, leaving our grandparents to bring us up. Grandmother particularly was the primary teacher of ethics and behavior to Margarette and me, in a very loving and understanding way. When my grandparents were not around, Margarette—bigger, stronger, handsomer, and smarter than me—enforced the principles, salted with sibling rivalry, which, she always said, was for my own good. We had a close relationship, full of mutual respect and admiration, that continues to this day.

As World War I ended, Corning already was a major glass-manufacturing city with three distinct downtown areas and school systems, Corning Southside, Corning Northside, and Painted Post, a separate but attached town. The largest employer of course was (and is) Corning Glass Works,¹ founded and mostly owned by the Houghton family. There were also specialty cut-glass manufacturers and a cottage industry of crystal glasscutters. With a population of about 15,000, Corning was big enough to have a strong character and small enough to feel part of. A good place to grow up.

A few of the great engineering revolutions of the twentieth century were beginning to be used. Nationwide electrification was beginning to light streets and power streetcars, but there was still much use of coal gas and coal. The mass production of automobiles was beginning to change daily lives, but there were still many horse-drawn vehicles—to deliver groceries and packages and fresh milk and ice for the kitchen ice box. I remember at a young age “helping” a family friend deliver groceries on a

sleigh in the winter. An airplane was a rarity. Train travel was king. Motion pictures were changing from silent to sound to color. The telephone and radio revolutions were just getting started. The materials revolution was just starting in chemistry, but there were practically no plastics or artificial fibers like nylon. For us kids black cotton stockings were the choice, with many holes and darned patches. The modern medical and pharmaceutical revolutions had hardly started, and serious illness and early death were always close.

Many of the games we played after World War I were war games, and the most exciting were those based on then-new aerial fighting, an excitement that reached a crescendo when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in 1927. I knew all the aircraft types flown by both sides, and the Aces were my favorite. Then Houghton Stevens and I rushed to join Boy Scout Troop 23, sponsored by our church, the First Congregational, to which Grandmother belonged to ensure that Margarette and I attended Sunday school. Scouting became a passion for several years until I became a Life Scout. I won the Camp Spirit Medal at Camp Gorton, the Steuben County Boy Scout Council’s summer camp.

Grandfather Horton designed and built a new house in Corning, with a rental unit upstairs. It became a gathering place for our relatives, all with nearby farming roots: Uncle Perry and Aunt Hattie Gaylord, twin sister of Grandmother Mattie, farmers from Moreland, near Corning; cousins Guy, produce broker, and Nell Ford from Philadelphia; cousins Phil, food machinery salesman, and Ethylene Considine, and their sons, Bob and Paul, from Cleveland; cousins James and Allie Moore, farmers, and their children, Melvin and Rhea. Grandmother was clearly the most influential in the family, but the men folk did most of the talking, mostly about the economy and politics.

Politics just before the Depression were very rough and didn’t escape the notice of the young. In the bitter 1928 presidential campaign between Herbert Hoover and Alfred Smith, then governor of New York state, two events imprinted on my 12-year-old memory. My cousin, Nell Ford, took me to an outdoor speech by Al Smith, in Bath, the county seat. Her husband, Guy P. Ford, a well-to-do commodities broker in Philadelphia was the reason for my unique middle name, Guyford, one that my parents thought would pay off in the long run.² (Unfortunately,

the Depression was part of the long run, so it didn’t.) On that day in Bath, after a political lunch with the power brokers of Steuben County, Governor Smith gave a campaign speech to the crowd. It was a boiling hot day, and as he stepped to the podium, he wiped sweat off his reddened face. A friendly shout came from the front row, “Give the governor a drink.” My aunt instantly shouted from the middle of the crowd: “He looks like he already had one too many.” I was embarrassed, but the ayes and nays were about equally divided.³ And there was something much more sinister. The Ku Klux Klan, then a powerful political group, was very much against having a Catholic, Al Smith, in the White House.⁴ The Klan marched in full regalia in nearby Elmira and burned crosses on the hills around Corning. But we didn’t have anything like those tensions in our neighborhood. There were snowball fights, sometimes a little rough, between the students from the Catholic and public schools. That problem went away when a new public high school was built and the Catholic school, on economic grounds, sent their students there, with easy mixing.

Another feature of our home life in the 1920s was my exposure to the renters in the upstairs apartment. The first couple was Hugh and Marge Gregg. Hugh had just come to Northside High School to be the chemistry teacher and assistant principal. When they left to start a family, they recommended the place to Truman (“Jake”) and Ruth Jacoby. Jake was the new coach of football, baseball, basketball, and track at Northside High School. Both the Greggs and the Jacobys took a great interest in Margarette and me, and that interest continued through our grammar and high school days on into college. Another couple was a government employee and his attractive wife. He had rather odd hours, or odd until we learned that he was a “revenuer” tracking down bootleggers. We learned this when he landed in the hospital after being shot in a sting operation. Our renters often dropped in for an evening of chat with our grandparents, especially on hot summer nights. It was my first exposure to college-educated people other than our teachers.

Grandfather made our living room attractive with one of the best radios for picking up stations across the country and indeed the world. Its only disadvantage to Grandmother’s disgust was that it took its power from large automobile wet batteries that spilled the acid on the living

room rug. And for special friends there was homemade elderberry wine, the berries picked along dusty country roadsides by Margarette and me. Occasionally, fermentation led to a small explosion of a glass container in the basement. Prohibition was still in effect except for home consumption.

In high school I began to come into my own, getting involved in many different extracurricular activities. These meant more to me than my studies, which I did easily. And I tried to emulate Margarette. She was a campus leader, with the lead in the senior play, a basketball star, head cheerleader, class officer, very popular socially, and at graduation received the best citizenship cup. I didn’t like to take home any homework, so I concentrated on getting it done in the study periods. Quite often I did an assignment on one subject while listening to a teacher on a different one. I thought I had gotten away with this, but later, at graduation time, my civics teacher mentioned that he didn’t understand how I got such a good mark in the New York State Regents exam on his subject when I always did my math assignments during class. In my junior year I was elected founding president of our Footlight Society and president of the Latin Club and also served as senior class president and had the lead in the senior play. Though skinny, I won three football letters, and in my senior year I was quarterback of our undefeated, untied, and almost unscored-on team. In those days the quarterback selected and ran the plays and played on both offense and defense. To Margarette’s particular delight, I too got the best citizenship cup.

Although I remember those high school years as among the best of my life, the Depression shattered our close family life, then supported by Grandfather’s job as a manager in a small Corning department store, Wing and Bostwicks. By the end of my sophomore year, his deteriorating health and the failure of the store forced a move to a small two-room upstairs apartment, leaving two units for rental. Margarette left to earn her way through college at Cortland State through scholarships, jobs at school, and summer work as a waitress at a resort in the Adirondacks. Like so many others during the Depression, we were now very poor. At the end of my junior year, Grandmother, her spirit broken from trying to make ends meet, died from an infection following surgery, a common occurrence in those days. In my senior year I did the cooking and house-

work, not brilliantly. Grandfather, by then virtually an invalid, kept spirits high by encouraging me in all my school activities. Family friends and relatives helped with food, laundry, and mending clothes. One of the best gifts was from Mr. Stanton, who owned a small hotel and “beanery.” He gave me a hot lunch of my choosing every school day.

Adding to the Depression and to the poverty marking our daily lives in the mid-1930s was the “gathering storm” in Europe. We talked about it a lot in my high school days, as we “shot the breeze” at the “Four Corners” center of Corning Northside during balmy days and in the winter as we played pool and bowled in the recreation center at the First Congregational Church. Those sessions were enlightened by children of families newly arrived in America, bringing skilled glassblowers to Corning from the glass centers of Europe.

Amidst all this I got my first tastes of science. These came in many ways, the first being in the early 1920s when Howard Carter, supported by the Fifth Lord Carnarvon, discovered King Tut’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Just a beginning reader, I followed the stories of the discovery and the pictures in the Sunday rotogravure sections, intrigued by tales of lost treasures, the mysteries of ancient Egypt, and, when Lord Carnarvon died soon after the discovery, the supposed “mummy’s curse.” I read more deeply in an encyclopedia about Egypt and archeology and soon wandered on to pictures of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, descriptions of our solar system, and the “Martian canals.”

But it was the 200-inch Mount Palomar telescope that led me to a life in science and more particularly physics. Corning suffered serious unemployment during the Depression. So the announcement in 1934 that the company had been selected to cast the mirror blank for the telescope was a real upper.⁵ Our newspapers were full of articles about it for years, and we were very impressed when such leading science figures as Robert A. Millikan,⁶ chairman of the Executive Council of the California Institute of Technology, visited the casting project. Many of us young high school students, watching our elders, were infected by local pride in Corning and its glass works division, pride I still have. Frank Hyde, later a famous chemist at Corning Glass Works, instructed our Boy Scout troop in grinding an 8-inch parabolic mirror, with which we constructed a fine telescope and got kudos at a scout jamboree.

Hugh Gregg, now school superintendent, who with his wife had rented our upstairs apartment, persuaded me in my senior year to go to his alma mater, Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York, about a three-hour drive from Corning. On Friday, June 13, 1934, Gregg drove me to Colgate to meet the dean of students and admissions. There was both good news and bad news. The good news was that my high school records and references were plenty good enough. The bad news was that scholarship money was in short supply. If I could find $175 for tuition and fees for the first semester, they would give me a tuition scholarship for the duration, beginning with the second semester, if every semester I did exceptionally well in my courses. They would also find me a job to pay for room and board, costing $15 a week in a cooperative dorm. I accepted the offer, knowing I had saved $200 from my Corning Evening Leader paper route. I had just missed out on getting one of ten Steuben County $100 scholarships. Our high school valedictorian, Alice Rose, and our salutatorian, Mildred Lindbloom, each won one.

Starting at Colgate in the fall of 1934 took me on an emotional roller coaster. It was sad to leave my grandfather, the only remaining member of my immediate family, even though I knew he was in good hands with Aunt Hattie and Uncle Perry. I cheered up during the drive to Colgate, but I almost cried when I saw the shabby state of the dormitory for impecunious students, which I soon learned was to be remodeled the following year. My spirits climbed again when I met other residents of the dorm, all in the same financial boat.

Colgate was a well-rated liberal arts college for males. Its remote location in Hamilton and small size, though, seriously cut down on social activities, such as the dancing and dates that I had enjoyed so much in high school. So I substituted work, getting my social life at home during vacations. In the first two years there were required core courses in the different liberal arts to ensure that we did not get swallowed up immediately in our major studies—courses in philosophy and religion, biological sciences, social sciences, physical sciences, and languages. Of all these core courses I enjoyed philosophy and religion the most, having my eyes opened to a broader world. Confident that I could handle the load, I started off the first month with a full load, trying out for drama,

and taking on a job as a janitor’s helper in one of the dorms. The job was hard, because the janitor I worked for had very high standards. I worked my tail off. I didn’t get a part in the first play that semester. The heaviest blow of all was the “D” I got on my first mathematics exam, which had never ever happened to me and risked my tuition scholarship. In mathematics, the language of science! I was scared! Fortunately, my mathematics teacher, Professor Aude, a big ham-fisted Dane who came to Colgate after a successful career at Carnegie Tech, gave me a couple of special sessions in the evenings. He had me at the blackboard trying to solve problems, gave me a friendly poke on the shoulder with his big fist saying, “Come on, Stever. You can do it.” It worked, and I wound up getting an “A” in that math course and in the next five.

I was determined never to get a low mark again—and I didn’t. For the next seven years, four as an undergraduate and three as a graduate student, my studies came first. It wasn’t only the fear of losing my scholarship that drove me, but also my rapidly emerging goal of becoming a college professor. That meant a doctorate as an entry ticket and that meant doing exceptionally well in my major and minor courses, physics for the major and mathematics and chemistry for the minor.

By the end of my freshman year, my confidence in my academic capabilities was restored. I made the Phi Society, a way station to Phi Beta Kappa. I lined up a better work program for earning room and board in my sophomore year. I had a summer job at Corning Glass Works in the packing and shipping department. And I had the summer to join my old gang of Northsiders⁷ in the social life of 18 year olds. On the weekends I visited Grandfather, who was being very well cared for, although his health was obviously worsening. In the middle of the summer of 1935 he was brought to Corning Hospital, where he died of heart failure the day after he gave me his most prized possession, his gold Waltham watch and chain. Margarette came from her summer job waiting tables at a hotel at Saranac Lake. And we shared a sad but grateful remembrance of the life our grandparents had given us. Margarette and I had been making our own decisions and earning our way, so our lives didn’t change after his death. Vernon Schoonover, with whom Grandfather had worked at Wing and Bostwicks, became our legal guardian until we were 21, and he managed the closing of the estate, which was not much once all the bills were paid.

By the end of my junior year I had taken all the physics, math, and chemistry courses needed for a major in any of the three. I declared a major in physics, and along with some other physics majors got to work with professors on individual research projects. The professors were very good, with doctorates from first-class research universities, thanks to the efforts of the President of Colgate, George Barton Cutton. He set high standards and capitalized on the Depression, when jobs were hard to get and good people were available at reasonably low salaries. The head of the physics department, Paul Gleason, asked me to assist him on his research on photoelectricity, a continuation of the work he had done at Harvard. Preparing samples for Dr. Gleason meant carefully depositing in a vacuum a thin film of selenium onto a copper-oxide-coated iron wafer about the size of a quarter. That was done through sputtering, in which an electric field was established between a selenium cathode and a coated iron wafer anode. If the vacuum, anode and cathode positioning, and electric field strength were all just right, selenium flowed from cathode to anode, depositing as a thin film on the wafer. I became reasonably expert with the technique and could provide Dr. Gleason with samples for studying photoelectricity.

The physics faculty informally selected some of us as likely candidates for graduate school and a research career and exposed us to meetings of the American Physical Society and its journal, The Physical Review. They also assigned us additional and very well-chosen special projects in which one did the sort of background analyses essential to starting research. One was reading papers on the theory of auroras, caused by the ionization of air molecules in the upper atmosphere by solar-emitted particles. This study was to link directly to my graduate research on cosmic rays, also due to charged particles entering the earth’s atmosphere from space. A second study was on the theory of metals then flowering in the United States and seeded by theoretical and experimental work in Europe. This helped me understand the silicon semiconductors used as detectors of microwave radar, a field I got into during World War II. A third special project was the ultracentrifuge work of Jesse Beams, to become very important in the development of nuclear materials.

That high-powered science stuff mixed with some very “real-world” experiences in my summer jobs, first at Corning Glass Works and then for two summers in Detroit at the Ford Motor Company, which during

the summer hired about a dozen or two college students from around the country. I got some lucky assignments at Ford, first with an expert toolmaker who taught me the use of metal-working tools at least for simple jobs. Then I worked with a machine repairman. He and I fixed machines on the spot all over the plant. The largest job we did was replacing a bearing on a three-story-high metal stamping machine.

And I picked up the labor politics of the days when I worked with a dyed-in-the-wool communist in the electric repair shop. Our routine was interrupted one day to set up a trial of a new technology for heat treating cylinder blanks, by putting them in a coil and heating them with eddy currents from an alternating magnetic field. Observers assembled, wearing the white shirts and ties of higher authority. The cylinder got red hot but not evenly, and the man with the whitest shirt pronounced the technique useless. My radical work mate then told me what every one of the white shirts did and whispered scurrilous remarks about them.

I saw in close proximity some of the labor battles of the mid-1930s. Henry Ford, abetted by Harry Bennett, fought the unionization of his plants. It got very rough. There was a fight on the overpass to the factory gate through which we entered between a union organizer and company goons. The organizer was shot. All of us workers had to walk past a line of goons at each entrance to the plant. My social science studies were sharply augmented.

The great drive of the spring semester of my senior year at Colgate was to be accepted to graduate school and get a fellowship or scholarship to pay for room, board, and tuition. I applied to Harvard, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois, and the University of Rochester. All accepted me and all offered financial aid. I accepted Cal Tech, partly because the 200-inch mirror was being ground, polished, and coated there and partly because Robert A. Millikan had made a great impression on me when he visited Corning. And that Cal Tech offered both a teaching scholarship for room and board at the Athenaeum (the faculty club) and a teaching assistantship in the physics department was more than I could imagine.

In 1997, when I was given the Vannevar Bush Award of the National Science Board, Victor Neher, who became my graduate thesis advisor, told an interesting story about my acceptance at Cal Tech, a story which I had never heard until I was 80 years old. He told this story at the end of the ceremony after I had given my prepared “extemporaneous” acceptance remarks and the cheers of my many friends were dying out in expectation of the end of the occasion. He asked to be heard and said that he had been on the graduate admission and scholarship committee of the Cal Tech physics, astronomy, and mathematics division in the spring of 1938, and there arrived an application from me with many letters of recommendation. No one on the committee knew any of the letter writers, and they had never had a Colgate student apply to Cal Tech. After some discussion one of the members said, “Oh, let’s take a shot in the dark.” Richard N. Zare, presiding at the dinner, answered, “Blessed are the risk takers.”

I was Colgate valedictorian and graduated summa cum laude. I was even more excited that my classmates voted me “Most Brilliant,” without even an honorable mention as “Most Studious.” I like to think they were very perceptive! Although I had planned to return to Corning to get a job for the summer of 1938, I received a personal letter from Dr. Millikan inviting me to come to Cal Tech early to join the cosmic-ray research group, starting on thesis research right away. Paul Gleason urged me to do it and gave me a $300 loan out of his pocket to make up for missed summer earnings. So with hurried good-byes at Colgate and Corning, I was off by train to Chicago, the farthest west I had ever been, and on to Pasadena and Cal Tech.

Cal Tech was ideal for me. To be immersed completely in a community where scientific research was the prime interest was my first reward. And with room and board at the Athenaeum, my living standards rose sharply. I remember the lively luncheon discussions of a variable group of graduate students—for example, Charley Townes⁸ and Pief Panofsky⁹ and occasionally a faculty member or two, like Willie Fowler—right under a large painting of the founding fathers, the “Trinity,” the professors from the effete East: Millikan, the physicist; Noyes, the chemist¹⁰; and Hale, the astronomer. And I enjoyed the climate and other amenities of Southern California that had attracted those founding fathers.

In the spring of 1939, near the end of my first pressure-cooker graduate year at Cal Tech, Victor Neher, my thesis advisor, came by my research room in the subbasement of the physics building with a startling offer: that I do a cosmic-ray experiment in the summer in the High Sierras of California. I accepted immediately. Dr. Neher had planned to do the experiment himself, but he and Millikan, like a lot of people, knew the world was on the verge of war and that time was running out on experiments they wanted to do, based mostly in India, to send balloons with cosmic-ray detectors into the upper atmosphere.

I took a week’s vacation with some friends, stopping at Yellowstone, Bryce, Zion, and the Grand Canyon, and put on hold my original thesis problem: probing the discharge mechanism, or quenching, of Geiger counters, a now familiar instrument for detecting and measuring ionizing radiation. The experiment I was to undertake, the hunt for cosmic rays in the High Sierras, was an important one. Cosmic rays were not well understood in the 1930s when Millikan organized three lines of attack on them, using three different detectors: Carl Anderson using cloud chambers, William Pickering using Geiger counters, and Victor Neher using electroscopes.¹¹ Millikan had taken detectors all over the world so that he “could use the earth as a giant magnet to analyze the energies of primary cosmic rays.”¹² The stuff of cosmic rays is mostly protons with an admixture of other particles, traveling at very high speeds and probably coming from outer space. The intense interest in cosmic rays since their discovery in the early twentieth century by Victor Hess was both in understanding them and in using them, since, until the advent of accelerators later in the 1930s, they were the only source of high-energy particles for probing matter. Indeed, in 1937, Carl Anderson and his graduate student Seth Neddermeyer had concluded from cloud chamber experiments that most of the secondary cosmic-ray particles in the earth’s atmosphere were particles intermediate in mass between electrons and protons.¹² Hideki Yukawa, a Japanese theoretical physicist, had postulated their existence earlier. We called them mesotrons, but today those particles detected by Anderson and Neddermeyer are called muons.¹³ Yukawa also postulated that the mesotron once outside the nucleus had a finite lifetime, yielding an electron

upon decaying.¹⁴ It was measuring that lifetime that our experiment was all about.

The experiment was conceptually simple. Mesotrons created when cosmic-ray protons hit the earth’s atmosphere make up most of the cosmic radiation passing through the atmosphere onto and into the ground. Cosmic rays lose their intensity as they course through the atmosphere, pass through matter, are absorbed by other particles, and as mesotrons decay into electrons. Cosmic-ray mesotrons travel almost at the speed of light but have a lifetime of about a millionth of a second, which means a steep drop in their number for every mile of travel down through the atmosphere.

So the experiment to measure the lifetime of mesotrons becomes “quite obvious”—the sort of statement that has forever irritated students. We would measure the intensities of the radiation at two different heights above sea level and compare them. These would differ because of both absorption and decay of mesotrons between the two heights. All we had to do was measure the intensity at the two different altitudes, separating out the difference due to absorption by the intervening atmosphere. That would give us the difference in intensity owing solely to decay of mesotrons into electrons and therefore the lifetime.

That explains why we went for our measurements to two different elevations in the High Sierras but not why we put our detectors, recording electroscopes, into a lake at each site. That was so the extra water depth in the higher lake equaled exactly the mass that the mesotrons penetrated to reach the lower lake, canceling absorption effects and making the difference in intensities due simply to mesotron decay. We actually sank the detectors in both lakes to even greater depths to eliminate any transition effects as the mesotrons went from air to water. There were other complications that had to be dealt with in our calculations: the relativistics of particles traveling near the speed of light and the different angles of the cosmic rays entering the atmosphere, with intensities dropping as their angle from the zenith dropped.

Getting the equipment ready during the summer was a great experience in working with Vic Neher, who was a master experimental physicist. He had designed and built the electroscope to detect charged

particles. It had a slight Rube Goldberg flavor: Bombarding mesotrons ionized gas particles in a chamber that created charged particles that in turn discharged a quartz fiber. A battery-driven clock arrangement recharged the fiber and also advanced the film recording the position of the fiber at regular intervals. The rate of discharge of the fiber gave the intensity of the mesotrons, which is what we were after. And there was a nice little optical port for looking at the discharging fiber to make sure the instrument was OK.

This rather delicate instrument was going to be suspended from buoys in mountain lakes. So we needed a container that could protect the electroscope against water and against the mules bearing it up the mountains. We tested the container, which looked like one of those large milk cans farmers use, for watertightness in a pool in the courtyard of the physics lab. We could not think how to simulate riding on a pack mule, so we trusted to luck. More on that later.

Robert Millikan had secured money for the experiment from the Carnegie Corporation, all $300 of it. We had to scrounge, beg, and borrow more. We needed a boat from which to submerge and retrieve our instruments. We were lucky. Dr. Goetz, a research associate in physics, was the proud owner of a “faltboot,”¹⁵ a sort of large kayak with a rubberized cover stretched over a wooden frame, which could be disassembled somewhat like a tinker toy. It weighed about 95 pounds, which seemed just right to balance the load for the mule of the electroscope in its watertight container. We learned later that meant a pretty strong mule. We promised Dr. Goetz that we’d be especially careful with his boat. To my great pleasure, two of my fellow graduate students, Hugh Bradner and Bob Hoy, joined the expedition. Bob was in geology and Hugh in physics, and, even better, Hugh offered the use of his handsome Ford convertible. We packed our food, 60 pounds of it, including such essentials as a pound of raisins, 3 pounds of chocolate, a half-pound of peanut butter, and one jelly-jar key.

Our first lake was the Kerchkoff Reservoir, at 6,000 feet, in the foothills of the High Sierras, west of Mount Whitney. The faltboot assembled with no problems. The electroscope when wound for the day ticked away happily. All we had to do each morning was row out to the buoys, haul up the gear, get it to shore, open the watertight can, take the

electroscope out, wind the clock, check that it was recording, reverse the whole process, and, after the rig was back in the water, relax for the rest of the day.

It was pleasant for us but a disastrous time for the world. As we did our measurements from September 1 to 3, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand declared war on Germany. Even though the United States declared its neutrality a couple of days later, we knew we were on the verge of a world war. It was depressing but not a surprise. The three of us had lived with Hitler’s rise to power as we made our way through high school, college, and now graduate school.

Now we had to get to the upper lake, Lake Tulainyo, at 12,865 feet. To get to it we had to climb over Whitney Pass just south of Mount Whitney, on the ridge line of the dramatic cliff of the High Sierras, then drop down on the west side of the pass to Crabtree Meadows, where there was a ranger station at the junction of the Whitney Pass and John Muir trails. From Crabtree Meadows north on the John Muir Trail, we would use a fisherman’s path along Wallace Creek to Wallace and Wade Lakes, to our base camp at about 11,000 feet. Lake Tulainyo was 2,000 feet higher and three miles east. It took four days before we could put the instrument in the lake.

Bob Hoy knew something about pack animals, and he negotiated with the hostler for our pack animals, two mules and a horse. Listening to Hoy and the outfitter, I learned a few things—for example, that the horse should be a mare because it had a quieting effect on the mules. Not quieting enough, it turned out. One of the two mules was a male, a big fellow and strong enough to handle the electroscope in its watertight can and the faltboot. A pleasant-tempered female mule rounded out the train. As we learned about diamond hitches, hobbles, and the like, I also learned, in a sort of bees and flowers conversation, that even though mules were sterile they were not uninterested in sex.

We made it to Crabtree Meadows, where the ranger and his wife were closing the station and pulling out after a five-day reconnaissance of their territory. We would be the last party in that summer. He told us his route in case we needed help. We found an almost perfect spot at the base camp area at 11,000 feet. At a lunch stop en route, the ornery male

mule suddenly lay down and began pounding the pack with the delicate instrument against a boulder. We had to cut off his pack, and with my heart in my mouth I immediately looked through the porthole to see if the electroscope was working. It was!

Wales and Wallace Lakes were just above the tree line. And just below where their outlet streams came together, there was a pleasant grassy field for the animals to graze, a rocky outcropping to protect us from wind and rain and, not least, plenty of firewood. I reconnoitered our route to Lake Tulainyo. Cliffs that in most places seemed to call for an experienced climber blocked access. And even where an ordinary climber like me could do it, a mule could not. Luckily, one of the physics professors at Cal Tech, Ira Bowen, foresaw our problems and had given us an old clipping from the Los Angeles Times, with pictures of a fish-stocking expedition to Lake Tulainyo, including an aerial photo on which a dotted line showed the route taken. It wasn’t easy, but we made it, not without pushing, cursing, beating metal on rocks, and whatever else we could do to harass our animals into scrambling over the worst places.

Lake Tulainyo nestled on the west side of the steep eastern slope of the High Sierras less than a hundred yards from the divide. A steep slope of boulders ringed it. It was deep and cold. No living plant was in sight except lichens. And we found no signs that the fish stocking a few years back had been successful.

We got our apparatus into the faltboot and then into the lake, with a lot harder work than at Kerchkoff Reservoir, over 6,000 feet below. Our instruments checked out fine the next day and the following morning dawned beautifully. But there was something missing, our two mules to be exact. There was consternation, especially since a search of our immediate surroundings didn’t turn up any mules. We finally found tracks and agreed that Bob would set out after them while Hugh and I did our daily turn with the gear. Bob returned later in the day without mules but with a big smile. He had tracked the mules down to the John Muir Trail and found a penciled note on a large stone cairn in the middle of the trail. It was from the ranger telling us that our mules had joined his pack train and that he would keep them until Friday when we could meet him and the mules at the cairn.

After two more pleasant days we had enough data. Bob picked up

our mules. And we planned a day of retrieving the instruments and retreating from the mountains. But a great storm blew up during the night, and the weather turned cold, cloudy, and very windy. Still, Hugh and I set out to retrieve the instruments and the faltboot. The higher we climbed, the colder and windier it got. The lake was covered by nasty whitecaps, and occasionally little swirling “dust devils” whipped across the water blowing up spray. It looked scary but not nearly as much when we found our faltboot missing. We had wedged it between large boulders to keep it from blowing away, but it wasn’t enough. There were rubber scrape marks on the boulders, pieces of gear, and a broken strut or two. Hugh and I were shocked, I even more so because I was responsible for the whole thing. We found the faltboot across the lake floating upside down and being battered against the boulders by the high waves. It was very hard, but we got to the boat, righted it, emptied the water, and carried it back to the launch site rather than risking the lake.

But we still had to get our gear out of the lake. Perhaps the supposed loss of mental acuity with altitude accounts for what we did next, which was to get into the faltboot and paddle out to the buoys. We never made it. About 15 yards out we were flipped by one of those little twisters. The cold water was a terrible shock, and we both bellowed when we surfaced. Our heavy wool clothing and climbing boots were hard to manage, but holding on to the boat we struggled to shore. We were too frightened to try again, and after storing our boat, we ran toward camp. We threw off our wet and freezing clothes except for our boots and socks and passed naked by a startled Bob Hoy, who had harnessed the mule and was en route to meet us to pick up the equipment and the faltboot. We kept going toward camp for some warm clothes and our sleeping bags.

The instruments and boat still had to be retrieved. The storm continued for two more worrisome days and nights. We were running out of food and dreaded a retreat without the instruments and data. Finally, the winds calmed and with record speed we managed to retrieve our equipment, break camp, and get down to Crabtree Meadows that night to the now-closed ranger’s cabin. Winter was returning to the High Sierras. We had a light snowfall for our return over Whitney Pass, but otherwise the trip went well except that the horse was becoming increasingly lame from a rope burn. The hostler lost his temper about that and asked for

$45 in damages. We had already used the $300 from the grant. I was later chastised by an administrator at Cal Tech and had to verify the claim.

Steak! Mashed potatoes and gravy! Chocolate milkshakes! Fresh bread and butter! A warm night’s sleep in the desert near Lone Pine! We were new men. We returned to Kerchoff Reservoir for three pleasant days of more measurements to confirm our earlier ones and then to Pasadena and Cal Tech. I spent a tense evening in the darkroom developing 2 feet of 35-mm movie film. The whole record was on it, and it came out very well. The next night I dined at the Athenaeum with Bill Pickering¹⁶ and his wife, Muriel, who were sailing to the Orient to join Robert Millikan and Victor Neher. They were so interested in my account that they asked me to go with them to the station to continue the story. As I got into the little car that was taking them to the train station in Glendale for the trip to Vancouver where they would embark, I stepped right in the middle of their farewell basket of fruit. They said the stories made up for the loss.¹⁷

Then the real work started. I had to plot the data, correlate the data with the barometric pressure during the entire time, and work up the accompanying theory and calculations. We did not have a computer programmed to receive data and then spit out the results nicely graphed and diagrammed. The theory was quite complex, and I had to work hard at it. And there was competition for my time, for I was in the second year of graduate study when the toughest of the required courses had to be passed.

William Fowler,¹⁸ a future Nobelist but then a young instructor, just out of his own graduate school days, told me to get going before I was scooped. I was learning something about the pressures of “publish or perish.” Robert Oppenheimer,¹⁹ who spent a term each year on the Cal Tech faculty and who was especially interested in our results, saw me at lunch one day and asked how it was coming. When I told him some of our difficulties, he came to my research room and spent an entire afternoon with me discussing the problem, rapidly filling in and erasing my small blackboard as I took notes. He was a magnificent lecturer, but he had one disconcerting habit. He was a chain smoker, and at the blackboard he always had a cigarette in one hand and chalk in the other. We

were always waiting for him to write with the cigarette and smoke the chalk, but he never did.

The research work, including the trip into the Sierras to get the data, took up the summer of 1939 and much of the time through the spring of the 1939–1940 academic year. With a heavy course load it was a very intense, high-pressure time. By the end of the spring term in 1940, I felt a tremendous load lifting, for the toughest courses were well passed, the theory for the cosmic-ray work was done, the paper by Neher and Stever for The Physical Review²⁰ had been submitted, and a letter to the editor of the Review summarizing our results had been published. I had punched my ticket for acceptance into the research world. Although my doctoral work wasn’t done, I was clearly on a higher plane in my career scramble.

My spirits soaring, I set out with three graduate school friends, George Wheeler, Bob Wells, and Byron Havens, in Bob’s car on one of the best auto tours of my life. We camped out every night for three weeks from Southern California to Seattle, where we dropped Byron, to Edmonton, Alberta, and back to Yellowstone, where George and Bob continued on east and I bussed back to Pasadena. It was totally effective in renormalizing me after months of battering by the metronomic beat of seven days a week of studying, solving homework problems, going to classes, taking exams, and somehow finding time for research. I was particularly grateful to George, not only for his friendship but also for a loan of $600 for incidentals. This, added to Professor Gleason’s $300, came to $900 debt to be repaid at the end of my education, which I did in three months.

The trip rested and refreshed me for the 1940–1941 school year. But what was there to do? I had already taken the “unrequired required” courses, the core courses for a Ph.D. in physics and a minor in mathematics: electricity and magnetism with Smythe, optics with Bowen, mechanics with Zwicky, atomic physics with Millikan, mathematical physics with Fowler, complex variables with Ward, thermodynamics with Epstein, quantum mechanics with Houston, and nuclear physics with Lauritsen and Oppenheimer—a powerful package with a galaxy of star teachers.

That qualified me to take my oral exam, for which I immediately began to study. And I could take some electives, including theory of numbers with Bell, relativity with Tolman, and an extended course with Epstein that brought together at a higher plane some of the earlier courses.

I returned full force to the problem of what makes a fast Geiger counter quench. Victor Neher and I agreed that I should take a new tack on the problem. I hadn’t gotten far when Victor came to my office one day to explain that he was taking a temporary assignment as a staff member of the newly formed Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was at this time that I learned of the National Defense Research Committee, an organization put together at the request of President Roosevelt by Vannevar Bush to mobilize academic scientists and engineers to work on military needs. Victor assured me that I would be well looked after by Bill Pickering in my pursuit of the Geiger counter work.

All this neither surprised nor upset me. Like many Americans, shocked by the quick capture of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and frightened by the seemingly impossible job the British had in the Battle of Britain, I was convinced we had to start helping the British. Fortunately, President Roosevelt was working as fast as allowed by the practicalities of politics to get us engaged. And even many who did not want us to get into the war were still supportive of a military buildup, including having a draft. The draft bill passed by the narrowest of margins.

Soon after Victor Neher left to join the MIT Rad Lab, Professor Ira Bowen dropped by my research lab to inform me that the experiment on the lifetime of the mesotron was a good thesis and that I should concentrate on taking and passing the oral exam to finish by June 1941. I agreed but said that I would also like to work on the Geiger counter problem. He agreed, so the shape of my academic year was determined. The highest priority was studying for the oral exam. A standard start in that process was to get the “bone book” from the last candidate who took the exam. It was a record going back several years, with each candidate describing the questions that the various faculty members asked and giving the candidates’ answers to them at the time and, if necessary, the correct answer worked out later. Since the faculty knew of the bone book, this

was more of a challenge to them to think up different questions or to cleverly conceal the real nature of their questions. More important was to go over all of one’s notes from all the important courses and to study alternative texts on the same subject. As the time approached, I found myself getting more than uptight. I solved that by going ice skating at the Pan Pacific Rink in Los Angeles or to a “happy” movie. I found Olivia de Havilland just right.

The three-hour exam with a quarter-hour coffee break was as tough as I expected. I stood up quite well, even though there were moments when I did not have the foggiest notion of an answer. The worst question was from Fritz Zwicky: You have a string with a ball of wax at the end and a beaker full of water into which you dip the ball of wax. What is the electric charge on the surface of the ball? Zwicky had taught me mechanics, and I could not think of anything he taught me that would solve that question, so I searched for some things I had learned from Epstein in thermodynamics and wrote a couple of basic equations on the board and turned and found that Epstein had a great big smile on his face. I continued and somehow out of those equations found an answer. Epstein then asked me some more questions, and I answered them correctly. I had a feeling Zwicky was disappointed that I answered him with someone else’s stuff. I waited outside with some friends after I finished. When the faculty came out with big smiles on their faces, my friends cheered and then carried me on a stretcher over to the Athenaeum for lunch, to cheers from the diners.

With the exam behind me, I tore into the Geiger counter problem, and solved it.²¹ I was able to show the deadtime of the counter, that is, the time when it cannot register another incoming ionizing particle, and the recovery time, the time it took for the count register to regain full strength.²² I also discovered that a directional counter could be made by putting a small number of glass beads on the central wire to prevent the initial ionization breakdown, confined to a thin sheath right around the wire, from spreading along the wire unless the ionizing particle traveled lengthwise through the counter, giving a directional measurement. By measuring the strength of the discharge, one could tell whether the particle came along the wire or from the side. Cal Tech insisted that I apply for a patent, which I did and then forgot about until after the war, when

I began to receive small checks periodically, my 7 percent of the take by the institute. So I had completed two parts of a thesis, either of which would qualify me according to my graduate committee. And it kept me hopping right up to the end of my third year.

Although I worked briefly for two corporations, Corning Glass Works and Ford Motor Company, my first contact with scientific consulting, later a substantial part of my professional life, came when Professor Bowen asked if I could spend a few days consulting for a movie company, Metro Goldwyn Mayer. MGM was making a movie of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Spencer Tracy in the title role and Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner as the leading ladies. They would show him changing from Jekyll to Hyde by painting his face with a grease paint that fluoresced in ultraviolet light, so-called dark light. The concern was that ultraviolet light might damage Tracy’s eyes, recalling the problems early movie stars had with “klieg eyes” from the burn—in effect, a retinal sunburn—by the ultraviolet light from the powerful arc lights then (and still) used.

I dressed in the only suit I had, a white shirt, and tie and drove to the MGM studios in a borrowed car. The head cameraman took me to the set and handed me over to the assistant cameraman, who was very helpful, as were the technicians who understood my questions and were very forthcoming. It didn’t take many questions and measurements before I was sure of the answer, based on my optics studies with Bowen and on a talk I had with him. They offered to show me around the studio, an offer I declined lest it appear that I was not a busy man.

Back at Cal Tech, I spent a day writing up my report and sent it to MGM along with a bill for $100. I stated that not only would Spencer Tracy be safe from “klieg eyes” in that scene, he would be safer than if the scene were shot with normal arc lights. The industry had already solved the “klieg eyes” problem by fronting the carbon arc light with a Pyrex lens, which wouldn’t crack with the heat but would filter out the extremely high-frequency portion of the dark or ultraviolet light, the burning part of the radiation. Adding an ultraviolet filter to block visible

radiation striking Tracy’s face left the nonburning, lower-frequency ultraviolet for the fluorescence to turn Jekyll into Hyde. QED for $100.

I had more consulting ventures, none as glamorous as that one. But it was spring 1941 and my time at Cal Tech was ending. Physics Ph.D.’s were in great demand. I had three offers: one from the Research Corporation, which developed patents assigned to it by universities; one from Stanford University, to be a physics instructor; and one from MIT, to join the Radiation Laboratory. Had times been normal I would have leaped at the Stanford offer to start a career in physics in an outstanding department. However, my strong desire to defeat Nazism turned me to the Rad Lab. Professor I. I. Rabi of Columbia University came through Cal Tech to lecture and to recruit for the Rad Lab, dropping by my research room to convince me to go east. But convincing wasn’t necessary.

Saying goodbye to my many friends and colleagues at Cal Tech brought tears. I boarded a Santa Fe train for the east, stopping in Corning. I didn’t stay long. I had to start work.