Introductory Materials

Legal Information

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a modern research technique involving an interviewee and an informed interviewer in spontaneous conversation. The taped record is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed in final form, indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Charles Hard Townes dated February 4, 1992. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with Charles Townes requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Charles Hard Townes, A Life in Physics: Bell Telephone Laboratories and World War II, Columbia University and the Laser, MIT and Government Service, California and Research in Astrophysics, an oral history conducted in 1991-1992 by Suzanne B. Riess, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1994.

Abstract

Townes, Charles Hard (b. 1915) Physicist A Life in Physics: Bell Telephone Laboratories and World War II; Columbia University and the Laser; MIT and Government Service; California and Research in Astrophysics, 1994, xxiv, 691 pp.

South Carolina family background; education at Furman, Duke, and Caltech; Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1939-1947, radar work, WWII; Columbia University, professor of physics, microwave spectroscopy lab, 1948-1955; 1951 maser discovery: Office of Naval Research millimeter wave committee, earlier related work, Columbia associates, publication and patent, Russian claims, challenges, patent law; air force and navy interest in maser and laser; International Conference on Quantum Electronics, 1959; vice-president and director of research, Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA]: President's Science Advisory Council, the Jason Group, ARPA, Vietnam; 1964 Nobel prize in physics, and other honors; GM Science and Technical Advisory Committee, and other directorships; MIT provost and professor, 1961-1966, academics in government; UC University Professor since 1967: Berkeley in the sixties, committee work; championing the Apollo program, 1964-1970, problems of MX basing, SDI; move into astrophysics and infrared work at Berkeley; thoughts on religion, responsibility, fallibility, future. Includes an interview with Frances Brown Townes. Appended 1984 talk to Jason Group.

Introduction by Arthur L. Schawlow, Jackson-Wood Professor of Physics, Emeritus, Stanford University.

Interviewed 1991-1992 by Suzanne B. Riess for the University History Series. The Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Preface

When President Robert Gordon Sproul proposed that the Regents of the University of California establish a Regional Oral History Office, he was eager to have the office document both the University's history and its impact on the state. The Regents established the office in 1954, "to tape record the memoirs of persons who have contributed significantly to the history of California and the West," thus embracing President Sproul's vision and expanding its scope.

Administratively, the new program at Berkeley was placed within the library, but the budget line was direct to the Office of the President. An Academic Senate committee served as executive. In the four decades that have followed, the program has grown in scope and personnel, and the office has taken its place as a division of The Bancroft Library, the University's manuscript and rare books library. The essential purpose of the Regional Oral History Office, however, remains the same: to document the movers and shakers of California and the West, and to give special attention to those who have strong and continuing links to the University of California.

The Regional Oral History Office at Berkeley is the oldest oral history program within the University system, and the University History Series is the Regional Oral History Office's longest established and most diverse series of memoirs. This series documents the institutional history of the University, through memoirs with leading professors and administrators. At the same time, by tracing the contributions of graduates, faculty members, officers, and staff to a broad array of economic, social, and political institutions, it provides a record of the impact of the University on the wider community of state and nation.

The oral history approach captures the flavor of incidents, events, and personalities and provides details that formal records cannot reach. For faculty, staff, and alumni, these memoirs serve as reminders of the work of predecessors and foster a sense of responsibility toward those who will join the University in years to come. Thus, they bind together University participants from many of eras and specialties, reminding them of interests in common. For those who are interviewed, the memoirs present a chance to express perceptions about the University, its role and lasting influences, and to offer their own legacy of memories to the University itself.

The University History Series over the years has enjoyed financial support from a variety of sources. These include alumni groups and individuals, campus departments, administrative units, and special groups as well as grants and private gifts. For instance, the Women's Faculty Club supported a series on the club and its members in order to preserve insights into the role of women on campus. The Alumni Association supported a number of interviews, including those with Ida Sproul, wife of the President, and athletic coaches Clint Evans and Brutus Hamilton.

Their own academic units, often supplemented with contributions from colleagues, have contributed for memoirs with Dean Ewald T. Grether, Business Administration; Professor Garff Wilson, Public Ceremonies; Deans Morrough P. O'Brien and John Whinnery, Engineering; and Dean Milton Stern, UC Extension. The Office of the Berkeley Chancellor has supported oral history memoirs with Chancellors Edward W. Strong and Albert H. Bowker.

To illustrate the University/community connection, many memoirs of important University figures have in turn inspired, enriched, or grown out of broader series documenting a variety of significant California issues. For example, the Water Resources Center-sponsored interviews of Professors Percy H. McGaughey, Sidney T. Harding, and Wilfred Langelier have led to an ongoing series of oral histories on California water issues. The California Wine Industry Series originated with an interview of University enologist William V. Cruess and now has grown to a fifty-nine-interview series of California's premier winemakers. California Democratic Committeewoman Elinor Heller was interviewed in a series on California Women Political Leaders, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities; her oral history was expanded to include an extensive discussion of her years as a Regent of the University through interviews funded by her family's gift to The Bancroft Library.

To further the documentation of the University's impact on state and nation, Berkeley's Class of 1931, as their class gift on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary, endowed an oral history series titled "The University of California, Source of Community Leaders." The series reflects President Sproul's vision by recording the contributions of the University's alumni, faculty members and administrators. The first oral history focused on President Sproul himself. Interviews with thirty-four key individuals dealt with his career from student years in the early 1900s through his term as the University's eleventh President, from 1930-1958.

Gifts such as these allow the Regional Oral History Office to continue to document the life of the University and its link with its community. Through these oral history interviews, the University keeps its own history alive, along with the flavor of irreplaceable personal memories, experiences, and perceptions. A full list of completed memoirs and those in process in the series is included following the index of this volume.

Introduction by Arthur L. Schawlow

Charles Townes' many important discoveries rank him high among the greatest scientists of his generation. Certainly they attest to his extraordinary scientific talents. He has a powerful command of the tools of both theoretical and experimental physics. He also has remarkable personal qualities which have contributed greatly to his success as a scientist, an academic leader, and an advisor to government and industry.

I have been fortunate to have known Charles Townes for more than forty-four years and to have worked with him for several of those years. It began in 1949 when, as the work for my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto was nearing completion, I was awarded a Carbide and Carbon Chemicals Corporation postdoctoral fellowship. This fellowship had been established a year earlier for research on the applications of microwave spectroscopy to organic chemistry to help support Charles Townes' program at Columbia University. Dr. Helmut Schulz, who instigated the fellowship, hoped that Townes' research along with the millimeter wavelength magnetron tubes being developed at the Columbia Radiation Laboratory might lead to some method of controlling chemical reactions with radiation of wavelengths shorter than radio waves but longer than visible light.

We first met at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington, near the end of April 1949. He greeted me pleasantly, and we had some opportunity to get acquainted. I had not known much about his work until then, but I was greatly impressed by the fact that he was giving two invited papers at that meeting. It is considered an honor to be asked to give such a paper, for which half an hour is allotted rather than the ten minutes allowed for a contributed paper; to give two invited papers was nearly unprecedented. One of these was on molecular microwave spectra of some molecules. The other was on the use of these narrow microwave absorption lines as frequency standards, that is, for controlling an atomic clock.

Because he had arranged to spend the summer at Brookhaven National Laboratory, it was not possible for me to start at Columbia until September. Meanwhile, he suggested that I should read Linus Pauling's book, The Nature of the Chemical Bond. This was particularly appropriate because at that time a considerable part of his effort, along with his colleague Benjamin Dailey in Columbia's Chemistry Department, was directed toward understanding the relationship between chemical binding and the hyperfine structures which they could observe in microwave spectra.

At that time, his research group consisted of about ten graduate students and Jan Loubser from South Africa, my predecessor as Carbide and Carbon Chemicals postdoctoral fellow. Soon after, we were joined by Eilif Amble, another postdoctoral fellow from Norway. Their experiments occupied about half of the tenth floor of the Pupin Physics Laboratory, and a large room on the eleventh floor. The other half of the tenth floor was given over to the molecular and atomic beam experiments supervised by Professors I.I. Rabi and Polycarp Kusch.

I was given a laboratory room adjacent to the atomic beams group. Charles Townes suggested that I try to observe the microwave spectrum of the free radical molecule OH. This molecule, like most of those with odd numbers of electrons, is not stable by itself, but easily forms compounds with many other atoms and molecules. However, OH molecules are known to be produced in electrical discharges through such gases as water vapor. Even then he realized that OH would be one of the most abundant molecules in astronomical objects such as galaxies and planetary atmospheres. Indeed, the OH spectrum was one of the first observed by microwave telescopes and has led to the rich field of astronomical spectroscopy at centimeter and millimeter wavelengths.

In our early search, the OH spectrum proved to be elusive. Although, with the collaboration of T. Michael Sanders and Wilton A. Hardy, we constructed a spectrometer that used Zeeman modulation so as to be sensitive only to free radicals, for a long time we found nothing. The problem was that we had no direct way of being sure that our gas discharge was producing free radicals. It would have been good to ensure that by using the ultraviolet absorption spectrum of OH, which by then was thoroughly explored by Henry Crosswhite, but there was no appropriate optical equipment available. Therefore, we had to rely on a chemical test, the production of hydrogen peroxide on a cold trap, but this was found to be misleading. Eventually, a different set of conditions for the discharge was found to be effective in producing OH so that its spectrum was observed and measured. With this information, radio astronomers later could know at what frequencies to look and could use shifts of the line frequencies to infer the motion of the astronomical object relative to the earth. In this, as in so many other instances, Charles Townes' vision proved to be penetrating and far-sighted.

Indeed, he was full of ideas for good experiments and inspired a large group of graduate students working on a wide range of projects. They would meet weekly at a seminar where a student would present his own research or some recent publication of interest. Good ideas would often emerge from these discussions. Both at the seminars and in private conversations Townes had a remarkable way of helping a student develop a half-formed idea without taking it away from him. This was an excellent way to help students to learn how to formulate their own ideas and have confidence in them. Many of his students have gone on to brilliant research careers. He was both a master of all the relevant theory and of experimental techniques. Many a student was surprised by how quickly he could find out what was wrong with the apparatus and get it working.

One of his most remarkable attributes was his ability to concentrate, despite interruptions. If anyone called him or came to see him he would give that person his complete attention. As soon as that was finished, he would return to the task that had been interrupted and immediately continue, apparently without having to spend time picking up the thread of his thoughts.

He was also concerned for the personal well-being of his students, and entertained all of them at his home from time to time. Usually this was very much appreciated, but there was at least one surprise. One graduate student had come from a distant country, one from which communication had been cut off, and had left his wife and family behind. Frances and Charles Townes invited this man to their home every year for Thanksgiving dinner. But after a few years he told Charles that he couldn't come any more because his wife didn't like it! Everyone was quite surprised that he had acquired a wife, and they never did find out how it happened.

Frances Townes was a very gracious hostess, also interested in the people in his research group. I came to know their family of four lovely daughters. It was said around Columbia that physicists had only daughters, not sons, and that was true for the faculty members I knew. Although Charles Townes worked long and hard, he always made time for his family. He was in his office or laboratory six days of the week, but never on Sundays. The family attended the Riverside Church, and both Charles and Frances were active in church affairs. He has always been, and remains, an eloquent spokesman for the compatibility of science and religion.

It was Frances Townes who made sure that I became acquainted with Charles' younger sister, Aurelia, when she came to New York in 1950 to continue her musical studies. It didn't take me long after to realize what a wonderful person Aurelia was, and we were married in May 1951. Although everything I have done in physics since then has been enormously aided and influenced by what I learned from Charles Townes, I have to say that meeting Aurelia was the best thing that happened to me in New York. After our marriage I became acquainted with his parents, two brothers, and three sisters. Theirs was a truly remarkable family of extremely intelligent and talented people.

I.I. Rabi was the Columbia Physics Department chairman and had attracted an outstanding group of professors, researchers, and students to Columbia. There were no less than eleven future Nobel laureates around during the time I was at Columbia--H. Yukawa, W. Lamb, P. Kusch, C. Townes, J. Rainwater, A. Bohr, V. Fitch, L. Lederman, M. Schwartz, J. Steinberger, and myself. Even in this galaxy Charles Townes was a bright star, beginning to receive the many honors from the United States and abroad.

Although he has been universally honored and respected, I know of a couple of times that he "didn't get no respect." Once when he was a young man he bought an accordion and began learning to play it. Then he took it with him on a train trip through Mexico. His fellow passengers urged him to play, and he responded with some lively Mexican songs. Soon most of the people in the car were singing along and having a grand time. Then one of the Mexicans said, "Play us an American song." Not having practiced very many songs he responded with "Old Black Joe." This was not the peppy music they were expecting and was met with momentary silence. Then one of the Mexicans said, "You play another one like that, we kill you." You can't please everyone, but Charles does have considerable musical talent, and he and Aurelia would sometimes sing duets.

Another occasion, when I was at lunch in the Columbia Faculty Club with Charles and a few of his colleagues, the discussion turned to two articles which had just appeared in Fortune magazine. The science editor, Francis Bello, had picked ten outstanding scientists under age forty in universities, and ten in industry, and had tried to draw conclusions about what they had in common. One thing he noted was that they were all oldest sons or only sons. Charles remarked that it didn't seem right to him, for he had an older brother and two older sisters. Thereupon Rabi squelched him by saying, "You didn't make the list, did you?" There can't have been many lists since then of the outstanding scientists of the twentieth century that failed to include Charles Townes.

I left Columbia in September 1951 to begin physics research at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. A few months before that Charles Townes had conceived the idea of the maser, and I had witnessed the disclosure in his notebook. My research at Bell Labs was on superconductivity, and I did not participate at all in the exciting developments on masers during the next few years. However, I continued to go to Columbia on most Saturdays to work with Charles on our book, Microwave Spectroscopy, which was published in 1955. Then in 1957 he was consulting at Bell Labs, and I was beginning to think seriously about the possibility of extending the maser principle from the microwave region to shorter wavelengths, such as the infrared region of the spectrum. It turned out that he was also thinking about this problem, and so we decided to look at the problem together. Without interrupting our other duties, over the next few months we worked on this in odd moments. Again, he was enormously helpful in clarifying my ideas as well as contributing his own. By the spring of 1958 we were convinced that it would be possible to build an optical maser, which is now known as a laser. We submitted our work to the Physical Review and it was published in December 1958.

Charles and I have had no further opportunities for collaboration, but we have kept in close touch even though our research fields have diverged. Despite heavy commitments that would overwhelm anyone else, he is generous with his time when needed. In 1985 it became apparent that the group home where our non-verbal autistic son lives was on the verge of bankruptcy and would close unless someone else took charge of it. Aurelia and I helped to organize a non-profit corporation, California Vocations, for that purpose and asked Charles to be a director. He has been serving on the board of directors ever since then, and his counsel has been invaluable. He is a wise man, who listens to what everyone says before coming to a conclusion. Quite often he will recognize some aspect of the discussion that others have overlooked.

In all, I feel very fortunate to have known Charles Townes. He is a marvelous scientist and an inspiration to everyone.

Interview History--Charles Hard Townes

Charles Hard Townes, Nobel Laureate in physics, inventor of the maser and the laser, is one of America's most distinguished contributors to scientific knowledge. In 1991, twenty-two years after Charles Townes became University Professor at University of California, Berkeley, joining a pantheon of, at that time, nine Nobel prize winners, the Regional Oral History Office of The Bancroft Library proposed to Professor Townes that he be a memoirist. The timing was good: Professor Townes was ready to tell the story of his work in science and to put it in autobiographical context. We reached an agreement to do the oral history, with underwriting from the Sloan Foundation.

Professor Townes simultaneously was starting, with Charles Petit, San Francisco Chronicle newspaper science editor, to write a detailed account for the annals of science of the invention of the maser and the laser, from the background of the idea through the patent controversies. His thought was that taping the oral history and creating the manuscript with Petit could take place simultaneously. Thus Charles Petit was present for a number of the interviews, and the reader can supplement the scientific side of the oral history with the Petit-authored book.

For Professor Townes, doing the oral history and writing the book constituted a kind of major desk-straightening, an activity which he does at periodic intervals to clear psychic space for his next work. And as the title of the oral history neatly demonstrates, Charles Hard Townes' life divides into several large periods, associated with different loci of activity. But as the table of contents and Townes' prefatory biographical pages make clear, there was a lot going on within those large periods, and continuity between them. There are themes in Townes' life and career that started early and appear in retrospect to continue to today, such as a deep respect for science and the revelations of physics; a willingness to serve government based on a strongly felt code of ethics; an ability to see when work is finished and to move on; and an instinct for where his fine curiosity can next be put to work.

As an example of the latter, with physicist Arthur L. Schawlow, who shares with Townes the patent on improvements on the maser that are basic to the laser, Charles Townes co-authored Microwave Spectroscopy [McGraw Hill, 1955], and in an article written a decade later he says about writing that book that he was "relieved that the advances of the special field of research were recorded for all to share... `I decided I must make a complete break, to stop and consider what were the most interesting and important things which I might do.'"1 That habit of examining what one is doing, and searching out the important things, is referred to several times in the oral history.

Another aspect of the character of Charles Townes is his religious grounding. He says, "...faith is essential to science too... [The scientist] must be personally committed to the belief that there is order in the universe and that the human mind--in fact his own mind--has a good chance of understanding this order." He writes that "we must use our best wisdom and instincts, the evidence of history and wisdom of the ages, the experience and relations of our friends, saints, and heroes in order to get as close as possible to truth and meaning. Furthermore, we must be willing to live and act on our conclusions."2 Clearly science and religion are compatible, and he gives time to both--it has been his lifelong practice not to do physics on Sundays.

The range of influences on young Charles Townes' character and on his professional life is broad in many ways, including geographically. He is from South Carolina, and his undergraduate degree is from Furman University in his hometown of Greenville. He received a master's degree in physics from Duke University, and then crossed the country to Caltech for his doctorate, granted in 1939. Through the war years, until 1947, he was a member of the technical staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, and his work there introduced him to the major laboratories in the northeastern part of the country, as well as to his future colleagues at Columbia University.

At Columbia he was professor of physics, chairman of the department of physics, and director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory. In 1954 he and his graduate students at Columbia built the first working maser--the idea for which had come to him in 1951 when he was in Washington, D.C., for a meeting. On leave from Columbia from 1959-1961, he served in Washington as vice-president and director of research of IDA, the Institute for Defense Analyses, and on the President's Science Advisory Committee, and chaired the Science and Technology Advisory Committee for the Apollo Lunar Landing. In 1961 he returned to academia as provost and professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And in 1964 he went to Stockholm to receive the Nobel prize in physics.

In the late sixties, facing a number of choices of where to go and what to do next, Charles Townes chose Berkeley, a campus he had known well from his Caltech days. Berkeley offered him the opportunity to begin work that he had wished to pursue in infrared and microwave astronomy. Once on campus in 1967 he became a vital participant in the life of the University, working with students and taking on extensive committee work, including advisory committees for the Space Science Laboratory, the University's various observatories, and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He also maintained, and still does, his connections with Washington, as a consultant on international security, arms control issues, and energy technology. Here at home he is a trustee of Berkeley's Pacific School of Religion and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences.

Given all that, how did Charles Townes find time to tape-record thirty-five hours of oral history? Well, first of all, it is something he decided to do, so he made the time. He starts his working day early. Our appointments would be at 9:00 in his office in Birge Hall, but he and his secretary would already have dealt with the day's mail and the strategy on priorities on putting through calls. He would have given thought to the hour-and-a-half or two hours of interviewing ahead of him, but it was my impression that like most well-organized persons he only allowed the oral history interviewing to occupy a compartment of his mind that opened for that time, and then closed. The exception might be in the second interview when he opened our meeting by going deeper into the background of his South Carolina roots--he had been thinking about that between sessions.

The interviews began in November 1991 and ended in July 1992. We met on a more or less weekly schedule, although sometimes work at Mount Wilson or trips further afield, such as to New Zealand, would interfere with a planned date. As a result of that discontinuity, and the overall length of the interviews, the manuscript at several points includes repeated material, material that had been discussed at an earlier chronologically correct time, but that needed to be reviewed in other contexts.

Charles Petit's involvement in the interviewing began with a session which took place at the Townes' home in Berkeley on the morning of December 31, 1991. It was a bonus to have Mr. Petit a part of the process: his focus on some scientific details drew fuller and different responses from Professor Townes. Though neither Charles Petit nor I are physicists, his science background took him further. My background was informed by reading, both from the bibliography (listed in the volume) of articles that Charles Townes gave to me at the outset, and from several books of history of science, footnoted in the text, in particular The Physicists, the History of a Scientific Community in Modern America, by Daniel J. Kevles of Caltech ( Harvard University Press, 1987.)

Charles Townes was an excellent interviewee. Like the good professor that he is, his inclination is to speak clearly, answer directly, set things in a framework that instructs. To the extent that he thought about the oral history between sessions, he might expand on an aspect of the interview of the week before that he perhaps felt was unclear. He knew that we were working chronologically, and at the end of each session we spoke about what would be covered in the next session. In August 1992 I gave him the entire 1205-page transcript, with my editing, to review and edit, which he did very carefully.

As we received Professor Townes' edited transcript back in the Regional Oral History Office the final typing began, but subsequent to that, and up through the final review of the transcript of his speech to the Jason Group [appended], there was considerable correspondence on spelling and completing the full names of persons referred to in the text. I am grateful to Professor Townes for patiently participating in that painstaking editorial process.

Charles Townes' wife, Frances Brown Townes, is valued in her Berkeley and Oakland and church community by friends and groups and colleagues who appreciate and share her interests without necessarily knowing that she is "Charlie's wife." A two-hour interview, conducted with Frances Townes one day in March when her husband was called away because the skies were clear at Mount Wilson, is included with the Charles Townes memoir. In her interview she discusses the alliances she has forged which give her a separate identity, and an expertise of which she is proud. I first knew her as a docent in the Natural History Division of the Oakland Museum. She devoted herself to that museum, as well as to the University Art Museum, and now most remarkably to the chaplaincy for the homeless of Berkeley's First Congregational Church. She is a thoughtful woman, frank and open about her need to be seen for what she does--herself. From the day she arrived in Berkeley to meet the challenges of this University community in the late 1960s, she was and still is open to learning.

Arthur Schawlow, asked to write an introduction to Charles Townes for the oral history, wrote a thoughtful reminiscence that has both the civilized tone of a man of science, collegial and mutually respectful, and at the same time the warmth of a deep personal friendship. James R. K. Kantor gave his usual scrupulous attention to proofreading this oral history. As former University Archivist, and critical reader, he is of inestimable value to the Regional Oral History Office.

The researcher may wish to consult the on-line catalogue of the University of California at Berkeley for other oral history memoirs in the History of Science oral history series, in particular the history of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Interviews in the history of the Department of Physics at Berkeley include a recent interview with Carl Helmholz, and an interview in 1960 with Raymond Thayer Birge. The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to augment through tape-recorded memoirs the Library's materials on the history of California and the West. The office is under the direction of Willa K. Baum, and is an administrative division of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

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1. I Family Background

3

Family History in South Carolina

Townes

Well, let's see. I could tell a long story.

Riess

Tell a pretty long story.

Townes

All right. Actually, all my ancestors came over before the revolution in various ways. I'm descended from Governor William Bradford, for example, who came over on the Mayflower. That's on my mother's side. And a long series of congregational ministers from Massachusetts and Connecticut, plus also a Baptist minister, William Screven, who was run out of Maine and formed the first Baptist church in the South in the seventeenth century. My mother [Ellen Sumter Hard Townes] comes from Charleston, and during the early part of the nineteenth century there was a certain amount of exchange and intermarriage back and forth between Charleston and New England. Of course, as the Civil War came on there was relatively less of that.

Riess

Was that because of shipping?

Townes

Well, Charleston was a very important port and so was Boston. And people had relatives back and forth, and travelled back and forth, and intermarried. Just general interaction in the colonies between two important cities. But as the Civil War approached and tension grew, that died out, there was so much enmity. So my ancestors have all been in the South since 1835 or 1840 or something like that, but prior to that I have New England ancestry, too.

My father's [Henry Keith Townes] ancestry, the Townes family, came to Virginia sometime prior to 1710. There were three brothers and a sister who all came at once, were farmers, builders, and landowners. The sister married a Baron de Graffenreid, who started the city of New Bern in North Carolina. He was a Swiss baron. It was a kind of an idealistic society formed in New Bern, North Carolina, and named for Bern, Switzerland.

My family was generally fairly conscious of history.

Riess

Idealistic in what way?

Townes

I think it was a somewhat socialistic--it was a religious colony and somewhat socialistic at the same time, a Protestant colony. I think the ideal was that it was kind of a new Switzerland, with very democratic ideals. The city of New Bern is still there in North Carolina. It's not a very large city. The community, I think, got along all right and then just kind of faded into the background like many other special communities started in early America.

My Townes ancestor who came to South Carolina came down from Virginia, immediately after the Revolution, when the Piedmont region was just opening up--. The Indians were just being driven out and this was new land, so one of my ancestors on the Townes' side came down into the western part of South Carolina, the Piedmont region. He was a big landowner there.

My grandfather Townes was born in 1809. That's fairly long generations as you can see. He was born in South Carolina. It was his father who had come, I guess. The old house that his father had built was still there when I was a boy. And they were friends with John C. Calhoun. One of my father's half brothers married John C. Calhoun's niece. They were interested in political affairs. My grandfather was a state senator. He was a lawyer and a state senator and a newspaper editor. My grandfather, who as I said was born in 1809, I had stories about sitting on his uncle's knee and hearing his uncle tell about being in Washington's army and seeing Cornwallis give up his sword. [Yorktown, October 19, 1781]

As I say, my family was somewhat conscious of history. They didn't overplay it particularly, but there was a background there that was present. The Civil War was very strongly in their memory, of course. The South had lost, and any group that loses a war is likely to remember it more vividly than the ones who win, I think. There were many stories about the Civil War period.

Riess

It sounds like the oral tradition was alive and well in your family, that there was story-telling.

Townes

Yes, that's true, a lot of story-telling, but a good many records, too. They had letters and records, and there was always a maiden aunt around somewhere who had time and could keep these things and keep them up. I think that is part of the reason history was preserved.

After the Civil War, my grandfather essentially lost everything. He had had lots of land. I remember there was one ten-thousand acre tract of land that he had to sell for ten cents an acre because he had no money. He had debts associated with the war he had to pay and so he lost out completely. My father, then, was born on a small farm. His father was newspaper editor and a prominent citizen, but everybody was poor at that time in the South.

Riess

By his father, you mean the same grandfather you were just talking about?

Townes

This is the grandfather that was born in 1809 I am talking about, my grandfather Townes. So my father was born on a small farm. They all had to work hard. Whereas his elder brother had had enough money to study in Germany before the war. My grandfather married three times. He had three different wives. Wives got worn out and died in those days. He had a family of about four children by each wife. So my father was the last of twelve children.

Riess

Not that they wouldn't have had servants. It was just the childbearing.

Townes

Oh sure. It must have been largely childbearing problems. They would have enough servants.

Riess

So your father was the last.

Townes

He was the last of twelve. Now, speaking of servants, my father's mother came from that part of South Carolina, also. She was from a large family with lots of servants. She was a Keith. They, too, had come down from Virginia at an early time. Cornelius Keith and his wife were the first white settlers in Cherokee territory which is now Pickens County, S.C. He is said to have arrived in 1743 and to have traded a pony to the Indians for the land. His grandson, my grandmother's father, had five hundred slaves and had them all in a kind of a little town. It's still called the Keith Quarter, where the slaves were. It's a small little crossroads now. So they had plenty of slaves. At the same time, they worked very hard, and I know lots of stories about the kinds of things they went through.

Riess

Saving the crops kind of stories, or what--?

Townes

Just various kinds of crises and things that had to be done, and they did them. Women were very strong, too. I think people don't really understand southern women. Southern women of that period were very gracious, but they were tough people.

Riess

The "steel magnolia."

Townes

Yes. [laughter] Well, they had to be. They managed estates. The husbands were away some of the time, particularly during the Civil War. One of the stories, for example, was about my grandmother. It was during the Civil War. Most of the family was away. There were plenty of slaves around. One of her sons suddenly turned up from the war, and he had to have a coat. He was in the middle of winter and he didn't have enough warm clothes. In the course of twenty-four hours she organized the slaves, got the sheep sheared, spun the wool, and made a coat for him. Sent him off again.

Riess

Hot wool!

Townes

Yes, that's the kind of thing that these women had to do.

I started to comment about my father's education. His older half brother had gone to Germany, and I believe gotten a Ph.D. But my father, coming along after the Civil War, couldn't afford to go to college. So he worked. He taught, and made enough money to go to college, and studied law at night, by himself, and passed the bar exam. He was a lawyer, too, just as his father had been a lawyer. He went to a small local college, which was perfectly good, the same college I went to also, Furman University. It was in my home town, so it was inexpensive to go to. My mother went to the Greenville Women's College. She graduated from the Greenville Women's College there.

Let's see, let me get to my mother's line. She came from Charleston. Her father was an insurance adjuster. He was a very active man, and a person very interested in the state. He took a lot of public responsibility. He was more of a business man, and he moved to Alabama at one point when Alabama was opening up. He was mayor of a town called Selma in Alabama. I know stories about that, too. Selma was a rough mining town, lots of drinking. He, himself would parole the streets at night to see that things were okay. But that was not very much of a financial success, so he came back to Charleston.

His wife, my grandmother on my mother's side, was from a somewhat more intellectually-oriented family. One of her ancestors, who had been editor of the Charleston newspaper, had been an abolitionist. He was an abolitionist in the early part of the eighteenth century, when he could get away with that as editor of the most popular newspaper in Charleston. But as the tension between North and South built up, why, he lost his newspaper because people were so against anybody who would be an abolitionist. This was beginning to be a very hot issue between the North and South, you see.

Family attitudes--. My father's family tended to be rather intellectual, interested in affairs of state. They were lawyers and planters and so on. They sort of looked down on anybody who was in business. Business was not the thing to do. It was something Yankees did, and it was kind of coarse. It was the wrong kind of orientation to just be trying to make money. So my family always had a joke that my father's family looked down on my mother because she was from a business oriented family. Her father was a businessman, in insurance. And her family looked down upon my father because my father was from the back woods in the upper part of South Carolina. Charleston was the center of civilization, you see.

Riess

Why are they intellectuals? Does this mean that they had big libraries, and that they thought about things?

Townes

Yes. Well, as I say, my father's brother got a Ph.D. in Germany. That was not so common. He was president of the college there. His father was a lawyer, and a writer, and an editor, and was very interested in intellectual things. My father knew Shakespeare backwards and forward, as well as the Bible, of course, and a lot of other things. Of course the law, and medicine, and ministry were respectable trades. Also, running a plantation--all those were respectable things that an honorable person could properly do. But running a store, running a business, that's much more questionable. Now partly I'm exaggerating. It was a joke in my family. [laughs] They didn't take it all that seriously. But there was a little bit of flavor there in the general family attitudes.

My grandfather was an insurance adjuster and a fairly successful one. He came out after the San Francisco fire, and was head of the adjusters. The different companies got together and elected a head adjuster, and he was head of the adjusters in the San Francisco fire. So he was out here with my grandmother for a while. My mother didn't come out at that time. She was in college by then. He brought out some of her younger sisters. They lived in Berkeley.

Education and Expectations, Furman University, Greenville, SC

Riess

Was Furman University considered to be good enough for the family?

Townes

Oh yes. We never felt it was a poor place to be. There were universities which were much more prominent, of course. But they were too expensive. It was the university right in our hometown. It was a very good university. I think it was an excellent education, actually, for a variety of reasons--I can come to that. But my older brother went to Furman. I went to Furman. My sisters went to a local South Carolina college. Then my younger sister and my younger brother began to break away. They wanted to go somewhere else, and so they went to Swarthmore. But then both my older sisters took a Master's degree, one at Cornell, one at Columbia University. My younger sister went into music and studied in New York for a while. My younger brother became a lawyer. My older brother was an entomologist and he took his Ph.D. at Cornell. So there was a tradition. And then, once you got into graduate school you could usually get some kind of help, a fellowship or something, that would help you pay for the costs.

Riess

And Furman was free?

Townes

No, Furman was not free, but it was low cost. Furthermore, I could live at home, you see. I could live at home and we got rid of the costs of dormitories and food and whatnot. I just commuted back and forth to school. I went to Furman, and so did my older brother. My sisters went off to a college which was away from home, because they felt that the Greenville Women's College wasn't quite good enough. It wasn't as good a place as Furman at that time, and they wanted to go off. So they did. They went, I don't know, seventy-five miles away.

Riess

Furman was all-male?

Townes

At that time, Furman was all-male. It has now become co-educational. When I was there it was beginning to be somewhat co-educational and uniting with Greenville Women's College. They eventually united completely.

Poverty in the South was common. It was everybody's role. We never felt that we were poor at all. In fact my father, in one sense, was really quite well off. He had land. He had tenants that lived on the land. He liked to manage farms, though his primary occupation was the law. However, we had to be quite abstemious. We lived very simply. I always felt it was quite adequate. I lived in the country on a twenty-acre farm, and it was a great place. We could roam around and play in the stream and the woods. I picked cotton some, and I sold apples. We had an apple orchard, and I sold apples to pick up a little money. As I say, on one hand some people may think, "Well that sounds as if it's almost poverty." And in a certain sense, one might regard it that way. But by comparison with other neighbors and other people, we were doing fine. I never felt any particular want. I felt we could always get what we needed. My father had much the same attitude. Be abstemious, but we can always do what we need to do.

He had a pretty hard time during the Depression. My father helped people make loans. As a lawyer who wrote mortgages for people. In most cases they were people he knew very well, friends, even family and so on. He would lend money on pieces of property around. As the Depression came along and people couldn't pay for the mortgages, he felt that it was his obligation to see that nobody lost any money on things which he had helped them do. So he always took over the property and paid for it himself, as a kind of duty. The result was that he had a lot of land but not much money left. But after World War II came along and land prices went up, prosperity came along. Then he had a fair amount of wealth at that point. It was a very different situation. By then, I had left home. Nevertheless, it was helpful. He helped out some of the younger children a bit more then he helped out some of the older ones, which didn't need it really.

Riess

You had a large family, two boys, three girls?

Townes

It was three and three. Six children. Three boys and three girls.

Riess

Were there always high expectations for you?

Townes

Yes, there were high expectations. There were in my father's family and my mother's family. My mother was taught at home. Her mother felt that the schools just weren't good enough and she taught her at home. My mother, as a little girl, she remembers how she wished she could go to school with all the other children. But no, she was taught at home because the quality was supposed to be so much better. My father, on the other hand, went to public schools, then worked for a little while, then went to Furman, and then studied law himself.

They had high expectations of us. They saw that we did our homework, and rehearsed it with us at times. I remember very well my father teaching me Latin, which I thought was kind of fun. He made it fun. And he always had lots of encyclopedias so that whenever there was any question that nobody could answer, we would look it up.

Riess

There wasn't one of you who was, in some sense, expected to stay on and manage the land and continue in the tradition?

Townes

No, I think my family wanted us to be there and together, but nevertheless there were no strings attached. My younger brother took over my father's legal business, but I think that was just because he decided that would be a sensible thing for him to do. There was no pressure. But he decided to go into law, and he worked in my father's office, and took over his business.

The home place then, nobody lived in. After my father died, my mother moved to a smaller house, and we sold the home place to a local hospital. It was a fairly nice big tract of land. So we were not inherently tied to old traditions. There was plenty of tradition there, but for some reason my parents were able to loosen the strings and let us go. Now, I was rather young for going to college, and this is another reason for staying in my hometown for college. Let's see--.

Riess

I see that you skipped a grade and graduated a little bit earlier than usual.

Townes

Yes, I skipped a grade. I really was getting a little bored with grade school. I told my parents that I thought it was kind of boring and they said, "Well, how would you like to skip a grade. Maybe it would be more interesting to get up a little higher and get on into high school." So I skipped the last grade of grade school, which was seventh grade. I went on into high school, and it was more interesting then. Now, high schools in the South only went through the eleventh grade rather than the twelfth, which was common in most of the rest of the country. That was part of the result of poverty, a question of how many grades they could afford. So I went through eleventh grade and finished high school, so by then I was ready to go to college. I guess I was fifteen. I was to be sixteen that summer. So basically, when I went to college I was sixteen. I wasn't particularly eager to leave home. I was happy with my parents, and they were eager for me to stay there. I didn't see any point in going off to college, especially. Furman seemed fine. My brother had been there. So I went on to Furman.

Riess

Was your brother a great pal?

Townes

Yes. He and I did a great many things together. I'll come back to that again in a minute when I discuss my attitudes towards natural history a bit.

Furman had some very good professors and very good courses. And because it was a small place, and I was interested, I just took whatever courses were supposed to be really good and the professors who were supposed to be really good. I just took everything that there was there. It turns out my mother had taken every course that existed at the Greenville Women's College. [laughs] She just took every course. I didn't take every course at Furman, but I took every course that was supposed to be good. There were some of them that really weren't so good and I didn't bother.

But that meant I took quite a variety of things. I took Latin and Greek, and I majored in modern languages actually. The reason that happened is I knew I wanted to do science, but I was finishing the requirements for a degree in three years and my mother said, "Really you're too young to go off to graduate school at this point. You ought to stay another year." Well, that sounded reasonable to me. I stayed another year. I took two degrees, just to sort of have something to do. I took a degree in modern languages and a degree in physics, both. I knew I wanted to do physics.

Riess

So the fourth year was more science?

Townes

The fourth year was the finishing up of the physics degree. But I planned it that way by the time I was half through college. I was two years through, and could have finished up the next year, and I talked to my parents about it. My mother was very much against my leaving home that early. It sounded perfectly reasonable to me, so I stayed on and planned it that way. I like modern languages, but I never intended to really be a professional at that. I wanted to do science, and so I just did both of them because they were interesting and as kind of a scheme to keep me busy, I guess.

Interest in the Outdoors, and Natural Science

Riess

When did you decide that science was the subject that gripped you?

Townes

Well, let me come back now to a question which should lead up to that perhaps. My father was quite interested in the outdoors, natural history. He supervised farms. Every Sunday afternoon he would take us out to one of the farms, and we would roam around and play in the streams, and catch turtles, and so on. He knew a moderate amount about plants, trees, animals, and encouraged us. As youngsters, my older brother and I did a great deal of that. We liked it very much, and we made collections of all kinds of things. We both made butterfly collections, and then we'd collect some other kinds of insects. I made shell collections and leaf collections. We liked to identify things and try to understand them.

Riess

Those encyclopedias, then, came in handy.

Townes

Encyclopedias were part of it. We got what books we could on those things. I continued to do that fairly late in life, on through Furman University. I was curator of the museum at Furman University, which had previously been kind of shut down and stuck away. They had a number of interesting specimens there, actually, from the past. I reactivated the museum. They had some Smithsonian Institution publications there, on fauna and flora, just kind of stuck away. The Smithsonian sent them around to colleges as a part of some government public service to have these things. Big thick things nobody paid much attention to, but I found them very useful. We would use those things in identifying insects, and plants, and so on. Fish--I also collected fish at one point.

Riess

That's fairly amazing that you reactivated the museum. It implies a quite different university in which a student can come along and make such a thing happen.

Townes

Yes.

Riess

Did you do it with a professor?

Townes

Well, there was a professor of biology who I guess in some sense was officially responsible. He was friendly, but he wasn't all that interested. The professor of biology also ran summer schools, and he was primarily interested in ecology. That was very early so far as much popular or even scientific interest in ecology is concerned.

My family went to a Baptist church which was rather fundamentalist. They were not themselves, but that was the nature of most churches at that time and place. I remember the minister would in his sermon make absolute statements about natural phenomena based on the Bible which I knew could not be true.

 

Townes

I would come home and talk to my father about it, and he would say, "Well, you have to understand that the minister is not terribly well educated--sure he's been to college--but he's not terribly well educated. He's just limited in that respect. That's all right. He's a nice man. He's a Christian. He's trying to do a good job, so don't worry about what he says on that score." And that's the way we lived with it. Now, let's see--.

Riess

We were talking about your collections and working on that.

Townes

Now, I was talking about biology. The outdoors has always been a great inspiration to me, in the sense that I regard science as the study of the universe. And it is. All kinds of things. Trying to understand the universe around us. That's what some of my boyhood was like. It took a little different form, I just becoming personally familiar with the things around me. I enjoyed those things which were natural.

While, I collected stamps, and coins, too, nevertheless I wasn't so struck with those things which were man-made, just because it seemed to me that they were more temporary. Temporary kind of things are okay, but the world of nature and the universe around us is a much more permanent and absolute kind of thing to learn about, which will always be here and which had some kind of an order in it, and would be worth understanding.

Riess

Is it possible to close a door between us and the secretary?

Townes

Sure.

[tape interruption]

Family Values, Attitudes

Riess

When you say that you realized that nature was permanent and important and worth learning about, this is your own concept, or are you reflecting an important professor, or some thought that was--? Is there somewhere along the way here an influential mentor?

Townes

I've frequently been asked that. "Who was it who started me?" and so on. I would have to say in general it would be hard to pick out an individual person. Most of that kind of approach, I think, came from my family basically, my father and mother's own attitudes. My father was more knowledgeable about natural history than my mother was, but she appreciated it. She was very tolerant. She let us keep caterpillars and snakes in the house, and so on. We always kept cats and dogs outdoors. These slimy things that most people wouldn't want, she would let us keep in our bedrooms and they would crawl around the rest of the house sometime. She was very tolerant about it and, I think, appreciative of the interest in them.

Riess

I think you can get very far with tolerance. So many people are ready to make judgments, but it sounds like your family was not.

Townes

Well, they made judgments about things, but on an ethical and moral basis. Otherwise, they were quite tolerant intellectually and very open in giving us personal choices, and so on. They would express opinions but not press them.

Now, on the other hand, they were very religiously oriented and very firm about it, so that we were accustomed to being somewhat different from most of our neighbors and much of the town. We were just expected to be different. You do what you think is right. The social pressures weren't there, for me at least.

In all kinds of ways I was completely accustomed to being different. I expected to be different. It wasn't that I pressed that on anybody. I got teased a good bit at school. I wore short pants--. I think I was the last of two boys in my high school class still wearing short pants. What was wrong with that? I didn't see anything wrong with it. But everybody else was growing up, supposedly, and wearing long pants. They would jump on me. I was a little younger anyhow. But I never felt badly about it. I said, "Well, that's the way it is. What's wrong with short pants?"

Riess

That's interesting. So you didn't bring the short pants problem home. You decided to face the world in short pants rather than saying, "I want long pants."

Townes

No. I never made any demands for long pants. My mother bought me the pants I should be wearing. That was okay. [laughter]

Riess

I will pursue this. I know it's an obvious one for me to jump on. Do you think you felt different through high school, or before that? This feeling of differentness, you were comfortable with for a long time?

Townes

Yes. I don't remember when I didn't feel that there was some difference, that we had different standards from the rest of the neighborhood.

Riess

And different meant better, clearly.

Townes

Yes, in our view, of course, better. But that was just the way it was, and that's the way it should be. You should try to be better than other people if you think they are not doing the right thing. On the other hand, we were never belligerent about it. We just did it.

Riess

It's really interesting, isn't it though? Do you think back about that? About the kind of amazing ego that's involved in being a minority, a different minority?

Townes

Well, I think there is a great deal of advantage in being a minority. I think the Jewish people have a real advantage in a certain kind of way from being a minority, being a little different. It sets them aside. They have to look at things independently, for themselves. My family, even though they were sort of some of the aristocracy of that region, highly thought of as a family group, nevertheless they were not social. They were just not interested in being in society. That wasn't the point. They lived the way they felt was the right way to live. We didn't feel like we had to please somebody around us.

Another part of that picture was that around our farm some of our closest neighbors were a large black community which used to be called "Negrotown."

Riess

Niggertown?

Townes

Negrotown. Never nigger. My family always was very careful about calling them Negroes and sort of not running them down. There was a very large Negrotown there, a black community, on one side of our farm. On the other side was a very large cotton mill area. Now, the cotton mill people had been brought in there by the newly built cotton mills. They were poor white farmers who had failed, basically. Farming was very tough in those days in the South. Cotton was not making any money. Farming in South Carolina is not--particularly in the Piedmont region--not very prosperous anyhow. So a lot of these little farmers who were failing, and had been living in little cottages in the country, and couldn't make a go of it they got jobs in cotton mills. They were, if anything, less moral in our view than the blacks, than the Negroes.

The Negroes were a consolidated community. They were mostly servants. It wasn't that they were perfect, but there was more sort of gross immorality among what would be called the poor whites in the mill town. These people didn't own their own houses. The mills built houses for them, and they came and worked in the cotton mills. It was a long, tough job working in the cotton mills. I palled around with some of those people. They would come play with us. I played with them, both the blacks and the whites. We had some black tenants as well as some white tenants. I played with their children. We were good friends as we grew up. But it was, of course, quite clear that we were different from them. We were good friends, and we had common things, we played marbles together, and we played baseball together, and we climbed trees together, but in terms of intellectual lives, ethical attitudes, and so on--. That was different.

Then there was the rest of the town. On another side, there was a neighborhood that was ordinary, middle class people, and then all kinds of others in the town. It was not a large town. At that time, it had a population of about 25,000. A metropolitan population would be more like 50 or 60,000. When I went to school, it was a white school. Schools were segregated then. When I went to school, then, I saw more people of let's say from families with the same kinds of privileges, at least, which we had. Of very well educated parents, and so on. Even in those cases, too, we just felt a little differently. Again, my families attitude towards business--. They were not against business. They thought business was needed and necessary, but it wasn't really the best thing to do. That wasn't a good thing to dedicate your life to, necessarily.

So it may well have been partly these neighborhood groups that immediately set me off, set me aside as a young child even. Of course we were different. But we liked these people, and played with them, and everything was okay. But when some of their not-so-good sides showed up, we would just back off. That's all.

Riess

And you had a large enough family that you constituted a group.

Townes

Oh yes. That's right. We were a very close family. We also had some cousins, a family of five cousins, about the same ages, my mother's sister's, and a lot of other relatives in the area. My grandmother lived close by. We went over to visit her and she was good to us.

But to show you some of the attitudes which were a little extreme--and we felt our grandmother was being kind of extreme--. There was a local grocery store which we always shopped at which started selling beer. My grandmother refused to buy anything from them thereafter. Absolutely! She wasn't going to trade with a grocery store that was selling beer. It was terribly inconvenient for her, very inconvenient. There was nothing else nearby. But that was the way she looked at it. That was fairly late in my life. I was in college by then. But we kind of joked about it, that Grandmother would take such a hard-headed attitude. Nevertheless, that was her sense of what one should do, and so she did it. She didn't make any big point about it. She just told them that she would not trade with them if they were selling beer.

Riess

Was it very helpful to have your older brother as a kind of trailblazer?

Townes

Yes, it was very helpful. I learned a lot from my older brother. I think a younger child has many advantages. I guess it's known that the oldest child and the youngest child are usually somehow more favored. They get more attention, or something. But I learned a great deal from my older brother, and from my older sisters too, to some extent. Although I didn't play with them as much, I played with them some.

Siblings

Riess

What is the sibling order?

Townes

Well, the oldest child was my sister Mary, who became a librarian. She married a Naval officer she met in the Philippines somewhat late in life, and became Mrs. Mary Nyland. The next child was my sister Ellen, who studied Latin and taught Latin. She married a local Greenvillian, and became Mrs. Ellen Taylor. Then the next one was my brother Henry, who became an entomologist and married a botanist from New England whom he met at Cornell. Then myself. Then I had a younger sister, eight years younger than I--it was a big gap--Aurelia. She married Arthur Schawlow, who is the co-inventor of the laser. He was doing a post-doc with me at Columbia University. That's how they met. Then my youngest brother, George, who came still later, is a lawyer. He married a young woman from Washington, D.C. whom he met at Swarthmore.

Riess

So in a way, you are very comfortably situated in the middle of the family, where children aren't ordinarily much noticed.

Townes

That's true in one way. On the other hand, you see, there was an eight-year gap before my younger sister came along. So I was the youngest for eight years there. Then my younger sister I looked after a good deal, and I'm very fond of her, but I still had the stimulation of my older brother and my two sisters. I primarily did things with my older brother. He was two-and-a-half years older than I, and had been through a lot of these things. He went through high school, for example, and told me the science courses other than mathematics were no good and I shouldn't bother with them. So I avoided them except for one required general science course, which indeed wasn't very good.

Riess

You didn't have a choice in high school, did you?

Townes

Yes, I had some choice.

Riess

I thought high school was a place without choice, ordinarily.

Townes

No, I had some choice there. I took mathematics. Mathematics was good. But they had some chemistry and physics, and they had a general science course. The general science course was required. I had to take that. My brother used to joke about the teacher. I got in the class, and it was the same thing. She said some stupid things, and I just had a good time teasing her by asking her questions that she would clearly answer wrong. I would just kind of smile to myself. [laughter] I learned a certain amount that way. But I didn't take any physics or chemistry because it wasn't very good. My brother didn't take them either, but we talked about it. We talked with other students, and my brother advised me not to take it. I took shop, construction and woodwork largely, then more or less standard courses. But there was a moderate amount of variation. I took Latin, more than I was required to. I took four years of Latin. You were required to take two then. I took some French, which wasn't required.

Riess

Do you think you had a kind of curious mind about the primary causes of things?

Townes

Yes, I was curious. I liked new experiences. I liked to try things. I liked to figure out things. In some certain sense, science was sort of a puzzle, lots of puzzles that you could work out, figure out, and then everything fit together. It helped me to understand what the universe was like, and there were always lots of questions. I was interested in rocks. I was interested in the stars. I was interested in plants, and fish, and insects, and everything that was around. So was my brother, except he was rather more specialized on insects. He was very good at it. I frequently joke that one primary reason I didn't go into biology was because my brother was so much better at it than I was. I had to do something else. I don't think that was the entire reason, but it may have been somewhere in the back of my mind. But he was very good at it. We were competitive, as well as doing a lot of things together.

My brother Henry was so very, very good he attracted the notice of a professor down in Georgia who collected the same kinds of insects he did. He came up and visited us, and we collected together. He became published and found some new species and so on. In a sense, he got trapped in that field because he was so good at it. [laughs] Which was not a very rewarding field over his life time. He enjoyed it, but it was not a rewarding field, just because it was not one of the forefront popular fields of biology, mainly the taxonomic study of insects. But he became very famous in that field. He had an enormous collection. He was a very important scientist in that field, and in a way, I think contributed quite a lot because there weren't so many people doing it.

He went up to Cornell, which was a good place in entomology at that time, to get his Ph.D. degree. But we did a lot together, and he was very stimulating to me. He was good in mathematics and physics, too. I listened to what he said.

2. II Introduction to Physics

A Feeling for How Things Work, Boyhood Interests

Riess

Did physics have the reputation that it now has of being the place where the answers would be found? Or if it did, when were you aware of it?

Townes

No, I wouldn't say physics had that reputation at that time. Physics was relatively unknown then. This was back in the early thirties. When I went into physics, while, my close friends from more intellectual families knew what physics was, many of my friends asked, "Physics? Now what is that, physics?" And I would explain, "Well, it's a little bit like chemistry. It's a little bit like electrical engineering." Well, yes, they knew those subjects. "Well, it's sort of somewhere in between those." So it was not a very visible field. It was clearly a basic field. They could easily understand that.

Riess

When you knew the physics class in high school was not going to be worth your while, did you realize that this was the place where you really wanted to be?

Townes

No, I didn't know that I wanted to do physics. I was still uncertain just what I was going to do, except I thought I'd do some kind of science. But I didn't know what. I was doing things on the outside, though. My brother and I both had a number of hobbies, but I, particularly. I did some electronics on the side. I had an uncle who was chairman of the electrical engineering department at a nearby university, Clemson University. He gave us a very early radio. He got some very early radios, and when he got a new model he gave us the old model. We tinkered with it. That was very interesting. I also tried to make a small crystal radio when I was in high school.

My father also owned a building which he rented to a watchmaker. He would stop by and get the clocks and watches which were about to be discarded, and brought them home to us so we could take them apart and fix them, put them back together again, and so on. I did a lot of that. I did a lot of construction. I raised animals. I made houses for them, and built things of various types. I had a lot of outside hobbies which were basically learning about how to do things.

Riess

That's interesting. Isn't it? Maybe that's unusual in the background of physicists, that sort of manual dexterity. But that served you well?

Townes

Yes, it certainly did. Now, you said it's an unusual background for physicists.

Riess

Great generalization.

Townes

I think that is true today, but it was not true in the period of my bringing up. In fact, the United States became prominent in experimental physics first, rather than theoretical physics. Theoretical physics was not well understood among American physicists, even prominent ones. It was not a big subject. You find that most successful scientists of those decades--let's say the most successful scientists of the scientists of the thirties, for example--were mostly people from small towns, not big towns. There was a thought at that time that the reason they were so good in experimental physics, and the reason they came from small towns, is because the experience of fixing farm machinery, fixing automobiles, fixing things, allowed them to get right into experimental physics and have a very good feel for it. I think there is some truth in that.

Today, we are strong in theoretical physics as well as experimental physics. The majority of our successful scientists come from big cities. A lot of it is the Jewish population, but just generally big cities. They go to good schools. They get stimulation, I guess. So their background is different. But I came along in the small town syndrome. When boys were doing things, and fixings things, and so on, and I did a great deal of that. Perhaps more than normal. It was very helpful. But there are quite a number of physicists with that kind of background. Maybe you know E. O. Lawrence came from North Dakota. If you look at the background of physicists of his period, you would find a large fraction of them came from small towns. It's very striking. I've seen statistics of that type.

Riess

But then a lot of people with this background went into electronic entrepreneurship, maybe. Like the Packards and the Hewletts, people like that. What's the difference there?

Townes

That is true about Dave Packard, at least. You know, I'm not sure just what Bill Hewlett's background was. But they were very early in terms of electronics entrepreneurs. They were an exceptional case. Electronics entrepreneurs have come along again in a more recent generation. We didn't have so many of those. On the other hand, we did have a lot of businesses set up, manufacturing businesses, mechanical manufacturing, and so on. Some electronic manufacturing, but electronics, per se, really didn't come along until the thirties, and they were very early in the game. A lot of the new companies are still much more recent.

Riess

That's interesting to think about the possibilities that the radio presented to a bright kid with an inquiring mind.

Townes

Yes, well, we had a lot of fun with it. We had a lot of fun. We fixed up various things.

My relationship with my brother was very important to me. I learned a great deal from him. Of course, it was always a challenge, because we competed. He was older than I, so I had to work hard, and he was frequently better than I. And I did know that I wanted to do science. I took a fair amount of biology, and I liked biology. I didn't like chemistry so much. Chemistry seemed to me a rather fuzzy subject. The way it was taught was a little fuzzy. The laws were not very precise. It was hard to reproduce anything in the laboratory, or at least in the laboratory we had. [laughter] I never liked chemistry until I got along much further and started doing research in chemistry. Then I appreciated it much more.

First Physics Course

Townes

I took my first physics course as a sophomore in college. That was a very important event. It was taught by Professor Hyden Cox, who had only a Master's degree in physics. But he was a very hard-headed, thoughtful person. That was fairly typical of the professors at Furman University. They were high quality people, but not known in research. They did very little research. A number of them had Ph.D.'s, but some of them just had Master's degrees. But they were higher quality people than you would find with only a Master's degree teaching science nowadays. Professor Cox was one of those.

Generally, my family knew them all quite well. My mathematics professor, Professor Marshall Earle, was a distant cousin of my family's. They knew all these professors and people quite well. They were fine people, and generally good teachers. So that you could get challenging teaching, even though they were not very well up on research. Now, Professor Cox was particularly rigorous in the logic of the laws of physics and deriving things from them. We worked lots of problems. And the thing that appealed to me is the really quite firm and general logic of the subject, which covered so many different cases and many different things. With relatively few laws, you could build a whole structure which you knew had to be right. At least closely right.

Riess

Do you think there was something you were searching for? It met a need?

 

Riess

So, anyway, the logic was appealing.

Townes

Yes, the logic was very appealing. The fact that what one needed to do was think things through carefully, and then you could really prove something. You could prove new things. You could cover so many different cases. That appealed to me. I liked mathematics, also. I enjoyed that, but I felt physics had the same kind of logic and applied more directly to the real world around us. I enjoyed the real world around us, and would try to understand it and what made it work. Mathematics, then, I regarded more as a tool than a subject that was just appealing in itself. That's why I decided to go into physics. I decided to go into physics about the middle of the year my sophomore year, I guess. I had had enough of it by then to say, "Well, this really is what I would like to do."

Riess

Were there several professors, or just this one that you're thinking of?

Townes

When I first started taking it, there was one professor. By the time I left Furman, there was another person who had come in. I think Professor Cox had retired, maybe, or was not too well, or something. I'm trying to remember. Another professor had come in who was by no means the same quality. He was a nice person, and he tried. He not only didn't have a great deal of training, but he wasn't the same quality of mind.

Now, to major in physics, I then had to take four courses. You had to have four courses to get a major. But they weren't really giving four courses, at that time, in physics. But they were graduating people in physics; about one a year, or something like that, would major in physics, or one every other year. To major in physics, then, I was simply, the last year, given a book. They said, "Go study this and work all the problems. Show us the problems that you've worked. That's the course." So that's what I did. Even the third year, it was supposed to be taught, but there were only two students in the class. This other professor was teaching it, and he wasn't terribly good. So it was mostly studying a book.

Quantum Mechanics, Nuclear Physics, Relativity

Riess

Was there any kind of a library so you could read what was going on in physics? Things were going on, weren't they?

Townes

As a matter of fact, yes, there was. There were a couple of libraries that were fairly important to me. One was the Furman library. I remember reading about electromagnetic theory in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, an article written by [James Clerk] Maxwell, I believe. He was a great physicist, the creator of the field, in a sense. So, it was very well written and very informative. I used the Encyclopedia Brittanica. There was another thing I found interesting at that period, the Bell System technical journals. The Bell System published a kind of technical journal once a month, or once every few months, something like that. I remember the covers were blue, and it was sent around to libraries. It was in the public library, a free gift from the Bell System.

They had technical articles in there. The thing that attracted me was some articles by a man named Carl Darrow. Carl Darrow was a physicist who was never very creative in doing physics himself. What he liked to do was try to understand the field and then write it up in explanatory fashion for everybody else. He was working at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. He had some kind of slight paralysis so that he couldn't do experimental work very well. Bell Laboratories tried to look for something for him to do. [laughs] He kind of found it himself, and this was it. He became sort of a scholar of physics. He would read about physics and then write it up. He expressed himself well. So he wrote articles, at that time, on nuclear physics, which was a new subject. He had articles on other things, too. Nuclear physics was quite new in the thirties. So I read his articles on nuclear physics with great interest, as well as some of his other articles. I later came to know Carl Darrow very well. He was a good friend of mine.

Riess

It is interesting that you came across that in the public library, rather than your Furman library.

Townes

Furman did not receive it. It was not a public institution, or for some reason the Bell system didn't send it to them.

Riess

And there were not physics journals coming into Furman, or anything like that?

Townes

No, essentially no physics journal in either place.

Riess

Was nuclear physics popularized in the way that Freudian psychology was popular at the time? Or Marxist politics?

Townes

I don't think people outside of physics paid much attention to it.

Riess

Well, Einstein.

Townes

Einstein was a popularly known figure, yes. Now, he was not a nuclear physicist though. He was a popular well-known figure, and people knew about him. He was in the newspaper. People made jokes about him.

Riess

People made jokes about him? Mad scientist jokes?

Townes

Yes, something like that. Brilliant, but a little odd. And he was a bit odd. He created that kind of image.

Riess

You mean fostered it?

Townes

Well, I don't know whether he fostered it. That was his nature.

Riess

In other words, when you were in college, if you were talking about being physicist, what it would conjure up would be Einstein for people at that point.

Townes

Possibly. Yes, possibly. I'm not sure it would conjure up anything very much. Most people were not very familiar with it. Einstein was certainly known, yet I never talked about being like Einstein. I'm not sure anybody ever talked to me about that. I think he was just kind of way out there somewhere, not really sort of the center of what you were doing if you were a physicist.

Nuclear physics was not popularly known. It was becoming very important in the physics community, but it was not popularly known. It was not in any of the books that I studied. It was too new. Quantum mechanics was, and I had some fascinating time with quantum mechanics. I remember my first serious study of quantum mechanics. And relativity, relativity was fascinating to me.

I remember very well, one summer I took a physics book with me up to my grandmother's mountain cottage. I remember very vividly, sitting on a rock up above the stream there, studying this book, studying relativity for the first time, special relativity. It was just enormously impressive and striking to me, what could be concluded. I remember the whole scene very vividly. I remember, also, that I thought I had found that Einstein had made a mistake. I was really excited about that. I went back to the house for lunch. I came back after lunch. I worked on it some more, and I found that no, it was my mistake. [laughter] Which was okay, I found it out.

Quantum mechanics was fascinating, too. I remember somewhere in that period reading about Jansky's discovery of radio waves coming from outer space. It was not understood at that time. That fascinated me, partly because it wasn't understood. Here's something to think to about, what's going on. During World War II, I did think about it, and made the first really correct theory of it. It was partly because I had always been fascinated by it from that initial moment. It was a field which current astronomers didn't pay very much attention to for some time. So that enabled me to work on it after I had gotten more experience and had a little bit of time.

So there were very stimulating and interesting things that I was seeing, but to the public it was not a very visible field. It was not something people would think about or talk about. That's so different from after World War II. After World War II, physicists were sought after socially. You know, you go to a dinner, why, everybody jumps on you because you're a physicist and asks lots of questions. It was an exciting business. Whereas previously, physics was some kind of dull, esoteric subject which nobody was interested in, after World War II, suddenly it was the center of the stage. And just because you were a physicist, you were socially very popular.

Now, of course, it has swung back the other way perhaps. You are socially objectionable because of the atomic bomb or something. I don't think that's a very strong effect now, but it was for a while. Maybe that rounds out this particular thought.

Riess

Yes. Well, let me pursue one thing. Reading that book on the rock, when you read a physics book, do you work out every problem for yourself? Is that part of reading it?

Townes

Oh, yes.

Riess

So you take a piece of paper with you and you check everything?

Townes

Yes, you think through everything. You think through all the equations. Are they right? Just what do they mean? And so on. What can one say from this? And how do you get these conclusions?

Riess

Even if you were absolutely the most brilliant physicist in the whole world, you would have to put pen to paper to really make sure?

Townes

Oh, yes. Probably. Some of it you can do in your head. But generally, you would work out things on paper unless they happened to be all written out in the book quite thoroughly.

Riess

That's interesting. It's a quite different way of reading. Quite a different definition.

Townes

Well, reading in physics tends to be fairly slow for that reason. If it was something like special relativity that you are seeing for the first time, you need to think that over and over and over. What does it mean? Is it really right? It is very striking and startling.

Riess

And none of your professors at Furman were ready to do that. At that point you were off on your own.

Townes

No, they kind of knew about it, but I don't think they really understood it.

Philosophy

Riess

My other question is, did you take any philosophy? Did you have a background in philosophy at that point? Or were you beginning to acquire one that was helpful in thinking about physics?

Townes

Well, I took whatever philosophy was available at Furman. There was a very fine philosopher and theologian, who taught there my senior year. A man named Petite, who had been head of a seminary and was a kind of a theologian, historian, philosopher type. Very broad-minded, intelligent, and again from a family that we knew very well, prominent in South Carolina. He taught an excellent course. I also tried another course or two in sociological philosophy and things of this type, but those courses weren't all that good. I think his was the only strictly philosophical course at Furman.

Riess

My assumption is that a good philosophy course could broaden the questions that you might apply to physics.

Townes

To physics? I don't think so.

Riess

Maybe that's a more current way of looking at philosophy.

Townes

That's not usually the way philosophy has been taught. It depends on just what you look at. If you talk about the Greek philosophers, for example, they would not generate many specific questions in physics. Greek philosophy wouldn't. Nowadays, there are a lot of philosophers who are primarily interested in logic, logic in a very mathematical way. That's closer to mathematics than physics really. I think the general ideal of wondering about the universe, what it's all about, and how it started, that's something that is philosophy. It's very prominent in popular minds and people who are thoughtful. It's involved in religious thought, of course, and involved in philosophical thought. But it's not something that philosophers in my experience really talk very much about. What can they say? They don't know any answers. I think the typical philosophy courses are not especially oriented in the direction of raising questions that would be important to physicists. You might think of very deep philosophical questions that are there, but philosophers are more interested in generally talking about details of logic, or something like that these days.

Riess

Yes. I think on the tables of bookstores now there are more cross-over books.

Townes

Yes, there are. There are increasing numbers. I agree.

Riess

For the popular audience.

Townes

Yes. Many of those are written by physicists, physicists or scientists.

Riess

Like, what's his name? Paul Davies.

Townes

Yes, and he writes well. Many scientists have gone into this because it's a very challenging thing. Approaching it from science is easier, in a sense, than approaching it from philosophy. But there are some philosophers who do. Now, there's a young man, philosopher--well, he's not young anymore, young to me--Herbert Dreyfus, here, who talks about learning, for example, and intelligence. And can machines be intelligent? That's one of his research writing efforts. Well, that's a big question. But I don't know of any philosophers here who are asking the big questions of how did the universe start, or what's it all about. They can talk about it socially, maybe, but it's not a research subject for them. It's also not a teaching subject, so far as I can see.

Riess

When a hostess wants a physicist at her dinner table, does she want to learn how the world began?

Townes

Well, that's not her whole interest. She may just want to badger him about the dangers of nuclear energy. [laughter]

Riess

Ah hah! Well, let that be our ending for today.

Townes

Okay.

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3. III Further Family Background

Pre-Revolutionary War Family History

Townes

I had a few more comments I thought might be pertinent to the kinds of things we were discussing, also. First, you asked about my general family background. I think one good way of putting it is as follows: that my ancestors all came over before the Revolution. Of course, the South has been there a long time and people are fairly mixed, so that I am really descended from essentially all the Protestant groups that came to the United States before the Revolution. [laughing] That means I had some French blood, some French Huguenot, some German, and English, and Scottish, and Irish--well, Scotch-Irish, not Catholic-Irish--Scotch-Irish, Welsh and so on. That's my general family background. A good deal of English and Scottish, but it's mixed. For example, in Charleston, not many people know that the King of England tried to set up a kind of aristocracy in Charleston. He set up three landgraves. Landgrave corresponds to the German "landgraf."

Riess

How is it spelled, the "grave" part?

Townes

G-r-a-v-e. Instead of g-r-a-f, which was, of course, the German word. It's just the anglicization of a German count. So he set up these three landgraves who were supposed to sort of run the place in some kind of sense. And gave them big areas of land. There was a man named Smith who was a landgrave, and I am descended from him. The landgraves didn't last a long time, because they just didn't work out in America. They just became democratized, so it was not a long period when they were important.

Riess

But the idea was to report back to the king?

Townes

Well, he felt that an aristocracy was the right way to run a country, you see. That was the King's view, that you had to have an aristocracy, and give them certain privileges. Not that they were running the place tightly, but they would have certain authorities. And they would report back to the King, of course.

Then, I think about the mid-eighteenth century, some Germans came over who were relatively poor. They were a rather poor group of Germans who came over. They were workmen, and I am descended from one of those. He was a drayman. Then he became a quartermaster for the revolutionary army. There was quite a settlement of Germans there, so I have Lutheran ministers and Lutherans in my background, too, in my mother's family.

Riess

Dissident?

Townes

What's that?

Riess

Dissident? Were they leaving for religious reasons?

Townes

You know, I don't know just why they left, but I'm sure it was some kind of dissidence, all right. They were a Protestant group and relatively poor. Then the French Huguenots came over, of course, you know for what reasons. The two LeConte brothers who came from South Carolina in the nineteenth century and were important in the early history of the University of California were almost surely of this Huguenot group. And the French Huguenots were considered a kind of aristocracy in Charleston. The Germans weren't. In fact, I remember my mother said some people used to kid her for having German ancestry. That was terrible. [laughter] That was just the local Charleston scene. The Huguenots were considered very elevated and desirable. They were, again, some of the aristocracy, and again are in my ancestry.

Now, my father's family was initially English, but intermarried with Scots and came down from Virginia into the mountainous region. People in the mountains were generally less educated, but good solid farmers. Some of them had a moderate amount of land, and there was intermarriage, too. I think there were a lot of Scotch-Irish that settled in the mountainous area. Then, the Charleston wing and the Virginia Appalachian wing married, my mother and father, so we're a real mixture, as I say, of essentially everything that came over early.

Riess

And each of these groups hung on to their identities probably as long as they could?

Townes

Well, I don't know. They certainly had a pretty clear identity. They knew about their ancestry and were interested in it. There were certain kinds of culture and attitudes that were attached to them, too.

Riess

How about some of the language?

Townes

Not the language, no. I think the language differences in a given locality disappeared quite early.

Riess

What accounts for the southern accent?

Townes

What accounts for the southern accent?

Riess

Yes, right.

Townes

In general, you mean?

Riess

Yes.

Townes

That's very much influenced by the blacks. Of course, many white children were brought up by black "mammies," and so what they heard when they were young was talk by the blacks. So a good deal of it is strongly influenced by black accents.

Riess

People refer to your "soft South Carolinian drawl."

Townes

Well, mine is rather modified by now, because I've lived away from the South a good deal, and I guess my accent just changes with time more than some. As a matter of fact, my own family had a moderate southern accent, not a strong one. But I remember when I went to Caltech, I was away from home for three years. The third Christmas I telephoned back to my family as kind of a special thing on Christmas. It was expensive for a student to do that, but I splurged. I telephoned back to them and suddenly found my family had an accent. When I left, they sounded perfectly normal to me. [laughs] My own accent had changed in that period. Nevertheless, I still have some of it left. Some words, also.

I think another thing which has affected the southern accent is old Scottish and old English. It hung on there a good deal more than it did in the North. You'll find, for example, in Virginia the o-u-t would be pronounced "out." You find that also around Buffalo and Ontario, that same kind of expression. So old English, particularly in the mountains--. There are many old English expressions in the mountains there.

Riess

That's what I've heard about, relict groups still speaking the language of Elizabethan England some areas of North Carolina.

Townes

There are certain words and phraseology that is still there. My grandmother, for example, always talked about "pal-m" for "palm" and "sal-m" for "psalm." I learned somewhat later that that is Scottish. I listened to a Scottish minister once, and that was the way he pronounced "psalms," also. It's an old Scottish pronunciation.

Southern Blacks

Townes

In addition, on the coast of South Carolina, there were the so called "Gullahs." The Gullah blacks lived in a good deal of isolation along the islands and the coast of South Carolina. They had what was really a lot of African words in their language. They were not understandable to most people. The Charlestonians and other local people there could kind of understand them, but that was a very distinctive carry-over from African civilization. Most of the blacks, however, in the South dropped their direct African language very quickly and just picked up English, but they had an accent. That is certainly part of what has affected the southern accent.

Riess

What was your family's attitude about the blacks?

Townes

Well, Southerners among my friends at least, and my family, were very kind to the blacks. But it was a patronizing kind of attitude towards the blacks. It wasn't obviously patronizing, but clearly it was. The blacks needed help, and they were a little bit like children. You tried to look after them and help them out, and so on. But they were treated in quite a dignified way.

We played with them as children. We played with their children. Our tenant farmers, and we had a black cleaning woman and a sort of person who did many of the household chores. We had black nurses that would look after the children. And we played with their children. It was all very friendly, but clearly it was separate in the sense that public facilities were all separate. Schools were separate. By the time I got up into my 'teens, then I saw less and less of them. They went their way, and I went my way. But, nevertheless, we were good friends.

Riess

You weren't bonded, particularly, to a nanny?

Townes

No, I wasn't. Because, of course, in that period the slave period was over. These people were hired. We knew certain ones who'd been with my family over a decade or so. But there were no special ones who I felt were a substitute mother, or anything like that. On the other hand, for my grandmother's family, and my father's family going back a generation or so, that was different. There they had special household slaves that were really almost members of the family. They would have photographs of them and keep up with them, and so on. And vice versa.

The blacks were quite loyal, in general, to the whites. That's very different from the stories that you get about persecution and beatings and that sort of thing. The latter occurred, certainly, some of the time, but those were not exactly respectable people. By that time, also, there was no longer any slave relationship. Whites couldn't beat up blacks. They would fight. If there was some fight--maybe name calling or something like that--they could get in a fight and hurt each other, but they couldn't just pick on a black and beat him up. That couldn't be done at all.

A Southern World-view

Riess

I'm wondering why you wanted to include this longer definition of what your family was comprised of. Is it something that has given you a great sense of responsibility as an American, or some sense of yourself?

Townes

It came up as I was just thinking over the interview. Had I made the situation clear? That's why it came up.

Riess

Yes, and I appreciate that.

Townes

On the other hand, if you ask, "Is it significant?" Yes, it is significant to me. It has always given me a certain sense of solidity, the feeling that there was a past and one had to try to live up to it.

Another thing I think that most people not of the South don't realize is the enormous effect that the Civil War had, not just on economics, but also on the psychology of the people there. I think that's one of the things which made the better class people in the South feel, well, they lost the war, they were poor economically, the Yankees were making lots of money, and they were coming down and exploiting the South, and so on, and clearly, that was not their sense of values. They had to have a different sense of values. Certainly religion was one of them.

There was also a general ethical sense that money is not everything, you stand for something different from that. Money is not the important thing. Money is okay, but that is not what you really look for. So they created, in a way, a kind of a sense of personal values which replaced the financial drive and success that was so rife, in their view, in much of the North. I think that colored the southern views at the time of what really was valuable, and helped them in a certain kind of sense.

Riess

It must have colored your view sufficiently, so that when you left the South and went west to school--which we'll get to later--why, you had to revise some of your attitudes about the rest of the world.

Townes

Well, no, I wouldn't say so much, at least not consciously. No. I have never sensed any need for any great break with my parents, or my background.

Riess

Now, I would say that the other need would be for tolerance for the values of the rest of the world.

Townes

Well, I'm not sure I'm tolerant in that sense. [laughter] I still think the world has a pretty distorted sense of values in many ways. I think our whole society does. Now, am I tolerant of it? Well, I'm tolerant of it in the sense that, sure, some of my friends are that way. I don't jump on them. [laughter] You have to live with it. But if you ask is that the right thing, no. My parents were very tolerant in a certain sense. It was the ideals they held up for themselves. It wasn't that they looked down on other people, particularly. It was just that these were their ideals.

Thoughts on the Relative Importance of School Grades

Townes

The other thing I had thought I might comment on is you asked me about my being different and my family being different. I might say a little bit more about my schooling. I was always a good student in school but never the best. I was sort of in the upper two or three in the class. I made good marks, but marks weren't all that critical to me. School was only a part of my life. I did a lot of things outside of school with my family. Just hobbies and so on that my brother and I did. I was pretty busy outside of school, so grades were important but they were not critical.

My sisters, on the other hand--and this is somewhat the male-female difference--my oldest sister was valedictorian, and my next sister was only salutatorian of the class, because she became very sick her last year and had to stay home most of the time. My mother taught her. And then my third sister was valedictorian of the high school. My brothers were not, and I was not. I was up fairly high, but we boys were doing other things. While I was interested in schooling and made pretty good grades, I was not a perfectionist so far as school grades were concerned.

When I went to college, it was pretty much the same thing. I ended up salutatorian of my class. The valedictorian, I remember, had a--. Let's see. We both attended a class with a new professor in journalism. I wasn't good in journalism, but I thought, well, it's something I ought to learn. He was a new professor, supposed to be good. About the first week, he pointed out that he just didn't think anybody deserved an A. An A was such a perfect grade, and nobody was going to be perfect, so he probably would not give any A's. This chap then dropped the class, because he didn't want to do anything that wouldn't give him an A. Well, to me it didn't make any difference, so I got a B. That was okay.

Then there was another case I guess that showed a little bit of my haughtiness. The other case was a required class, general education, everybody had to take it. It was sort of the snap course, a bit of a joke at college, but everybody had to take it. It was sort of orientation to college. We had no papers to hand in, and on the final exam, the professor asked us to write down what we thought of the course. Well, I told him what I thought. [laughs] It wasn't very complimentary. I told him I didn't think it was a very serious course. I expected something better in college, and so on. Well, he gave me a C.

But that Freshman year, I had A's in everything else. He found that out, and he ran into my father on the street. Now to me, "Well, that's a cranky professor. That's okay. So I got a C." But he ran into my father on the street, and said he thought maybe he'd done me an injustice. He'd looked over my other grades and was going to raise me to a B. [laughter] I don't know. I guess my father probably thanked him or something, or told him, "Well, fine."

I'm trying to give you my attitude towards schooling at that time.

Riess

And towards grades.

Townes

And towards grades. I was very interested in some of the subjects, but again I just didn't feel that was the right thing to go after. Grades were like money, superficial in a way.

Riess

There is something called the Gentleman's C. Are you defining that for yourself?

Townes

The Gentleman's C. I don't know.

Riess

That's the notion that a gentleman doesn't really work hard at these academic affairs. That he's got more important things to pursue. But I don't think that sounds quite like you.

Townes

No, I worked at them. I worked at schooling. I enjoyed some of it. I worked hard, and I was salutatorian in my class. I just didn't insist that I had to get an A or an A+, or otherwise I was a failure.

Riess

Did you get your A's and A+'s in physics?

Townes

Well, in most subjects, actually. In most subjects I got A's. I got an occasional B or B+, but most subjects I got A's in in college. And in high school, for that matter. I was very close to the top of the class, but that wasn't something that I strove for particularly.

Thoughts on Fighting with Fists, and on Being Different

Townes

I wanted to comment on my family's sort of being different and teaching us to be different. One thing my parents felt was that we shouldn't fight with fists, because people can get hurt seriously if you fight with fists. You shouldn't fight with fists. Well, all the boys were fighting at that time. You know, it was kind of a macho thing. If you didn't agree with somebody you were supposed to fight them and beat them up, or something.

Riess

You mean in school?

Townes

In school, yes. Or in the neighborhood, whatnot. There were always boyhood fights. You would try to hit each other. My parents said, "Look, it's all right to wrestle. If you want to wrestle somebody, wrestle somebody. But don't fight with fists. That's dangerous." So what I would do, and what my brother would do, is if somebody would want to fight, I'd say, "Well, look, I don't fight with fists. If you'd like to wrestle, I'd be glad to wrestle. So let's wrestle." And I became a very good wrestler. That usually worked. "Okay, we'll wrestle." And so we wrestled. We'd throw each other on the ground, and hold each other down, and that sort of thing. That was just a different way of winning. I was told I wasn't supposed to fight with fists, so I didn't. I thought that was reasonable enough.

Riess

You were a big kid, tall. You had an advantage.

Townes

Well, of course I was younger. In school, I was younger than most of the others. But I was plenty vigorous enough and big enough. I could take care of myself under most circumstances.

Riess

Did you and your brother wrestle, also?

Townes

Oh, yes. We wrestled. Oh, sure.

Riess

Did you fight in the spirit of grappling over things, or was that never part of it?

Townes

We never tried to settle a quarrel by fighting, no. By physically fighting, no. We quarreled plenty, but there was no point in physically fighting. He was bigger than I was, bigger and older, anyhow. But we did wrestle some.

The same thing was true about playing football. I wasn't supposed to play football, because in football you were too likely to get hurt. But I played a lot of baseball and tennis, and track and things, but no football. That's the kind of thing where my parents felt, "Well, this is a reasonable thing to do, and that isn't." I never felt they were particularly wrong. I was quite willing to go along with it, and it didn't bother me.

Riess

Well, it was in your own best interest.

Townes

Sure, I recognized that. That was the sensible thing to do.

Riess

In your own family, were you viewed differently, or viewed as being particularly gifted?

Townes

No. All my brothers and sisters were just as smart as I was, certainly. As I say, my sisters were valedictorians, and they did better in school, generally, than I did. They were very sharp. My brother was very sharp.

Riess

So you weren't particularly the fair-haired child?

Townes

No.

Riess

I didn't mean to interrupt you completely, but some of the things you are saying are along the lines of some of my questions.

Townes

I think I had essentially finished saying the few things I thought I might add.

Early Mentors, Father, Professors

Riess

I wanted to ask what person you would say, at that point, you most admired? I'm thinking of mentors, in or out of the family.

Townes

At that point, being what age?

Riess

In high school years or, maybe, since you were at home and still in that milieu, college years.

Townes

I've been asked that kind of question many times. What person inspired me, and so on. I don't think there was a single person. There were people that I liked. I didn't regard anybody as perfect. I learned from a variety of people. As I mentioned, I certainly learned a lot from my brother, Henry. I liked him. On the other hand, did I admire him and overtly try to be like him? I don't remember that overtly. We were competitors, and I tried to do as well as he did. But I didn't idolize him at all. I don't know of anybody that I did.

I remember, let me see, there was a mathematics professor in high school that I liked very much. Then again, I didn't see him as the perfect man at all.

Riess

Did he take you under his wing? Do you have that kind of a recollection of any teachers?

Townes

No, no I don't. There were teachers who liked me, clearly, and I liked them. This man was one of those. I generally liked him, and I liked mathematics, which he was teaching. But he wasn't somebody I felt I would want to copy, particularly. He was a bachelor teaching school, a nice man, but I wouldn't have said that's what I wanted to do, teach high school.

Riess

Were you looking around at people and asking that question? "What do I want to do? Is this a life that I would like to model myself on?"

Townes

I wasn't looking for a model, no. I wasn't looking for a model. I thought somewhat more abstractly, I guess, in terms of careers and what I wanted to do. I did expect that I wanted to go into science and probably to teach, but to teach in a college or university.

In fact, yes, I remember there was somebody who was supposed to be a fortune teller looking at hands. She was a friend of an aunt of mine. My aunt said, "Well, wouldn't you like to have your fortune told?" So she looked at my hands and predicted lots of good things, of course. And she predicted I would be a millionaire. I said, "Well, no. I don't think so. I'm not going to go into business. I'm just going to teach. I'm not going to be a millionaire. That's a nice thought. Maybe I will be someday, but I don't really see it." So I had a general expectation of what I was going to do. But no special model.

Riess

Did you read biographies?

Townes

Not particularly, no.

Riess

Books about inventors who?

Townes

No. I read a lot of natural history stories and books. Ernest Thompson Seton, for example, was a favorite of mine when I was a young boy. He wrote a lot of stories about animals and the outdoors, about Indians, and so on. Again, clearly I wasn't going to copy my life on that, although I enjoyed it and liked the outdoors.

In college, I liked my mathematics professor, I liked my French professor, I liked my Latin and Greek professor. I liked my physics professor. I thought he was very rigorous. But, I never thought of those as ideals, particularly, as something that I wanted to copy. That just didn't cross my mind. Primarily, I was thinking of probably getting a Ph.D., probably teaching, and hopefully maybe I could find a place where I could do some research.

 

Riess

These professors that you had in college probably weren't doing research?

Townes

No, they weren't really doing research. The biologist was doing some things in the sense of collecting some. I think he essentially never wrote any research articles, however. None of the other professors were, at that time. One of them, a chemist, had done some research at Johns Hopkins before he came to Furman, but he wasn't really doing research at that time. There was just not the equipment, nor the surroundings, nor the atmosphere in which that could be done. But I hoped to be lucky enough to get a place where I could do some research. Primarily, I felt sure I was going to teach at a university.

Riess

It sounds like, also, you felt like you were going to discover something, that there were enough questions in your mind that you intended to be able to get some answers.

Townes

Well, I hoped to find something new, yes.

Riess

That's a rather special notion, I think.

Townes

Yes, well, that was a very exciting prospect to me, to be able to find out something new that somebody else had never known. That is a very exciting thing to me, and a contribution. To figure out something that nobody had ever been able to figure out before.

Riess

Of course, the key to all that always is to find what the question is, isn't it?

Townes

Yes, if you know how to ask a good question--. But as you get along further, you find there are lots and lots of questions, and you have to pick out which questions you go after.

I remember catching a fish, which I could not identify. I sent it off to the Smithsonian, and they wrote me back saying, "Well, either this is a hybrid of some kind, or it's a new species." And if I caught some more, please send them to them. They sent it back to me, and I kept it along with my collection of fish. I hoped, then, that maybe I could get back in the same river and catch some more. But I was busy and I never got around to that.

That was an exciting prospect, to discover a new species of fish, you see. It wasn't all that much of a feat on my part. It didn't require a great deal of knowledge, just catching some more fish in that same place, and recognizing it was a bit different. I recognized it was different, and I couldn't identify it, so I sent it off to the Smithsonian. But I wouldn't say that I really discovered anything new until I got into graduate school, and I began to do some things that were new.

Riess

Let me throw in a few questions that you don't really need to expand on unless they really strike your fancy. Would you say that your father was a pal, in a sort of pal-ly sense? Was he someone that you were around a lot, and had a lot of parallel opportunities to chat with?

Townes

Well, he was around a lot and we certainly talked a lot. I wouldn't have regarded him a pal. He was a more elevated figure than that. He was a father. He did a lot of things with us and stimulated us. He took us out to the farm where we would play around, but he would be doing something else while we were playing in a swamp, say. However, he was interested in what we did. He knew most of the trees and many of the animals, and he would talk with us about them. I wouldn't have regarded him as a pal, though. Pals were boys, and he was an older man. But we saw a lot of each other. I lived at home all through college, after all, so I saw a lot of my parents, and we were quite close.

Riess

Do you have recollections of stimulating dinner table conversations where you would talk about what you had learned in class, for instance?

Townes

I'm not sure I would talk about class, particularly. But we would talk about ideas and things, and any world events. My father was quite current on world events. He, also, was a bit in state politics. He was chairman of the Democratic Party in the county, for example. He ran meetings and talks for all the Democratic candidates. My mother was quite interested in things generally.

So I was very interested in going abroad, going to Europe, very interested in travel. My parents talked a lot about other countries and other things, even though they had never had a chance to travel very much themselves. I remember when my father and mother made a trip out west, and I stayed with some cousins. They brought back eucalyptus seeds, for example, to us and various other things. My aunt spent some time in Japan with the YWCA back in the early twenties, and she brought back souvenirs from Japan, various kinds of little typical Japanese trinkets, handmade things that I kept in the collection for a long time.

My family was very interested in the world at large even though, as I say, mostly they didn't travel very much at that time.

Riess

Did they read National Geographic?

Townes

Oh, yes. They had all of that, lots of good books and so on. A generation earlier, they would have travelled somewhat more, when there was more money, before the Civil War. I mentioned that my father's uncle had taken his Ph.D. in Germany. People were doing more travelling then. But after the Civil War they were pretty poor. The country in general was pretty poor, and people stayed put. Of course, travel wasn't as easy as it is today anyhow.

But they were very interested in all kinds of affairs. I always felt closely connected with Europe and the rest of the world. We had some cousins, also, who were missionaries in China. They brought back souvenirs and things, and we would talk with them about China. So I had a fair amount of contact, a lot of discussion of world affairs, generally.

Riess

Did you have a room of your own?

Townes

Yes, I had a room of my own.

Riess

Did you find it hard to get away from the family and have any quiet time to yourself? It sounds kind of like a lot of family. But that wasn't an issue?

Townes

No, it was never an issue with me. I could always go up to my room, go somewhere else. I could go out in the field, in the woods, and do things. No, I never felt particularly put upon by any of my family.

Sundays, and God

Riess

I noticed in one of the articles you gave me that it is your tradition to always take Sundays off to think about things other than physics. Was it also true when you were growing up that Sunday was a particularly special day?

Townes

Oh, yes. Sunday was a sacred day, and you didn't do ordinary things on Sunday. Now we did go out to the farm and the countryside, and that sort of thing to have picnics on Sundays. But we also went to church regularly, church and Sunday school. We didn't do any serious work on Sunday. That day was always set aside. And I've continued to do that. I think, generally, it's been very valuable to me.

Riess

Of course, often it happens that when you are not thinking about what you are thinking about, you get all these serendipitous thoughts.

Townes

Yes, that's true. That's true, except that to even get started on anything like that on Sunday--. I'd say, "No. That's not what I'm going to think about now."

Riess

You might jot something down and save it?

Townes

No.

Riess

You don't think thoughts are that fleeting?

Townes

No. [laughter] If it's fleeting, it's probably not worth while. I suppose there might have been some occasion where I had some ideas and though, "Well, maybe that's an idea. I'll think about it tomorrow." But I never remember writing anything down.

Riess

Is your faith such that you believe anything is possible? Moving of mountains, etc.? And has this given you huge self-confidence?

Townes

Anything is possible? Well, I wouldn't say "anything is possible," but a lot is possible. Surprising things are possible, certainly. Has this given me huge self-confidence? Well, I think my general attitude towards life and my feeling of closeness to God, I think that has given me a certain amount of confidence, yes. It has also meant that I don't feel that I have to please the world around me, necessarily, if I think I'm doing something sensible.

Riess

That's nice. Obviously that's not something that occurs to me, and yet, just as soon as you say that--. It's very liberating. Isn't it?

Townes

Yes, it is. I think that has been a very important aspect of my personal life and, to some extent, the reason I have been able to do original things. Because I don't feel pressed for public approval, personal approval of people around me, nor pressed to be on the bandwagon.

4. IV Further Introduction to Physics

Master's Degree From Duke, 1937

Riess

Okay. Well, Duke University. What did Duke do for you?

Townes

Well, Duke was my first chance to do some research and learn rather more advanced physics. Since there were not many physics courses taught at Furman, when I went to Duke I was still taking courses which some undergraduates were taking. They were fairly low level graduate courses or very high level undergraduate courses that I was taking there.

I went to Duke because that was basically the only decent place I could get some financial help. I got a teaching assistantship there. I applied around to all the big schools and they said, "No." Not that I couldn't have gotten into the schools. There was no problem in those days with getting into graduate schools. But you had to pay the bills, and the problem was to get some kind of assistantship, or fellowship, or something so that you could support yourself. My father had basically supported me through college, and he felt, and I felt, that's it. He's done that much, and from now on, if I'm going to do something, well, that is up to me.

So I applied around to various places to get a fellowship, a scholarship, or a teaching assistantship, and Duke was the only place. The University of North Carolina was another possibility. I had a cousin there who was a professor in the department. [laughs] I remember very well saying to my father, "Well, you know, since I have a cousin there, maybe I have a chance there." He said, "No, no, no. Because he's your cousin, he'll be very careful not to give you any special consideration." And I didn't get anything there.

I got an assistantship at Duke, and Duke was a perfectly good place, so I went there. It was certainly valuable to me. There were people who were in reasonably good contact with first-rate physics. I did my Master's degree there with a Professor Constant, [F.] Woodbridge Constant, who had gotten his Ph.D. at Yale. Then he'd been over in the Cavendish Laboratory in England for a year or two, in a post-doctoral position. He was all full of the latest things. He knew [Paul] Dirac. He met Dirac. He was involved in nuclear physics, physics that was bursting out and had been initiated in Cavendish Laboratories.

Riess

That was actually the place where physics was, wasn't it? [J.J.] Thomson was the other?

Townes

Thomson, yes that's right, Thomson and then [Ernest] Rutherford. Thomson was probably dead by then. In any case, he was very old. Rutherford was very active, and Rutherford had taken over running the Cavendish Laboratory.

That was the big center, and Constant had been there in a post-doctoral position. He was all full of stories of that. He was not, himself, a very successful research person, but I found him an interesting person to work with.

Then there was some spectroscopy there, which was good, and some cosmic ray physics, which was good. So it was a perfectly decent place to learn. I did learn a lot. I did a Master's thesis there.

Riess

What was that on?

Townes

It was on the Van de Graaff machine. They had some small Van de Graaffs there, but they hadn't been able to get them to work adequately. I got them to work well and worked out some of the theory of the performance, and I wrote my thesis on that. I actually finished up in the Spring, although my degree reads--.

Riess

Either "1936" or "1937". It depends on what one reads.

Townes

Let me see, I went there in the Fall of 1935. I actually finished in 1936. My degree reads 1937, but what happened was this Woody Constant told me--it's still amazing to me--he told me, "Well, you know, yes, you've done your thesis. But really, we've never had anybody finish in one year and it just won't look too good to finish in one year. I think you'd better wait until later." And I said, "Well, can't I just finish up now and then leave, and you can give me the degree later?" "Okay, maybe that would work." [laughter]

Riess

I wondered about that.

Townes

So I left in the Spring of 1936, but because he felt it wouldn't look too good for him to have a student who finished too quickly, the degree was actually given probably mid-year--well, maybe January, I'm not sure, but sometime later--and, anyhow, I had gone by then. I had done the work. It didn't make any difference.

Riess

So you didn't view Duke as an opportunity, in the way you had Furman, to just take everything and read?

Townes

Well, I did take a number of things. But I was very busy with physics. I took physics, mathematics, and chemistry. I took a chemistry course from a very excellent teacher.

I also studied some Russian. I was still interested in languages, and there was a professor who taught a special Russian course there. I roomed with a chap who was from Bulgaria, actually. He was American but had lived most of his life in Bulgaria. He was interested in Russian. He was an historian; he became a historian at Princeton [University]. So I was interested in a variety of things. I also sang in the chapel choir, and did various other miscellaneous things, but I was concentrating pretty hard on physics. There was a lot of physics there to be learned, whereas at Furman I had done all the physics that was there, and I had plenty of time for other things.

It was a very fruitful period. There was somebody from MIT who was a graduate student there that I found stimulating. Another chap from Caltech was a graduate student there, and I found him stimulating. It was a very useful period. I felt, perhaps, I would stay on there. They had one full-time fellowship for a student, and I applied, but they gave it to this chap from Caltech. I could have stayed on in an assistantship, but I felt--. I didn't want to particularly stay at Duke. I applied around to a number of other universities again, all the big universities. Cornell was good in physics at that time, Chicago, Princeton. I didn't get anything. When I didn't get the fellowship at Duke, I felt that I just better go to the best place and give up on trying to work my way through lesser schools.

Riess

I'm not quite sure why you weren't getting fellowships. Maybe it's easier now than it was then?

Townes

The reason I wasn't was because I was from a small school.

Riess

Duke wasn't sufficient?

Townes

Duke was still not highly known. Furman was not highly known. My training was not intensive. While I had done very well at Furman, Furman wasn't particularly known. Physics was also not a big field. There were not a lot of fellowships and assistantships, so it was not surprising to me. In terms of competition, you get somebody, let's say from Caltech, who has had very, very good training. You know that the professors there know physics, and they can say whether he is good or not. They recommend him. That's going to give him enormous advantage over somebody from a place where they have never heard of the professors. They may not even have heard of the school, maybe. So what can you tell about that.

Riess

Constant didn't have what it took?

Townes

No, Constant, himself, was not well known. He never really did very much research. He was a nice man, and he was useful to me that year, but I wouldn't have learned much more from him. And he, himself, was not well known.

But I think also, you see, now this was Duke giving a scholarship, but they also may have been nervous about their own reputation. It was much simpler for them, much more understandable for them, to give a fellowship to somebody from Caltech than to this little guy from Furman University. They would feel much surer of themselves. The guy from Caltech was--. I knew him many years afterwards. He was a perfectly good physicist but nothing--. Nobody would ever know him at this point. But he had had good training at Caltech, so he was a much surer bet for them.

I had saved up some money. I went home that summer and worked some more, and put together a total of five-hundred dollars.

[tape interruption]

Working with Van de Graaff Machine

Riess

For your dissertation, you worked on the Van de Graaff machine. What kind of physics were you doing?

Townes

That would have been nuclear physics. See, Van de Graaff machines were the high energy accelerators of the day, and had been invented by a man named [Robert J.] Van de Graaff. It was an electro-static machine to get high energy. High energy at that time--well, I got up to about a half-a-million volts. Of course, now people are talking about thousands of times more than that, many thousands of times. But that was moderately high energy, and to do nuclear physics of the kind that was being done in Cambridge and some other places--. The Carnegie Institute of Washington was a very outstanding place at that time making Van de Graaffs. I visited them to see their machines.

Riess

You mean when you were at Duke?

Townes

Yes, I went up to Washington and saw the machines. A man named Merle Tuve was head of that program at the time at Carnegie. He was a next door neighbor of E. O. Lawrence in North Dakota. Interesting, that two very outstanding people were brought up just around the block from each other, or something like that. He was a very stimulating, very vigorous person, and I knew him for a long time. He's dead now. He was head of the Carnegie Institute effort in nuclear physics at that time and doing very well with it.

Riess

Just indulge me briefly, maybe nobody else needs to know, why a university like Duke would have this machine and no one could get it working. It's not a mechanical matter, I take it.

Townes

Well, the machine, I think, was started by Woodbridge Constant himself, because that's some of what he learned at Cambridge. He came back and somehow got some money and got these machines. But he, himself, was not a particularly good experimentalist, and didn't work at it so hard, and didn't know too much about just what to do. Maybe he was waiting for a student to do the work and get it done. In any case, these sort of half-built machines were sitting there. I decided that would be a sensible kind of a thesis for me, so I finished them up and got them working and wrote a little theoretical analysis of them. There were some relatively simple theoretical problems there which other people hadn't solved that I worked out, plus making the machines work.

It was Duke's effort to get into modern physics. They'd hired Constant, and he'd come there and got some money and started these machines, and they just hadn't gotten going yet. As I said, he wasn't, himself, working on them very intensively. I think he was just not the kind the person to get dirty in the laboratory very much.

Riess

That's something that you brought out the last time, this willingness to try to get something to work. It's not just watching blips across the screen; it's getting it all wired up.

Townes

That's an important of physics always, an important part of many sciences. There are several aspects of it. One is a kind of a feeling for how things work. Another is an interest in figuring out if something isn't working properly, how to make it work. Or what are ways of doing things?

The main use of your machine is to accomplish something. You want to accomplish something, and then you design a machine to try to do it. You have to think of how this can possibly be done. A person's cleverness in thinking of the right way of doing it, rather than some long-winded, wrong ways of doing it, is an important part of the game. Then understanding it well enough to master the whole thing and see that it works--.

Some people just don't have a feel for it and don't like to get their hands dirty in the laboratory, and so on. Some people like to work on paper. A lot of people like very much to work with computers, typing at a keyboard, but know very little about what's inside the computer. Other people really like to dig into the computer and think about the insides, and how it works, and what makes it work. There are a lot of different tastes there, and abilities.

I would say overall, for an experimental physicist, the best thing is to be able to do any of those things. I think a combination of theoretical work and experimental interest is, perhaps, the most powerful combination. The people who do experiments only, and know how to run machines but don't understand the physics, don't know what they are trying to do or don't have good ideas of what to look for, they are somewhat limited. A combination of theoretical understanding and experimental work, too, is, I would say, the strongest combination.

Thought Experiments, and Intuition

Riess

What is meant by a thought experiment, or a thought problem?

Townes

Well, a thought experiment is generally used in the sense that you are trying to figure out the logic of something and what would happen. So you imagine an experiment, and imagine doing this and this and this, and you imagine what would happen. Once you reason out what would happen, then you can use that and say, "Well, no. You see, this is the logic and this is what the laws of physics say." And you don't have to actually do the experiment. You can just talk about the possibility of doing it, and if you're right and convincing, people say, "Yes, that's so."

 

Townes

Once the tape is running, I'll make a few more comments on that.

Riess

It's running.

Townes

Well, some of it is quite esoteric. Some of it can be very simple. Let me just give you an example. You tell somebody, "Don't drop that glass because it will get the floor wet." Well, that's a thought experiment on your part, you see. You think about the glass dropping, and that will break, and that will get the floor wet. So you tell them, "Well, that's the answer to the experiment. So don't drop the glass." That's a very simple kind of example. The extension of that is thinking things through, you see, thinking things through to illustrate what would happen, and hence, this is why you have reached certain conclusions. That's what a thought experiment is.

Riess

And what about intuition is appropriate?

Townes

Well, intuition is important. That's something still a little different. One aspect of a good understanding of physics is just to feel completely at home with all of the processes and the elements of the world around you. To feel they are part of you. They are good friends. You know exactly how they behave. I think of atoms and molecules, and electrons in them, and I have a picture in my mind. I can just see the electrons and how they are moving and what they would do. If somebody asked me, "Now what would happen if a molecule does this and that?" Well, I just think about the molecule, just as you would think about a friend, or what would he do in a case like that.

You have, then, such an intimate knowledge that you don't have to write down equations and figure things out. I would call some of that intuition. You just say, well, you know, this is the way it has to happen, because that is what the molecule is like. We know the personality of a molecule. That's what it's going to do, what it has to do. Generally, if it is an important question, you may want to write down equations and figure it out mathematically just to be absolutely certain and be sure that you haven't missed anything. But the intuition gives you the first picture of what may be important and what will happen. Then you want to work it out in more quantitative detail, just to be sure your intuition is really right. You might have missed something.

But by reasoning with intuition, you can think much faster. You immediately see what is likely to be important and what isn't. You throw away certain avenues of possibilities. "Well, I'm pretty sure that can't be. That wouldn't happen. Something else would happen." You suddenly see something very surprising and interesting that might happen. Then you follow it up with more quantitative reasoning that would convince your peers.

Riess

Do you think that brilliance is measured by the most highly developed intuitive capacity?

Townes

There are so many different aspects of brilliance, I would hesitate to say that. People contribute to physics in a wide variety of ways. Some people are very mathematical, and just good at manipulating equations. They may not even have a lot of intuition about it. They manipulate equations and they can find out new things. Other people are very skillful with apparatus. They don't understand a lot, but they can make things work and do some things that other people would have missed. A lot of it, I think, comes about not just from brilliance but from interest, a real interest, and a pleasure in doing these things and sort of constantly thinking about what is going on.

Intuition is a very important part of it, but I think it is hazardous to try to characterize creativity. It comes about in so many different ways. Sometimes it's just blind; you just stumble onto something. The important thing is, then, having stumbled on it, to recognize that this is something different and maybe of some importance. And to think about it.

There was a famous German physicist, who did some excellent work, who found some of the very first manifestations of quantum mechanics, or rather his assistant did. He took a picture of an effect, and said, since he wanted to use the picture in a talk, "Well, wipe that out. There is some mistake there, that can't be right. I need this as a slide, so take that off the picture." So he presented this talk. About six months later, somebody in the United States discovered essentially the same thing and believed it, and he got a Nobel Prize for it. Now, this chap saw something. He stumbled on it. He just didn't take it seriously enough.

Good Ideas, and Making Discoveries

Townes

The other case is where people do take it seriously and make great discoveries. You can say, "Well, they were brilliant in finding this." No, they just accidentally found it. Whatever genius is there is in realizing that they had found something. In some cases, that may just come from talking with a friend and saying, "That's interesting. We should look into that." It may not even be their own sense of what's important, maybe somebody else suggested it to them. So there are lots of different ways in which science is done. As I say, I would be very hesitant to characterize it in a single straightforward way.

An overall combination of very strong theoretical understanding and interest in experimental work and knowledge, and a very intense interest in the field itself I would say is one of the strongest combinations for possibilities of important discoveries. To say that it is only intelligence--. There are so many intelligent people in the world. It is not simply an I.Q. question. There are lots of high I.Q.s around. It is not just intelligence. There is a lot more involved.

I think a lot of intelligent people, if they'd headed off in the right direction and been interested, could have made important discoveries, too. They just got deflected into doing something else instead. Maybe they are good lawyers, or maybe they are making money on the stock market. But they don't happen to be in what I would look at as a creative kind of field, and so their talents didn't get used quite properly.

Riess

It would be interesting to be having this discussion with someone from the eastern world, because what you were saying there sounds a little bit like a Zen thing of not looking for the answer to your question. If you are looking too hard for the answer to the question, then you overlook what is there.

There are a lot of Indians in physics, aren't there?

Townes

Yes.

Riess

Do they look at the world differently?

Townes

I think when it comes to science, I wouldn't think they do, basically. No, I think it is much the same. I spent some time in Japan, and I spent a little time in India. No, I think science all around the world has a rather similar character--physical sciences do, in any case--because it is of western origin largely. The Chinese originated it long ago, but then they kind of forgot it. They have picked it up from the West, and many of the attitudes and approaches are very similar.

I wouldn't downgrade the concentration in really looking for the answer. I generally work in a very concentrated way and try to look for answers. But at the same time, one has to be open-minded and ready to change your tack at any time if you see that you are on the wrong track, and open-minded about any chance idea that comes along. I don't think that just sitting and musing is going to do to much. If you know what to muse about, in a very concentrated way and a pointed way, why then that can be successful.

Riess

Yes, it is important to disabuse me of that notion. There is the story of you on a park bench--.

Townes

Well, that had a lot of background you see. A lot of background was necessary for that to come about. I know some physicists, as a matter of fact, very brilliant people who have done some good things, and for years they have been sitting around waiting for a good idea to come. That is one approach, but the good ideas basically have not come for several of them that I am thinking of. They kind of have all taught each other the same attitudes. "Well, wait until the really right idea comes." And for years, no right ideas have come, and they have just been sitting there. They teach physics, but they haven't done very much. In fact, one of them said, "You know, there is nothing wrong with me that a good idea wouldn't help." [laughter]

But my approach is to say, "Well, so I don't have any great ideas at the moment, but there are some interesting things to do. I'll get started and start doing them and see what I find out." Ideas, in my view, come much more from participating and doing things, getting going. As you work along and are really trying to solve something, you might not think it's the most important problem or the very best idea, but you are trying to solve something and you are working and learning things. Then the ideas are more likely to come, in my view.

Riess

One more question in this Duke section, and then on to Caltech. Were you working with others? Were you part of a team, or were you on your own when you were working on the Van de Graaff machine?

Townes

Well, in principle there was another student working with me some, this chap from MIT, but he was not very active as I remember. He had worked on it some before, and I kind of took it over. He sort of lost interest and was doing something else. So it was basically just me, with the professor. I would talk with him a good deal, and he was interested but he didn't do any of it himself. It was just myself, and I would read articles about it and think about it and try to make the system work.

Riess

Your learning to work as part of a team is what I'm working up to. Maybe that doesn't happen until Bell Labs.

Townes

No, I didn't really do any teamwork until Bell Labs. There there was a lot of teamwork involved. Physics mostly, in those days, was done in very small groups or individually. Nowadays, some of it is done in very large teams. I think that is not exactly ideal but, on the other hand, if you are dealing with an enormous big machine, sometimes you have to do that.

5. V Caltech

Expectations of California and Caltech

Riess

Okay. You chose Caltech. What had you heard about Caltech? Who was there?

Townes

Well, Caltech at that time was, I think, the best place in physics. Maybe that would be arguable, but I think it's certainly a defensible statement that that was the best place in physics. [Robert Andrews] Millikan was there. [Robert] Oppenheimer was there. Oppenheimer was oscillating, half the time here at Berkeley and half the time down at Caltech. Other people were [Richard Chace] Tolman, Zwicky, [Ira S.] Bowen, Carl Anderson, who got a Nobel Prize just before I got there. Well, he made a big discovery before I got there; I'm not sure just when he got his Nobel Prize, perhaps about the same time.

It was a small place of very, very high quality. Einstein had spent a sizeable amount of time at Caltech. It was just a very outstanding place. Also, I knew a few people who had studied there. Constant, himself, had been there for a while. This chap who was a student at Duke who had come from Caltech. I had read a lot about it and knew about it, and I just felt that that was probably the best place. I was also glad to see a different part of the country. I felt experience in a different part of the country would be valuable and interesting and worthwhile. California was a fairly exotic place at that time.

Riess

Exotic? What was your notion of it?

Townes

Well, you know, it was warm and had palm trees, and no rain all summer. The Pacific Ocean, high mountains--. That was all interesting.

Riess

Hollywood?

Townes

Yes, I guess Hollywood. I wasn't that fascinated by Hollywood. Again, you see, my family background. My family thought some of these movie actors and actresses were just awful. [laughs] We went to movies some, but they looked down on the Hollywood atmosphere.

I could say the same thing about fraternities. There is another aspect, you see. Furman University had fraternities. My parents felt that fraternities always throw these big beer parties, and their attitude towards women is not an awfully good one. That's nothing to have anything to do with. So I was absolutely never tempted to think about a fraternity. Why should I want to join a fraternity and mess around like that? Whereas for many people going to college, that's the first thing; they want to be sure they join the right fraternity, you see. For me, it was just off to the side, nothing that I would bother about at all.

And Hollywood was a bit the same way. It was kind of amusing, but nothing that inspired me very much. But there were other aspects of California which were interesting. Just the difference in the plants and the wildlife was interesting to me. So that, plus the really very outstanding character of the physics going on at Caltech at that time were attractive. I would have gone to Cornell, or Princeton, or MIT, or a variety of places if I had gotten the right position there. But if I was completely free to choose a place, I decided Caltech was probably the right place to go.

I had saved up five-hundred dollars, which of course was more money than it is now, and I felt I could probably last through one year there, and then I would have to get something else. But I decided to go and take a chance. Fortunately, after the first semester there, they gave me a teaching assistantship. So I was perfectly well taken care of. I couldn't have gotten anything just coming in cold from Furman and Duke. Once they got to know me a bit, then they had a little better way of evaluating what I could do.

Riess

What was the first thing you did when you got there? I mean, practically off the train--? How did you get yourself oriented? Do you remember?

Townes

One thing, I didn't go by train. I went by bus. I stopped off various places on the way west that I wanted to see. And I mostly slept in parks and slept in the bus. I stopped in Alabama where I had an aunt, and visited there for a few days. I stopped in Texas and New Mexico and at the Grand Canyon, and various sight-seeing places that I wanted to see.

I arrived in Pasadena--. Well, the first thing I had to do was to find a place to live. I went to Caltech and looked at all the bulletin boards and the advertisements and walked around. I found a house that had a sleeping porch. They put up two students on a sleeping porch for six dollars each a month. That was about the cheapest thing that I could find. It was perfectly adequate. I had all my clothes in a small trunk, and that was my wardrobe on the sleeping porch; I set up the trunk as my wardrobe, and I slept there. Another student, Howland Bailey, who became a good friend of mine and we did lots of things together, he was a physics student, also--he lived there. That house also rented rooms to other people, with more money, who had inside rooms. So that was the first thing to do, to find a place to live.

I don't remember a lot of the details. You know, I just signed up for the courses, and--.

Smythe, Zwicky, Feynman, Oppenheimer, Pauling, and Fellow Students

Riess

Was there a predictable set of courses that you would take? Or did you want to go back and do some undergraduate work even there?

Townes

Well, there were courses that were obvious to me that I needed to take, because they were subjects that I felt I needed to learn. Some of them, too, were courses that Caltech undergraduates were taking, a basic course in electricity and magnetism, which was a terribly important course to me, and a very difficult course. Caltech undergraduates were taking it. There were mathematics and mechanics, and there were sort of standard kinds of physics courses, but ones which I hadn't yet had. So I think it was pretty clear to me what courses to take, and I signed up for them.

The electricity and magnetism course was taught by a man named [W.R.] Smythe, who was a very tough taskmaster. He gave lots of good problems. I was very green in that field. I remember spending eleven hours on three pages of this text to try to understand it. Eventually, I think I understood it. I later became his research student.

Riess

Was that a setback? I mean, that must have been a little bit alarming, to realize that you were so far behind?

Townes

No.

Riess

I thought electricity and magnetism was one of the basic first classes.

Townes

It is a kind of basic course, and I had had some electricity and magnetism, but at a much more elementary level. This was sort of the real thing, getting into real equations. It was a very intensive course. Sure, I had had some electricity and magnetism, but nothing like that. Some of the equations we had to solve and the problems we dealt with I had just never encountered before at all.

That was a very important course to me. You asked me didn't this throw me to feel I was taking courses that undergraduates at Caltech were taking, and having a hard time with it. No. I knew that I needed to catch up, and I had no problem with that. I had to work hard on it. Again, I think this, to some extent, is a question of self-confidence, realism. [laughs] I knew that I had not had a lot of training. But also, when I worked at it I found I could do it. In fact, pretty soon I was solving problems that nobody else in the class was solving. There was one other very good student there, Leverett Davis, who became a good friend of mine--he became a theoretical physicist and was a professor at Caltech, later--he could do most of them, too.

I eventually worked with Smythe. He was writing a book at that time, which was a new book he was composing. I eventually worked every problem in the book for him. He used me as a test case to check the problems to see if they had answers, and whether he had them right. So I learned a great deal of electromagnetics from him. It was a very important, fundamental course that stood me in good stead. Smythe was a hard taskmaster. One reason I worked with him was because I felt he had very high standards. He didn't have many students because he was a bit tough, but he worked very closely with the students that he had. I felt I'd get a lot of attention and high standards, and he would be a good person with whom to do a Ph.D. thesis. Overall, I think it worked out quite well.

Riess

You did have exposure to the others?

Townes

Oh, yes I did have a lot of contact with others. Caltech was a small place. I had a lot of close contact with Ike Bowen, who was a spectroscopist and an astrophysicist. He was a person that was very kind to me and I liked. I had a good deal of contact with Zwicky, an astrophysicist. He was rather erratic, and a difficult person with students, but very amusing and original, and I enjoyed him. [Paul S.] Epstein, who was a theorist from the Soviet Union--.

Riess

[Richard P.] Feynman had a reputation of being amusing and original.

Townes

Well, Feynman, of course, was long after my time. I knew Feynman very well, but he was not of that era. On the other hand, Oppenheimer was.

Oppenheimer was perhaps the Feynman of that time. He didn't try to be amusing the way Feynman did, but there were lots of amusing stories about him. He was very, very quick. If you just talked with him for a few minutes, you would obviously be impressed with his intelligence. Very quick. Not easy for people that he didn't think highly of. He would jump on people pretty hard, and was rather egocentric.

As it happened, Oppenheimer really didn't create as much physics as one might think he should have, in view of his apparent brilliance. But he did train a large fraction of American theoretical physicists. He knew quantum mechanics better than any other American physicist of that day. He had studied in Germany and come back with a good understanding of quantum mechanics, which was not so common in the United States in the twenties and thirties.

Linus Pauling was there. I took courses with Linus Pauling in chemistry. He was an intriguing figure.

Riess

Why intriguing?

 

Townes

Pauling is better known nowadays for his playing up of the dangers of atomic bombs or any kind of radioactivity, and for his emphasis on vitamin C, a few things like that. But at that time, he was not into quite such extremes. He was just a fantastically good chemist, very bright, very easy going, pleasant to students, and stimulating. I knew a number of his students, and I knew him pretty well. He took a course with me. I was a student in a course of Tolman's, and he decided to take the course, too. He was just a very informal, pleasant, and hard-working person.

Riess

So it was a very democratic place? It's not like the English universities?

Townes

Oh, no. It was very democratic. That's quite right. It was a very democratic place, and really I learned a tremendous amount from it. It has been exceedingly important to me to have gone there and learned what I did and be in contact with the people who were there.

Riess

Was it a year of brilliant students? I won't use that word brilliant again. How about your fellow students?

Townes

There were a number of good students there. Students in physics were a mixed bag at that point, because physics was not terribly popular. As I said before, it was not hard to get into graduate school. The problem was to pay your expenses there. So it had some people who were interesting characters in many ways, and told good stories, but were not terribly good physicists, and some others who were extremely good. Leverett Davis was one of my classmates. Willie [William] Fowler was more senior than I. He had just finished his Ph.D., but he was still around on a post-doc. He was obviously one of the bright people. He also became a professor at Caltech, and he won the Nobel Prize. Dean Wooldridge had worked for Smythe and had just left before I got there. Dean Wooldridge I then later worked with at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and he became head of Thomson-Ramo-Wooldridge.

So there were lots of good students there. Then Oppenheimer's students travelled with him. They were mostly students who would get their degrees at Berkeley, but in the spring semester they would go down to Caltech and be with him there. I bummed around with them quite a bit. There was Leonard Schiff, who was sometime professor at Stanford, Phil Morrison, who was at MIT, Bob [Robert] Serber--.

Riess

Serber?

Townes

Serber, who was here at Berkeley for some years and then during the period of the loyalty oath I hired him at Columbia University when I was chairman of the department there. So he has been at Columbia the rest of his years. He is a very prominent physicist. There were a number of others in Oppenheimer's group who became prominent and excellent physicists. [see further p. 76]

Music, Hikes

Riess

Was there a lot of sitting and talking physics with these people? Were there coffee houses and places you debated things? What was the academic atmosphere?

Townes

Well, students didn't have much money to sit around in coffee houses. But there were seminars, and there was a coffee hour before colloquium where all the students gathered. We took hikes together and did things together, various kind of inexpensive things. I saw quite a lot of these students. I took a trip down to Mexico with some of Oppenheimer's students and some others. I took other trips around. I remember first driving up some of the steep streets of San Francisco with a mathematics student, and Howland Bailey, the person who roomed with me on the porch. We drove up to San Francisco in a little car the mathematics student owned, but it didn't have enough power to make the steep streets, so we got out and pushed it. We did a lot of things together, and it was a very pleasant sociability.

Riess

Monastic?

Townes

Pardon?

Riess

Somewhat monastic feeling?

Townes

Yes. Of course, Caltech didn't admit women at that time, officially. There had been one woman who got admitted by mistake some years before that, but generally there were essentially no women in science then at Caltech. On the other hand, Pasadena was a very pleasant place. There was no smog at that time. You could look up at the mountain every day and see it. It was a place where a lot of wealthy people lived or came to retire. They were very friendly to Caltech students and would invite them around. There was a Bach Society of which I was a member, which had a good many women in it. As I say, the local people were very friendly to Caltech students and invited them around some. It was a fairly pleasant, happy place.

Riess

Was your voice trained? I hear of you singing at one point or another in this story.

Townes

Well, I trained some. I never took it very seriously. It was just a hobby of mine. I did study voice when I was at Furman University. I took voice from the wife of a faculty member there. Then, later, when I went to New York for my first job with Bell Labs, I lived in New York. And I took music at Juilliard, a course at Juilliard for a while there. So I have studied some, but with no intention of doing it professionally at all. It was just a hobby. I sang in the Bach Society. That was nice music and a nice social kind of group.

Riess

In choosing to sing, is it that you thought perhaps you might become a kind of a bookish lad, and that it would be a good thing to be doing some of these other things.

Townes

[laughter] No. No, I never thought of myself as particularly bookish. [more laughter]

Riess

I'm sorry. I mean, were you consciously rounding yourself off, do you think?

Townes

Yes, I consciously wanted to be able to do anything. And I frequently took courses and did things just because they were out of my field. This is something that I would like to know about, and I'd like to see if I can do it. I consciously did different things just to get the experience. I thought, well, there is nothing that is outside the pale but interesting and I ought to know about it or try it out. So I tried a lot of things, and did a little bit of a lot of different things.

I liked music. I don't think that I felt I was doing that just to do something different at that time; I thought it was good fun, and also, maybe, a little bit of a break from what I was doing otherwise. But as I say, I kind of purposely tried to do things that were different just to try them out and see how they were. I felt that I shouldn't close my mind to anything.

Riess

The hiking. Was that a California discovery for you?

Townes

Well, no. I had done a certain amount of hiking in South Carolina. I was fairly active in Boy Scouts, which, as you know, do camping and hiking and that sort of thing. I had been to Boy Scout camps. I had hiked in the mountains. It was not quite such an overt thing. We would just take half a day and climb a mountain. The mountains there were not so high, but still it would give you some exercise. A lot of it was just seeing plants and animals, and sightseeing, and maybe climbing rocks. Just things like this. We did a lot of that back in South Carolina. It was just a normal fun activity.

Now, hiking in California is rather different. It's more planned and serious, and you hike along paths. In South Carolina, you just climb a mountain. You walk through the woods and through the brush and find your way up. The first time I started doing that kind of hiking in California, I ran into one of these dry hillsides with heavy hard brush. You could hardly get through it. In California, you stay on a trail and the mountains are higher.

[tape interruption]

Doctoral Thesis

Townes

We didn't get Caltech completely done, but let's go on with as much as we can. My thesis was on the separation of stable isotopes of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, and an examination of the spins of the nuclei of some of their rarer isotopes. This was a program which had been started by Smythe, with Wooldridge building some of the equipment. Wooldridge had built up a system for diffusion separation of isotopes. It was sitting there, but he hadn't really done much science with it. I took that over in order to try to do the science. I had to change the equipment some and keep it going, but also separate oxygen 18, for example, carbon 13, and nitrogen 15. I tried to get those isotopes separated by gaseous diffusion techniques and then do some spectroscopy on them to determine their nuclear spins.

This was a glass apparatus, many mercury pumps boiling away which pumped the gas around at low pressure, about 1/10 atmospheric. It was more or less of a vacuum system because air had to be kept strictly out. So in this room it became very hot with twenty-four gas flames boiling away mercury in twenty-four pumps. Every once in a while, one of the pumps would blow up and mercury would scatter around the floor. I wasn't so much worried about mercury poisoning at that time, and was fortunately never affected by it. Then I would re-blow the glass and put it back together again, and we would work away some more.

I finally got samples and did some spectroscopy on them. I wrote a thesis. I came up and talked with a physicist here at Berkeley, Francis or "Pan" Jenkins a prominent spectroscopist here at Berkeley. We talked about the spectroscopic part of my work. I measured some spins of nuclei. [laughs] I wouldn't say it was a great breakthrough, but I learned a good deal from it. Carbon 13 was one of my principal objects. I published the results on carbon 13 saying the spin was one-half. I gave a talk about it, but I published just a short brief extract.

Then I went to Bell Labs, and Professor Smythe then studied my spectra carefully and wrote up a longer paper. He concluded the spin was three-halves. Here I was: my professor was writing a paper saying it was three-halves, and put my name on it, and I had said it was one-half. I was uncertain what to do. I didn't think that his conclusions were so tight. But I felt, well, I shouldn't argue with him at that point, so I just didn't do anything further with the paper. The paper got published that way. Professor Jenkins up here at Berkeley later then tried out the same thing, and he found that the spin was, in fact, one-half. [laughter] So I wouldn't say my thesis was a world beater. On the other hand, I did learn a lot. I did determine correctly the oxygen 18 spin. And let me see, nitrogen 15--. No I think I didn't really finish that one up.

I was at Caltech three years. I was very eager to get through. Money was awfully short. I felt it should be possible to finish a Ph.D. in three years. If I can't do that, then I've done something wrong. So I pushed and pushed, and finished it up. Then I took a bit of the summer off. I had gotten a job at Bell Labs. I took a bit of the summer off and then I went to Bell Labs in the fall.

Riess

There hasn't been very much written about your Caltech years.

Townes

Well, it was a very important period. Of course, I wasn't prominent at that time. Maybe I just didn't tell enough stories about it.

European Physics, Physics in the 1930s

Riess

In the earlier thirties there had been the exodus of great physicists from Europe. Where would you catch up with Einstein or Fermi, or any of these people? Were they teaching somewhere in this country?

Townes

Fermi came over a little later. Einstein had come. He spent some time at Caltech, but by then the Institute for Advanced Studies [Princeton] had been formed and he was at the Institute for Advanced Studies. He had gone there. That was not a place for students. [Paul S.] Epstein was a Jew from the Soviet Union. He had come over a little earlier. Fritz Zwicky was Swiss. He had come over. There was a German named Gertz whom Millikan had brought over. I think that was probably somewhat of a mistake. He wasn't as good as he might have been.

There was a lot of effort to get Europeans over, because they were the people who knew physics. There was another physicist at Caltech named Potapenko, who was also of Russian background, I guess. He was working in the field of short radio waves, but I never worked with him. Millikan had brought quite a number of Europeans in.

Riess

Who approached whom?

Townes

It was a direct search to bring over important, knowledgeable European physicists. Gertz was brought over because he had worked in a lab where liquid helium had been made. It was very difficult to make liquid helium in those days. Liquid helium was going to be a great research tool and a subject of study. So here was a young German physicist who had worked with liquid helium, and knew how to make it, and he was brought over to Caltech. It is not clear he ever succeeded in making liquid helium at Caltech. He claimed he did once, but it was never clear to me that he actually ever made it successfully. But that was the idea, that Europe had the latest physics, and that we were missing some of it. So Millikan brought over a number of these people.

Some of the others that you are thinking of came over during the period of Hitler. Many who were essentially refugees were coming over. Some of them were quite young. Felix Bloch, for example, I remember. He came to Caltech and gave some lectures. He was a young man, had no job. He ended up at Stanford. [Victor] Weisskopf must have come over somewhere along about that period. A number of Jewish refugees were coming over. Millikan had founded Caltech and already gotten a lot of important Europeans. They had essentially no new jobs at that point. That was the Depression. The bin was filled, so to speak. Millikan was getting to be rather elderly, and they weren't getting so many of the new people. In fact, new people were having a hard time finding jobs.

Riess

That's right. You were saying both that physics was not the important science it became, and yet there were many important physicists.

Townes

Well, there was a much smaller number of physicists then than now. Physics was growing in terms of ideas, and individuals stuck out perhaps a little bit more. We used to say at that time, "Well, it doesn't make too much difference how many students want to major in physics. It's only the good ones that count and are really going to do something, and they are always going to want to do physics. The numbers are not important. It is a fact that anybody who really loves physics, really wants to do it, is going to do physics anyhow." That was the attitude of the time, that you didn't try to sell physics. It was just a thing that people were kind of born to, and if they were going to do it, they would do it. Those were the ones that counted. If you got in a lot of extra physicists it was okay, but it didn't make all that much difference.

Riess

This would not be said of chemists or biologists?

Townes

I didn't hear it said of chemists or biologists at that time. Those were bigger and better known fields. Of course, it's not said today either. I think there is not quite as much of that spirit now. It was certainly said then and felt then, that numbers are really not important. People, if they are going to do physics, will do it regardless of whether there is any money or whatnot. They'll do it, and they'll be the ones who count.

Riess

The fact that that spirit was alive and well in the land in the thirties was because there were just that many more pressing questions? High profile, pressing questions?

Townes

Well, I think physics was so neglected that you had to be a little crazy to do physics anyhow, you see. You did have to be of that character.

Riess

Physics was neglected?

Townes

Yes, because it was not a popular field, not much money in it. It wasn't in the newspapers. You just had to be devoted to it to do it at all. Otherwise it didn't make sense to try to do it.

Riess

So this view of a boom of great physics because of the influx in the thirties is more historical hindsight?

Townes

Oh, it was a very important time in physics, and no, a great deal of physics was happening. But the public didn't have that sense. Einstein was well known. He was a colorful person. Some physics was well known. But I think outside of the world of physics, those people coming over was not looked at as a particularly great event at that time. It was confined to the physics world. To look back on it now, you realize how important it was. I think physicists recognized its importance then, too.

Riess

It was behind this country's being as top-ranked as it is today, don't you think?

Townes

As educated as it was, yes. Oh, yes.

Hans Bethe came over along about in there. I remember reading Hans's papers when he was in Germany. When he came over, well, that was nice. But he was a young man then and not as well known as he is now. He was a good physicist, and he got a job. It was not a world-shaking event. It was just nice that we could attract a bright, young person.

Riess

Do you remember [Jacob] Bronowski's Ascent of Man series?

Townes

Yes.

Riess

I was digging into general comments on physics in history and Bronowski said, on one of his other programs, "Physics in the twentieth century is an immortal work. The human imagination working communally has produced no monuments to equal it. Not the pyramids, not The Iliad, not the ballads, not the cathedrals."

Townes

There is something in that. Bronowski likes to make great statements. But I think one could validly say that.

Riess

"An immortal work?" It's the creativity that he is talking about?

Townes

Well, science has an immortality which is also quite in addition to that. That's one of the wonderful things about science. Once you discover something, then that becomes a part of the human race, a part of the knowledge from then on. They don't lose it. It is always there. Now, it may be modified a little bit; if they find it wasn't exactly right, they may modify it a little bit. Nevertheless, you realize that when you discover something, it is something that is permanent. It will be a part of human knowledge from then on. So, in that sense, these monuments are much more permanent than any sort of physical monument. They are part of human knowledge.

It isn't even like literature. Literature can fall out of favor maybe, or not be paid quite so much attention. Shakespeare, unfortunately, isn't as well known now as he was a couple of generations ago. It will undoubtedly be there, but it will be harder for people to read and so on. Whereas Newton's laws of physics are taught everyday in the undergraduate classroom. They are important. They still seem to be right, even though they have been modified by relativity, and quantum mechanics. That is a very basic and inherent part of our culture and always will be. So there is a real sense in which these are permanent monuments and things which will be everlasting in the human race as long as we are here.

Riess

And not something that man made.

Townes

No. What man has done is to try to understand them for the first time. They were there all the time and we just didn't know it. Now that we know it, we won't lose it again.

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Further on Being Different

Townes

Is it operating now and recording?

Riess

Yes, it is.

Townes

You had asked me was I a fair-haired child in the family, and so on, and to what extent did I feel that. I certainly didn't feel any more intelligent or successful than most of my brothers and sisters. They did very well in school. My sisters all did much better than I did. My brothers were active and busy, particularly my older brother. But also, my parents were very careful to be fair-handed. They would never think of appearing to favor one child. Of course, I happened to have been more publicly successful, at least, than the others. But when I got the Nobel prize and my mother was called by a local news reporter saying, "Aren't you proud of your son?" she said, "I'm proud of all of my children." [laughter]

That was very typical of the way we were treated. I never felt within the family anything special. Otherwise, externally, sure, well, I knew I was somewhat smarter than most. I remember one time when I was singing in the church choir, and the professor of philosophy at Furman University happened to be sitting next to my father, and he said, "Now there sits the best mind in Furman University." My father came home and told me. He was interested. He knew I was doing well, it wasn't any great surprise, and I thought, "Well, that's a nice compliment." So I knew perfectly well that I was doing well and could do well. I had a lot of self-confidence.

Riess

It's interesting that it was a professor of philosophy who made that comment. Was that from a classroom contact?

Townes

Yes, that's right.

Riess

He knew the way you thought as a philosopher?

Townes

Yes, that was in the classroom, but it was a small university, so I'm sure he probably talked with other professors, too. But he had had me in his class, yes.

Riess

Philosophy seems like a watershed for abstract thinking.

Townes

Maybe.

Riess

You don't think that his remark reflected on your deep understanding of philosophy?

Townes

I think probably it reflected the fairly critical questions that I would ask in class, and the comments I would make. It was a small enough class that he asked students to comment, too, and to talk about things. It was just a general interaction.

Let's see. I think there was one other question that you had asked that I thought perhaps I could shed a little bit more light on. I don't remember it now, so we'd better go on.

Further on Caltech

Millikan

Riess

Well, maybe it will come up. One of the questions I didn't ask is a typical interview question, and we slid right past it. You talked about Smythe at Caltech, but I never asked for anecdotes about Oppenheimer or Millikan, the classroom scene. Caltech was full of "scene." Do you have particular recollections of the dynamics of an Oppenheimer class?

Townes

Oh, yes. Caltech was a very enjoyable and stimulating place. That was a very fine experience for me. There were lots of people there who were characters. Millikan I had in class. Millikan was getting a little old then. He taught. He knew past fields. He wasn't really hot on the latest things at that point, but he had a lot of interesting history and stories and so on. I took a course in general modern physics from him in which he discussed the development of some of his own work and related work. He was a nice person, sort of benign but stimulating at the same time. But he was past his prime at that point.

Riess

In the book I was reading about the history of physics, The Physicists 4, the author talked at some length about the Millikan-Compton spectacle, and how that had set physics back, at least in the minds of the general public. I wondered if you--? I'm not sure, I think that was earlier.

Townes

Well, that was a little earlier. When I was at Duke University I went to the first national meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington, D.C. The society was small then. We all met at the National Bureau of Standards building. We had only one meeting going on at any one time, and everybody was there. It more or less filled the room. But that was the whole bulk of physicists that would come to an American Physical Society meeting at that time.

It was very enjoyable because you saw all the great figures there and interacted with them. I remember R.W. Wood, who was a famous person in optics, giving an amusing talk about some sleuthing he had done on a man who had been killed, he believed, by the explosion of a dynamite cap from his furnace. He had done the detective work to figure this out, and he told about it. That was the informality of the physics reporting at that time.

Millikan and Compton got up and talked and argued their points with each other. It was clear that they had very different points of view. They were arguing strongly, and we all talked about it and joked about it. Clearly, there was considerable feeling between the two, but it was still done in a gentlemanly way. I don't think physics as a whole was set back. I didn't see any particularly harmful things about it.

Riess

But in the public eye?

Townes

The public eye? Well, I just didn't have any reading of that at the time. I didn't hear anybody outside of physics mention it. Physics was so out of the public eye, anyhow, that not many people were paying much attention to it in the public at that time. That was in the thirties. I think that probably did get in the newspapers. It's hard for me to say how that affected the public. I didn't sense any deleterious effect, but then I wasn't worried about that at that time.

In the physics community, well, we all sort of joked about it a little bit. These two people were so much at odds. Two very famous physicists clearly were struggling over their ideas. It could have affected the field of cosmic rays a bit in making some division and struggle over these ideas.

When I was at Caltech, [Carl D.] Anderson had just discovered the positron. That was a great coup. Anderson was one of Millikan's people. I think he had done his research with Millikan, and certainly they were working together to a certain extent. There was another person there working with Millikan on cosmic rays, Victor Neher. They were doing good solid work, and so far as I could see, by the time I got to Caltech, the controversy had kind of died out. It was in the background, but it was not an active controversy at that time.

Riess

It wasn't part of his lecture on the history of physics?

Townes

No. He did lecture about his argument with Ehrenhaft over whether the electron had an integral charge or not, or whether there were also electrons with fractions of these charges as Ehrenhaft claimed. Millikan clearly was right in that case. I saw Ehrenhaft--he was Austrian, I believe, and he came to the United States along about 1940--I heard him speak. He was clearly very biased, and everybody recognized that. He was an elderly man very much on the aggressive argumentative side, but nobody paid much attention to him. It was clear Millikan was right.

Millikan did discuss that argument. I don't remember his discussing the cosmic ray argument in that class. He was mainly talking about his book, which I think was written before the period that came up. Perhaps that was the reason.

Oppie and His Postdocs

Townes

There were a lot of other interesting characters there. Oppenheimer was in his prime so far as contributing to physics was concerned. He was spending half of his time here in Berkeley and half of his time down there, but his students were all registered at Berkeley. His students would travel with him. That's the kind of person Oppenheimer was. [laughter] It was his own school, and his students would travel down to Caltech when he went down to Caltech. They enjoyed attending some Caltech classes, but they were registered up here at Berkeley. I knew many of them very well. I enjoyed theoretical physics, and I attended Oppenheimer's lectures. Some of his students and I were very good friends, and we hiked together and made trips together.

Riess

They'd all drive down with him?

Townes

Not in the same car with him, just at the same time. When he went down to Caltech, they all arrived, in a variety of ways. Some of them may well have travelled with him, but he couldn't pack them all into one car. There must have been a dozen students, at least, graduate students and a couple of post-doctoral people. [Robert] Serber was a post-doc at that time, I think maybe the only post-doctoral person travelling.

There were a lot of other people. Leonard Schiff, who was a theorist at Stanford for some years, was in that group. Volkov, who wrote the first paper on neutron stars with Oppenheimer and was Canadian, was there. Kikuchi, who was a Japanese Canadian--. Let's see, Hartland Snyder was another one. There were just a lot of important theorists that were with Oppenheimer. Oh, yes. Phil Morrison was one of them. Phil Morrison has been at MIT for many years now and is still quite active, especially in explaining physics to the public. He is a great scholar of physics. He knows physics very broadly. Phil Morrison was one of his students. Phil was crippled, so I never hiked with him, but I knew him well.

Bob [Robert] Christy is another one. Bob Christy became provost down at Caltech. Bob Christy and I used to be very close. He was another theorist who was in that group. So these were very important people that spread out around the country. Oppenheimer's most important contribution was to train this generation of theorists, because he was much more up to date and advanced about quantum mechanical theory, largely developed in Europe, than most Americans were.

"Oppie" could be very cutting with people. He didn't take nonsense lightly. If somebody said something he thought wasn't very right or he didn't agree with, why he would just cut them off in sometimes a rather cruel way. His own students, though, he was just lovely to. His students were usually bright. They adored him, and he treated them well and was very stimulating.

His classes were almost always about things that were quite new. He didn't give a systematic lecture about some field of physics. He rather talked about new fields of research. At that time, a lot of it was nuclear physics, which turned out never to have been very right, very correct. But it was the latest theoretical physics of the day. He also brought a few other people in to talk at his lectures that turned out to be very outstanding young people that he knew about around the country.

There were lots of stories about "Oppie". He was very, very fast in repartee. You just didn't have to talk with him more than a couple of minutes to realize he was very, very bright, at least in the superficial sense. He had a terrific memory, about things he was interested in, at least. He was very quick, expressed himself well, and if he wanted to disprove somebody and discount them, he could do it very quickly and easily. As I say, at times he was a little cruel. Mostly not to students.

Riess

Were you on the inside of his band?

Townes

More or less. I was not his student, but I knew him well. He treated me nicely. I enjoyed his lectures.

Riess

Did he hike with the group?

Townes

No, he wasn't hiking with the group. His brother, Frank Oppenheimer, was a student at Caltech at the same time. Frank Oppenheimer I knew very well. Frank was more of an outdoor type. He had a little pick-up truck that he made trips around in. But I never palled around with him. I never went on trips with him. He did invite me to his Communist cell at one time. I would have gone if I hadn't been busy. I was tied up with something else. He invited me to another party of two.

Frank was clearly attached to communism and probably a member of the Communist Party at that time. Robert Oppenheimer wasn't, so far as I know. I guess that's all written in the newspapers and history, whatever he was. Frank was very close to the Communist Party at that time, his younger brother. Frank was not as good a physicist as Robert. He was perfectly all right, a perfectly good, sound physicist, but not so outstanding. He did experimental work.

There were lots of stories about Oppie, for example he would have a date and then forget about it. He would be working in his room, and his poor date would be wondering where in the world he was. They would try to call him and, oh, he'd gone out by then. [laughter] That kind of story about him. He was forgetful about things that didn't matter to him.

Zwicky, Smythe, Tolman, Lauritsen

Townes

In addition, there was Zwicky, who did a lot in astrophysics, a very original guy. He was Swiss. He liked to go skiing and snowshoeing in the mountains. He was rather neglectful of his classes, rather self-centered. He would just go off to the mountains when he wanted and tell us, "Well, read the book some and work some problems." But a fascinating person, very original in his outlook and the way he handled physics. I learned a great deal from him, particularly about thinking very generally. He thought very generally and broadly, with sort of very broad principles.

Riess

He taught that in some way?

Townes

Yes, he taught that. Dimensional analysis, for example, which very few physicists teach--. He used dimensional analysis a great deal. He gave us problems with dimensional analysis, which is a very general but sometimes very powerful technique.

Then there was Bateman, the mathematician, who was from Cambridge, England, and just was fantastic in his ability to handle integrals. We had lots of jokes about him. He would immediately recognize any integral and tell you just exactly what the answer was. His way of solving them was unique. I took classes from him.

My own professor, Smythe, was not as outstanding. He was very, very thorough, very demanding, and had very high standards of himself and everybody else. But he was not famous as a research physicist. He did some very good things. He's most well known for his book on electromagnetic theory, a course which was very tough, very difficult. I took that. For him, I worked all the problems in the book. I think maybe I've been over that. Smythe played tennis. He and I played a lot of tennis together. He swam. He was very active physically and worked very hard. So he was a character too, but not as outstanding a physicist.

Then there was Epstein. He was a Russian import, Jewish of course, very cultivated. He had known all the intellectuals in the Soviet Union. He was a very good theorist, and he taught thermodynamics and statistics. He had worked in those fields.

[Richard C.] Tolman was another person. [Linus] Pauling, I think I've mentioned, was there. I saw a fair amount of Pauling. Tolman did work in relativity and statistical mechanics and then became the first U.S. scientific head of negotiations to control atomic weapons. During World War II he got into that. He was very determined to try to control nuclear weapons. He worked very hard on it. He failed. He died shortly after that. I always felt that the disappointment was part of what killed him. He was very devoted to that. He just felt it was tremendously important. He was a somewhat more distant person. He was warm in a sense, but he was very senior and somewhat more distant, but a very nice person, a very good teacher, very thoughtful. Those were some of the characters.

Riess

Did they all feel accessible to you? Could you drop in?

Townes

Yes, if I really had anything I needed to talk to them about. Sure, they were accessible. It was a small place, after all. I don't know how many physics students there were. I would guess maybe thirty graduate students or something like that. You see, one tenth of what we have here. The ratio of faculty to students was fairly large. No faculty member generally had more than two or three students.

I should have mentioned Charlie Lauritsen who headed the nuclear physics experimental work. He was another important person there. Danish. He was doing very good quality work. Caltech actually sort of lost out on nuclear physics, because both he and Oppenheimer felt that the way to understand nuclei was to look at the simplest ones. That was perfectly logical, and they worked very, very hard on the simplest ones and never got anywhere in really understanding nuclei as a result. He measured a lot of things. He knew all the measured qualities, but he never understood the theory well. It turned out later that it was the more complicated and heavier ones that were simpler to handle theoretically. Aage Bohr, another person that I knew very well at Columbia, really finally got a reasonable theory for the more complex nuclei.

But that work did pay off in the work of Willie Fowler and others in understanding the synthesis of the nuclear elements in stars. Willie Fowler was a young post-doc when I was there, and became a professor. He was part of Lauritsen's group. He just knew all of these energy levels, all about these light nuclei, all the facts very well. When Fred Hoyle made one of the critical suggestions, I think, about the synthesis of nuclei, Willie Fowler saw exactly what to do. He and Hoyle and the two Burbridges, other English scientists, wrote a fundamental paper on the synthesis of the elements in stars.

Riess

You're using a phrase that is getting past me. It sounds like "synthesis," but that is not what you are saying.

Townes

Synthesis, yes.

Riess

It is synthesis.

Townes

Yes. It's the making of the slightly heavier nuclei from the light nuclei, from hydrogen and helium. Making beryllium, boron, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so on, from hydrogen and helium within stars. That was the theory that was worked out. Willie got a Nobel Prize for it. It was a very important development. But they never understood very clearly the theory of those light nuclei. It was just too complex, even though they worked on it hard. They were bright. It just didn't pay off.

A View of Berkeley, Lawrence and Alvarez

Riess

In your contact with the Berkeley people who were coming down to see Oppenheimer, did some notion of Berkeley take seed in the back of your mind?

Townes

Oh, yes. When you say notion, yes, I had a pretty clear idea of what was going on up in Berkeley. Of course, I talked with these students.

Riess

But as a place you wanted to be?

Townes

Berkeley clearly was a very desirable place. I became a little acquainted with it. I made a few visits up here, and a visit to Stanford I remember. Berkeley was a beautiful place. So was Pasadena in those days. I would have been delighted to stay at Caltech, but things didn't work out that way. They just weren't hiring anybody at that period.

Riess

Did you, for instance, come up to [E.O.] Lawrence's lectures?

Townes

No. No, I never hung around here. I would make a visit. I came up to see Pan Jenkins, who was a professor of optics and spectroscopy here, because his work was related to mine and I talked with him about some of the problems. That was the primary reason for my coming up here. I never came up to listen to lectures or anything like that. I didn't stay up here more than a couple of days at a time.

The first time I came to Stanford was to a meeting of the American Physical Society. My roommate Howland Bailey and I came up. I always joked that during my very first visit to Stanford I slept with the Stanford family. Which I did, because we brought our sleeping bags, and we slept in the cemetery. [laughter] It was a nice quiet place. The cops came around in the morning and waked us up and said, "Well, you aren't really supposed to this." But they didn't bother us.

I think, probably, I came to Berkeley for the American Physical Society meeting, too. There is a West Coast meeting, and the West Coast meeting oscillated between northern California and southern California. So every second year, it would be up here. I may have come to Berkeley in the same fashion, but what I remember is coming up to see Pan Jenkins.

But I knew pretty well what was going on at Berkeley from talking with students and other things, what was published in physics.

Riess

The cyclotron wasn't a magnet for everyone?

Townes

No. Again, interestingly, the Caltech people were working with Van de Graaff machines. They felt Van de Graaff machines were more precise. You didn't really have to have these high energies, they felt, in order to study nuclei. They wanted to study the light nuclei. The energies they had were enough, and they could do more precise work with the Van de Graaff. The cyclotron was interesting and worthwhile, but they didn't think it was as clean a physics as what they were doing. So it was an interesting device, but not the center of everything so far as Caltech was concerned, or other people.

I saw Lawrence, and I heard him talk, I guess at an American Physical Society meeting. Luis Alvarez, also, I remember, came down to visit me because he was interested in isotope separation, which I was doing. The one way that people knew then for separating isotopes was by diffusion, and that is what I was doing. Luis came down. Luis was interested in nuclear physics and he wanted to get some separated isotopes. He was a young post-doc at Berkeley at that time and obviously very bright. I enjoyed talking with him a great deal. He came down to visit Smythe and myself.

So there was a fair amount of interaction back and forth. Of course, some rivalry, although there was never any rivalry that was harmful at all. It was just a good, healthy rivalry. Oppenheimer was teaching in both places, and that was fine. His students enjoyed both places. We talked about comparisons between them, but it was really a pretty friendly relationship. Sure, I liked Berkeley. As time went on, I always sort of regarded Berkeley as one of the nicest places to live and be. Caltech I would have liked at that time, but the smog there and the build up of population there has made Pasadena not as attractive to me now.

6. VI Bell Laboratories, 1939-1947

Job Market, 1939

Riess

When you graduated from Caltech in 1939 there were a lot of new physicists. My book said it was an academic buyer's market.

Townes

Which book was that?

Riess

The Physicists, by Kevles. "Between '33 and '39, physics Ph.D.'s had reached twice that before the Depression. The academic world was a buyer's market. One in four Ph.D.'s joined industry." Also, ". . . Jews took Ph.D.'s in greater frequency than their weight in the population . . . in physics, where achievement was usually clear-cut, talent and brilliance could make their way despite anti-semitism." [Kevles, pp. 275, 279] The "academic buyer's market" comment interested me.

 

Townes

Physics certainly was growing and becoming better known. Nuclear physics had arrived in the early thirties. Quantum mechanics had been imported from Europe and was becoming more popular here. So physics was beginning to make a name for itself. Undoubtedly, some more people were drawn into physics. It was still a very small group of people, however, and basically you just had to be kind of crazy to go into physics. There weren't jobs. My friends at Caltech, a large fraction of them--well, I remember a number of them taking jobs in the oil field doing seismology because there weren't any other jobs. And teaching in junior colleges. They taught in Pasadena Junior College and Pomona College. They could get jobs locally in some of these smaller colleges, but jobs were scarce.

Riess

I think that is what this expression means. The academies could choose.

Townes

Well, there weren't many jobs of any kind. There weren't many academic jobs. Caltech wasn't hiring anybody. I hoped to be in an academic institution. I had a good chance of getting a National Research Council Fellowship, and I had planned to go to Princeton. The Bell Labs job came along, and I was quite uninterested. In fact, my professor said, "Well, you ought to go over there and talk to them anyhow." So, okay, I went over there and talked to them. I wasn't interested in going into industry.

Riess

Did they come out to Caltech to recruit?

Townes

They came out to Caltech. They asked me to fill out some form, so I filled it out roughly and talked with them a little bit and went on back. Smythe got this call from them. Smythe had told them, I guess, a very good story about me. They had hired Dean Wooldridge three years before, and I had taken up Dean Wooldridge's work under Smythe after Dean had left. Dean Wooldridge was doing quite well at Bell Labs. He was very bright. Smythe told them I was just as good, or something equivalent to that.

They called up Smythe and said, you know, "What's the matter with this guy Townes? This is the messiest application we've ever seen. He just doesn't seem interested. What kind of guy is this?" Smythe told me, "Look, you know, you ought to take this seriously." He told them that I was really all right. They offered me a job.

Now, I was the only one they offered a job at Caltech at that time, I believe. John Pierce had gone there a couple of years before, I believe. He was an electrical engineer. I was the only one, I think, that they offered a job at that time. I didn't particularly want to go, but Smythe and Bowen--. Perhaps I didn't mention Ira S. Bowen. He was an optical person, a very fine spectroscopist that I knew very well. He was very kind to me. He took me on hikes and invited me to Thanksgiving dinner and so on. He later became head of Mount Wilson-Palomar. His optical work had a lot to do with astronomy. Well, Ike Bowen advised me, and Smythe advised me, "Look, this is a job. Jobs are very scarce. You had better take it."

It is perhaps true that a fraction of physicists being hired were being hired in academic jobs because there weren't many industrial jobs. Industry just wasn't hiring many physicists either. Three years before, when Wooldridge was hired, Bell Laboratories had started hiring again after no hiring for several years. They were still just hiring a few people. It was growing a bit, but industry simply was not very interested in physicists. Industry was more interested in chemists at that time. So, the reason they went into academic work at such wonderful places as Pasadena Junior College, and so on, was because there weren't any other particularly good jobs, academic or industrial. That was part of it.

Riess

Okay.

Townes

Now, physics, itself, also was generally oriented towards academic work. My own view was that in most industries there was not high quality work. I knew Bell Laboratories had done some very high quality work and was a pretty good place to work. That's one of the reasons that I accepted.

Riess

Where was Caltech getting funding for the research work at the time that you were there in the late thirties?

Townes

The Research Corporation was supporting a good fraction of academic research at that point. Then there was a fairly wealthy family, the Mudds, who made their money on copper in Cyprus. The Mudds were close to Caltech, and they supported the nuclear physics a good deal, just personal money.

Riess

This was the Harvey Mudd name?

Townes

Yes, that same family. Then there was a Jewish doctor there who I think had some personal money and was contributing a bit. He was interested for radiation purposes. He worked with them.

The money was small. In the first place, it didn't take a lot of money. A lot of it came from private sources and the research corporations. The government wasn't putting much money into research.

I am curious about this comment about prejudice against the Jews. I must say, as a student I never saw any prejudice against Jews at all in the universities among the students. This was in the thirties. Now, I come from the South where perhaps surprisingly there is very little anti-Jewish prejudice. New York is where you get it. The South has some old Jewish families who are very well accepted down there. So in Duke and Furman, I never saw anything like that. I had some good Jewish friends. I would have to say at Caltech I just didn't see any anti-Jewish prejudice.

Riess

I think the idea was that despite anti-semitism as a general problem, it didn't exist in physics.

Townes

Yes, I think that is by and large true. A lot of the European Jews were coming over to the United States. That added a great deal to our manpower and the excitement of physics, too. That was part of the growth of physics. The growth of physics was a lot of these people coming over.

But they were looking for jobs, and jobs weren't all that plentiful. I remember [Emilio] Segre saying something to me about this. He had a hard time finding a permanent job in that period. Felix Bloch was one of the people that Oppenheimer invited to speak to his class. Felix got a Nobel Prize. He was down at Stanford many years. He's dead now. He was an excellent physicist, and he was kind of cruising around, looking for a job, doing temporary things. So they were getting jobs, but I wouldn't say jobs were abundant. There was a build-up of excitement. That is certainly true. That undoubtedly was attracting more students, but the total number of students was still quite small.

Well, okay. Let's go on to something else.

Riess

Was there someone in particular you had wanted to work with at Princeton when you had thought of Princeton?

Townes

I had some ideas of what I wanted to do, namely further work on isotopes. Princeton was a high quality place, an interesting place, different from where I'd been, and I thought a change would be good. There was a physicist there who did mass spectroscopy and separation of isotopes that way some. Let me see, what's his name? I can't think of it right now. He's a mass spectroscopist, quite well known. That was one person I thought I would probably be associated with, but I wasn't going to just work with somebody and do the things that they were doing. I had some things that I felt I wanted to do at that time.

Riess

Then what did you expect to be doing at Bell Labs?

Townes

Well, I was told that I would be doing fundamental physics. It would be maybe studying electrons, solids, radiation, but it wasn't very clear. It was not highly defined. In fact, they told me they would let me come, and then I could look around and decide what I wanted to do. They followed through with that very generously for the first nine months. That would be three months in one division of Bell Labs looking around and doing some things, three months in the next division. They were going to do this for a full year.

However, the war was coming on, so I believe by the fourth quarter of that year I was working on a more-or-less permanent assignment with Wooldridge, and not long after that I was suddenly assigned to work on radar, radar bombing systems, which was the furthest thing from my mind when I went there, and I wasn't particularly eager to do it.

I worked in the magnetics department, which was one of their fundamental departments. I worked in their electron emission department for a while. I worked in their microwave generation department for a while. So those three departments, and then I was going to move on to something else. I'm not sure it had been picked out. Then I was supposed to sort of say what I would like to do, and they would decide what they would want me to do, and we would work something out. That was the general idea.

Riess

Was this basic research with some industrial application in mind?

Townes

There were clearly industrial applications in those fields. They had them very much in mind. Some of the people who worked on these things were engineers with particular projects and particular things they had in mind.

Seminar Group: Shockley, Brattain, Fisk, Wooldridge, Morgan

Townes

They were very generous to me. I think this was the first time that they allowed somebody to move around like that, and sort of get acquainted with Bell Labs and the work going on there before it was decided just what to do. This was a new experiment on their part. They also, just at that period, started a seminar--and this was fantastic in industry--they picked out about eight or ten physicists and one or two chemists who would meet together one afternoon a week and discuss some science that they wanted to discuss. The company provided tea and cookies. That was absolutely unheard of, though now it is fairly commonplace.

I was one of the people chosen to meet with this group. [William B.] Shockley, who ended up at Stanford, was a member of that group. He was one of the transistor inventors. Walter Brattain was another one of the three transistor inventors who was a member of the group. Both Bill and Walter won the Nobel Prize. Then Jim [James B.] Fisk, who ended up as president of the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Dean Wooldridge who later became head of Thomson-Ramo-Wooldridge Company. Foster Nix, a solid state physicist. Then there was a person, Stan Morgan, who became head of the chemistry department at Bell Labs. They were all young men at that time. Most of them were pretty young. There were a few others, some of whom were not quite so notable. But they picked out a group that would want to get together and stimulate each other and think about fundamental physics.

Now that was very broad-minded of Bell Labs. Nevertheless, there was clearly the possibility of applications. For electron emission from surfaces, for example, that had to do with electron tubes. But I was working on the fundamental side to try to understand it. I would say that solid state physics is something Mervin Kelly, the head of Bell Labs, recognized was going to be important somehow because Bell Labs dealt with a lot of solids. He started building up a group of solid state physicists as soon as solid state physics became a very good, active field in physics, and better understood. He started building up the group hoping that they would eventually contribute, but I think with nothing very specific in mind excepting that Bell Labs did a lot with resistors and wires and surface contacts and a lot of solid-state work. Understanding it clearly ought to be useful.

The microwave group was already working on communications with microwaves. It was quite fundamental work in microwaves, trying to understand microwave generation, propagation, and so on, but they clearly had communications in mind and were working hard on that. So there were applications in view in most cases. Nonetheless, they were pushing the fundamental aspects of it at that time. I think very wisely, and Bell Labs was an exceptionally good place.

Riess

They were putting their own money into it?

Townes

Oh, yes.

Riess

They weren't getting government money?

Townes

There was no government money that was allocated that way. The company had to do it itself. Of course, it was a monopoly, so those kinds of expenses it could charge to the subscribers to telephones, basically. Their earnings were controlled by a commission, and so this was justifiable in the view of commission. That was one of the things you were allowed to do. ATT was under intense investigation at the time for being too much of a monopoly. [laughing] It was fighting hard to try to do a good job for the public so it would be appreciated. There was a big investigation, as I remember, during the Roosevelt administration. It had kind of passed over, but it was still around a bit when I was there.

One of the reasons Bell Labs was so good, and Bell Systems was so good, was because the government was breathing down their neck all the time. They developed the idea that they just had to be a good service. They had to be devoted to the public if they were going to succeed, and I believe there was a real public devotion as a result.

Assigned to Radar Work

Riess

You weren't eager to do radar work. Why?

Townes

It was engineering and development of systems, not understanding principles. The job was just to make things and build things that were going to work and do a job, you see. It was not basic physics at that time much. There was some basic physics around the edges. But if you are building a radar, you design something for manufacture. The bombing system, well, I designed something that would work in an airplane and allow bombs to hit accurately, allow the plane to navigate, and so on. It was not uninteresting intellectually, but it was not basic physics. The primary motivation was not to get new understandings of our universe, but, rather, to make something that would work you see. It was just more or less the difference between engineering and science.

Riess

In the seminar groups at Bell Labs, was the talk about basic physics?

Townes

That was basic physics, very definitely basic physics. That was what it was for. That was what the physics department, by and large, was doing.

I mentioned magnetics. Now magnetics was a very important part of the communications business at that time. Magnetic materials were used for switches. Instead of transistors, Bell Systems used switches or relays for switching lines on telephone calls. In addition, it was used in certain circuit elements, inductors. Bell Laboratories had invented a new kind of magnetic material, Permalloy, which was very important economically. The person who invented it, I remember, was sitting in the office never doing anything but smoking cigars. People said, "Well, he gets a good salary. He invented this, and somehow he just sits back and doesn't do anything more." Because he had invented Permalloy. I don't think everybody would have reacted that way, but he did.

So magnetics had many applications. It was fundamental to try to understand it. At the same time, good magnetic materials were exceedingly important to communication in that day. So many of the efforts had a general view of possible applications, even though they were research of a rather fundamental type.

Riess

Tell me about the work in radar bombing systems. Was Bell Labs in a race to find a working system?

Townes

No. There was competition, but let me describe the situation a little broadly. Radar--I'm not sure how you could say who invented it. Merle Tuve used radar, in a sense, to examine the height of the ionosphere. He reflected waves from the ionosphere. That was a kind of a radar. Back in the early thirties, I think that was, certainly quite early. That's the first radar-like thing that I know. I'm sure other people used it. I'm not sure you could pick out a real inventor.

But the thing that made it big and important during World War II was the British, who developed a new kind of magnetron that had great power in pulsing short waves. It was this magnetron that the British had invented that really put the field on the map. The British were using it intensively, developing it intensively, to help protect themselves against the Germans and the missiles that were coming over, the German shipping, and so on. They appealed to Bell Labs and the U.S. to help them. This was before we were actually in the war.

Bell Labs was working in this field about the time I got there, as I remember. Certainly after I'd been there a short while, they were very busy in the field. Jim Fisk, who entered the same year I did, a short while later worked on the magnetron very hard. There was a lot of communication back and forth from Great Britain. Great Britain sent one of their magnetrons to Bell Labs. I think the first one that came to the U.S. probably went to Bell Labs.

So Bell Labs felt, in the first place, it was a field they should know and they should be able to contribute to. Secondly, the leadership of Bell Labs, and many of the leaders in this country, felt as if we just couldn't avoid getting into that war. It's important for us to help the British any way we can, and we'll probably have to get in it ourselves at some point. We've got to get going and do things.

Interaction Between Bell Labs and MIT Radiation Laboratory

Riess

I just want to interrupt you while this is relevant, because my understanding was that the first to pick up on it was an MIT group that called themselves the Rad Lab.

Townes

[laughter] Well, I'll get to that. My memory is that the first magnetron that came over came to Bell Labs. The British wanted Bell Labs to get going on it, and help them out, and make still better magnetrons, and more of them. But I could be mistaken on this. The MIT Radiation Laboratory--I don't know just when they were formed [1940]. They were formed fairly early. My impression, though, was that they were formed a little bit later, maybe even just about the time the war started.

The point about the MIT Radiation Laboratory was it was government sponsored, government financed, and they got together academic people from all over who might want to work in this field. Now academic people weren't going to work in this field until the war was very pressing. So I think it really got going about the time the war started. People felt they had to do it, and so MIT's Rad Lab could pull in people. Luis Alvarez, for example went to MIT at that time. People from all over went to MIT, and if I had been in a university, I might have been tempted to go to the MIT Radiation Laboratories.

They had a very large group of outstanding academic people. It was headed by Lee DuBridge from Rochester, who was a well-known physicist at that time. I.I. Rabi went there from Columbia University. Many important people. And so it was the biggest collection--. I think Bell Labs probably got started earlier, but Bell Labs was working somewhat more on design for manufacture. MIT was exploratory development, more. MIT Radiation Laboratories produced a lot of the ideas and they brought in theorists. Julian Schwinger, a theorist who is now down at UCLA, and also has a Nobel Prize--. He was a very young man then, and he went there and did a lot of theory of electro-magnetic waves and so on. Everybody was just pitching in by that time.

Now, Bell Labs and MIT were competitors in some kind of sense. There was a good deal of close cooperation, but there was also some competition of different groups. There was also competition within Bell Labs. Different groups within Bell Labs would try to do similar things and do them better. They would have alternate ideas.

But MIT probably because the biggest collection of people in the radar field. At least by the time the war really got going it was the biggest collection of people. By and large they did an excellent job. They were in the radar business and guidance of airplanes. You may know Luis Alvarez invented a way of landing planes by radar. I think it was probably after he went there, but I'm not sure, somewhere along there. It was one of the very early things. I saw a moderate amount of Luis at that time because he was in the radar business.

There was a great deal of interaction back and forth between Bell Labs and MIT. We designed systems, and MIT designed systems. There was competition as to which systems were the best. MIT generally started out designing very primitive kinds of systems which would get into the war fast. Bell Labs was making components, magnetrons especially, which were used in those systems and was working on designing rather more complex systems. That was the difference in style.

Eventually, the final radar navigating bombing system--I would say the most sophisticated one that finally got into use but after the war--was an MIT system. It was a system that MIT initiated. They said, "Well, why not do it this kind of way," and just broadly speaking, they initiated it. Then, they asked us at Bell Labs to do it. I finally ended up designing it.

Riess

What was that called? Did it have a name?

Townes

It had a name. Let's see, what was it?

Riess

There was the A1-10. That was the first thing that the Rad Lab worked on. Then, later the H2X.

Townes

It was none of those. It had a name, and I should remember it. I can't think of it right now. It was put in the B-52s and used later. After the war, I never really saw anything much of it, but I know we had finished the design. Bell Laboratories had finished the design and it was manufactured-the laboratory doesn't manufacture, Western Electric manufactures for them.

Riess

"The three-centimeter set microwave, called the H2X, in 1943--."

Townes

Oh, well, now that was what I was referring to as kind of a primitive system. That was a system that was in use in Europe. None of my systems at Bell Labs really got into use during the war. We were building more complex systems, and one of the things that annoyed me was that, well, they were supposed to be helping the war, but they don't really ever use these things. Once we got through with one of them, they would want it still different, with shorter wavelengths and so on, and we'd have to keep changing. I even said, "Well, if I'm going to help the war, maybe I ought to stop and go to China with General Stiltwell. Do something like this and help over there." My boss had a talk with me and said, "Oh, please don't do that. Really, you can be very useful here." [laughter]

This final system, which was initiated at the Radiation Laboratory, but which I was sort of the central design figure for, that really finished up after the war. It was one of the reasons why Bell Laboratories sort of insisted on my staying in that business about six months after the war to finish that up. And they insisted on my finding a person who would take over after that, before I could get out of it. [laughter]

 

Townes

We were all working intensively for the war effort. Just who you worked for didn't make all that much difference. I think there was a great deal of cooperativeness around. There was, of course, rivalry, but there was a great deal of cooperativeness around. People were devoted to trying to win the war and help. So there was interaction back and forth with the Defense Department. My immediate boss was Dean Wooldridge. His boss was a man named Walter McNair, who was a more senior physicist, and his boss was eventually Mervin Kelly, who was head of the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

We talked with people in the Pentagon from time to time, but they were not a big factor, actually. We talked with the MIT Radiation Laboratory people somewhat more. We talked with the Air Force people, particularly Wright Field. Wright Field was a place that was going to use these things. So I flew out of Wright Field a little bit, worked out there installing equipment and testing it.

Test Flights Out of Florida

Townes

I was down in Florida a great deal. I flew out of Florida, first out of Tampa, which was in the Gulf of Mexico. We had an old shipwreck there that we were using as a practice bombing target. I took my wife down there. We lived in little shacks. The Wooldridge's were down there, too. We would go out and exercise the equipment and drop sand bombs on the shipwreck.

Then I was for a while, more of the time, at Del Ray Beach, or the Air Force base there at Boca Raton. I flew out of there. We'd fly down in the Caribbean. There were ships or islands that we could use to practice bombing. We dropped sand bombs, normal bomb shapes but full of sand. We could watch them on the way down and see where they hit. I also flew out of the Air Force base down near Pensacola a bit. I was down in Florida quite a bit. I would come up to the New York area for a few months, work on a system, take a system down there, try it out, work with it, and so on. We moved back and forth and around quite a lot during the war.

I saw a lot of Air Force pilots and people. I had four main Air Force pilots. Those were the primary Air Force pilots I saw a good deal of successively during the war. Three of them were killed in planes, in this country. It wasn't combat, it was just a hazardous business. The fourth one lasted through the war and came through all right.

Riess

That's tragic.

Townes

Well, maybe I was more unfortunate than most, but that's what the war was like. Everybody was working hard, and these planes were pretty good, but there were accidents.

Riess

Was it helpful to be with the pilots in the bombers to get feedback about what you really needed to be doing? Or was it not that practical?

Townes

That was useful, yes. We could see what they could do and what their problems were. That was part of the game, to get real experience in the field. At first our work represented a rather funny case. Bell Labs had an idea how to do something, and talked with the Air Force. The Air Force asked us to build the system. So we started building. We asked them, "What kind of accuracy do you need?" They said, "Just get as much accuracy as you can." We said, "Well, what kind of accuracy are you getting now? To see whether it's practical, we've got to know what we're shooting for."

Their Norden bombsight was a great secret of that time, one of the war's great secrets, according to the newspapers. The popular story was that it could drop a bomb in a pickle barrel. That's all we knew, but they would not tell us what the Norden bombsight actually did, what its accuracy was. That was secret. And here we were trying to make new bombing systems, but we couldn't know what kind of accuracy we were supposed to get. They said, "Just do it as well as you can."

Well, that's what we did. We had an old bombing pilot on our very first tests. We were flying out of Tampa, Florida. He was a colonel, who was an experienced bombing pilot. He had come back from overseas and was a test pilot. Here we were in the plane, working the equipment, and reading dials, and guiding, trying to drop our first bomb on this ship. We released the bomb. I dashed up to the front cabin, in order to see where it was going to hit. Well, it missed it by about a hundred feet, and this pilot said, "That's a damn good shot if you ask me." [laughter] That was the first time we knew what was good and what was bad.

We still couldn't see the Norden bombsight. [more laughter] That was secret. It was sometime after that I saw the Norden bombsight. The Norden bombsight was never as good as it was supposed to be. I think maybe that was part of the secret.

Riess

What was special about it?

Townes

It was a mechanical device, well designed but much more primitive than some of our systems. It was an optical system only. That is, you aimed at things visually. It was good for its day, but it really wasn't very good. The talk about it was very much overblown. The secrecy they felt was essential, so that it wouldn't get out to the enemy somehow, but one can question the importance of such secrecy.

Wartime Secrecy, Urgency

Riess

Had you been sworn to certain kinds of secrecy?

Townes

Oh, yes. What we were doing was secret. I couldn't tell my wife what I was doing, for example. She knew I was going up in planes and doing something with radar, but just what it was she wasn't supposed to know.

Riess

In your Bell Labs group seminar would you talk about what you were actually working on?

Townes

Some of them would know about it, and some of them wouldn't. But no, we didn't talk about that with this group. Many of them, pretty soon, were doing things in the war effort, too. One of them was in the atomic bomb work, connected with Columbia University, where Fermi was at that time. I knew very well how the work was getting along. He wouldn't tell me anything direct, but he dropped enough hints. It was pretty clear to me exactly what was going on. He wasn't supposed to talk. I think they probably had a pretty good idea what I was doing too, but officially it was a secret.

Riess

Talking about the Rad Lab, Millikan, at that point an elder statesman, said it was probably "a mistake...to concentrate fifty prima donnas in physics at any one spot." [Kevles, p. 307]

Townes

That it would create dissension or something? [chuckles]

Riess

[F. Wheeler] Loomis was in charge of the "prima donnas."

Townes

That's right, Loomis and then Lee DuBridge from Rochester. Yes, Loomis was up there. Loomis was not an academic person, but he was, I think, a good administrator, and he knew a lot of science. He was interested. Loomis was one of the initiators. I'm not exactly sure of whether Loomis was head. I don't know the official structure.

Riess

He was said to have "kept them in harness." He ran the lab like a Dean, with steering committees, tasks to be accomplished, system research groups. It was run in some ideal way.

Townes

A collegial kind of way.

Riess

Yes, right.

Townes

Oh, I think that's quite right. There was plenty of rivalry, and people trying to do different things and have their system the one that really got used. But I felt it was pretty productive. I don't think it was a destructive kind of relationship at all. It was a rather productive type of rivalry. The same thing I would say was between the Radiation Laboratory and Bell Labs. It was a productive relationship, with always good respect. One person was trying to do something better than the other, all right, but there was a good deal of complimentarity, too. They relied on each other and learned from each other.

Riess

The expression "operations research" comes up in my reading. Did Bell Labs do operations research?

Townes

I don't think Bell Labs worked on that very much. Phil [Philip] Morrison at MIT was one of the prime movers, I know. Bill Shockley got involved in that kind of work. He was at Bell Labs, but he got involved in that, in an operations research group. Bright Wilson from Harvard, the chemist, got involved in that, and also H.P. Robertson. It did start to be a serious kind of way of looking at things during the war. It was largely academic people that got that going, I think.

Post-War Work in Microwave Spectroscopy, 1947

Riess

When the war ended, did that mean that your particular research was phased out so abruptly?

Townes

No. Bell Laboratories was very eager for me to continue, which I didn't want to do. We were building a system. The military still wanted it. They sort of insisted that I finish that system and then find another person who could replace me on future work. I finished that system, and it was used in most of the B-52s thereafter for quite a while. I had to stay on about six months after the war doing that, which I objected to, but I felt, well, okay, I was in the middle of it. It was very difficult for someone to pick up the whole thing, design and all. All right, I'll finish that. But I was very eager to get back to physics.

Now, Bell Laboratories, at that time, resisted. I tried to sell them on the idea of my doing microwave spectroscopy, and that something could come out of it that would help them in communications. Particularly the use of molecules and atoms interacting with waves, and so on. I did not completely foresee the laser at that point, but I saw some rather more passive uses. I wrote a paper, a memorandum, to try to persuade them that molecules and the interaction between waves and molecules and atoms was likely, eventually, to contribute to the communications business, to electronics. I wrote a memorandum, and I still have that, pointing out how similar molecules are to circuit elements and, as one got shorter and shorter waves, that they might well be circuit elements instead of resistors and inductances and so on. I did not, at that time, foresee useful amplification by molecules. I specifically pointed out the second law of thermo-dynamics doesn't allow you to get very much power from molecules, but as passive circuit elements, and as frequency standards also, I pointed out they could be quite useful.

They sort of bought that. They thought it would be worth investigating, so they let me work on microwave spectroscopy. I was doing microwave spectroscopy, by sometime in 1946. Lets see, I left Bell Labs January 1, 1948, but I decided to go in the late summer of 1947, only a couple of years after the war had stopped. They appreciated the work I was doing, just because it was good science, and it put them on the map with respect to scientists. They realized it was useful physics. But when I wanted them to expand it a little bit, and hire another person in the field, they said, "No." They felt it was not promising enough for communications work. They didn't feel that they would want to expand it. They let me continue in the field, because I was doing good physics, and that was fine. But they would not invest more money in it and expand it.

I had word from one of my friends that the vice-president of Bell Labs said, "Well, gee. We shouldn't let Townes go back to physics now. He has become a good engineer. We need him in engineering. We shouldn't let him go back to physics." The head of the physics department at Bell Labs even gave me kind of a little lecture, saying, "You've made a lot of people annoyed because you are talking about what you would like to do. You ought to be talking about what is good for the company. Give them arguments about what's good for the company, not just to say you would like to get back to physics." Which is what I was saying. I wanted to get back to physics.

Riess

He was advising you in strategy?

Townes

Yes. Well, it was after the fact. He was jumping on me for having the wrong attitude, and the approach that I wanted to do what I wanted to do instead of what was good for the company. I tried to persuade them that this was good for the company, but it clearly was, and I was quite frank about it, what I wanted to do. They were big enough and generous enough to let me do it.

Bell Labs' Loss

Townes

Partly for that reason, when I got an offer shortly thereafter from Columbia I took it. But partly, also I had always wanted to be in a university and would have gone anyhow. But they were not sold on it at all as being something that was likely to be of any use to the communications business. Let me say again, Bell Laboratories was, I think, the best industrial laboratory that we've had. A wonderful place in many ways, very intelligent people. Their misjudgment is simply a picture of how difficult it is to judge what is going to come out of fundamental science. It is not that they made a gross mistake, that they were stupid, or anything like this. It's just very difficult.

It was after I went to Columbia, about two years after I left Bell Labs, that the idea of the maser came along, and eventually the laser. And of course, that has really revolutionized the communications industry. They're using fiber optics and all kind of things like this. In fact, the microwave work, which was so active at that time, was going to be their long distance communications, microwaves going down tubes. Eventually, after the laser came along, they realized that this was going to replace those things. So they stopped that kind of microwave work and have gone into the laser business and are doing very well with it. So they played the game intelligently, but that doesn't mean they can't make a mistake. It is just very difficult to judge the future applications of science.

Riess

I'm surprised they weren't willing to gamble. They certainly could have afforded to.

Townes

Well, everybody has to make judgments about what fields to support, and what's most likely to pay off for them. This is one they just didn't see. Again, while they turned out to be mistaken, and I thought they were at the time, nevertheless, I could see things there and be convinced of them, and enthusiastic about them a little more than they could. I wouldn't downplay their excellence because of that.

I think that really is an example of how modest we have to be as a country, and as decision makers, about making decisions, and what we really can predict. We can predict some things, but other things are just going to surprise us. We have to recognize that. I think that means we have to cast our bread rather widely and try all different kinds of things, develop science very broadly, if we are going to get the most applications out of science. We must not plan too overtly and say, "Yes, this is the thing that is going to pay off." We just can't tell that.

Riess

It's not a matter of investing in the man, then, which is what I thought that they could continue to do?

Townes

Well, it's partly that. I think one should invest in people that you think are creative and good, sure. But there is also a question of the field, and whether the person is going to do something good for that company or produce something in a particular field, or whether a given branch of science is. It is difficult to know, really quite difficult.

I think there is another case where Bell Laboratories made the right bet, and that is in solid state physics. Mervin Kelly, who hired all these solid state physicists, I think certainly did not foresee the transistor. He just thought, "Well, solid state physics is something that bears on our field, and we ought to have people who are expert in it. Maybe they'll find out something." The transistor came out of it. That, too, was somewhat unexpected. In that case, they had hired and kept the right group of people, because they thought solid state was important to them. But this work on molecules was kind of a little far out, and it wasn't so clear that it was ever going to do anything for them, you see.

Well now, I think maybe we ought to close up pretty soon. If it's all right with you, let's find a stopping place.

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Review: The Route to Bell Labs

Townes

These were the Depression years when I was at Caltech. Money was quite scarce, but it also went a long way. Many of my friends were taking jobs at about $1,800 a year. That was sort of a standard post-doctoral pay at that time. That was adequate to live on. You couldn't live very well, but people could live on it. Both universities and industry were paying something like that.

Well, Bell Labs offered me, I remember very well, $3,016 dollars per year, which was I think supposed to be the biggest salary that anybody had been offered for quite a while. That seemed like a lot of money to me, everything I would need. Then they sent me a hundred dollars for the train trip from Pasadena to New York. I thought, "Well, I don't normally travel by trains. Busses are much cheaper. With all that money--a hundred dollars--I could take a nice trip. I want to take a little break anyhow."

Mexico was nearby and I was interested in Mexico, so I decided to take a trip down to Mexico en route to New York.

Riess

Why were you interested in Mexico?

Townes

It was a nearby foreign country. I was very interested in foreign things, foreign countries, and languages, and it was different enough from the United States to be very worth visiting. It also had a different fauna and flora, and a different language.

Riess

There wasn't as much of the hispanic culture in Southern California then as there is now.

Townes

No, but there was some. I had a friend who had been a student at Caltech who lived in Mexico City. I visited him, among other things.

With that money, it seemed to me I took a bus to Arizona, and then took a Mexican train from somewhere in Arizona, I believe Tucson, that went south. I got a third class ticket for some ridiculous price to go down to Mexico City and then back up to the United States border in Texas. There trains had sort of wooden benches with big gaps between the wooden boards, and they were mostly occupied by Mexican fruit pickers. They were all going home at that time. They had done their job. They had money. They were just very happy, and they sang in the train.

I took along an accordion that I had just bought from a Nazi student--.

Riess

From a Nazi student?

Townes

--a Nazi German student who was going home. This was '39, and he was a very ardent Nazi, but studying in the U.S. He had brought an accordion with him, and he wanted to sell it. So I bought the accordion. I took that along on the train trip.

Riess

He had been at Caltech?

Townes

He was at Caltech, and he was headed home. There were several German students at Caltech at that time I knew pretty well.

Riess

Any follow up on them? Did they become great scientists in Germany?

Townes

No. I did hear from one of them later, but they are not prominent people now.

It was an interesting time to talk to Germans, of course. This chap was quite strong about Nazism. The other one was a little more skeptical, but kind of played along with it. I remember taking him to a party that some distant cousin had invited me to, and it was a party largely for reserve officers in the military. He looked at these people, who weren't very impressive, and he turned to me, "That's the kind of army that you have in the U.S.?" I said, "Well, those are the reserve officers. We don't have a large army."

Riess

Interesting that he didn't keep his thoughts to himself, given the temper of the times.

Townes

No, he was pretty open. The other chap was also pretty open and argumentative about the importance of what Hitler was doing and the rightness of it.

So I went down to Mexico, and one thing I learned was that I couldn't go up to the dining car from third class. It was not allowed. The only food that was available was food that was handed up from the streets through the windows of the train. That obviously would be contaminated. There was a lot of dysentery around. The only thing I could live on for a while was beer. They had bottled beer on the train. I felt that was safe, so I lived on bottled beer for about two days, [laughter] until we got up in the mountains and get some fresh fruit that could be peeled. Terribly interesting trip, for me. I learned a lot of Mexican songs and played these songs on the accordion.

Riess

And learned Spanish?

Townes

I learned some Spanish, of course, picked up some additional Spanish, and went on down to Mexico City and visited this friend of mine for a while. It was a rather prominent family in Mexico with a moderate amount of money and a nice house.

Then I went on down to the border of Guatemala. The bridge was out then--it probably still is--so I couldn't get across into Guatemala. I went to Acapulco which was a very primitive place at that time, and I slept out on the beach in a little hut which I got for fifty cents a night, I remember. It was wonderful water, but it was not the kind of resort it is now. It's all built up now. I went down there by bus and then back to Mexico City.

I came on back through Texas. I took a bus home, spent a little while in my home in Greenville seeing my family again--I hadn't seen them in three years--then on up to New York, again by bus. I did all that essentially on the one hundred dollars they sent me for the train trip.

Riess

Were arrangements for your living in New York made ahead of time?

Townes

No. I just found a room.

So that's how I happened to take that particular trip into Mexico. I've been to Mexico a number of times since, and Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. I have frequently taken the family down to one of the Caribbean islands. That's a very nice place for a Christmas vacation, or something like that. Lots of good natural history, lots of underwater life on the islands there. I have done a lot of SCUBA diving down there.

Riess

Did you do it on that trip the first time?

Townes

No. I did some underwater swimming, but there was no SCUBA equipment at that time. Even face plates were essentially unheard of. Nobody was doing that, but you swam underwater, and you could see some things with your eyes open. It was very nice water, and I could see some of the underwater life.

I first did that with something like a face plate during the war, when I was down in Florida, in a very make-shift way. Later, after the war, I made my own SCUBA equipment. It was still not easily available commercially. I could put together some things from some surplus Air Force equipment. I had a friend who was very early into SCUBA diving and did it sort of professionally. He helped the Navy. I learned how to make the equipment that way.

[tape interruption.]

Review: Decision to Work at Bell Labs

Riess

We're talking about your arrival in New York. You said that Bell Labs was on West Street in New York.

Townes

Right. So I went there and found a room, sort of a furnished room they rented by the week.

Riess

In our interview last time I didn't ask what you did in that period, directly enough about your work at Bell Labs, I guess partly derailed by your references to it as "not a high point" in your life.

Townes

What? Going to Bell Labs, you mean?

Riess

Right. And yet it seems to have set you up for your successes.

Townes

I made a point of this in the talk I gave not so long ago, that most of my successes have come as a result of failures. For example, I went to Caltech because I couldn't get the right scholarship at Duke University. That was very important to me, that I decided to break with Duke University and just go to the best place there was.

A number of things like that have come up in my life. Now, I went to Bell Labs with some reservations. I really wanted to go to a university. But my professors urged me to go there. It was a very good place. I knew very well a lot of good work had been done there, but I wasn't interested in working for a commercial company and working on engineering. I wanted to be in a university. But there weren't any university jobs.

On the other hand, I have frequently pointed out that most of my subsequent work has grown out of that experience. I learned a great deal. It was broadening. Particularly, by learning engineering and electronics that has very much helped me in physics later. Now, maybe if I had gone somewhere else, I would have developed in a different direction. In any case, much that I did subsequently was dependent on that experience at Bell Labs.

[tape interruption.]

Riess

The phrase that your "heart was never in it" was the phrase that I was responding to.5

Townes

I see. Well, that's part of my feeling about what's interesting and valuable. I just would not feel comfortable working for a commercial company to make money. Why do that? Or helping somebody else to make money. Now, I don't downgrade the importance of commercial companies in terms of producing things and doing things.

Bell Labs was sort of an intermediate thing. It really is a remarkably good place, and, I think, had the public interest in mind, partly because they were so pressed by government. Being a monopoly, they were always looked over very carefully to see that they were serving the public properly, and I think they developed a real spirit that they were serving the public. Bell Labs was a very unusual place from that point of view.

I didn't really object, but it wasn't my ideal as to where to be. I wanted to be in an academic community and doing things for the sake of learning rather than for the sake of manufacturing something.

Pre-war America, and Science in Wartime

Riess

That first year that you were there, war was far off, wasn't it? How did this country feel in 1939?

Townes

Well, when I was at Caltech, some students were marching around the campus, "marching for peace" they called it, against the warmongers and commercial companies that were trying to make money and urged that we go to war, and so on. That was the atmosphere among some of the activist students. I didn't take that point of view very seriously, and I would say most of the campus didn't. Nevertheless, it was there.

For a place like Caltech, where everybody was pretty busy with science and engineering, that it was there at all would indicate that there was really some feeling. People felt we shouldn't get involved in that European war. "It is not our business. We shouldn't get involved. It's just the warmongers, and the military, and the industrial companies are trying to get us into the war."

As time went on, I think people began to realize more and more that if Europe fell under Hitler's domination, that would be exceedingly troublesome for us and eventually dangerous. I think most realistic people recognized that, and that somehow, almost inevitably we would get involved. President Roosevelt was obviously trying to help out, trying to get us involved. I think he realized very clearly what the nature of the problem was. He tried to help the British out by various ways, which some of congress jumped on him for doing it in underhanded ways.

People at Bell Labs were talking about it. Everybody was talking about it, saying, "Somehow we are probably going to get involved."

Riess

But its financial potential for science--. People didn't recognize that right away?

Townes

Its possibility to support science?

Riess

Yes.

Townes

No, they weren't thinking about that. It really wasn't science that the military supported at that time. It really was not science.

Riess

Radar is not science?

Townes

No. That basically was not science, the radar per se. The military also was not as appreciative as they are now of high quality science, or of the need for understanding, and so on. One of the things that I learned at Bell Labs--after I guess maybe the war had just about started then, or it had gone on for about a year--was that Bell Laboratory officials had gone to the Navy and said, "Look, we are experts in acoustics. We'd be glad to help out. There must be problems with submarine detection and so on. Would you like us to try to do something in this field?" They were told by the Navy, "No, everything is under control. We know what we are doing. We can detect submarines. Everything is all right. No, thank you very much."

After the war got started--of course, our ships were being sunk even before that--then they completely changed. They wanted everybody's help. It was a very different atmosphere then than it is now from the point of view of the military, because science had not done great things for the military. Engineering, yes, had done some things. Chemistry, in World War I, became important, but in general the military was not highly coupled to science.

Riess

The military was just strategy?

Townes

Strategy and equipment. It wasn't that they were unintelligent. It was just what they were accustomed to, and science had not yet contributed very much, certainly not physics. Physics hadn't done anything for the military much.

Now I was there, as I said, visiting various departments, for nine months. Bell Laboratory was very generous to me and let me look at various aspects of what they were doing, three months in each of three different areas. Then I was assigned work under Wooldridge--physics, but with applications in mind. That work never got very far because suddenly, on a Friday I believe it was, I was told that the next Monday I would start designing radar bombing systems. Maybe we've been through this already.

Riess

Yes but would you tell that story in an a-b-c.

Townes

I had been working first, I believe, in microwave generation, then on vacuum tubes, then in the field of magnetics. The microwave generation was somewhat engineering, but, nevertheless, there were some interesting physics questions, interesting to a physicist. Wave propagation, and so on. Then in electron emissions from surfaces, and that was a part of solid state physics. After that, I was asked to investigate the possibility of making gas discharge tubes which would provide a discharge at voltages as low as twenty-four volts, the standard voltage used in telephone systems then. The goal was applied, but I was then in the physics department and was to look into the fundamentals involved in this or anything broadly related. My boss at that time was Dean Wooldridge, who later headed Thomson-Ramo-Wooldridge.

I had been there a little more than a year, having come in September of '39. We got a call from Kelly, who was head of the laboratory. We came to his office. There had already been some people working there on anti-aircraft guns guided by electronics, which involved rather new ideas, guided by electronic type computers. They were analog computers at that time, not digital as we have today. But that was a brand new idea. It was working. A group at Bell Laboratories had developed that, and now they wanted to apply it to bombing systems and navigation systems. The head of the laboratory simply told us, "On Monday, I want you to start designing a radar bombing system."

That, really, was something I objected to. Just being told, "Next Monday you are going to do something completely different, and you are going to do some engineering and make a system." But, on the other hand, the war was coming. I recognized that and felt that everyone was going to have to pitch in. While it went against the grain so far as my emotions are concerned, in thinking about it I thought, "Everybody is going to have to be doing something before long. I guess it is not too unreasonable." I wish they had done it a little more gently, but it was not too unreasonable that I should get converted into doing something for the war. So that's what we did.

Riess

The idea of rotating you through the possibilities there was that you were going to be free to choose.

Townes

Well, I would have some freedom in choosing. Also, it was all physics pretty much, you see, whereas this was more like system design. So we started in. We worked at it pretty hard, and after about a year we had a system which we put in an airplane and actually used. It worked. Then the military wanted the system upgraded, with a change in wavelength and some other changes, so we built another system. At that point, the military wanted still another upgrading.

These systems never actually got into use during the war, although we provided some ideas for other systems which did. Generally, the military was using simpler systems. Ours was fairly complex and complete. The military was using other systems, most of which were designed up at MIT Radiation Laboratory.

Riess

When you dealt with the military, did you deal with them directly?

Townes

It was generally through the management at Bell Labs, but we did deal with them some directly. The contracts and the agreements to do these things were done by the management at Bell Labs. However, we tested in military planes and we had military test pilots. We went out to Wright Field, for example, and worked out there in their airplanes and dealt with the military firsthand. That was just carrying out the job. We talked with them a great deal about what their needs were, how things were working, what they did in the airplanes, and everything we needed to know in order to design systems properly.

Thinking About Radio Astronomy, and Resistance to New Ideas

Townes

I did a lot of testing down in Florida, with military air bases down in Florida. We would fly out over the Caribbean. We first dropped bombs on a particular ship just outside of Tampa. The ship, which I believe had been a wreck, had been anchored there and we dropped sand bombs on that. Then we later dropped bombs down in the Caribbean. We flew out of Tampa initially that first trip. Later, we flew out of the Air Force base in Boca Raton. I later flew out of the Air Force base near Pensacola, still another place we used.

So I made a lot of trips back and forth. That's where I really started to do some underwater swimming with something like a face plate that I rigged up. Also, in my spare time, I started doing work on astro-physics there. When the plane couldn't fly, or didn't fly, then I had enough time that I could do some other kinds of thinking.

Riess

Thinking work.

Townes

Yes, that's right. The astro-physics I was doing was theoretical at that point. I was trying to understand the generation of radio waves by astro-physical objects, which was not understood really at that time. Eventually I published something on this shortly after the war. I think the first--.

Radio waves coming from outside the Earth had first been discovered at Bell Labs by a man named Jansky in the early thirties. That was a great discovery. Astronomers were not very excited about it nor very interested. Astronomers weren't working on it very much. They were kind of amused, but not interested, I would say.

Riess

Amused?

Townes

Yes. Well, with radio waves coming from out there. That was kind of fun. Radio waves were getting generated, and it wasn't clear quite how.

Riess

Amused? In other words, they were not made curious?

Townes

They were clearly somewhat curious, but very few people were working on it, very few astronomers. They just didn't think it was important, somehow, to astronomy.

Have I ever told you the advice I got after the war on radio astronomy?

Riess

I don't think so, no.

Townes

That was one of the fields that I was thinking of going into after the war. I began thinking about that during the war, as to what I would do after the war. That was one of the fields I thought I might go into, because Bell Labs had good radio equipment, a lot of good experts in radio. I felt that was a good base from which to study radio waves coming from outer space, try to understand them, and use them for astronomy. (The other field I thought of doing, and this also came out of my radar experience and frustration by some wrong choices made by higher-ups during the war, was to do microwave spectroscopy. I recognized that a very powerful type of spectroscopy could be done with microwaves. So those were the two fields I was playing with and expected to follow one or the other.)

Well, on the radio astronomy score, Frances and I made a trip out west somewhere along in '45. I went to see the head of the Palomar-Mount Wilson observatories, who was a former professor at Caltech that I knew very well, a very fine person. He had been very kind to me. He was a very outstanding astro-physicist at that point.

Riess

Who?

Townes

Ira Bowen. He had been one of Millikan's assistants, and then became very prominent himself. He was a member of the National Academy. He was very well-known for certain particular discoveries in astro-physics. He was a good optical person. He was the head of the two observatories there. I thought, well, he could probably give me some reasonable advice about what would be the most important things to try to do with radio waves in this field that I thought would be useful.

I asked him what he felt would be the most important things to look for and try to do, explaining that I thought I had a good opportunity to work in this field at Bell Labs, a natural place to do it. He looked at me and said, "Well, I'm very sorry to tell you, but I just don't think radio waves are ever going to tell us anything about astronomy. I just don't think there is anything to do. The wavelengths are too long. They are not directional, so they can't really tell us anything." Now I felt instinctively that he must be wrong. On the other hand, he wasn't very much help in telling me what would be the most interesting things to try! [laughs]

That is one of a variety of reasons which made me then decide to do microwave spectroscopy at that time. But I had done some theoretical work trying to explain these waves; I think I produced the first really complete theory of what was producing the waves. I published a paper on it at that time. Then I stopped and was busy with microwave spectroscopy.

Riess

You published that paper in the early forties?

Townes

Well, I gave a talk at a meeting, I think in '46. The paper must have come out a year or two later. I had basically done most of it during the latter part of the war when I was still working on the radar bombing system. But that's a picture of how seriously the astronomers took radio waves at that time. Now, you may know, it is a very important part of astronomy.

Riess

Yes. What is your understanding of the resistance?

 

Townes

Well, there is a very interesting phenomenon, that I have run into all my life, that people in a reasonably well-developed field tend to be conservative with respect to new ideas coming in, especially new ideas from people outside the field. You know, "What do they know about it?" is the idea. "We've been working in this field for a long time, so what can they contribute. They are just interlopers and they don't understand." That is a very common kind of reaction for scientists that are in a field that has been reasonably well developed. They are experts. They know a lot more than other people. New ideas coming in from other fields are kind of suspect.

The other aspect of it is that if they are not familiar with the ideas and the technology in this new proposal, they are also uncomfortable with it. Suppose you've been doing something for a long time. You are an expert on how to, let's say, fix an automobile, and suddenly somebody tells you, "Well, it would be a lot better to make automobiles in a completely different way, using completely different things. We don't use gasoline anymore. We are going to use electricity." As a mechanic, would you want to see that introduced? No. Your whole life is devoted to gasoline engines. You don't know much about electrical engines. You would generally resist it.

Riess

Sure, that's human. But astro-physicists are people who are asking super-human questions. I don't think of them as mechanics.

Townes

Well, they are still human. [laughter] They're not mechanics, but they are still human, and all scientists are, of course.

Some fields are more conservative than others. Optical astronomy happens to be a fairly conservative field, but this happens everywhere. Every field has that kind of resistance to something new. But here are these radio waves. They've never worked with radios. They don't know much about electronics. It just kind of impinges on them as something from outside. They don't see what they can do with it, and they don't know how to do anything with it. So the field had to be developed by engineers and physicists, and it was.

In fact, the U.S. missed the field rather broadly. Very few people in the U.S. were interested. It developed in England and Australia from the radar equipment, in part, which was in those countries and the people interested in radar. They had the radar equipment, and this was something good they could try out and do with it. So it initially got going in Great Britain and Australia, primarily. It happened to be a very good radar man who went back to Australia who had a good deal of financial backing and political influence and got radio astronomy going there.

But to indicate to you the problem for astronomers, I remember very well a time when there was a special lecture in Great Britain, a very honorable, famous lecture, and an astronomer named [Jan Hendrik] Oort was asked to give it. Oort was a Dutchman. On the continent, there had been a moderate amount of use of these things, too, and interest in it. Oort was a Dutchman, a very well known astro-physicist, and very highly respected by the astronomers. He was a real astronomer. He gave this talk on radio astronomy. My American astronomical friends were just shocked and surprised. You know, "Oort giving this particular lecture on radio astronomy. Maybe there is something in it. If Oort does that, maybe there is something in it. Maybe we ought to be taking it more seriously." Those were the precise words that I was hearing from astronomers.

The Europeans, the British in particularly, and the Dutch were taking it seriously. The British have gotten a couple of Nobel Prizes in this field, one particularly for development of special techniques to get high angular resolution. But you see, Ira S. Bowen said, "Well you can never get resolution. The waves are too long. You can't really get any clear-cut information." It was a question of understanding the technology and the possibilities well enough. The engineers understood that, and the physicists understood it fairly well, so they were the ones who really developed it. A lot of radio astronomy is done by people who are formerly physicists or engineers.

But astronomers, people really trained in astronomy, are now taking it under their wing, and it is now fairly natural. It is much more natural to them now than it was a generation ago.

Riess

In any case, that closed the door on your thinking?

Townes

That was one of the things which influenced me to say, "Well, I don't know just what is most important to do. Microwave spectroscopy I understand better, and clearly there are some things I like to do there. The fields seem to be equally important." So I decided at that point to do microwave spectroscopy.

Riess

Besides which, you can't go ahead in a field where there is no support.

Townes

That's generally true, excepting remember at that time that the Bell Telephone Laboratories was supporting all the work that I did. They did not get any money from NSF [National Science Foundation]. There wasn't any NSF initially. Bell Laboratories wouldn't be funded by the government to do basic research. They would allow me to do some research, but on their own funds. So I didn't need governmental support. I would have needed Bell Laboratory's support.

Riess

You could see an end to the radar work by 1945?

Townes

Well, there was no real end to the radar work. I wanted to get out of it after the war. I felt, "Well, okay. I'll serve during the war. It was necessary." So I served during the war. As soon as the war was over, I wanted to get back to physics.

Riess

Within Bell Labs?

Townes

Within Bell Labs. Or go to a university, if I had an offer in a university. University jobs were very scarce before the war. They were still fairly scarce immediately after the war. Then, about two or three years after the war, universities began to really open up and expand. The ONR got going in supporting universities. NSF got going, so for a while there were quite a few jobs. But immediately after the war, it wasn't clear to me that there were many university jobs. I expected to stay at Bell Labs, at least for the time being. What I had to do was to persuade Bell Labs to let me do that kind of work.

Wartime Schedule, on the Home Front

Riess

It's interesting that you recall these moments when the weather wasn't good, you couldn't fly, as time to think about astro-physics. What about your weekends? During the war, did you have your nose so close to the grind stone?

Townes

Oh, yes. We were working weekends when needed. It was largely a question of a time scale on when the plane could fly. The plane had to go through certain servicing. Sometimes it was broken down and had to be fixed. Sometimes the pilots had to have a little rest. So we were sort of working any time when we could work. But there were also times that we were shut down.

We weren't working eight hour days. We had no such clear-cut schedule. We were just working as hard as we could to get things done. That was what everybody was doing during the war if they were working on military equipment. Everybody was pretty devoted to really trying to see it through and get the war over. So we had no specific schedule, but there were times when we just couldn't work because of the flying schedule.

Riess

But you didn't sit down and read a mystery.

Townes

Mystery stories? No. [laughter] I find physics a good deal more interesting.

Riess

I see.

Townes

I did a lot of swimming and, as I say, some underwater work. I'd look at birds. But then I had some time I spent thinking about physical and scientific problems.

Riess

Did you stay in touch with people who were in the fields that interested you? You were in New York City, so you were close to Columbia during all those years.

Townes

I stayed in touch with many scientists. Again, you have to realize that scientists weren't doing science during that period. Columbia University's main activity was a microwave laboratory, making magnetrons in the physics department. Scientists in the universities pitched into the war effort. A large number of the best scientists were at MIT. Another large fraction of them were at Los Alamos. I knew where they were and who they were, and I kept in touch with them. But they largely were not in the universities.

People left in the universities were generally less important people. They had to keep up the teaching somehow. I remember a particular professor at Columbia who was a very nice person, taught well. I remember the head of the department sort of explaining to me, in the way of apology, he just had to hire this person because he didn't have enough teachers. She wasn't really the research type, but during the war he just had to find some teachers somehow. All the research-type people were doing things for the war.

Riess

Did you say "she?"

Townes

It was a she, yes.

Riess

So there were more "she's" teaching, perhaps, during the war?

Townes

Possibly. There weren't many women in physics at that time, very few women in physics. But she was in physics, and her husband was also in physics. He taught in New York City University.

Riess

But they wouldn't have had the research facilities or graduate students to do major research?

Townes

Not so many graduate students. Their job was teaching. A lot of it was teaching military people who took quick courses in enough science and technology so that they could work in the field. University research was largely shut down during World War II.

The Bomb, and the End of the War

Riess

What did you know of "the bomb?" And when?

Townes

Well, it was of course in one sense a deep secret. On the other hand, 1939 I remember very well--. I was a student at Caltech, and the discovery of fission was announced. Immediately we started talking. Max Delbruck, who was from Germany, was a post-doc person then. He was a non-Nazi. He had come over to switch to biology. He became a very famous biologist. But he was a good friend of mine, and I remember talking with him about it, that it seemed highly probable that a bomb could be made. That was 1939. One couldn't tell for sure. We didn't know just how many neutrons were coming off it. It hadn't been measured, but it looked highly probable that you could get an enormous amount of energy out of this, and a bomb could be made, and explosions, and so on. So there was talk like that among physicists.

Then, suddenly, everything was hushed up. We knew, of course, why. I had friends who were working on these things. When I went out to Bell Labs, there was a good friend of mine, Foster Nix, who was working up at one of the centers at Columbia University. Now, Columbia University worked on isotope separation and other aspects of the bomb. Then that work got moved to Chicago. [Enrico] Fermi was at Columbia University at that time and was working on this. Then the whole group got moved to Chicago as a center with rather more space. So they collected a lot of people to Chicago. But what work was going on at Columbia, some of it was that.

This friend of mine kept helping them out, working in the field. He would always say enough so I knew quite well how far along it was and what was going on, even though it was all supposed to be a deep secret. I knew which friends had gone to Los Alamos, and so on.

Riess

"Gone away?" Or, you knew they went to Los Alamos?

Townes

Yes, I knew where they were.

Riess

You knew because of cryptic comments?

Townes

Yes, they would say enough. You know, we all trusted each other. We were all working on the war. People said things that, perhaps, strictly speaking they shouldn't, but it was among friends. They would disappear somewhere. What are they going to say? They had to explain themselves somehow. Generally, it was not hard to tell what was going on and pretty much how far along things were.

Riess

When you talked to Delbruck about it, did either of you realize what a big bomb it would be?

Townes

Oh, yes. That was easy to calculate. Of course, Fermi almost immediately calculated it, and I think told his friends before it was supposed to be deep secret. He said, "A mass of fissionable material of this size could blow up Manhattan." It was easy to calculate.

Riess

Did it instantly become an ethical question?

Townes

Ethical? What do you mean? You mean whether or not anybody should ever make one?

Riess

Yes.

Townes

No. At that point, people were so eager to win the war that that was the biggest ethical question, to get the war finished, save lives. That was the big question. Very few people questioned building the bomb at that time. Stopping that war, which was a terribly destructive thing, and saving lives by doing that was the first thought. Well, you would worry about other things later.

I remember very well, I was at Whippany, which was a branch laboratory of Bell Labs. I was working there on a Saturday. I remember being in a little hut where we had some equipment, and I was listening to the radio. I heard an announcement that the bomb had gone off in Japan, and I said, "Well, I can stop work for today."

[long silence]

It's still an emotional thing. But I said, "Well, I don't have to worry about this anymore. It's over."

Riess

That relief is what you are re-experiencing now?

Townes

Yes.

Riess

You think about lives saved and life going forward.

Townes

Yes. There were a few people who raised questions in, I think, some semi-official form. But they still were not against building the bomb. They were more in favor of demonstrating it and trying to scare the Japanese into giving up. I felt that, too. I was not in that business directly myself, so I never said anything publicly about it. I felt that would be the sensible thing to try. But that was not Truman's decision, and I don't know whether it would have worked. To me, it was just an enormous relief to hear the thing had worked. As I say, I felt, "Well, the war is over now."

Riess

I'm sure you've talked and thought a lot about all of that.

Townes

Well, we've had to deal with it ever since.

Riess

Yes, that's right. And not dropping it wouldn't have made any difference about that.

Townes

That's right. Well, the fact that it could be made meant that eventually it certainly would be made by some nation. We've had to worry about it ever since. We'll continue to have to worry about it. In fact, I have just been on a congressional committee to try to review safety problems in our own nuclear arsenal. There are some. Most scientists are eager to try to help out and try to see that they are controlled. But the idea that people would be against building it at that time, that's just post-hoc reasoning.

Riess

Max Delbruck wrote an interesting book, Mind From Matter. I wonder if he was exploring these questions at that same time when you knew him?

Townes

Well, he tended always to be somewhat philosophical in his approach, his viewpoint. I wouldn't say he was exploring that. He was just getting into biology, doing work on phages, and he had a rationale why phages were the thing for a physicist to start out on. But he was doing biology. Of course, he did some very fine work on that.

I think the mood during the war is hard for people to imagine now, and I think we have to keep this in perspective. Whether you are for or against a war depends a lot on the particular situation, what the threat is. I don't know whether I mentioned this story. During the war, I was walking along Times Square in New York with my boss. Not Dean Wooldridge, but the person on top of him, [Walter] McNair, an elderly gentleman. We were walking along Times Square, and somebody came up to me and said, "You're not in uniform. That's wrong. A man your age ought to be in uniform. You ought to be helping out." And so on. Most people my age were in uniform. McNair then tried to explain, and to see that my feelings weren't hurt, and said, "After all, you are doing very important things for the war. It's okay not to be in uniform." [laughter] That argument never touched me one way or the other. I knew why I wasn't in uniform.

But that was the national attitude. Everybody ought to be in there, and doing things. Very different from what you would find today. "You shouldn't have anything to do with the military," is a rather common attitude about Berkeley. And I remember back at Caltech, when these demonstrations were being carried on on the Caltech campus. A professor who had been in World War I, he said, "Well, just wait until the time really comes when we need to fight. Those people will change around completely. They will change 180 degrees. They are just emotionalists. They'll be for whatever strikes them at that time." That was essentially true. Popular feeling just turned around completely after we got attacked, after the attack at Pearl Harbor.

---

7. VII Columbia University, 1948-1955

Quadrupole Moments of Nuclei

Townes

After the war, Columbia got going again in physics. Rabi came back from MIT Laboratories. Bill Nierenberg, I remember, was a student there, and I used to see something of him and others who were working in the field, somewhat related to microwave spectroscopy, which I was doing. So at that point, after the war, I became fairly familiar with Columbia University and what was going on there. Norman Ramsey was at Columbia at that point doing molecular beam spectroscopy. Rabi was working with radio waves. I was working with still shorter waves. Columbia also had a microwave laboratory where Professor [W.E.] Lamb was working and did his famous work on the hydrogen atom. That was something I was personally interested in and, in fact, would have done maybe if he hadn't already started it. So there were physicists working there. Physicists at Harvard were also working in fields closely related to what I was interested in at that time. I got to know all of those people.

Now, another thing that I happened to be interested in, growing out of molecular work, was the shapes of nuclei, otherwise and technically known as the "quadrupole moments" of nuclei. Basically, it's a question of whether they are flattened or elongated and how much. You probably have heard the word "dipole." Quadrupole is simply a slightly more complicated kind of thing. Instead of a dipole, this has four poles in it.

I had found a way from my molecular work to measure the quadrupole moments of nuclei. Now Rabi had been working on that a good deal, so I talked with the Columbia University people about it. Brookhaven was relatively new. I remember going out to Brookhaven. It would have been the summer of 1947. There was a conference called on just this subject, the quadrupole moments of nuclei. Various people talked. Ramsey gave a talk. Rabi gave a talk, and I gave a talk. After my talk, Rabi got up and said, "Well, Charlie, that's a very pretty picture you are drawing, but there is absolutely no science in it. There just is no scientific basis for it." [laughter]

He was an outspoken person. I knew already that he did not agree with what I was doing. I thought I understood very well why he didn't agree, and that he just wasn't very well up on molecular properties. So I asked him, "Specifically what objections do you have?" Then he floundered around a bit, and he couldn't really bring up anything. He just really didn't know molecular structure. It happened I had at Bell Labs, with some of my colleagues in the seminar group, Dean Wooldridge, Bill Shockley, Jim Fisk, and others, had just been through Pauling's book on molecular bonds and molecular structure, so I felt fairly knowledgeable about it. It was clear to me that Rabi had not really understood molecular structure very well, so it was easy for me to answer any questions that he really had. [laughter] But he was quite strong in his objections and continued to be for a long time.

Job Offer and Decision

Townes

However, then we broke up. This was kind of a morning session at Brookhaven. Then we went out to the beach late that afternoon swimming, and Rabi said, "How would you like to come to Columbia." He offered me a job. [laughter] So you see, while he could attack very strongly, he knew what he was doing in some cases.

Of course, I was interested. I agreed to go, but I wanted to finish up some of the things I was doing at Bell Labs, so I put it off until January 1 to go there. Harvey Fletcher, head of the physics department at Bell Labs first said, "Well, if you are going to go, you ought to go." I said, "Well, look. I am in the middle of things here, some experiments I would like to finish." He said, "Okay, that's fine. Go ahead and do it that way."

Riess

What's that "If you're going to you ought to go?" Is that sort of petulant?

Townes

Yes, it was clear he was angry that I would leave them. [laughs] But he retracted and said, "Okay, if you have some good things to do, and it's a bad time to interrupt things, why fine."

Riess

Could they have created a joint situation?

Townes

They could have. But they weren't doing it then, and I was a pretty young man then. You know, I think a more senior person, a well-established senior, a well-known person at Columbia University, they might have had some kind of regular exchange with. For a younger person, that would hardly happen.

Riess

Actually, you were thirty.

Townes

Yes, I was, in fact, thirty-one or thirty-two.

Riess

Were you feeling like you needed to make your big move in physics, on the theory that it all happens between twenty and thirty?

Townes

No, I've never felt that. Also, experimentalists, you know, usually develop later than theorists. A theorist should do something by the early thirties, certainly. Experimentalists generally develop more slowly and last longer. It is just the nature of the field. You need more skills development. It's a different kind of approach.

Anyhow, the work I had done by then had become quite notable. It was highly regarded and very well-known, but I still was not a very senior person at thirty or thirty-two, and wouldn't be the kind of person that Bell Labs would ask to generally give them advice. I was still pretty junior from the point of view of age. They were, at that time, having--. Let's see. [Peter] Debye came regularly to Bell Labs for a while, and Slater. Debye was at Cornell then. Slater from MIT came regularly to Bell Labs. They would come once or twice a month, and they would talk with people, and listen to talks, and comment. But these were people who were in their fifties or late fifties.

Riess

Would they join your tea group, when someone was there?

Townes

No. They didn't do it that way. What they did was to invite in people in a given area of Bell Labs, a given field of work at Bell Labs. They would invite them all in to come and talk about what they were doing. They would give some criticism and comments and so on. So they were having interaction with university people at that time, but a very different kind of age group.

Riess

That's interesting. Brookhaven had, I read, a thousand staff, including two hundred visitors from surrounding academic and industrial labs.

Townes

Of course, I visited on the occasion of that talk, but I wouldn't have visited there more permanently. Being at an industrial laboratory, I wouldn't have gone out there for the summer or anything like that. After I went to Columbia, then I did go there during the summers, and I was pretty closely connected with them for some time. I worked there in the summers. One summer I worked there, Walter Knight, who is here at Berkeley, was a young student, just getting his Ph.D. degree. He had discovered something quite interesting, and he and I published a paper together at that point.

I guess I went out there several summers, and I would take the family out. It was a nice place to work and the children could get on the beach. I certainly was still going there as late as 1950 or '51. I saw a lot of Brookhaven. I was on some sort of advisory committees formed later, too.

Riess

What was the offer from Columbia?

Townes

It was associate professor with tenure. As I remember, by then my salary had gotten up to $7,000 or $8,000 a year. That was quite adequate. Of course, I had a family by then, a couple of children. That was an adequate salary. Columbia offered me $6,000 for the academic year, with a chance to earn $2,000 more by working in the summer.

Riess

Did you plan to settle in? You were there for quite a stretch, and yet your pattern has been to change.

Townes

Almost always, I have gone to a place expecting to stay there more or less indefinitely. At Bell Labs I thought, well, I'd probably be there for quite a while. If a good offer at a university came along I would go, but I had no special time scale. I expected to be at Columbia more or less indefinitely. I did get an offer from Berkeley, which was very attractive to me. I've always liked Berkeley better than New York City.

Riess

That was in 1949 or so?

Townes

It was probably 1950. I remember I had been at Columbia for two years--it might have been a year-and-a-half, something like that--and I felt, "Well, it's too inefficient to change laboratories at this point." I had just gotten well started in building up a laboratory at Columbia. I had too much to do. I didn't want to start over again and come out here. I would lose six months or a year of time. So that's basically the reason the I didn't come. I would have liked to have come out to Berkeley.

Riess

Is it the actual physical laboratory, or is it the accumulation of students that are working with you when you say you "built up a laboratory?"

Townes

Oh, it's the equipment, constructing the equipment and making things work so I could start physical measurements.

Riess

It takes that much time?

Townes

Oh, it can take six months or a year, very easily. For bigger equipment, it can take much longer. It can take five years to build up large scale equipment and make it work.

Riess

When Rabi said, "Come to Columbia," then you assumed they would support a lab.

Townes

Of course, I talked in more detail about that, how much money there would be to support what I was doing. They had a certain amount of money that could be allocated to my work, and a certain number of fellowships for students that could work with me. It was quite adequate.

Office of Naval Research, and National Science Foundation Support

Townes

Columbia Radiation Laboratory, for that time, was well supported by the joint services. It had an overall budget that was just given to it every year. The story is that when they approached Columbia--Columbia had been doing magnetron work--the Signal Corps approached Columbia and said, "Wouldn't you be willing to keep this laboratory going, and do some physics with it. We can give you some money." They said, "We could give you a half-million dollars a year." Rabi said, "Oh, that's too much," so they cut it down some. [laughter] In general, it was generously supported. We had what money we needed.

As time went on, it began to be a little more restrictive, but I didn't have to go ask anybody for anymore money. It was just there. It was arranged by the university and by the physics department. I didn't have to go look for money myself, the way one has to do now typically. It was a little bit more like Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in the early days when the overall money came in. E. O. Lawrence and others brought it in, and the younger people could just work. They got supported, and they didn't have to go after money.

I did still know some of the military, and I guess maybe they looked on the laboratory kindly partly because I was there, but I would say more it was the nature of the work. They felt that they wanted to support it.

Riess

This was already the Cold War. What was the public attitude about the work of physicists?

Townes

After World War II, there was a very marked change in the public attitude toward physics in particular, and to science in general, but especially towards physics. To the public, physics had produced radar, and it had produced the bomb. Those were powerful and popular at that time. The bomb was a thing that we had and that other people didn't have. This kept the United States in the forefront and kept the Russian threat down. Physicists suddenly were popular in dinner parties. Everybody wanted to talk to a physicist and find out something. [laughter]

Riess

What made them think they could? [laughs]

Townes

It was just a curiosity. Physicists were in the newspapers. Prior to the war, nobody knew what physics was, outside of the intellectuals and people who were interested in science. After the war, suddenly physics was popular, and physicists were popular. There was a lot of good feeling towards science. Again, the military at that time was still in favor, too.

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) really saved American science after World War II. They began to support science in the Universities on the basis that good science was very important to the military generally. Alan Waterman, who had been a professor at Yale, was head of this effort. He was pretty wise about convincing the military that U.S. science was important. This was just enormously important to the saving and the buildup of the physical sciences in United States universities. They were the big supporter of university research for quite a while. The Air Force and the Army did some too, and the Columbia University Laboratory in particular was supported jointly by the three of them. But the Navy was really the foresighted group, headed by Waterman.

The spirit of that, and how it was done, was really part of the reason that NSF got going. NSF was formed--. I guess Vannevar Bush, it was one of his suggestions, but I am not completely clear about who suggested it first. Then Alan Waterman became head of the new NSF because he had done such a good job at ONR. When NSF got going, then ONR didn't have to take all of the load, and gradually the military decreased the fraction of fundamental research that they were supporting in the universities.

Of course, finally we came up to the sixties when the military were forbidden by law to support basic research that didn't contribute directly to some kind of military weapon, or military effort. That was a law by a senator from one of the western states, Idaho or Montana, who then became ambassador to Japan. I can't think of his name right now. I think it was a great mistake, but it fulfilled the feelings of the sixties. The military could not support basic research unless it was clear it had a direct importance to their mission. They then kind of pulled out a lot of support from the universities.

Now they are back again. They can do it again, but they don't have as much money. The law has been changed again. It was finally recognized that such a rigid rule was a mistake.

Riess

Was it that they wanted to turn that money into flowers and butter and social work?

Townes

No, I think it was largely that the military should not be so influential in our society, and the universities in particular. That if the scientist had to depend on the military for support, they would all be prejudiced towards the military. The military would be running the universities and telling them what to do. That was not wanted, which is certainly true. You don't want that. But actually, that wasn't happening anyhow.

Riess

Is that because there are built-in safeguards, or because in this country, that wouldn't happen?

Townes

Well, most decent universities and decent scientists--I don't mean decent in an ethical sense, but I mean good universities and good scientists that are doing academic work--wouldn't tolerate it. They wouldn't tolerate having the military tell them what to do. Some of these sort of third-rate places might listen to the military if they told them they wanted to them do this and that. They would perhaps do it. But not the big universities. It was not a problem in the big universities. But symbolically it was a problem, and that is the reason this law was passed.

Living in New York City, 1939: Marriage to Frances Brown

Riess

Let me pick up on your personal life at this time. You were married. Tell me about meeting Fran.

Townes

Well, let's see. When I went to New York I rented a room, sort of a rental by the week or by the month. I first lived down in Greenwich Village, because that is where Bell Laboratories was, on West Street. It was close to them, and Greenwich Village was a nice place to live. But I made a point of every three months I would move.

Riess

[laughter] This is something our readers will have a hard time conceiving of.

Townes

The reason is that I wanted to get acquainted with the larger New York. Most people don't realize that New York really is a series of villages, each very different in flavor. So I lived in Greenwich Village for three months. Then I lived up in Morningside Heights--well, not strictly Morningside Heights, but next to Columbia University for three months. Then I lived down in Midtown near the American Museum [of Natural History]. I would simply put all my stuff in a trunk, get a taxi, move to a new place, and get acquainted with that neighborhood.

Now, this is in part my style. I like to explore new things; just because they are new, I want to see them and see what they are like. I also was studying voice at that time at Juilliard, which was up in the Columbia University region, right next to Columbia and the International House. I was studying voice, and I was singing in a church over in Brooklyn for a while.

Riess

In a choir, or were you singing solos?

Townes

I was in a choir. I did some solos, but in a choir.

The room I rented up near Columbia University was on a floor of a small building where there were about six or seven rooms rented out to individual single people who lived in these rooms. They were all musicians except for myself. I thought that was interesting. One of them was a conductor who had had some considerable experience. He had come back for more training. There were people playing different instruments. I had a little piano in my room so I could practice voice.

Now let me say, I was not serious about being a musician. I simply liked it and wanted to try that, too. I enjoyed taking voice there and seeing what I could do.

Riess

You weren't measuring the intervals and the harmonics?

Townes

Well, I took some music theory at nights, too. But it was just like languages. I enjoyed languages. I enjoyed music. I did some studying on them, but I never expected it to be serious as a profession or anything.

So I was living in that area, and Frances [Brown] was working at International House. Jobs were very tough then, and she had a family connection--somebody knew some people at International House. She'd left New Hampshire and got a job in New York. She just wanted to see it. She, I suppose like me, wanted to explore something new, and she wasn't going to stay up in northern New Hampshire where she was brought up. So she came to New York without a job, and, again through family connections, she got a job as a receptionist in a law firm, a very fancy law firm. Then she got this opportunity at International House. She was director of activities, the activities director at International House.

One of the things she organized was a ski trip. There was a friend of mine who, with his girlfriend, was going on this trip. Frances didn't have quite enough people to pay for the bus. She asked them was there anybody else around that might be interested in going. I knew both this chap and his girlfriend, who was a dancer. I had known them out at Caltech. Apparently she said, "Well, Charlie Townes is around. I know him. Why don't you call him?" So Frances called me and asked whether I would be interested in going on a ski trip that weekend. I said, "Sure." We went on a ski trip together, and that is how we first met.

Riess

Had there been a girlfriend in the picture before?

Townes

I had had a girlfriend or two out on the West Coast, yes, but none of them were very serious.

Riess

Did you have a life plan at that point that included marriage?

Townes

Oh, I was sure I would get married. I was looking around for the right person, sort of, but I was not active. [laughter] That was not a first priority for me, but that was something I was interested in. I felt sure I wanted to have a family and wanted to get married. It was just a question of when, and when I would run into the right person.

Riess

Would it ever have occurred to you that the ideal person would be another physicist, a female physicist?

Townes

Not particularly. Female physicists were very scarce. They were very scarce. I know of no female physicist at Caltech when I was there.

 

Riess

It could be one sort of brilliant two o'clock-in-the-morning conversation after another.

Townes

Well, my own thinking is quite different from that. I would have favored somebody with a different background and different interests. Just because, again, I feel there is virtue in diversity. I really would not have been especially attracted to somebody who was in exactly the same field. I see those kind of people all the time. Why should I want to see another one at home, particularly?

Riess

[laughter] Right.

Townes

So I wouldn't have been oriented that way, but there were essentially no females in physics at that time. There are a few now, but physics is still one of the least-favored sciences, so far as women are concerned. Astronomy is much more so.

We had a good time together on the trip. We picked up little Filipinos who were trying to learn to ski and had fallen in the snow and so on from International House. So we got acquainted there, and we continued to see each other for quite a while.

Riess

Did Frances have career ambitions at that point?

Townes

She liked International House, but she had no special profession. She had majored in Italian. She liked art, and she had spent her junior year abroad in Italy. She also spent a year in France. So she liked languages. But she had no specific professional training or expectations of what she was going to do. I think she was very well suited for the activities at International House. She was sort of internationally oriented, and very good with people, so she might have continued on doing that for quite a while.

We got married in the spring of '41. We planned to get married earlier that year, which was about a year after we had met--. The summer of 1940 I had taken a trip with her family up into Canada. Her family were Browns, and they ran the Brown Company, although the Brown Company was in financial difficulty then due to the Depression.

Riess

What was the Brown Company?

Townes

The Brown Company was a lumber and paper company. Her father was in charge of the woods part of the paper company, in particular. He was a forester. They did a lot in conservation, and so on. So they had lots of acreage up in Quebec, with nice lakes on them. There was a cottage that belonged to the company where people could stay. So I took a trip with her family during the summer of '40.

Then we got engaged sometime in very early '41, maybe late '40, and were going to be married in the winter. But my mother couldn't come to the wedding because one of my sisters was having her first baby, and my mother felt she had to be there. So we postponed it until May. We got married in May, and then my parents could come.

Riess

You had been living out of a trunk up to this point. Were you the kind of a person who really didn't care about his surroundings?

Townes

Yes. I'm not fussy about my surroundings as long as I can live. I'm accustomed to living quite simply. It was as good as most other people at that time. I didn't feel deprived at all.

Riess

When you lived in your various apartments, did you perhaps put one or two paintings on the wall that you liked very well, one or two things?

Townes

As a matter of fact, I had quite a few. I had a collection of prints from the Metropolitan. I had framed a certain number of them. I would change them every few weeks. I had paintings up, yes.

Riess

In other words, you looked at them. They didn't just become background.

Townes

No. That's one reason I made a point of changing them. As you see, I am kind of geared to change in a sense. I don't like sameness all the time. So I had prints up, and I would change them regularly and see a different set. My quarters were not unattractive, but they certainly weren't fancy.

Choice of a Place of Worship

Riess

When you met Frances was religion important to both of you?

Townes

Frances was not very religious. Her family was not very religious. She was interested, but she had not been very much attached to the church. She turned in that direction after we were married, actually. She was very sympathetic and kind of interested, but not active at all and not a regular member of any church.

Riess

Had you been attending--?

Townes

We'd attended church together, Riverside Church, for example.

Riess

But I mean before. When you were at Bell Labs, for instance, did you seek out a church in New York?

Townes

Yes, I attended churches fairly regularly.

Riess

Did you change churches in the same way?

Townes

I did, as a matter of fact, I would change churches, too. I liked Riverside Church, and I went there a good deal, Riverside Church in New York.

Riess

That's Presbyterian?

Townes

No. That was originally northern Baptist, sponsored by Rockefeller, who was a Baptist.

Riess

Northern Baptist?

Townes

Northern Baptist. It's very different from Southern Baptist. But then they became allied, I believe, to the Methodists and became somewhat inter-denominational. Let's see, yes, I think they joined with the Methodists. After [Harry Emerson] Fosdick, who was their most famous minister, the minister after that was a Presbyterian. So it was kind of inter-denominational.

Riess

Did you experiment with different faiths?

Townes

Well, I was never particularly tied to any one sect. I always felt Protestant. I was never attracted to Catholicism, or any of the eastern religions. I liked to learn about them, but I never felt attached to them at all. Most of the Protestant groups I felt reasonably at home with, and it didn't make all that much difference to me whether it was a Lutheran, or Baptist, Methodist, or Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregationalist. As we've moved around, we almost always join a different denomination. We just pick whatever church seems to be the best one in the place. I have been almost everything by now.

Riess

So the best one is the best pastor?

Townes

Yes. Or, when we had children, it was also the one that had the good Sunday school. So it's just the best overall for the family. As I say, I have been almost everything except Catholic. Almost everything Protestant we've been by now.

Riess

That is not a stretch of the imagination, or the faith, to change Protestant religions?

Townes

No, not for me. My religion is pretty far from fundamentalism. I think many of the special attributes of particular sects don't particularly move me one way or the other. I can tolerate them, but I don't particularly like them. Episcopalianism, I guess, is the one that appeals to me less because of the formalities. I don't like a lot of rituals and formalities. They just don't appeal to me particularly. On the other hand, I have been a member of an Episcopalian church. I can tolerate it. Frances really likes it rather better. In cases where she likes it very much, then I can tolerate it.

Riess

I am curious. When you go to church on Sunday, what do you expect to have happen in that hour, hour-and-a-half?

Townes

Well, I do a good deal of meditation. I hope for a thoughtful and challenging sermon. If there is good music too, that's just great.

Riess

Have you found thoughtful and challenging sermons?

Townes

Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't. I would have to say the church that I am with right now is weak in that respect. When we moved to Berkeley, they previously had a minister that I thought was quite good. At the Riverside Church, I always felt Fosdick was really quite good, challenging, thoughtful. Some of the other ministers were, too. So I frequently find good ministers, but not always.

Riess

What does it "challenge" when you say challenging?

Townes

Thoughtfulness, behavior.

Riess

Your own personal way of being in the world?

Townes

Yes.

Riess

It doesn't challenge your scientific beliefs.

Townes

[laughter] No.

Riess

That's really interesting.

[tape interruption]

Townes

The Quaker church I find useful. I don't prefer it over all, or for a long time, but I like to go to Quaker churches occasionally. I go to Catholic churches on occasion, and others, just to kind of see what they are like.

---

Experiments with Absorption of 11/4 cm. Radio Waves by Ammonia

---

Riess

By the early 1950s you were at Columbia and you were working on microwave spectroscopy. Why don't you start with that?

Townes

All right. Well, I'm not sure we got very much on the origins of microwave spectroscopy, which occurred during the war, and which, I think, is of some importance in leading up to this. We talked about it a little bit--about the Bell Labs--but I think it would be well to start in that period, and then I won't talk so much about my moving to Columbia, but just about the nature of the field and how ideas came up.

[tape interruption]

Petit

[For the purposes of the book, I'll want to know about how] energy levels of molecules and atoms are exploited, and so I need to understand it, so I'll interrupt.

Townes

All right, I'll get a double interview. [laughs]

Well I, of course, was working on radar during World War II, and we were going to shorter and shorter wavelengths. I was a little annoyed in particular that the military were not using the things they asked me and our group to develop in radar navigation bombing systems. We developed one at 10 cm. and then they said, "Well, that's very nice, that's fine, that works, but we really would like to move to 3 cm. now," and so we made one for that. Then they wanted to move to 11/4 cm. I felt it was, each time, putting it off. In fact, I almost decided that, well, I wasn't being very useful in helping the war effort and maybe I ought to go do something else, but I was persuaded to stay and stick with it. However, I looked at the 11/4 cm. problem just to be sure that it was going to work, recognizing that there was a possibility of absorption in the atmosphere.

Now absorption of microwaves by molecules, I suppose, probably started with experiments back in the '30s at the University of Michigan. People there recognized from other spectroscopy that there should be an inversion of ammonia--ammonia turning itself inside-out--at a frequency which is just about at this wavelength: 11/4 cm. So a couple of physicists, Cleeton and Williams, at the University of Michigan, decided that they would try to demonstrate this, and they used magnetrons very early--it was really a pioneering experiment--used very early magnetrons which they built, and they got big bags of ammonia and sent the waves through these big bags of ammonia at atmospheric pressure. They showed that, sure enough, the ammonia did absorb at that wavelength. Now, it was a very broad absorption, not very specific as to wavelength. It's clear that it was centered at 11/4 cm., but it was almost 100 percent broad. That was an important experiment.

Well now, during the war people were kind of playing with ammonia a bit, since better magnetrons had been developed. We also had klystrons at 11/4 cm., we had the technology, and some of the engineers were just playing with ammonia showing yes, it did absorb. So people were aware that gasses absorbed, but what woke me up was a memorandum written by [John] Van Vleck of Harvard University. It was an informal memorandum, not published, but sort of passed around by people interested in radar, pointing out that there was a transition in the water molecule at about this frequency. It wasn't exactly known, but it could be deduced from infrared measurements, and Van Vleck pointed out that it was this transition of water which could absorb 11/4 cm., and he estimated intensity and what would happen and said, "Well, this could give some trouble." Well, I read that with great interest and thought about it a good deal.

Van Vleck and [Victor] Weisskopf also did some work along about that time--maybe they published just before the war--on theory of line widths, that is, the width of a spectral resonance; how wide a range of frequencies a molecule might absorb. They discussed it in a fairly broad way, but in particular putting in collisions in gasses as one of the ways in which the lines become broad. I knew about that paper and I read it, and I knew about the work of Cleeton and Williams, and two things interested me particularly. One was the worry that water vapor would kill this radar because there would be too much absorption, and, as I thought more about it, the other was that, according to the Van Vleck-Weisskopf line width theory, as one decreased the pressure of the gas, the lines would simply get narrower and narrower and narrower, until finally they were down to a Doppler width.

Now, at this point it seems--

Petit

Could you stop and describe what it is that the atom or the molecule absorbs in microwaves? Is it in the electron energy levels, or is it in the vibrational mode, or both?

Townes

It's usually rotation. It's usually end-over-end rotational molecules. That rotates at a microwave frequency.

Petit

So when you said the ammonia turns itself inside-out--?

Townes

No, that's a very different motion. That's a very different motion. The ammonia is built like an umbrella: nitrogen and three hydrogens around it, and it literally turns itself inside-out, the same way as an umbrella can. The ammonia oscillates back and forth through the plane of the hydrogens, just inverting itself.

Petit

There is a conformational change in the molecule.

Townes

Complete conformational change. Very unusual, and this is why it was so striking, and why physicists went after it to try to prove it and measure it.

Petit

Now I interrupted you saying that this water vapor absorption should narrow as the pressure goes down.

Townes

Yes. Any molecular transition would narrow as the pressure goes down and, at this point, it seems obvious it wasn't such a strange idea at the time, but what was strange about it was the extension of that which I quickly saw might be done: to go into very, very low pressures, and get exceedingly sharp, narrow lines.

The reason nobody had gone into that before was because they had been working at higher frequencies in other realms where they could never take advantage of this very narrow line width because they did not have narrow enough sources of radiation, for example, to excite the molecules. There were various other reasons, but that was one of them. Now, in the microwave region, I had oscillators that had very, very specific frequencies, so you could measure very, very narrow lines, and I immediately saw that this could provide a very accurate kind of spectroscopy and something I might like to do. I had some arguments about it with the people at Bell Labs--they weren't quite sure this was right--but they eventually were convinced.

I studied this problem quite thoroughly because, in the first place, I guess emotionally, I didn't want to have to transfer to a complete new system with 11/4 cm. wavelengths, but secondly, I was very concerned about it--the feeling that people had not properly taken this into account in making the choice of that wavelength in deciding to build a new radar there, which was supposed to help the military, especially on the Japanese front in the Pacific, because the war with Germany was sort of coming to an end. I kept pointing this out to my superiors at Bell Laboratories, and to some of the military people, some of the people in Washington and eventually I remember some character in Washington said, "Well, you know, you may be right, but we've already made the decision, we can't stop now. You just might as well relax about it." Well, the radar was built, it was tried out, and it didn't work; there was water vapor absorption.

Petit

How far did it go before it attenuated out?

Townes

How far did it go?

Petit

At ten miles it was all gone, or what?

Townes

That depends on how much water vapor there is in the atmosphere. But a few miles is about as much as one could expect, and it was much, much too limited then for search over the ocean for ships or anything like that.

Riess

When you made these suggestions, were they in the form of memos?

Townes

No, no. I just talked to people. I don't think I wrote any memos. I might have written something--a letter to, something like that. No, I just talked with people. I talked with Rabi who was in up at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, I talked with people at Bell Labs, I talked with people in Washington. I remember talking with some British representatives, because the British and the Americans were very close then, working together on this system. But "Well, they were just hoping, keeping their fingers crossed that it was okay." They weren't really taking it as seriously as they should have.

Petit

What would have been the theoretical advantage of a 11/4 cm. wavelength radar?

Townes

It's simply that you get more directivity with a smaller antenna. You get more directivity, and they wanted directivity, and they wanted smaller antennas on their aircraft and so on. Basically, it was a good idea if the transmission through the atmosphere had been satisfactory.

All of this, of course, keyed up my interest in molecular spectra. I was also thinking about radio-astronomy a bit at the same time, but I was very interested in molecular spectra and the possibility of doing some spectroscopy, which I thought I foresaw there. Some spectroscopy of a very unusual type with exceedingly high precision. So, by the end of the war I proposed to Bell Laboratories that I do that, and after some resistance, they accepted. My sales pitch to them was that molecules interact with waves so you've got to know about them. And they may in the long run provide circuit elements because of this interaction; they can do things similar to resistors and capacitances and so on. You just use molecules which, as you get to shorter wavelengths, are going to be more and more important because interaction gets stronger as you go to shorter wavelengths. They kind of bought that, for a while. At least they let me look into it.

Another advantage of that radar system, however, was that having collapsed so far as being useful to the military was concerned, there was suddenly abundantly available lots of klystrons and wave guides and equipment and detectors at this wavelength. You could get them for nothing; they were just kind of lying around. In fact, I remember buying a few klystrons down on the sidewalk in lower New York city where they are sort of sold as spare junk, you know, military junk. [laughter] Very expensive things these days, and would have been then if you'd had to buy them fresh.

So that provided a very good background for the birth of microwave spectroscopy, and I immediately went to work on ammonia as being a very strong absorber. I wanted to see what happened as you pumped that down and got very low pressure, see if you really got high resolution very narrow spectra.

Petit

Did you work alone, or did you have grad students or technicians, or were you sitting in a windowless office? How did that work?

Townes

I had a laboratory, with windows. Sometime soon after I started, I had a technician to help me. A person with a high school degree only, but a perfectly bright young man, helpful. And I published papers with him, too. I started out on it alone. Bell Laboratories then gave me this technician to work with me, and eventually another person that would work with me some.

Riess

After the war was over, did the team break up at Bell Labs?

Townes

Oh, yes. Everything was reshuffled. A lot of things were reshuffled. My immediate boss was Dean Wooldridge, and he was brought back into physics at Bell Labs immediately when the war stopped. I wasn't, because as I mentioned last time they required me to stay on for about six months to finish design of this new bombing system, which I didn't want to do, but they insisted, and I agreed to do that much and then they would let me come back to physics.

It is interesting--here I was very eager to get back to physics, and Dean Wooldridge was sort of automatically taken back into physics. Then about a year later, I guess, Dean left and went to Hughes [Aircraft Corporation]. I talked to him about it. "Gee, why did you do that?" "Well," he said, "you know, I just found that I liked these big things, these big projects." Well, that's the last thing that I like, so I stuck to physics. He and I were both trained as physicists, we worked together, and we were congenial, but that was his taste. He tried to get me to come out to Hughes a little bit later, which I just wouldn't think of doing.

[tape interruption]

Hyper-Fine Structure in the Ammonia Line, and Brebis Bleaney

Townes

Well, here was microwave spectroscopy. Now, as I pumped down the ammonia I found that the line did not stay strong, as it was supposed to, it weakened. I pumped it down more and it split up so there were many lines, split up in a way that was quite contrary to the current theory, and I checked up on that and I found that the theory wasn't right, that the ammonia lines should split up, but split up in a whole complex series of lines, each of which was very narrow and obeyed the Van Vleck-Weisskopf laws perfectly well. There were many lines instead of a single one. But that only added to the total amount of information one could get. And we found hyper-fine structure in the lines. And I found that the line could be saturated, which had never been done before in spectroscopy, to saturate a line and make it weaker just because you are putting in too much power.

So there were a lot of new phenomena. In my first paper on this I had written up about how narrow these ammonia lines had gotten and how I had resolved them, and it was to be a letter to the editor. I had it in the mailbox, ready to go, and just that morning arrived to me in the mail a manuscript from Brebis Bleaney at Oxford. I had known him since he was working in this general area of the 11/4 cm. radar, too.

Riess

Could you spell that?

Townes

B-R-E-B-I-S. Brebis. A very bright physicist. It means sheep--French for sheep. He was born during World War I, and his father was in France and so he picked that unusual name. Well, Brebis sent me this. Now he had not really pumped the ammonia down very far, and hadn't recognized all of this splitting up, but I said, "Well, gee, somebody else has done it first." So I pulled my paper back out of the mailbox and didn't send it in. I said, "Well, heck, he's just sent this in and he had beaten me to it, and I'll just do it still more completely and publish a long paper instead of a short notice."

Riess

He knew you were working on it?

Townes

No, he didn't. I think he knew I was interested, but I'm not sure he knew I was working on it.

Petit

You had gotten a fairly complete look at the hyper-fine structure and all. He didn't have that completed. He looked at it, but he didn't recognize it was there?

Townes

No.

Petit

Well, what had he found that obviated what you had done?

Townes

Well, what he had down is he had pumped ammonia down, I think to pressures of maybe a centimeter or something like that, and the lines got narrower, and he'd seen some structure. We were going down to a thousand times lower pressure than that, but I felt, well, okay, he had shown the lines got narrower if you pumped it down, he had shown you could get the lines with these klystrons. So rather than my rushing something to the press, he had really started it first, and I would wait.

Now, it's interesting because I think that kind of ruined a Nobel prize. I worked in the field very intensively from then on; Bleaney worked for a while and then he transferred. I was very prominent in the field later, and one of the members of the Nobel prize committee for physics came over to visit at Columbia, and obviously he was looking around. He asked me about this and he asked Rabi about this, you see, just what had I done? I told him Bleaney did it first, and I've been working at it since, and I've done all of these things, but Bleaney really started the field. It was clear to me that that turned him off, and I've always thought it is too bad that somehow Bleaney couldn't have been recognized because Bleaney did some very nice subsequent work in a slightly different field, but related. That's the nature of the Nobel prize. Bleaney had really initiated it, but then kind of faded out.

Petit

You had inspired it because you had independently begun doing the same thing.

Townes

Yes, that's right. I had independently done the same thing, but I made a point to this man that Brebis did it first. He started the first work. I've always felt that somehow they ought to recognize this field, or recognize Bleaney at least. [Also see p. 288 ]

Well, the field did develop very actively and there were really three originators, I would say. There was Bleaney, and myself, and then a chap named Good at Westinghouse [Electric Company]. Now, most of the radar equipment was in industrial hands at that time. Columbia University had some--they had worked on radar--and MIT had some, but a lot of it was in industrial hands, and so it was natural for the field to spring up in industry. A little later, somebody at RCA [Radio Corporation of America] became active, but the three people who really began it independently were those three, although Bleaney did something first. It was very active at General Electric, Westinghouse, RCA, Bell Labs, and only somewhat later began to be active in the universities and then these industrial companies dropped out. I kept telling Bell Labs that it could be useful and that they ought to support it, and they rather halfheartedly agreed, but RCA specifically closed it out. One of my friends at General Electric was working on it and said General Electric told him he just had to stop, that it was not of use to the company, and he should start doing microwave work on solids and so he was phased out.

Petit

This is microwave spectroscopy in gasses?

Townes

In gasses, yes.

Riess

And you were in contact with these people all of the time?

Townes

Oh yes, we all knew each other because we were publishing similar things and going to meetings together and talking and so on. That is one of the characteristics of science, that you generally know people in the field, and especially if it is not a very big field, then you know everybody. You try very hard to keep up with what they are doing, understand what they are doing and see how your work fits and how their work fits and so on. Sure, I knew them very well.

Riess

And Bell Labs didn't have an attitude about that?

Townes

Well, it was basic physics so far as they were concerned, and so far as these other companies were concerned. Westinghouse was the other company that closed out their work.

I mention that just as a problem of evaluating the future of a field. I think I have already commented that I was given a lecture by one of my bosses at Bell Labs that I shouldn't have insisted so much on doing this just because I wanted to do it, I ought to be doing things that were good for the company, not what I wanted to do, but nevertheless they let me do it. Then it was successful and it was good science, and I felt that it would produce some things, and in fact I wrote some patents in the field, the first patent for stabilizing frequencies on molecular lines, for example, plus some ways of using molecular lines as circuit elements.

I wrote, I guess, maybe four or five patents in this general area, but Bell Labs wasn't convinced that they were really very practical. When I wanted to expand the field further--they had given me two technicians, I wanted them to hire another physicist--then they said no, it was not fruitful enough, they didn't foresee any real use in communications. It was good physics, and they were glad to have me do it, and it was getting good publicity for the company, obviously, but they didn't foresee any communications use, so they would not expand it.

Petit

Did you? Did you have in mind practical devices that could plausibly make money for somebody at that time, or was this merely a purely intellectual curiosity that drove you to look into these?

Townes

My own interest was intellectual. But I sold it to Ball Labs, on what I thought was genuine, namely that molecules interact with microwaves and really do exactly the same things that condensers and resistors do. As you go to shorter and shorter wavelengths, the effects are stronger and stronger and more and more convenient to use. I said, "Maybe someday you'll be getting down to very short wavelengths, a millimeter or even shorter, communicating on those wavelengths, and these will become increasingly useful. Right now its marginal, you probably wouldn't want to use them. It can be done, but as you get shorter wavelengths, you ought to be mapping out the possibilities."

Review of Bell Labs's Loss

Riess

I think I said last time I was surprised that Bell Labs, as well-endowed as it was, wouldn't let you develop this.

Townes

Well, they let me work, but they didn't want to expand it. It was okay to do on the side a bit, but not to invest too much in it.

Jim [James B.] Fisk was one of the people that had to make the decision. He was then head of the physics department, after the war. He became the head of Bell Telephone Laboratories. He had come into the Bell Laboratories with me, that same year. I knew him very well, and he was a fine person. He became a kind of a scientific statesmen, and is well-known. There wasn't anything wrong with him, excepting that people are imperfect, not all-wise. [laughter]

I wrote a memorandum at that time to sell it to Bell Labs, pointing out all of these possibilities. Rabi, at Columbia, had suggested using atomic lines for determining frequency as clocks. He had done that before I wrote anything. I pointed out the use of molecular lines and found particular ways of doing it--he had just sort of the general idea he had thrown out at a meeting. I discussed all of the possibilities.

However, interestingly, I was very careful to analyze whether or not you could get much power out of molecules in the microwave region, and I proved to myself and to them that no, you couldn't get much power. The reason was the second law of thermodynamics: if you have molecules at temperature equilibrium, which would be the normal thing in any kind of gas, then you can't get more than a certain amount of power, which is fairly small. I pointed this out to them. You could do all of these things in passive elements, but an active element, that is, which would generate power, I felt was not practical. So I was wrong, too, at that time, you see. I had very sound reasoning except that I later found an escape from that reasoning. I did, however, feel that in the long run it would be of some importance to communication.

Now, I left to go to Columbia partly because Columbia was more interested in the physics and the principles which I was interested in. And furthermore I liked university life much better anyhow--I really always wanted to be in a university. So I went to Columbia and continued to work there.

Now, many of us were trying to get down to shorter wavelengths. The reason was, first, there are more and more molecular lines at shorter wavelengths, but secondly, the absorption was stronger. One of the problems of microwave spectroscopy is that absorption was relatively weak. In fact, after I had done ammonia, one of my friends who had played around with ammonia some at Bell Labs said, "Well, okay, so now you've done ammonia, but you can't do anything else; there's nothing else that is that strong. You can't detect any other lines, just ammonia, because it's unusual in this particular motion." I said I thought I could pick up some others. In the course of a few months, I did, and the field began to develop as we developed better and better techniques to detect weaker and weaker lines. So it became a very fruitful field.

 

Townes

We were all trying to get to shorter wavelengths and I tried a number of methods. I tried magnetron harmonics, and did some work with magnetron harmonics getting down to about a millimeter and a half wavelength and so on, but it was not very handy. I also tried something called Cerenkov radiation, which is sending electrons past a surface, or through a material. Electrons are very fast and the waves in the material are very slow, and this can generate waves. That worked, one of my students did a thesis on that; we published some papers using magnetron harmonics. I tried also getting harmonics from klystrons, and Professor [Walter] Gordy down at Duke University used harmonics of klystrons fairly successfully. He was doing nice work using that technique. I kept thinking about various ways of doing it--getting to shorter wavelengths.

The Lab at Columbia: Townes, Rabi, Lamb, Kusch

Townes

Now, our work at Columbia was in one of the Joint Services laboratories set up immediately after the war. The three services, army, navy, air force, were jointly supporting this laboratory which included Willis Lamb, who got a Nobel prize for his microwave work on hydrogen, Polykarp Kusch, who got a Nobel prize for his work on magnetic moments, and I.I. Rabi, who already had a Nobel prize, and myself. I guess that was the four of us. It was an unusually strong laboratory and we worked together reasonably well. We had very different ideas in many cases, but nevertheless we managed to work together really pretty harmoniously even though we did disagree with each other scientifically at times. The disagreements were actually often helpful. It was well-enough supported that we didn't have to keep applying for new funds to do this or that; we had money coming in as just a block grant every year. An excellent way to work, I felt. We just divided up the money among ourselves.

Riess

Was there a lot of report writing on what you were achieving?

Townes

Every quarter we wrote a report, but I just wrote a paragraph on each one of my projects and it was not troublesome at all.

Petit

Interesting contrast with the idea that competitive grants is why American science is so vigorous. Here you guys did fine with a big block grant and a blank check. [laughter]

Townes

Yes, it worked fine. They were good people and they were busy and had some interesting things to do. There was enough money. We were doing small-scale science in essence. It was not a large amount of money. I think there is a story written up in Rabi's biography in which the Signal Corps proposed initially that this be set up. Since Columbia had been working on magnetrons; they wanted Columbia to continue to work on magnetrons and they went to Rabi and said, "Look, you can have a physics laboratory and work on microwaves and anything you'd really like to do, just keep working on magnetrons, too, and we can underwrite you." Rabi said, "Well, how much money are you talking about?" They said, "We could give you a half million dollars a year." And Rabi said, "Well, that's too much." [laughter] So they cut it down.

Well, we really had enough. It wasn't flossy but it was very convenient and pretty much enough. As time went on we needed a little more all the time. Eventually this had some connection with a story that I may have told you already, that after I had been working on the maser for a couple of years both Rabi and Kusch came in my office--a very unusual situation, I never had anything like this happen before or after--two distinguished physicists come into my office and sit down and say, "Look, you should stop the work you are doing. It isn't going to work. You know it's not going to work. We know it's not going to work. You're wasting money. Just stop!" [laughter] I've never had anything quite so direct. [laughter] Well, I always joked that I was lucky that I had tenure already.

Riess

You were all high powered people, and you were working in the same lab but on different projects.

Townes

Somewhat different projects, yes. Rabi and Kusch tended to work closely together. Kusch was a post-doc with Rabi originally.

Petit

Was their counsel to quit that, was that during that period you are talking about or was that somewhat later?

Townes

Well, that would have been in late '53. I told them, well, no, I thought it had a reasonable chance of working. I couldn't be sure, but I thought it had a reasonable chance, so I continued and they didn't say anything more.

Petit

You were taking various gasses and shooting these short wavelength microwaves through them and using klystrons and magnetrons and anything else you could use as a source to look at the spectrum and see how the gasses behaved, and that is the absorption?

Townes

Yes. That's right. As a result I got some very interesting information on molecular structure, very interesting information on nuclear structure: the spins and the quadropole moments of nuclei, and even some magnetic moment information, and then some very basic theoretical tests we could make of the interaction of waves and molecules. It was partly because of the latter--I was very interested in examining very carefully this interaction--that the maser came along, but let me just finish this story.

I think at that point they were trying to get me stopped because probably they felt they would like to have a little more money, a little larger fraction of the money. I think I had spent about thirty thousand dollars by then on this project. At that time that was not big, but it was enough to make some difference. I had been working at it for a couple of years, so it was only fifteen thousand a year. I bring that up just to indicate some of the interaction and the fact that yes, the money wasn't infinite, but it was quite adequate.

Riess

What other kind of interaction is there in a lab like that? Would you make a point of discussing once a week where you all had gotten on your projects? Was that formalized?

Townes

Oh, well of course. I would go in and out of their laboratories and I'd talk to their students and I knew what they were doing. In some cases it rather paralleled the things that I was trying to do and so we would just talk about it. In addition, there were seminars and there were colloquia--a colloquium every week--and in general two thirds of it was colloquia about things that were going on the in the department. Advanced students would give a talk and professors could give a talk or some outside professor would come in and give a talk. So there was a lot of interaction. It was a small department. Columbia's department was really quite small by comparison with many modern physics departments, and in fact by comparison to most departments of that day it was not a large department. Not nearly as big as Berkeley was, for example.

Millimeter Wave Committee for the Navy

Townes

Now, we've gone a little bit off on a tangent from the part that I wanted to tell about the result of this attempt to get to shorter wavelengths. The armed services knew that I was interested in shorter wavelengths, and they were kind of interested in shorter wavelengths. They wanted us to work on magnetrons in particular. In fact, several times Rabi or somebody would say, "Wouldn't you like to work on a magnetron?" and I would say, "No, I really don't want to work on magnetrons." [laughter] That was sort of our pay work, you see, what the military really wanted us to do. But I didn't feel obligated to do that, and didn't, except to use magnetron harmonics with spectroscopy.

Well, somebody from the navy came around that I knew quite well--these people would come around every three months or so and look at the laboratory and talk with us, and so we had a representative from each of the services and we knew them reasonably well. This chap named Paul Johnson approached me and said he thought it would be good if we could form a committee and really examine nationwide what uses there might be for millimeter waves for the military, and how they might be generated. "We know you are interested in millimeter waves and would you be willing to form a committee?" We talked about it a bit and I said okay.

So they allocated a certain amount of money to Columbia University for forming and running this committee. I picked the people and I had a very wide spectrum of people, purposely. Let's see, John Whinnery from Berkeley here, John [R.] Pierce from Bell Labs, Marvin Chodorow from Stanford--these were all microwave engineers basically. Very, very bright, imaginative engineers. John Whinnery from Berkeley, he's one of these so-called University Professors [as Townes is], a very distinguished engineer. John Pierce at Bell Labs, by the way, is one of the half a dozen or so that the IEEE has picked out as a genius for a write-up they have sponsored, and he really is a very creative person.6 And then Marvin Chodorow at Stanford: he was in the klystron laboratory and a microwave physicist turned into a microwave engineer.

Then John Strong, who was a very important experimental infrared man. I felt that if we wanted to get into shorter wavelengths, we had to get a wide spectrum of people. He, at that time, was at Brown, I believe. He had been at Caltech, and then Johns Hopkins, and I think he was at Brown at that time--might have been Johns Hopkins. Then there was a British physicist at Ohio State working in superconductors at very low temperature, and I felt that that might have something to do with the field, so he was a member of it. Then there were two or three others, I don't remember some of the other names--that's all documented in my files, however.

So we started meeting, and John Pierce--we persuaded John Pierce to write an article on the importance of millimeter waves for Physics Today, I guess it was, just to try to get physicists interested and say, "Well, does anybody have any good ideas how to do it?" And we visited laboratories that were proposing work in this field that the Navy might sponsor. We talked about possible military uses. Well, there were not many military uses. One of the general features is that short microwaves tend to be absorbed in the atmosphere, so it might be good on short distance communications that you wanted to keep secret, because they couldn't go very far. Or it might be useful where you wanted a very small antenna and high directivity. Or it might be useful above the atmosphere.

Now, this was 1950, about, and there was no work above the atmosphere. There wasn't any space work then, people were not very concerned about it. But maybe a very high flying airplane--it might be of some use. And then we talked about various ways of producing the waves. We wanted to keep the navy interested, so we suggested those kinds of things, but they really did not have many strong applications in the military field. We tried to generate ideas ourselves for producing the waves. I remember presenting one idea using electron spin resonances, very high magnetic fields, somehow getting them started with a pulse of energy, but it was just an idea. I never worked on it because I didn't think it was that practical myself. We explored everything and didn't get very far.

Riess

The committee's mandate was to get going, to get something happening quickly?

Townes

The committee's mandate really was to examine what it was that would be worthwhile for the navy to support in the millimeter wave field, and what ways might be encouraged to get down to short wavelengths. How might anybody in the country get down to short wavelengths? To examine all of the ideas that anybody was producing in any of the university or that military or industrial laboratories were producing, examine those ideas and see whether they were any good. To figure out what would be the best ways, and what suggestions might really work best. And then, how much of this the navy should support, you see.

Riess

And you met in Washington?

Townes

Well, we met in a variety of places. We visited some laboratories, for example, in which case we'd meet there, but frequently we'd meet in Washington and have people come into Washington and present their ideas to us. I don't know how many times we met. I suppose we probably met about five times or something like that. We would meet sort of every four or five months over a year and a half, perhaps, that we were meeting.

Petit

You've been the head of any number of government panels and so forth over the years to look into problems, to sort of brainstorm like this. Is this the first such committee that you actually headed?

Townes

I believe it was, yes, I believe it was. I was very particular about setting it up because I didn't have experience, and I wanted to be sure that I had adequate control and so on. It wasn't a navy committee exactly. It was a committee set up by Columbia University with navy money. They gave a grant to Columbia to run this committee, you see, and I picked the people and they agreed to them. They knew I would pick a reasonable batch of people, and I knew them better than they did. And they gave us lots of freedom as to just how we did it and what we did.

It is interesting--there are a couple of people who write about laser history that I think have a very doctrinaire political point of view. One of them is this woman, [Joan] Bromberg, who's written a book on lasers that has just come out, and another one is a historian at Smithsonian [Paul Forman]. And they both keep trying to sell the idea that the navy was very interested in shortwaves, it had important uses for them, and they were very interested in the possibility of generating energy and hence they did this, and they had it all in mind and this was the reason we did what we did, I did what I did. And not only the military, but also industry. That shortwaves were very important to industry, and so industry was very interested in pushing us in this direction.

That's pretty far from the truth. There was one industrial person who had some interest, and I'll mention that. For the navy, this was kind of exploratory. They didn't really see a lot of uses, but they were hoping there would be some uses, and it was really exploratory for them. Another part of the historians story is that the military was very interested in pushing me on the maser and so on. Well, they were completely uninterested in the maser when I started it. It was just one of the things they tolerated, along with the rest of my science, and in order to have the laboratory there, they would give us freedom, and okay, if I thought I wanted to do this, why it was all right, but they were quite uninterested. Now, on the other hand, they did sponsor this committee to explore the field, and I think that is a very good and sensible thing that they did. But we basically didn't get anywhere very much, and we just didn't find any particularly good methods for doing it.

8. VIII Moment of Discovery of the Maser

The Franklin Park Incident, 1951

Townes

This is how the Franklin Park incident originated. We would have a meeting in Washington--and by that time I was somewhat frustrated, we just hadn't found anything, we hadn't found any good way of doing it, a thing that we could recommend highly, you know, that this was the right thing to push. I went down to Washington, and Art Schawlow, who was a post-doc with me at that point and working on something different--he was working on microwave spectroscopy--was at a [American] Physical Society meeting I guess in Washington at the same time, and he and I saved money by rooming together at some little hotel right off Franklin Park.

So I woke up early in the morning--I'm accustomed to waking up early in the morning partly because we had young children at that time--I didn't want to wake Art, so I went out to the park, and it was a beautiful morning. The azaleas were all out--Washington, of course, has wonderful azaleas, in springtime Washington is a beautiful place. I sat down on a bench and began to worry about our meeting. "Why is it that we just haven't been able to get anywhere? What is basically stopping us from being able to do this?"

My reasoning was that on the one hand we had to make something quite small to produce small wavelengths; the tubes had to get smaller and smaller. All the ways it was being done at that time, at least, they had to get smaller and smaller. To produce the short wavelengths you had to have resonators which are very small. And yet you have to have a lot of power going in there in order to produce some power output. That made for overheating. John Pierce in his review article had sort of brought up some of these questions, saying these were problems. You had to make something very small, which is difficult for human hands to make and control adequately, and in addition you had to have a lot of power which made it difficult for the thing to hang together and to stay under control and dissipate a lot of power.

I thought, really it would be awfully nice if we could use molecules or atoms, because they've got resonances; we don't have to built resonant cavities, they've got resonances like this. If we could use them, then we could get rid of that problem. But unfortunately, they don't work because the second law of thermodynamics says they can't generate more than a certain amount of energy. But I thought, now wait a minute! The second law of thermodynamics assumes thermal equilibrium. We don't have to have that.

Oh yes, that's right! If you have just molecules in their excited state, well then there's no limit to the amount of energy they can put out. How do you get that? Well, a lot of people were working with molecules in excited states, particularly molecular beams people--Rabi was working with molecular beams, he'd been doing that for years, and a number of people. There are various ways of getting things into excited states: you can excite them with radiation and so on. But molecular beams people were particularly using isolated excited states at that time.

So I immediately took an envelope out of my pocket to try to figure out exactly how many molecules do we need to get this going? In order to make it work there was a threshold condition. You have a resonator and now you don't have to heat up the resonator, you send in energy with these molecules, and you have the molecules radiate into the resonator. The resonator is going to have certain losses in it, so you have got to put in enough power to overcome those losses and that means a certain rate of input of molecules. So I calculated how many molecules could you get.

Fortunately I had heard, I think only about a month before that, a talk at one of our colloquia by a German physicist, Wolfgang Paul from Bonn, in which he had been exploring new ways of using molecular beams, and a particular way of getting intense beams by focusing the beams using four surrounding rods. Rabi had always done it with two plates like this [gestures] and that had been the classical way--Stern and Gerlach and Rabi and others--two plates like this, and the molecules or atoms get deflected. But this chap had done it with four rods with voltages on them, a so-called quadrupole, and sent the molecules in between the rods, and showed he got a lot more molecules. I remembered very well just what he had done, and I could figure out how many molecules he could get and I--

Petit

Were these ionized molecules?

Townes

No, this is not ionized necessarily. They could be ionized, and I think he may have at some time used ionized atoms, actually, but I was going to use neutral molecules. And in that case you used the electric dipole moment of the molecule to interact with the fields that are produced by these rods.

The original atomic beam work was done with magnetic fields, and magnetic effects. Then electric charges on an ion were also used, particularly for seperating different masses. But I was going to use just the molecular dipole which could interact with electric fields due to these rods. So I calculated what might be done. I knew all the numbers well enough that I could immediately calculate what might be possible, and it seemed to me that it was just marginally possible. It probably could be made to work.

Now, interesting, my reaction. I stuffed this back in my pocket and went back to the hotel room a little later, and Art Schawlow was getting up. I talked to him about it and Art immediately saw the point and said, "That's interesting." I went to my meeting, and we had this meeting in which we went through all of the possibilities and didn't come out with anything very exciting. I didn't mention this. For one reason, I had just thought of it that morning and I said, "Gee, you know, if I talk about something I've just thought about, and a brand new idea, it is certain to be questioned and so on. I'd better think about it some more." So I never mentioned it there. I had mentioned it to Art Schawlow, and he agreed with the general principle--he didn't know the numbers. And that was the last meeting we ever had of that committee, because we sort of said, "Well, we've done what we can and we just don't see anything startling there."

Riess

I'm still curious about your decision not to mention it to them.

Townes

I decided not to mention it to them at that time, yes. Partly because I felt it was premature. You think of something an hour and a half before a meeting, a new idea and--

Petit

What do you think now, though? If you had brought it up, might that have accelerated the process?

Townes

I think they would have said, "Well, that's interesting. Why don't you try it?"

Riess

Which is, in a way, what you got anyway.

Petit

So it would have been too premature to incorporate it into any report, anyway.

Townes

No, I could have done it. Maybe I was too cautious; I might well have mentioned it. But it turned out I didn't mention it there. I had already brought up a lot of ideas which didn't work very well. [laughter] So I thought, "Well, look, I really ought to think about this a little bit more before making any formal presentation about it."

Riess

But were you sort of bursting with it?

Townes

No. I just said, "Well, that might work." That was my feeling. I was pleased to have thought about it, but now, see--

Riess

And when you thought about "it", did you think about the actual physical form that it would take?

Townes

Yes, general physical form. There would be a resonant cavity and then these quadrupole things and a beam, and I would use a molecule, and I was thinking of going down to the sub-millimeter range--slightly below a millimeter--which is the region I was driving for because we already had things in the centimeter region, you see.

Background in Stimulated Emission, and Arguments with Townes' Proposal

Petit

Now all you knew was that if you put enough molecules in there, all in the excited state, they would provide a source of emissions in the right frequencies to exploit that little resonant cavity. Did you already have the idea of a stimulated emission of radiation in resonant cavities and all that sort of thing?

Townes

Oh yes. That was all required. The idea was complete in a sense, but numerically it was shaky as to whether you could really get enough molecules and it would really happen.

Now, I've said many times, that really there was no idea in the maser or the laser which was new. No basic idea, no component which was new. Stimulated emissions had been well known since Einstein's days, about 1917. Resonant cavities were known. Molecular beams were known. It was just the combination that nobody had ever thought about or worried about.

One other thing which probably affected my thinking--I don't remember its affecting it overtly, but it probably did--was some work at Harvard that [Norman] Ramsey, Ed Purcell, and I believe Bob Pound did. They had been talking about so-called negative temperatures. They liked the wording "negative temperatures." Negative temperature really was a series of atoms or molecules that had more population in an excited state than in a lower state, and they defined that as a negative temperature. It didn't obey the normal thermodynamics, but you could apply thermodynamic laws to it in a way which still can give you some interesting deductions. "Negative temperatures" were already rather common for atoms, nuclei, or perhaps molecules with resonances at very low frequencies, such as in the normal radio region.

 

Norman Ramsey has fairly recently gotten a Nobel prize, and I knew the group at Harvard very well. They were good friends of mine. I think it may have been Norman Ramsey, Ed Purcell, and [Nicolaas] Nico Bloembergen. Bloembergen later got into the laser business. Anyhow, I knew that work very well. Norman Ramsey had been at Columbia--he was a post-doc who began with I. I. Rabi and had had a professorship there. Harvard bid him away, and that made an opening at Columbia which then allowed them to make me an offer. So I had taken Ramsey's job at Columbia University and we all knew each other quite well and I knew their work well. I don't remember overtly thinking of the negative temperature papers at the time, but I have no doubt that it was in the back of my mind and was part of the general milieu in which I was thinking--the negative temperature work at Harvard.

Petit

As a way to evade the second law of thermodynamics?

Townes

Yes. Right. It changes thermodynamics. Their argument was that you could apply thermodynamics to this negative temperature, that the laws still worked but gave rather different results, you see. I never particularly liked that way of looking at it, but that was the way they were looking at it. They at least emphasized the negative temperature formulation.

The German physicist that I was thinking of was named Paul, at Bonn. He, too, has a Nobel Prize now, for work somewhat related to the thing I was talking about, but rather more advanced and different.

It has been a real privilege for me to work close to all of these people, and know these people who obviously are very expert physicists. Part of the growth of science is very closely associated with this interaction, personal interaction. You read journals, of course, but the ability to talk with people and argue with them and try out ideas and think about other people's ideas and so on, and be able to call up somebody if you want to find out something quickly, call up somebody that you know who is an expert in that field--. The interaction between scientists is a very important part of the general growth of science.

Riess

Do you think that was enhanced by the war experience?

Townes

Yes, it was. The war experience provided particularly an interaction between academic scientists and industrial scientists and engineers. I got engineering experience during the war, which is quite important to all of this, and I knew engineers, like John Whinnery and John Pierce and these people I had on the committee. It did provide a strong interaction, an opportunity for university and industrial people to get together. I think it had a powerful effect on the development of industry as well, after the war. It is very difficult to get that kind of close interaction anymore, though, because we have gone our separate ways: the university people in the universities, and the industrial people in industry. We try to maintain contact, but it's a little harder to do now.

Riess

Along that line, in one of the articles about you there was a reference to Einstein's 1917 theory, saying that physicists knew it too well to find it interesting, and engineers didn't know the theory, and physicists and engineers were going separate ways. The war threw them together; after the war it took that kind of a match to see the possibilities.7

Townes

Yes, well, I think that is an important point, and I could expand on it a little bit. Physicists knew about stimulated emission. Now, when I say physicists, some physicists did. All of these people I've mentioned at Columbia, the people I've mentioned at Harvard, they all knew that perfectly well. Now, there would be other physicists who never worked with it. It's not a phenomenon that shows up in an obvious and common way in most circumstances, so people were not dealing with it or thinking about it very much, and yet it was a well established theory. Anybody who had studied it said, "Oh yes, that's right." It had been talked about and written up in papers and books and so on.

The engineers didn't know about that at all because most of them had not been that intensively trained in quantum mechanics. This is a quantum mechanical phenomenon. The physicists weren't very familiar with resonators, excepting insofar as they had learned about it during the war, as I had, and they weren't so familiar with electronics. Many of them weren't all that interested in getting to shorter waves. Spectroscopy was by then an old field, and they were interested in other things, particles and nuclei. Resonators and oscillators were sort of not very much in their thinking. But some of us had learned about it, and I think the work at Harvard had been very much helped by that experience, the work at Columbia University was too, and my own work certainly was.

Now, one of the biggest questions that all physicists raised about my proposal came out of the [Heisenberg] uncertainty principle. Engineers were not very concerned about the uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle said that if you make a measurement during a finite time, you cannot have more than a certain accuracy in energy or hence frequency. So here were these molecules I had going through a cavity: they went through it pretty quickly, and that very short time meant that the frequency of the molecules couldn't be defined more than within a certain accuracy. It was very clear as an uncertainty principle problem. Actually, it was true if you took a single molecule: you couldn't possibly measure its frequency or have it give you any frequency that was very precise because it went through the cavity quickly.

Many very outstanding physicists argued with me about that. L. H. Thomas, who was a very well known theorist and was at Columbia at that time, never believed it. By the time we got it working and showed it was true, he just stopped talking to me. [laughter]

Petit

You were a heretic and he didn't want--.

Townes

There was a younger physicist Danos who was not so famous, but he was smart and had been trained as a theorist and he insisted on betting me a bottle of scotch that it couldn't be.

Now, for an engineer, some of the arguments were obvious, I would say. See, engineers had been using electrons going in a vacuum tube from the emission surface to the plate, and that takes place very fast. They had been using vacuum tubes to make very precise oscillators. They never had any problem with that, and never thought of any problems. Electrons had a very short time of passage and yet they make very accurate oscillators with very precise frequency. So an engineer would not see why this would be any problem. But the engineer wouldn't know how to stimulate emission, wouldn't dream of getting energy out of molecules, you see. So that's the kind of mismatch which occurred.

I think I've mentioned that after I got the system working--I say I got it working, but there were two younger people with me who were very important in making it work, [James P.] Gordon and [H. L.] Zeiger--I was in Denmark visiting [Niels] Bohr, and I remember just walking along the street with him talking with him. He asked me what I was doing. I told him, and I told him I had gotten this very, very precise clock, and he immediately said, "But that's not possible. If molecules go through it in a finite time, it has to be broad." I said, "No, that would be true of a single molecule, but we have a lot of them." Well, I was never sure that he was convinced, but he very politely said, "Oh, well, yes, maybe you are right."

Then, another case was [John] Von Neumann. (I mention these people because these are very famous people, and everybody knows they are excellent physicists. John Von Neumann, I was at a party with him in Princeton and again, after we had had a drink or two, he asked me what I was doing and I told him and he said, "That can't be right." I said, "Yes." and he wondered off and had another drink. In about fifteen minutes he came back and said, "Yes, you're right." [laughter].

That's the kind of mismatch there was with physicists, you see.

Riess

But in both cases, the conversation with Bohr and Von Neumann, it was after--

Townes

That was after it was working. I told them it was working, and they still thought I must be misunderstanding something.

The Problem of Getting a Working Maser

Townes

Now, let me get back to an earlier time. You wondered whether I was jumping up and down and thinking, "Well, now I've got it." Well, I was very pleased with the idea, but it was clearly going to be difficult. To indicate how hard I pressed it, this was in early May when I had the idea. I came back to Columbia and I talked to my friends there about it, Arthur Nethercot in particular, a post-doc with me. He went to a meeting on shortwaves in Ohio and immediately talked about it; he was asked to get up and say what was going on at Columbia and he talked about this. I think that was the first time it was talked about publicly. But it was never recorded, and there is no record of it at all. But he told me all he said. Well I was a little uncertain about how clear he had made it, or what he had done, but in any case, there was never any record of it there. So it was kind of passed around a bit. But I didn't do anything because I felt it was difficult and I'd have to find some younger person to work on it with me. I didn't want to assign an ordinary student to it because it was uncertain how well it would work. So I waited until the fall, I think it was, certainly late summer or fall, and Jim Gordon was a student who came around.

Jim Gordon had done some work at MIT on atomic and molecular beams. He was, furthermore, a very good student, and I talked with him about it, saying, "Here is an idea I think would be very interesting if we can make it work. I think it is likely to work, but I can't be sure. Nevertheless, if you feel like working on it, I think it could payoff, and if it doesn't work, there are aspects of it," which I pointed out to him, "which we can do where we can do some spectroscopy that will be new, and you can get a thesis out of it all right. And so the question is whether you want to take a gamble with it." Well, he decided to do that.

Then, a little later, Herb Zeiger, who was a student of Rabi's and also experienced with molecular beams, said that he would like to work with me on microwave spectroscopy or something. I suggested that he work on this, so we hired Herb Zeiger who then worked with us for a year. Jim Gordon kept going right on through until it was working.

So there was a gap of a number of months before we got going.

Riess

Were you refining it in some way in your mind or on paper?

Townes

Yes, yes. I was playing with it. Now one thing that I did, one change in orientation I made, was the following: my original idea was to try to produce very short waves, down in the far infrared, as a matter of fact, and I had worked it out for molecules that would give far infrared radiation. But before we actually constructed anything I decided that was more difficult, because we'd have to deal with a small cavity, and we'd have to work in an area where nobody knew the techniques very well, and hence, to try out the idea it would be better to go back to longer wavelengths and just show that it worked at longer wavelengths. Ammonia was a very strong absorber and interacts strongly with waves, so I chose ammonia where I could get 11/4 cm. It was an old favorite of mine and I knew a lot about it, we had cavities at that wavelength, and we had all of the techniques and we had wave guides. To try out the idea I thought we ought to work there first.

By the late fall, I think, I had decided to do it that way, to try it out in the 11/4 cm. range. I believe it was Dousmanis, who had come over from Greece and was also working with me, he made some calculations on this, how many molecules we could get, and more detailed calculations. We made a little bit of a report of it in the quarterly report, in December of '51.

Riess

You made a report to the joint services?

Townes

It was a normal quarterly report to the joint services, yes. It is a very interesting speculation as to what happened to that quarterly report. A quarterly report is supposed to be an informal report to the armed services, but they purposely initially sent it out to all of their other laboratories, just for general information to show other laboratories what was going on at Columbia, which is a good thing to do to get a cross-fertilization of ideas. And then, pretty soon, a lot of people started asking for it, and anybody who wanted it, we would send it to them. But it was supposed to be private, and not a publication.

Publication and Patent Questions; Joe Weber, the Soviet Union

Townes

There was eventually something of an argument about was that or wasn't it a publication, because a man named [Joe] Weber who was at the University of Maryland also had an idea about stimulated emission and he published a short paper in, I think, about '53. He always argued that he had published the first paper on this. Now he had a method which was numerically very wrong, by about six orders of magnitude--he made a number of mistakes--and he never tried to build anything, but I've always agreed that he had formally published something before I published.

But when the patent case came up--. I had to sue Bell Labs eventually--when I say I, the Research Corporation sued them, the Research Corporation owned the patent--to pay up on this patent as sort of the first big company that they went after. Bell Lab lawyers are very good, and they dug up the fact that Harvard University had put this report on the public library shelf, and hence it was published information. [laughter] From a patent point of view, it was published information. Hence, I had already published, and I didn't apply for the patent for almost a year after we had made the system work and we had published a more final paper.

Petit

How long was that gap?

Townes

Well, that gap was two and a half years or so. Now, you may know, in the United States you cannot have a gap of more than one year between publication and applying for a patent, otherwise people say it is public information, you had not enough interest in the patent to make any claims. On that basis, I couldn't make any claims on the patent--this was officially public information by U.S. law. I managed to get around that and get the patent all right, but not around the fact that it was public information.

The other interesting kind of thing to wonder about is to what extent this material got over to the Soviet Union. You would think the Soviets would be quite interested in knowing what is going on in research laboratories sponsored by the military.

Riess

Can I take that question back a little further? Was your committee for millimeter research, looking at things abroad?

Townes

Yes, anything we knew about abroad.

Riess

Was there anything?

Townes

Yes, there was some things abroad. There was something in France. A kind of magnetron in France that seemed very successful that we looked at. They didn't do anything very important to science as a result of it, but they did a good job. The Russians later were doing a good job with magnetrons, and I never found out what they were doing there. It was done in Gorky, and they were always very secretive about it. They are willing now to sell magnetrons. [laughter] But, again, they were magnetrons which had a limited range. They could get pretty short waves, do better than people in this country were doing with magnetrons. Those were the only two reasonably challenging things that were abroad, and both of those came along a little bit later than our committee, but the French work sort of bordered on our committee work.

Our work, however, was not secret. There was nothing secret about what we were doing. I think that's correct. There may have been a few specific things that we considered secret, but I don't remember any.

Riess

You mean about what you were doing at Columbia?

Townes

No, about our committee work. The committee work was perfectly open, sort of basic exploration.

So, anyhow, it is an interesting question as to what extent this material got abroad in the Soviet Union. It certainly could have easily. These things were not secret, they were not highly watched over. It turned out that some of the universities--at least Harvard--were putting it in their libraries. It was just open to anybody who wanted to come in and ask for it. So I don't know how widespread it became, officially.

What Was New

Townes

Unofficially, a lot of people came into the lab and talked about it. Not very many people were interested. They would say, "Oh yes, well, that's a cute idea," and leave. That was the extent of the strong interest in this new idea, so we could work along peacefully on it in a graduate student kind of style for three years, and we finally made it work, and nobody else was trying to do it that I knew of. Nobody was even attempting to duplicate it or beat us or anything, so we could just work along, which is the way I like to work.

But a lot of people knew about it, and [J.] Weber, I'm pretty sure, visited us at that time, and I probably talked to him. Frankly I think he forgot about it, so I don't regard his work as derivatory particularly. I'm sure he didn't consciously know about it, but on the other hand, he visited our laboratory rather regularly. My guess is he might have seen it and just forgotten about it.

Now, the other thing that would give you an indication of how uninteresting this was to many people is that you look back in the literature and you find that the idea without a resonator was by no means new. There were other publications back in about 1925 or the late '20s. There was a book that I ran into by Tolman. Tolman was a physicist and chemist working in statistical mechanics, and he was one of my teachers down at Caltech. Tolman discussed stimulated emission and the interaction of radiation and molecules, and he pointed out how molecules are distributed in energy, most of them more in the ground state than the upper state, and this gave absorption, but if most of them had been in the upper state, why the wave would have been amplified. He pointed this out in a textbook in the late '20s. Very few other people who have various sorts of claims to the idea know that, apparently. [laughter] There was also a Russian somewhere in the '30s who tried to do an experiment on this. He was thinking of getting amplification, and in the optical region as I remember, and he did a thesis on it, he published.

Petit

He was sort of on the trail of the laser.

Townes

Yes, sort of, he didn't make it work, but he had the idea of getting amplification. You might say there is nothing new there. Now I'll come to what I think was new and patentable at least.

Then there was a German physicist and theorist, [Fritz Georg] Houterman. After the maser came along, maybe the laser too, he talked with me and told me--I knew him before and he never said anything about this before, but I don't doubt it's true--that back in the late '30s, somebody at his institution had gotten some funny results in doing a spectroscopic experiment, and that he had thought about trying to explain it. He thought it was probably stimulated emission, and the wave getting amplified. He talked with this guy about it, and suddenly the guy found out another explanation which was the right explanation, so he just dropped the idea and that was that. He never published anything, and regarded the process as a photon "shower," not thinking of thw coherence properties. But of course after the maser and the laser came along, he remembered this, and he published a paper pointing out how he had thought about it and so on. He was perfectly honest and justified in doing that.

I mention those, and there are others too, to indicate that the general idea of stimulated emission and amplification had been kicking around, but people just hadn't thought much of it. They hadn't worked on it, they didn't see all that much value in it, I guess.

Now, when it came to the patent, I talked with a patent lawyer about it, saying, "Look, other people have suggested doing this kind of thing, recognized that it could be done in principle. Nobody has succeeded, but I think the general idea of amplification in an open gas, it seems to me, has already come. Should we try to patent that or not? I think the thing that is new is combining that with a resonant cavity."

What the resonant cavity did was to give the effect of a very large amount of gas--the beam going through a long distance in the gas--because in the resonant cavity it bounces back and forth many times, so it can interact many more times, and you get much more amplification. This was a problem, really, before: that they simply couldn't get a long enough path and enough amplification to do anything. If you have a resonant cavity, then the beam bounces back and forth and gives you, effectively, a very long path, so the combination of stimulated emission with a resonant cavity is what I felt was the new combination. So that is what we patented and the lawyer said that the general idea of just amplification by stimulated emission, he felt, was not patentable, probably, and we might as well not worry about that. We'll just patent the case with the cavity, which was the more important case anyhow.

I think if you wanted to pick out what was new, it was the combination of stimulated emission and a cavity, the general realization of its importance, and the particular method of doing it. The first method was a molecular beam in the cavity. Well, molecular beams were well-known, but the particular way of putting it all together and making it work--. And then later the laser. I think those are the things which are new. But the most striking thing of all, I think, is the sort of a lack of a grasp of what really was potentially there by so many people who were really very knowledgeable in the field. It certainly could have come about twenty-five years earlier; all of the ideas were around twenty-five years earlier.

Riess

It sounds like you are saying that the purposefulness of that committee and the need to produce something tangible was what--

Townes

Well, the committee clearly was a stimulus. On the other hand, I was very interested anyhow, and that's why I accepted doing the committee job. I was moving pretty intensively in that direction anyhow, but the committee was certainly helpful, and undoubtedly it added to the general picture and it certainly provided a particular occasion for me to be in Washington. [laughter]

Riess

I wonder, without that ocassion--or are you saying the time was right for you in any event?

Townes

Well, I think it could easily have been delayed another fifteen years, really, if a few people hadn't really gotten interested.

Petit

There is an interesting almost inconsistency here, that it could have been done thirty years later earlier, yet when you actually did it, people still denied the possibility.

Townes

Well, they denied the possibility of certain characteristics. They recognized, sure you could amplify, but they thought it would have different characteristics. Now, it is those particular characteristics which, however, were exceedingly important in making the whole system valuable. If you had just gotten more energy in a broad line, let's say, and radiation scattering around, why it would maybe be of some use, but not a great deal of use.

No, the fact that you get a very sharp frequency, the fact that you get a highly directed beam in lasers for example, the fact you can get an atomic clock very, very precise--all of those things are the things that make it valuable, and I think that is part of what they didn't see. Not because it wasn't known by somebody, but there were not many people who could put it all together, and still fewer that would be interested in doing that or recognized it would be a worthwhile thing to do. It was primarily my interest in doing spectroscopy, getting down to higher frequencies to do better spectroscopy, that was driving me, not all of these many applications which now you see.

---

Twisting Nature

Riess

You used the expression somewhere that you thought you could twist nature a bit to get what you wanted, and I thought that was an interesting idea, twisting nature.

Townes

Well, I'm not sure just what I was thinking of at that time, but I can imagine that--. You see, nature operates as a result of these laws, and gives us all of the things that we have and see. What we are accustomed to is something more or less like thermodynamic equilibrium. We are accustomed to heat flow and everything being in approximate equilibrium; the molecules in your finger and in the air are more or less at the same temperature, and almost always there are more systems in the lower state than the upper state. That is very basic to thermodynamics--any kind of thing approaching equilibrium is that. It's not necessary, however.

One can make artificial situations which nature doesn't ordinarily make, and use the same laws in a very different physical situation, which then gives you these things we are not accustomed to. For example, if you look at a blackboard, we all understand perfectly well a blackboard absorbs light, it's black, it doesn't reflect light, and everybody understands and has a good feeling for the fact that almost everything absorbs light, that light goes through some things pretty easily, but always some light is taken out. Now, if you just put that blackboard in a little different state, and you shine light on it, the light will be amplified. It is exactly the same process, but in a situation which is completely different from our ordinary experience, you see. And that's the sense in which you twist nature around.

The physics of the process is exactly similar, perfectly natural, it's just that you don't naturally see any object in that peculiar state. You have to be careful and manufacture it and set it up that way and then it can work.

Petit

And you had to think on the molecular level, too, for all of these atoms and molecules with this high energy content, with this one transition just sort of stuck up there, all ready come down, rather than equal partition.

Townes

Rather than equal partition. You have to avoid equal partition. You have to avoid the ordinary state of matter. Now, again, let me illustrate the fact that this was known before. When I first started thinking about it and I drew the conclusions I did, I thought, "Well, I'd better check up and be sure this is right mathematically." I pulled out the notes from a quantum mechanics course I took at Caltech from W. V. Houston back in--it must have been '38 or '39. He gave a course in quantum mechanics, including radiation theory. So that's what I referred to and I looked through that and yes, the equations were all there, and it had to be right. I hadn't made any mistakes that I could see. And there it was, all in a course taught to graduate students.

On the other hand, there were many physicists who weren't very familiar with that. They just didn't think about it much. It was a relatively unimportant kind of something off in the corner somewhere they never had to use, and they never thought about.

Petit

It was just sort of an anomaly.

Townes

Yes, kind of a novel thing that they didn't ordinarily run into, and many physicists wouldn't be quite aware of it, but on the other hand, any physicist who was really working in the field and was thoughtful would know it or they could look it up.

Riess

Well, if you hadn't just spent five or six years trying to build things, perhaps you couldn't have visualized this.

Townes

As I say, my primary interest was getting short waves that would work in a new spectral region, and do the kind of very rewarding spectroscopy we'd been doing in the microwave region but at shorter wavelengths, where I felt it would be still more rewarding. So that was my primary drive. All of the applications--well, sure I was glad to have applications, but that was not my particular interest.

I, of course, pretty quickly saw the atomic clock applications and the amplifier applications--it would make a better amplifier than we had before--and I, again from Bell Labs experience, knew a good deal about the struggle to get better amplifiers and I knew that would be valuable. So I recognized those values, but they came after I had discovered what to do and how to do it for other purposes and then I realized, "Well, we can do all this, too." Then the laser--again, it had many of the same things. I recognized a lot of the things the laser could do, but by no means all of them. All of the enormous variety of things that have come out of the laser just weren't conceived at that time.

Petit

Did you want the maser to be a source of light you could then use to probe other gasses for molecular spectroscopy?

Townes

Yes, that's right--of course light only in a broad sense, since it was initially to be in the very far infrared.

Petit

You thought you get it tuneable in some fashion. Or actually you would like a broad emission maser for your intellectual goal.

Townes

Well, no, I wanted a narrow one as a tool for high resolution spectroscopy, and I did want it tuneable in principle. I started out at 11/4 cm., with a rather special type, and that wouldn't do most of these things. After all, there was already 11/4 cm.--we already had klystrons which would work at 11/4 cm., no point in using that as a source. But I got interested in the atomic clock and the amplifying properties, and I got somewhat delayed moving on to shorter wavelengths or the laser as a result of that, because there were a lot of interesting things to do with it. I just kind of got sidetracked for a while.

Petit

Do you remember the time when your interest shifted from development of the maser as a tool to do other work, to the interest in it itself as a focus of your activity? Was there such a transition? Or perhaps there never was?

Townes

Well, it was always for me a tool. It was going to be a tool. In order to get the tool, I had to work on it. [laughs] I had to work on it, and make it work.

Petit

But at some point the tool maybe became more exciting than the object you were going to employ it on.

Townes

Oh, but it's exciting because of what it does, not in itself--at least to me. There were some very interesting ideas in it, but on the other hand, no one new idea. The potentialities as a tool is the thing that makes it interesting. I would say the same thing is true of the laser--it is what it will do that makes it particularly interesting. It does have some interesting physics, and people have worked on it and so on, but if it were only that, you would never have heard of it.

Riess

You talk about how good it was to have that period of unpressured time to work on developing the maser, because nobody else seemed to be working on it. At the same time, you were delighted when Gordon was able to make it work. It wasn't just something on the back burner.

Townes

Oh no, we were working hard on it, but still at the speed of a graduate student's thesis.

Success in the Lab: Jim Gordon, 1953

Riess

Would you just describe what those couple of years were like--you were in the classroom, and your graduate students were working away on this. [laughter]

Townes

Well, see, at that time I had about a dozen Ph.D. students, which is a lot for a physicist--chemists frequently have that many, but that's quite a lot for a physicist--which kept me pretty busy. So I was doing a lot of things, different kinds of microwave spectroscopy, largely microwave work. I had quite a lot of students and I had two or three post-doctoral people also, including Art Schawlow, so I had a lot of projects going on. The maser was one of my principle projects--I was very interested in it--but Gordon and Zeiger were sort of carrying the ball, and it was in the same laboratory where most of my work was and I saw them very frequently, talked with them essentially every day and we tried out ideas.

One of the problems was to make a cavity with sufficiently low loss so that a practical number of molecules entering it could make it oscillate. There was this critical condition that you have to have a certain number of molecules, and the number would go up as the loss in the cavity went up, in order to make it oscillate. Meeting that condition was a tough thing and a thing that I wasn't absolutely--

Petit

Is this so it wouldn't die out before it bounced off the end and came back down?

Townes

Yes, that's essentially right. In a microwave cavity the waves are more sort of bouncing back and forth like this [gestures] as the molecules go through, and if it loses energy every time it reflects, then it dies off faster than the molecules can give it energy, you see, and so this made what is known as a threshold condition.

Now, almost as soon as we had it completed and set up, and that took quite a while--there was a lot of machinery that had to be done and electronics had to be put together and so on--we almost immediately saw stimulated emission. We saw the effects, but we didn't have an oscillator. The molecules were amplifying, but there was no net amplification because there were losses in the cavity.

The hurdle we had to overcome was finding a cavity with sufficiently low losses. We did that kind of little by little. We made long cavities with a particular mode, that is, a distribution of fields in it which would be low loss, and we tried to get very good copper. The molecules had to enter the ends, and we kept modifying the ends. Finally Jim Gordon just took off the end completely, and that was what put it over the margin--taking off the ends of the cavity. The cavity was completely open on the ends. But our design, was such that the wave was largely bouncing back and forth this way [gestures] perpendicular to the cavity's axis and didn't leak out the ends very much, you see, so it had a very high Q [quality factor].

Also, we had to modify our molecular source and try to make that as powerful as possible. We just kept edging things up a little bit. We could see that we were getting closer and closer, and finally the thing that put it over really was taking the end caps off of the cavity.

Petit

So there was leakage, but not enough to prevent--?

Townes

That's right.

Petit

What was the source of the original stimulation to get the whole thing going?

Townes

That is just thermal radiation. There are microwaves around us all of the time. You're radiating microwaves. They are here all the time. They are at a very low level, but that's all that's required. If microwaves were not present even at zero temperature, there is always what's known as zero point fluctuations, zero point fluctuations in a vacuum that can start it. But as a practical matter, it is just heat waves.

Petit

Are the walls entirely opaque, or did some of the microwaves come shooting out?

Townes

Oh the walls are opaque, the ends of the cavity are not. The walls are opaque, but they are lossy, so on reflection you don't reflect 100 percent. It is like 99.9 percent, maybe.

Riess

What is that word?

Townes

Lossy--lose energy, they lose energy. Every time a reflection is made, you lose some energy.

Support from Hap Schulz

Townes

There is one other aspect of this that I think we ought to pick up. That is a very interesting interest of a chemical engineer named Hap Schulz. He worked at Union Carbide--I believe his branch was called Carbide and Carbon--down in West Virginia. Hap Schulz had been a chemical engineering student at Columbia University, had had an explosion in the laboratory and blinded himself. Well, he was smart, so he sort of did theoretical work and thinking, and I guess insurance or something enabled him to get a secretarial helper who could write down his thoughts and so on, and he would sit and think. He was hired by Carbide and Carbon because he had a good theoretical head. He has come up with a number of different ideas that were good. He worked to some extent in nuclear energy for a while.

He showed up in my laboratory in late '49. I never knew him before that. He came in with somebody from Carbide and Carbon who was escorting him around because he was blind, and he came in and said, "I proposed to our company that we could do very interesting chemical reactions if we had a stronger source of infrared radiation. Infrared could excite particular energies in molecules which would then allow them to react in special ways with other molecules. So we are looking for somebody who would like to work on generating infrared radiation and my company has put up $10,000 that they will give to somebody who wants to work on this, and would you like to work on that?"

I said, "I see your interest, all right, and that certainly sounds reasonable, but I don't know how to make infrared, I'm working in the microwave region. I'm interested, but I don't think I can take your $10,000 because I want to do work that I'm doing now. I don't see a way to do this and it would be a little false for me to say I was going to do something." So he went away, and about two days later he came back and said, "I've been around to a lot of other laboratories, and I've just decided that I really would like to give you the money and you do whatever you'd like. We'd like to get infrared rays, but you can take it and do what you like with it."

Petit

What a deal!

Townes

Yes. [laughter] So I said, "Well, thank you very much. If I think of a good way to produce infrared waves, I'd be very interested, but in the meantime I'll just work on what I'm working on." I put $5,000 of it towards a post-doctoral salary, which was enough in those days, $5,000 for general equipment, and the first person that I hired was Jan Loubser from Bleaney's laboratory. He was a South African, he came over and worked with me. He worked on getting very short waves out of magnetrons. The next person I hired was Arthur Schawlow who had just finished getting his degree at [University of] Toronto, so he came down as a Carbide and Carbon Fellow and he worked with me on microwave spectra and free radicals and other things. As it happened, he didn't work on the maser at all. (I think the third person I hired with that money was Herb Zeiger, who did work on the maser.) Art was a very excellent scientist and I was eager to have him around, so he stayed around Columbia for a little while and in the meantime married my kid sister [Aurelia], and then went to Bell Laboratories, and I still saw something of him then. He was very well aware of the maser work, and he had been down in Washington with me at the time that the idea had come, but he wasn't working on it. It was sometime later that we worked jointly on the laser, but I'll postpone discussion of that.

But Carbide and Carbon was very unusual. Hap Schulz as I say was a very imaginative guy. He works on energy conservation, he works on nuclear energy, a lot of different things. He has a number of patents. I still hear from him, we are good friends, we correspond a bit, and he likes to philosophize about the cosmos and so on. So here is Carbide and Carbon which is really not a particularly advanced research company, and he is a chemical engineer, not a research chemist, but he wanted some infrared waves and talked them into it, and since then his method has actually been used to produce chemical reactions. So far as I know, it has not yet been commercially successful. I think it still could be with special chemical reactions; it is basically a good idea. That's the one case of any commercial company that I know of that had any interest at all in the kind of things that I was doing in getting to shorter wavelengths, you see.

Petit

They got no benefit from it?

Townes

They got no benefit, no. But that case is one of the sources of these so-called historians saying it was industry and the military that pushed me into doing this. [laughter] What I would say is well, I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and fortunately I could get some money from these people to do it. The military was pushing me, certainly, to do magnetrons, something I just refused to do--that's what they wanted me to do. What industry wanted me to do, in Bell Labs, was to be an engineer. So it is true that we live on each other, and all of these contacts are important, and the support of these groups has been important, but so far as motivation or causality is concerned, I think it is a little distorted to think that it is the military and big business that's really pulling all of the strings.

The Presence of God

Riess

I have this need to take our conversations into a different kind of abstract realm--granted you live in abstract realms. In Shirley Thomas's profile of you, and I wonder if you would comment about this in light of the Franklin Park episode, I read that you "possess a deeply felt conviction that [you are] an instrument through which scientific contributions might be made." I take it that means literally what it says: that you are the conduit in some way. I wonder if this is your philosophy.

Townes

That is consonant with my general philosophy. That is consonant with my general attitude about life.

Riess

Can you make that process work in daily life, or is that just a kind of moment of inspiration?

Townes

Well, no, I think it works in daily life. I don't think there is a big difference in character or principle between any of the little things we do every day and the somewhat more important things that come along every once in a while. Much depends on the individual's particular background, and accident, and whom he's been talking to, and so on, as to whether you happen to hit a series of things that are very fruitful and noticeable. Or you simply affect your family and friends--again it is much the same process in my view.

Riess

Do you pray for a solution?

Townes

Do I pray for a solution? [pause] I don't think I've ever prayed for a solution, no. [pause] No. I pray, but I don't pray for some sort of specific personal benefits. [laughter]

Riess

I realized how outrageous that question is. [laughter]

Townes

No, I think some people might. No, some people might. But I feel that is demeaning of God to say, "Help me to get ahead."

Riess

That's right. Or you would at least have the good grace, humanly, to save it for the big moment.

Townes

Well, I would pray to help me do a good job, or do the right things, but I wouldn't pray to please give me a hundred dollars tonight. [laughter]

Riess

Another note has you exhorting yourself to be more emotionally involved--I guess in what you were working on.

Townes

That doesn't quite fit my thinking, that I would try to tell myself to be more emotionally involved. I'm essentially always emotionally involved. You have to be emotionally involved to do anything, particularly if its difficult.

Riess

This was the National Geographic piece and these were notes you had made to yourself.8 The quote was you were "still stumped, it won't work, got to work harder, be stubborn, be emotionally involved--."

Townes

I see. If it is notes to a speech, then I would guess that's what I was trying to tell the audience, is to do something that's difficult, you have to be stubborn and be emotionally involved. I would just assume that I am, otherwise I wouldn't take the trouble. [laughter] I wouldn't tell myself to be emotionally involved. But, if I was giving a speech about how one overcomes these difficulties, and how do people go about things, then I certainly might tell the audience that you have to be emotionally involved.

Objectivity, and Meeting the Arguments

Riess

I could just as well imagine someone saying stay cool, keep a certain distance.

Townes

Oh, well that is important, too. Objectivity, you see. This last article I gave you makes a couple of points: one, since the microwave work I have really been changing around rather purposely, changing around, and I don't finish up any field. Really, I start fields. The other point is that criticism and differences of view and so on, and people jumping on me, is generally probably all for the good because it is important to think about these criticisms, look at yourself, and say, "Well, am I really doing the right thing?"

That kind of coolness, being willing to find that you are wrong at any point is quite important, otherwise you waste a lot of time. The criticism of scientists back and forth is a very important process. A scientist can be both emotionally very involved, at the same time he has to be objective enough to recognize whether he is right or not, whether he has a reasoned case that is likely to be right. He may not know whether he is right, but he has a reasoned case, at least, that he is. Otherwise, if you are doing something controversial, you might just stick with it for emotional reasons, and it might be all wrong. So that kind of coolness is very important.

Riess

Like when you were talking to Bohr, and Bohr sort of dismissed the idea, you let it be, instead of being determined to convince him.

Townes

Let me say, with Bohr that was no problem for me, or for any other scientist. I already had it; it was working. [laughter] So it was just a question of having him understand. I would say a bigger problem would be like Rabi and Kusch coming in. Here's Rabi and Kusch, both of them great experts in molecular beams. In a sense, I was working in their field, and they came to tell me I was really all wrong, it wouldn't work. They were experts and knew it wouldn't work, and I was just being stubborn. [laughter]

Petit

They did this after the epiphany of Franklin Park?

Townes

Yes, it was after that. We had been working on it for a couple of years, trying to make it work, and they were tired of my working on it and said it clearly wasn't going to work. They were experts in the field. They didn't say it that way, they just said, "We know it's not going to work, and you know it's not going to work, and you ought to just stop." That's the kind of case where a scientist really has to think hard about himself. Was I wasting my time? Was I wasting laboratory resources? Was I wasting the student's time?

Petit

Did you already have a clear notion that the arguments against individual atoms inability to be precise weren't true? Did you know that precisely, or were you going partly on instinct?

Townes

I'll tell you, my attitude in that particular case was the following: it is one of those cases where an outsider is invading the field of another group of scientists, and the other group of scientists is almost always negative. I've done that kind of thing quite a lot, and it is bound to happen. It is just human nature that, "Well, this outsider doesn't know anything about this kind of thing, we've been working at it for years, and after all he thinks he has a new idea in our field, and he just doesn't understand." That is a very natural reaction. I recognized, psychologically, that that was going on. But furthermore, I had done all of the calculations. I had been over it very carefully, backwards and forwards, and with Jim Gordon and with Herb Zeiger, I had looked at it very carefully. I talked with anybody that I felt might add to the ideas.

 

I think there were two things going on. I had been over the numbers very carefully, backwards and forwards, and Rabi and Kusch, I felt, were going on instinct more. They hadn't really looked at everything carefully, you know, it was my experiment, not theirs. They had just, from instinct and their experience, felt it just wasn't going to work. But I had looked at the numbers carefully, and that is what you have to do. And then, in addition, I was invading their field in a sense, and I felt that they were probably emotionally negative about it partly for that reason. If they had brought up something specific that I hadn't already checked through, that would have been very important. I would have immediately gotten after that to see if this is a real objection. It was still marginal, and I knew that. I wasn't sure it was going to work, I just thought it had a pretty good chance.

Common Elements of Interest, and Intuition, in Townes's Work

Petit

You said, a moment ago, that you don't finish fields, you start them. Even taking that into account, there have been some consistent themes to things you've done. Would you care to describe what common element seems to run through the work you've done?

Townes

It might look like I've worked on a lot of different things; they all do have a common element. One grows out of another, and that is usually the way in life. Everything I've done has come out of the past. I did spectroscopy as a thesis. I got thrown into microwave work in the war. The combination of microwaves and spectroscopy has been the root of much of what I've done, and I've just moved on from one branch of it to another, one kind of application to another.

Consider the astronomy that I am doing now. I started out doing microwave molecular astronomy to look at molecules in space, which astronomers didn't think existed there, but I felt they might. I moved from there into infrared work, which is again spectroscopy. I'm still doing spectroscopy, radiation physics, and so on. They all closely related even though the broad fields in which I work may seem quite different, and they are. The background of information and the background of experience in astronomy is very different from the background of, let's say, laboratory atomic and molecular physics. I can't name as many stars as a normal astronomer can, let's say, but I don't need to. So all of these things have been related and grown one out of the other.

Petit

What I want to lead up to is how you visualize the subject that you study. I get this impression that you are almost on a friendly basis with molecules. You imagine photons come in, they do something to molecules, they go out, this and that and that. I mean to find out whether when you are imagining new developments you sort of think mathematically and do the calculations, or your first instinct is to think in a more intuitive sense. Just orders of magnitude, probabilities about what might happen.

Townes

Well, let me try to answer that first and then we'll get back to this question of finishing things up. I think a physicist, certainly I myself, working in a field, becomes so familiar with the things you are working on that they are like friends, and you immediately know how they are going to react or what they are going to do and so on. And I feel that way about molecules and atoms: I visualize them and I have an instinct immediately that tells me what they are likely to do. So I think of these things instinctively in terms of a visual model, and the molecules are going to act this way or that way, or do this or that, when you do things to it. As I say, they are close friends; I know them very well.

Now, however, having had such an intuitive view about what they do, then I sit down mathematically and check it all through to be sure I didn't miss something. Something may be going on that I didn't quite realize, you see, didn't visualize. So I check it through mathematically to be sure whether I'm right or wrong, and then, if it is a good research idea, well then I can work on it. One does become very familiar with these objects and sort of think of them in quite concrete terms. At least I do, and I think many physicists work that way.

As for finishing things up. Microwave spectroscopy I did as my sort of first big field when I was younger, before I was known as a physicist, and it did help me become known. I felt microwave spectroscopy was a moderately large field, but not enormous. A single person could really stay on top of everything. I felt I wanted to do that and sort of finish up the field. I felt it was a field that would carry on for a finite time in physics, and then move over into chemistry and become primarily something that the chemists used. So I stuck with it because it was my first field and I felt it was a good way for me to really do something major, finish up the field. As it came to what I thought was near approaching the end of its excitement for physicists per se, where the principles had all been established and the ideas, then I wrote a book on it, thinking I'll write a book as a summary of the field, and that will close it off so far as I am concerned, and it is time to move on to something else because the field for physics is matured. So in one sense I finished that field up, and did take the trouble to write a book with Art Schawlow. The two of us wrote this book on microwave spectroscopy which is, strangely enough, still going. The field has not changed all that much in principles, although its been very much more widely applied now in chemistry.

After that, my feeling has been that I can be most useful in trying to see and understand those things which other people are missing. There are many important fields in science which are very obvious. For example, fundamental particles, that's clearly very fundamental and interesting and worthwhile. Many people know that, lots of people are working on it, and why should I bother to do it, too. There are other fields of that type, where it is clear they are important, but I just don't like to go with the herd. There doesn't seem to me to be much point in doing that.

I'd rather find something that other people are missing, and that I think is likely to be important, and try to develop that and open up a new field. In the case of microwaves, I stuck with it pretty much to the end. In most of the other cases, it is not clear that there is any end, and also I'm restless and I want to move around and do something else. So as the fields get going very well, and lots of people [get into it], and it has become very popular, why should I try to race with everybody? It is just a question of who does it first. It is pretty clear that there are lots of good things to do. I try to tackle the things that aren't so clear and that might, in the future, really pay off. That has been the way that I have cycled, generally.

In the case of astronomy, we really got the field of molecular astronomy going. It is a very big field now, lot's of work in it, lot's of good instruments, and sure, I could work in that field and do it, but I would be just one among a lot of people, and it doesn't make all that much difference. So I am mainly doing something else now.

By the way, there's one other aspect of the masers that I always felt was interesting. A maser requires some material in a condition we do not ordinarily experience in order to amplify, and that is in part why nobody ever thought about maser action. But in molecular astronomy, there are natural masers. They've been up there a long time, billions of years, so they were invented a long time ago. They are not resonators, they don't have resonators, but they do have amplification, and a large amount of amplification, enormously powerful masers.

When we detected water, I suspected it was probably a maser, and we checked it out, and yes, water was masing. It is the most powerful maser so far. I believe maybe there are several others that are close, OH masers, for example, which are very important. So if we had looked up in the sky earlier--again a case of doing the right fundamental research--if we had been doing more radio-astronomy earlier, we would have seen these masers. Probably astronomers would have figured out what was going on and then gotten the idea, why don't we build something like that on earth?

Petit

What's the line in water spectrum that is masing?

Townes

Well, this very same line, 11/4 cm. It is actually about 1.3 cm. It is the same line that absorbed the radar. That was the one we discovered, and the first most important one due to water. It turns out there are a number of others due to water that have been discovered now. And methyl alcohol has them, and ammonia has them, and the OH radical has them. Masers are not at all uncommon in interstellar space or material surrounding stars.

Petit

Are they directional?

Townes

It is believed that they are somewhat directional. The more powerful ones are probably directional, but not highly directional.

Petit

They are just continuous waves of emissions going through these clouds, building out, flying out the ends this way and that way.

Townes

Yes, that is right. If the cloud is somewhat elongated, lets say, then it will amplify most going this way through the cloud, and so it will be somewhat directional. It is so powerful, it is hard to believe they are not directional, because if they are that powerful in all directions, it would just be an almost impossible amount of power.

Petit

It is just starlight coming into the clouds from central sources?

Townes

In some cases it is, in other cases it is supersonic collisions in clouds that produce the excited states. A variety of reasons. But in astronomical space we find matter in these unusual states, you see, that we are not accustomed to on earth, and hence it amplifies, and it has been there all of the time. Back in the '30s if people had imagination enough to be looking around, they could have picked it up then.

Riess

If they hadn't denied it completely.

Townes

Yes, the astronomers sort of denied that there could be these complex, stable molecules up there. For a long time they did. Radio-astronomy began back in the early '30s, but it was not actively followed, but I think even if they had just been looking around then, they might have run into this. In any case, it was there all the time, and we didn't know it until a few years ago. [laughs]

Petit

Are these the lines that people like Barney Oliver talked about, a waterhole looking for extraterrestrial intelligence?

Townes

It is the same line as what Barney calls the waterhole, it is the same line exactly. The reason Barney picks that out for extraterrestrial communication is that he says, "If you think about it, what wavelengths would you pick where somebody else might realize that you might have picked that wavelength?" Well, because water is so important, maybe it is that frequency you would pick, then. But there are several others: he originally thought hydrogen was the right one; now he talks about the waterhole. Who knows which ones anybody may be trying to broadcast to us?

Riess

You say that you try to find the areas in between where people aren't working. You also say that you publish preliminary results as a way of encouraging other people to go on with ideas that you have that you don't particularly feel like following through on.

Townes

Yes, I have done somewhat more of that recently, just because I cannot follow up everything. Also, some of the things I've been doing would be very time-consuming. For example, I wrote a paper on communication with extraterrestrial intelligence using infrared. I personally think the infrared is the most likely place people would try to communicate. I wrote a paper on why I thought that was, and what one might do. But it is a fairly long-range specialty thing, and it would be a long time before I got around to doing anything about it.

Riess

Where did you publish that?

Townes

I think I published it in Science, and I did that when I was at the Institute for Defense Analysis in Washington. One of the younger people I talked with about it, and he got interested, so he and I wrote a paper on it.

Riess

That is a ways back.

Townes

Yes. And I have written another paper on that subject somewhat more recently, trying to bring it up to date and to counter what I think most people's over-emphasis on the radio region is. I am not against looking in the radio region, just because we've got the technology there, but I'm not convinced that that is a region necessarily somebody else would pick.

Petit

If there is one guy out there, maybe there is hundreds. Somebody has got to have tried almost everything. [laughs]

Townes

Sure. And it will depend on the particular civilization. But if you try to analyze what really is the most ideal, the most advantageous, then I think you might well end up in the infrared. But you might say, "Well, I've got a radio antenna here, and I'm all set up to do this, why not go ahead and do it." And somebody might well broadcast in the radio region. There are theoretical suggestions of that type, that I have made from time to time.

Natural Masers, Molecular Astronomy

Townes

Maybe a still better example is the case of molecules in space. I wrote a paper on that, what molecules I thought would be there and why and what the frequencies were and said somebody ought to look for them. I wrote a paper on that in 1955, and essentially nobody ever did anything about it, so when I came out here, I said, "Well, I guess I'll have to do something about it now." That was '67, twelve years later. I would have been happy if somebody had gone ahead and done something. I was working in some other field at the time and didn't have an opportunity and inclination to do it then, but I finally got impatient and had an opportunity to do it myself, so we started really seriously looking in '67. Nobody acted on it, and I thought it was a convincing paper, but I guess the astronomers didn't.

Petit

Do you remember what you were going to look for? Was it formaldehyde, or ammonia, or water or what was it?

Townes

Ammonia and CO were sort of my first primary candidates at that time. Water I mentioned. It was not a first candidate. And we wouldn't be seeing water, as we did, unless it were masing, and at that time, I wasn't predicting masing in interstellar space. It was possible, but I thought well, that is pretty far out.

Petit

You were mainly looking for absorption lines, not emissions.

Townes

No, emission lines. I looked for emission lines of CO and ammonia. And I pointed out a number of others, I guess. Microwave CN and HCN, and I don't think I mentioned formaldehyde. That one didn't seem so likely to me at the time, and it is not terribly abundant, but it is an important line. CO is perhaps, nowadays, the most important single one, but water and ammonia are certainly in there close. You find everything now. Methyl alcohol, ethyl alcohol, ether.

Petit

It is a pharmacopeia.

Townes

Yes. All of the things you need to start life with.

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Townes' Goals, Possibilities for Masers: Atomic Clock

Townes

Let me try to indicate what I saw in the future of the maser. As I have mentioned already, my primary object was to get down to short wavelengths--to get a source for short wavelengths for spectroscopic and scientific purposes, and at that time, that meant getting down below a millimeter in wavelength, into the far infrared, because we had techniques that could get to one or two millimeters. They weren't easy or terribly favorable, but they could get that far.

Getting down well below a millimeter and maybe somewhat further into the far infrared was my goal. Now the reason I didn't start that way was because I felt it would be easier to try out the idea at somewhat longer wavelengths. We had a good molecule, ammonia, which was very intense and favorable, and we already had hardware and techniques, knew how to handle microwave wavelengths of that size and detect them sensitively and so on. So that's why we started there, thinking that we would check out the idea and it would be kind of neat and interesting. Then, if it worked well, we would push on down to shorter wavelengths.

But even as I began to develop it and work out more detailed theory of exactly how it would behave, I realized it would oscillate at a very, very pure frequency and hence provide a kind of atomic clock. I published some papers on that. I'd already been interested in atomic--or molecular clocks, really, but everybody called them `atomic,' because there is no big difference between a molecule with one atom and two atoms as far as time keeping is concerned. I'd already even patented something on that while I was at Bell Laboratories, using molecular lines for atomic clocks, and written something about it in my early microwave spectroscopy work at Bell Labs on ammonia, pointing out what might be done. I tried it out and demonstrated it there.

Riess

Was this a problem other physicists had been working on, the atomic clock?

Townes

No, they had not been working on it very much. Clocks at that time were based on quartz crystals, and Bell Laboratories was sort of the best place for accurate clocks. They needed pretty good timing for their own purposes, and there was an engineer there who had specialized in quartz crystal oscillators for many years, and I remember talking with him very carefully about what kind of accuracy could be achieved. They were achieving about a part in one hundred million, and he felt we might do a factor of two better, but getting a part in a billion was sort of the absolute limit as far as he could see, from using quartz, and he didn't really know how to do that. The problem was that the quartz crystals gradually flaked off a few molecule layers at a time, or something like this, and they changed in size.

Petit

From the mechanical operation?

Townes

Right. They aged as they were used, and he had had a lot of experience with that.

Now I was interested in accurate frequency measurements for spectroscopy reasons. It did not have to be that accurate, but nevertheless I had gotten interested in accurate frequency measurements. And then I would have to give credit to I. I. Rabi in that at a Physical Society meeting he was talking about his molecular beams work which he was an expert on--he'd been working on that since the early '30s and that was the area in which he got his Nobel prize, atomic and molecular beam work--and in the process of talking about that, he pointed out that one could make a very accurate clock using such atoms. He wasn't interested in doing it, but he hoped somebody would do it someday. Now, it was a very different technique from what I was using, but that, too, I'm sure, interested me. So I analyzed the possibility of doing it with microwave spectroscopic techniques, and I actually set up such a system at Bell Labs and demonstrated it and patented it, and so on.

When I was working on the maser, then, I already had that background and was interested in the precision that could be obtained. My general philosophy is that when you can measure something better than had previously been done, you always find out new things. As long as you can look at something more closely, measure something better, you are bound to find out new things, and very high precision physics is a very pleasing kind of physics. The fact that you can check something to enormous accuracy and you can check things out with the theory is very satisfying. This is one of [Isaac] Newton's great successes, the precision with which one could talk about and measure and predict the behavior of heavenly bodies.

Quantum mechanics makes very good predictions about atoms and molecules, and the precision of microwave spectroscopy itself I found very pleasing because we could measure molecular characteristics with fantastic accuracy. An atomic clock was a generally pleasing kind of an idea, in addition to having some potential uses which were hard to foresee completely then. I could foresee some scientific uses in careful measurement of relativistic effects, for example, measurement of very small physical effects in atoms and molecules, but there were some technological uses--navigation and other things.

The signal corps, which was located in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey--its primary technical headquarters were there--was part of the group of the three services that supported us. They were part of the army, and that was the part of the army that was paying special attention to the laboratory at Columbia and giving us operating money. I never felt any special duty to do what they were interested in. Nevertheless I knew that they were interested in good timing, and it would be pleasing to them if we developed something.

As I worked on the theory of the maser, I recognized it would be a fantastically good atomic clock, and--what I had not thought of initially--a very, very good amplifier limited only by fundamental quantum mechanical considerations. It was an amplifier that would do as good as any amplifier possibly could according to very fundamental principles. It was about a factor of one hundred more sensitive than electronic amplifiers.

Now, again, I was rather familiar with electronic amplifiers, having been at Bell Labs. John Pierce, one of my good friends, and Rudi Kompfner, who had come to Bell Labs from England, they had invented the travelling wave amplifier and had done a lot of theory on amplifiers and had shown that amplifiers couldn't be very much better than what they were making. But that was based on the assumption that all amplifiers had to be associated with electron tubes of some kind. As long as you had electrons, their theory was correct, it couldn't be better than a certain amount, and that was kind of a resting place for engineers and for amplifiers. Suddenly we had an amplifier which was roughly one hundred times better, and part of the reason was it didn't have to have any electrons. The electrons were all bound; there were no flowing electrons, and so there was no noise due to the discreteness of the electron charge.

Amplification, and Inspiration from a Biologist in Tokyo, 1956

Riess

When did you actually realize this? You say you hadn't quite thought about that being an effect of it.

Townes

See, my primary object was to get oscillation and energy, rather than just amplification. Now, an amplifier and an oscillator are very closely related. An amplifier makes the wave grow bigger and if you take the output of an amplifier, put it back into the input, then it grows bigger again and it becomes an oscillator. So an oscillator is just a positive feedback amplifier with the feedback big enough so that it oscillates. But they are essentially the same thing. If you get internal amplification, you can also get oscillation. But I was after the oscillation.

We worked out theoretically what it should do, and here I don't remember completely, but I think I was primarily trying to look at the fluctuations in the frequency. So I was looking at what kind of fluctuations would be there, and how precise would the frequency be, and recognized all of these fluctuations are very small, and hence, as an amplifier, the fluctuations would be very small. I'm trying to remember when I really first recognized that. I believe it was probably in about 1952, fairly early in the development of the maser.

Jim Gordon, who was a student who worked on it, was very good in theory, and Jim worked out some of the very nice fundamental theory of fluctuations in the maser. We worked on the line widths, for example, and he was an important a part of that. However, we never did it completely until after the maser had been built and I was on sabbatical. It was then I really finished the theory and wrotte a paper, the first definitive paper on that, the one I wrote in Japan in '56 with a couple of Japanese colleagues. I was on sabbatical and I got interested in really working it out properly and completely.

This is an amusing story, because the idea for how to work out noise in an amplifier came to me from talking with a biologist friend in Japan. It was Francis Ryan from Columbia University. I knew him well at Columbia. He, too, was on sabbatical in Tokyo. I ran into him and asked what was he working on. Well, he had just finished reading this interesting paper recently about population of microorganisms, and how the population of microorganisms fluctuated. The British theoretical chemist [C. A.] Coulson had really first worked out the mathematics, and Ryan was following it up.

I asked him about it. A microorganism can multiply by division, and then some of them die off. You do statistics on the multiplication and dying off, and you get the fluctuations in the population of the microorganisms. I realized immediately that is not very different from photons--photons get multiplied and they get absorbed--so maybe I could apply it. There was a difference, though, that photons are spontaneously generated, and microorganisms certainly aren't spontaneously created. That's what [Louis] Pasteur found out, they have to come from each other.

Photons are created spontaneously; you have an excited atom and an excited atom can produce a photon when there had never been any there before. So I had to add another term. I looked at his equations, and I added this other term to see if I could then get the statistics of the photons and work out not only how low a noise one could get, but how big the fluctuations would be under a wide variety of conditions including large amplification, varying ratio of population in the two molecular states involved, with oscillation, and so on.

I had gone along part way, and I had been talking to Koichi Shimoda, who was then on the faculty at Tokyo, so-called Todai, the Tokyo University. He had worked with me at Columbia as a visiting post-doc, which is how I first knew him. He came over to work with me at Columbia on microwave spectroscopy, and he worked on the maser there. I was talking with him, and also with another Japanese physicist whom I met over there named Takahashi. Takahashi was rather mathematically oriented and he found a good way to solve these equations. I had sort of solved them roughly, but not very completely. Takahashi it was who found a really good way to solve these equations. We worked it all out in some detail and published the paper in a Japanese scientific journal. So it wasn't terribly well known over here, excepting for people who were really very interested.

Petit

What was the name of the biologist you were talking to?

Townes

Now, let me see. He is long since dead, and I would have to do a little research on that. He was Josh[ua] Lederberg's thesis advisor. Josh Lederberg is a very well known biologist, you know, and I think I would have to ask Lederberg. I knew him very well, but my memory for names these days is getting weaker, and so I don't remember it at the moment. He was a good biologist, but not nearly as famous as Lederberg, and I'd have to find out.

Petit

That's as strong a lead as one needs. [laughs]

Townes

So that's the story of the fluctuations. Before I went on sabbatical, really quite early, I realized this was going to be a good amplifier, but exactly how good, to really calculate it right within a few percent, took this additional theoretical work.

Another aspect of the amplification was that initially, with the ammonia maser, it was purely a theoretical exercise, because the ammonia maser was so narrow band, it could amplify only exactly on the molecular frequency--a very narrow band. You couldn't vary its frequency, you couldn't tune it and so on. So it was a good amplifier, but only in a theoretical sense. It wasn't going to be very useful. I knew that, but the general idea that this mechanism can produce a good amplifier was the important thing.

Sabbatical, 1955, Kastler's Lab, Paris

Townes

When I went to France on my sabbatical--I went first to Europe, and this was after the maser had been built--I had various ideas of how to tune the maser and allow us to get different frequencies, and how to pick additional frequencies. I jotted down in my notebook various ideas about that, and I think also in my notebook talked about electronic spins flipping in a solid material as a way of getting microwave amplificational energy. Because the flip of an electron in a magnetic field which you could generate in a laboratory gives a frequency which falls right in this microwave region. So it provided another kind of possible maser. But I didn't see any really good materials that looked exciting enough for me to start working on it in the laboratory. I do think I wrote it down in my notebook as one of many ways which then might allow some tunability, because you would vary the magnetic field and then you could tune and get a whole variety of frequencies.

Well, I went to France and Europe. For the summer, we travelled around a quite a bit. I visited a number of laboratories--that was summer of '55. Then I settled down in Paris in a laboratory with [Alfred] Kastler. He is a French physicist, a very fine person, and he had been working in the microwave spectroscopy area, but particularly on atoms. He later got a Nobel Prize for his work, developing a special technique of exitation and measurement of atomic energy levels which he called optical pumping. For some time these was confusion in the popular mind between Kastler's optical pumping and optical exitation for masers or lasers, which later became called optical pumping but which was in fact different.

Riess

May I interrupt by asking, after you published in 1954, whether that generated a response, whether you were hearing of others, or from other labs, that somebody had been interested in this and was now proceeding? In other words, were you going into a field that was developing along with you?

Townes

All right, let me talk about that. I've gotten a little bit deflected in this direction and we ought to take it up at some point, but I can stop here and go back.

Riess

When you were in Paris you were connected with a lab there, you were teaching there, and you ended up doing some serious work there. To set the scene, these people knew what they had when you arrived?

Townes

Yes, they did. It might be useful for me to take just a few more minutes and finish this particular track, and then I'll go back and try to answer that question.

I settled down in Paris in the fall of '55. It was just a year after the maser had gotten going, and one of my microwave spectroscopy students had come over to Paris to do postdoctoral work in Kastler's laboratory. Just after I got there I saw him and he talked about what he was doing. This chap's name was Arnold Honig. Arnie had been working with a man named Combrisson, a Frenchman there in Kastler's lab, and had discovered an electron spin resonance with a very long relaxation time. In other words, the electron stayed in the excited state for a very long time, exceptionally long. He was all excited and interested in that.

I immediately said, "Gee, that's what I need for a good amplifier, something that we can get up in the upper state and it will stay there for a while." So we worked out whether or not we could make it amplify adequately and decided to work on it. I had about three months in Paris there before I was to leave. So the three of us worked on it, and we got it almost working. We made it amplify, but it was not quite over the hump of giving amplification greater than circuit losses. That was sort of the first really practical, tuneable amplifier that could really be used.

I came back to the United States during that winter and I went immediately to my friends at Bell Labs and told them, "Look, I'll let you in on something if you might give me some help with providing some solid state materials that have these particular qualities that I can take back to Paris to try out. Just keep it confidential, because you'll understand that we want to get it written up and I want to patent it." So I told them about this. This included Jim Gordon, who had then gone to Bell Labs. He and George Feher, who was a specialist in electron spin resonance at Bell Labs, worked on one at Bell Labs, and they got one just over the hump, just got it going.

Working with Silicon, Back at Bell Labs

Petit

What was the working material?

Townes

Well, that was silicon. It was a semiconductor with impurities in it. I can't remember just what impurity it was at the moment, but it was semiconductor material which Bell Labs knew how to make--they were the specialists in semiconductor materials by then, coming out of the transistor era. So that was very exciting to the Bell Laboratories people, as well as to us, and they started working on it then.

It carried on from here. I would say the next big step involved Bloembergen at Harvard.

Riess

The material I thought was germanium.

Townes

It was silicon, as I remember. I can look up that paper. I've forgotten what that is. But let me sort of just round this off. I won't finish it, because there is so much more to it.

I wanted particularly to note the interaction among scientists involved here. I didn't know much about these materials, because I was not in that field. I knew about them generally, in principle, but I didn't realize there were any that had those specific characteristics. And, in fact, Arnie Honig and Combrisson had just found it, and that's what really got me started, and then I contacted Bell Labs, and Combrisson, Honig, and I wrote a paper on it published in France. The next step after that was done by Bloembergen at Harvard, and I'll stop at this point because I think we should pick that up later.

That takes us a little way on the amplification story. Unless you have some other questions about that, I'll get back to your other broader question.

Riess

In my reading in Men of Space, the material that Bell Labs sent to you in Paris was germanium.

[tape interruption]

Townes

Silicon and germanium are kind of lumped together frequently. That author [Shirley Thomas] was a semi-popular writer, and I think she just slipped on that. Right here [refers to paper] it talks about experiments, and it says it was silicon with impurities of phosphorous or arsenic, and then we talk about also making some experiments with magnesium silicon fluoride crystals. It is possible what I was asking Bell Labs for was something different, but I don't think so. I think it was the same material.

Riess

Here is the quote, from you, from Shirley Thomas: "In Paris I happened to run into one of my former students, Arnold Honig, whom I had helped to get a fellowship for study there. He and a French physicist, John Combrisson, were making fundamental studies with germanium crystals with impurities of phosphorous or of arsenic."

Townes

Well, germanium and silicon are lumped together very intimately and have many of the same properties, and they are both used for semiconductors, and that may have been my confusion. I'm glad to get it straight.

Riess

But silicon is correct.

Townes

Silicon is correct, yes.

9. IX Issues of Publication and Patent, and the Russians

Publication, Physical Review, 1954, and Buildup of Interest in the Maser

Townes

Okay, let's go back to the broader question now. You were asking about how did the scientific community react to this.

Well, I first talked about this at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington in the spring--there is always a spring meeting in Washington of the American Physical Society, along about in April. I first discussed it there. It was a post-deadline paper. They allowed people who had particularly interesting things to say, they thought, to submit a paper after the normal deadline for papers. It was not, then, published in the Bulletin which was already in print before the meeting, but it was supposed to be part of the meeting. You could give a talk aboutt the work. So I decided to do that and they accepted it as a post-deadline paper. Now, that is some indication that both I thought it was important, and they thought it was important.

There was a moderate number of people there. Of course they didn't know what it was all about by the title, and a post-deadline paper many people would just overlook. But there were a moderate number of people there. The only person I remember clearly, because he mentioned it to me later, was Bill [William] Nierenberg who was a professor here [University of California] for a while, now down at La Jolla. Bill Nierenberg was a very good physicist, and he's mentioned to me many times that that was a very exciting paper, and it impressed him and so on. What other people heard it, and what they did about it, I don't know. But we then submitted it for publication as a letter; it was published in the Physical Review letters, I think in June, maybe.

 

Riess

So you weren't hearing from other people that they were close to the same work.

Townes

No, I'll comment about that in a little. As I think I mentioned before, our laboratory was completely open and anybody could come in and visit, and I told them all about it, and this was just an experiment in my laboratory, sitting off in a corner, and we were working on it. The people who were interested enough to listen would look at it and say yes, that's very interesting, and that was about it.

Nobody got very excited about it before we made it work. A number of people said it would be interesting if we could make it work. People were complimentary about it as an idea, but nobody got very excited about it. I think most people just did not foresee the potentialities. We already knew its potentiality as a clock, as an amplifier, and it clearly had some commercial potentialities both in those directions, as well as scientific potentialities. I was hoping to get down to shorter wavelength, but many of the characteristics that we now get out of lasers I didn't foresee at that time.

Riess

The light amplification was not foreseen.

Townes

No, I hoped to amplify light in a sense, but it was infrared light. Both are generally considered light these days, but really it is not visible light. So I was hoping to get down into the infrared, and thought I could. But I did not expect at that time to get down to visible light.

Nevertheless, after we published then there began to be really quite a lot of excitement. A number of people came to my lab. For example, I mentioned this chap from JPL, Walter Higa. They sent him from there to my lab to work with us and learn about it. There was another chap from Varian, I believe, Varian or Stanford, who visited back and forth and wanted to see what we were doing. Various other people started working on it and writing papers. Professor [Willis] Lamb, who was at Columbia, one of my colleagues at the Columbia Radiation Laboratory, did some theoretical work on the maser. There were a number of people who then started to build atomic clocks.

I believe some time before this Harold Lyons at the Bureau of Standards had asked me to consult with them. He went after atomic clocks based on microwave spectroscopic lines as the thing for the Bureau of Standards to do, which I think was a very wise decision. I already had a patent on this at the Bell Labs. The Bureau of Standards has the job of making our standards, including atomic clocks. But Harold was the first there to go after atomic clocks. This was really a molecular clock, and in talking with him I said, "Well, it's kind of misleading to call it an atomic clock." "But everybody is interested in atoms, you know." [laughter] People know atoms. You say molecules, it won't sound so good. He was an electrical engineer, interested in physics, but primarily an electrical engineer who had been working on frequency standards and radio propagation and things of this type. He started to go into this, and he wanted to build the first atomic clock. He built one, based on ammonia. It was not using a maser. He knew about my interest in microwave lines, and he used that technique and made a big splash about atomic clocks and so on--the Bureau of Standards working on atomic clocks, and pictures of it. But he, of course, became very interested in the maser also.

I think it is important to recognize the intermeshing of science again. Harold was then hired by Hughes on the West Coast. He came out to Hughes and formed a quantum electronics group, a group to work in this general field, and he hired [Theodore H.] Ted Maiman who then made the first laser. Ted Maiman had been a student of Professor Lamb who had been my colleague in the Radiation Lab at Columbia. Lamb moved to Stanford at one point, and Ted Maiman was a student of Lamb's at Stanford. So this is really all in the family, so to speak. That is an important characteristic of scientific research--the trading of ideas and people who know each other and talk with each other and so on, and a school of people who are interested and interact and so forth. So Harold Lyons started the group at Hughes, which has done some very nice things, after this period when I was consulting with him and he was interested in atomic clocks.

Now, I can't remember the exact timing of the buildup of interest, but certainly it was building up pretty rapidly, and it grew more and more rapidly, so at one point the Physical Review said, "We are getting flooded with papers on masers in the letters section and are not going to take any more papers on masers." I've never seen them take that position in any other field, and it was kind of funny. There are plenty of other places to publish, but they took that position.

Riess

Actually, why?

Townes

Why? They were just getting too many. Everybody was making new proposals of new kinds of masers. They would write in a theoretical proposal on some idea. Because masers were the hot topic and everybody wanted to hear about them they would quickly publish all kinds of things, including some cockeyed ideas that were hard to knock down completely. So they were getting a lot of theoretical proposals: "Here is another kind of maser that we propose to build," or that might be built, or something like that. And they would send it off to Physical Review letters.

Petit

Do you think that frenzy in any way compares to the one over high temperature superconductors in the '87-'88 period, which was borne by fax machines more than by letters?

Townes

[laughs] Well, I think there is some comparison there, yes.

Riess

You were on the board of editors of Physical Review at that time, weren't you?

Townes

No. Not at that time. I was at some time. Let me say that particular action came after I came back from sabbatical, so that would have been along in the later '50s.

Riess

You were on the board of editors of Physical Review from '51-'53.

Townes

Ah. That was before [the maser]. You really know these things better than I do. [laughter]

Riess

"I have a piece of paper here."

Townes

So this built up, and I would say it was peaking in the late '50s, but it was going already some before I left on sabbatical. I think after the papers began to be published on amplification it peaked up quite a bit. A lot of engineers and companies got interested, and so on. It just kept on going as masers became more and more successful, and it perhaps peaked after the laser came along, in the late '60s.

I think Ted Maiman has put out a story that Physical Review turned down his first announcement of the laser, and with suspicion that it was because of this ban on masers, you see. I don't really think that is the case. I knew the editor there, and the statement he made about it was that he turned it down because of serial publication, that Maiman had already published something on ruby, and here was another paper on ruby, and it looked like just a whole series of short papers instead of him putting it all in one long paper. It is clear that the editor must not have really understood it, and I think the paper wasn't very clearly written at that time. In any case, that first laser paper was turned down, and that came in '60. So the effects of the maser papper ban were still in force about that time. I think the edict was initially made probably '57 or '58.

Riess

It is an interesting footnote. You might think that instead this might generate a new journal. A journal of masers.

Townes

Well, it eventually has, but it didn't at that time. We now have the Journal of Quantum Electronics, for example, plus a number of others.

Let me get back to the question of how much did physicists really appreciate it. Certainly it was picking up. It accelerated--many of these things grow exponentially. In that sense I guess it was different from the low temperature fusion. Low temperature fusion sort of hit all of a sudden, and everybody was looking at it. While the actual maser announcement was a sudden thing, in a sense, though, most of my friends knew I was working on it. But the fact that it worked was a discrete event, and there was interest and it built up. I interest and activity just kept on getting more and more and more over four or five years.

Petit

Sounds like a metaphor for the way a maser works. The wave moves through and gradually--

Townes

[laughter] Exponential growth! Yes.

Now, when I was in France--. See, I went on sabbatical. I had planned the sabbatical for a long time, thinking sabbatical is a time to sort of reassess what you are doing, and think about what is most important, and what you had best do next and so on, and I had a sabbatical coming up. I was looking forward to it. I wanted to go to Europe and spend some time there, and take the family and go to the far east too. I went on from there to Japan. I had a sabbatical, which with a Fulbright and a Guggenheim fellowship let me take fifteen months, two summers as well as the wintertime. I had a long sabbatical, and my plan was to just think through everything again and figure out what I should do. That meant in a sense that I wasn't sure I was going to push hard on the maser, or that was the thing I should be working on. I thought that was very interesting, but I wanted really to look over everything again.

I did believe that microwave spectroscopy was finished for me. I felt it was pretty much rounded out so far as the physical principles were concerned. I had finished the book and so, okay, that was a chapter that was more or less finished. But that didn't mean I might not do something different with it. I was thinking of doing radio-astronomy as a possibility. I was thinking of doing relativity experiments as a possibility. I was certainly thinking of maybe working more on masers. But I was just looking around generally.

I visited a number of laboratories in Europe, and I talked with people just to see what other people were doing and think about what was the best kind of physics I should do. I gave a talk in France in '55, and to show you there was some interest, one thing I remember was a French physicist whom I knew moderately well who had done some microwave spectroscopy. I wasn't talking about the maser even, but he knew about this work and he said, "You know, that is just beautiful. That is the thing you are going to get the Nobel prize for." That was a new idea to me. [laughs] And I kind of laughed, but it did make enough of an impression on me that I remembered it. So he thought it was very important. I would say that that was not a common judgement, but that was his judgement, anyhow. A few people had that idea. So it was recognized as exciting and important. Interest in it and participation in it grew kind of exponentially; more and more people pitched in as the field developed. For example, after we had worked out the theory of noise, that interested additional people, and other people began working on it.

More About Joe Weber

Townes

Now you asked, also, did other people show up who said they had been working on it? I indicated really a great lack of interest while I was working on it. After we had published and I started writing other articles on it, Joe Weber showed up. Joe Weber was an interesting character. He claimed he had invented the maser. Joe Weber was at the University of Maryland, and he is a clever person, but with kind of extreme self-directed points of view. He is the person who started gravity wave detection work. Gravity wave work--people are still working hard on gravity waves and have never detected gravity waves. Joe Weber set up a system to detect gravity waves which was many orders of magnitude off, it couldn't possibly have done it. But then he reported he had found them, and for a year or two it was a great controversy whether he really had them. He claimed he had, but he wouldn't show people his data very freely and so on. It is clear to everybody else that he never found them, but I believe he still feels that he did.

Riess

This was in the early '50s also?

Townes

No, this would have been in the early '60s, I guess. But that is the kind of person he was. He did write a paper on amplification which I hadn't seen. It didn't stir any interest. He had published it in '53. We were already working on the maser. Yes, it published it in late '53 in an electrical engineering journal, just a little kind of short paper. So he began to claim that he had invented the maser. That is the only person that I know other than the Russians, and I'll mention them in a moment, who said that they were working on it, or had thought about it at that time.

Petit

Had he built hardware?

Townes

No, he never built any hardware, no. Furthermore, his idea was--. He recognized that one could get amplification from stimulated emission. He was doing it with no feedback--no cavity, no feedback. He didn't have enough gain to counteract just a minimum loss in any input or output windows. He would never have got any gain. He also was applying electric fields which would have ionized all of the gas, he wouldn't have had any molecules. So he was off by about eight orders of magnitude, as I remember, in the amount of amplification that he thought he would get. But he did understand that stimulated emissions could give you amplification.

He was in microwave spectroscopy, and he may well have visited my laboratory. He was visiting back and forth at times and he may well have seen this. That doesn't mean that he was specifically copying. It's just that physicists visit back and forth and sometimes they don't remember exactly where ideas came from.

Riess

You mentioned last time that your laboratory reports where circulated.

Townes

The laboratory reports were circulated, and everybody had them that was interested. Those reports started circulating in 1951, you see. So Joe certainly had access to that. Whether he specifically had seen those things I will never know. He was very fierce about that for a while. After he had a patent case on it and I pointed out a number of basic difficulties with his paper which I never publicly pointed out, he suddenly became very friendly. I have always said, well, he had an idea, and I mentioned his papers and so on, and he had.

Riess

What do you mean fierce?

Townes

Oh, that I was being unfair to him, that he was the real inventor. I wasn't giving him proper credit and all this.

Riess

Was he saying this in publication?

Townes

Well, pretty publicly.

Petit

At meetings, with friends--

Townes

Yes, yes, that is right. He was even publishing papers pointing out very firmly his publications and sort of down-playing anything I had done, you see.

Riess

Did you respond in publication?

Townes

Well, I told them, "Look, let's try to get the facts right." So I wrote a short letter--I had something else to publish anyhow, and I made him a co-author, and we put down some of the history in a short paper in the Physical Review. I said, "These are some of the real facts, and we'll put those down, and this will give you some credit." So we made a joint publication together. But he still wasn't very satisfied with it.

Interestingly, I never talked with him about this patent case, but I'm sure the patent lawyers on the other side showed it to him to get his counter-arguments, you see. And he was just way off in about four or five different ways. I never had mentioned that in public before, you see, but when the patent lawyers asked me about it I pointed it out, and he suddenly became very friendly with me. In spite of not always being right, Joe is a creattive and very inventive person.

Riess

He became friendly because he felt that at his point you could truly expose him.

Townes

I don't really know. Itt's only my guess. But I think he felt that I really had been fair to him, after all. And maybe more than fair.

He is presenttly pushing an idea for detecting submarines using neutrinos, and that is very, very far out.

Petit

He is still around?

Townes

He is still around. He is retired, but he is still around. He is a clever guy, but kind of a one track type.

Petit

It sounds like you don't think he was being dishonorable. He really thought that he had it.

Townes

No, no. I think he had convinced himself. Even though it might have been a little erroneously, he had convinced himself.

What was new that we did was finding out how to do it, making it work, that was new. When I talked with the patent attorney about patenting it, about a year after we published--you have to apply for a patent within a year to make it valid in the U.S.--I said there had been a number of publications going back twenty years about the fact that there could be amplification, but none using feedback or cavities, or for that matter none suggesting the amplification might be useful. However, knowledge of the effect of stimulated emission was certainly not new. Nobody had done it, but did he think that the idea of amplification without feedback was patentable?

And he felt that probably would not be patentable. That is public information, because it has been published and talked about already, even though none had done it. But the oscillator was patentable, the feedback, that was a new idea, and that is basically what we patented then.

The only person who was speaking up and saying that they had the idea was Joe Weber. Weber didn't say he was working on it. In fact, Weber told me personally that he thought it was a nice idea, and he wanted to show the electrical engineers that something could be done with molecules, and that is why he gave the paper, but he never said that he worked on it further or ever built anything.

A Meeting with Basov and Prokhorov

Townes

Now, the Russians are a very different case, and I can tell you about that. I don't know whether you want to go into that now.

Riess

Well, why not?

Townes

All right. Now the Russians, [Nikolai G.] Basov and [Alexander M.] Prokhorov published something. Their case is one that I simply do not know fully. But some of it is not quite what is publicly claimed. They published in about 1953, I believe it was. They published an idea of an oscillator with a molecular beam, very, very much like my ammonia system. But they didn't use ammonia, they used alkali halides, I believe it was, which I considered not nearly as favorable, but in principle it could work. They even showed that for an oscillator using the molecule they selected, tthe cavity would have to have an exceptionally low loss, one that could not practically be achieved at that time. But they did suggest a molecular beam, and a cavity which would give feedback. It was remarkably similar to what we were doing, but published in '53. I don't know why they didn't think of ammonia, or what they did about it at that time.

I first met them in Cambridge, England, at a meeting of the Faraday Society, when I was asked to come and give a talk on some of my microwave spectroscopy. That had to be the summer of '54, I believe. However, I'm not sure. I'll check that later. The papers on the meeting have been published, and that would have dated the meeting. I was asked to come over and give a talk to the Faraday Society. I thought that maybe the most interesting thing to do was to talk about the maser. The maser was quite new, and so I submitted a paper, and they wrote back that they weren't accepting anything in that field, that wasn't what they wanted to talk about, they wanted to talk about my microwave spectroscopy. So I said, okay, and I submitted a different topic and talked about something else.

I got over there, and it was very uncommon to be able to meet with Russian scientists at that time, and here were these two Russian scientists that had come to the meeting (the British could accept Russian scientists a little more easily than we could in the U.S. at that time.) So here were these two Russian scientists that showed up at the meeting. They hadn't sent in the topic of their talk. They were invited to come and talk, but they neglected to send in anything, which is quite typical of the Russians. They do these things at the last minute, and usually people excused them because they were so eager to have them participate. So they got up and talked about an ammonia maser.

Petit

I bet you sat up straight. [laughter]

Townes

Yes. They talked about an ammonia maser. They didn't have it working, but they were working on it, and they felt sure it would work and this was how it ought to work, and so on. Well, after the discussion period, of course, I got up and said, "Well, that is very nice, but we have one of these working," and described our results a little bit. Actually, our first paper had already come out.

It was great fun to talk with them. I remember very vividly walking around the streets of Cambridge and talking. They spoke enough English and they seemed to talk a little more freely on the street than in the meeting where they might be overheard. I was, of course, very interested in talking about some semi-political things as well as science. But we talked a lot about science as well. I didn't know that they had published anything, but they had, in fact, published this paper, not on ammonia, but using something else, before and in a different way.

They were very eager to talk with me about how did I make this work, because they were having trouble and hadn't gotten it working. The thing that they had missed was the quadrupole focusser, which is a scheme that I had actually learned back in early '51 from Paul, the German physicist. It was public information--that is, he had published it--and there was no reason they shouldn't know about it, excepting that they hadn't hit on it. They went back there and used the quadrupole focusser and got their system working. We talked about it. Their position is that this is completely independent of anything we did. They didn't know about our work at all.

Riess

You discussed that particular point when you were walking around?

Townes

Yes, just informally. "Had they seen it our publication?"

Petit

What year was this, and had you not published yourself?

Townes

Well, yes our first publication in Physical Review Letters had come out. And we had done a good deal more work which resulted in a longer paper but it wasn't out yet.

Riess

And so you really gave them a hand up, in that case.

Townes

I gave them a hand up? What do you mean?

Riess

Well, telling them about the quadrupole focusser.

Townes

It wasn't any secret. I would tell anybody about my science.

 

Townes

No, they were scientists, not ostensibly secret service agents. No, anybody who asked me about my science, what I was doing, I would tell them exactly.

Petit

And your publication in the works had a description of the focusser.

Townes

As a matter of fact, the focusser was shown in our first publication, which had come out the summer before. It was all there. I'm not unattentive to military needs and I recognize a responsibility there in a sense as an American citizen, and also the fact the military was supporting our work, so I did contact the Signal Corps before I sent this paper in to the Physical Review and I told them that I thought this was an interesting thing and it would have some applications. I did not want it to be classified, but I felt it was my duty to call it to their attention; if they wanted to classify it, I would be sorry, but that was up to them.

They responded that I had already talked about it in Washington, which I had before I asked them, so they thought there wasn't any sense in classifying it. [laughter] So it was something that clearly had applications, and it was not something that I was unconscious of, and I did raise the question. But generally that wouldn't have been classified. It was just my feeling that I ought to be completely fair to them and let them know, give them the chance to say that they want to classify it, even though I was against that. So, otherwise, it was public information and we discussed it all.

The interesting thing is that each group wants to claim they had the idea first. Weber is now saying that he had the idea before the Columbia University reports came out. There is no record to support that, but he says he had the idea before, he knew about it before, and who knows? The Russians even went so far as saying they had discussed it at a meeting in '51 and they stated that in one of their published papers, sort of to stake out a claim.

The fall of 1951, of course, represents my first account that had some circulation, by the Columbia Radiation Lab report. Just to illustrate the problem further, I would always say U thought of the idea a couple of years earlier, in 1949 or so, which I did. However, what I thought about was simply demonstrating stimulated emission as a physical phenomenon. It would have given localized amplification but not net amplification. I did not do the experiment because I wasn't thinking of useful amplification, and thought a demonstration not worth the trouble. This is why I have not made such a claim, and in any case it is not documented in any way.

You see how difficult it is for scientists to see exact origins, and people can fool themselves, and so on. But the Russians said that they talked about it at a meeting and there is a Swedish physicist who came over and I knew quite well--he was, again, in radio-astronomy, a member of the Swedish Academy and, I'm sure, involved in the discussions of the Nobel prize--he came over and he sort of specifically asked me at one time what did I think of the Russian work. I told him that so far as I knew they had had the idea independently. They hadn't made it work by themselves, but they had an idea. I asked him if he knew about this meeting. He said he had looked into that and he found that the meeting didn't exist. They have not, more recently, claimed that anymore. To what extent they may have seen the Columbia University publications I don't know. If I were an assiduous Russian, I think I would have tried to keep up with what was going on in American laboratories, and it certainly could have been done. The unpublished and unrecorded part of the story is of course difficult, and I pretend no special insight into it.

Riess

Were they working in microwave spectroscopy?

Townes

They had been working in microwave spectroscopy and electron spin resonances, so their work was very pertinent, and I've always pointed out that the three places where this originated were all doing microwave spectroscopy. If you look at the laser, you would think that it is unlikely that something like that would come out of radio waves, you see. Why should bright light come out of the study of molecules and radio waves, or all of the other applications?

Well, we've got a test saying there are three cases, more or less simultaneously, three different laboratories, separated, all working on microwaves, they all had this idea. So it is clear that it is a field, and a set of ideas associated with that field, which generated the invention. It wasn't just some strange accident. There must have been real reasons why it came out of that field, and I think one can understand them when you look at the basic ideas.

Petit

Three groups including the Russian group?

Townes

And Weber, yes. Weber, our group, and the Russians.

Well, the Russians obviously were very interested, as I was, and they went back home and used the quadrupole focusser and got the system to work, and then they made a number of other inventions. I think one of the ones that they claim, and I think this one could be right, insofar as I know, but I have not looked at it carefully, they claim first to have suggested the semiconductor laser. Basov did. Now, again, they didn't make one work first, but he certainly did suggest the idea, and so far as I know, he may have been the first one to publish that, at least. Basov and Prokhorov are very capable physicists, they were good physicists, and they have continued to do work in this field and have done a lot of nice work. Weber, himself, never did any direct work. He just left the field and has been doing other things, gravity waves in particular.

Dating an Idea

Riess

Do you want to say anything more about the Russians?

Townes

No, I think that is about it.

Riess

It does sound like a situation where the first thing is press the button, and then see if you really know the answer, like on quiz shows.

Townes

[laughter] Well, I think it is very tempting for people to feel that they had the idea, which is generally probably true, because a lot of ideas cross your mind, and you discard them. What I found, when I was a younger person, was that the older physicists would say of any ideas I had, oh yes, they had thought of this, you see, and it wasn't going to work, it wasn't very worthwhile, but they had thought of it. And they probably had, but they hadn't thought about how to really use it or how to make it work, clearly, because they had never pursued it and they had never written anything down. In most cases, I don't doubt that yes, they probably had thought about it, but they didn't get the point, or the time wasn't right, or something, and so they didn't do it. If you are musing about all kinds of things, a lot of these things cross your mind, so it is very easy for people to think, "Oh, I had that idea first."

I am reminded of [Edwin] Ed McMillan's comment to me. Ed McMillan, you know who he is, a physicist here, he died recently. Ed invented the synchrotron in some kind of sense. It turned out that a Russian had really written a very good paper on it--nobody ever read it because they don't read Russian, we don't look at the Russian journals very carefully--a couple of years earlier, but nothing ever happened, and he didn't actually work on it so far as I know. Then there was a young electrical engineer who wrote a paper about it, just a kind of a manuscript, sent it to somebody in LBL [Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories]. This person evidently never looked at it particularly, because here is this odd engineer in New York who was an elevator engineer, and he had this same idea.

Petit

Is he that guy that ended up out at Livermore?

Townes

Yes.

Petit

Oh yes, I can't remember his name either.

Townes

I knew him very, very well. It was Nick Christophilos.

Petit

A native genius just popped up.

Townes

Yes. He presumably said, well, there was this crackpot in New York who sent a big thick manuscript. He never read it. He sort of put it away, but it was the same thing. Ed said, "Well, all I can say is I was the last one who had to invent the synchrotron." In other words, when he invented it, it took. [laughter] That was his claim to fame, that he was the last one to invent it. That can make a very big difference.

Ed took it seriously. He knew it was something, and he took it seriously, and he saw that it was made, and then everybody knew about it. He made something of it. Now, the Russian wrote a very good paper and published it. This poor young Greek, he got hold of the LBL people saying, "Look, I sent you a paper on this!" They dug it out of their drawer and sure enough it was there. So they hired him. They thought, "Look, this guy must be good." So they hired him, and he was employed up here at LBL, and then he moved out to Livermore. And he did a lot of very interesting things after that, too.

So there are two things, the effect of just kind of transition ideas, because you think about a lot of things and you don't take them seriously, and you may not even think they are right, but you had the idea. It just crossed your mind and you think that you had the idea. The other one is that even when papers are published, if nobody does anything, makes them work and puts them on the map, or calls them to the attention of the community in a way that they really are convincing, you see, then it doesn't necessarily get things started.

Riess

That is very interesting. It makes you think about what ideas really are.

Townes

Yes. And these ideas do go back a long way, and, as I have said several times, it was not uncommon knowledge that stimulated amplification occurred and that you get an inversion of population, and it is amazing to me that other people didn't get going or think about it seriously as amplification. Particularly the Harvard group.

I would say the Harvard group is the one that surprised me that they missed it, because Ed Purcell and Norman Ramsey, are very good physicists, they had been involved in the MIT radiation laboratory with microwaves, so they knew all of the engineering things, they worked on these things, they talked about negative temperatures, and so on. Somehow they never got the idea of using it for amplification, and it is very surprising. Now Bloembergen, another of this Harvard group, a somewhat younger man, did make a big contribution to the maser somewhat later.

Research Corporation, Columbia University, and Patent No. 2,879,439

Riess

You began talking about the process of patenting. Could you tell me about the relationship with the Research Corporation?

Townes

Well, the Research Corporation was started by a man named [Frederick G.] Cottrell, who invented the process of getting dust and smoke out of gasses with electrostatic potentials. I think he put them on chimneys first. In any case, it was an anti-pollution method of the early days, and Cottrell made quite a lot of money at it. I don't think he was enormously wealthy, but he made a fair amount of money, and he set up factories. He patented this as well as manufacturing it.

After he had arrived at a good deal of money he decided to set up a research corporation which was to accept patents from people, particularly people in universities, but from anyone who wanted to submit their patents, and then collect money on the patents, give the inventor some fraction of it but save the rest of the money to support further research. He believed in research, so this was kind of a non-profit organization to support research based on patents, and he gave his own patents and his own property to the Research Corporation to start it off. I'm not sure if, in his will, he specifically asked them to emphasize universities, but that was a natural place, and they did emphasize universities. So they were working with many of the universities, and still are, with agreements that the universities would turn over patents to the Research Corporation.

The Research Corporation gives a certain fraction to the inventor, a certain fraction to the university, and then the rest of the money it puts back into the university on a grant basis. They were very important during the '30s as a source of grant money for research. That was before government money became available in any quantity at all, and so a thousand dollars here and there was very important for research. I believe Rabi told me they supported him. I know they did support E. O. Lawrence in his early work in cyclotrons. So it was an important source of money for universities at that time.

Riess

And their directors were from the universities?

Townes

Well, they had a board of directors, and I feel sure some of them were university people, or university presidents, maybe.

Riess

And who decided about the grants?

Townes

Oh, well, they organized committees and they had just a standard kind of an organization like any kind of foundation might have. They had a board, and the board, I am sure, had university people on it. The present head of it is the former president of the University of Arizona, for example. I don't think before that time the head of it was ever a university president, but I'm sure the boards had various university people on them. Then you had committees that would advise them, and so on. So they did it sensibly, generally.

Riess

Was their orientation to practical research, or pure research?

Townes

Oh, pure research. The idea is, you support research, and from research sometimes inventions come out. The universities were doing basic research, and when inventions came out they [Research Corporation] helped capitalize on them--the university didn't know how to do that, you see--they took over, and did it. They always plowed any net income they had back into university research. It was a very helpful organization, and very important to American research in the '30s, especially in the physical sciences. I don't know what they did in biology. They were also given a very important patent by a man who was at Bell Labs who was a chemist who invented a kind of medical application, R. W. Williams, that was in the biochemical field at that time. I knew about the Research Corporation. I knew the general purposes of the organization very well, and what it had done, and I admired it, thought it was a very useful thing.

Now, the patent regulations under which I was working required two things, and we all had to sign them: one, that patents would belong to Columbia University; secondly, that because it was government-supported, they would allow the government to use the patents free of charge. So the government had free use of any patents. But for non-governmental uses, the University could patent it if they wanted to and then take the profits on non-governmental use.

Well, Columbia University was freewheeling on the patent business. I contacted them and said that here was something that I thought ought to be patented, and that they had the right to patent it, and asked what we should do. They had a kind of a standing committee which was very inactive, but the committee took this up and said that they really didn't have any patent policy, and so if I was interested and I felt that I would like to patent it, I should go ahead and patent it myself.

There was a man, Major [Edwin H.] Armstrong, in the electrical engineering department at Columbia University, and he was a great inventor. He invented frequency modulation radio, he invented some of the early oscillators and amplifiers--the super-regenerative amplifier he had invented. He had a number of inventions in the radio region, and he was a professor of electrical engineering. He always patented his own inventions and profited from them. He had made, really, quite a bit of money, but on the frequency modulation business he had a big suit, and none of the companies were willing to pay. He sued RCA as sort of the test case.

I used to see him over at the faculty club at Columbia and talk with him. He was an interesting old chap, and I enjoyed him, and we were eating lunch together frequently. He would rail about RCA, and about how this was unfair. It clearly bothered him a lot. RCA claimed that frequency modulation was a natural phenomenon, and hence not patentable, and he claimed that it couldn't possibly be a natural phenomenon, and hence it was a real invention. He was regarded as fairly wealthy, and he told me that this case had cost essentially all of his money. It cost many millions of dollars fighting this case with RCA. He jumped off the roof a little bit later. He had some family problems anyhow, and that may well have been the biggest cause, but he obviously was not a happy man, and he jumped off the roof and killed himself. His estate then followed up, got a new lawyer, and they won the case and collected twenty million dollars or so net profit after all of the costs.

Petit

He jumped off the roof of the physics building?

Townes

No, he jumped off his own apartment building.

Now, I didn't really overtly think about that. [laughter] I had no idea that I would ever kill myself, I see no point in that.

Petit

But patents are no fun though?

Townes

I did recognize that patents were a nuisance, and I wanted to concentrate on science, and I felt that would take a lot of time for me to bother about this. Anyhow, my general outlook on life is that I don't do things for money. I have to make enough money to make a living, but money is not the object. Instinctively it doesn't feel right to me to be doing something just to make some money unless, of course, it's needed to live.

Riess

From what you have said, you hadn't predicted the financial boom.

Townes

Well, no, I felt that it would certainly make a moderate amount of money.

I had had about a dozen patents prior to that, which I patented primarily because I was at Bell Labs. Bell Laboratories wanted to be sure they covered everything, because they might possibly use it themselves. I never felt that they were money-making things, they were just things that Bell Labs would need for their own purposes, and wanted to be sure that they had them covered, and that included the atomic clock even. The atomic clock, maybe there will be twenty of them made in the country, and that would be important scientifically, but obviously there is no money in it. This I felt, yes, there probably is some money in it. How much I didn't know, but I thought it would be appreciable.

Anyhow, the university said go ahead and patent it if you'd like to patent it. It is up to you. I felt the Research Corporation was the right kind of place. They were an organization I admired, they would take it off of my hands and take care of it, and then I wouldn't have to mess around with it too much. So I contacted them and they patented it.9 I put down stipulations that first they were to pay all of the expenses, including their legal expenses if necessary. That was the first thing that would come out of any income. They would be cleared of any costs so that they wouldn't have to risk the costs if it had any income at all.

After that, I was to get three quarters of the income, until I got twenty-five thousand dollars. Why twenty-five thousand? Well, twenty-five thousand was about three times my salary at that point, and I thought I really didn't need more than twenty-five thousand. That is a lot of money and I just don't have to have more than that. If I make that much, that is fine; more is nice, but it is really not important. After that, they were to get 75 percent, and I was to get 20 percent, and Jim Gordon was to get 5 percent. Jim I felt had been important to this. While it wasn't his patent, I nevertheless felt that he had been important, so I gave him the 5 percent. I also planned a lump sum of $1,000 tto go to T. C. Wang, a Chinese postdoc who had helped us after the first maser was going. So that is the way I set it up, and then they patented it.

That patent I paid some attention to, because I did think it would probably bring in some money and be of some importance. Furthermore, I was pleased about it and so paid some attention to it. I had quite a lot of discussion with the lawyer, for a moderate amount of time, and it was going on even while I was on sabbatical. I wrote some letters back and forth to lawyers explaining how it ought to be phrased, in order to be sure that it was general enough. I was very careful to make it quite general, because I knew it could be extended to other wavelengths. What I patented was the amplification of electromagnetic waves. The specific example, showing the invention, was in the microwave region. That was the ammonia maser, and also some amplifiers and so on. I was very careful not to let it be specified too narrowly, I kept it very, very general. All of the claims are in terms of amplification of electromagnetic waves.

Now, I had a problem, because before this finished--. These patents take a long time. You apply for a patent, and then you really write it and get all of the wording right. The patent application had to go in within one year of the first publication, which was in June of '54, I believe. So the patent application did go in within one year, we just made it. I didn't get around to it until about nine months after our first paper. I wasn't all that interested in pushing that, but I thought I had better do it before a year is up because I ought to take advantage of it in some way. Then it hung on for a long time. On the one hand I was kind of eager to get it through, but the Research Corporation lawyer said, look, you don't realize that the longer these things wait, the more money you make. [laughter] I said, okay, but it has been three or four years now already, so why don't we get this finished up. And he was dead right. If I had let it hang on for another ten years, an enormous amount of additional money would come in.

Petit

Because the expiration date is that much longer?

Townes

That's right. Because the field builds up, you see. People have to get accustomed to the idea of manufacturing with it, and it builds up. It is generally not the original inventor that makes most of the money, it is usually the add-ons, the little extra changes and extra fillips that later inventors come along and add on that make most of the money. He realized that. It didn't mean much to me one way or the other, and I said, why don't we get this finished up. So it was finished up in 1959. It started sometime in late '54, early '55, and this was going on four years. I didn't give it that much attention, but every once in a while he would send me something and I would have to revise it and send it back to him and so on.

Townes' Relationship with Bell Labs, 1957, and Patent No. 2,929,922

Townes

Now, the dilemma that came to me was that by that time the laser had been invented. That really started seriously in '57, and I had first written some things about it just sitting at my desk at Columbia. Now, Columbia University and the U.S. Government insist that anything invented while working for them is their property. Here I was sitting at my desk at Columbia University, and I had this idea. But I was also consulting with Bell Telephone Laboratories. Bell Telephone Laboratories wanted me just to come and visit around and talk with people, and help stimulate the work and look at it and comment about it and so on. I was quite free--they said do this two days a month, and I agreed to do it.

 

Townes

They gave me a monthly stipend, and I was supposed to just keep track of it myself. Just be a friend of the laboratories and visit from time to time, and talk with people. Well, that was a nice kind of consulting job, and so I accepted it. One thing I happened to be specifically asked. [Albert M.] Al Clogston was a physicist there who was the supervisor of Art Schawlow and Ali Javan. Javan was one of my students who went there, and Art Schawlow had been a postdoc with me and married my younger sister and went there. Al said, "Art is having a hard time right now. I don't think his work is going too well. Why don't you talk with your brother-in-law some?"

I thought that was fine. I always thought very highly of Art, it was fun to talk with him, and so I talked with him about what I was doing. He was very interested and said he had been thinking about that, too. He was the one who had the idea of simplifying the cavity into two plates, only. Two simple mirrors. Why I didn't come up with that idea is hard for me to understand. Again, it is just one of those things, because I knew all about it. But Art came up with that idea, and he had a lot of really good ideas, and he was interested, and since I thought maybe he was a little bit at loose ends and I enjoyed working with him,I suggested we do this together.

He was interested in doing that, so we wrote this paper together. He did a lot of the work on it. He would keep looking up things and finding new materials. I did most of the theoretical end of it. Now, in particular the cavity, the mirrors, he suggested this, pointing out that the light would go straight back and forth and you wouldn't amplify any beams that go across this way, which I didn't want to do, you see. I had fixed up a system which was far from perfect to try to do that a little bit, but I didn't make it work very well. Suddenly this clarified things greatly. It would amplify only this direction.

I worked out also that one could pick a particular frequency within a line width, and have only one frequency. While it was bouncing back and forth in this direction, you could adjust the dimensions so that it would have only one frequency, adjust the mirror size so that you could damp even a slight off-angle motion. I worked out a theory for this, but it was Art's idea. Plus a number of other things--he particularly suggested certain solid states for solid state lasers and so on.

Now, when I go to patent this, what should I do? I had this patent application already going on with Research Corporation which I felt ought to cover the whole field, and here was this new idea which was an aspect of it. Clearly Schawlow's part of it ought to belong to Bell Labs. And what about my part? Should I try to make that a joint personal and Columbia University thing? Some kind of Bell Labs/Columbia University joint patent, or what? I thought about it a good deal, and I decided I was at my desk at Columbia, but my working hours were not defined, and I wasn't necessarily working for the military then or for that contract or even for Columbia University. This was just an idea that came to me. And when did I work for Columbia University? How could I define it? I talked with them a little bit about it, and they were pretty open about it. Columbia University didn't care. So what I did is to say well, this is a Bell Laboratories patent, and put it all in their lap and said let's just give it to Bell Labs, and let Bell Laboratories patent it.10 I was consulting with Bell Labs, so I'll call that part of my consultations.

Petit

So the seed may have come from Columbia, but the nourishment was all at Bell Labs?

Townes

The seed certainly came when I was at Columbia. I continued to work on it, but I said my further work on it will be as my Bell Labs consultancy. But this is a problem for a University person. I am here I don't know how many hours a day, and on Saturdays. My official working hours, I suppose, are forty hours a week, and when am I working for whom? We are always also given one day a week--one day a week is a normal University arrangement--that you can do consulting; you are free one day a week on your own. It was kind of a difficult ethical problem what I should do there. That is what I decided was the right thing to do, to give it all to Bell Labs. At least it wasn't me seeking something personally. But it was a question of whether it partly belonged to Columbia University.

Riess

It does seem that Columbia didn't care. I don't understand why.

Townes

Well, they didn't know whether it was important or not. And again, they had no special patent policy. I think partly because of Major Armstrong. You see, Major Armstrong always patented his own things. He always did his work at Columbia and patented his own things, and they just let people go their own way. Universities now are more conscious of patents and the possibility of making some money on them, and I think they may now overdo it. The University of California is looking hard for patents, and they keep encouraging people to write patents, and my guess is that most of them will lose money, making it not worth the effort to patent them. But every once in a while you hit something that is quite valuable, and you have to know when that is.

Petit

Where was this Mr. [Gordon] Gould at this time? Was he at Hughes?

Townes

No, he was at Columbia. Two doors down the hall from me. We can talk about him.

Petit

I don't know when you want to go through that.

Townes

Well, any time, but--

Riess

I just want to ask one other question, what was the Research Corporation arrangement with the laser?

Townes

Well, you see, my feeling was the original invention covered everything in the field. It was not defined by any particular frequencies or wavelengths. That was the basic invention, and that covered amplification of waves of any wavelength. That was my feeling about it, and I talked with a lawyer. Now, again I had a problem. Because here was a lawyer for Research Corporation, and I felt I could not tell him overtly about the laser invention because that might be unfair to Bell Labs. I had to keep that within myself. I couldn't talk with him completely openly about it, because he might then try to take advantage of something to favor Research Corporation. It was better for me to make the decisions at that point I felt.

Petit

You regarded the Bell Labs laser as a subsidiary sort of patent to the broader patent?

Townes

That's right. It is. That is the way legally it is. Although it is not popularly understood that way, but that is the legal patent situation. The maser patent is the general patent, and the laser patent is what is called an `improvement' patent.

Riess

And that is all to Bell Labs?

Townes

The laser patent was completely Bell Labs.

Riess

And not Art Schawlow?

Townes

Oh, Art Schawlow and I are the inventors, but the property is owned by Bell Labs.

Riess

And the financial arrangement?

Townes

That is all Bell Labs. Just as once I gave my patent to the Research Corporation, they owned it. They didn't invent it, but they owned it.

Riess

But you were still getting 20 percent.

Townes

Sure, I was getting some income from it.

Riess

And not from the laser?

Townes

No, I didn't get anything directly from the laser. But you see, the main income from the maser patent was, in fact, the lasers, because the lasers fell under that patent, so the Research Corporation did get money from the early lasers. That patent has long since run out. Again, that lawyer was quite right. If I had waited ten years, more money would have come in.

Riess

And the lawyer makes a little more money, too. [laughter]

Townes

Well, he made plenty of money anyhow. Let me get back to this other question, sort of the jurisdictional/ethical question. I recognized the complications and the difficulties, but I felt that I should not tell the lawyer about the laser because somehow he might twist things in a way that wouldn't be fair. In fact, it would be best for me to try to make the decisions myself, which I did in this way: the maser patent really covers all frequencies, but we will not in the maser patent specifically mention light. It was invented for microwaves, but it is a general patent, and I had already generalized it to include all wavelengths. We will just keep it that way. It is clear that it includes all wavelengths. But we are not going to use the laser as an example, or say anything about it in the patent. And I never told the lawyer about it, you see.

Once I started working with Art Schawlow at Bell Laboratories, I felt that is commercial now. It does have patent potentiality and is owned by a company. Once I started solidly working with Art Schawlow, then I did not openly talk about it. That is very different from my work at Columbia. My work at Columbia I talked about quite openly with anybody. My work at Bell Laboratories I felt I could talk with anybody at Bell Laboratories, but not people outside. So that became restricted, and Art Schawlow and I could work on this from the fall of '57 to the midsummer of '58 without anybody else much knowing about it. There wasn't any excitement about it, any talk about it, until our paper came out then. This is very different from the university atmosphere and what I did in the university.

Patent Law

Townes

There was another peculiar thing about the Bell Laboratories patent. After we had drafted a paper on the laser, I told Art, "You take this to the Bell Laboratories patent lawyers and have them patent it." I suggested he go to a particular patent lawyer, Torsiglieri, who I know patented the transistor. The transistor people are good friends, and I remember their saying he was a very good patent lawyer. So I suggested he go to see him. He was a fairly senior man then, and the next thing I heard from Art Schawlow was that they didn't think they wanted to patent it. Why not? They didn't think that light had much to do with communications and it wouldn't be much use to Bell Labs, and they said, "You can patent it yourself if you'd like."

I told Art, "They are clearly wrong, and I don't think we should take advantage of the fact that they just don't understand. It would be unfair to Bell Labs, so we had better talk with them." Art went and talked with them and said, "Look, Townes says he thinks you really ought to patent it." They said, "Okay, why don't you come in and talk." I went and talked with them, and then they patented it. They wanted us, however, to write it as a communications device, so the title of out patent is "Optical Masers and Communication." That justified their patenting it, you see.

Now, actually, this more senior lawyer had gotten a younger patent lawyer to do it. I guess he figured that he didn't have time, didn't think it was important enough, or something. I think sometime soon I ought to contact him and get his memory of this. My guess is his memory will be very different, but my very clear memory is that Art Schawlow told me that they didn't want to patent it. I think I ought to ask him, in fairness to him, just what he remembers about it, you see.

I think Art also commented to me that Alexander Graham Bell really tried light for communication, and it never worked out. As I heard Art, Bell's patent office seemed to be saying it is an old story. People have tried light many times before and it is just not very useful in communication, and since we must concentrate on communication, we are not interested. I learned about that time that Franklin Park in Washington, D.C., where the maser idea came up, has a building on one side of it which is a building in which Alexander Graham Bell worked trying to use light for communication. [laughs] Isn't that amazing? I made a point of going by and looking for that building. I am not sure I could find Franklin Park now, but I knew where it was then. There is just a big brick wall there, and an old building, and I think there is a plaque on it or something that Alexander Graham Bell had worked there.

Anyhow, we convinced them that yes, they ought to patent it. But I was pretty fed up by then, and I felt okay, this is Bell Laboratories property, and I have gone through a lot of trouble to give it to them, and from now on I am just not going to pay much attention. I know it is their business now, and they can take it from there. I felt the maser would cover it all anyhow as the primary patent, and they are supposed to be good patent lawyers, and it is their business. So I never paid much attention to that patent.

The result was, it was not really very well written, there are a number of things in our paper which didn't get carefully covered. This is one of the reasons Gould has been able to get some things which should have been covered in the patent. He tried to overturn the patent, which he didn't succeed in doing, but then he was able to sort of pick off various things that weren't mentioned, that we had in our publication paper, but weren't mentioned in the patent. He has been successful at that, just because the lawyers didn't really think about covering everything properly, you see. The lawyers had our paper. We said, develop a patent. These are the ideas, and there is our paper. But they did a rather limited job, I would say. The patent was not well written, whereas the maser patent I think turned out well. I paid a lot of attention to that scientifically, you see, to help the lawyer do it right. I knew this lawyer wasn't very familiar with the field, and hence needed some help, whereas the Bell Labs lawyers, "Well, it is off my back, and it is your problem," and they ought to be good. But the patent was not very well written, and in retrospect I should have paid more attention to it.

Let me get back to another part of the story on the patent that I started to digress on. The first lawyer which the Research Corporation hired was a nice old gentleman, a fine person,and I thought very well of him, but he was not terribly effective. He retired, and by then they were trying to sue Bell Laboratories. No, it was not Bell Laboratories, they threatened to sue Bell Laboratories and Bell Laboratories sort of made a settlement. But they were suing one of the biggest and oldest laser companies down in Palo Alto, Spectra-Physics, and they were suing them to pay up. That was the test case. They got this lawyer to carry it out, because the other lawyer had kind of retired.

It turned out to be the same lawyer who had picked up the case for Major Armstrong and won his case on frequency modulation. He was, in fact, very good. I worked with him and we won the case. What happened was that it went through all of the hearings, evidence and testimony and whatnot were taken, and then the company decided to settle and agreed completely with the original specifications of the Research Corporation. They agreed that yes, it did cover the laser, and that patent was all on sound ground. It was what is known as a "consent decree." As I understand it the litigants agree on settlement of the case and the judge decrees that is the outcome, so it's a normal legal decision.

The laser patent was challenged by Gould later, and that is a longer story. Before we get into Gould, and I think we should stop here.

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Basov and Prokhorov, and the Pressures on Russian Scientists

Townes

I was puzzling over the exact dates of my meeting with Basov and Prokhorov, and I was a year off. The meeting was April 4-6, 1955, which was after we had published on the ammonia maser, and it was in the literature. I was thinking it was before, because they didn't mention our own work. [laughs] But in the published version of their talk, which was published in the Faraday Society discussions, along with a paper I had given on quite a different subject, they do say, after discussing all of the theory of how such a maser might work, they said, "It has been reported that one has been operated," and they refer to our first paper.

Riess

And they refer to it by name?

Townes

Well, no, I don't think they refer to it by name, but they give a reference to it, so that the names are there. The Faraday Society wasn't supposed to be, they said, about this subject, because I had sent in a paper on this subject and they said, "No, that is not what we are discussing." But when the Russians came there, they hadn't announced their topic, and Russians were so rare in those days that they let the Russians speak about anything. Nevertheless, even though they had read our paper, they still hadn't gotten on to the quadrupole focussing device, and that was the thing which had prevented them from making one work. I discussed that with them and then they got one working.

Riess

Are you saying that was in the paper but they had just overlooked it?

Townes

Now I'd have to look that up. [I have now looked it up. I was in the paper--CHT.]

At that time, they referred only to one previous mention of their own: they had published a theoretical discussion of the possibilities in the Journal of Experimental Theoretical Physics, in 1954,11 not about ammonia, but about using alkali halides, as I remember. In any case, that was the paper that they referred to. Sometime later, then, was when they said they had talked about it at a meeting at a still earlier date, which meeting nobody could ever really locate.

Riess

What I am left with is not a very clear idea of what your attitude is about all of this.

Townes

Well, officially they have an independent publication, because they submitted it before our publication came out in print. They published on the general idea. It was done in such a way that it wouldn't have worked, and they didn't make it work that way, they made it work after they had learned about our system. Nevertheless it was the right general basic idea.

Riess

Do you feel that they were pushed by the Soviet government?

Townes

I think almost certainly there was a push for them to be there, because they knew I would be there, to sort of stake out some kind of a claim. It was quite unusual for Soviet scientists to come--they generally were invited, but often didn't come. They were in the field of microwave spectroscopy, the spectroscopy of molecules, which the conference was supposed to be about. But they clearly made a great point of coming over and speaking about this.

Riess

And what does it mean to stake out a claim? It is not that they were running for the honor of the Nobel prize at that point.

Townes

Well, they were running for the honor of having had the idea. That is what they were running for. Whether the Nobel prize came out of it or not was a different matter. It was clearly an interesting scientific idea, you see, and they were wanting to get as much credit as they could for it. That is not abnormal for a scientist, let me say. If there is a meeting, a place where a scientist might explain what he is doing and get some notoriety from it, why then that is a very tempting and not unreasonable thing to do. If he is invited to come to a meeting, he is likely to speak about his latest things, and he'll make more of a point of going there if he's got something he wants to talk about. It is not unethical at all, it is just that they clearly made a very substantial effort, and were cleared by the Soviet government, to come.

I think the thing that one could wonder about, and I have always wondered about, is to what extent they had prior information, through reading our laboratory reports, which came out long before they announced any idea of the subject, you see. I think that is more of the thing one could wonder about. And, of course, I wouldn't ask them. If just the right occasion came, I might sometime have been able to ask them, "Had you ever seen any of our Columbia Radiation laboratory reports?" or something like that.

Riess

You didn't see them in subsequent meetings. Did they go to Stockholm?

Townes

Oh yes, I saw them in subsequent meetings. I've seen them off and on now that the international atmosphere is cleared up. They come and go a good deal in the United States. But at that time it was not common.

Riess

Is it something that could be clarified now?

Townes

That would be hard. They wouldn't say anything, or they could distort it. In fact, I was handed a publication of the laboratory of Prokhorov, a kind of table show book to show what the laboratory had done, a history of the laboratory and the important people there and so on. Much of it is very nice and normal, excepting it starts out saying that Prokhorov and Basov made the first ammonia maser. It said independent work was also done on this by Charles Townes. Now, they clearly did not make the first working one. [chuckles]

Riess

And clearly they are not going to have a confessional conversation with you.

Townes

No, at this point that can't be expected. It is going to be hard to clarify it. This book is in Russian and English, that is, translated into English, and says that very plainly. I'm sure if I were to ask them about that they would be a little embarrassed, but I wouldn't ask them. Nevertheless, it would be very difficult to sort of clarify the situation at this point. They wouldn't want to say anything.

The Russians are accustomed to having to cover up things. They are becoming much clearer now, and they are taking great pleasure in being able to speak frankly and truthfully, but they have been trained to say the wrong things when necessary, and most of them are willing to do that. It is just that they recognize that that is the appropriate thing to do, and they've had to do it. It could be a threat to their lives if they said the wrong things.

Riess

Was the scientific community perpetually under the thumb of government.

Townes

Yes, they were under the thumb of the government. And many of them have been very strongly supportive of communism, these two people in particular, and I think they are still probably hurting badly over the present situation. They are strong communists. Prokhorov's father was a revolutionary, and Basov has recently been replaced as head of his laboratory because he is too rigid and old-time. Now that they have got some democracy, the laboratory members have replaced him as head of the most important laboratory there. So these two particular people were fairly strong communists, and I would assume probably still have fairly strong attachments to communism and the old regime.

Many people just felt, well, it was critically important to protect their government and the reputation of the Soviet Union and all of that, and they were willing to say things that weren't really so. They felt that was their duty. If you had to lie in order to save somebody's life, you probably would do it. If it was somebody close to you, and you have to lie to save somebody's life, you'd probably do it. It is a question of relative values, and it wasn't just their own choice, either, but they have had to say things that aren't correct.

Riess

When you use the term `staking a claim,' who is it for? The people of the United States, or the people in the Soviet Union? I'm not sure if you are staking it among the scientific community, or the government? In other words--

Townes

Who listens? [laughter]

Riess

Yes. Who was caring?

Townes

Well, everybody. It's the scientific community, and their government, to get credit for the Soviet Union. It was very important that the Soviet Union get credit for having done something scientifically.

Riess

In the Soviet Union science was taken seriously, and every school child would have been alerted to this event in a way that in this country might not be true? This is the mythology, almost, of the place of science in Russia.

Townes

Yes, and the general success of their community, too, was terribly important to them. Success scientifically in all of the things that they considered good and modern.

Riess

More so than in this country.

Townes

Oh yes, that is right. It was government policy there to tend to glorify their achievements, even down on a fairly low level. Here, of course, our government is very proud of any achievements in the United States, but they usually don't say anything one way or another about some scientist until after he does something.

Riess

Well, I think there is a kind of ambivalence here about certain kinds of success.

Townes

Yes, we tend not to have official government backing of various private interests here. Of course, the government does praise the astronauts, for example. That is a national program, and the President will say great things about the astronauts every once in a while for political reasons. But the Soviet Union systematically was trying to get credit for what good things it was doing. We do the same thing in a sense. We have public relations, and the state department has a press department, and there are United States information libraries abroad and so on to show what the United States is doing, and to interest people in the United States. So we are not completely remote from that. It is just that in the Soviet Union they tend to be much stronger and more official.

Riess

And they have a greater handle on the press than we've ever had in this country.

Townes

Oh yes, they certainly have. And they are supposed to all work in that direction.

An Incident Regarding Sakharov, National and Personal Interests

Townes

I might comment on another little incident that shows you this tension, and how difficult it was at that time for the Russians to really be able to speak the truth: I ran into Basov and Prokhorov in Sweden in probably '75 or '76--I think this was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nobel prize, which would make it '76--and they had fairly recently signed a statement against [André] Sakharov, calling Sakharov all kinds of things about being against the state and subverting the state and treason and that kind of tone. They along with others had signed this.

Now, one of my friends Roald Sagdeev, whom I've always thought very highly of, and I've never heard him say something that was knowingly erroneous just for political reasons, Sagdeev heard that people were being asked to sign these things, and he quickly had arranged a trip out of the city. So he was away and they couldn't get hold of him to sign it, you see. There was one other person in the academy who was asked to sign it, and he refused, and he was really pretty downtrodden for a number of years. He's back now, on his feet, and he's an important figure there now. But Basov and Prokhorov signed it, and not only that, I would say they were defending it and pleased to sign it in some kind of sense.

I asked them about it and Prokhorov said, "Well, you know, Sakharov publishes all of these things, and he doesn't even write them himself. Somebody else is writing that, and he is just giving it publicity, and that is all very wrong, to not write his own stuff even." Basov, in the meantime, just wouldn't say anything in response, he just looked at the ceiling. But Prokhorov was defending this and saying it is not a question of free speech, he is just publishing what somebody else is asking him to publish. I asked Prokhorov, "Did you write that statement that you signed yourself?" [laughs] He was slightly embarrassed, and that was sort of the end of it.

A few weeks later, I ran into Ginsberg, who was a very well known scientist there. He is Jewish. But he had been highly trusted in the sense that he had been out of the country a number of times. But he was very careful--he is liberal, but he was very, very careful. I said, "You know, Prokhorov said that Sakharov doesn't write these things that he publishes. Is that so?" Ginsberg looked at me for a few minutes and said, "I'm no hero, but I wouldn't tell you a lie," and he turned around and walked away. He wouldn't come near me the rest of that whole meeting, because he didn't want to have to say. It was perfectly plain what he was saying. "I'm no hero. I'm not going to go against the Soviet Union, but I wouldn't tell you a lie," so he is not saying anything. Now Ginsberg was very close to Sakharov, I knew that. They were in the same laboratory, and Ginsberg had worked with him some, so I was sure Ginsberg knew. It was clear that Prokhorov was just saying something that wasn't true.

Riess

But that was the line that made him feel--

Townes

Made him feel justified in doing it, I guess. That is how he could explain it. Would an American do that? Well, I think when caught in some kind of inconsistency he might somehow distort things to get out of it, but in the Soviet Union that was fairly common for governmental officials. In fact, in going over there, one of the translators came up to me in the hallway when nobody else was around and said, "I hope you Americans knew whom you are talking to. These people have all been officials, and they've had to do some terrible things. They lie and they've done some awful things, gone along with the government, and I hope you know whom you are talking to because you just can't trust anything they say." That was their own translator trying to be sure that we didn't misunderstand!

Riess

It would be awfully hard to operate in an atmosphere like that. You'd really wake up in the middle of the night in an anxiety attack I should think.

Townes

Yes, but at the same time, many of these people have very fine qualities, and they want to do good things and they want to look good, as anybody does, and they do some very fine things--when it fits the government pattern. If it can fit the government pattern, why they do some very nice things.

Riess

Is that in science? What do you mean by very nice things?

Townes

Well, one of them, for example, who has faked things--. He was a high official in the academy, and he was very close to the government. I knew him quite well, he was head of the arms control group for some time. He would say things that were clearly not correct. He was chairman when this translator spoke to me about it, and he was one of the people of whom he said, "You know, he looks like a very nice fellow, but you have to understand what he is all about."

Riess

What a position the translator is in.

Townes

Well, the translator had access, because he was an official translator, to certain English and American books which they had otherwise sequestered, and so he was a little sophisticated about the international situation.

Well, this person and his wife invited me to their house. They had a piano, they were musical. They had just come back from spending a reasonable fraction of the summer helping young people get out in the country to camp, and they had invited American youngsters to come over and go camping with Russian youngsters. They led them, and they worked out in the wilds. They also had an old monastery or something there, and they made a point of having the youngsters try to do something about restoring and looking at it. Now, they are absolutely non-religious, officially, they say that very strongly.

Riess

Were they taking some risk, in fact, in doing this?

Townes

Well, he was so well placed that I don't think to him it was any great risk. It was historical, you see. It was a historical, not a religious question, is the way he would explain it. And the Russians, for some time, have been proud of their historical monuments and their churches in that sense. They have restored and kept up some of their religious buildings. In that sense, it is a historical monument, and part of the history of the past.

Many of the churches they have turned over to other kinds of things. There is a very famous church in Lithuania I remember visiting which is now a science museum. Nice building. One of the biggest, best churches of the time, but they didn't want to remember it is a religious monument. They wanted a monument, but they didn't want it remembered as a religious monument, so it is a scientific library and museum. They have converted many of these things, but they still want to keep up the buildings.

Riess

It sounds like they tried not to make the apparent dishonesties or inconsistencies into ethical issues. It is just the greater good.

Townes

Yes, and they had a lot of compulsion. They sort of had to do it. Now, there are various things working here: one is a national interest, and the other is personal interest. The scientists are, generally, fairly objective, and in most cases you find them pretty honest about things. But the one thing that scientists have difficulty with, I think, is what is really closest to their own efforts, namely, getting recognized for having done something important in science. That is the thing that they really value: to do something important in science.

Riess

And to be recognized.

Townes

And to be recognized. The world having accepted yes, that they did it, you see. For some people money is the be all, end all. For some people sex, various sorts of goals. But for the scientist, the thing which makes an enormous amount of difference is that after a lifetime of work, or during a lifetime of work, he is able to accomplish something. That is what he is working for all along. That is his life. So people get very heavy stakes in the particular thing that they are doing, and getting recognized for it. Miscellaneous thing, people adjust and generally recognize and accept what the facts are, but when something is very, very important then there is a terrible temptation for many people. It is a temptation for everybody, but it is too much of a temptation for many people, so you begin to see unethical behavior in those kinds of things which are clearly well-recognized as important. The person has had some stake in it, and then they tend to distort that and even fool themselves as to just what they did.

Riess

A lot of these cases are highly publicized. Does that mean that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that there are many, more of them? Just yesterday I read about someone who realized that the pulsar he discovered wasn't there. In the article there was a kind of congratulatory tone for his having come forward.

Townes

Sure, it wasn't easy for him.

 

Townes

The scientist recognizes that he must understand when he is right or he is wrong, because other people will find that out. If he doesn't recognize it, somebody else will, and disprove him, and that makes him look much worse. So, in the case of admitting your mistakes, the scientist has a big stimulus to recognize his own mistakes when they are clear mistakes. If he thinks maybe they are still right, then he may be very argumentative about it, but if he recognizes that he was wrong, then it really is much to his advantage to find that himself and admit it and say so, because somebody else is going to find it out and disprove him otherwise.

Now that is a different matter from getting credit. Suppose these really were planets, and somebody else discovered them at the same time or maybe even earlier, but there was some reason why the first person had a way to claim that he had done it first or something like that. That is what generates the arguments.

Riess

The first person was looking for something else. He knew that that was there, but he never mentioned it--.

Townes

Yes, it is that kind of thing where there is a struggle for credits. The struggle for credits is a difficult one, because frequently it is a very complicated situation, and frequently nobody can make a complete proof the way you can prove or disprove scientific findings. There is a kind of personal history that each group has.

In the case of the Russians, there is not only the national drive, but there is also the personal drive. In the United States we have plenty of personal drives, too. They are always there. In the case of the Soviet Union, generally the government is behind the individual, and sort of pushes. That's been true in the past, at least. Now the government is so disorganized, nothing would happen.

Riess

When you met Basov and Prokhorov, was that your first personal encounter with Russian scientists?

Townes

I'm sure it wasn't, somehow, but I can't think now when and where I saw Russian scientists earlier. Let's see. This was '55. I certainly had not seen many Russian scientists firsthand in my same field. I knew of their publications, some of them at least. I probably had seen one or two Russian scientists, but more some important figure that maybe got out to give a lecture or something like this, but I don't remember any. Since then I have seen lots of Soviet scientists, and I have travelled in the Soviet Union a good deal, but at that point it was quite uncommon.

Riess

Trying to set the scene for your work with the government at the end of the '50s and into the '60s. You had actually met the "evil genius," as it were. I mean, there was so much mystique about it all.

Townes

Well, no, that really had very little to do with it. Let me say, furthermore, I was very pleased to see these people, and we were very friendly. I realize they were overstepping the line a little bit, but I excused that because I knew the pressures they were under, and it was nice to see them, and I was pleased to find somebody else in the same field. So it was a very friendly relation, even though, of course, there was some rivalry. But I was generally very, very pleased to see them and find that they were working in the field. I knew they were overstepping the lines, but that didn't seem all that important. It is a very natural kind of thing in their position.

So we kept in contact. I may have seen them a few times in between, but in 1959, when we had a big conference on quantum electronics, I invited them over to the United States, and I think that was their first visit to the United States. They came over and we had them to dinner. I had generally very friendly relations with them. I saw Basov in Sweden, and he was very friendly. At this point, though, I think their position is becoming much more difficult because they are part of the old guard. Prokhorov is rather personable. People like him personally even though they might not agree with everything he stood for. He still has, I suppose, a moderate amount of influence there. Basov will have some influence just because of his Nobel prize and general position in the past, but he has very little official role now. So their positions are getting to be more difficult.

More on the Historical Record vis a vis Basov and Prokhorov

Townes

I don't want to over-emphasize hard feelings here, because there really isn't very much of that. [laughs] I think the situation they have somewhat misstated. They may well think I have misstated in places. But I recently was asked to give a special talk about Prokhorov, honoring his seventy-fifth birthday, and he was supposed to come over here to a meeting. I was glad to do it, and I said a lot of nice things about Prokhorov. At the time he didn't come, because he felt he'd better stay home to look after his political interests there. He sent another person.

What I want to do here is look at the historical record, and there are a couple of things which seem to me a little out of order. One is this so-called meeting, which was mentioned to stake out an earlier claim than anything I had published, to be sure that it looked like they had had the idea earlier. Now, they may have had the idea earlier, but nevertheless there appears to be no record of it. That particular meeting seems not to have occurred.

The other point I wanted to make about Basov and Prokhorov is the question about to what extent were they quite aware of what I was doing, because it is certain that one could have access to it in the United States, and they certainly had people here that were looking out for such information. They were working in this field and knew I was working in this field, so I think it would be very normal for them to say, "Send us any reports or information about what professors X, Y, and Z are doing because those are things we are interested in." So there are reasons to see that they might have had the information, but on the other hand I do not know.

Riess

Were our spies in the Soviet Union getting information about what people like Basov and Prokhorov were doing?

Townes

I don't know of such. I saw their publications on occasion. I didn't read all of them, because Russian publications weren't much read in the United States, but I saw some of them.

Riess

But was there anything coming sub rosa?

Townes

Sub rosa, not to me on that. I think if it had been anything that seemed very hot, then it might have come to me. And whether people in other fields were getting it, that is a different question. I'm sure that people in some of the military fields were getting information.

I did, at one time, get questioned. Some US government agent wanted to come see me to ask me about a particular thing which he felt was related to my work, and wanted to let me know about it and ask me about it. But it really was a public publication within the Soviet Union that he brought up. As they had translated it, it was a new kind of amplifier invented by the Russians. There was some kind of slight mistranslation that he had made which made it sound like it really was new, but I looked up the words carefully, and it was clear that it was a silicon amplifier and there was some word that they had mistranslated. When we got it right, it turned out to be simply the transistor, and they were claiming to have invented the transistor in their newspapers.

Whether the scientists had claimed that, I don't know, but the newspapers were claiming this brilliant new amplifier was discovered in the Soviet Union, and that worried our government people. They wanted to be sure we knew what it was and so on. They got the information to me, just because they thought I could help them out, understanding what it was. So in that sense, you see, anything that was really exciting over there that was in my field and was readily available to our agents, I might well have known about, but that was the only time that anything that might have been close to my field was brought to my attention overtly.

Riess

It is so interesting how driven science is by competitiveness in this period.

Townes

Yes, well, there has always been competitiveness.

Riess

Among scientists, but now we have it among countries.

Townes

Yes, this is part of the problem that is increasing. Science is getting more into the newspapers. More government interest, more local political interest, university interest. It is just becoming much more public, in part, and everybody recognizes how important it is to society in general. This brings in everybody and makes the pressures much higher, and also the distortions more common, because it is not just between scientists then, it is a lot of newspaper and advertising and public relations and that sort of thing.

Once you sort of aim at public relations, why then it is awfully easy to be misleading, even if you are not completely wrong about something. For example, this Russian newspaper article. I don't remember exactly what it said, but it talked about this wonderful new thing that had been made in a Russian laboratory. I'm not sure that they said that nothing anything like this had ever been invented before. I doubt that they said that, but it seemed to make it quite plain that this was a brilliant Russian invention that was completely new. Well it wasn't. Maybe they made it a little bit differently, or something like that, but it was just a transistor. They were trying to catch up with the western transistor, and there wasn't anything special about it. Nevertheless, you don't have to say something that is completely erroneous in order to be very misleading in a newspaper article.

Riess

In medicine there is the hippocratic oath. Law has its ethical system. Does it ever come up as a subject in science?

Townes

Well, yes it does, but not in an overt way. No scientist ever takes an oath to speak nothing but the truth and so on, they just assume, of course, that is what you are supposed to do.

Riess

It is the definition, somehow, you would think.

Townes

And people look down on those who falsify things very severely. But it is not in any oath that I know. There was a time when one of the professors at [the University of California] Berkeley in the physics department wanted to sort of impose such oaths, but particularly the oath was that they would never do anything that would help the military, because that was ethically so wrong in his view.

Riess

Was that Charles Schwartz?

Townes

Yes, it was. [laughter]

So there have been proposals of that type, but I have never heard of even any proposal that a scientists is supposed to swear that he would only tell the truth. It is just assumed that is what you are supposed to do.

Scientific Rivalry, Secretiveness

Townes

These things are human nature, and I think that the thing that maybe people outside of science do not recognize is the very strong emotion that a scientist has for feeling that he has done something useful. Because that is what his life is about, you see. It is not about money, normally, it is not about other things. His life is about trying to find out something new and make an important discovery, so it is a big temptation to slightly distort that. By and large, I think scientists do quite well. Even in this case, Basov and Prokhorov are good scientists, they have contributed quite a lot, and the problem for them--and I would have to say it is a problem for me, too--is just to not be tempted to step over the line and be misleading as to just what you have done, and what somebody else has done. That is the point.

I do think that the present modern pressures are somewhat greater than they have been in the past, but mistakes like that have been made in the past. There was a very bitter rivalry between Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton. That was a very bitter rivalry, and I remember as a young man we were kind of amused about it. They weren't awful to each other, but on the other hand, it was very clear that they were trying to stake out their claim and make their point about what they thought was right. Gradually it got straightened out by the scientific community at large as to who was right in that case.

Riess

I should think that this would just engender more secretiveness.

Townes

Yes, secretiveness is sometimes an aspect of that. There are some scientists who feel that as soon as they have got anything important, they must keep it secret. That that is the only reasonable thing to do, otherwise people will jump on it, until they get it all prepared and ready to publish. They won't let anybody see the paper until it shows up in publication, and then they will talk about it. Some scientists take that approach. Not so many, but there are some. And I think that many people feel once a subject is very hot, then they should not talk about it until they get it all ready to be complete about it and say something.

There is a problem that if word of a very hot discovery gets around, somebody else is likely to jump in and try to do it and beat out the first person. That is perfectly true. My general instincts, and the way I like to operate, is that can happen, but we mustn't close off science just in order to protect yourself that way. You have to stay open and--

Riess

Just stay open means that you publish right away?

Townes

You publish as quickly as you can, but you don't refuse to let anybody in your laboratory just because he might come in and see something. But that has its hazards. A friend of mine in Germany--and these are two active, living people, so I won't mention the names--a friend of mine in Germany with whom I worked a great deal there, sent me a very interesting paper on the galactic center. He sent it around to a number of people. He said this was not for circulation, but he wanted his friends to know about it and think about it. He was going to publish a paper on it. It was not all finished, but he was sending out a preliminary copy.

I talked with him by phone recently. He found somebody to whom he had not sent a copy, so far as he remembered, had just rushed off a paper to Nature, discussing these results, before he had had a chance to publish. That is completely unethical in any scientist's view, and yet this person, so far as I know, is a nice young person. I don't know him awfully well, I know him somewhat, but he is overeager and he jumped the gun, and has done this. We are guessing that a friend of his, to whom this man did send the paper--a very close friend of his--gave him a copy. Here he is quickly rushing something off to press to beat everybody else. So it is a strong temptation for some people.

Riess

That is a tricky situation. By sending out that paper initially, your German friend is wanting everyone to stay clear?

Townes

Well, that was certainly not his primary goal. They were experimental results he found, which have very interesting interpretation. Now, he was working on the interpretation, so he could have kept the experimental results confidential, not said anything to anybody, until he had all of the interpretation worked out. He sent it over to people in this country who wouldn't normally see him, and wouldn't visit his laboratory normally.

Riess

He wanted response?

Townes

In fact, he asked for any comments or suggestions, but just also as a friendly gesture to people he knows well in this country who were in that field. He though they would be very interested, you see.

Riess

Isn't it like a woman coming up to another woman and saying, "I've a secret to tell and I don't want you tell a soul." The second woman mmight feel it would be better not to be told, to be in that position. What is there of that in science? In telling things, the burden is on the recipient.

Townes

Well, no, that is commonly done in science, and I don't think anybody feels hemmed in by it at all. It is down on paper, exactly what is there. It is not that you can't think about it and be working on it and so on, but you must not publish this person's results until he has a chance to. It is not your results, it is clearly his results. But what this chap is doing is publishing the results and comments about it and interpretation of it.

Riess

It was not that the chap had claimed this area for himself.

Townes

He wouldn't have known anything about it. The measurement was quite out of his field. And I was very pleased that he sent it to me. We were quite close, and he would send anything like this to me. I would send anything like this to him. And we worked on it, and we were writing a paper on a related subject, and this fitted into it very well, and I asked him if it would be all right to put this in there. At that point he said, "Yes, that is fine, that is okay." Now, he had, in the meantime, sent off a paper on it, and I had made some suggestions to him to help his own views, and he had sent off a paper, and now we can send off a paper discussing it, too. That is all perfectly normal and all right. But that is the problem about being open. It is a very real problem if someone gets jumped to try to grab credit where it is unwarranted. In most cases it doesn't give trouble, but every once in a while it gives trouble, and then it is very much of a nuisance and people get concerned about it.

So secrecy is another area. I know people who have simply closed off their laboratory. Word has gotten around that they are working on something hot and they don't want to talk about it. So they close off their laboratory, and don't talk for several months. A few people operate that way, but that is not common. They don't feel that it is unethical. It is their interpretation of how to keep things straight, and be sure that they have a right to develop their own discoveries fully before they say anything about it.

Riess

It is so interesting. I obviously get a great kick out of this conversation because it forces me to examine my own attitudes about science. I would feel that scientists are--that it is all somehow there, that it is nature, everything that you are identifying and discovering, and that it all belongs to us, and by golly what is this possessiveness? [laughter]

Townes

It ought to be public property. Well, you take a person like Einstein. Einstein in some ways seemed a rather modest man, and I think I would credit him with that generally. Nevertheless, he became an enormous public figure, very much looked up to, with statues of him around, and there are very few people who can resist wanting to be recognized that way, as a great man, you see. It is just human nature, and the more science gets kudos and recognition, the more difficult that kind of problem is going to be. But it has always been a problem. The recognition previously was just among scientists, primarily, until you got people like Einstein who get so much in the public news that he became an international figure.

10. X Working with the Government--The Military

Impressions of the Ranking Military

Townes

Now, we wandered a good deal from our primary topic.

Riess

Quite an entry into the section on working with government. I was thinking that you already were a valuable person to government for many reasons, but one of them would be that you had substantial international connections as a scientist.

Townes

Well, I did have some connections. If you want to talk about my work with government, particularly the military, maybe I might try to give a little background on how that developed.

My fundamental instincts have been to be rather offish about the military. I didn't particularly want to have anything to do with the military. It was not that I thought of them as being morally in the wrong position, but rather it was a kind of a dull and unhappy business. To be trying to think of ways of killing people. It was not attractive at all. I felt, "Sure, we need a military," but it is like being a policeman, it is not very attractive to me, and I would never think of associating with policemen, particularly. As a young person I was very offish about the military and never wanted to have anything to do with it particularly. I wouldn't have said that they were morally wrong--I felt that the country has to have a military and I am glad somebody was willing to do it--but I would make fun of them more than say that they were wrong.

As World War II developed, it became increasingly obvious that we were going to have to fight, and that there was a just cause. I was never one of those who argued that Roosevelt was trying to get us into the war wrongly and we shouldn't be involved. I felt that we did have a duty. The world was so close together that if Hitler took over all of Europe that would give the rest of the world great problems, too. So not only was it our problem, because they were our friends over there, but also our problem because in the future it would hurt us. I was ready to try to do something in World War II, but I certainly didn't want to be in the military, it just didn't appeal to me at all. Whereas Frances' older brother [Newell Brown] seemed to be rather eager to get into the military. He wanted to get into action. He was just an action type, I guess, and he wanted to do this. He went over to Burma and worked behind the lines and so on. But I was very offish about the military generally, except in recognizing that they had an important function, and that in the particular case of World War II--

 

Townes

This is why I could accept the role in World War II of developing equipment for the military. I felt we all have to pitch in and do it. I worked quite hard on that, and was enormously pleased when the thing was finally over.

Riess

You had dealings with military men?

Townes

I had a certain number of dealings with military men, and many of them were very fine people, and I enjoyed them. They were pilots at that time, largely, pilots, and people who were trying to do things. Some of the higher people in the Pentagon I had a bit of contact with, the people at Wright Field, people at air bases in Florida and so on. They were just ordinary people, many of them very good citizens. So I looked down on them less.

I would say during World War II, we got a better quality of people into the military. Before World War II, Americans generally were not very eager to be in the military, and the general quality of people on the average there was less than after we got into World War II, and then everybody got in. Everybody got in and it was just a mixture of everybody in our society.

The military seems to have the ability to pick out the better people as they rise to the top. You take a person like George Marshall, for example: really he was an extraordinary person, and he just got in the military and kept rising. In my experience, the remarkable thing about the military is how successful they are at picking out the right people to move on up so that by the time you get to positions of leadership, they are very frequently unusually capable and fine people.

Riess

People who are not what we would think of as the military mentality?

Townes

That is right. Well, they may have certain aspects of the military mentality, and some of them may be kind of gung-ho, but that is not necessarily characteristic at all.

I can think of any number of high-ranking generals that have risen to the top who are just extraordinarily good, well-intentioned, thoughtful people, in addition to being people with considerable ability. Andrew Goodpasture, for example, you may know of. He is a kind of military statesman. His father, I believe, was also a general. He inherited that kind of outlook. Then the person who has just retired as head of JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratories], Lou Allen. Lou Allen was a Ph.D. in physics who liked flying, and he got into the air force and he became head of the air force. When he retired, he went to JPL. He is really a remarkably capable and fine person. George Marshall is another one.

Riess

How about the ones that come out of the academies?

Townes

Many of those people are quite good, too, but I would say I think the most remarkable thing about the military is their selection process that just picks out the unusually good people. They seem to have that ability to sort them out. They promote them gradually, you know, step-by-step, and the ones who really get up into higher responsibility are usually very, very capable people.

Riess

I've always assumed they get to the top by staying in line.

Townes

Well, you might think that, and certainly they have to know how to work with the organization, they have to be loyal and so on. On the other hand, they also speak their minds. I remember very well after we had finished the MX [Missile Experimental] study, Lou stoutly defended the air force position. They wanted the MX to be fully deployed in about two thousand silos in the western part of the United States. And he defended that very stoutly. We ended up with a meeting in front of President Reagan and his cabinet, and I was reporting on our committee findings, and he was defending the air force findings and views, and argued that strongly, but not falsely.

After the President made his decision, which was largely on our side, in favor of the committee report, Lou said, "That was really a very good report. You taught us some things." And that is the kind of spirit one can admire while disagreeing. He is loyal to his own service. He had to defend their position because that was their official position. At the same time, he recognized what the facts were and he was a very decent person about it.

Riess

What was the name of that particular committee?

Townes

That was a committee on the basing of the MX missile. I have forgotten the official title, but that was what that was. That was one of the more important ones that I have chaired.

Riess

So, you were introducing your attitude to the military.

Townes

Yes. I was also glad to stop working on military things because I wanted to do physics after World War II. I wanted to do physics, and I was glad to be able to do the things that I wanted to do. Now, if they had a bearing on military matters, that didn't give me any problem. I thought the military was important, they had done a very important job, we needed to support the military, but I didn't want to specifically work on it just because it was military. Anything I did that was useful, that is fine, but I wanted to do physics. And I was young enough not to have a very great responsibility for a while and was busy with physics.

Further on Millimeter Wave Committee

Townes

I think, perhaps, the first real call on me was this millimeter wave committee [1950]. And this was from the research wing of the navy, and it was from a physicist who was himself a minor physicist, whose name was Paul Johnson. A very nice chap who was kind of a liaison with the Columbia radiation laboratory. He knew what I was interested in, and he was trying to think, "What kinds of new physics and things might be of good use to the navy, and what should we be sponsoring?"

He [Johnson] came to me and asked me if I would chair a committee looking at ways of producing very short waves. He knew I was very interested in that, and hence it was in my interest in physics to do it. I felt that was the kind of thing I had been trying to do for some time, and if I could point out to the navy what fields of research they ought to sponsor in order to help develop that field, well, that is fine. It was a thing I would like to do if I could take myself away from the laboratory a little bit and do that.

The committee was then set up more or less in accordance with my suggestions. I had very little experience at the time, but I didn't want it to be directly a part of the military, I felt that I might be hamstrung. So I suggested that he give a grant to Columbia University for the setting up of a committee, and then I would set it up. It was to do the thing he wanted to do, but it was really a Columbia University project, officially. So far as I've discovered, that was pretty unusual, but he had no trouble with that. So he made a grant, at that time maybe twenty-five thousand dollars or something of that order, so that I could hire a secretary and administrative assistant--we did all of the secretarial and administrative work there at Columbia in our offices.

I invited people and we got together this committee. I have fairly complete records about that committee, and my memory on this score can be checked.

Riess

In an earlier interview I think you named, from memory, the members of the committee, and you talked a little bit about them.

Townes

Yes, I mentioned some of them, at least. I probably did not mention all of them, but they would be on record there.

So that was my first experience. I think what we really found was, well, no great ideas that were new. We encouraged the navy to continue to support things that it had been supporting, various ways of getting down to short waves, but there wasn't all that much, really, that was now to be added. That was the frustration which led to my worrying about it in Franklin Park, and we have been through that.

Riess

The committee met in various places?

Townes

Yes, we visited various laboratories and various places.

Infrared Research, The Sidewinder Missile

Townes

Somewhere along in there, also, I was asked to serve on a somewhat similar committee to look at infrared. The navy had been supporting infrared research for some time. It was done by a man who had gone into the Office of Naval Research who was himself an infrared physicist, so he was interested. He was supporting all of his pals in universities that were working in infrared physics or chemistry, spectroscopy and so on--he thought this was a great thing to do. The navy had been supporting this a long time, and nothing very much had come out of it. So they formed a committee to investigate their general support of infrared research: should this continue? And what kinds of things might come out of it that would be of some importance to the navy or the military generally?

That committee was headed by Don [Donald F.] Hornig, who was an infrared spectroscopist, who later became president of Brown University. I knew him pretty well. He was a physical chemist, not a physicist, but very close to my field. Don formed the committee. I was a member. [John H.] Van Vleck from Harvard was a member. There was a well-known British physical chemist from Cambridge University on it, Sir Gordon Sutherland, and Gene Fubini, who was an engineer and later an important figure in the Pentagon, was on it. I don't for the moment remember the others. It was quite a good group of people, and I enjoyed being with them and talking about things and looking at research programs. We travelled all over; we went to Europe and looked at British work, for example.

One of the amusing things is that we ran into the early stages of the Sidewinder [Missile]. We were looking at ways in which infrared might be developed further and might be of some general potential use to the military. I regarded it as a good way of getting educated about infrared, seeing other laboratories, and talking with people. I was glad to help the navy, also, but it was just a good scientific exercise, too. We visited China Lake, down in southern California. Somebody told us there was some infrared work going on there, and we were visiting all of the places with infrared work.

It happened that a former classmate of mine at Caltech, Bill McLean, had gone to China Lake. China Lake was a navy base for the development of various kinds of aviation technology. He [McLean] had the idea of using infrared to detect airplanes and be able to shoot them down. He developed what is presently known as the Sidewinder--he was calling it Sidewinder then, too. Sidewinder, of course, is a rattlesnake that lives in the desert nearby, and it was an attractive name to him as being able to sting and kill. We looked at this, and it seemed to us to have a great deal of potential, and he had gone along fairly far. It had been tested out in a limited way, and it worked. He had very good ideas, he was a good physicist, and we were pretty well impressed by it.

Now, it turned out that the naval authorities in Washington had found out about this work being done there, and they had put through an order saying, "Stop that kind of work, because that is not in your bailiwick. That is not the type of work you are supposed to be doing at China Lake." They had been doing it kind of undercover, what we call "under the bench," with some kind of overall funds that the center had. So it wasn't specifically allocated to that, but they had some money that they could use for it, and they had been sensible enough to think, "Well, it is a good idea, let's work on it." So it had been going on under the bench.

The military had just issued an order. They had found out about it and said, "Stop. That is not the kind of work you are supposed to be doing. You are supposed to be working on rockets." This was a well-enough placed committee that we immediately got in touch with the people in Washington and said, "This is one of the best things you have!" and that was reversed inside of a few days and they could go ahead. Our report then played up this as one of the more important things that infrared could be useful for. We had other aspects which we thought ought to be developed in general, but that was the most obvious, most important useful thing.

Riess

When you got back to Washington, at that point did you have a specific person that you would get in touch with? Were you dealing person-to-person at a high level?

Townes

I wasn't chairman of the committee, so I didn't make most of those contacts. But I believe the committee was commissioned by the Office of Naval Research, so it would have been the admiral in charge of the Office of Naval Research at that time who would be the highest person. Actually, I think Don Hornig in particular got--we telephoned from the base there back to Washington. We found out who the admirals were who had placed this order, and who their bosses were, and we telephoned back to Washington to somebody much higher ranking than the head of the Office of Naval Research.

Riess

That's what I wanted to know.

Townes

Because it wasn't the Office of Naval Research that told them to stop, it was somewhere up the line. We found out who it was and who their bosses were, and we talked with a few of them, and they immediately reversed it. They said, "Well, okay. If you think this is important." But I didn't do that directly myself. That was Don Hornig primarily, who was chairman of the committee.

Riess

I am very interested in that. You got on the phone and talked to someone. You didn't sit down and write a lengthy memo and have it go through channels.

Townes

Not in this case. I would never do it that way, either, first. I would first talk to somebody and see what kind of response you got, and where a letter should go, and what it should say, and so on. It was just a telephone conversation that convinced them. They said, "Well, okay. If you think it is really that good." Frequently that is the case. Sometimes you have to move on, you have to write a report and a letter and send it around, and sometimes it doesn't work. But I would always try an informal contact first.

I can't tell you the exact year that occurred, but it would have been in the early '50s sometime.

Riess

Maybe it is not listed as one of these committees? Because the millimeter wave committee ends in '52 and then the next committee is the physics advisory committee to the air force office of scientific research. That is '54-'55.

Townes

I guess I did not list that because I was just a member. Normally I would just list it if I was chairman or something. But that was a fairly important committee--I guess I forgot to list it or something. Again, somewhere in my files there will be letters and things about this, but I cannot place it at the moment exactly.

Comments on the Office of Naval Research

Townes

So that was another thing that I did for the military. The military were calling on research people, particularly the Office of Naval Research. That was sort of the biggest and best real research program. They were more active than the army or the air force. It was the head of the Office of Naval Research, who was a professor from Yale, Alan Waterman, who then became the first head of the National Science Foundation because he had been so good at sponsoring research. His view and the navy's view, after the war, was that science was very important to the military and the country generally. There wasn't any other source of support, and the navy had enough money, so the navy simply would help support much of the work in the universities because it was important for the general strength of the country. The army and the air force played along with that, they kind of agreed, but the navy really initiated it and carried the ball, initially.

It was because of the success of that program that people recognized that we must have a general program for the support of science, but it shouldn't be just the military. From that basis, the National Science Foundation was formed, and Waterman then became head of it. He had been a former professor of physics at Yale.

Riess

I keep thinking that we are going to get around to Vannevar Bush.

Townes

We probably will, but in a minor way. I never saw a great deal of Vannevar Bush, personally. In the first place, I was young during his period of greatest activity and not operating in the higher circles. Secondly, I just didn't happen to run into him. Every once in a while there would be something that he said that we would think about or would affect us a little bit, but I was not involved directly with Van Bush until I got to MIT. Then I did become rather more involved with him. I knew of him, but I was at too low a level during the war and immediately after the war, and I think that by the time I was serving on these committees, he wasn't very much in evidence and had probably left Washington. I am a little unclear about just where he was at that time. He did become head of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, and I guess that is probably where he was then.

I did serve on some other committees. The military would call on me to do something, and if it were in my field and something I felt that I could contribute to, and wouldn't be too distracting, I was generally willing to do it.

Riess

What was the physics advisory committee to the air force, OSR, in 1954-55? Do you recall?

Townes

I don't remember too much of what happened there. We were looking at various proposals to the air force which they might support.

Riess

The Office of Scientific Research, what was their function?

Townes

Office of Scientific Research. Let me see. My memory of these military connections is less good than my memory of some of the physics, and that just reflects my real interests. These things get to be very fuzzy to me.

Riess

I also see here in my notes the Office of Scientific Research and Development--OSRD. Bush reorganized the NDRC and turned it into the OSRD.

Townes

That's right. That was an overall office in the Pentagon for the general efforts in support of science and research.

Riess

The failing of the NDRC was that it could conduct research but could not approve development. Bush organized the Office of Scientific Research and Development because, I guess, it had powers of approval of development rather than simply basic research.12

Townes

I know very little about that now. I remember it, and it was important at the time. I did not participate in that effort. As I say, I saw very little of Bush. I was not highly connected with the military until I went to Washington in '59. That was the first time that I really normally operated on a fairly high level. By then Bush had kind of gone.

Riess

Should we go to that period?

Townes

I think we might go to that, but let me give you some transition.

Air Force Sponsors Second Von Karman Report, 1957

Townes

I did serve on various committees and advisory groups when I was called on, and when I felt it was appropriate and it fitted my pattern--things that I could help them out on without too much trouble. But I don't remember anything particularly outstanding.

One thing I remember is that in the summer of 1957 there was a summer study, organized by the air force, which was supposed to repeat something that Von Karman had headed. Now, he was an aeronautical engineer who had been head of Caltech's aeronautical engineering. Hungarian in background, a Hungarian Jew, one of the many Hungarians that have contributed so much to science in the United States. I had known Von Karman as a student back at Caltech. My friends worked with him, and so on. The point is, Von Karman had carried out a study [in the 1930s] and issued a report on the future of the air force for the next couple of decades or so. I think it was twenty-five years. The air force regarded that as a great success, in sort of getting them aligned in the right directions as to what kind of things to expect for the future.

This was '57 that [the summer study] was organized. I don't remember just when Von Karman's report came out, but I know the general prospect [for us] was to look at the next twenty-five years and [produce what] was supposed to be the second Von Karman report. Von Karman himself was getting to be rather elderly, but he was present at that meeting, kind of a master of ceremonies or something, just an honorary figure.

The air force organized various groups to discuss various aspects of the air force program, and what one should expect in the future, and how the air force should go in the future. It was done in the summer at Woods Hole. These kinds of studies were getting to be more and more common among the military. They would get scientists involved and help them look at things for the future, and they were done in the summer at a pleasant place. This was up on Cape Cod and I could take the family there. So I agreed to go there for a couple of weeks or something like this. I, in particular, was supposed to serve on an electronics panel.

 

Townes

I remember Bill Shockley was one of the members, and I knew Bill Shockley very well from my days at Bell Labs. We had been good friends there. There was another chap from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, and he was an important figure. There were about ten people that were members of this panel trying to map out the future for the air force in terms of electronics-like technology and science. So I sat with them and we discussed things. I probably wasn't up there the whole two weeks, probably more like a week that I was up there.

One of the things that I, of course, emphasized was the maser, because the maser was in my own mind and I felt it had important possibilities. We put in the report that the air force ought to continue to be interested in masers and develop them as time standards and frequency standards, and as good, sensitive amplifiers. I also said that they could probably be pushed as far as the mid-infrared, and that the air force ought to look forward to doing that, to exploiting them and pushing their development down as far as the mid-infrared for the future. I felt that they could get that far. That report was written and finished along about in September, and it was going to be issued by the air force as a report on their future.

At that meeting, I remember very well that some of us kept bringing up, "What about satellites and going further into the atmosphere and space?" because that was something that people talked about in those days. It wasn't a hot field, but we talked about it. The air force said, "We are afraid of that, and we would appreciate it if you don't mention it in this report, because it will look like a boondoggle, and Congress will slap us down and think that we are not really minding our business but just playing with things. We think it would be best if you didn't mention it. We appreciate your suggestion, but please do not put it in the report." We kind of laughed about that, "Well, okay, it is a kind of suggestion. They know about it, but they think it will hurt them if it is in this official report." So it wasn't in the report.

Now, it was October of '57 that Sputnik went up. Suddenly the whole atmosphere changed. Congress wanted the air force to be in space, suddenly. [laughs] The whole population did. Space was very important, and we had to compete with the Russians and we had to do better than they and so on. So that report was not issued, and they had another summer study the next summer to polish it up and change it and modify it and make it fit the present pattern. Of course, they put in a lot about space and satellites and so on.

Riess

There was no report from the summer study at all in the face of that?

Townes

That's right. It was just held up and revised because of that development.

I think one can see the picture of political forces, even in the face of what was probably a fairly sensible technical recommendation, which we recognized. Nevertheless, the air force told us not to put that in, so okay, we didn't put that in. We told them about it, but they felt that this would spoil the effectiveness of the report if we didn't put that in.

Riess

They felt it would distract so much.

Townes

That's right. It would just mean attacks by Congress on the air force for playing around with nonsense, getting diverted from their real business, thinking they were going to play up in space somewhere.

Overlooking the Possibilities by the Maser

Townes

The next summer I was busy, and I decided it wasn't all that interesting and I wouldn't be a member this time. So they had some of the same members and maybe some new members. In any case, I wasn't very close to it. But the second report came out in the fall of '58. Now, in the meantime, Art Schawlow and I had finished this paper and circulated it some. We began to circulate it about the end of July, early August, 1958. The patent had been applied for and Bell Laboratories was ready to circulate our manuscript, and it was sent around to most of our friends. Anybody in the field that we thought would be interested, we would send a copy to. So it was moderately well-known.

Nevertheless, in the next report, the group that met that summer in '58 decided not to mention anything about masers going into the infrared, because they didn't believe it or take it seriously or something. So in that final report, issued in '58, there was no mention of masers being pushed to shorter wavelengths. They mentioned masers, yes, but pushing to shorter wavelengths they just didn't think was useful, or in the cards, or something, so they omitted it. I do not know the arguments pro and con because I wasn't there, but it was omitted. I have both reports, in fact.

That is part of the picture which I think is important to recognize--how little people were thinking in that direction. It was not considered by most people a promising or hot field, to get to shorter wavelengths. Here was a good collection of experts, and I had it in there as something, because I was interested and I could persuade people. If I wasn't there, they weren't persuaded, and they left it out and purposely changed it and left it out.

So that is a picture of the view of lasers at that point. Even though our manuscript was in some circulation, probably no one of these people had looked at it very carefully. I think if they had they might not have taken out my earlier comments. People who began to read this report began to be quite enthusiastic.

Riess

Good scientists were there the first time. Was the second group the same group?

Townes

I don't know whether Bill Shockley was there and whether Bill Shockley would have read our report. He was in a little different field, and he might never had bothered or something. There were a number of electronics engineers, and you can understand them not having read it or missed it or something. In any case, that was the community feeling of that group. So the interest was not only so low that they wouldn't think about it, but it was also skeptical. So skeptical that they took it out. They thought it was just a pet project of mine.

Riess

You are saying that it was actively removed.

Townes

The first report in '57, we had it in there. The second report in '58, you see, which was just a polishing up of the first report, adding on things that were missed and modifying in whatever ways to update it--

Riess

It was in in sufficient detail in '57?

Townes

It was not in a lot of detail, no. This was just a field in which I urged the air force to encourage and push as something I felt was in the future. But a year later, in '58, they thought it wasn't in the future for the air force.

Riess

Do you think that they were so completely distracted by Sputnik and satellites?

Townes

Well, no. It is not a matter of distraction. I think it was a real judgement on the part of that group. I could look up and see just who they were, but it was a real judgement on the part of this group that, "Well, that is not very promising, not something that the air force should do."

I mention that specifically because there has been so much of this popular writing, particularly on the part of these sort of politically-oriented historians that try to argue that it was the military that was pushing this field all of the time and pushing for lasers, and this is why I developed them. The air force was officially told not to do it by these official advisors. The air force wasn't that interested, and it was not in the report at all. And this was a year after my 1957 suggestion, in '58, when things were really beginning to happen.

One Interested Person, Bill Otting

Townes

Now, I was fairly close to a few representatives of the military that would continually visit our laboratory because they were supposed to monitor it. Paul Johnson is the name of the fellow who got me to serve on this millimeter wave committee. And then there was a representative of the air force who was working for the Office of Scientific Research, Bill Otting. He was the contact person for the air force with the Columbia radiation laboratory where I was working, and so he was trying to keep up with our work. He was a master's degree physicist and a nice guy. He knew what I was interested in, too, and he had come around to me, probably in later 1956, or early '57 and said, "I know you are interested in getting this to shorter wavelengths, how about writing a paper on the possible extension of the maser into the infrared?"

I said, "I am very interested in that, as you know, but I just don't have any great ideas of how to do it at the moment. I know it can be done, I can see some ways, but I do not think they are very exciting. I just don't feel like writing a paper until I have the right idea." He said, "Is there anybody else here that might do that? Just make an overt kind of discussion of the possibilities?" I told him Ali Javan, one of my former students and a post-doc, a very smart guy and very imaginative, maybe Ali would do it. Well, he approached Ali Javan, and he didn't want to do it.

Now, one of these historians says that Otting also approached Polykarp Kusch, who was a professor there and another person in the radiation laboratory. That might well have happened, I just do not happen to know, personally. Kusch was not really quite in that field, he was a molecular beams person. I would have said he was an unlikely person, but he may well have approached Kusch, too. In any event, this young physicist from the air force was personally interested, and he knew my interest, and he suggested that to several people sometime in early '57 or '56. So there was one person in the air force who was interested, but that's more the story than some kind of official overt air force policy, or anything that the air force really was pushing. It was just an individual interest, and he was playing with ideas, and he thought this might be a good idea. I would give him great credit for that, that he recognized that this was something that might be of interest. But it was not a general air force interest at all. No kind of policy thing.

Riess

In asking you or someone to write a paper, he is asking that you do more work on it, isn't he?

Townes

Yes, basically he was encouraging me to work on it and discuss the possibilities more fully.

Riess

Was he also saying there would be some funding for this?

Townes

I already had funding at the radiation laboratory for all I needed, and writing a paper doesn't require money, generally. Just secretarial help, and we had secretarial help in the office. It required my time, primarily. So it was not a money proposition. I suppose if I told him to give us a little more money and I would do it, he might have said, "Fine, if you really need it." But that wasn't the issue. It was just that he knew I was interested, and he thought it was interesting and he was encouraging me to do it. I said, "Fine, I am interested and I would like to do it, but I do not think this is the time. I just do not see the right idea yet."

Riess

You are telling this story to make the point that there was a passive relationship with the military.

Townes

Well, to make the point that people who were scientists in the military were interacting with me from time to time, and some of them were pretty good, and some of them weren't, and he made this particular suggestion. He of course already knew I was interested but wanted to encourage me. This was latched onto as showing that this was official air force policy pushing me to do this. The point is that here is a really official, considered report of what the air force ought to be doing, and even after I had made the suggestion that they ought to be doing it, they took it out, saying, "No, this isn't a thing for the air force to do."

They wouldn't have objected, of course, if I had written the paper, and they wouldn't object to his saying, "Wouldn't you like to write a paper on this." But the point is that it was kind of a shot in the dark of one individual, not the air force per se. That individual deserves the credit, but that does not mean that it was air force policy, or that the air force deserves the credit for somehow foreseeing this. It is exactly the other way around, so far as the air force as a whole was concerned.

That was another committee I served on. There may have been others, but as you see, I really served on these military committees more as a sense of duty in most cases, feeling, "Well, it is not too far from my field, and maybe I can help out, maybe I will learn something." Hence, a lot of it I do not remember very well. Whereas the things that were more important to me, personally, I remember much more easily. [laughs]

Scientific Camaraderie, A Recent Jason Meeting

Riess

It is interesting that they brought together the scientists, at Woods Hole. Did the meeting have some kind of intrinsic interest. Or were you all really there for the point of serving the committee? In other words, when you are at Woods Hole with Shockley and so on, is it a great opportunity to be together?

Townes

There is a good deal of camaraderie, yes. Those meetings are interesting and worthwhile, from that point of view. There were engineers and physicists, I would say. I would say the majority of people there were engineers, or strongly interested in engineering, but there were also a number of physicists. I found it an interesting group to be with.

Riess

But not interesting enough to go back for another year.

Townes

No, that is right. It was not that interesting to me. Partly, I thought it was a good way to take a vacation and take my family up to the Cape. I was willing to do this. I did not find it highly exciting, but I would do my best for it.

Riess

It certainly is an example of the air force, in this case, binding physicists to it.

Townes

Yes, that is right. Overall, I think that is a very good way for them to operate. I think this method was started by Jerrold Zacharias of MIT, who had one of the first studies for the navy. I think I was even asked to serve on it, but I didn't. But he got together a group of physicists, primarily, to discuss scientific matters of importance to the navy during one summer, kind of made a holiday out of it, a discussion and then a report. That sort of started it off. Jerrold had worked at the MIT radiation laboratory and he was a fairly senior physicist. He felt it was a good idea to try this. Then the military picked up that pattern and did a fair number of those summer studies.

In some sense the Jason group, which is operating now, might be a descendant of that. Not a direct descendant, but somewhat of the same spirit: that you get together a group of scientists, they enjoy being with each other, and they look at things for the military. They sort of map things out, the fields they feel ought to be developed.

Riess

And they are getting close to power at that point. Is there something in that?

Townes

I suppose so. I think people differ a lot. Some people really like power, and others just want to go their own way and not bother with that. On the other hand, if they feel it is important, then that is some additional argument for doing it. That is a highly personal matter. Some people like the sense of power and like to talk with the top people and so on. For others, it is not all that important per se.

I was just down at a Jason meeting on Friday. (I will have a good deal to say about Jason because I was quite involved in its formation, but this will give you an illustration in a present context, and one which I remember very well, as to how these things work.) Why did I go? Well, there is a committee there that has been working in the infrared because, in this case, the army wants to know what aspects of the infrared are going to be most helpful. Are there new kinds of detectors that ought to be developed for the army? By now the army is using infrared detectors a great deal. So is all of the military. They know they are valuable for the military, but they do not know whether they have the best types or how to get the best types. So they asked Jason to please look at this and advise them what fields ought to be sponsored and developed that would be helpful.

The Jason people, in this case, in contrast to most of the committees that I have mentioned in the past, get paid a certain amount per day for working. It is good enough that it is somewhat meaningful to them. So they can have a summer holiday, in this case down in San Diego, and they all get together, some of the most important physicists around, and they have a chance to talk with each other and take their families down there for a month in the summer. They can do things that are not only useful for the military, but interesting scientifically.

Some of them are working on theories of the atmosphere and measurements of the atmosphere with climates in mind. The navy is interested in climates, and predictability of weather and so on. But also they are looking at it from the point of view of pollution and the greenhouse effect. To get that good a group of people working on it is quite important. And they enjoy it. They feel that they are doing something worthwhile. It's a part-time occupation for them, but nevertheless they are expert enough in all of the surrounding fields that they can contribute substantially. And the government relies on them for an objective opinion in many cases. They don't otherwise have a personal stake in it. They are not directly working in the field enough that it makes all that much difference to their careers, or their establishments, whether the government funds this field or that field. They are academic people, so they can give relatively unbiased advice.

Riess

It is all academic people?

Townes

Largely academic. There are a few from industry. For example, Dick Garwin from IBM [International Business Machines] has been characteristically very active in many of these things. But he does it in a highly personal way. He is not out to serve IBM's interests. There are some others from industry, some from the national laboratories that come.

Well, they have been asked to look at the infrared detection problems. I'm very dependent on infrared detectors for my astronomy. I'm very interested in them, hence also somewhat knowledgeable about them. They had sent me the report, and asked me to comment on it. "Did I have any suggestions on the report, or comments?" I had read it carefully, and they were having a kind of a wrap-up meeting to discuss it all, present the findings to the army, and have some of the industrial people who are making infrared detectors come in and comment on it and say more about what they were doing.

I decided to go because I felt I wanted to be up on the latest technology in infrared detection. I could also help and criticize some. Also I had a chance to talk with some people there that I didn't see too frequently from industry, see exactly what they are doing, find out if they are interested in doing kinds of things that would help me. So I spent a day down there, and it was very worthwhile, just from those points of view. I think I helped them in advising about what to emphasize, and helped straighten out a few scientific discussions. At the same time I learned some things from it. I had a chance to talk with several people in industry who were doing things of interest to me and they may be able to provide me some detectors.

So there was a strong interaction, and I saw a lot of old friends, and it would have been fun to stay down there longer. We had lunch together, we would have gone out to dinner together, gone to the beach. There were lots of good friends I haven't seen in a long time. Some from Columbia. Ken Johnston from the naval research laboratory, who's doing work parallel with mine on interferometry, he was there on another study. So I got a chance to talk with him.

That is the sort of mutual reinforcement and the value of meetings like that. I would say that this was a fairly extreme case in terms of it being worthwhile to me, but there is always some of that. It is just useful to people to have a chance to talk informally, and there is good camaraderie generally, and the government gets an objective and expert kind of criticisms and opinions.

Riess

Are those meetings covered by the press?

Townes

No. Most of them are secret because they have to discuss some secret matters. A lot of the technology in science is quite open, but there are frequently some secret matters. The army may have some particular device that they are putting up in the atmosphere, or something like that, to measure something special, that is classified. Just exactly what they are doing and exactly how good it is--how good or how bad it is--isn't supposed to get out. There is almost always some classified aspect of it. So the press is not there.

The final reports may be secret, or may not. This particular report is not secret. The press can see it now, once it is issued. The press can see it and do anything they want to with it. Anybody can see it, and I have showed it to some of my colleagues here. Some of my younger colleagues I thought would be interested in seeing what was being said about infrared detectors. Sometimes the reports are secret, in which case then they essentially never get out until long after the fact.

That is the kind of an atmosphere one can have. That was a particularly good one, as I mentioned, but that is part of the reason for scientists doing it. Then there is a very genuine feeling of trying to help out the national cause, and help out society. I would say they are more pleased, generally, to work on the atmospheric effects than they are on some military device, much for the same reason. They feel that, "Gee, this is really more the thing we need, but sure we ought to help out the military too. They need some help. We want to see that they don't waste money, and don't do the wrong things." So they are glad to assist in advice to the military.

Now, how much of that is power, you asked. I would say at this meeting that's not--. There's no power plays that I would have said are recognizable there, except maybe on the part of the industrial people. It was very important for some of them to be there because they get contracts from the military to do these things. It is not power, exactly. They just want to be there to represent their interests and show what they are doing and be sure their work is recognized and appreciated. So the industrial people who made presentations to us were clearly representing their companies.

Riess

In a way you are talking to your clients which must be very attractive.

Townes

Clients, friends, but also sponsors. I would have to say that I did talk with one of the army people about the possibility of supporting some of my research, too. He was there and I said, "Are you people interested in this kind of thing which I want to do?" He was friendly and said, "Well, it is not very directly applicable to any programs that we have, but let me think about it and see if we can do anything." There are all kinds of interests there that interplay. Just people getting to know each other, and discussing each others' ideas, and the general ferment, can be quite valuable.

I would have to say that this air force study that I have been talking about was relatively dull in that respect. [laughter] That was one reason that I didn't go back the second time. It was okay, but I had said everything once, and why go back? Of course, the result was that the particular thing I was interested in was left out. But I was not paying that much attention. I thought, "It is their business, and they did it the way they wanted to do it."

Let us get back on track.

Riess

It is close to the end. This has been two hours, and I do not have another tape.

Townes

I think the next thing I would mention is this 1959 conference on quantum electronics, which was the first International Conference on Quantum Electronics. I was asked to organize that. Again, it was very directly in my own interest. This was my field, and the navy representative said something like, "I wonder if it isn't time to have a general international discussion now. It is an important field, it's developing. Would you like to organize an international conference? We would sponsor it, pay the money." So I did that.

Further Thoughts

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The Historical Record and Edward Teller

Townes

Now, the 1959 conference. I thought you might be particularly interested in the preface to this, and introduction, which is a talk I gave that sort of states the situation as I saw it. This is from the first International Conference on Quantum Electronics.13 In fact, we invented the name "quantum electronics" just for that meeting. [laughs] We said, "What shall we call this?" I suggested quantum electronics as sort of related to electronics but involving quanta.

Here is my introductory talk. That explains how the meeting got started and how I saw the field at that time.

Petit

What I would also like to get is the report you made to Bell Labs in the late '40s or early '50s on your thoughts about the prospects.

Townes

Sure, I'll get you a copy. Here is something else that just came in. There is a magazine, Lasers and Application, a general trade magazine, and the editor [Jeff Hecht] carried a series of interviews with various people in the field. He has now put it in the form of a book, written his own preface, the history as he sees it.14 It is a useful reference. You're welcome to review it. That will give the viewpoint of a lot of different people, and what they think they were doing, you see. You will find discrepancies between what they are saying, but that is just memory, you know. Twenty years afterwards.

Riess

Are they left as interviews?

Petit

There is a long introductory overview.

Townes

Yes, it is his own interpretation of the history, which is not all that bad, and then interviews which are just what people felt that they remembered. It is a pretty good collection

Petit

There is another new book out which you might want. Teller's War [The Top Secret Story Behind the Star Wars], by Bill [William J.] Broad of the New York Times. There is a story about him and that strange fellow who was at Livermore for a while and quit, and went to MIT to help develop the X-ray laser, that big nuclear pumped device, and some other people at Livermore. Of course, it says that Teller had done some scurrilous things in promoting energy weapons.

Townes

Well, Teller is a great salesman, and he was misleading in some respects. [laughs]

Petit

That book will probably make a bit of a splash.

Townes

Teller is a very good scientist, but he had the troubles that some other scientists have: when you get in the public eye and start debating public issues, it is very easy to become a politician and start stepping over the line as to what real facts are. Teller is a very persuasive person, and I think he has done some poor things in what he said. But so has Linus Pauling. Linus Pauling and Teller debates--they are both wrong. [laughs]

Petit

Rational policies work out as a sort of a middle ground among extremists.

Townes

Yes. [laughs]

Riess

And they have taken on the mantle of Teller the Devil, and the sweetness of whatever Pauling has done. They are kind of poles for people's feelings about science, I think.

Townes

Interesting. So many of our scientists really abhor Teller, and they love Sakharov. Now, both of them invented atomic bombs, and it is interesting that Sakharov always felt a great affinity for Teller. He talks about Teller rather nicely, you see. He feels that the Russians were against him very much like the Americans are against Teller, feels that there is an analogy there, you see. I have heard him express that a number of times, and my fellow American scientists try to tell him, "No, that is not right, Teller is bad!" [laughter]

Petit

Maybe Sakharov in his soul is also so anti-Marxist and anti-communist that that is where the affinity comes.

Townes

No, I think he feels that it is a very parallel case to his. He became an outcast from society because he disagreed with them, and the scientists here are disagreeing with Teller, and it is a very similar kind of persecution. There are some similarities. I don't think it is very exact.

Riess

That might be how it appears from a great distance.

Petit

It goes on about Lowell Wood.

Townes

Lowell Wood is worse than Teller in that respect, in terms of being a salesman. [laughter]

Petit

He is also very clever.

Townes

Oh he is, yes. He is very bright. So is Teller. Teller is a very good scientist. Lowell Wood has never done any great science, but Teller has.

Let's get on to some other things. I recollected a few things that I think maybe ought to be discussed, and you may be eager to get on to this conference, which I want to do, too. But I wonder if it wouldn't be good to put some of these things in at the moment. Otherwise they will be still more out of place.

Now, just to fill in a few names. I think, last time, we talked about a company which the research corporation sued in order to establish the maser patent as applying to lasers, particularly, and the case was settled out of court after a court hearing, and that company was Spectraphysics.

I mentioned an air force scientist who talked to me about possibly writing an article about possibly writing an article on the application of masers to the infrared. That was Bill Otting. He was working for the air force Office of Scientific Research. He was a master's degree physicist and he tried to keep in touch with us at Columbia and then I think he deserves some credit for proposing this. As I mentioned before, this was his own personal idea. This was not an air force policy, just an idea that he himself had. Bill Otting was the contact person for the air force with the Columbia radiation laboratory where I was working, and so he was trying to keep up with our work. Sometime, along about early 1957, it might have been late '56, he came around to me and said, "How would you like to write an article for us on the possible extension of the maser into the infrared." I said, "That is just the kind of thing that I want to do. That was my original idea--to get into the far infrared, at least. But I just haven't had any great ideas how to do it, and I am waiting until the right idea comes along. If it does, sure, I will be glad to write an article, but I don't want to just go off and write an article. I don't think I've really got the right idea yet as to the best way to do it." He said, "Could anybody else do this?" I said, "Ali Javan would be a good person." Ali was a postdoctoral with me and he was good on the theoretical side. Ali talked to me about it and didn't want to do it either, and so nobody ever did that.

Then I mentioned that in summer of '57, I was on a committee for the air force, suggesting that they ought to be looking at this in the long run as a future development. But that report was not published, and it was revised in the summer of '58 by a different group of science and technologists who struck that out. It was just my pet idea, I think they felt. That was summer of '58, even after Schawlow and I had written our paper.

Petit

What was the air force motive for wanting infrared masers?

Townes

The air force's motive? Well, I think Otting's motive was simply exploration; just development of something new. There was no particular application at that time. That is what we were doing, and new techniques for generating waves. I don't think he had any other specific motive. Nevertheless, I think it was very much to his credit that he at least thought about doing this some time.

I also tried to illustrate that this was not air force policy by any means. He was an individual. I put it in the official air force report and they officially struck it out, as late as '58, after the paper by Schawlow and I had started to circulate around. That was done by a committee acting for the air force.

We talked about that some last time, and I guess we need not repeat that anymore.

Riess

Had you ever had a chance to ask anyone how that oversight occurred? The fact that you bring it up now, it is something that clearly--

Townes

How that oversight occurred? No, I never asked anybody. I did have a friend who read the original formal report and said, "Say, you were mentioning the laser in that." I said, "Yes." The other report left it out completely, and I never asked anybody. The only reason I never asked was that I felt pretty sure that I knew the answer, namely, that people didn't particularly think it would work. They just thought that it was a pet idea of mine and I was pumping my own business and putting that in there, that the air force ought to be thinking about that. They didn't feel that it was going to work, and that should not be in the overall thoughts or plans of the air force; they had more important things to do.

Riess

So it was a judgment.

Townes

It was a judgment by a group of scientists and engineers. They didn't know the field too well, probably. I don't even know who that group was, now. I was with them when the first report was written, but then I dropped out. So I feel sure that is what it was. They probably did not even debate it very much. They said, "Well, that is a far out idea and it is not going to work. Let's leave that out." I am sure it was that kind of thing. They probably wouldn't remember now why they left it out.

More Work on Stimulated Emission

Townes

Let me go on to a few other things I think we have omitted. I have talked a bit about the fact that stimulated emission was well-established, known theoretically. Various people had talked about examining it experimentally. A German physicist who came over to the United States, was at Princeton for a while, R. W. Ladenburg, worked on it in the optical region, trying to show some effect. And then there was a Russian in 1941 who in a thesis said something about this. And I already mentioned the book by Tolman that mentioned it back in the '20s. So it was not an unknown thing, but it was rather esoteric. Very few people had experience with it, very few people worried about it. People in the field of radiation physics thought about it theoretically, but they didn't recognize any interesting experimental possibilities.

There were several thoughts about measuring it. I thought about measuring it once, just to demonstrate that yes, it is really there. But I discarded the idea because it was difficult, and because I felt that it was already adequately demonstrated. For example, if you simply take a gas, a gas has a mixture of molecules in the lower state and the upper state, the molecules in the lower state absorb. You send a wave through it and they absorb a lot. Now, if you warm up the gas, you get more of them in the upper state, and the absorption goes down. That is measurable. The absorption goes down because the upper state is more populated now, and adds energy. The lower state subtracts and the upper state adds. You heat it up and you get more in the upper state.

That is a very well known effect and it is so common, particularly in the microwave range. At microwave frequencies the difference between the absorption by the lower state and the emission by the upper state is only about 0.5 percent of the total absorption. In other words, when microwaves go through a gas, they are absorbed, but there is both absorption and emission going on all of the time, and the emission is 99.5 percent as much as the absorption. The absorption wins by a very small amount. One can see the effects of it, and I felt that there wasn't any real reason to try to demonstrate it. It wasn't worth working hard at. If there was an easy way to do it, it might be a pretty experiment, but there was no real need to do it because obviously it was there. One could test it in this slightly indirect way, but it was still a pretty good test.

There was, however, a person who I think is generally left out of the picture, partly because he just hasn't made any fuss about it, and [laughing] much of the attention that people get depends on how much they wave their hands around. This chap is John Trischka. He was a postdoc at Columbia at the time I was working there; he worked with Rabi. For some reason, he got interested. I think maybe Rabi encouraged it; I know Rabi was somewhat interested. He was thinking of an experiment on how to demonstrate that stimulated emission was real, that it existed--just to show that it occurred. He wrote in his notebook quite a long treatise--I have a copy of that somewhere--about various ways of doing it. He was in the molecular beams field. I didn't know he was doing that much on it at the time. I knew he was interested, but I didn't know just what he was doing. He wrote, it must have been a dozen pages about how, possibly, to do this. But he decided not to do it. It just seemed very difficult and wasn't quite worthwhile.

Riess

He put it aside?

Townes

He decided not to do anything about it.

Petit

Did he have the idea of inverting the populations?

Townes

Yes, I think so. I think what he was doing was a molecular beams thing, selecting upper states. He was going to show that there was stimulated emission. His work, and the work in Rabi's group, involved a lot of molecular beams. That was their job. They made transitions of molecules, up and down, and they put the radiation in, generally, to make the transitions. They didn't measure the change in the radiation, that was very hard. They measured the change in the molecules. It was very hard to measure the change in radiation, so basically he was going to try to measure the change in the radiation, instead of the molecules, to show that stimulated emission was there.

He talked with me about stimulated emissions. We discussed the possibilities quite freely together. I said I had some ideas, too. I felt it certainly was there, and it was really demonstrated in other ways.

Riess

When was this?

Townes

This was somewhat prior to the maser.

Riess

When you first arrived at Columbia?

Townes

Well, it was not when I first arrived, but it would have been along about in the 1949-'50 period.

I mention that for two reasons. One is that I think Trischka has never made any claims. Other people who had done that would have made big claims that they had the idea. He was just going to try to check it and see if it was real, and then he stopped. He never published anything, and so far as I know he has never given any talks about it.

Petit

You saw it as confirming a well-known phenomena?

Townes

Confirming a theory. I thought it was well enough known that you didn't have to confirm it further, but he felt it would be good to demonstrate it. He wasn't going to build an amplifier; he didn't say anything about amplification or certain not net gain. It was just that he wanted to show that it was there, you see. But of course he recognized that in the process molecules would give up energy to the radiation.

I mention that to indicate that people were thinking about it, it was a known phenomenon, and even thinking about how to demonstrate it. Trischka is now at Syracuse. He went from Columbia to Syracuse and has been there ever since in physics.

Riess

Did he continue in this work?

Townes

He continued to do spectroscopy. I am not sure what he has been doing most recently. I haven't kept up with him in recent years. But he was doing molecular and atomic beam spectroscopy, and I think he continued to do that when he went to Syracuse, at least for a few years.

Riess

But you didn't gather him in at the point when you were really developing the maser? It didn't occur to you to make him part of your group?

Townes

He had left by then. I never particularly overtly thought of him when I was originally thinking of the maser, either. I certainly knew he had been thinking about stimulated emission, but stimulated emission was not all that uncommon among people in this field, you see. The problem, really, was using it. I think it is important to know that it was not suddenly a brand new phenomenon that I had discovered. A lot of people didn't know about it, particularly the engineers. Engineers who didn't worry about quantum mechanics or radiation theory so much, that was not in their thinking at all. Possibly, if it had been, they would have been more likely to think about using it for amplification.

Weber, for example, was a bit of an engineer. He came up through engineering. And one might say, "Well, maybe that is the reason he thought about it." He gave his talk to engineers. Basov and Prokhorov, I wouldn't say they were engineers. They were interested in applied things, but they were physicists.

Riess

The book you showed us by Hecht, has that prompted some of your thinking of this?

Townes

No. [laughter] No, it has not. And Trischka is not mentioned in that book. No, actually I had put down these notes before that book arrived a couple of days ago.

Riess

Have you had a chance to read the whole thing?

Townes

No, and I probably wouldn't read the whole thing unless there was some particular interest in it. But I have thumbed through it and looked through a few things.

Riess

You don't think that it will have any surprises for you?

Townes

No, no. It won't have any big surprises. What I would say, though, is that in writing a book, I think that we need to go through that and other papers very carefully to see what the facts are. I think as I review these tapes, too, I may want to look through these things to be sure that I have stated things accurately. And I won't always agree with what they [subjects of Hecht book] say, necessarily, because memories can be tricky. Nevertheless, I would certainly refer to it for a kind of finished product of my own. I would like to check and see if anybody has any contrary evidence. But this would be on details, just details of exactly what happened when, dates, and things like this--what somebody else thought that they did and what it seemed to me that they did.

Well, now, these 1959 conference proceedings are, I think, of some value historically because it shows what the thinking was then, which was after we had introduced the idea of the laser, but just before one was made. Most of the principle actors were at that conference. I gave this introductory talk and preface and so on, which was very general, but it nevertheless shows the nature of my own thinking at that particular time.

Styles of Doing Physics

Townes

Still one further thing that I wanted to mention that I don;t think I quite made the right point about yet, which is the different styles of doing physics. That is a very general statement. Everybody realizes that there are different styles of doing physics, but there are remarkable differences. There are experimentalist who work with apparatus. There are theorists. But experimentalist have a lot of different styles, too. Some experimentalist just try one thing after another with intuition and they like to work with apparatus and play with it and so on, and every once in a while they see something interesting. They like to see what they can get out of apparatus. They may just like to try a lot of things and sort of see what happens, or they are looking for something, and they try one material after another and they test it and see if it works. That is one way of doing experimental physics.

It is an empirical search rather than a planned experimental research. You may have some very good ideas, but you don't write them all down and work it all out and say exactly what should happen, you just try some things. Every once in a while, that pays off enormously, because they are things which even the best people couldn't predict. People try out things and they discover something. If they are clever, they recognize they have discovered something important, and they work with it.

Another way of doing experimental physics though, and it tends to be my way, is to think about an idea intuitively first. Determine what might happen, what you might want to do. Then work it out on paper, theoretically and numerically, and see if this is really right and exactly what should happen and exactly what is required in order to do this. So you develop a theory for what you want to do. My approach, generally, is that one. I develop a theory and I know it has to work. It is just a question of my doing it right, and it has to work. There is not much question about it. It may be hard to do, but I know exactly--

 

Riess

It sounds a little more intellectually satisfying.

Townes

It is just a different habit of working. I work something out and I feel it has to work, and so I get in there and try to make it work. Sometimes I find some difficulties I didn't anticipate, but then I work out how you can get around that, theoretically, and what the difficulties are. I work at it that way.

I generally have enjoyed doing theoretical work. In fact, I almost decided to become a theorist. I was a student at Caltech, and trying to make up my mind between doing theoretical work and experimental work. Every young physicist faces that. I wasn't sure which I ought to do, but I had another thing which made the decision for me. I was having trouble with my eyes, they were burning and bothering me, and I was studying a lot.

I went to the eye doctor a number of times and he finally said, "You'd better just give up physics, because you can't do physics with your eyes. You just ought to pick another trade." I told myself, "Nothing doing," but maybe the best thing is to do experimental work, and maybe I will not have to be reading so much and doing paper work. So that is part of the reason I went into experimental work. That kind of tipped the scales as to what I really ought to do.

That, in part, indicates that I have always been fairly interested in theory. I'm not sure I would have been a particularly good theorist, but, on the other hand, I enjoyed theory and had done a moderate amount of it.

Riess

That seems like such a major moment. You left with that diagnosis and made that decision so quickly? You felt that the pain and the discomfort really came from the reading?

Townes

Yes.

Riess

You couldn't have just taken a couple of weeks off?

Townes

Oh, well, it was a continuous thing. It had been bothering me for several years, and it was getting worse.

Petit

Your vision appears fine now.

Townes

Yes.

Petit

I take it it was a passing thing, whatever it was.

Townes

I think other people have had this, too. Eyelid trouble and stinging and burning and blurring and whatnot. There was no basic trouble with my eyes, but it was painful. It was a result of reading at night, and often, and so on. I think the doctor was just a little silly to say, "Change your business because your eyes are hurting." [laughter] He clearly was not the kind of person devoted to his own field, I guess.

As I say, I was trying to decide between the two fields, and I think I thought it over for another week or so and decided I had better do experimental physics, and that will help solve that particular problem.

Riess

It sounds like the ideal thing is teams of complementary physicists.

Townes

Yes, in a sense, although they don't even have to be teams. I think we need a lot of different types of scientists with different approaches. One kind of approach is going to discover some types of things, another kind of approach is going to discover different types of things. We do need a lot of different types of approaches, and we have them. Science works in a lot of different ways.

Petit

Kamerlingh Onnes was just fooling around when he found superconductivity. He wasn't looking for that.

Townes

Well, nobody could have imagined it would be there. But he was trying things. Many experimentalists work that way, in a sense. But there are all kinds of combinations.

Then there are various types of theorists. I know some theorists who work completely by mathematics. They work out the mathematics and then they say, "This shows this." They don't think about the object itself very much, and how it is working. I have seen some very bad mistakes for that reason. They work out some mathematics which they think applies, and they interpret it, and they just haven't felt what is going on. I have run into things like that I have to straighten out. They just sort of blindly go ahead with mathematics. They are very good at mathematics, and they somehow are not in tune with the rest of the world.

Intuition Guiding Theory in Developing Maser

Townes

My own approach is that I feel I have a very clear view of what I think this object is like, and what I think it is going to do. I have an intuitive feeling for what will happen. I think about things intuitively first, as to what might be done, and then I work it out theoretically, to see if this really applies. My intuition guides the theory rather than the reverse. My intuition checks the theories. I think, "Is this really what it is like?" Occasionally the theory shows me my intuition is wrong, which is very important. I do both. I work it out theoretically thoroughly, and then I know it has to work when I start in on something. It may or may not turn out to be handy, work well or easily, but nevertheless I feel it is clear it is going to work, unless I made a mistake. But that is where talking with other people and comparison is important.

On the maser, there were a number of very good theorists who thought it was wrong. But I had thought through the theory and I felt it had to be right. And I felt I could understand why they weren't looking at the problem correctly. Their disagreement didn't bother me particularly. I thought I understood where they had gone off track, you see.

Riess

Are you also saying that because they were so wedded to theory, that they--

Townes

They were wedded to theory and not very intuitive. But I also felt that they were wedded to a particular way of looking at photons.

Photons had come along in the early part of this century: they were a demonstration that light is discrete. That was such an important discovery that physicists then began to always think of light as photons--you have to treat them as photons. The engineers didn't, they thought of light as waves. I am making this a little more absolute in terms of the physicists than it really is. But many physicists thought you've got to treat things as photons, remember they are photons, and you cannot talk about waves. So they kept viewing things as photons, and that was part of the misunderstanding as to why the maser would or wouldn't work. The maser was actually a large collection of photons and a large collection of molecules, and that is why these discrete things became less important. It was more like the engineering milieu where one is dealing with gross waves.

Petit

Several people had thought that the uncertainty principle prevents the precision that this thing--

Townes

That is right. That is part of it. You take a single molecule going through this cavity and they are completely right. A single molecule could not have given off a pure frequency. But a whole collection of them could.

I can illustrate that further. There is a physicist named Willis Lamb. He is a very fine physicist, and I have known him for a long time, closely. He was in the Columbia radiation laboratory, and he discovered what is known as the "Lamb shift," and he has the Nobel prize for that. He is primarily a theorist, although his Lamb shift discovery was an experiment that he directed.

Maybe I should go back a little earlier than that. There was an experiment being done down at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] by a man named [Alvin Theodore] Forrester who was being supported by the National Science Foundation. Forrester wanted to have two spectral lines of mercury, I think it was, which were very close together, so that their frequency difference was in the microwave range. The frequency difference was something like 109 Hz or something like that. He wanted to shine these two spectral lines on a photo-emitting material, just a photo-diode, and get a microwave signal, because the two lines, having different frequencies, would beat together in the photo-emission, and produce a microwave frequency. He thought this was a wonderful demonstration of physics. But a number of people told the NSF that was wrong in principle, that these are separate quanta and you cannot get a correlation between them. There are some quanta in one spectral line and some quanta in another spectral line, and these are just particles, and by mixing them together you cannot get a frequency out of it.

So NSF actually asked me and maybe a few others to look at Forrester's experiment, and did it make sense. I looked at it and I said, "Of course it makes sense. Yes, the photons are particles, however they do have frequencies. This is a nonlinear process. There is nothing wrong with it. It is a difficult experiment, but there is nothing wrong with it in principle." I thought it was completely obvious, from my point of view, even though it was doubted by a number of pretty good physicists. So the NSF went ahead and backed him, and he did the experiment, and it has become a reasonably well known experiment.

Now, Willis Lamb, a while later, after the laser had come along, asked me, "Do you think, if you had two different frequencies from a laser, would they beat together in producing electrons from a metal surface? Would the electron current have a beat frequency in it?" I said, "Oh, yes." The idea that Willis Lamb would have to ask me that was very surprising, but Willis obviously had a very firm photon point of view at that point. I pointed out to him, "Look, if you have some light and you vary its intensity, and the light is striking a photo-diode, you are going to vary the current coming out of the photo-diode, aren't you?" "Well, yes." "Okay, now you have two different frequencies of light, and we know that the waves beat together, and that produces a varying intensity on the surface, and so that has to produce a varying intensity of electrons." It is just so obvious with that kind of approach.

Petit

This only works with laser light? With coherent light?

Townes

Well, with laser light or with any other kind of light. He was asking, really, on the basis of any kind of light. But we happened to be talking about lasers at the time. And of course it has to produce a variation, because two light waves interfere with each other and make a maximum and minimum, depending on how their frequencies beat together, and that makes a max/min intensity.

You know if you change intensity you are going to change the number of electrons. The only question is the time scale: can the electrons get out fast enough to respond that fast. I think today that would seem obvious to essentially everybody. To me, it was strange that it wasn't obvious then. But it was a result of the different approaches to physics, the different approaches to thinking about things.

I would say Willis is more typical of the mathematical type of theorist. He works out equations, and if the equations say something, then it must be right. Whereas I am more of the intuitive type and think, "Here is a system, and I think I understand it and I am friendly with it. I know just what it is like." Then I work out the equations to be sure that I am right.

Riess

It is an interesting line of thinking. Do these ways of approaching physics correlate with anything?

Townes

Well, I have no special insight into that. My guess is some types of people go one way and some types of people go the other way, but we are all different in the way we do things, and the world needs that. Science needs that.

Riess

None are better.

Townes

No. Well, some work more frequently than others, but as long as there is an honest approach to science, a real attempt to try to do things and understand things, it is all useful.

Further Work on the Theory

Petit

It sounds to me like you have a good intellectual peripheral vision of keeping the problem at hand in context of other phenomena you know well. You know what works and doesn't work, and you have a sense of what just makes sense.

Townes

Maybe. Microwave spectroscopy was partly that way. Some of it was counter-intuitive on the basis of experience, and that was one reason people didn't believe it. But I had looked into the theory--I had somewhat different intuitions about it anyhow, but I had looked into the theory enough that I felt it had to be true, that microwave spectroscopy would give us very, very high resolution. People doubted that. The maser was another case.

I might mention an interesting reaction to the laser at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Art Schawlow's boss was Al Klogston, who was a good physicist. He did solid state work, largely. Art and I wrote this paper about the possibility of the optical maser--as we called it then--and it included a resonator which was two mirrors with the light just traveling back and forth and thus providing a resonance. On one hand, that was a common device, the so-called Fabry-Perot interferometer. Lots of people had used them. I had used them, Art Schawlow had used them, various other people had used them. It was a well known device, and people knew its properties, but it had not been talked of very much as a resonator. I found some papers that referred to it as a resonator or said it was like a resonator, but it hadn't been looked at that way.

Al Klogston said, "I don't think this is right. A resonator has to be closed. You cannot have a resonator with just two open mirrors. You had better look at that again." The paper we were going to submit was sent up through him, you see. Well, he objected to that. He showed it to Ali Javan and said, "Ali, would you check this over?" Ali was by then at Bell Labs. Ali was one of my students, I knew he would do it right anyhow. He looked at it and said, "Sure, that's right." Klogston still didn't believe it, and he was pushed, I think to some extent, by the radio and microwave engineers at the Holmdel Laboratory of Bell Labs. I was at Murray Hill. Holmdel was fifteen or twenty miles away and was a kind of an outpost where the microwave engineers worked. They didn't believe that this could be a real resonator.

So I said, "Look, I will work out the theory in a good deal more detail to show this." That is why we had in the paper a fair amount of theory about this resonator, just how much its loss would be, what its so-called "Q" or quality factor would be, and so on. We worked that out in some detail just to convince Klogston. I felt, "If he is confused about it, maybe other people will be, too, and we had better demonstrate this pretty clearly." So I worked out the theory and we put it in the paper.

Now, the people at Holmdel, and I don't know how many other people at Bell Labs, still didn't really believe that or trust it. So the Holmdel people started working on this. They did it somewhat similarly to the theory I had done, but they did it with a computer, and so some parts of the calculation could be numerically accurate which I couldn't otherwise do very exactly on paper. They did it on the computer and worked at it and worked at it, and they came out with a very good solution and convinced themselves it was right. They felt somehow we had missed the point and they really did it right. [laughter]

Petit

You were right, but they were really right.

Townes

Exactly, but it took all of that for some people to accept that this really was a resonator. I remember the head of Bell Labs, Bill Baker. I ran into him some time later, and he said, "You know, Bell Labs is working out all kinds of things based on your idea of how a resonator really works." [laughter] I said, "My goodness, did it take that?" Here is Bell Labs, a wonderful place with very good people, but they just started out with a different point of view. They had been in the field and working with resonators with a long, long time, and somehow they felt they knew what a resonator was.

Petit

They were convinced those sidewalls were essential?

Townes

That's right, apparently it had to be a more closed system. Now, it doesn't make any sense at all, because no system is completely closed, you open up little holes to put the energy in and get the energy out. Why not open up a bigger hole? What is the boundary? It turns out there isn't any, really. The point is that it bounces back and forth a number of times, and that makes it a resonator. I still have people who bring up this problem. I say, "Look, if you shout in the hallway, don't you hear a resonance?" [laughter]

Petit

Yes, but it is off the wall at the end.

First International Conference on Quantum Electronics, September 1959

Townes

I think that sort of finishes the discussion of that kind of point of view, but I felt it was of some importance to bring it up. Now maybe we are ready to go into this conference.

Riess

Yes, what was the basic purpose of the conference?

Townes

Well, we had been working in this field since 1951, and it was then early 1959.

Riess

That you thought of it.

Townes

No, that I was asked if I would be willing to organize a conference. I would not have myself thought of organizing a conference, I was too busy. But the field had become a very hot field with the publication of the masers and then our paper on the lasers had been published. Lots of people were going into it and it was talked of a great deal. There was a representative of the navy, again one of the people who monitored our work at Columbia, Irvin Rowe--he was a local New York representative--he asked me, "You know, we would be glad to sponsor a conference in the field if you would be willing to organize it." I thought about it and decided, "It probably is a good idea to get together everybody, because things are happening fast. Let's get everybody together and talk about what is going on and what should be done and so on."

I suggested again that we just do it from Columbia. The navy then gave a contract to Columbia with some money for me to run the conference. I organized it largely with the help of my students. I must have had a dozen graduate students then, and many of them were interested and they were willing to be helpful. I wanted to get people in a variety of fields that were somewhat connected, whether or not they had actually worked in the field directly themselves, because I wanted to produce new ideas and get together people who would talk to each other and stimulate each other as to new ways of doing things and new aspects of the field. So I got on the committee a fairly wide variety of people, including, for example, Professor [Charles] Kittel from Berkeley, here. He was a solid state physicist, theorist, and since both masers and lasers might use solids and did use solids, and he was a good theorist, I thought he would be an excellent person to be on the overall committee and think about things and suggest what other good people might be invited.

We put together a committee of about ten people. They were purposely from a wide variety of fields, and not all of them were actually active. I can tell you which ones had done something in the field. Many of them had, but not all. Birnbaum had not done anything in the field. Bloembergen had, of course, with the maser. Dicke had played with it earlier, but then hadn't been active recently, but Dicke was very smart and had many associated ideas. Kittel was not in the field.

[Rudi] Kompfner of Bell Laboratories was a good electrical engineer, very imaginative. He himself had never done anything in the field. He had invented some amplifiers using electrons, and I know that later he was very much interested in lasers and helped pushed them into Bell Labs for communication. I don't think at this period he was onto that yet, but he was a smart person who knew a lot about resonators and waves and so on. Lax at Lincoln Laboratories had been somewhat interested on the periphery of the field, and again represented a lot of technology in solid state work. Tony Siegmann, at Stanford, had published a few things, and he has since become quite prominent in the field. Stanley, at California Institute of Technology, had expressed a good deal of interest, and I don't know what has happened to him. Woody Strandberg at MIT had done some things in the field, and so had I.

These were mostly quite prominent people, well known. They knew the field broadly, but it didn't mean they had done anything in it yet. Some of them were very active and some of them weren't, and I wanted a general good overall point of view represented there. So we got together and planned the conference. I wanted to limit it to one hundred people, because I wanted it to be a fairly intimate conference, but as we got going, all kinds of people wanted to come. They pressed on me, and particularly a lot of industry researchers wanted to come. I felt we shouldn't neglect the industrial people, so we got some of the better ones. But I still had to cut off a lot of people that really wanted to come. I think we probably ended up with one hundred and twenty people instead of one hundred.

Riess

All of the people who wanted to come wanted to present something?

Townes

No, just to listen. Anybody who had done anything in the field, I almost automatically let them come in. But there were a lot of people who weren't in the field yet and were eager to get into it, you see. Commercial companies were eager to get involved and have their people listen and so on. I tried to get people who were really going to contribute something.

Riess

Were they to give you the names of their papers or some idea?

Townes

Oh, to come to the conference you did not have to present a paper.

Riess

But if you were going to present a paper, did you want to know?

Townes

Oh yes, if they wanted to present a paper. They would automatically tell me what they wanted to present. If they had something good to present, we would let them in.

So it was a restricted conference, but it really had all of the active people at that time. Anybody that I knew who had really had any ideas or expressed any interest. This was an international thing, too. We invited people from Japan and the Soviet Union, and some Dutch who had done some things. Here is Walter Higa, here, from JPL. All of my students. Maiman was there and he had done some things, but he hadn't done anything remarkable at that time.

---

Gordon Gould

Riess

The emphasis in it was to acquaint engineers as well as physicists with quantum physics.

Townes

Right. It was an educational thing as well as a sort of consulting thing. I see Gordon Gould was there.

Riess

He wasn't presenting anything?

Townes

No. Gould was at TRG [Technical Research Group, Inc.] and I knew he was interested at that time. TRG was trying to get going and do something. It was a new company that somebody had formed and Gould was there.

I got Art Schawlow to give the primary talk on optical masers, or lasers. Art Schawlow then gave the primary talk, and I told Art, "Try to say something good about Gould to help him out, because they are trying to get going." So Art said, "I'll try. I'll see what it is, really, he has done." One thing that he felt Gould had proposed, himself, first, was a non-resonant cavity, sort of a scattering cavity, just white walls that would scatter the radiation, but still contain it so that the radiation would be in there, but it would not be a resonant thing.

Petit

What about the optical pumping things that he claims for himself?

Townes

He didn't originate that.

Petit

It will be fun writing the portion of the book concerning that. [laughs]

Townes

Yes. This thing is something that he alone had proposed. It wasn't terribly good, it not used today, anyhow, but it was new, so Art put that in. Art told me later, "I wish you hadn't insisted on helping Gould out, because that really was not much good. I tried to do the best that I could for him."

Riess

Why were you ready to be so helpful?

Townes

Well, he was a young man, trying to do things. He was not making these claims of being the originator at that time, at all. He talked with me a great deal and consulted with me a great deal, asked me lots of questions and so on. I tried to help him out as a young man interested in the field. He had been a student at Columbia and had an office just a couple of doors from me. I had had a moderate amount of interaction with him, so I was trying to help him out. It was no problem at that time. He wasn't making any overt claims then.

Riess

So it was generous on your part.

Townes

Well, yes. Anybody who was struggling hard and trying to do something, I would try to help them out.

For the conference, we invented the term quantum electronics. We thought, "What in the world shall we call this new field?" I suggested quantum electronics as kind of a marriage of the two fields: electronics and quantum mechanics. That was the origin of the name. We met up at Shawanga Lodge, which was a little place up in New York state, a vacation hotel. It had a good swimming pool and was a nice, pleasant environment, and it was about the right size.

The Russians

Townes

So we met, and Basov and Prokhorov came over. I think that was probably the first time they came to the United States. It was a big thing to meet with them. A number of other foreign people, and I think at least a couple of other Russians, came with them. We had quite a substantial Russian team. They were very pleased to come, of course, and interact with the best of the world's science. I remember we invited them to our house later, and at that time Dr. Zhivago had fairly recently come out, and I had a copy of Dr. Zhivago. They were interested, but they didn't want to look at it. [laughter]

Riess

This sounds incredibly intense. All in two days. And I know you said, I think last time, that you had a chance to walk and talk with Prokhorov. And that number of papers, very intense stuff.

Townes

Well, it was all thoroughly planned beforehand, and I had a lot of help from students. This money from the ONR allowed me to hire a secretary, also, especially to do this. A bright young woman who just came in to do this and she was quite interested.

Riess

Were people hearing things that they hadn't heard before? Did it require a kind of concentration that makes your eyes sting to read physics? To sit there for two days and listen?

Townes

I think many people probably did. On the other hand, for my own part, I had largely selected all of the papers and all of the people, and I knew pretty much what was going to happen and pretty much what they were going to say. I was familiar with their work and had seen abstracts and so on. It was a thing I was very much immersed in at that time, and I knew pretty well all of the people who had said anything about it. It was intensive in the sense that there was a lot of personal interaction and discussions and so on. I think for the industrial people, they might have found it hard to follow at times. But the people who are in the field, well--.

The optical maser was quite new, so there was a good deal of discussion of that.

Riess

Was that sort of at the end? As it is given in the book?

Townes

I do not now remember. I think it was towards the end, but not at the very end. I think it was not too rushed of a meeting, overall. A nice, relaxed atmosphere. At least for people in the field, I don't think it was regarded as too intense.

Office of Naval Research Sponsorship

Riess

The ONR sponsored the conference, and in Irvin Rowe's statement he says the navy was fully aware of the potential of the maser.

Townes

I have not read Rowe's statement recently, but broadly, as I remember, what it says is what I think was the case: that they were interested in sponsoring good science which might have something to do with technology, and they could see some uses, but they wanted the science developed, and that is why they were doing it. While they were interested in technology, and these uses were important to them, nevertheless, it was also important to see that the science was stimulated and they were helping on that. I think that was basically their attitude. That is very different from what [Joan] Bromberg and Paul Foreman, the historian at the Smithsonian, have been saying, that this was all planned by the military. That they knew what they wanted, and they were after the laser, and this is what they were thinking of all the time.

Riess

That all of this research had been driven by--

Townes

--by military and industry.

Petit

Who proposes that? That the military was that savvy?

Townes

[laughter]

Bromberg has a book on masers and lasers, and the historian at the Smithsonian [Foreman] put up an exhibit about me, and his title for the exhibit was Who was Using Whom? His original manuscript started out saying "Townes graduated from Caltech, and after he graduated, the industry and the military took over his career." [laughter] I thought, "Now wait a minute, I didn't know that! I thought I was doing what I wanted to do." So they pulled all of the strings, and they made me do these things for them. Well, I had to fight at Bell Labs to do what I wanted to do! It is a doctrinaire approach to history, in my view, a politically oriented approach to history.

I have calmed them down pretty much. I don't think that they are saying anything quite that wild anymore, because I have tried to review what they have said. But in a few cases, that has not been impossible. That theme is still there in some of their work, but it is a little more disguised now.

All of these forces were in play, all right. There is Otting's case, and sure, Otting made a good suggestion, but it was his own. And then there was industry, and one which they cited was Hap Schultz. I think I mentioned Hap Schultz, the blind chemist who had the idea of using the infrared for molecular interactions and gave me some money for a fellowship. I told him I didn't work in the field, I didn't have a good idea how to do it, but he wanted to give me some money anyhow. But it was he, individually, who did it. He sold his company on doing something. The company wasn't all that interested, but they thought, "Well, okay, he is the chemical engineer, and he says this ought to be done. Why don't we give him ten thousand dollars and let him see what he can do." It was that attitude, and that is the only industrial interest that I know.

Well now, the conference stirred up a lot of ideas. People exchanging ideas. It was a very ripe time, because this was in the latter part of 1959, and the people working on producing the lasers had not yet done so. Then Maiman's laser came along in the summer, probably, of 1960--I've forgotten the exact time. So it was a very yeasty time, all right. The conference had a very good spirit about it. It was very effective and useful.

Then I got my students to help put together this book, which was a report of it. We had to get everybody's written documents, see that they were right, correct them, edit them, and whatnot. We got this out in record time. Columbia University put it out, and they told me it was the fastest they ever put out any book. I think they had it out within about three months after the conference, because I felt it would be most useful if it got out quickly. So it did get out quite quickly.

Subsequent Conferences

Riess

I noticed on the library shelf that there were several subsequent conferences.

Townes

Yes. Well, the next conference--I was asked to just keep going, to organize some more conferences, just by the group in general. I said, "Look, I have done one, we ought to alternate this around, so let's have one every two years, not every year, that is too much work." So I think it was two years later, we had one here at Berkeley. J. Singer, who was in the electrical engineering department here--

Petit

Had you come to Berkeley yet?

Townes

No, I had not come to Berkeley at all. No, I just felt, "Berkeley is a good place to have this, and there are active scientists here. It is the center of a lot of activity. We had one on the East coast, let's have one on the West Coast." So the next one was at Berkeley, and I asked J. Singer if he would head it. He was glad to do that. He has since dropped out of the field, but he was working in the field at that time. He was originally a physicist, turned engineer. So the next one was here.

In the meantime, also, I had gone down to Washington. When I originally agreed to organize this conference, I had not gone down to Washington. I went down to Washington in the fall of '59, and this conference was just a month or so later.

Riess

September 14th.

Townes

It was just around the time I was going down. I probably went down around the first of September, officially, something like that. So, in the meantime I had agreed to go down to Washington, and that is another part of the story that we will talk about at a little later time, maybe.

J. Singer out here gave the next one, and I gave a kind of a general talk. I think the next one was in Paris, run by Bloembergen, the third international conference. Then they kept on going. I haven't been to one of these conferences in a long time now. I am going to the coming one in June, I believe it is, in Vienna. I haven't been back in quite a while. This must be the fifteenth or something like that.

Petit

Is it still called the quantum electronics conference?

Townes

Yes, International Quantum Electronics Conference.

Riess

Resonance phenomena was also in your conference title.

Townes

That does not continue. You see, quantum electronics was a new word at that time, and I guess we were trying to give it a little recognizable flavor. Resonance phenomena both in macroscopic systems like cavities, and also in molecules and atoms. Not all quantum electronics is necessarily resonant. There are free-electron lasers, for example. Free electron lasers I recognized could be done somewhere along about in that period, but I didn't think that they were going to develop all that far. But for very high power, now, they are quite important. People are going to enormously high power, and once you build a very high powered system, then the free electron lasers become quite important. Those are non-resonant systems.

Riess

Your stated aim in the first conference was to acquaint engineers--you mention that several times--with quantum physics. That was peculiar to the times that it wasn't well understood.

Townes

That is right, by engineers. They wouldn't normally take quantum mechanics. Now, I would say, they do, typically. Solid state physics, for example, transistors and so on, as well as lasers, are very fundamental and very lively parts of engineering, and those involve a good deal of quantum mechanics. So quantum mechanics would be a pretty standard fare for a young engineer today.

Riess

In a lot of big meetings, there is hiring going on on the side, and people are politicking. Did that happen?

Townes

I don't think there was so much of that. This was not a typical big conference. It was a pretty intimate affair. I don't doubt that there was some discussion that people may be moving or something like that, but not many of those people were moving at that time, and we purposely tried to avoid this. Just the industrial people who were in the field. The flavor was more an academic one. So I don't think there was all that much of that kind of activity at this conference.

Now, laser conferences have become enormously large, and very much emphasized by industrial people who put on displays and are looking for converts and sales and so on. So it is a very different atmosphere now. I don't think anybody in the field would know a large fraction of the people there, probably. This was purposely a small, intimate conference to discuss things in a different phase of the game where it was largely academic scientists who were doing it. Some in industry were beginning to do it, and the idea was to produce some interaction among all of them and spread the word, so to speak, and see what new ideas there were.

1. XI IDA--Institute for Defense Analysis, 1959-1961

Decision to Join IDA

Riess

You knew you were off to Washington and IDA [Institute of Defense Analysis]. You knew you were moving out of the field.

Townes

Yes. That's right.

Riess

Was that generally known?

Townes

Yes, it certainly was open information. All of my students knew it, and there was no reason anybody shouldn't know it. I don't remember talking about it particularly, but no doubt most people knew that.

It was a difficult decision, to go down to Washington at that time, because things were very hot in science, but I decided to go.

Petit

Did you feel obligated?

[tape interruption]

Petit

It was beginning to gain so much momentum. Geometrically the number of people interested in it was going up, and then suddenly you fly off to IDA in Washington, away from the laboratory. It must have been difficult. What led to that decision?

Townes

It was mainly conscience. I would say there were two things. One is, I have always liked to try new things, and that is part of it. I don't mind changing, and I enjoy trying something different and new. You will find that until I came to Berkeley, I was always moving about seven or ten years. Since I have come to Berkeley, I have gotten into a rut, at least geographically, but I have been changing my field, somewhat, which I typically do.

That is probably part of the picture. But basically, I was asked to go down to Washington to take what I considered to be an important job, and the country at that time seemed to be in trouble from the point of view of its technical plans and directions and the knowledgeability in Washington. There weren't many good scientists in Washington. ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency] had recently been formed. Herb York from the LBL [Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories] had gone there, and everybody was surprised that Herb, who was such a good scientist, would go and do this kind of thing, but he did, and he became head of ARPA.

IDA was playing a very important role at that time. It was run by a group of universities, so it was a non-profit, university-run organization, but it had a most unusual arrangement with the Pentagon in that it provided the manpower and oversaw the manpower and the work of the people in ARPA, who were really IDA employees, but sat in the Pentagon. Also, the people in the Weapons Systems Evaluations Group, which is a group established to evaluate whether weapons would work and their effectiveness and so on. And then it had some other roles.

In fact, it particularly wanted to get into broad policy issues connected with science and technology. The scientific advisor system to the president had recently been set up to try to help, and I talked with--George Kistiakowsky was the advisor, then, to Eisenhower. I talked with him, and he urged me to come. He felt it was very important, and we would have very close relations with his group at the White House and so on.

We had just come through the Sputnik crisis, which was in the fall of '57 when Sputnik went up. We were still worrying about it and not doing too well, we felt. Then there was the ICBM [Inter-continental Ballistic Missile] crisis. It was thought that the Soviets had a number of ICBMs, and we were trying hard to get going there, but hadn't gotten going. I just didn't feel there was enough technical talent in Washington, and the country had deep problems. I felt I couldn't very well turn it down.

Now, a number of my friends thought I was crazy, and maybe I was, to do that. Particularly at this time. I remember Rabi saying to me, "You know, your work is going so well. You must be absolutely frightened if you feel you have to go to Washington." I said, "No, I am not frightened, but I just feel that if I am called on, I ought to do it. Somebody has got to do it."

Petit

You mean Rabi was wondering if you had lost your nerve in the lab in a way?

Townes

No, no. Frightened about what was going on in Washington. He thought I was too upset about Washington. It was just a casual remark. He was not beating on me.

Riess

IDA had formed in 1957. Had you had any consulting connection with them?

Townes

I had not done any consulting with them. I don't know why they picked on me, excepting I know they had trouble getting some reasonable person to go down. They had tried John Wheeler. John Wheeler had been active in IDA and had sort of helped. He told IDA how important it was to get physicists together and have them work on these things. John has been very devoted to trying to help the government. So they asked him to be full time, and "No," he wouldn't do that. He has continued to work part time, but he wouldn't do that. I don't know how many other people they asked. Maybe a few others, but somehow they picked on me.

Riess

Is Garrison Norton a scientist?

Townes

No, he isn't. He is an accountant. He made a fair amount of money in an accounting firm in Chicago or something. By that time he was retired from his accounting firm and living on his money and doing good works around Washington. He was the president of IDA at that time, as I guess you know.

Riess

Yes, and he put it together, initially.

Townes

Yes, I think that is right.

Riess

Was he a good friend of the president?

Townes

He was just a public-spirited person who both worked hard and was kind of easy-going. He got along with people well, and knew how to get people to work together. He had worked in the Pentagon in some minor role, assistant secretary or something I think. He knew the people in the Pentagon. He knew [Thomas S.] Gates very well, and Gates was the Secretary of Defense then. That was important to me, too, that he was very close to Gates and felt he could push on them and do things. It was very helpful and effective.

Riess

Was it Norton himself who pulled you into it, or was it a combination of people?

Townes

He approached me, but then I talked with other people. I talked with Jim Killian, for example, who was on the board, and I talked with George Kistiakowsky, who was the president's science advisor, and I don't know who else.

Petit

Killian was before Kistiakowsky?

Townes

Yes, Killian was before Kistiakowsky. When Killian left, Kistiakowsky took over during the latter part of the Eisenhower regime. The President's Science Advisory Committee was working very well at that time. It was very effective. Scientists were devoted to trying to help. The president used them and used their advice and it was working exceedingly well. We badly needed something like that. It was new and everybody was pleased with how effective and useful it was, and the president was listening to them closely. It was a time when one could do something, and it was a time when I felt it was needed, also. I decided that I just had to do it, and I agreed to do it for two years. I felt that I could stand two years.

The Assignment for Townes

Petit

What did they say your job was to do? Would you say it was oversight on ARPA?

Townes

I was Vice President and Director of Research, so I was basically the intellectual leader. Garrison Norton was the administrative person.

 

Townes

My job was to hire and direct the people who were making the decisions in ARPA, and in the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, and any other governmental jobs in which scientific and technical help would be useful. We were very interested in trying to help the State Department at that time, too. I organized a group specifically in that area.

Getting additional scientists into Washington, that is the place I would say where perhaps I had most impact, organizing the Jason Group, which has kept going ever since then. That has had a very big, I think beneficial effect, although they were very much attacked during the '60s by some of the radicals as, "Anybody that would work for the government was awful." They had some really rather serious attacks, some of these university professors, particularly at Columbia University. I had left Columbia by then. But I think generally now the Jason Group is looked at as being useful and successful. I personally think it has been. I think it has been exceedingly useful in bringing scientists into contact with the general overall U.S. problems, good scientists, and getting universities a little better contact with government.

So that is another thing that we did, but the field was open as to what to do. IDA had these two big assignments, and some other minor ones. They would run conferences and so on on various sorts of things, on arms control business and others. But the field was open as to just what we should do in trying to help and advise the government. It was the only organization really in the field at that time. As for the present, there are all kinds of think tanks set up around Washington's outskirts, eager to help out, and some of them are useful and they do work of that kind. In addition, there are somewhat more scientists in government now, directly in government, although I think we are losing out at the moment. In NASA and in the Pentagon, we don't have the quality of people that we had in the '60s when a number of new people were moving in.

Riess

Is that because people are not, as Rabi would say, scared enough?

Townes

[laughter] I think it is just the system growing old. It is growing old and it doesn't seem as exciting to them, and I think the government is a little less welcoming to scientific advice now. Scientists sometimes disagree with the government, and once those disagreements build up, then the president is much less ready to listen. There are a variety of reasons.

NASA's case is still a little different one, I think. The Apollo program was exciting to many people. Once it was over--. NASA is doing good things, but it hasn't been able to hold on to many of its very best people or to get an outstanding new crop in. Not that they are bad, they just are not as outstanding as they once were. It is an age problem, in part, and a lot of other things.

Riess

So it could be characterized as the first of the think tanks?

Townes

I don't know whether it was the first. Rand [The Rand Corporation] was there before. Rand was on the West Coast, though, and it was specifically working for the air force, so there was nothing central in Washington. And Rand didn't have that charter and wasn't really called on to do that. Rand clearly was before. Whether there were other think tanks before that, I don't know. I don't happen to think of any of them. There were temporary summer studies that were being done. Summer studies for the military, as I had already mentioned. IDA was certainly the only one of much importance in the field at that time. I don't remember any others that were there except Rand, and Rand was in its own particular quarter. It didn't cover the field generally.

Petit

It was called ARPA, not DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] in those days?

Townes

It was called ARPA then. It has been changed to DARPA with an idea of upgrading it somehow, but it was just more of a name change than anything else. They renamed it with the idea that it was being reorganized and improved.

President's Science Advisory Committee--PSAC

Riess

As soon as you got to Washington, you were called upon to join the President's Science Advisory Committee?

Townes

No, I wasn't. There was more or less an expectation and understanding because I was connected with IDA, which was a separate organization, another branch of government. I wasn't completely like a university scientist called in separately from outside to come in and advise Washington on an ad hoc basis, you see. I think it felt a little wrong for the vice-president of an organization like that to also have a position on the committee. It was after I left IDA, and also after I was not quite so busy at MIT, that I was asked to serve on the committee, and I served on it for some time.

Riess

It must be wrong on your vita because here it says '60-'63.

Townes

What does it say I was?

Riess

President's Science Advisory Committee, the Panel on Strategic Weapons.

Townes

Oh, that is a particular panel. I did serve on some panels, but I was not on the overall committee. I think you will find later that I served on the committee, and I was vice-chairman of the committee at one point, but this was in the Johnson and then Nixon regimes. And things were beginning to get difficult, particularly with Nixon.

Petit

Have you found any systematic difference in working for Republican versus Democratic administrations, or not? In their willingness to listen to scientific advice, is their a difference in ideologically driven decisions?

Townes

I think academic people generally feel closer to the Democratic party, and vice versa. But except for that general feeling of sympathy, I don't think there is all that much difference.

Petit

The workaday atmosphere is the same?

Townes

Yes. The trouble is that there were other changes at the time that kind of make it hard to be effective. Eisenhower, for example, worked very, very well with the scientists. Eisenhower started this whole thing, and he worked very well with the scientists. So did Kennedy. Johnson continued to work very well with scientists. Things began to be a little bit strained in the very last part of Johnson's term; it was good, but you could see the strains coming up.

Nixon started out fine, and then it got more and more difficult. By then, some of the scientists on the President's Advisory Committee were speaking out publicly against the president on policies that they were supposed to advise him on. You can imagine that would create a good deal of difficulty in further intimate consultations, and it did. You just can't do that. So things were getting pretty difficult during the Nixon term, and I think it was time to stop the organization. [Petit leaves]

Riess

I was wondering, Eisenhower being a military man, whether military presidents would be more oriented to working with scientists?

Townes

I think so. I think Eisenhower was oriented to working with a staff, and taking his staff seriously and handing over a good deal of his work to staff. Also, being in the military, he was a little more accustomed to dealing with technical matters. He was not a technical person himself, of course, but he had to deal with them, and so he was accustomed to dealing with specialists and technically oriented people.

But then Eisenhower was different in himself. He was a man interested in the effectiveness of an operation, not in politics itself. He was very moderate, he took a kind of a central position, really. He was asked, I believe, to be a Democratic candidate as well as a Republican candidate, and he just finally decided to go Republican. But he was not a partisan type, at all. A very broad minded person. Some people felt he was a little too easy, and didn't force decisions and so on, but I think overall Eisenhower handled the situation pretty well. His training in the military certainly would have helped him be able to work with teams of people and committees and so on.

Johnson, on the other hand, had worked with Congress, and he knew how to work with groups of politicians. He was very good at that. And overall I think he did pretty well with the Science Advisory Committee.

Riess

And Kennedy?

Townes

Well, there were a lot of intellectuals that swarmed around Kennedy, and Kennedy was a very interesting person. Intellectually oriented, in a sense, himself. A very attractive kind of person. So there was a great blooming of intellectually oriented people going to Washington and trying to help out. There was a very warm kind of interaction there for a while. I think if you look back on the Kennedy period, it doesn't look at this point all that liberal or enlightened. You have things like the Cuban invasion and so on. Kennedy did magnificently in sort of taking the blame for it, but it clearly was a sad, uninformed mistake. Although there were things like that going on, by comparison Kennedy seemed at that time a really very inspiring person, full of ideas and goodwill and interested in new things.

Riess

Nixon was a secretive person. Would you say that that stood in the way of good communication, working with him in an advisory capacity? How would you characterize him?

Townes

I think Nixon really just didn't interact with people very easily. Nixon was a very intelligent person, and he thought through things, in some ways very well, but he had difficulty interacting on a personal basis.

Chairman, President-Elect Nixon's Task Force on Space, 1968

Townes

I'll tell you just one illustration of that and then perhaps we ought to stop for the day. Nixon, before he first came in, organized a group of committees to advise him on future policies. This was in the late fall after he was elected.

He asked me to head a committee on examining the space program, what the space program ought to do. Lee Du Bridge headed a committee on a program for science; there were a variety of other people involved. We all worked on our reports on what policies the government ought to try to pursue in all of these different areas. We met with the president-elect one afternoon, each of us made our reports saying what we thought and we had a big dinner. I think somewhat for the right public relations they had me sitting on one side of the president because everybody knew I was a little bit on the liberal side (although my friends here in Berkeley think of me as a conservative, in government I am looked at as somewhat liberal). So a liberal academic on one side, and then they had a person who became the head of environmental problems for Nixon, a person very noted in environmental work, he was sitting on the other side of Nixon. That was the picture they wanted of Nixon at the time.

Trying to talk with him at dinner was an interesting experience. He just was not terribly adept at small talk or at conversation. A member of one of these committees came up to me and said, "I know you are sitting next to the president at dinner. My daughter has been talking about this in her class at school, and they want very much to have some little memorandum or something, some statement from the president. It would be just a great thing for my daughter. Would you tell him this? Here is her name, ask him if he would be willing to write a little note to her, for her class. It would just be so great if you could do that."

Well, here I was sitting at dinner with him all evening, and so I brought this up. He thought about it. It was clear he was sitting there thinking about it, deciding what he should do. Finally, he took his place card, signed his name on it, and said, "Here, give her this." [laughter]

Riess

Just another autograph seeker.

Townes

Yes, he couldn't think of anything to tell to a little girl in school, you know. Most politicians would be very adept at that. He just wasn't.

Then he gave a talk after dinner which was a great talk. He is a remarkable speaker. Somehow he remembers all of these things. He knows how to order the speech and so on, and he did it very well. One of the things he said was, "I know that here among you, and on the committees advising me, there are more Democrats than there are Republicans, and that is just fine, that is the way it ought to be, that is the way we are going to work. Everybody is going to participate, and the Democrats are welcome, and I am going to take their advice," and so on. It was a very gracious, good speech. But then, when the fights began down in Washington, it looked very different, and he gradually sloughed off the President's Science Advisory Committee those that didn't agree with him on things. Even Lee Du Bridge had a hard time getting in to see him, and he was kind of down on Lee Du Bridge finally, who tried very hard to help him. He just didn't fit the political pattern that Nixon apparently wanted.

Now, Henry Kissinger came in, and Henry Kissinger also was part of that. Henry did not believe that scientists should have very much to do with policy. He felt that that was the wrong idea. Scientists did not know anything about policy, and he tried to keep them out. I think he blockaded the road between the Advisory Committee and Nixon to a considerable extent. He was able to work with Nixon quite well--his mannerisms fitted those of Nixon rather more, even though he is good at small talk. Nevertheless, Henry was is very politically-oriented, and knows how to deal with politicians on their own terms. Nixon and Kissinger, I think, got along very well. Kissinger is an academic in a sense, but a very unusual type.

Riess

He knew how to exploit the paranoia of Nixon.

Townes

Yes. Well, Kissinger was good at that. He is a person of very great ability, but he operated in a completely different way from what the Science Advisory Committee would do. The Science Advisory Committee just sort of slipped out of the picture during the latter part of his term.

---

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11. XII More Thoughts on the Maser

Earlier Work in Higher Frequencies

Townes

I have a few items here that I thought might be finished up. I keep thinking of things that we have missed and that might be said. Some of them are quite short.

I wanted to mention a couple of more things about why it was that people were so slow to get going on the things which now seem obvious, in the way of masers and lasers. One remarkable thing is that no one pushed on towards higher frequencies until Art Schawlow and I did, even though the high frequencies, that is, work in the optical range and possibly getting some amplification had been mentioned as early as 1940 by this Russian physicist [Valentin A.] Fabrikant. And others had casually mentioned it. None of those, however, talked about doing it for useful purposes. It was just a demonstration that something could happen like this, and that made it not so interesting, scientifically. No technical uses of it were envisaged in those earlier things, even though it was understood it could happen.

Now, when the maser came along, people got excited about that, and why didn't they push on to shorter wavelengths which was my original intention in trying to get this kind of amplification anyhow? Well, I myself was pretty busy, and the maser was going strong. I took a sabbatical along about then, and there were lots of things happening. I felt I just didn't have quite the right idea of how to do it. I felt it could be done, but it would just be a brute force effort, rather than a nice idea of how to do it. Eventually I decided to go ahead with the brute force method, and then we worked out some still better ideas.

Riess

Is "brute force" a term that is used by other physicists than you to mean that you just sort of push on something?

Townes

Yes, that's right. You know how to do it, but not gracefully. [laughs] Not cleverly, maybe, but you can see how it can be done, and you just have to work hard at it and get it done. Whereas there is a certain aesthetic appeal to something that seems a clever, efficient, and effective way of doing something. That is the difference.

Riess

And it also seems that what you have talked about a lot is that you have known what the end was, and as soon as you knew the end, the means was simple, but here you are not entirely sure.

Townes

Yes. I could envisage the means, but nothing that seemed really convenient and graceful. But yet the end was so important to me that I said we had better go ahead. Frequently, when you get going on something, then you have some ideas.

Townes' "Do Something" Approach, Fabry-Perots

Townes

Another comment I might make about that in general is that I have always just been doing something. I am interested in doing things, and even if I don't feel that I have a great idea, I go ahead and make some measurements and do some studying and try to figure out some things. Just in the process of doing things is frequently where ideas come. If you just sit back and wait for a good idea to come, then it never comes. In fact, some of my friends have had exactly that trouble. They are very good physicists, and they have done one or two very nice things, and then they sit back and wait for the new nice idea. They have told me that is what they were doing. Well, they haven't had any good ideas, so they weren't doing anything. "All they needed was a good idea." The result was that they didn't do very much the rest of their lives. Sometimes you may have a good idea, and sometimes you don't.

My own approach is to just go ahead and do the best you can, start undertaking something, get involved, and then you are likely to see more of the ideas. That was also part of the picture.

In deciding to go ahead, I wrote down some of the necessary equations and theory in thinking about it. That was what made me realize that one could move right on down to the visible region, just looking at the equations and the numbers. A lot of people had automatically assumed that you can't go to very short wavelengths because once the atoms begin to decay rapidly from an upper state to a lower state, give up their energy spontaneously, then you are lost. You can't keep them up there. Therefore, going to high frequencies was not practical. In fact, a number of people sort of said that, offhand: you can't produce very high frequency by the maser method because the rate of radiation is too fast.

In working out the equations and really looking at this quantitatively and carefully, then it was quite clear that one could go on down to the visible regions. Art Schawlow and I in writing this paper pointed out the difficulties of going to the very, very high frequencies. By the time you get into the x-ray region, you have to provide so much energy that it is almost prohibitive. Not completely prohibitive, but almost prohibitive. Whereas, in the visible region, my first calculations showed you need only about a watt of energy to be able to do something. So it was not so imposing and not so difficult. It was that realization which encouraged me further. A lot of other people just had not looked at it. They had an automatic judgement about it, it being so different from the microwave and the decay rates so rapid, that of course it wouldn't work. That was one of the impediments for people.

The next thing that I want to mention is the fact that Fabry-Perots also were quite old. And I really don't know why I didn't think of a Fabry-Perot. I had worked with them, I had a student in the Columbia Radiation Lab who fixed up a Fabry-Perot for a microwave resonance device to measure frequencies. Art Schawlow had done his thesis on Fabry-Perots, so he was very familiar with them. I had never actually used one in the optical region, but I knew all about them, they were well known. Other people had even suggested them for a maser, and this included Prokhorov and [Robert H.] Dicke. Now, what these and others didn't do was they didn't have the right idea about just why to use them. Namely, to pick out just a single mode. The Fabry-Perot was an open device, and hence they could feed energy into it easily. I even had a letter from Dicke who said in retrospect that of course, that was what he was trying to do, and that was why he suggested a Fabry-Perot. But if you look at his paper and patent, it doesn't say that at all. It doesn't point out how to get a single mode, and it has dimensions such that you wouldn't possibly get a single mode.

I wrote him about this. Dicke is a very fine scientist, and I have great admiration for him. I wrote him very carefully, saying, "Well, I respect your science so much, and I have been looking at this, and I don't find anything about this in your patent." At that point, he didn't respond. He must have realized that he hadn't really focused on the right thing. The same thing is true of Prokhorov. And yet, for me, initially I just didn't think of it at all until Art Schawlow thought of it. Then immediately it was clear, and we worked out just how to do it. It is difficult to know why you should miss something like that at times. But I did, and of course other people had missed the rest of the field for a long time.

Riess

You are talking about the year or two preceding the quantum electronics conference?

Townes

Yes, that's right. I am trying to catch up on that part of it. The remarkable thing is that nobody seems to have taken seriously the possibility of getting to quite short wavelengths until the paper by Schawlow and myself--at least not seriously enough to do any work in that direction.

[telephone call; tape interruption]

A Rosette in the Offing

Townes

I am being made an officer of the Legion of Honor in France. The president gives this thing. I haven't had much information as to just what goes on, what I am supposed to do. [laughs] I know I have to be over there.

Riess

But a speech is not involved?

Townes

No, apparently I don't have to make any response. When the president himself gives it, then they say you don't respond. If somebody else gives it, you do respond. The president, I suppose, has heard enough speeches and he doesn't need to hear another one. [laughter]

Riess

So this is the rosette?

Townes

Yes, it involves a rosette. Another thing that I didn't realize is that there are all kinds of grades of these things: there is a Chevalier, an Officier, a Commandant and so on. Various kinds of ranks, and the president only comes in on some of the higher ones. Surprisingly, I have not had a sort of official statement about it and what I should do. My guess is it must have been lost in the mail. I can't imagine that they would be so casual. That is why I am asking a few questions, to be sure.

Riess

I guess it would be interesting to know what the wording is.

Townes

I don't even know what I'm getting it for.

Riess

Exactly.

Townes

I don't know what they do. I have had very little information about it. Nevertheless, it will be interesting.

Inventions, Patents, and University Interest, or Lack Thereof

Riess

Now, you were reviewing how everyone was moving slowly, and you were kind of bemused as to why it took so long. I don't know if you had more you wanted to say about that. I am interested that patents are one of the main issues of this book [Laser Pioneers, by Hecht]. The patent and what happens afterwards is as much of the discussion as the science. It is kind of amazing to me.

Townes

That is, of course, a commercial journal. Laser Focus, it is called. It is written for the applications world, not the scientists. So that person, who writes the book, is the editor of that journal, which is for the practitioners of the art and the commercial producers and so on. This is partly why he is oriented that way. But there has been an awful lot of fuss about the laser patents. For one thing, it is a popular idea, and so it gets in the press. The other thing is that there is a certain amount of money involved, and so it has stimulated substantial investments in trying to get the patents. Investments, and a lot of people working on public relations to get their ideas before the press and that sort of thing. So it has been a kind of a big affair.

Riess

I don't want to derail, but I was interested that Gould's interview starts out by his saying, "I always wanted to be an inventor." I don't know whether you would say that about yourself.

Townes

No, invention per se is not one of my great interests. That is, patents, per se. Invention in the sense of creating new ideas, that is.

Riess

So in that sense that is a legitimate statement. The drive to do something.

Townes

That's right, it is legitimate. Now, Gould has been quite inconsistent. He has only been saying that in recent years. He didn't say that in the beginning. It is clear however that after a while he got terribly interested in the patent and the money. I can talk about that when we start talking about the patents. Gould is a very appealing person. What he says is frequently a public relations kind of thing.

Riess

I was interested in your response to this idea of being motivated by the notion of invention. It is a very American thing; invention is a great tradition, and you are certainly in that tradition.

Townes

Yes, but, for example when I was at Bell Telephone Laboratories, I guess I made about twelve or fifteen inventions when I was young, and that was only over a period of about six or seven years. But I did it because Bell Laboratories was very invention-conscious, and they wanted you to write down inventions. So I wrote them down and they patented them. Since I have been out of Bell Labs I have patented only three things: the maser, the laser, which was really a Bell Labs patent. The third thing had to do with some Brillouin line scattering that I felt might have some applications, and my friends who worked with me were interested in patenting it.

A lot of the things that I have been doing now could be patented. I don't think they are terribly important patents, and I am not all that interested, and it is not something that drives me at all: invention per se. At least in the commercial sense of inventions, getting patents. Producing new ideas is what I enjoy, and that is much more the point. The new ideas are frequently fundamental physics ideas, but they may well be applied physics. The laser and the maser are applied physics. Sure, I want to produce something useful, but just writing down inventions and getting patents is of no interest to me at all.

Riess

Isn't it a point of contention in the academic community? Is there an academic high road? I am doing an interview with a woman whose son made some kind of improvement on the x-ray machine. I asked, "Did he get it patented?" She is from Switzerland, and she said, "Well, we don't think that way, we are not oriented that way," as if getting patents is kind of a low form of business.

Townes

I don't look down on getting patents. What I would look down on is someone who is primarily in academic life or in intellectual work in order to make money. If money is the object, then I think that somewhat degrades the game. Getting patents per se, I would say that you shouldn't waste a lot of time on it, but getting some patents is perfectly respectable.

The same thing is true of people in the academic community who want to found a company. There are some people who are terribly eager to make some money, and so they want to start a little company that will hopefully explode and make them a lot of money, and they spend a lot of time on it. There are other people who do found companies, and they are a real contribution to society. That is fine. But if academics waste a lot of time and deflect their work by just being after the money and trying a lot of things like that, I think that degrades the academic scene some.

Riess

To make this a more rounded discussion, is there a way that you could generalize about what happened at Columbia, MIT, and Berkeley along those lines? About the spirit of the departments at each of those places that would mitigate for or against?

Townes

Well, I have mentioned this a little bit already, but let me try to comment about Columbia. I don't think of anybody else at Columbia that has had a patent. Probably there were a few, but I don't think of any excepting a very early person named Pupin, for whom the building was named. He invented a way of perfecting long distance communication by putting in certain circuit elements and so on. He made some money on it, and people respected him. But he was an immigrant from Central Europe. He came over, and he had this idea, and he made a fair amount of money on it.

And there was Armstrong in the electrical engineering department. Well, the engineers are rather close to this. But outside of Pupin, who was long since dead when I came to Columbia, I don't know of anybody who ever had a patent. That doesn't mean there weren't some, but nobody ever worried about it or talked about it.

When I got a patent--. On the maser, I realized it ought to be patented.

Riess

And you said Columbia wasn't interested.

Townes

I knew that I had to offer it to Columbia University as a patent because I worked at the Columbia Radiation Lab, where it was required in principle. Columbia had a committee that said, "Well, we don't really do very much of this, and we don't have any set form for doing it. If you would like to patent it yourself, why don't you go ahead."

I didn't get that started until quite a while after I had published. I knew that I ought to do it, but I just didn't get around to it until almost the last minute, because you have to do it within a year's time--I knew that from Bell Labs--within a year after publication there must be an application, otherwise you lose the patent.

What I didn't know was that you lose all of the foreign rights immediately when you publish if you have not already patented. So, in principle, I should have patented before I published at all, you see. But I didn't know that and I wasn't worrying about it. So the patent was a secondary thing. As I say, there was not much discussion of patents. Nobody worried about them in the department.

Riess

What about MIT?

Townes

MIT, I think the same thing was true of the physics department. The engineers were more conscious of patents, and many of them were involved in commercial companies at that time, and there was some real utility to that. MIT was more oriented towards patents, but again, I don't think that in the physics department there was very much concern about it. Nobody was working on patents to try to produce one. They were doing physics, and if something came along that clearly had applications, then they might patent it. I think Zacharias at MIT patented an atomic clock, for example, and he got this built by a commercial company. He was a bit oriented that way.

Riess

Of course an institute of technology is a bit more of a statement of--

Townes

A statement of orientation, that's true. But that is the general furtherance of technology. It does not mean that individuals have to aim at patents. A physicist would not normally aim at patents. That would be kind of corrupting the field, so to speak. It is like an artist in an art department who spends all of his time designing toys that he wants to sell. He could do that, but if the main game is selling rather than producing art, that is not what people are looking for in a university.

In physics departments, it isn't that patents are looked down on, it is just that that is not the thing that people are doing. It is just not their concern. On the other hand, if they run into something that they know is patentable and that may involve some money, why sure, they would patent it. We have a good deal of pressure here at Berkeley, particularly recently, for trying to drum up patents. They are giving special awards to students who will produce patents and so on. But I haven't heard of any students in the physics department who are responding to that.

Riess

This is for the financial implications for the University?

Townes

That's right. They would like to collect money on the patents. Biotechnology is an area, I think, where people have become rather patent-conscious recently. Universities would like very much to have some valuable patents which would bring income to the University. I would say if it fits in with the scientific work, if it is part of it, and they produce some patents in the progress of science, well, then that is fine. But if their primary aim is just to try to invent something that is going to make some money, that is not university work, really.

Townes and Ammonia

Townes

I wanted to mention a couple of other things, and that is my interesting relation with ammonia. Ammonia is an unusual molecule in that it turns inside-out, and it turns inside-out at a very high frequency, at microwave frequencies. This is what makes its peculiar spectrum at a microwave frequency. And a spectrum of very high intensity. That is, it absorbs microwaves more intensely than any other molecule. This is why my microwave work started with ammonia, because it was expected to give a very intense interaction with electromagnetic waves. In principle, there are some other molecules that are similar; other molecules have different motions which have, sort of in principle, the same interactions. But ammonia is particularly intense. And this is why microwave work started with ammonia.

So I worked a lot on ammonia and studied it very thoroughly, I knew it just like a friend. And this is also the reason that the maser started with ammonia, because of its intense interaction with microwaves. It was a very good candidate, and of course I was very familiar with it. And so my microwave work started with ammonia; my maser work started with ammonia; and then as we discuss the astronomical work, the discovery of molecules in interstellar space, that also started with ammonia. So it is partly my familiarity with ammonia that in new fields I saw the possibilities of using it, but partly also that ammonia is such an unusual molecule that I could just fit it into the things that I wanted to do. One would say that in three areas of my biggest scientific success, ammonia has been involved.

Riess

Are you saying that maybe when you thought about further development of it that you were so predisposed to working with ammonia that you were hampered in thinking about other things?

Townes

No. I was just very familiar with it, and it was a natural, so ammonia has been a key element in starting the several different fields because of a combination of its unusual properties and my own familiarity with it as to just what it did. I have started off new areas several times with it.

Effect of the Nobel Prize on Science, and the Recipient

Townes

Another thing I felt I might talk about a little bit is the Nobel prize. So many people ask me, "What does the Nobel prize mean to you?" And they want essays on the subject and all of this. "What does a Nobel prize do to a scientist?"

The Nobel prize is clearly the biggest public recognition that a scientist gets for scientific work. That is very clear. Furthermore, it is affixed to your name. You can't get rid of it. Whenever anybody mentions you, you are likely to have that title, you see, Nobel Laureate. If I am coming to a meeting, if people want to make an impression, they list me as being a Nobel Laureate. And, in a way it is kind of a nuisance, and maybe even a little insulting at times, you know [laughs] that that is the reason why you are invited! The Swedes have made that a very important signature, so to speak.

I think it has been a big contribution from the point of view of honoring science and getting science in the public eye, but it also puts a certain kind of aura and drive about Nobel prizes which I think sometimes is good, but sometimes not all that good. My own view is that the best way to get a Nobel prize is to not worry about it and just try to do good work. There are some physicists and some scientists that are specifically after a Nobel prize, and to do work and they want to pick a field that they think has a good chance of getting a Nobel prize.

Riess

But you don't think that might motivate some fairly amazing breakthroughs in areas that people wouldn't have chosen because they are peripheral?

Townes

I do not think that motivation adds a great deal to the development of science, no.

Riess

The prize must have been originated for that reason.

Townes

Well, the origin of the prize was to try to reward somebody who had been effective, and give him enough money that he could continue to work more or less unhampered. I think that was Nobel's idea. He gave them enough money. In 1900 it was one hundred thousand dollars, which is equivalent to probably four or five million now in terms of the possibility of using it for support.

 

Townes

I think the orientation of specifically working for a Nobel prize is a little harmful in this sense: it tends to make people pick out those things which are presently known or thought to be important and have the possibility of opening up some new field, and everybody else is working on. So it rather specifically tends to prevent people from working on things that are not obvious, or working on fields that are uncertain, let me say.

Let's take high-energy physics. Everybody would know that if you find a new particle in high-energy physics, why that is likely to win a Nobel prize. So you want to work on a big machine. Well, the big machines are built for that, to find new particles. That's what they're all about, and finding new particles is important. But that puts a drive on for everybody to try to be first in there using the big machine, rather than going off and doing something new that other people aren't thinking about, you see, that other people don't know might be promising.

Now, there are a lot of things that other people don't know might be promising that, in fact, are not promising. So people cannot go and find them very easily, but must use intuition, originality, and take some chances. Take high-temperature superconductivity. There was some work being done in Switzerland on solids. It was work that most physicists had felt they had proved as impossible.

But [Johannes Georg] Bednorz and [Karl Alexander] Mueller had the recent important breakthrough in high-temperature superconductivity. They were working with solid state materials and examining them and trying things. They eventually did something that the theorists in the field of superconductivity had written papers on to prove could not be done. They believed it was against the laws of physics. So no sensible person, you might say, would try to do that.

If somebody thinks they are going to try to do something important, why would they be playing around with something that has been shown not to be possible? And yet, they found it. If they wanted to be sure to do something important and striking that would pay off, they would be working in fields that people had shown were the way to go. But the few fields that have been shown to be the way to go, that is what everybody else is doing. To have additional scientists doing it, too, does not necessarily add very much.

Riess

That is very interesting, actually. A theoretical physicist can shut the door to an area so incontrovertibly?

Townes

Well, it seemed a tight argument to everybody in the field. People still don't know just how these new superconductors work. The theory is difficult enough that it is still unclear how they work. It is clear that they do work, but it is not clear how they work. And the old theories of superconductivity just didn't allow this, you see.

So that is the kind of case that I would point out. I think that a drive just to specifically get a Nobel prize is not terribly useful. A drive to discover new things, and to try out new things, that is the kind of thing that does pay off, it seems to me.

I have sort of touched on three Nobel prizes. One was in microwave spectroscopy. There, I played a very important role in developing the field. I was one of two who were first in getting high resolution. But Bleaney at Oxford had really done something first in doing something with ammonia and getting moderately high resolution. One of the members of the committee for the Nobel prize came over to Columbia at one time for a visit. It was clear to me that he was looking into this. He asked me who did this, and I told him Bleaney had done it first and I had done the subsequent work. Eventually, there was no Nobel prize in that field. I have always regretted it, particularly on Bleaney's part because Bleaney did something initially, but then he didn't follow it up very successfully. He didn't continue in the field and develop it. I continued in the field and developed it, and so they were looking at me, and yet the very first claim was not mine, you see. And so that kind of washed out a Nobel prize. The field, I think, was important and made important contributions.

Riess

If you had worded it differently, perhaps it could have ended up being a joint prize?

Townes

Yes, maybe. If somebody had pushed hard for that or maybe if I had--

Riess

Is there a pushing hard aspect of it?

Townes

Well, some people do. Sometimes it is done rather officially, particularly by those countries that don't have many Nobel prizes. For example, the Russians work very hard on trying to get their people Nobel prizes. The French tend to do this, too. The French feel that they have been somewhat slighted, and one could argue that perhaps it's true, so the French push. The United States doesn't. The government doesn't touch the problem, one way or the other. The United States has lots of Nobel prize winners. The same thing is really true of Great Britain.

On the other hand, sometimes a person, or a group of friends, would work very hard trying to get him the Nobel prize, and sometimes that is quite justified. We are all asked to make recommendations. But there [microwave spectroscopy] is a field that I think probably deserved a prize, but it just didn't quite fit the pattern. At least in the eyes of the committee at that time. I think one might have made a case for something about it.

Another interesting situation when I was working on the shapes of nuclei, the so-called quadrupole moments, I showed some rather interesting things about systematic behavior in quadrupole moments. Jim Rainwater, who was also at Columbia, then had an idea of what might be producing this, and he wrote a short paper on it as to why these results might have come about. I continued to think about it and work on it, and I thought I had an idea that would push that much further. That was basically to look at the nuclei as somewhat like molecules and their molecular rotation energy levels, that nuclei would have these rotational energy levels. But it was somewhat complex and I felt the problem needed a person who was more adept at theory than I was.

I talked with then young Aage Bohr. (This was Niels Bohr's son, who was at Columbia then and a good friend of mine.) He was a theorist, and I felt he was quite good and interested in these things. So I talked to him a bit and I said, "Maybe this is what is happening. Would you be interested in working on it? I would like to be working on it, but I feel it really needs a professional theorist, and I wondered if you would find it interesting." He felt not, so he wasn't interested. So I dropped the subject. I didn't feel that I could pursue it alone very effectively, and I had lots of other things that I was doing at that time.

About three or four years later, Bohr and [Ben R.] Mottleson came out with a paper discussing the nucleus very much along that model. It was a nice paper, and it showed that the energy levels and behavior of the nucleus fitted that pattern. I talked with Aage Bohr and I said, "Isn't that rather like the model that I had discussed with you?" [laughter] He was a little embarrassed, and he didn't remember that it was and so on. Which may well be perfectly genuine. He was a very nice person and very honorable. It was just something that was in the back of his mind, maybe, but he felt that he didn't remember talking with me about it that way.

Riess

What if he had said, "You know, it really is a lot like that, Charlie." What happens if he admits it, assuming that in fact it was in his mind? What does this do to his status?

Townes

If he remembered it and thought about it, it wouldn't do all that much. What he would do then is to, in his next paper, say this was a model that I had initially suggested. But he had worked it out. I don't consider that I deserve any great credit for this, because I didn't pursue it at all. I felt I wasn't quite competent in that field to do some of the theory necessary. I would have to do a lot of learning in order to follow it up and I was busy with other things. So I dropped it, and I don't feel that I have any great claim. I am just talking about how things developed.

Riess

But there is a kind of meticulousness and an honorableness about this that you believe in.

Townes

Yes, that is quite right. But he felt he didn't remember it, and didn't see it that way, and so I let it drop. He and Rainwater got the Nobel prize. I happened to be over there because it was the seventy-fifth anniversary, and they invited us all back, and Rainwater made the point that he felt he maybe should have shared the Nobel prize with me, which I think was very much over-generous.

Riess

You mean a three-way?

Townes

Yes. But there would have been a problem anyhow, because there were already three people, Mottleson and Bohr and Rainwater. And I don't think that would have made sense, either. But he leaned over backwards to be very generous about it, and to talk about my contributions. Bohr and Mottleson just didn't see that and just didn't mention it.

That is a picture of an interaction between scientists. I would personally downplay my role in the theoretical part of it because, as I say, I didn't follow it up. Anybody can have ideas and sort of mention them and so on, and you maybe deserve a little credit for that, but nothing very big if you don't believe in it enough and don't work on it or don't follow it up. So I think the prize went in the right direction. I already had a Nobel prize anyhow.

Riess

You can get more than one.

Townes

Yes, you can get more than one. But there is no question that those would be the three to give it to. I shouldn't have been in the picture. I mention it as an interaction, and the fact that these things come about in a variety of ways, and exactly where the Nobel prize goes turns a bit on accidents of history, and what happened, and how it looks to the committee. There is a lot of very good science that goes on that doesn't get recognized by Nobel prizes.

Well, now, I have often been asked, "To what extent did you expect this?" The answer is yes, the invention of the maser--I recognized its importance, and my friends in the physics department at Columbia recognized its importance and interest once we got it working. Nevertheless, I never thought of it as a Nobel prize project, and ever after we had it I didn't think in those terms. The first time that it was mentioned to me, I was in France in '55 and a French physicist said, "Oh, that's going to lead to a Nobel prize." Well, that was kind of a surprise to me, I hadn't thought about it. It was, of course, flattering. Nevertheless, I was skeptical that it was that important. As time went on though, and the maser developed, and then the laser came along, by the time the laser had come along, I felt it had a very high probability, and people kept telling me this.

As a matter of fact, when I went down to Washington, one of my good friends, Walter [H.] Brattain, who had gotten a Nobel prize as one of the inventors of the transistor, he kept telling me, "Oh, make a laser. Don't stop, don't go to Washington. Get a laser going. That's very important to you." I realized that that would make some difference. On the other hand, I personally felt I had done enough. I felt the laser was here. It hadn't been working yet, but no doubt it would work, and I in a sense kind of thumbed my nose at that situation. I wasn't going to be ruled by trying to get a Nobel prize, and just doing some more to try to get a Nobel prize.

Riess

And a proprietary interest was not one of yours?

Townes

Well, I thought I had the basic patents anyhow. I had given the patent to Bell Labs for the laser, and the other patent I had a modest interest in--the Research Corporation--so I wasn't after drumming up money, but I frankly felt, "Well, gee. If the Swedish committee doesn't recognize that, why phooey on them." [laughter] So I really expected it would probably come. Every scientist makes an evaluation of what other people have done, and how important it is, and thinks about his own work. And people talk with him about it some. They may be a little secretive about it, because they don't want to get his hopes up too high, or something.

Riess

By accepting the job in Washington you had to relinquish control of the field.

Townes

Yes, that is partly true, but I had developed the field up to that time. I had such a big role in developing the field up to that point that I felt that is that.

In Bleaney's case, I think he didn't get the prize because he didn't follow up that field. He had just started it. It was not a very forceful, clear cut experiment he did, but it was the first experiment. So I would say he was overlooked possibly because he didn't stay in the field and really help develop it. In the case of the laser, I felt the field was there. I had been working at it for some years, I felt it was well established, and that was enough. I could go off to Washington with a good conscience.

Art Schawlow was in the running also. He had contributed to this paper importantly, and he might well have gotten the prize with me. Bloembergen might have gotten the prize with me also. But they chose the Russians. And the Russians did have earlier claim than either one of them to doing anything in the field. Then I'm sure there was a good deal of Soviet pressure on the Swedes, too. So they chose the Russians. They can't have more than three people.

Actually, Art was phoned up. These things get to be sort of quietly in the news. It doesn't usually hit the newspapers, but the news people know about them, and Art was phoned up by the news people in Sweden and they said, "You are being considered for the Nobel prize, and you are very likely to get it, and we would like to get your biography and so on." So they came to see him. They had done that to me the year before I got the Nobel prize. They did the same thing, called me up at night and wanted to know all of my biographical information so they would be all ready with it. But I didn't get it that year. The next year they phoned again, and Frances refused to tell them where I was so they wouldn't wake me up in the middle of the night.

But they had contacted Art Schawlow, and he didn't get the prize. Some years later he did, and they picked out a different contribution that he had made, high-resolution spectroscopy with lasers. For Bloembergen they picked out the field of nonlinear optics. I have no doubt that some of their [the committee's] thinking was on their earlier contributions, but they couldn't recognize that officially. They had to pick a separate field to which they had contributed and give the prize for that. They gave Schawlow and Bloembergen the prize jointly with a third Swedish person in a somewhat different field.

It is not an easy problem to decide who should get it. There are lots of good candidates. I think the Swedes do pretty well. They work at it pretty hard. They try to look into the facts hard and carefully. They do a better job than most prize-giving committees. They work on it much harder. But the way the prize is set up, it takes a certain kind of discovery with certain kinds of aspects to it to get recognized. I think, on the one hand, it has helped science a great deal in the public eye. On the other hand, it does complicate interrelations between scientists sometimes. And I think it produces some motivations which aren't terribly helpful.

Riess

What would it have done if you had gotten it earlier, for the spectroscopy? Are you saying it derails you?

Townes

It would have gotten me busy with public affairs somewhat earlier perhaps. I don't know. I would have been still pretty young. I don't think it would have derailed me completely. It would have been a distraction, however.

Riess

How did getting it for the maser get you into public affairs?

Townes

I was already into public affairs by then, but the point is, once you get this kind of recognition, you are generally more visible to all kinds of people, including government officials. They want to have the cachet of the Nobel prize. You are generally more noticeable. They might call on you for advice, or committee service, or some kind of figurehead occupation. They would be much more eager to get you into whatever positions they have for which they are looking for scientists.

Riess

In the same way that they would like a Nobel prize-winning economist, I'm sure.

Townes

Right, and then there are a lot more public speeches you are asked to give, and things you are asked to sign, and all kinds of extra time-consuming things that some people find very distracting--it is always somewhat distracting.

13. XIII IDA, Continued

ARPA--Advanced Research Projects Agency

Riess

Well, you were into IDA and into government service long before that.

Townes

That's right. I was before that.

I think we have taken up enough time, perhaps, with the subsidiary things. Let's talk about IDA a little bit more. IDA was a most unusual organization at that time, and you have to remember that this was a time when Sputnik had come along. We were very concerned about the U.S. position generally in technology, and particularly in military technology and in space. We were concerned about Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, and that concern had then pushed Eisenhower into setting up the President's Science Advisory Committee. That was a most unusual situation, the President's Science Advisory Committee, and I want to talk about that a little bit more at a later time.

The whole nation was very conscious of the need for scientists in Washington and their need to think more about what we were doing technologically. ARPA had just been instituted, again as part of the reaction to the apparent situation of the United States--ARPA, in the Defense Department, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was given this very special charter. It was supposed to be equivalent in stature to the three other armed services. They tried to maintain that position for quite a while, that they were equal to the army and navy and air force. ARPA was a separate service.

Riess

Who ran it?

Townes

It was run by a former General Electric executive who had been in the refrigerator business, as I remember. I should remember his name, but I can't recall it right now. He was not technically oriented, really. He was more of a sales and administrative person. He did a perfectly reasonable job, because he let technical people run the show pretty much, excepting he made the administrative decisions.

Herb York, from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, went out as the first chief scientist. That was a surprise to the scientific community because Herb was a prominent young scientist. That he should do this kind of thing was a surprise.

Riess

What do you mean by "this kind of thing?"

Townes

Go work in Washington for the defense department.

Riess

Is it as bad as going into industry? Is it sort of that idea?

Townes

It is different. More unusual. In industry there are straightforward jobs to do, and work, and money. In Washington there is not money, there are difficult, politically-oriented jobs to do, and the defense department was not highly regarded at that time. It wasn't looked down on, but it wasn't highly regarded. For a scientist to sort of give up his career at a good university and go do that was unusual.

Riess

So you could have people like Herb York in mind when you thought about going?

Townes

Well, I knew he was there, and that was a help to me, because I wanted to see some other good scientist down there to interact with, you see.

Riess

ARPA reported directly to the President?

Townes

No, it reported directly to the Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of Defense is over all of the armed forces. In principle, it was stated to be equivalent in stature to any of the three other armed services, you see?

Now, IDA had been set up a few years before. I don't remember just when it was set up. I think it was two years old.

Riess

Garrison Norton started it in '56.

Townes

And this was '59. So it had been started three years earlier. The trustees were largely university presidents, and it was a kind of a nonprofit service organization. It was given a lot of authority, because IDA hired and employed scientists who then sat in the Pentagon and made the technical decisions for ARPA. They could not, as non-government employees, sign official orders. Those were all done by some paper work people who were official government employees. But the scientists and engineers really made all of the decisions. They sat in the Pentagon and they had their offices there. The Pentagon provided assistance, and so on.

IDA also ran the Weapons Systems Evaluations Group, and employed those people. The Weapons Systems Evaluations Group was sort of in the heart of the Pentagon, advising the military on which weapons would work and why, and what was necessary. This included tactics and a lot of things. The military, then, had given up a lot of its authority to IDA. Why would they do that? Well, they were desperate for scientific talent. Real technical talent they needed badly, and they knew that, so they were willing to do that. Washington in general was desperate for scientific talent. This is part of the reason I went down there.

At that period, IDA was able to be very, very effective in my view. They had a good deal of influence, and people listened to them. The President's Science Advisory Committee had an enormous amount of influence for much the same reason. They were just all eager to get the service of scientists, and scientists pitched in, generally. They tried to do a good job. But it is a very abnormal situation because we were usurping the authority of the Pentagon and of government officials. We were making the technical decisions for them, you see. It was only advice, we had no authority officially, but a lot of authority in fact, to help them make these decisions.

Riess

How would it work?

 

Townes

To give you sort of an example of how this would operate, many companies, and universities, too, would make proposals to the Pentagon. Particularly companies. They would want to do research and development along certain lines for a certain kind of military purpose. The technical group, headed by IDA, would look at these and sort them out and make recommendations as to which ones should be accepted.

Riess

This is the staff people, the technical group?

Townes

This is the IDA group.

Riess

I know, but at the first level, would it go to some sort of staff people?

Townes

It would come into the Pentagon to some sort of staff person, who would then turn it over to the technical people.

Riess

And the technical people are real scientists?

Townes

Yes, scientists and engineers. Technical people who would then examine these and try to decide what ought to be done. They could also help the Pentagon institute programs. They would study things to determine what should the Pentagon be doing. What should it try to stimulate people to do in industry and universities, and what should it try to support? They would analyze things and make plans and contact companies and do the normal technical business of the Pentagon.

It was a period of great activity, and a good deal of money, because ARPA had been given a good deal of fresh money for research and development. So research and development money was flowing rather freely at that time. There were a lot of new projects being started, and IDA was trying to keep tabs on them and advise the Pentagon on what to do.

Riess

Were the scientists at IDA like you, people who had been full time academics, and they were now government employees, or were they in an advisory capacity?

Townes

I was perhaps the most successful academic scientist there, but there were others who were academic, and others who had come in from various other technical organizations. Some from industry. We had one person from Rand, I remember, who came there and decided to work for IDA instead, and thought it was a better opportunity. So there were academic people, there were people from industry, people from anywhere who were interested in doing this. Not a large number of very distinguished academic people, because while those people were generally sympathetic and wanted to see it go well, they weren't willing, generally, to take the time to do this kind of thing, to sit in the Pentagon for a year. It was less notable academic people and industrial people that we hired.

Riess

And you would hire them for a short term?

Townes

Usually it would be an indefinite term, but the academic people would generally expect to just stay one or two years, maybe. A good many of them were engineers, also, and the work was a little closer to their field.

The Weapons Systems Evaluation Group was another group, and essentially all of those people, by that time, became permanent employees. ARPA was more transient. The Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, many of them became permanent employees, and there were some very smart, young academic people who had gone into this, and they just stayed on.

Struggle with the Pentagon over WSEG--Weapons Systems Evaluation Group

Townes

I mention that this is a very unusual situation, as clearly it is, and so was the President's Science Advisory Committee, and I think it was bound to collapse at some point because basically we were usurping authority that was officially governmental authority. As time went on, the government officials became more and more jealous about this.

The first break was in the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. There was a new general who was officially in charge. All of the people who were officially in charge had to be Pentagon people to sign the papers. He was officially in charge of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. We had had another military figure before that. At one point, this general told me that I wasn't supposed to be present in the discussions; that this was his group and I wasn't supposed to be there. That was sort of the beginning of the evidence for an increasingly prickly feeling about this. This was the Pentagon's business, and not mine.

Here I was, vice president of IDA, and I was supposed to be supervising these people whom we had employed. I wasn't all that eager to stay in Washington anyway, so I made a point of it. I said, "If we are supposed to be supervising these people, how can we do it if I am not supposed to listen in to the discussions? How can I do that? I just don't think we can continue to do that." The Pentagon worked on that for a while, and we continued to do that. They agreed with me that I had to have access.

Somewhat later, the military generated so much pressure about it that we decided that IDA should just bow out. Which we did. We bowed out of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. I saw it coming in ARPA, too. Eventually, that just wouldn't work. It was a temporary thing which worked for a while, and it continued to work fairly happily, but I could see it coming. Within two or three years after I had left, a lot of that kind of preempted authority which IDA had was largely gone. The Pentagon was then running things, and they were trying to employ more and more people, they were trying to induce people to become direct government servants so that they could run things, and they would have authority over them.

Riess

More and more scientists from industry and scientists from academia is what you mean by "more and more people?"

Townes

Scientists, yes. The Pentagon was trying to employ them themselves so that they could make the decisions and have authority over these people who were making decisions for them.

Riess

So they incorporated the best.

Townes

Well, I wouldn't say the best, necessarily, but they incorporated enough people that they felt they could do it. In time, IDA's position became quite different. Now IDA is a think tank, along with many other think tanks. It does work on contract for the Pentagon and other government organizations. They ask them to please study such a problem, so they study it and provide a report. But they are not sitting in the Pentagon making almost first-hand decisions for the government. That was a very unusual, temporary situation. It was a very powerful one at that time.

Of course, if the Pentagon recommended something to the president, he certainly would take it seriously. But I don't think this is something that he would normally be concerned about. This was more between the Pentagon and the people who were helping the Pentagon. Once they felt they had enough personnel, they wanted to do it themselves. Over a period of not more than six or eight years, the Pentagon got enough personnel, and hence was able to operate itself, and so IDA didn't have that kind of function very much longer. It continued to have a function, but in a very different kind of a way. In a way which would not have interested me in going down.

Riess

In your years there, what was the effect on our weapons systems? What happened?

Townes

I don't remember exactly when IDA gave up that role. But it was towards the end of my term or shortly after. I think it was I who made the transition there. By that time, the people in the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, which really dealt with a lot of highly classified things, many of whom had been there for some years, were ready to stay on for a while. I think they continued to do a good job for a while, but in the long run, the quality decreased. The Pentagon could not continue to hire and get good enough people. The quality of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, I think in the long run, decreased. For a while it worked out quite well under their [the Pentagon's] supervision and their management.

Riess

What do you think was your best work in that period of time? What did you achieve?

Townes

I think the most important, lasting thing that we did was to set up Jason. The Jason group, I think, has been quite important, and I believe quite successfully defined and set up. So it has been long lasting. It is still going and still considered quite effective and important. I would say that is undoubtedly the most important single thing that I did. But that is a fairly long story. Let me try to finish up these other things a little bit, and then at some point we will certainly want to get into Jason.

IDA's Interest in Lasers

Townes

We were making decisions on missiles and space programs and lasers. There began to be a lot of interest in lasers, and I was called on a good deal on lasers. There was both great interest and doubts about it. One of the people--you mention academic people in IDA--had been at Bell Labs and worked with Art Schawlow a little bit. He had gone to Minnesota, I believe, and we got him into IDA for a couple of years. He was a good scientist, and then he went back to university. His name was Bob Collins. He was in the laser field, and he was very doubtful about getting much energy from lasers. I felt that the Pentagon ought to look into lasers, that it was a new technology and something that they really ought to examine carefully, and promote an examination of it.

I remember him telling me, "Don't you realize that in order to send off one laser shot at a missile you would have to have the energy in a pile of dynamite as big as a skyscraper?" He had calculated that, and it was approximately right at that time. Gene [Eugene G.] Fubini, who was at a consulting firm which was working for the Pentagon, at a meeting in the Pentagon where we were discussing matters--this was a big meeting with a number of people--he questioned whether lasers could ever produce any power. "Look," he said, "they are all very inefficient."

I had to make the point that there is nothing inherently inefficient in laser operation. The transfer of energy can, in principle, be as efficient as it is in almost any other kind of a transfer of energy, a steam engine or anything else. It is a question of finding the right substance and doing it the right way. So we continued, and, in fact, that efficiency has been found.

Now lasers have not paid off for the Pentagon in terms of shooting down missiles, which was a lot of the concern, but they have paid off in big ways in other directions, particularly guidance. Guidance has been exceedingly important and very effective. But lasers was one of the issues that was very much under discussion, whether the Pentagon should or shouldn't do this, and what they should push and what they shouldn't push, and which projects to work on. There were doubts about it as well as great enthusiasm. Those were the kinds of things that we technical people had to try to deal with, you see.

Riess

Were you able to work as a scientist at IDA, or were your administrative duties completely time-consuming?

Townes

Oh, I was in there checking on the people who were doing the calculations, and the thought, and providing some additional ideas and pushing things. I wrote some technical papers as to what I thought might be done. I remember I wrote a paper about possible ways of clearing fog in airfields, for example, because I felt others were neglecting that possibility. There were a variety of things of this type that came up, and I was very much involved in the technical things. Garrison Norton would handle most of the paper work. I, of course, had some paper work to do, but it was more organization and people and technical considerations that I was concerned with. Contacting the scientists and sort of representing the scientific front for IDA.

Riess

The picture I have of you is very much of getting to the office early and spending a lot of time on the phone, and on desk work. I wondered if that precluded scientific work?

Townes

You might say that the scientific work was precluded by engineering and technical work. It was much more applied. But I continued to do some scientific work. Another thing I did at that time was that I wrote a scientific paper with a young scientist, R. N. Schwartz, who was in the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group.

Work on Communication with Extraterrestrial Life

Townes

I had talked about the possibility of communicating with extraterrestrial life a bit. It was very much in the scientific news. There was a discussion by Phil Morrison of listening for extraterrestrial life signals by radio waves, and he felt that radio waves of 21 cm. near the hydrogen line would be a logical thing and that this was the way to do it with microwaves. I realized that it could perfectly well be done with lasers and detection of light or infrared. People were overlooking that, and so I discussed it a bit. This young scientist, Schwartz, who was a member of WSEG, seemed interested and wanted to think about it, so I wrote a paper with him about it, on the possibility of detecting signals from extraterrestrial life by light or infrared frequencies. That was partly technical in a sense, but it also could be considered science. So I was looking at all kinds of issues of what might be done.

Riess

But the paper was written for IDA?

Townes

It was written while I was at IDA.

Riess

Where was it published?

Townes

I believe that was published in Science--either Nature or Science, one or the other.

Riess

Was it picked up by the press?

Townes

It got some attention. I don't think a lot, but it got some, and it was the first paper that discussed that idea. I have since written another paper on it.

Riess

I should think it would have gotten a lot of attention.

Townes

Well, most of the people working on this are pushing the radio waves. My own point of view is that is a little bit distorted. Not that we shouldn't do radio waves, but we don't know which one to do, and one ought to be a little more broadminded about it. Another civilization might find it much more convenient to work with lasers.

Riess

The thing that is more attention-getting is not how you get in touch, but the premise that there is something to get in touch with.

Townes

Yes, but most of the attention on that is on the group of people who are working directly and constantly in the field. I am not constantly in the field, I just say something about it every once in a while. They are primarily radio people, and I think that [radio] is sort of the first thing to do, anyhow, because we have radio antennas, and we can make them easily, and that is a possibility, so we try there first. Most of the people who are promoting the field are interested in that. I am not a promoter, I just point out to them occasionally that they could be wrong. [laughter] "This is another way of doing it, and we have to be openminded about it."

That is an illustration of the semi-technical, semi-scientific work that I was doing. I was looking at just a broad range of issues as to what the possibilities were and what could be done, and trying to help the country get oriented in appropriate directions.

Thoughts on the Insider Role for Scientists

Riess

Talking about your time at IDA, you assume scientists to be persons basically able to think better and more clearly about issues of--

Townes

About issues which require scientific knowledge and scientific understanding.

Riess

But one of these articles says your reasons for going to IDA were, "...Fighting for our civilization as we have known it...we are in a tight spot...chances for a catastrophe...black plague..."

Townes

There was a very deep concern, and it was partly justified. A lot of it was uncertainty. In case of uncertainty, you can't afford to take too many chances on the nation's future.

Riess

Is the uncertainty that we didn't really know what was going on in Russia?

Townes

That's right. We didn't know very much of what was going on. It was clear, however, that they were more advanced than we were in some respects. Particularly in space work, that was very clear. They had pushed on faster than we had. And that is so closely related to missiles that it was a big concern. They were certainly ahead of us in some respects in the missile field. I think they were not ahead of us as much as we thought was possible. I think I mentioned that when I first got down there I was given a briefing on this, and we felt we didn't know, but we couldn't take chances.

Riess

In your couple of years there, were you getting spy-generated information from Russia?

Townes

We had access to CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] information, certainly. Any information that was pertinent. We really didn't have all that much good technical information through CIA. They were working hard at it, but it was not that successful, as it is today. Satellites have meant an enormous amount to the possibility of finding out what is going on in the Soviet Union. Satellites have played a very important role, and we were flying some very high-altitude planes over there, and they were beginning to get some information.

Riess

They show you what the installations are, but then it is the agent in the field with the little tiny camera who photographs the documents in the labs.

Townes

There were secret agents, of course, but it is difficult for a secret agent to get much technical information unless he himself is a scientist that is right in the middle of things.

Riess

And did you have any?

Townes

I would say there was not a great deal of success in that direction of having scientists who were in the Soviet Union in the middle of things.

Riess

And it wasn't a career opportunity for a physicist in America to join the CIA and be a spy? [laughs]

Townes

There were some scientists in the CIA, but they didn't go over to the Soviet Union. They were planning things, instruments and ways of doing things, and trying to analyze what information we had. The information that we had was not from highly-trained technical people, generally. So it was rather fuzzy. On certain kinds of issues, those people could do pretty well, about sentiments and that sort of thing, but on technical issues they had a much harder time.

Riess

And you would never know when they were being fed wrong information, anyways.

Townes

That's right, they could be fed wrong information. They could just be mistaken, they could think they had seen something and not. The information was not very solid.

Riess

So that is a terrible situation to have to work with. Really groping.

Townes

We could deduce a good deal from the published work of the Soviet scientists, in general. What they were building in the way of missiles we didn't really know at that time. Since then, we have had very much better information. It has steadily gotten better. And of course now the Russians are talking themselves quite freely.

You asked if I did do much phoning and paper work. I did do office work, but it was mainly making contact with scientists and making plans. There was a moderate amount of administrative work, and some of that administrative work was forming the Jason Group.

Riess

I fear that the questions I am asking are just about the nature of things, and it is just going to end up being too vague. There is so much vagueness that has to do with the Pentagon and the work on weapons and so on. I want you to give as clear and specific a sense of a problem, and how that problem was solved, as you can. Saying things, "We took care of things," and moved things along--

Townes

That doesn't tell you very much. [laughs] Well, let me see if I can give you a few examples of what ARPA was doing. I have a little trouble digging up things from example.

I remember one somewhat amusing case. In an attempt for the United States to get some recognition in the field of space, ARPA had, shortly before I came there, made some plans and gotten the country to shoot off a missile which would circle the earth, which we could do. We couldn't send men up, but we could send up a missile that could circle, just barely. Small missiles could be made to circle the earth. They thought it was a great idea to have President Eisenhower speaking from this missile by radio, so people could hear him.

Now, it could circle the earth, but it wouldn't stay in orbit. So they had one shot, with a missile that went most of the way around the earth, with Eisenhower saying something on the radio. Now, who would be able to pick that up and what good would that do? [laughter] That is one of the things that I questioned, "Do we need to do more of that?" But they were desperate to find some way of getting in the news, and show that the United States was really doing things you see.

Riess

Now, that is interesting. A large part of the push was to make America happy about America's contribution.

Townes

Yes, that was important. But I don't think that was a very solid way of doing it.

There was a lot of work on design of spacecraft and space efforts. There was work on what to do about the laser, what to do about supporting that, and how to support it, and what it could do. There was a lot of analysis of submarine detection, how could we improve it, various kinds of ways of doing that. That is a highly secret field; the navy has kept that very much under wraps because the countermeasures to detect and prevent detection are very important matters. But that was another kind of area that was worked on.

---

IDA and Industry

Riess

Were the ideas coming in from the outside, or were they coming down from above, or where?

Townes

Oh, they weren't coming down from above. Coming down from above was just very broad ideas of, "What can be done? What would you advise?" The ideas were coming in from outside or from the group there at the Pentagon, that is, the ARPA group. Various industries would have ideas of what they felt they could do and would like to do. IDA would get memoranda and reports from companies which were sent into the Pentagon, saying, "This is what we think we ought to do, won't you support us?" We would examine it to see whether that was a sensible thing to do. There was a lot of interest and contacts on the outside that needed to be sorted out and judged. There was also a lot of analysis on the inside. And there were questions from the military, "Will this work, can we do this, can we do that? What is the best way of accomplishing a certain particular result, and how can we go about it?"

We also organized at that time a group to try to advise on state department matters, particularly associated with science. I hired a new person who would be head of that particular wing of IDA. We had a number of meetings, and we would have them between people in Washington and others, particularly academic people, to discuss matters and issues and particular fields of work. I was trying to bring in the academic community.

Riess

What was this group called?

Townes

These were ad hoc meetings, frequently. We would say, "Well, here is

14. XIV The Jason Group

Selling the Idea

Townes

I indicated that the most long-lasting and important thing we did was to get Jason initiated. Maybe it is about time we start talking about Jason. I knew a lot of the young people who were to become members of Jason. They were prominent young scientists. Murray Gell-Mann, for example, who is down at Caltech. He is a Nobel laureate, a theorist. Murph [Marvin K.] Goldberger, who was at Princeton--I guess maybe he was at Carnegie, still, but I think he was at Princeton--also a nuclear theorist who was to become president of Caltech. A variety of people, some of whom had been going in the summer to Los Alamos as a kind of vacation.

Los Alamos would invite them and give them salaries and have them come there and discuss matters. Science generally, but some of it applied to nuclear work and the other things Los Alamos was doing. So these people had been going to Los Alamos several summers. They would go for a month at a time and take their families and have kind of a paid vacation, so to speak.

I first got the idea of what might be done from a young mathematician on the West Coast here. He said, "These people are thinking about doing this kind of thing permanently. They have been talking about even forming a company which would do this on the basis of contracts with the government."

Riess

By "these people" you mean these nuclear scientists?

Townes

Yes, these youngish scientists. Ken Watson from the University of California was another person. He was a theorist here for some years. Keith Bruckner was another important member.

Riess

So they had already collected themselves--

Townes

They had already sort of banded together and had gotten acquainted and had been working on these things some. They were kind of thinking about how they might do it in a way which was better for them. He said, "It would be so much better if they were associated with a nonprofit group, because that would give them a much better basis for work and won't look like they are just a commercial company or something." I agreed with him and said, "That would be a very good thing for us to get going in IDA, which is a nonprofit group. These are the kind of people that really ought to be involved in major scientific and technical decisions."

Furthermore, one of my strong interests was that I could see how important some of the senior scientists who had been involved in World War II were being in Washington at that time, in 1960, let's say.

Riess

Like whom?

Townes

This would be Rabi, Zacharias, a lot of people involved in the MIT Radiation Laboratory, for example. So many scientists had been working on the war effort in some way or the other.

Riess

And they were still being in--

Townes

They were still being called upon. For example, the President's Science Advisory Committee was made up largely of people like that. But they were getting along [in age]. I had been fairly young during the war, and was somewhat younger than they, but here was this new group that was still younger. I felt that these older people were going to be gone sometime, and there would be nobody who really had had contact and understood the governmental problems. We would just have a split then between the universities and government. There would be nobody they could call on. We need badly to have somebody come in and get some more experience and training and understanding so that the government will have people they can call on. That was my biggest reasoning behind it. This chap mainly thought, "Well, gee, it would be so much better to have them in a nonprofit group than to have some commercial company organized if they want to do that kind of thing."

I quickly tried to think through a plan of how to do it. Gary Norton was sold on this pretty quickly, too. I think we went over to see [Thomas S.] Gates, the then head of the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense, and talked with him about it, and he agreed with us. So I started contacting these people and met with them. They were interested and they thought this might be a good idea.

Getting Security Clearance

Townes

We worked out a scheme, and in particular I worked on the Pentagon pretty hard about giving them appropriately full access. One of the big problems about really knowing what is going on is having access to things which are highly classified. Not only are there various classes of classification that are well known, like "restricted," which is sort of slightly classified, and "secret," and various classifications of secrecy--

Riess

"Not without parental guidance?" [laughter]

Townes

It just gets tougher and tougher. But then there are a lot of secret codes. You aren't even supposed to know the name of this group of facts, so they had code names and the code names were secret even. These were very touchy things that nobody could ever know about, a lot of them having to do with information processes, but some of them having to do with very touchy matters such as submarine signaling. There were all kinds of compartments for the classified material.

To really do a good job, you had to know what was there and what was going on in order to try to give good advice or new ideas. So we worked very hard in trying to get them security clearance, and to be sure that they would have access to all of these things. That was not easy because of the compartmentalization. The army and the navy and the air force had their separate compartmentalizations and so on. But we were finally able to work out a very excellent arrangement. The Pentagon was so eager to get the help of these young people that they did something that was quite unprecedented in giving us essentially authority for access to anything. The individual case still had to be worked out for some of the very highly classified things, but most of the categories were more or less automatic for this group of people. They had to clear each individual separately and there was at least one case, Murray Gell-Mann, that was rather difficult. He was an expressive person and probably expressed himself against the government a few times. So they had some real questions about him, but we talked about it and got him cleared along with everybody else.

So there was this group now, about fifteen or twenty people, I guess, who had originally met at Los Alamos, and they had also been strongly influenced by John Wheeler, who had also organized a group and come to Washington to try to help work on government problems.

Riess

When was that?

Townes

John Wheeler had been somehow around IDA a bit, but also around Washington. He had worked on nuclear bombs during the war, and he was a very fine academic scientist at Princeton, a theorist, but he was very much interested in helping the government. He organized a project which met, I think, in the summers for a couple of years. It was called Project 137, 137 being a number of special significance and mystery to physicists, the "fine structure" constant. Well, Wheeler had tried to encourage these people to look at the governmental problems. He, himself, had been asked to go down to take this job that I took at IDA, and had backed out because he didn't want to devote his full time work to it. He was interested in helping the government, but he didn't want to go full time. After encouraging everybody else to do it, he didn't feel that he wanted to spend full time at it.

So this [to be called Jason] group had been activated and gotten together, and they interacted with Wheeler. In a sense it was ripe, but they didn't have a good organization, and it was not well defined just what they might do or ought to do.

Riess

What kind of problems were they talking about at Los Alamos? Did they have an agenda each summer?

Townes

No, they would just go there, and people would ask them to look into this or that, or they could make up an agenda as they went along, saying, "We would like to look into this problem or that."

Riess

But it was all weapons?

Townes

Not weapons generally. But certainly nuclear energy. Basically the fundamentals of nuclear energy. To some extent protection against nuclear weapons, too. But there were other high technology problems that Los Alamos worked on. They would undertake pretty much anything, and spend the summer looking at and trying to analyze problems. They could go there with some plans as to what they would like to look into, or they could go there and be asked to look into certain things. They had a moderate amount of choice as to what they should do.

Structure of Jason, Senior Advisors

Riess

This idea of getting a collection of very smart people together, I guess that was a World War II byproduct, like the rad labs where you just get more out of the group than individuals working alone?

Townes

I would say that is true in science in general. Science in general, individuals work alone, and in quiet times that is very effective, but also discussions and meetings and throwing ideas around is very important, too. So scientists work that way. They have meetings about subjects, and get together and talk about things. What is different here is the interest in doing things that are pertinent to national problems. Some of them felt that they enjoyed doing it and it was useful. There were some good scientists at Los Alamos that they could interact with, and they were interested in seeing what they were doing. So they seemed to more or less enjoy themselves doing those kinds of problems.

The organization we set up gave them this unusual access to classified materials, so they could really find out what was going on, and they were--. I would have to review this. I have lots of letters about exactly how the structure was, letters written to the Secretary of Defense as to what we thought the structure ought to be, and how it was eventually set up. We got very favorable boundary conditions which we have been able to maintain ever since. I talked with all of the people, and I met with them. We also picked out some additional people we felt ought to be in the group. We got them organized, and we had a steering committee, about five of them, and we chose a president, who was Murph Goldberger, to be sort of chairman of the Jason group.

Then I picked out four senior advisors. The reason for that was that these were all young people, and I felt they [the advisors] would add more credibility, and they [the young people] could also get some advice from people who had been in the business. John Wheeler was one of the senior advisors, and Eugene Wigner, from Princeton, and Edward Teller, and Hans Bethe. Edward Teller was not quite in such disrepute politically among scientists as he is now. [laughter] Everybody recognizes Edward Teller as a great scientist, but many people disagree with him very strongly politically, now. He was not characterized quite that way at the time.

Riess

And he hadn't been involved in government work.

Townes

Oh yes, he had. He had been involved in the atomic bomb, after all.

Riess

But he hadn't been down in Washington?

Townes

He had never stayed in Washington, but he had been in contact. He was one of the many senior people who were around at that time and who had had experience during the war.

Riess

So it wasn't that you were bringing him back in?

Townes

No, no. He was involved from time to time, and it was important that he was. And so was Bethe. Now, Teller was on the conservative side, Bethe on the more liberal side. I purposely tried to balance them off so we could get a representation of people. Those four were the senior advisors to give them some extra credence, and some extra interaction. The senior advisors generally met with us every year. I would generally talk a bit with those fellows and meet with them and so on.

So that was the general structure, and the idea was to allow the academic people to work at these problems and help the government without taking them away from academic life. They could come into meetings, hear briefings and have some discussion, go home and work on problems they liked. Then they were to have more extended time during the summer when they would get a good salary, and they would meet together and discuss things and meet with government officials.

Riess

In Washington?

Townes

No. We first met out here in Berkeley, up the hill here. Now they are meeting down in San Diego every summer. But it is generally kind of a vacation-type spot. A place where they could have restricted access for classification, and adequate access to libraries and things of this type.

Riess

Did it start in 1959? You couldn't have gotten it together the first year.

Townes

No, I started in the fall of 1959, and I think we got this started late summer of 1960.

Now that organization, I think, has been very effective. It tried very hard to look at imagining new ways of doing things, and new techniques and so on. What might be done, what shouldn't be done. They worked on a combination of military things, and somewhat diplomatic things, and arms control and so on. Different people did different things, depending on what they felt like, what was important, and what they were interested in.

Riess

How would they do diplomatic things, to get specific again?

Townes

Well, when I say diplomatic, I mean things having more to do with diplomacy, but particularly in the arms control front. What kinds of agreements might be made? What kinds of techniques might be used to ensure and safeguard weapons or to ensure proper inspection? How many weapons do we really need? What kind of treaties might there be? That sort of area.

Riess

There must have been a huge amount of disagreement among them, because these are questions that aren't simple to answer.

Townes

No, they are not simply answered. There would be disagreements and discussions, but no hard feelings or vendettas. It was just a group of colleagues talking about things. When they would write a report, for example, the report would be reviewed by the steering committee, and people might disagree with it, but if there were crucial disagreements, then it would be revised. I don't think there were generally any sort of basic disagreements. There were discussions about which was better, this way or that way, and there would be compromises, and sometimes the conclusion would be that there were two ways of doing it and we didn't know which was better.

Riess

So when Jason spoke, it was with one voice?

Townes

It was with one voice pretty much. And it was carefully considered, passed by the steering committee, and generally very sound in the sense that it had really been looked at hard by good scientists. And that, of course, was a help to the government.

Jason Members, and PSAC

Townes

The other way in which that group has been effective is that a number of the Jason group did then serve on the President's Science Advisory Committee. After a few years experience there, then it was known that they were good and knowledgeable in addition to being outstanding scientists. So quite a number of them served on President's Science Advisory Committee and have become important advisors to the government since.

Dick Garwin was another person that was a member of Jason. Dick Garwin was in IBM of all things, but he was interested in this field and was a very bright young man at that time--he's still bright but not so young. So he went out to Los Alamos. We had no reason to exclude somebody from a company, in particular a company that wasn't making military weapons. It wasn't a commercial conflict of interest. So Dick was with the group, and Dick has continued to be very active. At the moment he is considered somewhat anti-government. The government doesn't always consult him [laughs], but he is still very active in all kinds of public affairs, and he is still in Jason.

So the government has not tried to control Jason in any hard-fisted way. It couldn't, and they know that. We had to keep emphasizing that. There was one time recently where the head of ARPA was pushing on Jason, and trying to control Jason in the sense of having it just work on contract specific things that he wanted, otherwise he wouldn't give them money. Some of us went to see the Secretary of Defense and talked about this and that whole effort was then rescinded. Jason has enough public visibility, and there is enough understanding of what it is all about, and it has enough friends around, that it can now use its reputation to see that it continues to be an effective and open thing and not restricted by some government official wanting to take over because there's this group that disagrees with his views.

Now, Jason was not like IDA in the sense that it doesn't have people sitting in the Pentagon. It is only a part-time advisory group, but it still has a lot of power. Not everybody likes that, because they may not agree with their advice. But it has managed to continue to be very effective, and I think has recently had a burst of increased recognition of how important it is.

During the Vietnam period they had a hard time, because here were these scientists working in part, at least, for the Pentagon. The Pentagon was exceedingly unpopular on campus, and these were people who were professors. At Columbia University, Henry [M.] Foley, who was one of my friends there and a member of Jason, was attacked and criticized. People threatened their homes. Some of them had a hard time.

Riess

Did they drop out?

Townes

Not over that. I think they would have been ashamed to drop out as a result of pressure, but I don't think they really considered it. As time went on, there were a few people who dropped out: there was a chemist at Chicago who specifically wanted to work on arms control problems, and that was the only thing that he felt he was ethically justified in working on. I said, "Fine, we've got arms control problems, you work on that." He continued to do that for some few years, and then he said that he didn't particularly feel that he was being terribly effective. And he didn't feel completely comfortable about the other problems, and he felt that he ought to drop out. Okay, he dropped out.

During the Vietnam period there was another scientist, Ed Salpeter, from Cornell, that dropped out, but in a very sympathetic way. He said he just was beginning to find it too hard. There were some things the government was doing that he disagreed with, and he felt Jason was doing a useful job, but he was just getting uncomfortable about it and he felt he should drop out. Those were the only two cases I can think of. There may have been one or two others, but they were relatively few.

There were some hard times, though. I met with Jason during that time, but I was not very active.

Riess

Did you become one of those senior scientists after you left IDA?

Townes

I am still a member. The four senior advisors, after a few years we kind of let them drop off. They don't have senior advisors now; there are too many senior people within Jason itself. I am one of the people, but some of the Jasons are getting to be fairly elderly. [laughter] They are working hard at bringing in young people, which they are doing. They will only take people at the tenure level, but they are trying to get young people at the tenure level, and they are quite successful at that. Nevertheless, they still have some of the older people around.

Riess

What is your status?

Townes

I am a member.

Riess

Just a member?

Townes

I am a member, and I attend the meetings occasionally, and I occasionally do some work for them. I recently worked, for example, on infrared detectors. That is very important to my own field, and the military has paid for a lot of development of infrared detectors which have become exceedingly important to astronomy. They needed advice on which ones might turn out to be best and how to develop better infrared detectors. That is something of strong interest to me, scientifically. We have made a report, and the report is not classified, it is open, about what areas to emphasize in development. I participated in that. I spent about two days on it over the last year, a minor amount of time, but that is the kind of thing that I do. If something is of special interest to me then I work on it, but I don't go there in the summers and spend a few weeks, as many of the other people do, particularly the younger people.

Vietnam Years, McNamara Wall, Denouncement

Riess

So what are some of the other hard times? What about Star Wars?

Townes

I will come to Star Wars, but let me mention a couple of other things during the Vietnam period that indicate the kind of interaction that was there.

I was asked to go to a particular Jason meeting. I had dropped out of much of that activity when I became provost at MIT. I was just too busy with administrative things, and I felt that was a time for me to become less active.

 

Townes

The Jason group developed a way of separating the North and South Vietnamese with a lot of special devices, a way of keeping the North Vietnamese from infiltrating into South Vietnam. Part of this was known at the time as the McNamara Wall. They developed a lot of special techniques for doing this and were very set on that idea as a way, not of just fighting, but of separating the two countries so there would not be internal fighting and external support from the North Vietnamese to the internal people inside of South Vietnam. [Secretary of Defense Robert Strange] McNamara was very much behind that, but the military were not; they didn't like it and they didn't support it very well. I didn't even know about that until I was asked to come in and look at it, and I did.

I met with them and they said they were concerned. They didn't agree with the government. They thought this was a reasonable policy, but many in the government didn't, they concluded the military wanted to just fight. They [Jason] felt a lot of unreasonable things were being done, and they were uncertain about continuing, and they wanted my comments. Well, I understood that very well. My own point of view was that we had a lot of men over there that were fighting, whose lives were in danger, and we ought to push on trying to see that there were right policies. I knew there was a lot of pressure, but I felt a good deal of obligation to try to help the people who were there. The country was involved, and it would be best to try and stay in and give good advice.

I pointed out, "Their lives are at stake over there, and so far as I'm concerned, all I have to lose is my time and my friends and my reputation." They sort of bought that. They felt, "We don't like what is going on, but we need to be in here. We can help better this way than being isolated from it."

Another thing that happened--and I'll just close with this one--is that I was over in Italy some time after that. Europeans had heard about Jason, and there were some activists there who were stirring up a lot of objections to Jason. Jason scientists, when they went over, were being harassed. I went to this international meeting, and it was headed by a Dutchman, Hendrik Casimir, a very fine scientist, and I had always considered him a good friend. At the meeting he let in a batch of students who came in and denounced Jason, and said a lot of things about Jason which weren't true, as to what they were doing.

Here was this international scientific meeting, and he let this political group come in and make this big statement. I held up my hand and I said, "I'd like to comment and respond." He would not let me speak, "No, you cannot speak." I presume he knew I was connected with the Jason group. Hans Bethe got up, and they let him say something. Hans was not then connected with Jason, but he said some useful things. But I felt that this was completely out of order. Particularly out of order not to allow any response.

I went home and wrote a letter to him saying that I thought this was going to kill international scientific meetings, if we had scientific meetings run by someone who wants to let a politically-oriented group come in and denounce other scientists and allow no response. I said I won't come to another one if we are going to allow this. I sent the letter to him and to a couple of other organizers of the meeting. They woke up then. I got complete apologies and so on. But that was their feeling, you see. That was how they felt. The Vietnam War was full of such strong emotions that they just went overboard and did things which were quite inappropriate. So that was some of the stress that was there during the Vietnamese period. a subject which we have got to examine," and we would call up people and get people to come in and have a meeting to discuss it.

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15. XV Honors and Travels, 1992

Krishnan Lecture, Trip to India, and Unofficial Envoy

Riess

I'd like, before we launch into our chronological story, to have you tell me where you have been in the last three weeks.

Townes

Well, I spent a week in India and then a week in France. It happened to add up to a bit of time away from home. Characteristically you get asked to do things long in advance, and I was asked to come to India to give a talk commemorating K. S. Krishnan who was an excellent physicist and a person I knew quite well. He had founded the National Physical Laboratory of India in Delhi. I visited him there in 1956 when I was on sabbatical and traveled with my family from Europe to Japan. I felt that I ought to try to do that, so I agreed to do it. Then eventually it came up, and I had to fit it in.

I was happy to go to India. I like to travel. I hoped that my wife Frances could go with me, and we could visit Indonesia, but things got a little too complicated and we had to forget about that, and I went directly to New Delhi where I gave this lecture--an annual lecture arranged in honor of K. S. Krishnan. In addition, they asked me to speak to commemorate the founding of the CSIR in India fifty years ago. This is the fiftieth anniversary, and they have a special year of celebration.

CSIR is the Committee on Science and Industrial Research. It is a government committee, as most things in India are run by the government, which has set up a number of research laboratories, around forty or fifty around the country, and some of the strongest scientific centers in India. It is run by a physicist named [S. K.] Joshi who is a very good theorist, solid state theorist. He is the person who runs it now and he, just previous to that, had been running the National Physical Laboratory, so when he invited me over there, he was head of the National Physical Laboratory and in the meantime he became head of the CSIR and he wanted me to do both.

So I gave the Krishnan lecture in New Delhi, and then went to Bangalore and gave the CSIR celebration lecture. But I was also asked to give another lecture--somewhat more specialized--which I did, to scientists there. Then I went to Poona. I had never been to Poona, and I was surprised to find how much science has been built up in Poona. That is a rather more recent story, that Poona has become quite an important scientific center. Bangalore has always been an important scientific center, or for a long time, as a result of the elder [Jamshad] Tata, who was very foresighted, and as early as 1901 he felt that India needed a good science and technology university and he gave a lot of money.

Riess

Who is that? Is that a family name or a government name?

Townes

Tata? It is a family name. They originally made their fortune in steel, but then it became a big industry with a wide variety of things. It has been a very generous family. They have given a lot of money for social purposes in India, particularly cultural and educational and scientific things.

Riess

The scientists that you are referring to--Krishnan and Joshi and so on--are these men who were educated mostly in America, and that is why you know them?

Townes

No. After all, the scientific community is an international one. I had never met Joshi. I knew his name, but I had never met Joshi before. But he has been in the United States many times. I just am not in the same field with him and haven't happened to have encountered him. But I have know a lot of Indian physicists. They come to international meetings. I first met Krishnan at an international meeting, for example, and I have visited in India.

I even heard him speak on Hinduism in New York City once. There is a temple there that invited him to speak. He was visiting for scientific purposes, and I happened to find out about this and I went. He was a very devout Hindu, and very knowledgeable about the early Hindu myths and so on, and he spoke about those.

Riess

A devout Hindu would be questioned in the same way you sometimes are about the conflict between religious belief and scientific thinking?

Townes

Yes, I suspect he would be. Now, when I said devout Hindu, what I should maybe say is devoted Hindu. He did not carry out all of the Hindu practices and everything in every way and try to become a saint, but rather he admired the tradition and believed in it and felt it was important. He was a scholar of it.

Riess

But the world creation view of Hinduism?

Townes

I think he probably took that as a kind of a figurative discussion of the creation, as I would the first chapter of Genesis. It is an analogy and a literary discussion which is of importance and catches the meaning of the creation but not all of the scientific details.

Riess

[laughs] Yes, that's right.

Townes

And I think he would have treated the Hindu stories in much the same way.

Now Krishnan also did his early work with [C. V.] Raman. I'm not sure where he was educated. I suspect he was educated in England. But he helped Raman in finding the Raman effect in the very early days. Raman, of course, got the Nobel prize for that very, very famous effect. And Raman helped build up the scientific community in Bangalore then.

But I know a number of Indian scientists in Bangalore. Radakrishnan is a well-known radio astronomer, and because our fields match, I had known him for some time, been entertained in his home, visited there before. Then there is a very fine physical chemist named [C. N. R.] Rao who is now head of the Indian--

Riess

How is that spelled?

Townes

R-A-O. Then [M. G. K.] Menon, M-E-N-O-N, is a good friend of mine. He has been scientific advisor to the Indian government, Indira Gandhi in particular, for some time. Well, successive governments. Another person I met is [Srinivasan] Varadarajan. He is, I believe, a chemical engineer in background, and for a long time been very much involved in scientific policy.

So this is just a picture, that scientists generally tend to get to know each other and they have common causes, and they talk with each other and consult. They go to international meetings together and so on.

Riess

Are they doing some astrophysics that was of interest to you?

Townes

Yes, in Bangalore there is some very good astrophysics, and I listened to about six or eight students talking about their work in astrophysics there. They wanted me to meet with the students and I was glad to do so. Then, in Poona, there is a new astrophysical institute under the leadership of a Professor

[J. V.] Narlikar who worked in England for some time.

Then, the head of the biggest laboratory there, which is a chemical laboratory, is a man who has come to the United States many times and has been teaching at the University of Delaware. He is a chemical engineer, and the University of Delaware is exceptionally good in chemical engineering. But I met for the first time in Bangalore a man named [G.] Srinivasan. No, sorry. Srinivasan is an Indian student who got his Ph.D. with one of my students.

No, the person I am thinking of whom I met is [Roddam] Narasimha and interestingly, he is on the faculty of Caltech. He has a Clark Millikan professorship at Caltech and he spends some few months of the year there and then the other time as the head of the Indian aeronautical institute in India. That again gives you an indication that there is a great deal of interplay.

Now, in spite of the fact that the Indian government has generally been unfriendly--the Indian government and the U.S. government have generally been unfriendly in the last few decades--I talked a great deal with the Indian leaders about policy and about their problems. They are very eager to get high technology going there, and looking hard for ways of doing it. The government supports them with what money the government has, and they have excellent leadership. They have problems in their educational system for various policy reasons, and they have problems with building up industry. They have kept out foreign industry in recent decades because they have made a rule that the majority of any industry has to be locally owned by Indians, and of course American companies have just kind of bowed out of that largely. They didn't want to try to build up an industry which they couldn't control.

Now, the Indian government has changed that. That is no longer required and they are hoping very much that industry will move in. I learned a great deal about their general political feelings. I think they are more open than they have been in the past, but also, perhaps, I just had a chance to talk with them carefully.

Riess

Do you think that in talking to you they see you as a messenger?

Townes

Yes, they do. A messenger and a friend and somebody who can help them out. They want very much to get help from the U.S.

Riess

And so what will you actually do or be able to do?

Townes

Well, one complaint they had was that the United States had been more helpful to China than to India. That we had set up special committees in the National Academy of Sciences to make liaison with mainland China, and we hadn't done the same thing with India, and they need help too. That is the kind of thing that I think I may be able to help out on. I certainly will look into it and see that we are treating them as well as we can.

Riess

And who do you contact in this country?

Townes

Oh, I would contact a variety of people. I think one of the first would be Frank Press, head of our National Academy of Sciences. But I might also talk with the president's science advisor, too, and maybe with NSF, because NSF helps sponsor some joint projects between the U.S. and other countries. And they are very eager for joint projects.

They know America very well, they like Americans. The governments have been at odds, and their view was that the primary problems had gone away now. One of the problems was Kashmir, where most of the Western countries felt that they ought to give up most of Kashmir to the Pakistanis, and only the Soviet Union supported them in wanting them to keep Kashmir, and therefore that kind of threw them in the arms of the Soviet Union. Now, the Soviet Union has changed, Kashmir has a very different set of problems now, and they feel that has changed and been forgotten, and there is no need for them to look communist or socialist now.

The other thing is over Israel--I suppose because of the Moslem population there, there is still a great deal of Moslem population in India. They have felt strongly that the United States has overly favored Israel, by comparison with the Arabs. And I personally think that is true, too. They feel that Bush, now, is doing it fairly, and they feel that is a big change and very welcome. They are now, I believe, just making a move to recognize Israel--they had not recognized Israel before.

So at the moment, politically, they are friendly with the United States and they are very eager to get cooperative work and have good contacts, and so the scientific leadership there were all talking with me about that and what the possibilities were. Of course, I was talking with them about how they were trying to do things, and what their possibilities are, what they could do. That is the kind of interaction that one would normally get as a senior scientist, particularly those that do get involved in governmental policy.

Riess

In France was there any sub rosa business going on--sub rosette? [laughter]

Townes

I also took a couple of days--. Saturday and Sunday I was really a sightseer there. I went back to the Taj Mahal, which is such a beautiful building [that] I felt I had to see it again, and I went to Bharatpur again, which is a bird sanctuary. It is very exceptional. Then Fatipur Sikhri, which is another interesting establishment connected with Agra. And Deeg. Deeg is not a very well known place with tourists, but rather interesting to me from that point of view. It was a castle built up in the early part of the nineteenth century, in the style of that time, and now it is a local thing. Very few tourists visit it, so I had a very special look at a remnant, so to speak.

Officier of the Legion of Honor

Townes

Then I went from there to France. France, politically, scientifically and economically is much more attuned to the United States, and has much easier relations, and there is a great deal of travel back and forth and understanding, even though we clearly differ with France on certain foreign policy issues. We have a good deal of exchange, as we do with India, too, and one of the things I did was have lunch with a young advanced doctoral student there who was very eager to come to the United States and work with us, and with his sponsor whom I know quite well. Otherwise, I saw some of my old friends. I had spent the winter of 1955-56 there at École Normale Supérieure on my sabbatical, and one of the leading figures there was, at that time, a student with whom I shared an office in those days. He, of course, entertained us as he had done before, and so did other people, and we had a fun visit there.

The primary reason for going there was that my French friends had persuaded the government to give me an honor, which was to make me an Officier of the Légion d'Honneur. At the Officier level, characteristically, the president of France gives the medal, gives the recognition. So it had to be a time when the president was available, and I was available, and there was a little ceremony in the Élysíes Palace. There were actually ten awardees at that time. Among them was [Claude] Levi-Strauss, whom I had never met before, but I had read many of his things. He is a little elderly now, but still going. Also some French people. There was an American businessman who owns a big business in France and he was given an award. But otherwise they were French people, an admiral, and the head of their science community, and so on.

The remarkable thing about Mitterand was he gave long speeches about each of these people with no notes at all, and seemed to be quite accurate. What he said about me was remarkably detailed and accurate. He has a fantastic memory which, of course, is important to any politician.

Riess

Yes, but that is very impressive.

Townes

Yes. Just one speech after another for each person, saying a lot about them and what they did and so on, and, as I say, remarkably accurate and detailed. Then they had a big reception, and my daughter was very eager for my grandson, who is eleven, to come over and experience this. She couldn't come because she is teaching, so her husband came and brought him, and we had a nice time. Showed him around Paris--his first time abroad, and he is all eager to learn French now. He enjoyed it, and he shook hands with President Mitterand, and that was something that he was hoping to do.

Riess

Oh that is terrific. Do they do this annually?

Townes

I don't really know all of the regulations and just when it is done, but from time to time, I suppose. I am told that Mitterand rather enjoys these affairs. He is intellectually oriented. He writes books, writes well, and he is intellectually oriented and he enjoys these things, and likes scientists, so I am told. The science advisor there is a person that I have known for some time and he commented about that--that Mitterand likes to meet scientists and so on. But they do it occasionally, and some of these awards are promotions. Once you are in the Legion of Honor, you can get successive promotions. There are about four or five grades. But then there is also a medal of merit, which de Gaulle established, and many of those recognized at the ceremony were given the medal of merit--they consider it a little inferior to the Légion d'Honneur, I gather, but still quite important.

Now, on the one hand, it was a very nice occasion, and I was glad my grandson could be over there and it was a nice vacation in Paris, and Frances did come over for that--she is very fond of France and so she came over. I think the other thing one could say is, yes, that is a wonderful honor, but [laughing] why make a special trip to France and spend seven days there and take that much time to get a medal pinned on you? I'm not sure I can answer why. I suppose once in a lifetime you do that sort of thing.

Riess

Well, it is more outrageous to decline to appear, I must say.

Townes

Yes, that is another thing. That would be very ungracious to say I'm too busy to come.

But it was a very pleasant occasion. I gave a talk there. I was asked to give a talk to École Normale Supérieure and I had a chance to talk with scientists and catch up with their work.

Riess

Well, that is what I wondered when I said, was there any sub rosa theme. Was there any government to government message that you have come back from France with?

Townes

I would say, in the case of France, nothing special, because I think the situation there is all pretty well understood. We work together fairly well, have a good deal of contact. They are successful industrially and scientifically, and so they are not sort of seeking hard for some new relationship. I think they regard things as pretty satisfactory, and they have got a European community which is quite strong in science and rivals the United States, but it is generally a healthy rivalry. We have meetings together and we do a fair amount of collaborative work. So they are not struggling the way India is to try to bring their economy up to something reasonable and try to make contact.

India is, after all, pretty isolated, just because of distance. In addition, industry in India is backward enough that it is difficult to get scientific and technical instruments and equipment there. Even the power is inadequate. It goes off many times and the voltage fluctuates so it burns out scientific equipment, and so on. They talked with me about the problems of trying to work there. It has very real problems, and they are trying hard to settle them, whereas France is a pretty successful country and they don't have all that much to learn from the United States, nor do they need or expect that much direct help from the United States. They expect a sort of normal give and take relationship, which is there already.

Riess

Yes. They have a president's science advisor. That is interesting to me. Does he have about the same advisory clout as the science advisor in this country?

Townes

I think, actually, he has probably a little more. This person's name is [Jean] Audouze, and the general feeling among the scientists is that once a person does that, he is really a government servant. He characteristically doesn't come back to science, he becomes an administrator, and so he sort of devotes his life to that. That would be somewhat different than the United States. I think our scientists go and come in government a little bit more.

Riess

So it is more like a cabinet position?

Townes

It is more like a cabinet position. In fact, there is a cabinet position for science, and some of these have had it. I think Audouze does have that cabinet position, so he has a fair amount of administration to do.

Riess

But you would say that is not as effective a use of a scientist as--

Townes

No, no. I think it is very important for good scientists to be in those positions, because they understand science and know the scientists better. On the other hand, that intensive and long term work which is characteristic of the French when they go into government means that their scientific career has probably stopped. You are not likely to get back into science directly.

Riess

But that would mean that they then become out of touch.

Townes

Yes, it does mean that in time they become out of touch. And of course you need some turnover. The French are expecting that. In fact, they say Mitterand is out of touch now, and that he has three more years and they feel it is time for him to leave because he has been there a long time and he's not in very good touch now. Just as a politician, that could happen to anybody. With scientists it is perhaps still more striking that they can get out of touch. I don't believe that they feel that Audouze is yet out of touch, but they realize that his scientific career is now finished, and he'll have to go on into some administrative position when he leaves this one.

16. XVI IDA, Continued

Effectiveness of Townes' Term, 1959-1961

Riess

Okay, well, that gets you back home and sitting in this chair.

When you signed on to work on IDA, it was for a two year period. I am not clear who decided it was two years, and how two years can possibly be an effective span of time. I always thought it took about a year and a half to get anything rolling.

Townes

I guess it was I myself who specified it as two years, because I did not want to go permanently into that kind of work, yet I felt that it was important that I should pitch in and try to help. I felt that two years would be enough so that I could be effective, and the president of IDA also felt that, and so he accepted the two years.

I would say also, though, that some turnover is important, and the people who then succeeded me in that position in IDA, while generally they stayed a little bit longer than two years, didn't stay more than, let's say, four years. The turnover is of some importance to get an active science person who is really in touch there. In addition, in my own case, I was eager to stay in science per se, and I specified that they would pay my transportation back to New York so that Saturdays I could come back and work in a laboratory and see my students and so on and continue to do some things.

Riess

But your assignment at IDA was to take a critical look at the research?

Townes

The basic requirement, I felt and they felt, was to bring in new science and technology, to have the insight of an active scientist or engineer, and in addition to help bring in other people to make contacts for the government and that could advise the government so that they had really current scientific thinking.

Now some of it was administrative in the sense that I was vice-president. I had to do a certain amount of administrative work, and in a way getting Jason started was an administrative problem. And yet, if I had not been sensitive to the scientists, understood the scientists--and many of them were friends--I think we wouldn't have been so successful in getting Jason started. They felt they could trust me, and I knew what their viewpoints were and what they needed, so that helped me, as an administrator, get the whole thing set up in a way which would satisfy both these bright youngish scientists and all of their special viewpoints and requirements, and at the same time, satisfy the Pentagon and the government that they were going to get some real help, and would be willing to make a lot of concessions as to what the arrangements might be.

Riess

Who would make the concessions? The Pentagon or the scientists?

Townes

Particularly, the concessions were made by the Pentagon so far as clearance was concerned. They gave them really very full access to innermost secrets, so that they could bore in and look at the problems and give them advice, you see. We had a hard time getting one or two of them cleared because of impressions in Washington. about, "Well, you know, they are communist-oriented, too liberal," or something like this. Well, we struggled through that and got them all cleared.

Riess

You mean on a case-by-case basis.

Townes

Well, a few of them we had to do on a case-by-case basis. But we were able to convince the Pentagon both that they were earnest US citizens even if they were critical at times, [laughter] and in addition it was very worthwhile to see that they could participate, you see.

Riess

You mean because it is better to have them on the inside than on the outside if they have some doubts about them?

Townes

Yes. It is better to have them on the inside, particularly technically, seeing what the problems are and criticizing it in a constructive way rather than maybe on the outside just talking to newspapers, you see.

IDA History, Project 137

Riess

Was the thinking on Jason completely within your administrative term, or had it started a little earlier?

Townes

There was a kind of a predecessor, which was called Project 137. Project 137 was a project to get scientists during the summer to study government problems, and it was headed by John Wheeler of Princeton University, a very fine physicist. It had started, and it was essentially one summer, I think, and then it had done its job. John Wheeler was asked to then spend full time in Washington and he refused. This group of people then, the next summer, I think, some of them went to Los Alamos and just worked there and they looked at what was going on at Los Alamos, and enjoyed that as kind of a summer vacation activity with good scientific contact.

They thought that they might band together and do something on a national level, but what--

 

Townes

So far as I know, what they were thinking of was a profit-making company. Certainly they were thinking of that. I don't know if that is the only thing they thought of. They were going to organize a company, maybe, and sell their services to the government, so to speak. We felt, I and another person who met with them--his name was Marvin something-or-the-other--also felt very strongly, and he and I talked about it a good deal, that it would be much better for them to go into a nonprofit and really just serve the government and forget about industrial profits, just get some kind of consulting fee and do it on a nonprofit basis so that it was clearly not a profit-making thing, and therefore they would be much more on the inside and trusted to give objective advice, you see, rather than selling something to the government. I felt strongly that that was the right way to handle it. After talking with them, they agreed, and said it would be a better way to do it, and so we organized the Jason group.

Now, the tape recording, which I will give you, talks about that period, of trying to make decisions and working with the Pentagon, trying to get things worked out at the Pentagon in a way which would satisfy them and satisfy the scientists.15 I read from some of the documents which I wrote at the time, and maybe also some documents from the Pentagon, working out the arrangements.

Riess

On the tape you read?

Townes

Yes, on the tape. The tape is, I think, a fairly accurate picture. I tried to give an accurate historical view of how this developed. It mentions, also, Project 137. This, in a sense, was a result of 137, but it wasn't so directly connected. It was just that 137 had gotten them alerted and thinking about doing something, and then it kind of petered out. This was a way of setting it up on a permanent basis.

Riess

You said earlier that the Pentagon pushed you aside as overseers of the Weapons Study Evaluation Group. Was that connected with Jason?

Townes

Not connected with Jason, no. The Jason group are academics, primarily--a few from industry, but basically independent academic people.

IDA also ran groups which should, by all reason, be an integral part of government. They were sitting in the Pentagon, making government decisions for the Pentagon, and they would normally be government employees, but the Pentagon had not been able to attract the right kind of high quality of people. And so IDA was able to do that for them and get the right quality of people there. It fulfilled, I think, a very useful function for some time, but I think it had to be only temporary because, in the long run, government servants are going to feel, "These are just more government servants and they should be reporting to us. Look at the function they are fulfilling. A private group can't come in and put people in the Pentagon and have them making Pentagon decisions. They can give advice, but not really in that kind of operational way."

So there was bound to be a break at some point. Exactly when it occurs depends on the details of the situation and the personalities and so on, but in the case of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, it happened when a new general came in who was the official head of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. Even though we employed the people and oversaw them, and oversaw their work, he decided he had to be the real head. [laughter] So he sort of pulled the plug on that. It had to happen sometime. So that is a separate story from Jason.

Now, in the tape about Jason, I tried very hard to be quite accurate. It was a talk to the Jason group on the 25th anniversary of their formation, and they had asked me to give a talk about the history, so I tried hard to make it fairly accurate, as accurate as I could, and quote original documents and so on. There is one part of it where I think I would change it to be completely objective. There were one or two people there whom I didn't want to offend, but I would otherwise be a little bit more critical of, and I made a point of saying nice things about some of the things that they had done.

Riess

Perhaps when you see the transcript, you can make current notes.

Townes

I can modify it a little bit, yes. Otherwise I think it is a pretty good statement of the situation.

Funding and Continuation

Riess

We will assume that covers that. But just indulge me in a few questions. IDA was funded by Ford. Did you ever hear again, after the funding, from Ford? In other words, was that funding in place and no problems about that?

Townes

Yes, there were no problems, or pushing or anything. So far as IDA was concerned, we had complete freedom in the sense that the trustees of IDA were largely university presidents, and a few other public figures, but they also gave me and Gary Norton quite full rein. They were a sensible group of trustees, and nobody giving money tried to pull any strings. It was quite free and open.

Riess

Was that grant with the expectation that IDA would have a limited duration?

Townes

I don't really know. I think it wasn't known at that time. I would guess IDA might have had an extended duration in that form, excepting that it was fulfilling such an important function that a number of other people also wanted to do it and there began to be private advising corporations set up around to do it, and then government itself started building up its own personnel more. Then IDA's importance began to be less. It just fulfilled a gap at that point. Now, it is quite possible that it might have continued if these other things hadn't happened, but I think they were natural.

I might say, in general, people outside of the operations frequently don't realize how dynamic the government situation is. Things will work for a while, and with particular circumstances, and then they have to change. The best time to do things is when a new president comes in, a new government comes in, and things are changing, and they are quite ready to accept new ideas and so on. After a while, they get kind of frozen in place, and then the outside advice is usually not nearly as effective at that point. Organizations which work very well for a while, particularly if they are very effective, they generate antipathies and rivalries and jealousies which then tend to destroy them. That is a pretty natural process.

Riess

The process is organic in some way. You have that central core and it sort of grows little things around it and then the center caves in and then you've got five new organizations.

Townes

That is quite right. It is always changing. The possibilities change, and the possibilities change, in part, because of the conceptions and needs and rivalries and so on.

See, there was a vacuum at that time, and IDA was badly needed. I also felt there was a vacuum, and hence I was needed and I ought to do that.

Riess

And this does explain the two year notion that you had, too, it seems to me.

Townes

I felt I could do something in two years, and it would be time for other people to take turns then. It needed some turnover, and I didn't want to do that kind of thing on a permanent basis. It was just kind of a personal sacrifice for me, in a sense. It was interesting, I was not uninterested. On the other hand, it was not something that I would choose to do of my own. As I mentioned before, it came at a very critical time in my own scientific work--I had to give up some things that were quite critical--but I felt that it was worth doing.

A Sense of Emergency

Riess

Did it have an emergency feeling about it? You had background in industry during war time. Was there the same kind of energy?

Townes

Well, it didn't have much to do with the situation from the last war. It had more to do with Soviet-U.S. relations, and the general new relations with the US and the world. Of course, the United States had been dominant for some time after World War II, and one could say, "Okay, this is a kind of hangover of World War II." But for the first time the United States began to be really challenged in terms of control and ability to try to stabilize the world. They were challenged by the Soviet Union, particularly with their Sputnik having gone up, and with Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles for the first time the U.S. could be attacked and its technology seemed to be not so dominant. We just didn't know how we were going to come out of that.

Riess

So that is the emergency?

Townes

There was a sense of emergency there, all right. I think the only way in which it was a hangover from World War II was that it was a buildup in the Soviet Union, and their technology and new technologies which suddenly began to challenge the stability of the world, particularly any kind of dominant control. The United States had been so dominant after World War II for some time, and suddenly we were in trouble. Not that we had to be dominant, but rather we had to try to see that the world was stable, and didn't get into another war.

So there was a feeling of emergency and--. Well, you could look at some of Eisenhower's actions and speeches at the time. Eisenhower made a great point of trying to show that the US wasn't so far behind in missiles and in space work and so on, and [laughs] he wasn't very successful for a while, in demonstrating that to the population. He also instituted ARPA, this new wing of the Pentagon, to develop technology. He also instituted the President's Science Advisor and Science Advisory Committee. It had existed in some kind of sense earlier, but it hadn't really done anything. It essentially was unknown and ineffective. Eisenhower really changed that all and began to make it effective. Now those were very stringent measures to take, and it shows a great sense of emergency and need there, you see.

Riess

My reference back to Bell Labs and wartime was I was trying to think of the environments in which you worked, and in your other environments you had maybe more time to deliberate, or more time to mull things over. But when you sat down at your desk at IDA--this is my speculation--the ordinary sort of cautious, deliberative processes had to be put aside.

Townes

Well, in some sense, I think, one could say that is true. There was more of an operational requirement, to decide where to spend money, and what technology and what science to try to develop and so on. But I would say the biggest difference was it was more an overall oversight/managerial theme rather than individual research.

Riess

Were people pushing you to do things with developing the laser as a weapon? Where was laser weapon research at this point?

Townes

Yes, some people were pushing on that, and I was pushing on it myself, because I felt that this was something that ought to be looked at carefully.

Riess

Was that why you had been invited to head IDA? With that in mind?

Townes

No, I doubt that the people who invited me to head IDA knew anything about the laser. See, Schawlow and I had written a paper on it, but none had been made to work yet at that point, and Garrison Norton was not technical, he wouldn't have known anything like that, so I don't think that had anything to do with somebody picking on me to do the job. Nevertheless, when I began to do the job the laser was one of the things, one of the new technologies I felt ought to be pushed. And it has contributed to the military. It has not produced a death ray, which I don't think it ever will very effectively, but it has been particularly useful in guidance and communication.

That was one of many new ideas that might be pushed.

Riess

Was the Jason group talking about it? In that two year period, what was going on in developing laser weapon technology?

Townes

Well, we were talking about lasers and their possible importance and what they might do. The Jason group never paid any great attention to the laser, I believe. I think, perhaps, they were kind of leaving it to me, because I was supposed to be the expert on that, and I could take care of that part, and they were looking into other things. There were many questions of just what the laser would do. We had committee meetings, I organized committee meetings of scientists around the country, to discuss that and give advice to the Pentagon about it.

I think I mentioned that there was a problem that some saw in how much energy you could get, energy conversion. Then also the question of how well the laser would propagate through the atmosphere, and hence give you directionality, high intensity, and so on if it were used as a weapon. Jason did work on that problem some, and I worked on it personally some. That was another one of the issues. But they worked with many, many technical issues that people were looking into, and actually, radio work with microwaves was a very active subject in the Jason group for a while. That was a very active subject, how to locate things--identify and locate things--with radio waves.

Riess

You were commuting to Columbia to work with students. Were your students continuing to do laser work, or were you supervising different kinds of research?

Townes

Well, I had, at that period, usually quite a number of students--about ten or twelve graduate students as well as a few post-docs, quite a big group. They continued with considerable momentum. Arno Penzias, for example, was one of my students then, and I think his thesis may have suffered because I couldn't work with him very much, but I did work with him some. Arno then, later, discovered the Big Bang radiation, and became a very prominent, well known scientist.

I had a small group working on trying to build a laser. And then I had a good many other microwave spectroscopists. Ali Javan was there when I first went down to Washington. He was the inventor of the helium-neon [HeNe] laser, and he went to Bell Labs and worked on it there, though. Pat Thaddeus was another one. He is a professor at Harvard now and he works on molecules in space. He was active at that time, I remember. I had quite a group of students, and they had quite a lot of momentum, and by coming up on Saturdays and talking with them I could keep reasonably well informed and keep them going reasonably well during that period. It wouldn't have lasted indefinitely, but for a couple of years it worked out all right.

The Turn Against Scientists, An Outgrowth of the Vietnam War

Riess

And it worked out all right with Columbia that you were gone? This is the sixties, and here you are doing what you see as emergency work, and yet at the same time, from some of my reading, I understand that this was the beginning of a kind of general suspicion and revolt against scientists in government. Often those revolts are first manifest on campuses, and so I wondered if there was anything about that you could speak to.

Townes

It didn't occur in that period. People were high on scientists at that time, still high on scientists. And the needs of the country and the worry about the space program and about missiles and so on, the worry was more of a concern than, let us say, the "misuse of science." People were not really much concerned about the misuse of science at that time. They were worried about atomic bombs, but they weren't blaming that on some scientific lack of foresight or something.

I think the turn against scientists really was an outgrowth of the Vietnamese war. People were so strongly against the Vietnamese war, and this was the military and military technology, there was a feeling that science had been doing things that were bad and so on. Plus, also, the general revolt against authority in universities and among young people, that perhaps started here in Berkeley. Let's see, when did that start in Berkeley? I thought it was about '63-'64 or something like that.

This was before that period, you see. So scientists were generally in good repute then. I have mentioned that right after World War II scientists were very highly thought of, and people would want to invite a scientist to dinner so he could say something. [laughter]

Riess

I know, I love that. Even though they might not understand it, they wanted it.

Townes

Yes, that is right. [laughing] It was the latest thing, and scientists had been sort of heroes then. Now, I would say, in many quarters they are antiheroes, but that was more true a few years ago than it is now, I would say. I think science is coming back into some reasonable balance.

As time went on, scientists became less looked up to. But still in this period of 1960, science was highly regarded, the need for it was recognized, and getting science and scientists involved in government was just generally looked at as a good thing.

Riess

To people in the humanities it meant that most research money was going in the direction of science.

Townes

Oh yes, certainly, and that continues to be true. The problem there is that the research money is given to science because it is thought to produce economic success for the United States--economic and military success for the United States. What in the humanities could you do to justify spending a lot of government money in order to support humanities? It is only because the humanities are cultural and nice and we ought to have them, but there is no direct pay off of the type that congress can see. So it is still true that while we have an endowment for the humanities, the difference in the amount of money is just enormous.

Riess

Possible uses of money would be to better people's lives in concrete ways, housing and the infrastructure and things like that. Wasn't this a period when that was talked about?

Townes

Yes, that was talked about, but if you ask yourself how best to do that--. It would not normally involve better specialists and scholars, you see. I have had a number of people ask me in the past, "Why is science so privileged? Why shouldn't we be in there advising government, too?" I point out to them the rather special circumstance that politicians don't understand science. They know they don't understand science, so if they are going to answer a scientific question, they have got to call on the scientist to look at it. On the other hand, politicians think they understand social policy, and they don't have to call on some academic specialist in social policy to decide whether or not their constituents need some money or need some housing or something like that. I think many politicians are even suspicious of the university-type intellectual political scientists as not being practical, and being a bit left wing anyhow and so on, and they don't need advice from those people, they are the ones who really know the business--they are politicians, that is there business.

Science, on the other hand, is a specialty. It is very easy for them to recognize that they really don't know and they need help. So the scientist gets called on, and the scientist in getting called on for technical things almost immediately also gets into policy, because the policy and the technical decisions are very intimately connected. So the scientist frequently has gotten into policy matters much more than the people who are directly studying policy, just for that reason.

Riess

And what I have to remind myself is that I am thinking of science as physics, but the science advisor, from what I have read, was also concerned with saltwater conversion, other projects that were science.

Townes

Oh yes, a lot of engineering, very practical problems.

I would say the kind of intermediate area is the field of economics. Now there again I think many politicians feel they know what will work in the way of economics, but on the other hand they do have economic advisors, and economics is specialized enough. But if you ask a politician about political science--what are the needs of the city, and how do you treat people and so on--then most of them will not see any need for academic advice. They might get it occasionally, but it is not something that they feel any pressing need about. They feel that those are the things they know.

Riess

I am really amazed that you mention economics as anything that anyone really knows anything much about. [laughter]

Townes

Well, I think one can question that all right, but I would say it is a bit intermediate between the so-called "hard sciences" and, let's say, political science and humanities in terms of the politician's belief that maybe he understands it. Economics does have some quantitative aspects, which may not tell us very much, but it can be quite technical. In fact we do have a board of economic advisors. They don't have a board of political advisors, but they have a board of economic advisors for that reason.

Riess

And economics you can relate to because you can predict in economics?

Townes

Well, I am sure you are aware of the difficulty with any real prediction, but the hope is to be able to predict, and you can get statistics and facts and so on which take some study and some specialization.

Riess

I have read in an article that you no doubt saw in the New York Times about Los Alamos physicists who are now sitting in front of computer terminals working the stock market.

Townes

Market theory. It is perhaps subject to quantitative treatment, although the stock market is by no means physics. [laughter] One has to ask if anybody really made a fortune using a computer on the stock market. I am sure it has helped from time to time, but I will bet it has also been a disaster occasionally.

Riess

But in this post cold war world it is not exactly swords into plowshares, but [laughs] some kinds of shares.

 

Riess

I saw a reference to an experiment at the Naval Research Lab in Washington built by Townes, [G. A.] Giordmaine, and [L. E.] Alsop. What is that, and when was it? I don't want to get us way out of context.

Townes

Well, that was slightly before this time frame actually. One of the clear utilizations of the maser was for a good amplifier, and I had always been interested in radio astronomy, so I developed the maser for amplifying microwaves to do radio astronomy. The Naval Research Laboratory at that time had the best radio antenna in the country. They had built it up after the war, and they had a very good radio antenna--microwave antenna--and they had been doing some nice radio astronomy. So Alsop and Giordmaine were two of my students and we jointly built a maser amplifier, and the Naval Research Laboratory let us use their antenna to install that and do observations. That was done about 1957 and '58 I guess. Somewhere in there.

1. XVII Committees, Directorships

Samson and Associates, Investment Company

Riess

In references to your going to IDA I read that you had to resign from three mutual investment companies you had formed. I would like to know all about that: when you started them, why, how successful that was, who was involved, were other scientists involved, where are they today?

Townes

Well, I think it sounds like a bit of an overblown story. I had a student, Mirek Stevenson--Czech in origin, his original name was Mirek Cevcik but he was a great admirer of Adlai Stevenson and he decided to take a more American name, so Mirek Stevenson--and he was a very bright student. He got interested in investments. I think his girlfriend--now wife, shortly after his wife--was then working in some investment company. In any case, he was interested in investments, and he started a little mutual investment fund and wanted to go into this, and he asked me would I be on his board?

I thought this was interesting, and it didn't take too much time and I wanted to help him out, so I agreed to go on his board. I even took an exam to show that I was qualified as an investment advisor. It was a trivial exam, I would have to say [laughter], so that I could have the right credentials and so on. He ran this for a while, and I helped advise him, particularly on a few technical companies which were quite successful. Technical companies were getting into the laser business or optics or things associated with that.

Riess

So these were new companies that he was backing?

Townes

They were generally companies that he would invest the mutual funds in, you see. That was along about in that time. I guess when I went to IDA I had to back out of that because part of the work of IDA was to decide whom to give contracts to, and what kind of work to sponsor, and that had an important impact on technological companies, so I would have--

Riess

Are these all the Samson group?

Townes

Samson, yes. Samson, and then Quantum Science Company. That company is still going. He is still running it, but it is on a little different basis. He mainly gives technological and economic advice to large companies now. He analyzes the market and gives advice to large companies now.

Riess

Well, there is Samson Associates, Samson Convertible Fund, Samson Fund--

Townes

There are several different names. But it was not a very big affair. It was a nice little company and it had several different aspects. Samson Associates was the overall, and Samson Fund was the fund. But it wasn't all that big or important. It was fairly successful for a while and then I bowed out of it and I don't know how much longer it lasted, but not much after that he changed the nature of his business some and it has continued.

Riess

Your last term as a director ended in 1973, it looks like.

Townes

If that is true, I must have come back on board or something. I have forgotten exactly the details.

Riess

Did he bring other scientists into it?

Townes

Yes, he had some other scientists involved, but particularly in the last period I was not terribly happy with the way it was being run. I wanted to help him out but I finally decided I had better just bow out because I didn't feel I was in enough control of it to see that things that I really believed were right were done and I should just get disconnected. So I did. But he is still running it, and I still keep track of him a little bit.

Riess

Would you suggest I put a little money into it?

Townes

No. [laughter]

Riess

Securities and Capital Fund Incorporated, is this a separate one? 1958-'64?

Townes

That was probably another division of the same company. My entry into the securities business was really fairly minor. But I guess it does indicate my--. I like to try things, and I am curious about things, and I have been doing some investing of my own, so it indicated my general experimental nature. I was willing to try things like that.

Perkin Elmer Directorship

Riess

What about Perkin Elmer?

Townes

Now, Perkin Elmer is a very different story. Perkin Elmer had asked me to be on its board when I was provost at MIT, as did some other companies. I refused because I felt that as provost I should not be so uniquely connected to any one company. MIT had a lot to do with commercial companies, and as a matter of principle I felt that I shouldn't do that.

After I resigned as provost, a year or so after that, I told them, well yes I was willing to do it now. So they asked me to be on the board and so I was on the board then for some time, and I have had continued close relations with Perkin Elmer. Its business is very close to my own scientific interest.

Riess

Was it started by scientists--Perkin and Elmer?

Townes

Well, Elmer was an optical scientist. Perkin was a person who had a hobby in astronomy, but he was really a sort of a Wall Street type. He had been in a Wall Street firm but his hobby was astronomy. He knew Elmer, and Elmer was in optics, and he started a small company making optical equipment then, and then he went into more and more full time and broadened out into a wide variety of instrumentation.

Riess

And this is the kind of thing that Samson and Associates might have invested in, originally?

Townes

Yes, yes. They certainly might have. Perkin Elmer was initiated some time before that, though. It was started probably in the late '30s actually. It was not very big for quite a while, but it had some success during the war. Many of the technical companies did pretty well during World War II, they had a lot of business. But then it had a difficult period and faded out for a while, and then it came back and it was quite successful during most of the time that I was a director there. It was growing rapidly and was very successful. It still is a quite successful company. It has spun off a large part of its operations now, but it is still going very well. I was scientifically interested in the company and it was doing things that were very close to my own field and it was a high quality company, and so I was pleased to be connected with it.

General Motors Science and Technical Advisory Committee

Townes

The General Motors situation was very different. There, I got connected again with what I felt was sort of a national need. GM asked me to form a science and technical advisory committee at a time when GM was very much under fire and very much criticized, as it is today perhaps, but it primarily had a problem with emissions and with safety. So they felt they needed an outside committee, and I agreed to start that committee and chair it under certain conditions, and they were very generous and agreed to everything I felt I required.

Riess

So it was more than just public relations?

Townes

Oh yes. In fact, I wanted to be sure that it wasn't just public relations. One of my requirements was that they not have any public releases about our group that I did not approve before hand. That was one of the things I required just for that reason--I didn't want us to be used just for publicity. They agreed to that, and allowed me to pick the group and they gave us considerable freedom of action. We reported directly to the executive committee so that we could have a substantial influence. And in the case of General Motors I think we had quite an impact.

There is an almost lurid story on the occasion of one of our first meetings there. There was a group of scientists and engineers listening to what General Motors was doing, and what its various managers were doing--they were trying to explain to us, and of course we would ask questions, and I don't think we did it in an impolite way, but in a critical way. One of the presenters was obviously very nervous and suddenly fell to the floor and had heart failure and died.

Riess

[laughs] Oh dear.

Townes

Yes, it was pretty lurid. Well, I adjourned the meeting, and we waited for about an hour, and then the GM people said that they felt we ought to go ahead so we went ahead.

Riess

Due mourning time had elapsed and you could go on.

Townes

This poor guy, he had had a history of heart trouble before, but nevertheless one has to guess he was under considerable tension. They were clearly taking us seriously, but that was a sad way of commenting on it.

After I had done that for about three years, I felt that what they needed was a rotation--they needed some fresh people--so I told them that I felt I ought to resign now and they should get another chairman and rotate. Then they asked me would I serve on the board and I thought, "Okay, it is an important company and maybe I will do that." [More on General Motors, page ___]

So those were the two commercial boards I served on. I kind of made a rule to myself not to serve on more than two because I wouldn't want to get too distracted. But I think it was interesting and I felt, in the case of General Motors, that it was important nationally. I just didn't want to get bogged down with having too many of these things on my hands so I limited myself to just those two.

Well, now, let's see. We are getting into commercial things rather than to governmental things, and let me just sort of outline for you the things I think were important and ought to be discussed somehow. Of course, I was involved at MIT in an administrative position for five years and at that time pretty much avoided other government and public work because I was so busy with administration anyhow during that period.

Chairman, NASA Advisory Committee on the Manned Space Program--Apollo

Townes

[In 1964] I did undertake the chairmanship of a committee on the Apollo program, again an effort on my part to try to see that scientists and government were connected. I knew George Miller, the head of the Apollo program, from Bell Labs days. Many scientists were very critical of NASA, very critical of the whole program, claimed it wouldn't work and so on. I ran into George one day and I told him, "Look, you are getting all of this criticism in the newspapers. What you ought to do is--these are good scientists--you ought to get together a group of them who can talk to you and advise you. Rather than talking to the newspapers, they ought to be talking with you so you really understand what they are saying and so that they can have an interaction. You should see to what extent they are really right, and maybe they can help you. In any case, they are good people and you ought to understand their criticisms because they can affect your program and they have some real things to say."

A man named James [E.] Webb was head of NASA at that point. He was a rather politically oriented person, but very skillful and sensible, and George Miller talked with him about it and he said yes, he though that would be a good thing. So George came back to me and said, "Jim Webb agrees we ought to do that, but we would like you to be chairman." I was kind of stuck [laughs], and that did happen during the time I was provost but I agreed to do that and we formed that group. But otherwise, I was not taking on much public work. That Apollo committee was, I think, a very interesting and effective committee.

Riess

What all did it achieve?

Townes

We went over all of the technical aspects of the lunar landing program--the Apollo program.

I also met with the executives of all of the major companies that were working for NASA. Miller organized the highest executives of all of the companies that were working for NASA, and had them go around and visit installations and visit the other companies and see what they were doing. That was very effective.

Riess

It was your idea to have them move around, or his?

Townes

It was his idea to get the executives to do this. I think that was effective in that the executives could see and talk with each other, and really put them into sort of a good competitive relation. They wanted to see that their company did well and they would show their friends around their company and talk about the issues.

This was still another committee but I was on it to represent MIT because MIT had a major role in guidance and variegation through the Draper Lab. I was on just as a member, not chairman.

Now, the science and technical advisory committee was a group of scientists and engineers, and we went over all of the technical issues that seemed important at the time.

Riess

You picked the group?

Townes

Yes. I picked them.

Riess

Was it from academia again?

Townes

Largely academic, but not entirely. I know the only person who turned me down was John Pierce, who was then at Bell Labs. John had been very critical of the program and said it wouldn't work, wasn't worthwhile and so on.

Riess

What did people actually know of the program? Were they critical of it because they didn't really know anything?

Townes

I think they were critical of it in part because of the way it was launched. It was largely some engineers that persuaded Kennedy to do it. Jerry Wiesner, who was also an engineer but was then the science advisor to Kennedy, was against it himself. The science advisory committee weren't talked to, and it was launched without a full consultation with scientists, or discussing the program and thinking it through and so on. Some of it, I think, was psychological: they just automatically criticized this new thing that had sort of suddenly come up. And many of them criticized in a way which was really quite wrong. One scientist, a normally very dependable scientist, wrote an article saying that nobody could live up there is space because of cosmic rays. A cosmic ray is something perfectly calculable, known, and he just distorted the situation--it wasn't true. Obviously people have been up there and gotten back in reasonably good health, but he tried to prove and he wrote a paper that it wasn't practical because it would be too dangerous to health.

Another well known science administrator claimed that it would take one hundred billion dollars instead of the twenty five billion that NASA estimated, and it would take at least twice as long as had been estimated so it was all just completely unrealistic. Another one was Jim Killian, who had been science advisor to Eisenhower and president of MIT, a very distinguished man and I think a very well intentioned person. He gave a speech in which he said that to do it would require so much of the country's scientific and technical talent that it would rob industry and make the U.S. poor--that we just couldn't afford that many people working on the space program. We would lose them from industry and industry would suffer badly. Well, I think everybody agrees that in fact it helped industry [because of the new] technology and financial support.

So there were many different kinds of comments, and I would have to say a good deal of it in my view was psychological. I felt so at the time.

Riess

What is the psychology here? That it was run by engineers without asking scientists?

Townes

The psychology was that they hadn't been consulted and there was this big new program and it cost a lot of money.

Riess

So it was economics and psychology?

Townes

Well, the psychology was that here is this big new program that the president has announced, and he didn't talk with us about it and it has not been thought through and obviously cannot be right because it has not been thought through well. I am not sure the president thought it through very well, but it was not so wrong after all. I had looked at it and felt that many of the criticisms were not justified even though there were many uncertain aspects of the program.

Riess

That administration--NASA--when did that begin? Was that with Kennedy or was it with Eisenhower? Air and Space?

Townes

I believe it had been started under Eisenhower, partly as a result of the Russian Sputnik and the associated pressure. It was steadily being modified as time went on. And I'd have to look up the history of it to remember exactly, but by this time it had been consolidated into this new organization and Jim Webb was head of it. I think that might have finally taken its present form when the Apollo program was announced.

Anyhow, I think there was some industrial people there. I mentioned John Pierce, who made an amusing comment. I explained to him, "Well look, the country is committed to this. We had better look into it carefully and try to see that it is done right." John's comment was that he had always felt that things that aren't worth doing aren't worth doing well.

Riess

[laughs] Amazing!

Townes

So he was the only person who turned down my invitation to be a member of the committee. The group eventually, I think, did a lot of good. I think they were critical and at the same time appreciative. As they looked into it more, they recognized the reality of it.

The Moon Dust Problem

Townes

One of the things we looked into, for example, was the problem of landing on the moon. There was a claim that the moon was covered with dust, that it was so deep in dust that once you land you'd just sink in five hundred feet maybe and be lost and so you just could not land on the moon. Now, that is a technical issue, and it really was remarkably easy to disprove that idea. But again, I think scientists were so negative about the program that many of them believed it without looking into it. It was particularly promoted by Tom Gold who was a good scientist, an astronomer and a good scientist, very persuasive. But there was very clear cut evidence against that, and we dug out that evidence.

Riess

There was evidence?

Townes

Well, one of the things I did was to look carefully at the radar scattering as a function of wavelength which showed, basically, that there were chunks of material very close to the surface which were rocks. Close to the surface, and they weren't sinking in.

Riess

It is very interesting, the thinking at the time, the resistance. It is not good scientific thinking.

Townes

No, it was not careful scientific thinking. There were lots of emotions, and it was quite unknown to many people, and so they would jump to conclusions without looking into it thoroughly and were not very scientific in approach.

There was one particular occasion that I remember because it was so striking to me. Tommy Gold gave a presentation to our committee about how the moon was all completely covered with dust. I had a geologist on the committee, a geologist from Princeton who was I think a pretty good person, and Gerard Kuyper who was a planetary astronomer gave us a little talk about the differences in reflectivity of different parts of the moon, particularly in the ultraviolet, which were quite striking. Tommy Gold was there, and he completely pooh-poohed that and gave us a very strong story about the moon being uniformly covered with dust, and it was very deep, and his reasons for it. Kuyper did not give a very good presentation, and I remember the geologist, after they both left, saying, "We must recognize the difference in salesmanship here and be very careful." [chuckles] I did not think it needed great care because I felt the Kuyper story was clear enough, but he was just not such a good salesman. On the other hand, Tommy Gold was exceedingly persuasive.

Then we met with the President's Science Advisory Committee. George Kistiakowsky was there. George Kistiakowsky was chairman of the committee at that time and I am trying to remember--. [pause] Let's see now, I cannot quite place the year. I know George Kistiakowsky was chairman, and the Apollo program was well under way, and Tommy Gold wanted to persuade the committee that we must approach the president and be sure that he put a stop to any idea of going back a second time.

If we are going to go once, okay inevitably NASA would do that, but we shouldn't waste money going back a second time because, he argued, this dust that covered the moon was completely uniform and we wouldn't learn anything new. In one stop you could see everything that was there. There was not any other part of the moon that was any different. He gave a talk to the President's Science Advisory Committee, and the chairman asked opinions. He went around the room--there were about a dozen scientists on the committee--he went around the room and every scientist said, "Yes, we agree with that. We had better start building a back fire to be sure that NASA does not try to go back a second time. It would be a waste. We had better start talking to the President about that right away now," because Gold's argument seemed right.

Well, I pointed out to them that no, the reflections on different parts of the moon were quite different. There are differences in different parts of the moon, and it seemed pretty clear to me. I was the only one that disagreed, but Kistiakowsky, the chairman, was wise enough to realize that that was a very real argument, and he said, "Maybe we had better wait until after the first landing. Charlie might be right, and we had better, before approaching the president, wait and find out more." But if I hadn't been there, it would have gone the other way. There was such a uniform negative emotion towards NASA and the Apollo program at that time.

Riess

And you just happened to have been invited as the head of the Apollo program to come in and talk to them?

Townes

No, as I remember I was a member of a committee called together by Kistiakowsky at that time. But everybody else uniformly agreed with Tom Gold, though he was clearly wrong.

Riess

And was no one of those people just dying to actually get up there and find out whether they were right or wrong? They would rather be wrong?

Townes

Well, Gold was inventing ways of measuring the dust, and had some good ways of measuring the dust, and some of the Apollo program tried to use his technique. So he was interested in it, and there were people interested in it, but he had this idea that it was uniformly covered with dust and initially he claimed it was very deep. As I say, he was such a very persuasive person, and other people didn't look into it carefully, and so he kind of tended to carry the day.

---

National Academy of Science Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China

Townes

[Speaking of committees], I was on the President's Science Advisory Committee for a while--first under Johnson, and the vice-chairman of the committee in the early days of the Nixon administration. There was also the GM committee, which we discussed. Then I was chairman of the Academy's space science committee, which at that time was very close to NASA and worked very close with NASA.

Riess

What academy is that?

Townes

That is the National Academy of Sciences, which again has the role of giving advice to the government.

Later I was chairman of the committee for cultural exchanges with mainland China during the early days. I started just one year after Mao died. I think it was of some importance.

Riess

Cultural exchange meant an exchange of academic--?

Townes

Academic exchanges, yes. It was science and social sciences and humanities. They made a great point of combining the two, because though the Chinese were interested in learning our science, our scientists weren't so interested in what was going on in China--there wasn't very much. But our humanists and social scientists were very interested in what was going on in China. So for cultural exchange we purposely combined the two, because we were interested in that part of it, the Chinese were interested in the other part, and that gave us leverage to get some humanities information from China.

Riess

Why were you appointed to head that?

Townes

Well, partly because I was a scientist, and again scientists have much more leverage in China. But secondly, they just picked me and thought I would be a good chairman, I guess. They asked me wouldn't I do it? I was interested again--

Riess

You were in Washington in one way or another from 1960 on, so you were being handed around?

Townes

I was coming back and forth, as many scientists were, but with a full-time job back home. Actually, somebody else had been chairman of this committee before I was, I didn't start it, but I was asked to be chairman at that point, and it was still in an early stage and taking form.

Riess

I guess for the purposes of oral history, that phrase "I was asked" is not helpful. It is better if you say, "The president asked me," or "My predecessor," and name that predecessor.

Townes

Actually, I think officially I was asked by the foreign secretary for the Academy of Sciences. But I also talked with the president of the Academy about it to see what he thought, and he encouraged me to do it, and I talked with various other people who had been on the committee. They badly needed a prominent scientist at that time to do it, who had some administrative skill, and I felt it was of value and of interest. I thought it would be interesting to see what China was like at that point and get some contact with them. So I agreed to do that.

Riess

How did you work as chairman?

Townes

Again, I think the point about the scientific role is that for the scientific part of it you generally would require a good scientist. Nobody else can do that, really. Everybody recognizes that you need a good scientist to do that sort of thing. One doesn't pretend to know science unless you are a scientist. Now, the administrative and cultural part of it might well be done by someone of a different background.

But while I was not a Chinese scholar by any means, they needed it headed by a scientist to really get the attention of the Chinese, and the interest of the Chinese, and where could they find a scientist that really know much about China? I was one of many that didn't know much about China, but on the other hand I was broadly interested in cultural matters, and I guess they felt I could work with the humanists. I don't speak Chinese, but we had staff members who spoke Chinese and knew the cultural history of China well. Also we had members of the committee who spoke Chinese and who again knew the cultural history of China quite well. So they helped me out in those directions. But a lot of the job was to try to help them out in making contact with the Chinese, and give to them a prestige in China which was needed because the Chinese wanted science.

Riess

So it is ambassadorial.

Townes

That's right.

Riess

I mean, not to trivialize it, but it honors China to have you there.

Townes

Yes, and they would pay more attention because they wanted to get American science, and they were going to pay more attention to a prominent scientist, you see.

So then I went over to make speeches of various kinds, congratulatory and warm speeches and all that, and negotiate with them. We had to negotiate on arrangements, and things were a bit touchy as to what they would accept, where they would let us go, what they would let us see and so on. I would be sensitive to the needs of the humanities which was, I felt, a much more important part of our job at that time, so I of course used the advice of the humanities people on the committee and our staff.

Riess

When you talk about making congratulatory and warm speeches, are you saying that ironically?

Townes

No.

Riess

No.

Townes

No. It is just that with the Chinese, as with most similar diplomatic things, there are lots of dinners and parties and speeches trying to say nice things and warm people up and encourage them to be open and so on.

Riess

Did you have advisors, China experts who were telling you, cluing you in as to what the nuances of things were?

Townes

Oh yes.

Riess

How did that function? I mean before you went over?

Townes

Well, no. It certainly happened before we went over, but we had them with us. We would meet with the State Department people, we would meet with the embassy people over there, we had people who were--there was a cultural advisor who was stationed there who travelled around with us, and then we had very good Chinese scholars on the committee, some of whom were pretty good diplomatically, some of them who weren't particularly, but they could at least give facts and advice, and of course we talked with them very carefully as we went along.

Riess

Any in particular? John Service is a person we always think of here at Berkeley as a China hand.

Townes

Let's see now, there was a very fine person at the University of Michigan, Mike Oksenberg, and a person here from Berkeley, John Jamieson. Jamieson was a representative over there in China for some time, and part of the request was that he divorced his wife in the U.S. and married a Chinese woman. [chuckles] But Jamieson spoke Chinese beautifully, and he was one of our contact people. He was later replaced by another U.C. Berkeley person, Fred Wakeman. Oksenberg, the person from Michigan who was a political scientists specializing in China, was very useful. I think he is still serving on that committee.

The first time I went to China, which was with a group of astronomers, I found Nathan Sirin, a chap from Pennsylvania who was science historian--a historian of the science of China--was especially helpful to my understanding of the Chinese. It was very helpful to have a historian of science in China because he understood the Chinese traditions and their historic contributions to science. He was terribly eager to get original documents and things like this in China, and he was very valuable. That astronomy group was a somewhat earlier visit to China. However, Sirin helped bring together the Americans' strong interest in cultural aspects of China and their interest in our science. For the committee I headed on scholarly exchanges, this balancing of interests of the two sides was quite important in the early days of our contacts.

Well, now we have gotten on this considerable digression on that particular committee. I think one other committee that ought to be mentioned is the MX committee. That was a very important committee, and I chaired two different committees on this missile and its deployment. That came some time later, after I came out to Berkeley. And the other committee that we ought to discuss is the arms control group that worked with the Soviet Union.

---

---

18. XVIII Disarmament Work

Stowe Conference, 1961, and Pugwash

Riess

"Townes stayed with IDA until September, 1961, when he took part in a disarmament conference at Stowe, Vermont."16 Now, that sounds like a bit of a non sequitur.

Townes

Yes, that is a non sequitur. [laughter]

Riess

I would like an explanation of what happened there.

Townes

Well, the two are not connected. I signed up to be there two years, and I was definitely going to go back to academic life. Now, there was a conference in Stowe, Vermont, which was interesting and of some importance. It was very early in the discussions between scientists in the Soviet Union and the United States about disarmament problems. It was quite early in the stage of that development which has, I think, now paid off very handsomely.

People were meeting with the Soviets, and there was a first meeting with them over in the Soviet Union. I had planned to go to that when I learned that people in the Pentagon were objecting and it appeared likely they would jump on IDA for having somebody who would go to the Soviet Union just because this looked like I was sympathetic with the Soviet Union or something like this, you see. So, after talking with Garry Norton and thinking about it, I decided as much as I felt it was important and I would like to go, that I shouldn't go to that meeting, which I didn't. Now that might seem like it had something to do with my leaving IDA, but no it didn't.

A second meeting occurred in, I think it was late summer of '61, and I did attend that, and that was in Stowe, Vermont. The Soviets came over here.

Riess

Who pulled these meetings together?

Townes

It was a group of interested scientists on both sides, but Jerry Wiesner, for example, was active in it.

Riess

This is not Pugwash, is it?

Townes

No, well, now wait a minute. No, I don't think it was really Pugwash. I will have to think about that. My memory is a little vague about the exact--. I think perhaps it was Pugwash, yes. An offshoot of Pugwash.

Riess

Pugwash was begun in 1956 by Bertrand Russell? At the Cyrus Eaton estate in Nova Scotia?

Townes

Yes, I would say Cyrus Eaton perhaps had as much responsibility for it as Bertrand Russell, but in any case it got off to that start. Pugwash itself was initially a little questionable in the minds of many Americans. Bertrand Russell had said some very acerbic things about the United States and so on, but it was basically an effort to open up a window and try to talk about things.

Now, I think this may have been a part of the Pugwash operation, but I have forgotten--I am not certain about that, I would have to find out. It was specifically on arms control, and it was specifically just between the United States and Russia. Pugwash in general has had people from all countries. Normally its meeting has people worldwide--it is an international thing--and that is what makes me think perhaps this probably was not Pugwash, but it was organized by some of the people who had been active in Pugwash.

Riess

My Pugwash information comes from a book by and about Bernard Feld.17

Townes

Bernie Feld, ah yes. Well, Bernie Feld was very active in Pugwash, and he was a friend of mine at MIT. I think he was probably at this meeting, but I don't think because it was Pugwash. I'm inclined to think this was not really Pugwash, it was a separate effort, but a number of the people who had been active in Pugwash were also active in this.

Riess

So the one that you had chosen not to go to in Russia was in a series that the second one then was in Stowe.

Townes

The second one was in Stowe, that's right. And we had interesting people there, but they were just American and Russians, Americans and Soviet citizens. Robert Frost was there, for example. He was interested and he came.

Riess

He had been invited?

Townes

Yes. He had expressed some interest and so he came. We felt generally it was good to have prominent Americans that were broadminded in various kinds of disciplines, and Robert Frost was a notable character, so we thought that would be interesting both for Americans and the Soviets to be there with him. He added a little bit. He didn't have all that much to say, but it was interesting to meet him and talk with him.

Riess

Can you think of any others?

Townes

Well, most of the others were prominent American scientists. Paul Doty from Harvard, a chemist who was active in that field and, I believe, in Pugwash, too. He was certainly there. I remember him very well. We had some important discussions with him. Jerry Wiesner was very active in that. I don't remember specifically Bernie Feld, but he likely was there.

Riess

So the issue was disarmament rather than a kind of more fuzzy edged thing about peace?

Townes

No, no. It was very specifically looking for ways of producing disarmament and how to--. It was peace in general, yes, but it was focussed on disarmament.

The Russian Team at Stowe

Townes

Now, that was a tremendously interesting conference from the point of view of how the Russians had to behave, and what could and couldn't be said and the tensions which were there. The Russians were eager to send over prominent people, too, to sort of compete with the Americans. If we had prominent people there, they wanted to have notable people, too. So they sent over some of their best scientists, including some that I think they wouldn't otherwise have probably let get out of the country.

Let's see, there was a physical theorist, Nikolai Bogoliubov, who came over with his wife. And we had a Russian-born interpreter, I believe from Washington, a woman interpreter, to help us out with the conference. She was in the office there, and also this gentleman, who was a very, very well known theorist and a person who had come up from nothing--he was just so brilliant that somebody recognized that and he got to university. My memory is that he was an orphan, and was recognized for his brilliance, and he got to a university and became very prominent. Well, he had walked into the office, and I happened to be there, and this woman was in the office and she knew him. It turned out she had been a friend of his in college days, back in the Soviet Union. She tried to speak to him. He refused to respond, turned his back, and left.

Bogoliubov had come over with his wife--she was sent over with him, which was somewhat unusual--and we felt his wife was supposed to be looking out for him and seeing that he didn't do anything unwise. The interpreter told me that during his student days he was somewhat radical. That is, he didn't agree with the authorities completely, and as a young student he made a few outspoken remarks, and she felt sure that he didn't want anybody to know or think or be reminded about those days--that was the problem. He didn't want to have anything to do with her or have any discussion of those earlier days when he was a student, he just couldn't afford to. So he walked out, and he carefully avoided her all of the rest of the conference, although she was an important translator and official there and an old friend, she said.

Riess

He was very highly placed yet still couldn't risk it.

Townes

That is quite right. Let's see. As I remember, Basov certainly was there, and I think Prokhorov may also have been there. Another person, Igor Tamm, a very famous theorist there and a very fine person. Tamm was one of those people that you really could sense was trying to be as open as possible, and he was trying to do things right and trying to be honest. He was there. Then a chemist whom I knew quite well and thought highly of.

After they got there the first night, the Russians went out in the woods to talk among themselves. They carefully were avoiding, you see, any possibility of a secret microphone or anything. They went out in the woods to talk among themselves about just what they were going to say and how they were going to say it and so on. They assigned this chemist, who was a very non-political person and a very honorable person, they assigned this chemist to give sort of the primary speech, which was a very tough speech and rather false. I talked with him afterwards. It was clear that he was quite upset about having to say the things that he had to say. But they got him, as sort of one of the most honorable people, to make this official speech to help give it credence, and it clearly hurt him.

Paul Doty gave a talk on the American side. Paul was very active in the arms control business, and I think very, very well intentioned. He, in turn, made a speech which I thought had some things in it which were not erroneous, but a little too strong, about our going into a fiery pit and so on.

Riess

Fiery--

Townes

Fiery pit. And about how the Russians had behaved and so on--.

Oh yes, I haven't yet said just why there was a crisis atmosphere. The Soviet Union had been against any further testing of nuclear weapons. I believe this was something that they were urging, and the United States was not accepting that. This conference was all arranged, the people were on their way over to the United States, when the Soviet Union released an enormous nuclear blast in the atmosphere. I think perhaps the biggest one that has ever been. It was maybe ten megatons of blast into the atmosphere. An enormous explosion. The people who were on their way, coming over to the United States--I remember now, I sort of sounded them out--they were all prepared to talk about restraint on any nuclear testing and so on, and suddenly the Soviet Union had tested the biggest bomb ever as they were on their way over here. And it was that which then made them feel they had to consult, and they went out in the woods to talk about what in the world could they say.

So they put together something, but were simply not informed. Now, in the United States, even though our scientists might be opposed to the government, they would be much better informed about what is going on. The Russians were simply absolutely not informed, so they had to decide what could they say now. All of their plans, what they were going to press on and so on, were completely upset by this. So that was part of the tension and the reason they had to disappear. And they disappeared [chuckles] sort of one by one from the lodge where they were saying. I happened to be sitting on the porch. They would come by one by one in periods of three or four minutes separated, so they were supposed to be unobservable. [laughter]

Riess

Whistling with their hands in their pockets.

Townes

Nobody was supposed to notice they were disappearing when they went out in the woods to talk it over.

Now, that is just a little picture of the kind of problems and tensions that there were, and yet there were genuine efforts to try to solve the problem. Soviet scientists were in a very difficult position, and some of them had to and were willing to say things which were not so. This is why they are enormously relieved now that they can think and speak as they want to and they can be honest and truthful. Whereas previously, they just were restrained.

It all comes back to me now. That big explosion was sort of an entrance into our conference on the control of nuclear weapons, and a complete surprise to everyone, including the Soviet representatives.

Riess

Apropos of that, Feld makes a remark that he believes Soviet scientists had more access to their leaders than scientists do in the U.S. because of what he says is the Soviet Union's "mystical belief that technology can solve all problems." If this is true, you would think that the power balance would be a little more on the side of the scientists, that they wouldn't be left out in the cold in a situation like this, that in fact they would be consulted on strategy. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Townes

Well, I think that statement has some truth in it, but I think it is quite misleading. I would say, in the '60s, the U.S. scientific community had great access to government.

Riess

Ours?

Townes

Ours did in the United States. The President's Science Advisory Committee had very good access to the White House, and science advisors saw the president regularly, and the committee met with him on some occasions and made reports to him and so on. So that scientists were very much listened to. The United States also was worried about its scientific and technical position and feeling that it was very important.

In the Soviet Union, some--. Certainly the Soviet Union emphasized science and technology. And some scientists and technologists had access to government; many others didn't at all. Some of them were on the inside, and many others were not on the inside, so there was not a free and easy conversation around the scientific community at all. Science was highly regarded in the Soviet Union, but most scientists were not in on policy matters at all, I believe.

Information was also very much compartmentalized. The Russian scientists allowed to discuss arms control or other policy matters at such meetings as Pugwash or others were basically government representatives and represented government policy so they were somewhat close to the government. American scientists at Pugwash were on their own--often ones who were against U.S. policy or others who wanted to participate in international affairs but had not been called on for much committee work by the U.S. Perhaps this led to Feld's view.

Now, I think in recent years when Gorbachev was making all of these changes, he personally took a different approach. I had something of a visit with him--he personally said, "Well, I rely on the scientific and intellectual community a great deal because they, we think, understand the west better than most of us, so they give me lots of ideas and I get their advice," and so on. That has decreased recently. The scientists began to differ with Gorbachev more, and in addition I think it is a very natural thing--it has happened in this country, too--that when there is a crisis involving something scientific or technological and the military, then the scientists get called in and they are close to the administration. But then, after a while, people think they have too much power, and other people come in and the politicians think, "The scientists don't always agree with us and they may be undercutting us in the newspapers or something, and we have got to be careful." So they tend to go away from the scientists and isolate them more.

Riess

That is really very interesting. It is like the counsels of biblical days when you would bring in your sort of necromancers and so long as they were giving you the--

Townes

So long as they were telling you the things you wanted to hear.

Riess

That's right. Feld also says that Americans in general, and probably the government would reflect this, have a breakthrough mentality, that they get very excited and turned on and willing to go pretty far with something new.

Townes

Whatever direction seems important at the time, yes. That's quite right.

Riess

In a New Yorker article on arms control efforts in the '60s, [David] Lang said something kind of that I thought you might respond to, that "scientists were brought in as `answer men', with a sense of method and data and an aversion to politicking," that the diplomats were disappointed when scientists kept offering new data and changing their minds. A physicist told Lang, "It's in the nature of science to guess. It doesn't matter if you guess wrong." And this was a very disturbing notion.

Townes

It doesn't matter if you guess wrong?

Riess

"It is in the nature of science to guess," and the politicians want the scientists to guess correctly all of the time.

Townes

Yes. They want a firm answer they can just go ahead and work with, rather than something that is changing. It is in the nature of science to have to recognize when you are wrong, and hence to change. But I wouldn't characterize it as guessing.

Riess

So I should think that this would be a kind of stumbling block for a good working relationship.

Townes

Well, perhaps. I am not so much impressed with that being the stumbling block as by a different set of things. If you look at the President's Science Advisory Committee, which really got going under Eisenhower, the scientists came in with a great sense of idealism and devotion to try to help the president make the right decisions and do the right thing, and they worked very hard. They took a lot of time in Washington, many days, working on reports and examining things. They were very conscientious about the fact that they were advising the president. They leaked nothing out to the newspapers and they were very careful, which is not typical of Washington, after all. And the president trusted them a great deal and they really were devoted to the job.

More Thoughts on the President's Science Advisors, and the Breakdown of the System

Townes

Now, I think two things broke down that system: one that the scientists then had so much influence that after a few years other people in other fields, as well as government employees, felt well, why should they be so influential? Why shouldn't the economists, why shouldn't the social scientists, why shouldn't the various other officers of government have similar influence, too? Scientists were in there by some sort of special grace that had been given to them, and they really don't belong. They shouldn't have that much power. That was one natural outcome.

A second one was that scientists made a rule at that time not to be political either against the president and the government or for it. So the government could not ask them to give speeches or say things that would be favorable, politically. And that was a nuisance to the politicians. Here were these people working with them and trying to help them and so on, but they wouldn't go out and make a nice speech at some place about how well the government was doing.

Riess

Was this a policy of the AAAS?

Townes

No, this was a policy of the scientists in that group [President's Science Advisory Council]. That was sort of the stated policy, that we are not here to do politics, we are here to give scientific and technical advice the best we can and we stay out of politics. That meant that people who were either Democratic or Republican could feel comfortable, you see. They were trying to help the government and they weren't supporting any one particular party.

That troubled the politicians, and eventually Lee Du Bridge, who was the science advisor to Nixon, was the first to go on the political stump and make some speeches--pro-Nixon speeches. That was a beginning of a breakdown or change of the system, anyhow. He obviously is a very fine person and he decided it was the thing to do. He was science advisor to the president, so why shouldn't he speak supporting the president? Well, the earlier science advisors never did that.

Riess

Supporting the president, not the president's policy, but the president?

Townes

Well, the president's policy.

Riess

Reelect this man because he is going to--

Townes

Well, the president's policy, but it was primarily for political support.

Now, the other thing that happened is the scientists began to get a little careless and speak in public on subjects which they had been asked to consider by the White House. Some even testified in Congress and talked to newspapers about subjects they felt very strongly about, and they felt the administration wasn't doing right, and yet they were things which they had been asked to consider and they had inside information. Their excuse for that was that what they said wasn't based on any inside information, it was what they would knew anyhow, so why shouldn't they say it? But, of course, to the political powers, for people who were known as their advisors to come out against what the White House was doing was very damaging and offensive. How can you be trusted friends if you are going to attack somebody in public? So that was another part of the breakdown.

There were a number of reasons why eventually the system broke down and became ineffective.

Riess

Did you get caught up in this?

Townes

No, I never spoke. I have always been very careful about speaking to the press. I am not a person that is particularly interested in talking to the public, to the press especially. No, I wasn't involved in that myself, and only a few people were, but it was some very outspoken people who felt strongly.

Riess

So it wouldn't be without attribution. Their names would be attached.

Townes

Oh yes, their names were attached, but on the other hand, it was known that they were on the science advisory committee to the president, and so they had inside information, and they knew the president's reasons and their reasons, and they had advised the president, and here they came out opposing what the president wishes.

Riess

Were there a group of consultants to the President's Science Advisory Committee who were not named? In other words, deep consultants who were not on any roster?

Townes

I think essentially not. Of course, there were people in the CIA whose connections with the CIA were not known and so on, but in terms of the real general advice the president got, those people were all known. It was quite open. There were people called in to serve on committees who weren't on the main committee, and that was public information, generally. There would be some secret things, where the meetings--the existence of the meetings--would be secret, dealing with particularly sensitive things, but they would be the same people, generally, operating in other spheres. So it was public.

Riess

Did you say the existence of the meeting would be secret?

Townes

The existence of any meeting on that topic would be covert.

Riess

It is so hard, isn't it? I mean, when you talk about this disarmament meeting in Stowe, the rhetoric gets so much in the way of what people must universally have felt, I am assuming, that disarmament was the way to go and be willing to make concessions. But you can't make concessions publicly.

Townes

Well, see, one of the problems for the Soviets is that any Soviet citizen at that time, if he said something, that was thought to represent the Soviet Union. In the United States, an individual scientist doesn't represent the United States, and he is much freer to say what he thinks. On the other hand, if he is an advisor to the White House and says something, then it is presumed that he is speaking with some authority and considerable knowledge, and hence he is strongly connected to our policy. An individual scientist in the United States can say pretty much what he wants to say. If he says a lot of procommunist things at that time, then he is not likely to be called on by the government for advice, but on the other hand, he is not persecuted. He can go his own way as a private citizen.

But the Soviets would simply be complete outcasts and maybe even put in prison if they said something that they weren't supposed to say at that time. And here are all of these people who came over all primed to talk about the importance of having no more nuclear tests, and suddenly the Soviet Union had made the biggest test of all, and they had to completely reverse themselves and say this was justified, it was the right thing to do and so on, and that we forced them to do it and they had to do it and that it was the right thing for the Soviet Union to do.

Riess

It sounds a little like the U-2 incident on our side, too. I've forgotten exactly when that was, but didn't that kind of throw a monkey-wrench into--

Townes

Into relations? Yes it did, but that was a very different situation in that I don't think any scientist was called on to make misstatements about it.

19. XIX Massachusetts Institute of Technology----MIT, 1961-1966

Townes' Interest in the Job--Provost, and Professor of Physics

Riess

Well, so that is our introduction to your going to MIT. What were the steps in moving from IDA to MIT?

Townes

Well, basically, Jim Killian, who was chairman of the board of MIT, and had been president, was also chairman of the board of IDA, I believe--he was on the board, and my memory is that he was chairman.

 

Townes

I guess he was reasonably impressed, and MIT was looking for additional leadership. The president then was Julius Stratton and I believe it was Stratton who first approached me. It might have been Jim Killian, but both of them talked with me about coming to MIT to serve as provost, saying they needed additional scientific leadership there. This would be a position right under the president and working with the president. Would I come?

Well, that was not an easy decision for me because it meant giving up concentration on scientific work directly and becoming an administrator. I had been an administrator in Washington for a couple of years, and I am frankly not thrilled by administration, I don't find it objectionable, I just prefer to do science.

My reasoning on MIT was something which maybe was a little presumptuous, but I had always felt that MIT really needed some changes. I had been approached about other administrative jobs in academic life before, and always turned them down on the basis that there was no special reason that I should do it; there were other people who could do that. But I felt that MIT was different, and being a technical school specifically, it needed a scientist. I felt it had gone rather too far towards industrial work and engineering with some neglect of science, and they needed to build up their science more and thereby change the nature of their engineering, too. It needed a technical person to head it.

Riess

Had you had conversations of this nature with Killian the year before?

Townes

No, I had not, I had not. I might have said something about ways MIT might improve itself, I might have done that, but I don't think I had any particular long conversation with him about it. Even then, I would not approach them saying, "Well, look, MIT isn't doing really very well and I think it needs changes and hence I am going to come." I wouldn't tell them that because after all they had been running it and in some sense doing a very good job--it was a notable place. But I felt it needed changes and they clearly felt it needed a stronger scientific cast.

So it was on that basis that I agreed to go. As I say, I have before and after turned down other high academic positions, just because I felt that what was the point in my doing it? There are other people who can do it, and in a general university I wouldn't be particularly interested. But MIT I felt both needed some changes and it needed a technical person.

Riess

Was this a position that had been newly created, to be in charge of research and the teaching program?

Townes

Let me see. I think perhaps they did not have a provost before, but I may be mistaken. Possibly Julius Stratton was provost while Killian was president. That is likely true.

Riess

Oh yes. Actually, I think that's what I have read, too. Each one moved.

Townes

Yes. I think he was probably provost while Killian was president, and Killian moved up to chairman of the board and Stratton became president. So I think they had had that post before. It is a natural post within a university. It is sort of a vice president of academic affairs, really.

Riess

Otherwise you would have gone back to Columbia?

Townes

Otherwise I would have gone back to Columbia, yes. That is what I had planned to do, and this sort of came up in the summer sometime. In late summer they approached me about doing this. So I agreed to do it, and we moved to MIT. I worked at that for five years.

Substantial Changes to be Made

Faculty Positions in Industry

Riess

Did you change the organization structurally, or how did you work as an administrator?

Townes

Well, I didn't make overt drastic changes, no. But I did make some substantial changes. And the engineers clearly were not enthusiastic [laughs] about my doing it, and the industrial people were not enthusiastic about it.

For example, I felt that as head of the academic program I should not have a particular connection with an industrial company. I had mentioned that Perkin Elmer approached me about being on the board and I said, "Well, no. I think in principle I really shouldn't do that because I have to stay above the possibility of any kind of favoritism to any particular company, any special connection. I've got to serve all companies equally."

I found out later that some of the industrialists on the MIT board very much objected to the fact that I had never been connected with any industrial company this way. I obviously "didn't care for them" because I hadn't gotten connected, you see. But I felt this avoidance of conflict of interest was important.

We also put in a rule that nobody on the full-time faculty should also have an operational position in an industrial company at the same time. That is, they couldn't be president of a company and professor of physics engineering at the same time. Now, many people had done that in the past--

Riess

Because all of those Route 128 companies were already beginning up there?

Townes

Yes, many of them were there, and they were quite important, but what was happening was that I felt the academic program was sort of getting sold out to industry. People weren't paying much attention to the academic program per se. They were putting all of their energies into the company, because their private fortunes were invested in them and many times they made a lot of money on it. So the president of a company, if he has a problem in his company, that is the thing which is going to have first call on his time. While I felt it was all right for professors to be connected with companies, do consulting, be on boards and so on, they should not have an operational position which made a daily call on them.

That was objected to strongly by some of the engineers, but overall the faculty agreed that that was a wise thing to do, and they put it in. But that was a real change for them.

Riess

I would imagine. The academic senate debated these things?

Townes

Yes, that's right.

Riess

Did it become very uncomfortable?

Townes

Oh, I wouldn't say very uncomfortable. [laughs]

Riess

Did the students take a stand on it? Students here always take a stand on things.

Townes

No the students did not take a stand on it. At that time MIT was, in a sense, a very happy place, in that the administration and the faculty got along well together, and the students accepted the faculty and the administration, and everything was on a very friendly relations basis. No enormous pressures and no demonstrations and so on. It was a very happy place, I would say, at that time. Certainly up until the time that I left MIT.

The crisis that broke out here in Berkeley didn't reach MIT until sometime later. After I had left, the new president Howard Johnson felt himself attacked. Somebody, I think, broke the door to his office, and he secretly moved his family away from the campus because he was afraid for his family. So it became rather tense afterwards. The movement arrived at MIT, but rather late. While I was there, it was a very friendly atmosphere in general. That didn't mean that people didn't disagree with each other, but there were no great movements and causes and so on, and feeling of basic distrust.

Riess

Well, I would say that your decision was only good for the student body anyway.

Townes

Oh, I think the students were probably generally pleased about this, but they weren't active on the question.

Now, there were a variety of other things. For example, we had a big program sponsored, I guess, largely by the government on material science. Now material science is partly engineering, partly science. The engineers were very eager to control that program, and I felt, at the time, that solid state physics and material sciences were most critical at that particular stage of development. Much of the new information was coming from the basic sciences, and then moving over into engineering. Hence it would be better to have a solid state physicist heading the program. Again, the engineers were a little miffed about that, that there was a scientist that was heading this rather than an engineer, you see.

The engineering school is very strong at MIT.

Material Sciences Department

Riess

What is material science? Do we have that here at Berkeley?

Townes

Oh yes. We have a separate department of material sciences, but we also do material science work in the physics department. It is the study of the properties of materials, and how to control them, and what makes materials the way they are, and how you make materials, what are their properties, trying to understand them. Semiconductors, for example, came out of this field. Semiconductors would be one of them, metallurgy would be another.

So in trying to make these changes, there was clearly some antipathy, and in addition I was something of an outsider--I had never been at MIT before--and there is a great loyalty there naturally, as there is at any school. So I had come in from the outside and was making these changes. That was very popular with some people [laughter], but not so popular particularly with the engineers and businessmen, I'd say.

Riess

Did you have a counsel you worked with?

Townes

Well, the school was run by an academic council which was the president, the provost, and all of the deans, and there were about five deans of different fields and schools. We met regularly and had long discussions and tried to make all decisions there jointly in the council.

Riess

So you would say, "Look, this is what I would like to do." And you would meet most of the argument there.

Townes

Yes, and generally the logic of the situation meant that I could prevail, plus also my position, but that wasn't so critical. In terms of a vote of the council, these things were all passed on, you see.

Nevertheless, there was strong feeling on the part of the dean of engineering and at times he really disagreed. So while it was done in a democratic way and when it came to discussing it and looking at the arguments pro and con, most people were convinced, nevertheless, it was a weakening of the position of the engineers as they saw it. So that was a continual difficulty. On the other hand, I felt it was something that was quite important in the long run, to make some metamorphosis of the character of MIT. Not that engineering should be weakened in any sense, but rather there ought to be a broader outlook, and we ought to strengthen the basic sciences, and it ought to be a university in its own right rather than simply a kind of a service to industry.

Now that is an extreme statement. It, of course was a university in its own right, but I felt it was bending over a little too far to do what industrial people wanted them to do.

Riess

Did some top physicists come in during your time there?

Townes

Well, we got a number of very good people in the sciences and in engineering.

Riess

I should think that with your influence it would have become more attractive to some of the fine physicists.

Townes

Yes, I think that is true. On the other hand, it still was not especially more attractive than many other universities which already were much purer, let's say. I wasn't trying to make MIT pure in the sense of just being scientific or just being scholastic, but rather to modify the ethos a bit in the direction of having more science.

I didn't believe in taking sudden, drastic action. I felt that it was better to try to modify things gradually, and try to get people to agree. So most of these changes were not all that drastic.

MIT and Washington

Riess

There are a number of connections between MIT and Washington, Compton, Wiesner, and you. You refused to have a connection with Perkin Elmer, but you had any number of connections with Washington during that period.

Townes

Yes. Actually, I bowed out of some of them just because I was too busy. But nevertheless, I felt that connections with Washington were okay. That was central government. Advising Washington was all right. I guess perhaps my most important role at that time was being chairman of the Apollo committee--Apollo advisory committee. I was somewhat less active then, actually, because I was so busy with administrative work at MIT.

Riess

May I run through the group that is contiguous with your MIT time and see what you would say about them? Two NASA committees: the NASA Advisory Committee on the Manned Space Program from '64 to '70 and the NASA Ad Hoc Science Advisory Committee at about the same time.

Townes

The ad hoc science committee I don't remember and I suspect it was probably not a very important one. The Apollo committee was important and I was quite active on that.

What else in there?

Editorial Board, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Riess

The Board of Directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. That is interesting to me.

Townes

Ah yes.

Riess

What does that mean to physicists? The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists?

Townes

Well, you know the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, do you?

Riess

I am thinking of the clock ticking towards doomsday.

Townes

It has that on its front cover. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was formed after the war--the Organization of Atomic Scientists and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists--largely by people who had worked on nuclear weapons. The feeling [was] that they had to educate the public and worry about policy, and try to see that the nuclear weapons were not unwisely used. It was a group of generally pretty competent people. It differed with government some, but not in a raucous way, and it was sort of a public information source. A number of very competent people wrote articles in it. I was simply asked to be on the board to supervise its general policy and style and so on, and I felt that was worthwhile.

Riess

Was the distribution to the general public? They were very much in touch with the media, it seems to me, because they are often quoted.

Townes

It was a magazine which they tried to distribute generally, and it had a fairly wide circulation. But articles written in the magazine then were certainly presented to the press and the press would use them and quote them.

The Organization of Atomic Scientists themselves, the organization that backed the Bulletin, did sometimes make ad lib interviews--some of the officers would make ad lib interviews with the newspapers. And they were sometimes pretty critical of the government.

Riess

Was [Leo] Szilard associated with it?

Townes

Szilard was associated with it, yes.

Riess

And Teller not?

Townes

I think Teller might have been associated with it initially. He wasn't at that period.

Riess

Were your board of directors meetings ever hot and heavy?

Townes

No, I wouldn't say so.

Riess

But the organization itself might be the place where there would be conflict?

Townes

Yes, the organization meetings might have more politically oriented debates.

The whole organization I think was looked on with a little suspicion by government, but not by scientists. Most scientists were fairly sympathetic with what they were doing, or trying to do, and felt that they were mostly speaking the truth. On the board would be people with whom I differed politically on certain kinds of issues. Their leanings would be different from my leanings. But on the other hand, we could always come together as to just what really ought to be done as a representation of the community; we agreed on what the Bulletin should do. So I would say there were no enormous hot debates.

Riess

Would there be someone who would report in the Bulletin on the annual Pugwash meetings?

Townes

Sure. There would be reports of that type.

Trusteeships: RAND, Salk Institute, and Carnegie Institute

Riess

Your trusteeships: RAND, Carnegie and the Salk Institute.

Townes

Oh yes. Well, actually, those I did in part because of MIT. Julius Stratton--I called him Jay--had been on the board at RAND, and he asked me if I would mind serving on the board at RAND. He felt it would be useful. RAND, again, is in a sense a public institution, not a private one. It is a nonprofit, it works for the government. He felt it would be a useful thing to do and kind of urged me to do it, and so I decided, okay I will serve on the board there.

The Salk Institute I served on because it was very active in the forefront of biology at that time. We had a good biology department at MIT, but I wanted to learn more and see more about biology myself. Jay Stratton and others felt it was a good idea for me to have the contact and sort of see good biology and what people were doing. The same was true for RAND, that it was partly an education for me, to have broader contacts and be able to judge MIT properly by seeing how they were doing. Salk asked me to serve on the board, and I felt it would be a useful function, and again it is a nonprofit organization. The Salk Institute is not a money-making organization, it is a nonprofit research organization. So I felt that would be useful and I served there.

Riess

What did you accomplish? How did you impact Salk?

Townes

Salk, at that time, turned out to be in some turmoil. Jonas Salk himself was not a particularly good administrator. He was a very original person, and he liked to do things his own way. He was interested in art and public impressions, but he was using up a whale of a lot of money, and the chairman of the board was somewhat antipathetic to him and to that general approach. The chairman of the board was an engineer, Gus Kinzel, I knew him well--and he had asked me to come on board.

Some of the board members--I think they all recognized Salk's strengths and weaknesses, but some of them were much more sympathetic to his point of view than others, so there was a real division on the board and a division within the Salk Institute, too, among the scientists who regarded Salk as again an interesting person, but not a top scientist really. He had done something that was important, but he was a kind of developer of medical ideas rather than a basic scientist and he had got together a group of very good basic scientists there. They had some problems, too, with the administration and how the institution was running.

It was a good exercise in trying to sort things out administratively and a good chance to get acquainted with the biological sciences there and the biological scientists. It was an interesting term, but I found that it was taking a good deal of time and after--I don't know just when I left--but after giving up my administrative job at MIT, I felt there was no point in my taking extra time to do that also, so I resigned.

Riess

That was in 1968. RAND you resigned from in 1970. And Carnegie you are still on.

Townes

Yes, well, actually [laughs] Vannevar Bush asked me to serve on that. Now Vannevar Bush had, before Killian, been chairman of the board of MIT. He was head of Carnegie at one time--he was president of Carnegie Institute of Washington.

Carnegie is a nonprofit scientifically-oriented research institution. It does a lot of astronomy. It has been very important in astronomical work, it runs Mt. Wilson--or rather it has in the past, it has recently given it up and it is trying right now to make new arrangements for Mt. Wilson--well that's important to my present research. So it is both a nice scientific institution and not a lot of trouble in that it has generally been well run, and it is also rather directly connected with some of my own personal interests, so I've continued with it.

In some sense, those were opportunities for me to see other administrations in the scientific field in operation, and see how they were doing, and be in contact with another organization which was not competitive with MIT in any kind of sense but kind of parallel. Van Bush asked me particularly would I be willing to serve on the Carnegie board. He was eager to get me on the board.

Riess

What did he want of you? I mean, I can understand what you could get out of this relationship.

Townes

I think he felt it would be useful for me to be on the board. It would be helpful to the board, and he was interested in Carnegie, and he was also interested in MIT.

Riess

It wasn't that he was interested in the fact that you have other connections in Washington?

Townes

No, I think he mainly wanted to help out Carnegie at that time. I think that was his primary thought. But he was also an old MIT hand and obviously he felt it was a good thing, and I felt it would be a useful sort of connection to see what other boards are doing, and I agreed to serve. I still serve on Carnegie. I think it is a useful function, and I still serve on the board there. It is kind of a lifetime appointment usually. Unless you resign, they continue to reappoint you.

Riess

Did it get to be kind of fun?

Townes

I would say interesting. I have no objection to that, I find it interesting, and I like to talk with other people in other fields, other administrators. Many of these boards had very prominent people on them in various walks of life, and that is an interesting connection, too. On the other hand, if you say "fun," for me I don't exactly consider it fun.

Riess

Well, fun was probably not the right word. I mean the kind of pleasure of being where it is "happening", making connections and meeting one group of people and another.

Townes

Sure, that's true. That is interesting, and some might even say fascinating at times. Sometimes a little trying when there are squabbles and so on. But again, if I were to choose what I were going to do, say, that is not what I would choose as a first priority. I would like to do some of that because I like to do a variety of things, so I would like to do some of that. But I wouldn't find it terribly refreshing to spend full-time at it.

Riess

But you found that you were good at it?

Townes

Well, I guess I was reasonably good at it, yes.

Riess

I mean, if you hadn't been good at it--

Townes

Well, people kept asking me. [laughter]

Townes' Students, and Scientific Work at MIT

Riess

Did you keep some students going down at Columbia during this period?

Townes

No, I moved my research to MIT. I took on two students there: one of them is Ray Chiao, who is a professor here now, and the other was Elsa Garmire who is a professor down at USC. I took two students and then I had some other more senior people working with me--some post-docs, and I had a visitor from Canada, Boris Stoicheff, a very prominent scientist who spent a year with me. Then there was an electrical engineer who was already there in the department who was very much interested in what I was doing, and he and I worked together some.

I felt on one hand I wanted to keep in touch with my own science, and on the other hand I also felt it was important for me to understand how MIT worked and to be down in the department, so to speak, and working with students so I could see how it worked from down below. In fact, I got a very different view from down below than from up above. The things that the deans were saying about what was happening were not what the students were saying about what was happening at all. Or the professors even. So it was helpful in that respect. But it also allowed me to keep my hand in science, which I enjoy doing, and was somewhat of a change and refreshment and so on.

Riess

What were you working on at that point?

Townes

I suppose the best way of characterizing it would be to say non-linear optics. We were in the early stages of non-linear optics. I was working on non-linear optics, and various new effects that were being found there. I had also invited Ali Javan, who had been at Bell Telephone Laboratories, to come to MIT as a professor, and the physics department accepted that. He was one of the creators of the laser, and he was a former student of mine at Columbia. He and I worked together also there. So it was quite a group working, and I could come and go and do little parts of it when I had time, and that kept me busy, and I did some moderately important work in non-linear optics at that time.

Riess

You also during that period were on a couple of other committees I haven't asked you about: the American Physical Society Panel on Strategic Weapons.

Townes

Yes. The American Physical Society decided to study the problem and make a report on the problem and they asked me to participate in that because of my background at that time. It was not a very big job.

Digressions

Freeman Dyson

Riess

I wrote a note to myself to ask you whether you knew Freeman Dyson. I read a book about him and his son, a really quite wonderful book by Kenneth Brower, called The Starship and the Canoe. Wasn't Freeman Dyson a very, very strong advocate of the space program?

Townes

Yes, he has been.

Riess

Have you worked with him?

Townes

I have known Freeman well for a long time, and he was one of the initial members of the Jason group. At that time, he was thinking about various kinds of space problems and so on. He and I have talked a great deal. He is not a committee member type. He is a researcher [laughs], very original. What he does, he does in his own way. So I think he has never served on--.

 

Townes

Freeman is a most unusual and enjoyable person. When I say enjoyable, enjoyable on an intellectual basis, and he can be quite witty. But he is very different and most people would sort of not feel comfortable, not feel particularly chummy with him, let me say, because he is so different. Now, his son--actually, I admire Freeman for what he did with his son. His son was really somebody who revolted and went off on his own, and Freeman tolerated that and worked with the situation and tried to help him out and make contact, and he succeeded, I think.

Riess

It is a well-known story, apparently?

Townes

I don't know how well known it is. I have met the son at various times, and I know about it, but I don't know how well known it is. I think it was really a '60s kind of problem of a young person who wanted to chuck over all of the old values and do something different and separate from his family and so on.

I think Freeman did a wonderful job in making contact with his son.

Astronomy, Harvard

Riess

During that period you were also on the visiting committee for the department of astronomy at Harvard. Was this a way of beginning to spend more time with something that was an interest of yours?

Townes

I am trying to remember. Let's see. I had known Leo Goldberg for a long time, and he was head of the department then. We had served on some committees together. He was on, in fact, the Apollo committee with me. I had picked him to be on the Apollo committee, and he was very helpful. So we had had a long acquaintance, and I think he asked me to do that to try to give some additional input and insight into astronomy, a different point of view. I have always been somewhat interested in astronomy and felt it would be an interesting thing to do. Again, to sort of see what another group was doing and thereby get acquainted with astronomy. So I think Leo asked me to do that, I am quite sure that is the case, and I agreed. It wasn't a very time-consuming thing.

Riess

It sounds like whether Killian knew it or not, he really picked someone who came in and made changes. Surely he must have known that this was what he was going to get when he picked you, I mean after you have said what you have said.

Townes

I suppose. But I think at that time they felt they didn't have any strong scientific leaders there that could do administrative work. So they needed somebody, and maybe they were just desperate, which was the reason they asked me.

Government Watchdog Groups, Pugwash

Riess

Hardly that! One more quote from Bernie Feld, and then I'd like to go to the Nobel prize moment in history. Feld says in his book, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, that what was really needed--and it seems to me that a lot of the groups that you were on maybe started out as "what was really needed" and maybe they transformed themselves--he is saying that a watchdog group is needed, an outside body of scientists, with access to the facts, but no official connection, not part of the establishment, not the President's Science Advisory Committee, not the National Academy of Sciences. Has there ever been an effort to back off that one step and have a completely outside group of scientists?

Townes

Yes, I would say Pugwash did that. That is why Bernie Feld is talking about the need for that. Pugwash was of that type. It was clearly not officially connected in any way. I think, though, his statement is a little extreme. I do think one needs some objectivity, and people who are not dependent on the government or feel that they have an obligation to the government and so on. I have always felt that most academic people succeeded in doing that if they just went to Washington to serve on committees. Unless they get enamored with the idea of doing that, and want to keep on doing it, they can always just resign and come home, and they save time and get rid of a nuisance. So I think in that sense they are able to be really pretty objective. They can disagree with the government when they want to.

I think that kind of function is very important. I don't think that means that you necessarily can't work for the National Academy of Sciences. The National Academy of Sciences is really quite independent, and in our working on arms control for the National Academy of Sciences, that point was repeatedly made. We consulted with the State Department, we told the Russians, "Look, we are independent scientists. We are acting for the Academy of Sciences, not for the government. We cannot say anything officially. What we say is not official." I think the Russians eventually understood that. The State Department would talk with us and tell us their views, and what they thought was important, but again with a very clear understanding that we had no official position. We were just private individuals, and the Academy of Sciences put together a group of private individuals to try to consider the problems and speak to them. I think in many cases these groups are plenty independent enough.

Riess

That one perhaps more so than the President's Science Advisory Committee.

Townes

Yes. In the case of the President's Science Advisory Committee I would say while an individual scientist could easily resign and stop; if he completely disagreed with what the president was doing, and didn't want to do it any more, he could do that. On the other hand, he would not and should not feel free to sort of sound off about policy, because that is so likely to be misinterpreted by newspapers or anybody else as to whom he is speaking for. He does have a pretty close connection there, you see.

I think most of those people were pretty independent. Most of them are academic people, and as I say, quite ready to resign if they felt it was appropriate to resign. What happened, though, is that people who disagreed with the government usually stayed on because they felt in part it is a position of power, a way of getting their point of view over to the government. So they stayed on and began to criticize the government both internally and externally, and the external criticism was very damaging to the relationship. The President's Science Advisory Committee was certainly more official than most other committees, and had a different position.

Now Pugwash I think is useful. I think it is good to have independent groups speaking their minds and analyzing problems. I wouldn't say that the academy can't do it perfectly well and many of these committees can do it perfectly well, too.

Riess

Well, what was Pugwash's voice? Did they speak at the end of a conference as one?

Townes

Yes, they sort of tend to write a report of their findings at the end of a conference. Pugwash, I think, has done some good things. I dropped out of it after a while. I went to some Pugwash meetings and was active for a while, and then I dropped out of it because I felt there was much too much of a tendency to make statements which were not exactly untrue, but particular statements made, and other statements which weren't made, tended to always favor the communist group. The communist countries were there pushing very hard to get their statements in and they would word them in such a way that they weren't really wrong, and so people would agree with them and make that their public statement. But there was no one pushing to represent the other point of view and have some statements made which might seem to be a little bit critical of the communist group, you see.

Riess

Are you talking about the Russian communist group or the American communist group?

Townes

The Russian. No, I mean the communist world at that time. Not only the Russians, but other communist countries. I felt it became a little tainted, and a little slanted in the sense of being willing to make all of the criticisms of the United States, that were justified criticisms perhaps, but no criticisms at all of the rest of the world. While the statements weren't necessarily in themselves so bad, nevertheless overall they were not a fair representation of what a scientific group ought to be saying.

The problem for them was that if the Soviets didn't get their statements done, and people didn't agree with them, they probably wouldn't come back. And the Americans didn't feel it that necessary to support the United States or its policies, and so okay they would agree with what the Russians wanted said, and then that was it.

Riess

Well, I should think it would have gone down very badly in this country.

Townes

Well, it did in some quarters. After a time or two, I felt it was a little too much, and that I wouldn't want to be associated with them any more for a while. They continued to meet, and I would say now they are not very effective in any way. They have very diffuse reports. They are working a good deal on Third World countries, but it is also a difficult kind of subject. It doesn't attract much attention. The Pugwash group at the moment, I would say it is useful but not very visible, and not terribly important. I keep being invited to go, and I wouldn't mind going again, but I just haven't felt it was needed.

Meeting Russia's Space Program Head

Townes

Now, I think it did do some things, though. It did help open up discussions. In the early days I felt it was quite important. In one meeting I went to I met with the then head of the Russian space program, and he was a very fine person. He was an old artillery officer who, because rockets were used in artillery, was connected with rockets and became head of the space program--an artillery general, a very nice old gentleman. We worked up an agreement which was a report from that conference saying that all nations should agree to not put weapons of mass destruction in space. I brought it back to the United States, and he to the Soviet Union, and other people did as well who were there, and that was eventually agreed on not so long after. So it was kind of first broached there, and the Russians found it acceptable, and we certainly found it acceptable, and then the governments were interested enough that they made this international agreement which I think has been of some importance.

That represented a first sort of breaking the ice and beginning to be able to talk with people, and there were pretty serious talks then. I think it got more and more political as time went on and somewhat less useful.

Herbert York

Riess

Was Herbert York a part of the Jason group?

Townes

Well, Herb was at that time head of ARPA. Hence he could not be a part of the Jason group. In a sense, the Jason group was reporting to him, or through him to the Pentagon. ARPA funded the Jason group initially.

I saw a lot of Herb then, and he was an important figure, but he was not a member of the Jason group at that time. I believe since then, sometime after that, he became a member of the Jason group. After he left government, he became active in various kinds of arms control considerations, and other kinds of considerations involving governmental policy, and I think has played a very good role. I believe he is a member of Jason. I see him with the Jason group frequently, but he wasn't one of the first members.

On "Working from Within," and Academics in Government

Riess

The notion of "working from within"--I don't know whether it is still a kind of key phrase, but when I was in college, and people were making their job decisions, and they had to take jobs with the agencies or organizations they didn't wholly approve of, they always thought that they could "work from within." It seems like it is a very hard thing to do.

Townes

Well, I think if your livelihood is dependent on it, then it is difficult to put over a disagreement. It is difficult, not impossible, but difficult because you have to be careful. You can't offend you boss too much. So I think a full time employee, if he is not in general agreement with the administration, can have a hard time, and would not be able to be very successful if he is really dependent on that for a livelihood. Now, if he is ready to resign at any time, well that is different.

But this is why I have emphasized the participation of academic people. They have a job back home, and they can participate, and they can leave very easily, and in that way I think one can work from within without the pressures of having to conform. You still have to be diplomatic, anybody does in trying to persuade anybody else of something. You have to be diplomatic, and if you make a public speech against the government, saying how horrible it is, and then expect the government to ask you for advice, then you don't recognize how people work.

I generally don't talk to the press very much, and, partly because I am unwilling to make extreme statements which can produce headlines, they are not as interested in talking with me as they are with some other people. I just don't feel that extreme statements are honest. They may be persuasive, but--.

Riess

The measured statements go on the back pages.

Townes

That's right. If you make a balanced statement, it is not so exciting. I much prefer to work in that way. I don't discount the importance of people who speak out strongly against the government, who want to be disconnected from the government and so on. That can be a useful function, too. But I do think inside work of certain types is very important.

Now, sometimes it can be successful, and sometimes it isn't. When it can work then I tend to be active; if it is not working, then I just kind of retire, resign and do something else. I think perhaps I have already mentioned that the times when it works generally best is when a new government comes in. A new government, new personnel, new people. They really want advice, are ready to listen, they are trying to formulate policy, and that's the time you can be quite influential. After they are in power for a while, and you keep giving them advice, if you differ with them, they are likely to finally not pay very much attention. That's the time to drop out.

I don't know whether I mentioned the time when Nixon first came in, and I was asked to head one of his committees for study.

Riess

President-elect Nixon's Task Force on Space?

Townes

Yes. [see page ___, Interview 8.]

I was on the President's Science Advisory Committee, and Lee Du Bridge was his science advisor then. We worked with Nixon for a while, but the Vietnamese period was in and there was a good deal of tension over that, and most of the people on the committee differed with the government in terms of its policy in Vietnam, and gradually then Nixon just stopped listening, stopped using the committee.

Then, in addition, let's see, we had an issue on a jet plane that was to vie with the European jet passenger plane, the Concorde. The idea was that the government should sponsor it and have it built and so on. It was going to be a great thing for American industry and for America. The committee felt that it was not really economical. It might be an interesting thing to do, but would not pay off industrially and would not be economical. We advised the president of that. The president was still rather for it. One of the committee members then testified in Congress against it. His position was that, "I knew all this before we did any work on the President's Science Advisory Committee. I am not revealing any special information that we had, or any work that we did, I knew that already, so why can't I talk with Congress?"

I think he was absolutely wrong when the president was trying to push this. We had advised the president against it, but for him to go to Congress and tell Congress that the president was wrong when he was on the advisory committee to the president just completely undercut the president, of course. Eventually Nixon decided against it, which I think was right, and I think he would have decided against it anyhow. But that is the kind of thing that then built up tensions, and eventually the President's Science Advisory Committee was quite ineffective.

But for a short while I think it was effective. During this transition period it was fairly effective. The president was ready to listen. After his policies had become all set, and there had been enough arguments to develop some antipathy and so on, then you couldn't do anything more, and that was time to stop. That was, perhaps, a particularly marked transition, but most other cases are just the same way. You get a new group in or something new that they want to do, and they are ready to listen to advice, and that is a fruitful time. After everything is all set and they have gone along for a long time, then you can't change things very much.

PSAC Meeting with President Johnson

Riess

Were you involved then when Johnson came in?

Townes

Yes, I was. I was on the President's Science Advisory Committee then. Don Hornig was the advisor. After I stepped down at MIT, Don, whom I had known quite well, asked me to serve and I felt, well, okay I could take time to do that now. So I served under Johnson and then under Nixon on the committee.

Johnson, I think, got along with the committee pretty well even though the Vietnamese tension was there. Johnson's problem, for example with Vietnam, was he simply felt he did not know enough about military operations to differ with the Pentagon. At least, that's my analysis of it. He felt he just had to take what the generals were telling him, because he himself was not enough of an expert. How could he tell them, "No, that is the wrong procedure, that is the wrong tactics, that is the wrong thing to do."

They were arguing that we had to keep bombing North Vietnam at that time because that was the only way to keep the North Vietnamese from further infiltrating into South Vietnam; that this was a thing that was effective in stopping them from sending further troops and supplies and so on into South Vietnam, so we had to bomb them. Somehow we persuaded Johnson to let the science advisory committee try to analyze that, and so we spent some time--I was on that subcommittee--we spent some time analyzing to what extent this bombing really was checking the flow of people, personnel and materials into South Vietnam. We decided that it was not effective at all, hardly, in that respect.

Riess

Were you able to draw on military data?

Townes

Oh, yes, we had access to everything. We had access to everything, but what we concluded from it was that we differed with the military. We advised the president. The president called in the military and told them, and the president then was ready to call off the bombing because he felt he had sound technical advice and he could then overrule the military.

Actually the military--I talked with some of them later and they said, "We think you were really right." But their top brass weren't ready to say that. So the president needed this kind of independent look at things. I think even though there were tensions over Vietnam, I think Johnson was trying hard to do something sensible. Certainly in that case, we persuaded him this would be a good thing for us to do, and I remember when he said yes, we breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank goodness."

Riess

Oh that's interesting. So the persuasion was really from PSAC.

Townes

We initiated it, saying, "We could do that. Wouldn't it be useful to you to have us independently look at it?" He was a little suspicious that we were just politically oriented, and wanted to push him in one direction or the other. He was a little afraid that we might not be really objective. But we talked with him about it, the pros and cons, and he said yes.

Riess

He wasn't afraid that the military might not be entirely objective?

Townes

Oh, I'm sure he was, but what could he do? They are there. They are the ones who advise on military policy. I'm sure he recognized that, and I think this is why he decided yes, it would be helpful if you would do that, and then he took us seriously, you see.

Riess

Is the hierarchy that you have the president talk to the science advisor, one person, who then speaks with the voice of the science advisory committee? In other words, the President's Science Advisor, is that a person who comes between the president and the committee?

Townes

Yes, he would normally talk with the president about what questions there are to be asked, and what some of the answers are that the committee finds. He would report the findings of the committee to the president. The committee frequently writes a report, the report would be given to the president by the science advisor who would say, "This is the committee's report."

Riess

But with Johnson and Nixon, did you sit in the Oval Office or around a table and do this directly?

Townes

Occasionally.

 

Townes

A big meeting like that was more ceremonial, and it would happen every once in a while as a kind of a courtesy, and an interesting thing, to have a little discussion directly with the president. But that was not the way the big issues were really discussed generally. This particular thing was brought up in a meeting of that type, to persuade him that we might do that. But that was not common. More normally, a group of people would study a particular problem, write a report, and deliver a report. Then, if the president wanted to talk with them, it might be the chairman of that committee or a couple of people from the committee would go talk with him and explain the issues a little bit more, you see. The head of the science advisory committee, who was the science advisor to the president, usually would take the report and explain to him what it meant, and try to answer any questions he had. Then, if there were more questions or more discussion, they might have called in some other members of the committee if need be.

But we did not have sort of formal discussion meetings. The president is not in a position to talk about technical issues in a kind of a freewheeling way with a committee. He doesn't know enough about it, and probably would look bad if he tried to discuss these things. He wants an analysis, a report, and then he can ask questions.

Jerome Wiesner

Riess

In a book by Wiesner he talked very respectfully of Kennedy's ability to stay with the actual material being discussed.

Townes

Well, Kennedy was of course rather intellectually oriented, and was sharp in that respect. But I think Kennedy was somewhat like the rest of them. He was close to Wiesner, but he didn't meet with the full committee very much, it was just on occasion.

Riess

Speaking of Wiesner, you used some phrase about effectiveness eventually dissipating if you have been on the inside for too long. Wiesner was on the inside for a long time.

Townes

Yes, he was. I think he was quite effective with Kennedy, although he differed strongly on the space program. He didn't like the Apollo program at all, and evidently Kennedy just didn't call on him for that, which is surprising. But in most cases he agreed with Kennedy, and he was in on various important discussions.

I remember he said he was in on some of the Cuban invasion questions, but he felt he wasn't really part of it. I guess he's glad not to be considered a part of it. [laughter] But he was fairly close to Kennedy, and in on many discussions, even though the Apollo program he was quite against--as were most of the science advisory committee with him.

As time went on, though, he was not at all close to Johnson or others. He was one of the people who, as sort of a senior person, by courtesy was kept on, as most of the science advisors were, by courtesy, kept on in the science advisory committee. But he didn't attend very much in the later meetings, he didn't show up very much. He differed substantially, particularly over Vietnam and various other things. He was one of the people who made a public attack on the president's policies. And that upset a lot of people, that he was officially on the science advisory committee and that he would do that. Wiesner had always been quite ready to be bold and speak out. He doesn't hesitate. He is not always diplomatic at all, either. I would say with Kennedy he did a very good job, and relations were close. But thereafter it really faded out, and I think in this particular case [Vietnam], was even a little damaging.

Riess

It's interesting. It sounds a little like the Supreme Court. You keep people on for the term of their life because it is one way to keep a balanced court.

Townes

Sure, that's right. You've got some balance of opinion. Although in the early days of the President's Science Advisory Committee nobody asked what kind of political party you were a member of, or what your political beliefs were. It was your standing as a scientist and an honest citizen that was the reason that you would be chosen. Nobody worried about politics. It wasn't specifically stated, this is not partisan politics, we are trying to advise the government, but it was the case. That was in the early days.

As time went on, later, then to get appointed, people might start worrying, "Just what are his views about these political matters?" and so on. There was concern to be sure that the president would approve it all right, and so on. That began to be true very late in the game--in Nixon's time. Prior to that, there just wasn't any thought or worry about normal political problems at all.

Riess

We now dread anything like a confirmation process.

Townes

Yes.

The Big Out-of-Hand Problems

Riess

Was there ever a point in that 1961 disarmament conference when you thought any of these issues could be simply resolved? Or have you always known that it would take practically the rest of man's lifetime to figure out how to put it all back into the box?

Townes

Well, I think it has always been clear that we would have to constantly watch the problem of nuclear weapons. That is going to be a constant threat. We have got to deal with it carefully for the rest of history, because once the information is known, you can't hide it again. We know how to build nuclear weapons. An increasing number of people are going to know how to build them, and we somehow have to learn how to deal with that. Overall, it is going to get more complicated, probably, as time goes on. At the moment we are happy that the Soviets have changed so much, and it looks simpler, but overall it is going to get more complicated, because more people will have them, unless we have some kind of overall world-wide government which has powers of enforcement. I think we have to expect complications and continued concern.

Riess

Did any scientist worry thirty years ago about what to do with plutonium to get rid of it?

Townes

Oh yes. I think scientists have worried over that to some extent all along. It just was not very pressing initially. As the accumulation of material has gotten larger and larger, it has become more and more pressing. But I think everybody has realized we had to find some ways of storing it. People talked about storing it. One of the first ideas was down in a salt mine, another idea was to send it off to the sun in a rocket. All kinds of things have been played with. But there wasn't a lot of serious work on it, because it could be postponed, and was postponed. It probably should have gotten a lot more work and thought earlier.

But the solutions we have all involve putting the material in somebody's backyard, and that means it is very, very political. So many of the issues are political now. While scientists can think about alternate solutions, they all have political problems and politicians in the last analysis are going to have to force the decision.

Riess

I bet scientists could have predicted it all. I grant you that vision, that you could have modeled this situation. I'm feeling for you and for everyone the frustration of thirty years of working away at things that are getting out of hand.

Townes

Yes. Well, that is of course not the only thing that is getting out of hand. There is the population, and various other things, and we all see that and what can we do? In most cases, the world is unwilling to do something about those things until they are in a crisis.

Riess

But the reason you were willing to put your time into these things is because you thought they were amenable to solution.

Townes

Yes, or that I could ameliorate the situation if not solve it. Furthermore, it was a highly technical thing. It needed technical people. Now, as for the world population, I am not a biologist or a sociologist. I haven't anything special to offer there. While I am interested in that problem, and been involved in some conferences, I am not specifically working on that. I just don't think it is efficient for me to do it. Somebody needs to do it. But on the other hand, it is efficient for me to work on issues where physical sciences are particularly involved, and some scientist has to do these things, some physical scientist. So I pay more attention to those things that are in my own area.

Riess

Well, I'm sure it is all just over the horizon. [laughter]

Townes

Well, we have to look pretty far into the horizon. Things happen pretty fast, and we can't predict everything, really. We get many surprises, but some of these things certainly can be predicted.

By the way, I don't know whether you want to spend more time on MIT. We might talk a little bit about leaving MIT at some point. The transition there in coming to California. But that can be the beginning of another chapter.

Riess

The nice thing about your life is that it sets itself up in terms of transitions. You get one about every two interviews. [laughter] So we have all of these cliff-hangers. That will be the next one.

20. XX Nobel Prize in Physics

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Degrees of Recognition

Riess

What were the circumstances of the Nobel prize award being announced to you?

Townes

Now, have I not talked about the day of the award or the circumstances at all before?

Riess

No.

Townes

Okay, I've been interviewed so much on that that I'm confused. But I'm perfectly willing to repeat it, that's fine. I just didn't want to duplicate for you.

All right, so you'd like for me to talk about recognition and awards in the scientific community.

Riess

I don't want it to be terribly discursive.

Townes

Let me talk about the recognition in the scientific community. There are, of course, a large number of awards, and each had its place, and interest. I think for a scientist, the sort of steps in a career that are major in terms of recognition, in terms of the significance for his career as a scientist, are first, election to the National Academy of Sciences. That's an honor, to become a member of that, simply because the choices are made carefully and they are generally the more prominent scientists in the country. The duty of the National Academy is supposed to be to advise the government. Many people do work at that hard and I've worked at it some for the academy. For others it's just as honor. But that is a recognition that is permanent, and for the rest of your life, people will know, "Yes, he's a member of the academy," and that sort of automatically classifies you as of a certain status.

Then there is election to the foreign academies, like the Royal Society. Being elected a foreign member of the Royal Society is another distinct honor. But the biggest of all, certainly, is the Nobel prize, first of all because the numbers are limited--there is one prize in physics each year, although it can be given to up to three different people at one time, and that was Nobel's stipulation, never more than three people at any one time. The choices are made by the Swedish Academy, and they work at it rather hard. They try hard to represent different fields and, to some extent also, different countries. They are eager to see that the prize gets spread around the world rather than just concentrated in some of the more active scientific countries, so they do some spreading of the award. Nevertheless, they make the choices carefully.

Then the whole Swedish nation makes a big festival out of it. And that helps enhance it. The royal family is very much involved, it is sort of a big event and holiday in Sweden. Sweden is a small enough country that it can afford to devote itself to something like that, and at the same time it is big enough that it is significant. For the Swedes it is a big event, the whole capitol is alerted to the occasion, and there are parties and the distinguished people from Sweden are invited to come in and attend the ceremonies and so on. There are several ceremonies.

But a further thing is that it was one of the first really very big prizes. I am not sure that it was the very first, but certainly one of the very early, very big prizes, so it has a long history and has accumulated a certain kind of aura in the public mind. [laughing] On the other hand, I frequently find people are a little confused about what a Nobel prize is. They say, "Oh, I am so honored to meet you because you've gotten a Nobel peace prize." Apparently that's somewhat better known than the science prizes are. So the public is a little confused about it, but nevertheless they recognize the name and it is of significance.

The October Announcement, and the Press

Townes

There is a phrase, about October, along about the time when the Nobel prizes are beginning to be announced, I guess "Crazy October," or something like this, because scientists, some of them get a little nervous.

Riess

They are all hanging about their telephones?

Townes

I think that's a little exaggeration. Some people do that, but its not universal. Now, furthermore, the whole thing is also somewhat uncertain. It's chancy. There's a matter of luck both in what you happen to do and how important it turns out to be, and a matter of luck as to how the committee looks at it. I can see some very important physics I think should have had a Nobel prize, but there are various kinds of arguments that somehow ruled it out, but I think surely it is as important as many of the things for which Nobel prizes are given. The history of a particular scientific development was just slightly clouded or something like this and this was why the prize was not given for it. Or maybe the Nobel committee just misjudged it.

For a long time the Nobel committee did not like to give prizes for theoretical work. This was why Einstein took such a long time to get a prize. He finally got a prize for theoretical work, but about a very specific experiment. That's changing, and there is now more recognition of theoretical work.

But to illustrate the tension, and also the uncertainty, let me mention the physicist at Harvard, Percy Bridgman. Percy Bridgman was called up the night before, saying, "Well, you've won a Nobel prize." The newspaper people in Boston had gotten the news, not from him, but the news people in Sweden. They regularly call around and try to get information so that they can publish information. So this is how people generally get alerted first.

In this case, Bridgman was told he had the prize by some news person, and it was published in the Boston papers--headlines in the Boston papers--and he waited and waited and never got an official notice. Later in the day it was announced somebody else had gotten the prize. He waited twenty years before he really got the prize, twenty years later.

Well, things like that happen. Generally, people who are in the running get alerted by news people like that. It is kind of unfair, but news reporters want all of the information they can get so they will be prepared when the prize is really announced. They've got a little list of a group of people who are being considered, at least, a small group of people, and they will tell you, "You are very likely to get it," or something like this. They want information, and they want to come and interview you and take a picture and so on. Then one of this group of maybe four or five people that they alert probably gets it within a couple of days after that.

In my case, I had been called up the year before. However, that didn't come through, the prize was given to three other people. The year that I actually got it, they called my home and Frances was there. She handled it, I think, very well and didn't tell them where I was. I was out on the West Coast. I was due to run a meeting on the Apollo program that day, and I was in a hotel on the West Coast, and she wouldn't tell them where I was until a little later in the day because she didn't want them to wake me up in the middle of the night. She had been waked up in the middle of the night the year before, so she was experienced by then.

So they woke me up, I guess, early in the morning, probably five or six o'clock at my hotel in Pasadena and told me the news. I still had some reserves about it because this was just newspaper people. However, a little later in the morning I got the official news.

Riess

Well, who did you tell first?

Townes

I don't remember. Of course I called Frances to talk with her. After that, I don't remember. I think it was sort of in the newspapers and on the radio by then. I was meeting with a group of people on my committee, all of whom I knew very well, and we were staying in the same hotel. I don't remember whether they knew about it at breakfast time, but I suspect they did. I know when we got to the meeting they knew about it, and there were newspaper people there waiting for me and wanting a TV interview and so on.

Riess

Given all that advance, was it still thrilling?

Townes

Yes, it was thrilling. Of course, you never know. You may expect it's likely, but you never know until it comes, and I think there are many different cases. For some people it's unexpected, but most people, if they have reasonable judgment, would judge yes, they have a chance. Some people think they have a very large chance. I would have to say that I thought it was highly likely, but still it was uncertain, and so when it actually came it was a thrill.

Riess

In a book about the Nobel prizes, there is an interesting phrase, in a section called "Critical Reception." "Most of the attention devoted to the 1964 Nobel prizes went to Martin Luther King, Jr., the winner of the peace prize, and Jean Paul Sartre, the winner in literature. Sartre refused the award, generating a controversy that overshadowed any objections that might have arisen over the Nobel committee's choice of physics laureates. Townes did receive more notice in the Western press than his two co-winners, Prokhorov and Basov, but no one suggested that all three physicists did not deserve the honor." [N. A. Renzetti, p. 853-857] It seems to there is an awful lot of damning with faint praise in that statement. What do you think?

Townes

Yes, well I think that case is debatable, but on the other hand, I don't think it was wrong.

Riess

The controversy they mean is whether Basov and Prokhorov should have--

Townes

Whether they should have been included, or whether more Americans should have been included, or just myself alone, or what. Now, Basov and Prokhorov, of course, they were from the Soviet Union. And the Swedes do try very hard to see that different countries are recognized. They made a point to me that Basov and Prokhorov together got half the prize, and I got half the prize. So they weren't treating us all equally. They made that point to me. On the other hand, I think it would be a mistake to downplay the Soviet physicists. They are very substantial physicists and they did some very real things.

Riess

I just thought that phrasing made a point in such an oblique way.

Townes

Well, Frances made the mistake of trying to expound on this when the TV people called her up or the radio people. So they had her on tape making some objection to the Russians. Now she, of course, is not a scientist, and she was I guess feeling very personally about it and very partial, and so she made some comments and that stirred things up--that was published. Now, I'm not sure exactly what she said, but it was published.

Riess

In the American press, or abroad?

Townes

In the American press, and I suspect probably some abroad, too. So one of the things which I was asked at this meeting on the first day the TV people came in and wanted to interview me, they asked me, "Why did your wife object to your getting only part of the prize?" I said, "Well, I haven't talked with her about that, but obviously it is a lot better to get the whole prize than just half of it." [laughter] That helped take out some of the tension.

The Prize Money

Townes

Actually, the prize money at that year was not very large. The total amount was fifty-three thousand dollars, I believe, whereas now it is up close to a million. The management of the Nobel funds had not been very good, and the size of the prize went steadily down. For Nobel, when he first set it up in the 1900s, the idea was to give a scientist or an engineer who had proved himself by doing something important enough money that then he could live and work without being troubled by money. The amount at that time was a hundred thousand dollars, the prize was a hundred thousand dollars. Now, considering the fact that inflation has been about a factor of thirty or something like that since then, that's three million dollars today, and that was enough for the science of that time to be able to live, and support his work and so on, with that money. That was his idea. As time went on, there was both inflation, and they didn't manage the funds well. By the time I got the prize, it was fifty-three thousand dollars in toto, and I got half of it.

So the total amount of money was not large. On the other hand, I felt that really the prize was to some extent a matter of luck, and to some extent a matter of having good colleagues. I have had a lot of students and young post-docs that have worked with me, and all contributed, so I distributed a sizeable fraction of it, I've forgotten what--maybe half or two thirds of it--I split up and I gave all of my students an equal amount. Then certain post-docs, in particular Art Schawlow, substantially more. It wasn't a large amount of money, but just a token that they had all participated, you see.

Riess

These were students who had worked with you at Columbia, or at MIT?

Townes

Columbia and MIT both. Just all of my past students, past and present students.

Riess

Was there some precedent for that? That seems very, very gracious.

Townes

I don't know. Most of these things are kind of private, you know. I don't know what--. I know Luis Alvarez, when he got the prize, he gave all of his colleagues--people who had worked with him--a free trip to Sweden to participate in the affair. So I'm sure that people do some things like that. I don't know--. The amount of money at that time, it was nice, but it was not a critically large amount of money. It was more symbolic. The symbolism of the Nobel prize is enormously more important than the money, or at least has been for a long time.

The Events of December

Riess

The actual event was December 10th. You met Martin Luther King, Jr. Can you talk briefly about the ceremonial aspects?

Townes

Yes. Well, you perhaps know that the Swedes are very formal in their social activities. In some ways they are very informal in the way they dress and so on on holidays, but in social activities they are very formal. I was supposed to have a black Homburg, so I bought a black Homburg--that I rarely wear [laughs]. I wore it over in Stockholm also on the 90th Anniversary celebration, but the custom has almost died out among the Nobel laureates now. At the time I was instructed that yes, I should have a Homburg. Of course, white tie and tails, which I have rarely worn except in concerts, that is, giving a concert. I rented that over there. And my four children went over with me, as well as Frances, so she had to get them the right kind of outfits and get herself one.

Then, in addition, all of the social amenities are quite formal. It was explained to me I needed at a certain point to bow to the King. I said, "How do I bow?" They said, "He's not particular. Just your plain ordinary bow." [laughter] I don't remember ever bowing, so I didn't have a plain ordinary bow. They had several rather formal occasions. One in the town hall, where each laureate had to give a little speech, and that was hosted by the King and Queen. The old king, Gustavus Adolphus, was in charge then. He was a remarkable person, very intellectual and a very nice person. His wife was British, and she was still alive at that time. The town hall was full, and there were buglers and all of that. Then there was a dance afterwards for the people who wanted to dance in the town hall.

Then there is an official ceremony in a big auditorium in one of the palaces, I've forgotten which, where the laureates are given the award. That's a very select audience, and everybody in white tie and tails and fancy dresses. All of the royal family is there, and all of the laureates and their families, and then distinguished Swedes and also other distinguished foreigners who get invited--the diplomatic corps and so on. You are given the award by the King, and they take lots of pictures and so on. The Swedes took a lot of pictures of all of these affairs and gave us some pictures.

Then, the third occasion, as I remember, is a banquet at the royal castle. That was only for the laureates, their spouses, and a few very highly selected Swedes. Maybe the ambassadors of the laureates who were getting prizes were invited, too, I think.

Riess

And the wives?

Townes

Yes, the wives of all of these people were invited. That was the most select and formal of all of the occasions. It was quite nice. The royal family was very gracious, and I had a good chance to talk with them at some length. We had taken over some maple syrup, and I thought I might give it to the royal family, which we did, but it had to go through a special examination, it had to go through all of the formalities. They don't take any food that's given to them.

Riess

Particularly since maple syrup comes in that suspicious looking can!

Townes

[laughing] Well, we had our own can from our farm. We grow maple syrup on our farm, and we had our own specially-designed can. And we had a very nice note from the queen after they had tried it for breakfast and so on. They have been quite sensitive about poisoning. One of the symbols they have on the banquet table every time--they still have it there, this year when I went over they still had that--is in front of the royal family there is a salt cellar and a holder for a boiled egg, a little stand for the boiled egg, and a special fork for getting marrow out of the insides of bones. The reason for that is that when the first king was chosen--he was a general in Napoleon's army, he was chosen to be the king and start a new royal family in Sweden--he was worried about poisoning, and so he ate boiled eggs, which he thought was safe. And he had his own salt cellar so that the salt couldn't be contaminated, and he would eat the marrow of bones because that was harder to poison. So now those things in gold are there in front of the royal family at every banquet. This is symbolic of the royal family. It seems like kind of a perverted symbol, but--. [laughter]

Riess

Do you know that because you asked about it?

Townes

I'm not sure. It is such an interesting story, I think somebody probably mentioned it to us. But we talked to the royal family about it, "Oh yes, that was how it started, and now this is symbolic of the royal family." When they sit down to dine, why those things are there. It has become just like a special kind of tiara or something, some special ornament symbolizing the royal family. But that dinner was really a lovely occasion.

Martin Luther King, Peace Price Recipient, 1964

Townes

Now, Martin Luther King, of course, got the Nobel peace prize. The Nobel peace prize is given in Oslo, and it is chosen by the Norwegian parliament. The reason for that is the Swedes had owned Norway before that, and Norway was trying to break away from Sweden. Nobel himself was very sympathetic to the Norwegians, and felt they understood peace more than the Swedes did, and he put in his will that the peace prize should be decided on by the Norwegian parliament and given in Oslo. So the peace prize is given there. The other prizes are all given in Stockholm. So Martin Luther King was not there during the ceremonies, but it is typical that each ambassador of every laureate throws a party, it is kind of a nice occasion to display the successes of the nation, and so he had a party and he invited Martin Luther King to come over from Oslo. That is typical, too. The people who are given the peace prize come over and join the party later.

 

Townes

Well, Martin Luther King came over with a big troupe of people, his brother and his wife and a lot of friends. I think he had come over with maybe twelve or fifteen people, all on the plane and traveling together. I'm not sure all of them were there at that party, but quite a few were. We met him, and my children were very pleased to meet him. As I first shook hands with him, he said, "Is your aunt Clara Rutledge?" I said, "Yes." "Well, she's told me about you. You know, she helped me a great deal in the early days." I had known that. My aunt Clara lived in Montgomery, and when Martin Luther King was quite young, and before he became famous, he was still active in trying to get more equality for the blacks, and she helped him quite a lot and supported him. I remember her talking very avidly about him and what she was trying to do. To have a prominent Southern family supporting him at that time I guess was important.

He remembered it very well and he said, "She helped me a lot in the early days." So we talked quite a bit.

Riess

Was she a teacher, or what was she? Was she just a citizen?

Townes

She was a citizen at that point. Her husband was the chief engineer for the highway system of Alabama. They lived in Montgomery. Earlier she was a YWCA worker. She had worked professionally for the YWCA for a while, she had gone over to Japan to work for the YWCA in Japan, so she was a kind of an activist and interested in public affairs anyhow.

Then Martin Luther King was to preach at a cathedral one or two days later. I remember talking with the queen about it and talking about Martin Luther King, and I told her I was certainly going to hear him preach. She said, "Well, would it be interesting? Is he good?" I said, "Oh yes, you really ought to go to hear him." So she went and heard him preach. He gave a good sermon.

Riess

Was it done in the Southern Baptist manner?

Townes

No. Martin Luther King's sermons were generally more sophisticated then what you think of as at a small Baptist church. He wasn't the shouting type, normally. He could do that, but it was not a kind of sermon that would be shocking, even to the Swedes. It was different from what they would have heard from their own pastors, but nevertheless it was straightforward and intellectual and a good sermon. He wasn't beating on anybody at that time, he was trying to give a good Christian sermon. He did talk about equality and how you treat people and that sort of thing. He brought in some of that, but in a very dignified way. It was not something that, as I say, would shock anybody, but certainly was different from what a Swedish cathedral normally gets.

Riess

It wasn't designed to chastise people?

Townes

No, no. Not at all.

Jean Paul Sartre, Rejecting the Prize for Literature, 1964

 

Townes

Now, Sartre was a different case. I was disappointed not to meet Sartre. He didn't come, and of course he maintained that he did not believe in any kind of choice of prizes by some committee in literature. "They couldn't judge, and this was really completely out of keeping, and it was insulting," and so on. He wouldn't come. The Swedish took the attitude that since he had been chosen, he was a Nobel laureate. If he didn't come and didn't accept it, why that was his business. The amusing thing was a year or two later I was over there and talked with one of the Swedish committee members, and told him I was really disappointed Sartre didn't come because I would have enjoyed meeting him and seeing what he was like, and it was too bad he turned it down. He said, "Well, you know, when he wrote us later he said he would like to have the money." [laughter]

My Swedish friend added that Sweden took the position that the person who accepts the prize, he comes to Sweden and he's given the money at that point, and if he refuses it, why he has refused it. So they decided not to give him the money. That sort of took the edge off of Sartre's idealism, so far as I could see it.

Riess

That's very funny.

You, of course, gave a speech. Was that designed for kings and commoners?

Townes

Yes, for example I gave a short speech for the public at the town hall banquet. I tried to talk about the science, and the many people who contributed to it and so on. I was careful not to mention any names, specifically. Maybe I should have, but I thought that on an occasion like that, to mention one or two specific people might be somewhat controversial and make the others feel badly, so I mentioned my coworkers and scientists in general and so on. It was a short speech--they were all supposed to be quite short speeches--in honor of science, and appreciation of what the Swedish nation was doing and had done for science, and that sort of thing. It is published in the book of Nobel laureate records.

American Public Interest in the Nobel Prize

Riess

The same book about the prizes says, "The American public"--this is referring to 1964--"The American public had failed to take much interest in lasers after it had become apparent that weapons of mass destruction were not going to be an immediate result of the new technology." I think that is an extraordinary statement. Since when does the American public think along those lines anyway? Does that ring--?

Townes

That doesn't really ring true to me. In the first place, I don't think the newspapers had ever suddenly said, "Well, the laser is not going to produce a weapon." I think they continued to play on that theme. I don't think there was any great letdown there. Secondly, my memory is that the public was very interested in the laser, just as a very remarkable bright light and beam and what it was doing and the discovery. I don't remember any letdown in the public interest at all.

Riess

"The popular press therefore did not run lengthy articles on the laureates. Attempts were made to explain the prize winning work in terms simple enough for the lay man to emphasize the practical possibilities for Townes' research." I thought that idea that the public had failed to take interest in the laser--

Townes

Yes, that doesn't quite ring true to me. I would maybe have to think over that period, but I just don't recognize that effect. Maybe he is thinking they didn't play it up as much as they should. When I was getting the prize I didn't especially feel that way, but then I don't get that kind of attention all of the time anyhow, and I don't measure it.

Riess

Yes. And I think that the American public feels what it is told to feel, too.

Townes

Yes, to a very considerable extent. They read the newspapers and that's what they know.

Other Honors and Awards

Riess

Your other honors and awards that are noted in the article--and I thought maybe it was a way of defining the ones that they thought for scientists were the most important--were the Comstock Award of the National Academy of Sciences that you got in 1959. Was that the point at which you were inaugurated into the academy, or is that something separate?

Townes

No, I was made a member of the academy in 1956 while I was travelling abroad, actually. On my sabbatical I got news of it, I guess when I got to Japan. But the Comstock Award is a very important award. As I remember, it is given every five years or something like that. So it is highly selective, and that is a very important award.

I would say the first important award I got was one which really seemed important as an initiation to the series of awards: the Research Corporation Award. That wasn't given just because I had given the patent to the Research Corporation. That is chosen carefully by a group of people--Ernest Lawrence had gotten it, and they generally had made very good selections. That was a substantial award. Not nearly as important, in a sense, as some of the others, but it was the first reasonably big one which I had gotten.

Riess

And it means more research money. I mean, that's the idea?

Townes

Well, some of them mean money, some of them don't. The Research Corporation award might have been a thousand dollars, or a few thousand dollars. In most cases it is a little money, and of course that money was more then than it is now, but the actual money is not enough to make any big difference in one's research program. At times, the Nobel prize has been, and there are a few other prizes out in the world where large amounts of money are given. I don't think any of my awards were really very critical from a financial point of view. Five hundred dollars to five thousand dollars, you know, it might be a month or so salary, and that's nice, but it doesn't change one's life by any means.

Riess

So the most important award is the award of your peers, I suppose?

Townes

Yes, recognition by your peers and by prizes which are chosen carefully and are not common. And prizes that are given to other people that you admire, so you know they have been chosen carefully.

Riess

So the Research Corporation Annual Award in 1958 was the first one?

Townes

That, I think, was the first substantial award which I got, so it was particularly significant.

The Comstock prize is a very important one and very rare, and I certainly appreciated that, too. The [John J.] Carty Award from the National Academy is another one that should be in there somewhere. I was given an award by a British--the Thomas Young Award, jointly with Art Schawlow. I wasn't even able to go over and receive that. I always felt a little badly that I wasn't able to, because that's a nice award. And there were a number of others.

Riess

The Stewart Ballantine medal?

Townes

The Ballantine medal, that was quite an important one, and the first one came early. Actually, I got two of those.

Riess

In 1959 and 1962.

Townes

Yes, right. I got two of those, and the first one was obviously more important to me than others, and that was a nice award.

Riess

The Niels Bohr International Gold Medal? That's a medal.

Townes

Yes, it is a gold medal, and I think there is a little money with it. You go over and give a lecture. Now, that one is a somewhat unusual one in that it is given for contributions to atomic energy. I have never worked in atomic energy. I have studied the structure of nuclei, but I have never worked in atomic energy, and what they cited was my work with molecules in space, it seems to me, and a few other things. Now, that has a little bit to do with atomic energy, but not much.

That brings up another kind of an unusual story. I don't know whether I have mentioned my relationship with young Bohr, Aage Bohr. I think I did. I think I talked about that. [see page _____] I have always felt that it was Aage Bohr's interest and attempt to sort of be nice to me that probably made that particular prize come my way, because otherwise it is not a field in which I have worked especially. But it is a very big honor, and I was of course pleased to receive it.

21. XXI Transition from MIT to Berkeley, 1966-1967

MIT Picks a New President, 1966

Riess

Your last year at MIT as provost was 1956, and then you were something called the institute professor. I have seen references to the possibility that you might have been named president of MIT. Can we talk about that?

Townes

Sure, I'd be glad to talk about that.

I had gone there, as I have mentioned, because I thought MIT really needed some changes and it needed a scientist or an exceptional engineer as head because it was so technically oriented. That was one of the few places I felt it made sense for me to do administrative work. The general expectation was that I would probably inherit the presidency. I worked closely with the president, and I think he sort of expected that. I am not sure to what extent that was ever overtly said, but it was certainly pretty clear that that would be a natural kind of progression.

I mentioned to you that I was trying to make some changes, and most of what I was doing was very popular among the scientists and popular with some engineers, but not very popular with businessmen. Particularly the dean of engineering was unhappy. He was a somewhat combative type and very feisty and eager to promote engineering. He felt that I was slighting engineering and being unfair to them from time to time. So he was rather antagonistic, I knew that.

A [presidential] selection committee was set up, headed by Vannevar Bush who is one of the grand old men of science and engineering. He really was an engineer, but he understood a lot about the connection between science and engineering. He was a kind of a senior statesman. He had been chairman of the board at MIT, although never president. I always had the impression that that kind of hurt him, that he was never president of MIT. He went down to be president of Carnegie for a while when the presidency was opened up to him. So he was chairman of the selection committee.

When the announcement was made of the president, they had a meeting of the faculty to make the announcement. When I walked into the room, one or two people rushed up to me and said, "Oh, congratulations, congratulations." I said, "Wait a minute, it's not I." [laughs] They had chosen the dean of the business school, Howard Johnson, as their new president. That was something of a shock and a surprise to many people. He was a perfectly good man, but not widely known. He was a good manager, so they chose him.

Riess

Odd. They had invested so much in the idea of good science.

Townes

Well, it was a bit odd. I was surprised, but I said, well, okay, they don't want me as president, so I think it is time for me to get back to research. So I resigned and was appointed institute professor. They were very eager to keep me there. Howard Johnson came and talked with me. He wanted very much for me to stay, and he offered me what was at that time a fantastic salary, $100,000. As provost, I was making $36,000 or something like that. He said he felt that was what I was really due, and so on. So he was generous to me and wanted very much for me to stay.

Riess

You wouldn't have had an administrative role?

Townes

I wouldn't have taken an administrative role I'm sure, but he wondered if I would like to be head of the department, for example. I wasn't interested in any administrative role, really. I said, "I'd like to do research and take a year off." So okay, I did that and they gave me a nice office. I spent about half the time over at Harvard learning astronomy there with the Harvard astronomy department, and I had a number of good friends there. I did research and some public service things.

Well, of course I had lots of offers coming along. I was offered the presidency of Tufts, which I was not at all interested in, and some other administrative things--I've forgotten what all. I guess dean at Chicago was another one. A number of schools were after me. I visited around, I visited Caltech, I visited Chicago.

Riess

What did Caltech have in mind?

Townes

A professorship. Chicago was either a professorship or pretty much anything. A few other places. And then Berkeley. I decided to come to Berkeley primarily because of the astronomy possibilities here. Well, I'd say two reasons: one is that I have always considered Berkeley a very pleasant place to live and I would much prefer to live here than in southern California, it is one of my choice places. In addition, it had a strong general physics department, and also was a university with a good deal of orientation towards the liberal arts. It is strong both in science and in other fields, and there is a good interaction on campus among the faculty members generally. So it is an excellent place, an ideal place.

If I had had an earlier opportunity to come here at a good time, I would have come. I guess I mentioned I did have an opportunity about two years after I had gone to Columbia, but at that point I felt it was too inefficient to change. Particularly because of the strength on the West Coast of astronomy, and the astronomical observatories which are here or available, I decided to come here.

Background on MIT's Decision in Not Selecting Townes as President

Townes

I don't regard myself as the perfect administrator. I think I can do administration fairly well, and I think I did MIT some good. I have a pretty warm feeling about much of MIT. I think the real reason--. Julius Stratton, the president, told me it was Van Bush. He [Bush] was chairman of the committee. Stratton told me he thought other members of the committee were really trying hard, but that Van Bush was the one who really made this decision, and did it this way. The committee never even talked with me. They never even interviewed me. Now, of course many of them knew me anyhow, but they did interview and talk with most of the other people.

Van Bush had told me at one point it was very wrong for me to take money from NASA to build a building on the MIT campus, because NASA was a government agency which was just wasting money. He was very much against the lunar landing project, and this was sinful, to take money from this big NASA project, really basically a wrong thing to do.

Riess

Was it NASA money that was already assigned to MIT?

Townes

No, it was NASA money which was offered to us to build a center for space science and engineering. So MIT has a building now, Space Science and Engineering, which I helped arrange and get and I felt was appropriate. NASA also gave money for a building up on our campus in Berkeley; the Sam Silver Space Science Laboratory. It made the same kind of allocation for a laboratory at MIT, and it has now been named for the black physicist who was killed in the space shuttle disaster, Ronald McNair. I went back to give a talk at the naming of the building for him. He was a very nice person, and from South Carolina, too. A black physicist, and he had worked with one of my associates in laser physics there at MIT. The building is named for him and I think they are very pleased with it. I never heard anybody but Van Bush who was against it.

Now, Van Bush has had a long history of being against rockets. That is an interesting thing, which I don't think many people recognize today. He never believed rockets were any good, that they would work very well. In fact, rockets were first developed in this country at Caltech. One of my fellow students at Caltech, Martin Summerfield, came in the same year that I did as a graduate student, and he worked on rockets with Von Karman. But when he started his research, he wouldn't tell me about it though I knew him very well. He was very secretive about what he was doing, and finally, about a year later, he said, "I'll tell you what I am doing, but you have to keep it quiet." "What's that?" Well, he was working on rockets with Von Karman for his thesis. I said, "Why do you have to keep it quiet?" At that time it wasn't a military secret. It was still a few years before the war. He said, "Well, Von Karman thinks that rockets have such a bad name in the press that if word gets around that Caltech is working on rockets, that will hurt the institution. And yet he thinks there is a good deal of promise in them, and hence he wants to work on them."

So in fact they did work on them, and they made the first success which was very important in World War II--for the navy especially. Jet Propulsion Laboratory came out of that effort. The head of the MIT aeronautics department was against it, and Van Bush was convinced that rockets were not functional. He testified even in Congress that the ICBM would not work; he made a formal testimony in Congress that no, inter-continental ballistic missiles just would not work, they wouldn't be able to make it. He has all along been very much against rockets, in addition to being against NASA and the moon program.

I was chairman of the advisory committee by then to advise NASA on the lunar landing. He thought the whole thing was cockeyed and he kept telling [James R.] Killian that. Killian even made a speech against landing on the moon, saying it would wreck U.S. science and technology because it would take too many resources and would consequently hurt the whole country because it would bleed all of the science and engineering in the United States if we really did it.

Now, Jim Killian I have great admiration for, as I do for Van Bush. Killian is a real senior statesman. He was not a scientist, but he had talked with enough scientists and engineers and generally understood the situation. Bush told Killian that the rockets required to take people to the moon had to be so big that there would be instabilities in them, and they would not work. He believed the big rockets which were then being designed to take people to the moon were not going to work, they were going to have problems. Killian came around to me and said, "Well, you know Van says that this is not going to work. Is that right?" I said, "No, I don't think so. There are problems of that type, problems with instabilities because of the large volume, but there are ways of taking care of it, and those are being done and so far the tests look good. I see no reason why they shouldn't work." Well, of course they did work.

I've always thought that the antipathy that Van had for the space program, and hence for what I was doing, was part of the picture. He was just avidly against that, and had been all of his life. Although I think many people who know his story think very highly of him--he's done many admirable things--but don't realize that was one place where he got off on the wrong foot and also stayed on the wrong foot.

I think another thing that counted against me was that I had, as I think I said already, avoided being directly connected with any commercial company. As an administrator at MIT I felt as a matter of principle that I should stay disconnected, and I think the businessmen were kind of disappointed about that, thinking that I didn't like business or something. The engineers I tried to keep from being too involved with business in a way which would distract them from the university. I think I mentioned that we got through the faculty--the faculty voted on it and approved it, but I pushed it--a policy that no full time professor should also have a full time job running a business. He shouldn't have an operating position in the business, because I felt that was too distracting and he just wouldn't pay enough attention to campus. So that annoyed some of the businessmen and the engineering teams. That is, some of the engineering teams--some of them appreciated it, but not all of them.

 

Riess

When William Wurster was dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT [1944-1950], he encouraged practitioners to be lecturers, in other words, to use professionals for the design classes.

Townes

And that is very easily done in engineering. To be a lecturer, full professors are also practitioners in a sense. The idea was that you could consult and you could do things with industry, but not have an operating responsibility that was basically demanding in a full time way, particularly for people who had founded their own companies and were presidents of their own companies and had their own finances involved and so on. I felt that was just too distracting and didn't give the university a fair shake. In addition, it could bias some of the research at the university, you see.

As for the architects, when I was there at MIT, many of them were active architects. They could do some architecture on the side. They could design houses and so on, and a certain amount of that was encouraged. The connection, I felt, was important, but on the other hand the conflict of interest in full time work in that direction, and a full time sense of responsibility--that is the thing you had to be thinking about. You see, if you had all of your money involved in it, and you were president of the company, the stakes were high. You might make a million dollars or more, or you might fail. The stakes were high in those cases, and that's why I was somewhat against it.

Other Job Offers, 1966

Townes

I think that was my general philosophy, and perhaps it just didn't fit MIT. As I say, I wasn't terribly interested in running other things. As a matter of fact, when I was at MIT I was asked would I be considered for president of Duke, and I told them no, I didn't think I wanted to be considered for that. I was also asked to be vice-president and director of research at General Electric, and also at IBM. Those have some sort of theoretical interest to me, but emotionally, no. I'm not interested in that kind of operation.

Riess

Was it because you were moving towards astronomy?

Townes

No, I just like to be free to do science rather than only managing things. And I felt there were other people who could do the managing just as well and enjoyed doing it. There were other people who could do it and why should I do it? It wasn't a great pleasure for me. I don't get any big kick out of having authority, or something like that, or making big decisions which affect a lot of people. I take it conscientiously, but it is not something that I feel is exciting or pleasurable particularly.

Riess

I understood from what you said last week about MIT that you felt that MIT had a very important national role almost, and great potential. Is Caltech the equivalent of MIT in terms of importance?

Townes

Well, Caltech is very important, maybe as important as MIT. It is much smaller and it is important in a different way. Caltech is more concentrated on science and very high technology. MIT is in more direct contact with industry and somewhat lower level technology, you might say, although they have a lot of very high technology, too. MIT has now become really quite good science--some aspects of its science are exceptionally good. At that time, it didn't have any Nobel laureates, now it has had several. So MIT is doing well.

Riess

Being provost at MIT had more meaning for you.

Townes

Well, I felt it was more important for me to do that than to be a president of an ordinary university. I felt that there are lots of people who would like to president, and who could do it perfectly well at Duke, and why should I do it? I would say Caltech would be the other place that I would have considered. I was never approached for that position at Caltech.

Now, being vice-president or director of research at IBM, well that is a very exciting job too, for some people. But to me it was just a nuisance job--[laughs] "Okay, if I have to do it, I will do it." But it was not a great pleasure. In fact, the IBM people were shocked. They interviewed me, they wanted me to talk with the president, and I talked with them. I knew the then-head of research, [Emanuel] Manny Piore, very well. He was a fairly crusty person, but we were good friends, and I had known him for a long time. I think it was particularly he that wanted to get me there.

When they made me the offer, I said, "Well, I'll think about it." A day later I called them up and said, "I really don't feel this is the right thing for me. I'm sorry, but at this point I don't want to do it." The money, of course, was enormously greater than what I was getting at MIT, so he found it a bit unbelievable and said, "Have you talked with your wife about this?" [laughter] I was a little insulted, but I said politely, "Yes, I did talk with her." He later apologized. Frances, too, was a little insulted at the idea that she would go after the money.

But it was just a completely different style of life and it is not a style that--. I don't look down on that style of life. I want to make plain that I think it is a very useful function, and I hope some very good people do it, but it is just not something that I find exciting and pleasing for myself.

Riess

You had mentioned someone from IBM who was on the Jason team. I didn't know whether he was a top ranking person.

Townes

Well, he is top ranking research-wise, but not administrative-wise. That's Dick Garwin. Dick Garwin is a very bright person, but he's not an administrative type. He is probably a poor administrator, in fact. He doesn't have a high administrative position.

22. XXII General Motors

General Motors Science Advisory Committee, and UC Departmental and University-Wide Antagonism to Government and Business

Riess

You have had a long-term relationship with General Motors.

Townes

Yes, that had been long and very interesting relation. I think there is a good deal to talk about there. I don't know how much longer you want to--. I guess we can go ahead and talk about General Motors.

The General Motors situation was very different from Perkin Elmer. Perkin Elmer is interested in optics and optical instrumentation and spectroscopy--well, that has been my field, so it was natural for them to invite me to be on the board, and when I was free of MIT I felt I could do that and was glad to do it. They continue to do interesting things and I stayed on that board until I retired. They give me some research money now, fortunately, make a small grant for me to do research and I am still in contact with them.

General Motors is a very different situation.

Riess

I see 1973 was the year that you first joined the board.

Townes

Yes, but I was chairman of the science advisory committee for them first, and that probably was 1970 or '71.

Riess

Yes, 1971.

Townes

Okay, '71. And in 1971, of course, this campus was still in an uproar. It was still in the Vietnam period, and people were very much against business, and very much against government, and very much against the military. Now, that never troubled me a lot, although a few people attacked me from time to time as being pro-military or something. I never made any bones about it, I was ready to help out the military in the things where I felt they were moving in the right direction, and try to advise them.

I felt it was important to continue to advise government, even if you thought they might be wrong, so I made a very overt point that yes, I continued to have relations with government. I had a safe in my office, which is still here, where I could have classified materials, so I could do that. It was the only such safe on campus. I consulted carefully with the university president [Charles Hitch] before doing that saying, "Is this legal on campus?" I told him I understood it could cause some disturbance, but to me it was a matter of principle that one should not give up on government as long as you feel they are listening to your advice and you can do something useful. It is important to maintain ties of that type, as well as to make objections. He bought that point of view and felt, yes, that's okay, that is a reasonable thing to do.

Riess

How many people would have known that at the time, do you think?

Townes

Well, it was widely known in the physics department, and by Charlie Schwartz in particular, who publicized it. I was at one point even portrayed in the Berkeley Barb, and had a phone call from the campus police, "Do you realize you are on the front page of the Berkeley Barb as `Dr. Strangelove'?" They had a picture of me and an article, and they claimed that I had anti-personnel weapons in my safe. They [the police] said, "We think we had better protect you and post a guard by your office because you might be attacked and it would be dangerous. And we'd like to change the lock on your door," and so on.

I said, [laughing] "Now wait a minute. I am working with students here all of the time, they come in and out of my office, and I don't want to lock my doors. I don't want this to be a guarded establishment with guards posted at my door." They said, "Well, we think there may be some danger." I said--I read the article, I wouldn't otherwise have seen it--I told them I didn't think there was all that much personal danger and I just didn't want a guard. They said, "Well, all right, it is up to you. It is your own choice." And nobody ever bothered me, it wasn't any problem.

Riess

But that was mostly the work of Charlie Schwartz?

Townes

Well, there was a whole group of students. There were some students here, one or two of whom I knew very well, and I liked, and they liked me. But they were so much wrought up about the government and about the Vietnamese war that they differed with me, and they were sort of hangers-on with Charlie Schwartz. He had some following at that time, and on the whole campus there was a lot of feeling. Not as much in the physics department as in some other departments. I think the physicists were generally more realistic and busier with their own work than were students in the social sciences, for example. But there were some students in the physics department who were in that camp and objected to what I was doing.

I would talk with them about how I saw things. I was even--somewhere along in there--I was invited to comment on a speech by Dan Greenberg, who was going to talk about science and government policy. He was invited to give a speech on campus, and they invited me. "Would I come and comment on his talk, after his talk?" I said okay, and so I went over and I made a few comments after his talk. Well, then they all started jumping on me. Charlie Schwartz in particular said, "You invited President Johnson to speak to the American Physical Society. That's all wrong, you know, you are kowtowing to the government," and so on. I said, "No, I don't think so. President Johnson was president of the United States. His policy and his attitudes were very important to physics and to us. We need to think about that and get in contact with him and try to persuade him." Inviting him to meet with the American Physical Society and talk about science I felt was a good thing, and I would do it again.

There were various other attacks, and I finally said, "Look, Dan Greenberg is here, he's the speaker. Let's talk with him some more." It turned out one of them, a mathematician here, invited me to his house and said, "Well, I guess you realize we were all very antagonistic to you when you came over. This was kind of planned. But you persuaded a number of us." He was very friendly. Charlie Schwartz has always been very strongly against any of these connections with government or business or anything, so he wasn't persuaded.

So my position was well known on campus, you see, and people were jumping on me from time to time. I could tell you any number of other amusing stories. Here's one of them--my secretary came in during a lunch hour somewhat unexpectedly and found Charlie Schwartz ransacking my files. [laughter] I wouldn't have done this, but she reported it to the chairman of the department. He insisted that Charlie Schwartz write me a note of apology, which he did--a very brief note, but he did write a note of apology. And there are a number of other stories.

Riess

But he never broke into the safe apparently?

Townes

He couldn't get into the safe, no. He was hoping to find some incriminating evidence. Well, I don't mind anybody seeing whatever is in my files. My only hope was that he didn't get things confused, get things mixed up in the files.

Riess

Do you think that your positions were in any way softened by the positions of--well, Charlie Schwartz is hardly a good example, but other thinking here?

Townes

You mean, were my own views affected by people here? No, I don't think so. Perhaps I have talked about this before. I have always felt that independence of mind and independence of thought are very important, particularly in science, but in civilization generally. This means being able to think through things and stand on your own feet and have your own opinions and differ with people when necessary. So I am not heavily influenced by other people generally. I listen to them, and if I think they are right, why then I think they are right. But if I think they are wrong, I don't feel like fitting into the crowd, that is not--

Riess

Yes, well I can understand that. What you are saying, then, is that you don't think that at any point any of those people were right?

Townes

Oh, no, no. I wouldn't say that at all. No, no. There were a lot of right things in some of the things they were saying. Their arguments were complex. But just being arbitrarily completely against anything having to do with the government, I felt that was the wrong attitude. "You just mustn't have anything to do with the government, that is morally wrong. Or anything to do with the military, that is morally wrong." Well, that is not my position. I think the military has a function, and we need it. We need to try to help them fulfill the right function and not the wrong one. On the other hand, I think the Vietnamese war was a very sad mistake. The military and the government frequently do things that are wrong, and that is the point of staying in contact with them and trying to advise them. They can do things that are wrong.

No, I didn't completely disagree with all the things on campus at all. It was a very mixed bag. But I would say that there was a lot of extremism that was quite unproductive, and unthoughtful, and that I did disagree with.

The Work of the GM Advisory Committee

Townes

Well, anyway, let me get on with General Motors. It was in that atmosphere I had a call from the chairman of the board of General Motors. He said he was coming out here and could I have dinner with him? Well, it was completely out of the blue so far as I was concerned. I never had anything to do with General Motors, and I was not all that much interested in automobiles for that matter. I said, "What is this for?" He said he would like to talk with me about some things at General Motors. I said okay. So he came out, and I had dinner with him at some restaurant over at the Oakland airport, and we talked.

Well, it turns out that what he wanted was for me to initiate an advisory committee for General Motors, an advisory committee on science and technology. The point being that General Motors was being very severely attacked at that time, and it was in a weak position on safety and on pollution. It had come around to recognizing that they probably needed some outside help.

Now, General Motors is a big company and it had been so good for so long that it was very ingrown, and it was hard for them to recognize they had problems. By now they recognized they had problems, all right, but it was difficult. He had come around to the point of view that yes, maybe they needed some outside advice as to what to do on these and maybe other technical problems.

That company, at that time, was about 3 percent of the total U.S. GNP [Gross National Product] and obviously important to the country. It was a very big company--it is a smaller fraction now, by a considerable amount--but at that time it was 3 percent of the total GNP.

I tried to lay down various conditions. I though the advisory committee might be a good idea, but, "Who was to select the members? How much say would I have?" Well, I could select the members, they would just like a veto, but I could basically choose the members and they would certainly not veto people arbitrarily, but they would like to be able to say no in the last analysis, otherwise I could select the members. "Whom should we report to?" I suggested we report to the executive committee, and that was fine. They were the top brass and we would report directly to them.

On publicity, I was concerned that they would just use us as public relations, saying, "We've got a fine scientific team advising us," and put that in the advertisements. He said, "No, we really need you." I said, "Would you agree to having no public releases about us that are not approved by me?" "Oh yes, sure. That's just what we want to do." So he was just agreeable to all of the conditions I laid down. By then I felt, maybe I have to do it. [laughter]

I told him I would think about it. I called up Charlie Hitch, who was then president [of the University of California system], saying I felt I ought to do this, that the company was important to the country, they clearly recognized that they had some need for science and technological advise from the outside, and they agreed to all of the conditions I thought were reasonable. But I recognized it could cause a disturbance on campus, that people would object. I wanted to see how he felt about it. If he felt I shouldn't do it, why fine, I wouldn't do it, as I wasn't all that eager. I just felt, conscience-wise, that this was a sensible thing to do, and I probably ought to do it. He thought about it and said, "On balance, I think you ought to do it."

Now, it is interesting to recall the contrast between those times and now. I think most people on campus, if they thought GM was at all interested in them or interested in the campus, they would immediately be pleased. At that time, having anything to do with General Motors was an anathema. That was big business, and you shouldn't touch anything like that, you see. We are "the University."

Riess

So it is the ivory tower thing?

Townes

We are the purists, we are the University. Yes, that's right. And big businesses are basically evil. There are these evil corporations and they are in cahoots with the government, and they are in cahoots with the military, and these are all things that we shouldn't have anything to do with.

Riess

That was widely felt, not simply Charlie Schwartz?

Townes

Oh yes, that was very widely felt. However, most of the reasonable members of the campus would, after some discussion, recognize that contact with other parts of U.S. society was important.

Charlie Hitch, for example, said he felt on balance I ought to do it. But by contrast it would be ridiculous now for somebody to say, "Oh, you mustn't have anything to do with General Motors." If General Motors was interested in the physics department, I'm sure the chairman of the department and everybody else would go talk to them and say, "Come around and visit us. What can we do that would stimulate more interaction?"

Riess

It is hard to understand now. But I do remember it.

Townes

Oh, it was a very strong feeling. And I talked with my daughters about it, because some of them felt very strongly about the general situation and were against big business. I talked carefully with each of them, and with Frances, and each one of them at last said, "I guess maybe you ought to do it. If you think you should do it, it is okay with me."

Riess

It is interesting that it was such a fraught decision.

Townes

Those were very different times.

Choosing the Other Committee Members

Townes

So we organized a committee and I don't think they turned down anybody that I chose. It was a very good group of people.

Riess

Did those other people go through the same struggle?

Townes

I don't know. Of course, Berkeley was pretty extreme. But one of those people I invited was Lee Du Bridge, president of Caltech. Lee said, "Yes, he would be glad to do that." Caltech was a very calm place and there were no problems there of that type. He knew that, and he was quite comfortable and secure about it.

Riess

Had Caltech not had the same kinds of relationships with industry that MIT had?

Townes

No, not like MIT. No, not at all. It did have some relations with industry, but I would say generally it was not an emotional campus. People were working hard, scientists and engineers. It was small, everybody would talk with each other, there were no big demonstrations and that sort of thing, it was not an emotional scene. People were concerned about Vietnam, sure, but GM was just a company and an important company, so to try to advise them wouldn't be such a problem.

Riess

So you had Lee Du Bridge?

Townes

Lee Du Bridge. Then the president of the University of Rochester, Bob Sproull, a physicist whom I had known for a long time. He had also been in Washington for a long time. Then Ray Baddour, a chemical engineer from MIT; then a biologist, Bob Morison, from the Rockefeller Foundation; then a mechanical engineer from Texas, Martin Goland, who was president of the Southwest Research Institute, a special institute in Texas; and Jim Coleman, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago with some engineering background.

Riess

An interesting mix.

Townes

Well, I was careful to try to get good representation and very strong people who were experienced.

 

Townes

I think I can finish this story in the order of five minutes.

So we met and we really got on the inside of GM. They were very open with us, and very willing to listen. They would show us anything. We visited a number of plants, we talked with engineers. I remember very well talking with Bob Stempel, who was a young engineer there, and being very impressed with him. He is now, of course, president of GM. We really had a very good view of General Motors in trying to understand it and see what was there. We were an excellent committee, we were very probing. And we would make reports to the executive committee and they certainly listened carefully and tried to do what we recommended in most cases.

The Issues, Quality Control

Riess

You were dealing with what issues?

Townes

Safety issues, environmental issues, and many other issues.

I would have to say generally they listened to us carefully. They were certainly always polite and pretended at least to listen. There was one case where it is clear they weren't. I was reminded by one of the following chairmen of that committee that in our very first report to them we emphasized that the technical things can be solved, they are soluble. Clearly they will take some work, but they can be done. But the one thing that seems in the long run more problematic to us is the Japanese competition. The Japanese competition in '71 didn't seem like much to most people, but our group realized the potentialities. In our very first report we mentioned that, and nobody paid all that much attention to it. It was in there although we were primarily looking at other issues.

It was either the second or third year that I decided we ought to look at their manufacturing techniques and manufacturing efficiency, particularly controls, the controls for quality. I knew something about quality control--it had been developed at Bell Labs. There was a special person there named [E. F.] Schumacher who is very famous for quality control, and so I had a little background in that, and felt that from what I had seen of General Motors, I really didn't see the kind of quality control that ought to be there. So we spent some time on the manufacturing processes and quality control.

We made a long report, they listened politely and carefully and thanked us, and nothing happened. Furthermore, on all of the other occasions we made a report, I was invited to come in and talk with the board of directors of General Motors, to give a summary to them. That year, I wasn't invited. [laughter] It was clear to me that GM thought, "A bunch of scientists and engineers can't tell us anything about production, that's our business. That's the thing we know better than anybody else and they can't tell us anything about that." So that was some of the institutional resistance which was there very naturally. They were very pleasant about it and nice about it. They just obviously thought that that was not something where our advice would be particularly useful.

Riess

Was Ralph Nader on their case? [Unsafe at Any Speed was published in 1965]

Townes

Ralph Nader had come before that. So Ralph Nader was one of their plagues, and that is one of many reasons they decided they needed an outside committee, I think.

Now, about the third year, I said, "I have been here for three years. What you need and what you want is a fresh outlook--people to look at your situation and try to advise with new ideas and different points of view--so it is time for me to resign and let somebody else take over. You need some rotation." I was determined to do that. Then they said, "Would you be willing to serve on the board?" In a sense they sort of kicked me upstairs. It was interesting--at that time it meant a big decrease in my income. They were paying us twenty or twenty-five thousand a year [for the committee work], which was a lot of money at that time for a university scientist.

Riess

That's very interesting. I hadn't any idea.

Townes

Well, that was a fantastic amount, and I didn't negotiate it. I just said, "How much honorarium will you give people?" And they said, "We'd like to think about it." They came back and said as chairman we would like to pay you twenty-five, and the others twenty. It was a whale of a lot of money for the committee work. When I resigned and went on the board, board members were being paid, as I remember, seventy-five hundred dollars a year. [laughter]

Riess

But perhaps with stock or something?

Townes

No, that was it. It was a meagerly paid board at that time, as commercial companies went. Perkin Elmer was paying me more. I think Perkin Elmer was giving me maybe either twelve or fifteen thousand, something like that, and it was a much smaller company. But General Motors' pay to the board was very meager at that time. Now, they later increased it and increased it, and by the time I left it was up to, oh, forty thousand I think, or something like that. But at that time, the board was poorly paid and I remember one of the board members saying, "Wow, you really took a step down!" [laughter] I said, "Well, I was going to resign."

So that is how I got on the board. The board at General Motors went along fairly smoothly for a while, and then [H.] Ross Perot came in [1984] and it began to be a little turbulent. I got Murph Goldberger in--I say, "I did it," I was just one of the people who were urging another academic scientist. Goldberger, who was then president of Caltech, came in, and he is still on their board. He will be retired at some point soon, I guess. And the present head of Caltech is now on their board, Tom [Thomas Eugene] Everhart. So they've got some good scientific representation there, scientific and technical representation--Tom Everhart actually is an engineer. It was a reasonably well-balanced board, and became increasingly important. It went through a period of severe turbulence over Ross Perot, but I had been retired before the worst of it came along. Now, of course, they have got a very tough economic situation.

Riess

Well, you had several committee titles: public policy?

Townes

Yes, I was on the public policy committee. The GM board worked, generally, fairly hard. It came in the night before, sometimes, to discuss things, then it was pretty much all day. The subcommittees worked all morning and then the overall board met, and the subcommittees reported to them what their findings were. There was a fair amount of detailed discussion and work, and I was on the Public Policy Committee, which would meet every morning, and Ross Perot was on that also.

Riess

That had to do with image?

Townes

Well, it was partly image, but it was really more of public policy in the sense of how they were treating employees, what about the environment, what about public responsibility? Yes, I guess we looked at the advertising some; we were not advertising specialists, but we looked at the advertising some and commented on that. The Science Advisory Committee frequently reported to the Public Policy Committee, because that was sort of the internal policy of the institution, which also affected their public results. There were a lot of different issues that came up: pensions--.

Riess

And you were on the audit committee and the Cancer Research Committee.

Townes

They set up some cancer prizes. That was a minor effort. It just met occasionally just to approve the prizes and take care of policy.

Riess

And then you retired from GM in 1986.

Townes

Yes. And at the retirement party you have to make a speech, so I told them about the problems within the University at the time [laughs], to remind them of how the old times were. Some of them were surprised; they were all amused. [laughter] And I said that just wouldn't happen today at all. Everybody would be pleased to have contact with General Motors because in many of the cases they would be looking for money. They certainly wouldn't take the attitude that there shouldn't be a connection.

Riess

But in 1971 it had been a brave and fearless act on your part to join up.

Townes

Well, those things come so easily to me, really, that I never feel it takes any bravery particularly, it is just a matter of thinking it through as to what's the reasonable thing to do. It never worries me. I don't feel it is a matter of courage, it is just a question of whether it is sensible and right.

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XXIII The Matter of Patents

Russian Claims

Townes

About the patent and so on, I had said some things, but more or less incidental and partial, and I felt [today] it would be worthwhile to really try to give a coherent story about the various claims on the laser, so I'm going to try and do that. I even tried to refresh my memory a little bit so I'd have some of the facts and figures around. [laughs]

The primary point one sees in this, I think, is that the laser seemed so exciting to people--it filled the popular press and hence it excited scientists still more, and in addition to its scientific merits there is the popular appeal. There are a lot of people who had some ideas about it, and what one finds, then, is a lot of people pressing to get claims and credit and so on. That happened really to a large extent--or to some extent at least--after the rather large publicity. That is, they did something or thought they did something, and then after it became obvious to them it was important, why then they decided that they had contributed a great deal.

One finds also that a number of scientists who said something and knew something about it and might have had claims of some importance just didn't say anything, but they are as important as some of the ones who have made a big fuss about it and said they did so much. Generally, the scientists who were better established and had enough to talk about anyhow were less likely to make big claims or false claims about things.

Riess

About things?

Townes

About what they had done and how much they had contributed, you see. I would say generally it was the scientists who had not really done very much really in science themselves, but this was the one thing they had some contact with, that made as big a story out of it as they could.

The Russians are in a separate category. The Soviet Union has always over-claimed about what it has done in the past, and the Soviets are accustomed to saying things that aren't really so; that's just been part of their political system. So while the Soviet scientists, Basov and Prokhorov, I think really have some valid claims and did some good things, they too have overstepped the line in a way that I think most established American scientists or European scientists would not do.

Let me show you a book which was presented to me sometime in the last year. There was a meeting of an optical group down in Monterey and they decided they'd like to celebrate the birthday of Prokhorov and invite him over and so on. They asked me to give an address honoring Prokhorov, which I was happy to do. I went down there and Prokhorov decided he'd better not come--as he put it because he likes to joke, he said, "Well, if I leave I might not have a job when I get back!" He has a very important position in the Soviet Academy, he's the vice president, and my guess is he felt it was important for him to stay and be a part of the maneuvering there when the academy was being changed. He didn't come, but he sent a subordinate, a younger person who is in his lab, who proudly presented me with this book.

Riess

Excuse me. Let me just relocate this microphone. I think it's a little bit off the mark.

Townes

Okay. Let's see. Somewhere in here they discuss the important parts of the laboratory. Prokhorov and Basov have split off from each other--they didn't get along too well--and so a special institute was created for Prokhorov. Now let's see if I can find what I was thinking of.

Oh yes, now here they talk about various important things that were done in this particular institute, and they say, "Specific mention should be made of quantum electronics which originated at the FIAN oscillations laboratory in 1954 when A. M. Prokhorov and N. G. Basov developed the first maser operating on a beam of ammonia molecules. The same discovery was made independently at the same time by C. H. Townes in the U.S.A."

Now, that's blatantly wrong. [laughter] And this younger guy in presenting this to me probably didn't know. He probably thought it was right, because that's what he'd been told, you see. I'm sure Prokhorov wouldn't come to me and say that, but here in the public description of their institute it's officially printed, and it's written in English as well as in Russian, so it is something they expect to get out. That's the kind of thing one runs into.

Now, they can't support that, and I'm sure that they are big enough men that probably in the scientific community they are likely to say it straight. But let me say what happened when I first met them. We had published our first paper on the maser. In the summer of '54 it actually came out, and in the spring of '55 I went over to England to a meeting of the Faraday Society--there was a meeting on microwave spectroscopy and other related things--and I was giving a paper on something else, and Basov and Prokhorov showed up. They were invited, and this was most unusual that Russian scientists could get out, but they could come to England more easily than they could come to the U.S. The U.S. was much more suspect than England, and also less likely to invite the Soviet scientists.

So these two Russian scientists were there. They got up and gave a paper, and they gave a theory of how an ammonia maser would work. It was all theoretical. After the paper, I got up and said, "Well, we have one of these working," and I talked about how it worked and that was very interesting. Well, our paper was out in the Physical Review some six months before that, and one can't really believe that they hadn't seen it. Then, when they published the paper, they--let me see now. [long pause] They hadn't mentioned our work in the talk. When they published the paper they realized, I think, they had to.

They say, "In our article"--they refer to an article in 1954 in a Soviet journal--"we pointed to the possibility of building a molecular oscillator. Such an oscillator is reported to have been realized." And they refer to my published paper, you see?

Petit

So they acknowledged at that point that they had a concept, not a working piece of hardware?

Townes

Yes. And this paper, which they published as a result of work in 1955, was only theory, you see? But they were setting out a claim that they had the idea earlier.

Now, I think they really did have some similar ideas. I had not seen their paper, which was in 1954, essentially the same time that we had published a working system. I had not seen it, but I of course looked it up. It turned out that they did have a beam system remarkably like ours in a sense, and the question is well, had they already read the Columbia University progress reports which were available. They weren't purposely sent out to the Soviet Union, but they were available, for example, in the Harvard library. It had been available rather widely and it was easy to get, so if the Soviets wanted to watch us, they certainly could have gotten a copy.

I don't personally think that their work was a copy, because they picked molecules which were rather unlikely and unfavorable instead of ammonia, and I had always talked about ammonia. They picked alkali halides which are less favorable by a factor of thirty or forty or something like that. So I think it probably was original with them, to some extent, at least. I think they probably did have the idea.

Now, later then, because they recognized that their dates didn't predate mine and I had a record in the Columbia progress reports, they claimed that they had presented this idea two years earlier, to a meeting. The Nobel committee looked into this, and I knew one of the Nobel committee. In fact, he came over and talked with me and I asked him what happened at that meeting the Soviets mention, and he said, "Well, frankly, we haven't been able to locate that meeting." [laughs]

So that's the kind of pressure that these people have, you see. Now, Basov and Prokhorov I think are worthy scientists. They are good scientists. Probably if they had been Europeans or Americans they wouldn't have behaved this way; that's a Soviet phenomenon. There was surely great pressure on them to get as much world credit as possible and so on. But that does indicate the kind of pressure that was there.

Now actually before we had made the maser work, lots of people came into my laboratory, but nobody tried to copy it. People just didn't wake up to its potentiality, you see. That's the reason, in my view, the maser didn't come along earlier or the laser didn't come along earlier: people just didn't grasp its importance or what it might do or how it might work. It wasn't that the ideas in themselves were so revolutionary. It was just the whole combination of things and making something work and seeing what it would do.

Disclosures

Petit

Can I just ask a little bit more about how fully the work at Columbia was disclosed. My notes show that Jim Gordon came into a graduate seminar in December of '53 and said it's working. A graduate seminar implies that the grapevine of people who cared about these things would learn of it pretty quickly. Is that correct?

Townes

Oh yes, oh yes. But actually, the initial disclosures were in written reports which we had to do quarterly; that was a requirement of the armed services--we made a quarterly report as to what was going on and what we were doing. So it was first described in a quarterly report, officially on December '51, our quarterly report for then, where it was first discussed and described in written form.

Petit

Conceptually?

Townes

Conceptually, that's right. But it wasn't working until late '53 or early '54. But everybody knew we were working on it, and anybody that visited could see it. People visited our laboratory all of the time and I'd tell everybody--

Riess

There was not a lot of interest?

Townes

Nobody tried to copy it.

Riess

Nobody could imagine what it was--

Townes

Absolutely nobody tried to copy it, and it was all open and people would say, "Oh, well that's amusing and interesting," or something like that, and that was the extent of it. So I think what one finds is that no one of the ideas was really revolutionary. But what people missed completely was what it really would do when put together--what the whole thing would do, and what kind of quality of radiation it would give. And people also missed something else, even after the maser was built, they really missed quite completely the possibilities in the short wave length, or optical region.

So the laser was another place where the physics wasn't all that revolutionary, but it was quite revolutionary to people's thinking about what could happen. The physics wasn't revolutionary, but what could happen was. Essentially nobody was very interested in the laser before Art Schawlow and I described it in some detail. We would talk about going down to shorter wavelength, and some people would claim that it wasn't really practical. People realized that in principle shorter waves could be obtained and a few ideas were suggested, including a Fabry-Perot resonator, but nobody looked at it or worried about it very much until we wrote this paper, which then got things going.

Now, after the maser came out, then there were lots of people interested. In fact, especially after good amplifiers were suggested, the pressure to publish in the maser field became terrific. So much so that the Physical Review, for the first time ever so far as I know, said they weren't going to take any more papers in this field. They were just too flooded.

Joe Weber

Townes

Now, let me mention next Joe Weber. Joe Weber I knew quite well. He was in microwave spectroscopy, and you note that most of these people were in that general area: Basov and Prokhorov were doing microwave spectroscopy and they certainly knew about our other work, whether they knew about our maser work or not. Joe Weber used to come up to Columbia every once in a while and visit, though I made no record of his or anyone else's visits. I wouldn't think of worrying about that, and I don't know for sure whether he saw our maser. I would guess he probably did. But he wrote a paper which I didn't know about, and he published it in a small electrical engineering journal. Actually he gave a talk at a meeting and then he published a short paper about it, about getting amplification with ammonia.

My guess is that Joe thought it was his own idea, but he might well have seen it in our laboratory and then thought about it later independently or something like that. Now, he published before we published our working system. So we published and everything was all right for a while, and I didn't know about Joe's paper at all. Then, after the maser became popular, he began to get quite upset and felt that I had robbed him of credit and so on. After he pointed out his publication and made claims to the first maser idea, I agreed to publish a joint paper with him saying, "Let's discuss the history, and let's publish a paper in which we agree what the history was." We did that, and I was as generous as I felt I could reasonably be with him. And that satisfied him for a while, but he--

Riess

Where did he publish that you didn't know about?

Townes

It was in some fairly minor section of the IEEE. Some sort of report of the IEEE. One can find that paper easily. I've forgotten the name of it.

Now, his paper was incomplete and wrong in several aspects, but he did have the general idea, and he did recognize, I think, that the amplification was coherent. And that's something a lot of people didn't recognize. That the amplification would be coherent. That is, if a wave came along, it would magnify the wave in exactly the same phase and exactly the same frequency and so on. I think Joe recognized that, and that's important. I certainly gave him credit for that. His method of doing it was wrong in principle. I knew that at the time, but I didn't feel like trying to put him down by publicly pointing out the mistakes.

Nevertheless, when the patent came up, the Research Corporation was suing Spectra-Physics, which was down here on the peninsula making lasers, and the Research Corporation wanted to collect money on their lasers because they felt, as I did, that the maser patent covered lasers, too. The lawyer for Spectra-Physics decided to fight it. In fact, he was a good friend of a physicist friend of mine who told me, sort of teasing me, "This lawyer says he's quite sure he can beat you on that. He says it's no problem, and he's sure they'll win."

So we went to court and took testimony of various people outside of court--they had a court representative there and took a lot of testimony. I found one of his principle ideas was that Joe Weber had anticipated my work, and hence it was all public and I couldn't patent anything, you see. So I was asked, "What's wrong with Weber's idea?"

Well, I pointed out that he had mistakenly thought the ammonia molecule had a linear stark effect whereas it was quadratic, and so he was splitting the energy levels with an electric field and thereby inverting, and they simply don't split that way at all. They behave quite differently. Secondly, that his amplification he had calculated was off, I believe by about a factor of a million. The amplification is so minuscule that he would never get any energy through any kind of a window, so it couldn't possibly provide any useful amplification, you see; his numbers were just way off. Thirdly, he was putting on a very strong electric field in order to split the levels, and the field would simply produce a discharge and break down the gas; gas couldn't exist in that field.

Well, there were also a few other things, but I did hear rumblings in the background of, "Well, I didn't know it was that far off." [laughs] It had very serious errors from the point of view of actual operation. Now in principle, on the other hand, I believe he had recognized that one could get coherent amplification, and I would certainly give him some credit for that, I frequently refer to his paper, and I don't think I have ever publicly pointed out that he made these mistakes, you see.

Now, Weber is an unusual guy.

Riess

They didn't bring Weber in?

Townes

Well, I don't know. They heard testimony individually. They called in people to hear testimony, and whether they brought Weber in or not I don't know. I haven't really ever read all of the case to check. But what happened was that they simply settled out of court. They made what was called a consent decree, which means it's a court decision but they simply agreed to it and they didn't have to go through the rest of the case.

Petit

What year did Joe Weber claim he had published his paper?

Townes

In '53 I believe.

Petit

But you had already published?

Townes

No, we waited to publish a working system, which was in '54, you see. If you take the normal scientific meaning of publication.

Petit

The quarterly reports had come out.

Townes

The quarterly reports were not normal scientific publications and officially they were supposed to be private and not publications. I was relying on that for my patent because if you publish something in the United States you cannot get a patent unless you apply for the patent within one year after publication. Abroad you have to apply before you publish at all for most other countries. In the United States it's a year. Well, I was quite familiar with this one year limitation. I had made a number of patents at Bell Labs where people were interested in patents, and so I had had a number of patents at Bell Labs and I was familiar with that. So before the year ran out after my publication, why we started the patent action. Even though the quarterly progress reports were widely distributed to people in the field, and we first described the maser in 1951 there, I was relying on the quarterly progress reports being legally private and not really officially public.

Good Patent Lawyers

Townes

Now, another generality one can make about these cases is a whale of a lot depends on the lawyers, not necessarily the facts in the case, but the lawyers, whether the lawyers are good or not. The Bell Laboratories lawyers felt they had to fight this case. We sued Bell Labs--

Riess

Research Corporation sued Bell Labs?

Townes

That's right. Research Corporation was beginning to sue Bell Labs, and Bell Labs was largely using it in their research laboratories, and first they appealed to me and said, "You know we must allow free research," and I said, "But you are using instruments built on this principle in order to do your research and you ought to pay for them." So they settled with Research Corporation and made an agreement, and they would pay royalties.

But in the meantime they had done work on this to try to see how they could discount it, and one of their lawyers dug out the fact that our progress reports had been on the open shelves in the Harvard Library, and hence they were public. So this was in fact a publication. From a legal point of view it was a publication, and hence the publication was earlier than Joe Weber's, though scientists usually count what is published in a scientific journal or said in a public talk.

Riess

It's a wonderful snarl--

Townes

Oh, it's crazy.

Petit

But if they won that argument, then you would not be able to--

Townes

Then my patent was no good.

Well, this was brought up by Spectra-Physics in Research Corporation's suit against them. You see, the Bell Labs had dug this up. And so my patent lawyer said, "Well, can you think of anything that you did for the final working system that was different from what was said in this early description?"

 

Townes

The patent situation is pretty crazy. It doesn't make sense, in terms of normal scientific values.

Riess

So what did you say?

Townes

Well, the best thing I could think of quickly was that yes, we had taken out a little ring from the side of the cavity. As the cavity had been described, in the end of the cavity we had a big hole cut out, and the molecules would enter through that hole. But there was a central little disk in there. I said, "Oh yes, we took that disk out. That was a change." Well, that relaxed my lawyer. [laughter] There had been a change, it wasn't completely described. You know, to me it's a very trivial kind of a change, and I think it would have worked anyhow, but that changed everything again. So then the patent was valid.

Riess

I guess it's humorous as we sit here talking about it, and yet I know you told us the story earlier of Major Armstrong who had finally ultimately done himself in over these issues.

Townes

Well, at least he had a hard time and he did do himself in, whether it was over this issue or not, it's clear he had a hard time. Of course, some people like to play these games, for some people it's fun. But if they have a lot of money at stake, why then of course they play it very eagerly and then it may not be so much fun for them; in fact it can be anguishing, as it clearly was for Major Armstrong.

Petit

What was your motive for arguing so strongly in the patent issue? Your experience with the Research Corporation shows that you weren't terribly smitten with all of the money that might come with it, so what was your own personal reason?

Townes

For arguing in the patent case?

Petit

Yes.

Townes

Well now the patent case we have been talking about so far was the Research Corporation patent, and I was trying to protect that. I had some financial interest in it. But my general interest in the patent in any case was just getting everything straight, primarily the straight history and credit. So far as Gould and the laser patents are concerned I've always felt that basically he's a kind of a parasite on the industry, and that the industry ought to be protected, and people shouldn't be allowed to get away with false claims. And so that's why I testified in still another case against Gould. I haven't been all that active, actually, but I did also testify in a case against Gould.

Earlier Claims, Dicke's Claim

Townes

Now, we've been talking about Weber so far. Let me point out the variety of people who had some ideas but most of whom did not make any firm claims. I found that Von Neumann had written a letter--well, actually John Bardeen found it. John Bardeen was writing up some of Von Neumann's history and works after he died, and John found this letter he'd written to Edward Teller pointing out that if you send neutrons through a semi-conductor, that this would excite electrons. Electrons then falling back down would produce a lot of energy and make a very intense beam. He talked about stimulated emissions in this process. He'd written to Teller saying, "What do you think of this idea? Would this be useful?" Teller never answered.

I asked Teller about it. He was very silent. I think he may have been a little ashamed for not having responded more because Von Neumann had this idea--. Well, it was in fact a little after my first idea. I think it was probably '52 or '53 or something like that. Nevertheless it was clearly original for Von Neumann. Now, what he did not say, and I think didn't realize, is the coherence of the light. He didn't recognize the coherence. And he never actually made anything. Of course, he was dead by the time the maser was really getting going strongly, but he never said anything more. He never said anything to me about it or anybody else. It was an idea he had, but it didn't pan out, or he didn't work on it, so that's that.

Petit

John Bardeen found this letter from Von Neumann?

Townes

Yes, that's right. John Bardeen found the letter that Von Neumann had written to Teller when he was pouring over some of Von Neumann's papers and writing out some obituary about him.

Well, now then it turns out there is a Russian physicist, Fabrikant, who in 1950, as a thesis, tried to get stimulated emission, and he worked hard on it and he recognized what he was trying to do. He had a thesis, and that was published, and he was talking about amplification. He did not specifically talk about coherence, and whether he recognized it or not, I don't know.

I think almost any good physicist if carefully asked, "Would this be coherent?" might have to think about it a little bit, but he would probably decide, "Yes." Einstein, for example, never said anything about coherence. Einstein originated the idea of spontaneous emission. He never mentioned coherence at all. He probably never thought about it particularly, but I'm sure if somebody asked him would this be coherent, he would have thought for a couple of minutes, and said, "Yes, that'd have to be coherent." But I think Fabrikant didn't mention it.

Now Fabrikant later had a patent issued in the Soviet Union, somewhere in the mid-'50s, and I saw that patent and it had a lot of very up-to-date things in it. Basically, if it had been real, it would have preempted my patent, but it turns out in the Soviet Union you can change patents. I understand he had applied for a patent long ago, and I have never seen that original one and what it said. In the Soviet Union you can upgrade and change patents and rewrite them, so that this is presumably why his patent had so many modern things in it.

He had an idea, but he never got anywhere with it and never did anything. He tried, and he wrote a thesis about the possibility, and that was it. Now he's gotten precious little credit even in the Soviet Union, because Basov and Prokhorov have been the ones, you see.

I just discovered the other day another Soviet case. There is a kind of autobiography by Ginzburg, who is a very fine theorist in the Soviet Union, and he's done a lot of work in astrophysics and in physics and he talks about a friend of his named Levi. Ginzburg is, of course, Jewish himself, and he's sympathetic with other Jews there. Ginzburg says his mathematical aptitude was modest, and hence he decided to do "experimental optics (the department was headed by Landsberg) and started working under the guidance of S. M. Levi."18 He talks about what he tried to do and then:

It is more interesting that as far back as the 1930s Levi (and obviously many others) understood clearly the sense and the possible role of induced emission. Levi told me straightforwardly, "Create an overpopulation at higher atomic levels and you will obtain an amplifier; the whole trouble is that it's difficult to create a substantial overpopulation of levels." As is now known, it is not so difficult to create an overpopulation, and, more importantly, by using mirrors the optical path length can be extended so that we obtain a laser. Why lasers were not created as far back as the 1920s I do not understand. Much becomes obvious in hindsight. Perhaps there were some obstacle or simply nobody thought of using mirrors. The idea did not occur to me either, and here I definitely cannot explain this by my lack of knowledge

.19

And then he goes on to praise Levi. But now Levi never did anything about it either, you see. He thought, well, yes, this is a cute idea, but it's not practical, it can't work.

I never heard anybody in the literature ever mention that claim, you see. The man is dead, and he doesn't make the claim directly. I presume Ginzburg is quoting more or less accurately, though later memories can be tricky. Sometimes these memories are changed, of course; the context is changed and the memory is changed a bit. Certainly the emphasis is changed because of what has happened since.

There was a German physicist who also has a Nobel prize, a theorist named Jensen, from Heidelberg, and he told me when I went through Heidelberg once, he said, "Well, you know somebody had some funny, intense lines in a hydrogen discharge back in the '30s, and they couldn't explain it, and I felt it probably was stimulated emission and I told him to look for that. I thought it was probably what was going on, and I realized that you would get amplification, you see--that you got excited states this way." But then he said, "It turned out they found it was a different effect, so I just forgot about it and never wrote anything about it." Then later, after the maser had come along, he wrote a paper explaining how he had thought about this. But again he made no false claims. He just said he had thought about it, though he wouldn't even have written about it if the maser hadn't by then become notable.

The point is, I think for a number of people, it probably crossed their minds. And the ones who want to make big claims, they have built it up, and perhaps somewhat falsify things, or maybe it's just that they don't remember quite straight, and one is confronted with claims of priority.

Petit

In one of your earlier papers you mention that German's name. Is this correct: Fritz George Houtermann, does that sound correct?

Townes

Houtermanns?

Petit

Houtermann.

Townes

Wait a minute. Let me see.

Petit

In a talk you presented here at Berkeley in '63 you use that name.

Townes

Yes, that's right. Houtermanns and Jensen were in the same laboratory. I think you're right. I think it was Houtermanns. Yes. I'm glad you corrected me. Somehow I was visualizing both people together and it was Houtermanns. Yes. Right. H-O-U-T-E-R-M-A-N-N-S. That's right. Thank you.

Well now, I think I've already noted that Tolman in a book on statistical mechanics discussed this and said, "You get absorption in the lower state and emission in the upper state," and he said if you had an excess population in the upper state it would then give an increase in energy rather than a decrease. That was in the 1920s in a book. Again, sure, everybody knew that, so you don't pay any attention to it.

Riess

In the same way that you knew it and didn't pay attention?

Townes

Yes. That's right. I knew it. The one thing which I had to check was the coherence. I felt sure that it had to be coherent, but in order to check it very thoroughly I went back to the notes from my quantum mechanical course at Caltech, sort of Xerox/mimeograph notes by Houston. I worked through the mathematics there that he had, very carefully, and found yes, it had to be coherent. So that was, I would say, the question.

Now, there were a lot of people who didn't know this, but on the other hand there were a lot of people who did. For people within the field of spectroscopy, it was more or less known. Willis Lamb was another person who at least likes to see it noted that he mentioned this in a paper. He was working on something else, and he just noted that, well, if the relative populations had been inverted they would have seen some increase in power. He's a good theorist and he knew that. I would say most of the people in the Columbia radiation laboratory, the senior people, would have understood that quite well.

There was a younger person there who I think should get more notice, but he hasn't pushed it and nobody knows about it, named John Trischka. Trischka was a young post-doc working with Rabi, and several people at that time thought about just demonstrating that, yes, there was stimulated emission. I thought about demonstrating it, thought about various ways to do it, and I figured, well, it's pretty hard, and I felt it wasn't necessary to demonstrate it because it was very clear that when you heat up a gas of molecules, the absorption goes down for that very reason, that you get a balance between the absorption and the emission. That's a very clear demonstration, and maybe not so obvious to a beginning physics student, but nevertheless it was very clear and there wasn't any doubt about the theory, and so I didn't feel it was terribly important to demonstrate it, although it would be kind of nice to demonstrate it.

Rabi was somewhat interested in demonstrating it. I had a conversation with him once, I remember. He thought he had an idea, and he said, well, I guess that's not too good. But Trischka wrote a number of pages in a notebook about an experiment to try to do this. As I remember, it was a beam experiment; he was working with beams. And he made extensive calculations as to how hard or easy it would be, and whether it could be done and so on, and concluded that it could be done but it was marginal, and so he just never did it. But nevertheless he understood it, and was thinking about doing it. I think a person with a different personality would have then plugged that as, "Well, look, I had the idea, you see." Trischka has never been heard doing this, however. He's a professor at Syracuse now.

Petit

Did he have the idea of either a resonant cavity or coherence?

Townes

No. Let me say none of these people had the idea of a resonant cavity, but they did have the idea of amplification, which was what Weber had, say. They also said nothing about any practical applications nor about coherence, though they may have understood the latter.

Basov and Prokhorov did have a cavity. They had a resonant cavity. They did point out that they wouldn't get enough energy to make the system oscillate, though. They did not initially think of a very favorable molecule and calculated the possible threshold from the particular molecules that they suggested, which were alkali halides and in a normal type of molecular beam.

Petit

The alkali halides?

Townes

Yes. These were the particular molecules they suggested. When they came to Cambridge and gave their talk, I felt that obviously they had read my paper, but they weren't talking about it. They were very eager to talk with me, and I was very eager to talk with them. We had a good time together talking about things. So far as I could tell, they weren't really quite aware of what the quadrupole focuser was doing. I had a quadrupole focuser which very much enhanced the intensity of the molecules. They had been thinking in terms of an ordinary molecular beam deflector and weren't quite aware of that. When they went back and put in a quadrupole focuser, it worked. I talked with them sometime after that. And they did some nice things with the quadrupole focuser.

Riess

A lot of this is review, you have mentioned these incidents in one way or another, and I hope that today you tell the one story that you feel you haven't told completely, the Gould story.

Townes

Yes, I'll come to that. I wanted to give this background on all of the different people and I'm sure there are a few more that I haven't mentioned, but I think I've kind of covered most of them.

Let's see. The paper here I think maybe is one I gave you. And here's another person involved, Strandburg.

Now Strandburg at MIT was another microwave spectroscopist. He never made any claims for the origination of the maser, per se. But after we got on to the solid state maser, Strandburg clearly was interested, and I think he may well have had an original idea about the solid state maser before reading the paper by Combrisson, Honig, and myself. He recognized that the maser was a very good amplifier, and he was very much interested in that. I think he probably had some independent idea about doing it with solids.

He gave a talk at MIT where Bloembergen attended, and talked about doing it with electron spins, and Bloembergen said, "Well, why would you want to do that?" and Strandburg said, "Look, it's a very, very good amplifier. It's the best amplifier ever conceived." So Bloembergen went back and thought about it and invented the three-level solid state maser.

But in the meantime we had already published something in France on this electron spin maser using two levels. Sometime that year Strandburg broke out into a frenzy and was passing out papers at the doorway in the American Physical Society about his work [laughter] and so on. He went a little bit nuts. He's a good physicist. He coined a special name--let me see, what did he call it, he had a special name for it, something with "spin" in it, perhaps "spinner," but I've forgotten. Authorities at MIT learned about this and they kind of calmed him down some. It was clear we had already published before he said anything at all and so he had the good sense then to quiet down. But that's the kind of frenzy, you see, that the maser and laser got some people into.

Now, on the laser, I think one of the most important claims patent-wise is that of [Robert H.] Dicke. Dicke is a very, very good physicist at Princeton, and he's been very inventive. I think his father was a patent lawyer, and he had a special interest in patents. He had an arrangement with RCA that RCA would patent anything that Dicke wanted them to patent as long as they had right of free use of it. So he got everything patented free; he would just turn it over to RCA and they would patent it. He has patented an enormous number of things, only a few of which have been really terribly useful.

He wrote up a patent--after the maser had come along, but this is in direction of the laser now--he wrote up a patent using parallel plates, and it was for the submillimeter or far-infrared region. Now that gets awfully close to our laser invention. It turns out that Prokhorov and somebody--I think not Basov in this case, but Prokhorov--published a paper on using parallel plates also, a little later; later than we had had the idea but nevertheless it was independent. I never saw either one of those things. I wouldn't see a patent that's just held by RCA and Dicke; I would never see that. I don't go to the patent office and look for things.

Now Prokhorov's paper I might have seen, but it was in a Russian journal, and I don't read all of these Russian journals.

Riess

Dicke wouldn't publish?

Townes

Dicke didn't publish, no, he didn't publish. He just patented a lot of things, and again that's an indication of what they thought of it, you see, "Well, okay, it might be worth something, so you patent it," but he didn't bother to build anything. He didn't try to build anything, he never talked about it so far as I know, and certainly didn't publish in the journals.

Prokhorov published. The Russians publish theoretical ideas much more readily than we do in the United States usually, and the reason is that they don't have very good experimental equipment; it's hard for them to do experiments. So they've gotten into the habit of publishing every idea, and they publish a lot of fairly far-out ideas. It turns out maybe twenty years later it was a good idea and they can have some claims on it. So they are much more in the habit of publishing ideas than we are. And Dicke I think normally would not have published an idea unless he had done something about it, and he didn't bother to do anything about it. He must not have thought about it that much.

We referred to Dicke's work in our paper, saying that he had done this, but that he had not gotten the idea of single mode selection.

Petit

You are talking about you and Schawlow?

Townes

That's right, Schawlow. By "we" I mean Schawlow and I.

--that he had not shown how to separate the modes and get single modes out of this, which we felt was important, you see? Dicke at some point wrote me, saying, "This is wrong. That was the whole point. That was just what I was doing. The whole point was to pick out individual modes." Well, I have a great deal of respect for Dicke. I wrote him a very respectful letter telling him how much respect I had for him, he certainly was perfectly capable of doing that. But as I read the patent, the geometry he had did not, in fact, pick out any single modes; it was not suitable for that, the particular geometry he had. And furthermore, nothing in the patent had said anything about single modes or any method of picking them out or singling them out, so that I was surprised and I didn't understand how that could be a claim for picking out single modes.

Well, again, you see what one gets. If you think about what you've done and you want it to be important, you can easily get it twisted a little bit in your memory as to just what you were thinking about, and I would say it's very clear Dicke was not thinking about single modes. He was thinking about an open structure, and that was inventive.

Well, I wrote him this letter explaining why it didn't seem to me that he had been worrying about that, because his geometry in fact wouldn't do it and no mention was made of it in the patent, and I didn't understand. He never answered back. He's a good scientist who had done a lot of important work himself. He didn't remember it quite right, but when called to his attention he must have realized that was the fact. Maybe he had been thinking about it but it certainly wasn't in that patent. There was no evidence that he had thought about it you see, so he didn't make any more claims than that. Prokhorov also didn't try to pick out single modes; that wasn't his geometry, or what he talked about.

What is Really Patentable?

Townes

Now, you might get down to the question of what really is patentable in all of this, because so many people were aware, and you see Ginzburg is saying why in the world didn't he think about this before. It looks so obvious now. And I would generally agree with that, that there were no basic new ideas. What was patentable? When I talked with the Research Corporation lawyer, I told him that I felt that just amplification itself was not patentable because I felt other people had talked about it, and it seemed to me that the only thing that was patentable was the resonator and oscillator. That had not been talked or written about so far as I could find anywhere, and I think that's still true, that nobody had previously suggested an oscillator or coupling stimulated emission with a resonant cavity.

I pointed out what had been said, and the lawyer said, "Well, yes. I think amplification alone is probably not patentable; that's been talked about enough." I said, "Furthermore, I think it probably occurs in nature; in some forms it probably happens in nature anyhow." You cannot patent anything which occurs naturally. That is part of the patent law. If it occurs in nature, you can't patent it. There have been a lot of arguments of what really occurs in nature and what doesn't, but that's the law.

Now, we have, in fact, found it--I knew of some astronomical cases that were likely at that time--we have, in fact, found strong maser action near stars and laser action in the atmosphere of Mars and of Venus. In the planets it's very, very weak amplification, but there is some amplification there of sunlight with CO2 molecules.

Petit

The limb brightens up a little bit?

Townes

Yes, that's right. The sun excites the molecules, and then they're ready to amplify infrared and they do, and one can show that they amplify. There are lots of masers in space. Of course, I was patenting the general idea. There are lots of masers in space. We didn't know that at the time, but I felt it could well occur naturally.

So my lawyer advised that amplification itself is probably not patentable, and let's just patent the things that you feel are new, and so that's why we patented the oscillator. I think I may have mentioned before that I had a problem by the time we were writing up that patent on the maser. I had gotten going on the laser with Art Schawlow at Bell Labs and felt that they ought to have that patent, and how to keep those separate so that Bell Labs and the Research Corporation wouldn't start fighting with each other or--I don't think they would fight, but they might make counter-claims.

So I was careful never to mention light in that maser patent. I put it all very generally. "The amplifying of electromagnetic radiation." I felt, well, I realized it could be done for light, but I was talking with Bell Labs about that and I ought to try to keep it separate and not let either side know the rest of the story, you see. So we would make the general patent on electromagnetic radiation but not say anything specifically about light, Bell Laboratories would say something specifically about light, and that was the way I tried to divide it.

The maser patent, as it worked out in the trial with Spectra-Physics, that did win all right, and was proved to apply to lasers, and from then on the Research Corporation could collect money on the royalties on lasers.

Lack of Interest Stalled Laser Development

Townes

Well, now let's see. In the laser story, an important observation is that there was essentially no interest and no thought that one could really get down to very short wavelengths. There was some thought of let's get it down to millimeter wave, maybe, and maybe you could go a little further. My original idea was to get into the sub-millimeter region. That was what I was after, but I felt that was harder and I would do the microwave work first just to try out the idea.

 

Townes

[laughs] There's an awful lot of material here.

Well, I think I've already mentioned this, but let me recapitulate a little bit, that in the summer of '57 I was on an air force committee to produce what was then called the second Von Karman report. Von Karman made a report about the future of the air force technically and what it should be doing, and that had been very important to the air force and they wanted to have a second study as to what the future held, particularly in the way of technology for the air force.

So I agreed to be a part of that study for a while. It was at Woods Hole, a pleasant place to take the family. The report of the electronics committee, which was what I was on, talked about masers, and also that report said that the air force should work on pushing it down to shorter wavelengths because it probably could be taken down at least to the mid-infrared. That was basically what I told the committee and felt strongly about, that they ought to be working on that.

Well, that report was written up, but not published for another very funny reason: Sputnik had gone up and that changed everything. So they waited a year and had another study the next year, in 1958. I didn't go to that one, and the committee took out my statement about going down in wavelengths at least to the mid-infrared. The report was changed to recommend work on masers, but they said nothing about the infrared. They obviously thought that wasn't practical and it wasn't something the air force should be worrying about. It was a little different group of people, but a group of reasonably expert people.

I mention that specifically to indicate how little interest there was and how little belief there was that anything could be done in that direction. Also, partly because of this book by Joan Bromberg. She's very insistent about how important the military was in pulling all of the strings and making the laser get started, and so on. According to her writings, they were the ones who wanted this from the beginning, and that's what stimulated me and everybody else, you see?

The military certainly supported me, but I more or less did the work "under the table" for the maser. They weren't at all interested initially. And the laser they didn't believe in, at that point certainly. Their official technical committee took it out in the summer of 1958. Now, in 1958 Art Schawlow and I had already written our paper, but they didn't happen to have a copy, and so they weren't quite aware of it.

I think there are a number of people who must have played with the idea, or it sort of crossed their minds, getting down to shorter wavelengths. Dicke and Prokhorov were certainly some of them, but they weren't thinking of really making a big jump and getting down to very short wavelengths, and they never did anything about it in a laboratory, never pushed it. Nothing was being done.

Gordon Gould's Patent Claim

Gordon Gould, Student

Townes

In late September, or sometime in September of '57, I decided I really needed to go to shorter wavelengths and see what could be done, because I felt surely we could get substantially further, and so I started working on it. It was along about in there, I think early October maybe--and this is all in my notebook, I've got a good record of it--I talked with Gordon Gould.

Now, Gordon was a student just a couple of doors down the hall from me, a student of Polykarp Kusch, who was a professor and colleague of mine. He was working with beams, and Gordon was trying to do a thesis. In the process of doing his thesis he was using a beam--and he knew all about the maser by then because it was in the same laboratory--he was working with a beam of thallium, trying to excite it with an internal thallium lamp, and get as many atoms as he could in an upper state in order to study this upper state.

Well, then he thought about maybe he could get enough to get a maser going using thallium atoms, you see. Now this would have been generation of radio frequency, not light. He talked with me at great length about this. He was very interested in patenting it, apparently, and he asked me all about patents, and I tried to help him out. He was a student who wasn't working very hard, and Kusch was concerned about him. He seemed bright enough, but not terribly interested, and somehow just wasn't making progress, and Kusch was worried about whether he was ever going to get his thesis done and so on.

But he kept talking with me and asking me questions about a patent: how do you get a patent, and do you have to make a system, and so on. I explained it all to him and told him all you have to do is just you have something you think really will work, write it down and have it notarized, and then you've got a record of it and you can patent it after that. And he asked me all kinds of detailed questions about the process.

Well, it turns out he never patented that particular thing, but it was a little bit later that I invited him in my office and said, "I'd like to know, how much intensity are you getting out of those thallium lamps? I'm interested in using something like those lamps because I've decided that it's possible to make a maser operate down even at wavelengths as short as those of optical frequencies with intensities of excitation which are probably obtainable. I'm quite convinced that that's possible, and I'd like to know just what intensity you're getting so I can use that as part of the calculation. Otherwise I can look it up or something." So he gave me some numbers, and he said, "I think so, too." This is very interesting. Gould doesn't give this kind of an account and I have never pointed this in any patent case because it had never been brought up.

Now, whether that was real and he'd really been thinking about it, or whether it was just a natural reaction, "Oh, yes, I'm thinking big thoughts too," or whether it was just a general idea of maybe it can be done down at short wavelengths, I don't know. But he did have that reaction of, "Yes, I think so too." I told him a little bit about what I was doing, but not very much. I said I wanted an intense light. About a week later, he came back with more information that he'd gotten from the official manufacturer of the lamps and gave me that, and I told him again this was what I was working on, and I felt it looked quite practical, and again he said, "Well, I think so too."

Now, his story initially was that I had telephoned him at his home and asked about his lamps, and that made him suspicious that I might be interested, and since he had been thinking about this so much he was worried that I was getting onto the idea which was his idea, and that hence he'd better get everything written down. That was his first story. Well, I never telephoned his home at all. I don't think he's ever publicly said that he came into my office and we talked about it, you see. But he has modified his story now to something like I was asking about the lamps or he learned that I was interested, or something like this, so hence he decided he'd better get all of his wonderful ideas down as quickly as possible.

About six weeks later, in mid-November, he wrote quite extensively in his notebook and had it notarized, though he has no recorded notes prior to that. Now people have asked him why he didn't get a patent--why he didn't apply for a patent--because he didn't try for a long, long time. His answer to that: well he didn't know you could apply for a patent if you hadn't built something. I'm sure that's wrong, because as I say he had talked to me very, very extensively about this other patent, and I know very well he explored all of the possibilities and he asked me about that specifically, and I told him to just get it written down--write down a complete system and get it notarized and then patent it. But this is his story now why he didn't apply for a patent.

My own interpretation is really quite different. I think that every time Gordon learned that I was doing something, he would dash to try to get it covered in his notebook. But then he never did anything if I wasn't doing something.

Riess

You mean his contact with you was that frequent even though he was working with Kusch?

Townes

Oh yes, we were in close contact. You know, he was in the same hallway and he was working in the same field with my students, he knew all of my students and I saw him very frequently, and sure, people would pop into each other's labs or offices and so on. So we were in close contact and I talked with him a number of times. However, there were long stretches of time when he didn't know that I was seriously working on optical masers, and those were the times when he didn't write much about them in his notebook.

Townes and Schawlow Publish, 1958

Townes

Now, before very long, probably about November of 1957, I started making contact with Bell Labs and with Art Schawlow, when I talked with Art I said, "Art, you know I believe one can make a maser system go even on down into the optical region," and Art said, "Well, I've been thinking about that, too." Again, that was maybe a standard reaction. [laughter] But Art was a little bit at loose ends then and he was a very, very capable guy. I had worked with him a lot before and we were good friends, and so I said, "That's great. Let's work together and get something done, and written up."

Petit

Had he married Aurelia yet?

Townes

Yes, he had married my sister Aurelia by then. In fact, this is one reason that I've always said that we couldn't keep him at Columbia, because he had married my sister so we couldn't appoint him because that would have been nepotism. I was chairman of the department along about in there, and I did think about it and decided that I really couldn't make any move in that direction. So he went to Bell Labs.

So Art and I worked together on the idea. Now, at that time, when I decided it was going to be a Bell Labs project, from then on I didn't say anything about it because Bell Labs had proprietary interests, and was different from the university. At the university I was always completely open and told anybody anything they wanted to know about what I was doing. I made a point of being completely open. I think it's a much happier situation for everybody to be just completely open. But this was Bell Labs, so at that point, then, I stopped talking about it and we just worked away and finally got a paper together by the next spring, about, and we put it through the patent department.

Eventually the paper, in preprint form, was circulated to quite a number of people and I am quite sure that Gordon got a copy of that. I don't remember whether I sent him a copy. I might have, but I'm sure he got a copy. I don't keep a record of whom I send these things to. Just anybody who wants one, I give them one. Let's see--this paper was to come out on December 15, and I feel sure that was known. It was easily known by just phoning the Physical Review and saying when is that coming out? And we had distributed lots of copies.

Gould's Claim

Townes

Gordon had left Columbia and went to TRG [Technical Research Group]. He must have left sometime along in late fall of '57. What he says is he left Columbia because he wanted to work on the laser and he couldn't work on it with Kusch because Kusch was interested only in pure science, and so Kusch wouldn't have let him do it. I find that hard to believe. But anyhow, he went and took a job at this company. My interpretation at the time, and I think probably the right one, was that he wasn't making very good progress on his thesis and he probably needed the money, and he went to TRG which was a new small high-technology company. So he just took a job. That was everybody's belief at the time, and I think probably was right, because I doubt very much that Kusch would have stopped him from working on an optical maser (or laser) because it was an interesting subject even if a little applied. Furthermore, he could have just asked me--he could have come to me and said, "Could I work on this?" and I would have said, "Sure. If you want to work on this, that's fine, be my student instead of Kusch's."

Riess

I wondered about that.

Townes

There was absolutely no problem so far as I can see.

Petit

After all, you were department chairman and you had been talking to him extensively.

Townes

Yes, that's right. He could have just come to me and said, "Could I work with you in your laboratory and work on this?"

So this is the story he still puts out, that he had to go because he couldn't work on the laser there, and he wanted to go work on the laser. Now, the next written thing which he has in his notebook that's public is along about in November of '58. This was about a month before our paper was to come out, and TRG put out a proposal to the Pentagon which contained a lot about laser possibilities, which came out December 12, 1958, just before the December 15 date of publication of the paper by Art Schawlow and myself. My guess is they tried to predate our official publication. Our paper was out in the sense that it had been circulated. Their idea may have been to predate the official publication. But Gordon appears not to have started doing anything until he learned from our preprint that I was taking it seriously, and then he wrote down everything he could think of.

There was another curiosity. He had another notebook. Some of the patent attorneys got hold of some pages of it, but they weren't dated. In these pages he even quotes the manuscript of Townes and Schawlow and says equation such-and-such and number such-and-such and gives the equation that he got from us. His initial claim was that well, the notebook writing was of course after our paper had been published and everything was known, so that anything he wrote prior to that official publication was his own information. But it turns out the number he gave for the equation and the details of the equation are what was in our manuscript and not in our published paper. It turns out also that there were no dates on these pages and the rest of that notebook was lost, so nobody could ever date it. [laughs] Again, one wonders why that particular notebook was lost. Eventually, in court, he sort of halfway agreed that he had seen our manuscript before his November, 1958 notes. I have no doubt that he had seen it and probably fairly early.

I was asked by the Pentagon to review the TRG report. They phoned me up and asked would I be willing to review this. This was something which was associated with masers and so on, and TRG suggested that I should review it. I said, "Well, gee, I'm pretty busy and I'd really rather not." They called me up again and said, "TRG doesn't want anybody else to see it but you. Would you please review it?" I said, "Well, then, okay." So I reviewed it, and it was strikingly like many things in our paper, but he hadn't mentioned our paper, which is again not exactly cricket. I asked Gordon, "Had you seen our manuscript." Well, yes he said he had. I felt sure that he had all right. He agreed he had seen it. So why didn't he mention it? Well, he didn't have any great response to that.

Eventually, the court finding was that Gordon had access to our preprint before he had written anything in November of '58. Now, his November of '58 notebook seems to be the basis for what patents he actually has. I don't think his '57 work produced any patents. It was his '58 work which produced patents, which was after he had seen our manuscript. He never clearly admitted that, but under pressure it was pretty well proven.

The '57 notebook actually had some very interesting things in it. I don't know where he got them. By now I'm rather suspicious--because he clearly has falsified things in some cases--that I just don't know whether his date on that is right. He has it notarized by a candy store notary--also named Gould [laughs], which probably has nothing to do with the case. There was a little candy store notary that notarized it and dated it. It could possibly be misdated, but that cannot be proven.

Riess

You mean the interesting things in 1957 could have been?

Townes

Might have been misdated. I don't know.

Petit

But in 1957 you had discussed many of the elements of the--

Townes

I hadn't discussed them in any detail, really, with him.

Petit

And that was before you and Art started seriously--

Townes

That's right. Well, it was just about the time we started seriously working. It was just about the time we started working together.

So I'm a little suspicious because he's pulled off so many other things, you see. Nevertheless, officially he has a notarized document, and the document has some interesting things in it. He did have parallel plates; he had a Fabry-Perot and parallel plates. There's quite a lot of stuff. On the other hand, what he seemed to do was just to write down everything he could think of, everything he could find in books and everything he could think of, all of the possible ideas. Rather than concentrating on something that was really right and really workable, he just wrote down everything. He used that approach both times, in '57 and '58.

Based on what his notebooks had in 1957, Gould got TRG to challenge the patent of Art Schawlow and myself. But he insisted it was his personal patent, not TRG's, and when he went to TRG he did say that he wasn't going to talk about that with them. So he believed in it enough to be that protective of it, at least. Now, for any work he did at Columbia University, then there is a question, shouldn't it be government property. I decided my maser patent was because I was working for the government as part of the Columbia Radiation Lab and there was a provision specifying anything invented under that work was government property. Actually, whether I was working on my own time or for the lab when the maser idea came up is debatable. Presumably Gould said to himself, "Well, I was only working at home, or not while I was being paid by the government, and even though my salary comes from the government I wasn't really working for the government then, and hence it doesn't belong to the government." That I feel sure is his position, though in my case I judged such a position to be ethically questionable.

Now, at TRG what he did was to offer them some part of the patent if they would pursue it, because he didn't have much money, I guess, at that time. TRG agreed, and pursued the patent. So they challenged Bell Laboratories, they had some hearings on that, and it went back and forth. The outcome of that court case was a very interesting one. Here, again, I would emphasize that I think the outcome of a patent case depends strongly on the quality of the lawyers, and Bell Labs has good lawyers. The TRG lawyers, I don't remember who they were at this point. They were probably okay, but they might not have been great.

In any case, the court decided that Gould in the first place had not had the right ideas and not really made the invention partly because he did not say anything about mode control. He had two parallel plates and a tube. He didn't say whether the tube was transparent or not. He said nothing about it. He just had a picture of two parallel plates and a tube. It looks very much like the kind of thing we suggested, but he doesn't discuss any materials, or mode control at all. He didn't discuss whether the tube is transparent, which is quite important. Of course, he claimed he had all of the right ideas, but they weren't in that notebook; they weren't written down, and so the court couldn't say that he had the idea.

So the basic decision was both he had not had the idea, and secondly he had not shown diligence. Now this is another patent requirement and a source of interesting contention in Gould's case. If you have an idea and write it down, then you can claim priority as long as you pay enough attention to it and thus show that you are really interested. That's what is called "due diligence." If you work on it from time to time, then that shows you are really interested and you think there's something there and you work on it. I think roughly they say, "Well, if you don't do anything about it in the course of many months, have big gaps of many months where you don't do anything about it, why then obviously you are not interested enough to take it seriously."

Riess

How do you demonstrate that you are doing something?

Townes

Well, you have entries in notebooks or you have somebody that knows you've been working on it, or you have something real that you've built or something like that.

Gould's story was he was terribly interested and he was working on it all of the time. But there were absolutely no records from the fall of '57 to the fall of '58, absolutely no records of any work.

Petit

You'd think he'd have boxes of paper.

Townes

Yes. Well, he had no records. He got some friends to testify that he seemed to be interested in something, and so on, but he hadn't really talked about it and the court decided that he did not show due diligence, so that would have thrown his many patent claims out also. I would say that's probably a more fully justified reason for discounting his claims. I think he did have some ideas, even though they weren't specific in some critical directions, but he didn't think they were very important. My belief is that he was just kind of watching me, and whenever he thought I was taking this possibility seriously, then he would also and would sort of quickly try to jump and do something to cover it. And later he was very, very interested in the patent and money. That's clear. But after I started talking with Art Schawlow about "optical maser" and decided it should be a Bell Labs job, I also decided not to talk about it with my colleagues at Columbia, so Gould had no knowledge between the early fall of 1957 and about September of 1958 when our preprint was widely circulated, that I was seriously working on this. And that is just the period when he had no evidence of taking it seriously.

Riess

In the book by Hecht, the article about Gould, I think Gould is quoted as saying he is motivated by the idea of inventing, that he always wanted to be an inventor.

Townes

It is clear he was very interested in getting an invention at various points, and he did talk with me about trying to patent this other thing. I never sensed before that that he was specially interested. My own guess is that it's just the maser idea that made him start thinking about inventions, but in any case he certainly from then on was very interested in inventions.

Well, you can maybe sense that I don't feel that Gould's personal contributions have been all that great. During all of that time he never published anything, and so far as I know never said anything to anybody else. He just kept putting down everything he could think of in his notebook whenever he learned I was doing something. And many of those things were fairly trivial and, I believe, already well-known.

Now, this brings up another aspect of patents: that you aren't supposed to be able to patent something which is obvious to people skilled in the field. If a person who's very knowledgeable and skilled in the field can come up with the idea more or less casually or after a few minutes thought, then you can't patent it. Even if it has never been written down before, why then you can't patent it.

Gould's presently owned patents are really various kinds of modifications of the basic laser patent, mostly involving various kinds of things which I would have felt are not patentable. For example, I think he has a patent on amplification in a laser. As I said earlier, I had discussed amplification without a resonator with my lawyer and we decided it was probably not patentable, so we made no claims on that. Also it has been shown to occur in nature. Masers without resonators are now known to be common in astronomical objects, and natural laser amplification occurs in the atmosphere in Mars. There was testimony about Mars at a court case in Florida, but the jury apparently didn't pay any attention to that. This is part of the lawyer's skill.

TRG tried a case to win Gould a patent and lost it. Then TRG was bought by a bigger company, whose name I've forgotten, and they worked on it for a while and then decided not to play with it any more, that it wasn't worthwhile.

Refac, Patlex, Pursuit of Patents

Townes

Eventually, there was a company called Refac, which was specifically interested in pushing patents of individuals, and it invests a lot of money in pushing these patents and then collecting royalties. These other companies were normal commercial operating companies and they weren't patent specialists. Refac and Gould somehow got in touch, and Refac then decided to finance a real effort to try to validate some of Gould's claims.

After a while they sold out to a company called Patlex, and Patlex was financed by some mercantile store group that sold out--the people who owned it sold out and hence had substantial cash. Somehow they were persuaded that the laser patent was something that they might go after and make a lot of money on, and they helped finance this company called Patlex, which had quite a bit of money--twenty or thirty million dollars, something like that--to play with and try to go after patents. A lawyer from Refac moved over there to be head of it. He was obviously a very bright and clever man, though a bit unscrupulous too.

Riess

A bit un-what?

Townes

A bit unscrupulous. In fact, he was convicted of something prior to that. But he was a very bright lawyer; he pushed it and used a lot of the money. Money has come in quite importantly in making a lot of publicity, and he's worked very hard on public relations saying, "Here's this poor little Gould chap who's been forgotten, and the underdog, and he really made this wonderful invention." That's the kind of a story he kept putting out, you see, plus working on the patent game.

What he did--and this is not so uncommon in the patent field, I understand--what he did was that with the big companies he settled very easily, so it didn't pay them to bother to fight the patent. For example, General Motors he sued. General Motors started preparing the case, and they were doing a very thorough job; they had gotten good patent lawyers. Then he agreed to settle for, I don't know, $150,000 or something like that. GM could have all future use of any of Gould's patents for $150,000. Well, at that price it wasn't worth their spending money on lawyers, so they just paid that. He settled also with IBM and with AT&T on a similar kind of basis. I don't know exactly how much all of them paid, but I know the first ones were sort of in that ball park. The AT&T lawyers talked with me, and just said that it wasn't worth pursuing a case, you know. They just paid a lump fee and then there is never any question that they can use any patent that Gould might be able to get from then on.

 

Townes

You know, it's a complex game in itself, and you can see why I wanted to keep out of it. [laughter]

Petit

Were these patents that he had already won?

Townes

No, no. He didn't have any patents by then.

Petit

So he simply said that, "When I get these patents I'm coming after you unless you settle with me."

Townes

Well, he had a patent claim; he had applied for patents in the patent office, and he had patent claims, but I don't think he had any patents yet. Possibly there was one, on using windows in a laser at a particular angle to minimize reflection--something I would not have thought patentable.

After settling fairly cheaply with the big companies that had good lawyers and resources, he started going after the smaller companies. For one smaller company that was already in bankruptcy it was kind of a farce, I gather. They asked me if I wanted to come over and testify and I told them no, I didn't think I would bother. The company didn't have any money anyhow, and they were in bankruptcy; they won the case but didn't get any money.

The major success was down in Florida, a company called Control Data. They had a local Florida lawyer who was a nice man, but I think not very smart or skillful. Of course, the Bell Laboratories lawyers I think were good. The lawyer I had with the Research Corporation was first a man named Stoll who was a very nice person, and I think very scholarly. I don't know how well he would have done--but then he retired and they got a lawyer named Dana Raymond, and I think part of the success of the Research Corporation in getting all aspects of that patent in a complete way through was Dana Raymond. He knew what he was doing and he did a good job and they got the patent.

The lawyer for the Control Data Corporation was a man named Duckworth, a local person down there, and I think a perfectly reputable lawyer. But it was clear to me he really didn't understand it too well and didn't push the right things. Patlex, on the other hand, did a very sophisticated job. First they got a local lawyer, but from Miami, a very sharp trial lawyer type. Duckworth asked me would I testify and I agreed. When I got down there, he explained to me that they had asked Maiman to testify and Maiman had come and this lawyer--in pretrial discussions, the lawyer can ask you a lot of questions prior to the trial, apparently, I never knew that before, but he can--the lawyer had made him so mad--that's one of his techniques, to make the person mad--he made Maiman so mad that Maiman went home and said he wasn't going to testify. [laughs]

So they wanted to warn me about him. And sure enough, he tried that technique, too, and it was annoying. It was clear he was a good lawyer. Duckworth was rather more passive, a nice gentlemanly type. This case also was tried by a jury. Everything else had not been tried by a jury, it had been done before patent specialists--patent judges, particularly. This one was done before a local Florida jury. In addition, they tried what was then a very new technique, I understand. They hired local citizens, kind of like the jurors, to sit in the audience quietly, unknown, and listen, and then to report to them as to how they think the jurors would react and hence how to steer the case, you see, and what arguments to make.

Gould's Refinements, Subsidiary Patents

Townes

They did a very good job. As it ended up, what the jury decided was that Gould had, in fact, seen the paper by Schawlow and myself, and hence anything in there which the Bell Labs patent claimed, he could not also claim. However, the jury did give him claims to a lot of little refinements. For example, we had been pumping one atom, or the discharge, with light from the same atom. We had, in our paper, discussed pumping an atom with a different atom--light from a different atom--but it wasn't written into our patent, and hence the jury gave him that. Well, okay, you don't pump with the same atom, you pump with a different atom. It seems like one of those things a knowledgeable person would realize and hence it would not be patentable, but I think the jury gave him that. And then, also, he wanted to use broad lines; we had used narrow lines. Well, there is no definition of broadness or narrowness; it's all a continuum as to whether the lines are broad or narrow, and we, in fact, in our paper discussed broad lines in solids. But our patent hadn't specifically claimed that case, so they allowed him broad lines, whereas our patent had covered narrow lines, you see?

Petit

Easier for pumping?

Townes

Yes, in some cases.

I think those are the two main things he got out of that. Now, in addition, as I mentioned earlier, he has a patent on the particular angle at which you can put a plate of glass or transparent material which then doesn't reflect. That's called a Brewster's Angle, that's a well-known thing in optics, but somehow he's managed to patent the idea of using that in a laser. I would have said that's obvious if you want to have a window that doesn't reflect; it's well-known the Brewster's angle doesn't produce reflection, so you do that. But strangely he's managed to get that patented.

He also has patented the use of a laser to produce change in materials, for example to melt material, to change it chemically or anything. When General Motors was threatened with this because they use lasers in processing, they talked with me about it and I said, well, you know Archimedes was using sunlight to burn sails of ships, and that was his idea. And after all, women hang out laundry to get them dry in the sun, and photographic images are chemical changes due to light. [laughs] That's so obvious. So if you have some laser light, why wouldn't you use laser light to do it? The GM lawyers were sure he couldn't get away with that. Well, he bowed out of GM, and by not tackling GM he was to my amazement able to get that patent: using lasers to melt something or do something.

Well, there may be a few other things, but that's the kind of thing his patent lawyer managed to get claims on.

Riess

What does that mean, then? What does he get in getting that patent?

Townes

Well, he's got a big company with a fair amount of money behind him, Patlex, who will beat on anybody and try them in court and so on and go to very expensive lengths if they don't pay up. Furthermore, some companies have paid now, so all of the other companies of modest or small size feel that the easy way out is to go ahead and pay.

Petit

Aren't the patents expired now?

Townes

Well, no. There Patlex is lucky. You see, my patent and the Bell Labs patent were taken out in '59, and since a patent expires in seventeen years, they're now out. Some of his patents were finally given just a few years ago, after many years of effort for them. They go for seventeen years. So Patlex makes a lot of money on it because the laser industry is now quite large. I don't know what fraction Gordon gets, but he gets certainly a sizeable fraction. So Patlex will make a lot of money on this, because the field is now well developed.

That's very common in the patent field. Actually, it is also very common that the money is made by subsidiary patents--little changes and so on, little modification and changes; so-called derivatory patents. It's very common that those are the things that make the money, not the first big breakthrough. And also it's common for people in the business to try to delay issuing of the patent as long as possible.

Gordon, in a way, is very lucky, you see, that he failed for so long but he kept going. Finally, when patents were issued, then the total haul is really much larger than he would have ever gotten had he gotten some of these patents to begin with.

Riess

And something like Patlex is a publicly held company?

Townes

Yes, it's a publicly held company.

Riess

My goodness!

Townes

I don't know how well they're doing. I've been watching it to see what's happening, and the stock went down from about sixteen [dollars per share] to about four, so while they are getting some money, I don't know that they're doing all that well. I don't know just why the stock is that way, but that's what it is, so that they have not overall as a company been especially booming. But they are collecting some money now.

Let's see. There are a few other things that I might say about the patent case. Art Schawlow and I have the basic patent on the laser. I have the basic patent on the maser which covers lasers also. So I have the basic patent on the whole field. Gordon doesn't have any basic patents for the idea, he has subsidiary patents. But Patlex and he, of course, play it up that he's one of the original inventors, and he has basic kinds of patents. They are important patents financially, but as I say, they are fairly minor things which could easily be considered unpatentable, I believe.

Now, a couple of other things I want to comment on just to give this a little more interpretation. The Bell Laboratories did not do a good job on that patent. They didn't write it very thoughtfully. And that's partly my fault, but partly their fault.

Bell Labs and Writing the Patents

Riess

You said you didn't have as much time to devote to it?

Townes

I just didn't pay that much attention to it. In the case of the Research Corporation, I paid a lot of attention. It was partly my patent and the Research Corporation's, and I paid a lot of attention to see that was right. Now, the Bell Laboratories patent, I felt, was a subsidiary patent, and one of the reasons it was psychologically easier for me to give it to Bell Labs than it would have been otherwise was that the maser patent covered the whole field anyhow. If you get another patent in the same field it doesn't make all that much difference, so that for me it was just as well to let Bell Laboratories have it.

But also, I was a little annoyed with Bell Labs. I had told Art Schawlow, "Before we issue this paper, they ought to apply for a patent on it." Bell Labs had always required that before any paper is published it get reviewed by somebody to see if there is anything patentable in it before it is issued. So I told Art, "Take it around to the patent department and in particular see Torsiglieri," who I didn't know personally, but he had done the semiconductor patents, and Bill Shockley and other of my friends in the semiconductor business told me he was very good. So I told Art to take it around to Torsiglieri.

Well, now I'll tell you the story of what happened, and I've just gone to the trouble of checking it yesterday. I phoned Torsiglieri, who is retired now, and another lawyer at Bell Labs who actually wrote the patent, named Canepa, C-A-N-E-P-A. My memory of it is the following: that Art then called me up and said, "Well, Bell Labs thinks that they don't want to bother to patent it. There's nothing of specific interest to them, because communications never uses light. Alexander Graham Bell had played with light himself for a while and found it wasn't worthwhile. So this is not in their bailiwick and they don't want to patent it."

Bell Labs, I knew, didn't want to try to cover all technical fields because it made them look like too much of a monopoly. They didn't want to try to cover everything. They wanted to see that they covered the communications business well. Art said, "Well, they just don't think this is going to be of any value to communications, and hence told me that they weren't interested, but if we wanted to patent it, we could go ahead and patent it." I said, "I think that's a little unfair to Bell Labs because obviously they just don't understand, so you tell them they really ought to reconsider. There are certainly possible uses in communications." Then Art called back and said, "Well, they say why don't you come in and let's talk about it and tell them what you think about its use in communications, and then they'll consider it." So I did that. I went in and met with them and very quickly they were convinced, "Oh yes, there are some communication possibilities here, and so we'll patent it."

Now, I have just called Torsiglieri and Canepa. They, of course, don't remember it quite that way. I got it second-hand from Art, and he may have colored it a little bit; he was just talking informally over the phone. But Torsiglieri did say, "Well, yes, we were uncertain about whether there would be many applications and what it would be good for, or whether it was just a kind of a scientific thing, and so we were uncertain about it."

Canepa didn't express it that way quite so strongly. He was a younger man and he actually wrote the patent. Torsiglieri figured he was busy, and so he assigned it to his young assistant. As I say, [laughs] I was a little annoyed about the whole thing, that they did not pay that much attention to it, you see. I said, "Well, okay, it's Bell Lab's business. I've got the whole field covered, after all, with the maser patent, and I'm trying to be generous to them, and they should be good experts. That's their business, let them do it." So I never paid much attention to it.

The result was that he didn't really put in everything that was in our paper, he just put in a few things, and it was, I think, not very well thought through and not very well written. That's part of what's given Gould leverage, because these things were not written into the BTL patent; they were in our paper but not in the patent, you see? For example, that we could use solids and we could pump with other substances and so on.

Now, I think the jury was wrong nevertheless, because these were ideas which were known. They weren't original with Gould in terms of any record.

Petit

It must be frustrating that these arguments are not about actual historic priorities, but whether you've documented things in the peculiar ways that are required in patent law.

Townes

That's right, it's all little technicalities. In the first place, Gordon had been terribly interested in the patents, and finally he got a group that really could do it well--very good lawyers--push on it in every way including the public relations which they worked on very hard. And it's come through. And the way it has worked out, he's making a whale of a lot of money on it.

From my point of view, I think it's a kind of parasitic operation. I don't think he's really contributed substantially. Nevertheless, he has had some ideas, and I think one needs to recognize that. But many of the things he's got patented are pretty obvious and trivial. I would suppose that any company that really wanted to fight the patents and had good lawyers could probably disprove their validity. However, a jury without much scientific background could be uncertain.

There are two things where Gould maybe had an idea at least that I didn't have, and which he did not get patented. One of them one of the other lawyers told me, a lawyer who was expecting to work with Spectra-Physics and was visiting the trial down there in Florida--he wasn't involved in the trial, but he's obviously a very smart lawyer and he had listened to some of the other cases, in particular, the case of Gould vs. Hughes, that is the Hughes Research Laboratory.

Now, so-called Q-switch lasers represent an important kind of system. You excite the atoms and you suddenly open a window so that the thing can oscillate and it lets out an enormous big pulse. So you get a lot more intense energy for a very short time. I was thinking mainly in terms of a continuous oscillator. Of course my oscillator could be turned on and off, but a more or less continuous oscillator. The Hughes people really started that. They did it and demonstrated it. It was a good idea and they patented it.

Gould challenged their patent, and this lawyer tells me that he thinks Gould should have won it; that Gould had the idea in his notebook of some kind of switching and he'd written it down. He didn't think the rest of Gould's claims were very valid, but he thought that that was one case where Gould might really have won. The trouble is the Hughes lawyers were too good. And what the Hughes lawyers argued was that yes, Gould said something like that, but it wasn't workable because it was too early and no lasers were working then and nobody really knew how to build a laser. Of course, we had our patent and our paper out. They argued that paper didn't really show how to build a laser because it took a while to build one. Nobody really could build it just from our instructions, you see?

Now, they didn't call me or Art Schawlow or anybody in. (Gould probably wouldn't have. We might have testified on Gould's behalf, but on the other hand he was probably nervous about inviting us or something.) So the Bell Labs patent and we were not involved. Some people have claimed that invalidates the Bell Labs patent because the court decided that no lasers could work at that time. Well, it doesn't, legally, because to invalidate somebody's patent, you've got to challenge them. You can't take a third party and convince them, you see, you have to give the legal owners a chance to argue the case. So legally the patent is perfectly valid, but that puts a little bit of mud on it that some court has decided in some case that it wasn't clearly a workable system yet.

Ali Javan

Townes

In any case, that's what they used to defeat Gould on that one. Now, there's another one where I know Gould had an original idea--I don't know that he had it first--and that is in the use of what's known as second-order collisions. That is, collision by an excited atom with another atom which then transfers the excitation and gives the other atom energy.

Ali Javan, who is a former student of mine, had gone to Bell Labs. Because I wasn't talking about the laser after I started doing it with Art Schawlow--I wasn't initially talking about it to Javan, even though he was in my lab--he didn't know about it. Well, he went to Bell Labs, and then it was open and he could hear about. So he heard about it and he immediately started having ideas. He was a very, very smart young physicist and so that's not unexpected at all. He told me he had an idea for doing it by second-order collisions and I said, "That's fine. That's a very good idea. You ought to think about it, write it up, publish it."

Well, sometime about that same time I saw Gordon Gould, and Gordon said he'd had an idea--and this was after our paper was around and being distributed, you see, so I feel sure he had by then seen our preprint--he'd had an idea of excitation with second-order collisions. Well, I knew that Ali Javan had the same idea, but it was confidential and I didn't want to say he already had the idea, but to be fair to Gould I had to say, "That's great, that's interesting, why don't you think about it and write it up and publish it?" Well, Gould never published it, and Javan did publish it. Gould never really got it all worked out: for one thing, he never had a very workable case. Ali Javan worked through it very carefully, he did all of the numbers, he did some laboratory tests and so on, and he eventually got the helium-neon system working.

Gould did go after Javan's patent, but since he was up against Bell Labs lawyers and Javan really had a good case, he didn't win that one. I would say clearly I don't think he should have won that one, but, on the other hand, he did have an idea which I had not myself had. If you read optics books you'll find yes, that's one of the methods of excitation, and so one could argue that the general idea is obvious, and anybody who reads the right optics books will find that. But nevertheless doing it successfully with specific atoms and so on or finding a specific case that's going to work, that would be inventive, but I don't think Gould ever really quite did that. But at least he did have an idea. And I missed that one, personally.

Okay, I think that sort of covers the situation. As I have indicated before, in my view I think there are a number of other people who had ideas, and if they wanted to make a kind of a claim they could--not in the scientific tradition, but in the popular tradition of saying, "Well, I thought of it, too, and I should have some credit." While there are a number of people who could say, "Well, I thought of it," what's important is whether people thought about it enough and saw a way of doing it and believed in it enough to really do something. The history is that nobody was doing anything. Even while we were building the maser and many people knew that, nobody else was interested in doing anything. After we got it going, then it became exciting. The same thing is true of the laser, until Art Schawlow and I wrote our paper, and that includes Gordon Gould. He really didn't do anything excepting when he was stimulated by me. When he knew I was doing something, then he would do something.

Petit

In his career has he ever built a laser?

Townes

Yes, he did build a type of laser we mentioned in our paper, with light from a particular atom exciting another particular type.

Petit

He's never built anything on a lab bench to demonstrate his ideas?

Townes

Well, he has built lasers, but I don't think he has ever personally built a new type of laser.

Now, TRG did build the type of laser I mentioned in which he was a participant. It built a helium pumped cesium system, which was one of the things in our paper. Gould claims that was his idea. Well, he wrote that idea down in his notebook of '58, after he had seen our paper. So it clearly is not original and he can't really claim originality, but on the other hand, people at TRG built it, and he was a co-author on that paper.

Classified

Townes

Another thing, Gould has said publicly many times that his problem was that once the Pentagon financed the program there at TRG, he couldn't work on it because it was classified and he had been a member of a communist group at one time, so he was excluded and he couldn't work on it. He also said at one time that his report was classified and he could not read his report. He kept saying that to the public press, and that's an exciting story, that the poor guy had a great invention and he couldn't work on it because the Pentagon has restricted him and so on. Well, I had reviewed that report and recommended that the work at TRG be financed. And at one point I got a copy from the Pentagon just to check because I didn't quite believe that the report had ever been classified. A classified report has a stamp, "Secret" on it, or whatever classification it is, and it turned out this report had no such stamp.

I called up Gordon and said, "Gordon, I'm puzzled about this. It seems to be quite open. Anything that's classified has to have a stamp on it." He said, "You know, you're the first one that's pointed that out." [laughter] And so he stopped putting out that particular story to the press. But he has continued to say that he was restricted and he couldn't work on it at TRG. He's not saying he couldn't read his report, but that he couldn't work on it at TRG because it was restricted. Well, I know a lot of people who visited TRG and talked with them and they said they never saw any indication of such a restriction. My own work was not restricted. So I haven't checked on whether Gould's participation at TRG was restricted, but I doubt it.

Well, let me see. There were one or two other things I was going to say and I've forgotten. Oh yes. There's another place that I would give some credit to Gould or TRG, one or the other: their report was trying to sell the Pentagon on making rather powerful lasers, and by powerful they were talking about a few kilowatts, which is not very powerful these days, but then that was a big thing, way out there, to get that kind of energy. I had been talking about very low power systems, generally, and I hadn't been worried about higher power. But they were making a proposal to ARPA which was out for new things and military things, of course, and so they gave them a very ambitious program and they were going to get lots of power. And I would have to say that was basically right, it could be done. I was a bit skeptical, and I wrote in my report I thought this was possible, but difficult. I thought certainly a few hundred watts could be obtained, but how much more was uncertain. Well, it turns out we've gotten a billion watts in pulses, at least, maybe a 100 kilowatts in CW.

Now, the actual report was written partly by Gould and partly by [Lawrence] Goldmuntz, who was president of the company. And Larry Goldmuntz told me--he was kind of an entrepreneur/engineer-- he told me at the time he just couldn't get Gould to ever write down anything, and he finally had to sit down with him to get that report written, and that he wrote a good part of it, but many of the ideas were Gould's. So I think Larry Goldmuntz may have put some of that in concerning the high energy, big systems kind of approach.

It was in fact very doubtful at that time how much energy you could get out. In fact, when I went down to Washington I remember fairly high engineering officials in the Pentagon challenging me in a meeting there in the Pentagon; there were a lot of people saying, "How are lasers ever--can lasers really ever produce any energy? After all, the efficiency is about 10-4 or something like that and so you are never going to get much energy out of lasers." I pointed out, "Basically, it's simply an energy conversion, feeding one kind of energy into another kind of energy, and there's no reason that can't be as efficient as any other energy transfer process. We don't have a method of doing it at the moment, but there's no reason it can't be." Gene Fubini was one of the doubters, but "Well," he said, "I guess that's right." But there was doubt at the time, whereas TRG went all out in being very optimistic about it, and it turned out to be basically correct.

Scientists' Notebooks

Riess

What is the status of a scientist's notebook? You keep referring to the notebooks as if they are in the public domain. Are they?

Townes

Well, they are not usually in public domain, but they are called on in court cases, and I've been always quite open with mine. People have copied my notebooks and xeroxed them and other things for other cases.

Riess

And you make a note when something has happened, or do you just keep a kind of running log?

Townes

Generally, scientists differ. Some people keep very, very complete notes. I don't keep especially complete notes. My practice is, whenever I make some new measurements that I don't have recorded somewhere else, I record them, because I may want to refer to them during the next few weeks. Anyhow I record how the measurements came out, primarily. Or, if I work something out as I'm thinking about something, and I work out some equations, and I come to a result which I feel is useful--I may or may not feel it's something I want to publish, but something I want to remember--then I write down the derivation in my notebook and say, "Well, that's it." Or, if I get some information from somebody, like "Such-and-such material has so much transparency," or something else, I write that down as to where it came from and so on in order to remember it.

This is why I had written down all of the information I got from Gordon Gould on what power he was getting out of his thallium lamps. So that's the type of miscellaneous information I thought I might want to refer to in the future at some point.

Riess

Scientists are assiduous about this for the most part?

Townes

Oh, they differ. They differ a lot.

 

Townes

There is another aspect which had particularly to do with patents. Now, if you have a patentable idea, then, if you really know about patents and you write down in a notebook as to what you are thinking of, write out the details, and then you have somebody witness it--it doesn't have to be a notary public, just a witness--then it is a record of it which is acceptable in court. For example, I had one of my students, Joe Giordmaine, witness the laser thing, and I had Art Schawlow witness the maser thing and so on. So that's another way a notebook may be used, but that's only if it's something you think is patentable, and that's fairly uncommon.

Now, when I was doing the maser thing, and when I was working on the maser patent, I wrote down a number of little separate ideas including three-level pumping, for example. That's something Gordon Gould claims--well, I had the idea a couple of years before, and I have written records of it and so on.

National Pressure on Scientists

Townes

I should mention still other cases where you can see the pressure, the nationalist pressure as well as the personal pressure [laughs], on trying to get credit in this sort of high-publicity field of masers and lasers. There was a French physicist named Kastler, Albert [Alfred??? pp. 176-177] Kastler, and I spent my sabbatical over there with him. A very fine person, wonderful man, and a good physicist. He got the Nobel prize for something which he called "optical pumping." Now it was a specialized kind of thing where you effect the levels of an atom in a particular way. It is not just exciting them, it is effecting the levels in a particular way with certain polarizations and so on. It is a little bit complicated, but valuable scientifically, and he called it optical pumping and later got a Nobel prize for it.

Now, in the laser field, everybody calls optical pumping simply excitation, and that's an older idea--much older idea, people have been doing that for years. But the French, that is, many of Kastler's friends and the French newspapers and all, started claiming that he had invented optical pumping, which he had, but in that specialized sense, and hence it was claimed he was really a basic contributor to the laser, you see? This went into a lot of French magazines and newspapers and even scientists there were claiming that Kastler should be getting more credit because he was really behind the laser, and so on.

Well, Kastler, being the kind of person he was, got up in a meeting with the press and said, "You know, I didn't have anything to do with that. I wish you'd give me credit for what I did, not what I didn't do." [laughter]

Petit

Sounds like an honorable fellow.

Townes

Yes, well he is, he was; he's dead now. But that's another case of the kind of super-pressure that's been on this particular field.

 

Riess

Who named the laser?

Townes

Gordon Gould claims that he invented the idea, and he did write it in his notebook.

Riess

You mean the acronym?

Townes

Yes, the acronym. It was used in my laboratory, however, just off and on informally. But one of my former students, Bruce Rosenblum, now down at Santa Cruz, told me he remembers it very clearly. I know we were batting around things like IRASER for infrared and GASER for gamma rays and RASER for radio, and LASER was just one of those, you see. It was just a take off on the MASER. Rosenblum says he remembers it being used in my lab by students long before it was in Gould's notebook.

Petit

Did you resist it?

Townes

I resisted it initially, because I guess I was too formalistic in thinking, "Let's classify them in accordance with the wavelength"--optical maser, and microwave maser, and infrared maser and gamma ray maser, and so on. But then people started inventing all of the other acronyms: IRASER, GASER, and so on, and those were kicked around for a while. Finally the laser settled down. Now people call almost everything lasers, including microwave systems. [laughter]

Petit

So the generic term has turned around.

Townes

The laser just caught on so much more in popular imagination.

Riess

This gadget [a laser] sitting on your desk amuses me, whatever it is. I unplugged it so I could plug in the tape recorder. Who knows what the effect was!

Townes

What the effect was really is that it won't work. [laughter]

---

---

24. XXIV University Professor, University of California at Berkeley, 1967

Planning to Work in Astronomy

Townes

All right. You'd like me to talk about how I came to Berkeley. Let me quickly go through a little bit of my connection with Berkeley. I first became acquainted with Berkeley as a graduate student. When I was a graduate student down at Caltech I came up here. I talked particularly with Pan Jenkins who was an important physicist here and later became dean. He was doing spectroscopy and he gave me some good advice and I kept in touch with him a little bit.

Then, in 1950--I had been at Columbia University for two years--Jenkins approached me about coming to Berkeley, because Berkeley was beginning to expand. I've always liked Berkeley. I would have said that it was probably my favorite place to be in academic work, but at that point I had just gotten my laboratory going well at Columbia and I felt it wasn't the time to change, so I had to say no. But I helped him--. We talked about other possible people in the general field that I knew, and I remember introducing Ed McMillan to Charlie Kittel, because Charlie Kittel was one of the candidates--Charlie Kittel was at Bell Labs--and Charlie did come out here. Walter Knight was another friend of mine. Walter also came here at that time.

So Berkeley was building up substantially then, and getting some very good people, but I stayed at Columbia because it was just inappropriate to make a change at that point.

Then, after I resigned from being provost of MIT, I felt MIT was not really the right place for me to stay. As an administrator I felt that there was maybe something I could do that would be useful, but in a non-administrative position, I didn't feel MIT was ideal and I also decided to move towards astrophysics.

Riess

There was some possibility with Harvard, too, wasn't there?

Townes

Yes, that's right. I was offered a position at Harvard in astronomy, and they had already raised some funds for a named professorship for me there. But I felt leaving MIT and going to Harvard was a little embarrassing to MIT. Although Harvard was going to raise funds for a professorship, I wouldn't have been one of their--let me see--university professors, I guess, whereas I was a university professor at MIT. I felt, well, it didn't make any difference for me, but it would make MIT look kind of bad if I took a step down at Harvard.

In addition, while Harvard has a good astronomy department, is not near very good observing facilities. The West Coast is the best place for observing facilities, telescopes and so on. The West Coast has been strong in astronomy for a long time, and the scene here is good. So the West Coast was a good candidate. Actually, Chicago offered me a position, too, but Frances just was absolutely not interested in going to Chicago. [laughter] And Caltech. I talked with people at Caltech, they were interested in my coming there, but the Berkeley area was more appealing to me, even though I have great admiration for Caltech.

Riess

How long would you say you had been focussed on doing astronomy next?

Townes

Well, as I indicated, I think, somewhat earlier, as a graduate student I approached Professor Zwicky, who was an astrophysicist. I was doing my research in physics, but I said, "Look, I'd like to learn some astronomy. I like astronomy. Is there some small research job that I could do with you and really get acquainted with the field?" Well, he gave me a very, very dull job of just examining photographic plates. I did that for a couple of hours and stopped. [laughter] But I had thought about it even then. I was attracted to astronomy.

Then when I was at Bell Laboratories during the war, whenever the plane was not flying down in Florida, I would do some thinking about a particular problem--. I decided to pick out a problem which I knew about--I think I had read about it even as an undergraduate--about these strange radio waves coming in from outer space, and which weren't understood at that time. In my spare time I tried to figure out what might be producing them, and I wrote a paper then on that. I talked to Jansky who had found the waves--he was still at Bell Labs--and he had some data he hadn't published, he wasn't doing anything in the field at that time.

It's been reported that Jansky's family said Bell Labs told him he couldn't do this anymore. I didn't get that impression from him. It seemed to me that he, as an engineer, had done a lot of good things about radio waves from outer space and sort of come to the end of what he felt he could do in the field. In any case, he didn't express any unhappiness about it to me. He had just stopped working in that area. I used some of his results and analyzed them, too.

I did a little bit then, and I really debated going into astronomy versus going into microwave spectroscopy. I think I told the story about my discussing the situation with I. S. Bowen, who was then head of Palomar and Mt. Wilson, and a former teacher of mine. He said, "Well, there's nothing in radio waves that is going to help astronomy." That's typical of how wrong astronomers were at that time in judging the field. But that was one of several things that made me decide to do microwave spectroscopy instead.

Then, when we developed the maser, I built a maser amplifier especially because it was a very, very low noise amplifier, the best amplifier that anybody had ever seen by a factor of fifty or something like that. I worked on the maser during my sabbatical in order to make a good amplifier, partly with astronomy in mind. With some graduate students, I did some work with an amplifier we built at Columbia after my return from sabbatical, using a telescope down at the Naval Research Laboratory--they had the best radio-telescope in the U.S. at that time.

I kept thinking about it and talking about it. One of my students, Alan Barrett, went into the field after he got his Ph.D. and he found the first molecular line in the radio region, namely OH. He very persistently worked at it and discovered OH. And I had been asked during my sabbatical in '55 to give a talk about what molecular lines might be found in interstellar space in the radio region, I gave a talk at an international meeting of astronomers. I gave a talk there in which I thought through a number of things. The astronomers thanked me and seemed pleased about it, but never did anything about it. I think they didn't really believe there was anything there. In fact, I'm sure that that was the problem.

So, I played with astronomy a number of times and was attracted to it, as well as with some other fields. I thought about a variety of fields, and during my sabbatical I debated whether I should do astrophysics or continue with some other things. I decided that really the best thing to do would be to stick with masers and build amplifiers that applied to astrophysics, for one thing.

When I was leaving MIT, by that time there was a lot of work in the laser field, and I think I have said before that I generally don't like to just be in a very popular field where there are lots of people working, because the field is going to be developed anyhow, and I'd rather do something that I feel is being neglected and where I could make a more unique contribution. So while I was very interested in lasers and non-linear optics and I continued to do that after I came out here, my general goal was to migrate into astrophysics. Coming to the West Coast was a natural place to do that, and so that was my rough plan. When I came here I continued laser physics and non-linear optics, but initiated an astrophysical program which then gradually took over all of my work.

Riess

The various places you've mentioned, Harvard and Caltech and Chicago and here, did they care what you were about to do or did they just take you on the strength of your record?

Townes

Well, I was to be hired into the astronomy department at Harvard, so they knew I was interested in astronomy and I would be doing that. At Chicago, I think, that was not an issue at all, they just wanted me to come. I visited Chicago, and Chicago is a better place than most people on the East or West Coast think, but as I say, my wife wasn't very interested.

Caltech I considered. I don't like southern California as much as northern California, and the Caltech people asked me a good deal about what I wanted to do and so on. I felt the provost there was even a little too particular. He was trying to pin me down. I didn't want to be pinned down on exactly what I was going to do, one thing versus another. I told him the general field or fields that I was interested in, and I told him infrared and microwave astronomy and some things like interferometry and so on. But Caltech was pretty badly besmogged at that time, and Berkeley seemed a somewhat more attractive place to live as well as being very, very positive about giving me facilities and not saying, "Well, just exactly what are you going to do?"

Riess

So there is one case where the Nobel Laureate operated on your behalf.

Townes

Oh yes. I'm sure being a Nobel Laureate helped in getting plenty of offers. There were other offers around. I was asked to be president of Tufts University, and there were some other administrative positions, but I was not particularly interested in an administrative position.

Riess

Are there any large telescopes near Chicago?

Townes

Well, Chicago is fairly well-known for astronomy, but they do not have a lot of modern equipment. They use other people's equipment now. But it is an outstanding astronomical department and has been for a long time. And an outstanding physics department, too. I think Chicago is doing very, very well actually.

The Bid from Berkeley

Riess

Did they all negotiate with you about salaries and facilities and all of those things? How did Berkeley approach you?

Townes

Well, these other places talked about just my coming, and maybe talked about salary some. But I didn't talk seriously about salaries until I was more or less decided what my choice was.

Now, in the case of Berkeley, I was approached by the department. I guess Burt [Burton] Moyer probably called me up and approached me. Then he said that Clark Kerr wanted to talk with me. So I came out and I talked with Clark Kerr. I was interested in coming to Berkeley. It was perhaps my first choice from the beginning, although I took the other places seriously and thought about them. One thing I was concerned about in Berkeley was how the new governor, named Reagan, was going to treat the University, because he had just fairly recently come in and we had all of these troubles in Berkeley, and not many people were coming to Berkeley during that time because it was a period of deep trouble. People were moving out of Berkeley over the hills because they thought the city was going to fall apart and so on.

Riess

That was because of integration?

Townes

What's that?

Riess

That was because of busing, wasn't it?

Townes

No, no, no, no. That was just the general political attitudes here. The sixties problems.

Riess

Yes, but busing moved a lot of people over the hills, too.

Townes

Well, the people I talked to simply said, "Berkeley is going to fall apart politically, and it isn't going to be a good place to live," and they moved out.

Riess

Because of the civil disobedience?

Townes

Yes. I think they misjudged it, frankly. I think they misjudged it, but those things didn't worry me too much. I talked with Clark Kerr, and one of the things I asked him was, "How is Governor Reagan going to treat the University, because he is very conservative and the University has all of these problems." (I've forgotten whether he had already sent in the National Guard and so on.)

Kerr explained to me, very civilly, that when Governor Brown came in--Pat Brown--he was not in favor of the University, really. He looked down on the University. He didn't think very well of the University, anyhow. But we talked with him and persuaded him and he got more acquainted with the University, and then he was a great supporter of the University. He said the same thing would happen with Reagan.

Well, I didn't know whether that was right, but I sort of accepted it as an explanation. Of course, after I had accepted the job, not very long after that, Clark Kerr was fired by Reagan--well, actually by the Board [of Regents] but Reagan was behind it. As he [Clark Kerr] puts it, he was "fired with enthusiasm."

Riess

Did Kerr have a very good understanding of science?

Townes

No, we didn't talk science, really. He didn't care what I was going to do in any detailed sense. He wouldn't know.

Riess

He wanted you here.

Townes

He wanted me here. I talked with him about the expense and difficulty of moving the laboratory. He said, "Well, how expensive is it? What would that take?" I said, "Well, probably something like $100,000." He said, "Well, I'll give you $100,000"--$100,000 is not very much money today, but in those days it was quite a bit, enough to establish a laboratory--and Burt Moyer told me that's very unusual. That's just great.

Then the space sciences offered me some money, I think another ten or twenty thousand or something like this, to help me get started.

Riess

That was fairly new itself, right?

Townes

That was fairly new at that time. I had been very much involved with NASA, and I think they wanted me to work up there, but I decided the physics building here was the right place for me to work at that time.

Riess

Did you actually physically move your laboratory, or did you reestablish it?

Townes

I just reestablished it. Yes, I reestablished it. I brought a few things out. As a matter of fact, I did bring some equipment out from MIT, but mostly it was just new equipment.

Now, the other thing that I was involved in was a lot of public work--international work and public work--and I had a free secretary at MIT. I talked with Clark Kerr about that and he said, "Well, we'll give you a secretary." My understanding was that it was from the President's Office, that the President's Office provided the money for the secretary and that didn't come out of the department's budget.

So they gave me an administrative secretary, which has lasted up until this year. They have continued to do that up until this year. It's just being cut off because of the hardship of the University and the fact that I retired. They continued it on into retirement very generously, for a while. That, too, was somewhat unusual.

The other thing that they did was to make me a University Professor. Now, University Professors--. Actually, it was called Professor at Large at that time. I knew Edward Teller and Harold Urey were Professors at Large. I think those were the only two at that time, but I may be mistaken. Maybe there was another one or two that I don't remember, but those were two that I knew.

I called up Harold Urey to say, "What does a Professor at Large mean? I am supposed to report to the President rather than the department, and I'm supposed to be connected with all campuses equally. What does one actually do? Is it just an honorary thing?" He said, "No, you really report to the President." I said, "What does that really mean?" He said, "Oh, yes, I've reported to the president. Why just last month I wrote him a letter about not cutting trees on the campus." [laughter]

So it was really an honorary position and has now become "University Professor," and now there are about fifteen or twenty of them scattered around. The idea was that I would be associated with all of the campuses and speak on all of the campuses. Now, for an experimental physicist that's not very practical; you can't spend equal time on all campuses. But I always made a point whenever invited to a different campus, to go and give a talk, a single lecture or two. I always did that.

Riess

The initiation would come from the other campuses?

Townes

That's right. And the University had money for me to travel; this way it wouldn't cost the other campuses money, and I could travel to the other campuses and give talks. That was true of all of the Professors at Large.

Riess

Were you asked to talk to alumni groups?

Townes

No, not particularly. I have done that some, but not a great deal.

Riess

Were you asked to "mingle with the regents," or with important donors?

Townes

I have done a little bit of that. But those things were clearly not the function of that job, no. That was not what they had in mind particularly. On the other hand, the University does use its Nobel Laureates and other prominent people for purposes like that, and I would get invited to the President's House to meet some of them and talk with them, or the Chancellor's House. I have made a trip to Taiwan, as a matter of fact, with the previous chancellor [Heyman]. He took Frances and me and Glenn Seaborg and Yuan Lee over on a kind of a fundraising thing, or a public relations trip. It was a very pleasant trip to Taiwan.

So I have done a modest amount of that, but that's not particularly part of the job.

The Welcome

Riess

How were you integrated into the department by Moyer, how were you received?

Townes

Oh, I think people welcomed me. You see, I think Berkeley was feeling a little beleaguered at that point, and to have a new person come--[laughing] for them to make a successful bid to get a new person to come, I think they considered it a great success, you see. They were very pleased because, in terms of public relations and attitudes towards Berkeley, they felt that was positive, that they could bring a new person here.

And I had a lot of friends here. I've known many of these people for a long time, just as colleagues. They were very kind to me. Ed McMillan I have known for a long time, and he and his wife helped us out. The Nobel Laureate chemist, Melvin Calvin, and I had known each other--not terribly well, but I had known him for some time. He invited us to stay in his house while we found another house and got settled in it. So we stayed with them, oh, I think two or three weeks or something like that. And people gave parties for us. Carl Helmholz put on a very nice party out at his house to entertain us. People were very, very cordial, and many of them are old friends. So it was a happy time.

Now, I think some people in the East were a little puzzled that I would come to Berkeley, because they considered Berkeley in such deep trouble with the student riots and disturbances and so on. But those did very much affect the scholarship on campus in some departments. In the physics department it did not affect the scholarship very much because the physics students were busy and serious about their work, and not many of them spent much time on the political scene.

LBJ and the APS

Riess

It's hard to turn physics into a statement of--

Townes

--of politics. [laughter] There were some of them, but not a large number that were much involved, and so most of the physicists just carried right on with their work. We had tear gas and so on on campus occasionally, and I would watch it out of the window, but it was a fairly minor thing so far as any interruption of work was concerned here in the physics department.

Riess

Well, did Charlie Schwartz try to organize the department to be more active in its response?

Townes

Oh yes. He tried. He tried a variety of things. And he had some following during that period, of the students particularly, and a few professors. People took him more seriously then, certainly, than they do now, because he was right in there pushing all of these causes which were supported fairly broadly on campus. Not completely, not by everybody by any means, but there were enough people supporting them that Charlie Schwartz had a substantial following.

I had already encountered him at the American Physical Society where I was president and he did some funny things there. One of them was, I had invited President Johnson to speak at our banquet in Washington of the American Physical Society--I think the first time a President had ever spoken at the American Physical Society. I invited Johnson to speak. I thought this would be a good thing, to encourage Johnson to think about science and hear what he had to say about it. And he gave a banquet speech.

But as he got up to speak, Charlie Schwartz rose from the table with this placard and started saying something--I'm not sure just what now--but other people around the table grabbed hold and pushed him down. [laughter] So he was stopped.

That had a repercussion on campus some years later when I was asked to comment on a speech by Dan Greenberg, who had been invited in to speak about science and the national scene. I was asked would I be willing to be in a little panel just to make a few comments about his speech. I said, "Well, okay." So I went over to this thing, and I made a few comments. Then people in the audience started questioning me in particular: "Why did you invite President Johnson to speak to the American Physical Society?" How terrible. Inviting a president, particularly Johnson.

Well, I explained that I felt after all Johnson had a pretty important role in this country, and it was a good thing for physicists to get acquainted with him and a good thing to get him interested in science and to see what he thinks. We've got to be connected and think about that. By the end of the session, people were rather more kindly about it. In fact, one faculty member said, "You realize that we were very antipathetic, but some of the things you said really turned us around." He was a member of the little committee that had planned the whole thing.

So there were things like that going on.

Riess

Well, that was, in a way, part of your--. I mean, it has, by default, become part of your role to be a liaison.

Townes

Yes. As a matter of fact, I have made something of a point of that. I think it is important for the University to be connected with the rest of the national life. I think the Vietnamese war was an unfortunate war, and what it did internally was to separate people so that they just weren't talking with each other. And I know how industry felt about universities, particularly about Berkeley.

I may have mentioned that I was on the board of Perkin Elmer and Chester Nimitz, Jr., was chairman of the board at that time. I told him I was moving to Berkeley. He said, "Charlie, how could you move to Berkeley? That's the most sinful city in the whole United States!" [laughter] I said, "Well, should I resign from the board?" Well, he was joking in part, but that was somewhat indicative of the feelings. Industry was just suspicious of anybody from Berkeley, and Berkeley suspicious of anybody from industry, or anybody from the government. They just weren't talking.

So when I moved here, I brought my safe, which is associated with the Jason group--a classified safe--and I put it right here in my front office. I said, "Look, I think it is important to try to be influencing the government, and it's important to ask how you are influencing the government, whether you are doing it in the right direction or not, but to try to disconnect yourself and let them go their own way, and we go our own way, is the wrong thing." So I have purposely made a point of trying to represent that: that we have got to have liaison, we've got to have influence and be talking with these people rather than isolated from them.

That was part of my role at General Motors, also. People in industry and government sometimes looked at me as a suspicious Berkeley character--maybe too radical. Whereas, people here looked at me as an arch-conservative dealing with industry, of all things.

Riess

Did they--when you were with your fellow physicists in meetings or social events--did they sort of avoid this topic?

Townes

No, let me say I think the serious physicists here have always treated me very well and decently and been appreciative of my public role.

Riess

But I mean, do people talk physics with you first or do they talk government?

Townes

Politics or something? Oh, I don't know. Some of both, I think. You know, people are interested in political things and--

 

Townes

Yes, people would be eager to talk politics with me. Sometimes they would get a little heated about disagreeing with me, but in most cases it was really quite civil; a few cases not.

Riess

The attitude about having Johnson speak to the American Physical Society, what does that express about physicists sense of themselves, that they can't be spoken to by the President?

Townes

[laughter] Well, I think the attitude was that somehow we were honoring the President by asking him to speak to us, you see, and you mustn't do that.

Riess

Sort of an apology.

Townes

That's right. To do anything that would look good for the President would be very bad, you see, very bad. And having anything to do with him, for that matter, was kind of bad. You should boycott him; that was more the attitude, boycott him, don't have anything to do with him, don't talk to him.

Riess

Actually, physicists have been great signers of position papers.

Townes

Yes they have. Physicists are generally fairly liberal, more liberal than chemists or engineers. Perhaps sort of comparable with mathematicians, I'd say. On the other hand, physicists have also have a lot to do with national policy because physics is so fundamental to much of our science and engineering, so physicists have a lot to do with national policy. If you look at the President's Science Advisory Committee, for example, over the years a large fraction of those were physicists.

Riess

It must be that the expectation is from a physicist you get the most dispassionate evaluation.

Townes

Well, from a scientist the hope is you get an objective view. But physics applies rather more broadly across a number of fields than do some of the other sciences, which is the reason physicists were very much involved in the President's Science Advisory Committee.

Now, let me say, I've mentioned some fairly extreme things, and there were some extreme people here, but on the other hand, many of the people were very sensible and they recognized the value in what I was doing. The extremists were even kind of funny to me. Some people felt it was dangerous and awful and so on, but I wasn't all that worried about it.

Other Incidents, Charlie Schwartz

Townes

Let me mention a couple of other kinds of incidents now. A bunch of about a half a dozen fairly radical students wanted to talk with me about political issues. They were from some student organization here, and I knew some of them as physics students, and they were in this radical group that wanted to talk with me. I said, "Okay I'll talk with you," so they came in here.

Well, Charlie Schwartz, unannounced to me, came in, too. I didn't shoo him away. So they asked questions and talked about things. Then Charlie Schwartz wrote up and published a kind of a booklet about various professors on campus, including me, and he quoted me as saying things which were absolutely opposite from what I had said at that meeting. I talked with one of the students and I said, "Do you think this is really right?" "No," he said, "No, you said the opposite thing." But it was published by them. That was the strength of feeling.

Riess

Did you make any kind of public refutation of that?

Townes

No, I didn't. Where would I do it? The Daily Californian wouldn't take it, probably. The Daily Californian at that time wouldn't have treated it honestly. And I said, "What difference does it make?"

Charlie also made some statements to The Daily Californian about me, rather uncomplimentary. One of my graduate students had been president of the student body, and was a pretty liberal guy, himself. He went down and talked with The Daily Californian and said, "Look, that's all wrong. Professor Townes is not like that. He's a valuable member of the department and that's all wrong," and they published it--they were willing to quote him.

Then Charlie came into my lab and said, "Why did you make Eric say this?" I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "What he said here!" I said, "I didn't make him say it. I was out of town. I didn't know it was going on." He said, "Well, why did Eric say it?" I said, "Why don't you ask him?" [laughter] I mentioned it to Eric, and Eric said, "That insults both you and me, that you would tell me to say something!"

My secretary came in here at lunchtime one time and found Charlie Schwartz rummaging in my files. [laughter]

Riess

You mentioned that before. It's really unbelievable.

Townes

And she--I'm not sure I would have done this--she went to the chairman of the department. The chairman of the department, George Trilling, told Charlie Schwartz, "You've got to apologize for doing that. That's not the right thing to do." So Charlie wrote me a note; he had to write the note. But now Trilling, you see, understood the situation. He was very sensible. Schwartz was just very extreme and became, as I say, to me a little comic about it.

Now, there were other professors who supported Schwartz, and very much the same political ideas, but were not so far out in what they felt was appropriate to do. [laughing] They were just a little more self-contained in their emotions, I guess, or something like that.

Riess

Were you and Teller lumped together in people's minds?

Townes

I'm not so sure. Probably some, but I never had that direct accusation. There was a time when the--let me see, what's the newspaper? Some newspaper here in Berkeley--

Riess

The Berkeley Barb?

Townes

The Berkeley Barb published a picture of me and a story about me that called me Dr. Strangelove and said that I had anti-personnel weapons in my safe and so on. I didn't read the Berkeley Barb, but the campus police read it and keep up with it apparently, or they did at that time. They called me and said this has occurred, and they thought that I would be in some danger, and they'd like to change all of the locks.

I said, "My students come in my office all of the time. They use it after hours and they come in. I don't want to change the locks."

They said, "Well, could we have somebody in the hallway there, as a guard to protect you?"

I said, "Goodness, no!" [laughter]

They said, "Well, all right. It's up to you. We think it's a little hazardous."

I never had any trouble. So I think one needs to recognize the extremes of behavior here; at the same time, to recognize the fair amount of just general reasonableness and good sense in most people. I think on the one hand the worst of them, the extremities, were really pretty bad. On the other hand, most of the people went about their business and they were sensible and decent.

I never felt there was any unfriendliness towards me on the part of the majority of the department, or the majority of the campus people, for that matter. The students--I had no trouble with the students that I knew of.

Benefits of Teaching for Research

Riess

What were your teaching duties?

Townes

Well, now, a University Professor is not required to teach. That's another fringe perk. But I did teach regularly for quite a long time. I taught quantum electronics and then I ran seminars--seminars on astrophysics. I made a point of sort of teaching one course, but it was a fairly light duty. And then also I gave lectures when I was asked to by other campuses and was trying, generally, to participate in the overall University as well as I could.

Riess

Does that mean University committees also?

Townes

Yes. University committees and various kinds of public things that the Chancellor wanted and so on. However, I was fortunate in not heaving a very heavy load.

But I had lots of students. I characteristically had around a dozen graduate students for quite a long time and that kept me pretty busy. We had seminars together, and I also gave a few special series of lectures on subjects of interest to me. People would ask me would I give a series of lectures on this or that. I gave a series of lectures on molecular spectroscopy and structure, for example, at one point.

In recent years, however, I have not been teaching. I guess the last ten years of my work here at Berkeley I have not been teaching very much. I'd excuse that on the basis [that] first I wasn't required to; secondly, I had a lot of public things that I needed to do. Plus I had a lot of graduate students. In any case, the University Professor is not required to teach formally.

Riess

So your teaching--the earlier teaching in quantum electronics was undergraduate?

Townes

Well, no. Those were graduate students. I have given a few special lectures to undergraduates, but generally I have not taught undergraduates here.

Riess

Are you available? Have you been available to undergraduates who were looking for mentors?

Townes

Yes.

Riess

Could they make appointments with you?

Townes

Well, the physics department has asked people would they be available for undergraduates from time to time. They get a list of professors who are willing to do that. I have volunteered to do that, and I have had some undergraduates. I invited them into my home and just generally tried to get them acquainted with the place and talk about things and so on. So I have done that for a few years also.

Riess

It seems like a very satisfying kind of activity.

Townes

Yes.

Riess

Has your experience with teaching graduate students been very rewarding?

Townes

Oh, yes. I like to teach. It takes work, of course, and at the time you have to do the work, you wish you had enough time to do all of the other things that you are supposed to be doing too. On the other hand, there are two facets to this: one is dealing with graduate students, and young people learning things is always very satisfying; in addition to that, I think teaching adds a great deal to research. This is not something that everybody notices, or talks about anyhow, but I find that a systematic examination of a field frequently turns up things that you've overlooked.

Usually, if you are doing research, you do certain particular things and work on those. Then there are various areas in between that you kind of neglect because they are not necessary at the time. Whereas if you are teaching you have to really try to give an overview and really try to be sure you understand things, and look at every aspect of it systematically.

In my own teaching, I have turned up a number of research ideas as a result, things that because I had looked at them and thought it through, I'd see possibilities there that otherwise I would have missed--and other people were missing, too. So I think teaching--at least an upper-class course, a graduate course, teaching can contribute quite a lot to research. It certainly contributes to the breadth of one's understanding of the field.

One of the difficulties scientists in industry have, I think, is that they become too narrow. They work on a particular field and they just work on that. The result is, they don't see the other things around them or see how other ideas might feed into their own field or their own field might feed into other fields. Whereas in teaching you are forced to be broader.

Riess

You are forced by your students or by your own standards?

Townes

Well, by your own standards plus your students. But you know the students are going to ask questions and you have to understand things. So it's a combination.

Riess

Were there journal clubs? Did you participate in that kind of thing?

Townes

Oh, yes. We had journal clubs. And I participated a good deal with the astronomers for a while. I guess George Field and I ran a course. George Field was head of the astronomy department for a while here; he's now gone to Harvard. He and I ran a course in astrophysics jointly together in which we invited in a variety of speakers, and spoke some ourselves.

When I first came I worked very hard at learning astronomy, and at being associated with the astronomy department. I sat in on a variety of things there. But also we had this joint thing, and George was very helpful in helping me get started.

Lunch at The Faculty Club

Riess

Did you lunch at The Faculty Club and mix? Who were your pals? What table did you sit at at The Faculty Club?

Townes

Well, let me see. I eat at The Faculty Club with some frequency, but I also just have bag lunches here with my students quite a lot. We would have bag lunches in the library and sit around and talk. Once or twice a week that would be a time for a kind of informal seminar, too.

But whom did I talk with? Well, pretty much anybody. Of course, the people that I knew I would generally sit with, but I did not--

Riess

Well, Carl Helmholz describes the various distinct tables up at The Faculty Club.

Townes

Well, some people are very regular in exactly which table they sit at. I generally make a practice of doing it the other way around. I enjoy the people I know, but I make a point of not sitting at the same place all of the time, or the same table all of the time. I just like to move around. The times I eat over there, I would just see wherever seemed to be an interesting handy table. But I did eat with the physicists and the chemists and the astronomers quite a bit.

Special Committees for the University

Protesting an Attack on Roger Heyns

Riess

Okay. I have a list here of highlights of University hirings and firings, and Nobel prize winners and Chancellors, and I just thought if you cast your eye down over it, it would remind you of some of the early events.

Townes

Well, let's see.

Riess

You've commented on Reagan; you knew Kerr briefly; you knew Charlie Hitch.

Townes

Yes, that's right. Well, I was also from time to time on various special committees for the University. I made a point of serving when asked. I might mention some of those. Roger Heyns I knew very well, and I thought very highly of Roger. I still see him frequently. At one point, he was being called a Communist by some regents and that was in the newspapers, that Roger Heyns was really a secret Communist sympathizer. [laughter] More of these extreme things coming out. I knew some of the regents, and one of them I remember calling. He was originally from Stanford, an engineer named Dean Watkins, and he has a company, Watkins-Johnson, down in the Palo Alto region. He eventually became chairman of the Board of Regents. He had rather newly joined the board, where there was a real attack on Roger, a feeling that the regents would force him to resign because he was too radical. (Of course, some of the radical students looked at him the other way around.) [laughter]

Some of us got together, Melvin Calvin I remember very well doing this, and I think maybe he got me involved in it, and we all went over to visit Roger. We said, "Look, we're not going to stand for this, and if they make you resign, we'll resign too."

Riess

Was that publicly known?

Townes

I think that was known to the regents, yes.

Well, then I called up Watkins and said, "I know Roger pretty well, and this is just not true. Roger's a very earnest, sensible person." To show you, again, the thinking of the times, he said, "Okay, I won't prejudge it, I will wait and see." He wasn't accepting my story, but he would say, "I'm going to be open-minded," at least. He later became chairman of the board, and I had another experience with him in the opposite direction politically. Well, maybe I shouldn't say the opposite direction, a little different direction.

Replacing John Lawrence at Donner Lab

Townes

The Lawrences, of course, are very important prominent people here. John Lawrence I had known, not well, but I had known him for some time, and he was on one of the national committees I served on and so on. It was time for him to retire, and he wasn't retiring from his lab, he was still running things and insisting on that. He had also just been appointed to the Board of Regents by Reagan. People felt the lab was in trouble, and so I was asked by Charlie Hitch to chair a committee to make a recommendation to the University what should be done.

Well, we recommended that a new appointee be appointed as the head of the laboratory, that John Lawrence certainly ought to be given an office and allowed to continue to work, but he would not run the laboratory. This was very strongly opposed by some of the conservatives, and by John Lawrence himself, and the regents. And so here is President Hitch trying to take the recommendation of a serious committee that had been put together to try to advise him as to what to do and the regents--a conservative group--were bucking that and really threatening to vote him down.

Riess

Why was it an issue of conservatism?

Townes

Well, it was partly personal, but John Lawrence was a conservative and appointed by Reagan, you see. So he was in that camp, and hence those people would support him particularly strongly. There were conservatives versus more liberal wings in the Board of Regents that were somewhat antipathetic with each other, and of course each side wanted to control things.

Riess

I didn't know he had a political reputation.

Townes

He didn't particularly. But he was an important figure and he was at retirement point, and Reagan appointed him. He was also politically quite conservative, let me say.

Riess

Yes, that's what I mean.

Townes

Oh, yes. He was quite conservative. As E. O. Lawrence was, too. Ernest Lawrence was politically rather conservative. And that showed up in places, but his scientific contributions were so much more dominant, most people didn't think about it all that much.

John Lawrence was himself naturally a conservative, and so he was appointed by Reagan, and all of the conservatives wanted to support him and have him made a special case where he could continue to run the lab. Well, he was getting along in age and I believe nobody on campus felt that that was the best thing for the lab.

Well, Charlie asked me to meet with Glenn Campbell, who was one of the prime conservative movers. We met with Glenn Campbell, and I talked about it. Glenn was pretty adamant, though, he was going to support John Lawrence. I talked with him privately on the street, too. I knew Glenn Campbell. Well, he was adamant.

Then Charlie said, "Well, we'd better go down and see the chairman of the board," who was then Dean Watkins. So we went down to Palo Alto to see him and talk with him. I explained this was the committee's view, and why it was their view.

Now, interestingly, he said, "Well, if that's your recommendation, and that seems to be the best thing for the University, I think that's what we had better do." He was one of the real conservatives, but he was a person of good will towards the University, and he wasn't going to just play politics. So it went through--barely.

Riess

I'm sure that's why Hitch appointed you, because you would have a very perfectly unassailable reputation in these areas.

A New Head for Lawrence Livermore Lab, Not Edward Teller

Townes

Let's see. I was also a chairman of the group to try to find the new head of the LBL [Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories], and another one to try to find the new head of Lawrence Livermore. And another one to find a new head, more recently, of Los Alamos. I've just been appointed on a committee to review Los Alamos again. So that kind of thing the University has called on me for, and I feel that I always tried to pitch in and help them out.

Riess

This business of finding new heads, the personnel issues--does that take an awful lot of time, or is there an efficient system?

Townes

Well, it can take a lot of time, but not always. Frequently there are difficult personality and political problems. In the case of Livermore--.

Let me say, I've always been rather friendly to Edward Teller. I don't agree with much of what he says in its more extreme form, but I have a considerable respect for him, and I think he's treated unnecessarily unfairly by some of the scientific community. So I've always been very civil with him, and he's generally been very civil with me and likes me so far as I know. But in the case of the Livermore facility--.

Riess

Yes, which head were you replacing?

Townes

Well, we were replacing Mike May. Mike May resigned, and so we had to find a new head. There were several candidates, and after we had gotten started, Edward Teller announced that he was a candidate. He had a certain amount of support within the labs, but the committee felt that he was not the best candidate. We picked out someone else and made our official recommendation. [Roger Batzel]

In the meantime, Teller was fighting this strongly. He contacted the Board of Regents, where he had some good friends, and got them to fight it too, you see. So this was, again, another very real political battle. Edward came into see me and he was furious. He's a very distinguished man, and he's had a lot to do with Livermore; but we just felt that he was not the right person to direct it. He had important influence out there, but he was not the right person to be the director.

Riess

When was this?

Townes

It must have been fifteen years ago [1971]. Something like that, I guess. Edward was still young enough to be appointed.

Here was a very distinguished person, very well known and all of that, but we just didn't feel his style was right to have him run the place.

Riess

The person who resigned had resigned over some issue?

Townes

No, no. Mike just wanted to get out. He had done a good job and he felt it was time for him to move out.

Edward was absolutely furious. I had to talk with him as best I could about how this was the committees view and mine, too, and I felt we needed to stick with that. We admired him in many ways, but so far as the directorship, we felt it would be best done by somebody else. That was fought in the Board of Regents, too, but it was put through and Edward lost.

Then, after a couple of years, he became friendly again. [laughter]

Riess

When you were appointed the head of the committee, does that mean that you picked your committee members? And were they University-wide?

Townes

Oh, they were University-wide plus some outsiders, too. I don't remember exactly how the committee was picked. I think in consultation, yes. We picked the committee in consultation with the President's Office; they would make suggestions, I would make suggestions, and we'd kind of sort it out as to who would be the appropriate committee. We had some people from Livermore on the committee.

Riess

Do you think that Hitch had already anticipated that Teller would make a scene?

Townes

No, I don't think so. I didn't anticipate it. He was not particularly in the running, initially, when we started. But then he got interested.

Some of this is personality, some of it's political, and it's not easy, at times, to get to the right answer. Now, whether we made the wisest choice, maybe nobody will ever know, but on the other hand, you have to do the best you can and not get pushed around.

Riess

You've become the heavy in this.

 

Townes

The fact that I have no political ambitions myself--I don't want to head anything myself--and so I'm somewhat removed from the competitive scene, I think that's a help. So if somebody doesn't like me, okay I can still do my research in my lab and my students like me all right, or if they don't they don't work with me and I get some other students. So I don't have any other aspects that I have to worry about when there are disputes or disagreements. Not that I like them, but I just feel one has to see them through.

I think I talked earlier about my general family upbringing, which says that's the thing you are supposed to do. If you have to stand up against people, why try to do the right thing and be proud of it regardless of what they think. So I don't feel it's hard for me.

Riess

Was Teller at that time a University Professor?

Townes

Yes, he was University Professor.

Riess

That's interesting. It seems almost like stepping down to run a lab.

Townes

Well, no. That's a big, important lab. But I think also he was really interested in directing it to do the things that he wanted to do.

Riess

And at that point that would have been research on what?

Townes

He would have pushed it more strongly in certain directions than it has gone. I think there is no doubt about that. You see, that was along about the time Reagan came in. Star Wars came along not so long after that, and so on, so he pushed very hard on Star Wars. And as director of the laboratory, he could have done a lot more, probably, although he still pushed on it quite a bit. And let me say I'm not entirely against Star Wars either. I think there is some virtue in it. Nevertheless, I think Teller has pushed it much too far.

Now let me see.

Riess

People's Park?

Townes

People's Park. I didn't have very much to do with People's Park. I was just busy here, and I saw the parade. I had really very little to do with that. I wasn't bothering with that kind of thing, and I couldn't have had much influence anyhow over a crowd of students and there was no point in my trying.

The Sixties

Handling the Situation at Berkeley, European Universities

Riess

You were going back to Washington for committees. Didn't you have to answer endlessly people's questions about, "What is going on out there at Berkeley?" Didn't that get awfully old after a while?

Townes

Yes.

Riess

I mean, what did you say, in a nutshell, was going on out at Berkeley to the Washington people?

Townes

Well, I'm not sure what I said. I think what I would probably say was. "There are some people going wild out there, extremists and so on, but the University as a whole is still going on reasonably. Most people are carrying on their work and not paying too much attention to that." I felt the University could pull through it all right and come back to their senses--even though they were doing some extreme things.

I think American universities did very well during that period, let's say as compared with the European universities. American universities tended to be flexible. If the student bodies insisted on going this way or that way and wanted to have special course on things of their interests, for example black studies, American Indians, social uprisings, whatever, the university would think about it and maybe put in something and say, "Well, okay, let's have a course in this or that." They put them in. I don't think they were necessarily very valuable courses, but they put them in, they tried them for a while, and the students generally didn't attend very much. They weren't really interested in the courses, they were interested in the activities of complaining, and so the courses then kind of dried out and they were dropped.

Now, the American universities, I think, essentially did very well in handling the situation. They didn't do perfectly. I don't think Berkeley did perfectly; particularly initially I think they did very poorly. But overall, the American universities responded with some flexibility, without getting broken. Then if it turned out that the things weren't awfully good that were being suggested, well then they sprang back again.

We have black studies, but the extreme kind of form of specializing only in black culture and that sort of thing has been ameliorated. That's a perfectly valid subject, but the extremism that it represented at that time, and the kind of things they wanted taught, and the kind of people they wanted teaching them, just weren't going to last. And they didn't.

Now, the European universities, on the other hand, some of them were really broken by this. The University of Copenhagen, for example, they had a student uprising. You think the Danes are sensible people, but they basically gave in too far, and they agreed to have the university jointly run, administratively, by equal numbers of students, faculty, and staff. So for some time--that may still be true, I don't know--for some time the university was run by students, faculty, and staff. The professors there I know just thought it was just awful.

One of my friends wanted to buy a klystron, which is a piece of technical apparatus, and he had a committee of three: one janitor, one student, one professor decide whether or not he could buy a klystron. [laughter] He said it was just terribly slow and difficult to get the right things done. And some of the German universities really got completely captured by student control.

American universities are not controlled by students. They are heavily influenced by students, but I thought Berkeley--and I felt pretty confident at the time--would spring back and be reasonable. It was just having a little excessive excursion in one direction at that time. And that's what I generally told people.

Riess

Actually, compared to the other universities that you have spent long periods of time at, it's one of the most democratic, isn't it--the most faculty-run?

Townes

Well, one reason I like Berkeley that I haven't mentioned is there is a kind of a unity of the faculty, and the sciences have been important on campus along with the humanities. The humanities and the scientists get along and talk with each other.

At Harvard, the scientists--. Sciences are really kind of put down at Harvard and separated out. At MIT you have only sciences and the humanities are a very minor thing and kind of looked down on there. Whereas at Berkeley you have both humanities and science pretty much on an equal footing, and both in good standing and highly thought of on campus. And the campus is run by the faculty, which in many ways is good. It is sometimes a little too tedious, but I generally do like it.

Damage

Riess

Then the other question that people looking at Berkeley might ask--certainly it was the question my father asked me--is what are those people growing all those beards for and smoking pot, and what about the morals?

Townes

I felt a lot of it was very damaging, and it was. If you look at the students of those days who were active, many of them have been hurt. I think it's hurt a whole generation of people. But we've sprung back. Some of those people have gotten along very well.

A student of mine who was a graduate student here and was president of the student body, he was liberal. He was not extreme, but he was in some of those movements, and he was rather more sensible. He is teaching now at a college in Maine. He likes college teaching--one of my few students who has gone into college teaching, and he's enjoying that and doing very well. Many students came out of that period and did well, but I think also many of them were damaged and--.

Riess

You mean it derailed them academically?

Townes

Academically and personally. Drugs, of course, don't help anybody, and some of them got into that. But also general attitudes I think were steeped into these people at that time in which it was just difficult for them to get back into normal life. It certainly derailed them academically.

Our youngest daughter moved out here with us, and I would say that was the hardest thing for us. She was in Berkeley High, which was all disturbed, and then she went down to Stanford, which then went through a period of great disturbance. It was okay when she went there, but then it went through a great period of disturbance. And she basically didn't learn very much. She got her degree in biology, but she didn't learn very much. There were too many demonstrations going on, and she was a young person who participated in that.

But she's come out very well. She's just finished a mechanical engineering degree at University of Washington. She's interested in conservation, and she's been working in conservation. She decided to stop her job and go to the university and get a mechanical engineering degree because she felt that was important. She's done very well. She made a good solid plan. So she's come back and doing very well. But at that time it was pretty hard on her and she lost a few years. I think a lot of young people lost a few years, and some of them just never came out of it.

Riess

But it probably made you more sympathetic--angry but sympathetic--to what people were going through.

Townes

Well, yes. Well, I was sympathetic with the young people. Of course, as for the things that I was doing, I talked very carefully with all of my daughters about it. I never did anything that they wouldn't agree to--sometimes a little reluctantly. [laughter] But I always talked with them, "Do you think I really should do this?" I talked with them about the pros and cons and so on, because I didn't want to do anything that they would feel was wrong, even though I felt they might be mistaken. And they agreed to everything that I was doing. As I say, maybe a little reluctantly, but still they said okay, maybe it was all right.

Same thing with my students here. Now, I took various grants from the military, from the navy in particular, and I would talk with my students about it, some of whom were pretty liberal, and say, "This money is completely open. We use it the way we want to use it. Are you sure you feel comfortable about doing that and working on that?"

They all said, "Well, yes. If that's what we're doing, just using the money and doing the research we want to do, why then that's okay."

Now, not all students in the department may have taken that point of view. In principle, some of them spoke out strongly against it. But I think it may have been partly my example, partly also my talking with them, saying, "This is a choice. If you want to work with somebody else or work on something else, that's fine, that's up to you, but this seems to me perfectly valid and all right. It's government money. It just happens to come through the military, but we do what we think is right with it."

They all said, "Well, okay. I'm satisfied."

Riess

You helped them think about it.

Townes

Yes.

So I always talk with these young people. Now some of them were pretty extreme so that while they would listen when I talked with them, they really didn't accept it. But many did.

The young people, they really wanted to learn, but they got so emotional and so keyed in to catch phrases and catch thoughts and so on, it was a little difficult for them.

Riess

Did some choose not to work for that money?

Townes

None of my students, no.

Riess

Okay. Let me see. Nixon elected, 1969.

Townes

Nixon, now let's see. You want me to comment about Nixon? Did I tell the story about my being on an advisory committee for Nixon before he was President?

Riess

Yes.

Townes

Okay. Well, if I have told that, I think that is an insight that would be useful there.

Luis Alvarez

Riess

Luis Alvarez, fellow Nobelist--.

Townes

Luis I have known for a long, long time. I first met him when I was a graduate student. He was a bright young post-doc here, working with Lawrence, and I was separating isotopes for my thesis down at Caltech. He made a trip down to Caltech to come see what I was doing and talk with me. He was interested in isolating isotopes for nuclear physics work. I was very well-impressed by him then, and I've seen him from time to time over a long period of time, knew him before I came out here.

In fact, he was on the committee for the Apollo landing, of which I was chairman. When I left--after the first landing, I felt it was time for me to move off--he became chairman. But then it didn't last very long after that. It didn't seem to function too well after that.

But Luis has been an important figure in science most of my career, and some of his work has been moderately close to mine. He worked in radar at MIT laboratories during the war. He was very inventive. Of course, he invented a kind of blind landing using radio waves for which he is fairly famous.

Riess

Then he took off on a whole different thing.

Townes

Oh, his dinosaur thing?

Riess

Yes.

Townes

That's right. Well, Luis is very imaginative and broadscale in his thinking. I enjoy Luis. I've never considered him really quite a close personal friend. His personality and mine are just very different. But on the other hand, I've always enjoyed talking with him and he's been remarkably creative.

Riess

I guess what I was hoping was that the two of you had sat around and talked about dinosaurs and astrophysics.

Townes

[laughs] Well, we have to a certain extent. I was never completely convinced about the original dinosaur story. It was a very interesting suggestion. It had a powerful influence on geology, because it stirred up the whole field and made people really work on this, and a lot has been found out.

There still may be something in it, but I think the people who support that idea have modified it a bit in saying there were maybe a series of collisions with the earth--a series of things that came in over a period of a million years or so--and that really finished the dinosaurs, rather than necessarily one collision. But I'm not sure they've given up the one collision completely. The evidence is mixed, and I still don't know. It may or may not be right, but it was a very stimulating suggestion. [laughs] He certainly stirred things up.

Riess

Maybe it's more of a kind of a liberal arts discussion, in which you sit around and hypothesize from dinosaurs to radio waves. In other words, you meander over the areas and have fun with it. Maybe scientists don't have conversations that just are so lacking in real substance or whatever.

Townes

Well, I think sometimes you do. I never had quite that kind of conversation with Luis. I've had conversation with him about scientific matters, and we've toyed with some ideas, but nothing as completely open and wandering around.

Luis tended to be fairly closed in his own scientific work until it was announced. He did not, to somebody who was a little outside, he didn't particularly like to talk about his own preliminary ideas. He wanted to work them out first and then announce them, rather than talking about preliminary ideas. On the other hand, if you just wanted to talk with him about ideas in general, why he was a good person to talk to.

Riess

Okay. Back to names. Chancellor Bowker.

Townes

Bowker, well I'm not sure I have anything much to add about Bowker. I just saw him recently in Washington. He's been head of the Cosmos Club, and now he's retired from that, but he's still staying in the Cosmos Club a good deal.

Riess

And you go to Cosmos Club when you're there?

Townes

Yes, I usually stay there because I see friends there. I like it better than just a hotel.

The Ford Presidency, Committee on Science and Technology Policy

Townes

Ford--the Ford presidency--well now, let me see. The only thing I've had very directly to do with the Ford presidency was Ford's attempt to reconstruct the science advisory committee. Nixon, I guess, had cancelled it, and there grew up an antipathy between the scientists and the Republican administration, but particularly an antipathy over various issues and how they were handled with Nixon. Nixon cancelled it.

Ford was a more moderate and middle-of-the-road person and he understood the value of a scientific advisory committee. His advisors urged it on him, too, and so he wanted to reconstruct it. But he reconstructed it this time not just with scientists, but with scientists and industrialists. In other words, it was more technical and business oriented than just scientific. Previously, there had been almost no businessmen on the committee. Bill Hewlett was an exception, for example, but he has really rather academic in his interests; he's not a business pusher type, even though he is very strongly in business himself. He was an exception, and there were probably one or two other exceptions.

In this case, Ford put together a team of people who were very mixed, and by plan, in order to help industrial science and technology as well as to get scientific advise. I was asked to be on the committee. I believe Edward Teller was on that--I think one of the few committees that he took on.

Riess

Was it called science advisory committee?

Townes

It was called, maybe, Science and Technology Advisory Committee to the President or something like that. [White House Office of Science and Technology Policy]

[Nelson] Rockefeller, the vice-president, was made chairman of it. This was to make it important--Ford wanted to make it important. [Casper] Weinberger was on it, too. Now, you know he's not a technical person at all, but he was a savvy political figure and quite intellectual. He was put on it. I think Teller was on it. There was quite a wide mixture of people, including a number of technical businessmen--engineers running companies, that kind of thing.

Riess

It sounds almost too big.

Townes

Well, it was big and amorphous, and I think we met twice and then it just stopped. It just stopped. They weren't the type to get into matters very intensely. It was really never organized as kind of a serious study of something. They just talked about things, policy in general, and it wasn't getting anywhere, so it just kind of faded out. I'm not sure it was ever officially cancelled, it was just never invited to meet again, as I remember. [laughing]

Riess

When Nixon cancelled the committee, did he maintain a science advisor, a single individual?

Townes

Yes, he maintained a science advisor, and that was Ed David, who is in fact an engineer. But Ed David practically never saw him. [pause] Now, let me see. Guy Stever came in along in there somewhere [1976], during the Ford period. I have forgotten. But Ed David was in there [1971-1973], and let's see, when Nixon first came in it was the president of Caltech, Lee Du Bridge [1969-1970]. Lee was the first one, and Lee, I think, was very effective for a while, and then the tension began to grow, and I believe Ed David came in after that as I remember.

I talk with Ed from time to time. He didn't like to say this, didn't like it to be known, but he just wasn't able to see the President. Most of the time he couldn't get to the President. So he was a kind of a titular head, and he did some things in the White House, but there was not much real contact and influence there by the scientists.

Delayed Crises of the Seventies

Riess

You had worked well with Hitch. When Saxon was president did he give you jobs?

Townes

Now let me see. [pauses] I don't remember specifically. But whether or not I had some specific high-level jobs during his period, I would have to look over the record to see. I don't remember anything specific. I don't think I had to work with Saxon on any crises, or not so that I remember.

Riess

Yes, I have forgotten what the seventies are called, but they were also times of crisis.

Townes

Well interestingly, when I was at MIT, the faculty and the students and the administration were all very friendly, worked together very well, respected each other, there was good cooperation, and so on.

I guess I left MIT at the right time, because the troubles had not come to MIT when the troubles were already here and they were not young at Berkeley, when I moved here. A few years later they came to MIT and they had some fairly serious things. A student mob broke down the door of the president's office, for example, with a big pole of some kind, and the president moved his family out away from the president's mansion because he was scared for them.

So MIT went through a kind of a crisis period there, too, surprisingly. And most universities did, eventually, get it. The problem went down to Stanford a little later than here, of course.

The Bohemian Campers

Riess

Do you still see Charlie Hitch?

Townes

Oh yes, I see him. You know, I am a member of the Bohemian Club, and Charlie is in the same camp with me when we go up to the Grove for a summer outing.

Riess

That's the Isle of Avis?

Townes

It's the Isle of Avis, that's right. And Charlie Hitch has been a member of that. He resigned recently because, I think, he feels he's just too old to participate very much now or something, or wants to save the money, and so we still see him, but he doesn't go up to the Grove now.

Roger Heyns is also a member of the Isle of Avis, so I see him there. In fact, it's a place where a number of University of California people have been. Let's see, the former Chancellor down at Santa Cruz is a member.

Riess

Dean McHenry.

Townes

Dean McHenry. And Sproul was a member, as I understand it. He was gone by the time I became a member, but his brother [Allan], who is an economist, was a member of that group.

There are several people from Bechtel there. Cap Weinberger is a member; he was with Bechtel briefly, and I think that may have been why he joined that particular camp.

Riess

It sounds like a pretty heady group, my goodness!

Townes

Yes. Well, Judge Clark is a member now.

It's been very strong on Berkeley and Berkeley administrators. Ken Pitzer is another member from Berkeley, and the previous Chancellor, Mike [Heyman] was a member for a while, then he resigned. I think his wife really didn't like it. [laughs]

Interesting. Frances thinks it's fine. She thinks men should get together just like women get together occasionally. But Mike's wife didn't like it.

Riess

How are the new people picked for a camp at the Grove?

Townes

Well, first you have to get admitted to the club in general, and then an individual camp picks you, or you sort of get acquainted and you get invited to join this camp or that camp.

Riess

So you are "rushed?"

Townes

Yes, it's like joining a fraternity. If there is somebody interesting entering and we would like to have them, we'd invite them around to come and stay with us and get acquainted, and then we'd invite them to be members. And of course several other camps may invite them to be members, so it's that kind of pick and choose thing.

I purposely tried to avoid a specifically academic group. There was a specifically academic group that was really very kind to me, and especially invited me up there and so on. But they were all people that I knew very well and saw all of the time anyhow, and I just felt that was not the purpose of the Grove. So I think it was Charlie Hitch more than anybody else that invited me into the Isle of Avis. While it has a good many academic people, they were not--most of them were not--the professor type, they were administrative types. And it has a strong component of other types, too; outsiders, which I like a little better.

Riess

Charlie Hitch is someone who hasn't wanted to talk [in an oral history] about his years as president.

Townes

Well, I don't know why not. I felt he was quite a successful president. He had difficult times as some others did, but I think he would have plenty to talk about. Too bad that he doesn't feel like going over it.

---

Science in the Carter Administration

Townes

Okay, where are we next?

Riess

Carter's presidency [1977-1981].

Townes

Now Carter, no, I have not been very close to the Carter presidency. In fact, I never got close enough to Carter to shake hands with him until he came and visited our camp up at the Grove. He stayed with us over a weekend, and everybody was interested. People were very much impressed with him, including the strong Republicans.

Riess

Good.

Townes

They were very impressed with him and what he's doing now, you see. They weren't impressed with him as President, but what he's doing now they are very impressed with him, and as a person. I had come close to Carter, but I never really had a chance to talk with him until this occasion.

It's interesting. You see, I'm really a kind of a middle-of-the-roader, I guess. I consider myself a liberal, but a Southern liberal. The Southern liberals tend to be conservative financially, but quite liberal on social policy. That's typical of Southern liberals, and that's like Carter in a sense. I would say that that's where I started, as a Southern liberal. I'm more or less a liberal middle-of-the-roader, I guess. But I don't belong sharply to any one group. I play it as I see it on particular issues.

Now, if you look at the academic types, the academic types are generally thought of, at least, as liberal. Most of them are fairly liberal. So that when a Republican administration comes in, they don't have many people they can call on that they feel comfortable about. They don't feel completely comfortable about me, either, but I think they don't see me as a flaming liberal, and I've never made a practice of talking out to the newspapers and making charges here and there and so on, as some of the people who are active in political affairs and academies do. I've just not done that kind of thing.

When I give advice to the government, even if it is against their views, I try to do it privately rather than publicly. So I think the Republican administrations have generally felt that I was at least friendly and willing to work with them. And so I was one of a relatively small group of academic people that they could call on.

Whereas in a Democratic administration, it tends to be the other way around. When Carter came in, there were so many eager Democrats to work with him, and I wasn't all that eager, so various people came in. Harold Brown, for example, who I knew as a student back at Columbia--a very good person--became Secretary of Defense. And Frank Press I think is an excellent person, and he became the Science Advisor [to Carter, and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy].

I did some things, but I wasn't as active then. Now, when the Republicans need somebody from academic life, then there's a little larger chance that they call on me. But what happened with both Nixon and Reagan, and I think it's perfectly natural, they called on me initially, and then I tried to press on them some things that they felt were against their philosophy or something. They were courteous, and they took me seriously, but then they didn't keep inviting me back.

That, again, is a very natural process in my view. When a new administration comes in it tends to be open-minded, and it's feeling around what it should do, and that's the best time of all to try to change things or give them advice and get some things done. After they have been in for a while they kind of have their own cronies, and they know what they want to do, and they have already committed to do it. If they change, they would look politically inept or something, and so they are kind of stuck in a rut, and they keep on going that direction and you can't do very much to influence it.

Riess

Well, Reagan wouldn't have been interested in hearing too much from Berkeley anyway, would he?

Townes

[laughter] No, I think it's a little surprising that he paid that much attention to me, but it was Cap Weinberger that did it. However, I am going to have to say when we get to the MX that I was impressed at how far Reagan went towards my point of view when it turned out I was a minority. I was in the minority on the committee, but he went further in my direction than he did towards the majority of the committee, and that's surprising. I have to give him credit for that.

Riess

Good. Well, that will be a story.

Townes

And I kept being invited back for a while, but then gradually my welcome wore out. I'm not the crony type, you see, that would just line up with some particular group and always support them and so on. I don't attack them, but I'm frank with them--on a private basis I'm frank with them. I don't become a regular crony and a regular part of the system.

Riess

You said to your secretary that you're expecting a call from Frank Press now?

Townes

Yes, he should call sometime during the day.

Riess

And what is he now?

Townes

He's president of the National Academy of Sciences, and I think he's done a good job. He will be going out within the coming year.

International Council on the Future of the University

Riess

What's the International Council on the Future of the University?

Townes

That goes back to my Columbia days, I believe.

Riess

You were on the board of trustees of it from 1974. It has nothing to do with Berkeley?

Townes

That was a group I really was primarily connected with back in my Columbia days. It was started by liberal professors at Columbia--in particular by a liberal professor at Columbia who had been in government and come back to the university and was concerned about the political pressures on the university. Many of the pressures were somewhat radical, but some conservative, too. He felt the university was being pressed by political forces much too much, and that we ought to organize some way of protecting the university. So he organized an international group in which I was fairly active. We had a number of meetings and we made various public statements.

Then, I guess after I came out here, the organization was still going, but it wasn't really as active then. They must have asked me to be on the board, but you see I don't remember that very distinctly because it wasn't the period of great activity at that point.

Riess

It was really international?

Townes

It was an international group concerned with the university. Much of our concern was with the European universities at that time, because they were having more trouble than the American universities. We had a lot of prominent Europeans involved in it too. I think it did some real good. It was a very scholarly, outstanding group. We wrote some articles for magazines and newspapers and made some public statements and talked with political leaders some. I think we probably helped a bit.

Riess

Did you address issues of academic freedom?

Townes

Oh, yes. Well, academic freedom and scholarship--quality of scholarship, academic freedom, general independence of political views and that sort of thing. And also the organization of universities, particularly in Europe.

Riess

Did it extend to the Asian universities?

Townes

No, we did essentially nothing on the Asian universities. European and U.S. is what it was basically.

---

---

25. XXV Townes' Work Since 1967

Astronomy Background

Expansion of the Universe

Riess

[reading from jacket of Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos]20 "Allan Sandage, equipped with a brand-new 200 inch telescope on Mount Palomar, and with an unquenchable faith born of scientific optimism, embarked on ... search for the origin and fate of the universe, a quest that would eventually engulf all of physics and astronomy and lead to fame, controversy, etc., to the discovery of quasars, black holes, shadow matter, 10-dimensional space-time and the forces that ruled the first second of time."

Townes

[laughs] Well, that's not a wrong statement. I think how much of that is due to Sandage is more of a question, but he certainly was looking at that problem. He was looking at that problem and he contributed to it quite importantly. On the other hand, his own work was not critical to the big bang or to all of these other things. He was a part of it, but he was not critical to that.

The thing that he's done--well, he's done a lot of things, but the thing he's done in this direction is to try to measure the velocity of the expansion, the present velocity of expansion. That's still very controversial, exactly what it is, but he's probably the expert in that field, what is the present velocity of expansion. What that tells you is how long ago did the big bang occur. There's a question of whether it's eight billion years or twenty billion years or what. It's somewhere in that range, and his measurements would allow one to deduce when the big bang occurred.

The discovery that it really was a big bang, though, is primarily due to Penzias and Wilson.

Radio Waves from Outer Space, Astronomers' Lack of Interest

Riess

Was the big bang question what intrigued you when you decided you wanted to be doing radio astronomy?

Townes

No, there were many things that intrigued me, but what actually started me on work on radio radiation was simply the fact that at that time nobody knew where it was coming from and what could be producing it. [Karl] Jansky had discovered it, and I read about it when I was an undergraduate. Radio waves were coming in from outer space and from the center of the galaxy, and nobody knew what they were due to, what was producing radio waves.

So that was a puzzle and what intrigued me. I thought it might be important if one could figure out what it was, and hence find out more about what's present there.

Riess

You said earlier in the interview that during the war you puzzled over it a bit, and then after the war you went in to see Ira Bowen.

Townes

Well, during the war I worked on the theory and I worked out what I believed was an explanation for what was producing it. It was, in fact, part of the explanation. This is what is now called thermal radiation, due to electron collisions, and was an explanation of what produced most of it--but the longer wavelengths were typically produced by a different effect, synchrotron radiation, which I didn't, at that time, foresee. But I worked out what was producing the thermal radiation.

Now, it turned out some other people had kind of worked on it but had not really been very clear, and the previous theories were somewhat erroneous. They had just been mathematically done incorrectly. But there were some papers. Nobody really took them very seriously or believed them, apparently. I talked with a number of astronomers about what was producing this. They thought it might be this or that, and there was a theory. But the theory had been incorrectly worked out and gave an incorrect formula for what this radiation should be. I worked it out correctly.

Riess

That it should be what?

Townes

It was the collision between electrons and protons in interstellar space. It is hot, ionized gas, basically.

Riess

Did you need to be looking at--?

Townes

I didn't need to look at anything, I just had to think about things. What could be producing it? This looked like it was the answer.

Now, what I didn't have correct was that there is another effect. If that was the complete answer, some of the gasses would have to be very, very hot, up to a million degrees. Well, that was not unthinkable. It wasn't what astronomers expected, but then one frequently finds the unexpected, and a million degree temperature had been found in the corona of the sun, for example. I thought, "Perhaps some of the gas is at that temperature. Most of it isn't, but perhaps some of it is."

I. S. Shklovskii, the Russian, came along later and proposed that this was due to synchrotron radiation, a different mechanism. So my explanation was correct for much of it, but there's some it which is synchrotron radiation. It's both hot ionized gas and synchrotron radiation. Both of them are producing radio waves.

Shklovskii seems to have first proposed that, although there had been quite a dispute between Shklovskii and Ginzburg, both Russians, as to who, in fact, proposed it. They've had a bitter quarrel about it. In fact, Shklovskii's book says that Ginzburg gave him a heart attack. [laughs]

Riess

Did you publish?

Townes

Yes, I published. Well, I published in an electrical engineering journal, and I'm not sure astronomers really waked up to that or were really terribly aware of it. Other people then published, a little later, some similar theories. So it became pretty well accepted a few years after that.

Riess

Did it start any particular ball rolling?

Townes

No, it didn't. And this was because the astronomers just didn't think that there was much to do there, as I commented in talking about Bowen. Astronomers just didn't think radio waves were going to be very useful. I felt they should be useful, and that I might start measuring them and finding out things, but then I decided to do microwave spectroscopy at that time, instead.

Now, after the war many people had microwave equipment, because that had been used so much during the war. The British, in particular, then took radio astronomy seriously and started working on it, and the Dutch did, and the Australians did. In the United States there was very little interest. It was amazing that the United States astronomers just didn't somehow wake up to that.

One might say, "Well, the United States was richer and could do other things, while the then poorer countries already had antennas and radar, so they made use of what they had." But I think it was more than that. I think they appreciated the possibilities more than the Americans did and went after it.

Riess

Why? Do you have any ideas?

Townes

It's a puzzle to me, why the American astronomers were so uninterested.

Astronomy at Caltech

Riess

Caltech's astronomy program didn't begin until 1948, apparently.21

Townes

Caltech was very much involved in astronomy, but through a liaison with the Carnegie Institute of Washington, which ran Mount Wilson. Caltech began to construct Palomar back in the late thirties. They were constructing that telescope. Caltech had some very distinguished people who were astrophysicists, and then the astronomers from Carnegie kind of filled in and made really a lot of astronomy going on in that vicinity, related to Caltech.

That may be the date when they formed, officially, a department of astronomy and physics, while previously maybe it had just been physics. But that was not when astronomy started there.

Riess

Jesse Greenstein came to Caltech to teach astrophysics in 1948.

Townes

Yes, Jesse Greenstein, came and he headed what was sort of the first somehow-official structure within the university that was called astronomy. I think that still it was a division. It was an astronomical section within the division of astronomy and physics, as I remember. Yes, Jesse Greenstein came about that time, so Caltech went into it in a little more formal way, but they had been very much occupied with astronomy. While I was a student at Caltech Fritz Zwicky was there. He did a lot of work on supernovae, and a lot of very imaginative, inventive work.

Riess

Zwicky comes up in this book grinding his teeth that his ideas had never been acknowledged when he had them.

Townes

Well, he was quite a character, and very imaginative. He was a physicist, officially, but he was doing a lot of astronomy and went up and down Mount Wilson quite a lot and worked up there.

Riess

Did you talk with him about your astronomy?

Townes

No, I didn't. I talked with him when I was a student. I talked with him saying, "I'm rather interested in astronomy, although I'm going to get my degree in physics. Do you have a good astronomical problem that you think I might work on and help you with?" So what he did was to assign me the job of pouring over plates, trying to look for a new star. That's very, very boring, and I worked at it for about two hours and I said, "No thanks." [laughs]

Riess

Maybe that accounts for why the United States wasn't really ahead! [laughs]

Townes

Well, that was Zwicky's personality. He was just using me rather than giving me an interesting problem, and I realized that. I said, "Well, okay, if he won't talk with me about interesting problems, why it doesn't make sense for me to do this."

He was a very interesting person, but not easy to get along with.

Radio Astronomy Abroad

Riess

I interrupted you. You were saying that after the war, the British were--

Townes

The British were active, the Australians were active, and the Dutch began to be active. The American astronomers just did not believe there was much there or were not interested. A few engineers were kind of interested, and a few physicists like myself.

Things began to happen after some important work had been done abroad. In particular, there was a Dutch theorist, Jan Oort, who encouraged radio astronomy. I guess one of the important things that happened was the discovery of the hydrogen line, that is, hydrogen radiation at twenty-one centimeters. That was done by Ed Purcell, at Harvard, and a student who worked with him named Ewen. It was also thought about by a Dutch physicist, Van de Hulst. Van de Hulst was a close associate of Oort, who was a more senior astronomer. The Dutch began to get interested and build things.

The discovery of the hydrogen line did wake astronomers up. That was a few years after the war, but they still were not very alert. I remember some of my astronomer friends remarking that Jan Oort had given a very special lecture in London, a kind of a special invited lecture that distinguished people were asked to do. They said, "Did you know that Oort gave this lecture, this very important lecture, on radio astronomy? Maybe there's something in it." [laughs] If Oort's talking about it, maybe there's something there, because Oort was a classical astronomer. They knew him as a good astronomer, you see. These physicists and engineers that were talking about radio astronomy they didn't take seriously. But here was a real astronomer, a very distinguished astronomer, and he gave this very important lecture on radio astronomy. "Maybe there's something in it after all."

After that things began to perk up and Americans got into the game, and they became very good at it.

Riess

The quasar was discovered by an American.

Townes

The quasar was discovered in America at Caltech, but by a Dutch trained astronomer, though. But he was working at Caltech.

Riess

I read about Tom Matthews hearing, detecting them first out in Owens Valley on some 90-foot dishes.

Townes

Well, quasars were first detected with ordinary astronomy. But then it was found they were good sources of radio waves, too. Maybe Matthews was the one who discovered that. I don't remember.

Townes' Search for Molecules in Space: Microwave Work

A Talk to the International Astronomical Society, 1955

Townes

Well, now what interested me in astronomy? I had been working for some time in microwaves, and I realized there were likely to be many molecules in space. Whether one could detect them was somewhat uncertain, but I felt it was worth trying. I was asked to give a talk at an International Astronomical Society meeting in England during my sabbatical leave in France in 1955. It was Van de Hulst, one of the people who had suggested looking for the hydrogen line, who asked me to come and give a talk about what other lines might be found in the radio region, or in the microwave region in particular because I was doing microwave spectroscopy and knew that field well.

He asked me to come give a talk on whether there are any other things that might be seen. I had been thinking about it. In fact, I had thought about the hydrogen line, too, a little bit--independently, but not before these people. And I had been thinking about other microwave lines. So I was glad to go give a talk, and I made an analysis of it and gave this talk. Van de Hulst said, "That's great. That's the next kind of thing we should do; we should look for these."

I suggested CO and ammonia and water and several others. OH I felt was the first one to look for, because we knew there was CH in interstellar space. We hadn't seen anything like the other stable molecules, but we had seen something like OH, namely CH. So I suggested these other molecules, too, and Van de Hulst was very complimentary and said, "We really must look for these now."

That was in 1955. Nobody looked for them. I came back to Columbia University after my sabbatical and was working on the maser and I talked with my students about it. Alan Barrett was one of my students, and he said, "I'm going to go into that field when I get my degree. That's very interesting to me. I want to go into that field and see if I can find OH." So after his Ph.D. he did that. He went down to the Naval Research Laboratory which was doing radio astronomy. The Naval Research Laboratory was one of the places doing it early. They were in radar, and there was a physicist there, not an astronomer. He was interested and had been doing radio astronomy. They were a leading place at that time.

Alan Barrett's Work

Townes

Alan Barrett went down there to look for OH, and another young person from Harvard worked with him, a young post-doc. They looked hard, and they didn't find it. Alan persisted, though. He went to Michigan and kept thinking about OH. In the meantime, I was working away on the maser and the laser and other things. He persisted, and I kept encouraging him. But the people at Michigan--a friend of mine was head of the department there, Leo Goldberg. Leo wrote me, "Alan isn't doing very well. I'm not sure we can keep him here because he is just thinking about OH and doesn't seem to get very far on anything. You recommended him to me. Is he really good?" I said, "Yes, he's quite good."

Eventually he got a job at MIT because the Michigan people were not highly impressed. He got a job at MIT. At MIT he got in with other people who were good radio engineers and he worked on it some more and he found OH, which was the first molecule found in space.

Riess

And what was he using?

Townes

He was using a Lincoln Laboratory antenna. Lincoln Laboratory had been the old war-time laboratory for radar at MIT. So they were well equipped with good antennas and good techniques and Alan found it. That was a great discovery.

Ammonia and Water Molecules Found, Hat Creek Observatory

Townes

Then I thought, okay, that's fine, it's been found now, so people will get going. But nobody did anything else. So when I came out here to Berkeley, I said, "I think somebody's got to look and see. I think there's a good possibility there are molecules there; somebody's got to look and see." Astronomers were just saying, "No, there couldn't be molecules there."

So when I came out, that was one of the early things I started on. A young post-doc, Dave Rank, who is now down at [University of California at] Santa Cruz worked with me, and a Chinese student, Al Cheung, who did this as a thesis. We built a radio receiver and we worked with Jack [William J.] Welch over in astronomy, and an engineer, Doug Thornton, over there who helped us design the receivers. They had radio telescopes here which Professor [Harold F.] Weaver had initially started. I was fortunate that there was a good group of helpful radio astronomers here.

At that time--I don't remember whether Weaver was still head of the observatory, the radio observatory, or not, I think maybe Welch was just taking over. Anyhow, Welch took over at some time, and I primarily worked with Welch, and using the antennas up at Hat Creek. About a year after I got here, we had a system going and built up at Hat Creek. Sure enough, there were molecules. We found ammonia first and then water. That has opened up a very, very large field of effort. Immediately, other people jumped into it.

To illustrate the blindness of people, and I don't blame people for blindness, this is just a [laughs] human problem, there were two young men at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is a good place. It's in West Virginia, and it had the nation's biggest antenna. The United States had gotten going in radio astronomy very well by then. There were two young men, one of them had been Jack Welch's graduate student and his name was Dave Buhl, and Lew [Lewis] Snyder--I'm not sure just where he came from--but they were young post-docs there.

They asked for time on the radio telescope. You have to ask for time, and people review that and decide if that project is worth doing and whether you get time on the big telescope. They asked for time to look for water. The official committee that considered such matters decided no, that's a worthless thing to try to do, there wouldn't be any water there. So these two young men were denied the opportunity to look for water.

It was about the same time that we were looking for water, and we found it, it was there. In fact, very strong. Once we found water then suddenly they were given lots of time on the telescope, and they found the next molecule, formaldehyde, they, Ben Zuckerman and Pat Palmer, and a couple of young people from Harvard who came down and worked with them. Then they worked very hard and did a lot of good work. They were given lots of time on the big telescope, which was very fortunate for them.

But here is the official committee that turns down what would have been crucial work and path-finding work, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is supposed to be the center and open to everybody to explore new things.

Slow Acceptance of a New Science

Riess

The path that that's taking one down is the beginnings of life, the origins of life? If you are talking about different kinds of molecules?

Townes

Well, no, I wouldn't--. Well, yes and no. [laughs] The fact that these molecules which are important to life are so common in space was not known at all. People sort of assumed that after the earth came together as a planet, then these molecules formed here and so on. But in fact, space is full of them, including lots of very potent, very reactive molecules: formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, the alcohols, the ethers, and all of these things which biologists generally think must have been the components of the initiation of life. So they're all up there and they are very common in the universe. In interstellar space and in clouds around stars and so on, big dust clouds.

Riess

Well, when did biologists start thinking this?

Townes

Well, biologists thought that some time ago, but they assumed that those molecules were formed on earth; that they were formed after the material came together on earth in a stable, normal temperature and so on. They didn't think that they were there from the beginning, and in fact probably in some of the clouds that poured in and formed the earth the molecules were already there.

So in that sense it does have something to do with the origin of life, but I would say that other than a kind of a philosophical background of saying those molecules have always been here and they're common everywhere, the main thing the molecules have told us is a great deal more about the physics of astronomy, about what's up there and what's going on and how stars are formed.

Riess

But isn't that the origin of life, also?

Townes

Yes, that's part of the origin of life.

Riess

I was trying to understand their resistance to it.

Townes

Well, let me explain what their resistance was. In the first place, I think most people are a little bit resistant to a new kind of science that they don't know too much about. Astronomers never studied molecules very much. Even physicists never studied molecules very much; physicists are rather resistant to molecules, because they are a little more complicated than atoms and atoms are nicer and you can theorize about them more completely and so on. Chemists deal with molecules. That's kind of a dirty science, and physicists didn't want to deal with it if they didn't have to.

Astronomers, also. This was something new. They would have to learn a whole new thing about just what--. They wouldn't initially know what are the energy levels of ammonia, and how does it move and so on, and what kind of frequencies would be there. They were just unfamiliar with it generally. This is a kind of a complication. "Why bring in a new science when I know all about these exciting things that I am doing now and all of the background. I know just what to look for." That's something that you would normally kind of push away as a, "I hope I don't have to bother with that," kind of idea. That's part of the phenomenon, and that's common in many sciences. In human life it's common that you don't want to have to learn something new, necessarily, when you feel you are going along down the road in the path that you know and everything's fine.

Riess

That way you stay off each other's turf, apparently, which seems to be a big issue.

Townes

Well, turf is--

Riess

There's no virtue in being a generalist, it sounds like.

Townes

Well, I think there is. I think all scientists would agree there is virtue in knowing things generally, but there is not so much virtue in just being a generalist and not knowing something very deeply. You have to know something deeply, but if you can know something deeply and have broad knowledge, too, everybody would agree, "Yes, that's good."

Riess

This book that I read described a kind of deepness that becomes real entrenchment.

Townes

Well, there is that. There is that, and there are turf questions, and it occurs everywhere and sometimes it's very severe, but that's not what caused this resistance to radio astronomy.

I brought a young assistant professor with me here to Berkeley; they agreed to appoint a young assistant professor. He was working a certain field, and he was very much resisted by some of the people in the department. One of the well-established professors in the department who was working in that field already said, "Well, I just don't think two people in the same department should be working in the same field; you've got to give it all to one person." So this young chap was just pretty completely blocked; he had to go into a different field.

It wasn't in principle where everybody said, "Of course you can't work in that field." Rather there was just so much pressure and turf fighting that it was just too much for him and he had to do something else. So there is that phenomenon. Then there is a broader phenomenon that astronomers don't necessarily like physicists coming in and exploiting their field. They think, "You know, physicists don't really know what they are doing. They know about physics, but they don't know about astronomy."

Riess

They use the word "exploiting" because they feel they have spent so much tedious time measuring and doing dirty, hard, long, cold, work and then a physicist takes it and goes spinning off?

Townes

No, I think just coming into their field and trying to think that they know something about it and can do something about it, you see? It's just that they haven't been trained and they don't know about it.

And it's true. There is a lot of astronomy they don't know. On the other hand, they know a different set of things. My own view is that it's very important; this crossing of fields is an important phenomenon, important for the science, and that one should welcome it; one should welcome it if somebody seriously does it. But there's an instinctive reaction among people who are in a field to say, "Somebody outside my field, he's made a suggestion and gotten in the newspapers and so on, but what does he know about it? He's an outsider and doesn't really understand the field."

The astronomers know an enormous amount of factual information about stars and about other things that the physicist doesn't know. The astronomers realize that immediately, you see, and the physicist can get lost in the name of this or that, and so on, so obviously he's no good. But in fact, he may contribute in a different style and a different kind of way.

Measurement: Equipment, Persistence, Elimination

Riess

Did you use Mount Hamilton? Did they have radio telescopes?

Townes

No, Mount Hamilton did not have radio telescopes. I use Mount Hamilton for infrared. I use Hat Creek for radio telescopes, the radio telescopes at Hat Creek, primarily.

Riess

How do you measure a molecule through an antenna?

Townes

Well, a molecule emits radio radiation, so you simply detect the radio radiation.

Riess

And you can tell one from another by--?

Townes

--by the frequency.

[phone rings]

 

Townes

Let's see. You were asking how you hear a molecule.

Much of molecular radiation is associated with molecular rotation. A molecule rotates, and as it rotates it emits microwaves, say, or sometimes infrared. It rotates at a particular frequency or emits a particular frequency. So if you have an antenna and pick up that particular frequency, that stands out and can be measured very exactly and you know exactly which molecule it is and you know exactly which state of the molecule, how energetic the molecule is in giving off that particular energy. Generally you find several lines, several frequencies emitted by the same molecule, so you can tell the temperature of a molecule and you can tell its velocity, and you can tell the number of molecules. So you get a great deal of information.

Riess

This person who was at Michigan and worrying about OH and wasn't successful, was it that his equipment was not successful?

Townes

Alan Barrett?

Riess

Yes.

Townes

Well, Alan Barrett was interested in radio astronomy and interested in OH in particular. I believe that that was what he was thinking about. He was just there for--I don't know--a year or so, and the head of the department thought he hadn't really gotten going. My guess is that he was just thinking about how can he get ahead looking for OH. He wasn't very experienced in radio astronomy otherwise. He had come through my microwave laboratory, you see. So he was a capable person, but he wasn't very experienced in radio astronomy, and so maybe he just didn't fit in with the thoughts of the radio astronomers there and so on, and hadn't done anything very notable.

Riess

You make it sound quite straightforward, once you decide you are looking for something, once you have a good piece of equipment, then you just persist--

Townes

Then you look. [laughs] Well, of course it may not be there. So persistence is not necessarily the right thing. You have to decide what to persist on.

Let me say, I have looked for things which turned out not to be there. For example, Penzias and I--and this was Penzias's thesis, looked for hydrogen in intergalactic space. It was thought there might be hydrogen there. Now, this was something astronomers approved of at the time. They thought there was intergalactic hydrogen. Nobody had looked for it very successfully. We thought with radio waves we had a better technique than most and that we ought to look for it. So Penzias looked for it and he didn't find it. His thesis was a negative thesis that it wasn't there--at least not more than a certain amount was there, because there was nothing detectable. Then he went to Bell Labs and continued in radio astronomy using masers, and he discovered the radiation from the big bang there, you see.

But that was a negative result. It was not an unimportant negative result, not completely unimportant, just to show, well, it isn't there after all. But you can't spend your life, then, looking for something that isn't there, [laughs] unless you can keep pushing down the limits.

Riess

That's right. Eliminating.

Townes

To eliminate something as clearly as possible may be important.

Clouds of Dust

Townes

Let me comment a little bit more on the molecular problem: why astronomers didn't get onto that problem. Basically, they did not think molecules could exist in interstellar space because of the radiation, the ultraviolet radiation, which would destroy molecules, and they didn't think there was enough material there for molecules to exist. What is really the case is there is a lot of material, a lot of dust. The dust shields the molecules and there are big clouds of dust and molecules which are quite dense. Somehow, they did not think that.

The hydrogen line had given densities of the clouds, and they were what astronomers had already found by optical techniques: the densities were maybe one particle per cubic centimeter only, maybe up to ten. With that density, you could not shield the molecules very well.

Then there were other problems. After we had discovered ammonia, one of them was illustrated by the fact that Norman Ramsey who was a professor at Harvard, a very distinguished person who now has a Nobel prize, Norman Ramsey ran into me and said, "You know, Ed Purcell kept me from discovering ammonia before you did."

I said, "How's that?" Ed Purcell was another Nobel Laureate at Harvard, a very fine person. He was the one who discovered the hydrogen line, so he knew a lot about material in interstellar space. He was a physicist, not specifically an astronomer.

He said, "Ed kept me from doing this, because I had a student and I wanted him to look for ammonia and this was to be his thesis. He started working on it and Ed Purcell persuaded him that it couldn't be there. He said that if ammonia was there--even if it's there--it will be in equilibrium with the black body radiation (which had been discovered by then) and you won't see any lines. It's going to be in equilibrium and it won't produce any net radiation over big bang radiation. You won't see anything." Norman said, "He talked the student out of it. He didn't persuade me, but the student didn't want to do it, so I didn't have anybody to work with it."

Now, Purcell was a physicist, but he was very well-acquainted because he had discovered the hydrogen line. This is one of the primary things that is used to measure densities. What people were overlooking was the fact that there are these dark clouds. After I came to Berkeley, I studied the problem and I found a few papers discussing these clouds. It turns out that in the clouds, strangely, no hydrogen was found. People said, "Yes, this is dust, dust which is obscuring stars. But we don't find any hydrogen so there is no gas in there." I found one author who said, "There is no atomic hydrogen, but maybe the hydrogen is molecular. That is a possibility, that there is some molecular hydrogen there, not atomic, because the molecular hydrogen wouldn't have this line." But that was just one paper, and astronomers didn't pay much attention to it.

I paid a lot of attention to that. I thought that very logical, that in these dust clouds the material would be molecular and perhaps much denser. So those are the kinds of--

Riess

And it couldn't be measured optically?

Townes

It could not be measured optically, no, because molecular hydrogen has lines in the ultraviolet that don't get through the atmosphere, so astronomers couldn't measure that. They just thought there was probably nothing there.

Riess

So were you the first person to think about doing the infrared?

Townes

Well, now this has nothing to do with infrared yet. This has to do with microwaves. The fact that there could be dense clouds there was what this pointed to. So that encouraged me to continue. I had already started to build equipment to look. We looked in some of these dark clouds and there was the ammonia.

Water Maser

Townes

Now water is another interesting case. I would not have looked for water, initially, because the water line should not have been there, according to my estimates. It required too much energy to excite the water to this energy level to give that particular line which we found. But the water line is very close in frequency to the ammonia line. We had already built the equipment, and we felt if we found ammonia, which is what I thought might be there, I wouldn't expect water, but why not look. Let's look and see. We looked for water and sure enough there it was.

Initially, I had no explanation why it should be there. In that sense, you see, the astronomers who would not allow Buhl and Snyder to use the antenna to look for water, in one sense they were right. There was not a logical reason why that particular line should be there. They didn't think any molecules should be there. I thought molecules may be there, but that particular line was very improbable. So they were perfectly logical, but they were wrong, and they were just not interested enough in exploration and taking chances, you see?

Well, we took a chance because it was very easy for us. We said, "Well, we already have a receiver at this frequency. Let's just take a look," and there it was. Now why it was there is because it turned out to be a maser, very localized, and very localized materials can be much more dense. You don't have to have as much material if they are not in a big cloud. Very localized, but very, very intense radiation from water. The water maser is still not very well understood, but I think better understood now. For a long time it was very puzzling why the water maser in particular should be there.

We didn't know, initially, it was a maser. But I wanted to explore that more, and once we got these results, I felt justified in moving to the Naval Research Laboratory, which had a bigger antenna, and where Alan Barrett had already worked. I was well-acquainted with them. I had worked there, anyhow, using the maser, doing other things in radio astronomy. So we moved there and made some measurements which showed it was a maser, after all, in interstellar space, and it had been there a long time. Some of them were very intense.

We first looked in the galactic center. We found water. It wasn't very strong, but it was there clearly. Then, I may have already told the story about how Cheung, the student who was working on this at Christmastime when I was giving a party for all of my other group here, and he was working up at Hat Creek, he called during this party and said that "it must be raining in Orion, there's lot's of water, very, very strong water!" So we all celebrated for him there at our party.

Riess

What year was that?

Townes

Well, that would have been close to the Christmas of '68, I believe.

Riess

Very soon after you got here.

Townes

Yes. I got here in fall of '67. We built the equipment, we looked, and we found ammonia I think in the early fall or something like that. Then we looked for some other lines, and we found water, and then Al Cheung was following that up, looking at other clouds where we had found ammonia, too. He looked in Orion and there were these very strong lines. So they could have been detected long ago with much more primitive microwave techniques, if anybody had ever looked. There were very, very strong lines.

The Bandwagon Effect

Townes

As I say, shortly after that a lot of people began to jump into the field. It's the kind of thing you expect and want, and lots of people were jumping into the field. There are lots of radio telescopes around.

Riess

Did they join you here?

Townes

Yes, I had a lot of visitors come here and work with me, from various places. A fellow from Lincoln Laboratory came here who had helped Alan Barrett find the OH molecule. There were a couple of Swedes who came here, for example, and a chap from NYU, a professor on sabbatical. So a lot of people came here, and I had a fairly sizable group. But there were other big groups building up and very active.

Harvard went into the field. There had been a radio astronomer at Harvard early, Bart Bok. He had visited me at Columbia and I became very friendly with him. We talked about things; that was another thing that kept up my interest in radio astronomy at Columbia. He was rather looked down on by most of the Harvard department. He had a hard time there; even though he had started out as a real astronomer, he had decided there was something in radio astronomy and he was going to do it. But he had a hard time, and he moved to Australia--partly for that reason. [laughs]

Because he had started radio astronomy at Harvard, they had some young people who then took it up very quickly. Zuckerman was one of them, and Zuckerman continued for a long time and found a number of molecules. Snyder and Buhl continued and they found a lot of molecules. A lot of people who were already in radio astronomy began to look and find things.

Then Arno Penzias. Arno Penzias had Bell Labs techniques and equipment, and he had good millimeter wave receivers. So he--and it may have been Wilson with him, one or two other people worked with him--he went to Kitt Peak, which had an antenna originally built for the infrared which was never very good for the infrared but adequate for millimeter wave work. So he went there and put a millimeter wave receiver and found CO, which is a very important molecule.

So lots of other people began to do it and were finding things. I worked at it for a while, and then it was a big enough field that it began to be less attractive to me, just because I felt it was being done.

Interest on the Part of Chemists

Riess

Well, in fact the author of this book says it became a cottage industry, "measuring microwave radiation was a 'cottage industry' subbranch of radio astronomy." Was it of interest to any of the chemists around here?

Townes

Oh yes. The chemists, of course, like molecules, and they were very interested in finding these molecules in interstellar space.

Riess

Who would you say that you spent the most time talking with in chemistry here at Berkeley?

Townes

Well, let me see. Actually, Melvin Calvin was quite interested in this and came over and gave us some talks about some of his ideas. He was very interested. Let me see. There were several other chemists who were interested. They never did a great deal, but they talked with me a good deal about it. I'm afraid I can't dig up a name now. Chemists who are presently interested in this field include Saykally over in the chemistry department.

Riess

I don't know his name.

Townes

Rich Saykally. He's a very good chemist who measures infrared spectra and far-infrared spectra of molecules which are rare or very reactive and so on. He's done a lot of good work there and found lines and measured lines including ionic lines, which we've been finding in interstellar space. Chemists are very interested in contributing there and are interested in speculating about how the molecules are formed.

There was a chemist who worked on molecular formation and speculated about that quite a bit. Oh, yes. Then there was Bill Gwinn here. Bill Gwinn was a chemist who was in microwave work. I had known him for a long time. Gwinn became interested too, and did some theoretical speculation on how the molecules are formed and how they are excited. Gwinn was a member of the department here. He's retired now. Gwinn was one of the people who worked on it.

Work in the Infrared

Riess

It sounds like very soon it lost its primary fascination for you.

Townes

Well, I kept at it for a while. But after it became a very intensive field with lot's of people in it, then I sort of began to fade out of that and worked more on the infrared, which I felt was another new field that needed developing. I had expected to work on infrared pretty soon after I came here, but I didn't get going on it as early, and I thought I might do that.

I didn't get going on it as early because the microwaves seemed to be more obvious as the first thing to try. So I had already been building up infrared while I was working on microwave work, and it continued to build up, and I began to fade out of microwave work a bit. I wrote a review paper with Welch and Rank on molecules. We reviewed the field and wrote a number of papers in it, and analyzed it, and studied mechanisms and so on. I had a lot of students who worked on it, and I had quite a major effort in it, but I gradually moved out of the field.

NASA Funding

Riess

How was it funded?

Townes

That was funded at that time largely by NASA. NASA gave me a nice grant when I came here to do general work, but NASA eventually faded out because it was ground based work. They wanted to encourage space work only. The initial excuse was that this would lead to space work, which it has done in a sense, but I never did space work.

I felt that space work, while very interesting and important, was not good work for students because it took too long to do something. The students didn't have their hands on the apparatus, it had to be done by professional engineers, largely equipment built by professional engineers, sent up by rockets. The students were just very distant from it and never knew when something would be launched. It was just a poor thing for students to work on, I felt, so I never worked on it myself.

NASA eventually decided they had better stick to space, and keep out of the earth-based work, even though it was related to their work. It has a close relation with planets, the formation of planets, and life in general, and molecules in space, and so on. Nevertheless, it was ground-based, so they gradually faded out, and cut my funds back and back, so I had to go look for funds in other places.

Riess

And then when you turned to infrared? Were they still involved?

Townes

They were still supporting me when I was working in infrared. They supported me for quite a long time, actually. I also began to work in an airplane, NASA's airplane--NASA supports me in that field, in the far-infrared, because that is flying in one of their airplanes, you see, above most of the atmosphere. So NASA still supports me in the infrared, but the infrared work that I was doing at that time they gradually lost interest in. That was work from the ground, particularly in the 10 micron region.

Let me say I was rather generally in the infrared. Infrared work had been done a little bit over a long period of time. In fact, I believe infrared was discovered by Herschel, who was an astronomer. He found this heat radiation beyond the visible spectrum from the sun. So at least infrared from astronomical objects Herschel had done, and he was an astronomer of the past century.

Colleagues

Townes

Astronomers knew about infrared, but they just never worked at it very much. There was a physicist, John Strong, who started doing infrared. He was an infrared physicist, and he started doing work on planets and measuring the heat of planets and the heat of the moon, that sort of thing. He had a student who has worked at it for a long time--I can't think of his name right now--went out to Hawaii and used Hawaiian telescopes. So there was some infrared astronomy, but it didn't get very far.

Then Frank Low, who was a physicist working on semiconductors, which were good detectors of infrared, realized that he could make good detectors and got interested in infrared. He then began working on infrared astronomy. Now, he was an important figure in that he was an activist and enthusiast and a determined chap. He got a job at the University of Arizona, and he had good telescopes available, and he began to find out quite a lot in the infrared.

Another group was a group of physicists down at Caltech. Gerry Neugebauer was a student with a professor more my age, Bob Layton. This professor thought there might be stars which radiated primarily in the infrared, and cool enough that the astronomers just didn't know about them, and that one ought to look. So he set up a telescope and looked for infrared stars and he found them. He found quite a few new stars that weren't known. Again, this was a physicist getting into the field through infrared. So Caltech became famous for infrared work.

Riess

Now why did he have to set up a telescope? Why wouldn't he just go up and use a telescope?

Townes

I suspect that astronomers wouldn't want to waste their telescope time on that. My memory is that he built a telescope. For one thing, it didn't have to be terribly accurate. It was not a very demanding thing just to focus the light enough so that he could detect the heat. I believe he built his own telescope. (He later designed other telescopes which are out in Hawaii and Caltech has built. He got into the business of designing telescopes.)

But Layton wanted to use a telescope for a long time because they wanted to search all of the sky to find new stars. Well, that's a lot of time on a telescope, and astronomers wouldn't have given him that much time on a reasonably big telescope. So he searched with his own telescope, and they found a lot of infrared stars. Then that field burgeoned and they began to be able to use larger telescopes. Neugebauer and Becklin found infrared coming from the galactic center, which was exciting and interesting.

Frank Low at Arizona was working on infrared. Now they were all working on continuum radiation. There is continuous radiation, just heat radiation from dust and stars and surfaces and so on. Being in spectroscopy, I was interested in and I recognized the tremendous power of spectroscopy in that it's much more specific. If you see radiation coming from a molecule or an atom when you do spectroscopy, you know what the material is; you can also measure the velocity; you can also measure the excitation, how many times it collides with something and so on. So you get a lot of very specific information. So my goal at that time was not to duplicate what Caltech or Arizona were doing, but rather to start infrared spectroscopy seriously--particularly, I thought, in the mid-infrared, because many of these people were working in the near-infrared. I thought the mid-infrared would have a lot of spectral lines, the molecules don't have to be excited as much in the mid-infrared, and you are more likely to find them in that state.

Mid-Infrared, 10 Micron

Townes

So I started doing spectroscopy at 10 microns fairly early after I came here. I believe my first student to graduate, in fact, was working in infrared. So the infrared was started quite early. This was Jim Holtz, and we built our spectrometer. We used the smallish Leuschner telescope across the hills here that belonged to the University of California, and then we moved up to Lick Observatory with our equipment and did spectroscopy in the 10 micron region. To find the first line in the 10 micron region was sort of the goal, that is, to find something outside the solar system.

There were a few other people who had been thinking in this direction, but they hadn't gone very far. [F. C.] Gillett and [Wayne A.] Stein, at the San Diego campus of the University of California, had clearly detected some other line in this region before. But they had used what was a kind of a filter, which was rather broad. It could pick out particular wavelengths, but only very broadly. It had a few percent resolution. That is, it would pick out one wavelength within an accuracy of a few percent. They were interested in the temperatures of infrared astronomical objects, and they were primarily using such techniques to measure the variation in the continuum radiation and hence the spectrum.

But they also looked for a line of sulfur IV (S IV) which was one of the lines that we recognized might be there. These lines had been worked on theoretically by a theorist down at Stanford--again I'll dig up his name, I'm having trouble with pulling up names this morning, I frequently do--and he published a paper on various lines of ions, fine structure lines which might be detected in interstellar space, and I had read that paper and picked out the ones that I thought were most promising. Whether the Arizona people had seen the same paper I don't know, but quite possibly. Anyhow, they looked at the same line we were going to look for, and they possibly detected something very weak on their scale and broad. It was not a sharp line, but was an indication that there might be S IV.

We had built a very different kind of spectrometer which had high resolution. I wanted to get sharp lines and measure them precisely. We went up to Lick--we first tested the equipment at the small observatory across the hill here and then went up to Lick--and we found the line there very nicely and could measure the amount of S IV and the velocity and so on.

It seemed a little hard at that time. It didn't have a big signal by comparison with our noise fluctuations, but it was very clear. But we kept developing the system, and by now we and others can find lots and lots of lines, and that line we first found just seems enormously intense now. We find much weaker lines as a big field has developed. Now we have lots of lines, and we went from there to neon, ionized neon, neon II, and began work on the galactic center pretty soon, because I felt after finding some lines I wanted to find out some new information. The galactic center seemed to me particularly interesting.

But the field was waking up. People were beginning to work at it with instrumentation which was not as precise as ours, but enough to detect something. There was a British astronomer, Dave Aitken, who had found neon, again in a very broad way--he just detected some neon--in the galactic center, so we used our instrument and went after that and resolved it and got velocities and things like this. We went down to Chile to do that. By then the Carnegie Institute's telescope had been completed down in Chile. We were able to use that, and that's a very favorable place to look at the galactic center.

Deciding What is Important to Measure

Riess

You are describing a very kind of workman-like process in which, when there's a hint of something from somebody's paper, then because you all have slightly different pieces of equipment you go after it or not.

Townes

By workman-like, what do you mean? Do you mean straightforward?

Riess

Yes. Sort of tidying up pieces of information. It's not like--

Townes

--like a big breakthrough of some kind?

Riess

It's not earthshaking and nothing is secret about it.

Townes

There's certainly nothing secret.

Riess

People don't claim a line as their own. "This is my molecule in space."

Townes

No. [laughs]

 

Townes

A few very peculiar things get a person's particular name attached to them, like so-and-so's galaxy or something like this if it's very unusual and he specializes on that, works on it a lot, something like this. Now, for example ammonia, well, ammonia is here. Anybody can look at ammonia and lots of people have discovered ammonia in places I didn't look. I haven't spent my life on ammonia--not ammonia in interstellar space, though I have worked on it quite a bit.

So it is everybody's game to do that. Now, when you say "workman-like," well yes, I guess you want to be workman-like. On the other hand, it's exceedingly important to judge what to look at. There are lots of possibilities, all kinds of hints that something might be there or might not be there. A judgment of what really is the best thing to look at or try or how best to do it, that's the most critical thing. Then, of course, the persistence to do it and the ability to do it well and really carry it out.

Usually, there are some things that are fairly obvious that you can do. There are other things that are not so obvious whether they can be done or not, some of which might be quite interesting, and you have to decide if you want to do something that's very straightforward that other people are doing, you know can be done, it's been proven, and so on, you can do some more of it, or do you want to take a chance, do you want to look at something different, is there something very exciting here that might or might not be true but is worth checking out and testing. So there are lots of judgments, scientific judgments, and analysis which goes into that kind of decision of what to do.

The Galactic Center, Fabry-Perot Interferometer

Riess

Is there always a larger question behind it? In other words, "What if I find something? What does it mean?"

Townes

Oh yes, of course. You always want to know what it means and you want to ask what are interesting things to look at? Why look at one thing rather than another? You could always measure the infrared radiation from this building over there and you could make lots of measurements on it. [laughs]

Riess

Thank you. Actually, that's helpful. That's right. [laughs]

Townes

But that's not as interesting as something else.

Riess

But your meaning was not cosmic meaning, though.

Townes

No, I was not at that time looking for cosmic, or let me say, universal cosmic things. On the other hand, you see, galaxies have not been understood very well. Their formation is not understood very well, and I felt the center of the galaxy is a fairly unique place. It would be very desirable to look carefully at the center of the galaxy and see what's going on there. It's just an unknown region, and nothing like it had been explored well. We could see the centers of other galaxies, but they are so far away you couldn't see them very well; you couldn't see them in nearly as much detail.

So the center of our own galaxy had not been seen. There had been radio waves detected from it, but visible light you can't get from the center of the galaxy, and infrared you can. With spectroscopy you can begin to tell what's really there.

Another thing that we had in our favor was that I felt that the Fabry-Perot interferometer was the right thing to use to get the best sensitivity and high resolution at the same time. This was against the normal lore of the times. There had been a development in the near-infrared where a Michelson interferometer had been used to explore the infrared spectra of the planets. This was done by a Frenchman, Pierre Connes. Pierre Connes had worked with an interferometer, a Michelson interferometer, which accepts all of the radiation, a whole band of radiation, and then analyzes it by varying the distance within the interferometer. He had done some beautiful work on planets, and it was so striking and nice that everybody said, "Well, obviously this is the way to do the infrared, with that kind of instrument."

Now, that is true in the near-infrared. I realized that as you go to the mid-infrared, where you get heat radiation, radiation from the room and so on, which you don't get in the near-infrared so much, that you've got interfering radiation. You don't want to accept all of the radiation. You want to eliminate most of the radiation, and just look at what you want to look at. There the Fabry-Perot instrument was the right one to build.

So I was pushing on developing a Fabry-Perot, which, in the long run, has turned out to be exceedingly useful in the infrared. Other people were constructing things like Connes had done. I tried one myself, initially, and then I realized the Fabry-Perot would be better, and we went to a Fabry-Perot. So we had a different technique from other people, too.

When we looked at the galactic center we got some velocities, and we found how fast the galactic center was moving--the gas in the galactic center was moving--from us. That immediately stirred up an old controversy. There was an astronomer who thought he had deduced that we were moving away from the galactic center very fast, contrary to most astronomers. He immediately latched on to our results and felt sure it proved that. I didn't think necessarily so. I thought maybe just the gas was moving, and not necessarily the rest of the galactic center. So we kept studying this and eventually showed that yes, that was the case: the gas was moving fast and as a result one could show that there was a black hole at the galactic center of a few million solar masses.

That was quite controversial for a long time. Again, I think partly because I was not in the field, astronomers mistrusted what I was saying and generally tended to write it off. The stellar people wrote some papers saying they had measured the velocity of stars in the near-infrared and they find they don't agree with my measurements of gas, so the gas is misleading and there is not a black hole there. The same people continued measurements, however, and as they measured better they found, in fact, that they did agree with what I was saying.

Now, I think pretty much everybody is agreed there is a black hole, and the stellar work has shown that, even though their initial papers were in the reverse direction. That's very pleasing when the same people who disagree with you can study it more themselves and find out that they agree with you after all. [laughs] On the other hand, there are still troubling questions of other types, and reason for having some reservations about a black hole.

Moving into the Far-Infrared, 100 Micron

Townes

The other direction that I tried to move in was the far-infrared. Let me say that the mid-infrared, the 10 micron region, I continued to work at, especially working on the galactic center for quite a long time because I felt it was very important to work on the galactic center. And I'm still working on the galactic center in various ways. My last experimental work in that field using the mid-infrared, very serious work, was with [John] Lacy and Tom Geballe who have now left. Lacy was a student who is now at Texas; Geballe is out in Hawaii. They continue this kind of work.

Then I had a post-doc who came here, a Britisher, who was very good. He used the equipment and I let him more or less take it over as I was getting busy on other things. He is now down at one of the other University of California campuses, Irvine. He is now at Irvine, and has just gotten tenure down there. He has continued work in the infrared field.

But I no longer work in the mid-infrared spectroscopy anymore, as of the last four or five years, I guess. I have stopped that work, too, to do something else.

Two things I am now doing. One is far-infrared, the 100 micron wavelength region, or around there. The other is interferometry. The far-infrared also was an effort to explore a new area. It was a difficult field. Frank Low had tried some modest far-infrared. I used to see a lot of Frank Low, and he was also encouraging, but he never did spectroscopy himself, he always did continuous radiation. So he and I were somewhat complementary in the things we were doing.

I wanted to do spectroscopy in the 100 micron region. We started out doing the continuum because spectra were probably very weak, and it would be very hard to detect them; detecting in the continuous radiation over a broader spectrum was much easier, so we started to do that. We did it in an airplane flying out of NASA/Ames. First it was a very small airplane, then eventually they got the Kuyper Observatory and we began to work there.

Riess

Did you go up, or did you just send up equipment?

Townes

Oh yes, I went up myself and my students and post-docs, we all went up, sure. And I'm still doing that.

Riess

Wow!

Townes

Wow? What's the matter? [laughs]

Riess

You're shooting through the envelope?

Townes

We just go up to about 40,000 or 45,000 feet. It's moderately high.

Riess

Not supersonic?

Townes

No, it's not supersonic, and we are in a shirtsleeve environment in the interior of the plane. The telescope is out exposed to this very low pressure, in which humans can't live, but the telescope is out there, and we control the telescope from inside the plane. I was just down in New Zealand doing some of that, and we'll be flying in August again from California.

So that project continues. It had an interesting kind of start. It was difficult. The first student I had, a student named Don Brandshaft, who had worked with [Emilio] Segré a bit and then decided he didn't want to do that kind of work, he wanted to work with me on astronomy. So I talked with Segré, and Segré said, "He's really a very good student. I'm sorry he's leaving me, but I think he could do a good job and so you should accept him," which I did and he was really quite good. He worked at this far enough to get some continuum radiation and do enough for a thesis, but he suddenly stopped. He said, "You are never going to detect any spectral lines in this way. It's just not possible. Spectral lines are never going to be found, and I'm going to quit." So he quit and went off and took a job in industry.

So it was difficult, but I developed some new techniques using gauze mesh for an interferometer, and we got some better detectors, namely semiconductors, and those are now made for us here on campus by Eugene Haller over in Material Sciences who developed this field very successfully. So the general techniques were developing and I was inventing a few new ways of doing it. And then pretty soon we had lines, and now we've got lots of lines.

So we now commonly operate in an impossible field, at least judged to be impossible by some people. And by this student who worked intensively on it and then got fed up, poor guy--[laughs]

Flying with NASA, Collaboration with Reinhart Genzel

Riess

Was the breakthrough the equipment, then?

Townes

A combination of things: equipment, just trying harder. Modifying equipment.

Riess

What does it mean to try harder?

Townes

Perfect the equipment better, look in some additional places and some different lines and so on. Maybe find some that are stronger.

I would say it was primarily an equipment perfection; perfection of the equipment and modification of the equipment. I had some good young people working with me. I had other people work with me--this student wasn't the only person.

Riess

And NASA was interested?

Townes

NASA was supporting that work, because it was working in their airplane, and they continue to do that.

Now, that's a very active field. I'm collaborating with Reinhart Genzel, who came here as a Miller Fellow from Harvard. He's a German, and his father worked in the far-infrared, interestingly, in Germany. [He was] a very well-known physicist in Germany. Genzel came here from Harvard as a Miller Fellow, worked with me in this field. He was appointed a professor--a very, very excellent person--he became a professor here. Then Germany invited him there. He became, I think, the youngest head of a Max Planck Institute in Germany, ever. He's in Garching, just outside of Munich.

So he and I are collaborating on this experiment. We keep rebuilding the equipment and making it better and bigger. The present equipment has been mostly built over there, although we construct some of the critical spectroscopic parts of it, the Fabry-Perot and the detectors, here. Gordon Stacey has been working with me. He, now, has gone to Cornell. He's got a professorial job, an assistant professor. So he's at Cornell and I'm collaborating with him, too.

My own efforts in that field are getting smaller, because I'm so busy with interferometry. Nevertheless, it is a field I'm very interested in, and it's paying off very well. Again, because it is paying off so well and everything is working, why I may just drop it.

Riess

Does it always require flying to 45,000 feet?

Townes

Yes, well, almost always. It can be done from the South Pole. The far-infrared is absorbed primarily by water vapor. I made a trip down to the South Pole to survey this, to look at the situation and see whether it would be worthwhile setting up an antenna there and working from the South Pole. There are water vapor measurements for the polar atmosphere. It's cold, and the water vapor is low, and you can work some from the South Pole favorably. I decided it was a little too big a job to do, however, to operate down there, and it should be a bigger group than myself and Genzel--Genzel was interested in working with me on that. I thought it ought to be a bigger group, and there is a group now, a group of three different institutions who have banded together and are working down there in setting up a telescope for the millimeter and the far-infrared.

So it can be done from there, but in a limited way. The plane is the best place. Space is still better, but the plane works pretty well.

Riess

So are we--in Genzel's case--does he have the German air force up there?

Townes

No, he flies with me in NASA's airplane.

Riess

So when you are working on it he's back here?

Townes

He's back here, that's right. He's back here.

Riess

How about any kind of orbiting equipment?

Townes

I have not done anything in orbiting equipment. Again, it is so long-winded, and it's a big project and uncertain in timing, and it's not good for students.

Riess

What do you mean long-winded?

Townes

It takes a long time to do it. You build and build and you wait and you wait. I like to have a little more direct, better control. The big group and big project phenomenon and long waits and lots of commercialism doesn't particularly appeal to me. It can do important things, and I encourage other people to do it, and I have been on many committees advising what to do there, but it's just not particularly appealing to me. So I haven't done that. And again, lots of other people are interested, so they can do it.

Now, this field, as I say, is very successful, paying off very well, lots of people are wanting to do it, and we let other people use our equipment some and fly with us. Genzel is carrying it out very well and is very capable, and Stacey at Cornell is also collaborating with us and wants to do it. While I will continue it, it will be at a somewhat lower level. I may eventually just fade out of that.

The primary thing that I am doing now, the thing that's taking most of my attention, is infrared interferometry. Now, that's spacial interferometry; that is, using two separate telescopes on the ground, looking at a single small object and trying to get higher angular resolution.

Mike Werner, Paul Richards

Townes

I might mention one other phenomenon in the far-infrared: when I first started out in the far-infrared, we were working with a continuum, and I was struck by a paper written by Martin Harwit at Cornell who had, from a rocket, measured far-infrared and found an extraordinary amount of far-infrared coming in from outer space according to his measurements. It was remarkably intense, did not fit the big bang theory or any reasonable interpretation of it. So it was, in a sense, a very startling discovery, and very newsworthy, and people talked about it.

I looked at the paper. I was uncertain that it was really there. It was a difficult experiment from a rocket, and I felt it was intense enough that we should be able to detect that even from the ground. Mike Werner, a young post-doc with me at that time, had come from Cornell and he was working in the far-infrared. I suggested that he work on this, and he was pleased to do that. I felt we could use a telescope on White Mountain, which is just across the Sierras, and the University of California has a big establishment over there. We could use the telescope there, a fairly simple telescope, it didn't have to be big, and could make a detector which would be good enough that we could detect this and see whether it was really right.

I decided, "Well, Paul Richards is working in the far-infrared, and he works on detectors, and so we should get Paul Richards involved." So I invited Paul Richards to join the group and work with us, which he was glad to do, and he was helpful. We built a system and looked, and the radiation was not there. Harwit's result was a mistake. I felt it would be a nice thing to continue, but Paul was eager to continue, and he wasn't especially interested in having Mike Werner continue. Mike was working with me, so I said, "Okay, you continue the job," and he then moved into rockets, which again I wouldn't particularly have done myself, excepting perhaps for that particular experiment which was a fascinating experiment. If Paul hadn't been doing it, I might have done it, but he was eager to do it, so he went into rocketry and has measured the continuum radiation from rockets.

Now again rockets are difficult, though. You are up there a short time, you don't have very good control. So Paul then found some infrared which looked very exciting. It was different from Harwit's. Clearly Harwit wasn't right, but Paul found some funny things, too, and that was exciting for a while. Then [Andrew] Lange, who is now a young professor here, with Paul and with the Japanese, sent up another rocket, it must have been four or five years later, and obtained still different results. The first result wasn't right, but this one was different and also surprising. [laughter]

Riess

Oh dear.

COBE

Townes

Well, then eventually COBE got going. COBE was an interesting follow-up on this is a sense. John Mather had been my graduate student, working with Mike Werner and myself and with Paul. When Paul wanted to do this, why I said, "Okay, if you want to do it," and John Mather wanted to do it, so John Mather went and worked with Paul, and John got his degree with Paul, working on this. John went to Goddard, where he has been head of the COBE project.

The COBE project took a long time. It must have been about ten years, anyhow, something of that order. He worked on it. It took time, but he did a good job, and the other people who worked on COBE did a good job. It's now finding the results which I think are right and are very important.

Riess

What is COBE?

Townes

COBE is an American orbiting satellite which is to measure the radiation from space. In particular the big bang radiation. It was specifically sent up for that, to measure the big bang radiation very accurately. It's now measured it very accurately and found there are no deviations from a black body curve, no surprises. It's just an exact fit.

You may have seen the most recent measurements from COBE which were reported particularly by George Smoot from Berkeley here. That's also come from the COBE experiment. A little different equipment on the COBE satellite than the far-infrared, but it's also come from the COBE experiments. That was a follow-up, but it was something which I kind of bowed out of even though it was a very exciting project.

Riess

Is this a rueful--?

Townes

Well, no. Not particularly. It would certainly have been an interesting development. I don't think I would have wanted to do COBE myself, again because it is such a very long wait, engineering, administrative kind of a thing. I think I might have tried a rocket, I would have been willing to go that far, but probably not on into normal space satellites.

If I had nothing else to do, I would be very happy to do it, and if somebody else wasn't doing it, I might well have done it, but nevertheless it's not something that's particularly appealing to me. Nor is it very good for graduate students, I felt.

Riess

C-O-B-E. What does it stand for?

Townes

I've forgotten. [Cosmic Background Explorer]

Spacial Interferometry with Heterodyne Techniques

Background, Michelson

Townes

Let me get back to the interferometry. I started interferometry fairly early here. I guess when I say fairly early, it would have been probably the early seventies. It was five or seven years after I got here, but nevertheless some time ago. I felt that the spacial interferometry could be done with heterodyne techniques. I had worked on heterodyne techniques in the infrared and done some other things. I had another student who worked on heterodyne. I felt interferometry could be done with heterodyne techniques in the mid-infrared successfully. After making calculations and estimates and so on, I decided to start on it.

That was not an easy job. That's in fact a fairly tough job. It was a student thesis, but two students worked on it, partly because it was a big job and it took a long time. Mike Johnson and Al Betz. Mike Johnson did his thesis on making the first one; Al Betz helped him and then went on and did some other related things for his thesis.

The idea is you use two separated telescopes to detect radiation coming in--infrared radiation--coming in to the telescopes, by beating it with laser radiation. This is infrared laser radiation, and it mixes with the radiation coming in from outer space and the mixing gives the difference in frequencies between the two, which is in the radio region. Then you just amplify that and use it and work with it.

Now, it is basically like radio interferometry, which has been very successful, in principle just like radio interferometry. They use a local oscillator, which is a radio oscillator, instead of a laser, because that's the way all radio waves are detected by heterodyne techniques. To extend this in the infrared is somewhat new, but obviously it could be done with lasers. Once you have a laser as a local oscillator, then you can do that.

So we wanted to detect the radiation that way--convert it during that detection that converts it to the radio region--and then you can pipe it around and let the waves from two separate telescopes join together and interfere with each other, and that's the interferometer. The reason we are doing that is to measure very small things, to be able to basically get a microscope on the sky, you might say. You get higher and higher angular resolution. Whenever you can improve a measurement by an order of magnitude, or even a factor of two, you see more detail. And if you have anything that you haven't been able to look at before or study before, then you are bound to open up a lot of interesting things. I felt this was another direction that we ought to open up and work at.

Now, there had been some people interested in this. It was initiated by [Alfred] Michelson back in the twenties, but it had been very difficult. [Francis G.] Pease, Michelson's successor who worked with Michelson, worked for another ten years after Michelson had left and could not get another scientific result. Michelson was an extraordinary experimenter, and that, plus other things, had discouraged people. Other people had tried it, and again had gotten some results, but not terribly useful or exciting ones.

It is still doubted by many astronomers as whether it's ever going to really develop. So we are in a stage where we are getting somewhere, it's still uncertain, and the astronomical community, I would say, is still a bit doubtful, even though they have come out in favor of developing the field. There are many astronomers who are doubtful it is going to work very well or do very much.

Riess

How could Michelson--I mean, how could anybody have done it without the laser if the laser is part of it?

Townes

Well, a laser isn't necessarily part of it.

 

Townes

Michelson worked down on Mount Wilson and used the 100 inch telescope. He put mirrors on either side of the 100 inch telescope which collected light and joined the light together right there. His detector was his eye. He looked just by eye and saw the interference fringes. But it's very tricky. You have to do it very meticulously, it has to be just right, and you have to look just right, and so on. But he did it. His successor tried to build a slightly bigger one which he worked on for ten years. He said once he saw fringes. But he never got any result he could publish.

Riess

So now what's troubling the astronomical community?

Townes

Well, it's a very difficult technique, and part of it is because the atmosphere is fluctuating and varies the light and makes the stars twinkle, and the stars twinkling is very bad for astronomy. It may be romantic, but you don't want a star to twinkle, you want it to stay very stationary and be very quiet and have the radiation come through the atmosphere undisturbed by the atmosphere.

The atmosphere, unfortunately, disturbs it. When the atmosphere disturbs it, that means the two waves coming down to the two telescopes don't match together very well and don't give you interference. That's part of the problem.

The other thing is that the dimensions have to be controlled to a small fraction of the wavelength of light over rather large distances, and that's difficult. Now, the laser has changed that. The laser now can control distances very nicely, very precisely and very nicely, and that's one of the things that has changed the field substantially.

There are other things. Semiconductors and modern electronics have changed the situation a great deal. New detectors have changed the situation. So in my judgment the technology is ripe for exploitation. That's why I'm willing to work at it and I'm hoping the field will develop and flourish. It will probably be the last big field that I will try to help open up.

Navy Funding for Telescopes

Riess

Well, I guess developing and flourishing is, once again, a question of funding.

Townes

It is partly funding. To be able to do it, you've got to get the funding, but if it works well, then you are more likely to get the funding. If it works very well, then other people will get into the field and all kinds of people will be working at it, you see?

Now, there are some other people in the field, but they also are struggling hard, most of them.

Riess

You now have time at Mount Wilson?

Townes

Well, we built our own telescopes. I thought it was best to build our own telescopes in this case, and fortunately we were able to get some money from the navy that was interested in very precise positions of stars. It's always been, or for a long time it's been, the assignment of the navy to measure the position of stars for navigation purposes. So that's why we have the Naval Observatory in Washington, and that measures the position of stars. That's the navy's assignment.

Riess

It's an ongoing project? The stars move.

Townes

Oh, they move! But also, you want to measure them more and more accurately. We always try to measure them more accurately. And they are moving. Finding out how they are moving is one of the interesting things.

Riess

Backwards, aren't they?

Townes

Oh, they move across the field, this way [gestures]. You find out whether they move left, right, this way, how fast they are moving, and so on. The stars in our own galaxy aren't always moving away from us, because our own galaxy isn't expanding, it is other galaxies that are moving away from us.

Anyhow, that's an assignment of the navy. So the navy felt it was time to develop new techniques. Interferometry looked promising, so it sponsored developments in interferometry in the radio region, the infrared region, and the visible region, all to see which would be best for the measurement of positions. They gave us some money to build a couple of telescopes, rather different telescopes from any people had previously built. We designed them to fit into trailers and to lie down on the ground rather than sticking up in the air, so they would be more stable and we could control everything more. In trailers so we can move them around. We can vary the distance between the telescopes, which is necessary in order to vary the resolution of the system.

So we have these two telescopes now we have built here. It was a big job. I guess that's the biggest job I've undertaken in terms of big apparatus, and time-consuming and so on. It's not particularly my nature, but I felt I'd go this far at least.

Operating the Telescopes, and Life at Mt. Wilson

Riess

I remember knowing that about two years ago you took them down. That was very newsworthy.

Townes

Yes. I was just down there last week. We are working at them and continually improving what we are doing. We are getting interference fringes.

Riess

Is there anything special about the lenses or the lens grinding?

Townes

Well, not the lens grinding. The design of the telescope is different from anybody else's that I know.

Riess

Because of the horizontal?

Townes

It is horizontal, and we have a flat mirror that's mounted on altitude and azimuth axes and sends light into a parabola that's just the same height above the ground, and then back into our instruments.

Riess

Do you operate it yourself when you are there?

Townes

Yes, although I would say that some of my younger associates know a lot more about the computer system than I do. The young people are really hot on computers these days and I haven't--. They are so good at it that that doesn't give me a good excuse to learn so much. [laughs]

Riess

How far away from the telescope are they when they are operating it?

Townes

Well, we are sitting in trailers, and the telescopes are initially mounted in the trailers and the trailers lift up--pick up--the telescopes and can move them. Then they sit down again. The telescopes sit down on concrete slabs poured into the ground. So we are right there by the telescopes, but not touching them. The telescopes no longer touch the trailers once they are put into position, so we are not touching them. We even have to be very relatively still. If you walk around on the ground nearby you shake the telescopes, even though they are on pretty solid rock. Nevertheless, just walking around will shake them too much. That's the kind of meticulousness that is involved.

We have some rotating oil pumps. We had to mount them on special shock mounts on the ground so that they didn't shake the ground and so on.

Riess

In what sense are you part of Mount Wilson's operation?

Townes

Well, we are simply visitors there. They let us use the grounds.

Riess

There is that much acreage?

Townes

Yes, there's space there, and there's a good space where we could work, and they let us use the grounds. We have now an area which is about forty meters by forty meters square, and we have sixteen different positions we can put the trailers within that area.

Riess

And that's what you need?

Townes

We need something like that in order to have a variety of different positions.

We pay for utilities, we pay for some upkeep for the Mount Wilson facilities generally, so we are part of it in the sense that we contribute to its running.

Riess

Do you stay in the dorm there?

Townes

They have lent us a house which we can stay in, which is very helpful. Most of the astronomers have moved out of Mount Wilson. That left a lot of empty houses, so it was not so hard to get a house. Now astronomers are moving back there again, there are more things being done there, the houses are getting scarcer. But we have a house there which, is very helpful. We usually are down there at least two of us at a time, sometimes four people at a time. There were four of us down there last week.

Riess

Are you swept into the world of astrophysics when you are down there?

Townes

Oh, we are very busy with our own things. We see the other people around, and we say hello and chat a little bit, but we are terribly busy with our own things and they are busy with theirs.

Riess

As it was described back in Sandage's day, and probably for a decade or so more afterwards, it was a great hierarchy of who sat at the table depending on who was on the telescope.

Townes

Yes, that's right. [laughter] Well, that dining room is still there, but it's not operated that way now. Actually, it is hardly ever used, and we cook our own food in the house. There used to be a little place there where you could get luncheons, a luncheon/snack place there, but the Fire Service has closed that down for the moment. They're hoping they will open it up again so we can get some snacks again. But we cook our own food, and we are just more or less independent. The other groups down there are, too.

But we see them, and occasionally there is some reason for us to get together and talk about things. But I talk with astronomers more in other places than down there, I suppose.

Similar Work Elsewhere, Caltech

Riess

But this experiment is only going on down there? You don't have a matched set of people like you somewhere else?

Townes

No. Well, I have a group up at Space Sciences. I have a laboratory at Space Sciences and an office up there, and most of the people who work on this are working either up at Space Sciences or down at Mount Wilson. So we do the laboratory work up there, and the data analysis up there and so on, and much of the thinking up there, and then we go down to Mount Wilson to work on the apparatus.

Riess

But you haven't found someone in India or someone in Japan who is also working on this?

Townes

Actually, the people closest to this, closest to doing something parallel, are working in the visible region and up on Mount Wilson, nearby. That started as a joint group of the Naval Research Laboratory, MIT, and Harvard. It is pretty much all Naval Research Laboratory now. It's going on up there and they are doing nice work. They have been pretty successful in the visible region, and it is sponsored, again, by the navy. Now they are hoping to build a big one in Arizona--still bigger. That's underway--the construction is already underway.

Riess

Will their results feed or reinforce yours?

Townes

They are looking at different things, because they are looking in the visible region and hence have to look at stellar surfaces. It's about the only thing that emits visible light. We look in the infrared, so we can see not only the stars, but the material around them, the dust around them and so on. We are just studying different aspects of things.

They have done more real measuring of positions of stars than we have. We are not doing very much on the position of stars. I want to do some of that, but just haven't gotten around to it very well yet. We've really been looking at materials emitted by stars, materials around stars emitted by stars, and that's a relatively untouched field and one where we've been finding out some quite interesting things. For example, some of the stars seem to have a spasm every once in a while where they emit a lot of material, just a kind of a bubble of material blown out from the star.

Riess

Do you have anybody from Caltech working with you? So you have a kind of wider allegiance?

Townes

Well, actually, yes. There is this group which has been working in the visible region, and one of the people there has left that project and gone to JPL. A very capable man named Mike Shao, he's gone to JPL. The Caltech people now are getting very interested in interferometry. There is a general growing interest now, people who would sort of like to do this but are not sure how to do it, but they would like to get into something like this if they can. Shao at JPL and the Caltech group. Gerry Neugebauer, for example, is interested in this as I mentioned before, and a younger man named [Sri] Kulkarni, who was here for a while in radio astronomy and then went down to Caltech, he's very interested in this. And [Charles] Beichman, a person who has been at Harvard and then NASA, now gone to Caltech.

They want to collaborate with us and expand it and do it in a little different way. This is a different way which would be better in some ways and, I think, certainly ought to be done. I'm all for it. It's one of two directions I would like to move. One direction would be to get a third telescope so we could do what's known as phase closure. The other direction is to do direct detection, not heterodyne but direct detection. It has better sensitivity. It has some disadvantages, and also some very real advantages, but it requires some other special things. Shao has done some of the things required on the visible interferometer and done them well. I think they are interested in building that part of it, and we would match it to our system and make an additional system.

Now, whether we'll carry through with that, I don't know. We have agreed to collaborate, but they are looking hard for some money, and we'll have to see whether it works out and whether we agree on just how to do it and so on. That's a very real possibility. They are quite interested, but they haven't really done any work yet, it is more thought and planning and an effort to raise money. Once they get the money, then they will get to work. But we certainly encourage them to do that and we'd like to see it.

So that's a direction in which the field may grow. Somebody else may take over and if it develops into a good instrument with lots of activity at Caltech, well, that's fine.

[end tape 32, side b; end of session]

Riess

It's interesting to think about when this work will take off. What is required?

Townes

I think what is required is substantial scientific results that are new, and ease enough of operation that other people think, "I can do it, too. I can do it too, and let me jump in and get going," you see.

It is always going to take a fair amount of preparation and building very special instruments. Nevertheless, institutions are quite ready to do that if they think it's going to be promising and the astronomers are very interested. They can try to raise a few million dollars and build something. But it is a big enough job, and as I say it is bigger than I would characteristically do. It is just that I felt this was an important field that deserved attention. I decided I should go this far at least with it, and it's probably the last job of this type that I will do, because it will last certainly a few more years, and by then I will be eighty. Eventually, I guess, you ought to take some time off. [laughs]

Time to Think About Other Things

Riess

Does it feel like the direction that this is going is a reward for all your work in physics?

Townes

No, I wouldn't say this is the culmination or anything like that of what I have done. This is just another thing that I am doing that is interesting and worth doing, and I'm glad to do it, but no, I wouldn't say it's a culmination or anything like that.

And if somebody else were doing this, I'd be happy. That's fine. I would probably then spend more time thinking. Maybe thinking of new things to do.

Riess

Oh yes!

Townes

But thinking about other things, analyzing things, thinking through the galactic center maybe more, or thinking about cosmology more and so on. I'm just too busy with this, now, at the moment.

Riess

That's regrettable then. I think you should have your crack at thinking about cosmology more.

Townes

Well, there are lots of other people thinking about cosmology. [laughter] It's fascinating, and I'm interested in it, but there are lots of other things which are fascinating. It's also not always easy to tell, you see, just what is going to bring up the most exciting and new science. People typically dash into field that they think are very promising, going to be exciting new science. They are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and fields that get neglected frequently turn up things that are really big.

Take the black body radiation, for example. That was a rather accidental discovery. Radio astronomers accidentally discovered it. It was all done at Bell Labs as a result of their interest in measuring noise. They wanted to know how much noise was up there. How much noise is coming in, and where is it coming from? Just for communication purposes. Well, what can be duller than that, for some people at least. But they did it very well, and they suddenly discovered radio radiation coming in from outer space, and they discovered the big bang radiation.

So I'm not one to dash after the obvious things, partly because other people are doing that and that's fine. I think it's better to look at those things which are not so obvious that are being neglected and are likely, in the long run, to contribute more on a personal basis. You might not get as much credit, but you are likely to contribute more. You may have noticed that approach at the talk I gave here in Berkeley which I entitled “Unturned Stones” .22 There are a lot of unturned stones that I think one needs to turn over in order to look and see what's there. But you also have to be wise in deciding what are the most promising things, what are the most likely to yield exciting results.

Riess

It could be too big and wide.

Townes

Yes, that's right. There are a lot of stones. They need to be turned over. People need to look. But you have to decide, what's the most likely thing that people are neglecting?

Riess

Have you, in your notebook or wherever, been jotting down some of these questions that you would turn to if this got itself sorted out and you could back off of it?

Townes

I would say yes and no. When I work out something new or think about something new that isn't just a kind of a general thought, or off-the-cuff thought, something that really requires some mathematics you have to figure out for a while, then I write that down in my notebook. Then I may do nothing more about it, or I may come back to it later. But I have noted what I had worked out at that time. So I have a number of things like that I'd like to come back to.

One of the things that I have been thinking about off and on for some time is the apparent very, very hot gas in the galactic center. I am puzzled about that. I have worked at it a bit off and on for three or four years. People have made the measurement at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory now in New Mexico, the VLA (Very Large Array). They claim to have found the gas is very hot by studying spectral lines in the microwave region. That's contrary to what we thought we had found. The gas that we had found doesn't seem to be very hot. But they found some very hot gas as you get close to the center. Spectacularly hot. Up to 100,000 degrees, maybe.

I have been puzzling over that for some time. I work out things and, "Well, it can't be this and it can't be that." I finally decided, a little bit like the case of the laser, that I'd just better get going on this and see what it is that's going on. So I got together with Dave Hollenbach from Ames who was a post-doc with me. He was another person who came out and did post-doc work with me for a while--he is down at Ames and he now has a post-doc--the three of us worked at it together (I have to say they did most of the work) analyzing what can produce that temperature. Basically, we found nothing and decided it really can't be that hot in any understandable way and we began to wake up to the real question: "Is the experiment really right?"

Just about that time the people at the Very Large Array woke up to the fact that they hadn't looked in the right place, they hadn't measured the right frequency. They measured the right frequency and the gas wasn't hot at all. [laughs] That's just come out. It's still not published. So they had published several papers and so on.

That's the kind of thing I puzzle about from time to time. It's such a strange phenomena it has to wake us up to something new. So I look at it from time to time and I think about it. I finally said, "That's crazy. I'd better just do the best I can and work at it hard and figure out as much as I can and see. There has to be something going on there or something that we can figure out." In this case we found nothing, and it turned out to be actually there wasn't anything there. [laughs]

So you ask about other ideas or things that have come up I'm working on. Now, even though that was a spectacular result in a sense, and very surprising, nobody much was working on that. Maybe other people were and didn't say anything about it because they couldn't find a solution either, but I didn't find a lot of people excited about it. And yet it seemed to me that if the high temperatures claimed were really true, then in the galactic center, a region we don't understand very well, there was a new phenomenon we don't understand, and it might lead to some better understanding of quasi-stellar objects, or who knows what. You don't know.

Riess

And it may still?

Townes

Well, no. There are still things in the galactic center we want to study, but that problem is settled now, and we can go on to other things.

But I have things like that in my notebook, puzzles that I worried about, thought about, or things that I might do and I don't have time to do at the moment. There are a lot of interesting things there, but I'm presently pretty occupied with interferometer. In that case I would say, "Well, if I don't do it, then it just might not get done. At least, nothing quite like this would get done." As for the far-infrared, Genzel has taken that up. He's doing it very well and it's not that critical that I continue, you see? That's a field that's now well-appreciated, and a lot of people want to use our instrument and other people will be building instruments and are. So it's a going field.

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26. XXVI Government Service, 1950-1990

General Comments, Personal Stance

Townes

I thought first I would make a few general comments about my relations and general attitudes about public service and governmental things, and my experience. I simply feel it is everybody's duty, of course, to help the country, and that the government is never perfect, but it sometimes can be affected in the right kinds of ways, and one needs to work with it.

The times when government is most malleable, in my experience, and I think very naturally so, is when a new administration comes in or when there is some big change, a new person comes in or new administration comes in. Generally at that point they are rather open-minded and feeling around as to what to do. There is a chance to have substantial input. But after a government has been in power for a while, then they have everybody in place and they have enunciated certain policies, started out in certain directions, and even if they are no good, they are very reluctant to turn around and stop them because it's part of their reputation that they have started in that way, and they don't want to recognize they've made a mistake.

But at the beginning, generally they are quite open and that's the time to come in, in my view, and the time when you are most likely to do something useful. Other kinds of times are when there is a crisis where everybody knows that something is wrong and the government has to do something. Particularly if it is not the fault of the president or some important person that is trying to make the change but rather some situation that has arisen. Then there is time for action, and again the chance of being useful.

Another aspect of this is that I think that so far as political orientation is concerned I am more or less middle of the road in general. Also, being in academic life, I have a job, I can easily advise government and get out again. It is not something that is important to me from the point of view of my prestige or my money or anything like this, so that I can speak frankly, and then if they don't like it, get out again and go home. Now, I'm middle of the road in the sense that I think many of the people in Berkeley regard me as affiliated with big business and with government and pretty conservative and so on, whereas the business people regard me as a Berkeley liberal and a little dangerous, but not too extreme, just a little dangerous. [chuckles] So I'm looked at with suspicion maybe a little bit from both sides, at the same time a little bit trusted as being a kind of a mediator and trying to do fairly reasonable things, not extremist in any form.

Another part of my approach is that I have never tried to nor been interested in getting public attention and getting in the newspapers and making public statements, so I don't sound off in public and tell the government what it ought to be doing through the newspaper means. Now, there are some, I think very good scientists, who have advised government, but who like to talk to the newspapers, and they say spectacular things. The newspapers pick that up and the newspapers always approach them. That's useful in a certain sense, but it also prejudices their position and their objectivity with respect to the government. It also makes them a little suspect in terms of, "Could they be called in safely? They have already staked out their positions and they are likely to speak to the press about what's going on when they shouldn't," and so on.

Riess

Perhaps it is because they feel that they have a constituency?

Townes

I think it's just a kind of a personality thing. They like to speak to the press and are quite willing to speak out regardless of whether the situation is thought through well or not. Even when it is thought through well, I'm rather reluctant to speak out in a way which would be prejudicial to some particular aspect of the government or society, if I think it is prejudicial. If it is important and necessary, why then I am quite willing to speak out. But I don't go after that kind of operation.

Now, at the same time, within government, I tend to tell them what I think. It's very, very common that I'm called in to do something and then I try to do it, but I'm not a party member in the sense that I sort of loyally adhere to whatever they say regardless of what decisions are made. Hence, eventually, on a given subject, my welcome tends to wear out because I don't agree 100 percent with the sponsoring agency or the sponsoring official or something like that. They welcome my opinions initially, and I hope I can be helpful, but in the long run, after things have gotten kind of frozen, I tend to leave a given government operation or problem. There are differences that I'll have, and then I'm no longer useful and not called on. They move over to a more directly loyal person or group of people, let's say.

That doesn't bother me. That's just the function that I feel I can fulfill. I try to be objective, but not just arbitrarily approving of some particular government or some particular government official. When they are interested in change and looking at things in a new way, then I'm called in and can sometimes be useful. When they aren't then there is no great point in my doing it.

Riess

In some of the earlier decades that we have talked about, you were called in to start up a committee or to create something, it seemed to me.

Townes

Yes, that's quite right. When they want to try to start something new, get something new going, and the situation is open, that's the kind of time that I tend to get called in, and when I feel I can be of most use.

Riess

Has that usually been the role, or have they called upon you as a committee man rather than to initiate?

Townes

Some of both. But then I gradually work my way out of the committees if it is a more or less static situation, or if the chairman or the people who are making decisions don't agree with me completely, they tend to not reappoint me or I just stop working with them or something.

Riess

Of course, I'm feeling very loyal to you, so this all sounds like a tremendous indictment of government intransigence.

Townes

Well, yes and no. It's human nature. [laughter]

Riess

It's probably that, too.

Townes

It's human nature. No, I think apropos of that, I would say generally when you get to know the people in government and talk with them privately, most of them are a lot better than they seem in the newspapers; they really want to do some good, and they really want to do the right thing. But, of course, when it comes to their appearance in the newspaper to the public, they've got to get elected, and they say things which are objectionable and I don't agree with. In private, I've been impressed with their attitudes, and you'll see some of that as we go along.

Committee on Millimeter Waves, 1950-1952

Townes

Now, I think the first substantial decision-making group that I was a part of was a committee on infrared called by the navy. This was chaired by Don Hornig, who was a physical chemist that I knew, and he knew me. I was not working in infrared at that time, but he wanted people with general ability somewhat close to the field. He got a good collection of people. The committee was asked by the navy to examine the value of infrared for the navy. The navy had been supporting infrared research for quite a long time--just basic infrared research, infrared materials and sources and detectors--not in a very intensive way, but had been supporting it for a long time. Nothing had come of it and they said, "We'd better look at this. Does this make sense for the navy to be interested in infrared?"

Riess

I'm sure we've covered that because that predates the maser.

Townes

All right. I'll be very brief about that. I got some experience with that, and made some contacts and that was where the Sidewinder came in. I think maybe the most important thing that group did was to save the Sidewinder, and point out to the navy that it was worthwhile. Sidewinders then became a very important military device. That was also a basis for them saying, "Yes, infrared can be very useful."

I was later asked to chair a somewhat similar committee for the navy, to look at millimeter or still shorter waves. I believe we've covered that because it's closely connected with the maser.

IDA, 1959-1961

Appointment

Townes

Now, I think the next thing was when I went to IDA. That was a difficult decision for me because I was in the middle of a lot of important research. This was a time when I was trying to build what I hoped would be the first laser, and I was approached to come down to Washington to be a kind of administrative scientist as director of research and vice president of the Institute for Defense Analysis. Now, that was a group that I felt I could trust. The board of trustees were largely a group of university presidents, including the president of Columbia University, where I was. And Jim Killian, the president of MIT, was chairman of the board, and I knew a lot of the people.

IDA was a unique organization at that time in being a kind of a think tank to advise the government, but on a non-profit basis. There were essentially no good think tanks, otherwise, except Rand which specialized in air force problems and wasn't so close to Washington. Furthermore, the government was very short of scientists, yet we were in the missile crisis and Sputnik had been launched and we were desperately trying to keep up there in space. I felt the government didn't have enough good scientists or technologists to advise it very well.

Eisenhower, however, had just formed the new President's Science Advisory Committee of which Jim Killian was chairman [1957-1959]. He was the science advisor and chairman of the committee. So the government was getting going and really starting to use scientists, but they had very few good full-time scientists down there. IDA furthermore had the unusual situation of providing scientific talent that actually sat in the Pentagon, and wrote reports for the Pentagon as to what work should be supported. It could not officially sign that something should be supported, they couldn't spend government money in that sense, but they were basically making all of the decisions and sitting in the Pentagon. They had a rubber stamp type of official who just signed for them. They were also providing scientists for the Weapons System Evaluation Group which sat in the Pentagon to try to evaluate the effectiveness of weapons and so on.

So they were providing scientific manpower that normally the government would have under it's own wing, but the government couldn't hire at that point. One thing was that they could pay somewhat higher salaries. Secondly, I think these scientists trusted an organization like IDA more than just getting into the government routine. Thirdly, they could move faster, and the budgetary situation was such that it was just much easier doing it on a contractual basis. And the management of IDA was much more intellectually oriented and capable of using and inspiring and directing and attracting people like that. So that's why it was working that way.

Riess

Well, it was a great honor to be asked, it seems to me.

Townes

Well, yes. It was an honor. On the other hand, I knew perfectly well they were kind of desperate. [laughter] I knew at least one other person they had asked who refused.

Riess

That was Wheeler?

Townes

That was John Wheeler, yes.

Riess

Well, that's pretty good company.

Townes

Well, yes. But at the same time, it wasn't something that I really felt I would enjoy. It wasn't that I objected to doing it, but it wasn't fun for me. I felt pretty strongly obligated, and the country was in some trouble, we thought, and needed such help. So I accepted, of course after talking it over with my family, Frances and the children.

Riess

Now, we've--

Townes

Have we been through this?

Riess

Well, some of it, but I understand what you are doing. You are pulling it together in a long story. And I'm not trying to derail it.

Why do you think Garrison Norton chose you? I mean, I don't know how long his list was, Wheeler and then Townes? What had you done other than the navy work?

Townes

[laughs] Well, I had never met Garrison Norton. I don't know what his reasoning was. I had served on a few other government committees, and I was a bright young scientist who was getting to be very well known. I really don't know. I'm sure he talked with a variety of people about me to find out what kind of person I was and so on, and then came up and made me this offer. He came up to New York and talked with me about it. It was a bolt out of the blue, in a sense.

Riess

Because you--

Townes

Why did they pick me? Well, I think they may have thought, just from knowing my attitudes or something, that I would consider it. I had chaired this committee for the navy, and I had done a few things like that. None of them of great significance on a broad semi-political basis. This was suddenly brought to me.

I don't know. You could say maybe he was looking for suckers. [laughter] He had to find somebody.

Riess

No, I'm sure he got very good advice.

Townes

I'm sure he talked with a variety of people about it and decided that I perhaps could do it. But I'm sure also it was hard to get substantial scientists to do this, because it was a deflection in their career, and scientists weren't doing this very much. One good scientist who had gone there was Herb York. He had gone from Berkeley. He was a nuclear physicist, nuclear and high energy I guess. He'd gone from Berkeley to head ARPA. He said, "Well, they paid me a whale of a lot of money," and that's the way he explained it. [laughs] But as you probably know, he's continued to be dedicated to public causes.

Riess

Do you think that they saw that the laser had tremendous potential and that in getting you they were getting the most cutting-edge science?

Townes

Well, I think they felt they were getting cutting-edge science. I doubt that Norton felt the laser was going to be of critical importance nationally. I doubt that he saw it that way, but rather that he was getting cutting-edge science in new ideas and so on. And also, I knew John Wheeler pretty well. Later, he was president of the American Physical Society, in the year before I was. We worked together closely. He may have been a primary source of recommendation.

Riess

That makes sense.

Townes

Then Norton looked into it and so on.

Well, anyhow, I decided to go and we went down--I accepted a job for two years, I felt I could stand it for two years--and went down and did it.

A Talk with Allen Dulles about ICBMs

Townes

Now, I may have mentioned one of the first things that happened when I was there, just to show you the disarray in which we were and also the frequent disarray of government. I was invited to go over and talk with Allen Dulles, who was head of the CIA at that point. He said he would give me a run-down on what the Russian missile situation looked like, because that was one of the concerns. So I had about a half a day of presentations from the CIA, and Dulles was there all of the time, and I asked questions and he commented and so on. So I was filled in on what they knew about what the Russians were doing and where we were.

At the end of this, he asked me, "What do you think? How many intercontinental ballistic missiles do you believe those Russians have?" This came immediately after giving me this presentation, you see.

I had to tell him, "I don't think we know. Anywhere from zero to one hundred. From what we now know, the only thing one can do is to determine the upper limit of how many they could have produced over this period of time. We don't know how many they produced. Maybe it's zero. Maybe they haven't made any of them work well. But it certainly could be up to several tens." They were publicly saying maybe three to five or something like that at that time. But we basically had very little information, and that is something the space program has changed a great deal. Generally we are getting very much better information, for a variety of reasons. The space program has been a very important part of it. It shows how much in the dark we were, and people were rightly worried.

Riess

That's right, because in order to race, you have to know what you are racing against.

Townes

That's right. We didn't know. We knew about Sputnik, of course. That was clear and obvious, what they could do there. But we simply didn't know what they had, exactly, and that was cause for concern. I think, as it developed later, they were perhaps not quite as far along and skillful as we feared. Nevertheless, it is important to allow for the uncertainties and recognize they might be further ahead--one has to allow for that.

Well, somewhere along in there Jim Killian was replaced by George Kistiakowsky as advisor to the president. George and I knew each other pretty well. I believe Kistiakowsky was science advisor when I went down there [1959-1961]. Yes, that's right. I talked with him about it, how important was this, and he felt it was very important and we could work closely together. He said I was not to be a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee at the same time, nevertheless, I was welcome to come over and sit in on some of the meetings and we would be in close contact. Generally he was helpful in keeping me posted on things.

The Jason Group

Townes

During that period I also did the administrative work, at least, for forming Jason. Jason was already coming together a bit. People wanted to do something, but they were thinking of setting up a corporation, a money-making corporation, to advise the government. We finally worked out something that was--

Riess

In all of our talk about Jason, I hadn't realized that it was a money-making corporation.

Townes

Well, they were thinking of doing that. It was a group of people who had been getting together at Los Alamos during the summers, working on semi-military things and government problems. They said, "We are having a good time getting together in the summer. Why don't we do this and sell our services and form a corporation and keep going like this?"

So they were thinking of doing that. Someone tipped me off about this, Marvin Stern, a mathematician who had been working with them. We talked about it and he felt, and I felt, that it would be so much better being a nonprofit organization, and a central organization, rather than a kind of a money-making group. I think they just hadn't considered that. They hadn't realized that such things were practical or possible. I talked with them at some length, and went out to Los Alamos, and we had discussions back and forth. Finally we got something set up that really I think was very good.

The Pentagon wanted them very badly because they were a very brilliant group of scientists, but they wanted them under the Pentagon wing, and fulfilling certain things the way the Pentagon wanted it, and I had to struggle with that to see that they were more independent and didn't have just one single assignment, but could work in a variety of areas and for a variety of government agencies even. Then we had to worry about getting them all clearances, and some of them were young and had spoken out in radical-sounding ways, and so it wasn't easy to get them the kind of clearance we felt important. Eventually we got them really remarkable clearance in the sense that they could be brought in on a very wide variety of things, some of the tightest-held secrets.

Riess

Was that your work, going directly to the people who provide this kind of clearance? I mean, how did you act in all of this?

Townes

I went and talked with the people, I wrote memos. Garrison Norton helped out, also, and he, politically, was kind of well-placed. He knew everybody, and he's a mild man in person who doesn't antagonize people, he just works with them carefully. He was a public-spirited person, too. So they kind of trusted him. And I talked with them. I tried to lay out the ground rules and work with them. I talked to him a good deal about just how to do it, and jointly we got it worked out.

Now, that's on this tape [Jason 25th Anniversary Speech, November 30, 1984], so I won't expand on that further. That's on the tape. Jason is still going and I think now it's back in considerable favor in the Pentagon and doing some very useful things. The Jason people, I think, also feel that they are doing useful things.

Riess

Is it the same body of people?

Townes

Well, most of the same people are still connected, but now getting along pretty far in age. Some of them have kind of become inactive. I've become relatively inactive. I just went down last week, though, to work with them on some problems with infrared detectors. I spent a day down there, and I spent three days in Washington with them in the spring, but I'm not very active. And that's true of most of the older people. Some of them are still pretty active, but not many. We make a point of trying to get in young people, young faculty members, and they are in fact getting a pretty good group of younger people.

Riess

When you work together, you work as a group? You say you went down to work with "them".

Townes

Well, we work in small groups.

Riess

I see.

Townes

They have a number of problems they are working on, and people pick what problem they want to work on and try to get together maybe half a dozen people on any one problem. It's that kind of thing. And I think they are going strong. It's worked out very well. It's made remarkable contributions.

Apollo Program, 1964-1970

Negative Response to Lunar Landing

Townes

Now, the next thing that came along from my point of view was the Apollo program. I left IDA and went to MIT, again an administrative job, and so I backed out of all kinds of things like Jason. I just wasn't--I was officially a member, but I never attended, and never did anything, because I was too busy and had other kinds of committee meetings. I just worked at MIT. I did some research there, and I had a couple of students and some post-docs because I wanted to maintain a research contact, but otherwise I was doing MIT administration.

However, during that time there was an enormous discussion about the lunar landing program. Kennedy had announced it, it was largely pushed by a group of engineers. As for the scientists, by and large most of them were against it. They hadn't been asked, they hadn't been involved in it, and they reacted rather negatively.

Riess

You are explaining that as the basis for their negativity?

Townes

Well, that was the emotional aspect of it. But also, it was an uncertain program. We weren't sure at all just how to do this, and how it could be done. As an example of this reaction, a well-known physicist who had been head of Oak Ridge, named [Alvin M.] Weinberg, wrote an article showing that man could not be in space because the cosmic rays were too severe--there was no way of protecting them from being in space--so anybody who went up was sort of doomed. He published this article seriously. He claimed that you couldn't put adequate protection on and so on.

Jim Killian, a person whom I respected a great deal, also gave a speech in which he said that the Apollo program would be a disaster for the country because to do it at all would take such a large fraction of our engineering and scientific talent, there would be nothing left, and it would rob industry, basically, of all of the good engineers, and so it would mean the failure of our industry if we did the Apollo program. Now, Killian was a highly-respected, distinguished man. He had been advisor to President Eisenhower. Of course, he was a Republican and this was Democratic suggestion, but he's not really politically oriented, that's what he thought.

Riess

Was that more or less matching what the country was thinking?

Townes

No, no, no. That was his own analysis, and it was, I think, built up by the reaction of the people who weren't in on the program and looked at it as suddenly this thing was announced, and it was scary and uncertain. I think, in part, Vannevar Bush persuaded Killian about this, too. Killian was not a technical person; Vannevar Bush was. He'd been dean of engineering at MIT, a very distinguished technical person who was supposed to have great foresight and technical judgment. He had never believed in rockets, anyhow (I think I may have commented on that), and he was against the program. My guess is he influenced Jim Killian.

Then Jim Fisk, who was a classmate of mine entering Bell Laboratories, and who had become president of Bell Laboratories by then, made a public statement. I think the program was estimated to cost about $25 billion and he claimed it would cost at least $100 billion, and it would take at least several times longer than the estimated one decade. It was just far out and completely unrealistic, you see?

And so it went. Many good scientists, not on an administrative level as these people were, were speaking out to the newspapers and were against it and so on. There were some who were for it, but there was a great deal of clamor against it.

Riess

Do you think there was always, within these people who were against it, the idea that yes, it would be something to do, but at a different time? Or do you think that it was an all-out negativity about the very thought?

 

Townes

I think their primary feeling was that it was politically-oriented, hadn't been thought through, and it would fail, and it would disgrace the country. We shouldn't try it. It wasn't because they didn't think the moon was interesting. I think all of these people thought, sure, it would be nice to see the moon and get some samples from it and so on. They were more interested in instrumentation, and that's the general orientation of scientists: it would be more effective, more efficient if we send instruments up there and make measurements. You don't have to send people. That's been a continuing theme.

Townes Proposes a Committee

Townes

Now, somewhere along in there George Mueller was made head of the program. George Mueller was somebody I had known at Bell Laboratories, and he had done microwave spectroscopy in the early days a little bit. He was an engineer, but oriented towards physics, and I had known him pretty well. I ran into him somewhere, on the street maybe, and said, "You've got all of these people jumping on you and on the program. What you ought to do is bring some of them together and talk with them directly. Bring some of them together and have them advise you; rather than have them talking to the newspapers, talk to you so that you can really understand what they are saying. These are bright people, and they are serious, and they have something to say. They may or may not be right, but you ought to be listening to them, and they ought to be talking with you, because this is a serious program the country's trying to undertake. So you ought to form a committee with just these people, and particularly some of the objectors, the ones that you know can be reasonably objective but who don't agree with it. Get them together, and let them talk with you and tell you what they think and what ought to be done."

Well, he then went to Jim Webb, who was head of NASA at that point, and came back to me and said, "Jim Webb thinks that's a good idea. We'd like you to form the committee and be chairman." [laughs]

I was pretty busy with MIT, but I decided again this was a kind of a unique thing which was probably needed and I probably ought to do, so I did it. I tried to get a very representative group of people in different fields that could look at different aspects of the problem different ways. Medical people, for example, astronomers, soils engineers--I had a soils engineer on the committee, and a geologist--a variety of people. I would call them up and say, "This is something Kennedy has announced. The nation obviously is committed to it. We've got to be talking with them and try to see that it is done well and properly and that we are realistic about it. Are you willing to be on the committee? We report to George Mueller and talk with him and look at what they are doing."

They all accepted. Many of them were against the program, but they accepted, with the exception of one: John Pierce, who was an electrical engineer with Bell Labs I had known. I guess he may have gone to Stanford by then--no, I think he was still at Bell Labs. Well John's quip--John's always very amusing--his quip was, "I've always figured that things that aren't worth doing aren't worth doing well." [laughter] So he didn't join, but everybody else did.

Well, Mueller worked with us very well. He really took us into his confidence, he showed us everything, he listened carefully to what we were saying and responded appropriately. So it was a good little interactive club that he took very seriously and hence the members took it very seriously. We looked into a lot of things, one of them being the question of whether the moon was just covered with dust or whether there were some rocks and so on, and whether one could practically land on the moon, and various health problems, too, and technical problems.

The one thing I have always regretted that I think we missed that we might have seen--we weren't looking at it specifically and it was never brought up to us as something to look at--was the question of fire within the space vehicle. And they had at that point an outburst of fire that killed three astronauts. That was a real crisis. George Mueller felt terribly bad about it. Jim Webb made some sort of special kind of public efforts to prop up George Mueller and make him feel better. He told me that George was in a really very bad state as a result. But he pulled out of it, and NASA pulled out of it, and they went ahead.

Riess

Do you really think of that as something that was missed? That with more study--?

Townes

It was something that was missed. Now, we couldn't look at absolutely everything, and this was never brought up to us, and we were busy looking at other things. Nevertheless, we might have thought of it. We might have said, "Are there some fire dangers? Should we be looking at that?"

Riess

This is how you posed the set of questions? Elimination of dangers, for instance?

Townes

Oh yes, oh sure. We wanted to see that it worked. We wanted to see that people could live and we wanted to see that we got there. So this would be an appropriate question for us to take up.

Riess

As soon as it became a manned space program it was about survival?

Townes

Oh sure.

Riess

Mostly? Not about anything else?

Townes

Well, it was successfully getting there. And successfully getting there and back meant that the people would survive. Now, this was an accident on the ground, you see? And we had just not been oriented in that way, and hadn't looked at that particular problem. We had lots of problems to look at. So I don't feel deep blame about it. On the other hand, I regret that we didn't, because if it had somehow been called to our attention, or if we had directed our own attention to that, we might have helped and been able to avoid that.

Riess

It is so much like being in a submarine, the same sort of terrifying aspects.

Townes

Well, it's a very dangerous thing, a very dangerous thing. You have to think it through very, very carefully. Once you are up there, you have only what has been planned before to work with.

Liaison with Contractors for Apollo

Townes

So we went through this. Now Mueller, at the same time, formed a group of executives, which I thought was very effective. He wanted only the top executives from all of the companies that had big contracts on the Apollo program, and he got them together and had them visit each other's plants. Each one would explain what they were doing and why. This made a great liaison so that things fitted together. Furthermore, since they were competing businessmen, each of them wanted to look good, and be sure they were doing things right, to the others. So it was a very effective way of getting people working together and trying to do their best.

Now, he put me on that, too, I think partly because he wanted liaison between two groups, but partly because I was provost at MIT and MIT had a big contract, namely the guidance. That was through the Stark Draper Laboratory at MIT.

Riess

What was the name of the laboratory?

Townes

Stark Draper Laboratory. Draper really developed modern inertial guidance. He was an aeronautical engineer in the aeronautical engineering department there. He had originally been a physicist, then went over into engineering. He was a very good engineer. He built a big laboratory and sort of really established inertial guidance, and his laboratory's built a lot of inertial guidance for the space program. So MIT had a big contract, too. I was also on that committee and saw how it worked.

I think generally the whole system worked rather effectively.

Riess

Kennedy was gone by then, wasn't he?

Townes

Yes.

Riess

I wondered if you had ever talked to him?

Townes

With Kennedy? Yes, I met and talked with Kennedy on a few occasions. I think mostly around the White House. I never particularly talked with him about the manned space program though.

So we went through all of this. Most of the members, once they looked into it and thought about it and looked at solving the problems, became really rather positive about the program, instead of negative. Not that they wouldn't find problems--that was our job--but nevertheless they generally became quite supportive once they really got into the program and saw what it was and thought about whether it could be done.

Apollo's Success

Townes

Now, as you probably know, in fact it did get done within the decade, slightly before the end of the decade, which was Kennedy's goal. Remarkably, it got done pretty much right on budget. It was one of a few government programs that came in right on budget. It was quite unpredictable beforehand. But it came out remarkably well in both time scale and budget-scale.

Towards the end we had to make decisions on when we were ready, and whether to make more tests in orbit before going to the moon, or whether to take the chance of going to the moon. I remember before the first vehicle which orbited the moon, George Mueller posed the question to the committee: "Are we ready to send this mission to the moon?" We had to choose between doing more earth-orbital missions which in themselves were dangerous, or going ahead and doing this without the additional earth orbital missions, both to speed it up and also to not have to do too many orbital missions around the earth.

So all of the committee members voted yes, we should do it, except one, who voted against it. He felt so strongly he then resigned from the committee before the mission. Well, the mission, fortunately, was successful. Then we did the same thing on the actual landing mission. We felt it was ready, it was sensible to try it at that time. And again, fortunately, it worked.

We were all out at the space center--

Riess

Yes, I wondered where you were for the launches.

Townes

Well, for this landing, we had a meeting out at the center, the Johnson [Space] Center, I guess it is, in Houston. General [Jim] Phillips, who really sort of directly managed the program--George Mueller was the administrative person, but Phillips was sort of his aid directly in charge of all of the engineering and so on and for whom now the Phillips Laboratory in Albuquerque has been named, was a very capable person--General Phillips was there supervising whatever communications there were back and forth, and the landing and so on. We were hearing them all and watching, and of course there was an enormous big breakout of celebration when they landed successfully. We stopped our meeting, and then we sort of called it back together again and finished up the meeting.

That was '69, I guess, when we landed, and I must have started on this in maybe--

Riess

The committee was 1964-1970.

Townes

--'64, okay. So it had been a long time, and I had been chairman, and I felt it was time for me to stop. George wanted me to continue, but we had done the landing and everything was okay and it was time for some turnover. So I resigned.

Riess

I've asked you in a different context about your trusteeship with RAND [1965-1970]. That overlapped that period. Also you were on the President's Science Advisory Committee [1966-1970]. Your network was quite large. You've mentioned the NASA advisory committee as well as the committee of executives. How did you use the RAND connection? Were you talking about Apollo with these people?

Townes

No, I was not. It might come up in casual conversation, and people might even still criticize me and criticize the program, as some scientists still were doing who weren't especially connected with it--they were still suspicious. But generally that was not the point. Actually, I agreed to join those two boards primarily because of MIT. Jay Stratton had been on their board--RAND--and asked me to do it. I felt it would be of some value to my work at MIT to have those contacts and see what RAND was doing.

And as for the Salk Institution, we had a biology department which was good, but in some trouble. One of our people had gone to the Salk Institute from MIT who was quite good, and I felt maybe I ought to get a little more acquainted with another kind of biological institution and with these people and so on. So I agreed to serve on that. These positions were interesting in themselves, but not really down the mainstream of what I was doing.

Now, I was not on the President's Science Advisory Committee while I was an administrator at MIT. When I stopped, then I was ready to do some other things, and then I agreed to go on the board of Perkin Elmer, for example. Perkin Elmer had asked me before, as several other corporations had, and I refused because I felt it was inappropriate as a key administrator at MIT to be directly connected with one of the corporations, so many of which had connections with MIT and were funding things or using people and so on. I felt it was wrong. The board at MIT thought I was wrong for refusing to be connected with industry that way. But that was my view.

When I left that administrative position then I agreed to join Perkin Elmer, and I was glad to do that. It was a company which was of some interest to me. Then Don Hornig, who was then science advisor to Johnson, asked me would I come on the President's Science Advisory Committee, which I was glad to do. That had been doing an excellent job. I think the PSAC group from Eisenhower on maybe through most of Johnson's period was fantastically effective; the people were objective and they worked hard and they gave the country good advice, and they were very influential in the White House. But the welcome began to wear out.

It's much the same kind of thing that I was mentioning earlier. Other people got jealous of the power that the scientists had, some of the scientists began to differ so much with the administration, and worst of all, some of them spoke out in public on things which they should not have spoken about. That gave political difficulties for the president, and then he didn't trust them any more. So it kind of wore out and fell apart by the time the Nixon administration came along.

A Paper on the Convergence of Science and Religion

Riess

That year, though, 1966, in a way it was a watershed, the end of MIT and the East Coast and all of that. When I was preparing for this interview today, and I went back to look at the article that you had written about the convergence of science and religion, you wrote that in that kind of in-between year. Was this something that was brewing in you? I'm kind of curious about your state of mind in 1966.

Townes

That article actually grew out of a talk that I gave when I was at Columbia University. I was asked to give a talk over at Riverside Church to a men's group on science and religion. I was deacon at the Riverside Church at that time, so I agreed, and I gave this talk. There was somebody there from IBM who was the editor of their magazine which was then called THINK--perhaps it still is--and so he asked me if he could publish this. He had made a tape of it or something, I guess. I said, "Okay, if you think it's worthwhile, publish it."

I think I was surprised that he published it in a little trade magazine, you know? But he was very interested, and he wanted to publish it, so I worked on writing it up for that purpose. Then a lot of people started asking about it, and I think the editor of Technology Review asked would I write something like that for Technology Review, which I agreed to do.

Now, that came out before I had left my job at MIT, I think.

Riess

May, 1966 is when it came out.23

Townes

Well, now let me see.

Riess

You were Institute Professor that year, weren't you?

Townes

I had written it before that, I'm sure.

Riess

[reading] Let's make life a lot easier for both of us. "Dr. Townes, MIT Provost and Institute Professor, presented his ideas on science and religion first to a bible class in 1964..."

Townes

Now I was not at Columbia University then.

Riess

"...the year in which he won the Nobel Prize in physics. Later, he developed his thoughts further in an article that appears"--appears, future--"this spring in THINK magazine. [And it's] reprinted here by permission of the author and of THINK Magazine." So it was a simultaneous publication.

Townes

Okay, yes. I guess that sounds right. The only thing that surprises me is I thought I was still--

Riess

The bible class in '64? That's not Riverside?

Townes

You see, no. Well, it was at Riverside Church where I first presented it, I know that. But [pause]--in '64 I would have been up in Cambridge. It doesn't quite click. But maybe the Riverside Church people had invited me back again or something. That may well have been it. I still knew them, of course, and maybe they invited me back. Somehow I thought it was earlier.

But in any case it was Riverside Church, then THINK magazine picked it up, and then somehow this magazine picked it up--they heard about it or something and they wanted to publish it. And most people seemed to like it, although I remember it was something of a shock. A person who was connected with that magazine, I don't think he was editor, but he said, "One of our alumni wrote in and said, 'If you ever publish another article like that, I'm never going to give another cent to MIT.'" [laughter]

I asked him, "Why did he say that?"

"Well," he said, "I don't know. He didn't say what was wrong, but he was clearly against it."

Riess

I wondered whether it was controversial?

Townes

I don't think it was controversial. That was the only controversy I ever heard about it. I'm sure people would differ with me, some of the scientists would differ with me about it, but they were not annoyed by it so far as I know and didn't see that they could differ with me clearly enough that they ever said so.

Riess

Yes.

Townes

They never said, "Look, that's not right!" and so on, or, "How can you believe that?" They never said anything like that because it was based on more or less the scientific approach.

Now, I may have mentioned that it was also published in the literary gazette in Moscow, of all things. Somebody from the Christian Science Monitor, who was stationed in Moscow, contacted me and said, "This is the first article ever saying anything favorable about religion that's been published in a Soviet journal. How did it happen?" [laughs]

I said, "I don't know." They published it--I got a copy of it--they had published it, and then they had a commentary by Prokhorov right next to it, who was opposed, you see? So they did publish my article in a fairly positive light, I guess, but then they had the commentary by Prokhorov right next to it. They also left out certain key things that kind of applied to Russia and communism. They omitted them. I wrote Prokhorov about that, that I appreciated his comments, but I sent him the full article and said, "Maybe you'd be interested in the full article since they had excerpted some parts of it."

Then it began to get around quite a lot. I guess that's been republished more times than anything else I've written.

Riess

I see that there is one Russian reference, though, in the article: "It is interesting to note also that Russian communism, with it's roots in 19th Century determinism, for a long time took a strong doctrinaire position against the new physics of quantum mechanics."

Townes

Yes.

Riess

I'm sure that Prokhorov sat up and took notice. [laughs]

Townes

I think he didn't have that in his copy.

As a matter of fact, in quantum mechanics books the Russians for a while had to write in the preface that, "Of course, quantum mechanics isn't right. It can't be right from a philosophical point of view. Nevertheless, it's useful to do certain kinds of physics, so hence we publish this stuff." That's the way they approached it.

Riess

And a philosophical point of view is tantamount to saying a religious point of view?

Townes

Well, no. It's Marxian philosophy in that case, which is deterministic, you see? So they had to deny it, and then they went ahead and published the normal quantum mechanics textbook.

Riess

Have you changed any of your thinking about anything in here? Is this still you on record on science and religion? This was thirty years ago.

Townes

I have written some other things. Broadly speaking, I wouldn't say I have changed, no. Not in a broad sense. If I read it over again and look at the details, maybe there are some things I would say differently now, but I haven't read it over in a long time. So broadly speaking it certainly agrees with my general views, yes.

Riess

I know you had a conversation with the Pope. Was it about the convergence of science and religion? Are these things that you have talked about with the Pope? [laughter]

Townes

No, I don't think he'd expect me to enlighten him on fundamental religious problems, but more practical social problems and technical problems. He, the Pope, is quite interested in trying to recognize science as valid, and encourage scientists, and get some interaction back and forth between theologians and science. But he still regards the two as quite separate domains. [long pause] I have talked with him on several occasions about several different subjects, but generally they are public issues, that's what he wants advice from scientists about. But no theology. [laughs] He was never thinking about talking to me about theology, and I'd doubt if he had ever seen that article or heard of it.

Riess

Okay, so that's my plunge into 1966, seeing you as being more reflective and more open, perhaps?

Townes

[At that time] I was sort of trying to think about what I wanted best to do next, but I immediately started on astronomy. I knew I would. I said, "Well, I'm going to do some kind of astronomy." Just where, was the question, and a number of institutions contacted me and I visited and talked with them about the possibility of going there. Then Tufts pressed on me fairly hard to be president of Tufts at that time.

Riess

That was a quick derailment--I want to get back to government work after Apollo.

Townes

Okay, well let me go on with some of these things.

Let's see, the President's Science Advisory Committee we talked about.

Riess

And you told me about meeting Nixon.

Townes

Oh yes, right.

Well, let me carry on a little bit more with the space thing because I was then asked to be chairman of the Space Science Board of the National Academy [of Sciences, 1970-1973]. By then, Jim Fletcher had become head of NASA. Jim Fletcher is another person that I had kind of known for a long time. His father was my boss at Bell Labs, and I had met him first at Hughes. His brother had been a student of mine at Columbia, and he had another brother I knew slightly and I knew the family well. I was never terribly close to them, but nevertheless always friendly with them. They are a fine family. I admire them.

So Jim and I liked each other. I don't think that was why I was asked to be head of the Space Science Board--primarily [it was] because of my experience in Apollo. Fortunately, Jim Fletcher felt like taking us seriously, and so we would have meetings and try to make recommendations, and he would always make a point of coming over at the end of our meetings and hearing our recommendations personally and discussing them with us. He would talk with me about things, too, privately, because he took the Space Science Board seriously and I think it was fairly effective in that period.

Riess

That was 1970-73?

Townes

I wouldn't know. You probably have the dates there, but that makes sense, yes. It was after the Apollo program, you see. I had quit that, and after I quit I think Luis Alvarez was chairman of the Apollo committee for a while, but within a year it had kind of died out and stopped.

More on the Moon Dust Problem

Townes

Now, maybe I ought to mention one other incident connected with the space program to show the tensions which were there about the space program, as they frequently are about any big program involving lots of money and commitment. Before the Apollo was launched--

 

Townes

--I was vice-chairman of the President's Science Advisory Committee. That was when DuBridge was science advisor, so it was during Kistiakowsky's time, probably say '64-'65, somewhere in there, I believe. Kistiakowsky was chairman of whatever part of PSAC was involved, so it was fairly early in the game. We were, however, coming along, and the people were believing more in Apollo, that yes it was going to land after all, and it would work some time.

Tommy [Thomas] Gold had given a talk to our Apollo committee trying to prove that the moon was covered only with dust, and it was very soft and we'd sink into it. Gerard Kuyper, an astronomer, had been studying light from the moon, ultraviolet in particular, and had found substantial differences in the reflectivity and claimed that it can't be all covered with dust uniformly because it has different compositions over different parts of the moon. There are different compositions and you can see those. There were also some radar-scattering measurements from the moon, which convinced me that there had to be rocks fairly close to the surface. There had to be rocks and disturbances; there could not be just a uniform envelope of dust.

Well, Gold met with the President's Science Advisory Committee to press the idea that, "Okay, unfortunately we've decided to go to the moon, but let's be sure we don't waste still more effort by going twice because when we go there once, even if the people don't disappear, they are just going to find dust. The moon is uniformly covered with dust, and so any one part of the moon is just like any other. There is absolutely no point in going back. We must start now putting a bug in the President's ear about that, to start a backfire against NASA so that NASA won't be tempted to go back a second time. Otherwise, they are just a big organization, they'll want to keep going. So we've got to start this backfire to be sure the President understands that once is enough. There is no point in going back."

He gave this talk, a very convincing talk, he's such a salesman and a very clever person, too. So Kistiakowsky went around the room, because here were about ten or twelve very good scientists on the Science Advisory Committee, he went around the room saying, "Now, what do you think?" Everybody said, "I think Tommy's right. We'd better start making this motion."

Now, some of this, I would have to say, is a little emotional, because many of them had been opposed to the Apollo program anyhow, and it wasn't all scientific judgment. But they said, "Yes, we ought to do this." Well, the question came to me and I said, "I really don't see how that can be correct," and I quoted the radar results and the spectroscopic results, after everybody except me said, "We ought to start telling the President to be sure we don't get tempted to go back."

Then Kistiakowsky, and I admire him for this because he wasn't very fond of the Apollo program either, he said, "I think we ought to wait a while. Charlie might be right, and we ought to wait a while and not make any motions now." So that was the decision.

This is a picture of the dissension among really very good scientists. Later when I was on the Space Science Board Tommy Gold by then had gotten some instrumentation and examined dust on the moon--there was some dust, of course--and he had become very eager to go back. He jumped on me very hard because our Space Science Board, after we had gone there--I don't know how many times we did go there, six times or something like that--we decided that still another time wasn't quite worthwhile. He wanted to go back by then. [laughter] So I got it going and coming!

Space Science Board, 1970-1973, and Problem of Leaks to the Press

Grand Tour Proposal

Townes

Now, the Space Science Board also had some strong arguments. (I bring up these things because much of it is kind of cut and dried, that everybody sort of agreed we ought to do this and we ought to do that. You don't remember those things very well. It's the tough situations which you remember, and the emotional ones. The crisis situations.) One of the things we had to do was decide on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory program in which they were proposing to make what was called the Grand Tour. It was a very timely thing in that they saw a way of sending a spacecraft past one planet and have it swing then over to another and go on out to the furthest planets and make this grand tour.

It was an enormously expensive program, and they had to develop completely new kinds of computers, they said, and so on. At that time, our Space Science Board felt it would be better to explore well some of the prominent planets like Jupiter. Let's think about a Jupiter mission and explore Jupiter well, and Saturn, but as for seeing all of these planets and going on out to the outer edges, and spending that much money in the planning and taking that long before we get going, that was not the thing to do.

That, of course, was very hotly debated by the proponents. JPL must have sort of felt its life depended on it in part. Bill Pickering was head of JPL at that time, and Pickering was a former Caltech person. I had known him when he was a young post-doc and I was a student. A very sensible, good, physicist/engineering type. Pretty soon we had made this decision, made the recommendation to NASA, [and] about three days after our meeting at which it was decided, I got a call from a TIME magazine representative in Los Angeles, "Oh, I hear you are condemning that program and recommending against it and so on and this and that." It's clear he knew precisely what we had said, and he wanted it confirmed as to why didn't we do it and so on.

Well, it was all confidential, and I couldn't talk with him. Fortunately, what he quoted wasn't exactly right, so I could tell him, "What you are saying is not a correct statement and that's all that I am willing to tell you."

Riess

Did you ask him where he got his information?

Townes

No, I didn't.

There were two Caltech people on the committee, Norman Horowitz, a biologist who had been a fellow student with me as a graduate student, and now on the biology faculty, and Willy Fowler, who was a physicist who was a post-doc when I was a student there. So I called them.

Horowitz, I believe, called Bruce Murray first and then he called me back and said, "I'm awfully sorry, I'm to blame. I talked with him. It never occurred to me that he would go to the press. I'll never do that again. I thought Bruce ought to know, because it's important to him, and so I talked with him, but his going to the press, I never dreamed that he would do that." Bruce was at that time assistant head of JPL or something like that.

Then I got a call from Bruce Murray, and Bruce just jumped on me hard. I said, "I'm sorry. That's what the committee believes is the best course. I understand it's debatable, but I think that's the thing to do, and so I have to support that. I happen to think so myself."

He said, "Well, I'm going to take it to the American people as soon as this is public knowledge. I'm going to take it to the American people, and we'll show how wrong you are and how disastrous your recommendation is to the country." [laughs]

I said, "Okay. You are perfectly free to do that. We will, of course, give our arguments, and let's see what the American people believe." Well, he never said anything further about it. Pickering called me up and apologized and said he talked with Murray.

This pressure to get things in the press I had seen before. It's a very difficult problem. I had first run into it when I was at IDA and I was called up by Alsop--you may or not remember who the Alsops were, he was a famous--

Riess

Columnist.

Townes

--columnist, that's right.

Riess

Joseph.

Townes

Joe Alsop. He called me up about a recommendation that IDA had made. I have forgotten which one it was in detail. A recommendation about something. He called me up and he wanted to know what we had recommended. I said, "I'm sorry, it's confidential and I can't tell you."

Well, then he gave me this long, strong lecture about, "The American people have a right to know. It's your duty to see that the American people know what's going on. You are hiding this," and so on. He gave me this marvelous lecture. [laughs]

Riess

A little grandiose?

Townes

That's right.

I said, "No, I see my duty in a very different way. We have agreed that this is confidential, and I'm not going to break that." But he gave me this big talk, and I talked to Garrison Norton about it. Gary was outraged that he would take that attitude, that he thought he was going to bully me into doing it.

Of course, most of these recommendations and reports eventually became public. But before that, a government agency or possibly the President needed time to consider them privately, along with other matters which are pertinent, before preliminary and perhaps confusing views get in the newspapers.

Then there was another occasion. I don't remember just whether this had something to do with the space program, I can't remember exactly what aspect it was, but we had sent in a recommendation, and some newspaper person called me up and wanted to know. I told him, "This is confidential. It is White House property. If they want to release it, they can release it, but I can't release it."

In about three hours he called me back and said, "I've contacted the White House, and I want to let you know the press secretary there has given you permission to go ahead and talk with me."

I said, "That's fine. As soon as the right person contacts me from the White House, then perhaps I can talk with you." Of course I never heard. He was completely lying. It's unfortunate that it means so much to the press to get these things that they use any kind of tactics. Of course, too many people who are interested in the results are willing to go beyond bounds and leak things.

Dense-Pack Basing Proposal

Townes

Still another time that I ran into this in a very severe way was after the MX story. It was really the dense pack which was a sequel to the MX.

Riess

We haven't talked about any of that work.

Townes

No, we'll come to that. I just want to bring this up as a kind of a press problem, and the problem with secrecy and confidentiality.

The dense pack was something that I didn't have as much control over as I would like to have because, having done the MX, some of the powers-that-be got a little annoyed and tried to put restrictions on who should be on the committee and so on. It was not a bad committee, but it was clear that I was being a bit controlled. Weinberger, who had asked me to do it, I think recognized that. He knew the pressures there. We submitted a report which was a somewhat bland report. It was not wrong, and I felt okay about it, but it was somewhat bland. Weinberger took me aside and said, "I'd like to know your own personal opinion. Would you mind summarizing your own personal opinion about this? I've read the report, but I'd like to know what you think."

I said, "Let me think about it, and I'll write you a letter." So I did that and sent him a letter. Well, about a week later, it was out in the newspaper, I think it was the Washington Post, almost word-for-word, and I got called up--"Was this correct?" and so on. Well, fortunately it wasn't quite correct, and all I could say was, "No, this is not accurate and that's all I can say."

Well, Weinberger was very angry about it, because he said he felt my comments were very pertinent, and he had shown them to the Joint Chiefs and only to the Joint Chiefs. He didn't know how it got out, and he was going to try to find out. Well, he never found out how it got out, but it got over to Congress, and congressmen had a copy of my letter, and the press had it. They obviously had it essentially word-for-word. They hadn't published it quite correctly, but they had it. Weinberger never found out how it got out. I personally think it was most likely Admiral Watkins of the navy, because this is a program the navy would not have wanted, and I think basically it was not a good program. But Weinberger never found out how it made it to the press.

So this is just a picture of some of the difficulty and the pressures which are there. Now, to me, I am enough of an independent person, and not interested in making the news and so on, that it was not troublesome--annoying, but not troublesome--for me to handle that. On the other hand, if you take people who are trying to find their way in the world, and trying to seek political favor and trying to be newsworthy and so on, you can see how those kinds of pressures can be very severe.

Well, now, let me get back to a little more sequential story. There was the Space Science Board. Did you have a question?

Riess

The Space Science Board for the National Academy of Sciences, '70-'73. And then THE Space Program Advisory Council for NASA was '71-'77.

Townes

I don't think that was all that important.

Riess

Okay. Then the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Space Systems, Office of Science and Technology [1977-1980]. The Committee on International Security and Arms Control [1980-1989]. Then the chairman of the Committee on MX Basing, in 1981.

Townes

That was a very important one. But it's very difficult to tell from these titles whether the groups are effective or not. Frequently committees are formed with a good idea, or just for public show, and then the officials, government officials, never call on them to do anything, never listen to them very much, and the committees exist but really don't meet very much. Or they make reports which are bland, because the chairman, or one of the chairmen, wants to be very careful politically. Some of these things do work out to be functional and useful, others moderately useful, and some very useful. So I think I can perhaps best pick out the things which are of some importance.

President's Science Advisory Committee

LBJ and Vietnam

Townes

I want to go back again to one more case, though, in PSAC to show something about the functions of PSAC when it was working well. Now, in the Johnson administration, we were involved in Vietnam. Most of the academic community and the scientists were rather against it. Nevertheless, there were many scientists who felt they needed to help the government, and they were trying to help the government find solutions to the Vietnamese situation, and the President's Science Advisory Committee certainly was. Johnson, however, was a little worried about them, not sure that he wanted to ask them to advise him about Vietnam.

Now, Johnson had a problem that, not being a military person, he seemed to feel obliged to accept military recommendations. The military would tell him, "This is a thing that's necessary. And we're going to win in such-and-such a time, we just need this many men and we need to do this." How could he tell? He had nobody who could advise him differently. Eisenhower would have been in a different position, but Johnson felt, I think, that he had to believe the military. He wasn't an expert, and so when they said something he felt he had just got to do that. And he generally did it.

The military were basically rather unrealistic about that. Furthermore, my belief is that they weren't paying all that much attention to Vietnam in the sense of putting their strongest and best efforts there at all. They were more interested in the Soviet problem. That was where the key problems were, and Vietnam was a secondary thing, and I think they treated it in a secondary way, and I don't think they did a very good job.

Riess

You mean a sort of "old technology" war?

Townes

Yes, and it was a minor war. "Okay, well just put more people over there and that will take care of it," rather than putting very good people there or putting their real leaders there. The real leadership, and really their best people, were doing other things, you see?

Riess

That's interesting.

Townes

Well, now we occasionally met with the president as kind of a formality, just to talk with him in the oval office. Johnson would invite us to meet with him, sort of a once-a-year, or once-every-couple-of-years kind of event with the full committee. So we were going to talk generally about things. We brought up the Vietnamese problem, that we wanted very eagerly to get into it and try to help.

All of us sensed that he was a little suspicious of the scientific community, not eager for them to get involved. But we managed to bring up in a reasonably graceful way the problem of logistics and of bombing. The military argued we've got to continue bombing North Vietnam, because otherwise they could send a lot more troops and supplies down into South Vietnam, and in order to cut them off we've got to keep this intensive bombing going.

We suggested maybe we could look into the technical aspects of the logistics of just what this was doing. Johnson, fortunately, accepted that. So we did that, and we made a substantial study of to what extent this bombing was preventing the North Vietnamese from infiltrating and sending more supplies and so on down to South Vietnam. We found it wasn't very effective, and we made that report to the president.

Even the military said maybe we were right, but they had been saying something quite different before. As a result, then, there was a stopping of the bombing, at least at that time. It seemed very clear to me that Johnson was relieved and pleased to have somebody who could advise him outside of the military. He hadn't trusted us very completely, but I think he was pleased with the result. We had done a thorough job. The military listened to it, and they didn't have any real objections, and that was convincing to him. Then he could go ahead.

It was functions like that which PSAC fulfilled, and I think very usefully. Now, as time went on and things got more and more tense, PSAC became less and less effective.

Let's see, what else comes in here?

The McNamara Wall

Townes

Oh yes, I should mention another aspect of Vietnam, to bring back the color of the times. The Jason group worked on trying to find solutions for Vietnam. They had become convinced that they could stop the Vietnamese from infiltration by putting up various kinds of sensors and automatic devices and so on which would essentially establish a barrier. It became known as "the McNamara wall." Kistiakowsky was then somewhat involved with Jason, never a direct Jason member, but he was working with them closely. He knew McNamara, and I think he sold it to McNamara, and McNamara was very pleased with the idea that maybe we could put up a wall.

We wouldn't have to do this attacking on North Vietnam. We could put up a wall and isolate them, and then perhaps the situation in South Vietnam could be cleared up. Jason had invented various devices, listening devices that could be dropped into the ground, and which would broadcast when anybody came by, and things of this type, and other kinds of detection devices which would say when somebody was passing by, and what was passing by, roughly. Then you could bomb that or shell that, you see, any time of day or night.

Well, the military didn't particularly like that solution, but McNamara did, so they had to work on it. After I left MIT, I reassociated more actively with Jason. By then the Jason people were being attacked very severely in the academic community. A couple of my friends at Columbia University, for example, were kind of threatened by students, and they were concerned about their families and their offices and so on. They were certainly accused of lots of things and treated harshly. But they stuck with it, and they said they felt they were helping the country and that it was important to look at what the government was doing and try to advise them--much the same kind of attitude that I would have taken.

Well, when I met with the Jasons again and learned about what they were doing--I had been out of the loop and didn't know the details of all of these devices that they were developing--they, at that time, were debating, "Should we continue? Should Jason disband? Should we really be doing this with the government?" They had a full discussion of that, and they went around the group. I remember very well what I said. As we were going around the group I thought, "How should one put this?"

I said, "You know, we've got lots of Americans over there. Along with Vietnamese dying, we've got a number of Americans over there who are putting their lives at risk, and it seems to me that we ought to try to help regardless of what our friends think. They've got their lives at stake, and all I have at stake is my time and my friends and my reputation. I'm willing to risk that." So most of them stuck with it. A few resigned, and there were fine, idealistic, reasons why they decided they should resign. But very few resigned. Most of them stuck with it and continued.

Then I was asked to chair a committee which was to try to oversee the planning of this McNamara wall. There was a committee on which a number of Jason members had been, and there was a previous chairman, I forgot who it was but believe it was Kistiakowsky. I believe just before that time Kistiakowsky had resigned and said he would have nothing further to do with the military because he disagreed with them so much. So he asked me would I be chairman?

I was uncertain about it. Paul Nitze was the under-secretary at that time. I knew Paul pretty well. He's sort of academically oriented, and I had first known him when I was at IDA. I went to see Paul and talked with him about it and I said, "Look, I'm not in favor of what the country's doing. I think we ought to pull out. We certainly ought to not bomb."

Paul said, "Generally I agree with you, but we can't publicly disagree with the President's policy at this point."

I said, "Well, could I talk with the secretary?" (The secretary was Clark Clifford.) He said, "Unfortunately, the secretary just isn't seeing anybody."

I said, "Okay. If you feel your goal is essentially the same as mine, why then I'll serve on the committee." Now, Clark Clifford has written his memoirs recently, and what he is saying is that he had kind of purposely avoided discussing things with many others. He wanted to think it through himself and talk with the President. Before very long, in fact, there was a firm decision to stop all of the bombing, and Clifford claims that he was behind that, which I believe.

But I served on this committee. I met with them about two times. There was a general representing the air force who was a liaison person at the Pentagon. It became very clear to me that he simply didn't want this McNamara Wall. He wanted to use the devices for other purposes, other military purposes, for detecting things, but he didn't want to try to establish a barrier. So I resigned.

I guess my judgment of him was correct, because I think in about six months that same general had been court-marshalled because he had led a bombing raid against North Vietnam when he was ordered that all bombing should stop. He was so angry, he just organized a bombing raid himself and did it. [laughs] So that's clearly the way he felt. Well, I resigned and then the committee kind of fell apart and there wasn't anything.

I mention those things to indicate the tensions and the difficulties and dissension within the academic community, and within the country. People were unsure just what to do. Kistiakowsky, whom I had thought very highly of, at that point just resigned and publicly said it was all wrong and he wasn't going to have anything to do with it, and he would never, ever be associated with the military or the government any more. That probably had an effect. I would not denigrate his doing that at all. I think it probably had an effect, and you need some people to do that, but then you need some people to keep working and try to do things.

I talked with George Kistiakowsky about it before accepting the chairmanship. I said, "George, what do you think? Do you think I ought to do this? You've resigned. Do you think this is a good thing?" He said he thought on balance it would be good if I were willing to do it, that he couldn't do it, but he felt that it would be good if I were willing to do it. So I tried it, but it was not practical with this general in the position he was.

 

Riess

The name of that committee that Kistiakowsky resigned from was what?

Townes

I don't know. I don't know whether it's down on my list of activities, because I was there a relatively short time.

[tape interruption]

I don't see it here. Let me--. Let's see, the question was what was the name of the committee that was advising about the McNamara wall. I don't really know the name of the committee at this point. It was a committee largely of Jason members, plus some military representation, to try to advise on how to proceed in moving towards getting a successful McNamara wall, that was what it was.

Riess

Would it have been a committee of the Department of Defense?

Townes

It was a committee of the Department of Defense, yes, that's quite right. It reported to the Department of Defense, advising them what to do. McNamara himself was so interested that he had formed it. My guess is it had been fairly effective for a while. He had formed it, and he wanted that help in getting it done, but the military generally were against it, and McNamara was out by then, so there was no way of being effective.

Not Science and Technical Advisory to Vietnam

Townes

Now, I did want to mention a couple of other things. At some point along in there I was asked if I would be science and technical advisor for Vietnam. That would have meant moving to Hawaii, having headquarters in Hawaii, going back and forth between Vietnam a good deal. That was just out of the question for me. Here I wanted to be sympathetic and helpful to them, but I felt I could not be that closely and positively connected, that in that position, as an official, acting for the government and for the military, I couldn't very well oppose left and right, when I felt like it, what they were doing, and still serve them properly. I also wouldn't have enjoyed it, of course. I felt it would not be a position that I could accept. I could accept an advisory position when I disagreed with them, but to fundamentally disagree with them and be a part of the organization, I felt that was not possible. So I turned them down.

Riess

Did you make that decision on your own, or since you were very much a Berkeley person at that point, did you find yourself talking to peers here about it, or your family, or whatever?

Townes

No I didn't. I may have mentioned it to Frances, but I would never bother to talk with anybody. It was very clear to me.

Riess

Do you think it would have meant resigning your position here?

Townes

Oh, no. I could take a leave of absence. Officially, I could take a leave of absence. I'm sure it wouldn't have been popular in Berkeley. [laughs] Not popular wherever I was. Not popular with my family. But to me it was unthinkable anyhow, so I never really raised the question with anybody. I probably mentioned it to Frances in a way that she would have forgotten by now, I guess.

Riess

Was there ever such a [science and technical advisor] person [for Vietnam]?

Townes

Yes, there was such a person. One person who was there before, who has now died--I think he may have died along about in that time, I'm not certain--he was a physicist, a geophysicist. He had been connected with RAND. A very conservative person, and smart. I liked him perfectly well. I never agreed with him very well, but he was in that position and probably did an effective job.

One thing that he did was interesting. There was a town or region in Vietnam, Khé Sanh, in which there were about five thousand American soldiers. It was surrounded, somewhat by surprise. It was during the rainy season, and we couldn't send in more reinforcements very well, [as it was] surrounded by North Vietnamese opposing forces. It was played up in the headlines of newspapers very, very strongly as being a potential disaster for the United States, very much like Dien Bien Phu had been for the French--that sort of made the French move out. This would be a massacre of some five thousand of our soldiers; we had no way of reinforcing them, and they were surrounded. It was going to be an enormous disaster.

Well, what this chap told me, and what others have told me, though I never checked up carefully, was that he recommended and our troops used some of the Jason-invented devices, had the air force drop them around the perimeter of that town, and it was his idea to do that. He persuaded the military, and they dropped them around the perimeter of the town so that during the night, as the enemy moved around and moved in, they could tell exactly where they were and fire at them. They were successful enough, they both surprised the enemy and damaged them enough, that they then just gradually disappeared. They were frightened and injured and didn't know what was going on, because our troops could hear them and locate them and fire on them in the dark or any time. So they dispersed and left them alone and it was kind of a little bit of a puzzle.

The newspapers played it down and never said anything like, "This was a great American success." They never mentioned that because newspapers were very negative about the whole war at that time, you see. They played up the disasters, but they didn't play up the successes, and nobody ever read that this was a remarkable success. But that was one thing that I didn't have anything directly to do with at all and I have been told second-hand about it, but I think by authoritative enough people I believe that's more or less what happened.

Riess

Okay.

Committee on MX Basing, 1981

Townes

Well, now. I think we are perhaps ready to go on to the MX missile. I think I have mentioned the space committee [President-Elect Nixon's Task Force on Space, 1968] I served on for Nixon where Nixon came in, and the fact that he was really remarkably open at that time, or enjoyed saying that he was, anyhow. And he did have, in fact, more Democrats on his advisory groups than Republicans. That's quite remarkable, but again it shows the picture that when a government is coming in, it's much more open-minded and he was ready to take advice and these people were ready to help him and try to give him honest, good advice.

[pause] After Nixon became well-entrenched, why then clearly I was out, because I didn't fit his pattern at all. That's true of both liberal and conservative groups of people, once they are well in power and going on their own way, why I am kind of an outsider, but it's in transitions or times of need or crisis or something like that that I tend to get called on.

Well, the MX is a little bit more unusual case. Cap Weinberger for a short time was the chief legal counsel for Bechtel. Bechtel had given jobs to people who were important government people: Schultz for example, and Weinberger had been important in the Republican governments. Bechtel had given them jobs because they needed jobs, and because also Bechtel thought they were good people. Also, I assume, they felt that good political connections were important to business. But these were very capable people, and there were perfectly good reasons why George Schultz would be a reasonable executive for Bechtel, he would know the international scene well and so on. So Schultz and Weinberger were hired.

Weinberger happened to be a member of the same Bohemian camp that I was; he became a member of the same camp that I was up at Bohemian Grove. We were both in the Isle of Aves. He became a member partly because the previous legal counsel had been a long-term member of that camp. Bechtel himself was not a member, but his previous legal counsel was. Weinberger was a prominent person, we were glad to have him a member of our camp.

Riess

Who was the previous person?

Townes

It was Willis Slusser. He is a very nice person who was given a professorship in philosophy here at Berkeley, an endowed professorship of philosophy. He is an old blue, and very loyal to the University, and it's likely he's given some things for the library, too.

In any event, I knew Weinberger at the Bohemian Grove. Then lo and behold, when Weinberger was Secretary of Defense, early in the Reagan administration, I got a call from him asking if I would head a committee to examine the MX missile, and how they should be deployed in particular, because that had all been planned by the Carter administration and they wanted to reexamine it, and would I head a committee to examine and advise just what to do with the MX missile. Was this the right plan, and so on.

As usual, I had several questions. One is, how do we put this committee together, who chooses the committee? He said, "You choose the committee. I would want veto power, but you are free to make up the committee, and I'll just check them over and be sure that we find them okay." Then another question was whom do I report to? He said, "You report to me." Another question was, if we are going to look at the MX missile, that clearly has to be put in the context of our overall nuclear weapon arsenal and deployment of other strategic weapons, and are we free to look at the whole picture? He said, "Yes, that's just what I'd like you to do. That's just fine."

So I accepted. He provided a little money from the Pentagon for office work here in my office to help out so the University wouldn't have to bear all of that burden, and it was clearly going to be a fairly intensive job. Forming a committee like that is very critical. It's important to get people who are believable in the framework of the people that they are advising, believable to the people whose advice you want them to take. At the same time, they must be objective enough that they are not just party members that are going to go in some particular way. They must be balanced with different kinds of viewpoints, different kinds of background experience and so on.

Committee Members

Townes

Now, I worked over that pretty hard. I talked, for example, with Spurgeon Keeny. Now I wouldn't have told Cap Weinberger I was consulting with Spurgeon Keeny, because he [Keeny] had been in the Carter administration, he's a very liberal person, he'd been in arms control for a long time, he was an assistant to the President's Science Advisory Committee. I had known him for a long time. He was a very honest person, quite liberal in his orientation, but realistic. He also knew the business, he knew a lot of the people. So I would check them over with him as to what he thought of these people; many of them he knew much better than I, and some of them I didn't know at all.

I picked a committee of about ten to twelve people, mostly recognized as middle-of-the-road or conservative, but people that I felt could be objective. One of them was [Brent] Scowcroft, for example. I wanted to pick somebody from the air force, experienced in the air force, because this was an air force mission. Then, the person who had managed the Minuteman program, a general of the air force, Benny Schriever, I thought a very high-quality person. (I didn't know Scowcroft, but Keeny said he was really quite objective and good and so on, and I said, "Okay.")

Then Bill Nierenberg, who is a physicist and is definitely a Republican, but whom I knew very well, and I respect Bill Nierenberg. And Worth Bagley, a retired admiral--all of these military people were retired, they weren't active--from down at La Jolla. Bill Nierenberg knew him [Bagley] well and recommended him highly, and Keeny also knew him some.

Mike May, who has been head of Livermore, was an observer officially but a very active participant in fact, and Mike May I knew well. Bud Whelon, who was then head of Hughes. He had been in the CIA; I knew him in the CIA and have a great deal of respect for his technical objectivity. The full list also included Sol Buchsbaum, General Andy Goodpasture, Dave Packard, Henry Rowen, and Jim Woolsey, with General Glenn Kent and Stephen Ailes additional observers.

We built up a committee of people with different backgrounds and viewpoints, and people that I felt could be objective about things. Weinberger assigned a technical person from the Pentagon to be my special assistant. That was a very fortunate assignment and choice. His name was Ted Gold. He had worked at Livermore for a while and then moved to the Pentagon. He was a youngish physicist/engineer type, very, very helpful in digging up the right materials.

Now, let me say a little more about Cap Weinberger. I have a great admiration for his integrity. These recent news stories questioning his honesty I am very puzzled about. It just doesn't sound like Cap Weinberger to me. I have a great admiration for his integrity and his straightforwardness and so on. He is very conservative, politically, there is no doubt about that. But from the point of view of ethics and government service and so on he's very devoted, according to all my experience.

He said, "The air force is for this, of course, and I think my chief science advisor, the head of the technical work in the Pentagon is for it--that's Dick DiLauer, he's a missile man himself. I want you to be independent, and you need not invite the air force representatives to your meetings. You invite them when you need information from them, but I don't want them breathing down your neck. You invite whom you would like to invite and the air force is not part of this. This is a separate study from the point of view of the Pentagon as a whole."

I talked with him some about what was possible, politically. He said, "Don't worry about the politics. You tell us what we ought to do. It's our job to worry about the politics and get it done. You are not to make political considerations. Just tell us what you think really is the right thing to do, technically, and then we'll worry about the rest of it. That's our job."

Now, the other thing that's clear, he said, "In the long run, this is Reagan's decision. This is not my decision, this is going to be Reagan's decision. We just want to put together adequate information so that he can make the right decision and I'll present it to Reagan myself." I was surprised to find really how much control Reagan had in these decisions, because that's not the impression one gets. But certainly Weinberger regarded Reagan as clearly in control and in my meeting with him [Reagan] that seemed to be quite the case, too. For something like this, it was basically his decision, even though he wasn't very close to it.

Problems of Basing

Townes

Well, Weinberger really lived by that kind of standard. And we heard different points of view. We worked hard at it. We went over the whole strategic picture, and heard all kinds of presentations. The fundamental problem was that the MX was supposed to fool the enemy and work because it had many different silos for each missile. It had ten different silos for each missile, and there were two hundred missiles, so there were going to be two thousand silos built all around Utah and Nevada area, spread out around the desert, and you would never know in which silo the missile was, and so you couldn't afford to bomb them all and kill all of them off. As we worked it out, it turned out you could afford to bomb them all, unfortunately. The exchange ratio was simply not as favorable as had been claimed. So regardless of how many you built, it was cheaper for the Russians just to build a few more bombs and hit them all, and that was sort of the overall basic problem. But we had to work through it in detail, and we had to ask, "What other methods are there to base this system?"

Now, another thing I'd like to bring out is some of our interaction with the politicians. John Glenn had a particular scheme he wanted to sell. That was to put these things in trucks, big trucks, which would move around the country on our highways, and hence nobody would know exactly where all of them are and hence they would be protected. He was very convinced that that would work fine. Technically, it would perhaps work. This was not exactly a matter of politics, but the committee almost uniformly felt that the American people will not accept that, having nuclear weapons running around their highways. There would be people running out there, standing in front of them, stopping them, and holding them there, or shooting at them with firearms and so on.

Well, John Glenn felt, "No, no, no. Americans would find this quite acceptable." Well, he's from Ohio, and maybe he has a different constituency, and he came over specially to tell us about his idea. I think we met with him a couple of times, but we were just not convinced that would work.

There were many other schemes, and on the multiple silo one we met with representatives from Utah and Nevada. I'm trying to remember the name of the prominent Nevada Republican senator who was very close to President Nixon and very close to President Reagan, too.

Riess

Is that Orrin Hatch?

Townes

No, it wasn't Hatch. It was Senator [Paul] Laxalt. Hatch came over, too. But we had them all, about half a dozen politicians from both of the states, to talk about it. We saw this as using up an awful lot of desert. And there were, in the newspapers, lots of stories against it, people were objecting and so on. This is a picture of what one encounters in Washington, some nobility as well as some skullduggery. In this case, some of the leaders of those two states, their leading politicians talked with us. Everybody agreed and said, "Yes, this is not easy. People in our state don't want them, but you decide what you think really is best for the county, what really ought to be done, and we'll do it. We'll put it over somehow. It is clearly undesirable, and we don't want them, but we want you to know that you should feel free to decide what's the right thing to do and we'll do it."

We met with them in a way which was very carefully planned so there would be no news people around. We all agreed, and they agreed, there would be no news release. They wouldn't even say they talked with us. So it was completely confidential, and we didn't want a news story coming out and speculation. But they were very straightforward about it. "We don't want these things, but if we've got to have them, why we'll have them. We'll do it."

In the long run, we decided against that. There was one scheme that seemed favorable, namely putting the missiles in airplanes. If you put them in airplanes, you can have them cruising around in airplanes, offshore likely, but not findable easily. You couldn't find all of them instantaneously. That's reasonably safe. This was a scheme that was proposed by a small company, and Jim Woolsey, who was a lawyer and had previously been in one of the governments--I think he was originally a Democrat, but a fairly conservative one--Jim Woolsey was very much in favor of it. The committee decided that yes, this was workable--from a technical point of view this was workable. People wouldn't like these planes flying over them, but they wouldn't fly over them very frequently, they would mostly be offshore in very long-term cruising aircraft that would just stay up there. They could never be all located and they could fire.

Riess

It seems extraordinary to think about the state of mind. I mean, if you are going to do that, you have to assume that you are going to, at some point, destroy your enemy, because you can't continue to live like this.

Townes

[laughs] Well, we have continued to live like this for a long time. People are right on the margin, watching those missiles and ready to fire them off any time. We have them in silos.

Riess

That seems pleasantly terrestrial.

Townes

Well, but you know they can hit you any time. So you've got to watch out for what they are doing, and be ready to fire before their missiles land and so on. So that is a very tense thing, too. Or at least it can be.

Townes Presents Minority Report to Reagan

Townes

Eventually we voted. It's interesting. The committee by and large, many of them were not enthusiastic about putting these things out. We voted against the multiple silos and decided that economically that was not really useful. But most of the committee felt that we had to go ahead with two hundred missiles. Make the missiles, and put them out in the best silos that we could, or in these airplanes. The airplanes were a possibility if you really wanted to do that. Otherwise, put them in silos and protect the silos as well as we could.

There were three of us that were against it. I was against it. I felt that we are already making the missiles, and I felt we should go ahead and make some missiles and have them as a threat to the Russians that we could put them out, because the Soviets had multiple warhead missiles in abundance and they were a great threat to us. We should have that possibility, but we shouldn't deploy them because it was dangerous. That would be the first thing attacked, and certainly their missiles would be the first thing we attacked. They had lots of them, and I felt this could provide some pressure on the Soviets to get rid of their many multiple warhead missiles, but we should not deploy them. Bill Nierenberg agreed with me on that. It's interesting, he decided that one day, and the next time we met he said, "I am just so pleased that I was able to make a decision that way." [laughs] "I'm just so pleased with myself." Because he tends to be pretty conservative, and he might well have voted the other way.

Riess

That was genuine?

Townes

Yes. Then the admiral was against it. So there were three of us. Everybody else felt we should go ahead and deploy them. Scowcroft in particular. Now, Scowcroft at that time was very much for single missiles. He said, "This is really, philosophically, the right way to do it," and we all agreed: missiles with single warheads because they would be safer. "This is the way to do it, but we can't afford to do it, it would be too expensive to change over everything and so on." But he also said, "Look, politically the President simply can't turn these down. He's got to deploy them. It's just politically impossible for him to stop." He used the political argument much more than any of us. I pointed out we had been asked to discuss it technically but he said, "Still, it's politically impossible. He can't do that." He voted against it. He voted for deploying all of them. Not in the multiple shelters, but in the single shelters.

So we presented a report that we all agreed on. There was a minority view and a majority view. Weinberger already knew a little bit about my views because the air force had presented their story to Weinberger in his office. He had invited me specially to come hear what the air force said to him, you see, what their recommendation was. After the meeting he said, "Come into my office here quietly. I'd like to get your reaction to their presentation." So I talked with him some about that.

Then, when we had finished our report, he said, "Now we have to present it to the President because he is the one who's got to make the decision." So I was to present this to the President, and we had a meeting--most of cabinet was there. The head of the air force was then Lew Allen--Lew Allen has been recently head of JPL. Lew Allen is a physicist, and he had told me, "It's very exceptional for a Ph.D. physicist to become head of this hot shot pilots air force gang. It just happened because of the missile business and so on, it just happened that I came in at that particular time when they could reasonably appoint a Ph.D. physicist to be head of the air force." He was also a good pilot. But nevertheless, he felt that it was most unusual. He thought it would never happen again, and maybe it won't. Lew is a very reasonable person, but he was supporting the air force position as strongly as he could.

So we met with the cabinet, and I made my presentation. Lew made his presentation counter to it. We had some questions. It was clear to me that [Alexander] Haig was pretty much for the air force position. Interestingly, Casey asked many questions. He was head of the CIA. I felt Casey was a bit sympathetic to what I was saying. It wasn't completely clear. The President asked a couple of questions. I got a very funny impression about him. It's this mixed picture of Reagan. He came in, and as we were talking and part of the time I was making my presentation, one of the things he did, very slowly and over a long period of time, was to take care of his contact lenses. He washed them in a glass of water and wiped them and put them in his eyes and so on. [laughs] Here we are supposed to be talking about important things, and I thought, "My goodness, how much is he going to understand?" Then he asked a couple of questions which were good questions, really quite good questions.

Riess

Did anyone else seem to notice this behavior as strange?

Townes

Nobody commented. I don't know whether they'd dare to comment, but nobody commented on it. Most of the cabinet seemed quite interested. It was primarily Haig and Casey, I guess, that asked questions. I think Weinberger may have asked one or two leading questions, but we had a bit of discussion and then I left. I didn't know how it was going to come out.

I was frankly very pleased how it came out.

 

Townes

As I said, I was generally pleased and impressed that Reagan would go so far towards the minority direction--I think it was partly Cap Weinberger who told him that I was credible and so on--because he went down to deploying only forty. The struggle within Congress off and on has meant that the MX really is just kind of sitting on the sidelines, it's not doing anything. I think this is in fact the right thing, for them to sit on the sidelines as a threat to the Russians, "We might do it," but we don't need to do it.

Riess

When you say that Weinberger pointed out that Reagan would make his own decision, in fact it was Weinberger who would help Reagan make his decision.

Townes

Well, I'm sure that he would talk with Weinberger about it, but it is very clear that he wasn't sure which direction Reagan would go, and he was taking the position that it was really Reagan's decision and he didn't really know. I think that was quite genuine. Not that he wouldn't have some influence about it; Reagan would talk with him at some length.

There was a sequel to this: the so called dense pack. So this particular air force proposal was turned down. Lew Allen had argued very strongly for the air force position, and DiLauer had been very strong for the air force position, and as a result DiLauer was kind of excluded from our discussions. Amusingly, the next time I saw Lew Allen he said, "You know, your committee really taught us some things that we hadn't thought about." He's a very decent, intelligent person.

Positive Value of Expertise from Livermore

Townes

I guess there is another comment I would make that has to do with the University of California that I think is quite important. We heard from a lot of government contractors, engineers, and managers who were in the business of making missiles and planes and so on, and we heard their recommendations. In many cases, that was very good. But it was clear that they were very shy about disagreeing with the air force. A representative of one contractor--I've forgotten which one, it may have been Boeing--came in and took a position that disagreed with some of the things the air force was saying. The next week when we met they had another representative come back and essentially retract that, claiming it wasn't really quite right and so on. They didn't exactly say it was wrong, but they said some other things to try to gloss it over. It was clear that they felt they had offended the air force--the air force may have told them so--so they had to back down.

On the other hand, the people from Livermore and Los Alamos were very different. We had a Los Alamos person on the committee, as a matter of fact. I wanted an expert of that type. He was very good and helpful. We also had various people from Livermore and Los Alamos testify. Mike May, of course, was on the committee.

These people were highly respected by the military and by the air force because they were people who had really done the work and they were advising the military on the technical issues, you see? They would tell the military what's right, and air force personnel knew they knew the business. And we knew they knew the business, too. They didn't hesitate to disagree with the air force, though, in a very straightforward way. They would disagree, and they said things quite openly when they felt differently from the air force. They didn't have to back down and so on.

It's that independence, I think, which is tremendously important, an important part of the reason for having them managed by a nonprofit institution such as the University. It could be some other nonprofit institution perhaps, but nevertheless, the University has been able to maintain high quality personnel at those laboratories and, in addition, they feel independent enough that they can publicly disagree with the air force. They could disagree in an intimate committee like this, which dealt with an issue of great importance to the air force. They didn't have to backtrack. That was enormously valuable to the committee, to have that kind of expertise willing to be very straightforward and which had no personal interest that they were aiming at trying to protect. They could be independent.

Riess

So you are saying that the efforts over the years on the part of lots of people to disassociate the University from Livermore--?

Townes

I would say the independence of Livermore is very important. It might be achieved in other ways. It certainly could not be achieved by having them part of the government, because if they are part of the government, particularly part of the military, they are going to be somewhat controlled. And they couldn't be a part of an industrial firm, certainly. They might be run by some nonprofit group or something like that, perhaps. A university is one such. While this may seem unnatural in some ways for a university to run them, nevertheless there is a functional importance there which I think we can't afford to neglect. After we had written our report, I wrote the head of Livermore basically telling him this, how important I felt it was.

Defense Science Board Possessiveness

Townes

Now, this MX analysis had been done somewhat on an ad hoc basis. This was Weinberger's idea, to get me and to set it up this way and so on. But there is, within the Pentagon, something called the Defense Science Board. That is a group of experts, many of them from industry, some retired military, and a few academics. I had met with the Defense Science Board on other issues occasionally, I knew about them. But the Defense Science Board just wasn't involved in this. It's clear that they, and the military, were really troubled about this special set-up, and the special privileges we had, and that we could be so independent and so on. This was very troubling to them. So the next study, of the next thing the air force proposed--

Riess

How did you know that? Did you know individuals on it?

Townes

Yes, I knew individuals on it. Gene Fubini had been I guess head of it at one time. Gene Fubini was on the original infrared committee which I mentioned earlier. That's when I first got to know him, and I had by then known Gene for a long time, we'd had other contacts. And I knew some other people there. But I would say the actions were really still louder than the words; they made feelings of the DSB clear from events during the next consideration.

The air force was proposing what's called "dense pack." This was another way of deploying missiles, to put them all together in a very dense way, have intensive protection around this particular spot, and make them so close together you couldn't possibly hope to get enough missiles in to kill them all at once, and so on. They would also be very hard, that is, very hard to destroy, and whatnot.

So Weinberger decided there must be an outside group to consider that. But it seems clear that the Defense Science Board had then organized the rules, and told Weinberger, "You've got to follow the rules. The Defense Science Board is set up to give this advice. It's got to be under the Defense Science Board," and so on. So it was, officially, under the Defense Science Board and had to go through various formalities, and it was a much more controlled kind of situation. I've forgotten now whether I was chairman or just a member of that committee--it's funny.

Riess

Let me tell you, the piece of paper says that you were on the Defense Science Board from 1982 to 1986, and you were chairman of the Committee on the Dense Pack Basing System in 1982.

Townes

Okay, so I was chairman. I had forgotten whether I was chairman or not chairman.

[tape interruption]

So I was chairman again, but I did not appoint the members. I might comment, in the early MX panel, the one person that Weinberger ruled out was Pief Panofsky. Panofsky I think highly of, and he's well known in the arms control field. I suggested Panofsky, and he's the one person Weinberger ruled out of all the people I picked. The reason, he said, was that, "Panofsky had spoken out enough in the press and so on that he will not seem objective to some of our congressional people, and it will simply be hard to sell the report. So I think it would be unwise to have Panofsky on." I accepted that. He was the only one that Weinberger ruled out. I was sorry Pief couldn't be on it, but didn't think Weinberger was being especially unreasonable.

Now, this other committee I did not pick. I think the Defense Science Board largely picked it. I'm not sure, I don't remember now. Maybe I knew more at the time. I'm not sure how it was picked out. It was a perfectly reasonable group of people--I looked at that, and I knew very well that it was a reasonable enough group. But there were a number of members of the Defense Science Board and we had to follow all of their procedures. They were generally a little more politically oriented and business oriented than the people I would have picked.

We ended up with a report. It was a mild report saying, "Yes, this could work, but there were some limitations," and so on. It was not wrong, it was not the kind of report I would have written exactly, but this was what the committee agreed on, and I did not have any clear disagreement with what was said.

Riess

Were you called in to see Reagan and the cabinet on this one?

Townes

Not the cabinet, but I presented the report to Weinberger and this is where he asked me, "I'd like to know your own personal opinion now. I've read this report. Give me your personal opinion, what you think of the whole scheme." So I said, "Let me think about it and write you a letter," and I wrote the letter and this is the one that then got exposed. If it needed anything to kill it, that certainly killed it, because while I think I was fair-minded, I raised the problems involved clearly enough that Congress could see them and everybody else could see them. I believe it had a substantial effect in killing that program.

I think there was one other, still, that I was connected with, but just a member. I think maybe that one was on small, single warhead missiles.

Riess

White House Science Council Panel on Future Military Technologies [1982]? That was part of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Townes

At the moment, I don't remember just what that was.

Riess

This was 1982. It was the same year that you were on the dense-pack basing committee.

Townes

I'm a little vague about it, a little fuzzy about it now. It must not have been very important or effective. But after the MX affair, Weinberger asked me, "Would you serve on the Defense Science Board, because I want to see that these things get followed up properly, and I would like you to be there." It was quite clear the Defense Science was very eager to take over, you see, and they are the ones who are supposed to advise on technical issues. They were an outside group, supposed to advise on technical issues, they were organized for that, that's true. But it was pretty much of an "in" group, and there were a lot of them from commercial companies with interests in Pentagon money.

Riess

Similar in makeup to the committee that you had just been on?

Townes

Yes, maybe even more strongly represented by commercial people. The commercial people are very eager to be in there, that is, to get some of their highest executives right on this committee because, after all, they want the business and they want to be on the inside. They are good people, good technical people, and they are eager to be there and they want to serve. Whereas outsiders are not necessarily all that eager. For example the university people aren't, necessarily.

Riess

Are you paid to be on boards like this?

Townes

No, none of this was paid. I believe--. Let me see. I think in the case of the MX, I checked with the Jason people and said, "Is this something that can or should come under Jason," and I think they told me yes, that they would pay for that one. So my time, I think, was paid by Jason in that case. But not on the other committees. I never even raised the question. I believe that for the MX missile study the Jason people felt that they could cover that as part of their assignment to advise the Pentagon, but for the others, normally you don't get paid. Sometimes you get paid maybe seventy-five or one hundred dollars for some committees.

Riess

Plus your travel.

Townes

Oh yes, you get your travel paid, you get your expenses. Normally you get your expenses and nothing else. That's all.

Strategic Defense Initiative--SDI

"Star Wars" Announcement

Townes

Well, now let's see. I think that maybe the last thing I would mention is the SDI. The SDI came up to me in the following way. I got a call from the Science Advisor's Office at the White House saying there was going to be a meeting, the President was going to make a speech, they thought it would be very interesting to me and important for me to be there, and wouldn't I please come? I said, "What is it all about?" They couldn't tell me that, they said it's confidential so far, but that it would be an important announcement and they would welcome me to come to White House and be there.

Riess

You were out here?

Townes

Yes. And they would pay my expenses to come.

Riess

Mysterious!

Townes

Yes. So I decided to go. I think it was Saul [Sol? earlier] Buchsbaum who called me. Saul Buchsbaum had been an important figure at Bell Labs, and he was a physicist who graduated from MIT. He was a very fine person and very knowledgeable. Again, strongly Republican, generally. He had been working with the President's Science Advisor, George Keyworth. I think he called me, too; Saul Buchsbaum I'm pretty sure called me.

So I went, and there were a group of I suppose forty or fifty in all there in the White House, and Reagan made his speech. It was the "Star Wars" speech, introducing the Star Wars or SDI--Strategic Defense Initiative. Well, I immediately asked some questions about it because I had some doubts. They basically said, "Well, yes. The bugs haven't been worked out yet, but this is very important. We are sure this would be very helpful to the country," and so on. In a way, it was a very idealistic speech about protection. It is much better to protect people than to threaten them. It was also not incorrect in detail. I talked with Saul Buchsbaum. That office had worked over it very, very carefully. The speech had been more or less constructed before they saw it, but they then had worked on it very carefully to see that there was nothing that was technically incorrect in the speech. And it wasn't incorrect. Later things were said that weren't correct, but in the President's initial speech, it was all defensible. Whether it was good policy, and whether we could eventually achieve that, was the question.

An Inquiry Into the Source of the Idea

Townes

But I was puzzled about the proposal. It didn't seem to be too practical. I made a point of asking people, "How did this come up?" Well, the science advisory office told me they had worked on the speech very hard, but it had been Reagan's idea, that he was very much interested in this. I asked them did they really believe it. The science advisor at that time said, "Yes, yes," and so on. Well, Saul Buchsbaum was a little more cagey about whether it really could work. Then I asked more about how it came up. General Vesey was there. He was head of the Joint Chiefs. I asked him, "How did this come up?"

He said, "You know, it is kind of funny. We are not all that certain how well it will work, but the President announced his policy."

I said, "Well, how did it come up?"

He said, "You know, the President said that he would like to come over and see us. It is rather unusual. The President was being very nice and wanted to talk with us and to show his interest and so on--he wanted to come over and see us. So we said that was fine. Then we thought, `Well, what can we talk to the President about that will interest him? We have to have something to say to him rather than just details about business. What can we talk to the President about that will really interest him and show him that we're thinking about things and so on?' So we decided this was one thing we could talk about. It wasn't very sure, but it was something we had talked about, and we thought maybe the President would be interested in discussing this kind of possibility. We gave him a talk about it, and he just was very pleased about it, very enthusiastic, and he just said that's what he wanted to do."

I have never found out exactly who gave the speech, but I'm pretty sure it was Watkins, Admiral Watkins, who gave it. Watkins is a very intelligent, idealistic person, a strong Catholic, religiously-oriented, and he doesn't believe in attacking people. A very interesting case, a very devoted public servant, but he also has a good deal of political savvy. My guess is it was Watkins. Anyhow, somebody there among the Joint Chiefs talked about this just as a speculative idea and said, "We were just speculating about this and it would be a nice thing to do if we could do it. The President just latched onto it and he wanted to do it. So what could we do?"

Riess

Almost as if they were entertaining this fantastical idea.

Townes

Well, it was a somewhat futuristic idea. For the Joint Chiefs, their approach was apparently, "Let's look at the possibilities now, and this is one of the possibilities that we ought to be thinking about." It was that kind of thing. It clearly is very appealing because it was about saving people rather than attacking them, and politically it is appealing. Reagan understood that very well, and was attracted to the idea, and so he wanted to do it.

I went around further among the group and I talked with Judge Clark, Bill Clark, who was then the security advisor in the White House. He said, "Yes, what Vesey says is essentially right," and he told me how it happened. And I think I talked with [Robert] McFarland--I think he was there, too--I know I talked with Clark and with Vesey. They said that was the story, that's how it came up, and the President was very enthusiastic about it and said, "We've got to do it," and so on. Weinberger's view was, "Well, you know, when scientists get going, scientists can always do these things. I know there is a little resistance, but--."

Persistence of Faith in the Scientists' Ability to Make Things Work

Townes

Well, I talked with him about it later, too.

Riess

He sensed that scientists would be resistant?

Townes

Well, it was later when he realized that scientists were quite resistant. He said, "If we just get the scientists going on it, they can do it." I talked with Teller; Teller was there, and I talked with Teller on the announcement occasion, and I specifically asked him, "Do you know how this came up?" "No." "Have you been talking with the President?" He said, "No, I haven't met with the President in quite a long time now."

Now, it is generally claimed that Teller persuaded Reagan to do this. I think that's clearly not true. Teller clearly was interested, he liked the program, but it wasn't he that suggested it to the President. He was not key to setting it off, it really was the Joint Chiefs.

Riess

Because Teller would have acknowledged it.

Townes

Oh yes. Sure, he would have. If he had done it, he would have been pleased to have done it. But he said, "No, I haven't seen the President in really in quite a long time."

Now, as time went on I was skeptical but I never made any public speeches against the SDI. I was asked to be on the SDI council to advise the program, but I decided I couldn't do that. I told them I just did not think it would work, and how could I be on the council to tell them how to make it work? I was sorry, I was sympathetic, but I couldn't do it.

Riess

Because you didn't have the expertise?

Townes

No, I just didn't feel I could genuinely advise the Pentagon on doing it when I didn't think it could be done. I didn't believe in the program as they had planned it.

Riess

That day, when Reagan gave his speech, you were all audience, and you had a chance to talk among yourselves?

Townes

Well, we didn't talk technically very much. We just talked about the general situation, how it's interesting, and really can this work? I raised a couple of questions. There were very few people who raised questions. I raised a couple of questions, and they handled them politely. But it was after that that I looked at it more and more, and I was convinced it wouldn't work, unfortunately.

Now, I have never spoken out in public except when people asked me. If a newspaper person asked me, "Do you think it will work?" I'd tell them, "No, I don't think it will work." I told Cap Weinberger that a number of times. I believe Cap, and probably also the White House, to some extent draw an analogy with Apollo. You see, people attacked the Apollo and said it wasn't going to work. But the SDI was reinforced with the idea that, "Look, when scientists get going, they can do anything. Sure they are skeptical now, but give them money and let them work, and they'll find ways of doing this." They were just so confident in our technology.

I think they didn't understand that this was of a different nature, namely that you were not solving a fixed problem. You had to solve a problem with a moving target, namely the Russians could countermand anything you were trying to do. That was the nature of the problem. Technically, you can solve almost any given problem, but when the problem is always changeable, and a question of which side has the advantage in innovating and inventing the counterpart, the Russians clearly, in that case, would have the advantage in my view. So I never felt it would work.

Finally, a year or two later, I think I convinced Weinberger not to come out and say he was sure it will work and so on. I told him he was just hurting their cause. It's okay to look at it and work at it and think about it. But I think a lot of the rationale was just that: "Look, scientists have done it before. Look at the Apollo. If we just give them enough money and let them play with it and get going, then they'll solve it." They didn't realize it was a problem which was different in kind.

Withdrawal from Washington

Riess

Did your conversations with Weinberger continue in a kind of informal way? Does he call you still? Do you talk about these things at the Bohemian Grove?

Townes

When I see him we talk about them some, but he doesn't call me up. He didn't call me up later in the game very much. Occasionally he would call me in and talk with me, but it got less and less. You see, I was getting more and more out of the picture. I had differed with the administration enough, and I had played my role, and other people were mad at me for what I had been successful in doing, that is, in stopping some of these things. They had spoken to Weinberger, and these were some of the party members and whatnot. That meant that I moved further and further out of the way, which was okay. That's what I expected. So in the latter part of the Reagan administration I recognized that I just wasn't much involved.

Scowcroft, on the other hand, was moved into the White House. He was in favor of deploying everything, and more conservative, and he recognized the political ploys that had to be played. I think he's a very good person. I'm pleased to have him there because I think basically he's sound and he has the right ideals in the long run. And that's his profession to work that way, it is not mine. I think it's good to have him in the White House. I'm sure he's a good influence.

Okay, I think that sort of finishes things for me.

[tape interruption]

The Future of the Human Race

Riess

I know you are having lunch with Frances in seven minutes, so we'll finish, but do you have a minute to tell me about your interest in future studies?

Townes

Well, I was just, day before yesterday, in New York, meeting with a group connected with the Institute de la Vie, which has run a lot of international meetings on broad topics. What they are trying to look at is whether it is sensible and useful and practical to organize an international group to discuss the future of the human race, basically and in a rather long-term way, in a way that is not just taking popular current issues. It would involve, for example, genetic modification and general health of the earth, population problems in the long run, maybe even occupation of other planets and so on. Human destiny is what the topic of the group has been named, and that's a very ambitious thing. Other people are doing it in a sense, but generally concentrating on particular somewhat shorter-range issues like ecology and so on. We want to do it in a completely non-political way, too, a more-or-less scholarly way. We think in the long run it will be more effective. So we need to raise money, we need to find the right leadership, we need to decide whether the whole thing is useful. That's what we are trying to do.

Riess

And this is the idea of Mr. Marois?

Townes

Maurice Marois is the French biologist who initiated this, and he's generally been very good at international organizations. He's a very self-effacing person in these discussions, but very useful in getting people together. The Institute de la Vie has existed for about twenty years, and I've been to other meetings, and I'm on his board for other kinds of general meetings. I think they are useful. He brings together high quality people in many different walks of life, and that's part of the object here, to have theologians and scientists and social scientists and philosophers, but pretty heavy on the sciences, to get together and discuss these problems. So whether that will work I don't know.

Riess

You've got to try!

Townes

We'll see.

1. An Interview with Frances Brown Townes

---

An Introduction to Frances Townes

Townes

Before you start, I wanted to say that if you had wanted to interview me even twenty years ago, I wouldn't have wanted to do it.

Riess

Why?

Townes

Because I have needed to achieve my own self-image and this would have just been another downer for me, to be in the situation of being an adjunct to Charlie. Now that I feel that I am a person in my own right, I can do it with aplomb and in the kind of maturity that I have needed to gain through the years, and that is one advantage of living a long time: you do mature.

Riess

It sounds like California, then, was the turning point.

Townes

California was the watershed. I came to California very reluctantly but later I knew it was an absolute gift to me. So that was the one thing I wanted to say in the beginning.

The other thing that I wanted to say was that the most fun interview that I had was two years ago, when I was interviewed for a study by the husband of Professor Sharon Parks of Harvard who was here to give the Earl Lectures put on yearly for PSR [Pacific School of Religion]. They had a Lily endowment grant to do a study of people whose lives are able to sustain commitment to the common good in the face of discouragement, ambiguity, and the awareness of global complexity. They are writing a book to try to find out why people take on difficult things like homeless ministry. I was one of two people chosen in Berkeley for this interview. They had, of course, very specific questions they gave, and they interviewed me for four hours, and it was fascinating.

I had the tape copied for my children and they loved it because they had visions of me that they had never seen because they hadn't known me for the first twenty-five years or more of my life. The interviewer started way back.

Riess

And what did you learn about yourself?

Townes

Well--there are about fifty people being interviewed nobody's name is going to be in the book--and they seem to be discovering, at least when they sent me the tape, that I was filling the profile of adaptability that seemed to be emerging, that these are people who have been extraordinarily adaptable to all kinds of people in all kinds of situations.

I had never thought of myself that way. However, by growing up in a little town in northern New Hampshire where I went to school with French-Canadian children this was started. Then I lived in Europe twice in different cultures and learned languages, and lived in Japan as wide and mother, and also adapted to Charlie's life which was so peripatetic and all that. That made me open to new and different ways of relating to people, not just my own milieu, which I was originally supposed to be prepared for exclusively. Perhaps my early years prepared me for marrying Charlie, although he was very different in many, many ways from me, but he was educated and a WASP, all of those good things that he was supposed to be, [laughter] but he wasn't a sociable being like me.

Okay, that's all I need to say. Now I have said my little speech.

Riess

Well, of course I love it. It's just crammed full of insight.

Townes

Well, you can see that as a background, a water-color sweep over my whole life.

Riess

But one of the reasons that I'm here, other than the fact that I would have wanted to interview you anyway, is because people hearing about the interview with Charlie say, "Oh, well you really have to interview Frances. You have a lot of Berkeley identification.

Townes

I certainly have had in the last twenty-five years; being a bit of a chameleon, I guess I have taken on some of the aspects of Berkeley.

Riess

I would think that a problem for you in the work with the homeless might have been the issue of judgementalness.

Townes

Well, that's where people don't know me. I am not judgmental. I mean, I have been open to people of all kinds, and as my faith has grown and my religious life as well, though it didn't start until my late twenties, that's helped. You could start interviewing me now, if you want to.

Riess

Well, I am, actually.

Religion, for Frances and Charlie

Townes

All right. I didn't become really interested in religion until two years after I was married, and then I sort of had one of those complete flip-flops to high episcopalianism, and I have been coasting down ever since, in terms of the more liturgical, churchy-type things. But in terms of my inner growth, that has been a very important part of my life.

Riess

Why two years after you were married?

Townes

Because Charlie and I, when we met, both of us knew that there was something that we wanted, some kind of religious life. Charlie had backed away from his Baptist rearing, and I was coming into religious life from having been brought up by two people for whom this wasn't important. So we were looking for something together. It was kind of a search, and I seem to have hit it about two years after we were married, and that is partly because we had a fascinating, intellectual, exciting Episcopal priest living next door to us who became a friend. He was very instrumental in getting us to join the Episcopal church.

Charlie was very tolerant, but he did not believe in the laying-on of hands or any of that monkey business, but he let me go join. [laughs] We got closer together as time went on, even though he was not interested in the liturgical part. He still isn't. I am much more responsive to the liturgical part. That's my interest in arts and music and things like that.

Riess

Well, I remember you told me once, probably six or seven years ago, that you and Charlie shared some time in the morning, when you could, in prayer and reading from the bible.

Townes

Oh yes. We have done that for years when we read what they call now the lectionary passages that are chosen from three parts of the Bible. We take turns reading them, and then we take turns with a prayer, and it is part of our morning ritual. For years we have prayed alternately, morning and night. It is kind of one of our "Linus" blankets.

Riess

That's really nice. And you do it from faith rather than from skepticism?

Townes

Oh yes. We are not skeptics. We are not truly evangelists either, except that if you live a certain kind of life, certainly it is reflected, hopefully, in your children or your other associations.

Riess

Well, now let's pursue this outline.

Meeting Charles Townes, 1940

Townes

My first impressions of Charlie? Okay. Well, serious, skinny (believe it or not), looking like a professor already with those wire-rimmed glasses on, very versatile, vigorous, knowledgeable about a variety of things; different, not the usual kind of guy you go dancing with, or on a date with, but go to museums and lectures and concerts with.

Riess

The versatility struck me as one of the real charms.

Townes

That was what was the real surprise to me: that a scientist may have read a book, or was interested in languages, or was taking voice lessons, as he was in New York. He didn't fit my image of what a scientist was. At that time, I was in music still a bit, and I was skiing, and here was a southerner who had learned to ski and loved music. I was actually sort of in love with somebody else at that time, so I wasn't looking for a husband at the moment. [laughter] In fact, I had a lot of other ideas of what I might do in my life, but that changed.

Fran's Plans and Family--Genes

Riess

Yes, and that's a question. Actually, why don't we start out knowing that part about you? What did you expect to do with your life?

Townes

Well, not all that much, because I was brought up in the traditional East coast image of having a good education in the humanities, and probably marrying a well-to-do man and having several children and being a hostess, to be very much like my mother. But the Depression hit both Charlie and me and we are a product of the Depression. I think that is one of the things we have in common.

So we were both in New York on our first jobs without much money, and testing the world that we were going to live in. I had left Smith the day I graduated, because I was so fearful of being sucked back into this little New England town where I would never meet anyone or see the world, and I had already tasted the world--I had lived in Europe as a student twice. The war was coming, and my college roommate went over and was a translator in Italy and so forth, and I thought I would go. Three of my brothers joined up even before the war, so I saw myself going to Europe and working as a translator, and just seeing what developed with my life because I had skills with people and skill with languages. I wasn't clear what that would lead to, but it was certainly not sitting around and waiting for a husband to appear.

Riess

And your parents encouraged this independence?

Townes

Well, that's what the interviewer that I spoke about earlier wanted to know: what was it in me that gave me that strength to do it? Because I seem to have done that several times in my life, just sort of moved out when the time was appropriate, I'm not clear. I'm not clear why I did that, but I just knew that going back I would be going back. I've always wanted to move ahead, to live in the present and move ahead. I feel that very much right now, with time running out, that this is a very golden time for me to live as wholly as I can and experience as much as I can. I think my parents were perhaps partially responsible. I don't know. I just have done that, and I have always survived somehow or other. I am a survivor.

Riess

A survivor implies that you feel that you have been pretty much tested to the limit, or pushed to the limits.

Townes

Well, not really. Not like people in the street, but I certainly have been tested. To go to New York in the Depression without any money, and the only skill you have is speaking French and Italian, no stenographic skills, no other skills, to get a job is folly in a certain sense. I ended up finally at International House in New York City, in an interesting job. You are a little bit hungry, but you don't go home and you don't go and sleep with somebody just so you won't have to go home.

And Charlie has that kind of persistance. Well, he doesn't want to be bored, ever. And that is why we have moved a lot. Any time his work has become less challenging or he sees that other people are in the field, and it will be developed and that there is a possible new way of moving ahead, he wants to move on. I have adapted to that moving, but of course that has forced me to grow, too.

Riess

Do you feel that you have to kind of re-make yourself periodically, to be part of what's vigorous and new?

Townes

Yes, I have to be reborn again and again. Of course, you are everyday anyway, but in a really quite radical way less often. Certainly, coming to California was one of those. And to be reborn after being a mother for so many years and being a hostess, which I am not anymore, thank God! I did that to the hilt.

Riess

I have never known you at that stage.

Townes

Oh, I had to do so much of that at MIT that I thought I'd die. I never want to do it again. And it's not something that I enjoy that much or that I'm that good at. I just do it. I enjoy the people, but all of the work that goes into it, to act as if it is not work is such hypocrisy. That's what all faculty wives do. It's ridiculous.

Riess

Were you the younger sister of these three brothers?

Townes

I'm the oldest of five. As we know now, oldest children have this kind of feeling of responsibility. I have three younger brothers and then a much younger sister, fifteen years younger, who has become my best friend in our maturity. Unfortunately, she is on the East Coast, but she's like me in some ways and in some ways not. She knew my mother at a different point in her life.

Riess

Describe yourself.

Townes

I've always looked like this. I went to my fiftieth reunion at Smith three years ago and everyone knew me. I didn't have to wear a sign. Even though my hair is gray and I have wrinkles. But I have always been tall, and pleasingly plump and--

Riess

Not at all!

Townes

Well, I looked this way when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen. I think big women do--don't change as much. I never thought of myself as handsome or beautiful, but I was adjusted to being big, because my mother was tall, taller than I. My sister is too. I am the pygmy of the family. So I never felt that tall. Mother always said, "Stand up straight! You look taller if you lean over." She was taller than my father, and she always stood very straight. Like all teenagers, I thought I was a mess at sixteen, but I really wasn't; I've seen pictures of myself. I always had a pretty good figure, and I've kept my figure without any particular effort. I have good kinds of hormones and good kinds of genes and I enjoy them. [laughter] I've never done anything much with my hair, it has usually been this way--I wore it in a page boy in college, that style is pretty horrible for my face, but everyone did it then.

Riess

But it has always been long?

Townes

No, it was shoulder length for a while about ten years ago. I was experimenting. Mother had me in little dutch cuts up to teenage. It was the era that wore the big ribbons when I was little. I was adorable with these big pink ribbons, and beautiful clothes. I started out with a French governess when I was a baby, I was going to learn French by osmosis, but I would scream and pass out! They would have to shake me, and they finally discovered that this was my way of rebelling against Mademoiselle. So they fired her, and I stopped doing it. Isn't that amazing?

Riess

Oh my goodness! That's a wonderful thing to have in your history.

Townes

Well, mother figured that out finally, that the discipline of this woman was inimicable to my independence. I am not an angry woman now except justifiably [laughs], but I am a bit entêté. That's when I was--.

Well, now I am talking too much about me.

The Consequences of Charlie's Southernness

Riess

All right. So those were the first impressions. I know, somewhat, the story of your meeting him on this ski trip. Then, what was the quality of conversation with him? How did you get to know about these things which I allude to in the second paragraph: his value system, morality, ethics, religion?

Townes

Well, a long, long ride in a bus with somebody who doesn't enjoy small talk, nor do I, although I know how to do it and so--. My interest in people, and he was a nice-looking young man, so we talked about everything. It was a long trip up and a long trip back, and--.

Riess

What were his goals as he presented himself?

Townes

Well, he was in love with science. I think he had early on discovered where his talents were, that he was not to be a politician, although he had considered the ministry I believe, but you have to do a lot of public speaking, which he didn't like. He was not an extrovert, he was an introvert. Of course, he has told you all about growing up in the shadow of his brother and a family who, contrary to my family, was not very outgoing or sociably inclined. They sort of held themselves apart a bit, from the world. My mother was southern, but from the mint julep belt, and Charlie was from the Baptist belt, and those are quite different. Mother was brought up an Episcopalian in Atlanta, and Charlie was brought up a Baptist in Greenville. His father was a very capable lawyer and his mother went to college. They had all the proper ancestors and education and all of that. He wasn't a redneck.

You know, the South has so many different types that the North doesn't understand, and I have always felt very protective of Charlie's southernness. I think southerners are very devoted to the south, you know, when you lose a war, you have a defensiveness about that. The fact that Charlie didn't go to one of the famous northeastern colleges has stood in the way of certain things he might have done, but in a way it has given him strength to do other things. If he had gone to a northern college, he certainly would have gone to England on--what's that famous fellowship?

Riess

Rhodes.

Townes

Yes. Well, he applied, but being the smartest boy at Furman University didn't mean anything to the Rhodes scholarship committee. Where else could he have gone at Furman but to the top, which he did but that didn't matter. So, some of the things he aspired to he couldn't do because of having gone to Furman. Even one of the reasons we are here is because the astronomy department at Harvard raised money to keep him there as a university professor, but the president of Harvard said that Charlie couldn't have that job because he wasn't a Harvard graduate.

Leaving MIT for Berkeley

Townes

We were not planning to come out here and it was a very complicated situation. And then MIT was very upset after he wasn't chosen for the presidency because he wouldn't come back and sit under a little sign saying "Nobel prize" and not have anything to do with a university which he had had a lot to do with for five or six years, enriching it with arts and new professors and everything. They wanted him just to be there as a kind of a symbol. The faculty at MIT had voted him this high title of "Institute Professor," and then Harvard said, "You can't be a university professor here because you are not a Harvard graduate."

Charlie said, "I don't need to have a title, who cares? Or money either. I just want to stay." So it became a cause célèbre at MIT. "You can't go to Harvard for less title than we have given you at MIT!" So we were sort of a people without a country. It was a very strange situation. Here Charlie had been the first Nobel prize winner at MIT, and he was adored by the faculty and the students, and appreciated at Harvard.

Those kinds of wounds you never quite get over. So when the then-president of U.C. Berkeley, Clark Kerr, somehow learned about this he said, "Well, I'd like to have you. I'm the new president here." Of course, we didn't know that before we got here he would be fired by Reagan. [laughs] He invited Charlie and Charlie said, "I've always wanted to go into astronomy," and thought this would be a great time, and he [Kerr] said, "I'll give you a little money and let you start over in a new field, and I'll give you some space in Birge Hall." So there was really no other escape. It was really an opportunity for Charlie to try astronomy. And so we had to sell our house, and almost sold our farm--thank God we didn't--because we didn't know whether we could afford to keep it when we left Cambridge.

But it was a strange position to be so successful in your early fifties, and yet this whole thing of Charlie going to this small Baptist college in the South--. So I feel very defensive of that sometimes. Having gone to Smith, that gives me a kind of élan. It is stupid as far as I'm concerned.

Riess

Harvard I'm sure probably regretted their position.

Townes

Oh yes, I think now they would not have done it. Well, think how far we've come, because when I came here and stupidly wanted to go to the library school because all of my friends in the East were going back to library school so they could have an interesting part-time job, I was rejected by the library school because I was too old. I was fifty-two. Just think how much has happened to the women's movement and attitudes about ageism and all--we've changed a lot in the last twenty, twenty-five years. I know these things would have changed by now.

Riess

Somehow I think the move to Berkeley is a very positive thing for you. Maybe I have become so Berkeley-oriented that I can't see it as anything other than that.

Townes

But if you are completely eastern and all of your culture has been from going east to Europe and Italy and France and travel there, you almost think of California as an outpost of empire. It wasn't for Charlie, because he had gotten his doctoral here at Cal-Tech, and he had worked with Oppenheimer out here. For him it was a kind of mecca, but for me, I had no ties here. All I heard was of all of this craziness which is still going on, of course. We came in the midst of people throwing gas at each other, in '66-'67. It was just a very unsettled place.

Riess

I remember once when I was walking in the twentieth century gallery at the Oakland Museum with you and we were commenting somewhat scathingly about the view of California that the twentieth century gallery gives, which is a combination of sort of Mickey Mouse and surfing, and you said, "That's not why Charlie and I came here." So I realized it was a kind of sensitive issue.

Townes

Well, I had been brought up to think the East was the center of the universe, and especially Boston and Cambridge.

Riess

How about Charlie?

Townes

No. Well, he had already crossed the bridge by moving from the South. He knew he couldn't move further in his career in the South, and he'd come out here, to the best place that he could find for science since nobody would give him a scholarship anywhere else. So he'd come without a scholarship to Cal-Tech. And so many great scientists have been out here, you know.

It was for him, I think, a real dream. He never took the move to Berkeley as personally as I did, because I had worked so hard at helping him with this image at MIT. We wanted to make MIT something more than just an engineering school. We knew engineers and scientists would be terribly important to the future, but if they had a narrow view of the world, that would be very destructive.

Frances's Life, and Work, at MIT

Riess

You said that you became your own person out here in California. But you were very much in the role of the provost's wife there?

Townes

That's right, and I would have been the--he was going to be the president, you see, and I would have been able to continue some of the dreams we had. I just had lunch with the wife of a former president who was the president then, Kay Stratton, I saw her in the East about two or three weeks ago. We hadn't seen each other for twenty years. She's now nursing a ninety-year-old man who has had three strokes, and she still has vigor, the kind of vigor that I have, and is very much into the arts. She and I had all of these projects that we were a'borning, and she had this dream that I was going to carry them on. We were just going over all of the innovative things that we had done and just having the most wonderful time together. Those dreams that--. She's still doing something with the arts. We started the art museum there, and we got the Calder stabile.

We had classes for faculty wives, if you can believe, about how to go back to school and how to go on with your education and I started a program--I got wives who knew languages to teach foreign wives English. She said, "We still have the library for loaning artworks to the professors to keep in their offices." We were just having the best time remembering all of that. And so, to me, it was a time where I would have felt I would have used all of my skills in hostessing and in--

 

Townes

It was like I had done my darnedest to prepare myself for this job, and it would have been a real job. I would have had help with entertaining, which I had very little of when I was the provost's wife, and I would have had people to cook and to do all of those things, so it would have been--. But so much for that whole ball of wax. Kind of like, for once in my life I would have been really part of the team in a very creative way, so that was kind of denied me. But then I came out here and found other parts of me that were not developed. I'm a cat with many lives. [laughter]

Charlie's Beliefs and Principled Stands

Townes

You asked [in your letter] about his value systems. Three or four words here I think are really seminal. Charlie is a very principled person. Truth, for him, is just absolutely paramount. Now, what he calls truth is certainly more the scientific value of truth. In my life, I would include in truth a much larger spectrum, and that's often been the difficulty in communication because I would say that this is the way I feel, and that may not be exactly the literal truth. I also may have said Monday when I meant Tuesday, but that doesn't make me a liar. You can understand the kind of conversations we might have had.

Riess

His is always a testable truth?

Townes

Well, it is a very kind of--. And I think in certain areas it makes him pretty inflexible, because he can impose that on a person in a kind of way. I think that, in a way, could make him judgmental, although he wouldn't want to be called that. I am much less judgmental because I see, particularly people, in that larger spectrum. I think in sexual ethics he's grown a lot, because I have helped him and his children have helped him. The whole matter of homosexuality, especially the promiscuity and short term relationships, have been some [sic] of the things that he's fought a lot. The church is going through a lot of that struggle--whether we ordain, or not, homosexuals. The present ordained head of my chaplaincy is a lesbian woman, and she has become my dear friend.

Riess

If a member of his group were a homosexual, surely he--the scientist is more important than the sexual orientation.

Townes

Oh, surely! But I think it might make a difference to him.

You asked me whether we had been sorely tested, and one of them was this business at MIT, why we left MIT. Then, of course, there was the time when we went on our sabbatical, Charlie not knowing whether he might change his whole field, and this is partly because Rabi and Kusch and so forth really didn't think he was doing anything much with this money, you know. Here were these Nobel prize winners saying, "Come on, Townes. You're wasting your time," and so that was a time when we went abroad with a feeling of, you know, maybe, well uncertainty.

Charlie has this extraordinary tenacity to hold on. But that was a testing time, and fortunately he didn't give up, you know. He somehow is like the turtle that holds on.

Riess

Like the what?

Townes

The turtle, you know. I mean, he doesn't give up. He is very, very tenacious. I haven't written that down, but I think that's right. I mean, he's willing to change if it's appropriate, but he had an idea and he didn't wish to give it up, so he did what he needed to do to move on in these exciting ways.

Riess

As I read back over the chapters that are written about Charlie, all of these changes are seen as points of growth and development along the way, rather than defeats and kinds of derailments.

Townes

He, himself, I think, if you talk to him now, will say that. He's given talks to religious groups about it. It's been the times when he's had to step back and take a certain kind of defeat that have been those growing times. That's what life is all about. It certainly has been for me, because that's what coming to California was, a defeat for me, but a time of reassessing and reevaluating my life. So I think that that certainly is true, but it has not been a nice, even flow at all.

Another time that was even more poignant was when we were at Riverside church, when we moved to New York City and we didn't want to go to St. John the Divine, this big old Episcopal church, and I was getting less Episcopalian, and we decided to join the Riverside church. It was just the end of the [Harry Emerson] Fosdick era, and Dr. McCracken was there, this great Scottish preacher. We had small children--three then, not four--and we've always had leadership jobs wherever we've been, and before we knew it, Charlie was on the board of deacons and we, as a couple, were leading the parent's fellowship there, which was in charge of a very large, active and exciting Sunday school, very liberal. It went on three hours every Sunday and had art and music and everything. The parents met before church for an hour and discussed issues. It was very exciting.

Then, Dr. Ivar Helstrom who was then the head of the Sunday school retired and they brought in this Methodist man who had decided that this kind of Sunday school was inappropriate, and too liberal, and they were going to sort of make it neo-orthodox or some other label. Union Theological Seminary was big on neo-orthodoxy at that time and it was right across the street, and he did everything in a very backhanded way to make this come about and was dishonest about it. So Charlie and I resigned from Riverside church, and nobody had ever done that in the history of Riverside. I mean, if you were a deacon and could wear those striped pants and tail which they got out of a box--you know, they all had to wear them, it was sort of the Rockefeller stamp on the church--who would ever do that?

There was a distinguished theologian, now dead, named John Bennett, who was professor of applied christianity at Union and they had one child. They wished to change the whole Sunday school for that child to be brought up in a sort of neo-orthodox kind of Sunday school. So there were these terrific, really religious issues, and Charlie went to see John Bennett, who called him every name in the book. I remember sitting outside--we were going to dinner--and he came out and he said, "We have to leave this church." Well, we had so many friends there and had been so prominent.

Again, it was like when we left MIT. The students were so angry at the choice they made for the president they painted the dome of MIT's large building orange because they had chosen Howard Johnson. You know Howard Johnson restaurants had those little orange roofed houses? There was a kind of rebellion, and so our friends were angry. Well, guess what? This man was fired. [pause]

Riess

Howard Johnson?

Townes

No, no, not Howard Johnson but the minister at Riverside. It was discovered that he had done all of these sleazy things.

And Charlie was also in charge of, sort of, the members of the church on campus. I'll never forget, we had dinner for Dr. Helstrom who was the retiring person, and we invited this new man. We really went out of our way to meet him, and to bring him in. And he just forgot to come to dinner. I remember sitting there for an hour waiting, and I finally called his house, "Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot." So we fed the grand old man a cold dinner. I mean that was such a demeaning thing.

So we were being called all kinds of names at Riverside, too liberal, etc., and we actually went up to a not-so-liberal Presbyterian church in Riverdale. You see, we have never been linked to a particular denomination. We've been Lutherans in Cambridge, and we've been Presbyterians, and we've been pretty much everything in the non-fundamental protestant spectrum. So those were times when I would say that principle--things we believed in very strongly--have tested us.

Riess

But you referred to truth and the kinds of struggles you've had over truth. Tell me more about what truth really means to Charlie. I'm not sure what you are saying. Because I can understand that there is much in life that is inexact and unprovable and knowable.

Townes

I wish I could put it into words. I've thought about it often, but it--. The way we've had growth and pain in our marriage is just over that issue, you know, in some kind of argument we might have. I would fight back. I no longer do this so much, but usually I would argue, but Charlie's legal mind or whatever the logic of it was got us into "You said this, and "You said that," and "You said that," and "How can you prove it?" "All right," I said "Well how can you prove it?" But I couldn't. So there you are. And even if I said what I was supposed to say, he might say, "Oh, but you are raising your voice so that proves that you don't really mean it."

It was a kind of bridge across which we have moved, and I have somehow been the one who has pushed that area in our lives. But it is very strenuous to deal with a man who has a kind of--whose father was a lawyer, and who is a scientist and can catch you coming and going, and say you said this and you said that.

And it's true that I am a little free with the truth, and it's been my shadow side. My mother also was that way, and when she came to visit us it was always so difficult, because mother would sit there and babble on. "What are facts to a raconteur?" was her approach. She was just a charming woman, and she wanted to ask Charlie all of the right questions, and it was just so painful, because these two people were as far apart as they could possibly be. He wanted to talk very specifically, and she was flailing around with her facts. And mother was a very intelligent woman. It wasn't because she wasn't intelligent. She was not an expert in science, but she had been trained that you bring the other person out, asking about them and stuff like that. Oh, it was very difficult.

Riess

That's so interesting. I can picture that. I asked him once whether in a situation where he disagrees with someone else, where, in fact, the other person stands for all kinds of things that are anathema to him, he can learn a little bit from that person. Can something of what that person has to offer be of value? And I begin to wonder from what you are saying, whether--

Townes

It would be hard for him.

Riess

--it doesn't just close him off completely from certain kinds of information?

Townes

Oh! No, I think it's hard for him, however, because when he's made up his mind, he's made up his mind. There isn't quite that flexibility. I don't think I've ever said that before, but I think that's probably true. You have to realize that, of course, I'm seeing him through my glass darkly, you know, through who I am, so that I would judge him more severely than maybe another scientist. Scientists are used to going head on, and each with their own idea, and I don't think that for them it is such a cosmic kind of issue. But between a humanist and a scientist there would be--their values and his values might--. Who would give in? I think Charlie makes up his mind.

Certainly this whole issue of homosexuality has been very tender, but he has moved. We are having discussions at the church about it right now which he has initiated. We are going to have a meeting here in this house to talk about it, and I think he is--. You know, people do grow, just the way I've grown in my ability to see things in a less anecdotal and more real way. I think we've grown together more. We never will be exactly alike, but I think I've grown in areas where he's strong, and I think he has in areas where I'm strong.

The Shadow Side of the Social Life

Townes

I was interested that you said [in your letter] he was socially adept. I never have, at least certainly in the early days, never thought of him in that aspect. And that he said that he--people liked to have him at parties. Well, it's partially because he's kind of a VIP, and he has had an interesting life, and he does talk well. So I think he has graced many dinner parties for that reason. But most of the entertaining I have done has been with scientists, of course, and--. Except at MIT we had these weekly dinner parties where we would have a couple from Harvard and MIT, and then maybe a professor we were courting, you know. Sort of small dinner parties, intermingling, trying to bring Harvard and MIT together, and we would have humanists.

Houston Smith, you know, the distinguished humanist who was head of the ethics department at MIT, who came out here when he retired, was sort of semi-Buddhist, has written books on world religions. I got him to speak at the church, and he helped us to do a whole series on Buddhism and Hinduism and other world religions in our second hour after worship. He was a great admirer of Charlie's, rather a mystic person.

So Charlie has had friends and certainly brought people to MIT who weren't scientists--the artist who did that painting Kepish and his wife. Kay [Stratton] and I were talking about setting up a center where there would be a performing artist where students could come and see a person doing art--Kepish did this! So Charlie has a real appreciation of the arts. But I don't think he has quite that understanding. It was not in his background at all. Music, but not art.

Riess

I could see that that might be hard. You might end up feeling that the man was simply tolerating an area, but essentially not respecting it.

Townes

No, I think he respected it. I don't think he respects a lot of modern art, particularly, but he's not unique in that. But I mean his own home had, you know, a leather couch and a mirror over the mantelpiece. It was all perfectly all right, but it was sort of lacking in my estimation.

Riess

Talking about Charlie's "social life", here he was about to be president of MIT, he's got to have come to terms with lots and lots of dinner parties.

Townes

There again, I would say it was a typical Charlie dilemma. When you realize that he really has given up quite a lot of his life to working on arms control and disarmament, that we spent two years in Washington around that issue, when he didn't do any science. Then MIT was minimal science because of the responsibilities. So how do you contribute to the world? And if you are contributing that way, that is good. But in terms of his own personality and his own limitations, or his own talents, either way you want to see it, it was not satisfying. It would have been very difficult for him. It might have been my dish of tea, not his dish of tea.

Now, I'm not sure it would have been my dish of tea either, because that's a very difficult job. You have to be very--living on a kind of superficial level all the time. And Charlie does not like small talk, it is wasting time, and that job would have just been full of that kind of thing. And already, as provost's wife, my children would say, "Mother, you don't know who your real friends are. Everybody's nice to you because their husband might be sacked for somebody else." Charlie was in the position of hiring and firing professors, and that was his job.

Riess

Why were your daughters saying this?

Townes

Well, they were just saying, "Yes, Mom, you like Suzy and she's so nice to you. How do you know whether she really likes you, or whether its because she's concerned about her husband's job?"

Riess

Oh dear.

Townes

Well, that happens to people in high places. It's painful. I don't know half the time who--.

I went down last night for the first time in a couple of years to the opening for the Indian exhibit down at the Oakland museum. I was overwhelmed by people being nice to me, purely, I knew, because they want me to give money again, which I have stopped giving. I was invited because I got to be a colleague, or whatever the top rank is, because I gave, from my own money, one thousand dollars every year and I finally got to that top level. So I am on that list that gets invited, and I am being pushed, pushed, pushed. Tom Frye sidled up to me and gave me the sweet talk, and I just realized how much I disliked that.

I went and sat at the table with Dolly Dreiman and Jim Uren and a few of my old buddies from natural science, because I couldn't stand it. Theresa [Heyman] was there, and sort of was wanting me to sit with her, and I just went zooming by and went over there where we could sort of giggle on our own about it. And we were talking about the new president, "Isn't he a bore, how can he raise any money?" And Kay Winer came up and said, "We haven't seen you in such a long time!"

I just knew that that's the kind of thing that I would be subjected to at MIT. And I'm really too ebullient a person to take that job because sure enough, I would say something indiscreet or I would say too much, or I would--I don't know. So I think it was God's grace that we didn't do that. [laughter]

Charlie doesn't suffer fools unnecessarily, and you asked if I helped him. One of the things is he always likes to leave the party first. He's come, he's done his duty. Unless he gets into a corner with some like-minded person and they're having a great talk, he just grabs my arm and expects to leave immediately. I keep saying, "But we have to say thank you to the hosts." So I have to sort of hold on to him before he leaves, to make it more gracious, you know. I think he's learned to do that.

"A Little Leeway" for Scientists

Riess

But don't you think that great scientists are given a lot of leeway in life?

Townes

Oh, well they are, but they shouldn't be. Why should they? They're just people.

I am, right now--I have been for about six or eight months--going to a spiritual advisor at the church, who is our associate minister, because I have become so disenchanted with our minister for whom I had worked for seven years, who left about two months ago, that I was on the verge of resigning from my job from the church, which was a volunteer job, but a responsible one with adult education. I had been so tired of being used, "Fran, we'll do this and that and the other."

An example is a note in my box late on a Wednesday afternoon: "I forgot to tell you. I will be away tomorrow, will you lead the Bible class? If you can't, will you call the members to tell them that it won't exist?" So I was caught either way: I didn't have a chance to prepare or I had to spend time calling a whole lot of people. I mean, I had this kind of experience constantly. And he was a lousy manager and administrator, and he's gone to Portland, Maine, to a huge church. He and I had many objectives in common, but he took me for granted. Volunteering was being utterly flexible for him.

So I was having a lot of pain in that, and I was working that through with Foster, the associate minister. The day that Bill came in and threw his letter and said, "I'm leaving," I was just going to resign that very day. It was quite a cosmic issue, because I had been very active in the church and a leader. I had plenty else to do with the homeless work, but it was a big decision. Then he said, "Well, of course, you'll all have to stay on another year until we get another minister," so I'm stuck.

So I never did quite confront him, but I worked through a lot of that just recently. Then, when he left, I was asked to make a little speech at this farewell party for him at the church, and I had to get up and say all of the marvelous things that he had done about the homeless. Well, I had done most of those wonderful things, and I had not been recognized for it. I had never been asked to speak before. Anyway, I had to get up and try to--. And I could have refused. I decided that it would be a very good test of my own kind of forgiveness and clarity on it to do it. I sure prayed a lot about it, and I went on a retreat of a class in spirituality that Foster gave. It was my birthday, and the rest of the people said, "You can have the one little single room," and I went up and thought a lot about it. I wanted to do it in an open way without reading it.

I was able to find quite a few things that he had actually done. I mean, he had had an idea or whatever. He had come with this open idea about social change. Apparently my speech went very well. It also gave me a chance, at last, to say this agency that I had started almost four years ago is in danger of dying because of lack of money, like many social agencies. If it dies, it would have to be reinvented. I was able to say a few things that were significant to me, and I had probably the biggest audience that I'll ever have. And I said it with grace and so forth.

So I'm not quite clear what I'm saying except that that had been a threshold for me. And I have been journaling daily, very profoundly, with dreams and so forth. It's been a very creative time for me. Knowing who I am and what my calling is and knowing who I am separate from Charlie. It's been a very creative time.

Riess

It's funny, I've forgotten completely what the Charlie question was.

Townes

Yes, I know. That's what I was afraid of. I don't know where we went off.

---

Sartorial Asides

Riess

All right, so the question was about the leeway scientists are given.

Townes

All right, they are allowed to be a little quirky in their dress, but I was brought up with a family where people weren't allowed to be quirky, and my brothers were all very handsome and beautifully built. My father was smaller than me, but well-built, and they always looked wonderful in clothes. They kept their figures--genes I guess--and they didn't get a fat tummy the way Charlie has. Charlie just, you know, isn't built for clothes--never was, and has got more so as he's grown older. He didn't give a darn about his appearance, ever. And that is typically science, too. He had better things to think about. I would be almost embarrassed, sometimes, that I almost felt that I would be judged if he arrived with a crumpled shirt or whatever. And yet, to kind of suggest that he might wear another shirt, well--.

Now, I'm sure my influence has moved him a bit through time. I had a certain pride in the fact that he should look as well as he could, and particularly if you are not a clothes horse. My brothers could put on anything and look well. Charlie couldn't do that, so I felt it was more important for him to care, rather than less so. Through the years I've thought, "Oh Godness, Charlie, you look like you slept in your clothes! It's terrible." And then, when we were going to France, imagine: to meet the president of France and the French, and he didn't have a dark suit. He just didn't. He would refuse to get a blue blazer with gold buttons for example.

So he finally succumbed and we went up to George Good's, and dear old George Good's had a suit on sale, you wouldn't believe. Around one hundred and seventy five dollars, it fit him, we got it, and they fixed the trousers. He really looked quite handsome in it. Then he went off to India and he carried it all the way through India and came back through Zurich. He got to Paris a day before I did, and they had lost his luggage in Zurich, with his dark suit in it. When I arrived, he had been to Gallerie Lafayette to get another dark suit. [laughter] And of course the luggage arrived and he ended up with two dark suits. So now, if he doesn't get any fatter, he'll have them the rest of his life. But it was just--. And he looked very nice for the occasion.

That is finally ironed out, but I was wanting him to look as well as he could, because I try to look well. I don't spend much money on clothes, you know, but I have a knack of putting things together. All of these things I have on today are from White Elephant sales at the Oakland Museum or from earlier periods of my life. This is terribly old; this one I bought at the last White Elephant sale for five dollars. I know how to mix and match.

Riess

You mean that's my old gray sweater you are wearing?

Townes

Probably, yes. It probably is. [laughter] And you know, I do know how to get myself together, and I think Charlie, in a sense, appreciates that. He gives me lots of interesting semi-precious and costume jewelry, especially earrings--new ones more recently when I had my ears pierced. They help me to vary my old clothes. Get him to tell you about the beautiful pin he had designed for me for our twenty-fifth when we were in Washington. It had a maser ruby and interesting symbolism.

Oh, let me tell you another sartorial thing that is really funny. I think he thinks that my clothes don't matter to him. I'm sure if I came down looking like I slept in my clothes, he wouldn't be happy, however. But, I had a beautiful fuschia suit that I bought when we lived in Cambridge. I got it at a sale, as always, and it was wool and it had a little navy blue edging to it. It was stunning, and had a dark blue blouse. I came down in this suit, and he said, "Take it off! It's too flashy,"--or some such comment. Wow! I was so amazed. I didn't know that he noticed colors.

Now, do you notice that nothing in this house has got purples or fuschias in it? It is all oranges? He does not like the red colors that have purple in them. He doesn't even like it in the garden. I have had to push to get flowers that--you know, so many flowers have these purpley colors, it is one of the natural colors. He has never admitted it, but I think it goes back to the southern image of "nigger pink" that my mother used to talk about that blacks wear, and probably prostitutes, whatever, in Greenville wore that color. Isn't that funny? I finally wore the suit only when I was not going to be with him, and it finally wore out. But I have never bought anything more in that color. He didn't want it in his house. So that is not really an aesthetic thing, although he thinks its aesthetic. That's just my analysis of it.

Riess

That sounds very likely. That's very interesting.

Townes

And he doesn't like purple, either, because that he sort of associates with old ladies. When they're in mourning, they wear purple. I see it as a regal color. He's gotten a little used to that. I have a little purple that I can wear now. And I have a bright red suit. I was wearing that last night. You could see me a mile away. That he didn't mind, bright red. But the pink, no!

Friends, Mentors, and Kindness to Students

Riess

When you have chances to talk to other scientist's wives, do you find that these are really common kind of things that you are dealing with? Do you all kind of laugh it off?

Townes

Yes, probably, in my generation. But I think the younger women are so much more independent and have been busily out getting or doing their careers.

There is a lot of competitiveness in science, my gosh. It really was a disillusionment, to me, that scientists were not objective--any more objective than anyone else. I mean, even if they wanted to be that way. And Charlie is really a passive-aggressive. He has this southern, quiet, and slow-speaking manner, and all of that, but he's all there for his interests. He isn't going to walk roughshod over people, however. You asked me here something about how does he get along with--who were his mentors and things like that?

Riess

Yes, that is a very important question.

Townes

And his mentors are really--. He is not a person who has many men friends. I'm his friend, as much as I can be, and for that part of him which isn't scientific. There are the scientists, but I don't think that Charlie, at this point in his life, has any friend who would combine what I give him and what his scientific friends give him.

Riess

So how is a scientist a friend, then?

Townes

Well, they talk about scientific things together.

I've often thought about the whole question of who would take over his cloak, his work. When he goes, it is up for grabs. There is really nobody to do it. There have been one or two possible people along the way among his students and colleagues, but they've all gone off and done their thing. He felt congenial with them, but could they really have taken over his research?

No, they talk in their realm of science. They don't talk about personal matters. Okay, to just give a name, say John, somebody I know who is a scientist who has had a new baby. Well, I don't find out until the baby is a month or two old. "Why didn't you tell me?" "Well, we don't talk about things like that. I mean, why would he tell me he has had a new baby?" They wouldn't be into that whole thing of family.

Charlie is very, very supportive of his students, of people who work with him. He is utterly fair, and that part of him is so superior to some of the scientists that I've seen whom I could tell you stories about--right here in Berkeley--of people who have cut each other's throat. Charlie would never do that. He would have utter integrity in that. His name, of course, begins with "T". If it began with "A" I think he still would put his name at the end of the list of a collaboration. His students have been so impressed that he's willing to share with them, which you cannot say of most physicists or scientists. In fact, when he got the prize, I don't know whether he told you, he shared the money with all of his students.

The one thing that was so touching to me was that he sent a check to the one woman who at that point who had gotten her doctoral with him, and who had been a pain in the you-know-what. She was this Radcliffe girl who was with him when he was at MIT, Elsa Garmyer and she was six-feet-two. She used to come to the farm with her then-MIT husband, who divorced her--and she's remarried, she had two girls--and she was just impossible. She used to come up to his provost's office saying, "Ray Chia's is not treating me correctly, and the men--" she was in the big feminist mode, and just screaming and yelling at Charlie. But she went on, she graduated, she went into laser art and then teaching at university level. She's quite successful. I think she is the new head of the optical society now. Elsa just turned out to be a great gal. Well, she sent me back her check and said, "Since I got married and had a family, I realized how much you have supported Charlie through the years, and I want you to take this money and do something fun with it." Which I thought was such a touching thing to do.

Riess

How very nice. The check that had been distributed to her from the prize?

Townes

Yes, from the prize. She circled back to me as a woman, not as a physicist.

Riess

Very classy.

Townes

Not one of the men ever gave any money back and said, "We didn't earn this." Charlie got the prize at the absolute bottom of what it was worth, and he only had half of it, the two Russians each got a quarter so it wasn't any tremendous amount, it was a couple hundred dollars he gave Elsa I believe. But anyway, it was the symbolism of it that meant a lot to me.

Riess

You talked about his friends. For instance, Luis Alvarez.

Townes

Luis is absolutely an entirely different person. They lived around the corner but we weren't close friends.

Riess

I guess it's a kind of an ideal image, isn't it, of two great scientists having a long walk and suddenly a fusing of brilliant ideas or something?

Townes

A lot of these guys have huge egos. It makes it hard for them to share. Charlie never had difficulty sharing however.

Riess

So they are happier with students than with each other?

Townes

Yes. Well, now one pretty good friend we have who's a scientist is Dr. Art Rosenfeld, the physicist and they came to MIT when Charlie was the provost. Charlie admires Art an awful lot in his work in ecology. Art's not on any ego trip. And I admire his wife Roz [Roselyn], she's a fine lawyer working in ecology and a lovely person. She and I have had long walks. But anyway, Charlie isn't your typical man. He isn't interested in spectator sports for example. I share that with him; neither am I. Our joy is to go for a long walk with the birds and flowers.

Riess

So he wouldn't choose someone else to go for a long walk with?

Townes

No, not usually. But I mean he has scientists he greatly admires--he was a great admirer of Oppenheimer, he knew Sakharov. All of these people he admires.

Well, the one place that he's had--goodness, this seems so funny! Up at the Bohemian Club he has a very good time, and there are very few scientists up there. In his little Isle of Aves camp there are no other scientists--well, yes there is one.

He got in there through Roger Heyns and other UC administrators. The head person of this camp was the dean of the cathedral, Episcopal cathedral. He was from Louisiana. He has just died. A marvelous guy. They're a lot of lawyers; he gets on fine with lawyers.

He goes up there and he gets invited around to the conservative camps and other ones, and he just has a ball. Somehow, that's been good for him, and I surely encouraged him, although I felt this was a chauvinist group and pretty extravagant. But he goes one weekend or maybe two weekends a year, you know, so it is hardly going to change his life, but I think it is the nearest he has ever had to a fraternity. He didn't have one in college. It's like he's having arrested development way in his old age, because it is kind of like a schoolboy fraternity: peeing on the trees and drinking a little too much and talking. But they talk politics and he and Roger and the others have a fine time.

Charlie took his son in-law who is the minister up there. Craig just had a fabulous time. He came back with lawyer stories for the rest of his life, of course. He and Roger Heyns got on famously. Roger and Esther are very good Presbyterians. Craig and Roger had a wonderful time together. Roger's in charge of the lakeside chats, and Charlie has helped him a lot with that. That's usually what Charlie's contribution is up there, a lakeside chat.

So Charlie really looks forward to the encampment. That's the nearest he's had to really non-scientific friendships, I think.

Thoughts on the Washington Scene

Riess

When he was in Washington, and when he was on boards, did that represent a kind of strain and struggle, to have to listen so much to people whose opinions perhaps he didn't value?

Townes

I presume so. I think the whole Washington scene is yucky. I again enjoyed it because I took advantage of being there and going to Congress and getting to know how it functioned, and you live next door to all of these semi-prominent people. One of the people we lived near to, his wife and I had been to the Master's School together, and he was in charge of the Bay of Pigs thing. I see him the day this is announced and he's pushing--they had a late baby--and he's pushing the stroller. I said, "Have you been doing anything lately?" "No," he said (he was in, I think, the CIA), and I opened the paper and there he was. You never quite knew. You knew something was going on over there, but--.

My brother was there at the same time and lived near us. He was an assistant secretary of labor under Eisenhower. A year under Eisenhower, and a year under Kennedy. It was a very hopeful time. It was a better time to be there then now.

But anyway, yes, I think Charlie would never have wanted to make that a career, no. Again, it was going to all of these parties. Government was made by people who drank too many martinis all the time. It seemed to me very, very shallow. It was very disappointing.

Riess

So how did he "operate" in that situation?

Townes

He seemed to do pretty well. I probably don't give him credit for being as adaptable as he is. I think he felt he had a kind of mission. When he has a feeling of mission, then he pushes that very hard. He thought that was a contribution he could make. But he certainly didn't plan to be provost at MIT. We were going back to physics at Columbia. And then to be moved into this other role, it was like he was moving more and more into this non-scientific world, because he was learning skills of speech-making and writing and all of those other things. So it isn't that he couldn't--. I think he would have been a wonderful president for MIT, but I think it would have been a personal sacrifice, and even for me, though at the time it didn't seem that way.

Decisions: Job Changes, Houses, a Farm in New Hampshire

Riess

How does he make decisions? It sounds like it was hard deciding whether to move on from Bell Labs, or whether to give Bell Labs a chance to come through with some work that he could do. These and similar moments, does he work them through in his own mind?

Townes

He works that through and it's always motivated, in the end, by what he feels his contribution can be, what his gift is, what he could do that maybe somebody couldn't do. The Bell Labs thing was again a crisis because we had architectural plans to build a house out there and we had bought land and we had eliminated the poison ivy and we had--. It was, you know, a nice suburban community in Summit, New Jersey. That was very hard.

We moved to New York in the snowstorm of the century with a baby--Ellen was a baby--into this little apartment, and our furniture was stuck on the way, and we spent New Year's lying on the floors. Here we were sort of starting over again. So it was a hard time. But I think that--. You know, I thought being a professor's wife would be great, really. I didn't mind. But to give up that idea--we've never really had the dream house. We lived in apartments until Carla was born and until Holly was born, which was a long time. Then we bought a house. We have owned three houses in our lives.

Riess

Tell me about the farm, while we are talking about houses. What has that stood for in your lives?

Townes

Oh, that is so significant. That house, again, was a way to get away from the social crush. We entertained Thursday night and then we'd go to the farm Friday, and there we could be ourselves, and the children could come up, and it was near enough. We could be out-of-doors and we could be informal. Charlie has this tremendous love of the land, and he gets this from his father. My father, too, had that. So we share that.

We picked up this land for nothing.

Riess

You bought it? It was not in your family?

Townes

No, no. We bought it. My home was in the northern part of the state, way up near Canada.

Riess

When did you buy it?

Townes

We bought it in, gosh, 1962 or '63. I would have to verify that.

Riess

You were at MIT?

Townes

Oh yes. It was an MIT thing. We went looking for a farm that would be any old place. We didn't care. You know, primitive. But we ended up really with a much more beautiful house than we expected, and it was partly renovated, but very old. The people who started the renovation had hard times and had to leave, so it had bathrooms and stuff. So we didn't have to sort of camp as much as we thought. Then there was the barn and the land and it was just wonderful.

I think coming out here was [clouded by the thought that] we would have to leave that. We had a wonderful old Victorian house in Cambridge, a famous house with three stories, and lovely for entertaining, right in the middle of Cambridge, next to the Longines Music School. That was a hard house to leave, too. But then I had this gift--God has given me so many gifts. There was a friend of mine, a Smith graduate, a prominent woman in the community, quite a lot younger, interested in the out-of-doors, and they had visited the farm. I was going on some kind of tour to look at topiaries in Connecticut, I remember, and Pat was on the bus. I said, "Pat, we are moving to California. Would you and Herb be interested in renting our house?" And she said, "We would love to." She had quite a lot of money, and his family were in the lumber business; they had money, as many people did in Cambridge.

They rented our farm all year round, and we could come when we wanted to. That went on for many years, and they improved it and they became friends with the farmer who ran it, and it is still part of their lives. They are there for Christmas if we are not there. They send us notes--. He's a great birder. He writes, "I saw the bluebird, I heard this--." You know, it's been their home, too. But we thought we'd have to give it up because we couldn't afford it. And it's still there. I went there two weeks ago for two-and-a-half days. Now it's the children's home away from home. It is the only place that has really been home for us all because we have moved so many times.

I don't consider this [San Antonio Avenue] home, because the children have never been here, except Holly. I'd give it up tomorrow. Charlie wouldn't. He likes his old hole-in-the-wall here, his study. I don't know why we couldn't have a hole-in-the-wall like that somewhere else. [laughter] It is a lot to keep up an old house, as you well know. I would miss it, but I think--. Charlie knows the minute--if he goes before me--that I would sell this house, to have some flexibility, a place where I could come and go.

All right. Next?

Riess

Okay. All right. Next. So the decision-making mostly takes place within his inner self?

Townes

That's right. And he sees an area where he can contribute which he doesn't think, at that time, that other people can. And then if other--. I don't know whether you call that an ego thing or not, but it is what keeps him going. If he's going to be bored. All right?

Charlie's Interests Outside of Physics: Travels

Riess

All right. About interest in music, novels--I doubt if he is interested in novels, but--.

Townes

He likes classical music. He listens to it and poetry in the car. He used to do a lot more variety of things than he does now. I think his life has tightened up, the time left is shorter, there is so much to be done that never will be done, that's a lot of it. I mean, we used to go to opera, we used to do a lot more: music, go out, and everything. So I've had to do that more and more on my own, which I regret, because we both love opera, he really loves opera. I bought season opera tickets when we came out here, and he never was available.

He does not read novels because he likes to read for information. His older sister is terrifically well-read, and his younger brother, and they say, "It's sad Charlie doesn't read books." Now, I am dyslexic and a slow reader, and that has always been a problem for me. So I don't read novels very well either. I have read a million half-novels and the last page, but I haven't finished that many because I am a slow reader. And then when I went into the natural sciences [at the Oakland Museum] that was a mutual interest. We read for information, and he loves for me to read aloud to him. That's a recreational thing that we do. I find an interesting article that I will read, and then we'll talk a little about it.

So novels, no. Walks, of course, yes. And he pursues hobbies, such as they are, with great verve. Of course, the whole bird thing grew out of his older brother and his interest in natural history. He called me from New Zealand the night before last. He had taken a day off. He was so excited on the phone because he had been to the rain forest, and he had seen all of these things that we plant like podocarpus and pittisporum and everything growing in the wild. All of these plants that we buy in pots. And these exotic birds, and it was dripping rain. He just said it was fabulous--rain forest.

Riess

Does he get an expert to take him on a walk like that?

Townes

He often does, but he can go himself. We have a book on everything, you know: birds of New Zealand, for example. He knows enough about it that he doesn't need to go [with someone else]. He went on his own in New Zealand. He just kept saying, "I wish you were here because you would have enjoyed it, too." So that whole decision for me to go into the natural sciences was such a good move to bring us together in an old-age hobby. And having the new hip, which meant I would continue to walk well and all that. So I just pray that will be something that will continue.

Riess

And why aren't you in New Zealand right now? How do you decide which trips you'll both do?

Townes

Oh, well that is a good question. I could have gone to India, too. I mean, Charlie would take me on any of these if I wanted to go, but I feel very frustrated in a way. He would be flying all night, sleeping all day. But I would go for one day in the rain forest with him for almost two weeks in New Zealand. I could do things on my own, and I went to New Zealand with him once before when he went to the South Pole.

But to have some kind of life of my own, I cannot keep interrupting it, which I still do, any more than I do, or I would not be able to do anything. I mean, I haven't done anything for the Council on Architecture for ages. I should resign, because I couldn't come to the retreat and all of these things. So to do anything of any value, I have to have some staying power, and I had already been to India twice, and had been on a similar trip with him as his recent one.

He still has difficulty in seeing why I just wouldn't want to go. You know, you go and stay in a good hotel, and maybe we have dinner together. But then he would probably be eating with scientists and talking science all evening. It just wouldn't be worth it. And so I have to be here and he has to be there often. It's hard sometimes, because he feels it is almost like my rejecting him. But it is also that he's going to go anyway, whether I would object or not. I think it salves his conscience a little bit if I go too. Then I am supposed to be getting something out of a trip. But I'm really not, especially if I've been to that spot before. I mean, there was no need to go to Paris, really.

The reason we went to Paris was because all of our French friends had worked so hard presumably to get us this honor. We had to say thank you, have them at the Elysíe Palace, because you don't get prizes unless people believe in you. Then my son in-law wanted to come, and my grandson, and the big thing for my grandson was going to the Louvre with Grandma. He loved that. He came back with a picture of the Victory of Samothrace for his teacher. That was the thing he wanted to bring back. And Grandma could speak French.

 

Townes

He and I had been to the Egyptian exhibit at the Metropolitan, and he loved that, so he said, "Can we go to the Egyptian exhibit?" Well, the Louvre has a fantastic Egyptian exhibit. He has a picture of himself taken with a Pharaoh's foot about this big [gestures]. So anyway, for me that was the trip, with him and Craig. Charlie was lecturing over at the École Normale. Again I would have been just floating a lot if they hadn't come and it was terribly cold (of course, it was a thrill to be at the Elysíe Palace).

Riess

That is a big issue for lots of wives. Good for you!

Townes

Well, I think we keep our balance on that. India, I didn't go. We were going to Indonesia, you see, and see some birds. There is a part of Java where there is a special park, and it just turned out to be too complicated and too expensive. Charlie will never stay more than a couple of days, you see.

Riess

So you don't take trips where the only motivation is the sights you will see rather than the science?

Townes

Not often. We did go to the Galapagos Islands. He would go for pure science, and then for him there could be a sort of a nature component. I could do the art on my own, although he did go back to Delhi recently and spend two, three days and go back to the Taj Mahal to see it a second time and do those things which I would have enjoyed if I could have just dropped in for those three days. But trips are very exhausting to that part of the world. I mean the jet lag and then flying all over, and I'm getting older, and that's much harder for me to do.

Frances's Math Block

Riess

Speaking of reading novels and things, have you read science over the years? What have you done to make yourself smart? [laughs]

Townes

Less stupid? I'm not smart. I have done very little. I have a math block, a real math block. Charlie says when he talks math I have a little screen I pull down in front of my eyes. I took a course--when I was working with UC Extension for about five years (doing a little counseling of the women going back into professions) I could take any course free and I took a course for people who have math blocks, and I came out of it realizing that I was not utterly stupid, which was a big plus. But I didn't go on with what I should have done, which was to find a pal with whom I could talk about it on my level, and do some kind of math and stuff together and thus move along.

I just think that I gave up a long time ago, which a lot of women in my generation did, so that what little science I know is pretty much from osmosis. I have read some sort of more philosophical books about it, but I really know very little. I had one year of physics at Smith, and I took it because I was semi-in love with my physics teacher because he could ski. I didn't really learn much except Archimedes principle. Anyway, that's about all that I remember.

And physics has moved. You realize in my lifetime the exponential growth of science, so that the nearest I got to pure science is natural science. In fact, I lacked so much confidence that I didn't even think I could take the docent's course and pass it. I took it as an auditor because I wasn't sure I could pass the tests. That's how much I lack self-confidence.

Riess

The great day in Franklin Park, the park bench and he is looking at the azaleas, and then he has the idea for the maser--he told Art about it back in the hotel room, but when did he tell you, and what did he tell you and what sense did it make to you?

Townes

[pauses] It has become such a legend that I don't know what is truth and what is fiction about it. I don't remember really, but I think he came home with excitement that he had somehow had some insight that had put the pieces together.

Riess

Would he tell you the specifics or would he simply say, "I think I have found the answer."

Townes

I don't think he told me any details about it. I just think through the years I began to understand what masers and lasers are, but I don't know details; he didn't sit down and draw me a picture. He would have if I had asked him. But I have a kind of inhibition about that. That I would be too dumb to understand. But he is excellent at explaining things to me if I ask. He could teach any dodo about science. He is good at that. So it isn't his unwillingness to do that, I think it is my own feeling of inadequacy about it and that is sad for me.

I feel that that's a whole side of me that has really not been developed. Just a little bit of it has been developed through the natural sciences, but the whole world of pure science, no. Although cosmology and astronomy has got this whole philosophical thing which is very satisfying in a very abstract way, much more than that messy stuff in the laboratory with all of those little wires and everything. He takes the grandchildren in there and lets them play with the laser and they see all of these wires, but to me that is just so remote, and somehow not terribly exciting, that you plug all of these little things in.

The thing about science that I have learned, and about his success with science--and this list of adjectives you sent is such a good one for him, let's go through that: the persistence that he has to track down these stupid things. This is not glamorous. People think it is glamorous. You don't sit under an azalea bush very often and have God speak to you. You plug away and you plug away and you plug away doing stupid little things, and you go down to Mt. Wilson and find the mouse has chewed up the wire and you have to find which wire and you have to clean up the mouse do and you have to wash the mirrors.

It is not glamorous; people think it's glamorous, it is not. Charlie is an experimental scientist, and that's very different from being an Oppenheimer and sitting there with a paper and pencil and having great ideas. I mean, he is both--he has to have the concept--but to put it through [is often boring, hard work]. So, to this list, I would add stick-to-itiveness.

Looking at Charlie's Qualities: Creativity, Sensitivity

Riess

Well, let's spell it out. I asked you, "How would you associate the following words with Charlie: creativity--?"

Townes

All right, I'll start with creativity. Yes. I would call his the creativity akin to the old bromide about 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration. Cultivating the soil, the biblical idea, and then the seed falls. Charlie would perhaps call the seed creativity or God. That's not his part. But he certainly does everything to prepare for the God part, and I think that's probably what real creativity is. I don't think that too many people have life-changing experiences. Paul was struck on the road to Emmaus, but not many of us are.

Stubborn. Yes, of course. I mean, if he didn't have that ability to stick with it.

Distractedness. Do you mean is he distracted by things?

Riess

Well, I guess I was sort of working up to the absent-minded professor quality. In other words, is his mind somewhere else?

Townes

Well, it is a lot of the time. There again, that's a typical male/female thing. He has learned, like all husbands, to say "yes, no, and do go on," when he often isn't really there. And of course I know when he isn't, so I get annoyed and say, "I'm not going to waste my time on you if you are not going to listen to me." [laughter] He is not interested in all of the little niceties of the chaplaincy which is very human, because that is a big human thing I'm going through. He doesn't know Joe and Jim and Jane and all those people, and he gets the names all confused. So I try to spare him that some of the time.

And I think he is getting more inattentive, partially aging, but partially his hearing isn't as good now and he has been very stubborn about that. There seems to me to be a certain pride that he has about wearing a hearing aide, which I don't understand. You wear glasses--. I realize when we have been separated and we come back together he doesn't hear me, and I have to raise my voice. It's an effort. And then he doesn't get the consonants, so there is often a misunderstanding. I think I'm a little deaf, too. When you work for fifty years to be able to understand each other, and then you have misunderstandings--. I'm having adjustments to that, but we'll work it out.

Patience/impatience. He's patient when it's something he can't do anything about, like airplanes. He isn't going to sit there and fret that the airplane is stuck. He was stuck for over a day going east this last trip in this huge storm in Denver for this meeting on masers in outer space. He has papers with him and he will work, he isn't going to get upset about it. He's impatient if there's something that can be changed. Time is the most valuable thing for Charlie. It is like the clock is ticking all of the time; we don't waste time, it's valuable.

Tolerance. I guess, again, yes for things he can't do anything about. Intolerance for things he thinks he can change.

Riess

Okay, let's apply that. He's intolerant of homosexuality. How does he think he can change that?

Townes

[pause] Well, you know, the verdict isn't in on that. Is it genetic? Is it cultural? It is like so many things. Charlie thinks that it's best not to practice homosexuality even if you are one. You ask him about it.

Riess

So he's looking at it scientifically?

Townes

More morally. And yet there are more and more people that he respects who are homosexual. From my earliest childhood, my dearest cousin was Newey Jenkins, who's my age, who is a homosexual from ever. When I was at Dobbs Ferry [The Master's School], that strict school, I used to go up and be his hostess when he was at school at Yale Music School, because he was living with a man. I went to cover up for him. I never did tell my family. My father never let him in the house--he might corrupt my three brothers. My mother and my sister and I adored him. He has had a life-long companion. He has a place on an island off of Florence, Italy. He has been the head of this wonderful, small, baroque orchestra in New York City all of his life. We still correspond. Newey's been in our home many times. I mean, Charlie has known some wonderful people. But the question is, "Do you overcome it?" He has a pretty old-fashioned idea about this. And I don't think he's alone and that's so with a lot of males.

Riess

It's like fuschia?

Townes

Perhaps. It's a very deep conditioning. And I don't think he differentiates between what is truth and what isn't truth in this area. So he took Bonnie, the new chaplain who's a lesbian, to lunch at the Women's Faculty Club and he thinks she's wonderful, and he knows I go to parties at her house where I am the only straight person there. So he's not immoveable, but that's a part of him that, whether he'll live long enough to [change], I doubt it. And I have my intolerance, too. I have intolerance of his intolerance. You know what I'm saying?

Riess

Yes, yes.

Townes

Okay. So that goes along with a certain judgementalness, you see, that you haven't got the strength of character to give it up. Well, I would say why give it up, it's part of you that's essential, you know? Why give it up? Bonnie has a wonderful woman companion who shares everything and she's a friend of mine, too. Why should she--? Kyle gave up marriage, divorced her husband, and she and Bonnie are bringing up Kyle's two little boys, which we have talked about, how are you going to be father? Bonnie--two women and two little boys.

And criticism. Do you mean how he takes it, or how he gives it, or both sides of the coin?

Riess

Somehow I hadn't even thought of his ever having to take it, except maybe from you. [laughs]

Townes

He is a bit hypersensitive to my criticism. He does not wish ever to be put in a slightly humiliating light. There is an insecurity there. Out in the world, he's the great god Townes, and everyone is respectful to him and he doesn't have to deal with that. So he doesn't want that image to fade. And I'll give you a couple of examples, which are really funny when you think about it.

Remember that we grew up in the era when there was a division of labor. We married with the idea that I would be the housewife and do all of those things, and he would do the other things and he would earn the money. So I'm stuck with that, even living in the liberated woman's world. That's what has been hard for me. My four daughters all have married men who carry part of that burden; that's just accepted. They would not have married a man who couldn't wash dishes or couldn't get meals or couldn't do laundry or couldn't babysit. But of course all of our daughters have worked, which I haven't. So I have always said to them, "Well, but Charlie didn't want me to work." I was working when I married him, but he was going to take care of me. So it was different.

When they come here, Charlie is running around mis-loading the dishwasher. And the sons in-law all say, "Frances, we know he doesn't do it when we're not here." It's sort of the family secret. It's kind of a joke, but they don't quite dare say that, and so they let him do it wrong. And it's kind of a joke. Yet, sometimes I just can hardly stand it. And I'll give you a recent example.

When he was talking to a bunch of Lutheran students, graduate people at the Lutheran chapel--they are having a religious talk series. You know, he's part of this organization that's going to plan the future of the world. It's based in France. He has to give a paper on this, and there is going to be a meeting at Harvard with the head of the divinity school. So he was sort of trying this paper out on them.

Riess

What is the organization?

Townes

Well, it's this Morwa person: what kinds of things should we be thinking about for the future of the world. All of the scientists and humanists are getting together, and philosophers. Morwa came to this reception in Paris and--. I don't know, there are a couple of these things going on now, the French are great at these great big ideas. So Charlie's involved with that, helping to find people in different fields to be part of this committee. So on the way back from Paris he's writing his paper, starting way back with the Big Bang, and he brings people all the way up to the present. It's quite a wonderful paper. Then his religious side comes out (this is a semi-religious group)--that there are moral decisions we have to make, value decisions for the future. He did a nice job on the paper. It's really understandable to non-scientists like me.

Well, something happened that night that upset him. When we came in the girl students were in the kitchen getting the dinner. I said, "Well, isn't this interesting. I notice that the women are doing all the kitchen work." [laughs] They laughed and I said, "Oh, it's like my house." And that had put him in a bad light, because that said that he didn't do much to help me in the house.

Riess

So he really is sensitive to that.

Townes

Yes. He really knows in his deep heart that he isn't that helpful on the domestic side. So I got dressed down for that.

Later in the evening I'm sitting there--I have some ideas about the future of the world, too--and I was just sitting there. And finally Reverend Gus Schultz, who was one of my backers when I started the chaplaincy and a very progressive person, very liberal, goes to El Salvador and all, he finally looked up and looked at me and he said, "You know people, Frances is a person in her own right. She started this wonderful chaplaincy, and it's a great thing here in Berkeley, and I think you ought to know that." That felt good to me.

I have been working on this with Foster because I know how to push his [Charlie's] buttons. I'm very tempted, and sometimes I do it. I can do it just the way I did it that night. All I needed to say was, "Oh, that's the way it is in my house," and he is upset. I am putting him in this less-than-God role. Certainly in his home he's really sure that I love him not for all the things he did, or the medals he won. That's what being a loving wife is. Sometimes I wish he wouldn't be quite so sensitive. It's hard.

He's also shy. Does he look at you when you're talking to him?

Riess

When interviews start often he's looking out the window. Usually at some point--

Townes

Finally he'll come back.

Riess

--he comes around.

Townes

But he has a really hard time. I'm used to looking right at the person, and I see something there. I think through the years in a way, I have felt, people approach him because he's the great Townes, to ask him to do things. He can smell it a mile away. He sort of absents himself. He's shy. He's really shy, except in areas where he can blossom and talk with the fellow scientists. Now I think he's even getting to be a little overexpansive sometimes, sort of holding forth as older men do, you know, he gets the stage. And I'm sitting at the other end of the dinner table [laughs] and he's being expansive--people like it, but I found myself reduced again to the hostess, just watching this scene happen and not feeling that I have much to do with it.

Charlie's Thought Processes

Riess

How is he different when he's hard at work on something from when he's not?

Townes

He's sitting in there and it looks like nothing--.

Riess

In where?

Townes

In his study. I would only see him there, not at work. He would be more quiet here than at work because the phone isn't ringing or anything. And he does not wish to be interrupted. If I come in, or run in and have an idea or something--"Can't you see I'm working? Please don't disturb me. You may think I'm asleep, but I'm not." So I've learned through the years to be respectful of that.

Riess

I also was thinking that sometimes he's really onto something, and sometimes he's just waiting for something to begin to cook in his head. Whether that puts him in kind of an offish mood, so he's more difficult to live with maybe.

Townes

There are times that I call "walking on eggs time," when I know that nothing I'm going to say is going to be appropriate. I used to feel that I ticked him off. Now I know it's not so much that he's in the creative mood, but that he's had more than he could possibly handle that day almost--of people, angry or upset people, or the University has fouled up his account again, or his secretary--you know, what life is like. I've finally learned to deal with that. It took me a long time to know why that was going on and not take it as a personal affront. I get that way myself sometimes, and anything Charlie says ticks me off.

In terms of his thinking, I see all these little numbers on the piece of paper or little drawings or whatever. I think he's trying to figure out what the next jump will be. You just wonder what's going on in there. Must be kind of exciting.

Riess

Don't you think so?

Townes

I think so. Must be marvelous. I think those are wonderful moments for him. I'm not sure that that always happens to him, but he certainly--. I would meditate, to hope that I had some guidance. But I think his is a very different way of trying to make the synapses all meet. I would be opening myself up to let God in. We have each a different way of letting God into our lives. I think it happens to both of us.

Riess

You said earlier that 99 percent preparing the soil.

Townes

That's what he's been doing, and hoping that those things would suddenly meld and that insight would be given. And I'm sure it is. The guys just tell me it happens all the time. But sometimes it's the most simple, stupid thing. I hear him on the phone: "Have you screwed that thing three times instead of twice?" "Well, we didn't think about that." And they didn't, and they do it, and it works. He seems to have an ability to see these sort of mundane, stupid things that others don't think about. It isn't all high-falluting mathematics.

He's an introvert, I'm an extrovert.

Daughter, Like Father

Riess

You are answering my question about motivation and psychology?

Townes

Yes. I don't think psychology is a word he understands in the way I do. He's not self-analytical, at least outwardly.

Riess

Haven't you had conversations in which you would say, "Well, you're doing this because your father did it." There is a lot of pop-psychology floating around. Would that be something that would annoy him?

Townes

Our oldest daughter that I've recently seen is so much like him. She has an inquisitive mind and it wasn't easy growing up with her because it was like living with two Charlie Townes. She has two higher degrees. She's almost fifty. She's not happy. Our three other daughters are all happy. She's got a wonderful husband, a Jewish social psychology professor. They are just meant for each other. They're both messy, they're both intellectual, they're both very liberal. No children, he has MS, though not in a wheelchair, drives and plays the piano. He has many allergies, etc.

He seems a bit of a hypochondriac to us, so Linda now also seems a bit of a hypochondriac. I had a mother who was a hypochondriac. She cried all the time to get whatever she wanted, and had doctors and more or less minor ailments all her life and lived to be ninety-two, and died of old age. I don't cry, except surreptitiously. Charlie doesn't appreciate tears. I have turned out like my father on that. He was very uncomplaining. So now I have a daughter who is so wimpy about this physical stuff. It has been a very big difficulty for me. It presses my buttons.

Charlie understands Linda. He's been pressing me, "You've got to build a bridge to your daughter. I know you're different." He and Linda understand each other, and she talks to him endlessly. He will stay on the phone and listen to her tale of woe.

So I finally went on this trip recently to spend an evening with the Rosen to see if I could work out this problem with buttons being pushed. And here she is moaning about menopause. I said, "Linda, I saw you through puking and menstruation, I am not going to see you through menopause. She thinks she has all these ailments, and she was starting to blame me, her heredity, the way she was brought up, and said I hadn't paid attention to this and that and the other. She's put this guilt trip on me for years. I decided finally that she was a grown woman and I would give up the guilt.

She started again, and I said, "I have news for you Linda. I am not guilty about the fact that with two doctoral equivalent degrees and a fine husband you have not achieved happiness." "Oh Mom, I don't wish to put a guilt trip on you." I said, "That's what you're doing." "Well, of course your genes aren't have anything to do with it," she said. I said, "You have wonderful genes. You're the brightest of my four daughters. You got every advantage. You were the first child, you had everything." Well, we hugged and there was some real forgiveness and love between us. This is a woman who has a Ph.D. degree in developmental psychology, works with handicapped kids, has never gone and had her own psyche analyzed. And here was Ellen, our second daughter, who was flat-footed and easy-going and we thought she was going to marry and have twenty children and be a nice little happy housewife, and she has a research professorship in medical school and two children. It's hard, when you love your children, not to feel guilty when they are not happy!

Charlie is so loving with all our girls. Each one knows that he cares about them with their peculiarities. He says, "Linda needs so much more love because she isn't happy. The reason she hasn't been successful is because she doesn't know how to deal with people." He knows that. He says, "Ellen knows how to deal with people and so does Carla and so does Holly." These last three are my children, in a way. Linda was the first child as was I. Oh! Well, I think Charlie's daughters have taught him an awful lot about women. And of course they have taught me about being a professional and an emancipated woman.

---

A Good Marriage

Townes

So that's part of the question about what kind of husband and father he is. He is a loving father, a committed father. I worried a lot about whether my children would find husbands because they would not find a man like him. They've chosen men very different from their father. But they love him a lot, and he gives a lot to them. But he's not sentimental. He's affectionate with them.

We're lovers; that's been one of our natural gifts to each other. So that's been a very important part of our lives, as I'm sure it is in any good marriage.

Riess

If he were sitting here how would he feel that you had just said that to me? You must be so different from him.

Townes

He's very private. I should have said he's very affectionate. He puts his arm around me a lot. And that's unusual, because most men like him wouldn't be so demonstrative. And he always kisses me when he leaves and returns. I am very fortunate to have that kind of relationship.

There's little sweet talk, little sentimentality, but thoughtful, unusual gifts. He brought me that lovely rug from India, a piece of jewelry, he likes to give me earrings. But the division of labor is always there. It could have been different, and I've wished often it was, but that I've accepted with a certain amount of grace and realized that that was part of the way it was to be, especially for my generation.

When I look at marriage--so many of my friends' husbands have left them for other women and even in middle life they've had to start over. It's been--what could I say? I think the best way to describe it is that I have never had to meet Charlie at the door with a double martini because he didn't like his profession. Yes, some days are not so good. But he doesn't need to be rescued from some mundane job. He loves his work. As he's said to you again and again, it is his hobby. So he is a really blessed man.

I would much rather be married to somebody like that who has had less time for me, in a sense, or perhaps less ability to understand my kind of person, although I'm not sure that these husbands that have left their wives have really understood them any better than Charlie has understood me. Somehow they haven't been able to move--I mean I've done that pushing, to say, "We've got to understand each other better.

Frances: Measuring Up and a New Friend

Townes

I watched the Doll House by Ibsen last night. Did you watch that?

Riess

I watched some of it.

Townes

It's been so long since I read it. And I thought, what a statement on women's lib. She really leaves him because he is treating her like a doll. Charlie always says, "You feel inferior intellectually. You don't need to." That goes back to my own psychology of feeling I was a dumb bunny, and I'm sort of putting myself down. I bring that on myself.

And fairly recently it was Linda, my oldest daughter, who discovered that I was dyslexic. All these years I thought the reason I read slowly was because I was dumb, and it turns out dyslexia was the reason. Charlie has said, "You have plenty of brains, and most of us do, and there's no reason for you to feel stupid." But I said, "Isn't it ironic that most of my women friends have always been a great deal smarter than me." I've always been attracted to women, like you, who are very intelligent. I like the stimulation of very bright people. And I don't think I would have ever married a dumb person. I like to be challenged by intellectual things. And I suppose that's part of my youth, my family having intellectual interests and I like intellectual things. So I made a good marriage.

Riess

I sit here listening to what you say, and not denying it, but I think I would like to categorically deny anything that you say about yourself that, "I am less--

Townes

--of a person."

Riess

Yes. I don't believe it, Frances.

Townes

But I think that when you live in an academic world, where truth is a certain kind of truth--.

Riess

There's a lot of measuring.

Townes

There's a lot of measuring. When I wrote that slip for you about my education, it's so sparse. Charlie has all these academic degrees and honorary degrees, too. And my children have all these degrees. Mine is so sparse. So that when people ask you "What do you do?" or "What is your education?" they don't mean "what is your personal growth through the years? What have you given to the community that maybe isn't so intellectual but is valuable?" That isn't what they're asking you. So by marrying Charlie, I exposed myself to that kind of thing.

It's a weird thing. It's like being a moth attracted to a flame. You're attracted by all of that, and the academic world in spite of its stupidities and rivalries is a very exciting place. And Berkeley has all of that. It's so exciting, because where could I have done a ministry for the homeless? And where could I have been in the academic world? Where could I go to the French section and talk French? Where can I go to the opera and the art galleries?

I have a new friend. I finally have made a friend who is almost like me, and it's the first time I have had a friend of my own age who is a little like me, and it's been the greatest gift. And where did I find this person but through the chaplaincy. She's the wife of a retired electrical engineer. She's a poet, she's an artist, she's kind of fat and fuzzy-haired. But she's a beautiful woman inside. She has this dedication to liberal ideas, more than me. She found me and I found her. She's my vice president now, of the homeless chaplaincy, Phyllis Smith, Mrs. Otto Smith. She is my dear friend. We're both so busy we don't see each other that much. She's written poems for me. She wrote me a poem for our fiftieth wedding anniversary. They had their fiftieth. I went and she introduced me as her new friend. She and her husband met at Stanford. She only has a BA, she didn't go on to a higher degree. She's brought up four kids.

Riess

A lot of parallels.

Townes

Everything, except some of her children have been divorced and re-married, which ours haven't done. We have been able to share. She adores her husband, Otto, who's older, who is this little impish guy. They just went off to Poland, to Krakow, where she was part of a team. She learned enough Polish to help him--he's in ecology. Apparently, the pollution in Krakow is so incredible they both, with white hair, came back with yellow hair they can't get rid of, and almost got black lung disease trying to help the Poles. She was paid to go. She's not as vigorous as I am. She's a few years younger. And they have a place in the country as we do.

Phyllis has been God's gift to me, but I have known very few women like that here. I have younger friends that I admire a lot who like me because I have somehow for my age a somewhat younger point of view about life. Bonnie, the new chaplain, is now my new friend. She's the age of my third daughter, they're two weeks apart. We're able to talk about my hang-ups about lesbianism, all that world that she's in. I'm going at 11:30 to meet with her and the other chaplain. We've been trying to find where I best fit in the chaplaincy. I've been sort of doing little bits of everything in the chaplaincy to date, where I could have a really responsible part of it that would be more professional.

"Suddenly Feminized"--1967

Riess

Please tell me, back in 1967 when you came out to Berkeley, how you decided what you wanted to do here. When you came out, your daughters didn't come with you?

Townes

Three of them were in college. Linda was getting her doctoral in psychology at Michigan, Ellen was getting her master's in anatomy at Berkeley. Carla was off at Scripps, and Holly was fifteen, sixteen, and went into the public schools in Berkeley where she had all kinds of terrible experiences.

Holly had come out here hoping to make friends with blacks and was beaten up the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. She was very upset because she'd met him in Sweden and went around at age eleven saying, "My king is Martin Luther King not the king of Sweden." and had all these idealisms that she was working through, and I was working through being in Berkeley, and we had a difficult year together. I was trying to find my way, and she was, and Charlie's MIT secretary who came out, too. I persuaded her that she could help him get started and that she might find a husband here. And she did finally at the age of forty-one find another Greek and marry him and have two children and that was a success.

So Paula and Holly and I were floundering around in this crazy place. Charlie was scrambling to see if he could get a toe back in science, and he could not be disturbed if he was going to make it. He wasn't sure. So we were all on ice for that year. Then I applied to the Library School and was turned down, and became suddenly feminized and was put on the committee to plan the Women's Center for Continuing Education. That was Roger's idea, that I would be the one layperson, because I had felt rejected by the system, and that's what started the center.

Riess

Now wait. "Suddenly feminized."

Townes

Well, I mean I suddenly saw that women were not given their due. They had no advocacy for women on this campus.

Riess

And Roger was Roger Heyns?

Townes

Roger Heyns was then the chancellor. So he set up a committee to find an enabling way for women on campus. It started out to be a center for continuing education for women. Because what I was trying to do was to go back to school. There was no way that women were being helped with that. And so that's the way the Women's Center started.

Riess

So it was in social conversations with Roger?

Townes

Yes, I guess, and I was outraged, and I made such a big noise that I was the one non-academic person put on that committee. And then it got started and it grew into the Center for Women, and for undergraduates as well, and not just to help older women go back to school. It grew and it went on and finally became a place of advocacy for women of all ages and ethnic backgrounds. I guess they still don't have an appropriate number of women faculty, that hasn't changed. It's shocking.

I was so upset by the fact that the West wasn't way ahead of the East. You see, I had already helped set up classes on the East Coast for faculty wives to go back to school. There was nothing here like that. I was just amazed how little progress there'd been in helping women at this so-called progressive institution. And I still think it's a very chauvinist place. It still is. And in many ways I sympathize with Theresa [Heyman] because she has fought to be herself, her peculiar self. I saw her again last night. She married this dynamic man, and to be in his shadow, no way was Theresa Heyman going to do that. So I understand that part of Theresa very well. Very well.

Riess

It seems to me at about that time Babette Chamberlain, you must have known her, was starting consciousness-raising groups.

Townes

It was Owen's first wife?

Riess

I think so.

Townes

And she divorced him. And then he married Judy, this wonderful woman who died only two or three months ago and was an artist and a friend of mine. Yes, Babette Chamberlain was Owen's first wife and she was very progressive.

Riess

Did you become part of that?

Townes

No, I didn't. No, I never did. I just came in through this other door. I did know some of the women who were on campus, and who were emancipated--there's a physics wife that is a professor of psychology and she and I often talk about it. Wherever we went, it was in the air.

Remember, I was at MIT when Betty Friedan wrote her book, and Gloria Steinem was around--you know, that was all starting then. I met Betty Friedan, and I went to Smith as did Betty and Gloria and all of us--well, not all of us, some us went right on being Smithies. But I was affected by that book. Very much. So I came out here with that aspiration, and felt really put out by the fact that this wasn't going on here, that there was no one here to say, "You can be a person in your own right. You're not just the wife of a Nobel Prize winner." I didn't want to go to section clubs and just do that. I was in the music section. It met here occasionally, and the Italian section, and then I left both the Italian and French sections and then went back to the French section later because I didn't want to lose my French. But I didn't want to be part of that milieu. I had been head of the matrons at MIT, the same group that did all those little interest groups.

Fran and Charlie's Shared Interest in Natural Sciences

Townes

I wanted to do something now! But what could it be? So I fiddled around, and certainly library school would have been the worst place for me I see now, because I'm a slow reader and it would have been boring. So somehow, I thought, "What could I do that would be parallel to Charlie?" It would be something we could do together. I loved nature, and we both loved the out-of-doors. His birdwatching had sort of lain fallow, really, and here was a whole new bunch of birds. So I joined the Golden Gate Audubon Society. And they sent out an invitation to people on that list to find docents for that first class.

Riess

Docents for the first class of--?

Townes

For the natural science gallery [at the Oakland Museum]. So I thought, "My goodness, I can go to school and I can learn something. I can come home and tell Charlie about the plants and the birds." I went in with that in mind, and then became a docent much to my surprise, Then I went on to take some leadership jobs, like president of the Docent Council, and so other parts of me were used, and it was a place, a home away from home for me. I really felt that last night, because it was so good to see some of my old pals down there. Dolly Dreiman said to me, "You were in the first class, Fran." I said, "Yes." "I remember you took me on my first tour, and I was in the second class, and you showed me how it should be done." How many years ago? Twenty-two or -three. And Charlie said, "Yes, you are a teacher. You didn't know that." So I found that I could relate as a teacher.

It was a very exciting time for me and I feel that it was God's gift to me, that whole place. I've told you the wonderful story, that nobody'd heard of Charlie in the natural science department. We never talked about our husbands, we were there to do this work of docenting, and after two years Don came to me and said, "Are you related to the famous Henry Townes?" Did I ever tell you this story?

Riess

No. Which Don?

Townes

McNeil. He was an entomologist. No, this was Don Linsdale. Both of them were entomologists. I said, "Oh yes, I'm his sister-in-law." So I became the sister-in-law of the famous Henry Townes who was the world's authority on ichneumonide. Don asked me to write to him for a specific insect for the rotten log case. Do you remember the little case in the High Sierra with the grylloblattit in it? It's not there anymore. Gryllo means "cricket" and blattit means "roach". It's a large insect that they have in the High Sierra, and it lives under the ice. It has a very limited habitat and there are special insects above and below the ice. Back to Henry, Don wanted a parasitic wasp for the log, the decaying log. And I wrote, and Henry sent one. Whether they ever used it, I don't know.

For a long time, then I was supposed to know something about insects, which I didn't. That was heavy enough. But then one day they found I was married to Charlie, and the fact was out. But by then I had been "Fran". I was Fran and I was appreciated for my own self.

The rest of the grylloblattit story was that when I first knew Charlie, he took me to meet Henry. Henry was very narrow. He only was interested in the taxonomy of insects. Marjorie was a botanist but had given it up and collaborated with him, and they collected together all over the world. Very congenial partnership, very wonderful, wonderful woman. Henry must have been hard to live with. Anyway, he was very much a Townes. He didn't have Charlie's broad view. Thank goodness Charlie didn't go into entomology, at least into taxonomy. That can be pretty limiting. Physics is a much bigger world, and certainly astronomy is.

So he took me to meet Henry and I, of course, had never heard of the ichneumonide and trying to relate to Henry was difficult. I felt that he always wondered why Charlie married this nincompoop who didn't know anything about insects. Then when Linda was married, she was married in Ann Arbor, because we had moved here and she didn't know anybody and she married a man who was finishing his doctorate there as she was. Henry and Marjorie were in Ann Arbor, and he was teaching at the University of Michigan, and they said, "We will have a dinner for you the night before the wedding," which was wonderful.

By then I had become a natural science docent. I was out in the yard helping Henry clean the yard, and we were talking, and I thought, "Now I know something, and I will impress Henry with my knowledge." So I started talking about insects, and thanked him for having sent the insect, and said, "We have this very interesting case where there are all these insects related to the High Sierra, and there's this very interesting insect called a grylloblattit," and I went on. Henry looked up at me and he said, "Do you know who discovered the first grylloblattit in California?" Guess who? Henry Townes. He, and Charlie's younger brother. It's called grylloblattit bi- fraternilacta. "By two brothers". Charlie can give you the whole thing. I felt so--the one thing that I knew was the grylloblattit [laughs], and Henry put me down for the umteenth time. He had discovered the first grylloblattit insect in California!

Henry and I actually got to like each other through the years. I think he realized that I did know a little something after all.

Riess

He was probably quite pleased.

Townes

He was probably pleased, but I thought it was the irony of all ironies that I would try to impress him with my knowledge of insects.

So that [natural science work] became a very important thing. And then twenty years is enough in anything and my hip began to hurt a lot.

Riess

Now how is it that in that case you ended up being ensnared in the politics of the situation of the Oakland Museum?

Townes

Well, I didn't really get very ensnared. I was on the board, which wasn't very effective. I was the first docent that was asked to join the women's board, however. Betty Hine called me when I was docent council president and said, "We'd like to invite you on the women's board." And I said, "Betty, I can't do it; I'm too busy." "Well, you'll never be invited again." And I said, "Well, that's just too bad." She finally called me back and said, "Would you join, and you could not do anything this year." I said, "All right. I would like to be able to come on because I would like the women's board to know more about what the docents are doing." So I started that bridge. Then they invited Gladys Eaton, and they invited Deborah Wentworth, and they got some really good gals in there.

Part of every board meeting is now a report on what the docents are doing. And they began to understand why they were selling junk [White Elephant Sales] to support the museum. So I got into that part of the museum, I didn't really get involved with the politics. Like Charlie, I love to be an innovator, it's a lot of fun, but I got fed up too with all this silliness that goes on around there. It was this constant city [of Oakland] versus culture, and the women's board versus the docents. I just got enough of that, but that's what life is, I'm afraid.

University Art Museum and University Extension Jobs

Riess

Was the involvement with the church, then, a transition from the museum to homeless work?

Townes

It was a transition from that, and I know Foster is asking me this in my times with him: "How did you get called, if that's what you want to call this, to do this ministry with the homeless?" It kind of happened. How can I say? I tried to get docenting into the art museum, and it never took. I started the desk there, however.

Riess

At the University Art Museum?

Townes

Yes, I started the desk. There had been no contact with the public. I sat at the desk for ages and got it organized. It was the only contact with the public. One day I was there, and Rachel [Clark] came from Extension and said, "I'm looking for somebody to help me in the office. We're starting a new office, and trying to get more people interested in the Extension by counseling them and [helping them] to see if that's a way to get back into school especially through Extension."

Riess

For women?

Townes

For women or for whomever. And I said, "Well, what's in it for such a person?" She said, "You can take courses free." And I said, "What about me?" So I went and worked for her one day a week for five years.

Riess

How did you make your contact with the public? How did they make themselves known?

Townes

Well, people came in and they would be sent from all over. We had a little office on the ground floor. Rachel's still there. She smokes all the time, and everyone came down and smoked, and I almost choked to death. I came to have almost a specialty with older women, because so many of my women friends were being left and would come in looking for new directions and I was able to find ways for them to get on their feet by going back to school. Rachel was threatened by that. And that combined with the smoking. I just left. I never was paid, but it was at that time that I took quite a few courses at Extension for free. That's when I took the course in math blocks.

The Chaplaincy for the Homeless: First Congregational Church, Berkeley

Townes

Then I took on very different jobs at the church.

Riess

The church is the Congregational Church.

Townes

First Congregational. It's a long story, but I've been running the adult eduction program there. The new minister came, and I had done budget for the former minister--I'd done almost everything else, too--and Bill (the new minister) saw something in me and asked me to do adult education.

Riess

Bill who?

Townes

Bill Gregory, the minister who has now left. He was there for seven and a half years. I knew everybody on campus, and I was a good organizer and I really developed an interesting program.

Riess

What was the name of that position?

Townes

I still have the same 1/2 time position, that of lay associate for adult education at the church. Among other things, I do something called the Second Hour an hour after the worship service. This week we have this very interesting man who has written a book on the life and death of Oscar Romero and what it meant to El Salvador. We've done a whole lot of series, like world religions. We did a thing on homelessness when it began to be impacting us.

Riess

And you call upon University friends and people to do programs?

Townes

Yes, all for free. For five years I had a luncheon at The Faculty Club once a month where people connected with the University or on Holy Hill would come down. People would come and talk on different subjects, often things like different kinds of ethics, and I would introduce them. I ran out of people after a while [laughs], friends and people. So I brought a lot of enrichment to the church.

But all the time these homeless people were around, and I had a friend, Rowena Jackson who--I don't know how this happened--but she suggested I go and work for something called the Help Desk, which was at the BOSS office; Berkeley-Oakland Support Services. I worked there for two years and homeless people came in all the time. That was run by a few churches with a little money and it was such a shoestring effort.

 

Townes

We'd give them a bus ticket or send them to a transitional house for a few nights. I just saw that that was not going anywhere.

Riess

This was six years ago?

Townes

Yes. About six years ago. And then I went at night to the drop-in center run by the Berkeley Emergency Food Project, and I found that I was relating to these people and beginning to see some of the needs. Anyway, when they [homeless] were impacting our cloister, seventy-five a night, defecating and all, it was terrible, my church, somebody, said to me, "Would you get a committee together and see if there's any alternative? We have to throw them out." So I got a group together, and then it expanded into all the churches, and that's how it got started. But it was one thing leading to another, and now I'm really struggling to keep it going financially. So I'm using every talent I have.

And now I'm going to go over in a half an hour and talk about taking over the volunteers. Our innovation is to train some homeless people to be extensions of the staff to other homeless people, and through this not only re-build their self image aims, but they can help other homeless people get back into society. This is the peer chaplain idea, which is now in four or five cities all over the country. We do these educationals on "what is homelessness?" and how we work with it, and about the programs we have developed. I talked, because Bonnie couldn't do it, two weeks ago to a sociology class at Cal who asked us to do this. And then we sent five of our chaplains with the group, and they did what we call a "reality tour," and took them out into the streets to see the situation and meet the homeless people.

Then we've, of course, been involved with the political scene, although I've backed off from that a lot because I'm fed up with politics here. They're about to cancel all money for homelessness in Berkeley to balance the budget. It's just a mess. I would go to City Hall--. But anyway, our new chaplain is much more spiritually-oriented, as I am, and less politically-oriented than her predecessor was. So now we've decided that I should take on the volunteers. So we have volunteers, we have staff, we have board members made up of representatives from fifteen churches, and we have homeless. We meet once a month, all these groups, in a council where we vote on policy issues.

Just this week we did the most remarkable thing. We passed some rules that the peer chaplains in their own meetings had already decided on, that violence was one of the biggest problems they had and there had to be constraints on violence: sexual violence, verbal harassment, physical violence, all different aspects. They brought this to the bigger community, the council, and it was almost turned down the first time by, actually, one of the representatives from Newman Hall, because they thought that we weren't being kind enough. But we passed it finally. Now, people will be rejected from our community, which has become a family--we're the support family for these homeless people who don't have families, we're their family--it's the punishment of exclusion if they are violent. There are very definite ways of measuring this, and we reject them for a day, and then for two weeks, and then for six months. And if they don't go back and get professional help, which we will help them find, then they are indefinitely suspended. It's taken four years to get to this point. It didn't come from the staff and the board and the volunteers. It came from the homeless people themselves. Now that's a triumph, isn't it?

Riess

It is. Yes.

Townes

And these people are going back to school and getting jobs. And about a third of these people are making it. But it's a long haul, and we cannot help one thousand people out there.

Riess

It sounds like you're very high on patience and creativity.

Townes

Well, yes, and I am stubborn too. I will not give up. I can tell you that my acceptance by "those people," if that's what you want to call them, as a person for whom they have a lot of love. Well, I'm that rich bitch who lives in North Berkeley in a big house, and they've all been here many times. I represent everything that's inimicable to them. Successful husband, intellectual values, everything. But they have real love for me and it's the most accepted that I've ever felt in my life.

Yesterday, after I went to the early communion service, and we had this Oscar Romero person, then I came home, changed my clothes, and went to the People's Park where we had a service on the prodigal son. [laughs] I heard the prodigal son in three different versions that day. [To them] I was the older brother, the pharisee, all those things. They all talked about how they'd been rejected by their families, by society. And then I said, "Yes, I'm the older brother." They all looked at me and I said, "I'm the person who says, 'I've always followed the right thing. God, why don't you recognize me?'" And what did God do? He recognized the prodigal son, the sinner. We had a wonderful time. Bonnie was there leading it, and she had me read the parable. And they listened, and we hugged each other. It is just a very special time, when these people join our circle. The University lets us do that. We don't have any crosses, it's not a service in the real sense, but we have a spirituality committee of chaplains that meets every week and reads the lectionary and decides what the theme will be on Sunday. Bonnie takes that and develops some kind of sermonizing or idea around it. So I just wander in when I can.

A Lifetime's Commitment to the Common Good

Townes

What I can say is that commitment to the common good in the face of discouragement, ambiguity, and the awareness of global complexity--this is a non-solvable problem. Especially in the light of our present uninspired people running for presidency, with beknighted attitudes about this country right now. I am very, very deeply depressed about our attitudes and about the world right now. I think we're more than a little bit sick. More than sick. That's a nice note to end on isn't it? [laughter]

Charlie is never pessimistic. I have to end by saying that he is the world's true optimist. And I must be too, although I get discouraged. And I know that I'm only going to live a finite time now, and I want to live it as fully as I can. Charlie knows that his work may not be finished--there is no one to bear the torch. He says, "If my work is valuable, somebody will come along and take it up. And if it isn't, it will fail." I have the same feeling. I can push this so far, and if we can't support it and it goes down, I will have done the best I could. That's just the way you have to live. As long as the work you're doing is moving ahead and satisfying for you and you are growing, you can do it.

Riess

Yes, I guess the important way to judge is whether it's a satisfying and growing experience for you.

Townes

And the way that I judge it for me is that I can go down to the museum and docent, or I can go to France and speak French to Mitterand, and I can relate really quite well to my children, and I can entertain Charlie's friends and not put my foot in my mouth too much and all those things. [laughter] But I can now go and relate to "that bum" in the street and find that godlike spark in that person.

Riess

A lot of people would find that the most mysterious of the tasks that you do.

Townes

If you could see Michael, he's back at school now. If you could have seen him before--. You know, like Better Homes and Gardens before and after. I wish I had a picture of him then. Scraggly, dirty, he didn't care. He's back at school, he's learned to spell, he's going to get a degree. He's healthy, dressed, and clean. And Christ says, "To the least of them." If I only did it for one person I ought to be glad. But we're doing it for more than one. Certainly when you go out to get money you have to say there's more than one person that you've been able to help and that is, of course, true. It's really exciting.

Riess

 

Riess

That's a much better note to end on.

Townes

Yes, I think so. [laughter]

Addendum [in response to letter of June 24, 1992]

Riess

Frances, after you told me about the evening reminiscing with the Walter Gordon family member I got to thinking that that was a gem of oral history that might somehow be incorporated in your memoir. I wonder if you would sit down and write it as you told it to me on the telephone. I would indicate that it was an afterthought, the result of a later conversation.

Townes

Tonight Edwin Gordon, historian, teacher and graduate student, the great-great-grandson of a slave name Jim Gordon, is having dessert and coffee with us. Edwin turns out to be a neighbor. He's part of the famous Walter Gordon family--Walter Gordon, the Cal grad and Cal football player who became a lawyer and was governor of the Virgin Islands.

I was named for General John B. Gordon's wife, Fanny Haarlson, who was married at sixteen on the family plantation in Atlanta to General Gordon. Jim was married on the same plantation at the same time to Sarah, who was my great-greatmother's ladies' maid. Jim was manservant to the General. "Feedama," the name I gave my great grandmother (as I couldn't say "Sweet Grandma" when I was a little girl) spent the last years of her life--she was in her nineties--in northern New Hampshire where I grew up. General Gordon was the youngest general of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and later governor and senator.

Jim and Sarah were freed at the end of the war and my great-grandfather helped their children get highter education. Some of them moved to Texas.

At a time when race tension persists in our country I feel privileged to be connected to a distinguished black family. My brother met Walter Gordon in the Virgin Islands when Walter was governor and my brother was assistant secretary of labor. I met Walter Grodon's widow when I moved there twenty-five years ago, and now I know Edwin.

Tape Guide

Interview with Charles Hard Townes

Interview 1: November 5, 1991

Interview 1: November 5, 1991
• Tape 1, Side A
• Tape 1, Side B
• Tape 2, Side A
• Tape 2, Side B not recorded

Interview 2: November 8, 1991

Interview 2: November 8, 1991
• Tape 3, Side A
• Tape 3, Side B
• Tape 4, Side A
• Tape 4, Side B

Interview 3: November 25, 1991

Interview 3: November 25, 1991
• Tape 5, Side A
• Tape 5, Side B
• Tape 6, Side A
• Tape 6, Side B not recorded

Interview 4: December 18, 1991

Interview 4: December 18, 1991
• Tape 7, Side A
• Tape 7, Side B
• Tape 8, Side A
• Tape 8, Side B

Interview 5: December 31, 1991

Interview 5: December 31, 1991
• Tape 9, Side A
• Tape 9, Side B
• Tape 10, Side A
• Tape 10, Side B
• Tape 11, Side A
• Tape 11, Side B not recorded

Interview 6: January 15, 1992

Interview 6: January 15, 1992
• Tape 12, Side A
• Tape 12, Side B
• Tape 13, Side A
• Tape 13, Side B

Interview 7: January 20, 1992

Interview 7: January 20, 1992
• Tape 14, Side A
• Tape 14, Side B
• Tape 15, Side A
• Tape 15, Side B

Interview 8: January 28, 1992

Interview 8: January 28, 1992
• Tape 16, Side A
• Tape 16, Side B
• Tape 17, Side A
• Tape 17, Side B

Interview 9: February 4, 1992

Interview 9: February 4, 1992
• Tape 18, Side A
• Tape 18, Side B
• Tape 19, Side A
• Tape 19, Side B
• Tape 20, Side A

Interview 10: February 26, 1992

Interview 10: February 26, 1992
• Tape 21, Side A
• Tape 21, Side B
• Tape 22, Side A
• Tape 22, Side B

Interview 11: March 3, 1992

Interview 11: March 3, 1992
• Tape 23, Side A
• Tape 23, Side B
• Tape 24, Side A
• Tape 24, Side B

Interview 12: March 18, 1992

Interview 12: March 18, 1992
• Tape 25, Side A
• Tape 25, Side B
• Tape 26, Side A
• Tape 26, Side B

Interview 13: April 4, 1992

Interview 13: April 4, 1992
• Tape 27, Side A
• Tape 27, Side B
• Tape 28, Side A
• Tape 28, Side B
• Insert from Tape 27, Side A
• Insert from Tape 16, Side A

Interview 14: June 2, 1992

Interview 14: June 2, 1992
• Tape 29, Side A
• Tape 29, Side B
• Tape 30, Side A
• Tape 30, Side B

Interview 15: June 16, 1992

Interview 15: June 16, 1992
• Tape 31, Side A
• Tape 31, Side B
• Tape 32, Side A
• Tape 32, Side B

Interview 16: July 3, 1992

Interview 16: July 3, 1992
• Tape 33, Side A
• Tape 33, Side B
• Tape 34, Side A
• Tape 34, Side B
• Tape 35, Side A
• Tape 35, Side B not recorded

Interview with Frances Brown Townes

Interview: March 30, 1992

Interview: March 30, 1992
• Tape 1, Side A
• Tape 1, Side B
• Tape 2, Side A
• Tape 2, Side B
• Tape 3, Side A
• Tape 3, Side B

Notes