00:00:00 ♪

00:01:16 Well, you mentioned at an earlier point

00:01:19 your own exposure to science at an early age,

00:01:22 your mother's interest in poultry management

00:01:26 or technology of breeding and harvesting poultry,

00:01:32 your father's interest in mineralogy and geology.

00:01:36 When did you, in school and high school,

00:01:39 did you have teachers who had an important influence on you?

00:01:42 Well, in elementary school, we went to a very small school,

00:01:46 my colleagues and I, which was a country school.

00:01:50 It was the outgrowth of a Quaker school 200 years ago,

00:01:56 but it was a public school as it was called now.

00:01:59 And we had a lot of talk to each other,

00:02:05 lower grades talked to the higher grades,

00:02:07 had a lot of interest in natural science

00:02:10 or in the behavior of the environment,

00:02:16 animals, birds, and such things.

00:02:19 Teachers sort of sensed this.

00:02:22 The teachers were not very sophisticated

00:02:25 in any kind of science or math,

00:02:28 but we had, on the other hand,

00:02:30 an environment which was very interested in natural history,

00:02:34 in nature, in survival under difficult environmental conditions.

00:02:41 And that was picked up by the teachers,

00:02:44 and we learned quite a lot about science that way.

00:02:49 Do you think there's enough of that in curricula today,

00:02:53 in elementary school curricula?

00:02:55 Oh, I doubt it.

00:02:57 I'm not familiar with enough of a variety of elementary schools

00:03:02 to know how well they do their biology or their ecology

00:03:07 or their bioscience or physical science broadly,

00:03:11 but I don't think the same forces exist

00:03:15 in that nowadays they don't have to face the weather

00:03:21 and the chronic cycles and the supplies of raw materials

00:03:26 and the distribution of food and other things

00:03:29 quite as concretely as one did earlier,

00:03:31 and that concrete challenge earlier

00:03:34 got to the teachers as well as to the students.

00:03:37 And they knew if you were going to freeze,

00:03:40 it would have an effect on the roads

00:03:43 or harvesting of fruits or a variety of other things.

00:03:47 And the idea of what did freezing mean?

00:03:51 I mean, it was a lot of ice,

00:03:53 but I guess that had some connection with water.

00:03:56 And that sort of thing really struck people

00:03:59 in the rural environment.

00:04:02 We rather doubt if it has such an impact these days.

00:04:08 Well, let's hope that teachers still put experience

00:04:12 into the science curriculum

00:04:14 so that students do get a chance to actually see how phenomena work.

00:04:18 Maybe I could ask you a little bit more about the theoretical group

00:04:22 because it was a stellar group of people you brought together,

00:04:25 and it is an unusual idea

00:04:27 in an enterprise like Bell Labs

00:04:29 where people are interested in new devices,

00:04:32 new developments, not in blue-sky research.

00:04:36 Maybe you could talk a little more about that.

00:04:39 Well, as a result of the initiation of the solid-state era,

00:04:42 which on one hand, I think we talked about the seminars,

00:04:45 which there were two or three chemists among us

00:04:48 and other physicists and so on

00:04:50 that really started that era,

00:04:52 and Chokley and Bratton were members of that group.

00:04:55 I was recruited for the laboratories

00:04:59 and applied very modern multibody theory

00:05:04 to the very earliest studies that we were doing

00:05:08 in simple single crystals.

00:05:11 But in addition to that,

00:05:14 Herring, who had come from Princeton a little bit,

00:05:18 about the time of Bardina, maybe a little bit earlier,

00:05:22 had been also much interested

00:05:25 in statistical phenomena and electronics.

00:05:29 Herring, of course, remember,

00:05:31 did the earliest work with Wigner and Seitz.

00:05:34 Seitz, Wigner, and Herring

00:05:36 were the ones who really applied quantum theory

00:05:39 to solids, lithium, and some other simple systems.

00:05:43 Okay, Herring was very interested

00:05:46 in the multibody statistical mechanics

00:05:50 and got interested in electron emission,

00:05:56 which was very important to us then,

00:05:59 vacuum tubes from oxide cathodes.

00:06:03 And then he got interested in sintering,

00:06:08 which was sort of a black art, you know,

00:06:12 a mystery of how you would get

00:06:17 very tiny particles to fuse way below

00:06:20 their nominal melting points

00:06:22 with some kind of mobility on the surface.

00:06:25 And so Herring was clearly broadly intrigued.

00:06:30 We had another recruit around that period,

00:06:33 Charles Kittel, who relatively soon went to Berkeley

00:06:38 and has finished his career there now,

00:06:40 but he learned much of the solid-state work here.

00:06:43 Well, this is all by way of saying

00:06:45 that these people, very intriguing

00:06:49 and enterprising minds,

00:06:52 were closing in on solids

00:06:56 in a way that theorists had studiously avoided

00:06:59 for generations.

00:07:01 They said if you had more than two bodies,

00:07:03 it was probably hopeless,

00:07:05 and if it was more than three bodies,

00:07:07 it was probably illegal.

00:07:10 So these folks threw all that aside,

00:07:13 and therefore we felt that

00:07:17 if we could get them,

00:07:18 if that was exciting enough,

00:07:19 but if we could get these people reinforcing each other

00:07:21 as we've done in the experimental side

00:07:24 and as we've done in the multidisciplinary way

00:07:26 of having chemists, metallurgists, physicists,

00:07:28 engineers working together,

00:07:30 that we might produce some new results.

00:07:33 And so we persuaded Herring,

00:07:37 Herring, I believe, was the first

00:07:39 to chair a department.

00:07:42 Yes, he worked on applied problems

00:07:44 that seemed somehow capable of a solution,

00:07:49 seemed somehow amenable to defining the variables,

00:07:53 which is what physicists and physical chemists

00:07:55 and so on are often challenged by,

00:07:58 you see, to do that.

00:08:00 Now, Debye was an important influence there as well.

00:08:03 Debye joined us before the war.

00:08:08 Then during the war,

00:08:10 as brought out well in your essays,

00:08:13 Morris and so on,

00:08:14 he got constrained,

00:08:17 although he continued to do very important work.

00:08:19 Then he came back after the war

00:08:21 and with us here quite a lot,

00:08:23 and he had started in quite skeptical

00:08:27 of whether theory,

00:08:29 modern quantum theory, for example,

00:08:31 could be applied very much

00:08:33 or would be very suitable

00:08:35 for a lot of the applied problems we had.

00:08:37 But he changed his mind

00:08:39 and he felt there was a good opportunity.

00:08:42 So that sort of encouraged the theorists,

00:08:45 other theorists, too.

00:08:48 I've been working on polymers so much

00:08:51 in the last couple of years

00:08:53 that I keep thinking of analogies

00:08:55 with what I know about that field,

00:08:57 but in many ways it's similar,

00:08:59 the role of people like Herring and Debye

00:09:02 as a consultant, Bardeen and the others,

00:09:04 sound very similar to the kind of role

00:09:06 that someone like Carruthers played at DuPont

00:09:08 in the 30s,

00:09:09 Carruthers and Flory

00:09:11 and other theoretically-minded chemists

00:09:13 who really dealt with problems

00:09:15 that chemical DuPont was facing

00:09:18 in making polymers do certain things.

00:09:20 Yes, there's an interesting analogy there.

00:09:22 Now, as you know so well,

00:09:24 Carruthers was by no means a theorist,

00:09:26 although Flory was,

00:09:28 Carruthers did what you say.

00:09:30 He looked for basic principles

00:09:32 and theoretical principles

00:09:34 that could be applied,

00:09:36 and the chemists in that field

00:09:38 hadn't done that before.

00:09:40 It's very interesting.

00:09:42 Roger Adams, who was a fine chemist

00:09:44 who had a good influence on Carruthers

00:09:46 in many ways, nevertheless,

00:09:48 Adams and a fellow named,

00:09:50 I think it was named at the moment,

00:09:53 did polyester experiments.

00:09:57 Adams didn't have the idea

00:09:59 that Carruthers did about functionality,

00:10:01 about these principles you're talking about,

00:10:03 but he just had the idea

00:10:05 there must be some interesting chemicals

00:10:07 around somewhere,

00:10:09 and they isolated ester or polyester

00:10:12 from the skin of cat brown berries,

00:10:16 which was fine.

00:10:18 I mean, that's what organic chemists

00:10:20 in those days did, you see,

00:10:22 but it reinforces your point

00:10:24 that Carruthers did that as a model

00:10:26 for a whole set of functionalities

00:10:29 in polymers, which Carruthers did.

00:10:32 And those had implications

00:10:34 that we've all become familiar with,

00:10:36 whether we know it or not.

00:10:38 So the common thread there

00:10:40 is that you have a group of people

00:10:42 who are interested in reasoning

00:10:44 from first principles in the area of science,

00:10:46 applying it to problems

00:10:48 that lie close at hand,

00:10:50 and then transforming an area of practice

00:10:52 that really hadn't had any theoretical structure

00:10:54 before into something

00:10:56 that is much more powerful and efficient.

00:10:58 That's exactly the way to say it.

00:11:00 So Lycan was this fellow that I think of.

00:11:02 Oh, yeah, William Lycan.

00:11:04 But yeah, that's exactly the situation,

00:11:06 and a very good thing to be...

00:11:08 That's one of the values

00:11:10 of the history of science and of chemistry.

00:11:12 Unless people get reminded

00:11:14 of that kind of principle,

00:11:16 that kind of reality,

00:11:18 they can easily forget it,

00:11:20 and they go off without

00:11:22 consciously thinking,

00:11:24 how can we open a new field?

00:11:26 We've been talking about

00:11:28 some general issues

00:11:30 in Bell Labs' research in the 1950s

00:11:32 when you began taking on

00:11:34 more and more management responsibility.

00:11:36 But before we continue with that,

00:11:38 I'd like to ask you about

00:11:40 some of the broad areas of work

00:11:42 and to talk in a little bit more detail about it.

00:11:44 I wonder if I could ask you to talk a little bit

00:11:46 about some of the actual technical projects

00:11:48 that you did after the war

00:11:50 before you began moving up the ladder.

00:11:52 Well, just after the war,

00:11:54 we were, of course, much concerned

00:11:56 with a very large expansion of our plant.

00:11:58 And we had come along with microwaves,

00:12:00 and we knew that we wanted

00:12:02 to equip this country

00:12:04 and perhaps eventually the world

00:12:06 with systems that could carry video

00:12:08 and that could do all sorts

00:12:10 of broadband transmission

00:12:12 and distribution.

00:12:14 And we saw other things

00:12:16 shaping up.

00:12:18 Stibitz had done his computer experiments

00:12:20 with the relays,

00:12:22 and we saw that digital systems

00:12:24 were very much needed, and so on.

00:12:26 But we saw that the expense

00:12:28 of investment

00:12:30 in these systems

00:12:32 was going to be very large

00:12:34 as an actual physical plant,

00:12:36 the stuff you had to buy.

00:12:38 And the requirements were quite intense.

00:12:40 So we lurched into

00:12:42 a materials science

00:12:44 and engineering effort

00:12:46 to see how widely

00:12:48 we could bring new chemistry

00:12:50 and metallurgy

00:12:52 and solid-state work

00:12:54 into this telephone plant

00:12:56 that had huge amounts of cables

00:12:58 and huge amounts of

00:13:00 switching equipment,

00:13:02 of terminal equipment.

00:13:04 In fact, if we hadn't been then

00:13:06 as we are not now

00:13:08 responsible for the

00:13:10 total telecommunications

00:13:12 service of the whole plant,

00:13:14 we probably wouldn't have been

00:13:16 so much convinced

00:13:18 that we better do something about materials,

00:13:20 that we better control our

00:13:22 economics as best

00:13:24 we could.

00:13:26 We then saw

00:13:28 what some of these massive

00:13:30 materials requirements were going to be.

00:13:34 Synthetic materials

00:13:36 that were coming on,

00:13:38 of course we'd had a bit of experience

00:13:40 with ethylene,

00:13:42 were one of the important ones.

00:13:44 Metals, we saw

00:13:46 the improved magnetics

00:13:48 and magnetics of course were

00:13:50 vital for the

00:13:52 receivers and for

00:13:54 instruments and telephony.

00:13:56 And then we began

00:13:58 to see, and that's something we'll get to

00:14:00 later on because I wasn't

00:14:02 immediately involved until

00:14:04 later, the semiconductor

00:14:06 or semi-electronics part.

00:14:08 So on the

00:14:10 other material sides we

00:14:12 said, well,

00:14:14 these polymers and

00:14:16 synthetic organic substances look like

00:14:18 a very big new frontier.

00:14:20 Our

00:14:22 investment then was

00:14:24 hundreds of millions of dollars a year,

00:14:26 soon became billions,

00:14:28 in cable

00:14:30 insulation and cable sheathing

00:14:32 and cable production. But furthermore

00:14:34 our

00:14:36 survival,

00:14:38 our efficiency and our

00:14:40 reliability of the plant,

00:14:42 the quality of the plant,

00:14:44 depended very much on

00:14:46 polymer properties and

00:14:48 usage. And there was,

00:14:50 I recall reading a paper about 1950

00:14:52 that you did on stress cracking in

00:14:54 polyethylene. That became one of the

00:14:56 key issues. Yeah, that was a key issue because

00:14:58 we found that

00:15:00 the

00:15:02 first applications of

00:15:04 the industry was then coming along, chemistry,

00:15:06 the carbide, DuPont in particular,

00:15:08 ICI had already got started,

00:15:10 and we found that

00:15:12 their polymers, which were

00:15:14 very acceptable

00:15:16 quality,

00:15:18 when put on cables, after all, what we did was

00:15:20 rather brash. We

00:15:22 said, here's the world's largest

00:15:24 use of lead, one of the

00:15:26 classic materials of all

00:15:28 history. The world's largest use

00:15:30 was sheathing for cables that had been

00:15:32 picked because that

00:15:34 has to bend, it has to

00:15:36 withstand all kinds of external

00:15:38 environments, it has to be

00:15:40 made very fast, you see, by extrusion,

00:15:42 all of which things lead did in

00:15:44 one form or other. Now

00:15:46 to suddenly put an organic material

00:15:48 in that place was a little

00:15:50 bit brash, and

00:15:52 sure enough, although we did

00:15:54 compound it so that

00:15:56 chemically it was quite stabilized,

00:15:58 and we discovered things like this induction

00:16:00 period, Link Hawkins,

00:16:02 you have a

00:16:04 record of Link's work, I think,

00:16:06 and it's probably treated quite

00:16:08 all helped a great deal.

00:16:10 But, when you

00:16:12 get the stuff in,

00:16:14 thousands and thousands of miles of it,

00:16:16 you have to bend it,

00:16:18 and you have to be able to

00:16:20 handle it in all sorts of weather,

00:16:22 you have to get it into cities, into

00:16:24 ducts, which were quite narrow,

00:16:26 it cracked.

00:16:28 One of the forms

00:16:30 that may have been mentioned in some other

00:16:32 records you've made was that

00:16:34 they had a rather clever, and they felt

00:16:36 they being our outside plant

00:16:38 development engineers,

00:16:40 they felt very inert

00:16:42 detergent or surfactant,

00:16:44 which you would put on

00:16:46 cable to make it

00:16:48 flow, not just to make it

00:16:50 slip, really, you want to be able to slip it into the ducts,

00:16:52 you see, and that made it crack worse

00:16:54 than ever, and we had

00:16:56 a firm

00:16:58 policy then, which we

00:17:00 followed right up to our disintegration,

00:17:02 that it ought to last 40

00:17:04 years, at least,

00:17:06 whatever it was, it being

00:17:08 a sheath or plastic or telephone

00:17:10 or something else, and this stuff was

00:17:12 just, wouldn't do it.

00:17:14 So, we, Hopkins and

00:17:16 Howard and I undertook to find

00:17:18 out what was going on, because, of course, we discussed

00:17:20 with the manufacturers, they had no idea, they were

00:17:22 headed for

00:17:24 quite wide usage, particularly

00:17:26 of containers,

00:17:28 bottles and squeeze

00:17:30 vessels and so on. They had

00:17:32 encountered a little of the effect there,

00:17:34 but they thought it was just

00:17:36 a passing phenomenon

00:17:38 that if they got a little bit higher molecular

00:17:40 weight average, it would probably be all right.

00:17:42 Well, to make a long story

00:17:44 short, as you know, it's all

00:17:46 published, the

00:17:48 molecular weight

00:17:50 average wasn't adequate. You had to

00:17:52 shift the molecular weight distribution,

00:17:54 you had to remove some of the

00:17:56 low molecular weight components,

00:17:58 you had to guard against

00:18:00 certain surfactants

00:18:02 because of the

00:18:04 crystalline structure

00:18:06 that these things penetrated.

00:18:08 There's been, by the way, a wonderful

00:18:10 expansion of

00:18:12 the insights that we had

00:18:14 by people all over the world.

00:18:16 It's still published now. I suppose a number of

00:18:18 publications on that goes in many thousands

00:18:20 now. I know it goes in many hundreds.

00:18:22 They have followed up our initial

00:18:24 indications

00:18:26 about the polycrystallinity

00:18:28 loci

00:18:30 of these

00:18:32 agents that got in

00:18:34 between the crystals and also

00:18:36 of course the fact that

00:18:38 it takes a biaxial stress to really

00:18:40 bring this out. That biaxial

00:18:42 stressing had been pretty well ignored by the

00:18:44 industry

00:18:46 except that it was a thing

00:18:48 that happens when you have a squeeze container.

00:18:50 Practically your whole polyethylene

00:18:52 industry now of

00:18:54 containers and the like is

00:18:56 subject to biaxial stressing.

00:18:58 We found out that the

00:19:00 stress-strain characteristics

00:19:02 of the polymer

00:19:04 were dramatically

00:19:06 different under biaxial stressing

00:19:08 than under uniaxial stressing.

00:19:10 Again, that had to be dealt with in chemical

00:19:12 terms by shifting both

00:19:14 crystallinity and molecular weight.

00:19:16 Another topic I wanted to

00:19:18 ask you about was the work that you did with him on

00:19:20 partially carbonized

00:19:22 polymeric materials. Yeah, partially and almost

00:19:24 completely. The thing that

00:19:26 makes it work

00:19:28 of course is the thing that Edison

00:19:30 discovered of

00:19:32 the transducer.

00:19:34 We

00:19:36 depend on certain coal

00:19:38 structures.

00:19:40 The

00:19:42 particles from a particular

00:19:44 segment

00:19:46 of coal in Pennsylvania

00:19:48 for the

00:19:50 manufacture of the whole telephone

00:19:52 population everywhere.

00:19:54 We make

00:19:56 synthetic semiconductors

00:19:58 which is what this coal was. It wasn't all carbon

00:20:00 of course. It had a lot of impurities

00:20:02 in it and see how they behave.

00:20:04 But there's an interesting element there

00:20:06 that Stretch was exceedingly

00:20:08 diligent and effective about

00:20:10 and that is that the

00:20:12 carbon microphone

00:20:14 in your telephone only works as well as it does

00:20:16 because the mechanics of the

00:20:18 aggregates of the powder

00:20:20 as well as the chemistry and physics

00:20:22 of the powder, the electronics of it,

00:20:24 it has to

00:20:26 be labile

00:20:28 and when you put it down you can't have it all

00:20:30 jammed up in one place and so on. So we said

00:20:32 a perfect sphere is a way to get

00:20:34 at that and so we applied

00:20:36 things which Dow and others had

00:20:38 introduced of making

00:20:40 exceedingly perfect

00:20:42 homogeneous suspension

00:20:44 polymerization and sometimes

00:20:46 emulsion

00:20:48 and then we went and this comes

00:20:50 to the thing we can talk about later this afternoon on the

00:20:54 rubber business as well.

00:20:56 We went back into Staudinger's

00:20:58 notion of how you cross link

00:21:00 and we said well that

00:21:02 should keep the

00:21:04 shape and the structure

00:21:06 and

00:21:08 get rid of the hydrogen by

00:21:10 paralysis, some

00:21:12 chemical effect and get

00:21:14 some levels of carbon

00:21:16 or partially hydrogenated carbon or whatever

00:21:18 which would be ideal and we'd see

00:21:20 how they function as a microphone.

00:21:22 Well again, long story

00:21:24 but Stretch

00:21:26 mastered this very well and then we worked

00:21:28 on the electronics

00:21:30 of it and we got very

00:21:32 ideal microphonic

00:21:34 behavior but

00:21:36 in the course of this work

00:21:38 of getting these

00:21:40 partially dehydrogenated

00:21:42 highly cross linked systems

00:21:44 we discovered all kinds of interesting

00:21:46 chemistry. We

00:21:48 found of course the modulus, we made fibers

00:21:50 as well as

00:21:52 spheres and the modulus was

00:21:54 enormously high and so

00:21:56 that was the basic work

00:21:58 which we reported to the International Union

00:22:00 during applied chemistry in 1952

00:22:02 for the

00:22:04 graphite so called

00:22:06 which is not graphite, I'm still

00:22:08 fighting that battle, the polymer

00:22:10 carbon composites

00:22:12 and the polymer carbon composites

00:22:14 which they frequently now concentrate

00:22:16 on polyacrylonitrile which is one of the things

00:22:18 we have used and others have used

00:22:20 all depend

00:22:22 on those structures that we

00:22:24 began to

00:22:26 create for

00:22:28 microphones which also had to have

00:22:30 very high modulus of course because you don't want to

00:22:32 deform and use mechanical energy

00:22:34 when you talk into this

00:22:36 your voice waves

00:22:38 the sound waves of course do deform the

00:22:40 spheres or the particles slightly

00:22:42 but you want that to be the least amount and what you want

00:22:44 to be the most is the electronic

00:22:46 modulation that that

00:22:48 deformation causes and then that

00:22:50 gives you the highest efficiency. Well that's what we were

00:22:52 pursuing chemically.

00:22:54 Well that's, that again is

00:22:56 another interesting example of the kind of interdisciplinary

00:22:58 approach that Bell Labs and

00:23:00 many other industrial laboratories exemplified

00:23:02 where you were concerned not just about

00:23:04 the, it was a chemical answer to a question

00:23:06 that had mechanical and physical

00:23:08 aspects as well.

00:23:10 Didn't that work with Winslow

00:23:12 also have an application to missile

00:23:14 nose cones a couple of years later?

00:23:16 Well of course the process

00:23:18 there was the thing. During

00:23:20 the course of our study

00:23:22 as a matter of fact it was after we had made our

00:23:24 official reports but we had found

00:23:26 that Winslow and I

00:23:28 were very interested in the kinetics

00:23:30 of dehydrogenation

00:23:32 and we found you had to have oxidation

00:23:34 to

00:23:36 optimize some of those kinetics

00:23:38 and maximize the

00:23:40 preservation of the

00:23:42 carbon skeleton which is a little bit

00:23:44 peculiar. We were

00:23:46 then approached by

00:23:48 we at that point

00:23:50 later you see in the 50s

00:23:52 oh it was probably

00:23:54 mid 50s by the

00:23:56 ARPA

00:23:58 what was then ARPA

00:24:00 in the Department of Defense

00:24:02 was supposed to be seeking

00:24:04 a rocket

00:24:08 system

00:24:10 which would deliver

00:24:12 nuclear warheads

00:24:14 and which would generally

00:24:16 be intercontinental

00:24:18 it was a very large

00:24:20 range rocket system

00:24:22 and we

00:24:24 we were

00:24:26 Slater

00:24:28 and

00:24:30 I'll take a moment

00:24:32 I was asked

00:24:34 to form under the auspices

00:24:36 of the National Academy

00:24:38 a little task force which would study

00:24:40 how you could

00:24:42 get these

00:24:44 cones to preserve

00:24:46 the weaponry and permit

00:24:48 what was then a very

00:24:50 baffling

00:24:52 challenge of

00:24:54 leaving the atmosphere and coming back into the atmosphere

00:24:56 it was the intercontinental part you see

00:24:58 people could handle these things more or less in the atmosphere

00:25:00 not very well but it was

00:25:02 more familiar

00:25:04 but this thing had to go out into space and then come back

00:25:06 so Thurnauer

00:25:08 was the other fellow's name

00:25:10 Slater was the inventor of

00:25:12 fiberglass. Obviously the

00:25:14 intonation was to get a very

00:25:16 refractory ceramic or

00:25:18 refractory metal. Lockheed which was

00:25:20 one of the early forms of this

00:25:22 which was the Polaris missile

00:25:24 felt that they just had to depend on

00:25:26 metals and they had beryllium

00:25:28 and beryllium alloys which slipped as though they

00:25:30 might work

00:25:32 they were putting models of those

00:25:34 they were terribly difficult to make

00:25:36 you had to spin the beryllium

00:25:38 other people had tried some ceramics

00:25:40 they didn't hold together very well

00:25:42 Thurnauer was very well informed

00:25:44 on this. Well, our little task force

00:25:46 went charging along and we said

00:25:48 in my part of it, well let's do it

00:25:50 with an organic system which

00:25:52 will not remain unseen. The idea

00:25:54 there was you get something that's so

00:25:56 refractory it just doesn't change

00:25:58 when it goes at these very high

00:26:00 velocities out of the atmosphere, back into the atmosphere

00:26:02 I said, nuts to that

00:26:04 let's get something that changes

00:26:06 but that still provides the

00:26:08 necessary protection for the

00:26:10 complicated nuclear

00:26:12 warhead. And so

00:26:14 we proposed and again

00:26:16 this was all documented in fairly

00:26:18 detailed form

00:26:20 the ablative nose cone

00:26:22 and GE had

00:26:24 a contract for

00:26:26 at that point, Valley Forge

00:26:28 for assembling the

00:26:30 weapons and making those cones

00:26:32 into a unit

00:26:34 and some other people were also involved

00:26:36 Lockheed as well as I've mentioned

00:26:38 and so it was very exciting when

00:26:40 you've probably seen the picture

00:26:42 we took into Eisenhower's office

00:26:44 a nose cone which

00:26:46 was made of these ablating

00:26:48 polymers that

00:26:50 survived. It was the first one that was

00:26:52 sent down to the South Atlantic

00:26:54 island out there and

00:26:56 it

00:26:58 introduced the whole era of

00:27:00 ablative shields. Now

00:27:02 in a year or two these were put onto

00:27:04 space

00:27:06 vehicles and although

00:27:08 I worked for other reasons

00:27:10 which you may bring up during the day

00:27:12 for assignments

00:27:14 for public service

00:27:16 in the

00:27:18 earliest space

00:27:20 imagery systems

00:27:22 and one of the first things

00:27:24 we did there of course was try to recover

00:27:26 the film from the space imagery

00:27:28 which was all very secret at the time

00:27:30 and these things

00:27:32 these would burn up quicker than anything

00:27:34 else you see when you

00:27:36 got back but sure enough these ablative nose cones

00:27:38 protected those so they were all

00:27:40 protected that way.

00:27:42 Then of course the first

00:27:44 man who then went

00:27:46 out in the Mercury

00:27:48 system which we were

00:27:50 involved in for guidance and the like

00:27:52 also used the ablative nose cone

00:27:54 and the thing

00:27:56 he got there was really very interesting

00:27:58 and I don't know if you know this but it might be

00:28:00 worth commenting that the

00:28:02 chemical conversion that Winslow and I

00:28:04 pursued of course involves

00:28:06 the dehydrogenation

00:28:08 by heat

00:28:10 but also by oxygen

00:28:12 that we

00:28:14 purposely injected

00:28:16 but when you had these nose cones

00:28:18 and heat shields the

00:28:20 atmosphere injected it

00:28:22 and you might say well why didn't it just burn up?

00:28:24 Well it not only didn't burn up

00:28:26 but it

00:28:28 preserved its shape and structure

00:28:30 with great integrity

00:28:32 because apparently the

00:28:34 resonance energy

00:28:36 of the double

00:28:38 bond of the pi electrons which were

00:28:40 spread through the whole

00:28:42 structure very rapidly as this conversion

00:28:44 occurred stabilized the whole

00:28:46 solid. It became very

00:28:48 stable. Well that's interesting

00:28:50 so it was a system

00:28:52 that the hotter things got

00:28:54 the more they oxidized the stronger it got.

00:28:56 The stronger they got and of course

00:28:58 the main human interest

00:29:00 test of this was as the

00:29:02 re-entry vehicles with human contents

00:29:04 became more

00:29:06 long range and more difficult

00:29:08 and the most exciting moment of that

00:29:10 for us was the return

00:29:12 of the first moon capsule

00:29:14 the first moon vehicle because

00:29:16 that as you remember the

00:29:18 soviets and others named it

00:29:20 the second cosmic

00:29:22 velocity. Well it's true

00:29:24 that the velocity of that

00:29:26 vehicle coming back into the atmosphere

00:29:28 was many times that

00:29:30 we had been able to test before

00:29:32 and survive. I mean

00:29:34 we tested the ones from earth orbit and they weren't alright

00:29:36 so we wondered whether this one was

00:29:38 going to show the effect you were saying in a satisfactory

00:29:40 way and I can see it

00:29:42 to this day. It was very exciting

00:29:44 because we saw the

00:29:46 video

00:29:48 record trail

00:29:50 beginning over Australia

00:29:52 in that region and

00:29:54 of course it shows a lot

00:29:56 of luminescence. I mean partly the

00:29:58 burning or the oxidation

00:30:00 that started and partly the

00:30:02 excitation of the atmosphere due to the

00:30:04 velocity. So this great trail

00:30:06 started there you see and we thought

00:30:08 is the thing going to just get hotter and hotter

00:30:10 and hotter and go off. But this stabilization

00:30:12 this

00:30:14 absorption of

00:30:16 very large amounts of total energy

00:30:18 by electronic excitation

00:30:20 in the solid

00:30:22 worked. And that

00:30:24 all started from trying to improve on Edison's

00:30:26 microphone. Well that's what we got going

00:30:28 That's a very

00:30:30 intriguing story. Well that was

00:30:32 the report of that NRC panel

00:30:34 on nose cones and re-entry

00:30:36 vehicles was 1955

00:30:38 which was the year you became vice president

00:30:40 for research at Bell Labs

00:30:42 and for the next

00:30:44 I guess it was 18 years until 1973

00:30:46 you were in that position and they were

00:30:48 I'd just like to review

00:30:50 some of the remarkable innovations that came out

00:30:52 of Bell Labs then. The solar cell

00:30:54 had been introduced in 1954

00:30:56 just before you took over as vice president

00:30:58 The laser in

00:31:00 1958. Digital switching

00:31:02 in 1960. A whole host

00:31:04 of other innovations in telephone

00:31:06 transmission. Also continued

00:31:08 developments in transistors and

00:31:10 semiconductor design. The Telstar

00:31:12 satellite in 1962

00:31:14 and in the early 50's

00:31:16 developments with Unix and then later on

00:31:18 other computer languages. Those are just

00:31:20 some of the things that

00:31:22 came out then. And as I

00:31:24 think we

00:31:26 commented on in the last conversation

00:31:28 we had, Bell Labs was able

00:31:30 to create and sustain a remarkable climate

00:31:32 for innovation. There are few organizations

00:31:34 that have that sort of record

00:31:36 and I wonder if you could just talk

00:31:38 a little bit more about the

00:31:40 challenges of managing an organization

00:31:42 that was creating these kinds

00:31:44 of dramatic developments

00:31:46 that had implications not just in the Bell system

00:31:48 but throughout the world of science

00:31:50 and technology. Well it

00:31:52 was an exciting and

00:31:54 somewhat challenging period because

00:31:56 as we said

00:31:58 the

00:32:00 whole change of

00:32:02 human

00:32:04 social national

00:32:06 interests in

00:32:08 information handling and communications

00:32:10 was setting in. And what we had

00:32:12 got into

00:32:14 in this earlier period was

00:32:16 that physical science and

00:32:18 information and communication science

00:32:20 were converging. And

00:32:22 our challenge was to blend them, to

00:32:24 make them come together. Now

00:32:26 up to that time and the way that you've just been bringing out

00:32:28 in the discussion, we've had

00:32:30 plenty of cases where physical science helped

00:32:32 support communication science.

00:32:34 We didn't have a great deal of sophistication

00:32:36 in communication science

00:32:38 in those years. We had a lot of art.

00:32:40 People knew how

00:32:42 to make telephones a la Edison.

00:32:44 They knew how to send signals

00:32:46 a la

00:32:48 the early

00:32:50 Alexander Graham Bell

00:32:52 and later

00:32:54 engineering analysts

00:32:56 and so on. But a coherent

00:32:58 theory, this is not so far

00:33:00 from your point about theoretical

00:33:02 physical science, had been lacking.

00:33:04 The same year of the

00:33:06 discovery of the transistor, Shannon

00:33:08 in the mathematics department

00:33:10 published his theory of communications

00:33:12 and information, which said

00:33:14 that if you can do a digital

00:33:16 encoding, well in the first place it said

00:33:18 you can do a digital encoding of anything, of any

00:33:20 knowledge at any time. And it said

00:33:22 secondly, that if you did, you would have

00:33:24 all the information represented.

00:33:26 And what struck us in

00:33:28 research was

00:33:30 that nature

00:33:32 was smiling about this because

00:33:34 the physical structures

00:33:36 we had were all

00:33:38 digitally

00:33:40 potentials.

00:33:42 The digital part, as you know,

00:33:44 is on and off, plus or minus

00:33:46 by state. And

00:33:48 all these crystals and

00:33:50 phenomena

00:33:52 of plus and minus charges, north

00:33:54 and south poles, were that

00:33:56 way.

00:33:58 So we said,

00:34:00 why shouldn't we try to

00:34:02 enhance this convergence and

00:34:04 be able to

00:34:06 encode any kind

00:34:08 of information, images, data.

00:34:10 Shannon had dealt with all that.

00:34:12 And at the same time

00:34:14 communicated

00:34:16 very fast, very cheaply.

00:34:18 We're right now in 1987

00:34:20 in the big peak of that.

00:34:22 I don't think we're on the

00:34:24 downswing by any means, but

00:34:26 that's exactly what our

00:34:28 strategy and objective in 1955 was.

00:34:30 You have here some

00:34:32 examples of some of the objects

00:34:34 that were worked on during those years.

00:34:36 You might tell us a little bit about

00:34:38 the chips that are in front of us and how that

00:34:40 exemplifies the same sort of...

00:34:42 Yes. The miniaturization of

00:34:44 electronics

00:34:46 had always been challenging.

00:34:48 And along this line

00:34:50 that we were commenting on,

00:34:52 where we wanted to bring together the

00:34:54 information science, the communication

00:34:56 science, the digital

00:34:58 processing and coding of knowledge

00:35:00 with the

00:35:02 physical science and engineering

00:35:04 of electronics, modern

00:35:06 solid state work. There,

00:35:08 at Convergence, we

00:35:10 found films,

00:35:12 surface films, were very important.

00:35:14 And the

00:35:16 really early work was

00:35:18 before

00:35:20 Kilby's work at TI

00:35:22 and a couple of others.

00:35:24 Included, incidentally, some work by Tannenbaum,

00:35:26 who was a chemist, a chemist metallurgist

00:35:28 who's now a vice chairman of the

00:35:30 corporation, in which

00:35:32 we found you could

00:35:34 make circuits

00:35:36 on the surface of single crystals

00:35:38 of silicon and

00:35:40 other semiconductors.

00:35:42 Now, that was then

00:35:44 expanded into

00:35:46 integrated circuitry, as we now call it, with this

00:35:50 effect of Frosch and Derrick

00:35:52 that you could

00:35:54 control the diffusion of the

00:35:56 dopants of the actual phosphorus,

00:35:58 arsenic and other things which

00:36:00 control the properties of the whole circuit.

00:36:02 You control that chemically

00:36:04 by the

00:36:06 kind of silicon oxide film

00:36:08 you had on the surface. And it resulted then

00:36:10 in whole families of

00:36:12 new miniature

00:36:14 circuitry, which, of course, nowadays

00:36:16 worldwide

00:36:18 household term of

00:36:20 chip. But these were

00:36:22 the initial chips. And

00:36:24 we

00:36:26 found that we could pretty well revolutionize

00:36:28 the

00:36:30 attitudes, the thinking

00:36:32 of the very distinguished

00:36:34 groups of design

00:36:36 and circuit

00:36:38 engineers, research engineers

00:36:40 and research

00:36:42 scientists by

00:36:44 the notion that

00:36:46 these chips would produce

00:36:48 very high speed, very simple,

00:36:50 very low power

00:36:52 pulsing,

00:36:54 but also not just

00:36:56 the digital part,

00:36:58 also analog, and analog

00:37:00 to digital converters.

00:37:02 When would these chips have been made?

00:37:04 Do you recall

00:37:06 about what year? Those were made in the

00:37:08 late 70s,

00:37:10 probably 78,

00:37:12 77.

00:37:14 They represent

00:37:16 families of devices

00:37:18 which you could build

00:37:20 whole

00:37:22 communications and information processing

00:37:24 systems. You could build super

00:37:26 computers

00:37:28 which are much more sophisticated

00:37:30 than the ordinary digital

00:37:32 computer,

00:37:34 which did various

00:37:36 special memory,

00:37:38 special logic

00:37:40 functions.

00:37:42 A

00:37:44 direction

00:37:46 further along

00:37:48 around this time was

00:37:50 for microcomputers and

00:37:52 microprocessors.

00:37:54 These brought the costs down again

00:37:56 by a couple of orders of magnitude.

00:37:58 These

00:38:00 production of these devices

00:38:02 about early 79,

00:38:04 and of course they

00:38:06 applied immediately to

00:38:08 telephone

00:38:10 systems.

00:38:12 Among other things, the electronics

00:38:14 component, now that

00:38:16 was the first time, that comes right back

00:38:18 to what we were doing with the

00:38:20 microphones. We were trying to

00:38:22 make the telephone

00:38:24 that everybody uses

00:38:26 casually as a telephone

00:38:28 a truly electronic

00:38:30 device without much power

00:38:32 consumption, without all

00:38:34 the

00:38:36 controlled elements that

00:38:38 a hybrid structure

00:38:40 has.

00:38:42 That has been done.

00:38:44 This

00:38:46 microcomputer

00:38:48 is a major part of it.

00:38:50 The other part of it that translates your voice

00:38:52 into

00:38:54 the currents

00:38:56 and circuit uses

00:38:58 goes from acoustics

00:39:00 to electronics.

00:39:02 Eventually it got a tremendous lift from another

00:39:04 polymer chemistry

00:39:06 application

00:39:08 which was done largely by

00:39:10 Dr. West in our research

00:39:12 area in which

00:39:14 the

00:39:16 electrons are deposited

00:39:18 according to an old

00:39:20 method of electrep

00:39:22 formation into

00:39:24 first we

00:39:26 used polyester films

00:39:28 now polyfluoride

00:39:30 films, polytetrafluoroethylene

00:39:32 and its derivatives

00:39:34 and

00:39:36 they produce an electrep

00:39:38 where

00:39:40 these things, these electrons

00:39:42 are bombarded in

00:39:44 so that you have a

00:39:46 modest energy

00:39:48 particle

00:39:50 bombardment of the polymer

00:39:52 film and then

00:39:54 you get a very

00:39:56 efficient, this forms an electrep diaphragm

00:39:58 you then assemble it with

00:40:00 very careful acoustic and

00:40:02 electronic controls into

00:40:04 a unit like this

00:40:06 which is a complete unit

00:40:08 in your telephone which now

00:40:10 provides the

00:40:12 translation

00:40:14 of sound into

00:40:16 electricity for

00:40:18 all the advanced telephones

00:40:20 in the country.

00:40:22 That points again to how

00:40:24 truly complicated

00:40:26 and interconnected the phone system is.

00:40:28 It's a device everyone takes

00:40:30 for granted but in fact it is

00:40:32 a complicated electronic mechanism.

00:40:34 Yes, you see

00:40:36 this system works at electronic

00:40:38 energies and electronic speeds

00:40:40 in concert with this system which is the

00:40:42 microcomputer which

00:40:44 is in turn

00:40:46 the very latest chip

00:40:48 assembly.

00:40:50 So, just what you say

00:40:52 in order to get

00:40:54 the telephone

00:40:56 work

00:40:58 in the casual way that everybody

00:41:00 uses it, you have to be right on

00:41:02 the forefront of

00:41:04 science and

00:41:06 engineering. There's been a lot of

00:41:08 talk in the last five or ten years about

00:41:10 interactions between industry and the universities

00:41:12 and 20 years earlier

00:41:14 you were doing that systematically.

00:41:16 Yes, we were very much

00:41:18 involved in that.

00:41:20 We had exchanges and part of this recruiting

00:41:22 scheme was that the

00:41:24 professors could come here

00:41:26 and they did often for months

00:41:28 and sometimes for a year or so

00:41:30 and our people would go

00:41:32 there.

00:41:34 Selected, highly selected, but nevertheless

00:41:36 you get a few people distributed like that.

00:41:38 They're very well known.

00:41:40 Where were some of the key academic

00:41:42 centers?

00:41:44 Well, the key ones are essentially what you'd

00:41:46 expect. They were MIT

00:41:48 and Caltech

00:41:50 and Stanford and Illinois

00:41:52 and Minnesota.

00:41:56 Not as much numbers

00:41:58 at Chicago, Princeton,

00:42:00 Yale.

00:42:04 I've left out important ones

00:42:06 but those are samples.

00:42:08 They were all

00:42:10 pretty

00:42:12 importantly

00:42:16 mutual characteristics. Namely,

00:42:18 they were universities that had

00:42:20 research traditions.

00:42:22 You didn't find

00:42:24 even some very good engineering

00:42:26 schools that taught

00:42:28 lots of engineers but didn't have research

00:42:30 traditions. We didn't find them

00:42:32 participating. Of course, another

00:42:34 aspect of things was facilities

00:42:36 development. Once you recruit

00:42:38 the right people, you have to have the kinds of facilities

00:42:40 they need to keep them excited about the work

00:42:42 and that must have

00:42:44 required major investments and

00:42:46 a lot of your time and

00:42:48 thought and planning for it.

00:42:50 I used to have to have

00:42:52 vigorous, in some cases even violent,

00:42:54 tutorial sessions with our

00:42:56 owners about this.

00:42:58 I remember very interesting sessions

00:43:00 with AT&T

00:43:02 and the Western

00:43:04 in which we would try to explain

00:43:06 why we had the highest

00:43:08 indirect costs and the highest

00:43:10 capital

00:43:12 investment per

00:43:14 individual

00:43:16 scientist and engineer

00:43:18 of all of industry.

00:43:20 We were many times out of university.

00:43:22 The reason was because we were completely

00:43:24 committed to getting those facilities

00:43:26 quickly and as much as they wanted.

00:43:28 Even our own management

00:43:30 was a little skeptical as before

00:43:32 in the early part

00:43:34 of my responsibility.

00:43:36 Dr. Buckley said, well, everybody has

00:43:38 a microscope and that's too many.

00:43:40 We said,

00:43:42 that's probably too many because microscopes aren't

00:43:44 the right thing to have.

00:43:46 We're going to get so that there can be as many

00:43:48 mass spectrometers and

00:43:50 high vacuum

00:43:52 stations and

00:43:54 pretty soon computers

00:43:56 and all kinds of

00:43:58 spectrometers for

00:44:00 optical

00:44:02 control and microwave

00:44:04 spectrometers as we need.

00:44:06 We've been awfully lucky

00:44:08 to get those, but we did make that

00:44:10 a central element

00:44:12 in our strategy.

00:44:14 Had the telephone system changed

00:44:16 between 1950 and 1980?

00:44:18 Sure.

00:44:20 Cost is one way of looking at it.

00:44:22 It was

00:44:24 an order of magnitude less

00:44:26 that increase in the consumer price index.

00:44:28 Many of the

00:44:30 costs were

00:44:32 much reduced

00:44:34 going down

00:44:36 when the cost of everything else was going up.

00:44:38 That was one

00:44:40 factor

00:44:42 and a very major one.

00:44:44 Other things were

00:44:46 things like the

00:44:48 numbers of

00:44:50 personnel required to operate

00:44:52 the system

00:44:54 per telephone.

00:44:56 Those

00:44:58 went down

00:45:00 exponentially,

00:45:02 several orders of magnitude.

00:45:04 The

00:45:06 volume of traffic through the system,

00:45:08 I'll show you

00:45:10 figures on this,

00:45:12 were

00:45:14 rising exponentially

00:45:16 in that period, went up

00:45:18 something like

00:45:20 100 fold,

00:45:22 maybe a little more than that.

00:45:24 So you had

00:45:26 tremendous

00:45:28 variation, tremendous change

00:45:30 in the efficiency,

00:45:32 the economy, the reliability,

00:45:34 the capacity

00:45:36 of telecommunications in that period.

00:45:38 I think everybody

00:45:40 as the economists and the

00:45:42 engineers and the

00:45:44 management people

00:45:46 say that there is no other

00:45:48 activity in our society

00:45:50 that has changed to that

00:45:52 degree as transportation.

00:45:54 Well, look at it this way.

00:45:56 In that

00:45:58 period,

00:46:00 at the beginning of that period, you could

00:46:02 drive an airplane

00:46:04 at that time would go

00:46:06 150, 200 miles an hour.

00:46:08 You could drive

00:46:10 comfortably, say,

00:46:12 60 miles an hour.

00:46:14 Your rockets, which came in

00:46:16 perhaps

00:46:18 toward the late 50s,

00:46:20 would go 4,000

00:46:22 miles an hour. That was the fastest anybody

00:46:24 had ever gone, and still is.

00:46:26 Now the handling of these pulses

00:46:28 and the information

00:46:30 that was encoded there

00:46:32 went from conveniently

00:46:34 in the period you're mentioning,

00:46:36 which was already pretty high,

00:46:38 about 10 to the 6th

00:46:40 times a second

00:46:42 to, when we

00:46:44 finished our term,

00:46:46 we did it experimentally,

00:46:48 10 to the 15th times a second,

00:46:50 but we were doing

00:46:52 fairly

00:46:54 practical

00:46:56 preprocessing at 10 to the 6th

00:46:58 times a second,

00:47:00 and that's getting into you—I'm sorry, not 10 to the 6th,

00:47:02 10 to the 12th times a second, which is 10 to the 6th

00:47:04 greater

00:47:06 than we had

00:47:08 started with.

00:47:10 So you've got, say,

00:47:12 transportation, moving people,

00:47:14 perhaps a factor

00:47:16 of, well,

00:47:18 comfortably

00:47:20 for

00:47:22 supersonic planes,

00:47:24 a factor of 10, but

00:47:26 we'll say a factor of

00:47:28 50

00:47:30 for the total

00:47:32 capability, and that's

00:47:34 pretty good. In the

00:47:36 stuff we're talking about here, you have a factor of

00:47:38 a million. How would you characterize the

00:47:40 major changes in chemistry

00:47:42 and material science research since

00:47:44 you first began doing research in the

00:47:46 1930s and

00:47:48 today? Yeah, that's a very intriguing

00:47:50 issue. I think

00:47:52 quantitation is probably the

00:47:54 answer. We've been able to

00:47:56 quantitate

00:47:58 almost everything at levels that we

00:48:00 didn't imagine

00:48:02 earlier on. Now, a simple

00:48:04 interpretation of that might be, well,

00:48:06 it's because of computers. Well, computers are

00:48:08 very, very necessary, but the

00:48:10 quantitation and quantification has gone much

00:48:12 further than that. Analytic

00:48:14 work, use of

00:48:16 mathematical formulation,

00:48:18 in many cases crude,

00:48:20 but nevertheless very helpful,

00:48:22 has penetrated

00:48:24 almost everywhere. Instrumentation

00:48:26 is a form of

00:48:28 quantification, so

00:48:30 if you're looking for something,

00:48:32 I would say that you could

00:48:34 concentrate on the answer. I'd say

00:48:36 that's where it is. Now,

00:48:38 obviously, a lot of

00:48:40 help in other fields, the

00:48:42 bibliography, the ability to

00:48:44 consult other people's work

00:48:46 and have a

00:48:48 coherence, have the kind of thing

00:48:50 American Chemical Society has done so well

00:48:52 of providing their

00:48:54 literature base, is terribly

00:48:56 important. We couldn't have done anything like

00:48:58 the range of interdisciplinary work

00:49:00 and new

00:49:02 findings we have without that.

00:49:04 And there

00:49:06 are many other obvious,

00:49:08 more obvious elements, such as

00:49:10 improvements

00:49:12 in teaching, improvements in

00:49:14 preparation, people which

00:49:16 are not so good

00:49:18 now, but in terms of basic

00:49:20 skills, it's good in terms of research

00:49:22 people, but it took a great

00:49:24 leap forward

00:49:26 in terms of

00:49:28 engaging the

00:49:30 intellects of

00:49:32 our young people

00:49:34 in this period we're talking about.

00:49:36 And that brings me to

00:49:38 a couple of questions that

00:49:40 I think will interest many people who

00:49:42 have a chance to

00:49:44 view this interview, and that is

00:49:46 what

00:49:48 to try and get students

00:49:50 interested in science again, to get

00:49:52 more students, the brightest students interested

00:49:54 in science, what would be the kind of advice

00:49:56 that you would give to youngsters who are

00:49:58 contemplating going into science and engineering now?

00:50:00 Well, I think they'll realize how

00:50:02 valuable it is for

00:50:04 their

00:50:06 nation on one hand, and how satisfying it is

00:50:08 for their personal

00:50:10 aspirations on the other.

00:50:12 That is

00:50:14 a broad answer that

00:50:16 involves a kind of convergence

00:50:18 in itself. We're talking about

00:50:20 useful forces of

00:50:22 behavior and society converging.

00:50:24 Well, there's one that I think ought to be worked on

00:50:26 a lot harder. You see, what we're

00:50:28 worried about now is for personal fulfillment

00:50:30 that people see a lot of materialism,

00:50:32 they see a lot of

00:50:34 Wall Street success, they see a lot

00:50:36 of asset management

00:50:38 succeeding in a lot of

00:50:40 personal satisfactions.

00:50:42 They don't see its relation,

00:50:44 or its non-relation actually,

00:50:46 to national progress,

00:50:48 and they also don't really have

00:50:50 an exercise

00:50:52 in the enormous personal

00:50:54 satisfaction and fulfillment

00:50:56 that the

00:50:58 intelligence

00:51:00 and personal

00:51:02 achievement in learning

00:51:04 and using that learning can give.

00:51:06 They see what money can do,

00:51:08 but they don't see what learning can do.

00:51:10 And that's why we, for example, in our

00:51:12 state center, our new research

00:51:14 and development

00:51:16 institute,

00:51:18 or center in Liberty

00:51:20 Park, which we are

00:51:22 well along with getting going,

00:51:24 we convinced them

00:51:26 that the sponsors and the people interested

00:51:28 in that, that they should make that an educational

00:51:30 venture as much

00:51:32 as a museum. They're going to start out in a museum.

00:51:34 Well, we said,

00:51:36 what you ought to do is to show the

00:51:38 young generation and

00:51:40 the teachers of the young generation

00:51:42 the enormous personal

00:51:44 rewards

00:51:46 of learning and

00:51:48 of creating and of understanding.

00:51:50 And so

00:51:52 I think that's where the

00:51:54 advice has to come now.

00:51:56 Most of the young

00:51:58 students don't know what we're talking about.

00:52:00 So it's hard to say

00:52:02 just where you should start.

00:52:04 Our foundation, for example, is supporting

00:52:06 in its modest way

00:52:08 more of the

00:52:10 electricity

00:52:12 course, electric company course,

00:52:14 the

00:52:16 something one, two, three course,

00:52:18 the very simple

00:52:20 ways of exciting

00:52:22 the students' interests.

00:52:24 And we think it should be at a very early

00:52:26 age. So

00:52:28 we would urge them, and the question

00:52:30 you asked, how to get them started

00:52:32 to get themselves exposed

00:52:34 and we urge their parents

00:52:36 to get them exposed very early.

00:52:38 Kids are

00:52:40 idealistic enough at that stage to want to learn

00:52:42 and want to know

00:52:44 they can even lose it very fast.

00:52:46 Well, we've covered an awful lot of

00:52:48 ground and a lot of very interesting ground today.

00:52:50 I want to thank you again for your time

00:52:52 and for

00:52:54 a very fascinating conversation.

00:52:56 Pleasure to work with you, Jeff.

00:52:58 A lot of things

00:53:00 we said about how

00:53:02 science and engineering are going to serve

00:53:04 our society and our freedom,

00:53:06 maintain our freedoms are coming out of the

00:53:08 sort of record that you folks are making.

00:53:12 We think it's important.