by Brian Dear
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There was another kind of reaction to Sputnik, which went largely unnoticed due to the fear-mongering cacophony fueled by the media and political establishment. Another perspective on Sputnik existed, one that did not involve politicians or the media. In this alternate view, the Sputnik event was met with curiosity, excitement, and fascination. This was the scientific reaction.
For example, B. F. Skinner’s reaction to Sputnik was that of an intrigued, if not jubilant, scientist. In his diary Skinner expressed a reaction free of politics, free of media hype, and nerdy to its core: he was excited that somebody had proven Newton’s theory of celestial mechanics by lobbing a big ball into orbit, and guess what, it worked. Likewise, engineers and scientists around the world acknowledged that the launch was a historical, technical milestone. What’s more, it proved if you threw an object into the emptiness of space and had it send out radio signals, those signals could reach anyone on the ground.
It just so happened that 1957 had been a booming year for science. The year marked the beginning of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), involving sixty-seven countries including the U.S. and Soviet Union, undertaking scientific experiments, measurements, and expeditions all over the world. In fact the project was so major, the “year” of the IGY, which had officially started in July 1957, went on for eighteen months, ending on the last day of 1958. Within the IGY’s mission was also a goal, stated as early as 1955 by both the U.S. and the Soviets, to launch small orbital satellites during the IGY project time frame. So things like Sputnik were known to be coming. It was expected within the scientific community that rockets would soon launch little “moons” that would reach orbit and tumble across the heavens overhead. Many discoveries were made during the IGY, including the Van Allen radiation belts, the undersea mountain ranges in the Atlantic and Pacific (bolstering the theory of plate tectonics), and numerous discoveries and advances in the Antarctic region. The Sputnik launch fueled concerns, of course, about space being a new “platform” for missiles and bombs. But as with any technology there are good uses and bad uses. Scientists believed there would be good uses for space. And it was a new frontier, begging to be explored.
This was the other side of the Sputnik coin: possibilities now opening up with space, with implications both scientific and technological. A Space Age that was no longer science fiction but here. Now. Perhaps a few months sooner than expected, but here and now nevertheless. It was expedient for the media and the politicians to drum up fear as a result of the launch. America has witnessed such reactions and manipulations many times since. That very fear, uncertainty, and doubt was what motivated legislators and the president to enact laws that formed NASA, ARPA, and the NDEA and justified pouring millions of dollars into institutions, organizations, and businesses around the country. But money alone was not going to make things happen. There was more to it. For science and technology to advance, there needed to be a catalyst. Sputnik became the convenient catalyst.
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How Sputnik, ARPA, NASA, and the NDEA would change priorities at academic institutions can be seen in the story of the Control Systems Laboratory at the University of Illinois.
The story starts back during World War II. Universities around the country lost top faculty to the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. The University of Illinois was not immune to the “brain drain,” losing a number of its top scientists and engineers to the war effort. Many had moved to MIT to secretly work on radar at that university’s storied Radiation Lab, but when the war ended, those Illinois brains didn’t return home.
“Wheeler Loomis was head of the physics department at that time,” recalls Illinois physicist Richard M. Brown. “He had been in charge of recruitment for the MIT Radiation Lab during World War II, and had succeeded in raiding a number of the physics departments of their very good people to come to that laboratory for work on radar and other things, and saw what it did to those departments including his own and had vowed that if another war started of this kind, he would start a laboratory of similar form here at Illinois in Urbana. So when the Korean War started, he proceeded immediately to do that.”
So Illinois created CSL, to undertake new projects including air defense, radar, and missile guidance, all augmented through the use of brand-new digital computers. One notable recruit in 1951 was the physicist and electronics engineer John Bardeen, who along with Walter Brattain had invented the point transistor at Bell Labs in 1947 (and, together with William Shockley, would share the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics). In short order, CSL would claim roughly a third of the UI physics faculty.
Loomis hired Frederick Seitz to head up the lab, and Jack Desmond to be its business manager. Seitz, who resembled President Eisenhower, was a renowned physicist with degrees from Stanford and Princeton. In 1940 he wrote the book on solid-state physics, and during World War II had applied his expertise and interest in metallurgy to ballistics and how to penetrate armor. He also worked on radar and was a member of the Manhattan Project. He was heading an atomic energy program at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee when Loomis invited him to join and direct CSL.
CSL was what was called a “locked lab.” The engineers and scientists put their documents in locked safes at the end of the day, and every month the safes’ combinations were changed. Not only was nothing allowed to leave the lab without permission, but the academics working in the lab could neither discuss what they were working on nor share their experimental results. In the “publish or perish” world of academia, the inability of professors to publish or even talk about what they were doing could hurt their academic career, but Wheeler Loomis had taken that into consideration, relaxing academic requirements for people who took a chance on their career by joining the lab.
Funding for the lab came from Army, Navy, and Air Force grants. The lab’s cozy arrangement with the military was such that it received over $1 million of funding each year. The lab was then turned loose to work on projects it thought were important to the Defense Department. At the end of the year the results were reviewed by a technical advisory council, and depending on how the review went, the lab got the same, more, or less money for the subsequent year.
In 1957, Loomis retired and Frederick Seitz was picked to take over his position. That left CSL looking for a new director. While Loomis conducted a search, he also would run the lab until they found someone new. That someone was Daniel Alpert, another respected physicist with global stature. Loomis offered Alpert a deal whereby he would be given a half-time professorship in the physics department, plus he would start as CSL’s new technical director. If all went well, in a year or two he’d assume full directorship of the lab.
Then, right out of the blue, Sputnik happened.
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Daniel Alpert was born on April 10, 1917, in Hartford, Connecticut, to parents who originated from Russia and Lithuania. Originally a blacksmith, his father became a tinsmith once he arrived in the United States. His father’s tin business did well, the family prospered, and he retired around 1927. “I remember vividly,” Alpert recalls, “his taking me around when I was about ten and saying, ‘Daniel, this apartment building that I just bought is going to send you to Yale.’ ” It no doubt would have, but the stock market crashed and the Great Depression hit. His father lost most of his property. The life the Alperts had known up to that point suddenly changed. The Depression forced the family to move to a farm, where Daniel would spend the rest of his childhood. He graduated from high school as class valedictorian, still dreaming of attending Yale, but his parents could not afford it, so he went to the less expensive Trinity College in Hartford. At Trinity he discovered a love and a talent for physics. He did well and wound up pursuing a graduate degree at Stanford University, falling in love with the Palo Alto, California, area in the process. He finished the oral examinations for his PhD degree in physics on Saturday, December 6, 1941. The next morning, Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States entered World War II.
Alpert took a postdoctoral fellowship at Westinghouse Research Lab in Pittsburgh. In 1942 he married Natalie Boyle, a landscape architect. In October 1945, they read B. F. Skinner’s article in Ladies’ Home Journal about the Air Crib for babies. Inspired by the article, Alpert designed and built his own Air Crib, and over the next few years the Alperts raised their two infant daughters in homemade boxes based on Skinner’s designs.
During World War II, Alpert worked on a number of projects to help in the war effort, including airborne radar components and gas switching devices. He also worked with Ernest Lawrence on the isotope separation of uranium for the Manhattan Project. For a while he worked out of the Lawrence Livermore Lab near the University of California in Berkeley. He loved California and tried to get a job there so he could stay. “I’d done my graduate student days there,” he recalls. “I loved the area, it was beautiful at that time.” From his office in the Radiation Lab at the top of Berkeley, he had a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge in the far distance across the San Francisco Bay. “I wanted to stay. I looked around to see who’s there. Lockheed offered me a job at 55 cents an hour, not as a physicist but as an engineer. Fifty-five cents an hour! I was doing better at Westinghouse.”
So he stayed at Westinghouse and in 1946 began a fruitful decade of basic research at Westinghouse’s Pittsburgh lab, where, Alpert says, “I would do whatever the hell I wanted.” He pioneered work in a field that he himself named “Ultra-High Vacuum Physics.” As part of that work he co-invented a device called the Bayard-Alpert gauge, still in use in laboratories to this day. “I became known in the world of physical science, all over the world,” Alpert says. “In 1953, for example, my wife and I took a trip to Europe and I was invited to give lectures at every major industrial lab. Philips, GE, and so on. I went around for a month giving ultra-high-vacuum lectures and where we stood, and the physics that was involved, and wherever I went I got the red-carpet treatment.”
By 1957 he already had been promoted to manage the entire physics department at the Westinghouse lab and learned he was on the short list of candidates for the top role of the lab’s director. He didn’t get the job. “I wasn’t shocked, because at age forty to be the director of a whole laboratory for a company with fifty-one divisions—fifty-one divisions!—it was kind of a big job. My friends at GE and AT&T who were my professional colleagues, they weren’t forty, they were fifty, they were in their fifties before they could aspire to be director of a lab.”
Daniel Alpert (l) and Wheeler Loomis (r), c. 1957 Credit 6
He wasn’t happy, though, about being passed over, and the memory still stung nearly fifty years later. He had been one of three candidates for the prestigious position, a major deal to all three candidates. So major, that, as Alpert bluntly put it, “the other guy my age committed suicide after he wasn’t selected.” Instead of selecting Alpert the powers-that-be at Westinghouse went for the third candidate, Clarence Zener, who had made a name for himself by inventing what became known as the Zener diode. Alpert felt he had more relevant and meaningful experience than Zener. “Including factory experience,” he said. “Including the making of the first devices that we had, of getting into the factory and seeing what the factory was like, that it didn’t take intellectual labor on my part, it was intuitive on my part….They picked a guy who was ten years older than me, better known as a physicist than I was, but who was a disastrous choice as director.” He told his wife, with whom he was raising a family that he’d realized was now growing deep roots in Pittsburgh, that he didn’t think he’d be able to last more than five years under Zener. “Why don’t you wait it out, trust your judgment,” Natalie told him. “I don’t want to be a bitter person,” he told her. “I could easily be a bitter person in five years.” Alpert wasn’t threatened with being fired, but he was unhappy. “I had a very excellent secretary, and I was associate director of the lab. And I was still manager of the physics department in name, although Clarence would come around and tell my people what to do without ever even bringing me into the room. It was just asinine.”
Alpert was right about not lasting five years under Zener. In 1957 he made up his mind to leave Westinghouse. But where to? He turned to science colleagues, distinguished people who sat on the boards of IBM and Texas Instruments and elsewhere. He tried to get another industrial job. “It was the only work I’d ever done. Instead of offering me advice for another job, they offered me jobs in universities with which they were associated.” One job was at Berkeley; one was at Illinois. This would not be the last time he would be faced with having to choose between living in the San Francisco Bay Area and a small Illinois town surrounded by cornfields.
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The Control Systems Laboratory was situated on Mathews Avenue in the second, third, and fourth floors of the old Power House building next to the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory. The University of Illinois had struck a deal with the government that in exchange for designing and building the Ordnance Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (ORDVAC), they’d get funded at the same time for a second computer of their own. This second computer, the Illinois Automatic Computer (ILLIAC), became operational in 1952 and would stay in use for more than ten years. Within two days of the launch of Sputnik, a team of Illinois scientists had used the ILLIAC to calculate the exact orbit of the spacecraft.
Two of the creators of the ILLIAC standing by the machine in 1952 Credit 7
An effort to build a large, vacuum-tube-based digital computer, the ORDVAC, was large in every sense: row after row of vacuum tubes mounted in floor-to-ceiling steel racks, with miles of wiring running throughout. Once completed, ORDVAC was shipped off to the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground.
One unusual aspect of ORDVAC and the ILLIAC is that UI’s electrical engineering department was not leading the project—the physics department was in charge. Says Gene Leichner, an engineer who worked at CSL and later became a professor: “The head of CSL was a physicist. The head of the computer lab was a physicist. And that’s a funny thing. Those guys were running the show, not the double-E’s. The double-E department had said no to this endeavor, when the Army wanted the computer built….They didn’t want to have anything to do with the computer.”
To test out the numerous radar projects, CSL had built a tall steel tower right next to the north wall of the building. On top of the tower they mounted a large radar device with a rotating antenna. After the tower was built, someone got the idea that the space inside the tower’s four legs could be filled up and used as additional office space. So on the second, third, and fourth floors of the Power House building, holes in the exterior brick of the north wall were knocked out, doorways put in, and three small, square offices were added, one on top of the other, inside the legs of the tower. Alpert took the tower’s second-floor office.
Richard M. Brown headed up the new project, named Project Cornfield “to emphasize the remarkable fact that for the Navy, this was being done in the middle of an Illinois cornfield.” The project arose out of the realization that radars were providing a lot of information on the battlefield, but it was difficult to analyze all that data quickly and effectively. Perhaps the newly emerging field of computers could help? The ILLIAC analyzed incoming radar data, taking advantage of the principle of the Doppler effect, the same as when one hears a change in pitch when a train goes by. “If you could measure,” says Brown, “how much the phase differs as a function of the motion of the object being observed, you can tell if it is coming towards you or away from you and at approximately what speed.”
By 1959, Alpert had become full director of the lab. He was asked to put together a plan that laid out the future of the lab. The Korean War was long over and CSL was either going to have to adapt or probably be shut down. So he came up with a plan.
The first thing Alpert recommended was that they declassify CSL, as well as change its name to reflect better integration with the rest of the university. “I came to the conclusion that CSL could not survive i
n the size that it was and on the campus,” he says. While he was all for declassifying the work the lab did, he was happy to continue getting funding from the various branches of the military. But it would take a year to convince the military that declassifying was a good idea. Cleverly, he changed the lab’s name but not its initials, from Control Systems Lab to Coordinated Science Lab. That way, the Army, Navy, and Air Force would still recognize the “CSL” acronym that for years had such a good reputation in Washington circles, and, more important, would keep sending those annual checks.
“I had to look for some projects that would be viewed as valuable to the military but would not be classified,” Alpert says. “And there were several. One was air traffic control. One was the electric vacuum gyro, a new type of gyro for navigation, which was useful for the military but not in a military classified sense.”
He spent a lot of time wandering around the lab learning about everyone’s projects. He was proud of the CSL organization, which had assembled by the late 1950s one of the most formidable groups of brilliant scientific and engineering minds anywhere in the world, including Nobel Prize winner John Bardeen. Even on the campus of the University of Illinois, it was CSL that was recognized as dominating electronics, computing, and physics research and not the respective departments. In addition, since CSL and the Digital Computer Lab had built the ILLIAC, not the electrical engineering department, CSL always had first priority on its use, though it was a resource open to any department of the university.
One CSL physicist with whom Alpert had a long chat was Chalmers Sherwin. Known as a visionary who loved to ask probing, provocative questions, Sherwin began discussing the idea of using computers to help people learn. At one point Sherwin wondered, “There hasn’t been a great invention in the field of education since the book. Why couldn’t computers be applied to education?” By the late 1950s computers were becoming a lot more reliable, even the ILLIAC, which might run without a hitch for as many as forty hours straight—considered a very impressive feat at the time. Computers were going to get a lot faster, more reliable, and cheaper in coming years. Given all of the post-Sputnik cries to improve American education, especially in math and science, and given the flurry of activity by universities and businesses to create teaching machines and programmed instruction books, perhaps computers, which would be much more flexible than a mechanical machine or a printed programmed text, could be harnessed to help in the effort? In time, perhaps even on a mass scale? Perhaps a computer could finally deliver Thorndike’s “miracle of mechanical ingenuity”? For a technically savvy university physicist thinking about this problem in the very late 1950s and early 1960s, there really was only one answer. From a technologist’s perspective, if you believed in the principles of Self-Pacing and Immediate Feedback—and during this era, nearly everyone did—and you wanted to improve education at a mass level, it’s easy to see how computers were going to be the only answer. If you wanted to secure the “high ground” of education’s future in America, you had to figure out how to harness the computer.