The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  16

  Papa Flash

  May 5, 1983

  Steer Roast is on Derby Day every year. Steer Roast is Senior House's answer to homecoming weekend, when alums come back to remember the glory days and undergrads play one last time before exams.

  It was a beautiful warm Saturday afternoon, and the courtyard was jammed with people, a couple of hundred at least, sitting at picnic tables, eating their beef or vegetarian lasagna and corn on the cob. A bluegrass group of former tutors played from the stage at one corner, and the Sport Death banner waved gently in the breeze from Runkle 4. Professor Edgerton, the strobe inventor, played the spoons.

  The Senior House alumni club were free agents in the real world. From the dribs and drabs of the conversations, I gathered that many worked at start-up companies for good pay and stock options. Others did software consulting at home on their personal computers, like Dianne Mitchell, only for higher stakes. Others had low employee badge numbers and stock options at Sun, Lotus, Apple, or start-ups in Silicon Valley.

  They loved Senior House, and after making $100K doing what they loved to do-hack-it seemed that their memories of MIT had become a little fonder, too. I hoped my memories of MIT would be fond some day.

  Mary had come back to Senior House for the reunion and we sat next to each other at one of the picnic tables. She wore her Sport Death T-shirt.

  "Does this bring back memories?" I asked her.

  "Some."

  "Good ones, bad ones?"

  "Some of both."

  A sophomore from Runkle wore a baseball catcher's outfit and carried an umbrella. He stood on the table next to President Gray's garden wall and waved his hands downward to quiet the assembly.

  "And now for the moment you've been waiting for. As you know," he said, "last year I was selected the 'Most Obnoxious Freshman' of Senior House. By the powers of that office bestowed upon me, I hereby pronounce Howard Gelman M.O.F. of '83."

  It was that geeky kid from down the hall, the first one to come to my study break in the fall, the one who predicted the Poisson arrival distribution of the others. Everyone scattered from his table and he ducked under it. The corncobs started flying in his direction. Not curve cobs, just bean cob fast cobs. The mob converged on his table and pelted his unprotected side from point-blank range with all the fervor of generic zealots at a stoning. He speed-crawled out the other end of the picnic table and dashed toward the Grays' garden wall, pelted all the way.

  I wanted to make it stop. Mary didn't say or throw anything. Neither did I. Neither did millions of Germans.

  The kid held up a folding chair to shield his face while the mob hurled the remaining projectiles. The sophomore in the catcher's mask said, "What would you like to say for your acceptance speech?"

  I was amazed that he could respond at all.

  "Well." Zing, pelt. "I ..." Pelt "... can't accept the award without first consulting my lawyer."

  Sunday night I talked to John Dorsey about the cobbing.

  "I feel terrible about what happened to Howard Gelman yesterday," I said.

  "It's a tradition around here," John said. "Usually the kid knows it's coming and has an umbrella or something as a shield. This year it went a little out of control. A psychiatrist friend sug gested that they're throwing corncobs at their own self-images; since many of these kids were outcasts in high school, they take this chance to single out one and stone him or her. It follows from the pagan tradition of human sacrifice."

  "I don't know. I still think it's sick. I can just see that poor guy writing a letter home. 'Dear Mom and Dad, Everyone in the dorm threw corncobs at me yesterday. I'm really popular.' "

  May 22, 1983

  "Uh, hello, may I speak with Doctor Edgerton, please?" I asked his secretary on the phone.

  "Just a minute."

  "Uh, hello, Doctor Edgerton. My name is Pepper White and I'm a student at the Sloan Lab, and I was wondering whether I could make an appointment to talk to you about some pictures. Do you have any time tomorrow?"

  "What's the matter with now?" he answered briskly. "You busy?"

  "Uh, I have a meeting with a ..."

  "You are busy. How about tomorrow at 9:30?"

  "Okay, sir. Thank you."

  May 23

  I went to the fourth floor in Building 4, the hall lined with display cases that I'd admired on my first trip to the library to do my literature survey the year before. I had no idea then that my work might involve rubbing elbows with Doc Edgerton, the institute's legend in his own time. Doc Edgerton could have held his own with Eiffel (as in Tower), or with Edison, or with Bell. I wondered whether I could hold my own with him.

  Doc was born in Nebraska in 1903, the year of the Wright Brothers' first flight. He went to the University of Nebraska and came to MIT as a graduate student in the Electrical Engineering department. Even though he was only MIT squared (M.S., Ph.D.), he'd become an assistant professor in 1932.

  As a by-product of his Ph.D. research, he first developed the strobe photography techniques that were the basis for the company he founded with two of his graduate students, Germeshausen and Grier. E.G.&G., Inc., grew rapidly, making Doc and his partners three of the richest men in Massachusetts.

  But Doc was first and foremost an engineer, not to mention a midwesterner, so he remained friendly and open to whoever wandered into his office.

  The fourth floor hallway, called Strobe Alley, was lined with large, clear photographs, all made possible by Edgerton's strobe invention: a bat frozen in flight, a somersaulting circus acrobat's trajectory, a football being kicked, Mickey Rooney with his arm around Judy Garland, smiling and singing.

  On the other side of the hall cases displayed 1940s-style black metal electronics boxes with "EG&G" metal tags attached. Other cases displayed relics of ancient shipwrecks-ums, metal vases, things you'd see in a museum.

  I went through the door with "Enter" painted on it and walked to a workbench where Doc was talking to a younger man in his mid-seventies. They were both standing up and held things that looked like rolls of wet paper towels in plastic bags. A fourfoot-long yellow torpedolike thing lay on the floor, next to another box with EG&G marked on it. Doc started to put one of the paper towel rolls into the EG&G box; the box was a chart recorder to record data sent from the torpedo, also known as side-scan sonar.

  "What can I do for you, son?" Doc asked.

  "I called yesterday afternoon to make an appointment."

  "Oh yeah. I remember," Doc said. "What's your problem?"

  "I'm working on a rapid compression machine. It's in the Sloan Auto Lab."

  "Yeah, I know the Sloan Lab," he said. "A young guy by the name of Draper did some work on a diesel engine there in the thirties. What are you going to do that he didn't do?"

  "Well, we know more about what we're doing," I said.

  "Suppose I call Stark Draper and tell him you said that?"

  I didn't really want to go one-on-one with the inventor of the inertial guidance system that makes missiles land on target and put men on the moon. "I don't think that will be necessary. I just mean that we can control our operating parameters more precisely in the rapid compression machine than Professor Draper could in a real engine. I'm trying to make some movies of a diesel fuel spray, and I thought you might be able to tell me about some of the techniques available. We're using a high-speed movie camera, a HYCAM, and..."

  "You're all set then. What do you need to talk to me about."

  "I thought you could tell me whether there's anything faster than what we have or whether you have any cameras that go faster."

  "You'll have to talk to my colleague Charlie Miller about that. He's the expert on movies," Doc said. "The fastest that technology goes is about 10,000 frames per second. How many frames you want?"

  "Fifty thousand would be nice."

  "Yep. You're just like everyone else, always trying to take pictures of more and more and you see less and less. Now if you take a single exposure with a fraction-o
f-a-microsecond flash, that might be educational. Then you could see some individual fuel droplets, get some good resolution. We like to take a 4-by-5-inch print and then blow it up to a couple of feet square and then you begin to see what's really going on. Would you like to try that?"

  "Sure," I said. "I'd like to have the best pictures of a diesel fuel spray that've ever been taken."

  "Good. This here's Billy MacRoberts," Doc said, motioning to the younger man in his mid-seventies. "He's my technician. Let's the three of us see what we can find."

  The three of us went to the notebook where they recorded what equipment they'd lent out. It turned out that the equipment they'd lent me had been lent to Ben's research predecessor in 1981. The promised return date was May 25, 1981.

  "It's due in two days," Doc said. "Oh. That's 1981, not 1983. Where is this Vilchis guy anyway?" he asked, referring to the name on the form.

  "He graduated a year ago," I said.

  "Let's go down there and see whether we can find that stuff," Doc said.

  He escorted me to my cell. I showed him the electronics boxes we'd installed, and I explained how we'd shot the first high-speed movies of the fuel spray. Ben wasn't around and Nick couldn't find the stuff, so I asked Doc whether he wanted to see the movie I'd made the week before.

  "Sure. Let's take a look," he said.

  I set up the projector and tried not to be a klutz and mess up the threading of the film. It took longer than when I did it before but it worked the first time.

  "It takes most of the film to reach where we see what's happening. The HYCAM has to reach full speed," I said.

  "Yep. That's the problem with this high-speed photography business. Most of the film goes in the trash," he answered.

  A minute into the film, the fuel jet appeared. It was well-lit, in focus, and clear. "You can imagine my anxiety the first time I ran this thing and waited to see whether I caught the injection," I said.

  "That's a good picture. It must have been a thrill the first time you saw it." He said it with conviction.

  Ben knocked on the door to the screening room and the three of us went downstairs to Ben's cell and found some little pieces of metal and glass that Bill had made. They were in the random junk section of Ben's storage cabinet.

  "Yeah. This is the stuff," Doc said. "Let's take it back to the lab and get Billy to fix it."

  One of the pieces of glass looked like a test tube, with melted plastic at the open end. Doc told a story.

  "A couple of years ago Bill and I had one of these flashes set up, and we found that plastic wire wrapped around it absorbed most of the heat and almost prevented it from breaking. We put twice as much plastic around it, and it didn't break. That's engineering."

  We walked back through Building 13, past the photo of Vannevar Bush ('16) at a drill press, wearing a velour shirt. "Where you from?" Doc asked.

  "North Carolina," I answered. "But my father's from Beverly up on the North Shore."

  "So you're a rebel," he said. "Billy and I are both Yankees, we've been here so long. But I won't hold your being a rebel against you. I've got a lot of family in North Carolina. One of my grandchildren is a CPA in Hickory, another's a doctor in Chapel Hill, another's a lawyer in Raleigh."

  "Too bad none of them are making anything of themselves," I said lightly but received a cold look in return. "Just kidding."

  By now we were back at Strobe Alley, and on the wall there was a picture of something that looked like a slowly melting golfball on top of a metal frame.

  "Is that what I think it is?" I asked Doc.

  "Yep," he answered. "That's a small atom bomb they were trying to get to work back in the mid-forties. We had to take that one with a rotating shutter and a magnetic polarizer. Those things let out a lot of light, you know."

  Just a matter of fact. I answered, "When I did my thesis literature survey I came across an interesting paper entitled 'The Rapid Rise of a Buoyant Plume.' It was an AEC report and was written in 1945. I bet they were talking about the same thing."

  "Sounds like it, dudinit?" Doc said.

  We entered Doc's lab again. Bill was still loading water into the side-scan sonar paper towel rolls.

  "The guy says he brought it back," Doc said. "Some guy named MacRoberts must have forgotten to write it down when he did."

  "Or some guy named Edgerton," Bill retorted.

  "Well, let's get this guy fixed up," Doc said, referring to me. "And get him out of here so we can get some work done. Come on, let's go into the other room and see what we can lend him."

  We crossed the hall and went into the other half of the lab. It looked like the pictures from MIT I'd seen in Mrs. DaRosa's physics class in high school. There were strobe lights on every workbench, the famous spinning wheel with different circles on it that stand still as the strobe light flashes faster and slower. More and more electronic boxes from the preceding five decades.

  The Sloan Lab felt archaic; so did this room, but it was hightech. Maybe the Sloan Lab was, too. Along the wall next to the corridor there was a .22 caliber rifle mounted horizontally on one of the workbenches. There was a piece of cardboard behind it, spray-painted black like some of the things I'd spray-painted in my cell.

  "Is this it?" I asked, knowing Doc would know I referred to his bullet series of photographs: a bullet standing still after it shears the jack of diamonds; a bullet just after it leaves an apple; a bullet and its shock wave as it passes through a candle.

  "Yep," he said. "Usually we use a .45 caliber pistol, but it makes too much noise. The other day we did a demonstration for some high schoolers and we didn't want to blast their ears out. If you look over there you'll see we have to catch the bullet with something." He pointed to something that looked like a Clorox bottle.

  "What's inside that?" I asked, thinking it'd be something like flak jacket material.

  "Oh, that's just some sand we picked up at Revere Beach. It kills a lot of energy," Doc replied.

  Bill pulled two of the black metal boxes off the back of the bench. They were strictly analog, predating the transistor and digital computers-they reminded me of pictures of MIT wartime defense research along the infinite corridor. Both of the boxes had the same little EG&G tags that everything else in the lab had. I tried to imagine working in a place where every object had my initials on it. Bill picked up another glass thing that looked like the broken test tube with not enough plastic wire that was in Ben's storage cabinet.

  "Shall we see whether this one works, Doc?" Bill asked.

  "Sure. Plug it in," Doc answered. He explained the operation of the flash to me while Bill connected the wires. "Billy's seen everything fail at least once, so he knows what to do about it when it happens. He should be able to fix up this thing for you in a jiffy. See, you got two capacitors; one 8,500 volts positive, one 8,500 volts negative, for 17,000 volts. That'll give you a nice kick if you touch it the wrong way. Need I say more?"

  Bill finished connecting all the wires and he pressed the "manual" button. And POP there was a white flash so bright that I thought Bill and Doc should be blind by now from looking at that flash so many times.

  "That's a fraction of a microsecond," Doc said. "Here. Take a look at this," he said pointing to the other little glass tube inside the test tube. "That thing there's what we call the stinger. The high voltage ionizes the gas in between the electrodes here, and then the electrical resistance goes down and the spark jumps across. It's just like a spark plug, only more powerful."

  The tubes made a clicking noise and I asked Doc what it was.

  "Corona discharge," he said. "Put enough voltage across a gap and those electrons will just die to hop over to the low-voltage side."

  Maybe Herr Diesel wanted to hop over to the low-voltage side when he "apparently fell" into the English Channel and was never seen again. Maybe the kid in Hill's class succumbed to the intensity of the voltage as well. I wanted to put some of this on paper, but I'd left my notebook in my cell. "Do you have a sheet of
paper I could take some notes on?" I asked.

  "Sure. Here." Doc gave me a wasted Polaroid print with one corner torn off it.

  "We got everything, Billy?" Doc asked.

  "Sure do, Doc," Bill MacRoberts answered.

  "Well, while we're here let's clean up this bench a little bit. We gotta get rid of these two-by-fours. This guy can tell we both grew up on the farm." Doc winked at me, referring to his early days in Nebraska.

  They put a few things away and we crossed Strobe Alley again. "We gotta fix you up with a shield now so the flash doesn't go straight to the camera and that's all you see. Billy, can you make one up for this fella?"

  "Sure thing, Doc." Billy cut a piece of aluminum, rolled it to shape in a sheet metal bender, and it fit perfectly on the test tube.

  "He need anything else, Billy?" Doc asked.

  "Just a circuit to prevent the power surge from going back to the trigger," Bill said. I wondered why they called it a trigger, the same thing that was on the oscilloscope in my cell.

  "Why don't the two of you go back to the other room and see whether you can find one. I gotta go through my mail now."

  Bill and I went to the other storage room again. Bill did a quick calculation of the strobe's instantaneous power output: 6 megawatts, or about the equivalent power of 100,000 light bulbs, but for a very, very short time. Coulombs, electric charges, volts, and electric potential were as real to Bill as inches and pounds were to me. We couldn't find the circuit so Bill sent me back to talk to Doc while he continued to look for the circuit.

  Doc was still going through his mail. "Got something here from Koosta," he said. "You know, Koosta first came here in 1952. He was young and nobody'd ever heard of him. It was before the "National Geographic" specials. Heck, it was practically before TV. Anyway, I told every student in the class I was teaching then that if they didn't bring ten of their friends to the talk Koosta was giving it was going to be ..." and Doc drew his index finger across his neck. "It worked. It was standing room only for the lecture, and the guy who booked 26-100 for it couldn't even get in the door it was so crowded." I was confused so I peeked at the letter. It was signed by Jacques Cousteau.