Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  I was not alone in thinking that this small firm was unusual in its competent efficiency. Hewlett Packard, the fast-growing and first-class electronic giant, was seeking to develop a chemical instrument stance and had looked at firms like F and M all over the United States. Within a year, they chose to take over F and M and make it a part of their empire. It was a benign take-over and they rewarded the owners well and the technical staff were retained, but the capacity of the company was infused and enhanced by the expertise of Hewlett Packard’s powerful electronic divisions. I could not help comparing it with the slow sad destruction of the equivalent British firm of WG Pye. This firm also had built excellent gas chromatographs but when the European giant Phillips took it over, a promising small industry that could have served the UK well, vanished within a few years.

  At the time of the takeover of F and M, the benign quest for excellence that had been the aim of Hewlett and Packard, the founders of the firm, was still a potent force. Creativity was encouraged, and with it there was a tolerance of eccentricity; this is something that makes a proper habitat for invention and for the talented craftsman. There were some able but very odd people working at Avondale. At one time, the plant had its own foxhunt. Workers on flexi-time, who started at some early hour of the morning, would finish work at lunch and then dress in their red coats and riding gear and take off across the open country of Pennsylvania. Because it was a bottom-up hunt, it was not seen as a symbol of class warfare, and there were no hunt saboteurs. Indeed, the notion that hunting was cruel never seemed to surface. In England, the hatred of the hunt is somewhat hypocritical, and its emotional drive comes more from class war than from compassion for the fox. Some, I think, see the red coat of the huntsman as a powerful symbol of the sempiternal British class war, with those on their horses the rampaging cavalry of the ruling classes. As I write this, it astonishes me that the British Parliament is wasting its time voting for a bill to abolish hunting with dogs. My mother’s family, all avid Hardy readers, also hated hunting and hunters, and I grew up in an atmosphere strongly prejudiced against the hunt. It was relieved, however, because my father, a true countryman, knew that the cruelties of hunting, perceived by city people who knew nothing about it, was as nothing compared with the daily cruelty of farm life. This was true in his time and it was to worsen when animals were condemned to the Belsens of battery houses for chickens, cattle, and pigs. I am ambivalent about the hunt. The sight of it stirs me as a colourful spectacle and I would not vote for its abolition, but I would not join it. Often on visits to Jim Peters, I would discuss work problems as we took a country walk across the fields and through the woods. Jim and Chris Peters were both from an urban environment in Liverpool, but in their new life in Pennsylvania, they had their own horses, enjoyed riding them, and seemed to find nothing odd in doing it. To give the flavour of my many visits to HP over the years let me tell how I arrived in the USA for one of them.

  Philadelphia is an easy airport to arrive at—quiet compared with the pressure of Kennedy in New York or London’s Heathrow—and this was particularly true near the end of the 1980s. I was quickly through Customs and there was the minibus for my journey to the motel at Chadds Ford. Getting aboard it was like listening to a soap opera after missing a few episodes. The driver was a casually dressed grandpa and the service was a family business. Soon the minibus was full of passengers and we were on the busy road towards Wilmington—and almost immediately, we were part of the family saga. The radio link to Grandpa’s home bore news of domestic disasters. The basement was flooded, why hadn’t he returned to fix it? Grandpa yelled back, ‘How can I fix it when I am driving the damned bus? Why doesn’t your lazy nephew fix it?’ By the time the bus dropped me at the Chadds Ford motel, I felt again that I was a part of real America. The girl at reception checked me in and asked me if I was having dinner that evening. ‘No,’ I said, ‘It’s midnight now for me; I most of all want to sleep.’ She nodded, and added, ‘If you dine tomorrow, eat only the appetizer and dessert, the entrées are terrible.’ It was a good reminder, for a year earlier I had spent a night of severe indigestion following an unwise meal at the motel. The food was far too rich and spiced for me.

  Next morning Bruce Quimby, a senior scientist at HP, came at 8 o’clock to take me to breakfast. He proposed that we go to McDonald’s. It was my first visit to that bastion of Imperial America and I was curious to see what it was like. We parked and walked across to the dining room where Bruce ordered a substantial meal, at least an Egg McMuffin, followed by something equally substantial. After a frantic search of the menu for something light enough, I gave up, and merely had an orange juice and a coffee. We then travelled the back roads of the Pennsylvania countryside and arrived at HP’s Avondale plant at about 8.45 am. Good companies nearly always employ lively and helpful receptionists who do much to set the mood of a visit. HP was no exception and a warm and welcoming woman signed me in and gave me my stick-on label marking me as a visitor. We walked towards the research and development department passing and saying ‘Hi’ to Mason Byles, at that time Manager, and sitting at his open-plan desk like everyone else. Successful managers seem to understand the need for visibility and accessibility. Managers in closed rooms guarded by protective secretaries are sometimes the sign of a badly run organization.

  The R & D department occupied a large hall, lit by discreetly hidden fluorescent lights and filled with parallel rows of workstations. Walls about six feet high enclosed each of these. Inside the walls were desks, bookshelves, seats and computer screens. Somehow, looking from above, it appeared like a patterned carpet spread across the floor. At intervals, longer low walls marked off conference areas furnished with one large table, a blackboard, and about ten chairs. We made for one of these, stopping en route to pick up some more coffee. Tea was available but I have found from bitter experience that when in the United States it is better to drink coffee. The tea is anaemic stuff that tastes as if recently they had exhumed it from the bags thrown into Boston Harbour all those years ago. Around the table was the detector group with whom my first discussions were to be. The problem today was with the flame photometric detector, a strange device that senses nitrogen-containing substances specifically. It is useful, even invaluable, for detecting illegal drugs. I was glad that I had not invented it. It is notoriously erratic.

  After this session, I had a wonderful but all too brief encounter with my friend, Leon Blumberg, a small man but one with a presence. He is a scientist who emigrated from Russia with his wife Rita and they now live in the United States. He had grown up as a child in a Siberian gulag and was in some ways like a character from Solzhenitsyn’s The Inner Circle. Leon is one of the most intelligent people I know, someone who during a tussle with a challenging problem reveals their inner strength. There were several friends at HP who gave intellectually as much as, and sometimes more than, I did in an exchange of ideas, but to Leon alone I always left feeling indebted.

  My next task was to give an update on Gaia to whoever at the plant was free and wanted to come and listen. In one of the larger conference rooms, holding fifty or more people, I talked and showed viewgraphs. This time it was about progress in that most tantalizing of climate feedbacks, the cloud algae affair. How microscopic algae in the oceans make sulphur compounds that escape to the air where they oxidize to form tiny nuclei. Without these nuclei, the product of ocean life, the Earth might have few clouds and perhaps be 10–20 degrees celsius hotter than it is now. It was a joy to talk to these receptive engineers and instrument scientists who fully understood feedback and control. After all, it was their livelihood designing such systems. I sometimes despair of ever explaining to biologists, no matter how eminent, the subtleties of feedback in natural systems: the Cartesian linear thinking of reductionism makes them reject anything that requires the circular logic of control systems.

  After my lecture a small group of us lunched in the cafeteria. Mason Byles, the plant manager, joined us and we talked about the progress of a
gas chromatograph for the developing world. This was a notion I had for a cheap, simple instrument, not much larger than a pocket calculator. My idea was that in the developing world almost no one could afford the large and expensive instruments that HP made. An affordable instrument was what they needed. It might also become a saleable product in the developed world. We do simple sums on our calculators and leave the more difficult tasks to our computers. In the same way a hand-held gas chromatograph would enable a chemist to check his mixtures without having to fire up the complex instruments of the lab. I still have a most encouraging letter from John Young, one of the senior managers of Hewlett Packard, about this idea. It also had the backing of the United Nations University but for reasons unknown to me it was never made. As I said in the Introduction, I would not wish to start such an enterprise myself, although I would enthusiastically give it moral support.

  In the afternoon I happily spent time with Terry Berger talking about the possibilities of supercritical fluid chromatography and with Dick Kolthoff discussing the thermal conductivity detector. As the day’s visit ended, I went to see Jim Sullivan and Bruce Hermann and talked with them about the electron capture detector, which is described in detail in Chapter 7, and its latest trials and tribulations. I learnt that the most recent complaint from customers was that the detector was too non-linear in its response to meet the stringent requirements of the Food and Drugs Administration’s test for pesticide residues. We talked of ways of fixing this problem and about the use of fluorine gas to clean detectors. Leon drove me back to my motel in his huge ancient Lincoln town car. What is it about the United States that urges new arrivals to buy the largest and most uneconomical cars? Do they provide a sense of freedom or are they just insulation against an alien and incomprehensible New World?

  I had a thirty-minute nap, a shower, and made ready for the real ordeal of my working day, the evening meal. This time it was a fish restaurant near the Ship Canal with an unusual ambience which allowed us, seated at a window table, to watch the cargo ships passing slowly by. It was a good and simple meal and we talked of other things than work problems. What I most dreaded on these visits were Italian restaurants. I like Italian food, especially as eaten in Italy, but the ultra-spiced super-fatted American version of Italian food often gives me a night of indigestion. This would make the next working day a nightmare. How can one have a clear flow of thoughtful ideas when one is dazed from lack of sleep? I would be condemned after one such meal to spend a day as if hung over, trying to see through gritty drooping eyelids the faces of my friends. Fortunately, this rarely happened on visits to HP, but it loomed as a hazard on all other journeys that I made across that great continent.

  Often on visits to Avondale I stayed with Bill and Rosemary Buffington. Bill was in senior management and had been responsible for the development of the firm’s most successful gas chromatograph. Rosemary was, among several things, a writer of manuals. Anyone who has tried to program a video recorder is likely to have experienced the frustrated confusion that a badly written manual can cause. From its earliest days, HP manuals excelled in the clear concise quality of their instructions but good writing never comes easily and Rosemary’s was exceedingly good and did much to sustain HP’s reputation for quality. On visits to the Buffingtons, conversation often turned to Gaia. Rosemary decided in the late 1980s to apply her writing talent to the publication of a Gaian Science Newsletter. It ran for four years and did more than I think she knew to break the ice jam that immobilized Gaian science at the time. Bill and Rosemary moved to Tokyo when Bill took on the task of managing a joint venture between HP and the Japanese firm Yokogawa.

  I spent nearly all of my thirty-two years with HP at their Avondale division but I did occasionally go to the Corporate labs in Palo Alto in California. When I did, I sometimes stayed with Ellen and Harry Weaver; Harry was at the HP labs and Ellen a professor of biology at the nearby San Jose University and they paid a return visit to my home in England. Ellen was one of the few American biologists who saw Gaia in its early days as science not fantasy and introduced me to colleagues at the nearby NASA Ames laboratory. My visits to the corporate labs were usually on general topics such as the development of novel instruments for the growing biotechnology industry.

  Soon after the Hewlett Packard takeover of F and M, in 1964, I moved on to a new working relationship. I resigned from Ionics Research, the company that Al Zlatkis and I had founded. HP took me on, used several of my inventions, and in return paid me what was in effect a retainer; it was adequate and kept pace with inflation. My last pay before I retired from working with them in 1994 amounted to a yearly fee of $32,000. I would grow anxious occasionally that few of my inventions were making money for HP. When I asked a senior executive of the company if I should continue to pass on patents, careless of their potential, he replied, ‘This company already has too many lawyers. Patents and the legal affairs they generate keeps them busy. There is nothing worse for us than to have idle lawyers. They get up to mischief. So just keep those patents coming, even if they don’t work it still does a lot of good.’ It was a good and healthy relationship; it must have been to last as long as it did.

  Inventions

  To invent is to make useful practical things that did not previously exist, and what a misunderstood creative activity it is. The composition of music, the writing of verse and novels, the painting of pictures and sculpting of statues, all are recognized and praised as creative, but consider a wheel or a safety pin. They are hardly works of art but, without doubt, are creations and fine inventions, so why do we in England, although not Scotland, look on inventions as inferior? It may be a consequence of our obsession with class. The upper classes used to look on wealthy inventors who were from a lower stratum with disdain, and the lower classes envied them; this malign legacy of Victorian times persists. My father was a natural inventor and whenever we needed anything simple or mechanical or whenever anything broke, he would improvise a solution from whatever materials were to hand. The kitchen tap started leaking; it was Sunday and no shops were open. In no time, he had made a new washer from the sole of an old leather shoe. Greed, I think, makes many of us see inventions as a route to wealth but, in my experience, the truly inventive are rarely ever greedy; the satisfaction of solving a problem is their main reward. Inventors are often lazy and not motivated to acquire wealth—particularly if it means, as it often does, a long series of encounters with patent agents and lawyers and bureaucrats. Greed makes the uncreative steal inventions without a pang of guilt; the act of theft is often forgotten and soon the thief believes the novelty to be his own property. The decisive test for real inventors is to try stealing one of their inventions; if the inventor is genuine, he will hardly notice that it has gone, or if he does, he will give it freely and with his blessing. Good inventors invent all the time, and the loss of one of their inventions is trivial but if anyone is unwise enough to steal from another thief, his protests and denunciations will ring throughout the neighbourhood and beyond. This should not surprise: the first thief has lost the only invention he had and the one he cherished as his own. My mother was forever chiding my father for giving his ideas and inventions away; at times she would grow quite angry and call him an old fool. She never understood that to Tom Lovelock inventions were as prevalent as flies on a piece of decaying meat and, in his mind, of little more value. Towards the end of his life when he suffered an intractable kidney infection and was all but bedridden, he still had his inventiveness. The garden gate at the side of the house irritatingly banged in the wind, the noise repeated in a chaotic fashion and it kept my mother and father awake at night. Friends and neighbours had tried to fix it, always without success, but old Tom dragged himself from his bed, put on his dressing gown and wellies, and went out on a chill winter day and just looked at the offending gate. Then he went to his tool shed and within minutes had solved the problem and the gate never banged again for the two remaining months of his life. He died aged eighty-four. Creativit
y of the inventive kind does not diminish with age. I like to think I have inherited my father’s inventiveness.

  Inventing is a joy, but the driving force of invention is need, and it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to invent without it. Once the need is clear, the inventor soon finds an answer. Schoolteachers often have a strange notion about priority in inventions. When a child in their charge comes to them with an invention that he or she has made they will often dismiss it with scorn, saying, ‘Oh, there’s nothing new in that, my dear, it’s been known about for years.’ What they have not seen is that the child has retraced the steps of the first inventor and done so without prior knowledge. Therefore, that child has the potential to invent and needs encouragement, not putting down. Now that the sum total of human knowledge is so large as to be far beyond any individual understanding, re-invention grows ever more common. In addition, the wealth of new materials and devices makes re-invention novelty again. The use of a new alloy with superior qualities of strength and corrosion resistance can make a safety pin almost everlasting, and then it becomes a new invention. Some academics seem to enjoy diminishing the status of inventors. One of them referred to me as ‘Not a scientist, merely an inventor who makes amateur equipment in his garage.’ It compares well with the art critics who called John Singer Sargent ‘Not an artist, merely a painter.’ It must take a belly full of bile to hate and envy the creative so strongly.

  A legend has established itself in England that I invented the microwave oven. It grew from some remarks I made during an interview by Sue Lawley for the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs. I described how, in 1954, I had made several pieces of diathermy equipment to help my colleagues reanimate cold or frozen animals. One piece of equipment used a continuous wave magnetron as a source of microwaves for heating. Just for fun, I connected the output of the magnetron to a metal chamber in which I placed a potato. There was a timer, which turned on the power for the ten minutes needed to cook this part of my lunch. It worked just as any microwave oven does today and it may have been the first working microwave oven used to cook food that was then eaten. If it was, then I did indeed invent it. But I doubt if I did: surely some radar technician or scientist somewhere before this had trodden the same inventive path. If there is a real inventor of the microwave oven who feels anger or hurt at my appropriating the credit then I am truly sorry.