MIT Lincoln Labs (1955-1960)
In 1955 I accepted a job in the solid state division of Lincoln Laboratory, then run by Benjamin Lax, a source of frustration for several years. I also began my aviation career, a source of pleasure for 42 years. Ben Lax is an egomaniac with a very shallow interest in physics, driven by political ambition to "be in the driver’s seat" (his words), even if it required plagiarizing all his underlings. He had a way of turning mild-mannered academics into zombies and taking credit for their work. Ben spent most of his career going to meetings with borrowed slides, and was known for not being able to answer questions about work he hadn’t actually done. But he cultivated important players in the military and managed to raise funds for Lincoln. Ours was a symbiotic relationship. I didn’t turn into a sycophant but he needed my creativity as well as my influence on colleagues and avoided direct confrontations. He knew I wouldn’t lend him my slides, but he got copies from the photo lab and submitted abstracts to meetings behind my back. A particularly memorable one was at Leiden University in Holland, world center for low temperature research.
But I did have fun at Lincoln and I accomplished several meaningful things and I did make a name for myself, not just for Ben Lax. First, I invented a way to make helical coils strong enough to generate the world’s most powerful pulsed magnetic field . The field lasted for several milliseconds, long enough to make important measurements on semiconductors, and my coils survived, unlike the coils built at Harvard for similar research which self-destructed each time.
Second, I built an electrometer sensitive enough to measure work function changes caused by single layers of atoms adsorbed on the surface of very pure semiconductors. Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen had just won the Nobel prize for inventing the transistor, and my measurements cleared up a mystery they couldn’t explain. I remember Walter Brattain spending an afternoon in my shielded room in the basement playing with my electrometer to convince himself my results were for real. We had a very interesting conversation. A remark of his is worth remembering. He said
" When I grew up on a farm in Nebraska in the twenties I played with cats whisker radios, like all the kids. I was sure that a selenium crystal could rectify currents strong enough to run a loudspeaker. If Lee DeForest hadn’t invented the thermal vacuum tube, somebody, maybe I, would have invented the transistor in the twenties and bypassed thirty years of vacuum tube technology." In retrospect, I think all real physicists would agree.
Finally, I joined forces with Prof Francis Bitter who had built a high magnetic field lab in the basement of MIT in the thirties. We decided it was time to build a laboratory that can generate even stronger fields over larger volumes and a lab that would be shared by the entire science community, like astronomical telescopes. He and I made many trips to Washington and managed to raise funds to build and operate a National Magnet Laboratory at MIT .
We bought a bakery on Albany Street and started construction in 1961. The MIT Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory was dedicated in 1963.
(Continue to MIT Magnet Lab (1961-1982)
In 1955 I accepted a job in the solid state division of Lincoln Laboratory, then run by Benjamin Lax, a source of frustration for several years. I also began my aviation career, a source of pleasure for 42 years. Ben Lax is an egomaniac with a very shallow interest in physics, driven by political ambition to "be in the driver’s seat" (his words), even if it required plagiarizing all his underlings. He had a way of turning mild-mannered academics into zombies and taking credit for their work. Ben spent most of his career going to meetings with borrowed slides, and was known for not being able to answer questions about work he hadn’t actually done. But he cultivated important players in the military and managed to raise funds for Lincoln. Ours was a symbiotic relationship. I didn’t turn into a sycophant but he needed my creativity as well as my influence on colleagues and avoided direct confrontations. He knew I wouldn’t lend him my slides, but he got copies from the photo lab and submitted abstracts to meetings behind my back. A particularly memorable one was at Leiden University in Holland, world center for low temperature research.
But I did have fun at Lincoln and I accomplished several meaningful things and I did make a name for myself, not just for Ben Lax. First, I invented a way to make helical coils strong enough to generate the world’s most powerful pulsed magnetic field . The field lasted for several milliseconds, long enough to make important measurements on semiconductors, and my coils survived, unlike the coils built at Harvard for similar research which self-destructed each time.
Second, I built an electrometer sensitive enough to measure work function changes caused by single layers of atoms adsorbed on the surface of very pure semiconductors. Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen had just won the Nobel prize for inventing the transistor, and my measurements cleared up a mystery they couldn’t explain. I remember Walter Brattain spending an afternoon in my shielded room in the basement playing with my electrometer to convince himself my results were for real. We had a very interesting conversation. A remark of his is worth remembering. He said
" When I grew up on a farm in Nebraska in the twenties I played with cats whisker radios, like all the kids. I was sure that a selenium crystal could rectify currents strong enough to run a loudspeaker. If Lee DeForest hadn’t invented the thermal vacuum tube, somebody, maybe I, would have invented the transistor in the twenties and bypassed thirty years of vacuum tube technology." In retrospect, I think all real physicists would agree.
Finally, I joined forces with Prof Francis Bitter who had built a high magnetic field lab in the basement of MIT in the thirties. We decided it was time to build a laboratory that can generate even stronger fields over larger volumes and a lab that would be shared by the entire science community, like astronomical telescopes. He and I made many trips to Washington and managed to raise funds to build and operate a National Magnet Laboratory at MIT .
We bought a bakery on Albany Street and started construction in 1961. The MIT Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory was dedicated in 1963.
(Continue to MIT Magnet Lab (1961-1982)