William Hayward Pickering Oral History Interview

WILLIAM H. PICKERING D (1910-2004) INTERVIEWED BY MARY TERRALL November 7-December 19, 1978 ARCHIVES CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Pasadena, California Subject area Engineering, physics, administration, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, space flight Abstract Interview in four sessions in 1978 with William Hayward Pickering, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Caltech and director (1954-1976) of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, begins with recollections of his upbringing in New Zealand. He enters Caltech as an undergraduate in spring term of 1929: influence of A. A. Noyes; travels in Europe during his junior year. Remains at Caltech as a graduate student in electrical engineering and then joins the faculty. Recollections of life at Caltech during the Depression and the war years, including emphasis on power transmission in its electrical engineering department, under Royal Sorensen, and subsequent expanding into electronics. Recalls his work with H. Victor Neher and R. A. Millikan on balloon-flight studies of cosmic rays; travels with them to India and Mexico. Contrasts leadership of Millikan and Lee A. DuBridge. Comments on barrage of Japanese incendiary balloons during the war. Early history of JPL: Theodore von Kármán, H. S. Tsien, Frank J. Malina. Long-range missile development for US Army; JPL’s collaboration with Wernher von Braun at Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Ala. Advent of Sputnik (1957); competition with Soviet Union. JPL’s move into space program with Explorer 1, first US satellite; establishment of NASA (1958); JPL becomes a NASA lab, administered by Caltech. Ranger program (lunar http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 probes); Ranger 6 video failure; success of Ranger 7(1964). Simultaneous progress of planetary and lunar exploration programs; Mariner 2 (1962 Venus fly-by); Surveyor series (moon); Surveyor as precursor to Apollo program. His reflections on JPL directorship; JPL’s relations with Caltech; advantages of being administered by Caltech instead of by NASA as a civil service laboratory. The interview concludes with his comments on his post-retirement work setting up an applied research institute at Saudi Arabia’s University of Petroleum and Minerals. Administrative information Access The interview is unrestricted. Copyright Copyright has been assigned to the California Institute of Technology © 1981, 2004. All requests for permission to publish or quote from the transcript must be submitted in writing to the University Archivist. Preferred citation Pickering, William H.(I). Interview by Mary Terrall. Pasadena, California, November 7-December 19, 1978. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives. Retrieved [supply date of retrieval] from the World Wide Web: http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering 1 Contact information Archives, California Institute of Technology Mail Code 015A-74 Pasadena, CA 91125 Phone: (626) 395-2704 Fax: (626) 793-8756 Email: archives@caltech.edu Graphics and content © 2004 California Institute of Technology. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM H. PICKERING (I) BY MARY TErRALL PASADENA, CALIFORNIA Caltech Archives, 1981 Copyright © 1981, 2004 by the California Institute of Technology http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM H. PICKERING Session 1 1-25 Childhood and education in New Zealand; early interest in radios; coming to Los Angeles and to Caltech; undergraduate years at Caltech; marriage. Electrical engineering department’s emphasis on power transmission; R. Sorensen; Junior Travel Prize (1931); A. A. Noyes; taking sophomore chemistry from E. Swift at Corona del Mar. Building Geiger counters as Caltech graduate student; collaborating with H. V. Neher and R. A. Millikan; using balloons to investigate cosmic rays; recovery of instruments sent up in balloons; 1939 trip to India with Millikan and Neher; Millikan’s stamina and enthusiasm Measurements made in New Zealand trip; problem of explaining cosmic-ray distribution; Millikan’s explanation of the origin of cosmic rays; collaborating with Indian meteorological service; 1941 trip to Mexico; trips around the West; developing techniques of radio transmission of data. Session 2 26-55 Teaching electronics in 1930s; teaching pre-radar course in navy V-12 program; Engineering and Science Management War Training program; changes at Caltech during war; effect of V-12 program. Investigating Japanese incendiary balloons; recovering them; microwave research at MIT. Early history of JPL; long-range missile development; telemetry techniques; developing missile guidance systems; T. von Kármán; Air Force Scientific Advisory Board; H. S. Tsien and problems with US bureaucracy; loyalty investigations. Appointment as director of JPL, 1954; moving from research into administration; relations between Caltech and JPL; comparison of army and NASA as contracting agencies; JPL testing grounds at White Sands, NM; L. A. DuBridge. Early long-range studies of space exploration; development of WAC Corporal rocket; getting nto satellites; International Geophysical Year (1957-58); Vanguard satellite program of Nava Research Lab; competition between army and navy; stimulation to U.S. satellite program b launching of Sputnik (1957); public reaction to Sputnik; first announcement of Sputnik launch. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-iii Session 3 56-72 Development of Explorer program by JPL (alternative to Vanguard); collaboration with W. von Braun; IGY satellite committee; launching of Explorer 1; press response; discovery of Van Allen radiation belts. Sergeant missile system; development of US space program; origin of NASA; JPL’s switch from army to NASA; changing from classified to unclassified work; choice of deep-space research as focus for JPL; problems of designing and allocating space for scientific payloads; benefits of having contract administered by Caltech. Problems with Ranger program (five failures); successful launch of Ranger 6, failure of video cameras; success of Ranger 7. Session 4 73-86 Simultaneous progress of planetary and lunar exploration programs; Mariner 2 (1962 Venus fly-by); Surveyor series (moon); live TV coverage of Surveyor 1 moon landing; Cold War competition with Soviets; astronauts’ landing next to Surveyor 3. Problems of administering large laboratory; trying to improve campus-JPL relations; government policy of ceiling for number of JPL employees; retirement; consulting work for applied research lab in Saudi Arabia. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Interview with William H. Pickering Pasadena, California by Mary Terrall Session 1 Session 2 Session 3 Session 4 November 7, 1978 November 29, 1978 December 12, 1978 December 19, 1978 Begin Tape 1, Side 1 TERRALL: I know you were born in New Zealand. Can you tell me what your parents did there? PICKERING: Yes, my father was a pharmacist in Wellington. I was born in Wellington [December 24, 1910]. When I was four years old, my mother died. So I was then sent to live with my grandmother Pickering in a small town called Havelock. I went to primary school in this small town. It’s sort of an interesting coincidence that this primary school was the same one that Ernest Rutherford went to. And Rutherford, of course, later became a nuclear physicist; in fact, he was one of the very prominent early nuclear physicists. By the time I finished primary school, my father was working in the health department in British Samoa, and rather than take me over there, he arranged for me to go to high school in Wellington. It was a boarding school, so part of the time I was boarding and part of the time I was staying with some friends. TERRALL: You didn’t have any other family besides your grandmother? PICKERING: I had a younger brother, who died of diphtheria when he was about four or five. My father had lots of brothers and sisters -there were six or eight of them all together, I guess and http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-2 they were spread around the country. But there wasn’t any family in Wellington. So I stayed with these good friends— a man by the name of Rowe, who was a banker and had a son about the same age I was. They took me in, and I lived with them for I guess a couple of years, and then I boarded a couple of years at the high school, that sort of thing. TERRALL: So it was a private school? PICKERING: No, a public school. It was called Wellington College the terminology, of course, in the English system is a little different from ours; Wellington College means a high school in our terms. This was a public school. There must have been, say, 1,200 students and perhaps 200 or 300 of them were boarders. TERRALL: Can you place your first interest in science back then? PICKERING: Yes, I had an interest when I was still in primary school. About 1920, I got fascinated with radio, which was just then coming out, and read about crystal sets. I remember discussing this with my grandmother, and she said, well, she had an old broken glass which was a nice piece of crystal. [Laughter] I also can remember reading— in some magazine, I suppose about the fact that in 1924 Mars was going to be in a close conjunction with the earth. An astronomer-I’ve forgotten now who it was— had some scheme to go down into South America, where there was a vertical mine shaft, and he was going to spin a large dish of mercury at the bottom, which would make a parabolic surface, which would allow him to focus on Mars as it went across the entrance of the mine shaft; and he was going to get a real close-up look at Mars. Well, it was a wild idea, and as far as I know, it never materialized. But I can remember reading about this and thinking that this particular conjunction of Mars was going to be the closest conjunction for a lot of years and hopefully scientists were going to learn more about Mars. That was about the time I went to high school, I guess. So, yes, I had an interest in science in those days. I became a lab assistant, which meant sweeping up the labs and that sort of thing, before I got through high school. TErRALL: Did you play around with trying to build radios? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-3 PICKERING: Oh, yes. In fact, there at high school we put together one of the very early amateur radio stations in New Zealand. Another fellow and I really did it— a fellow by the name of Fred White, who stayed with radio and became quite prominent in radio research. He worked in England for a while and then Australia. Back in those days, you had to build it essentially all by yourself, out of bits and pieces around the laboratory. You didn’t buy very much stuff. We used to be able to communicate with stations in this country, for example. That was back in the days when you had to use Morse Code. TErRALL: Were you learning from magazines? Would that have been the sort of source that you were using? PICKERING: Yes. I don’t think we got much from our instructors in high school; we got most of it out of magazines. TERRALL: Did you have teachers who were interested in and involved in these projects? PICKERING: Oh, yes, we did. One teacher in particular, a man by the name of Gifford. He was really a math teacher, but he was very interested in astronomy. He interested me in science a great deal. In fact, interestingly enough, his son is now a doctor and came up to this country not too many years ago, and I visited him. He was just passing through, but he was in this area for a few days. TERRALL: So were you thinking of going on with science? PICKERING: Yes. I was interested in radio and electronics— the physics side rather than the chemistry side of science. Astronomy also interested me. When I got through with high school, my father was back in New Zealand. He’d remarried, and we were living in Christchurch, so I started in at the university down there. My interests at that time were leaning towards engineering; electrical engineering is what I thought I wanted to do. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering 4 TERRALL: How strong was the engineering department there? PICKERING: It was pretty good. The University of New Zealand did try to maintain good standards. In fact, in the early days and I think even when I was there they were still sending their final examinations back to England to be graded, so that they would be on a par with the British universities. In fact, there was a legend around the high school about one of our teachers, that the only way he got his degree was that the ship sank on the way back. [Laughter] Anyway, I started at Canterbury College, but I only spent one year there; then I came over here. TERRALL: How did you happen to come over here? PICKERING: Well, at that time I had an uncle, really a great-uncle, who was living in Los Angeles. But he also had a house in New Zealand, and he used to go back and forth. I spent quite a bit of time with him, because his home in New Zealand was a working farm. I used to go up on the farm and work during the summers. This man had been a mining engineer in South Africa; in fact, he had worked with Cecil Rhodes in Rhodesia in the early days as a civil engineer. He was retired, but, as I say, he had a place here and a place down there. He suggested that 1 ought to come over to America for my education. My thoughts had been that I would get a degree from New Zealand and then do graduate work in either England or in the US. But he suggested that I come back with him. He lived in Los Angeles and asked why not come to Caltech? This was in 1928, you see, so it was in the early days of Caltech. I’d never heard of Caltech. A friend of my father’s who happened to be an MIT graduate was down there, so I went around and talked to him. And he said, well, of course, if I didn’t want to go to MIT, he thought Caltech was a pretty good school. TERRALL: What did your uncle know of Caltech? Did he have any direct contact with it, or did he just know it was there? PICKERING: He just knew it was there. So I said OK, and I wrote to Caltech. They, of course, said, “Well, you’ve got to take exams, you’ve got to do this, that, and the other thing.” So my http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-5 uncle said, “Well, why don’t you just come on over and try and get in when you get over here.” So we did. I came in, then, as an immigrant rather than as a student. This was in March of 1929, so it was the end of the second term at Caltech. They weren’t quite sure what to do with me, so they gave me some of the freshman exams at the end of the second term. I took those exams, and on the strength of that, they admitted me to take the third term of the freshman year and then go on. So that’s what I did. I started out in electrical engineering, with the expectation that I would graduate in that field and then go back down to New Zealand and work down there as an electrical engineer. But [Robert Andrews] Millikan and [Arthur Amos] Noyes wanted me to change over to science. So I got my bachelor’s degree in science [1932], the master’s degree in physics [1933], and my doctor’s degree in physics [1936], with a minor in electrical engineering. TERRALL: When you first got here, what was it like living in Pasadena and being at Caltech? PICKERING: Well, it wasn’t so different, really, from New Zealand. After all, New Zealand is another pioneering country, and California, particularly in those days, was a long way out in the West. It was obviously different as a matter of scale and so forth, because this is a much bigger country and many more people and so on. But I fitted into the educational system without any great trauma and found that I could do the work without any trouble-well, not without any trouble, but at least I fitted right into it. In other words, my background in high school down there and the one year that I’d had at Canterbury made me able to go into this third term of the freshman year without any problem. And I guess, in fact, I came out with honors standing in the sophomore year. In those days, they used to have an honors section. TERRALL: Were you living with your uncle, then? PICKERING: No, I lived in a boardinghouse on South Wilson, because the dormitories were not yet built. The last year of my undergraduate term, I moved into Dabney; that was the year that they opened the houses. TERRALL: How did you react to the Caltech environment intellectually, having all these high-powered scientists around? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-6 PICKERING: Oh, I don’t know. I obviously enjoyed it. I did quite well in my studies. I very much enjoyed the place and working here with these people. A year or two after I graduated, I did go back to New Zealand, looking for a job. But that was in the middle of the Depression, and there weren’t any jobs. Caltech wanted me to stay on anyway, so that’s what I did. I also asked myself, “Why not? After all, there are lots of people who work hard to try and get a job at Caltech and spend most of their time trying to move to Pasadena. If I’m already in Pasadena, why not stay here?” TERRALL: Now, you were married just around the time of graduation. Was your wife a local girl? PICKERING: Yes, she was a sister of a fellow student who was in the same boardinghouse that I was in. TERRALL: And she was not averse to staying in Pasadena, probably? PICKERING: No. Although, at the time we were married, the probability was that I was going back to New Zealand, and she was not averse to that either. In her childhood, she had lived in lots of places in the Southwest. Her father was in the water development business, and so he was going from one place to another, and the family was always on the move. The problem of moving didn’t bother her any; in fact, she was remarking just the other day that when we were married she thought we would be doing a lot of moving around, and in point of fact we didn’t. TERRALL: As an undergraduate, did you have contact with Millikan? PICKERING: No, not very much. As a graduate I did, but as an undergraduate I don’t really remember any specific contact. TERRALL: As an undergraduate, when you were working in electrical engineering, do you remember who the people were who were particularly good teachers? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-7 PICKERING: Sorensen was, and [Francis W.] Maxstadt, and [Samuel Stuart] Mackeown. Mackeown was teaching vacuum tube and radio. In those days, electrical engineering was almost entirely power engineering. In fact, just to sort of jump ahead a little bit, when I did get into the electrical engineering department in the late thirties, I was fighting to get some electronics into the department. And I succeeded; I did get some work done. But when I retired [1976] from JPL [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory] and came back here and had a look at the electrical engineering department-in point of fact I didn’t really go back and do any teaching; but if I had, I would have been fighting with them to get some power engineering into the department. Because they have over-reacted. This happens in all academic areas. The academic work is always a little bit out of phase with the needs of industry. TERRALL: But at that time there wasn’t really any electronics? PICKERING: Well, Sorensen, who was heading the department, was a power engineer. The department had done some very useful work in helping the Edison Company develop the first long-distance transmission lines- from Huntington Lake, up near Fresno, down here. That was one of the first high-voltage transmission lines, and its development was done with the help of our EE department. Sorensen got the High Voltage Research Laboratory out of that, which was a very important laboratory. In fact, there was a test transmission line that went from the high-voltage lab out to the present site of the Athenaeum; there was nothing out there but orange groves at that time. So it was natural that the department was very heavily oriented towards power engineering. Radio communications and vacuum tubes were considered not very important. It was a problem to get the department turned around to recognize that there was a whole new technology growing up here. TERRALL: Were there other students in your position, who had gotten interested in radio? PICKERING: Oh, yes. We had a little amateur radio station. There was one professor, Mackeown, who was a good teacher, who was teaching one vacuum tube course; but we needed more. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-8 TERRALL: Could you talk to New Zealand with your amateur radio? PICKERING: Interesting question. I don’t remember. TERRALL: You decided to go to graduate school in physics. I guess there was no problem in getting admitted, since everyone seemed to have wanted you to stay? PICKERING: That’s right, they wanted me to stay. I had taken some extra undergraduate work, which gave me a degree in science. Let me go back a bit. Professor Noyes became interested in me because at that time there was an undergraduate travel prize, which was a quite prestigious thing, for which two juniors were picked. They left in March of their junior year and came back in time for school in September, so they had roughly six months in Europe. This was an anonymous prize, but my assumption, and I think everybody’s assumption, was that it was given by Noyes, who was head of the chemistry department. They would pick about a half dozen people from the sophomore honors section, and in preparation for this trip a man in the humanities division by the name of [John] MacArthur would take the candidates for about six months before the trip and give them some special courses on the art and culture of Europe. I was selected as one of this group at the end of my sophomore year, and Noyes became interested in me. TERRALL: So there would have been a small group of people, out of which they chose two to go. PICKERING: Yes, that’s what happened. We left in March [1931] and came back in September. So we lost the last term of the junior year. We traveled during this period, and we made a report to a student body assembly when we got back. TERRALL: Did you travel with the other person who was selected? PICKERING: Yes. As a matter of fact, traditionally, if some of the other candidates wanted to pay their own way, they were invited to come. Now, in our particular case, we had two other people http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-9 with us, so four of us traveled together. It was a very interesting and educational experience. We started out by going to Detroit and buying a Ford, fresh out of the factory, and driving that down to Washington first, then up to New York, and then shipping it to Europe, driving through Europe, and then eventually driving back all the way to Pasadena. TERRALL: Did you have introductions from Caltech people to people in Europe? PICKERING: No, we had some records and diaries of previous travel-prize winners. This exercise that we’d gone through with MacArthur was supposed to lead us to all of the worthwhile museums and cultural things of various sorts that we ought to see. The emphasis was very much on cultural activities, not particularly on scientific activities. Although it seems to me that we did visit one or two factories. But there really wasn’t any tie-in to the universities. TERRALL: You were very much on your own? PICKERING: We were on our own, yes; in fact, that was the point of it. We were supposed to be on our own and supposed to make a worthwhile trip through Europe and come back and tell other people what we did. TERRALL: It sounds wonderful. PICKERING: It was. It was very nice. We got as far as Budapest, and up into Germany, Czechoslovakia. The Depression had gotten started, but Hitler really hadn’t done anything yet. We got down to Naples, and I forget how far north we went in England. TERRALL: You went around England as well? PICKERING: Yes, we did. TERRALL: You had never been to England or anything? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-10 PICKERING: No. TERRALL: Did you have family there? PICKERING: No very close relatives. I do have some second cousins or something, but we didn’t visit any. No, we were on our own. As I say, we didn’t have any particular introductions and we didn’t have any particular objective of seeing scientific or educational things. At that time, by the way, Caltech did have a strong notion that in developing its student activities it should draw on experiences of other universities. The reason I’m bringing this up is that in building the dormitories, the question as to how the dormitories were going to be managed and run obviously came up. At that time, Caltech had some fraternities, which were not part of any national system-they’d grown up just as local fraternities; all schools then had fraternities. The question was, “What are you going to do with the fraternities? Are you going to abolish them?” Also, another question was, “How are you going to actually furnish these dormitories?” Caltech asked the students for advice in these areas, and student committees were formed to help them with the selection of furniture. One student committee was formed to make a trip to England and see how some of those schools ran their dormitories and so on. So Caltech was interested in developing relations with European universities. And when I come to think of it, I guess it’s a little surprising that on this travel prize, we weren’t instructed to go visit universities. But we were not; we did not. TERRALL: So [the universities trip] was a separate trip that they sent people on? PICKERING: Yes. Two people, I think, went over and visited two or three universities and came back and reported on how they were managed. Of course, Caltech eventually proposed a system in which the fraternities were abolished, although in point of fact the fraternities were permitted to move into a house as a unit. TERRALL: So when you got back, you made some sort of presentation to the student body? PICKERING: Yes, just a student body assembly. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-11 TERRALL: You said that Noyes had gotten interested in you. PICKERING: Yes, and I’m forgetting my chronology here; because one of the things I was missing was sophomore chemistry, which I hadn’t taken, as an engineer. It ended up that I took this chemistry as a summer course between my sophomore and junior years. This was something that Noyes arranged. Noyes had a house down at Corona del Mar. He had arranged, in fact, for Caltech to buy the Marine Lab down there, and that had just happened. Another member of the chemistry department, Professor [Ernest] Swift, had a summer home down at Corona del Mar. Swift used to teach the sophomore chemistry, and Noyes arranged that Swift would teach a special course in sophomore chemistry during the summer, down at Corona del Mar. There were about four or five of us who took the course. We had a fine time, because we lived in the Marine Lab there slept out on the balcony. Noyes gave us a canoe, so that we could do a little paddling around the bay. Swift would come down and teach us chemistry. It was a very pleasant summer. TERRALL: So you actually knew Noyes, but not through taking chemistry from him? PICKERING: No, I never had him as a teacher. But I met him because he was the man who gave this travel prize, and so he undoubtedly wanted to know something about the people. And then, as I say, he arranged this summer program. But during that summer program we didn’t see much of Noyes. In fact, I’m not even sure he was down at his house very much that summer. Swift was the man we worked with. TERRALL: When you got into graduate school and you started putting more emphasis on physics, did you start working on cosmic rays right away? PICKERING: Well, pretty soon. What happened was that I, first of all, did a little bit of work assisting Vic [Henry Victor] Neher, who was doing some electron scattering work. I did a little bit of work with him but not very much. Then Millikan got me interested in the problem of building Geiger counters. At that time, the Geiger counter was just coming into existence as a http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-12 useful instrument for measurement. So I started building Geiger counters and measuring cosmic rays and developing circuitry so that you could measure coincidences between counters, and so on. Fig. 1. William Pickering uses an experimental telescope to investigate the source and intensity of cosmic rays on the roof of Robinson Laboratory of Astrophysics, ca 1939-1942. Electrical circuitry linking three cylindrical ion chambers, mounted parallel to the telescope’s axis allows the simultaneous detection and measurement of high-energy cosmic ray particles. Caltech Archives TERRALL: Were other people on campus using Geiger counters or building them? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-13 PICKERING: No, I had the first Geiger counters on campus. In fact, I gave the first counters to Carl Anderson to put over his cloud chamber, because it was pretty clear that once we had developed this coincidence circuitry, you determined when a cosmic ray went through a pair of counters, and then it was obviously simple to say, “Let’s put the cloud chamber in the middle, and then we’ll take a picture.” Up till then, Carl had just been taking pictures at random with the cloud chamber. TErRALL: So he didn’t really know what he was taking pictures of? PICKERING: He didn’t know whether any particles were in the chamber. By putting a counter above and below the chamber, and using coincident discharges to trigger the chamber, we opened up a whole new technique. TERRALL: What about other universities? Were Geiger counters being used experimentally? PICKERING: Well, they were just beginning to be. TErRALL: Did you have contact with anyone else in the process of developing them? PICKERING: Yes, there were a few other people. But for the most part, we were developing it ourselves. Neher and I tended to find ourselves working more closely together. He was a very good experimental physicist and contributed a lot to the development of the counters and the circuits that we were using. Also, at that time he had gotten into cosmic ray work directly, with Millikan. He was building cosmic ray electroscopes for Millikan. Then he had gone off with Millikan on some cosmic ray trips and generally had gotten into the experimental end of cosmic rays. My work supplemented his, because the electroscope and the Geiger counter were two different techniques for measuring the cosmic rays. So we both worked with Millikan, and we went on trips together. TERRALL: Was the Geiger counter something that was sent up in balloons? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-14 PICKERING: Yes. TERRALL: Was weight a problem? PICKERING: Well, yes, we had to make everything as light as we could, because we only had small balloons in those days. But the Geiger counter lent itself very easily to sending a radio signal back to Earth. It was really easier to record by radio than the electroscope was. So the first balloon work was done with Geiger counters [Pickering later corrects himself on this point—Ed.]. TERRALL: Were electroscopes used in balloons? PICKERING: Yes. TERRALL: I thought they were just used in the sea voyages. So they were sent up also. PICKERING: Yes. But the Geiger counters were the first. TERRALL: I see. Now, what about the problem of recovering the instrument? PICKERING: Well, we liked to get them back, but if we didn’t get them back, we didn’t. TERRALL: But what kind of recovery rate was there? Did you get a lot of them back? PICKERING: We did, as a matter of fact. We did our first balloon flights from the lab here, from the roof of Bridge [Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics]. Actually, the very first flight that we made, we got back about two weeks later. It had come down near Blythe [on the Arizona border]. It was about ten miles off the road, and I don’t know how the man found it, but he found it and sent it back to us. Flights made from Pasadena generally went off to the east, but we had them go in all directions. We had one that was fished out of the ocean down by Long Beach. We had one that landed in a swimming pool out at Arcadia. This was amusing, because we sent http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-15 the thing up late one afternoon; it had drifted away east, and then it had gone up higher and gotten into a wind current which brought it back to the west. Incidentally, what we did was to have two balloons, and one balloon would always burst before the other one. As soon as one balloon had burst, it didn’t have enough lift, so it would start coming down and that took the pressure off the second balloon. So generally, it would come down gently, all the way down to the ground. So we knew it had burst fairly close overhead, and that it would land not too far from Pasadena. But it was dark by then, so we didn’t know what would happen. Well, the next morning, here’s a guy knocking at the door with our instruments. And he said he was the caretaker out at the Arcadia municipal swimming pool. He was locking up for the night, and he heard a splash out there, and he wondered what it was; he thought some kid was out there. He went out and saw this thing in the water, and there’s a piece of cloth tape going up in the air. He said he didn’t see what was up there, so he pulled it, and after a while the balloon came down. [Laughter] TERRALL: He must have been shocked. PICKERING: Yes, he was shocked. TERRALL: But were you monitoring the radio signals until the balloon burst? PiCKERING: Yes, and even on the way down we were monitoring as much as we could. We had just simple direction findings, so we knew in a general way where the balloons were. I don’t know what our recovery rate was, but it would certainly be more than half. Now, we went off to do experiments in other parts of the world. The most ambitious trip was when I went to India in 1939. Millikan was developing a theory that had to do with the creation of cosmic rays. His theory required, in effect, a measurement of the energy of these high-energy particles. Essentially what we were doing was using the earth as a great magnet to sort out the energies. So we wanted to make measurements near the magnetic equator and other latitudes. And the particular reason for going to India was that the magnetic field of the earth is not quite symmetrical-it’s stronger on that side than it is on the other side. So we wanted to make measurements there. We did, in fact, make measurements at three places: Peshawar, which http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-16 is up by the Khyber Pass, Agra, and Bangalore. This was obviously a major expedition. Vic Neher and I went over there with Dr. and Mrs. Millikan. Even on that trip we got a fair number of our balloons back. I don’t remember how many we launched, but there was quite a batch of them. We must have launched a total of twenty or twenty-five. TERRALL: How high were the balloons going at that time? PICKERING: Oh, about 100,000 feet. TERRALL: I want to go back a little bit, to talk generally about what it was like to collaborate with Millikan on these projects. PICKERING: Well, he was a very interesting man, and I have a great deal of respect for him, of course. I think he did a magnificent job in setting up Caltech and setting the standards for Caltech and getting the kind of people that he did. To travel with him was a very interesting experience. He was a man with an insatiable interest in and curiosity about everything around him. He was a man who enjoyed very good physical health. He would eat anything. He had stamina that was sometimes beyond what Vic and I had. I remember times when we were down in Mexico. We would drive the truck all day, and we would stop someplace for the night. Vic and I just wanted to collapse, but Millikan wanted to go off and see what the town was like or get to work on something. He was an amazing man. In fact, my wife tells a story about those trips: On this particular trip, my wife and I and Vic and Dr. Millikan were in a truck. By now the war had started. This was December ’41—in fact, Pearl Harbor happened two days after we were into Mexico. Anyway, Dr. Neher was doing some work at MIT at the Radiation Lab. My wife and I drove the truck from Pasadena to Laredo, Texas— this was a panel truck with instruments in it-and then at Laredo Dr. Millikan and Dr. Neher joined us, and we drove on down into Mexico. Well, anyway, my wife tells the story that one day Dr. Neher was suffering from a migraine headache, and of course migraines are a miserable sort of a thing. So Millikan was commiserating with him a bit. Then she and Millikan were riding in the back of the truck for a while, and Millikan turned to her and said, “You know, I don’t think I ever had a headache.” And nothing more was said for a while. Then after a while he says, “Yes, I did have a headache, http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-17 when I was about twelve years old.” [Laughter] On an occasion, he said, when he drank too much coffee. But he did enjoy very good health, up until about a year before his death. Begin Tape 1, Side 2 TErraLL: Did working with a person like that make you feel that you always had to do more? Was it a very high-pressure thing, since he put so many hours into his working day? PICKERING: Yes, that’s right, he put so many hours into a working day, and had so much enthusiasm for the work that the rest of us did, too. TERRALL: Was it hard to keep up that enthusiasm, though? PICKERING: No, it was easy to work with him. His personality, of course, was very good. He was called the Chief, of course, by the people under him. He really did inspire people to work with him. TERRALL: So there weren’t any feelings of resentment or tension? PICKERING: No. TERRALL: What about Neher? PICKERING: Oh, he’s a very good man. As I said, he was a first-class experimentalist. He could build things; he just had a knack for building good things. He was a very good man in the student laboratories as well as building research equipment. Yes, we’ve kept in touch with him. In fact, as a bit of history, you really ought to talk with him sometime. He’s living now up near Watsonville. He retired and decided to build his own house. I admire him for this. After all, he’s in his late sixties by now; he’s two or three years older than I am. He is building with his own hands this very nice house. TERRALL: When you first started going on these trips, I think I read about one voyage across the http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-18 Pacific to New Zealand. Did you accompany the instruments on that? PICKERING: Well, actually, I went down to New Zealand while I was still a graduate student; in fact, I went down to New Zealand to see if I could find a job. I did take some Geiger counters along with me to make some measurements on the ship on the way down. Then, when we went off to India, we also made some measurements on the ship on that trip. TErraLL: On that trip to New Zealand, did you find any variation in the intensity of the cosmic rays? PICKERING: Yes, there was a so-called latitude effect, which we measured; there’s a dip as you get down near the equator. TERRALL: Did that fit in with the theory that Millikan wanted to test in India? Or was that a different test? PiCKERING: Well, no, it was related to it, in the sense that it showed that in point of fact in order to reach the earth at the equator, the rays would have to have higher energy than to reach the earth at a higher latitude. All it said is that there were fewer rays of higher energy than there were of lower energy. Now, the difference is only a few percent. The interpretation of this difference is a complex thing, but it is an indication that you are in fact measuring the energy spectrum, as it were, of the rays. Now, to do this properly, you really have to measure the energy at very high altitudes, where the situation is not complicated by the rays interacting with the atmosphere. So that’s one of the reasons we did the balloon experiments. The sea-level measurements tell you that there’s an effect, but it doesn’t really tell you very much. TERRALL: When did Millikan first come up with the theory of the magnetic field of the earth affecting the cosmic rays? PICKERING: Well, I’m not sure that he did come up with that. He was one of the early experimenters with cosmic rays, because he had developed this electroscope along with Vic http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-19 Neher. He had found that there was an altitude effect, and he was interested in that. They would go to a high altitude and then lower the electroscope beneath a lake, so that the mass equivalent of the water would be equivalent to the mass of air down at sea level, and compare that with the sea-level data. In fact, they went up to Lake Arrowhead—that was the first place where they did this experiment. Yes, he was interested in trying to understand the properties of the rays as evidenced by these altitude effects. Now, the latitude effect, I think, was first proposed by [Manuel Sandoval] Vallarta, down in Mexico City. He did an analysis of the effect of the earth’s magnetic field on the radiation and pointed out that if these rays came from outside the earth, as Millikan was pretty obviously showing, and if they were charged particles coming through the earth’s magnetic field, the energy required to reach the surface would be a function of latitude. So, various people then started trying to measure this latitude effect. TERRALL: At that time, it wasn’t really known what the particles were. PICKERING: No. There was a question as to whether they were photons or charged particles. And various things had been discovered. For example, an east-west effect had been discovered, which again, is related to the magnetic field and to the charges on the particles. As soon as you start getting an interaction between the rays and the earth’s magnetic field, then of course they have to be charged particles. But at first there was some debate as to whether they were charged particles or photons. TERRALL: So by the time you went to India, it was pretty well agreed that they were charged particles? PICKERING: Oh, yes. There was argument as to whether they were protons or electrons. But they were certainly charged particles. TERRALL: When you went on this trip to India, did your wife go along with you? PICKERING: She went as far as New Zealand. By that time, we had had our first baby, so she http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-20 took the baby down to New Zealand and stayed there while I went on to India, and then she met me coming back. TERRALL: Did you stop in other places to collect data? PICKERING: What had happened was that Millikan and Mrs. Millikan went down to Australia ahead of us, because he was going to give some lectures in some universities down there. We were supposed to leave in August, and we weren’t quite ready to leave, so we delayed a month. During that time, the war in Europe broke out. So we telegraphed Millikan: What do we do now? “Just come on.” So we came on. We sailed in a British ship from Vancouver to Honolulu, Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia. This ship carried some refugees from the first ship that was sunk by a submarine in the Atlantic. It was a little tense on the ship, because there were rumors that there were submarines in the Pacific also. In fact, the first stop the ship normally made was Victoria, to pick up any passengers, and then go on. On this particular trip, they did not go into the harbor at Victoria; they picked them up out in the channel, and the ship was blacked out at the time we did it. So we knew there was a war on. Also on that trip, when they had boat drills, everybody took it pretty seriously. As a matter of fact, that particular ship was sunk by a mine, off the coast of New Zealand, about a year later. Anyway, we didn’t have any troubles. When we got down to Sydney, the Millikans were there, and we were informed that since there was a war on, our tickets for the rest of the trip were, in effect, canceled. Although for the next leg, which was to be from Sydney to Singapore, the shipping line which happened to be Dutch— said they’d take us up to Singapore, but after that we were on our own. And so we boarded. Now, on the way up, we did in fact launch one balloon, when we were in port in Java-Djakarta, I guess they call it now. We launched one flight, which, if I remember, wasn’t very successful-but at least we launched it. TERRALL: So you knew you were going to get to Singapore, but you didn’t know after that how you were going to get to India? PICKERING: That’s right. What happened was we spent four days or so in Singapore. Then we found a little British freighter that was going to Calcutta, so we took that. Well, everything went http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-21 on all right, although we had originally planned to come on around the world, but by the time we were ready to leave India the war in the Mediterranean was beginning to get pretty hot. We didn’t want to go back through the Mediterranean; in fact, we’d have had great difficulty, I think, if we’d wanted to. So we ended up by coming back across the Pacific. We got an Italian boat as far as Manila, and then one of the old Dollar Line American ships from Manila back. TERRALL: How long were you actually in India? PICKERING: On the order of two or three months. TERRALL: I presume it was all arranged before you got over there, in terms of where you were going to go and so on? PICKERING: Oh, pretty much. Millikan had things taken care of. And on this trip, of course, there was a lot of contact with other organizations. For example, the Indian meteorological service worked with us. They provided us with the hydrogen to send up our balloons. They had not done any high-altitude work. In fact, one of the by-products of this was that we made some of the first measurements of real jet stream winds. It turned out that we were launching from Agra in December. That time of year is very pleasant over there. It’s clear and sunny and just pleasantly warm, and there’s very little wind at the surface. So the balloons would go up vertically for a while. Then they’d get in the jet stream and go tearing off to the east. We were able to track them, from the instruments that the weather bureau had, and measure these velocities. We measured a 200-mile-an-hour wind stream once, which is exceptional but not that unusual in a jet stream. These meteorologists were fascinated, because they had never realized that that was what was going on. TERRALL: Were there any problems involved in collaborating with them? PICKERING: No, we got along quite well with them. They assigned a couple of people to work with us. Agra was the headquarters, and when we went from there to Peshawar and down to Bangalore, they sent people with us. In Bangalore, we had a very pleasant stay at the Indian http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-22 Institute of Science. The director was C. V. Raman, who was a Nobel Prize winner, the first Nobel Prize winner from India. Millikan and Raman had met and had known each other; in fact, I think Raman had been in Pasadena. He was our host while we were in Bangalore, and that was very nice. I was back in Bangalore, incidentally, not too long ago, and met a man whose father had given him a movie he had taken when we were launching our balloons. So he showed me this old movie. So, the Indian trip was in 1939-1940; then when we came back Millikan wanted to get some more data, down in Mexico. TERRALL: Why Mexico? PICKERING: Well, we had to get to certain latitudes. He was interested in taking measurements at a series of specific latitudes. So we went into Mexico on December 4* or thereabouts. Actually, on Pearl Harbor day, which was the 7” of December, Millikan and Neher and I were out flying a balloon. We were staying at a place called Victoria, which is about fifty or seventy-five miles south of the border, and we had gone out into the brush there, so as to get away from the town to make our balloon flights. When we came back at the end of the afternoon, of course my wife was in a great tizzy, because she had heard about Pearl Harbor on the radio. The news was in Spanish, but she’d gathered enough about what was going on so that she was pretty shaken. So again we had the same situation as when we were going to go to India namely, we asked Millikan, “What do we do; do we go home now?” And Millikan said, “Well, no, I don’t see any reason to go home. Nothing’s going to happen in Pasadena that would make any difference whether I’m there now or there a few weeks from now. Let’s stay with the work.” So we did. TERRALL: That was the trip that you drove down in the truck. Did you have any particular adventures on that drive? It’s a long drive. PICKERING: It’s a long drive. No, it was pretty routine. TERRALL: Were the roads fairly passable in those days? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-23 PICKERING: Yes, they were all right. We drove down as far as Acapulco. But we didn’t have any trouble. TErrALl: Did you get good results from that trip? PICKERING: We got some good measurements, yes. TERRALL: And they fitted with his theory? PICKERING: Well, more or less. Millikan’s theory had to do with the creation of cosmic rays by annihilation of elements. The data more or less fitted his theory, but actually it turned out that the data were more complicated than that, because there were changes in the cosmic rays as a function of time, because of changes in the solar magnetic field and so forth. So you can’t really interpret the data the way Millikan did. In other words, Millikan thought the data proved his theory, but in point of fact things were a bit fuzzy. When you really look at the data in terms of what we know now, they didn’t prove his theory. TERRALL: But this was much later then, that this was realized? PICKERING: Oh, yes. A few years later. TERRALL: This would have been ’41. Were there other trips after that? PICKERING: Yes. The last trip was to St. George, Utah. In the middle of the war, when Caltech first got into the rocket business, they were doing some work on rocket fuels in Kellogg [W. K Kellogg Radiation Laboratory]. They had a major fire or explosion there in Kellogg. It killed one man. A graduate student who was going to go with us on the trip, and we were supposed to have left that day or the day before, was just walking between Throop and Kellogg, and he got caught in the blast. It burned him fairly badly, although he lived. But it obviously upset our plans. We did go off a few days later. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-24 Neher and I had made another trip earlier, to fly electroscopes. I said we flew Geiger counters first; I’m not sure that that’s right. I think maybe we did fly electroscopes first. Anyway, in 1940 we had made a trip by train, where we had gone on a north-south line across the country-Bismarck, North Dakota, down to San Antonio, Texas, and someplace in Oklahoma. There was another trip down to San Antonio in September 1941. TERRALL: Now, had you been responsible for developing the radio technique? PICKERING: Yes, I had worked on the radio end of it particularly, and the general techniques for getting the signal back and recording it. TERRALL: This was something that hadn’t been done? PICKERING: No, there hadn’t been much of that sort of thing. The closest thing to it was that the weather bureau was beginning to launch weather balloons, which had some instruments. Though I think the instruments had to be recovered in those days. In other words, they scratched on smoky glass and things like that. They got a trace that you then had to recover and look at. TERRALL: You had to rely on people sending them back to you then? PICKERING: Yes. TERRALL: Millikan had been working with sending up balloons way back, right? PICKERING: Yes, that’s right. Some of the early ones you had to send back, yes. TERRALL: So it was only when you started getting involved that they started using radio? PICKERING: Yes. They had launched some balloons down in San Antonio, but those were the ones that had to be recovered. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-25 TERRALL: The weather service was not interested in cosmic rays, right? PICKERING: No, they were just helping. They had instruments and they had hydrogen. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-26 WILLIAM H. PICKERING SESSION 2 NOVEMBER 29, 1978 Begin Tape 2, Side 1 TERRALL: The last time we finished up by talking about all the cosmic ray expeditions. I wanted to ask you about teaching during that time. Were you teaching undergraduates? PICKERING: Yes, I was teaching in various places. In fact, for a while I was teaching current events and sophomore history. TERRALL: How did that happen? PICKERING: Well, back during the Depression, Caltech was pretty shorthanded. Dr. [William Bennett] Munro, who was running the history department, got me over there. I don’t remember how long I was teaching, but I did teach both current events and sophomore history for a while. Then I was teaching some physics and some electrical engineering. In a sense, the most interesting work that I was involved in was just before the war and just at the beginning of the -the late thirties- where I was trying to get more electronics into the curriculum. Because at that time electrical engineering meant mostly power machinery. Electronics was just beginning to evolve, and since my interests were very heavily in electronics, I was interested in developing courses in those areas. And I did develop a number of courses, both laboratory courses and theoretical courses. TERRALL: Were these graduate courses? PICKERING: Well, both undergraduate and graduate. In fact, the closest I ever came to writing a book was a book for an electronics laboratory. In fact I think I still have a stack of manuscripts http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-27 around somewhere which never did get published-although there was a lot of interest in it, and I had several publishers after me. But I never did get it finished TERRALL: Was this true in general at universities, that there wasn’t much electronics being taught? PICKERING: Oh, yes. Well, you see, if you go back to the twenties and thirties, radio communication and radio broadcasting were beginning to develop, but the use of electronics in control systems and all that sort of stuff was just unheard of. Some schools were teaching radio and communications, obviously, but we were not, here at Caltech. And this was partly because the head of the EE department was Professor Sorensen, a very good man whose interests were very definitely in power engineering. So the department was centered on power engineering, including the development of the long-distance transmission of power. The first long-distance power line in the country, I think, was the one that the Edison Company put in from Huntington Lake down to Los Angeles. Most of the engineering for that was done here at Caltech. Also, the high-voltage laboratory was financed through the Edison Company and was used as a test facility for the development of that line. In other words, the EE department was heavily involved in this business of the evolution of power systems. In that period, then, the idea of long-distance transmission of power was just beginning to be appreciated and it was beginning to develop. This Huntington Lake to LA line must have been put in sometime in the middle 1920s. By the middle 1930s, a line was operating between Hoover Dam and Los Angeles. Generally, the idea of large networks was beginning to evolve. In fact, the large power systems that we have now really started in about that period. So Caltech was heavily involved in that. But the idea of electronics was something new and something different. Professor Mackeown was here and taught vacuum tubes and vacuum tube theory. Then I tried to expand this into other areas of electronics, and did so in the late thirties and early forties. TERRALL: Did you try to attract people to Caltech who might be interested in expanding this part of the EE department? PICKERING: I don’t know if we did any particular proselytizing of either faculty or students. It http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-28 just sort of came about naturally. TERRALL: Well, then the war came along. That shook everything up. PICKERING: Yes, then we had the V-12 program for navy officers. We also had a special short course in microwaves and radar. TERRALL: It was one course? PICKERING: Essentially one intensive course, yes, and maybe only given once. TERRALL: And you were teaching in that? PICKERING: I was involved in that, yes. In fact, I think I must have organized it. That must have been towards the end of the war, when there had been enough developments that radar was beginning to come into use and the military needed people trained in these techniques. It was essentially a pre-radar course. People took that and then went to MIT, to the Radiation Lab there, and learned the particular techniques needed for the particular equipment that was being used. So we had that, and we had the V-12 program, which of course was a year-round program. TERRALL: You were teaching in that also? PICKERING: Oh, yes, I was involved in that. Then we had another one, which we called ESMWT-the Engineering and Science Management War Training. This was essentially a series of evening courses which were given all around Los Angeles, and we organized it out of Caltech. I was involved with the management of it and also did some of the teaching. This was mostly done at the junior college level, and it was presented in different high schools around the area. We must have had ten or twenty different courses set up under that program. TERRALL: How did having the V-12 students on campus affect the way things ran at Caltech? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-29 PICKERING: Several things. There was of course, first of all, the intensive effort to get these people through as quickly as possible. There was also the fact that a fair sprinkling of the faculty was disappearing off the campus to go into various war jobs. Then we had a kind of a running argument with the navy on the question of maintaining Caltech standards-because we obviously wanted to. But as far as the navy was concerned, what appeared in a man’s file was a grade-point average, without real recognition that this was a Caltech grade-point average, which meant a lot more than the grade-point average from Podunk College. This was hard on the individual, because the computer-well, I guess this was before the days of the computer-but the filing clerk would not recognize this difference. We used to worry about that and talked to the navy about it. We probably bent the system a bit to grade a little higher during that period than we otherwise would TERRALL: What was the system for admissions? The navy assigned people? PICKERING: Well, the navy assigned people. I don’t really remember now exactly how that worked. But there must have been some filtering, because we got pretty good people. Those classes went very well. In fact, they were not exclusively navy people, because the regular Caltech students were mixed in, too. The whole thing just went right along. There wasn’t any significant lowering of standards during that time. TERRALL: Did they come here for four years? PICKERING: Three years, because we worked right through the year; therefore the three summers made the equivalent of a year. They got regular degrees from Caltech-just in less time, because they worked right through. Now, I could give you the names of some alumni of that group. One of the most well known of the alumni is Eberhardt Rechtin, for example, who is president of Aerospace Corporation. Eb went through with the V-12 class, and then he stayed on and got a doctor’s degree. But as far as the system was concerned, everything was speeded up because of the war and there was high pressure to get these kids through. The numbers involved were a little more than we usually had, but not very much more. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-30 TERRALL: What about some of the other war research projects you were involved in? PICKERING: Well, I was doing some microwave work, which led to an association with some of the radar work. I did go back to MIT for about three months to do a little work back there. There were several war projects, but I think perhaps one of the most interesting was the Japanese balloon project. As you remember, the Japanese were sending over these unmanned balloons that carried bombs, and they hoped that these would drop in the US and cause trouble. Most of the bombs were fire bombs. They frankly hoped to set forest fires with these things, or else, if they were lucky, maybe to set some fires in cities. As a technique, the thing was highly successful. These things flew from Japan to various points in this country. In fact, I think one of them was picked up in Florida, so they really did travel long distances. However, as far as we know, no damage was ever done by these things until after the war, when some picnickers up near Ventura ran across one of them which had landed up in the woods. These bombs had a block of TNT on them, to destroy them. These picnickers were fooling with it, and the TNT went off and killed them. But during the war we don’t know of anything particular that happened from these things. TERRALL: So why were they not successful? PICKERING: A fire bomb dropped at random isn’t necessarily going to start a fire. And when we analyzed it carefully, there were a couple of technical problems [the Japanese] had overlooked. One of them was that these bombs, when they were hung onto the balloon mechanism, had a safety pin in the nose. The safety pin was a piece of piano wire, which was anchored onto the framework of the structure, so when the bomb dropped, it dropped free for a little bit and then the wire pulled tight and was supposed to pull out, you see. Well, after those things had flown at 30,000 feet for a couple of days, that wire became brittle and a good many of them broke, so that the bomb fell with the safety pin still in it and didn’t explode on impact. That was one problem they had. They had another technical problem in the operation of the balloon. The thing was designed to fly at a constant altitude day and night by dropping sandbags from time to time. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-31 Then when it got through dropping all the sandbags, it started dropping bombs, you see; that was the general scheme quite a clever scheme. There was a mechanism set up to drop these things, involving an altimeter, and this whole thing was operated by a little battery. Now, to stop the battery from freezing at high altitudes, they had made a little plastic box, which would hold maybe two or three quarts of liquid, and they put a low-freezing-point liquid in there. This plastic box, then, had the battery in the middle of it. During the day the liquid would warm up and then at night it wouldn’t cool down too much, so the battery wouldn’t freeze. Again, quite a nice idea. The only problem was that in order to prevent the liquid from evaporating, of course they put a lid on the box, and they had a little hole through which to fill it and they put a rubber cork in the hole. Well, what happened was that when the balloon got to high altitudes, a good many of these boxes exploded or broke open, because there wasn’t any pressure relief on them. So that meant that the liquid disappeared, the battery froze, and the thing didn’t work right. So they had a couple of technical problems. TERRALL: Were a lot of these balloons getting to the States? PICKERING: Yes. I don’t remember what the numbers were, but a quite surprisingly large number. TERRALL: And they were found and sent to you? PICKERING: Yes, we had an arrangement set up that any of them that were found in the area for 100 miles or so around here were sent in to us for examination, because nobody was quite sure of just what was going on. So our task was to examine these and to understand them so we knew what to do about them. This business of sending these things in had one amusing by-product. We got a phone call one afternoon that one had been found somewhere and was on its way up to Caltech, and we said, “OK, drop it down in the landing dock area,” near what’s now the aeronautics building. So they did. Later that afternoon we went over there and had a look at it. And here in the corner of the room was this pile of balloon, and underneath the balloon was the equipment. You see, what happened on a good many of these is that the balloon would burst and the thing would come down to the ground. You’d pick up the balloon and all the equipment, so http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-32 you’d have this great mass of balloon fabric and the equipment, which was a metal ring about three feet in diameter underneath, with various things hanging onto it. So we went over and we pulled the balloon off, and sure enough, here was the equipment; and along with it was this block of TNT, which we knew was tied into a detonator on the thing. [Laughter] Here it is, Friday afternoon, sitting in the corner of the aeronautics building. By then we were familiar enough with it that we knew how to disarm the thing. So we disarmed it, but we were still worried about that block of TNT. We decided the best thing to do was to put it up on the roof of Bridge. I don’t know why we thought this, but we did. At least it was in the open. So we put it up on the roof of Bridge, and then we called the army to come and get it. [Laughter] They did, and it didn’t go off, so all was well. TERRALL: What was supposed to make the bomb detonate? PICKERING: Well, there was a detonator that was operated from the battery. After it had dropped the last bomb, it was supposed to light a fuse which would set off this block of explosive. So that, in theory, nothing would land, you see; it would just shatter the thing the idea being, of course, that we would be mystified as to where these things were coming from. But because of this battery failure, a lot of balloons landed with the block of explosive intact. TERRALL: So the bombs themselves had already been dropped? PICKERING: In that particular case, I think so. I don’t think there were any bombs on this thing. But that block of explosive was about the size of a pound of butter. We were very nervous. TERRALL: Imagine how the Japanese would have felt if the building had blown up. PICKERING: Anyway, that was an interesting project. The other man who was working on that was Bill Nash, who is back on the campus now, working in the Alumni Office. He and I handled that project. Let me tell you one other interesting anecdote. We were interested in whether you could see these things on a radar or not. We patched up the balloon and put the whole thing together so it would look as if it was flying over here. Then we took it up to Oxnard, to a navy http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-33 facility, filled it up with hydrogen and put it up on a rope until it was maybe 1,000 feet up in the air. The idea was that various radars around could have a look at it and see if they could see it. Well, while it was up there, the rope broke and the balloon took off. We had taken the precaution to put a tag on it to notify the Los Angeles harbor defense if it was found. Sure enough, the next day, the harbor defense people got a phone call from the sheriff in Flagstaff, Arizona, that he had the balloon. They said, “That’s fine, bundle it up and send it in.” And this guy says he’s not going to touch it. And they ask “Why not?” He says, “Well, just because it’s got your name on it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t some kind of a Japanese trick. And I’m going to have nothing to do with it.” [Laughter] And he wouldn’t. The army had to send somebody out there to pick the damn thing up and bring it home. TERRALL: How did you get the ones that came straight from Japan sent to you? PICKERING: Oh, through the army defense people. In other words, people found these things, and they notified the sheriff or notified the army. In those days, after all, if you found something like that on the ground, you knew there was something funny about it. In fact, a good many of them, if you looked at them closely, had Japanese markings on them in some places. I think they were mostly turned in. TERRALL: Was this something that people were aware of, that Japanese were sending balloons over? PICKERING: Not at first; not until we had a pretty good handle on the fact that it wasn’t very serious, and then it was publicized. The Japanese made quite a to-do of it. We found afterwards that at that time, this was announced over there as a new weapon that was going to attack the Americans. They would launch these things with a public ceremony, usually down at a beach somewhere, and crowds of people would come down and watch them be launched off on their way to America. TERRALL: It’s amazing that there wasn’t more damage done by them. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-34 PICKERING: Yes, it is. In fact, there might still be some bombs out there. Anyway, that was an interesting project. TERRALL: On the microwave project, were you considering going to MIT and working there? PICKERING: Well, no, I was so tied up with the teaching program here that it really wasn’t considered that I should do that. No, mostly I went to MIT to get up to date on some of the things they were doing. So that even though most of it was classified, at least I could bring some elements of it back into some of the teaching here. TERRALL: Oh, I see. It was a question of getting it into the teaching. PICKERING: Yes, getting myself acquainted with it. TERRALL: So you weren’t involved in the development of wave guides. PICKERING: Well, I was doing some wave guide research. Studying some of the electrical characteristics of wave guides was especially what I did at MIT. In other words, I was not working on a particular piece of radar equipment but rather on some of the basic research underlying it. TERRALL: Were there other people here at Caltech working on wave guides? PICKERING: Oh, I don’t think so. No, all the intensive work on microwaves was done at MIT at the Radiation Lab. The big thing that Caltech was doing during the war was the rocket work— and actually there were two projects, the Eaton Canyon project and the JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] project. Of those, the Eaton Canyon project was much more active during the war, because it was really manufacturing rockets. [William A.] Fowler and [Charles C.] Lauritsen were the leaders in that. The JPL one was the aeronautics department, and that was [Theodore] von Kármán and Clark Millikan. I got involved in that before the end of the war, too. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-35 TERRALL: Had you had anything to do with the aeronautical lab before that? PICKERING: No. They got me into it when they got into some instrumentation problems. So I went up there to try to help with some of those things. To go back over the history of JPL a little bit: JPL, of course, started out in the late thirties, when some aeronautics students wanted to do some rocket research. They got a little bit of money to support that. Von Kármán’s interest at the time— in fact all of their interests at the time-really aimed at how you could use a rocket to make an airplane fly better, or faster. And the JATO-Jet-Assisted Take-Off-rocket was developed in the very early days of the war. As soon as it was appreciated what could be done, they got a lot of support from the army, which then had the Army Air Corps under its wing. But the thing grew so quickly that the Aerojet Corporation was spun off as a commercial company to handle the manufacture of JATO rockets, whereas JPL would continue with the research. Then, later on in the war, the army asked JPL to look at rockets for missiles and to really begin the development of a long-range missile. By then, the German V-2 activity was becoming understood, so we were asked to start a research program aimed at developing something like the V-2 —well, we didn’t put it that way, but to develop long-range missiles. That happened about the time I went up there. My work tended to be more and more tied up with this long-range missile problem. TERRALL: Now was this soon after JPL was started? PICKERING: Yes, in the ’44 period— it began to move in that direction. TERRALL: At that time, they were physically where they are now, at the end of the Arroyo? PICKERING: Yes. What happened was that when they started doing rocket research, they started in the aeronautics building, until they filled the building up with nitric acid fumes one day and they were told to get the heck out of there. So they went up in the Arroyo and arranged with the city to get a little piece of land. TERRALL: That was completely undeveloped then? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-36 PICKERING: Oh, yes. There was just a dirt road up there. TERRALL: Did they have any problems with accidents in those early days? PICKERING: No, the accident record at JPL has been remarkably good. I don’t know if JPL has ever hurt a man very seriously with rockets; it’s been very good on that. TERRALL: You mentioned last time that there was an explosion at Caltech; that was earlier? PICKERING: Yes, that was the Eaton Canyon project. That was in the basement of Kellogg. TERRALL: What was the relationship between the two projects? None? PICKERING: They were quite independent. TerraLL: So they had completely separate funding? PICKERING: Yes, the Lauritsen project was navy-funded; the other one was army. TERRALL: So there wasn’t any concern that the efforts were being duplicated? PICKERING: No, they were going off in different directions. [Tape recorder turned off] TERRALL: You were saying that von Kármán asked you to get involved in the missile project. PICKERING: Yes, so I got involved up there and went up there to do instrumentation work. As the missile project started developing, I got more and more heavily involved in that. One thing led to another, and I took over the lab in 1954 http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-37 TERRALL: But the first project you were working on was telemetry? PICKERING: Telemetry systems, yes. We started putting telemetry on some of the rocket test vehicles. The first big project was a large test vehicle called the Corporal. Then the army asked us to make it into a production missile from a research tool, and we modified it and came up with the Corporal weapon system. I was project manager for that. Fig. 2. The launch of a JPL Corporal missile at the US Army’s White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, ca 1954. Photo from “GALCIT: The First Twenty-Five Years,” Caltech Archives. TERRALL: Did the telemetry technique you were using grow out of what you used in the cosmic ray experiments? PICKERING: Yes, it was an evolution from the cosmic ray stuff, because in that, we were sending information down from balloons. So this was very much an expansion of some of the techniques http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-38 we were developing. TERRALL: But this was also a control mechanism? PICKERING: Well, no. The telemetry is independent of the control. The telemeter is just sending information back. The control involved something internal to the rocket, as to how you stabilize it and how you guide it. We evolved a system for the Corporal which involved radio guidance as well as some internal equipment. TERRALL: The Corporal wasn’t finished before the war was over, was it? PICKERING: Oh, no. No, work on the weapon system didn’t even start until 1949. TERRALL: What about the telemetry; that wasn’t used in any of the earlier rockets? PICKERING: Oh, yes, it was used in the test vehicles. The first Corporal test vehicle was launched about ’46, I think. TERRALL: Would you say that that project took longer than the army expected it to? Were they hoping that it would be used in the war? PickERING: Oh, I don’t know. They wanted us to get working in the field when they realized that the Germans had been doing something. So they wanted us to get started, but I don’t know that they had any feeling that we were going to come up with something, unless the war went on for many years. The Eaton Canyon rockets, on the other hand, were used in the war. They were barrage rockets. TERRALL: They were less sophisticated? PICKERING: Yes, they were just simple rockets, with no guidance at all except fins on them. They were used in large numbers on the landings on the Pacific islands. They were used as a http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-39 barrage, because you could get a very large amount of explosives on the beach to clear the beach before you tried to land. TERRALL: Were you involved in Aerojet at all? PICKERING: No. That had been established before I joined JPL. I had nothing to do with that group. TERRALL: But von Kármán was in both places, right? PICKERING: Oh, yes. By the way, the first director of JPL in its present form was really Frank Malina. I think Frank doesn’t like to call himself the first director; he wants to say von Kármán was the first director. But anyway, other than von Kármán, it was Frank Malina. He’s now in Paris. He’s an artist, and he enjoys life in Paris. Kinetic art has been what he’s working on, and he also publishes an art and science magazine, Leonardo. TERRALL: Is this just since his retirement? PICKERING: Well, after he left JPL in 1946, when Louis Dunn came in [as director], he went over to Paris and he worked with von Kármán, who was in Paris also, working for NATO. Malina was with him, but developing his art. He went through various phases, finally ending up with this kinetic art, which is abstract art using moving light. TERRALL: I knew his name from the early days of JPL, but I didn’t know what had happened to him. But von Kármán in those days was away a lot, in Washington and so on? PiCKERING: Well, during the war he was, although he was based here at Caltech. After the war—I guess I don’t know when he moved to Paris— but he set up what was called AGARD, Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development. It was a group of the NATO countries, banding together in aerospace research. They were headquartered in Paris. Von Kármán was primarily responsible for it, actually. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering 40 TERRALL: How well did you know von Kármán? PICKERING: Oh, not as well as I knew Millikan, but I knew him quite well. After the war was over, for example, I went over to Europe with him on a fact-finding expedition. So I saw quite a lot of him. He used to live down here; he had a big house down on South Garfield, with his sister, Pipa. He never married, but his sister used to look after him. TERRALL: Was he a very social person? PICKERING: Well, not in the sense of having big society-type parties, but he was always very sociable with his students. He was a very warm individual. Begin Tape 2, Side 2 TERRALL: I wanted to ask you about the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Did you get into that through von Kármán? PICKERING: Von Kármán set that up. That was a by-product of his war work. I was a member of the first board. TERRALL: What was the purpose of that? PICKERING: To help the air force with its research planning. TERRALL: But you were involved in investigating the state of Japanese electronics? PICKERING: Well, after the war, of course, everybody went rushing around to find out what was going on in the enemy countries. I was involved with one of these trips with von Kármán, in which we went over to Germany to find out what was going on there in aeronautics, principally aeronautics and then to Japan also. This meant visiting various laboratories and talking to http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering 41 people and trying to find out what we could. TERRALL: What did you find out about the Japanese technology? PICKERING: Oh, they were not very far ahead. In the electronics area, neither country was as far as we were. TErRALL: One of the other people in that group was [Hsue-shen] Tsien. Wasn’t he on that trip to Japan? PICKERING: No, he didn’t go on it. No, Tsien worked very closely with Kármán, and I guess Tsien made one trip to Europe with Kármán, but he was not on the trip that I went on. TERRALL: Had you worked with him at JPL? PICKERING: Tsien? Oh, not very much. TERRALL: He later had problems, during the McCarthy period. PICKERING: Yes, Tsien, of course, is a very famous case of the bungling of the US bureaucracy, really. Well, it was partly the McCarthy business but partly also just bungling on the part of the US government. Tsien had been very close to Kármán, and Kármán regarded him as one of his best students. Tsien worked very closely with him in the air force planning and research activities; he was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board. He worked up at JPL, and one of the things he did up there was to organize a rocket training program for the army people, to teach them something about rockets. Well, a few years after the war, he wanted to go back to China to visit his father, because his father was getting old. The Chinese, of course, have great respect for their ancestors, and he wanted to make a trip back. One group in Washington decided that he knew too much and he shouldn’t be allowed to go. They literally almost grabbed him off the boat, and essentially put him under house arrest up here in Altadena. The excuse for it was that they found a copy of his training manual in his luggage. At the time it was written, the training http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering 42 manual had been classified, but by then it wasn’t classified at all. But anyway, they held him, because they just felt that he knew too much and they were afraid to let him go to China. About six months or a year later, another group in Washington decided he was an undesirable alien and ought to be deported. And they deported him. By then, of course, Tsien was so furious he said he was never going to come back. And of course he didn’t TErrALL: He had been here for quite a long time, and he had worked on all sorts of things, hadn’t he? PICKERING: Oh, yes, all sorts of advanced stuff with Kármán. He was a very bright man and he is now in a very senior position in Chinese science. TERRALL: So Kármán couldn’t intercede for him? PICKERING: No, the thing just got out of our hands altogether here at Caltech. Now, if it had been handled correctly, of course, they shouldn’t have stopped him in the first place. They should have had a real discussion with him as to what his plans were and a real understanding. And I think Tsien would have come back and worked with us. But, in the first place, grabbing him almost off the boat and putting him under house arrest—he just couldn’t move out of the Pasadena area. I guess he came down to Caltech and did a few things. Then this other bunch just saying he had to be deported as an undesirable alien. The poor guy! In fact, things got pretty tense. I think there was one incident of burning a cross on his lawn up in Altadena, of all things. TERRALL: But he must have had plenty of friends around. PICKERING: Oh, yes, sure, and there were Chinese among them. There were quite a few Chinese at Caltech in those years. In fact, one of them came back here on a visit not so long ago, who was a physicist. He had gotten his doctor’s degree from Caltech about 1930, and he had worked around here; actually he worked during the war on what was called the Morris Dam project, which was a highly classified project that the navy had up here, doing some torpedo research. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering 43 And then after the war he elected to go back to China. I don’t think he got kicked out; he just wanted to go back. So he went back and stayed there, and he’s now one of their leading scientists. He came through here a couple of years ago, and he and I talked quite a bit. He was obviously getting homesick for Pasadena, because he was reminiscing about all the people he knew here and wondering what had happened to them. And actually, as I say, there’ve been quite a number of them through here. TErRALL: Did anybody else have the same kind of problems that Tsien had? PICKERING: No. I don’t know that any of the others were either kicked out or prevented from going. TERRALL: That was just sort of freak case, then? PICKERING: Yes. Although there were loyalty investigation cases involving some of the people who’d been up at JPL. There was a man by the name of [Sidney] Weinbaum who was jailed on a perjury charge as part of this McCarthy business. TERRALL: And what became of that? PICKERING: Well, he was jailed for a few years. I really don’t know don’t happened to him. TERRALL: Because, actually at Caltech, people really weren’t touched that much by it. PICKERING: No, no, because Caltech generally is not politically motivated. But this involved a question of whether there’d been some Communist cells, or something more or less equivalent to that, in the thirties. You know, this touched all kinds of people. Of course, the really terrible example here is Robert Oppenheimer. He was badly mistreated, really, for what he’d done in the thirties, whereas he’d made a tremendous contribution to the country. TERRALL: But this person at JPL, was it generally felt that this was exaggerated? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering 44 PICKERING: Oh, I think most people felt that these guys were not in any sense activists- that they were just sort of intellectually interested in socialism or communism. Particularly in the thirties, in the Depression days. TERRALL: During the time of the investigations, then, in the fifties, were people at JPL worried about this sort of thing? PICKERING: Oh, there was a little bit of worrying about it, but not very much. Let’s see, McCarthy was about ’52; the Tsien case must have been pretty close to that time. I’m not exactly sure when. I think the Weinbaum case may have been earlier; in fact, I’m pretty sure it was earlier. TERRAL: So this would have been someone who was working on classified research? PICKERING: Well, in general, the work up at JPL was classified, up until the time we joined NASA. TERRALL: So everybody had to get security clearance? PICKERING: Yes. TERRALL: When you were appointed director of JPL [1954], did that come as a surprise to you? PICKERING: Yes. Louis Dunn was the director at that time, and Louis and I were pretty close. Louis told me, of course, that he was going to leave, but I was surprised when [Caltech president Lee A.] DuBridge asked me to take it over. In fact, I wasn’t sure how long I wanted to keep the job. At that time, we were working on the Sergeant missile. I told DuBridge that I would stay at least to get the Sergeant missile project finished, but after that, I didn’t know. TERRALL: You were thinking of going back to the campus? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering- 45 PICKERING: To the campus, yes. And of course what happened was, before the Sergeant missile project was finished, the space project started, and then I got involved with that. TERRALL: How did you feel about putting so much of your time into administration? PICKERING: Well, it’s a different life. But on the other hand, I had sort of gone into it gradually. In other words, if I may make a distinction between my case and that of Bruce Murray [JPL director 1976-1982], who also went from the campus up to the lab, I had been spending a lot more time and had been a lot more involved in JPL administration over the years. I had been spending full time up there for several years. TERRALL: You were heading up one of the sections anyway, right? PICKERING: Yes, sure. I was doing less and less teaching as time went on, so that I sort of phased into it. Whereas in Bruce’s case, although he had done work up there, he hadn’t been involved in the administration of the place to the extent that I had. It was more of a switch in his case. TerraLl: But did you find that it took you away from the research end of things? PICKERING: Yes, sure. I wasn’t doing research, of course, so I found myself just worrying about people and projects and so on. And the teaching I used to enjoy. Particularly because this was a period, after the war, when there was a lot of evolution in the curriculum. A lot of stuff that was coming out of the war years was getting into the academic programs. There were lots of new things and lots of interesting things to teach. TERRALL: So you had actually been teaching between the end of the war and the time you moved up to JPL. PICKERING: Oh, yes. My last class was in ’52. I think I had a graduate student up until about http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering 46 the time I took over. TerraLL: So how did it work out? Was it something that you found you liked to do the administration? PICKERING: Oh, yes, sure. I was obviously already pretty deeply involved in it. And as I say, I told DuBridge I’d certainly stay to see the Sergeant out. It was because of my interest in what I was doing. TERRALL: What was the relationship between Caltech and JPL at that time? Were there a lot of people who had joint appointments? PICKERING: No, very few. Historically, it started out as a very close relationship, because, after all, everybody was a graduate student to begin with. In the early days of the rocket work, there was a close association with the campus. And, actually, in the early days of the missile work, there was a close association, because JPL had some equipment— namely, supersonic wind tunnels-which didn’t exist on the campus, and there was a lot of interest in the aeronautics department. So the aeronautics department and JPL were pretty close in those early years. But they started to drift apart when JPL became more and more involved in the engineering of missile systems; the security classification started getting higher and it became more difficult to communicate. So by the middle fifties, the relationship between the two groups was pretty slight. In fact, there was a period around 1950 when the Board of Trustees questioned whether or not Caltech ought to continue to operate JPL, because we were getting more and more into this highly classified stuff. The question, “Why do it?” came up. The army, in fact, sent out some high-ranking generals to talk to the Board, and they agreed to maintain it. TERRALL: So the trustees were actually also the trustees of JPL? PICKERING: Oh, yes. JPL is legally a part of Caltech. And all the legal documents the contracts and so forth- have to go through Caltech signatures. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering 47 TERRALL: And the army wanted to keep it that way? PICKERING: Yes, the army was quite happy with it and wanted to keep it. As I say, they sent some senior people out to talk to the trustees about it. But the day-to-day contact with the faculty and with the students was pretty slim — partly because of this classification problem and the physical separation and so forth. Apart from myself and Homer Joe Stewart, there were some others-Frank Marble, Duncan Rannie, Pol Duwez; just a few people who were shared between the two places, but not too many. Then when we joined NASA [1958], both DuBridge and I said, “Well, now this is a new ball game, because now we’re unclassified, and now we’re more scientifically oriented. And therefore, we ought to develop more relationships.” And that has been a more difficult thing to do than I think either DuBridge or I visualized. I think I understand why—it’s really because the faculty and the laboratory have completely different motivations. The faculty are motivated to do research that they’re interested in on a time scale that suits their convenience, whereas the laboratory is motivated to respond to a request from a contractor— be it the army or NASA-to do something for them, and we have to work on schedules and budgets and so on. Also, we have to do things that somebody else wants to do, not necessarily what we want to do. So you end up with people with different objectives in life. It’s not as easy to work together as it sounds at first. TERRALL: When you took over, the army was still funding JPL. Were there problems in running a lab for the army? PICKERING: No, actually it was easier to run it for the army than it was to run it for NASA. [The army] didn’t bother us. The army was very satisfied with us, because we were doing good work for them, and they did leave us alone to a much greater extent than NASA did. Then the other thing which was actually very helpful from our point of view was that because of the classification business, we did all our field testing down at the classified site, down at White Sands [New Mexico]. We didn’t have the TV and everybody looking over our shoulder. That made it a lot easier to do some things. So, yes, we worked very hard for the army, and I think we accomplished a lot for the army. But the army gave us a free hand to a very large extent. Then NASA came in, and one of the first things they did was that the first director of NASA, Keith http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering 48 Glennan, and his deputy Hugh Dryden, came out and talked to me. One of the first things they said was, “Well, now things are going to be different. Because instead of being run by a bunch of colonels in the Pentagon, we at NASA have a headquarters staff of research Ph.D.’s. And we’re going to have a lot more to say about what you do.” And that, as a matter of fact, led to some problems in the early days of NASA. TErRALL: But the army people [had kept] pretty close track of what you were doing. PICKERING: Oh, sure, yes. But they did not have a whole lot of PhD’s in the Pentagon to second-guess us. A small office in the Pentagon with one or two people in it essentially ran the project. The result was that we would tell them at the beginning of the year what we wanted to do. They would say, “Gee, we haven’t got that much money,” and then we’d argue abut it a bit, and then they would give us the money and off we’d go. TERRALL: And whenever you needed to do testing, you went down to White Sands? PICKERING: Yes. As a matter of fact, if you look at some very early maps of White Sands, you will find that they’re labeled ORDCIT, which was Ordnance Department, California Institute of Technology. And in fact the original choice of White Sands was made by a group that included Homer Joe Stewart. You ought to talk to Homer Joe about some of this stuff. The early maps show it as the ORDCIT extension of the Fort Bliss Bombing Range— that’s what it was called. And then it eventually became the White Sands Proving Ground. TERRALL: So it was used originally just for JPL testing? PICKERING: Yes, the first rockets that were launched down there were JPL rockets. In fact, the first rocket launch from Cape Canaveral was a JPL rocket, too. It was a so-called Bumper-WAC, where we put the WAC Corporal, which was a smaller version of the Corporal, on top of a V-2, and that was launched from down there. So JPL has an involvement in the development of both of those ranges. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering- 49 TERRALL: Did you know DuBridge before he became president of Caltech? PICKERING: Well, I’d met him when I was at MIT for a while. But no, I didn’t really know him. TerraLL: How closely did he work with you [when you were] director of JPL? PICKERING: Oh, he supported me, but he didn’t really interfere with what was going on there. With regard to the question as to whether or not JPL would continue to be a Caltech contract, he was very supportive of us in that. TERRALL: How do you think Caltech changed when DuBridge took over? PICKERING: Well, Caltech changed, and I could almost say that if Millikan had still been the president, Caltech would have changed, just because of the war and the way in which science and engineering changed during the war. I was going to say that DuBridge was a lot closer to a lot of the Washington activity than Millikan ever was. But I’ve got to reflect back that Millikan in World War I was just as active in the war effort as DuBridge was in World War II. But after World War I, the government didn’t play the role in the universities that it did after World War II, and so there had to be a closer contact with Washington. And of course, DuBridge provided that. DuBridge also ran what I would call a more businesslike operation than Millikan. Millikan tended to operate Caltech more as a personal activity. He never called himself president, for example; he was chairman of the Executive Council. And that was a reflection of the fact that he wanted this thing to operate in a very democratic and a sort of loose fashion. And it operated well, because he had some very good people and they worked together well. In DuBridge’s day, you could say it was the next phase of growth; the very fact of growth called for changes in the way you operated. DuBridge put in more businesslike methods of operation. Both he and Millikan had the gift of language. They knew how to talk to an audience, no matter who it was. They knew exactly the right things to say, and they did it very well. Whether this was trying to get money out of somebody, or addressing a technical group or a bunch of faculty or whoever it was, they knew what to say. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-50 TERRALL: It seems that one of Millikan’s main ideas was to have the best person in each of the different fields, so that he could rely on them. PICKERING: Yes, that’s right. He tried to get the best people and then turn them loose. TERRALL: And that changed when the place got bigger? PICKERING: Oh, I suppose so, although the ideal of excellence always remained. TERRALL: But the idea of having one person in chemistry, one person in biology? PICKERING: Yes. That had to change. TERrALL: When would you say that space exploration was first seriously talked about at JPL? Were people thinking along those lines? PICKERING: Oh, yes. There were some studies made back in 1945 or thereabouts. As soon as we began to appreciate what you could do with a rocket, some studies were made of satellites. TErraLL: Did you approach the army [about this]? PICKERING: No, these were just long-range studies. I don’t think that at that time we visualized going into a satellite program. We were too busy trying to get a rocket to fly a few miles. But we began to appreciate the scientific use of rockets for upper atmosphere exploration and began to want to do some work in those fields. The WAC Corporal was the first high-altitude sounding rocket capable of being used for that purpose. Now, in point of fact it was never used very much, because the effort at JPL was switched to the development of the Corporal. The WAC Corporal was picked up by Aerojet and became the Aerobee, which was used very widely as a research rocket. JPL has always been more engineering-oriented than science-oriented, but we recognized the possibilities of scientific research in high-altitude rockets, and eventually in satellites, way http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-51 back at the end of the war. When the US brought a batch of V-2s over here at the end of the war, and they wondered what to do with them, some scientists came along and said, “Let’s use them for upper-air research.” I was involved in that, in the sense that an upper-atmosphere rocket research panel was formed. I was on that panel. But we didn’t have any experiments that we developed at JPL. So JPL interest was more in the engineering capability required to do these things. And, of course, when the decision was made that the US would launch a satellite, then we dusted off some of this earlier stuff. By then, we were working pretty closely with the Huntsville people [the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Alabama-Ed.]. They came up with a proposal, based on using the Redstone and some upper stages. We took their proposal and said, “They’ve got the wrong upper stages,” and we redid it for upper stages, which we felt were the right ones. This was Explorer 1. TERRALL: I think I saw somewhere that [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower announced support for a satellite back in 1955. How did that develop? PICKERING: Well, what Eisenhower said was that the US would have a satellite experiment during the International Geophysical Year [1957-1958], and that this experiment would be developed as a nonmilitary rocket system completely independent of military rockets, keeping it outside of the classified area. And he assigned it to the Naval Research Lab, which is a lab that does classified research but that had been active in the upper-atmosphere research program as scientists using the V-2s. In fact, NRL had developed a rocket of their own called the Viking, which was a very junior version of the V-2 but which could be used for upper-air research. So it was fairly reasonable to say to NRL, “OK, you guys take your rocket experience and your science experience and go ahead and develop a satellite.” That was called the Vanguard. By 1957, it was clear that Vanguard was in serious trouble and was going to have great difficulty meeting the schedule. So we had, as I said, dusted off our old proposals and had basically worked with the army, with the Huntsville people, to [the point] where we had something we were pretty sure we could fly. At this time in history, there was very strong rivalry between the three services for the rocket programs. They were [each] very definitely going their own way in everything. Anyway, this study we’d made with the Huntsville people turned out to have an http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-52 application for the Huntsville work on what was called the intermediate range ballistic missile [IRBM], which was a 2,000-mile missile. They wanted to do some reentry tests on it, so we took our satellite study, and instead of putting it up to satellite speed, we said, “OK, we’ll leave off one stage and we can do this reentry test at about the range you want.” So we had made a number of tests of their reentry nose cone using a technique that could easily be modified to launch a satellite. And so by the middle of 1957 we had a lot of confidence that we knew how to launch a satellite. In fact, in about August ’57, Eisenhower publicly showed one of our reentry nose cones, which was recovered 3,000 miles out in the Atlantic and brought into Washington. So that program was going along. Then, when the Russians launched their first satellite [October 1957], of course we were very disturbed about it. But we got strict orders from the army to stay away from it. They told us we had no authority to launch any satellites. TERRALL: Why was that? PICKERING: Well, because the Vanguard program was the official US [satellite] program, and the Vanguard was coming along- so, “Stay out of it. That’s a nonmilitary program and you have nothing to do with it.” Then, when the Russians launched their second satellite a month later, the army got a go-ahead. Then we very quickly got together with General [John B.] Medaris and [Wernher] von Braun and carved up the pie, and [we] got moving on it. TERRALL: What happened to the Vanguard? PICKERING: Let’s see, the first Soviet satellite was October; the second one was November. Vanguard announced they would launch in December. We had been told in November—I think literally a day after the [second] Soviet launching- to get moving, as a backup. We said we could launch by about the end of January. Well, the December launch of Vanguard was a flop; the thing went up about four feet and fell back in a ball of fire. It was on nationwide TV, so that was pretty embarrassing for the country—let alone the navy and everybody else. So then we were going to be next, because we had said we would make the end of January. It was pretty tense because we knew that everybody was watching us— not only in this country but really http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-53 around the world— because here the Russians were making a big propaganda hit out of how they were launching satellites, and we were dropping rockets in a ball of fire on our launching pad. We did launch successfully, then, at the end of January. That was a very interesting period to live through. TERRALL: When Sputnik was launched, do you think the alarm that people felt was just a question of national pride or were they worried that it was a military event? PICKERING: Well, first of all, I think, as far as the general public was concerned, it was an awful shock to them that the Russians were launching something that was flying overhead in the US and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. There was all sorts of talk about dropping bombs on us from satellites, and all this kind of stuff. You’ve got to remember also that up to this time there had been no intercontinental missiles. The Russians, by the way, launched their Sputnik with their military missiles, as we did our Explorer. But I think the Russians launched a test missile a little bit before they launched their first Sputnik, and I’m not sure when we launched our first ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile]; I think it was later. So there was concern that the Russians were ahead of us, and there had been talk about intercontinental missiles but nobody really appreciated what they could do. And all of a sudden you wake up one morning and here’s this doggone Russian thing flying overhead, looking down at the US every hour and a half or whatever it was: “The Russians are doing this, and what’s the matter with us?” Oh, no, there was a great deal of disturbance not only in this country but around the world. Because all of a sudden, the Russians, instead of being backward peasants, were coming up with technology that the Americans hadn’t been able to achieve. Therefore there was tremendous pressure to have us do something and do it quickly. I mean, there were people who tried to discount it official statements out of the Pentagon— TERRALL: That it wasn’t such a breakthrough? PICKERING: Yes, that sort of thing. But the fact of the matter was that as far as the man in the street was concerned, he was very shaken. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-54 TERRALL: There was the feeling that these could be used militarily? PICKERING: Well, not only that but it proved that the intercontinental missile was a reality, and therefore you could sit in Russia and drop a missile on Kansas City. After all, if you could shoot something around the world, you could sure shoot it to Kansas City. That was the thing that shook people. TERRALL: In the International Geophysical Year, you were on the satellite panel, weren’t you? PICKERING: Oh, I was on various things. When the US established this satellite program, they set up a satellite panel, which was formed out of the old upper-atmosphere research panel, and I was a member of that. TERRALL: Now, did you have any information about what the Russians were doing? PICKERING: Oh, things used to drift out of Russia a little bit, and there were various IGY meetings. In fact, there was an IGY meeting in Washington that started a few days before the first Sputnik launch. The Sputnik launch was on a Friday, and the meeting started on the previous Monday and ran through the week, actually. This consisted of reports from various countries on what they were doing in their IGY programs. The Russian, a man by the name of [Sergei M.] Poloskov, happened to make his report on Monday. In his report, he said that the launching of a satellite was imminent— although the translation at the time did not use the word “imminent”; it used the words “in the near future” or something like that. But a man sitting next to me who knew Russian said, “That’s not what he said; he said it was imminent.” And in fact, it was launched that Friday. TErrALl: That’s interesting, because it was played up as such a big shock, and here the IGY was supposed to be international cooperation. PICKERING: That’s right. No, the Russian said it was imminent. That was October, and I know http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-55 a month or two before then, out at JPL, we were speculating on when the first Russian satellite would go up. I don’t know what sources of information we had — mostly rumors, I suppose. But the general opinion at JPL was that they were going to launch one in a few months, even then. And that’s what was worrying us, because we felt we could do it in a few months also, if somebody would say, “Go!” Incidentally, an interesting anecdote on that actual launching: On the Friday evening, the Russians had a cocktail party at the embassy for the IGY people. We were up there drinking vodka and so forth. Walter Sullivan from the New York Times came in and he spotted me. He said, “What have they said about the satellite?” I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, my New York office told me to hightail it over here and find out about the satellite, which Radio Moscow says they’ve launched.” So I got ahold of Dick Porter, and then we got ahold of Lloyd Berkner, and we went off in a corner. Sullivan repeated this story to us. Lloyd, who was the senior U.S. scientist present, said, “OK, I’ll handle this.” So he went over to [Anatoli A.] Blagonravov, who was the senior Russian [scientist], and said he wanted to propose a toast. So there was silence all over the room. Then Lloyd announces that the Russians have launched a satellite. [Laughter] TERRALL: He wanted to be the first to say it. PICKERING: I don’t think the Russian knew it. I think Blagonravov knew the launch was going to be soon but he didn’t know when, and his communications with Russia I don’t think were that good. And it was the New York Times that picked it up from Moscow somehow and relayed it down to Washington. That’s the way it happened. So Lloyd announced the launching of the Soviet satellite. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-56 WILLIAM H. PICKERING SESSION 3 DECEMBER 12, 1978 Begin Tape 3, Side 1 TERRALL: I think last time we’d been talking about Explorer. PICKERING: Yes, Explorer and Sputnik. TERRALL: Explorer had been held up because they didn’t want to use military missiles. PICKERING: The IGY program was going to be done with nonmilitary hardware, and therefore the US was going to build a new rocket to launch Vanguard. The new rocket got in trouble, and the Russians went ahead and launched Sputnik. After the launching of the second Sputnik, we were told to go ahead and use the army rocket and get a satellite up there. So we did. We used the Redstone rocket, plus a three-stage solid-propellant rocket that JPL developed, which was put on top of the Redstone. And we successfully launched the first US satellite. TerraLl: How did the fact that this was during the IGY affect the way this went? The IGY, as I understand it, was supposed to foster international collaboration, right? PICKERING: Well, the International Geophysical Year was what it says namely, a worldwide attempt by scientists to gather scientific data about the earth. This meant a lot of people who made simultaneous measurements of magnetic fields and all sorts of odds and ends. The satellite was brought into the picture as a new tool for looking at the earth and gathering information about the earth. It was in 1955 that both the US and the Soviets announced that they would try to launch a satellite as part of their contribution to the IGY program. The IGY program was formally organized on an international basis each country had its own IGY committee. The one in the US was chaired by Professor Joseph Kaplan from UCLA. These committees then organized the work within the various countries, and then there was an international committee http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-57 that put everything together. In fact, it was at one of these regular reports of progress at which Poloskov made the announcement that the Russian Sputnik launching was imminent. TERRALL: Were the data that the satellites were sending back open? PICKERING: They were open data, yes. Yes, and in fact the Soviets have been quite good about that. Scientific data from their satellites are published in the regular journals. In fact, they also tend to publish quite a lot of it in their newspapers at least they did in the early days. In fact, one could even make the comment that the Soviets were more prompt about publishing data than we were. TERRALL: I was just wondering whether the obvious competition between the two countries wasn’t counter to the principle of the IGY. PICKERING: Well, the theory, of course, at that time was that there wasn’t any competition. In fact, Eisenhower and the government tried to go out of their way in saying, “We’re not racing with the Russians to do anything particular, we’re just doing science.” In fact, there were members of the government who pooh-poohed the whole business when the Russians first went up there. But as far as the man in the street was concerned, he was very conscious of the fact that the Soviets had launched a device that was flying overhead at regular intervals and there was nothing we were doing about it, or could do about it. TERRALL: Now, when they decided to let you go ahead with Explorer out here at JPL, von Braun was assigned to that project? PICKERING: What happened was, it was done under the army. At that time, the army, navy, and air force were each developing intermediate-range ballistic missiles, having a range of about 2,500 miles, and work was beginning on the intercontinental ballistic missile, with ranges of nominally about 5,000 miles. Each of the services had conducted some studies as to how they would launch a satellite. Although there was an interesting situation that existed at the time namely, the air force had put out an official statement that said that the air force was not http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-58 interested in satellites and nobody in the air force was going to talk about space programs. That was sometime in ’56, perhaps, that that was put out. Since the navy had the Vanguard, they were not pushing other studies of potential satellite-launching mechanisms. So really, when it came right down to it, the army study of how to launch a satellite was the only real competitor of the Vanguard program. So when the country was in trouble, it was natural that the government came to the army and said, “OK, go to it.” Now, that meant that General Medaris, who was the general in charge at Huntsville at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, was given the assignment. Von Braun and I met with Medaris, and we decided on how the work would be done. Really, what it amounted to was that von Braun’s people would provide the Redstone rocket, the first stage. In fact, they would beef it up a little over its normal performance. JPL would provide the three upper stages, and would build the satellite itself, and would build the tracking system. So we had most of the new work to do. Their assignment was essentially to take the Redstone and get it launched. TERRALL: Had you known von Braun before or worked with him before? PiCKERING: Yes, we had worked with him. In fact we had worked with him on the so-called reentry test program, which was a part of the long-range ballistic missile program, which was trying to solve the problem of getting a high-speed missile to come back into the atmosphere without burning up. We had used this technique of solid-propellant rockets on top of the Redstone as a means of throwing a test nose cone some 3,000 miles out in the Atlantic. So that had been done already, and that’s why we were quite sure we could move ahead into this satellite program with confidence. We had also developed a backup guidance system for the long-range missiles, because although everybody agreed that an inertial guidance system would be the best way to guide them, there was some uncertainty as to whether a sufficiently accurate system could be built. So, as a backup, we developed a radio guidance system that would have done the job. So yes, we were working closely with them. TERRALL: So they did that work and prepared the Redstone. PICKERING: Well, yes, they had the assignment within the army of developing this long-range http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-59 ballistic missile. Now, the Redstone was not developed for that purpose; the long-range missile was a thing called a Jupiter. The Redstone had been developed as a sort of a grown-up version of the V-2, which might have some possible military applications. What happened was that at the end of World War II, the US brought von Braun and a good many of his people over here to this country, and then after wondering what to do with them, they finally decided that they ought to go ahead and redesign a rocket that was something like the V-2, only a little bigger and better. So they did, and they called that the Redstone. TERRALL: How was it possible to get the Explorer launched so quickly? PICKERING: We’d been working on the reentry test vehicles, and actually all we had to do was add one more stage. In other words, the techniques for mounting these solid-propellant rockets on top of the Redstone and of spinning them so that they would be stable in flight— these had all been worked out. TERRALL: What about the satellite itself? PICKERING: Well, we whipped that up out here in Pasadena. I think I mentioned that there existed an IGY satellite committee, which was doing the planning for the scientific payloads to go in the Vanguard. I was a member of that committee. During the course of these discussions [James] Van Allen and I got together on a what-if basis and decided that if the Vanguard was delayed or didn’t work, Van Allen’s payload, which was being designed for the Vanguard, could be easily modified to go on the army rocket. So when we got the go-ahead, it was necessary then for me to get approval from the committee [to] use Van Allen’s payload — approval that was easy to get. It was a little more difficult to get approval from Van Allen, because at the time he was down in the Antarctic on a Coast Guard research vessel, doing some cosmic ray research. In fact, we had a sort of an amusing situation, because what we did first was to go to the navy and say, “Send this message to Van Allen.” After two or three days, the navy hadn’t gotten the message through. So somebody up at the lab said, “Why don’t we try Western Union?” We did and the message went right through. [Laughter] So we got the reply back from Van Allen that of course said, “Yes, go ahead.” We then got hold of his graduate student— a man by the name of http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-60 George Ludwig— and told George to pick up all the bits and pieces in the laboratory and hightail it out to Pasadena as fast as he could. So he did. Then we put the satellite together out here. JUPITER - C (EXPLORER I) MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF EXPLORER LENGTH 60* AMETER 6 WEIGHT 30.8 LB VELOCITY (APPROX) 18,000 APOGEE ALTITUDE MPH 1.594 MI PERIGEE ALTITUDE 225 MI PERIOD 114.76 MIN MAXIMUM LATITUDE 33.3 DEG Fig. 3. The design features of Explorer 1, built in Pasadena in 1957-58. The satellite plus rocket motor measured only about 80 inches or 2 meters long. Caltech Archives. TERRALL: This was all with Van Allen not present? PICKERING: Van Allen was still down in the Antarctic until the time of the launch [January 31, 1958]. At the time of the launch, he was back in this country. In fact, at the time of the launch, Van Allen, von Braun and I were in the Pentagon. There was a big JPL contingent down in Florida for the launching, but the army wanted to have the three of us there in Washington, assuming it was going to be successful. So we in fact sat out the launch in a room in the Pentagon with the secretary of the army, whose name was [Wilbur M.] Brucker, and maybe a half dozen other people. We had, by today’s standards, very primitive communications- http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-61 namely, one teletype to the launching down at the Cape and the commercial telephone service. So we would telephone from time to time to see how things were going. Then when the Cape announced that the launching had gone, and that it looked good, we decided that we would not consider it a success until the satellite had been heard on the tracking station here in California. This had been arranged, and JPL had set up a receiving station down near Borrego Springs, at a place called Earthquake Valley. Frank Goddard was up at JPL with a telephone line to Earthquake Valley. There was a calculated time when they were supposed to pick it up. I placed a call from Washington to Frank Goddard, and then Frank and I held the line open until we got the word. It actually took about eight minutes longer than it was supposed to. That was a very long eight minutes, because here we calculated we should be receiving it and nothing is happening! So Frank and I were making small talk on the telephone line with all these people glaring at me there in the Pentagon, until finally the word came through. [Laughter] - TERRALL: That was your first track station, then? That was the first place that was going to pick it up? PICKERING: Yes. On the first round, yes. We had tracking stations also in Singapore and Nigeria which we had set up in order to give us round-the-world coverage. But on this first orbit, California was the first one to pick it up. And it was picked up by other people. Navy men were listening for it down in San Diego, and they picked it up almost the same time we did. Well, it was interesting, because this was now sometime after midnight in Washington, D.C. It was a cold, rainy night, and they told us that they wanted us to go over to the National Academy of Sciences for a press conference. So von Braun, Van Allen, and I went over there in a car to the press conference and they brought us in the back door of the academy. I don’t think any of us realized what we were getting into, but of course when we came into the room the place was jammed to the rafters, in the middle of the night, with TV and movies and everything. It was a very exciting period. There’s a classic picture, which you may have seen of the three of us holding up a duplicate of the satellite. The satellite was only this big around and that long, so that was the rocket engine plus the satellite on the end of it. TERRALL: How long did the press conference last? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-62 PICKERING: Oh, a couple of hours; it went on and on. It was very exciting. Of course, that was our first real realization of what this meant to the public. We knew that we were very much on the firing line, and people were getting very excited about the satellite situation and the Russians’ ability to launch these things. TERRALl: And the Vanguard had already failed. PICKERING: And the Vanguard had made a very public disaster in December. TERRALL: It’s a good thing it worked. PICKERING: Yes, it’s a good thing Explorer worked. TErRALL: Was the fact that you picked it up late at the tracking station just a miscalculation? PICKERING: It went a little faster than we Fig. 4. (L-R) William Pickering, James Van Allen and Wernher von Braun triumphantly hoist a replica of Explorer 1 at the Washington press conference to announce the successful launch of the first US man-made satellite. February 1, 1958. Courtesy of JPL. expected, so the orbit went out a little bit farther and so took a little longer to go around…It was interesting, though, at that time how much public interest there was in this thing. For example, a few days before the launch, I went to a professional society meeting in New York. Some enterprising reporter discovered I was out of town, and he was bound and determined that I must be going to the Cape and that we were going to launch. We had not announced when the launch date was going to be. That was being kept quiet. But my secretary at the lab said I’d gone to New York. The reporter obviously didn’t believe her, because I had http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-63 just checked into my hotel room when a United Press man [called] and said, “Just checking to make sure you really are here.” And obviously there was enough knowledge around so that they all turned out in the middle of the night, but the exact time and the exact circumstances of the launch were kept quiet until after the event. As a matter of fact, we did have to slip it a couple of days, because of upper atmosphere winds. If you run these big rockets up through the jet stream, they’re subject to some rather large and not very well understood forces. We didn’t want to risk it; so we had to wait. TERRALL: There was then a series of other Explorers, right? PICKERING: Yes, some of which worked and some didn’t. TERRALL: Were the failures the result of too much pressure to get them launched too quickly? PICKERING: No, I think just that the whole art of rocketry in those days was not nearly as reliable as it is today. We were obviously very careful with this first one, to make sure that it worked. Maybe we got a little overconfident. It’s interesting to reflect on how an art like rocketry develops. At the very beginning, you run a rocket motor test in the laboratory, and if it doesn’t blow up it’s a success. And then when you think you know how to build a rocket engine, you stick it on to a missile, and again, if it leaves the launch pad and heads in the right general direction, it’s a success. Then a few years later, it’s not a success unless it lands where it’s supposed to land. One can sort of go back and see that history. The first problem was to make the engine work. The next problem was to make sure that you knew how to fly them, and then how to guide them into a target. TERRALL: But you can’t have test launches. PICKERING: No, that’s right. Rocketry differs from everything else in that you can’t really run a complete test of everything. The only time you ever really test is when you push the launch button, and then it’s too late. In fact, that’s one of the things that has to get imbued into the http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-64 consciousness of all of the engineers who work on these things-you don’t get a second chance. You test what you can, but the only real test is the time you push the launch button. TERRALL: So when [a subsequent] one didn’t go, how was that received? PICKERING: I don’t know; I’ve forgotten exactly which ones didn’t work. Well, first of all, if we go back to the first one, the data received by Van Allen were very difficult to understand. It looked as though his Geiger counter was registering an increase in counting, right as you’d expect it, and then it went dead, and then after a while it came back on again. But the data were incomplete, because we had only these three stations scattered around the world, so you got a little piece of data here, a little piece of data here, and a little piece over here. There was some uncertainty as to just what was happening. It wasn’t until we launched the next one, and had more data, that we put it together and realized what was happening. One of the properties of a Geiger counter is that if you expose it to very intense radiation, it quits counting. This was what was happening. Then we realized that there was intense radiation up there. From this, then, came the Van Allen radiation belts and our first appreciation of the intense radiation in the belts. TERRALL: Were the Russian satellites getting data on radiation as well? PICKERING: They had some radiation measuring equipment, but they missed the radiation belts. That was done with our Geiger counters. TERRALL: But once the first Explorer was a success, the fact that several of the later ones didn’t go wasn’t a big problem? PICKERING: No, it wasn’t a big thing. People sort of expected those things to fail occasionally. I think we ought to point out that the first Vanguard went only about a month after the first Explorer. They, in fact, did launch one successfully in March. There was obviously a fair amount of feeling between the two teams. The Vanguard people felt that we had, in a sense, snatched all their glory away from them, and they were only a few weeks behind us. But the fact remains that with what was going on at the time, it was essential that we go ahead and do it. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-65 TERRALL: Did you hear about Russian failures at all? PICKERING: No. We used to speculate about them, but we didn’t hear much about them. The reporting on the Russian stuff was done at the meetings of the International Astronautical Federation or else the International Council of Scientific Unions, which set up an organization called COSPAR, which was the Committee on Space Research. COSPAR meetings or IAF meetings were the times when reports were made. Generally speaking, of course, these were just reports of successes. In other words, particularly in the early days, the Russians didn’t give you any engineering data. All they gave was scientific data the argument being that, as the Russians said, they were using the military hardware and the engineering data was all classified and they couldn’t talk about it. So they’d just talk about science. TERRALL: But the Explorer was using military hardware also. PICKERING: Yes, I know. But in this country we’re more open with that sort of thing. Although we didn’t publish all the engineering data on the Explorer I, either. TERRALL: When you were working on the Explorer then, JPL was still working on other military projects? PICKERING: Yes. At that time our major project was the Sergeant, which was a replacement for the Corporal missile. Sergeant was a properly engineered missile system, as distinct from Corporal, which was sort of a patched-up research rocket made into a missile. And Sergeant was a very good design. It put the laboratory in a very interesting situation, because between Corporal and Sergeant, we had covered the spectrum of what you can do with long-range missiles. Corporal was a liquid-propellant, radio-guided one; Sergeant was a solid-propellant, inertially-guided one. Corporal, as I say, was a bit of a mish-mash of all kinds of research equipment, and Sergeant was designed so it could be worked by GIs wearing gloves out in the Arctic, that sort of thing. There was a real attempt to make it a real field-worthy piece of equipment. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-66 TERRALL: How were decisions made about what was going to happen next with the satellite program? There was no NASA at that time. PICKERING: No, there wasn’t any NASA, but it didn’t take long. Let’s get the history here. The first American satellite was the end of January 1958. The conclusion then was that the US must have a space program. The Congress began to try to put together the way in which this would be done. By the middle of the year, they had passed the bill that set up NASA—I don’t remember the exact date, but sometime in the middle of 1958. There were various hearings, committee meetings, and all the rest of it; I participated in some of those, and so did DuBridge. The conclusion the Congress came to was that they should take the NACA —the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which had been very successful and had established a series of laboratories and had done a great deal in developing the engineering knowledge necessary to build good airplanes they should take NACA and grow a space program onto NACA. This was done then, and the new agency was set up to go into operation, either the 1» of October or the 1st of November 1958. By about the 1st of December, they had incorporated JPL as the first new lab to be added to the old NACA laboratories. TERRALL: It was very fast. PiCKERING: Very fast. Actually, in setting up the agency, they had been told that they inherited the old NACA and they basically had a hunting license to look for other laboratories the government owned that would be appropriate to transfer into the space program. And they grabbed us, over the protests of the army. There was an agreement that we would complete the work on the Sergeant for the army— phase that out in a sensible fashion-but then we’d work for NASA. At that time NASA also wanted to grab von Braun; the army dug their heels in on that, because they were still in the middle of the long-range rocket program and they felt that they just couldn’t give up both von Braun and JPL. TERRALL: How was the army persuaded not to put up more of a fight over JPL? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-67 PICKERING: Oh, this NASA bunch had a lot of authority. If it had been a real showdown, they could have gone to the President and said, “That’s it.” The other thing was that JPL wanted to join NASA. In other words, we were very happy to do it. Also, looking at it from the army’s point of view, they had their major rocket work going on in Huntsville. JPL was finishing up the Sergeant, and it wasn’t obvious where we would go from there. And Huntsville, furthermore, was owned by the army; it was a civil service laboratory, whereas JPL was a contract operation. TERRALL: So in a way this was a logical breaking point? PICKERING: Yes, this was logical. It did cause some problems for the army. I was invited in to discuss this with the army chief of staff. But the conclusion was that this was a logical thing to do. The country was going to set up a program and the army should make this contribution to it. Now, on the other hand, as I say, when it came to von Braun’s bunch, the army did object, and that objection stood for at least one year, maybe two years; I’ve forgotten now. What happened then was that the Huntsville group was broken into two pieces on the same grounds in Huntsville, which was a large army base, so that both the NASA laboratories and the army laboratories were on the old base. TERRALL: So you were in favor of transferring to NASA? PiCKERING: Yes. It wasn’t obvious what we should do next for the army. We were working on a classified program, and here was a new program with an opportunity for a lot of imaginative engineering and science to be done. It was unclassified. It had a closer tie-in to the campus-it just looked like all sorts of good things. This was the wave of the future, as it were, instead of just turning out another rocket for the army. Therefore, there wasn’t any argument about it. The only argument at JPL was what part of the program JPL ought to go out for. You see, once we had made the transfer, then NASA began to formulate a program, and we helped them. The question then was: What role should JPL play in this NASA framework? The choices were whether to get into the manned program—-because by then, the manned spaceflight program had begun— or do satellite work or do deep space work. I elected to go the deep space route, because this was the route that had the most exciting engineering and science ahead of it, and also http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-68 because this looked like a scale of activity that was suitable for JPL. The manned spaceflight program was too big for JPL and obviously was going to involve all kinds of other people, whereas this one looked like one we could get our hands on and do ourselves. Therefore we stuck with the deep space. That decision was made, I don’t exactly when, but sometime in ’59. Then we started immediately to draw up what we thought a deep-space research program ought to consist of— what kind of rockets, what kind of experiments and so on. TERRALL: How did the relationship between the Caltech campus and JPL change with the change to NASA? Was there really a change? PICKERING: Well, there was not as much change as either DuBridge or I thought there would be. Both of us welcomed the new directions and the fact that we were no longer classified. We felt that this put a new emphasis on science which hadn’t been there when we were building rockets for the army, and that therefore we should work much more closely with the campus. In point of fact, the first thing that was really appreciated was the fact that this was a national program and we were not going to make the science selections. The scientific payloads would be selected by Washington, not by us. In fact, that very definitely is the way it should be, because this was a national program. Therefore only some fraction of the science would come to Caltech; most of it would be spread around the country. Secondly, JPL up to then had been an engineering laboratory, and the interests and motivations of the people were still very closely tied in with the engineering design of the devices that would carry these things out into space and communicate with them and guide them and so forth. That’s where our skill lay and that’s where most of our emphasis would be, particularly since the science selections were going to be made outside of JPL anyway. So we found that although our relations with the campus improved, they did not really become as close as perhaps both of us had thought they might. TERRALL: Were there Caltech scientists who were advising NASA on the scientific payloads? PICKERING: Yes, there were Caltech scientists involved. Most of the flights had some Caltech people involved in them. Also, historically, we’ve got to reflect that we found ourselves in the http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-69 problem of the engineers and scientists not understanding each other, which became a bit of a difficulty in the early days of this program —not only for us but for some of the other people, too. The difficulty was that a scientist, particularly an academic scientist, had always been used to doing things the way he wanted them done, whether it was a case of making a particular kind of measurement he wanted or whether it was using a particular instrument or designing a particular instrument. On the other hand, we were under very strong pressures to make sure that the engineering design of the thing really worked, and that in fact when this thing was 100 million miles away it would do what we wanted it to do. Inevitably, then, we ended up with the engineers feeling that they were not going to allow some scientist to come and stick something onto their piece of equipment that was going to cause all kinds of havoc at some later time. Therefore they were going to want to get deeply involved in the design of instruments and even, for that matter, in the design of experiments. Because if a scientist, just for instance, says, “I want to fly by this planet in just this particular way,” the engineer might very well say, “Look, my guidance accuracy isn’t good enough for that; you’re going to have to fly in this way.” So you ended up with arguments of various sorts. Or if a scientist says, “I want you to fly on the sunlit side of the planet” and another scientist says, “I want you to fly on the night side of the planet,” then what are you going to do? So, inevitably, there were arguments and there were problems. These, I think, have been worked out to where we get along quite well with the scientists now. But in the early days, the existence of this engineering versus science problem, and the fact that the science was selected by Washington on a national basis, really meant that the tie-in to Caltech was not quite as close as it might have been. But, on the other hand, I don’t really find any fault with that. I think it’s just a fact of life, that that’s the way it was going to be. TERRALL: But you kept up your appointment in EE, right? PICKERING: Yes, I suppose I had the longest leave of absence of anybody in history. I was given a leave of absence to take over the directorship of JPL, and it just went on. TERRALL: But you never wanted to break that tie? PICKERING: No, no, I didn’t want to break the tie. In fact, at various times during the first ten http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-70 years or so of the program, there were occasions when people in NASA raised the question as to whether or not this should be kept as a contract operation or whether we ought to be a civil service laboratory. I always felt that there were all kinds of benefits of having a contract with Caltech that were perhaps mostly indirect rather than direct benefits but nevertheless were there that it affected the quality of people we could hire and it affected the quality of work we did, and that we could bring something to NASA that the government laboratories could not bring, and therefore that they should let it continue the way it was. Now, this problem reached its most dramatic period when we got into trouble with the Ranger. The Ranger program was the first major program we did for NASA. It was designed to go to the moon and collect data. The first five Rangers, for one reason or another, did not attain their objectives. The first two were supposed to go into Earth orbit and check out various parts of the system. The launching rocket in both cases misbehaved, so those two were wiped out. The next three were supposed to fly by the moon. One of them had a launching-rocket problem and two of them had a Ranger problem. But as far as the public, and in particular the Congress, was concerned, the first five Rangers had all failed and a lot of money went down the drain, and what’s NASA doing, et cetera. So this resulted in congressional investigations and in NASA investigations and a general concern about the whole business and whether or not NASA shouldn’t change the contract. Well, there were some very deep feelings at that time. It could very easily have gone the other way. NASA might have just canceled the contract and picked up the lab. But they didn’t, thanks to DuBridge, who supported us, and the Board of Trustees-although they were plenty worried, because this was reflecting on Caltech. Nevertheless, they had confidence in us and stayed with us. TERRALL: So NASA’s other option would have been to take over the laboratory completely and run it? PICKERING: Yes, run it themselves. In fact, part of the option, of course, was to kick me out and then take it over and set it up as a civil service laboratory. As a matter of fact, this was even more complicated because of the fact that the man who was running NASA at this time, Mr. [James E.] Webb, had a philosophical belief that a government laboratory was the right way to do these things— that they should be done by government laboratories and not by this sort of http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-71 contract operation. In fact, when he first took over NASA, he made a statement—I’m pretty sure it was a public statement— to the effect that if he hadn’t already had the contract with Caltech, he would never have started it. So it was pretty rough. Then the other complication was Ranger 6. Let’s see, after Ranger 5 we said, “OK, we’ll hold for a year.” TERRALL: This would have been in the early sixties? PICKERING: It was ’63. So during the 1963 period, we said we would hold for one year and then we’d launch Ranger 6. We did launch Ranger 7 [January 30, 1964], and it was a beautiful flight, went all the way to the moon. It was supposed to crash into the moon and take TV pictures for the last fifteen minutes. Well, the TV didn’t come on. That, I guess, was the real low point in our history. Begin Tape 3, Side 2 TErraLL: So it got to the moon but it didn’t give you the data? PICKERING: It didn’t give us our pictures. It flew beautifully, as I say, to the moon. Let’s see, the arrival at the moon was late in the evening, Pasadena time. There were a lot of people, a lot of press and everybody over in the [Von Karmán] auditorium, waiting to get the word on the pictures. Homer Newell, Ed [Edgar M.] Cortright, and I, plus one or two other people from NASA, were up in what is now the spaceflight control center, which at that time had been built but was not quite operational; nevertheless, we were up there. This voice from Goldstone came on, “…and still no video.” We watched the clock running out. We knew we were going to impact in about fifteen minutes. All this was happening, but still no video, and dead silence everywhere. That was a terrible time, and it impacted with no video. There was nothing we could do. They tried various things, sort of last-minute attempts. But nothing happened, still no video. Well, after that, both the Congress and NASA were indeed on our necks. In fact, in retrospect, I don’t really know why they had confidence in us, except that we did an analysis pretty quickly that pinned down what that problem was. It turned out to be a problem with a piece of equipment we had purchased from RCA. We had not really looked into that design as thoroughly as we should have. We understood what happened. On the strength of that, we said http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-72 we’d launch another one in three or four months. That was Ranger 7. And Ranger 7 not only worked, it worked perfectly. TERRALL: With TV pictures? PICKERING: With TV pictures— beautiful pictures coming from the moon, which were presented live to a big crowd of press and JPL people. Everyone was chewing their fingernails, of course, to see what was going to happen. That was a time when the laboratory really let go and it’s the only time that we really broke out the champagne. I didn’t know the champagne was all stashed away, but it was there. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-73 WILLIAM H. PICKERING SESSION 4 DECEMBER 19, 1978 Begin Tape 4, Side 1 TERRALl: We got up to the successful Ranger last time. PICKERING: Yes, we had the problems of the unsuccessful ones and the oversight committees from Congress and from NASA that were worrying about what we were up to and threatening to change the contract and change personnel, et cetera. But when it all shook down, we moved ahead with the Ranger program, and the remaining three Rangers were completely successful, 100 percent successful. Since that time, JPL has launched numerous spacecraft, generally with a very good record. In some cases, launchings were not successful because of rocket problems, but the spacecraft generally have worked very well. In fact, the only one I can think of at the moment that has been a bit of an embarrassment was quite recent-Seasat, which was launched last June and operated beautifully for about three months, then lost its power supply and is now dead. Fortunately, in that three months it collected all the key data that it was supposed to collect. This is being analyzed, and I think it will essentially have accomplished what it was supposed to do namely, to demonstrate what you can do with a satellite of that type when it comes to looking at the oceans. However, the expectation had been that Seasat would continue to operate for a lot longer than it actually did. The flights to the planets, though, when we’ve gotten one on the way to the planets, have worked. TERRALL: I have in my notes that Mariner 2 was before the Ranger shots. And that made it to Venus, is that correct? PICKERING: Yes, that made it to Venus in 1962. It sort of staggered out there, but it made it, and it collected the data that it was supposed to collect. TERRALL: Did it crash into Venus? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-74 PICKERING: No, no. It was supposed to fly by Venus and look at the planet with various instruments. And it did, and quite successfully—it sent back the data. It failed about two weeks after leaving Venus; the temperature control was bad and it got too hot. It started out as a lucky spacecraft, because the launching rocket actually went unstable for a time and then stabilized itself again in the correct position. So it got a good start. Then it had some other troubles during the flight, some troubles with the Earth-sensing equipment. In order to point its radio beam back to Earth, it had an optical device that looked at Earth and kept the beam focused on Earth. And this optical device was not working properly until about the middle of the flight and all of a sudden it cleared up. So it was a lucky mission. But you’re right, it was before the Ranger. And that was one of the things, which we had to point out to people, that while we were working on Ranger, we were also working on Mariner, and Mariner did succeed in this mission. Furthermore, Mariner was the first spacecraft to fly by another planet. That was one place where we had gotten there ahead of the Russians. In the case of the moon, the Russians had gotten there first. TERRALL: Why did you decide to go to another planet before going to the moon? PICKERING: Well, we had had a dual program- -namely, a lunar exploration program and a planet exploration program. We wanted to carry them both. And in fact, that continued. We had Mariner 4 to Mars, at about the same time as the Surveyor program to the moon. TERRALL: So the Surveyor program was the next one after the Ranger series, then, going to the moon? PICKERING: Yes, to the moon. TERRALL: And that was successful? PICKERING: Yes. Well, not every mission. There were seven Surveyors launched and five were successful. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-75 TERRALL: Did NASA and Congress continue to give you a bad time when one of these missions failed? PICKERING: No, after the Ranger was so successful and was such a good public success, because we were able to do live television of it flying into the moon—after that, we didn’t really have much trouble with Congress. 000 SP 23 Fig. 5. In the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, members of the mission team keep tabs on a Surveyor moonship, September 1967. The Surveyor series, run in 1966-1968, was the US’s first attempt at a soft lunar landing. Photo by Western Electric News/Caltech Archives. Just an anecdote on the live television: We had started out with some concern about letting the networks handle this live, but by the time we got up the Ranger 9, we were confident and we indeed let them handle it live. Well, when it came time for the first Surveyor [launched http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-76 May 30, 1966], which was to actually land gently on the moon and then look around and start taking pictures, we were much more nervous. So we were not at all sure we wanted the networks to really do that live. But we finally ended up by agreeing to let them do it, and we kept our fingers crossed and hoped it was going to be all right. But the thing that startled me was that about a half an hour before it was due to land, one of the network people said, “Oh, by the way, we’re live all over the world,” which really sort of shook me. [Laughter] Fortunately it worked, and in fact sometime later a friend of mine told me that he was in Paris, and he just idly turned on the television set and there was Surveyor 1 landing on the moon. TErRALL: Do you think the fierce competitiveness of the space race was productive in spurring NASA to work faster than it would have otherwise? Or was it counterproductive? PICKERING: Oh, no, no. I think that the competition was recognized as a Cold War symbol. Demonstrated capabilities in space were important. That certainly paced the program, both in the US and in the Soviet Union. And when [President John F.] Kennedy made the very bold decision to go to the moon in ten years, that really guaranteed that we were going to have a very active program. Furthermore, it meant that we would put an awful lot of priority on the program, because the nation was committed to doing these things in space. TerraLl: But it wasn’t the sort of thing where you felt you were being pushed beyond your capacity? PICKERING: No, no. If anyone was pushed, it was the Apollo people, because they had a deadline, and a tremendous amount of engineering to be accomplished. They could not have accomplished it unless they’d had essentially a top priority to do the job. TERRALL: And JPL didn’t have anything to do with that? PICKERING: No, we were out of the Apollo program, except in some very fringe ways. But the existence of the Apollo program guaranteed that there’d be enough funds for us to do a reasonable deep-space program. And in fact, we regarded the Surveyor as a precursor to the http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-77 Apollo in many ways— and the Apollo people did, too-because it was going to land on the moon automatically. We were strongly tempted to put a sign on Surveyor that said, “Follow me,” but we didn’t ever do it. It was arranged that one of the Apollos would land beside a Surveyor, and that was accomplished TERRALL: So there were a number of Surveyors actually there? PICKERING: Oh, yes. We had five of them on the moon. We were very interested in having the astronauts land by one of them and bring back some of the pieces, because they had been on the moon for two or three years before the astronauts got there. They did land beside Surveyor 3. That was very interesting, because those astronauts [Apollo 12] came out to the lab and had a look at the Surveyor and we discussed with them what we wanted them to bring back and just how they would do it, and they would cut the pieces off, and what tools they would need and so forth. So we had quite a lot of contact with those astronauts. Then, when they flew to the moon, the particular program meant that as they were coming in for a landing, the astronauts looked out a window, which was looking away from the moon and couldn’t see anything until they [were] about 10,000 feet [from the surface]. Then the spacecraft rolled around 180 degrees, so they could look out the window and see where they were going. I guess it was Pete Conrad who was looking out the window, and the first thing he saw was Surveyor, dead ahead. Well, he just about fell out of his seat. [Laughter] Incidentally, it was a very good example of the kind of precision guidance that existed in these systems, working essentially under automatic control. TERRALL: And they brought back pieces of it? PICKERING: Yes. TERRALL: Was that instructive? PICKERING: Well, yes. We didn’t think anything much would have happened, but we wanted to be sure. It was instructive to study them. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-78 TERRALL: I read something about one mission in which an American experiment went aboard a Soviet spacecraft. I was wondering if you could remember how that might have come about. PICKERING: No. There was a French experiment. The Soviets have flown French experiments on their spacecraft; I’m not sure they’ve flown American experiments. There was a time when the French were negotiating with the Soviets and negotiating with us at the same time, to fly their experiments. In fact, they had experiments on both Soviet and US satellites. Both the Soviets and ourselves had a stated objective to bring other people into the programs. The Soviets tended to bring the Eastern Europeans-Czechoslovaks, Poles, and so forth—into their program, and we tended to bring the Western countries into ours. In both cases, they were essentially scientific experiments. In other words, when NASA issued a so-called AFO-Announcement of Flight Opportunity- -this announcement would go out worldwide. If a scientist in Europe wanted to propose an experiment, fine. Some of them did get to fly. TERRALL: In your years as director of JPL, did you have to spend a lot of time in Washington? PICKERING: Yes, there was an awful lot of travel to Washington. I used to think that I made a trip to Washington about once a month. My wife says it was more often than that. I don’t know, it was an awful lot of riding in airplanes. TERRALL: That was one of the things that Malina said. As he got more and more into administration, he was going to Washington more and more, and getting farther and farther away from his work. PICKERING: Well, that’s true, and one just had to accept that. That was the job, really. In other words, in the administration of a big laboratory like JPL, if you ask what the job really consists of, you find that first of all it’s making sure that the laboratory has a good program, and that means dealing with whoever the program sponsors are, in great detail. The second thing is that internally the problem of managing a large organization is largely a people problem. You’re more concerned with the relationships between people and who’s doing what and who reports to whom, et cetera, than you are with the technical details of a program. Now, on the other hand, http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-79 just to reflect philosophically, I think that this does not mean management of a technical enterprise should be in the hands of a non-technical person. If I go back twenty or thirty years, there was a tendency to think that managers were trained in business administration or as lawyers or managers, and technically trained people were never top managers. But as time has gone on, there’s been more and more appreciation of the fact that a well-trained technical man can much easier learn something about management than a trained management man can learn something about technical problems, and that in fact the technical training is a very good background for management. So management of technical enterprises nowadays is usually done by technically trained people, which was not true fifty years ago— not even very true twenty years ago. But it does mean, though, that if a technical man gets into a top management job, he doesn’t do much technical work. But he helps, of course, in technical decisions. If a certain program is being debated as to whether it’s going to be done or not, the decision is going to revolve around technical factors. So a technically trained manager is important. Certainly when a project gets into trouble, the top management should be able to understand what the trouble is and what the possible solutions are. TERRALL: Did you ever consider moving to a different sort of job? PiCKERING: Well, when I first took the job, I thought I’d take it only for a few years and then go back and be a professor at Caltech. But I guess as time went on, I got more and more involved in it, and I realized that that was clearly going to be my life for quite a few years, particularly because of the way in which the space program evolved. You see, I took over in ’54; and the first Explorer satellite was January ’58. Quite obviously, after January ’58, I had one of the most interesting jobs in the country, and I was going to keep it. TERRALL: So when you took the job, you really had no idea where it was going. PICKERING: No, that’s right. When I took the job in ’54, I would not have predicted that I’d still be in it in ’74. But after ’58, I could. TERRALL: But you kept your appointment on campus. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-80 PICKERING: Well, yes. The institute was interested in keeping me as a member of the faculty. And I was very pleased that they did. So, yes, I kept my nominal association with the faculty. But in point of fact, I did very little for the faculty. TERRALL: How about in terms of contact with the campus in general? PICKERING: Oh, yes. One of the problems that used to bother both DuBridge and me was, What can we do to improve the relationships, particularly the working relationships, between campus and laboratory? Both of us used to worry about this and we used to try to do things to help it. One thing, for example, which we did come up with was this idea of the director’s discretionary fund and a matching president’s fund down on the campus, which gave us some money that could be used to support research activities conducted by faculty, in the sense that we were the able to make the decisions. One of the problems with the laboratory program was [that it was] really dictated from Washington. Now, that didn’t mean that we didn’t propose what to do, but the decision that said, “Do it,” was made in Washington. Whereas when you talk about faculty research programs, if you’re going to talk about working together, one thing that you have to say is that this means that faculty research activities have to be related to JPL, and to some extent vice versa. Which means, then, that you’d like to be able to make decisions out here locally, as to what you do. And in the early days we couldn’t do that. But when we got this discretionary fund set up, then that gave us some freedom, within at least the limits of those funds, to make local decisions. And that helped a great deal. TERRALL: What kind of project would that have funded? PICKERING: Oh, I don’t know that I can name one offhand. Usually it was a case of the use of some equipment that existed at JPL to help someone at Caltech with some research he was interested in, or [let him] use some results that JPL had in some research that he was interested in, or maybe even the use of JPL people to work with him. I mean, all of those were possibilities, and all of them were exploited. In some cases, JPL would invite somebody on the campus to do a piece of work for them. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-81 TERRALL: On a contract? PICKERING: On a contract, yes a transfer of funds. And occasionally, also, they would invite a campus professor to come up as a consultant. But that’s a little different. The fundamental difference between faculty research and the research that’s done in a laboratory like JPL is this question of who decides what the research is going to be. And a faculty man wants to make his own decisions as to what he’s going to work on and how he’s going to approach the problem. Whereas if the government is funding JPL on a contract, they will make those decisions. TERRALL: What about graduate students? PICKERING: Yes, we use a few of them. That has been a problem right along, because it would be nice to have some thesis work done up there. But a fundamental rule about thesis work is that it must be done under the direction of a faculty member. So that means that the faculty sponsor also has to be involved up there, and it gets a little messy. The result is that there’ve only been a handful of graduate theses that have been done at JPL. Now, in other cases, this thing has been handled somewhat differently. For example, at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which was essentially on the campus, they did set that up so that lots of graduate students did their thesis work in the laboratory. But JPL was physically eight miles away, and there were not many faculty who were actually directly involved in the JPL program. TERRALL: Is this something that is likely to change? PICKERING: Well, I know that Bruce Murray is trying to change it, and Murph [Marvin L.] Goldberger [Caltech president 1978-1987] is also interested in trying to change it. I’m sure they will both work on it; and I’m sure they’re both going to get a little bit frustrated. Because the fundamental problem is a matter of philosophical approach, which is basically different— namely, the faculty professor determines what he wants to do and he does it at his own pace. Whereas the JPL scientist or engineer has to recognize that he’s working under contract to the government, and the government determines what he does and how fast he does it. Therefore, http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-82 you have a different approach to problems. And that is always going to exist and it’s going to make it difficult. TERRALL: Do you think that this different approach over the years led to antagonism between the campus and the lab? PICKERING: Oh, I don’t know. From time to time, one senses antagonisms, usually sort of focused around, “How come you guys have all that money to waste up there, and I can’t get any money for my project?” There’s a certain amount of that. I think there’s also a certain amount of subconscious jealousy about the fact that we get a lot of favorable publicity up there or a lot of juicy jobs up there. Yes, there’s a little bit of that. But on the other hand, I would say that most faculty appreciate JPL and recognize that the image of JPL is an important element in thinking about Caltech. I personally think that the tie-in is important and that it should be maintained. TERRALL: How would it be different, if JPL were an independent lab? PICKERING: Well, if it were an independent lab, it would be a civil service laboratory. That does give you a different flavor in the way the laboratory’s operated, because if you’re a civil servant, then you are a lot more under the control of Washington than if you’re a contractor working for Washington. In particular, the laboratory is clearly not a simple case of an industrial contractor; here we’re a contractor in a very favored position. This has led to an openness and frankness, on the part of laboratory people, which in the government laboratories you don’t see nearly so much. In other words, we will be a lot more critical of the government than a government civil servant will be. Also, we will be much more governed by the necessity to perform on our contract. Now, I don’t mean that the government civil servants are lazy or incompetent or anything like that. There are some very good people in the government civil service structure. But they don’t have the same incentive to perform that we do. In other words, if NASA gets disgusted enough with us, they can cancel the contract and we can be out of a job tomorrow. Whereas a government civil servant can’t be; he knows he’s got a job. In fact, even the very way in which they’re funded is different. If you look at the way the government laboratories are funded, there is a line item in the budget that pays their salaries and the so-called operating http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-83 expenses—the normal running expenses of the laboratory. That comes in whether they do any work or not-that’s saying it a little harshly, but there is that basic funding paying your salaries and operating expenses. JPL does not have that funding. The only way JPL gets money is by contracting to do a project. Therefore, the emphasis on the project and doing it is much greater at JPL than it is in the government laboratory. This means that the government gets something different from a laboratory like JPL than they do from their own labs. I think that over the years the government has gotten its money’s worth out of JPL, as it has out of other laboratories that have been operated the same way-Los Alamos is one, operated by the University of California; Lincoln Laboratory at MIT; and so forth. Now, I must admit that over the years the sort of creeping bureaucracy has come in, to where detailed government control of the laboratory is looking more and more like government control of the civil service laboratories. I regret this. TERRALL: Do you mean in things like the number of reports that have to be filed or the amount of paperwork that has to be done? PiCKERING: I heard of a case just the other day, which involved the hiring of someone up there at the laboratory who happened to be a non-citizen. Now, the laboratory does unclassified work; there’s no particular reason why we can’t hire non-citizens. But the hiring of this person apparently was— well, Washington tried to turn it off. That I would regard as an unnecessary and an improper interference in our affairs. Of course, I used to regard the fact that the government put a ceiling on us as improper interference in our affairs. TERRALL: You mean how big you could grow? PICKERING: Yes, how many people. I used to take the position with them, “Look, you give us a contract to do the job; we will give you a price to do that work, and we’ll also tell you how many people we want. If you accept the contract, then OK, we ought to go ahead and do it.” Now, the counterargument on the part of the government people was that they did regard us as a special case, and they did regard themselves as providing a sort of institutional support for us. Therefore if we hired, say, 500 people to do a certain job, when that job was over, they said to me, “You’re going to come back to us and say that you’d better find some jobs to keep these 500 people busy; http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-84 you’re not going to turn them out on the street.” And I had to admit that that in fact is right. Because in the research activity I cannot have people coming and going in the way that you might in some industrial facilities, and indeed I wanted to keep them on. And therefore they said, “OK, if that’s the case, we have to make some extrapolation of the amount of work we think we’re going to give you and how we’re going to keep the employment more or less level and so forth. Therefore we’re going to have a say in what your total employment will be.” That’s sort of an argument. TERRALL: Did it, in fact, cause problems in any specific cases where you needed more people? PICKERING: Yes. We would have liked to have hired a good many more people at various times than the government allowed us. Of course, the other argument on the part of the government was, “Well, even though you’re different from the other laboratories, you are still a member of the family.” And the civil service laboratories are very tightly under this numerical control, because the Congress tells them how many people they can hire. Because that existed in those laboratories, if we rather blatantly ignored it, we would have a problem. But it was the way in which the government started getting involved in our hiring policies and so on that I regarded as unfortunate. I would rather have kept them out of it. Fortunately they did not try to put the civil-service-type constraints on us, because in that case we would just as well have been a civil service laboratory. You see, the Civil Service Commission does put very strict constraints on what the government can do with civil servants. If, for example, the government has to reduce the size of its staff, as NASA has had to do in recent years because the work has gone down, the process of “Reduction in Force”— the RIF process— is very formally spelled out, which means that you can’t fire Mr. A; you have to look at his past history and whether he was a veteran, et cetera, et cetera. Instead of Mr. A being laid off, Mr. B may have to be laid off, because he’s more junior or something or other. Whereas from the point of view of the work to be accomplished, you’d much rather let Mr. A go. Well, that kind of constraint on the laying off of people has been an awful headache to the [civil service] laboratories. Another one is that the Congress put a constraint on them as to what the average employment grade could be in the laboratory— the civil service has a series of different levels. The Congress would say that the average grade for your laboratory must be so and so. Therefore if you wanted to move some http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-85 people up into the more senior grades, the only way you could do it would be to move some more people into the junior grades. And it may be that you were limited as to the total number, and so therefore you had no choice; you could not move these people up to higher grades. So they were under all kinds of problems, and I’m very glad we didn’t have that class of problem. But as a function of time, the NASA interference in the internal JPL affairs has become increasingly evident. TERRALL: What about since your retirement? What have you been working on? PICKERING: Well, shortly before I retired, I had some contact with a university over in Saudi Arabia which was interested in setting up an applied research laboratory, which had some parallels to JPL-Caltech. They were looking at the way in which these laboratories operated around the country, and they came out to JPL and talked to me. One thing led to another until they said, “Well, you’re retiring; why don’t you come over to Saudi Arabia and put this thing together?” So I agreed to do that for two years. In fact, in the past two years I’ve spent about half of my time in Saudi Arabia and half of it here essentially planning, organizing, and trying to set up the initial program for this research laboratory. The two years was just up a few months ago, in September of this year. So I have been going back and forth to Arabia, because I told them that for this kind of planning, I could do most of it better in this country than I could over there. They agreed. I was last in Arabia in October and spent about a month there at that time. In other words, my initial assignment was completed in September; but I’m expecting to continue a consulting arrangement with them. TERRALL: And that has nothing at all to do with Caltech? PICKERING: No, no. Except I might comment that this university over there is called the University of Petroleum and Minerals. It happens to be an engineering and science school of about 2,500 undergraduate students. And this school, in turn, has a consortium of American universities to help advise them on academic matters, and they asked Caltech to become a member of that consortium. So, in that sense, Caltech has a little tie to it. But my activities over there in setting up the research institute had nothing to do with that. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 Pickering-86 TERRALL: Is the research institute going yet? PICKERING: Yes, it’s going. The building will be finished in two or three years. It’s under construction now. TErRALL: How did you find it working in a completely different situation like that? PICKERING: In a technical sense, it was clear that this research institute had all kinds of interesting possibilities, because it was visualized as being an applied engineering research type of thing, which would be supported by either industry or government in the country and would concern itself with the problems which were of immediate interest to people over there. A close analog would be the Stanford Research Institute. In fact, it was visualized that it would be supported by contracts, which it would get from either government or industry. It was physically on the campus of the university, and the university was prepared to build a building for it and provide the initial support for it. It would have its own staff, like JPL, and its own administration and so forth. Well, it was obvious that there’s a lot of opportunity for that kind of a facility and that kind of capability over there, that it just didn’t exist in the country, and that there were plenty of people who felt that this would be very useful to them. So it can be built up. Now, the build-up has not been as fast as I had hoped it would be, partly because of different ways of doing things than we would have and partly because of a physical space problem. Because until we get the building, it means that we just have to go in various nooks and crannies around the university. But it’s going along. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1 WILLIAM H. PICKERING (II) (1910-2004) INTERVIEWED BY SHIRLEY K. COHEN April 22 and 29, 2003 ARCHIVES CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Pasadena, California Subject area Engineering, physics, administration, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, space flight Abstract This 2003 interview with William H. Pickering, in two sessions, contains his further recollections of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s early involvement with the US Army and missile development, followed by JPL’s transformation into a NASA laboratory with a focus on exploration of the solar system. The interview begins with an account of his return to the small town in New Zealand where he grew up, to attend dedication of a memorial to himself and Ernest Rutherford, who attended the same primary school; he is also honored at Christchurch and Auckland. Additional recollections of JPL’s collaboration with Wernher von Braun; of the first flight of Sputnik; Caltech’s early work in rocketry; development and production of the Corporal missile. Awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975. Trip to Japan in 1994 to receive the Japan Prize. Further discussion of his work establishing an applied research institute in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s; his later relationship with it. Establishment of Pickering Research, a consulting business, after retiring as director of JPL in 1976; consulting for the Electrical Power Research Institute after Three-Mile Island incident in 1979; contract in 1980s to help mainland China set up computer systems for its satellite program. The interview concludes with an account of his recent involvement in the sawdust-pellet (alternative fuels) business. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Administrative information Access The interview is unrestricted. Copyright Copyright has been assigned to the California Institute of Technology © 2004. All requests for permission to publish or quote from the transcript must be submitted in writing to the University Archivist Preferred citation Pickering, William H. (II). Interview by Shirley K. Cohen. Pasadena, California, April 22 and 29, 2003. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives. Retrieved [supply date of retrieval] from the World Wide Web: http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Contact information Archives, California Institute of Technology Mail Code 015A-74 Pasadena, CA 91125 Phone: (626) 395-2704 Fax: (626)793-8756 Email: archives@caltech. edu Graphics and content © 2004 California Institute of Technology. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM H. PICKERING (II) BY SHIRLEY COHEN PASADENA, CALIFORNIA Caltech Archives, 2003 Copyright © 2003, 2004 by the California Institute of Technology http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM H. PICKERING Session 1 1-7 Recent trip to his native New Zealand to be honored by his old elementary school, which E. intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM); collaboration with W. von Braun. 7-10 Launching of Sputnik, 1957. Establishment of NASA. JPL moves from missile work under contract to the army to satellite and space work under contract to NASA. 10-16 Earlier work on rockets for the army, particularly the Corporal. NASA awards JPL the deep pace program for exploration of the solar system. As JPL director, he presides over changes ir nethods occasioned by switchover to satellite and spacecraft work. Ranger, Surveyor, Dee Space Network. Session 2 17-20 Awarded National Medal of Science at White House ceremony, 1975. Awarded Japan Prize, 1994; his trip to Japan to receive it. 21-28 Becomes an advisor to the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Cultural conditions in Saudi Arabia, and his experiences there. 28-33 Sets up Pickering Research, consulting firm. Works as a consultant on safety issues in nuclear ower plants; Three Mile Island. Works on Landsat photography of the Earth and consults wit hinese on their comparable program. Participates in manufacture of sawdust pellets as ? alternative source of fuel. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Interview with William H. Pickering Pasadena, California By Shirley Cohen Session 1 Session 2 April 22, 2003 April 29, 2003 Begin Tape 1, Side 1 COHEN: Welcome to the Archives here at Caltech. Why don’t we start with your more recent stuff, and then we’ll get back to JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. It looks like you were much honored in New Zealand this year. PICKERING: Indeed. I was in New Zealand for a couple of weeks in March. In fact, we got back on March 23”, just a month ago. The reason for the trip down there was that I was being honored. First of all, I was brought up in a very small town there about 200 to 300 people-and brought up by my grandparents. I went to primary school in a little two-room schoolhouse. It turns out that a man by the name of Ernest Rutherford, who is a very well-known atomic physicist, also went to that same school. He was probably twenty or thirty years before my time; in fact, he got a Nobel Prize in the early 1900s. COHEN: He did his work in England, though-right? PICKERING: Yes, he did his work in England, but he attended this little two-room school. And so the little village decided that if Rutherford and I both went through that little school, they should have something in the town to recognize this fact. So they decided to make a memorial to honor both Rutherford and myself. And this has been built—it’s right in the middle of town, and I think it’s quite attractive. They wanted me to come over and cut the ribbon, as it were. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-2 COHEN: For both of you. PICKERING: For both of us, yes, and I did that. So that was the first motivation for going over there this year. And the second one was that I had spent a year at the University of Canterbury [then Canterbury College], before I came over here to Caltech, and the university decided they’d like to give me an honorary degree. So we had a little graduation ceremony down there in town. I was the only graduate, of course. [Laughter] That went over nicely—it was in Christchurch. And then on the way home we stopped in Auckland, and there a local high school—Westlake High School-had decided to name their science building after me. They did this maybe about a year ago, but when they heard I was in town, they wanted me to come over and have a look at the building, and I did. So I had three stops— one in Havelock for the memorial, one in Christchurch for the degree, and one up in Auckland to look at the building. COHEN: It sounds like a nice trip. PICKERING: It was a nice trip. But we didn’t do any sightseeing [laughter], although we did do a lot of meeting with relatives, because of course I was on the local TV and radio, and anybody who considered himself to belong to the family turned up at one or another of these affairs. So l saw a lot of people who said they were my relatives, whom I’d never seen before. There was one other thing that was kind of fun, down in Christchurch. We had a couple of days down there, where we were relaxing. On one of these days, they asked me if I would like to be on a TV program at a local TV station. They had a cooking program. And I said, “Cooking! What do you mean?” And they said, “Well, there’s a man who runs this program who likes to have guests, and he invites the guests to partake in the meal.” COHEN: Does he cook? PICKERING: No, he doesn’t cook, he’s got a chef, but he runs the program — a rather unusual way of handling the emceeing of a program. But anyway, so I did that, and it was sort of amusing. First of all, I did get a very nice lunch out of it. [Laughter] And he was amusing — at least some of the time. This was the first and only time I’ve ever been on a cooking program. [Laughter] http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-3 COHEN: Could you get a copy of it? PICKERING: Yes, I have a copy of it. COHEN: You say somebody is writing a biography of you? PICKERING: Yes, a man by the name of Douglas Mudgway. He’s an ex-JPLer and also an ex-New Zealander. He has written a couple of technical books about work at JPL, and he decided he’d like to try and do a biography of me. So I suspect he’ll be down here [in the Archives] to talk to you about this. He moved up to Sonoma County somewhere. COHEN: When did he start doing this? PICKERING: Just a few months ago. So we’re just starting. See, [when] I was down in New Zealand just the past month, he came down, too. I was getting various honors, and he wanted to get in on it, so he went down there, too. COHEN: Of course, you have been well recognized for the work you did at JPL. So let me get back to some of this. I’ve read your oral history [1978], which is really wonderful. Along the line, there were big decisions that were made that established how JPL was going to go. It would be interesting to hear a little bit about how some of these decisions were made. I know it was a long time ago, but I’m sure you do remember. The first one I’m thinking of was Explorer. Now, when you did Explorer, was JPL still working with the army? PICKERING: With the army. NASA had not been formed yet; we were working for the army. The history goes—I think it was in 1955 that [President Dwight David] Eisenhower announced that as part of the International Geophysical Year [IGY] activities, the US would launch a small scientific satellite, and the Russians said, “Me, too,” very shortly afterwards. So we had a couple of years to develop it. Now, Eisenhower also said that he did not want to get mixed up with the development of the intercontinental [ballistic] missile or any other big military rocket program. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering 4 So he wanted [the scientific satellite] kept out of the military’s hands, and the Naval Research Lab [NRL] in Washington, DC, was chosen. The reason for choosing them was that they had been doing quite a lot of upper-atmosphere research using rockets. See, back before the days of satellites, we used to send rockets vertically upwards, and they would make measurements at high altitudes, and then they would fall down again, of course. So you could get only a few minutes of measurement. The NRL had done quite a lot of work in the upper-atmosphere research, so it was a fairly logical choice. On the other hand, there were those of us on the fringes of this who felt, “Gee, you asked me to develop the whole thing— brand new rockets and all the rest of it— and here we could use some of the stuff we have on hand and get through this a lot easier.” At the lab [JPL], there were several people who said, “We ought to be in on this.” Actually, the development of [the Explorer] program was under a committee [the Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Special Capabilities] chaired by Homer Joe Stewart. COHEN: And people from different institutions were members of this committee? PICKERING: Yes. So they were watching the development of [the satellite program], and as time went on, we felt that the NRL was having troubles. It was a bigger problem than the NRL thought it was, and we really ought to be in on it. COHEN: Now when you say “we,” who do you mean? PICKERING: I mean the army. Actually, there were a few meetings in Washington where the army made a presentation to Stewart’s committee basically saying that if you get in trouble, this is what you can do. I remember being at one of those meetings when a navy admiral-who I guess probably had responsibility for NRL-stood up and said, “I don’t believe a word of it,” and stomped out. [Laughter] COHEN: Meaning…? PICKERING: The idea that the army could end-run the navy, as it were. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-5 COHEN: Oh, I see. This was a matter of pecking order. PICKERING: Yes, army versus navy, you see. Here was a bunch of characters from the army who were telling him they knew his business better than he did, so he just said flat out, “It’s a bunch of lies; I don’t believe it,” when we told him we could do it. As a matter of fact, we myself and one or two others— went around to the secretary of the army and said we thought this called for an official apology on the part of the navy. [Laughter] And by golly, they did. They got the admiral to come in and apologize. COHEN: And they also gave you the program. PICKERING: Well, not yet. At that time, the large long-range rocket work was divided between the army and the air force. The army felt it should have been theirs entirely. In fact, General [John B.] Medaris, who was running the army program out of Huntsville, Alabama, being an old artillery man, said, “Look, this business of delivering a payload across the other side of the ocean, this is just an artillery job, and we’re the artillery, and we know how to do this. Of course, I’ll admit that the airplane was rather useful in World War II, but it was just an interim solution. The real solution is the artillery.” [Laughter] He was talking like this, and he was told to shut up. Anyway, they did end up by assigning the army what they called the IRBM, instead of the ICBM. The IC was the intercontinental ballistic missile and the IR was the intermediate-range ballistic missile which was a 2,000-mile range rocket. So the army facility at Huntsville was assigned that responsibility, and that included [Wernher] von Braun and his people, who had been brought over here after World War II and eventually ended up at Huntsville. Von Braun was very sensitive to the fact that one of the real technical problems you’ve got to solve is that if you’ve got a high-speed rocket coming back into the atmosphere, the friction of the atmosphere makes everything very hot. And he lost a lot of V-2s, which blew up because they had some residual fuel in them and the heat from reentry blew them up. So when he was faced with the problem of a 2,000-mile missile as against a 200-mile missile-it’s going to be a lot worse. The question of how you solve this reentry problem bothered him quite http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-6 a bit, so he came to us at JPL. In fact, General Medaris came to us at the lab and said that he would like to have JPL work with von Braun’s people on this whole problem. Medaris basically put his hands on the table and said, “OK, this is what I want you guys to do.” And I looked at him and I said, “We’re a contractor. We’re not going to do that.” [Laughter] I kind of surprised him. I said, “Look, we’ll work with you, but it will be on our terms. You’re not going to dictate to us what we’re going to do.” When von Braun came up with this reentry problem, we said, “OK, we’ll help you with that. What we’ll help you with is that we will build some solid-propellant rockets to put on top of your Redstone rocket and shoot it up to higher speeds so that you can get the equivalent of the 2,000-mile rocket. And you build your reentry whatever-you-want, and we’ll put some radio on it to communicate with it and find out what happens, and we’ll do the experiment for you.” This was what we did. We had about a half a dozen of these reentry test vehicles, as we called them, shooting out into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But with the reentry test vehicle, we had two problems. One was to build the solid-propellant rockets to go on top of the Redstone and the second was to build a communications system to get the data back. We did both of those things. The design we came up with used a rocket we had developed as part of the development for the Sergeant missile, which we were working on for the army. It was a six-inch-diameter rocket about yay long [showing the length]. COHEN: Five feet? PICKERING: Yes. Actually, what we had was a ring of eleven of these rockets in a circle. They were fired together and constituted, as it were, the second stage after the Redstone. Inside that ring was a ring of three rockets, which then were the final ones to deliver the payload. The payload was mounted really on essentially an empty third-stage rocket; we used the same structure because it was convenient; we just didn’t have propellant in it. And the engineers, of course, very quickly said, “Look, if we want to go into orbit, all we have to do is make that third stage a live stage, and then we can kick something into orbit.” COHEN: So you were already thinking about that. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-7 PICKERING: Yes, we were thinking about that. And it was General Medaris who said to us once, “I don’t want to hear by accident that you guys happened to put in a live third stage.” [Laughter] Because he had gotten very definite orders that he was to stay out of the satellite business. COHEN: Who was in the satellite business at that time? PICKERING: Just the navy. COHEN: So this was still an army-navy competition. PICKERING: Yes. All right. So then it goes along until the Soviets launch their Sputnik [October 4, 1957]…. After that, of course, my people got more anxious about putting up a satellite, because they said, “Look, the Vanguard satellite”— the navy one— “is having troubles, and we ought to have a crack at it.” Well, nothing happened until the second Sputnik, which was a month later, in November. When that was sent up, then the army was asked, “OK, what can you guys do?” And Medaris told them —we told him what to say—Medaris said, “We can do it in ninety days.” And we got the go-ahead…. COHEN: And you did launch Explorer I successfully [January 31, 1958], and that was a big success. PICKERING: Yes. And of course the other thing I think was interesting was that this is the 1 of February, essentially, and by the 1st of June the Congress had passed the act that set up NASA. If you think about Congress doing something as complicated as setting up a new agency between February and June, that’s pretty good. By October, NASA was in business, and by December 1958 we [JPL] were part of NASA. COHEN: Did you personally— or did [Caltech president Lee A.] DuBridge-think it was good for you to go from the army to NASA? How did that happen? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-8 Fig. 1. Shortly after its successful flight in February 1958, Lee DuBridge, Vice-President Richard Nixon and William Pickering proudly display a replica of Explorer 1. Courtesy of JPL. PICKERING: Oh, we were delighted about the whole development, because there was a feeling here at Caltech that it wasn’t really appropriate for us to be working on a classified project up there at JPL….From our point of view, we were very happy to welcome NASA, or to join NASA, pretty much on their terms. COHEN: Now, why was it that NASA was happy to let you stay an independent contractor, while places like Goddard and Ames and others were government laboratories. PICKERING: Yes, I know. But on the other hand, Los Alamos, for example, is run by the University of California. So the fact that Caltech was running JPL-the precedent had been set for that. They also wanted von Braun’s people in, too, and the army cried on their shoulder about that—the army didn’t want to lose all of their rocket capability. But eventually, of course, the Huntsville group became part of NASA as well. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-9 COHEN: And you also kept JPL from turning into a civil service organization. PICKERING: That’s right. COHEN: That’s a lot of maneuvering. PICKERING: Well, as a matter of fact, it caused some problems in NASA, because if you look at the laboratory structure of NASA, it was primarily the old NACA — the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics which owned a bunch of labs around the country and was transferred in toto into NASA. And then NASA set up Goddard, and eventually Houston [the Johnson Space Center]. As far as NASA was concerned, those were all civil service labs, and they didn’t realize that they had to treat us differently from the civil service people. That caused some tension between JPL and NASA. COHEN: Differently in the sense that they could not tell you who to hire or make you put them through their security system? I mean, what was different about it? PICKERING: Well, the civil service system required or at least expected- tighter control from Washington. And we didn’t. [Laughter] We wanted to do things our way. In fact, one of my big arguments with the NASA management in the early days was that they wanted to put a number maximum on the lab that we couldn’t have more than 2,000 people, or whatever it was. And I said, “Look, you give us a job and we agree to do it, and we agree on costs and so forth, and the hiring of people is my problem— not yours.” But since in the civil service situation they are very tightly controlled on numbers, they wanted to do the same thing with us. COHEN: And you did win. But, you know, they were footing the bill. PICKERING: That’s right. One other thing that we argued about was that we said we would select the projects we’d work on and then tell NASA what it was going to cost. And they said, “Oh, no! We will tell you what to do.” We argued about that quite a lot. And the way the contract is now written, NASA did win on that. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-10 COHEN: So they determine the projects? PICKERING: They determine the projects. But there’s some sort of a mutuality clause in there. I don’t know what the wording of the contract is now-see, the contract gets rewritten every few years… COHEN: Now, I have a point here about [the] Corporal [missile]. PICKERING: Corporal. Yes, we made actually two missile developments. The history of that goes something like this. The initial graduate student project was to learn about rocket motors. And they learned how to make a rocket motor-both solid-propellant and liquid-propellant motors. They learned how to keep them from blowing up unexpectedly. And the initial application of these was the JATO-Jet-Assisted Take-Off aircraft. This was because in the late thirties, early forties, the army was very conscious of the fact that they had to work from airfields that were too short for what they would like to have had, and therefore they needed something to get an airplane up in the air quickly. And the idea of putting a rocket under there and giving it a push was the solution. This was demonstrated for the army out at March Field, and then demonstrated for the navy up at Edwards [Air Force Base]. And both the army and the navy were delighted with the idea of getting this extra push, and they wanted lots of rockets. At that time, [Theodore] von Kármán said, “OK, we don’t want to do this. We don’t want to go into production of rockets.” So they set up the Aerojet Corporation- von Kármán and a few others. I wasn’t involved in that-unfortunately, because I think a lot of them made a lot of money out of that. [Laughter] COHEN: So they went instead to Aerojet to build those rockets. PICKERING: That’s right. Now, what happened at the lab was that after this first research effort to make a good rocket motor, the army then came to us and said, “Look, the Germans have this V-2 contraption, and we really ought to be doing some research to try to understand how those things work. So what about it?” So we said, “OK, we’d like to do that.” So we started out on a http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-11 research program to learn how to build stuff that would fly— also guidance systems and communications and all the rest of it. We started that in about 1944 or’45, toward the end of the war. Incidentally, one of the interesting things, which we had nothing to do with, was the fact that as the postwar thinking was developing, Vannevar Bush-who had been running the science program for the military during the war— stated that in order to develop a system to deliver an atomic bomb across the ocean, a rocket is not the way to go, because a rocket would have to be too big and you can’t build one that big. Certainly you can’t guide it accurately enough. Therefore, the way to go is to have an unmanned airplane do it. And the US started on a program they called the Navajo program, which was to develop an unmanned aircraft for this purpose. And it wasn’t until about the early 1950s that the US discovered that the Russians were happily working on big rockets. See, both the Russians and ourselves had grabbed a bunch of the Germans. [Laughter] The Germans they took into Russia, the Russians had them working right away on improving the V-2 and making bigger ones, and the word got out that that’s what they were doing. So in this country we did a quick turnaround, because by then we’d learned more about rockets and guidance and we realized that we could do it. So the country then did embark on what was essentially a fresh program, making ICBMs. COHEN: But not at JPL. PICKERING: No, we had nothing to do with that. Our objective was to build something not too different from the V-2, something definitely more accurate. We started out on a research program, trying to learn about the problems. And after a few years the army came to us and said, “Hey, we like what you’re doing. We’d like you to make it into a production device.” And they picked two firms for us to work with-Firestone, the tire company, and Gilfillan, an electronics company down here—and put the Corporal into production. We said, “Well, this is the research program and it’s not really designed to go into production.” They said, “Well, that’s all right; do it anyway.” So we did. COHEN: So you did the production part of it. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-12 PICKERING: Well, the two big companies did the actual production, but it was our responsibility. We told them what to do, and they did it. The result was that although, let’s see, I don’t know how many of the Corporals were manufactured, maybe on the order of 100 or so. And the army did learn how to fire them. I remember that it happened that as a tourist in Italy I was sitting in a bus, and the bus had to wait at a road intersection while the Corporal battalion went across the road. [Laughter] So we waited and waited and waited for that long group of vehicles and people and so forth. From the military point of view, [the Corporal] wasn’t really a success. And the army realized this, because even before they— COHEN: But let me go back. How did you get the name “Corporal” for this thing? PICKERING: Oh, yes. When we started out, we said first of all we’d do the Private, then we’d do the Corporal, and then we’d do the Sergeant, and maybe get up to the General. [Laughter] The Private was a little solid-propellant contraption that didn’t have any guidance or anything on it and went about ten miles. In fact, we had the WAC Corporal, too- Woman’s Army Corps. COHEN: WAC Corporal? How was it different from the other? PICKERING: Well, it was a little one. [Laughter] It was smaller. It was just designed to go straight up in the air. COHEN: I’m getting to the point where you’re out of the army. What made you decide to leave the rockets and go to the planets? PICKERING: Well, wait a minute. Let me continue on with the rockets. Actually putting the Corporal into production and seeing some of them get built and seeing the army trying to shoot them, the army decided that they would want an improved version of the thing. Possibly the same thing, but “Let’s have a good one!” They put out a request for a proposal. So at the lab we said, “Hey, we’re not industry, but we could propose on this, too.” So we did, and we got the contract. We beat out General Electric, who was our biggest competitor. This time we said, http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-13 “OK, let’s make something that is really a good, usable weapon.” And that was obviously the Sergeant. So at the time the satellite business began — that would be about 1955, ’56 we were still working on the Sergeant. When NASA came in, I said, “Well, I think we ought to finish what we’re doing on Sergeant, then phase out as quickly as we can, but not have a sudden cut-off.” And the army and NASA, everybody agreed, and so that’s what we did. So for a year or two, we still had a little bit of Sergeant work, but there wasn’t much left. COHEN: Was this because you saw there was more future in satellites? PICKERING: Well, it was because we wanted to get out of the classified stuff and into the unclassified. The Sergeant basically was the last thing we did for the army. Then we went off on a program for NASA…..I didn’t want to get into the manned program. I said, “That’s too big and expensive, and it’s not appropriate for JPL.” Or for Caltech. And likewise the near-Earth satellite program. That was all right, but not as much fun as the deep space. So they gave us the deep space program. COHEN: Sometimes you wonder how decisions are made, and sometimes it’s just as simple as that. And DuBridge, of course, must have agreed with you, up and down the line. PICKERING: Yes, indeed. COHEN: Did you do a lot of discussing of this with DuBridge? PICKERING: Quite a bit. COHEN: So it was the two of you together, you put your heads together and made the decisions. PICKERING: That’s right. COHEN: As simple as that! [Laughter] No board of directors. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-14 PICKERING: That’s right. I had the best possible contract-to go out and explore the solar system. That was a very nice contract to have. Well, we started out by sending some stuff to the moon— the Ranger program and the Surveyor program. And then to Venus, and then to Mars, and so forth. COHEN: What was your relationship with some of these other NASA labs, like Goddard and Ames? Did you have much to do with them? PICKERING: Not too much. Goddard took on the near-Earth satellites. One of the interesting things, of course, is what you do about the science in all of this. When we first started this, I think I said it, but certainly people at the lab said it: “Look, we’ll decide who the scientists are going to be and what experiments we’re going to fly.” And NASA said, “No.” And after a while, I realized that they were right that this was a national program, and NASA, representing the federal government, would clearly make the choice of what experiments were going to be carried. It was up to us to figure out how to get them to fit into the spacecraft. Now, in the case of Goddard, Goddard did more scientific experiments than we did, I guess, because these small satellites in Earth orbit-there were quite a lot of them and each one of them carried several experiments. So Goddard was closer to the science, I think, than we were. Begin Tape 1, Side 2 COHEN: And Ames? PICKERING: Well, Ames was one of the old NACA labs. The NACA was a very successful organization. They did basic research, underlying the whole development of aircraft in this country— or in the world, really. The NACA had some very good people. They had an office in Washington that was staffed by PhDs, who were thoroughly familiar with the research programs and worked closely with the people in the research programs. NASA pointed out to me that when I had gone to Washington I had talked to some colonel at the Pentagon [laughter] who didn’t know beans about what I was talking about. And furthermore, they knew darn well that http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-15 we were basically setting our own program; the colonels were just asking us how much money we wanted. [Laughter] COHEN: OK. And of course the Deep Space Network [DSN]-very successful. PICKERING: Very successful. Yes, that was something I was very interested in, because when I was in the electrical engineering department here, my interest was not in power engineering, which was Royal Sorensen’s specialty. Sorensen was running the department then. My interest had gotten into the electronics field. In fact, I used to have arguments with Sorensen as to how much electronics we ought to be teaching, and by the end of World War II we had developed quite a lot of electronics. In fact, that was the reason they got me up to JPL in the first place. And so my interest in the radio end of it, was, again, a natural interest and went way back. One of the things I remember: Back in New Zealand days, when I was in high school, another fellow and I put together a local amateur radio club. In those days, we built our transmitters by winding our own transformers and doing everything, from the ground up. [Laughter] So the DSN was something I liked very much also. The man who was running it, Eb [Eberhardt] Rechtin, had been one of my best students. He did very well. COHEN: OK. So tell me about the Ranger program. How did that change how you thought and planned? Did that entail major changes? PICKERING: No. NASA, in fact, insisted [after the Ranger program] that we had to learn to do things differently than we’d been doing. They said, “Look, you guys are brought up by the artillery people.” And the way the artillery people develop a gun, or a set of shells, is that they end up shooting a lot of them and eventually they get what they want. And now we were going to launch one satellite, and that one satellite has got to work. You don’t get the option of doing a lot of testing. And NASA was quite right, because when we lost the first half dozen Rangers, most of those were engineering tests of various things. It’s true that many of them completely satisfied their initial requirement. But we sort of had the philosophy that you were expected to launch a lot of them. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-16 Speaking of Corporal, we actually got around to launching about 100 Corporals. And in fact, when we got to around to number 100, I said, “I will push the firing button.” [Laughter] So I pushed the firing button, and instead of going north it went east. [Laughter] And that was very embarrassing, because we had decided to this was down in White Sands Proving Ground, of course have a big party afterwards. [Laughter] COHEN: So what did you do? You tightened up the program, then? PICKERING: Well, you have to learn to test and develop things differently and to be very conscious of every little thing in the process of new development. In other words, basically you’ve got to say that anytime you do a test on equipment that you think you’re going to fly, and it doesn’t do exactly what you wanted it to do or something strange happens, you have to completely explain that and correct it before you can do anything else. And we got this psychology of looking for any kind of irregularities and doing something about them. COHEN: What you’re saying is you really had to be very, very careful. I mean, everything had to be accounted for. PICKERING: That’s right. In fact we had to learn that the only time you ever test the whole contraption is the time you push launch the button. And then it’s too late. COHEN: So those were the major changes from the Ranger program. You really had to change the way you were thinking about things. PICKERING: Yes. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-17 WILLIAM H. PICKERING SESSION 2 April 29, 2003 Begin Tape 2, Side 1 COHEN: Good afternoon, Dr. Pickering. Here we are again at the Archives to continue our conversation. I see here, looking over your curriculum vitae, that you got many awards. But two of them that I’d like to talk about could you say something about getting the National Medal of Science? PICKERING: Yes. This was awarded, of course, at the White House, actually by President [Gerald R.] Ford. It was just a quiet little ceremony there in the White House—if you can have a quiet little ceremony in the White House. [Laughter] Guy Stever, who at that time was national science advisor, introduced me to the President, and the President gave me the award. This was done downstairs in the White House, not in the Oval Office, and I was the only one, in this case. The whole thing was over in a half an hour, I suppose. [Laughter] COHEN: So there was no dinner that went with it or anything? PICKERING: No. COHEN: The President came down, gave you the award, and that was it? PICKERING: That was it. COHEN: He said “Good work.” Fig. 2. President Gerald Ford bestows the National Medal of Science upon Pickering in 1975. Courtesy of JPL. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-18 PICKERING: Yes. And I have a piece of paper to prove it. [Laughter] COHEN: But you were the only one there? Because I think now when I see these announced, there seem to be a half a dozen or so. PICKERING: Yes. Incidentally, it’s interesting that the very first one of those awards was given to von Kármán. I’m not sure whether they called it the Medal of Science or Medal of Engineering at that time. But anyway, that started the whole series. COHEN: Well, quite a few Caltech people have won this over the years, but it’s still a great honor. Now, the Japan Prize is relatively new, and I see that you got that in ’94. So that was among the first. PICKERING: Yes,’94. Actually, that was the tenth year they’d given it. The first one was given to a Caltech alumnus, and that was John Pierce. This was a lot more elaborate, of course; it involved going over to Japan. We were there for about a week. There were various events going on. The actual awarding of the prize was done at the National Theatre, by the emperor. Two prizes were given one to a man from Sweden, Arvid Carlsson, who got it basically for the discovery of dopamine. So the two of us and our wives were on the stage, and the Emperor and Empress and one or two officials were on the other side of the stage, with a podium in between. There was a certain amount of speechmaking, and of course the awardees had to make some short acceptance speeches. The audience, I would guess, was several hundred. I don’t know how they were selected, but anyway it was very nice, a very nice affair. After the actual awarding of the prizes, we were invited to go upstairs, and we ended up sitting in the balcony of the theatre, with the Emperor, in the front row of the balcony, and the local symphony orchestra and some opera singers put on a concert for us. COHEN: Just for you people sitting up there? PICKERING: Yes. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-19 COHEN: There was nobody downstairs in the seats or anything? PICKERING: No, I don’t think so. Well, maybe the ones who were there earlier stayed. And there we were. As I told my wife, it’s not very often that you get to sit with the Emperor and have the orchestra playing for you. [Laughter] COHEN: Well, why not. Of course, there was a generous amount of money that came with that award. PICKERING: Yes. In US terms it was around $400,000. Anyway, after the concert we went back to the hotel and Inez complained that she had only half an hour to change. We had to change and go to a dinner at the hotel. And that was very interesting, because there were several hundred people at that dinner and it was entirely western—it was not a Japanese dinner in any sense. The service and the food were all western. The Emperor was across the table from me and Inez was sitting next to him, and the U.S. ambassador was sitting next to her. And I was across the table, with the Empress sitting next to me and I’ve forgotten who was on my other side. But anyway, it was pretty impressive to walk in as part of the Emperor’s party. They had a children’s concert—a children’s choir-singing and they also had some piano playing. COHEN: So it sounds like a lot more stuff went on than at the White House. PICKERING: Yes. And then after the dinner, we retired to a smaller room where there were maybe twenty or thirty people, including the Emperor, and we had an after-dinner highball. And then after that—the next day, I guess it was —we went down to Kyoto and had a couple of days there, which involved a little sightseeing. There we had the Japanese-type banquet, where we sat on the floor— well, a few inches above it, not quite on the cold floor. That was fun, because they had geisha girls waiting on us, and the girls did some singing and dancing afterward. Also, the ride down to Kyoto is on the high-speed train. One of the things that fascinated me about that was when we were on the platform to get back to Tokyo, on the timetable, up there in lights, it said that these high-speed trains would go by about every fifteen http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-20 minutes. A couple of them went by before we boarded our train. I don’t know how many stops there were between Kyoto and Tokyo; in our case, there was only one-Nagoya. So that was very exciting. COHEN: Those were nice awards to wind up your career at JPL. PICKERING: Yes. One of the things I did, having gotten a big chunk of money that I didn’t expect to get, was to set up a scholarship, a fellowship, here at Caltech for New Zealand students. I have one a year— graduate students. COHEN: That would be the Pickering Fellowship? PICKERING: Pickering Fellowship. COHEN: Well, OK, Japanese money paying for a New Zealander why not. [Laughter] That’s very nice. PICKERING: The Japanese have sort of taken over the tourist industry in New Zealand. The first time I took Inez down there, after we got married, we had a leisurely trip. We went to Honolulu for a couple of days and then Fiji for a couple of days. And in Fiji we got on this Air New Zealand plane, which had started in Japan, and we were the only white people on the plane. [Laughter] The plane was loaded to the gills with Japanese tourists. COHEN: Well, I think some years ago that was all you saw no matter where you went. I don’t think it’s true anymore. PICKERING: [Laughter] That’s right, no. No, it’s not true anymore. We just got back from New Zealand and there were a few Japanese tourists, but not like it used to be. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-21 COHEN: There’s another question I wanted to ask you, and then we’ll leave it. In looking back at all the good years at JPL that were so successful, is there anything that you wish you had done differently? PICKERING: That’s an interesting question, and I haven’t really thought about it. No, I don’t think there’s anything, short of a real sea change. COHEN: The big decisions we talked about-where you decided to do the deep space program. And that certainly was a good decision. PICKERING: Yes, the shaping of the overall program at JPL. Of course the question is: Should we have done it differently? No, I don’t think so, because we got into the space program as soon as we could, and that was the thing to do. There wasn’t any point in just continuing to make missiles for the army. So we did that when we should have. No, I don’t think I have any real second thoughts. COHEN: Well, that’s good. OK. So you finished up [your directorship] there [1976]. And then almost immediately you were approached by the people from Saudi Arabia? Or had you known them before? PICKERING: No. It turned out that what had happened in Saudi Arabia was that the oil minister, Ahmed Zaki Yamani, had decided that he needed to start training some Saudis for his business in the oil industry and that he was not going to get these people out of the conventional, old-fashioned university system. So he said he wanted to set up his own university, a technical school. And what he did was take a man who was an American who had been running the training program for Aramco. He got this man from Aramco and asked him to set up a school. And he quite naturally said OK, he’d set it up, modeled on an American engineering college, and he did, requiring that all the instruction be in English. Because, he said, “All our textbooks are in English, and you guys are going to have to learn English if you’re going to take engineering.” So he had set the school up [the University of Petroleum and Minerals]— and it was located right next door to Aramco, in Dhahran. As a part of that program, he wanted to set up a http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-22 research institute something like the Stanford Research Institute attached to the university but serving industry. In setting up the SRI equivalent, he came over to this country himself and was looking around at places. COHEN: Where had he been educated? PICKERING: That’s a good question. I ought to know, but I’m afraid I don’t. COHEN: But it must have been in the west, some place. PICKERING: Yes, he had a good background. Anyway, he was visiting various schools to set up something more or less equivalent to this. So obviously he came to Caltech and he ended up going to JPL-actually came up and talked to me. He discovered that I was about to retire and said, “Well, if you’re about to retire, why don’t you come over to Saudi Arabia and set this thing up?” And I said, “OK, I’ll do it for two years.” I didn’t want to make a career out of it, but for a couple of years it was all right. COHEN: He was rather lucky; he found someone who was used to traveling. [Laughter] PICKERING: Yes. So that’s how I got started. And it’s quite a good engineering school, in the sense that many of their graduates, of course, come over here for postgraduate work. I remember they had a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, or something like that. Anyway, this student was considered the best graduate student they’d seen for quite a long time. COHEN: In Oklahoma? PICKERING: In Oklahoma, yes. Most of the kids who came over here did all right. COHEN: This would have been in the late seventies? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-23 PICKERING: Yes, the late seventies. Let’s see-what else about that? The problem I had then was to try to set up this research institute, as to how it might work. They had made a tentative plan for a building for this place, and that building got built just about the time I left. The institute was turned over to a young Saudi when I left. COHEN: Now, what did you do there? PICKERING: I did the planning. COHEN: Did you just model it after Caltech? PICKERING: Yes, that’s right. Actually, I told them, “Look, if this is a planning function, I don’t have to live in Saudi Arabia to do that.” I wanted an office in Pasadena OK, no problem. COHEN: And that was even before e-mail. [Laughter] PICKERING: [Laughter] Yes, before the days of e-mail. I had a place down there at the Huntington-what’s now the Ritz Carlton— one of the cottages behind the hotel. COHEN: I see. You didn’t keep your offices here or at JPL —this was completely separate. PICKERING: Completely separate. And I used to have Saudis come over there to stay at the Huntington and work with me for a while. And conversely, I would get people usually from JPL who wanted to help me. Hire them as consultants and send them over there to Saudi Arabia for a couple of months. COHEN: I gather you just had a blank check or something. I mean, there was never a problem? PICKERING: There was never a problem, no. But while I was over there, I had a heart problem. I’d had sort of an angina problem for maybe five or six years before, but it had never been very serious- -but there, it was. When I was over there in 1976 or ’77, I remember one day I was http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-24 sitting at my desk about nine o’clock in the morning. I wasn’t running around or anything, but I had quite a bad angina attack. So a doctor over there took an EKG of me and put me in the hospital at Aramco. Aramco had a good, modern hospital. They kept me there for a couple of weeks, and then they basically said, “OK, we’ve done all we can.” They gave me a pat on the shoulder and said, “Good luck.” But they recommended that I go either to England or to this country and have it looked at. So I said all right, I’d go. COHEN: So they really didn’t do anything for you; they just watched you for a couple of weeks. PICKERING: Yes. Well, they gave me some shots and some pills, but that was it. I came back over here to the Huntington Hospital, and the Huntington did a bypass on me. This was back in the days when bypasses were not that common, really. But it fixed me up and I’ve been in great shape ever since. What brought this to mind was your comment about money. Because when I was ready to go back to Saudi Arabia, I said to the Saudis, “Look, I’m just out of the hospital, so I’m just recovering from this. So I think I ought to come on the Concorde instead of on an ordinary airplane.” And they said, “No problem.” [Laughter] COHEN: So how long were you at this? PiCKERING: Well, it essentially was a couple of years. Actually, at the end of the first year, I was talking to the head of the university— they call it the rector, over there. We were reflecting a bit, and he said, “You know, this year, to be perfectly frank, you lived in Pasadena and commuted to Saudi Arabia. I think for the second year you ought to live in Saudi Arabia and commute to Pasadena.” [Laughter] COHEN: Did you do that? PICKERING: I ended up spending a little more time there, but I never did spend a full summer there. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-25 COHEN: Oh, the weather must have been terrible! PICKERING: Well, the winters are fine; it’s not too different from what it is over here. In fact, in that particular year the rainfall in Saudi Arabia, in Dhahran, was greater than the rainfall in Pasadena. COHEN: So tell me, does that university function now? PICKERING: Oh, yes. I haven’t had any direct contact with it lately, but the last time I talked to the man who was running it was during the Gulf War. I remember some of us sitting here and philosophizing a bit and wondering what had happened to the place. So somebody said, “Why don’t you call him up and talk to him?” So we did. And the thing that fascinated me was that I just dialed the number here in Pasadena, and I got him, sitting in the middle of the war, over there in Dhahran. The university is next door to the airport, which is a combined military and civilian airport, and the university housing is spread around in that same area. So here he was; he was sitting right next to the airport. “What about Scuds?” “Oh, we haven’t had any today.” [Laughter] COHEN: So when you worked in Saudi Arabia, it was not politicized yet, at that point? I mean, as it is noW. PICKERING: No. There was a little bit of anti-American feeling, but not very much. Because actually there was quite a large American contingent at this airport. Air force people-I don’t know what they were doing, but they were there. COHEN: Now, this building that got bombed some years ago in Saudi Arabia. PICKERING: Oh, that was a housing development down there on the shore. That happened seven years after I left. At the time we were there, going downtown was not a problem. Women were not allowed to drive cars. One of the Saudis told me that if some of the Saudi men saw women driving cars, they would probably cause a collision, push them off the road in some way. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-26 The other thing about that that I remember—I was again talking to the rector of the university. He said, “The place is going to the dogs. When I go downtown and park my car, I have to take the keys out nowadays. I don’t trust them. Too many foreigners down there.” [Laughter] COHEN: So you didn’t see anything…. I mean, all we read about is that it’s a repressive place. PICKERING: They told us a story about when miniskirts first appeared. There were quite a few English girls working in Aramco and in the hospital, and so forth. There was at least one occasion when a bunch of these girls turned up down in Khobar in their miniskirts. And some of the vigilantes down there spray-painted them with black paint. [Laughter] COHEN: So that was really a good experience, this work you were doing. PICKERING: Oh, it was a very interesting experience, yes. Of course, as I said, on the university grounds it was pretty much an international university, but not entirely. There were still places where the women-well, in fact, women were not supposed to walk around the campus unless they were accompanied by their husbands. COHEN: There were no women in attendance at this school? PICKERING: No, although there was discussion about it, and I don’t know whether they ever got around to it or not. But if it had materialized, those women would have been put in separate classes. Thinking about the way the university operated, the recreation area was pretty much where the foreign faculty lived, and that was just like a university most anywhere. COHEN: So they brought in people to teach, by and large? PICKERING: Yes. COHEN: And those people brought their families with them. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-27 PICKERING: Yes, they brought their families with them. One or two incidents which sort of illustrate the differences in culture: There was one case where a Saudi had married an American woman and she’d converted to Islam. And like most converts, of course, they get very involved. And she discovered that in the library in the recreation center they had a copy of the Koran in English which was not the approved English version. And she got very indignant about this and made them take it out. COHEN: So you came back here after that, and that was the end of your involvement with them. And since then you’ve just been involved with this business of yours. PICKERING: I might say that when I came back here, the university had set up a sort of advisory council-an American group that met about once or twice a year—and I was on that for a few years. COHEN: So they graduated their own people to go into the oil industry there, in Saudi Arabia. PICKERING: Yes, the purpose was really to train their own people. As I said, the university had good standards. As a matter of fact, on at least two occasions I know they invited the group that does the accreditation of engineering schools in this country to come over and look them over. And the one that I was involved in gave us a good report. They found a few things to nit-pick— of course, they always do. COHEN: We won’t talk too much about your present endeavor, but you’re running a few factories here and there-is that correct? PICKERING: You mean the sawdust pellets? COHEN: Yes. What made you go into that? Where did that idea come from? http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-28 PICKERING: Well, when I came back from Saudi Arabia, the question was: What was I going to do now? What did I do? I set up Pickering Research—a little consulting venture. I had two fairly large things come out of that. One came from the Electrical Power Research Institute, which was set up by the industry quite a number of years ago and is headquartered up around Stanford. Right after Three Mile Island [March 28,1979], they came to me and said, “Look, you guys in the space business have a good record of safety and reliability. How do you go about doing it?” And I said, “All right, we’ll do a study for you and document it.” So we ran that for them, and I got both the military and the civilian space business to contribute to it. We wrote a pretty good report on what we did and how we did things differently. They thought it was a good report, and they said, “Now look, now that you guys have done this, it would be an interesting case for you to have a look at one of the nuclear power plants and see what you think about it, in terms of safety and reliability. And the obvious one to do is Diablo Canyon, up the road here, because the plant is being built but they haven’t got their operating license yet, so it’s sitting there idle, and it would be easy to run tests and so forth.” So another guy and I went up to San Francisco to PG&E [Pacific Gas & Electric] to talk to them about this, and of course they just threw us out of the office. “Who are you? You bunch of space cadets, get out of here! We know what we’re doing.” [Laughter] And the sequel to that is that about a week later the Atomic Energy Commission jumped on them for something they had done wrong. They had done some extra seismic bracing of some sort as part of spiffing up the station, and they had done it incorrectly, and the AEC jumped on them. However, we never did get the chance to show what we could do. As a matter of fact, I was at a conference back east, put on, I guess, by the AIAA [American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics]. Anyway, it involved the power industry and some of the younger generation talking about safety problems, and one of the younger engineers working in the power industry told me, “The trouble is that these things are run by a bunch of old-timers, and until they die you’re never going to correct these things.” He was right, because as a part of this I had to look at Three Mile Island, for example, and went over things in there. And by space standards, they were terrible. In fact, I heard some more stories about other things happening at other plants and it just scared the daylights out of me— these guys were telling me, “None of your business.” They just don’t have an appreciation for how they should do things. For example, at Three Mile Island, the basic problem was that when they had the incident that shut the thing down, they ended up with a pipe http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-29 with 500° water. Now, 500° water means it’s under very high pressure-very high-pressure water in this pipe. And the valve at the end here, which is an electrically operated valve. And the whole incident happened because that valve didn’t operate properly. Now, it took them several days to discover this. In the meantime, there was radioactive water going through here and dumping into the reservoir down in the basement. And the only way they discovered it was that-not in the control room, but around the back somewhere they had a recorder that was recording the level of the water in this basement reservoir. And they said, “Oh, my gosh!” They realized the water was coming up in the reservoir, so this valve must be open. And they got the valve shut down and that saved the problem. I looked into the question of this valve. Now, as it turns out, this valve was used on about fifty reactors in this country, and secondly there was no facility in this country where you could test it. COHEN: You mean, they just bought these valves and put them in? PICKERING: Yes. Well, it’s sort of a safety valve, and when you put a safety valve in a boiler, you just expect it to open. You don’t test it. COHEN: That’s scary. So did they correct that one? PICKERING: No. But the AEC said, , “Look, we’ve got to do something about this. You guys don’t have this wired up so that you’ve got any indication in the control room as to what’s going on.” “Well, what can we do?” And they said, “Put a microphone in the same room with that valve. When the water’s going through that valve, it makes one hell of a racket. So you’ll know it in the control room.” So I worked on that for a bit. I also worked a little bit, back in the space business, on the Landsat photography of the earth and the ways in which you can get information out of that. In fact, that ended by my taking a contract from mainland China to help them set up some computing systems to do this. This was quite interesting, because the first reaction was: “Working with mainland China? Are you really serious about this? You really want to tell them how to do this?” http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-30 COHEN: Was this before relations were established? PICKERING: No, this was in the early eighties. We already had some contact with them. As a matter of fact, we found out that the kind of computers we were talking about they had already gotten from America. They had them over there. Anyway, it ended up that I went over to China to negotiate a contract with them. We spent a couple of weeks there, and the negotiator on the Chinese side was a woman. We were talking about a timetable—I forget what we said, but anyway she looked at the timetable and laughed and said, “You’re never going to get Washington’s approval that fast.” [Laughter] And she was right. COHEN: You had to get Washington’s approval to do this kind of technology? PICKERING: Yes. She knew that. And we got approval. The other thing that was interesting was that once the contract got going, we had no trouble with the Chinese. In other words, they paid up; we got our money right on time. Another interesting thing regarding the cultural difference: When we negotiated the contract, at the end of the contract you end up with a disputes clause that says what you do in case of a dispute. And this clause basically said, “Neither side will have any recourse to a court of law. You will have an arbitrator to do this.” And I said, “Oh, yes, you’ll get your own arbitrator!” But it went on to say, “And the arbitrator will be So-and-so in Switzerland.” So I said, “OK, in that case I’ll sign the contract.” We didn’t have any arguments, so we didn’t have to check out this arbitrator. But it turned out that the Chinese just didn’t like lawyers. In fact, we had somebody from IBM involved in this, and when we told the IBM people how we were going to negotiate this thing, their reaction was, “You’ve got to take along a gang of lawyers with you to do this, and you’re never going to do it in two weeks like you say you’re going to do.” And we went without the lawyers and did it in two weeks. After that, the next thing I got involved with had to do with the problem of renewable energy. We’re talking now about the early eighties, and the energy problem was getting to be an increasing problem. Up at the lab, we had done a lot of work with solar energy, so I thought maybe we could find something in solar energy that I wanted to work on. I had one or two ideas that I thought might be interesting to work on, but it really wasn’t going anywhere when, through http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-31 another JPL-er, I met a man who had a patent on how to make wood pellets. I talked to this man and got kind of interested in what he was doing. And he got interested in me, because it turned out that he was trying to commercialize this and was having awful trouble trying to work with business on it, not getting anywhere. He felt that having some technical advisor helping him might help this. So I said, “All right.” Well, this went on for about a year or so, and he still wasn’t getting anywhere. Finally he basically said, “Oh, the hell with it,” and went back to South Africa, where he’d come from. COHEN: He gave up the idea. PICKERING: He gave it to me and said, “OK, you can have it.” [Laughter] Well, it turned out that the patent he had really wasn’t worth much, if anything. When I had first started working with this man, I expected that I would be his technical advisor and from time to time I’d exercise myself by going to the bank. Well, when he went off, I realized that I really didn’t know anything much about this business, about how to make pellets. And it turned out that another man had had a patent on how to make these things, a few years before this man. And the first man was a real promoter, and he had actually sold franchises, or licenses, to about a dozen people in this country, and they promptly proceeded to build plants, and all of them went bankrupt. And this man had the good sense to disappear to Hong Kong. [Laughter] One of the plants that went through this exercise was up in Sandpoint, Idaho, and the man who owned the plant got hold of me and decided he wanted to talk to me, because he thought maybe I would finance him and help him get started. Well, I didn’t have any money, so he went bankrupt. Then I talked to the bank that foreclosed on him and worked out a deal with the bank whereby we would work on the plant and put it into good working condition and take an option to buy it, and the bank would help by giving us some money to help us do this. The bank agreed that they would do it, because we told them they should let us put it into condition: “Then you’ve got something to sell. Right now, all you’ve got is a pile of junk.” So they said OK. So we did this, and at the end of the period we said, “OK, we’d like to exercise our option and buy it from you and go into business.” Because we had learned enough about the business end to know, first of all, how to make wood pellets. And we believed that the pellet industry was a niche industry that could very well grow. Also because Jerry Whitfield, who happened to be an ex-Boeing http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-32 engineer, had decided he wanted to make a good stove for burning these things. Jerry’s stove and my pellets sort of arrived at the same time. I had good pellets and he had a good stove. So that sort of started the industry. His plant is up in the Seattle area. The plant is still making them, although he sold the plant recently. But anyhow, we had some discussion about joining forces in some way. But I said, “No. If you think about the automobile business, I’m like Chevron and you’re like General Motors. And General Motors doesn’t own Chevron.” [Laughter] “And our firm is in the fuel business. But a few years from now, I don’t know whether your stove is going to be the best one or not, but I still want to make good fuel.” So I ended up in the fuel business. COHEN: So that’s been successful? PICKERING: Yes. We have this plant in Idaho, and we have a second plant in West Virginia, and they each make about between 50,000 and 100,000 tons a year, which is an awful lot of sawdust. The location of plants are out in the boonies, where there are a lot of lumber mills around, so you can get the sawdust from these lumber mills, because lumber mills have a problem getting rid of their sawdust. COHEN: So you make your pellets out of their sawdust. PiCKERING: We told the lumber mills we wanted clean sawdust, and by clean sawdust, I mean no dirt and no bark, just wood. They grumbled about that, but we finally got them to realize that we were serious about it. I’m sort of phasing myself out of the business. I obviously was very active in it when we started it, but now I call myself chairman of the board. The chairman of the board doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to. COHEN: So it has good people running it? PICKERING: Yes, it’s still running along very nicely. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2 Pickering-33 COHEN: You’ve done so many interesting things. PICKERING: We, of course, sweated through learning the space business. In the early days, when we had the Ranger missions to the moon, none of the first six Rangers worked properly. My goodness, we had the Congress and NASA both glaring at us, both wondering how they were going to cancel the contract. But we talked our way out of it. We learned. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_2