Читать книгу Piercing the Horizon - Sunny Tsiao - Страница 15

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.—Arthur C. Clarke

The panorama along the winding curves of the Pacific Coast Highway stretched on for miles. Going from Seal Beach north to Palo Alto finally gave him a chance to relax, gather his thoughts, and move on. The war that he had fought on the other side of the ocean was behind him. Like others who had endured and lived, he was still readjusting to life back in the States. The young were coming home to a changed postwar America filled with more hope, opportunity, and optimism than ever before. Tom Paine was ready for the challenge.

Returning from the Pacific, he applied to several graduate schools around the country: Brown, Columbia, MIT, and in-state at nearby Cal Tech and the University of California at Berkeley. He wanted to really understand engineering, but thought also of architecture. Although his undergraduate grades at Brown had only been fair, his wartime service record and recommendations had been sterling. It was enough to gain him admission to Stanford University. In the fall of 1946, he enrolled in the School of Engineering and entered the mining and metallurgy program. In October, Barbara joined him. They moved into a one-room apartment in an old Palo Alto hospital near the campus. With an influx of postwar students enrolling on the GI bill, the school had converted it to a dormitory for childless, veteran couples.

Highly technical courses such as Mining, Geology, Industrial Process, and Pyrometry filled his days. He liked these subjects, and received mostly As and Bs. Others, like Russian, were not quite as appealing. Although it was a difficult language to learn (he received a C), he recalled thinking that knowing some Russian might turn out to be useful in the world of international commerce after the war.¹

He immediately began work on the Navy’s early nuclear reactor program as part of his research. In the years following World War II, the US Navy was in a tight race with Great Britain and the Soviet Union to develop the first wholly contained nuclear reactor. A reactor sealed inside a pressure vessel could theoretically power a ship or submarine for decades. Such a vessel would be able to stay at sea for years without refueling. The security clearance he had from the War Department and his wartime experience on the Pompon made him an ideal choice for the Navy research program.

Under O. Cutler Shepard, a pioneering metallurgist and the department’s distinguished professor, Paine conducted laboratory research whenever he was not in class. His thesis research was to find out how liquid metals could be made to interact in a useful way with high-temperature alloys. A nuclear reactor requires a great amount of cooling. The Office of Naval Research had asked Shepard to see if liquid metal could be used (instead of water, for example) to cool a reactor. Led by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the reactor program was one of a number of highly classified postwar Navy efforts involving the universities, and one of the largest. Eight students under Shepard would receive their PhD degrees by working on the project.

Paine recalled finding the highly theoretical work “intensely interesting.” The hours were long. He often sat alone at night performing experiments. The university had a stress-rupture machine in its Mineral Sciences Laboratory that was his primary research tool. Paine became quite proficient at using it to test the compression, shear, and tensile limits of different kinds of materials. Using the powerful lens of an electron microscope, he scanned for traces of cracks and fractures in a variety of steels and alloys.

Stanford did not pay him much, just $110 a month. An additional graduate student subsistence allowance of $90 made a big difference. It was enough for him and Barbara to get by. After two semesters, he received his Master of Science degree in Physical Metallurgy on June 15, 1947.²

He continued to study for his doctorate. In his second year, Shepard made him his lead graduate student. For the next two years, he wrote papers on the results of his research; several written with Shepard were published in classified Department of Defense literature.³ In April 1949, he passed his comprehensive examination in General and Metallurgical Engineering. This put him into the School of Mineral Sciences PhD program. The Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies approved his dissertation on May 20, 1949. Ten days later, he successfully defended his thesis, a technical treatise titled “The Effect of a Molten Lead Bismuth Eutectic Alloy on Steel.”⁴

He now had a decision to make. A doctorate in the very specialized field of Physical Metallurgy meant he could either teach at a university or work in the burgeoning high-tech industry. Shepard asked him to stay, and offered him an accelerated professorship in the department. Paine wanted to teach, but just not yet. He recalled telling Shepard that he thought it was important, before teaching someone, to “first acquire a broader level of practical work experience for himself.” So he reluctantly turned his professor down.⁵

In its heyday, General Electric was the preeminent technology company in the world. No other had quite the cachet of GE. Young engineers and scientists came from all parts of the industrialized world to try and make their mark at the flagship company of modern high technology. Paine was no different. In the fall of that year, he and Barbara packed up and headed east to Schenectady, New York. That was where Thomas Edison had first set up shop in 1892. On October 1, 1949, he joined the GE Research and Development Center as a research associate. Throughout the industry, the campus was known as Schenectady Works, or “The Knolls.” To the public, it was a wondrous place of modern marvels at the dawn of the space age. Many simply called it “The House of Magic.” GE had it all: electric blenders, washing machines, fluorescent lights, refrigerators. Every Sunday night for ten years, millions gathered in their family rooms in homes all across America and watched the General Electric Theater hosted by a Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan on live television. Everything that made for the perfect image of American suburbia of the 1950s was embodied in General Electric.

Paine was now a new but highly trained materials engineer. For the next twelve months, he experimented on the magnetic properties of unusual metals. The work was very specialized. Hours of laboratory work were needed to return one data point. His team discovered that strong, man-made magnets could be formed by mixing iron-cobalt with lead powder. The magnets had a lot of uses. GE engineers could mold them into any shape they wanted using a process called powder metallurgy. The magnets could then be used in everyday microscopic applications. These ranged from hearing aids to automotive test equipment. His work led to GE’s patent on the Lodex permanent magnet. It has since been continually used in the commercial automotive, electronics, and communications industries.

When Paine first started, J. Herbert Hollomon, his supervisor, had given him a verbal promise. Hollomon was the laboratory’s assistant manager for metallurgy research. He told Paine that after being in New York for a year, he would have the chance to set up his own section at the Meter and Instrument Laboratory in the company’s Lynn, Massachusetts, facility. There, he could run his own programs and branch out into new areas of research. Hollomon kept his word. On December 1, 1950, he signed Paine’s transfer papers and sent him 150 miles east to Massachusetts.

Paine continued the research on fine-particle magnets while in Lynn. The work led to production of GE’s first one hundred thousand Lodex magnets. He and his chief scientists, L. I. Mendelsohn and F. E. Luborsky, ran and grew the laboratory. Over the next five years, the quality of its research reached new heights. In 1956, it received the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science award for Outstanding Industrial Application of Science. By 1960, the Lodex magnet was well on its way to becoming an industry standard, as annual sales surpassed $1 million.⁶

When his supervisor, M. A. Princi, left on November 1, 1955, to take a job as the GE executive engineer in Milan, Italy, the company promoted him to general manager of the Lynn Instrumentation Laboratory. At thirty-four, he got his first taste of directing a large technical organization.

The focus of his laboratory was to support the Lynn facility in its primary job of making jet engines. In the 1950s, jets revolutionized transportation and defense at an astonishing pace. Between them, General Electric and Pratt & Whitney made virtually all of the jet engines in the United States. His laboratory found ways to use leading-edge metals to improve engine performance at higher temperatures and pressures. The first of some two dozen patents he would receive was for a time-temperature integrator control system. GE used it to test aircraft ranging from the popular civilian Learjet to the super-sleek B-58 Hustler strategic supersonic bomber.

He also continued his work on shipboard nuclear reactors. The laboratory developed a first-of-its-kind solid-state instrument that could monitor the temperature inside a nuclear reactor. The US Navy would use the invention in its fleet of nuclear submarines and ships throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The USS Enterprise (CVN-65) was the most recognizable of these ships. It was the world’s first nuclear-powered super-carrier and was just then becoming operational.⁷

Back at Stanford, Shepard still wanted him back. But Paine was quite content now. Times were good for Tom and Barbara. They now had four small children: Marguerite, whom they called Greta, was seven; George, four; Judy, two; and their youngest, Frank, had just been born. They thought they just might stay a while in the Massachusetts Bay community. He wrote to Shepard, saying, “General Electric has been very good to me and can promise an interesting future.”⁸

It was late in the afternoon. Up until he heard the news, October 4, 1957, had been much like any other Friday. He was at his desk getting ready to go home when someone told him to come over to the lounge and listen to the breaking news coming over the radio. The announcement soon silenced everyone in the room. The announcer said that the US Air Force had just confirmed that the Soviet Union had launched the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit. They were told that in the early morning sky the next day, they would be able to see the light from the satellite that the Soviet Union called Sputnik.

Before sunrise the next day, he and Barbara put jackets on the children and went down to the beach. Standing on the shore of the Atlantic, they gazed into the sky and waited. Then four-year-old George suddenly looked up and yelled, “There it is!” They looked to where the boy was pointing and saw Sputnik gliding effortlessly across the dawn’s morning sky. He remembered feeling only a stark sense of awe.⁹

Ralph J. Cordiner was an influential businessman. In 1958, the iconic CEO of General Electric ordered the complete decentralization of the vast high-tech company. He separated the various groups of the corporation and put product line responsibilities under a brand-new management structure. The change streamlined GE and saved millions of dollars while boosting its stock value. But part of the savings came by way of eliminating management layers and cutting the number of mid-level managers. Paine was one of them; he found himself with no choice but to leave Lynn. In September of that year, he transferred back to Schenectady. Herb Hollomon was waiting for him, this time in the Metallurgy and Ceramics Research Department.

Studying the behavior of composite materials in a time before there were digital computers was not easy. Solutions to “finite element” analyses of materials that are solved entirely by computers today took hundreds of hours to do by hand. Paine performed thousands of calculations using a slide rule and plotted the data on translucent onionskin graph paper with a wooden pencil, all by hand.¹⁰ The tedious work supported other parts of GE. The applied research he performed had one goal, and that was to improve the commercial products the company made and sold to consumers around the globe.

In the spring of 1960, Hollomon left for Washington, DC, to become assistant secretary of commerce for science and technology in the new Kennedy administration. This left Paine in charge of the materials lab. Paine liked Hollomon, but was glad he left. They had worked closely together for many years. He considered him a fair mentor, a good technical manager, and an excellent engineer. He recalled learning most from Hollomon about the nuances of GE’s complicated partnership with the federal government. But he did not always endorse Hollomon’s inflexible way of doing things. Now, he was in charge, and had his chance to run the lab as he saw fit.¹¹

He thought the laboratory had underperformed with Hollomon as manager. To reach its full potential, it needed to broaden its customer base and win new government prime contracts by relying on the laboratory’s proven technical merit and past performance. Paine received permission from the corporate office to branch out to reach a more diverse set of clientele from various agencies of the federal government. He brought in new, nontraditional GE customers such as the National Bureau of Standards and the US Geological Survey, agencies that would go on to use the lab’s expertise in unorthodox and esoteric ways. They looked to his lab for quick results. Projects became much more dynamic and were no longer limited to research and development in material science. Work in medicinal electronics, water purification, and urban transportation now complemented the other engineering programs. GE headquarters began to take note. At age forty, Tom Paine was starting to make a name for himself.

In August 1956, General Electric had opened an office in the quiet seaside community of Santa Barbara, California. Nestled in the narrow range between the steep Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific coast, it was a new kind of office, gathering in one place many of the company’s top engineers and scientists from around the country. Their job was to use science and math to forecast the fast pace of change in the world of high technology. It was officially called the GE Center for Advanced Studies, but most people just called it TEMPO.¹² Over the next couple of years, the office grew and became the center of excellence for GE’s national defense research business.

East-West tension between the US and the Soviet Union was at an all-time high in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One miscalculation on either side could have led to an all-out nuclear war. Civil defense exercises were part of daily life for school children across America. Backyard bomb shelters were not uncommon. It was in this precarious Cold War setting that TEMPO had the very difficult job of trying to predict the needs of the country fifteen years into the future. They had to come up with creative solutions to better the country’s military, recommend ways to grow the national economy, and actually predict the future without being too hyperbolic. Experts gathered intelligence from government and private sources around the world and from classified materials in order to brainstorm the trends and possibilities in technology. What was the trajectory of the arms race, what was just over the horizon, and what were the changing needs of national security? Key in all this was selecting weapons (primarily nuclear) that would guarantee America’s survival in a protracted Cold War.¹³

Richard C. (Dick) Raymond was TEMPO’s first general manager. He had set up the center as an intellectual community that the Department of Defense could call on at any time for special studies and advice. He realized early on that to operate effectively as a “think tank,” they had to have as much autonomy from the rest of GE as possible, both geographically and in terms of the makeup of its people.

Raymond staffed the office with experts from all walks of life. Linguists, psychologists, and economists sat next to mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. Unlike other parts of General Electric, TEMPO delivered no products, only ideas. In just a few years, the Santa Barbara operation became one of the top think tanks in the country. With national goals and priorities changing all the time, the phone was constantly ringing. Washington wanted ever-more visionary solutions to difficult problems, and it wanted them fast.

But by 1960, the group was beginning to struggle as a profitable business unit. In 1961, TEMPO had a major role in the disastrous cancellation of the B-70 Valkyrie strategic bomber program. At the time, the program was one of the largest Defense Department acquisitions since World War II. Designed by North American Aviation in nearby Downey, California, the Valkyrie was a very large, Mach 3, six-engine bomber that could fly well over 70,000 feet. This would have made it invulnerable to the MiG-21 interceptor—at the time the only Soviet defensive capability against the bomber.

TEMPO studies had pointed out, however, that Soviet surface-to-air missiles had advanced to a point that high-altitude bombers were vulnerable. A particular threat was the S-75 Dvina (code-named the SA-2 Guideline) missile that could fly in excess of 80,000 feet to bring down an aircraft. This effected a fundamental defense policy change with regard to ballistic missiles and strategic bombers. The Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which was already in production by the Convair Division of General Dynamics, could also deliver nuclear weapons anywhere into the vast Soviet territory. That March, President Kennedy canceled the expensive bomber. The irony was that GE was already under contract to build the aircraft’s engines. Executives at headquarters in New York were furious. They demanded a change in Santa Barbara.

Paine was looking for a change, too. He recalled that he had reached an impasse with the senior leadership in Schenectady. “It’s hard to get emotional about the GE monogram, and it’s not always a place where you can find the crisp intellectual life. The question is whether you want to devote your life to devising the perfect watt-hour meter or to 37.2% of the electric toothbrush market. It is a model of a rigid hierarchy, though to be fair, the top men try to do something about it, to achieve a more flexible structure. The trouble is that someone always gets alarmed, and the effect is to turn power back to the pope.”¹⁴

He knew of the situation at TEMPO and applied for the job. He told his managers that “for family reasons, my geographical preference is for northern California.”¹⁵ It was not northern California, but it was close enough. In March 1963, GE headquarters appointed him general manager of the Santa Barbara office.

The first thing he did when he arrived was to change the way TEMPO did business. He started with the office building itself. Since it first opened in 1956, employees had been working out of a rented, run-down hotel building in a rather unsavory part of town. He moved the office into the much more attractive Barbara-Balboa-El Presidio historic downtown district.¹⁶ Then he changed the outfit’s business strategy. “We concentrated on areas I thought were important,” he said. “Rural development abroad, urban rehabilitation here, communications, transportation. What we would say was, ‘We have been spending a lot of time looking at the world of the future, and we think we can tell you a lot of valuable things about the problems you will be facing 10 or 15 or 25 years from now.’”¹⁷

The corporate office still treated TEMPO as somewhat of an outcast. The bearded, open-collar, “West Coast” look of many of the employees did not sit well with the suit-and-tie corporate management back East. Changing that perception was not easy. Trying to restore TEMPO’s standing took more effort than he had expected, he told close friend Ed Schmidt. But Gerald L. Phillippe, the President of GE, believed Paine when he said that TEMPO complemented the rest of the company and added value to the corporation. During that first year, he spent a third of his time at the corporate office in New York. The board constantly wanted to know from him how he was going to align TEMPO’s business objectives with the rest of GE. Another third of his time was spent on-site in Santa Barbara. The rest of the time he visited customers at different places around the country.

Paine worked with some two hundred experts who were concerned with what they thought would be the condition and needs of the country a decade or so into the future. Many predictions had to do with the condition of the cities—a topic that was seemingly escalating in importance with Washington on a weekly basis. Under President Lyndon B. Johnson, the new Democratic national leadership had a lot of questions that involved urban planning, urban renewal, and modernizing the inner cities. Most of the interest directed at TEMPO, however, still had to do with national security. TEMPO thinkers created “what-if” scenarios and projected their possible impact on the United States. An issue might be how a major breakthrough in the field of disarmament would affect the country. Perhaps a critical trade secret might be compromised. Another scenario was how vulnerable US cities would be to a surprise attack by a devastating secret weapon.

His group forecast that communist China would detonate a nuclear weapon some time between 1963 and 1965, most likely in late 1964; the actual explosion occurred in October of 1964. This brainstorming on the direction of US national security accounted for some 75 percent of TEMPO’s work under Paine.¹⁸

In 1970, Time Life correspondent Robert Sherrod asked him what was so special about the group and the work that they did. He sat back, reflected briefly, and recounted a rather unusual story that had Sherrod smiling by the time it was over.

His longtime friend, Ed Schmidt, was an independent consultant who worked for TEMPO. Schmidt was an eccentric, in terms of both personality and profession, a diversely educated, modern-day Renaissance Man. He had degrees from Georgia Tech and MIT, and had an unusually broad range of knowledge on everything from the technicalities of civil engineering to the nuances of the effects of foreign trade variances on domestic affairs. Paine found him very pragmatic and practical, and used him as an adviser, confidant, and sounding board partly to help in his own thinking. They spent many afternoons in Paine’s office tossing around ideas. This sometimes resulted in unconventional ways of doing things.

In the early 1960s, the US was trying hard to provide aid to the Republic of Yemen. Yemen was one of the poorest and most unstable countries in the volatile Middle East. But its location at the mouth of the Red Sea made it uniquely important geographically. For this reason, the Soviet Union and communist China were also giving it large-scale assistance.

The State Department asked TEMPO to take a look at what they called “the worst foreign aid situation in any country” in the world. Washington had installed a radio station there only to see the Egyptians capture it to transmit anti-American propaganda year after year. Food shipped by the Red Cross was not reaching the Yemenis. Supplies entering the country had to first dock in Soviet-controlled ports, where they were stolen. They were then transported on a road where they were further pilfered by Chinese communists. The same thing happened at roadblocks set up by the Yemenis. Local warlords helped themselves to what they could. By the time the trucks arrived at the American Embassy, only a sack of grain was left. One sack was always left to encourage the US to try again.

Paine’s office could not come up with a good solution for the State Department. Analysts had no answers, and the program dragged on and soon got Paine’s personal attention. He took the project over from the program manager and began talking directly with the State Department. One day as they discussed the problem in his office, Schmidt looked out the window and asked, “Tom, why not send me there?” He turned around; Paine looked at him with a big grin. His experts had worked for months to a dead end trying to get intelligence on the situation. They needed someone on the ground. So Paine said why not, and sent his friend into the middle of a war zone. Schmidt talked to the villagers and gathered information from the locals on the supply route, conditions of the roads, and the strength of the resistance. He scouted locations where the US could implement further aid projects. A week later (after claiming that he had dodged a hand grenade, no less), he came back with exactly the kind of information that Paine needed. He wrote up a report and hand-delivered it to Washington. He told Sherrod that it was a rather unorthodox way of getting something done. But it worked.¹⁹

By the fall of 1967, Paine had been with General Electric for seventeen years. A year earlier, NASA had brought its second manned spaceflight program, Project Gemini, to a successful conclusion with the splashdown of Gemini 12 in the Atlantic. It was the final flight of NASA’s two-man spacecraft program. By now, the United States had been launching astronauts into space for six years. Space probes were also venturing near Mars and Venus for the first time, sending back tantalizing black-and-white pictures of Earth’s nearest planetary neighbors. Four robotic Surveyor spacecraft had already soft-landed on the surface of the moon. America was now building the most complex rocket and spacecraft ever made in an attempt to land the first human beings on the moon. “Go Fever” was in the air. The country was in a full-blown race with the Soviet Union to put a man on the moon. NASA was in the news and making headlines. While TEMPO had a few small study contracts with the agency, he himself had nothing to do with them.

That was all about to change.