1

Dr. Robert Helliwell

17 September 2002

Brian Shoemaker

Interviewer

Begin Tape 1A

(000)

BS: This is an oral interview with Dr. Robert Helliwell, conducted as part of the Polar Oral

History Project of the American Polar Society and the Byrd Polar Research Center of the Ohio

State University on a grant from the National Science Foundation. The interview was taken at

Dr. Helliwell’s office, Stanford University, by Brian Shoemaker on the 17th of September 2002.

Well, thank you for having me here, Dr. Helliwell. We’re interested in you. We’re interested

in where you’re from, how you got started and what led up to your lifetime work, who you

mentors are and milestones along the way and personal things that made it a tough job, certainly

out in the cold, freezing your nose and toes. And how it affected your life after you retired.

RH: Well, those are interesting question and I’m not sure I’ll cover them in that order, but I

want to take up the cold first. The reason that I was so interested in Antarctica and willing to go

when the opportunity came was that I grew up in Minnesota. It’s a cold, cold place in the winter.

And the snow is deep and it’s cold and all the things that you’d experience in the Antarctic are

right there. So, I knew it and I thought that this would be kind of fun to go down to a place where

in the summer it’s like Minnesota is in winter. And that was the reason that I came to California, because during one of those bad winters, my father contracted a cold from not wearing his overcoat to work, came down with pneumonia and died. And that was when I was 7 years old 2

and the family had to do something. My mother was not trained in a productive process. She was

a housewife and a very good student. She and her three sisters all went to Hammond University,

first in Red Wing and then in St. Paul, where the university is located now, and all were top

students. But, her education was a classical education in languages and literature and some

chemistry and sciences. She wanted to be a doctor. Women didn’t become doctors in those days

which was in 1915. It was very interesting that her father, who was very liberal in this regard –

he felt that women deserved an education just like men, maybe more so – and as a result of this

tragedy, my mother had to do something and she counseled with her folks in Red Wing, and they

agreed to come out to California, and bring her family, myself and my younger sister who was 4

years younger than I, and get out of that cold weather which was what killed my father, in a

sense. And I think that helped to motivate their desire to go to California. They had relatives that

were out in California. They recommended Palo Alto, and so what she did was find out what she

could do. She had a very good degree, but it was classical education. So, she decided to get her

library credentials because that would use all her background. She really didn’t care for that

subject very much as something to go into, but she was good at it. She went to the University of

Californian in Berkeley two years when I was 7 and 8 years old, and she got her degree – got her

credential to be a librarian. And she had to get a job, so she applied around the state and was able to get a job in Palo Alto. And she came there with me and my sister and her sister and then the grandparents came out later from Minnesota. My grandfather sold his business in the feed and fuel business in Red Wing, and they all moved out together to combine limited incomes during the Depression era so that we could afford to live in a house. And we got a house in Palo Alto, with a second story, enough to hold everybody, and we carried on from there. That’s where I grew up from about age 9 until I got married in 1942. So, my mother got to be head librarian 3

and she ran the thing very well. And she hired people to come and look after us kids when she

was at work and I grew up in that operation and learned to drive at age 10 – that was illegal, but

my grandfather wanted me to learn. And then, after I had learned to drive, I wanted a car. We

had no money, so my mother talked to the Studebaker agent who she knew well because we

drove a Studebaker in Palo Alto, and he found an old Franklin down in San Jose that was for sale for $50, and she thought, well gee, this is an odd looking car, but this ought to do Bob all right, and so she bought it for me and it turned out to be the most magnificent car I have ever seen. It was almost like new. It had black leather seats, a completely aluminum body and aluminum engine and was in amazing condition for $50. It was an air cooled car. And after I got used to it, I used to drive it to Santa Cruz and go up over the Santa Cruz mountains . . .

BS: How old were you then ?

(50)

RH: I was then in high school and what was interesting was that, here I had this air cooled car, very well engineered. I’d drive up that long grade and it would pass all the ordinary cars with water cooled engines, all pulled over on a hot day, boiling over, and they would look at this car coming by at reasonable speed and they just stood agape. They just looked at this and thought, how come? Because it was air cooled. And there wasn’t anything to boil. And I enjoyed that car, and then it finally threw a rod and couldn’t be fixed. It was totally . . . you couldn’t get a block. It wasn’t a block. They were individual cylinders that were bolted to a crankcase, every one was a separate chamber. So, I had to find another car and I got an old Model A Ford and got back into

normal kinds of vehicles.

But, that was the way the family had to operate. We were all short of money and we had to

find ways of economizing in order to maintain access to education for both my sister and myself 4

because that came first. So, I went through the grade school and high school system in Palo Alto,

and was moved from one place to another as we moved our location and residence. Ended up in

Palo Alto High School, which I completed and was fortunate enough to have teachers in the high

school – this was before AP credit was available in the school system – but, they did recognize

the need for college preparation because many of the students in Palo Alto High School went to

Stanford University and other universities when they graduated. So, I was lucky enough to have

a college level chemistry course and mathematics course which was amazing. So, I learned

analytic geometry and beginning calculus from the teacher – Mrs. Younkin – who was a very

good math teacher, and she also taught tennis. And it was common in those days for people in

the athletic department to have an academic responsibility also, academic level material, and

some of them were very good at combining these and some weren’t so good. That’s another

story, but at any rate, the preparation in high school made it possible for me to apply to Stanford,

and the family had put away a little money for college. And that was in 1938. I graduated from high school in the spring and entered Stanford in the fall of 1938, and started out on an

engineering degree. But, the funds were so limited that I needed to get a job. So, as soon as

possible, I got a part-time job. This was during the build up before World War II. There were

government programs for funding students and I got paid 75 cents an hour to record Japanese

propaganda from Radio Saigon for the Hoover Institution, then called the Hoover Library.

BS: During the war, or . . . ?

RH: This was just the beginning of the war – Hoover Library for War, Revolution and Peace –

they funded this. And I would record these daily propaganda broadcasts on wax cylinders on a

dictaphone, prior to the advent of tape recorders and bring these wax cylinders in to the basement

of the Hoover Library where they were transcribed and put into the archives and they’re there. 5

One can find these transcribed cylinders in the Hoover Archives right now. I went over there to check it one day.

(100)

BS: Did they put them on tape or CD?

RH: No, they’re just transcribed in hard copy, typed out. I didn’t take any of them out because I knew about what was on them since I had recorded them. But, in the process I got acquainted with modern receivers. I had built my own receivers as a ham radio operator because I couldn’t afford to buy an HRO or Superpro. But, the department was able to acquire the receiver which I would set up and connect to the dictaphone each morning for the propaganda broadcasts, and I became acquainted with the local ham radio station which was set up by Professor Oswald G.

Villard, Jr., who lives at Channing House. He’s getting on in his years more than I, even. He was working with Fred Turmin, who was then Professor of Electrical Engineering, who had gotten his Ph.D. at M.I.T. and had come back to Stanford to teach in the electrical engineering department. This was all prior to World War II.

(100)

One of the projects which Turmin had thought was important was the study of the propagation medium, namely the ionosphere. And he got started in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, some measurements of the ionosphere, using fixed frequencies at Stanford.

BS: Now this is Villard?

RH: This is Turmin that got this started.

BS: Now Turmin was in the EE Department.

RH: Yes, he was Professor of Electrical Engineering. He taught communications and when I entered Stanford, he was my advisor. I went to see him when I had a question about courses, and 6

so on. My first advisor. He was the son of the famous psychologist, Louis Turmin, who

developed the Stanford-Binet IQ test.

BS: Oh, really.

RH: And he married a daughter of a psychologist and so he had a family background of

psychology. I noticed in my long-term relationship with Turmin that he was very sensitive to

questions that involved psychology. He never made a point of this, but he was good at it and I

could see where he got it.

BS: But he was into the propagation medium.

RH: Well, he could see that the one thing that was needed at that stage in the development of radio was not so much the instruments, which lots of people were working on because there were a lot of business opportunities there, but to understand the propagation of short waves. They were very important for communication and as the preparations for World War II were being

made, you had to have short wave – that was the only way, the only way available at that time

for communicating in long distance. And ships at sea and airplanes and ground operations all

depended on short wave radio. And the only way you could figure out how to use that was to get

measurements of the ionosphere so you could predict which frequencies would work and which

would not. And there was a very well known, by that time, law that says the higher the

frequency, the better, but if you go too high, it won’t get in at all. If you go too low, the

absorption will be too high and you won’t be able to get a signal and there’s an in between band

where, if you have enough power, you can get through on a non-magnetically disturbed day. So,

that was the sort of thing that motivated the study of ionosphere at Stanford.

(150) 7

And, I was employed through Mike Villard to run a sounder on three fixed frequencies that produced records on photographic paper and was located in the furnace room of the Ryan Lab.

There wasn’t money for any special buildings. You couldn’t build buildings in those days. You had to use whatever there was, and this was a dark dingy basement room in the concrete foundation, full of black widow spiders and very interesting surroundings. And this is where we had our transmitter.

BS: You transmitted signals?

RH: We transmitted signals through a dipole antenna that went up to the ionosphere and came back pulse signals and we received the pulse signals at the same location on a receiver with

_____ TR switches so that the strong pulse of the transmitter wouldn’t deaden the receiver too long.

BS: You timed them up and down?

RH: Timed them up and down, vertically. And just on three frequencies. Well, about that time,

Lloyd Berkner and others at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, were developing a sweep frequency sounder because they had to have the curves of virtual height versus frequency to make predictions of maximum useable frequency which everybody in the

Navy and other parts of the DOD and civilian operators needed to know.

So that’s what . . . they knew what the need was, but nobody had built a sweep frequency transmitter. So, they developed one. And we learned about that and Mike Villard had consultations with Lloyd Berkner. Lloyd Berkner came out. I met him personally while this was all going on and I helped build this machine, but mainly it was built by Villard and other members of the department and we finally ended up with a three-band tunable transmitter which employed a unique set of mechanical cams whose rotation rate could be adjusted by means of a 8

phosphour bronze leaf that was stretched over radially-centered set screws. And you could push

them out with the set screw and a little further and further in, and this flexible tape could go in

and out a little bit. And riding on that tape was a roller on a triangular set of arms, one of which

turned the shaft of the variable condenser. And so you could go to a particular frequency and

adjust until that particular stage was in tune and use the amplifier to amplify the signal and get

the angle correctly set. And you did this on each of three stages on each of three transmitters, so

there were 9 adjustments to be made. All these rotating cams, all made of bronze and well machined. One of our consulting Stanford people who didn’t design this device, and I was put in charge of operating this and collecting the data and scaling it and getting the results sent in to the

National Bureau of Standards which was paying for the operation of this gear, which incidentally was eventually replaced by a commercial so-called C3 sounder, which was a standard professionally designed 3-frequency sounder for doing the same thing. And it was more flexible, it was faster than the old one that we had designed at Stanford, and produced 35mm records which were easier to handle and scale and so on. So, that was the ultimate outcome of this development.

BS: What did you think of Lloyd Berkner?

RH: Oh, he was great because he was interested in the students as well as interested in the field and he was very helpful and inspiring in terms of a kid like me just starting in on this business to learn more about it and learn the science as well as the mechanics and so on.

BS: He told Van Allen that Byrd was his mentor.

(200)

RH: Yeah, well that’s . . . 9

BS: A lot of guys did! Interesting. In a way, he’sas much a father of the IGY as the guys who

put it all together.

RH: Well, he was really a vigorous guy and he visited Stanford several times and called on us.

To describe another connection to that background because I had to do a Ph.D. eventually and

when the war got underway, I eventually got classified 1-A and I was about ready to get on the

train and go to a camp for basic training and the people at Stanford thought that they needed to

keep me there to develop these pieces of equipment for DOD use. And so, they arranged to get a deferment so that I could do this work. So I stayed at Stanford and worked on the DAV direction finder and the ionosound and I also developed a new technique of sounding the ionosphere at

very low frequencies. It was not new in a technical sense because I employed the classic spark

transmitter which was the beginning of all the Navy’s communication efforts long before World

War I. The spark transmitter is very simple. You excite a resonant circuit with a spark discharge

and you transmit that result. It’s very noisy, lots of sidebands and it’s a big mess. The FCC won’t

allow that and still doesn’t. So, I couldn’t call it a spark transmitter. I had to call it an

experimental impulse transmitter.

BS: Who didn’t allow it?

RH: The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC was very understanding and

they actually gave me a license after I figured out how to write the application. The application required that if you were employing a pulse sounder that it be restricted to a certain percentage band width. So, it was a narrow band and you couldn’t make a very broad pulse. I looked at my pulse and looked at the fourier transform of it and it was very broad band – way outside. But, I went back and read the regulations very carefully to see if there was any way out of this and I noticed that they had never defined, for the purpose of that regulation, they had never defined 10

what they meant by band width. Now, we all know that typically you three db points – 70% off

the resonance and that’s the band width by definition. Well, that’s a convenient way to do that.

They didn’t define it. They just left it open, so I defined my own when I made the application. I

said, well, I’ll define this so it describes my device and I found that the band width that they

specified was reached at 98% of the peak value of the intensity. So, there wasn’t anything against

that, so I defined that and if they were paying attention to the license, they decided not to raise

the question because the regulations were not complete. So I did get the license. And so, that

began the transmissions which I used in a thesis and which provided a lot of new information on

the lower ionosphere, multiple layers and all sorts of interesting things.

BS: Did the Navy apply it during the war, or the DOD?

RH: I’m not aware of any application directly of that. There were new scientific results that are

still, some of them, puzzling because of the standard model which is a D region, an E layer, then

an F-1 and F-2 layer.

(250)

When you go into the E-region, you find it’s much more complicated than the simple model

suggests. And they’re up to five different levels of reflection that can be observed, or more. So,

there are sharp ledges in this stuff and it’s varying all the time. It’s called sporadic E sometimes,

and it can be created by meteors coming in and by, now we know, particle radiation triggered by

whistlers can create ionization layers during magnetic storms and all sorts of very interesting

phenomena which are still not understood. So, that produced a couple of theses and one student was able to see the sunrise effect in the F layer. As the sun came up and began to ionize the F layer, these low frequencies generated with the spark transmitter could see the beginning of this ionization and how it changed in height and critical frequency and that led to a very nice thesis. 11

And I’ll never forget the story. I ran into Fred Turmin who was an athletic supporter in the sense

that he liked competitive games and by the way, he was on an athletic team when he was a

student at Stanford in 1915. I forget which sport it was, but he was a member of it and he never

made much of this. He didn’t talk about any of his non-engineering exploits, at least not to us.

But, I ran into him when I was going to a football game and he was asking me what I was doing and I told him that we were working on this problem with Van Wamsgons and he said, “Oh, the baseball player?” He knew all about baseball. He was a baseball fan. I said no, this is a different

Wamsgons, and explained what he was doing. But, he picked up on the name immediately. He had that connection. I don’t think he read the thesis because he wasn’t in the position where he needed to do that.

So, that then led to one more thing which is part of a story of what I did. The next stage was to look at this spark transmitter result and say, how can I go lower in frequency? The standard measurements started at about 800 kilohertz broadcast band and on up and that solved the problem of the standard analysis of propagation for communication, but my interest was in the science. What was going on up in the ionosphere? There were some peculiarities in the structure of the ionograms at low frequency, at the lower end of the broadcast band, and it’s hard to get much data there because of all the broadcast stations. I was wondering how to go lower. I really wanted to extend the range. So, then I began to look at atmospherics. There was work at the

University of New Mexico on lightning and the reflections from the ionosphere and I did some of that with students because the transmitters were cheap. They were lightning. And you could observe the ground wave and the first hop sky wave and the second hop sky wave up to maybe a hundred hops and you’d get this whole sequences of pulses with very regular spacings. And you could measure the tail end of this sequence of pulses and get some very precise measures of the 12 height of the reflecting layer, which was about 92 kilometers at night. And you could look at the rate at which the intensities were dropping off, and fit that to a specular reflection curve and find out what the reflection coefficient was and we found that on a good day, the reflection coefficient of the ionosphere at those low frequencies, down around 10 kilohertz was about one .

. . a perfect reflection

(300)

And we could get the distance of the lightning flash by looking at the relationship between the order of the echo and the spacing. You can see that geometrically that as the distance goes out . .

.

BS: When was this taking place?

RH: This was in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. I supervised several theses on this subject of spheric study. But, then an astonishing thing happened right in the middle of this that changed everything that I was doing and everything the university was doing in this field and it happened in connection with a graduate student, Jack Mellenckrodt, who did a very nice thesis on some theoretical work on reflection of radio waves in the ionosphere, and he was out helping me in my program of wave form recording of atmospheric signals and he came in one day, we shared an office in one of the engineering buildings, he came in one day and he said, Oh, last night I heard, while I was watching the scope for the wave forms of the spherics and recording them on 16mm film with a surplus DOD camera that we could program with a pulse to advance one frame each time it took a picture, so we had all these 16 mm pictures of very high resolution. We used linograph ortho Kodak film that had resolution of about 800 lines per centimeter – very high resolution. So, you’d take these tiny ones and blow them up like this and still get resolution that would allow you to measure very accurately the time of arrival of all these pulses. So, this is 13

what we were doing. We had this gun camera sitting there recording the wave forms on a

techtronic scope and it was popping away each time a big spheric came along. And we’d take the

picture then advanced to the next frame and then we did what all ham operators do and all Navy

radio operators do, you always listen, you always listen to what you are recording. It doesn’t

matter what it is, if it’s within the audio range, you want to hear it. I was a ham radio operator

and everybody does this. It’s a fixation we all have. We’ve got to listen to what the machine is

doing and I’m sure that all Navy operators took the same point of view as they were hammering away at the Morse code and they were listening to the noises coming in as an indication of conditions that might affect their ability to record or transmit and so on. So, we had a loud speaker connected up to the amplifier that was connected to the antenna recording these spherics from about 1 kilohertz up to about 30 kilohertz – the band width – it was a really high quality

audio amplifier. And the speaker was sitting up there getting this click, click, whistle, whistle, all

these noises were coming in. Clicks and scratches. And then, every once in a while in these

spherics, that’s a sound of a tweak and that’s one with a very long train of pulses and the

asymtotic frequency is 1600 hertz.

(350)

You measure that, and you get the height of the ionosphere. We were listening to this. We could

hear the tweaks. And if it was a good quiet night magnetically, the tweaks were very clear and

nice. We were hearing the tweaks and everything was going just fine and what Jack had heard

the previous night was an occasional new sound that he said was very different. See, he was a

musician, by the way – a very important point. He had an ear for music. He was very good on the

guitar, and he collected classical records and he sensed this difference and he would hear

amongst the (sounds) a long whistler lasting one or two seconds, totally different in kind from 14

the sound of the tweak. And I emphasize this because one of the German scientists, earlier in

history, had studied the tweaks and the whistlers and he got them mixed up and he thought the

tweak was a whistler (imitating sounds). I’m not doing that very well, but if you look at the

records, you can see how that might happen. And in the early days, they didn’t have records.

They just listened. So, he got them mixed up and he offered the tweak mechanism that we know

now to be correct, or knew at the time I was doing this, we knew it was correct, he offered that

mechanism in the early stage of studying whistlers, which was an important topic at Bell Labs

and Marconi Company in Europe and various other places.

BS: This is Mellencradt.

RH: Mellenckrodt. C-k-r-o-d-t. It’s the same name as in the chemical engineering company

name – Mellenckrodt. So, when he came in – I have to tell you this story because it is a personal

observation on both of us – here I was, responsible for supervising this stuff. So, I was asking

John how did things go and he told me that things went well, but he had heard these strange whistling sounds. And I’d never read anything about this. Nobody around there knew anything about this and then he said he heard it another time. And I said, well there isn’t any such thing. I knew of nothing. I said you must be imagining things. You’re working too hard. You’d better take a vacation. Take your wife and go out and relax and I’ll bet these sounds will go away. I didn’t really believe what I’d said and they didn’t go away. And so I said a few days later, look, tell me when you’re going out some night to do this and I’ll go out with you. So, we got together and we were sitting in the shack out at the end of Searsville road which we had built.

BS: Where was this?

RH: Searsville Road on the Stanford campus. It’s still there and you can walk out there. In fact, there’s a bridge across the Menlo Park out there at the end. But, that’s where our building was. 15

Homemade, government furnished knock-down house that we acquired free and we poured the concrete slab and we built the whole thing and mounted it and that was our field laboratory.

(400)

So, we were there, sitting together, watching the scope, listening to the speaker and the tweaks were just marvelous – just great wave forms. I was really intrigued with this, almost forgetting why I was there. And then, quite unexpectedly, we heard a (whistle) coming out of the loud speaker and I heard this. I was startled. I’d never heard anything like that. And I said to Jack, “Is this what you heard?” And he said, “Yes, exactly.” And in the space of one brief second, I became an instant believer in this. That’s all it took. One second. And then there were a couple more that came along and that confirmed the whole story. And I said, “Jack, tomorrow I want you to go to the library, the Stanford library, go to the catalogue and look up, see if you can find anything that starts with the word whistler,” and he did, and he did. He went and he did. He found the literature. And it went back to 1919. And the first observation was made by a German scientist who was employed in World War I by the German Army to listen in with a recorder, listen in on Allied telephone conversations. That was his job. He was a high level scientist and that’s what they had him do out on the front lines. It was an amazing story. So, what did he do?

Well, he heard these whistlers on his telephone receiver because you can do that. And by the way, as a footnote, we finally found through Owen Storey, who became interested in this in his work at Cambridge, and did a marvelous thesis in 1953 on whistlers, but Storey included a very careful search of the literature and he discovered that Sir William Preece, a member of the Royal

Society in Great Britain, that he had been in Switzerland where they had a telephone line going up the Alps somewhere and he listened in on this telephone line and he heard all sorts of musical sounds that he described in his paper which is published in the proceedings of the Royal Society. 16

I looked it up and Storey knew about it and it’s my conclusion and I’m absolutely convinced that

he was hearing whistler mode signals called “dawn chorus” which often goes with whistlers and is readily observed in a quiet location. So, what’s interesting about this is this paper appeared in

1896, which shows that the first radio waves were actually observed before they were understood by anybody. Hertz and Maxwell were doing their work about the same time. And there was no prediction of any kind. The first actual observations were made, they weren’t believed very widely, but this guy was a very reliable reporter, scientist, and he was dead on. And then it turned out that in about 1950 sometime, I had occasion to visit my sister in Civall Ranch, which she and her husband owned and which is on a party line in Nevada, with 22 subscribers, all on the same line – single line from Elko, going all the way out up into the hills and there were 22 customers there.

BS: Could they all listen to one another?

RH: Well, they did. I picked up the phone because sometimes you couldn’t hear people talk because there was so much natural noise. And so I got very intrigued with this. I kept going and picking up the phone because it didn’t interfere with anybody. It just reduced the level of sound a little bit. And I listened and I began to hear whistlers and dawn chorus, and what I was doing was exactly what Sir William Preece did in 1896. He was on a telephone line. There was no radio.

There were no radio amplifiers. It was just a telephone. And a long antenna is all you need. And

so, when I was doing work on the atomic bombs in Nevada, bomb tests – you may recall, we got

involved in looking for the whistlers produced by atomic detonations and we did publish the

paper. Don Carpenter and I published the paper in 1964, giving all these results from Starfish

Prime and Johnson Island and all the stuff in Nevada, and it was very interesting. But, what I did

when I was doing this was to tune in on the natural noise band. I went up to Skyline Boulevard 17 with my sleeping bag and Charlie Waggle, one of my scout buddies – his father owned a piece of property up there, so I was able to go up and lay on my sleeping bag and I hooked on an hp amplifier to the cow fence, two leads, that was a good enough antenna, and put it into the amplifier and listened to the output. And I could hear all the spherics and whistlers at night.

BS: You could hear them on a piece of barbed wire.

RH: Yeah. Barbed wire was a good antenna for VLF. Anything will work. An undersea cable under the ocean is one of the best antenna’s for dawn chorus that they’ve got.

(500)

And Bell Labs got into this field, by the way, because their trans-Atlantic cable was so noisy at times with these natural sounds, that they turned this into a big project, to find out what they were caused by and how to mitigate them. That’s how Bell Labs got into whistlers. And there are some very good papers of early observations in New Hampshire of whistlers and atmospheric disturbances under magnetic conditions, aurora, and this and that that still had mysteries in them that hadn’t been solved.

BS: Lou Ranzerati on the team?

RH: Oh yeah. He’s been very closely connected to that.

BS: I’ve known Lou for a long time.

RH: Well, I think I’ve gotten off the track a little bit, but the result – and this is an interesting story in itself – the result of that observation with Jack Mellencrodt of whistlers completely changed our direction of research. We had an Air Force . . . well, it was an Army Signal Corps contract, I forget exactly which branch of DOD it was, but we had proposed to do some work on tweaks to find out about the ionosphere, which we did. It was a specific proposal to work on tweaks. Well, I wrote a report on these whistlers that had been found during the tweak 18

discussion. I said we need to know and understand this to understand what we’re doing. And the

management, the overseer of the contract from the DOD agency, immediately cancelled our

contract. Turned it off.

BS: Why?

RH: Because we weren’t doing what we proposed to do.

BS: Well, I can understand that.

RH: It was true. If we had known what we were about to learn, we could have proposed that and

it would have been OK. But, you can’t do that if you don’t know. And we found it out during

related observations. So, we weren’t allowed to do that. They were being unnecessarily strict. So,

we lost the contract and it was the best thing that happened. And this is a personal observation.

Because I was in charge of it and I had to get some money because I had to do this research on the whistlers. So, I got counsel from Mike Villard and others at Stanford and they sent me to call on other offices that were possibly interested in this and what we found was that the Air Force

Office of Scientific Research – AFOSR – was actually interested in this kind of thing. And when they heard what I wanted to do, they said, write us a proposal. So, I got busy and wrote a proposal and it was immediately funded and we changed the supervision of the project and for many years, we ran on this Air Force contract.

(550)

BS: The Cambridge Lab?

RH: No, it was directly out of Washington. And it didn’t go through any labs. We had had and did have, subsequently, more contracts with Air Force Cambridge labs, but, in fact, that’s where we had started.

BS: You knew Nate Pearson then. 19

RH: Yeah, I knew Nate very well.

BS: I just got half way through an interview with him. We took a break after three tapes and we were going to get back together on the phone and he died in January.

RH: Yeah. He was an interesting guy. He had a very interesting field experience.

BS: He was asked to leave the National Committee as the Secretary for IGY because he was doing classified work and they felt that if the Russians heard about it, it would just ___ the whole

IGY. Everything was supposed to be open. Everybody was supposed to have access to whatever was done down there. And here’s a guy doing classified stuff and had a reputation.

RH: You know that happened to me in connection with these bomb tests. We had a contract to study them because they needed to know, but some of the information was classified and the one that was the most interesting was the plan titled “The Test” was classified secret. But, I couldn’t do anything if I didn’t know what that was. So, I had a clearance and I got the information. And then I was really in trouble, potential trouble, when the big event over

Johnson Island was being planned. I had that information and I had to get our cooperating IGY related New Zealand team to turn on our tape recorder in Wellington, at the proper time and let it run for half an hour. I couldn’t tell them what it was.

BS: They knew afterwards, huh?

RH: Of course they knew afterwards. And they wrote a paper on it and everything was fine. But, before the fact . . . in fact, I took a risk because I couldn’t . . . I knew I couldn’t ask . . . it was only a couple days delay before it happened. I couldn’t ask the sponsors to come out and say it was OK. I just had to use my own judgment. So, I called him up on the telephone and said we’re doing an experiment and would like to get some data from this . . .

(End of Tape 1A) 20

(Begin Tape 1B))

(000)

BS: We’re on the second side of Helliwell’s tape where we’re talking about Air Force stuff,

Office of Scientific Research.

RH: Yes, there was also support from NSF through the Office of Polar Programs, and that connected us to the IGY data set. After the IGY was formally terminated, there was still a lot of data and there hadn’t been much discussion about how you handle all the data and make it available to people outside. There’s much more awareness of that problem now than there was then. So, it was all our problem, but we didn’t have any money. But, we looked at some of the data and what we discovered was . . .

BS: Excuse me, I think I’ve got some . . . (Interruption to interview)

RH: I think we did.

BS: OK. That’s where we ended, yeah.

RH: Yeah, that was a side issue connected with . . . you know I don’t know exactly how that . . .

BS: Well, you were listening to the electric noise on the bottom . . .

RH: And then there was this memory of the Scientific American article on electric fish. Oh, and also, right after the War, there was a very interesting demonstration of electric eels here on the campus – I think it was on the campus – it may have been at an ERSA meeting, but, the demonstrator brought electric eels along and they handle them very carefully with rubber gloves and so on because they put out hundreds of volts, as you know. And he laid them in copper bases that were curved to fit the body of the eel and those were connected up to ciliscopes to an audio amplifier and then showed the pulses, high voltage pulses coming out of this eel 100 microseconds long and you could hear them on the loudspeakers and this was all done very 21

carefully. It was a very impressive demonstration. Well, that coupled with the Scientific

American article told me to look . . . and also the story about the electric eel’s ability to kill a horse that’s wading in the water in South America where these fresh water electric eels are located, and they can turn out a pulse and kill a horse. Well, that’s very impressive. And that’s at one end of the spectrum of the electral activity that’s very high, but it’s very dangerous. So, then

you wonder about the microvolt level signals in a quiet environment and the fact that sharks and other creatures seem to use electric fields to detect prey, so the whole thing is a great big area of ignorance. The biologists, the oceanographers don’t seem to have any interest whatsoever in this.

I haven’t found a single person who is really interested.

A footnote to that last positive statement I made, there is someone in the field – that’s Ross

Adie, University of Cal at San Diego, and he specializes in detection of fields connected with . . .

for example, he’s also interested in cell phone damage to the brain, possible. And that’s the sort

of thing he studies. He knows a lot about sharks and their electric potentials and magnitudes, so

he measures those things. So, he’s one who is very interested in this particular subject.

BS: A lot of those guys down there at UCSD and Scripps have an office over at ___oma in

classified.

RH: Yeah.

BS: Walter Monk’s the leading one. I don’t know if Rob Waller’s still around. He was the last time I knew, but he still had plenty of Navy money. So, they’ve got an unclassified-classified life which is kind of nice because they’ve got fabulous facilities there. So, anyway, we’re getting off track here.

RH: Yes, we are. 22

BS: You’re at the bottom of Monterey Bay, and we still haven’t gotten to the Antarctic. We’re building up for IGY.

RH: We haven’t got to the Antarctic yet?

BS: No.

RH: OK. At the beginning of . . . just before the IGY, near the beginning – 1956 – I received a call from Allan Shapley, whom you know.

(50)

BS: I had an interview with him. I know him very well.

RH: And he asked me if I wanted to go to the Antarctic to check out on whistlers and I said, well, write me a letter and I forget how this happened, but he wrote me a formal letter inviting me to go and investigate the possibility that the Antarctic could be used as a location for some whistler research to go along with the adopted program of the IGY to study whistlers. And, by that time, the IGY organizing committee had set up two chains of whistler stations, one called

Whistlers West which I was in charge of, and the other one was called Whistlers East which

Professor Millette Morgan was in charge of at Dartmouth. Those are the two US supported whistler networks.

BS: Millett at Dartmouth?

RH: Morgan. Millett, M-i-l-l-e-t-t. Millett Morgan.

BS: I’m going to Dartmouth after this.

RH: He passed away just very recently. But, he has a son that’s working at Rensalaur, I think, doing related stuff. We have a student there, a former student here, at Dartmouth – what’s his name. 23

BS: I’ve got it here in my notes. So, you were Whistlers West and you had to organize some

experiments for IGY.

RH: Yes.

BS: And Allen Shapley invited you. You had no idea of going down there until Allen invited you?

RH: No, I was interested in places to put stations and I had picked ones in Alaska, Kottribeau,

Anchorage, and then Seattle, Stanford, Boulder and then in the southern hemisphere, New

Zealand, Dunedeen, Wellington, McQuary Island, where Neil Brice spent a whole year during the IGY, although not doing whistlers, he was doing other things. And then the next question was, what about Antarctica. See, Whistlers West went down to the south seas in New Zealand, and the whistlers were good down there. In 1955, Millett Morgan, working in Alaska, with people in New Zealand, made the first conjugate point recording of the same bouncing whistler – it would go back and forth like this. The first one to settle that question, although it was pretty well predicted by that time. And that’s what confirmed all of the unknowns in the basic mechanism of whistler propagation which made all these programs look quite legitimate. So, everywhere you went, you like to have a conjugate point. The Japanese have a base in Antarctica

– Shoa Base that you know about and that’s conjugate to Iceland. And there are conjugate events that happen at the two places. Long field lines that they still work. So, there was that kind of thing floating around in various stages of understanding that led to the committee’s strong recommendation that if possible, something be done in the Antarctic. So, as a result of that, I signed on to go down through Christchurch and get on a C-124, which was the main cargo plane at that time, and I was one of two passengers on board. The rest was cargo. It was a very exciting trip. Started out at Christchurch and the plane had to go back because one engine wasn’t working too well. They got that fixed up. They had let out all the school children in South Island to come 24

see this because it was a big event. And I have a picture of about 100 students standing out on

the runway.

BS: So, you flew . . . which year was this?

RH: 1956.

BS: OK. That’s before IGY.

RH: Yeah. I got acquainted with Lynn Martin, who spent a season at Scott Base as part of the

IGY.

(100)

He came to Stanford and spent a sabbatical – a year here. And one of his big accomplishments

was taking back a Studebaker Avanti car.

BS: Everybody and their brother scarfed up all those old cars down there. Put them in the back

of a Herc. I didn’t get one but everyone else did. It looked like the 1920s. Not any more.

RH: I think he still has that car. He keeps it in good shape and doesn’t drive it very much.

BS: So, you flew back to Christchurch.

RH: I went to the Antarctic and I went to Little America V where Bert Crary was in charge. And

the bunking there was pretty tight, but he was on his way out to the ice to do some glaciology.

So, he was going to be gone for the duration of my trip, so I took over his bed and I hot-bunked

it, so to speak. So, I got acquainted with Jim Zumberg at Little America, and Jim led us in his

usual singing affair which goes on everywhere he goes or went. And we had a good time. At any

rate, it was an interesting visit for me. I have to tell you a side story.

BS: Did you set up the experiment?

RH: No, I had a portable detector. I wanted to check out the noise level and see if I could hear

any whistlers. I didn’t hear any whistlers. I realized after I finished that I did part of the job, but 25 the equipment wasn’t sensitive enough. I was in a big hurry to get off and do this thing because of the schedule. So, to finish up on that theme, I went back and we redesigned the whistler receiver. Made a much better one.

BS: Came back here.

RH: Came back here. Redesigned it and sent it down to Byrd Station and it was successful and began to get stuff. But then, before that . . .

BS: Did you have a person down at Byrd?

RH: Well, before that, it’s very important, before that stage, Neil Brice went down to Sky High – you remember Sky High – temporary camp. Eights Station and Sky High, and he was there for one season in the winter, recording whistlers and he got a fantastic number. And it was at L__4, which you found out from Don was a plasmapause location and the noise level was very low because there’s no lightning in Antarctica. None. So, it’s quiet and all the sources at the other end of the whistler path are right there in New England, and lower parts of Canada. You couldn’t ask for a better, logical place to go.

BS: So, you found this out during IGY?

RH: Yeah, this was just before the IGY.

BS: Just before the IGY. You sent your new receiver to Byrd.

RH: Yes, we sent it to, I forget. I don’t know the details. We may have gone to Sky High.

BS: That’s after IGY.

RH: That’s after IGY, yeah. It would have probably gone to Byrd – not South Pole. We occupied that later with this experiment. I don’t think we did anything more at Little America.

So, it would have been Byrd Station.

BS: OK. That’s during IGY. 26

RH: And that was quite successful. It demonstrated all we had to do was make it better with

bigger antennas, lower noise amplifiers, broader bands, all the rest and that was quite successful.

BS: Did you go to the Arctic during IGY?

RH: Yes, we installed at Unalaska on the Aleutians. That was our best station. At Anchorage,

very noisy because of all of the build-up there. And at Kotribeau, and that wasn’t very active and

I don’t know why. It got some data, but the Unalaska stuff was just absolutely superb.

BS: Did you go to Greenland?

RH: Later, we went to Greenland. Sonderstrum and Thule. But, here’s what we did. See, the

IGY was international and we had Danish colleagues who owned Greenland, so to speak.

BS: So they did it.

RH: So they did it. And they did some great work and it’s published.

BS: So, you didn’t have to go up and do it.

RH: Unstruk, Igo Unstruk. He was the key man in the Danish program in Greenland, and the only reason that we went up there is that eventually we had radar at Sonderstrum and we had work at Thule and it was essentially the geomagnetic pole, so it was interesting from that point of

view.

(150)

But, I can’t think of a single thing in the whistler business that came out of Thule. It’s too far

inside the polar cap.

BS: More of it came from the northern United States, Canada around Montreal.

RH: The first breakthrough, the big stimulus for our IGY work came in 1955, and it resulted from an interaction I had with the director of the Geophysical Institute who came through 27

Stanford on a trip and we just had an informal chat. He was the Director of the Geophysical

Institute at College, Alaska.

BS: Who was that?

RH: You know his name. I know his name. Where the devil is it? Alaska, 1955. IGY data. Chris

Elby.

BS: I know the name.

RH: Chris Elby. And we were right in the business of studying, this was in 1955.

BS: E-l-b-y, right?

RH: E-l-b-e-y. He was the director. He was coming through for business, I don’t recall. But, I

knew him slightly, so we got together for lunch. And I said, look, we were getting these exciting

whistler data from the north and south hemispheres. It’s really beginning to shape up into

something extremely important and what I would like to do is record some whistlers at the

highest possible latitude where we can get to and I would suggest that we do it at your location at

the Geophysical Institute. So, he found a student, Joe Pope, who could take care of the field work

and we supplied the receiver. We sent a receiver up there. And they made recordings at College,

Alaska, for many days and they got some noise. They didn’t know what they were. This is a

really exciting tale because this was the beginning of everything.

BS: Now this is during IGY or prior?

RH: Before. The test of Storey’s theory had been made and it had been successful, but what we

didn’t know, because Storey did his whistler work at middle latitudes, and there was an

approximation in the theory that was limited to middle latitudes. I knew about this. It’s in the

literature. And Eckersley had the approximation. He published that. Storey used that approximation. It was a mid-latitude approximation and I looked at this and I thought, gee, if you 28 go up to high latitudes, this approximation is no longer any good. And I said, we’ve got to get high latitude records. So, I explained this to Chris Elbey when he came by and he said, oh we would love to do that. So, we sent up the gear and they did the recordings and totally by telephone that they were getting some funny noises. They didn’t sound quite like regular whistlers. I said well send down the tapes, because we were the only ones that had a spectrum analyzer. Bell Labs had just invented the vibralyzer, which was a spectrum analyzer, audio spectrum analyzer for studying speech. Well, it was perfect for whistlers because it was in the same range of frequencies. So, we got a hold of a vibralyzer which consists of a disk this thick and about this diameter on the edge of which is a magnetic strip.

(200)

And it will record, as it rotates, it will record 2-1/2 seconds of signal and then that can be scanned by a scanning filter that slowly covers the frequency range from 1 to 8 kilohertz, or 0 to

8 kilohertz, and displays the output on a piece of paper this wide and this long by sparking through the papers. It’s spark sensitive paper, sonograph paper, and it leaves a dark mark. And it was a slightly different shade of grey, depending on the intensity. So, each time the filter is sensed – the filter is putting out a narrow band slice of the spectrum. It’s slowly scanning that

(sound) and it’s printing out everything it gets about every 50 hertz or so of scan, and that filter output excites a sparking device that punches a whole through the paper and leaves a black mark.

Crude but really high resolution. We had that device. College, Alaska, didn’t have one because they’d never done anything like this before. So, they sent the tapes down to me and said that they really didn’t hear any whistlers. They heard some funny noises and they weren’t sure . . . swishes, they called them swishes. So, I mounted the tape right away and I listened to it and sure,

I heard these swishes, but I knew there was no way to interpret this by ear, because it wasn’t a 29

(sound), it was a (sound) – something like that, and I had to see the quantitative output. Well,

there was nobody to do this. We had the set up in the lab in the old electronics research lab

which had been torn down and replaced by these buildings around here. It was down there

somewhere. And we had one big lab and we did all our experimental work there – benches like

these, and there was my fibralyzer, so I decided that I was going to do this myself. I had to see

the answers. So, I went in and transcribed the tape onto the magnetic disk in 2-1/2 second

segments, so I did one at a time. And then I would mount the spark paper, and turn on the

machine so it was rotating at standard speed and then the filter would start to scan, and in synchronism with that, the sparking stylus would move up the paper and it was going around like this and tracing out kind of a very closely spaced helix of sparks. So, when you uncoiled this paper and laid it out, you had frequency versus time, and all these individual lines of spark intensity and you could read off the whistlers. It was really very good. But, it was slow. It took 5 minutes to make a record of 2-1/2 seconds of data. Now we do it in real time. But, then it was a hand operation and you had to adjust everything just right. So, I played with everything and got everything right. And I made records of all of the audible sounds that I could find. And in some cases they lasted longer than 2-1/2 seconds, so you had to make sure they overlapped and then carefully slice the paper so that they would match up exactly in time. Then you could paste these down on a strip like this, maybe all the way down the length of this table if you were going to take the time to do it and get many minutes of records, high resolution. It was labor intensive, but it was very good data. And then eventually we acquired real time analyzers, like the ray span, which was developed for submarine analysis and it worked perfectly for this. And we had one.

And we used it for a long, long time. And then digital techniques came in and once you did that, it was all over. You could do the whole thing on your computer and that’s what we have now. 30

But, to get back to the story, the tapes came down, I mounted them, I got the records and I looked at the trace and it was swishy as could be, and then I detected in this mass of noise – it was very noisy tape – I detected some definite curves and they weren’t the shape of the standard whistler. They were – this was the most astonishing thing I had ever encountered.

BS: This was ’55 now. This is when?

RH: 1955. Here we had this frequency scale from 0 to 8 kilohertz and times .012 seconds and so on and here’s all this noise all over the place. Typical noise and then you could see in here something like this. And then you would see another one something like this and sort of like this and after I’d stared at this a long enough time, I was able to barely pick out the systematic traces, which were weak but very well defined, and which had a peculiar property that was not predicted by the theory. The theory was an approximation from mid-latitudes and here, I was doing what I wanted to do, is to get a high latitude recording and it was different. I was so excited I could hardly contain myself because I had the answer, but I didn’t know what it meant. So, I had these

– I had maybe four or five of these traces, and I noticed that the frequencies of this turnaround – that there were two branches, an upper branch that had never been known before, not predicted and not known. And here was this classical whistler that would go down like this, and this was the part down here that was seen by Storey and others and Eckersley and the people looking at telephone records and so on. Nobody had seen this part. And this was the first time it had ever been seen and we published this and at the same time, we started working on the theory. And I had a student who’s undergraduate degree – he was a graduate student here, Robert Smith – Bob

Smith – very smart guy. He had a BS degree in physics from Cal Tech and his mathematics and physics background was superb as you might expect. So, I put him to work on the theory that had been published by Eckersley. I said, look this theory is limited to frequencies that are small 31

compared with the ____ frequency fh and that does fine down for this lower part down here

which is OK. That’s the kind of whistler that we all saw at Stanford and that Storey had seen in

Cambridge. Everybody had seen it all the time. None of them saw this. First time from going to

College, just because I wanted to go to a higher latitude because I didn’t know what would happen and that’s what happened. And then, what Smith did, he went back to the magnetoionic theory which had been developed by Sir Edward Appleton, for part of which he got the Nobel

Prize in 1946, and other people worked on that too. He went back to the theory, found out the approximation that Eckersley made, took it out of the analysis and did the complete study and we had a student, Tim Bell, who is down the hall here, very good theoretician who was a physics undergraduate at Stanford at the time and he wanted a part-time job, so I hired him to program the IBM 650 card program calculator. Do you remember that?

(300)

BS: Oh yeah.

RH: First big one we had here on the campus. It’s all we had. I said see if you can program the magnetoionic theory on this and don’t put any approximations in. So, he did. He was a very careful and methodical worker. He did. And he had a desk in the same office where I had this machine and he was there on the day I was there doing this. I had just gotten in town and I saw these incredible things and Tim was there at his little tiny desk, working on some plots. And I said, Tim how are you coming with those calculations? Oh, I have them. Here they are in color.

And he had plotted the dispersion theory from the full magnetoionic expression on the calculator because there was a lot of turns to be put in. And these are the shapes he got. They fitted exactly with the experiment and that was a blinding flash! It was just incredible. I’d never had that experience before. You get the data, you don’t understand it. You do the theory, you don’t 32

understand it. And they come together in detail. And then, Bob Smith came into the picture. I

said, look, if we can do this on the computer, which I don’t have any faith in – I don’t trust

computers, garbage in, garbage out – I said, look if Eckersley can make an approximation, let’s

see if we can make an approximation that will produce this and still be tractable mathmatically.

So, he went to work on it and found the parameters that could be put to 1 or 0, and sure enough, he came up with a simple expression which is now in my book that gives exactly this curve. And that was it. That was the discovery of the nose whistler and that, forever . . .

BS: What whistler?

RH: We call it a nose whistler because it has a nose – I hope you will see the nose in this. See the nose? Right there.

BS: Gotcha.

RH: Please see the nose. And we called this frequency fn and the time delay is __ of n, each of which is easily measured and if you have those two numbers, it turns out, as you probably learned from Don Carpenter’s history – if you have those two numbers, you can find the path of propagation in geomagnetic latitude and the electron density at the equator. And you do this over a wide range of latitudes and you get the plot of the entire magnetosphere’s electron density. And that’s how all these discoveries were made, from that nose whistler, which was discovered accidentally.

BS: You just have to find the nose whistler and you’ve got it.

RH: That’s it. And then what happened was, when we learned this, we calculated what the nose frequencies would be for Seattle and Stanford, and they were very much higher. Higher than we normally went because people generally looked up to 10 kilohertz because that’s what you could hear. Well hell’s bells, these things could go up to 50 or 100 kilohertz. Nobody had bothered to 33

look up there because you can’t hear. You can’t hear that. I can’t hear that. So, we published this

paper on the nose whistler at an ERSA? meeting in Gainesville, Florida, in 1955, and then that

became the basis for planning the IGY program which, then, had to use wider band width than

had ever been used before. Which meant that we had to get a really good tape recorder and a

wide band amplifier so that we could get everything. And what we discovered then was . . . and this raises another interesting point. When I was a graduate student, with the help of Mike

Villard, I became west coast representative for the Superior Electric Company in Bristol,

Connecticut. They make variable auto transformers like the Variax that the General Radio

makes. But, the Powerstats made by the Superior Electric Company were better quality. See I was the west coast representative. And I went around and sold these things to people as a

graduate student source of income. So we had these variable transformers that we could use to

get the right voltage on our equipment and that’s a separate question. It doesn’t deal directly with

this. But, I was into that kind of technology and I had studied machinery at Stanford. I knew all

about electric machinery – DC election motors, 3 phase motors, alternators and so on.

BS: You could tell them what to build and how to build it.

RH: That’s right. In fact, I was able to fix the one at Siple Station when I was there one year

because I was the only one who knew how to change the brushes on the Powerstats which came

from the company I used to work for.

BS: So, the nose whistler, the definition of the nose whistler became the key to measuring

whistlers during IGY.

RH: The key to measuring electron density from the ground up to 6 Earth radii. Incredible. The

whole magnetosphere was mapped. And this is what Don did and from this kind of information,

he was able to find the – he probably told you about this, the knee whistler. 34

BS: Yes.

RH: And the knee whistler, you recall, if you go out with the standard model all the way as far

as you can go, these nose whistlers will look like this and they’ll just keep on going like this.

And what Don found was that on many occasions, there was a break in this sequence and the

next one wasn’t here. It was over here. Astonishing! But, this has exactly the same frequency as

it might have had over here, but it has a much shorter time delay. And so, this is out of order and

he was good at pattern recognition and he found this and it was curious. Then he saw it was

repeated. So, then he did a calculation and he found that sure enough, this field lines measured

by this fn was always lower with ______higher latitude – lower nose frequency than any of these

______. So, he said, OK, these are doing the normal thing inside the magnetosphere with the

normal drop off and then all of a sudden, there is a huge drop in density of the electrons. The

density just dropped and that was the plasmapause. And so instead of just extending smoothly

out to where it meets the solar wind, there was a point where it just went Boom! – like two

orders of magnitude. And it was defined by this. And so, he published this in 1963, and gave the

talk in Tokyo at the ERSE meeting where the Russians had come with data that they were poo-

pooing from one of their people who is now dead. But, it was an on-board satellite detector that had crossed the plasmapause – they didn’t know this at the time – and then suddenly dropped down in magnitude and he claimed it was OK and they had all said there was something wrong with the instrument because other people, including the US had had trouble with instruments that were getting false information in low density plasma, because they weren’t designed to do that.

And everybody on our side, so to speak, had these worries about the quality of the instruments.

This message was completely independent of anything having to do with instruments. This all came out on the ground and we knew how the instruments were working. So, there was no doubt 35

about this. And then our friend from the Soviet Union was at the same meeting and he was

giving his results that led to a similar conclusion, in spite of the fact that his colleagues didn’t

support him. And he and Don got together and said, Oh look this supports the data. Grengals,

Grengals was his name. You have that.

So, the satellite and the ground base data came together in 1963 in this rather dramatic fashion. And then, later, we cooperated with Iowa, ___’s group, to compare actual satellite

measurements made with reliable instruments over a wide range of parameters with the ground

base data. And Don published a paper with that group showing the results and they agreed very well. So, the book is pretty well written on that event, but that’s what made the IGY.

BS: You were ready for the IGY when it was conceived. And Allen Shapley was probably following this and he knew that . . .

RH: He knew about these experiments.

BS: He knew the Antarctic would be a good place for them, too.

RH: It was a lot of challenges in the Antarctic because the stations were all, of course, equipped with generators and they made a lot of noise. And particularly if you sent a wire out onto the ice to a distant station and you didn’t design it properly. Oh, I had an awful lot of trouble with

McMurdo. They just didn’t know how to do that. Nobody does. How to design a power system that doesn’t create unnecessary 60 hertz interference – 60 hertz and harmonic_____. You have to do this very carefully, balance the line, ground things in the right way and look after it. But, if you don’t know how to do that. If you put a power engine near, it’s not in the specifications. In fact, later I took the initiative to do something rather unusual. You remember the sites of special scientific interest which are in the Antarctic Treaty. And I was looking at this and I thought we’ve got to find some way to control McMurdo and other places that are contaminating – I 36 think I use that word contaminating – the natural environment for radio. And so I thought, hey, I looked at the description for establishing a site of special scientific interest and said, ah, hey, this could be applied to noise level. So, I wrote a trial proposition for the committee for the SCAR – the next meeting of SCAR – recommending that a site of special interest be established behind

McMurdo on the mountain, in the mountain area as a low noise site and it would have certain requirements that it be free of power line noise and noise from transmitters or any other source above a certain level. I’d have to go back and look at this, but it’s in the site specifications somewhere. And they adopted it and so we were able to set up a station at McMurdo that was reasonably quiet.

BS: Let me back you up now. Here you are in ’55, and you went down in ’56. OK What did you do based on that afterwards?

RH: After getting the first station started . . .

BS: Did you leave someone doing work when you left Byrd Station?

RH: Yeah, we had somebody who was assigned to run the equipment. I forget the details of that.

Initially, we sent somebody down to set it up and then there would be somebody who would run various electronic instruments that weren’t too hard to handle.

BS: Throughout IGY.

RH: Yeah, throughout IGY. We had that at South Pole.

BS: South Pole. Byrd Station?

RH: Byrd Station, all those.

BS: Little America?

RH: Little America, we didn’t have any permanent station there. McMurdo, the South Pole and

Byrd. 37

BS: You didn’t have anything at Wilkes.

RH: No. There were other countries that had similar stations, because we had at ERSE meetings, particularly, ERSE was probably the lead institution or organization that brought the whistler work together in Commission E, and then I became chairman of Commission 4 which, those were split offs from E when it became clear that E, being the noise commission – radio noise – should remain as it was and naturally the whistlers, not being understood, were called noise. And now that we understood them, they were called signals.

BS: So, a lot of people were doing whistler work.

RH: Yeah.

BS: In Antarctica and the Arctic.

RH: Everywhere. What we had to do at these meetings, we had to sit down and agree on some specifications for equipment and schedules, because to be very useful, you needed to have all these stations recording at the same time. So, when you got some big event, you could look at everybody’s records and see how far it had spread in geographical areas. Extremely important, and we made use of that. So, that was the first thing we decided and we came up two minutes every hour – two minutes. And the reason for that was that with a big tape, you could last a day.

So, you’d change the tapes once a day.

BS: Turned the thing on for two minutes?

RH: Well, it’s automatic. And that uses up the tape and you can change the tape once a day and you get lots of data. Now there were deviations from that when there was some special requirement, like an atomic bomb, where you would run it continuously and then change the tape. You had somebody there monitoring it, change it every time it runs out so it’s continuous. 38

But, mostly it was automatic. And it was handled once a day. Everybody had accurate clocks or access to WWV.

BS: OK. After IGY, you’re really getting interested in the Antarctic and the Arctic.

RH: After IGY got started and it was ’57, ’58. So, as a result of having that collection of data

and having sent one of our graduate students down to Cape Horn to test an hypothesis I had that

the Navy stations, NSS and all the rest, would excite the whistler mode – this hadn’t been

demonstrated. The Navy didn’t know about it, although they probably interfered with it. I often

thought about those poor commissioned and non-commissioned officers on board the radio

building on a boat and when those whistler mode echoes are coming in, they have a delay of

about 3/4s of a second, and it totally scrambled up the Morse Code. And what did they do about

that? I never was able to track down – you might be interested in this – I was never able to track

down anybody who could see in the log some note about the difficulty of recording the Morse

Code.

BS: Down in the Antarctic?

RH: Anywhere, that might be conjugate, close to the conjugate point to NSS or, it would be in

the Antarctic or South America. Southern South Atlantic Ocean, South Pacific. A boat going

down there and wanting to tune in on NSS might have one hell of a time if there was a whistler

mode echo coming in because you would overlay the same signals right on top of the ground

wave – bang, bang, bang, and it would all be mixed up.

BS: I know a radio man, Billy Ace Baker, wintered over four times. He knows everybody down

there, so maybe we can get him interested in finding somebody on the Morse Code. 39

RH: Yeah, that would be very interesting to see if this could be tracked down in the Navy logs.

Because if I were doing ham radio and I was copying code and had some interference of this

kind, I’d be extremely interested to find out what it was.

BS: I’m in touch with him all the time, so I’ll ask him.

RH: So, we got successful recordings of whistler mode echoes from station NSS, and we asked

them and they agreed, I went through the Chief of Naval Operations and he agreed to ask NSS to

. . .

BS: NSS – National Security . . .?

RH: No, this is the VLF station at Annapolis – 16 kilohertz. And I supplied the keyer and they had to test it out, of course, to make sure it didn’t screw things up, so they just had a way of

switching that in immediately and that would send out one second long pulses every, or I forget,

¼ second long pulses every second, or whatever we chose. I forget the schedule. But, it was a

program. And when they weren’t sending critical traffic to submarines or ships, they would send these signals on the hour for two minutes, and we would record them wherever we were. Well, in this case, Ernst Gehrels was down there all set up, and we had this schedule set up and he recorded at Cape Horn on these schedules from NSS as well as all the natural stuff coming in, the whistlers, and he got some echoes.

BS: Who was the grad student at Cape Horn?

RH: Ernst Gehrels. And he was, by the way, a graduate student of Mike Villard’s doing other things on circuitry, information theory.

(End of Tape 1B)

(Begin Tape 2A)

(000) 40

BS: This is the second tape in the series with Dr. Helliwell, on the 17th of September, 2002. And we were just talking about your grad student at Cape Horn.

RH: Yes, it’s an interesting story. Ernst was a Ph.D. candidate in Mike Villard’s program. And he expressed interest in doing this and Mike was agreeable to letting him go down for a few weeks to do this, so we set him up with the equipment, sent him down to Santiago de Chile, where he entered the country of Chile, and then he was to go down on the Chilean side of South

America and find a place to set up his station. So, the first thing that happened to Ernst, he arrived in Chile and he had to go through customs. Think about that. And he had this strange homemade box, it looks like a bomb? No . . . they had a different interest in this. They wanted income. So, they wouldn’t let him in, we can’t admit this. He was an observant young man. He sat there looking around at other people going through and he quickly discovered that all he needed to do was to pull out five dollars and they went right through. So, at an opportune time, he went through and said, Oh, I really need to get this through and so he pulled out his five dollars and they let him right through. And then when he got back from this trip, I’ll never forget, he said, “Where do I put this on my expense bill?”

BS: OK. We’re back. Ernst Gehrels. We got him to Cape Horn.

RH: Yeah, and we got the data and we published the paper, Gehrels and I published the paper and it was clear that the ground based VLF stations were powerful tools. That had not been appreciate before, nobody had suggested it. And I said, Oh, wow, this is the way to go, But, then something else happened which was further ammunition for this. We had signed on to use the El

Tannin as a base for mobile whistler recordings from the equator down to the Antarctic waters and back up, or even further back up across the equator. We had a very nice station on the El

Tannin with high band width, up to 40 kilohertz with an Ampex recorder that I mentioned earlier 41

and I didn’t get to talk about that, but Ampex made the best audio recorders the world has ever

seen in analog form.

BS: So the naval ship El Tannin, right?

RH: Right, the El Tannin, and it was designed to do oceanographic and atmospheric work and

we got space in the instrument room and we got a big space on the foredeck on which we could

mount crossed loop antennas and I have to describe these because, really, you should see the

pictures of these. We made the antennas out of 2” diameter copper tubing welded at the corners,

20’ on a leg square – two perpendicular loops, great big square things and they looked like –

many people thought they were the Navy’s version of a still. Well, here’s what happened. It

worked fine. The noise level was under control by having put the loops on the foredeck, away

from the machinery.

BS: This is IGY, now

RH: This is IGY. And we got the data and we found out that we were able to chronicle the rate

of whistlers versus latitude and show that there weren’t any on the equator which is what the

theory would require. Oh, well, you can pick them up if you have very sensitive receivers, but

They’re not from the magnetosphere. They are crawling through the Earth’s ionosphere wave

guide through another exit point that comes out of the magnetosphere. So, we settled that, but then what we found was that we had, because of our high frequency band, we had good recordings of all the VLF stations, really good ones. And we got NAA on 18.6 kilohertz, well above where most of the whistlers are of interest. 18.6 kilohertz. And these were booming in from NAA, and guess what? When the El Tannin was down in the South Atlantic, it was picking up the whistler mode echo just as Ernst had done from NSS, but this was from a one megawatt station – NAA – whereas NSS was about 100 kilowatts- much more powerful. 42

(50)

And the signals are booming in and when we looked at the time delays, we saw they were whistler modes. They were a ¾ of a second delay because we already knew that from the NSS work. And then we made the most astonishing discovery of all. The dots and the dashes – they were transmitting Morse Code at that time by hand key before frequency shifts came in, and so you could read the di-di-di-dah, dis and dit-dit and all that. That was regular and you could hear it and no problem. So, we recorded all of that and when we looked at the records with the high resolution spectogram, we discovered the dots were coming through as nice clean dots and the dashes which were only three times as long and the same peak power were producing huge emissions. Great big smoking emissions. Things went way out of the frequency range of the transmitter and this was happening on almost every dash. And we published a paper on it and we called it the dot-dash anomaly because we had no explanation, the reason being that the intensity of the signal was the same for dots and dashes. The only difference was the dash was three times longer than the dot. How could that produce an emission when the other one didn’t? Well, when we looked very carefully, we discovered that the dots did occasionally produce an emission, but they were always falling tones and the dashes were producing emissions that were almost always rising tones. And we knew nothing about controlled emissions. We knew that such emissions could be heard and we thought that they were all natural. We said, my gosh, this is incredible.

The dot-dash anomaly opened up a whole new field, but the important thing about that anomaly was that you could excite it with a transmitter on the ground. Put that together with Gehrels results and look at the NAA results from the El Tannin and it’s obvious. You say, oh, the answer’s simple. We have to build a transmitter on the ice that will do the same thing, and it needn’t be terribly powerful because if it’s directed upwards, unlike the Navy stations which 43 have vertical antennas which direct the signals horizontally, we can probably excite all this stuff with a transmitter. So, that’s when we got on, with John Katsafrakas’ help, got on to the work of the Navy at Baltimore airport and were given the test model of the [siligen control rectifier] transmitter - high efficiency – 95%. So, we adapted that, put a computer on it, installed it at Siple

Station called Siple I and we built an antenna which was the biggest part of this whole project.

BS: Now this is Siple I, what year?

RH: 1973. We got started on this in 1971. We had to ship all this stuff down to McMurdo and store it. We had a lot of antenna wire and poles.

BS: You skipped something.

RH: What’d I skip?

BS: Long wire.

RH: Oh, at Byrd Station.

BS: Yeah. Now, you were 55 when you were doing this.

RH: Yeah. Long wire . . . after these findings about the NSS, we found a way to lay a wire out at

Byrd – I forget the date, but I’d have to look this up – and we cooperated with the University of

Washington people, including Ward, and Irene Peden and Don Reynolds was involved in this.

Don Reynolds was my ham buddy at the campus when we both got our tickets. We both got our tickets on the same day. We went up to the federal building in San Francisco and took the code test and technical test and passed. At any rate, from that experiment we said, look, let’s put out an antenna down in the Antarctic and see if we can detect this. Well, it wasn’t a very well thought out experiment because we didn’t look at all the compromises that were made, one of them being a wire on the ice is not going to be very efficient. There’s too much snow around, but it was the only thing we could do. We wanted to try it. We had the transmitter. 44

(100)

I forget what the transmitter was. I don’t think it was that experimental transmitter. That went to

Siple. I don’t think that was used at Byrd. I think it was a big amplifier. But, we excited it, and we did pick up signals from that antenna on an OGO 2 satellite on which we had a receiver. This was after the space program got underway.

BS: What’s OGO?

RH: It’s Orbiting Geophysical Observatory, and this one was in polar orbit at about 1000 kilometers. It went over Byrd Station. We transmitted signals appropriate to it and it received them.

BS: Now, you put this satellite up?

RH: Yes. NASA put the satellite up, but we had a package on board for observing VLF waves.

And it worked very well.

BS: And you coordinated it with your work at long wire.

RH: Yes, at long wire. So, we were able to do one experiment.

BS: So, that’s the first coordination of anything in the Antarctic with satellite?

RH: I believe it was, yeah. I don’t want to speak for other fields. There were lots of different experiments going on and there may have been some others. It was the first one in our area of interest.

BS: I think it is. You were doing stuff in the field the satellite was doing it and you were linking it. I don’t know of anything else.

RH: It provided a model for some future work involving both satellites on the ground.

BS: That’s an important point. Did you go down on this? Did you go out to Byrd? 45

RH: Yeah, I went out there once. I forget when it was. I didn’t get involved in the technical details of that program. There were some wild estimates about what could be done with that. The information was just coming up and bubbling up and you had the thought that if you had a narrow enough band width, you could detect any weak signal in any noise background. Well, that’s a nice idea, but there are limits to that. So, people at the University of Washington thought that would be enough to detect a whistler mode echo. Well, it wasn’t. They never detected one from this transmitter and so finally that was abandoned. And by that time, the wire had – oh, this is an interesting sideline on glaciology. The snow at Byrd is moving, the ice is moving and once you’ve laid out a straight wire, it’s a mistake. The differential movement will produce breaks, so it was breaking all the time. We had to go find those breaks, solder them up and try again. It became hopeless. So, that was a very important lesson that we learned for that reason alone. You don’t want to put an antenna in the ice. And then when we did some theoretical work on the coupling between the antenna and the ice, we found that there was significant loss in the known properties of the ice – complex dielectric constant – and so, it was obvious that the wire had to be elevated above the ice. Well, the work suggested you could get away with 20 ft. above the ice would be good enough and it turned out to be correct. Rag Huram, et al., did an antenna theory calculation and released the results and we’ve used that and they were about right. The efficiency was very low. A di-pole antenna, half-wave length in length, which in free space would be very efficient, put it over the Antarctic ice sheet, 20 ft above the ice, and you get about 1 to 2% efficiency. So, you’re not radiating many watts. And we had about a 40 kilowatt transmitter and if we got 1% out of that, we were radiating 400 watts. But, it turned out that omegas, the Omega

Navigation Station, there was one in North Dakota somewhere that was radiating 400 watts and you could get whistler mode signals from it on satellites. So, we felt that this wasn’t too far off. 46

So, all of this long wire stuff and theoretical work led to stepping stones to Siple using the

contributed Navy hardware and we felt fairly confident that it would work and it did. It just

worked magnificently.

BS: How powerful was the transmitter?

(150)

RH: About 40 kilowatts. I forget exactly what it was. It might have been as high as 100. Later,

we got a surplus omega transmitter. This other transmitter had been specifically designed for use

on aircraft and it eventually did get up there and there was a program run by the Air Force,

running these things.

BS: Who funded Siple?

RH: NSF, Office of Polar Programs.

BS: Totally?

RH: Yep.

BS: You sold it to them and they . . .

RH: But, they weren’t the only supporters of the program. The ONR put in a lot of money and

OSR put in money.

BS: Who’s OSR?

RH: Office of Scientific Research in the Air Force. And I forget exactly when those came in and

out. But, there were different sponsors that had their own interests being served by the same

experiments. But, the administration of the field programs was by Presidential edict limited to

the NSF, through their Office of Polar Programs. Nobody else was allowed to do that, which was

obvious when you look at the Treaty and the claims and all that. 47

BS: You didn’t want ONR and the Navy and military. Actually, you could. That was totally

misinterpreted. I spent a year at Cambridge writing a . . . (Gap)

RH: . . . was with the solid state transmitter which we called Zeus, and needed to be replaced at

the end of that time for a very interesting technical reason. Scientific reason.

BS: This is Siple.

RH: We were at Siple I, the snow level was building up – almost 100 ft deep. You have to build

up the vertical ladder on the outside so you can get in, and climbing that ladder was a good

calesthenic for you. It had to be done with gloves on and if you didn’t, you froze your hands to the bars and that was the end of you. At any rate, it was down under and it was working just fine,

but it was beginning to collapse. And the pressure from the ice load was too much for that ¾ inch

thick steel in the arch. So, it was just beginning to bend.

BS: Who built the station? Contractor?

RH: Contractor.

BS: Holmes and Narvor?

RH: I think it was Holmes and Narvor. The design was the same as it was later, same basic

principle. What we did with Siple I was we discovered, we did all of the experiments we wanted

to do with the limitations on the modulation. Now, this is a very important scientific point. The

transmitter could be modulated only in frequency and this was done by changing the pulse rate

that triggered the solid state silicon controlled rectifiers to produce the oscillations. See, you get

any frequency you wanted, but it was all at constant power. If you wanted to change the power,

you had to shut down the modulator and turn the power stats down on the power supply. And

that would give you . . . and we did that experiment and it was extremely interesting. It was a

very clumsy thing to have to do. Well, basically for routine operation, all we could do was 48

program in from the computer, any frequency we wanted and so I invented a way of getting

around this. I think it was a clever way. I invented the idea of an idler signal.

BS: What kind of signal?

RH: Idler. The point being that this transmitter had to have constant power, OK?

But, you could change the frequency to anything you wanted. Let’s say you wanted to study the

response of the magnetosphere at 5 kilohertz with a ½ second long pulse and you didn’t want it

any longer than that. In fact, you wanted to be able to vary that pulse length. That was to check

the dot-dash anomaly. That was the first experiment we ever did. Well, how do you do that?

(200)

With a constant power output transmitter. Well. It turned out to be absurdly simple. All you did

was you shifted the frequency to some non-interfering channel, so to speak, until you wanted to

go back to the original one. And so the idler pulse was the space between the two real pulses. So

you have bang – idler – bang – idler, and so on and we did that with great success. And one

kilohertz was enough frequency shift and we could then get any amplitude square wave

modulation that we wanted at a fixed frequency just by shifting the frequency of the oscillation

between the pulses to something that was well outside the band width of the receiver, or the

analyzer. So, that’s how we used the transmitter and it worked very well.

And we were able, then, to progressively change the pulse length from 50 milliseconds – the

length of a Morse dot – to 400 milliseconds which is longer than a Morse dash, and that made a nice program so we could study the effect of pulse lengths. And we did that for regular periods of time and we got beautiful repeatable data which showed what the answer was. And what do you suppose the answer was? Something that we hadn’t really appreciated and it was very, very simple. The pulses grew slowly in amplitude exponentially with time. They didn’t suddenly turn 49

on. They started out at the initial value of the pulse and they grew along an exponential curve

like this and they grew, if you left the pulse on long enough, they grew about 30 decibels – three

orders of magnitude in power – before they saturated.

BS: Couldn’t grow anymore.

RH: Couldn’t grow anymore. Sometimes these growth periods would last a ½ second, so the

difference between a 50 millisecond dot and 150 millisecond dash was clear. This was in the

growth part of the curve which could be as much as 200 db per second. It really ramps up fast.

And the dash had three times as long to go up that exponential, so it was a much bigger output and the reason it triggered emissions was that you needed that high amplitude to trigger the

emission. The transmitter didn’t have enough by itself, but by growing it on the interaction with

the particles in the magnetosphere, you could get up to a huge field. And that all fell out almost

instantly as soon as we saw those first records and boom! – just like a light went on. And that

was it. And then we started manipulating this and finding other things that we didn’t know about before, like the threshold for the onset of this growth. See, that was the next question. Where does it start? How weak can you make the signal before it doesn’t grow anymore? So, then we did an experiment that took several minutes to do. We transmitted it at peak power, we got all these multipath ducts – miniducts, maybe four ducts all excited together, all putting out growing

signals – big mess at the other end and you could see these.

BS: And where was the other end?

RH: It was Roberval, Quebec.

BS: Quebec. OK. R-o-b-e-?

RH: Roberval. R-o-b-e-r-v-a-l. Roberval. French village. So, what we did, was we stepped the

power down manually with a minute in between runs – boom, boom, boom, four power levels 50

which we published and we transmitted the same program on each one and what we discovered

was very, very interesting. The top power excited four separate paths and you could see them

because they had different delays – four separate dots with different delays. They all were

growing, and it was a big mess, but you could see the different emissions being triggered and

they were all separated by the time difference over those paths.

(250)

And it was always easy to interpret. Then, as we cut the power down, one by one of those paths

disappeared. They dropped out. The next level we had three paths and then two paths and then

finally one path and then the next lower level, nothing was excited. There was no activity. So, we found out that the answer was pretty obvious and we checked this later that the problem was the distance of the entrance to the path influenced the strength of the signal it got into it. So, if you

had a path overhead the transmitter, that was the last to go out, but if you had one 1000

kilometers away that started way over there, you had to go through the wave guide, suffer those

losses, couple across the ionosphere and go up, it might be 20 db less. So, that was always in the

equation. But, we did discover that the main problem with the threshold effect was simply the input signal – how strong the input signal is. And the frustration part about this conclusion was that we were unable to make quick changes in the intensity because the transmitter design didn’t allow it. So, that led to pressure to get amplitude modulation into the system and when the site, when the building began to show signs of decay, I said, well look, we’ve got to go out and start thinking about a replacement for this because we haven’t done half the experiments we want to do. So, John Katsafrakas discovered through his Navy contacts that they were decommissioning one of the Omega Stations in Hawaii because they didn’t need it any more – GPS was coming in and LORAN – 100 kilohertz LORAN was available and so on and so on. Didn’t need it. So, they 51 were expensive to run because these were class A, class AB run vacuum tubes which are inefficient. There was a big power bill – huge power bill. But, it had the advantage of being a linear amplifier. You could put anything into the input that you wanted. Any signal. Could be amplitude modulated, you could have frequency modulated or a combination of the two. It didn’t matter. Just didn’t care. So that was a free transmitter and we saw that we could adapt it to our use and solve all of our experimental parameter problems right off the bat. So, we took that and sent it down and we built the system and the power requirements went way up. We had to get a new generator and that was the biggest part of the station – 300 kilowatt diesel electric generator to run this thing.

BS: You visited all this, but you had guys down there year round.

RH: Oh yeah.

BS: How did you get these guys? Were they . . . some of them went several . . . well at least the station maintenance personnel, went every other winter.

RH: Oh yeah. Some returned regularly.

BS: How about your people? How did you select them? Who went?

RH: Well, we looked at our own graduate students and we frequently found one and then we went out to other institutions having an interest in this field to recruit somebody and sometimes we’d end up just recruiting somebody who had engineering talent, but no particular interest in the science since we knew they could do the work. So, John ran all of that. I turned all of that over to him and he did a good job.

BS: So Siple Station was Katzafrakas’ . . . I knewit was his baby. But, basically the science was conceived by you.

RH: Yes. 52

BS: So, you were the foundation of the idea of it and Katzafracas was the guy that made it

happen.

RH: Yeah.

(300)

BS: When did John die?

RH: I think about two or three years ago. He was a bit difficult to get along with.

BS: Not to me. We got along fine.

RH: Well, he’d get along fine with lots of people. He was black and white on people. He was

either full on get-along or full off bad guy. It was bad guy and good guy. There was nothing in

between. Absolutely nothing.

BS: How did he get along with Ed _____?

RH: Well, he had a lot of trouble here with me and with Chung Park and others and boy, once he got teed off at something, he would do anything to satisfy himself.

BS: He could make things go, though.

RH: That’s the point. That was the best thing he did. He made things go, That’s a good description of his ability.

BS: Did you have any repeat people who went down for you and did the work? They didn’t allow them to stay for more than one winter at a time. You could stay summer-winter-summer, but you couldn’t stay . . .

RH: You couldn’t be a permanent . . . no.

BS: The Russians let them stay a couple years, but we didn’t do that. They had psychological problems.

RH: The Russians had a lot of problems, too 53

BS: Oh yeah. We debriefed guys coming out and we had problems.

RH: Do you remember Mike Fancher? He went to Vostok, nearly died there. They ran out of food.

BS: Was that about ’85? Had to wait for a tractor train? Yeah. We flew over there. I was there.

I went there and they didn’t, for the first time, have a great big party for us.

RH: Did you take some food for them?

BS: We didn’t know they were out. Didn’t say a damn thing to us.

RH: Well you know, they kept that secret because it was an embarrassment to the whole management.

BS: There was a French team there – John, who in the heck was the geologist? He went way back to IGY. I’ve forgotten his name, but anyway, we left that team there and we didn’t know, there were no transmissions came out or anything until they came out. They had to wait for the . .

. they stayed there for ____ . They are very proud. The other thing that happened once. They burned the station down and we’re sitting in Christchurch. They flew the planes out ready to go home and they burned the station down. They went to survival for the winter, didn’t do anything just survival. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t call for help. I could have – it was early March. We could have flown back from McMurdo, refueled, gone over there 400 mile is alls, got them, turn around and brought them back. But, they never called. They made them stay in survival mode all winter long.

RH: I’m not surprised.

BS: But, two years before they had had a crash over ____ and the station guy without calling

Moscow called us and I was ____. It was Jerry _____

RH: He got in trouble for that, I’ll bet. 54

BS: Oh yeah. But, we got those guys out and up to Christchurch. There were 35 of them when it

burned.

RH: Wow. Good for you. That reminds me of Greenpeace. Remember that?

McMurdo?

BS: Yeah. Sank the ship and had it all ___ all over.

RH: When they came down to. . .

BS: They came down as I was leaving on my last trip.

RH: I was there on the base during that whole episode.

BS: Which episode was that?

RH: When the Greenpeace people came down in their own boat and they were . . .

BS: You talking about ’85 now?

(350)

RH: It wasn’t that late. I think it was earlier than that. At any rate, they were there to do their

thing and be independent and you know, up the Navy’s nose, so to speak. And the Navy had

properly warned them of the danger of a boat like theirs coming down and trying to navigate

through the ice. So, they came down anyway – a whole bunch of them and they got mired in the

ice and then the ship got crushed, slowly, and the copters came over and rescued them and

brought them back to McMurdo Station and the boat sank, I guess. And they came in and I was

there and I went to Navy mess the next day and here they were, a group of about 8 or 10, sitting

around one table. They weren’t talking to anybody. They looked bedraggled and embarrassed, I

would say.

BS: Which year was that?

RH: It might have been ’86. 55

BS: That’s about right. It was right after I left. See, they set up a station at . . .

RH: I’d have to look in my diary to see when that was. I don’t remember.

BS: They set up a station at Cape Evans. I left in March of ’85, and they had just set it up and

____ the Navy go down with a Herc and we took a look at it and then I went North. I came back mid-winter and we did air drops. But, it was interesting. They never told the world that they polluted the place.

RH: No, they don’t and they had the same problem . . . it was Cousteau. You remember

Cousteau over at Palmer Station?

BS: Anyway, we got to talking about John Katsafrakas. The building of Siple Station originally.

How long did that take? They didn’t do it in a summer, did they?

RH: No, I think it took a couple years. I forget. There was a lot of preparatory work. When the actual C-130s had to deliver all those arches and that was a big problem. But, they were delivered all right and then they had to be set up. I was down there for the finishing off of Siple

II, which was built the same way, but it was bigger – 320 ft. long. And we had a vertical ladder going down through the ice to the old station. And I went down that to inspect it. I had to crawl –

it was kind of exciting – I had to crawl on my belly through the old station, being assured that it

wasn’t going to move and it didn’t. But, what happened as you may have heard. During the year

of movement of the ice, the rivets on the overlapping plates would be stressed to the breaking

limit and they would shoot out like projectiles in the station, so that had happened a couple of

times and nobody was hurt, but it was realized that that was a . . . in a bending station, there was

a constant . . . because you don’t know where . . .

(400)

BS: We had a lot of supplies down there. You had to go up and down . . . 56

RH: Oh yeah, there was a lot of stuff. In fact, there’s a library down there in Siple I that hadn’t been moved. There was a good copy of Turmin’s handbook which I would like to have had, but I thought maybe I’d better leave it there for history.

BS: I went down to Byrd and that was worse than Siple.

RH: This was under snow?

BS: Way down. I put it off limits after I went down. I thought somebody was going to get hurt.

We had a refueling station out there. We had to refuel there.

RH: I remember because I used that.

BS: Well, that’s quite interesting. Tell me about the antenna. How did you maintain an antenna

20 ft. up? You had a lot of wind there. Did you have it knocked down and . . . ?

RH: By placing poles every 200 ft. and anchoring them very securely. And I don’t think that antenna ever broke due to the wind. Each support was aluminum channel which was tied into the snow with deadmen every 200 ft. for 40 kilometers. Long antenna, the final one – in fact, we had a cross of two antennas 40 kilometers long so that we could generate polarized signals to test the theory. And in fact, we turned up something very interesting in this case. You put right handed polarization going like this and it goes right into the magnetosphere just fine. Put in left-handed polarization at the same power, nothing gets through. It’s totally blanked out because . . . and this is the prediction of the theory, but I never thought it would be that clean. But, it wasn’t. It turned out not to be quite that clean, because if you send in the wrong polarization sometimes some of that gets converted to right hand up in the e-region and that allows a weak signal to get through anyway. And we discovered that. So, there’s a way there to measure the non-linear properties of the input region which hadn’t been done because we didn’t have time to do that experiment.

BS: Interesting. So, basically, about 25 miles long, and I say that for the tape. 57

RH: It’s the size of the state of Rhode Island.

BS: So, Siple Station was active and was first built, or first went active in what year?

RH: 1973, it became active.

BS: ’73 through ’88.

RH: There was a 15 year total period of data production.

BS: Have you crunched all that data?

RH: We processed it all and we published most of it, but not all of it because we ran out of

support and what happened was that the foundation, as soon as it quit supporting the physical

structure, couldn’t see much reason for more than about a year for support for data analysis and

all the hot stuff is still there. I’m doing it on my own time right now. I don’t have any help.

(450)

BS: That’s what you’re doing in your retirement. Stuff that you would ordinarily pay a grad

student to do.

RH: Yeah.

BS: And it sounds like it’s very important data.

RH: I think it is. But, you know what. I’ll tell you why I think this is endemic to the system.

NASA got where it is by flying spectacular missions – man in space and orbiting stuff and telescopes and this sort of thing. And NSF wasn’t competing very well for funds, so they had to get into the business of facilities. They’ve got these big radio astronomy facilities and Marisebo, and Greenland and all around radars and things. This is hardware. And they can get money for that from Congress. But, they can’t get money for anything as mundane as data analysis. And

there’s always some built in and they have to take any proposal and they’ve got to insure that it

passes muster from the science side of things to show there’s data analysis money, but once that 58

runs out, they want that money for something else that’s spectacular. This is a biased point of view, but I feel strongly about this because I see it happening all the time. And if you send the

National Science Foundation Board down there, they want to see things and many of them are scientists. They haven’t got time to sit down and read papers. They can do that at home. They go down there to see things.

BS: Ted Rosenberg’s on the National Science – not the national science . . .

RH: He’s polar research, or was. I think he’s off of it now. But, at any rate.

BS: He’s a good friend.

RH: Oh yeah. We’ve done joint papers with him in the past on some of these same problems.

But, it’s a rather vague topic. There’s nothing very solid about it, but I’ve had the notion that that’s the difference between NASA and NSF is that NASA is men walking on the moon and they have people doing things in space that can be put on the special PBS program and it’s all great stuff. Hubble Telescope comes in with stuff. We don’t have that and a scientific paper, most people aren’t interested in the kind of science we do except that it does things that are important, we think.

BS: We’re doing better astronomy at the South Pole than the Hubble space telescope.

RH: Yeah, that’s a good example.

BS: And a helluva of lot less money. So, OK, Siple was closed. Artic activity. What did you do in the Arctic?

RH: Supported the Siple program, except during the IGY, they were stand alone stations and

Unalaska and New Zealand were conjugate pairs. There was a lot of very interesting stuff that came out of that. Some of it hasn’t even been published because, again, it’s the same problem.

Any big program like that runs out of money eventually and unless there’s something sexy going 59 on to keep the money flowing, they shut it down and that’s probably the right thing to do, but the question is how you handle the old stuff – the stuff that hasn’t yielded to instant interpretation.

But, it’s puzzling. And that’s the sort of thing I’m working on now from Siple Station are things that I published. They’re in the literature and nobody has done anything about it because nobody knows how to solve the problem. I think one of them I’ve been working on just the last few days,

I’ve got the solution to and it’s very exciting. But, gee I don’t have anybody to help me because I can’t get any money. And you know why? I found out the evidence and I haven’t followed it up because I don’t think it’s worthwhile, but I got verbatim copies of the reviews of our proposal –

Tim Bell and I submitted a proposal for doing this analysis that I’m doing now on my own, and it was turned down. And the reason was, there was one “no” vote. It got two “excellents” and one

“no” and so I got the “no” analysis and the guy came out flatly and said, shouldn’t give any more to this guy. He’s too old. That’s me. And that’s a court case and I have no interest in persuing that because that’s what they wanted anyway and the trouble is, at the other level, which you can’t grasp, there are managers in the program at whatever agency it is that will select reviewers to produce results that can’t be challenged, so that they can move the money somewhere else.

And I believe that’s what happened in this case. But, it’s not worth the time. I’m on my retirement stipend and I can do some of these things that I want to do and keep myself busy and make some progress.

BS: Kind of like my retirement project.

RH: Yeah, kind of like that.

BS: I got money for it, though. I think I’ll get more.

RH: Well, I get some help from the university and from ____ and ____ in terms of support of my computer and the things I need and I can publish things and get that paid for, but it’s a living 60 game. I think with this book which I hope to finish this coming spring, I’ll wind it all up and if there’s something to be done, I might make another proposal, but I don’t know if it would make it. I think NSF is probably, OPP is probably too biased. Once they make a mistake like this that is actionable, they don’t want to reverse themselves later on because then that’s an admission of earlier guilt. And so, I couldn’t get any money from them. But, I might be able to get some money from a foundation or something like that.

BS: Well, Ted is still golden.

RH: Well, I was golden, too, when I was on the Polar Research Board. You can’t do anything wrong when you’re there.

BS: Well, are we done? I think it was a good interview. It was certainly enlightening to me. This is a sad note at the end. But, it’s a great interview. So, we’ll conclude it right here.

(End of Interview)