Oral History Program
Ernest Ambler interview with Karma Beal July 7, 1988
Beal Today is July 7, 1988. I am talking with Dr. ErnestAmbler, Director of the National Bureau of Standards, in his office in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Thiswill be the first interview of three about his career at NBS. I want to start by saying that you were born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England. You did all your studies at Oxford and graduated with your Ph.D. in 1953. Then you came to the United States. Did you come immediately because of Dr. Hudson, who was here at NBS? He had been at Oxford, too, hadn't he?
Ambler Yes. I had known him as an undergraduate during the war, and then of course, there was our war service and we didn't see each other again until we came here. But at Oxford the supervisorof our Ph.D. theses was the same guy, Nicholas Kurti, so that was the connection. Then, of course, the subject matter on which we worked, which was the particular branch of low temperaturephysics called adiabatic demagnetization. I suppose you know, at that time the center of gravity of science had moved to the United States and everybody who had theirPh.D. wanted to have post-doctoralexperience over here, so moving to the States was a natural thing. It was fortunate,at that time, that the United States was building up its research in low temperature physics, sponsored, in very large measure, by the Navy. There were, at that time, just a few places that had established laboratories in low temperatures,unlike today.Probably the bestone in the country-certainly one of the best, but I think probably the best at that time-was the Bureau of Standards. In low temperature physics the Bureau had had a reputation for a very, very long time. It was, I think, starting probably in [Edward U.] Condon's day that [Ferdinand] Brickwedde had the opportunity to build up his Low Temperature Lab, and he had been doing very well. Manny [Emanuel] Maxwell, who discovered the isotopeeffect in superconductivity and John Pellam, who made a lot of discoveries in liquid helium-second sound. Held secured [Dirk] de Klerk fromLeiden [The Netherlands] to come over to set up the Low TemperatureLab and hired Ralph Hudson to work with him and stay on to continue it after de Klerk went back. When I was looking for a post-doctoral assignment over here, I looked at the laboratories and the Bureau was looking forsomebody in the very fieldthat I was an expert,so it really was a natural and I was offered the job and came. one of the jokes I always make is that it was characteristic of Brick-he had his own way of doing things and sometimes you couldn't quite figure out why he was doing things the way he was. But looking back, I like to joke that only Brickwedde could conceive of setting up his very Low TemperatureLaboratory foradiabatic demagnetiza tion by employing a person fromLeiden and thereforeusing all the techniques that were Leiden techniques, and then getting a couple of guys from Oxford who'd been brought up on very different techniques to run it. But, as it turned out, when it came later to doing the experiments on parity nonconservation, that was a very fortunatecircumstance, becauseit turnedout that the Leiden technology was much more suitable fordoing the experimentand the knowledge of how to do it was much more extensive at Oxford.So Brickwedde had bought into both things by that maneuver. It seemed a little crazy to some people at the time, but it worked. So, yes, I came over and started to work with Ralph and also a guy that was working in the Low Temperature Lab part-time, and part-time over with Wilfred Mann over in radioactivity called Georges Temmer, who was certainly a great physicist, well known today. Ralph and I published together and then the three of us [Ambler, Hudson, and Temmer) published papers until Georges left. That's how it all got going.
Beal Now, the equipment that you had set up for nuclear alignment when you worked with Temmer and Hudson.
Ambler Yes. Beal That was the basis of the equipment that you used in the non-conservation of parity project that you worked on.
Ambler Yes.
Beal How did you get involved with the parity work? Was that strictly through [Chien-Shiung] Wu at Columbia?
Ambler Yes. She called. I've got a fewletters thatI can make available to you. Basically what happened,one morningshe called and I didn't know who she was,, although I'd heard of the name. She said that [C. N.] Lee and [T. D.] Yang had had this idea that with beta particles fromcobalt-60, more will come up one direction of the field than the other. I said, "Are you sure you mean up and down?" She said, "Yes, up and down, that's the difference."I said, "Is there a preprint of that paper?" She said, "Yes." I said, "Send me one." So she sent me one. The first thing I did was to check with our radioactivity people and discovered that she was tops in her field, so it was a request to be taken very seriously. As to the actual experiment itself, I talked to some of the senior physicists at the Bureau and they all shook their heads and said, "It's a very, very, very long shot." Ralph and I talked about it and we sort of decided, and I became convinced, that it was one of those things that is a risk you've absolutely got to take, because it was clear that the whole thing would be absolutely revolutionary. So, I went to see Brick and explained it and told him I thought we could do it with the budget we had. Damn if old Brick said, "Well, Ernie, if it's not going to cost any more money, you go right ahead and do it." I called her and said, "Sure." We exchanged some correspondence about the design of the equipment and we got started. She sent a couple of graduate students down to work with us. That didn't work toowell, so I persuadedher to invite [Raymond] Hayward and [Dale] Hoppes, the nuclear guys, to work with us and we'd make much better progress that way. She did and that's how the team got going. After a couple of falsestarts, we finallygot the equipment designed and operatingright and started to get results. Then all hell broke loose.
Beal It didn't take you very long, really.
Ambler No, it really didn't. I think at times Miss Wu thought it ought to go faster, but she didn't really, at that time, understand the low temperature techniques as much as we did. Sure, we got there first. We got there before [Richard L.] Garwin and [Leon M.] Lederman did using the mu meson experiments.The proof of the pudding is in the eating; who did it first. It was done at the Bureau on the old site, of course, in the old Low Temperature Lab.
Beal Most of the apparatus is displayed downstairs in the lobby.
Ambler Yes, I wonder how long it's going to be there. I'm glad that we got it back from the Smithsonian, becauseit would have just been in the basement there.
Beal How much did Dr. Wu contribute to the actual experimental part?
Ambler She contributed to the betaparticle detection side of it, and the counting side of it, and so, of course, did Hayward and Hoppes. We contributed the low temperature side of it and all that know-how. It was a joint effort, one that everybody worked very hard on and very enthusiastically and with perfect harmony until the result came and then relationships became a little strained after that. I guess that's the price you pay for success.
2 Beal The basic idea was fairly simple, wasn't it?
Ambler Yes, the idea was revolutionary. Te idea and the analysis behind why it was an appropriate thing to try was, of course, sheer genius and what got Lee and Yang the Nobl Prize. So to get the idea was not simple, but to state the idea and understand what the statement means was very simple. In principle, the experiment was very simple and it tured out to be more simple than we thought it would b at the time. It was a question of detecting beta particles at these very low tempratures and one thought that would have ben dificult. There had been gamma rays detected fr quite some years, first done at Oxfrd, of course. That was what I was involved in when I was there doing my Ph.D. I remember at oxfrd we had long talks in the evening when we went in fr expriments to "cook" during the night. Doing expriments, we'd sit down there talking with Kurti, and Luis Daniels, [H.] Halban, and Michael Grace, talking about other expriments we might do. We thought about alpha particles and bta particles. With parity conseration, which was what we were assuming at the time, there wasn't much pint to looking at bta particles. You wouldn't fnd very much out, and it would be damn difficult anyway, bcause bta particles don't have a very big range. Getting them out of the paramagnetic salt that had to be used and getting them out of the cryostat would have ben very diffcult, so this wasn't thought worthwhile. It wasn't a worthwhile experiment to do. It wasn't that people hadn't thought about it, but when Lee and Yang said, "Look it up and down, it's a question of parity conservation," that was a crucial experiment to do. So we tried it and then counting bta paricles proved to be more possible than we'd thought. I think we designed the appartus, after a fw flse starts, in about the best way that one could have done it. One of those things that just worked out, and we ageed to do it, to ty it. We went fr it very hard. We didn't mess around. It wasn't a part-time job. It was a lot of hard work.
Beal Tat was a nice New Year's present you received btween Christmas and New Yearls.
Ambler Yes, it really was.
Beal Where else, beside NBS, could this kind of research ben carried out?
Ambler At the time, it could have been done at Leiden, Oxfrd, Oakridge, 111inois-John Wheatley at 111inois-Berkeley, Chicago. Tat's a11 I can think of at the moment. Tere's probably some places like Be11evue in Paris, maybe, I don't know. Quite a fw.
Beal The group of you received a Gold Medal in 1957 for tis work. It seems to me that must be a new record. You came to the Bureau in 1953 and received a Commerce Gold Medal in 1957. That was 4 years. Most pople have to work longer than that, or do work longer than that, befre they receive that kind of recognition.
Ambler It didn't stike me as bing that way at the time. In my career there were 4 years that weren't exactly i11ustrious, but I was working in an aircraft fctory, working on metals fr jet engines, which was very usefl. I leaed a lot about meta11urgy, but it didn't contribute to my career. When I started my post-do work here, I was practica11y 30 years old. I was anxious when I was at Oxfrd to get my Ph.D. and then when I got my Ph.D. I was anxious to make whatever reputation I was going to make. Te years when you can rea11y tum to and do that kind of comptitive research, I don't think last that long. Some pople can keep it up, but most pople can't. Also, I might say that the opportunity that we got in the Low Temprature Lab under Brickwedde was a great opportunity. Ralph and I were doing temprature scale measurements about half-time and half-time we were doing whatever research we thought
3 was worthwhile. of course, the lab had a tremendous reputation at that time with Pellam and Maxwell. It was a tremendous opportunity and not to have taken advantage of it would have ben not doing the wise thing fom the point of view of one's career. I wasn't thinking in ters of IO years to make a mark for myself, by any means. At that age, at that time, with that opportunity, it was then.
Beal With a lot of hard work, it happened.
Ambler Yes, but to say that in 1957 we got recognition that we'd done something very significant, it was not something we weren't striving for. It was very great to get it and all that, but it was something that I wouldn't say would b beyond our wildest imagination, bcause in our wildest imagination that's exactly what we were shooting fr. That sort of thing, that sort of reputation.
Beal There were quite a fw awards that you did get-the Washington Academy of Science Award. That was tied in.
Ambler Yes, most of them are hanging up over there.
Beal There were quite a fw. The Fleming Award in 1961 as one of the l0outstanding young men in goverment service.
Ambler Yes, it was nice to get that one.
Beal You were Acting Section Chief while Hudson was at Oxfrd fr a year.
Ambler That's right. We didn't call them sabbaticals. It was frther eduction and training.
Beal In 1962 you were appointed Chief of the Cryogenic Physics Section. You replaced Hudson.
Ambler Ralph bcame head of the Heat Division. It might have been called Heat and Power at that time. He moved up and I moved up.
Beal You received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 fr your work on cooprative properties of spin systems at low temperatures. You lef fr a year to study at the University of Califria, Berkeley. What did you do while you were there?
Ambler The purpose in going was really to refcus my research. What had happned after the parity expriments was that I continued to work with Hayward on nuclear orientation expriments and in all of my reading I had become much more knowledgeable about nuclear physics. In fct, I'd given some courses out at Maryland on angular corelations. I'd realized that I was tained as a low temprature, solid-state physicist, not a nuclear physicist and that I ought to get back to that. Also, it seemed to me that in the experiments that we had done, we had done the major portion of them. There was the experiment on Cobalt-6, which was the main one, but then we did other expriments on
4 Cobalt-58 and Manganese-56, which were very important. They proved other things. Thenwe went on to other more complicated things that became the basis of Hoppes' thesis, but I gradually withdrew fromthat and Hayward and Hoppes were doing that basically alone. By that time, they'd learnedall the low temperaturetechniques themselves. Ralph had got very interested in paramagnetic resonance. He was working with a guy who had come on by the name of Billy [B. W.] Mangum. He's still with us, as a matter of fact. I thought I needed to get another line of experimentation. I had thought I would start working on liquid helium. Pellam had left and there was nobody working on liquid helium. So I thought I would go to Berkeley because there was an outstanding schoolin solid-state physics that Charlie Kittel had set up there, and tryto bring myself up-to-date. Kittel was just in the process of writing another book on solid-state physics and giving a course of lectures. I went out and I deliberatelydidn't do any experiments in the lab. People wondered whether I would, but I didn't. I just went to lectures, and read, and tried to get ideas. I came back and I thought I would be working on light scattering. By that time the laser had been developed and the inelastic scattering of light becamepossible, and I thought I would try some experiments along those lines. That might have worked out all right because it would have worked in well with the work that Mel (Melville S.) Green and his group were doing on critical phenomena, but I had just barely got back and I was also following supercon ductivity. I read an article by Marvin Cohen, who was then at Chicago, about the possibility of certain semiconductors becoming superconductors. I went over to see Hans [H. P. R.J Frederikse, who was head of the Semiconductor Section, but he was in Europe on a sabbatical, I think, at the time. I think it was Jim [J. H.J Becker who was then Acting, and I went over and said, "Hey, shouldn't we get Marvin Cohen down to give us a colloquium?" We did that and it was one of the most exciting colloquiaI've attended, because a lot of the solid-state people knew a lot about the kind of semiconductors that Marvin was talking about. After his talk they were just firing names of all kinds of compounds. One of the ones that really got everybodyexcited was strontiumtitanate, which was a thing that they had beenworking on in that group from the point of the semiconductor. Jim and I said, "Hell, we'll tryit." He got Bill [W. R.J Hosler fromsolid-state and I got Jim Schooley fromlow temperature,and I put the thing in and damn if it wasn't superconducting. That was a whole series of experiments. It's very related to these modem high temperature superconductors. The funniest thing was, some of the last experimentsI did were on these double oxides. Strontiumtitanate is a double oxide, a perovskite structure. These were the double oxide of strontium and titanium. These new things are triple oxides, the same crystal structure,so I was very close. Anyway, that was very exciting and that's what was going on when they asked me to become a Division Chief. That's when I left the Low TemperatureLab. In fact, one of the last experimentsI did, I did one other experiment with Billy Mangum,just beforeI left and it got written up afterI left, on glasses. No, that's wrong. I got it done after I went over to the Division, because I began to get interested in glasses at the time. Mangum and I did some experiments on some glass. That was about the last I did. There was only one. That was what Berkeley all led to.
Beal That was quite a change.
Ambler Yes, it was. I had a very strongbelief that if the Bureau is putting faithin you to support you in research, you've got to really contribute,and publish and be competitive. I always feltthat meant you had to keep changing what you were doing to keep fresh. You can't redo the same old experiments over and over again. That's not really research.
Beal You just answered my next question: why you moved over to the Inorganic Materials Division in IMR [Institute forMaterials Research].
Ambler Well, that's more complicated thanthat. I thought that I might be able to continue my research. My hope was that Schooley would come over with me and we could continue that superconductivity, but he didn't want to. I wasn't aboutto forcethe situation or tryto forceit. I just had the feelingthat materials research was really growing and that the low temperature physics as it had been was changing. The reason that it was changing was that liquid helium had become commercially available because of the Collins liquefier. When I was growing up and before that, you had to make it yourself and thatdemanded specialist plants, so you did low temperature physics in those laboratories that had the ability to make the liquid helium. If you didn't have that, you didn't do it. The whole situation had changed
5 and the Navy's and other people's intention to expand low temperaturephysics in this country had succeeded, so there were many, many laboratories working in low temperature by that time. It wasn't the low temperatures that was the focus; it was the particular scientific discipline and it was to become solid-state physics. First the transistorwas invented, then the whole of solid-state physics was booming together with solid-state chemistry and high temperature chemistry. There was a renewed interest in glasses because of lasers. So the move that the Bureau was making, it was my understanding, was spearheaded to a large extent by [Irl C.] Schoonover, to build a Materials Research Institute and build it out of what had been the old Industrial Building empire. It was a move in the right direction and was very interesting. It was the kind of discipline that I was getting more interested in. Also, I had finallysuccumbed to the feelersthat people had put out for a number of years, wouldn't I like to enter management? Before that, I wouldn't even talk about it. We guarded our time in the lab very jealously, so I wouldn't do that. But I had begun to change. I suppose as one gets older, one changes. I was more willing to consider that. I was asked to move over to the Inorganic Materials Division by Gordon Teal, who had come fromTexas Instruments. I felt with his reputation I might learnsome things fromhim as well as get into the kind of technical work I was getting interested in and in the kind of technical work that was going to be important at the Bureau. So I made that move. I think that analysis, looking back, was absolutely correct. That's the way things went.
Beal Then you totally moved out of the lab and into administration.
Ambler Yes, I'd say that's true.
Beal What were some of the projects that the Inorganic Materials Division was working on when you were Chief?
Ambler Therewas a group working on glass. The guy that I made head of that section, who was an outstanding guy, was Wolfgang Haller. He was in that section at the time. Another chap called [Clarence H.] Hahner, I think, was head of it at the time, but he was just about ready to retire. There was a ceramics group--I don't know whether it was called ceramics-under Jack [John B.] Wachtrnan that was up and coming. There was a solid-state physics group under Frederikse. Then there was a high temperature phase diagram ceramicist group that had the crystal data group, powder detraction data that [Howard F.] McMurdie ran with a group of people. They had a very good high temperature chemistry group. I think the central figure was Bob [Robert S.] Roth, who is still with us. He's an outstanding solid-state, high temperature chemist. There was inorganic chemistry under Tom [Thomas D.] Coyle. That was not quite materials. It was more high temperature chemistry. That was a new thing that Harry [C.] Allen had started to build. He was very interested in building capability in chemical synthesis and hired Tom Coyle and Fred [Frederick E.] Brinckman, quite outstanding people. That was a group that was being built. I suppose that my job was to kind of forgea unified Inorganic MaterialsProgram out of all these bits that had been brought together and meld it into the Inorganic Materials Division comparable and complimentary with Polymers, Metallurgy, and Analytical Chemistry under Gordon Teal. We did and that's when I got to know Jack Hoffman very well and built a life-longfriendship with him and Larry Kushner. It was a very good bunch of Division Chiefs at that time. A bunch dedicated to advancing materials science at the Bureau. So that's what it was all about.
Beal The move fromWashington, the Van Ness site, to out here-that was about the same time. Were you the Division Chief while you were still in Washington or had that part been moved?
Ambler No, I was the Division Chief while I was in Washington, but the move had all been planned. I think Harry Allen had had a lot to do with that, and Jack Hoffman. There was a guy, a general factotum around, by the name of Benny Riggs, who was quite a character, who had done a lot of the detailed planning, so I really didn't get involved in the planning. Well, I got involved in the planning forthe Low TemperatureLab and then didn't get involved in the move, but I was involved in the move in the Inorganic Materials Division but not the planning.
6 Beal How did you see thechanges in theDivision, the freedomto move, not so much as permanentlybetween Divisions, but to recruithelp on a very informal basis, fromthe Washington site and out here? I've heard that it was much more difficult to do this inter-division collaboration after the move to Gaithersburg.Did you find that to be trueor was it just as easy?
Ambler I really don't know. At the old site it wasn't that easy. I did some cooperationwith Ray Hayward and I did some cooperationwith Jim Becker and Bill Hosler, but when Frederikse came back it wasn't that easy. Some people were more willing to cooperatethan others. It was very easy to cooperate with Ray Hayward, but not so easy to cooperate with some of the other groups that were in the nuclear area. People didn't want to do that. One of the reasons that I had hired Harvey Marshak-this is a thing I left out of the low temperature thing-was because we couldn't cooperatewith some of the neutron peoplethere, for what reason I don't recall. But anyway, Hoppeswas getting his thesis and was moving onto more esoteric beta particle experiments and that wasn't for me. So I decided that what we needed to do was to apply the nuclear orientation techniques to nuclear scattering with neutrons. oh, that's right. I did an experiment first with Harvey, with Evans Hayward-Ray's wife-and Ev [Everett G.] Fuller, over at the betatron. That was a very important experiment. We got a prize for it, best written paper or something.
Beal The Stratton Award?
Ambler I don't know. No, it wasn't the Strattonone. It was a monetary prize. It was Ambler, Fuller, and Marshak, I think. [E. Ambler, E. G. Fuller, H. Marshak, "Direct Observation of the Optical Anisotropy of the Holmium Nucleus," Physical Review, vol. 138, no. lB, April 12, 1965, pp. B117-B126.] Anyway, it was at the betatron scattering off of the holmium nucleus, proving that it was shaped like a football by orienting it and turningit around. We did that and then it worked out fineat the betatron. Evans Hayward and Ev Fuller were very willing to cooperate, but then when we triedto get it to work with neutrons it didn't work. So we built a transportableapparatus and we transported that to Harwell in England to do an experiment.That's about the time when I left for the Inorganic Materials. I guess I was doing some of the work with Schooley at the same time. I guess I had two things going at the same time. Anyway, Harvey started his work then. He went to Harwell and successfully did that experiment and several others. That was another set of experiments we did. Anyway, cooperation. It seems to me, in my own experience, you can cooperate if you find another investigator who is a fairly independent investigator, senior in that sense. You convince him that by pooling your skills and experienceyou can do a joint experimentthat neither one of you can do separately. But if you go fromthe pointof view that this section works in this area and this section works in that, and it will be great if they work together, in a general way like that it never works terribly well. To get the cooperation,you've got to get the individuals convinced that it's in the interest of their project, to really pull it off. When we moved out here, I don't know that it particularly made a difference,but then I wasn't tryingto cooperate. I wasn't in the lab any more, so its really not a fair comparison.
Beal I was looking through the booklet Looking Back: a 75 Year Preview of Things to Come that you wrote.
Ambler I don't remember that. When was that?
Beal It was written in 1976. It was the 75th Anniversary of NBS. It was an address that you gave and in it you talked about the Nobel Prizes that have been awarded because of supportingor confirming work and experimentation that the Bureau had done. It seems like we're always a bridesmaid and never a bride. Everything kind of goesaround us. The first one was in 1934 for Harold C. Urey's identification of deuterium after Brickwedde concentrated heavy
7 hydrogen by fractional distillation of the liquid for him. The second was in 1944 for I. I. Rabi's work on the measurement of the magnetic moments of the proton and deuteron. NBS prepared the sample of hydrogen deuteride used by Rabi. Yours was. the third. Luis Alvarez used a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber built by Bascomb Birmingham, Dudley Chelton, and Douglas Mann and received his prize in 1968. Most recently, Russell Young's success in being the first to make a tunneling microscope work was written about in the description of the 1986 physics prize. Ernst Ruska, Gerd Binnig, and Heinrich Rohrer shared the prize.
Ambler Yes, right. That's true. And then there's a question today of whether John Cahn will get it forhis work. It's hard to believe they'll give that to anybody else.
Beal That'strue.
Ambler Cahn will either get it or it won't be given forthat work.
Beal Do you think that the work that was done here deserved more than the recognition that it did receive?
Ambler I don't know. I don't get too hung up about that. In the case of the one I was involved in, it seems to me that Lee and Yang getting the Nobel Prize was correct. I don't think anybodyfelt that was incorrect. I think with respectto credit there's always been the tendency, since miss Wu was first on the paper and was known forher work in beta decay, that we were the flunkies and she was the boss of the whole thing. People jumped to that conclusion. They write about it. People that jump to these conclusions and pretend they'rewriting history, and it really doesn'tresemble what actually happenedat all. It was much more of a joint undertaking and, as I say, tensions didn't build until there was success. Until there was success, nobody gave a thought about it or a damn about credit. Everybody was so excited in what they were doing. That sort of thing happens. It's botheredmaybe some people, but it never really bothered me because I didn't let it. What the hell? I know what I did and I've always felt that the most difficult person to live with is yourself. If you can live with yourself, that's the main thing. You can make yourself awfully unhappy if you think the world is going to be immaculately just at all times. That'sthe way to drive yourself cuckoo. Thatgets even truerwhen you're doing administration. You learn not to let these things get to you too much. Anyway, I've done all right. Why should I complain?
Beal I think you've done very well. A good attitude to have. It really is. You never know how much can get done if nobody feels like they have to take the credit.
Ambler That is so true. I guess that's the motto that Reagan has on his desk, but it is so true. It's particularly true in administration, too. It's trueif you're Director. Particularly, I suppose, if you're Director, because if you insist on getting credit foreverything that goeson in your operation,people will become very resentfulof you and won't work with you. If what you care about is the organization and getting things done, then that's fine, you can.
Beal Do you have any other reflectionson the work that you did while you were at the bench?
Ambler Scientific work? Ralph Hudson and I wrote a lot of paperson the temperaturescale and we did what we were hired to do. We kept our bond with the Bureau and did work on the temperaturescale. We were proud of that. We weren't under any illusion that that wasn't important work to do. We tried a lot of other things. I suppose that those years, until theparity experiments,were the happiest days of my lifeuntil the last few yearsof beingDirector. You're young,
8 you've got your health and energy, you feel you know something finally, you feelyou have ideas on what you'd like to try, there's an organization that's providing you a lab so you can do it. What more can you ask for?Ralph and I were very energetic and happy at the time. We worked very hard and we published a lot. I think those were very happy and productive years. These finalfew years of being a Director have been very happy, too, because the institution as a whole is getting somewhere. It's been a battle all of those years since I left the lab, until very recently. We were always under attack and never really recognized by the Department or the Administration for the capability. We were a fragmented institution. We weren't really pursuing our own thing. We were doing things for somebody elsels mission, by and large. I think it's understandable in terms of what the national priorities were at the time and what the political situation was that the Bureau found itself in. It's very different today with the emphasis on the economy and being able to support industry and transfer technology. The Bureau knows exactly how to do that. It's got a mission that's right on. If we don't make it now, we never will. That's why we embraced more than we would have gotten or we might get in this Technology Transfer Act. It's an opportunity with a risk, a lot of risk. Looking back on those research days, I think they were great. I wonder whether young people feelthe same way in the factthat they're given the opportunity- scientists, let's say-given the opportunity to do research half of their time of their own choosingin a well equippedlab. That's a tremendousopportunity, gift. Not many people have that. I wonder sometimes whether some scientists at least didn't get spoiled by all those very rich years, post-Sputnik years. I don't know. Probably not. our best scientists today have got exactly the same outlookthat we did then. It's the correct outlook,to take that opportunity while you've got that opportunity. In fact,I think that's exactly what happenedduring the first couple of years of the Reagan Administration. We had to lay offpeople and the budget got cut. It was very bad. We went down a lot, and yet, morale stayed high. Ray Kammer and I triedto lookinto this to find out why it was so. We thought we might have done something right. But it turned out to be that scientists became very self-reliant and were encouraged to be. We got Other Agency money. That helped a lot. But instead of hanging around at thecomer of the hall or in the coffeeroom moaning and groaning about what might happen-theyjust didn't do that. It seems as though theyjust said, "Well, I don't know if lightening is going to strike. If it will, so long as I've got a lab and a job I'm going to work my butt offto make a reputation, because that's the way I'll be able to hang in there and keep my career going." And that's what they seemed to do. Theydidn't gossip and waste time. They just got busy and we became very productive and morale stayed high. That's just human behavior. I don't take any credit for that. That's the way it should be.
Beal The projects that you worked on in those first years. Were any of them ones that you chose to do yourself?
Ambler Oh, yes. Well, the particular experimentswe did in temperaturemeasurement, Ralph and I decided, really Ralph had decided, but the nuclear orientation ones we did were all my choosing with Georges Temmer. And there were some other ones we did on what we called spin-spin relaxation that were mine. The superconductivity, well, I don't know that it was mine, but it was as a result of my casting around for some new things to do and getting Cohen to come in and give the colloquium.
Beal I'm just looking over some of the things you were working on back in those days. You talked about the temperature scales and quantitative determinations, antiferromagnetic transmission in paramagnetic salts-
Ambler Yes, those were our ideas, Ralph particularly.
Beal Existing theories of magnetic interaction in solids.
Ambler Let me see that. Yes, those were all experiments that Ralph and I did in magnetic cooling.
9 Beal Quite a list.
Ambler Yes. I forgethow many publications I had. By now, it's not a tremendous number according to what some people do, but at that time, and for that length of time, it was.
Beal You probably had some 30 or 40 publications by that time, didn't you?
Ambler More than that, I think, somewhat more than that. Maybe 40, maybe 50, I don't remember.
Beal I need to get a current list of your publications. I have one up to about 1974, I think, and that's where it stops.
Ambler Peggy has one. Yes, well, it did stop then, but Peggy has a list of talks. I gave a lot of talks, but they weren't scientific talks.
Beal It seems as your published articles and your talks now are more in the administrativeor sometimes even legislative line.
Ambler Yes, today I have to talk about the Bureau and about the Bureau's programs, but I always put it in the context of technology and technology policy, and the relationship of technology to the economy, and the importance of technology and industryto reversing thebalance of payments, thatsort of thing, which I consider crucialto thecountry as a whole.
Beal That's quite a differencefrom before. I can understand them now.
Ambler Well, I spent a lot of time talking with people like Greg Tassey, Ken Gordon, and Elaine Bunten-Mines. They helpedme with getting the information.Many of us in senior management have a lot of ideas about it. I was speaking about these few years being very significant for the Bureau as an institution. I think one of the manifestations of that is that people like myself, or the members of theExecutive Board, when we go out and give speeches,we speakwith much better confidence and assertion, and don't feel that we're taking our signals from anybody else. We feel as though we know what we're talking about and have enough sense to say, and it's all related to our mission. Whereas before,when you had the Department of Energy and energy issues, you had the environment and the EPA, you had consumer productsand protection and you had the Consumer ProductSafety commission, we had all these things we were working on that were somebody else's job, basically. We didn't talk much about our support for industry, whereas now we talk about that and that's our job and nobody else's, so it's understandable.
Beal Well, we'll get together again and talk about when you were Director of the Institute for Basic Standards. That, of course, was strictlyadministrative. About the programs thatwere going on and the problems withthat, and carrying out other people's programs.
IO Ambler Yes. Theseyears, if you can get Ralph Hudson, he comes over from time to time, probably [Karl] Kessler would know when he's coming. I might, but Kessler would have a better chance. He might be willing to sit down with you and give you his version of those earlier years. Of course, I'd certainly talk to Ray Hayward about the parity experiments and how he got involved and what his perception of it was.
Beal O.K.
Ambler And Dale Hoppes, too. Ray has some fairly strong opinions that I think you ought to get down.
Beal O.K. It seems that the St. Louis Exposition in 1904 really started something with the hydrogen liquefier.
Ambler Yes, and I think that we have, in some sense, come to the end of the line then, because the low temperature research as such is not as important to us as it was. But it's not an expanding field. It's changed, and it's changed because everybody learned how to do it and it's not a specialty any more as low temperature, per se. Low temperature is just a technique like a microscopeis a technique. But everybodyuses liquid helium now. But anyway, you're quite right. The significantthing is that the Bureau was at the forefront of the whole development of low temperature physics in the United States, not only here, but later on, of course, in Boulder and with the application of cryogenics to weaponry, and the bubble chamber, and hydrogen in space. So the Bureau has a reputation second to none when it comes to what its contribution has been in low temperature, physics and cryogenic engineering.
Beal How closely did you keep track of or work with the Boulder cryogenics people?
Ambler Hardly at all. There was some back and forth and good relationships with friends, but they were working on the engineering aspects of hydrogen liquefaction and hydrogen use. That was just intellectual interest only. It wasn't related directly to what we were doing and what we were doing wasn't related directly to what they were doing. But the Cryogenics Engineering Division, as it was called, has beena very valuable research in helping us build chemical engineering. It was a thing that nobodyreally thought it was a very, well, a lot of peoplethought it wasn't a very good idea, but you could see then that cryogenic engineering was coming to the end of the line, too, and that we had to do something else. It was those people that had the engineering experience that would enable us to make that transition. So it may have come to the end of the line, but it foundedanother dynasty now, in the chemical technology.
Beal Quite a going concern.
Ambler It's taken us a long time to build it up, but it's starting to go now.
Beal That's one worth exploring in another interview.
Ambler Jess Hord is head of that. I don't know what he was when I first met him, but he's a descendant, as it were, from Dudley Chelton and fromJoe [RobertJ.] Conuccini and Bascom Birmingham and that crowd. Bascom Birmingham and 35 Russell Scott were the people that got the-Russell had been in Washington and he went out there and hired Bascom and away they went.
11 Beal I talked to Bascom Birmingham last year when I was in Boulder.
Ambler Did you? A great guy, Bascom.
Beal Yes, he is. I have seen him once since then when he was back here.
Ambler Yes, I know I've always been happy working with Bascom.
Beal The Boulder group is a very god group, I think, overall. Everyone out there is so helpfl. Not that they're not here. Tey are. But they just have what seems like a diferent outlok and perspctive on things. Mayb it's living in Boulder.
Ambler Yes, it's much more relaxing. I always remembr taking my youngest son out to Colorado Springs. He went to Colorado State University and we got there in Denver and rented a car and drove up to not Colorado Springs, Fort Collins. We drove up there and I had the air conditioning on on the way up and I parked the car and we unloaded it. I saw water coming fom under, which you get with air conditioning, but I said, "I wonder what that is?" I looked under and Johnny was a little embarrassed, I think, by his fther. He said, "Dad, relax, you're in 'rado." And they are much more relaxed out there.
Beal Yes, my brother gos to Fort Collins fequently. He works fr Hewlett-Packard and he loves Fort Collins. That's one of te pleasures of his job.
Ambler Tat's where WWV is.
Beal It's a goo place.
Ambler Well, that kind of a relationship exists. It's that sort of thing that you can tace over and over again at the Bureau. It makes it what it is. More of a family business than a big organization.
Beal That's the way I've always flt. The coopration is fantastic. You just don't find it-
Ambler It takes pople a fw years, as much as 5 years, to really feel that they're a part of the family and know what the traditions of the place are, the style, but after that they do. If they don't like it they generally leave bfre then.
Beal Tat I've noticed.
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