Smashing Atoms and Expectations - Entrepreneurial Science and the Dawn of Publicly-Funded High-Tech...

Smashing Atoms and Expectations

Entrepreneurial Science and the Dawn of Publicly-Funded

High-Tech Venture Capital at Robert J. Van de Graaff's

High Voltage Engineering Corporation

Edward Fenner

13 August 2014

Major Research Paper for

Master of Arts, Science and Technology Studies

York University, Toronto

Research Supervisor: Dr. Katharine Anderson

Second Reader: Dr. Edward Jones-Imhotop

Smashing Atoms and Expectations: Entrepreneurial Science and the

Dawn of Publicly-Funded High-Tech Venture Capital at

Robert J. Van de Graaff's High Voltage Engineering Corporation

©2014 Edward Fenner

This major research paper (MRP) is submitted to the Department of Science and Technology Studies

and the Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University towards fulfillment of the requirements for the

degree of:

MASTER OF ARTS, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY STUDIES

Permission is hereby granted to: a) YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, the Faculty of Science, the

Faculty of Graduate Studies, the Division of Natural Science, the Department of Science and

Technology Studies, and the Institute for Science and Technology Studies to lend or sell copies of this

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CANADA to reproduce, lend, distribute, or sell copies of this major research paper anywhere in the

world in microform, paper or electronic formats and to authorize or procure the reproduction, loan,

distribution or sale of copies of this major research paper anywhere in the world in microform, paper or

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The author reserves the same rights and other publication rights, and neither the major research paper

nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author’s written

permission. Significant portions of this paper, in revised form, may appear as journal articles or book

chapters.

Table of Contents

ii Dedication

ii Acknowledgements

ii Funding

iii Abstract

iii Keywords

iv Conferences

v Glossary

vi List of Figures

viii Methodology

1 Introduction

14 A Brief History

19 Part I: Assembling the Team and Re-engineering MIT

25 Part II: The Precursors: The TVA Deal and the Laboratory at Round Hill

41 Part III: High Voltage Engineering Corporation, ARDC, and the Business of

Selling Particle Accelerators

73 Part IV: The Entreprevirtuous Scientist – Van de Graaff's Demo-Paternalistic

Leadership Style

88 Van de Graaff and the Modern Scientist in Traweek, Galison, and Shapin

98 Conclusion

101 Postscript

104 Appendices

108 References

112 Other Reading, Major Collections, and Miscellaneous

i

Dedication

This paper is dedicated to the memory of my late mentor Dr. Richard Jarrell of York University who

guided me through much of the early history of physics, MIT's history, and of the history of big

science, little science, and everything in between.

Acknowledgements

This paper was researched part-time between 2010 and 2014. I am grateful to my wife Linda for her

support, encouragement, patience, and love. I am deeply grateful to John and William Van de Graaff

and their families for opening up their homes and lives to me and my research. I am thankful for

student colleagues for their enthusiasm, interest, and encouragement: Jordan Bimm, Ray McKinnon,

Francesc Rodriguez Mansilla, and Hilary Moore.

I also would like to thank faculty and staff at York University for their generous time, knowledge,

and efforts: Richard Jarrell, Bernard Lightman, Ian Slater, Joan Steigerwald, Ernst Hamm, James

Elwick, Katharine Anderson, Kenton Kroker, Edward Jones-Imhotep, Ruthanna Dyer, Paul Delaney,

Peter Paolucci, John Dupuis, Sheila Embleton, Brian Poser, Steve Alsop, Kathryn Denning, Paul

Fayter, Sophie Bury, Patti Ryan, and April Josephs. I would also like to thank Gregory Good, Joe

Anderson, Melanie Mueller, Savannah Gignac, and Stephanie Jankowski of the American Institute of

Physics; Mary Markey of the Smithsonian Institution Archives; Paul McCutcheon of the National

Museum of American History Library; Mike Alexander and Daniel Davis of the Museum of Science in

Boston; Ariel Weinberg of the MIT Museum; Nora Murphy of the Institute Archives and Special

Collections (MIT); and the staff of the Ontario Science Centre's Van de Graaff electricity

demonstration. Sincere apologies to anyone missed.

Funding

The research of this paper was supported significantly by several sources for which I am greatly

appreciative:

• Friends of the American Institute of Physics who provided a grant-in-aid to visit the Niels Bohr

Library and Archives and to visit the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives – both at the American

Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, USA. This trip also provided me with the

opportunity to perform research at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and at the National

Museum of American History Library – both in Washington, DC.

• The Scientific Instrument Society who provided a grant-in-aid to enable me to visit the Museum

of Science in Boston where Van de Graaff's original Round Hill devices are now located; and to

visit both the MIT Museum and the Institute Archives & Special Collections (at MIT).

• The Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Graduate Student Association of York University and

to George Mason University for providing conference travel support funds.

• A patron of physics history who wishes to remain anonymous and who provided funds to defray

my travel costs to perform research.

ii

Abstract

Robert Jemison Van de Graaff is known as a pioneering experimental atomic physicist best known

for inventing the Van de Graaff electrostatic generator (also referred to as a particle accelerator) and the

insulating-core transformer (ICT). Van de Graaff, together with John George Trump, founded High

Voltage Engineering Corporation (aka HVEC or HVE) which, for about a decade, was the world's

leading manufacturer (mass producer) of particle accelerators – producing over 500 units over the

course of four decades. The company was primarily funded by the then-new concept of publicly-

funded venture capital embodied by the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC or

ARD). HVEC was thus the first high-technology firm and first corporation ever under this schema to

be successful. However, the genesis and evolution of HVEC is less well known and is significant in

that it exemplifies entrepreneurial science – perhaps entrepreneurial Big Science – and demonstrates

prototypical changes in the relationships between universities, government, and industry – particularly

at MIT. HVEC's development story has never been fully explored. At best, bits and pieces of its history

have appeared in other texts regarding other matters. This paper is believed to be the first to thread

much of that history together into one narrative and to combine it with new research into archival

materials to tell the story more fully and to indicate that Robert J. Van de Graaff was involved in an

even earlier almost unknown venture-capital-like proposal involving the Tennessee Valley Authority

(TVA) more than a decade before HVEC that possibly laid the groundwork and revealed the problems

that needed to be ironed out before later ventures could possibly have a chance to succeed. Framing this

fascinating time in early nuclear physics history are Steven Shapin's models of entrepreneurial

scientists, Peter Galison's studies of instruments and subcultures in modern physics, and Sharon

Traweek's insights into physics cultures and subcultures.

Keywords and Key Phrases

entreprevirtuous, entrepreneur, physics, physicist, physicists, entrepreneurial physics, entrepreneurial

physicist, entrepreneurial physicists, High Voltage Engineering Corporation, HVEC, Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, MIT, Van de Graaff, Van de Graaff generator, Van de Graaff accelerator,

atom smasher, atom smashers, nuclear physics, nuclear physics history, atomic physics, atomic

physics history, particle accelerators, particle accelerator manufacturing, venture capital, venture

capital history, Robert Jemison Van de Graaff, Robert J. Van de Graaff, John Van de Graaff, William

Van de Graaff, John George Trump, John G. Trump, John George Trump, William W. Buechner, Bill

Buechner, Route 128, Boston, Cambridge, Massachusetts, technology, World War II, Vannevar Bush,

Karl T. Compton, Karl Taylor Compton, OSRD, American Research and Development Corporation,

ARD, ARDC, Round Hill, Colonel Edward Green, Research Corporation for Science Advancement,

RCSA.

iii

Conferences

Portions of this Major Research Paper were presented at the following events:

26 May 2014, Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science (CSHPS) 2014

Congress at Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada. Topic: "Smashing Atoms and

Making Money: Robert J. Van de Graaff's High Voltage Engineering Corporation — Methods

and Challenges of Marketing Peaceful Uses for Particle Accelerators During the Cold War."

02 May 2014, Localities: Science and Technology in Places, Spaces, and Times at York

University's 4th annual Graduate Student Conference, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Topic: "No

Clean Room Required. Developing and Manufacturing Robert J. Van de Graaff's Electrostatic

Particle Accelerators for Science and Profit in the American Northeast."

05 April 2014, 14th annual STGlobal Consortium Science and Technology in Society

Conference at The National Academies, Washington, DC, USA. Topic: "Smashing Atoms and

Smashing Sales — The Prospects and Perils of Manufacturing Particle Accelerators for Science

and Profit."

26 May 2014, Cornell University's Northeast Graduate Student Conference in Science and

Technology Studies, Ithaca, New York, USA. Topic: "Smashing Atoms and Expectations —

Entrepreneurial Science and the Dawn of High-Tech Venture Capital at Robert J. Van de

Graaff's High Voltage Engineering Corporation."

iv

Glossary

AIP American Institute of Physics

ARD / ARDC American Research and Development Corporation

AMRE Air Ministry Research Establishment

CERN Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council

for Nuclear Research)

CMR Committee on Medical Research

DEC Digital Equipment Corporation

HVE / HVEC High Voltage Engineering Corporation (aka High Voltage)

HVL High Voltage Laboratory (at MIT)

ICT Insulating-core transformer

Linac Linear particle accelerator

MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MOS Museum of Science (Boston)

NEC National Electrostatics Corporation

NSRC National Securities & Research Corporation

ONR Office of Naval Research

OSRD Office of Scientific Research and Development

PPI Plan Position Indicator

RCSA Research Corporation for Science Advancement

RDF Radio Direction-Finding

SLAC Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

TRIUMF TRI-University Meson Facility

TVA Tennessee Valley Authority

WARF Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation

v

List of Figures

HVEC logo and wordmark (title page)

1. Robert J. Van de Graaff demonstrates a scale model of the Round Hill device to MIT alumni in

New York City.

2. Previously unseen portrait of Robert Jemison Van de Graaff.

3. John George Trump.

4. The Famous Van de Graaff Generator at Round Hill.

5. Colonel Edward Howland Green.

6. William (Bill) Buechner.

7. Robert J. Van de Graaff's personal copy of the “Atomic Bomb” issue of LIFE magazine that

featured an article on his device.

8. Denis Morrell Robinson.

9. General Georges Doriot.

10. Typical imagery and an early HVEC logo paired with one of its subsidiary companies on HVEC

literature. Note that Van de Graaff's name is a registered trademark.

11. A typical horizontal layout of a laboratory using a Van de Graaff accelerator.

12. HVEC brochure booklet circa late 1950s

13. Robert J. Van de Graaff chuckling in his office at HVEC.

14. The original Round Hill prototype at the Theater of Electricity in the Museum of Science in

Boston, Massachusetts.

Photo/ Diagram of HVEC's Route 128 headquarters in Burlington, MA (end page)

vi

Methodology

Founded in 1946, the original High Voltage Engineering Corporation (HVEC) faded away in the

1980s after selling over 500 particle accelerators. However, the Dutch subsidiary carries on with the

original core business. HVEC is a fascinating and historic corporation in many ways but a complete

history of this organization is beyond the scope of this research paper. This paper will focus on the

genesis of HVEC, its influences on MIT patent policy, its influences on university-government-industry

relations, and its influences on publicly-funded venture capital.

Unlike Sharon Traweek, I cannot sit in the lab of my physicist subjects and observe their

behaviour. I cannot sit among them and experience their culture first hand. I wish I could. I cannot even

ask any of them a question. My principal characters are all deceased. Long gone. They were all men;

regular, yet extraordinarily-gifted men who came together at a certain place and time to do some

remarkable things to further the cause of science. They may have worked in the Ivory Tower but they

never seemed to act much like they did. None of them were Promethean heroes1 but they were

searching for truth.

The genesis of this paper began as a serendipitous opportunity to investigate the personal papers

of late American physicist Robert Jemison Van de Graaff in the possession (and at the behest) of his

two sons John and William (Bill) in Northampton, MA and Burr Ridge, IL, respectively. That led to

several trips to photographically record everything they had (over 9,000 pages of documentation and

photos) and to dub an old reel of 1/4” magnetic audio tape which contained samples of Robert talking

about various things and a tribute by Denis Robinson to the board of HVEC after Robert's death in

1967. This reel was long-forgotten and is believed to be the only recordings of Van de Graaff's voice

known to still exist.

Additional trips were needed to fill in other pieces of Van de Graaff's story but also that of High

1 Traweek, 2.

vii

Voltage Engineering Corporation which no longer exists in the United States. Research trips were made

to Boston, MA to the Museum of Science; to Cambridge, MA to the MIT Museum and twice to the

Institute Archives & Special Collections at MIT. I also made a research trip to visit the Niels Bohr

Library and Archives and to visit the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives – both at the American Institute of

Physics (AIP) in College Park, MD. On that same trip, I ventured into Washington, DC to conduct

research into HVEC, Robert J. Van de Graaff, and his eponymous device at Smithsonian Institution

Archives and at the National Museum of American History Library. This paper will concentrate on one

of Robert Van de Graaff's key inventions: the Van de Graaff generator (accelerator). It will not discuss

the development of his other major contribution to electrical engineering technology, his insulating-

core transformer (ICT).

Oral histories from AIP and interview recordings made in 1984 by John Van de Graaff with John

Trump and Bill Buechner form much of the new materials adding to the narrative involving the

operations of the High Voltage Laboratory at MIT and of High Voltage Engineering Corporation.

Additional materials from many other sources known and previously unknown were collated to

develop a new narrative.

In this new semi-biographical account, I hope to provide both an origin story for HVEC and an

early history, but also to explain why this is important to the history of nuclear physics. I also shall

attempt to explain why it is also important to the development of high-technology venture capital

funding; and important to the development of major changes in the relationships between universities

(MIT in particular), industry, and government.

This paper is believed to be the first to thread much of that history together in one narrative and to

combine it with new research into archival materials to tell the story more completely. 2 Perhaps the

most important aspect of this narrative is how it demonstrates HVEC's development and to indicate that

2 HVEC's development story has never been fully explored. At best, bits and pieces of its history have appeared in other

texts focused on other subjects such as venture capital history, MIT history, physics history, and so on.

viii

Robert J. Van de Graaff and his technology were involved in an even earlier, almost unknown venture-

capital-like scheme more than a decade before HVEC that possibly laid the groundwork and revealed

the problems that needed to be ironed out before later ventures could have a chance to succeed.

Framing this fascinating time in early nuclear physics history are Steven Shapin's models of

entrepreneurial scientists to which I will determine if they apply to Van de Graaff and his team or, as I

will suggest, perhaps a new term might be more fitting to describe these scientist-engineers in their

situation; and if Shapin's time frame for entrepreneurial scientist should go back at least several

decades earlier. Also framing this narrative are Peter Galison's assertions of instruments and

subcultures in modern physics and his influential approaches to the history of physics. They will serve

as a touchstone on questions of materialism, material culture, microculture, and professional identity

with the gentleman scientists from MIT's High Voltage and Round Hill laboratories but also, of course,

from HVEC. This narrative shall also be framed with Sharon Traweek's anthropological discussions of

physicists, physics cultures, and how their communities produce knowledge or serve that production.

Other frames to bear in mind when reading this paper are the history of physics and its technologies,

the history of reliability, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the rise of the American

military-industrial complex, the history of economics and investments, the boom in postwar American

pride, power, and wealth; and public fears and fascination with atomic bombs, energy, and power.

ix

Introduction

The 1930s through to the late 1950s were an exciting time for experimental nuclear physics.

Following on the heels of Ernest Rutherford's 1919 experiment in which he was the first person to

deliberately transmute one element (nitrogen) into another (oxygen) by the uncontrolled disintegration

of a nucleus, the race to split the atom – if it was a race at all – was on. In England, at Cambridge

University in 1928, Rutherford's students John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton created a device – a

particle accelerator – to accelerate protons at a target (lithium) to deliberately and in a controlled

fashion, cause a transuranic effect – the artificial creation of helium. In 1932, they were the first to split

the atom on purpose. Slightly before this same period, at Oxford University, Rhodes scholar and

doctoral student Robert Jemison Van de Graaff was working out the design for his own atom-splitting

device which was a modern, technological expansion of electrostatic generating apparatuses that went

back centuries.1 After graduating in 1928 and moving to Princeton University, in 1929, he built his first

electrostatic generator which produced 80,000 volts. In 1931, Van de Graaff and his equipment moved

to MIT where he promptly built a 7,000,000 volt generator.

In order to “smash”2 an atom, higher and higher energies are required to pry deeper and deeper

into atomic and sub-atomic structures. Additionally, the ability to tightly focus and control (attenuate)

the beam enables more precise targeting, execution, and results. Cockcroft & Walton devices had high

energies, but the beam was not as focused nor could they be as well controlled. The same applies to

Ernest Lawrence's early cyclotrons. The Van de Graaff accelerator, in contrast, had both. For its time, it

produced very high voltages and enabled researchers a high degree of attenuation.3 This gave Robert J.

Van de Graaff and his team a technical advantage and superior scientific instrument over their academic

1 A brief history can be found in the section “The Ancestors of the Van de Graaff Machine” in “1,000,000 Volts – The Van de Graaff Generator – An Electrostatic Machine for the 20th Century” by Paolo Brenni.

2 The term “smash” is the colloquial term used generally and by the media in particular to describe bombardment of targets with a stream of high-energy, high-speed particles such as electrons, ions, or elements.

3 An excellent (and technical) comparison between the Cockroft-Walton, the Van de Graaff, and their variations can be found in this CERN paper “Electrostatic Acclerators” by F. Hinterberger: http://cds.cern.ch/record/1005042/files/p95.pdf

1

competitors at the time and, much later, when they commercialized the device.

Figure 1: Robert J. Van de Graaff demonstrates a scale model of the Round Hill device to MIT alumni in New York City.(Sourrce: MIT Department of Physics website).

Size did not really matter, but it sure did impress. Cockcroft-Waltons were fairly large but could fit

in a one- or two-storey room, in most cases. Van de Graaff's first generators were human-sized

demonstrator models (such as in Figure 1 above). Once at MIT, he and his team built the monstrously

large device (approx. 60 feet or 18 metres tall) that is so famously associated with his name and which

still exists as a working historical exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston (see Figure 14).

Originally built at Round Hill in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, it would eventually be redesigned into a

thoroughly unexciting large cylinder (see Figure 10 and 11). In all cases, these machines shrunk,

compacted, and increased in power until an optimum commercially-viable and useful size and design

was settled upon (and, ultimately, dictated by the practical limitations of the design's energy output).

Once energies exceeded the range of the Van de Graaff accelerator's capabilities, larger machines

mostly built underground and many miles long would then take over the spotlight (SLAC, TRIUMF,

2

and CERN, for example). Then, once and for all, size did matter.

Van de Graaff's focus at this time was primarily as a designer/ of scientific instruments and as an

experimenter – but doing so two decades before the “renaissance”4 of scientific instrumentation. He

made the machines bigger and better but it was mostly others that used them to smash atoms for pure

atomic research. Van de Graaff and his team did perform some research at this time and did publish

papers but this was between developments in improving the generator/accelerator.5

Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932,

Ernest Lawrence designed and his student Stanley Livingston built the first cyclotron. Unlike the linear

accelerator designs of Cockcroft-Walton and of Van de Graaff, the cyclotron used a spiral path inside a

magnetic field to accelerate particles. It was compact and energy efficient but not yet very powerful.

Cyclotrons would eventually surpass the linear devices but in the early years, the linear accelerators

(aka Linacs) were king. This was big science atomic physics on a small budget.

At first, the plans for the Van de Graaff generator (aka accelerator) were freely available. They

were published academically6 and distributed freely. Van de Graaff and Trump were, at this time,

virtuous scientists sharing their research for the benefit of science and scientific progress. Anybody

could make one and many physicists around the world did just that. It was a collegial thing to do and it

was the scientific norm of this community.7 One such scientist who built his own Van de Graaff

accelerator was Merle Tuve – who would later gain fame as a pioneer in radar development, in

electronically-activated proximity fuses, and as the founding director of the Johns Hopkins University

4 Galison, 545. Galison says this renaissance was between 1952 and 1964. 5 The terms generator and accelerator are used interchangeably to describe the device which, in truth, does both. However,

early literature called the device a Van de Graaff generator while later writings tend to call it a Van de Graaff accelerator. It is somewhat dependent on the circumstances of the writing but either term is used interchangeably quite often.

6 Van de Graaff, Robert J., "A 1,500,000 Volt Electrostatic Generator," Physical Review, Volume 38, 1931, pp. 1919-1920. And R. J. Van de Graaff, K. T. Compton, and L. C. Van Atta, "The electrostatic production of high voltage for nuclear investigations," Physical review, vol. 43, no. 3, February 1933, pp. 149-157.

7 It was, essentially, part of their culture. Trade secrecy would come later with commercialization and corporatization. However, at this time, it was every scientist for himself (very few women, if any, were engaged in accelerator building at this time).

3

of Applied Physics Laboratory.

In 1933, back in the East, Merle Tuve worked at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the

Carnegie Institute of Washington, DC and would be the first to get a Van de Graaff generator to reach 1

Megavolt (1 MeV or 1 million electron volts8) outside of MIT, in 1933. According to Tuve's oral

history transcripts at the American Institute of Physics, he and his team could have actually beaten

Cockcroft and Walton in being the first to split the atom. Unfortunately, they did not have the day and

night dedication to their lab work with the Van de Graaff machine at the time. Tuve explains:

“after we got this machine, the first 2-meter Van de Graaff, to work in June 1932, we didn’t have a building to put it into. [...] We knew this was going to take all winter, so we started to build a smaller machine. We just about had this 1-meter unit ready to run, had actually run it, in fact, when the news broke in the newspapers that Cockcroft and Walton had disintegrated lithium. It wasn’t a week later that we were making observations. We had fabricated all this thing from June till October, and there it sat. We hadn’t turned it on to the targets. So we turned it on on simple targets, and, sure enough, alpha particles. “

And on hearing of the discovery of the neutron...

“In 1932 we had the proton source ready. That was a separate job to work out, you know. Nobody had made any such thing as a beam proton source. So we worked that out. We had the Van de Graaff, the second one, all built-tubes, everything, targets, detection apparatus, shields—golly. And then we were tardy because we went home to sleep at night instead of ants in our pants... Well, that’s one. Then came artificial radioactivity. That was the second one. There I felt really ashamed, that we hadn’t just looked for electrons from the targets we’d been bombarding.”9

Tuve was reluctant to publish a “negative result”10 and described himself as a “funny guy on

publication, always have been” - preferring to take his time because things were “going to be there next

year and the year after. Why in the world publish this stuff that we know is so incomplete and

8 Measurements are given in Mega-Volts MV and Mega electron Volts MeV. There is a slight difference between the two values depending on the charge unit type and amount and elementary charge value. Depending on the literature, they are sometimes and incorrectly substituted for one another. In this paper, I have used whatever was written or said. Where it was unclear, I made best efforts to determine which was most likely being expressed.

9 Merle Tuve, Oral History Interview, 1967 March 30, AIP, OH 4920.10 Ibid.

4

uncertain? Let’s wait and measure it right.”11 Had Tuve a bit more ambition and discipline a matter of

months earlier, it might well have been him and his colleagues using a Van de Graaff generator to first

split the atom and cause an artificial transmutation! Tuve would have to settle for second place:

confirmation of the existence of the neutron.

Tuve, like many scientists of the day, was using a Van de Graaff accelerator he and his team built

based on the designs published by Van de Graaff. While Cockcroft and Walton's design was the first

device to split the atom and was a fine voltage multiplier used as an accelerator, it was a more complex

design than the Van de Graaff and therefore could not be built as easily nor as cost-effectively (that is,

as cheaply) as the Van de Graaff. While the race to be the first to split the atom was now history, the

field of experimental atomic science had only just been born. There were plenty of other atoms to split,

elements to transmute, and isotopes to be identified, and plenty to go around for the small number of

physicists in this nascent field.

While the Cockcroft-Walton was a good machine, the Van de Graaff was better. Much better.

Successful scientific experiments – particularly those in atomic research – require as few variables as

possible to ensure repeatable outcomes to verify results. The early Cockcroft-Walton devices were

more blunt and less precise – rather like using a hammer than a laser – to execute the task of splitting

atoms. For this accelerator, the voltages, and therefore currents of the electron beam, could not be

regulated as precisely as desired. They act as the hammer blow but the more accurate the hammer, the

better the results. The Van de Graaff devices could control the beam extremely well. This meant much

more likelihood of accurate, repeatable experimentation. It also meant very fine experimentation could

be done at myriad voltage levels, currents, and so forth and get very fine results – far finer than could

be done with any other accelerator available. Cockcroft-Waltons would improve but could never quite

catch Van de Graaff's precision and thus not quite realize the commercial potential, either.

11 Ibid.

5

The genius of Van de Graaff's eponymous accelerator was its very simple design and very reliable

output. Electrostatic science was not new, of course, it had been around for centuries. Simple

electrostatic generators (devices that generate static electricity) were also known for a few hundred

years. So why was Van de Graaff's design special? Van de Graaff figured out a way to create an

electrostatic charge of very high potential that could be collected then discharged or directed for useful

purposes. The parts were simple. A stock electric motor attached to a paper or silk belt travelling over a

pulley which created free-electrons (static charges). At the other end was a metal comb that collected

these free electrons which then travelled along the circuit to a polished aluminum ball. The electrons

gathered on the surface in massive numbers and when discharged created lightning rather like a Tesla

coil.12 Bigger generators moving at faster rates could generate bigger charges. Once the external ball

design was internalized into a series of vacuum tubes, the charge became a beam – a steady,

controllable beam of protons (or neutrons, ions, or whatever) that could be pointed at a specific target

for very specific amount of time.

To physicists, this was very exciting. For little money and modest effort, they too could have a

working particle accelerator in their university laboratory and get down to basic atomic research.

Research meant opportunities for scientific discoveries, fame (possibly), funding, and more

opportunities. It was an open frontier – a Wild West of science. Theories could be tested and in the

testing, new elements and isotopes discovered. Also possible were new medicines and medical

treatments. Radiation was still a mysterious force not well understood. It had fascinating properties that

were potentially beneficial including its use to destroy cancer cells and, potentially, to destroy much

larger targets.13 Peering into this Pandora's Box was the subject of much scientific and ethical debate

12 An amusing side effect would make the hair stand on end of anyone who had a hand on the ball during the generation process. This effect is how many schoolchildren learn about static electricity at school or at science centres to this day.

13 Around this time, Nikola Tesla was positing an energy-beam weapon that could shoot down enemy aircraft (Time magazine, 23 July 1934). Two decades earlier, in 1914, novelist H.G. Wells was the first to suggest an atomic bomb destroying cities in his novel The World Set Free but the physics to realize this was a few decades in the future.

6

(and still is in the 21st Century, especially re the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN).

What other secrets of nature could atom smashing reveal? Taking apart the building blocks of nature to

see what they were made of was one thing. Atomic energy, atomic weapons, X-ray machines, and other

atomic devices were another another matter; especially in the minds of the public who had little

understanding of what this new science would bring other than what they were told. The ghosts of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki competed with claims of shiny new atomic technologies of tomorrow that

would make your life so much better. For better or worse, the Atomic Age had arrived, but winning

over the public would be a challenge.

Van de Graaff's technology played a part in the atomic age. It had a small hand in the development

of the first atomic bombs but, at the same time, it identified numerous isotopes that were beneficial to

scientific understanding and also to medical therapies yet to come. Van de Graaff accelerator

technology also played a key role in two other areas: It helped fundamentally change university-

industry relationships and it also was at the centre of change in how high-technology corporations were

funded; that is, by publicly-funded venture capital.

To investigate these stories, it is important to investigate who created and developed this

technology and how they came about, to explore the influences they had on university-industry-

government relations and vice versa, and to examine how this unique technology was uniquely funded.

Equally important to this story is to examine how this all set, or at least significantly contributed to

establishing, a model for organizing, operating, and funding new and peculiar high-technology start-up

corporations for decades to come.

u

Part I focuses on the key men behind the technology, how the team assembled, and the genesis of

7

their research, work, and production environments. This will establish the principal players, a couple of

supporting players, and the locations that underpin much of the narrative. Robert J. Van de Graaff rose

to fame at MIT at the time MIT was being re-engineered by president Karl T. Compton. Compton

sought to build, promote, and exploit Van de Graaff's technology as a contribution to new ways of

commercialization of MIT-based technology and as part of a new paradigm for relationships between

universities, governments, and industry. The commercialization of Van de Graaff's technologies would

help establish a new funding paradigm for technological business start-ups: publicly-funded venture

capital. Three other men are key to the early years of this story: Vannevar Bush, John Slater, and John

Trump. Bush was the dean of the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT and would assist

Compton in executing his vision for MIT. Bush would move on to high levels of government and

influence federal government policies on science and funding of scientific research that would affect

universities generally – and MIT in particular. Slater, dean of the Department of Physics at MIT, was

not so visionary nor influential to the growth of the High Voltage Laboratory (HVL) nor Van de

Graaff's technology. In contrast to busy, Slater either did not understand or appreciate the importance of

what Van de Graaff was doing or, perhaps, just did not get along with (or maybe was jealous of) the

famous scientist in his department. Lastly, John G. Trump, who became Van de Graaff's lifelong friend,

was key to creating practical (and later, marketable) applications of Van de Graaff's technologies. His

work with Van de Graaff as doctoral student then Van de Graaff's lab partner at MIT's High Voltage

Laboratory and Round Hill Laboratory, and finally as business partner at High Voltage Engineering

Corporation indicate the transitions and linkages between Van de Graaff's academic and business

careers.

Part II shows how MIT president Karl Taylor Compton continued to re-engineer MIT in a way that

was favourable – if not influenced – by Van de Graaff's technologies through and examination of two

technical initiatives that can be considered key precursors to HVEC. These two MIT initiatives – one

8

failed, one successful – were seminal to the development and success of the company and its

technologies and may have been a precursor to the funding and relationship changes soon to come. The

failure was a power generation and distribution technology opportunity principally between MIT, the

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Van de Graaff, and Trump. The success was MIT's laboratory at

Round Hill. HVEC was the beneficiary of these two initiatives because they acted as test cases for what

would later become HVEC. Both the TVA deal and Round Hill required a new paradigms of relations

between industry, government, and academia – and to some extent, the media – but also both also

required unique funding models to make them viable.

At Round Hill, William Buechner, student, future lab partner and business partner, joined the team

and began his influence on the Van de Graaff-Trump partnership. These relationships show how the

working environment at Round Hill became the nexus of the teamwork that would form the core of

both HVL and HVEC, the first major research and development facility of Van de Graaff's

technologies, and of the way the team would be exposed to the demands of the press and how to handle

fame, investors, uncertain funding, and media relations.

These two projects demonstrate how HVEC was built upon pre-war initiativesas much as it was a

product of wartime relationships and networks between universities and government. The TVA deal

indicated a willingness of the government to consider and test Van de Graaff's untried technology on a

massive scale and and fund it in a new and unique way – a precursor and parallel of sorts to Doriot's

American Research and Development Corporation's (ARDC) support of commercializing Van de

Graaff's proven, but never mass-produced technologies. Before returning home to the HVL at MIT the

Round Hill laboratory site was both the proving ground to hash out the accelerator technology but also

the close quarters site of like-minded colleagues to hash out the working relationships, loyalties, and

friendships that would be the backbone of HVEC's technological brain trust and the first hints of

entrepreneurial potential.

9

World War II would soon come and some of the team would have temporarily split up, others shift

gears, and continue to research, develop, and build more accelerators to meet demand. These new pre-

war and wartime pressures plus heavy demand would foreshadow the skills and manufacturing

techniques they would need to launch themselves in business – essentially converting the academic and

virtuous environment of HVL for the industrial and commercial environment of HVEC.

Part III analyzes and focuses on four aspects of HVEC's history that illuminate the features,

challenges, and novel elements of their entrepreneurial science: innovative finances; patents, rights, and

licences; marketing, selling, and public/media relations; and competition. First and foremost is the

unique funding paradigm to be tested and HVEC would be the first high-technology firm selected for

this new, publicly-funded venture capital system. Within this new paradigm, HVEC was also the

vanguard in trying out a new stock-splitting arrangement when it began to turn a profit. This new era of

scientific entrepreneurship is perhaps best embodied in HVEC president Denis M. Robinson and

ARDC chairman Georges Doriot. Their working relationship would set the tone for the patient growth

of the nascent corporation and its subsequent rapid and profitable rise through the 1950s. Looking at

these two is especially useful to the understanding of the new paradigm of funding unusual, new

technology start-ups with publicly-funded venture capital. HVEC was the first of a small group of

peculiar high-technology firms that ARDC would fund and it would take Robinson's skilled leadership

and abilities to get the job done under great pressure. Robinson, a scientist and high-profile manager,

would replicate his World War II experience in managing complex scientific research and development

operations by bridging the gap between scientists and engineers on the one hand with management,

clients, and budgets on the other. In contrast, Doriot was a wise, but mostly hands-off kind of investor.

He would rarely meddle except when certain things either did not make sense to him, were costing

ARDC money, or HVEC processes were inefficient.

MIT's policies on patents, rights, and licences are linked to HVEC but also to Doriot's funding

10

demands for ARDC's investments. These policies were put into place by Karl Compton and were, in

turn, heavily influenced by his strong desires to remold MIT into an entrepreneur-friendly university

and the realities of the serious patent problems at the University of Wisconsin were making

international headlines.

The marketing and selling Van de Graaff particle accelerators is explored by the way HVEC

created their own literature but also in the way they handled media and public relations. How does one

go about selling a device to a very narrow market that only a small number of people understand? How

does one secure investment from the public and private sectors when they, at best, can barely

understand the technology or, at worst, may even fear it (or, at least, its kindred atomic cousin, the

atomic bomb). However, despite the fears of the Cold War, HVEC was able to leverage their technical

advantage and sell many accelerators and insulated core transformers. Their marketing strategy evolved

slowly and improvisationally as the company grew and flourished.

Lastly, HVEC had competitors. GE and Allis-Chalmers were its two major rivals through the

1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, National Electrostatics Corporation (NEC) became a huge competitor

and was formed by a former employee – Ray Herb – with information he is alleged to have stolen from

High Voltage. While HVEC had many competitors over the years including major conglomerates many

times their size, they were able to compete and often beat them in terms of sales and quality.

Part IV profiles HVEC's founder and chief scientist Robert J. Van de Graaff's leadership style, his

break from MIT, and the completion of his career and his life's work with HVEC. It begins with a close

assessment of Robert J. Van de Graaff himself and his role (and style) as a scientific leader in the new,

complex research environment of post-war USA. Van de Graaff can tell us much about a scientific

entrepreneurial culture at HVEC. He shows us a case of one academic who is not purely virtuous, not

exclusively a scientist-engineer, and not a straight-up capitalist entrepreneur either – more of a reluctant

one. Van de Graaff is a new hybrid, an entreprevirtuous scientist: keen to design and develop scientific

11

instruments for his commercial business, but equally free and keen to pursue his own scientific interests

using those instruments.

From 1946 through 1960, he would be tethered to both MIT and HVEC, filling dual roles as

professor/researcher at the former and chief scientist/entrepreneur at the latter. Van de Graaff's

leadership style was both democratic and paternalistic;14 and from 1960 until his death in 1967, he

would have no master but himself and no path save what he chose to research. There were always new

customers and designs for the accelerator to satisfy the demands of commerce, but he could also pursue

pure, virtuous research for the cause of expanding scientific knowledge and personal interest –

including his dream project of accelerating uranium on uranium.

Penultimately, this paper will deliver an analysis connecting this narrative to the works of

Shannon Traweek, Peter Galison, and Steven Shapin. Sharon Traweek's anthropological immersion into

and investigation of the culture of Japanese physics provides some interesting comparison's to the team

at HVL and HVEC in the United States. I am not an anthropologist, but Traweek would probably

describe Van de Graaff's and Trump's physics “style”15 as Japanese – taking greatest emphasis on

closely training the next generation of physicists – rather than American. Her book “is an account of

how high-energy physicists see their own world; how they have forged a research community for

themselves, how they turned novices into physicists, and how their community works to produce

knowledge”16 and broadly parallels my narrative. Like Traweek's, this narrative is framed, or perhaps

more influenced, in part by war; and with it: organization, money, power, and motivation. I will

compare Traweek's studies of community in Japan with the communities of pre-war HVL and post-war

HVEC.

Peter Galison offers insights into the material culture of physics and physicists and on professional

14 Democratic and paternalistic leadership terms are used in the business/industrial sense. 15 Traweek, 146-147.16 Traweek, prologue.

12

identity. In Image & Logic, Galison touches upon, very briefly, physicists Van de Graaff, John Trump,

and Ray Herb who are directly relevant to this narrative. However, Galison either ignores MIT's High

Voltage Laboratory or downplay's Van de Graaff's work in favour of larger, more conspicuous projects

such as the Rad Lab and Los Alamos. I feel this is not getting the full picture – especially when

discussing microcultures. I will explore his assertions and compare them with my findings to see if it is

reasonable to push back Galison's timeline for his renaissance of instrumentation.

Steven Shapin writes of scientific entrepreneurship, virtuous scientists, organization men, and the

environments in which they work. Like Galison, I feel he is missing part of the picture because he does

not go back far enough. Modern entrepreneurial science was not born in biomedicine in the 1970s. It

can trace back its origins to people like Van de Graaff and Trump who created influential technologies

as virtuous scientists then industrialized and commercialized their technologies without really changing

who or what they were individually or as a core team.17

Perhaps this was a reflection of the kinds of people who grew up in the early twentieth-century.

Perhaps they felt lucky to be working in their chosen field, getting paid good money, all the while the

Great Depression was ravaging the nation. They certainly did not display the naked egoism of Shapin's

successful entrepreneurial subjects. Quite the opposite, in fact. I shall examine Shapin's claims about

scientific entrepreneurship and contrast them with those of Van de Graaff's team to show that there is

another option between the virtuous scientist and the entrepreneurial industrial scientist: the

entreprevirtuous scientist – a scientist that can successfully straddle both boundaries and function

equally well within those trading zones.

Lastly, I shall conclude this paper with a brief review of the facts presented in context with the

assertions made together with some final thoughts on how this narrative fits together and, hopefully, to

demonstrate how Van de Graaff, his peers, and their corporation can reasonably be seen as being as

17 And even further back to the rise of the chemical industry.

13

influencers of significant change in university-industry-government relationships (including funding)

and on university policies on patents, rights, and licences.

u

It is my hope that this paper will create a more complete and thorough accounting of Robert J. Van

de Graaff's contributions to technology, science, physics, and their influence on the way MIT and other

universities would do business with government and industry; but also illustrate his company's

influence as a progenitor in the development of modern venture-funding of high-technology

corporations using public (or semi-public) funds.

A Brief History

Academic commentary on Robert J. Van de Graaff, John G. Trump, and High Voltage Engineering

is rare. There are no biographies on these men and neither wrote an autobiography. Van de Graaff, his

team, and HVEC are mentioned in some books on physics history and on the history particle

accelerators in particular – especially through the 1950s – but seldom more than a few pages or so and

almost never more than ten. Aside from a marketing booklet by HVEC and some journal articles and

book paragraphs, there is no proper history on the company, either. From the 1960s to the present, their

story fades further and further away and, in many cases, is absent altogether from modern histories of

14

physics and particle accelerators. This is both unfortunate and unjust.

Faring somewhat better is the Van de Graaff generator and its scientific output. The machine, like

the men and the company, pop up frequently in the early decades, then also fades away with little

reference or none at all. Where it does appear in modern histories, it is but a few pages containing the

same well-worn information and same old photographs. Nothing new is offered. No new insights and

little mention of the machines contributions to the war or to scientific discovery. One modern text, a

history of electrostatic generators does provide quite a bit on the Van de Graaff from a highly-technical

viewpoint. There are many academic articles on the machine in the early decades by Van de Graaff,

Trump, the Van Atta brothers, Ray Herb, and many others even up to recent decades using now-ancient

Van de Graaff accelerators at a number of well-known research facilities around the world.

Van de Graaff accelerators are still in use today. Small toy-like units based on the Princeton and

Round Hill prototypes are made for educators to demonstrate the principals and properties of

electrostatic electricity and some basic physics. Full-sized units are still made by an HVEC offshoot,

their still-extant competitor (National Electrostatics Corporation (NEC), and others for basic research

purposes, as always. NASA used them during the Gemini and Apollo years to simulate micrometeorite

impacts on various materials. Plastics companies used them to harden plastics. Others were bought to

sterilize foods to prevent spoilage or to sterilize sewage for safe disposal. They still do these things but

modern industrial applications of the Van de Graaff accelerator include the hardening of paints on auto

bodies, the precise implantation of ions in semi-conductor chip manufacturing, and as ion cannons that

initiate the beam for larger particle accelerators. Its inventor lived to see most of these applications of

his technology but could scarcely have dreamed of such things growing up in turn of the century

Tuscloosa, Alabama.

u

15

Figure 2: Previously unseen portrait of Robert Jemison Van de Graaff. (Courtesy of John Van de Graaff; artist unknown).

Robert Jemison Van de Graaff's rise to fame and fortune in physics is unusual. First, physics –

particularly in the early decades of nuclear physics – was not generally perceived as the ideal career

choice for riches. Second, Van de Graaff came from a family of wealthy, influential, and sometimes

famous folk. Many of his ancestors were officers for the South in the Civil War. More recent kin were

high-level judges and bureaucrats at the state and federal level. His three older brothers would all play

football very well with one of them becoming selected as an All-American in 1915. Another became a

decorated hero of World War I. Not one of them, according to family lore, were much interested in

science or physics and certainly not as a career option.

Young Robert, who was born at the ancestral mansion in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, felt the pressure to

succeed and, like his older brothers, tried football. “Tee,” as he was called then, did fine until a serious

16

back injury took him out of the game forever.18 This injury would haunt him for the rest of his life and

affect his career in ways that may have limited his career in academe and in business.

While convalescing, he took to reading to pass the time. Science piqued his curiosity most and

stimulated his mind. Books about electricity, energy, physics, Curie, Tesla, Edison, and so on must have

registered the most because that would be the direction he would take for his education and career. In

conversations with Robert's sons, their father's choice of career initially horrified his family. But Robert

would not be swayed. One of the other brothers could handle the family's cotton plantation and its

fortunes; Robert was going to be an engineer. In 1920, while Robert was an undergraduate, the great

cotton crash happened wiping out much of the Van de Graaff family fortune. They would still have

some wealth but Robert would have to do more to fend for himself. It would be helpful if he found a

job.

While still earning his BS at the University of Alabama, Van de Graaff took a summer job in 1921

working on a maintenance gang servicing high-tension lines and transformers of the Alabama Power

Company. It would be valuable experience and help him to understand the challenges of high voltage

electric power – all of which would remain throughout his schooling – and which would figure later

when he and MIT test-drove a new idea on electrical power distribution in Tennessee years later. Van

de Graaff completed his BS in 1922 and his M.Eng the following year, also at Alabama. He would then

cross the Atlantic Ocean to study under Marie Curie at the Sorbonne in 1925 then proceed to Oxford as

a Rhodes Scholar, graduating with a PhD in physics in 1928. He immediately took up a Research

Fellowship at Princeton University and began to build his first generator that would change his life and

make a considerable impact on physics. Stanford University business research professor Henry

Etzkowitz sums it up well:

“In 1926-7 it occurred to him [Van de Graaff] that 'the generation of high voltage in a

18 Graham, 463.

17

vacuum would afford a means of accelerating ions and electrons to enormous energies and that this high speed particles would afford a powerful means for the investigation of the atomic nucleus and other fundamental problems'. At Oxford University in the 1920s, in the course of doctoral research on another topic, Van de Graaff outlined methods of beginning this project but did not actually initiate it until 1929 when he received a National Research Council fellowship to Princeton University.”19

Philip M. Morse was a colleague of Van de Graaff's back at Princeton and describes the young Robert Van de Graaff in his memoir In at the Beginnings: A Physicist's Life:

“That year [1927-1928] Robert van de Graaff returned from two years at Oxford to finish his doctor's degree in physics at Princeton. He was tall, athletically built, with an Alabaman's musically slow speech. He knew Joe Morris [an upper-year physics PhD student] from his earlier sojourn at Princeton. Between them they seemed acquainted with all the important families in the South, and they would spend hours swapping gossip. Van spent most of his time pursuing his idea for a high-voltage machine. He set up equipment to find out how to spray electrons onto a moving paper belt and how to remove them at the other end of the loop. By the end of the year, he had built a model Van de Graaff machine, with a three-foot metal sphere on top of an insulating column, inside which a motor driven belt would haul the electrons up to charge the sphere. Impressive sparks could be drawn—when the belt was dry enough to hold the charge.”20

That model would be nicknamed “Frankenstein”21 and was used at a demonstration to the

American Physical Society drawing a lot of interest and attention from the physicists gathered there.

Van de Graaff's star was on the rise and he and his machines would soon be in the news and for years to

come. Van de Graaff's boss at Princeton, Karl Compton, must have noted something special and was

soon to take Van de Graaff and his technology away from Princeton and bring them with him to MIT

when he assumed the presidency there in 1930.

19 Etzkowitz, 96-97. Etzkowitz's quote contains a quote sourced from a document by/on Robert J. Van de Graaff, MIT Archives, AC 4, Box 274, Folder 1.

20 Morse, 73.21 The name “Frankenstein” was written in pencil on the back of a copy of a photo of the Princeton device that was

demonstrated at an annual meeting of The Physical Society.

18

Part I: Assembling the Team and Re-engineering MIT

The team that would form the heart and soul of High Voltage did not self-assemble. Van de Graaff

did not seek out MIT. He did not have a big corporate dream in mind. Neither did his lab and business

partners John Trump and William Buechner. Future business partner Denis Robinson may have, but he

came late to the scene. Serendipity may have played a small part in these men coming together, but it

was partly orchestrated and the maestro was Karl Taylor Compton, mentor and head of the Physics

Department at Princeton where Van de Graaff worked in the Palmer Physics Laboratory as National

Research Fellow from 1929-31.

This coming together of talented gentleman seemed only to serve the purpose of creating the High

Voltage Laboratory at MIT in which Van de Graaff and his team could build his atom smashing

machine and see what it could do. It was basic science, of course; basic experimental physics. It

certainly did not seem like a direct path for entrepreneurial science or commercialization. Yet, that is

what it was. Compton, it seems, had ideas on potentially commercializing Van de Graaff's technology

and for MIT's future to be sure. Whether these ideas were articulated to Van de Graaff by Compton

when he brought Robert to MIT is unknown.

Entrepreneurship or commercialization of the technology does not appear to be top of mind for

Van de Graaff nor for Trump even when demand increased for the X-ray machines they would build for

local hospitals. The relationships of these gentlemen, along with MIT's head of Engineering, Vannevar

Bush, Physics Department head John Slater; Harvard business professor and U.S. Army General

Georges Doriot, and a few others are the thread which weaves through the network of this techno-

entreprenuerial story. It is very much an accounting of what you know, who you, and who knows you

in academe, government, finance, and industry. And the person who knew everybody was Compton.

Van de Graaff was making a name for himself in electrical engineering and physics with his

19

invention of a new type of high-voltage electrostatic generator that was easy and affordable to build

with reliable, high-powered operation. In 1931, Compton not only brought Van de Graaff to MIT, he

arranged for MIT to buy his equipment and the rights to his technology. This was a bit unusual for the

time but Compton needed this badly. It was one of the key pieces he needed for his new vision of MIT

to become a reality.

Compton must have wanted to bring Van de Graaff with him to MIT not only because his was a

leading technology in a brand new field of research – atomic physics – that Compton very much must

have wanted for his re-engineering of MIT but also because, I believe, of the commercial potential that

Van de Graaff's technology and ideas promised.

However, it was John G. Trump that made Van de Graaff's electrostatic X-ray generator useful, in

a broad fashion, for cancer treatment. It was a brilliant and happy marriage of a great scientific machine

with a noble purpose everyone could relate to in some way. A machine that could treat those people

would be highly desirable and thus highly commercial, potentially.

Compton must have felt these two gentlemen would likely have more ideas like this – ideas that

could become good and commercializable science. However, it would be years before HVEC was

formed and before Van de Graaff could be released entirely from Princeton, Compton had to clear up

some loose ends. To ensure money, publicity, and good will that Van de Graaff's technology was

capable of generating all pointed back at MIT, Compton would have to secure the rights to the

technology from Princeton.

Henry Etzkowitz states, “The commercial potential of Van de Graaff's research was viewed as

sufficiently promising for MIT to draft a document to specify the rights of the different parties involved

in the research. The parties listed were MIT (Van de Graaff's current base) the National Research

Council (which had provided fellowship support), Princeton University (which had provided an initial

research site and equipment), the Research Corporation (which had provided funding for the

20

construction of the apparatus) and Van de Graaff (the inventor and leader of the research team).”22

Etzkowitz also notes that MIT would handle the patent rights and be responsible of the technology until

the “point of manufacture”23 which suggests commercialization, or the founding of High Voltage.

Princeton would retain a very modest share, scholarly access was protected, and other concerns were

carefully negotiated.24

What cannot be determined is whether or not Van de Graaff and Trump were motivated to become

entrepreneurs by this juncture. As far as I can tell, in the early years, they were quite happy to be

making accelerators for useful purposes. Their technology was being used to help heal the sick and to

perform basic scientific research into the structure of matter. Besides, they were working in a university

with a president who was fully committed to their development. Their lab was doing important work

and they had good, secure jobs in the middle of the Great Depression. Thoughts of making big money

were likely far from their thoughts when outside the Ivory Tower, soup kitchens, bread lines, and

massive poverty were all too common.

Two other gentlemen, both MIT professors and department heads, would have a significant impact

both directly and indirectly on the men of the High Voltage Laboratory. Vannevar Bush, head of the

Electrical Engineering Department and later a big wheel in influencing science policy at the White

House, would open doors and create opportunities for MIT, its scientists, and others to prosper. John

Slater, head of the Physics Department, seemed to never get along with Van de Graaff nor seem to truly

appreciate the work they were doing at the HVL.

u

22 Etzkowitz 96-97.23 Ibid.24 Ibid.

21

Another rising star was Vannevar Bush. Already a longtime professor and head of the Electrical

Engineering Department at MIT, he would not work for High Voltage Engineering but his influence at

MIT and in government during and after World War II certainly had a profound effect on the

corporation's establishment, product direction, early clients, and successes. Before that, however, Bush

would become intimately involved with the changes Compton was making at MIT and would have a

hand in the shaping of the way an earlier arrangement between Van de Graaff, MIT, government, and

private industry would cooperate.

Compton was hired to change MIT. Known as a good engineering school with interests in science,

Compton executed a strategy to change MIT and raise it up to become a premier school of science and

engineering. The new breakthroughs in physics would be a key part of that transformation and central

to that role at MIT would be Robert J. Van de Graaff, his technology, and the High Voltage Laboratory.

The more famous Radiation Laboratory was nearly a decade and a worldwide war away.

MIT was partitioned into three schools (Science, Engineering, and Architecture) and two divisions

(Industrial Cooperation and Humanities). Bush was named dean of the School of Engineering. Another

professor, John Slater, was appointed to head the Physics Department. The latter would be both a

blessing and a curse for Van de Graaff as the years went on.

Compton had every confidence in Van de Graaff and supported his every need. Van de Graaff, of

course, did not work alone or in “isolation” as Slater put it. He had a core team that kept with him

through the High Voltage Laboratory years and through the decades at High Voltage Engineering

Corporation. Soon to join him at MIT and become a loyal, steadfast friend as well as colleague in

academia and partner in business: John Trump.

22

Figure 3: John George Trump.(Source: http://www.findagrave.com)

1931 also saw the arrival of John G. Trump to MIT, who was going to Vannevar Bush's Electrical

Engineering Department for his doctoral work after earning his master's degree in physics from

Columbia University.25 Compton and Van de Graaff may have known each other from Princeton but

the record is unclear. Wilde suggests (and I agree) that “Trump's career was set in motion when

Vannevar Bush suggested that he become acquainted with Van de Graaff. A close and lasting friendship

ensued and they worked together for many years on high-voltage phenomena.”26

In 1932, Trump and Van de Graaff got together, compared notes, and for his thesis, Trump

proposed the design and construction of a 60Hz AC synchronous motor that would fit inside Van de

Graaff's vacuum cylinder creating a much more powerful generator.

Upon completion of his PhD, Trump remained at MIT for the duration of his academic career –

nearly 50 years later – building bigger and better Van de Graaff accelerators and improved

25 Wildes, 160. 26 Wildes, 161-162.

23

transformers; improvements making them much more commercially viable, too. Trump's vacuum

system was, in 1935, used to produce high-voltage X-rays with currents and voltages easily and

steadily maintained and adjusted at whim.27 This reliability and accuracy became the hallmark of Van

de Graaff accelerator technology and was reflected in the language of HVEC sales literature a decade

or so later.

u

As we have seen, it is quite evident that Karl Compton had great and commercial expectations for

Robert J. Van de Graaff and his technology somewhere in MIT's future. Van de Graaff was a rising star

with technologies that were innovative and commercializable; and that fit well with Compton's

revisioning and reorganization of MIT's policies, patents, and licenses but also with the Institute itself,

reorganizing it into three schools and two divisions, with an emphasis on scientific research leadership

and industrial cooperation. Vannevar Bush and John Slater were key department heads in this new and

improved MIT. Later, Bush would become very powerful and influential in White House science policy

which, in turn, benefitted many universities, but benefitted MIT the most. Compton assembled key

players to Van de Graaff's High Voltage Laboratory. John Trump and William Buechner were brought

aboard as graduate students and stayed on to become professors, peers, and partners to Robert both at

MIT and at HVEC. Nobody in Van de Graaff's team seemed to have any entrepreneurial aspirations at

this time. However, they all shared a predilection to creating scientific instruments of the highest

quality and reliability to serve the needs of the scientific and healthcare communities.

27 Wildes, 163-165.

24

Part II: The Precursors – The TVA Deal and the Laboratory at Round Hill

As Van de Graaff's scientific team was being assembled, MIT president Compton continued to re-

engineer MIT in a way that was favourable to – if not influenced by – Van de Graaff's technologies.

Working simultaneously on two major projects: a radical power generation and distribution enterprise

with the Tennessee Valley Authority in one hand and building of the iconic twin-towered generators at

the Round Hill research laboratory in the other. Each was a technological innovation, each was

experimental and prototypical. However, only Round Hill would be successful. That said, much would

be learned from each experience and both would, in my view, contribute greatly to MIT's ambitions

and, later, to the initiation and success of High Voltage Engineering Corporation. The transformer and

accelerator technologies would, together, form the backbone of HVEC's product line for their first 20

years of existence. The development of these technologies at MIT's High Voltage Laboratory required

the development of new paradigm of relations between industry, government, and academia – and new

funding models to finance them.

These projects were the nexus of the teamwork that would form the core of HVL and HVEC. Van

de Graaff, Trump, and Buechner would work together as lab partners building skills that would

transcend into entrepreneurial business partnerships and friendships that would last their entire lives.

Through fame and pain, success and failure, this was the intellectual garden from which they would

grow loyalty, fellowship, and the first hints of their entrepreneurial potential.

u

In 1933, while Van de Graaff and his team were busy at Round Hill building the iconic generators

that would bear his name, he was also extremely busy with Compton and Trump on designing a power

25

generation and distribution system for the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was one of Van de Graaff's

other grand ideas and it was front and centre at another very interesting development in university-

industry-government relations. A “revolutionary”28 underground power distribution system using his

accelerator technology (enhanced by Trump) – almost became a reality. It was so close, it must have

been a huge disappointment when the project bogged down and died a bureaucratic death. The

proposal, had it been accepted, would have been another game-changer – not in experimental physics,

but in commercial electric power. Trump built upon Van de Graaff's DC vacuum transmission line

which, in theory, would “transmit a million kilowatts a thousand miles at a million volts with the

energy loss of 2.5 percent.”29 It was a bold challenge to alternating current but would cost more in

infrastructure. “A vacuum line would comprise conductors buried underground; would have no corona,

no lightning faults, and no instabilities; and would be less expensive than a corresponding AC line.”30

As far as I can ascertain, it was never built anywhere31 – not even as a test; but it was almost given

the green light in Tennessee and was a precursor to the way Compton was looking at changing the way

MIT, industry, and government interacted when he helped facilitate the development of High Voltage

Engineering Corporation and its benefactor, the American Research and Development Corporation.

Because the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), traditional funders of

science and scientists, declined to fund the project, Compton had to seek support elsewhere and found

his “angel”32 in the form of the federal government itself. They would seek to strike a deal to for MIT

and the federal government to work together to develop this new Van de Graaff/Trump technology at

the Institute. The government was represented by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the newly-

28 Owens, 3.29 Wildes, 162. 30 Ibid.31 Given the crumbling infrastructure of modern, above-ground transmission lines, I have to wonder how things might be

different if the Van de Graaff-Trump methodology would have fared. 32 Owens, Larry. "MIT and the Federal "Angel": Academic R & D and Federal-Private Cooperation Before World War II."

Isis. 81.2 (1990). Print.

26

formed, federally-owned electrical power distribution organization,33 would utilize this new technology

and, hopefully, it would generate engineering jobs and research for MIT and jobs for the Depression-

era's unemployed. Indeed, part of the TVA's role was economic development for the region so there

was great interest and pressure to make this project a success. Larry Owens, professor of history and

the University of Massachusetts Amherst, identifies that the technology, if reality matched the plan,

was a superior system:

“Lacking both the internal losses and external susceptibilities of traditional electromagnetic power generation, the Van de Graaff-inspired system promised highly efficient power transmission over unprecedented distances.”34

In short, the TVA deal was a multi-party research and development contract would be made

between the main aforementioned parties (and a few others). It was new, it was radical, it was untried –

just like Van de Graaff's idea – to use Van de Graaff generators to generate power and distribute it

underground to transformers with virtually no loss of power. It was not quite Nikola Tesla's vision of

limitless free energy from the air or the earth, but it was a darned sight better than littering the

landscape with millions of miles of high-tension power lines and ugly supporting towers.

There were four problems: It had not been done before. It was going to be expensive to try it out.

It worked on paper but would it work in the field? Would it be able to pay for itself over time? That is,

would it be profitable? Profitable was not something associated with government interests;

governments were not businesses and therefore not about making profits. Yet, here was the TVA – a

government-owned corporation that would, over the long term, hope to make a profit once the

Depression was over.

The federal government's ownership of the TVA was a new concept and the government had never

33 The TVA was also responsible for flood control, navigation, and economic development (among other things) for the Tennessee Valley region which involved portions of Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia.

34 Owens, 199.

27

offered funds this way before. Also, Van de Graaff's electrical distribution technology was not yet

proven and Van de Graaff himself was not quite yet a public figure but his reputation in the physics and

electrical communities was growing. His work at Round Hill was only just then getting underway at

that time. Yet MIT tried very hard to get this TVA deal done. It was the perfect opportunity to try out

Van de Graaff's new technology. It was also, it seemed, a perfect time to try swinging new relationships

between government, industry, and MIT. I contend it was very much a test case for what would come

later with MIT and the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and, later, with HVEC,

ARDC, and numerous others.

Test case or not, a lot was riding on this venture: new technology, desperately-needed jobs, and

innovative government partnerships. It was the “dirty thirties” and men desperately needed work to

feed their families. This seemed deal seemed as good as done. Unfortunately, it never came to be. It

was taking too long and people started getting nervous.

Bush, Compton, Van de Graaff, Trump, and others put together a proposal for $250,000.00 to

work with the TVA to develop a new power distribution system. Everything seemed perfect and

everybody would come out a winner. Unfortunately, the deal fell apart over myriad concerns about

untested technology, patents, rights, licences, and even Van de Graaff's potential for switching

universities.35 There does not seem to be any evidence that Van de Graaff would go anywhere anytime

soon, but he had switched to MIT from Princeton after only a short while so perhaps it was a concern

he would do so again.

The game was more-or-less agreed upon, but they could not agree on the rules. While this project

ended before it started, it was, I believe, a progenitor if not the progenitor to a new contractual concept:

the government as negotiating partner, not as “sovereign power”36 – the idea of the nature of the game

was now changed. Moreover, Van de Graaff had a glimpse of what the future could hold. He could

35 Owens, 206-211, Isis. 81.236 Owens, 213, Isis. 81.2

28

know financial independence again but that does not appear to be his prime motive. His technology

was, obviously, seen as a commercially-viable prospect. It just so happened that this particular deal did

not work out – but it came close. This brief attempt at entrepreneurship faded to the background as

work continued back at the lab at Round Hill.

Figure 4. The Famous Van de Graaff Generator at Round Hill. (Source: MIT Museum).

Round Hill would become internationally-famous in the world of physics due to not only the work

they did there but for the famous and often-reproduced photographs (shown above) of the towers of

lightning that so impressed the media. There, a culture and camaraderie developed that would last for

decades and centred around mutual respect for each others skills and like-mindedness to serving

science in their respective roles creating devices scarcely imaginable only a few years before.

The Round Hill site was an unusual location, perhaps, but it was an extension of MIT's research

laboratories and much good science was being done here. For Van de Graaff's team, it was a place to

build and test a massive prototype, gain valuable research, achieve some much-needed exposure, and

answer many design questions. They would need to determine maximum voltages, stability issues,

29

leakage, ozone, and radiation issues, beam strengths, and more. They would break the million-volt

barrier here several times over and test new technologies of their own making to boost efficiency and

power output while reducing size and increasing safety. Once things settled down, they would move

back to Cambridge to continue their work. Before they could come home, they had to make some

history.

Prior to the founding of High Voltage Engineering Corporation on 31 December 1946, the

company's products germinated in the High Voltage Laboratory at MIT. Space was limited for the new,

monstrously-large generator that Van de Graaff wanted to build next. Fortunately, MIT was given an

offer it could not refuse: a giant workspace in nearby Dartmouth, MA at a place on a white sand beach

called Round Hill. It came with equipment, a private power source, and accommodations. Also, this

was a big, powerful machine they were building and they needed a big space to try it out. It would also

make a tremendous amount of noise (and poisonous ozone) and, not incidentally, nobody had built such

a large machine before and and possibly had no idea what might happen should things go terribly

wrong. Since there was no space available at MIT at the time, Round Hill was the perfect site for such

an experiment which would fire up for the first time on 28 November 1933.37 The “Colossus of

Volts”38 as the machine was often called was innovative science but so too was its creation. Much of the

parts – and the vacuum tubes in particular – had to be made from scratch; sometimes on site by Bill

Buechner and others.

Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, Round Hill was a hive of research in radio

communications, air navigation, and the propagation of light and radio waves through fog – all under

the auspices of Vannevar Bush's Electrical Engineering Department. Van de Graaff's project was the

only one from under Slater's watch but how much Slater had to do with it is not known. More likely,

37 Samson, 17.38 MIT Department of Physics website, “New Labs and New Frontiers: 1916-1939.”

http://web.mit.edu/physics/about/history/1916-1939.html

30

this was a kind of pet project of Compton's and his vision for a revitalized MIT depended on big,

splashy, media-friendly projects to help increase the profile of the Institute. The Van de Graaff

generator offered just the right kind of bait for national and international media hungry for news on the

fascinating new science of the atom made famous recently by the likes of Lord Rutherford and Albert

Einstein. And the media came often – particularly when their newsworthy benefactor, the mysterious

and eccentric Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green was on site or when visiting dignitaries

physicist John Cockcroft stopped by. Of course, there were also visits from Compton and potential

donors to MIT who wanted to look at this amazing machine crackling lighting bolts of “blue, green,

violet, and lavender”39 from the “huge electric mushrooms”40 (as the media described it at the time) that

first glowed blue from the charge. However, the shotguns41 the physicists kept handy to shoo away the

pigeons, were carefully hidden from view. Media were familiar with Round Hill and now the keepers

of the new attraction at Round Hill were starting to become familiar with the media. These visits by the

press and notable guests were the first regular experiences with public relations that would serve Van

de Graaff, Trump, and Buechner well at HVEC more than a decade later.

u

39 Samson, 22.40 Samson, 13.41 Samson, 14.

31

Figure 5: Colonel Edward Howland Green.(Source: http://www.findagrave.com)

Colonel Green, a famous and rich playboy of Gatsbyesque proportions, would drop by from time

to time in his fancy open-top car to see what Van de Graaff's team were doing, chat it up, and offer

more money or invite the team down to the beach for a swim or a party. He was no stranger to scientific

pursuits having been a pioneer in radio and aviation in the area. Green also provided much of the

equipment on site and he had his own power plant and diesel engines so they had all the free energy

they needed. Buechner recalls Green's visits:

“I never had much to do with him. He used to come around when we were working down there, he used to come around once in a while. He was a real character all right.” ...Occasionally, he used come down and visit the lab. It was a big thing when the Colonel was coming. We used to worry, you see.”42

Green was also their residential landlord; providing lodgings in various guest quarters for the

scientists and their wives. Rather than stay there, Van de Graaff, according to Helen Samson – the wife

of Edward Samson, one of the young scientists helping build the generator there – “came out often to

42 Buechner, William W. and John G. Trump. Interview with John Van de Graaff. Personal Interview. Boston, 02 April 1984. Van de Graaff Estate.

32

oversee, consult, discuss, and plan”43 but preferred to go home to his wife, Catherine. His bad back

likely meant he preferred to sleep in his own bed so he could get proper rest. Additionally, the

Tennessee deal was going on and Van de Graaff was needed for regular consultations.

During the Round Hill research facility years (1933-37), Green had offered his property as a place

to build the enormous machines that now reside at the Museum of Science in Boston. Specifically,

Green offered a gigantic and recently-abandoned airship hanger (aka dock) – home to the Mayflower,

pride of Goodyear's fleet – to Van de Graaff and MIT for free plus some working capital for research.

The Mayflower was a non-rigid dirigible used in the mapping of radiation fields of antennas at

Round Hill. Its home was the hangar where Van de Graaff's world-famous generators would be built.

Sometime after the Mayflower moved out, Van de Graaff moved in. Joining him at that time were MIT

colleagues, the brothers L.C. and C.M. Van Atta and other members of the Physics Department's

nuclear research program to study atomic and nuclear structure.44

While the Tennessee deal was being made and lost, Round Hill was started up but must have

challenged Van de Graaff. He had already worked out everything in his mind and now needed to build

it to see how it turned out. He could now make the biggest electrostatic generator the world had ever

seen, fire it up, and see what it could do. But he had to shuttle back and forth to MIT to consult on the

Tennessee deal, too. Given his health woes, this had to be difficult for him. But this was his peak time

of demand. Two major projects in the works, each very different, and each requiring his expertise. The

task was arduous for him but the potential rewards were enormous.

This was newly-formed science and offered the core trio of Van de Graaff, Trump, and Buechner

their first opportunity to work together on an important big science kind of project. All the men

working at Round Hill on Van de Graaff's twin-towered generator had backgrounds in physics and

engineering. This huge device was a serious piece of electrical engineering hardware. It would generate

43 Samson, 12.44 Wildes, 120.

33

the needed charge and accelerate it in a controlled beam to perform physics-related experimentation. It

was a scientific instrument – one of the largest of any kind of its day and would be assembled from

designs and plans created by Robert J. Van de Graaff and his team. The first new and major addition to

what would be the core of High Voltage Engineering Corporation's executive beyond Van de Graaff and

Trump was William “Bill” Buechner.

u

John Trump was already working with Van de Graaff for a couple of years when a young

undergraduate student came aboard by the name of Bill Buechner.

Figure 6: William (Bill) Buechner.(Source: MIT Museum.)

Buechner was working on his senior thesis at the time including topics helpful to Trump and Van

de Graaff's research: vapour pressures, vacuum tubes, vacuum pumps, and Textolite. The Round Hill

device was air-insulated, its massive columns were made of Textolite, and its inner workings required a

34

massive vacuum tube for the beam and other tubes for various components – most of them custom-

made.

Buechner first met Van de Graaff in the halls of MIT in April of 1934 where he stated that he

wanted to help out with this machine Van de Graaff was building. He recalled Van de Graaff telling

him, “I can't pay you anything but I can give you board and room.”45 Buechner started working on the

generator at Round Hill that summer; thus beginning of a friendship and working partnership that

would last 33 years until Van de Graaff's death in 1967.

There was much work to do to get the machine working efficiently. That was pressure enough but

Van de Graaff was a rising star and the monstrous machine was drawing attention from all quarters.

Colonel Edward Green, their host and benefactor, came around regularly, but the press, VIPs, and

potential investors (donors to MIT) were also regular visitors. Buechner continues, laughing at the

recollection:

“[We were] interrupted periodically by the need to put on a demonstration for the news people or for anybody we might be able to coax some money. Every so often we have to have a demonstration to put out a push and make sure the thing would make sparks.”46

The machine would crackle like thunder and shoot huge purple bolts of lightning into the rafters of

the hangar. It was all very impressive but that was more show than science. The discharges to the

ceiling were very much due to the accumulation of pigeon droppings on the metal domes of the

terminal towers. They would need to be cleaned often but they could never be kept perfectly clean in

such a place. The proper discharges were between the spheres which were mounted on rail dollies that

could be moved together or apart as needed. Nobody was trying to deceive anyone but the people

coming to visit expected a bit of a show and a show is exactly what they got – plus a good explanation



35

of the science going on there.

It was not all light shows and spectacle, however. Basic scientific research was going on at Round

Hill; and they were breaking voltage records, too. But similar scientific research was also going on

elsewhere and the Round Hill team kept up with the news. Often they were the ones making the news.

World-famous inventor and high-energy scientist Nikola Tesla, now mostly retired, but still press-

worthy wrote a favourable technical review of the Round Hill device as the cover story for an issue of

Scientific American,47 saying it was “a distinct advance over its predecessors”48 however, Tesla49

expressed some doubt as to whether it would achieve the goals Van de Graaff sought.

“While it is quite evident that exceptionally favorable conditions for accurate observation will be realized in this instrument, it is highly probable that the attempts to smash the atomic nucleus and to transmute elements will yield results of doubtful value.”50

In 1935, James Chadwick was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the

neutron. Neutrons were on every physicist's mind. Neutron bombardment produced X-rays. Higher

voltages meant higher X-rays and higher risk of killing yourself or your staff. The Van de Graaff

accelerator was no exception. Their machine would have to be made safer.

u

The lab at Round Hill created a unique and close working environment that fomented a relaxed

collegial and proto-entrepreneurial atmosphere that may have set the tone for HVEC about a decade

47 Tesla, Nikola. "Possibilities of Electro-Static Generators." Scientific American, Vol. 150, No. 3. March 1934: 115, 132-134, 163-165. Print.

48 Tesla, 165.49 It is unknown if Tesla was working from drawings and specifications or if he visited Round Hill and talked to Van de

Graaff and his team. I did find a copy of that Scientific American in Van de Graaff's estate papers. He did not keep much, but he did keep that so perhaps it was kept as a keepsake or for a chuckle later when he proved Tesla wrong.

50 Tesla, 165.

36

later. Having such a lab off-site from MIT. It extended the boundaries of the Institute beyond their

borders in Cambridge, Massachusetts and foreshadowed many such remote sites and offshoot labs that

would come in the years and decades ahead. When the Round Hill labs were closed and repatriated to

the main Campus, the porous boundaries closed temporarily but would open once more once the

economy improved. Closing ranks cut down expenses during the 1930s but, despite the Depression,

money would still need to be found from somewhere to keep fledgling projects in operation.

Change was upon them and with the neutron radiation issues, some changes had to be made to

make the unit more effective and safer to use. After a serious tropical storm swept through the

Buzzard's Bay area in the summer of 1937, it was time to move the project back to MIT. The two

towers would be reassembled as a single conjoined machine.51 This eased repair and maintenance

issues and also solved a radiation problem. A small lab was built in the spheres which shielded the

researchers from radiation and the vacuum tubes and beams were below them, far away. They were

thinking like good scientists, but they were also thinking like good businessmen. It is easier to market

and sell a safer machine than one that is less so. Moving back to MIT also enabled the team to

reconnect with peers back at the Institute. They had been semi-isolated for a few years and moving

back home so to speak would enable them to get back to university life and locales. They could

communicate with peers more easily, they had access to research and, not insignificantly, MIT would

have easier access to the team and the technology. This would, I suspect, change the free-wheeling,

improvisational working environment of the remote Round Hill facility somewhat and back to more

formalized structure and oversight. Coming back to Cambridge also made it easier for visitors to have a

look at the machine and for students to conduct research.

Unusual funders and circumstances would also be a hallmark of the fledgling company. Adapting

to change would be necessary to survive. Much change would come over the next decade and the


37

gentlemen of the High Voltage Laboratory would learn much of their adaptability from the Round Hill

years to the World War II years. Fortunately, finding money was not their problem. That was Compton's

problem.

After a few years, Green's visits became scarce and his financial support began to wane. The Great

Depression was upon the world and money was tightening up everywhere. In 1936, Colonel Green died

new benefactors would be needed. MIT professor emeritus Karl Wildes summarizes:

“Green was unable to increase his financial donations. In view of the large budget that Bowles52 had build up for the early thirties, it fell on Bowles and his MIT friends then to arrange to finance the Round Hill projects from MIT funds and from such sources as the Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, The Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, the United States Army Air Corps, and the Bureau of Air Commerce.”53

Buechner noted that people came from all over the world to work on the Round Hill accelerator

when it was back at MIT. In particular, physicist Harold Enge did his doctoral thesis on that machine.

Enge would become “director of MIT's Van de Graff [sic] Research Group for many years and was an

acknowledged world leader in the design of magnetic spectrometers for nuclear physics, instruments

used to determine the energy spectrum of nuclear particles. [...] He won the Tom W. Bonner Prize54 in

Nuclear Physics from the American Physical Society in 1984.”55 Robert Van de Graaff won the Bonner

in 1966 while at HVEC for his invention of his eponymous generator/accelerator. Ray Herb would win

it two years later. Despite Slater's assertions to the contrary, Enge was but one student attracted to

working with Van de Graaff, with his machine, and with his lab's staff.

During the Round Hill years, Karl Compton would take on new responsibilities that would have

52 Edward L.Bowles was the director of the Round Hill research facility for MIT's Electrical Engineering department and a former student of Vannevar Bush.

53 Wildes, 119.54 The Bonner Prize is one of the top awards for experimental physics and is bestowed by the American Physical Society:

“To recognize and encourage outstanding experimental research in nuclear physics, including the development of a method, technique, or device that significantly contributes in a general way to nuclear physics research.” < http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/bonner.cfm >

55 “Harald A. Enge, retired physics professor, 87” web.mit.edu. MIT News. 30 Apr. 2008. Web. 12 May. 2013. < http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/obit-enge-tt0430.html >

38

http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/bonner.cfm

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/obit-enge-tt0430.html

an enormous repercussions for American science. As war broke out in Europe, Vannevar Bush left the

Institute for the federal government. In both cases, these moves would also change the way MIT, and

universities in general, worked with government. America was at peace but Europe was getting very

complicated in the 1930s. Bush would work for President Roosevelt on this and MIT would soon play

a part as well.

u

Historians usually point to World War II and its organization of science as the catalyst for

America's boom in scientific research, educational expansion, and industrial innovation and

entrepreneurship, among other things. The story of MIT, Robert J. Van de Graaff, and his technologies

can be told in such a way. Compton and Bush ensured that MIT was a major centre for wartime

research – namely the Radiation Laboratory – and the funds they brought with them in support of the

war. Van de Graaff's High Voltage Laboratory played a much smaller role and with considerably less

funding but they continued to develop and make accelerators and X-ray machines in Building 46 with

staff of “20-30 people [...] grinding these things out”56 primarily on orders of Bush's Office of Scientific

Research and Development (OSRD) in Washington, D.C. The United States Navy used them to X-ray

welds on ships, aircraft, bombs, and such things. Another device went to the Oak Ridge Laboratory in

Tennessee and converted to nuclear physics work in support of the Manhattan Project. HVL's devices

would not go to Los Alamos, however. Two of Ray Herb's pressurized versions of the Van de Graaff

accelerator would go to New Mexico from the University of Wisconsin. Herb himself would go to the

Radiation Laboratory for the duration of the war along with John Trump and Denis Robinson.

MIT continued to grow and thrive in its new-found wartime importance. It was now a centre of

technological innovation and excellence. It was a vanguard in basic scientific research in core areas


39

such as physics, mathematics, and electronics. President Compton also had successfully restructured

the Institute into a business and entrepreneur friendly environment with attractive changes in policies

on patents, rights, and financial partnership relations between themselves, government, and industry. It

had powerful friends and supporters in government all the way to the White House during the war

which would carry over into the post-war period.

However, MIT's advances in these areas were formed earlier, in the pre-war years, in part through

the experiences learned with the development and failure of the TVA deal and with the development

and success of the Round Hill Laboratory. These two experiences helped advance Van de Graaff's

technologies but they also advanced MIT's new vision under Karl Compton. These were periods of

great growth and opportunity. The war provided less growth, but more experience in mass production

with some room for innovation to meet the needs of wartime customers. In other hands, Van de Graaff

accelerators did a great deal of scientific research and discovery in the area of identifying radioactive

isotopes. But all this was towards the goal of winning the war and not so much towards the goal of

scientific research for its own sake; and certainly not for anything remotely commercial or

entrepreneurial.

At the war's end and still under the shock and awe of the atomic bombing of Japan, Van de

Graaff's name and equipment came into the public consciousness once again in one of America's most

popular magazines, LIFE. The cover of the 20 August 1945 issue57 featured General Carl Andrew

"Tooey" Spaatz who directed the atomic bombings of Japan (see Figure 7 on the following page).

Inside, on pages 88 and 89 of an all-atomic-bomb issue were a photo of the Round Hill generator and

numerous article mentions of Van de Graaff's eponymous device. The advent of the atomic bomb

would propel this still-new science into the forefront of media headlines around the world. Just over 16

months later, HVEC was open for business.

57 "Many years of atom smashing preceded bomb" LIFE. 20 August 1945: 88-89. Print.

40

Figure 7: Robert J. Van de Graaff's personal copy of the “Atomic Bomb” issue of LIFE magazine that featured an article on his device. (Courtesy of John Van de Graaff).

Part III: High Voltage Engineering Corporation, ARDC, and the Business of

Selling Particle Accelerators

A new business selling state-of-the-art technology with no predecessors is a difficult story to tell.

It gets more complicated when that same business is itself made more complex by both its peculiar

origin story. HVEC technologies created pre-incorporation influences on university-government-

industry relations; on patent policies, rights, and licences; and on innovative and untried financing.

HVEC had post-incorporation effects on innovative profit disbursements. And HVEC had to market

itself and grow the business of particle accelerators where no such business existed before.

Additionally, acclerators were a bit mysterious, a little scary, and not very well understood by the

public or the investment community. The company had many challenges and this section of my paper

will be the most challenging to fully grasp. High Voltage began as an answer to the problems of mass

41

producing a scientific instrument that was previously only produced in an academic lab. The following

section will touch on HVEC's startup, location, organizational structure, unique funding by ARDC, and

unique share-splitting by ARDC. It will also provide some insights into HVEC's issues and influences

on patent policies, rights, and licences; on its sales, marketing, and public relations; and on its zeal for

creating quality devices against strong and increasing competition.

u

After years of working together in peacetime and wartime, and with a vast network of contacts in

academia, government, and the military at home and abroad, and having produced successful machines

in great demand, Van de Graaff and Trump filed the paperwork and formed High Voltage Engineering

Corporation. Having learned from the experiences of the failed venture with the Tennessee venture

much earlier, and given the new climate and direction of MIT and its offspring corporation, the time

was right for getting into business.

HVEC set up shop first in a “terribly dirty, filthy garage”58 at 7 University Road,59 Cambridge,

then, in the mid-1950s, at South Bedford Street, Burlington, Massachusetts in the heart of the Route

128 industrial research park. They built their own facility and expanded it several times over the years.

Like neighbours Polaroid, Vannevar Bush's Raytheon, and hundreds of other companies, they valued

the proximity to MIT, Harvard, Boston, Cambridge, DC, and other eastern cities and institutions but

also that wide, new roads feeding into the widened and expanded Route 128 enabled quick and

convenient movement of parts and products to and from their operations. Before they could get there,

they had to get the company off the ground.

High Voltage Engineering Corporation came into being on the last day of 1946 to build and sell

58 Robinson, Denis Morrell, Oral History Interview with Michael Wolff. HVEC. 1978 May 23, AIP, OH 484559 "The Story of High Voltage Engineering" This is a very early history of HVEC produced by the company.

42

electrostatic particle accelerators for nuclear research, for the inspection of industrial metals, and for

use as medical x-ray machines in cancer therapy. Later, a new invention by Van de Graaff would enable

HVEC to do build and sell ICTs in an industrialized fashion. The lab at MIT could not possibly meet

the demand that was upon them. That appetite could only be filled by corporatization, industrialization,

and expansion – that is, a proper business.

However, they were physicists, not businessmen. They would need help – lots of it – to design and

build the products, but also somebody to run the company day to day. Neither Trump nor Van de Graaff

were interested in that job – and they still had commitments to their jobs at MIT;60 a president would

have to be found elsewhere. However, Trump would become chairman, the big-picture person at the

head of the company and the de facto head of the corporation. Van de Graaff would become chief

scientist. Buechner and others would act as a consultants. But who would run the day-to-day nuts and

bolts of the operation? The company needed a leader with technological expertise, bureaucratic

experience, and who could work with a broad assortment of characters on an all-new enterprise. Fellow

engineer Denis Robinson had such skills and was known to members of the team; he would get the

nod.61 The idea was to make machines useful to science and society, of course. But making some

money sure could not hurt.

u

Tenured professors then, as now, made good money (Van de Graaff's professorial salary in the

60 In the early years, Trump and Van de Graaff, still had their full-time professorial responsibilities to MIT so they could not devote their full time to the company. Trump, Robinson said, visited HVEC almost daily on his way to or from MIT. Van de Graaff would do the same but only once or twice a week. On top of normal business hours, Robinson worked an extra three hours a day six days a week taking only Sundays off to be with family. He would typically leave around 9 pm go home, have a late dinner with his family, then go back to HVEC. Robinson, Denis Morrell, Oral History Interview with Michael Wolff. HVEC. 1978 May 23, AIP, OH 4845.

61 See Appendix I for an organization chart from High Voltage dated late 1950 (two pages) courtesy John Van de Graaff.

43

1940s was $6,000 per annum and later raised by $500).62 However, this was America and they were

scientists with good products, they could be capitalists, too. What they could not have expected was

that their little venture would be historic in the way MIT defined and maintained relationships with its

spin-off business, “In the course of twenty years the development of the Van de Graaff generator

utilized virtually all of the patterns of university-industry relations from assignment of patent rights to

an existing firm to formation of a new firm.”63 Not only that, but also, as we shall see, in the way they

would be funded but they still needed four big things: leadership, licences, money, and a place to put

their factory. Everybody wanted radios and aircraft, but atom smashers? There was only one way to

find out.

Figure 7: Denis Morrell Robinson.(Source: Route 128 and the Birth

of the Age of High Tech)

Before coming to MIT, Denis Robinson was head of the AMRE's Centimeter Group64 as “a

dielectric and radar expert with administrative experience as coordinator of the Anglo-American

program at the Radiation Laboratory”65 The British were using a primitive radar-like device called a

62 The average salary at HVEC in the early years was $3,600. Robinson, Denis Morrell, Oral History Interview with Michael Wolff. HVEC. 1978 May 23, AIP, OH 4845.

63 Etzkowitz, 96-97.64 AMRE being the Air Ministry Research Establishment, in England.65 Etzkowitz, 96-97.

44

plan position indicator (PPI) – a most useful component of the radio direction-finding (RDF) technique

developed by physicists in Britain and in the USA. Radar would eventually supplant RDF as the term

for this technology. The PPI was a good system but it was Robinson's task to make it better. To that

end, the University of Birmingham was developing a klystron tube using higher frequencies and greater

powers (klystron tubes would soon find their way into particle accelerator development) to amplify

power. In anticipation of that signal output, Robinson's group developed a receiver – an antenna and

parabolic reflector – to interpret the new 10-cm (3,000 MHz) signal.66

This new technology could better spot enemy bombers and, thus, saved a lot of lives by giving a

tactical advantage to Britain. After the war, Robinson's skilled leadership and abilities to get complex

technological things done under great pressure and urgency while simultaneously bridging the gap

between the scientists, the labourers on the one side with the government bureaucrats and politicians on

the other were exactly the kind of deft leadership the future High Voltage Engineering Corporation

would need and use to great success. Robinson would be president and key organizer of the new

corporation. He would set up the business and work with Compton regarding licenses, royalties, and

any other matters of interest to MIT. Where it gets really interesting is how HVEC was funded.

Whether or not traditional funding was an option is unclear. What is clear is that HVEC was at the

forefront of another new idea: publicly-funded venture capitalism.

Even though the TVA power distribution contract using Van de Graaff's technology failed, it was a

learning opportunity for all and the touchstone for what was to come next: General Georges Doriot and

the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC/AR&D/ARD). The following collates a

few notes on how Compton sold the idea to Doriot.

“Denis M. Robinson [...] says that his company's initial mission to develop powerful X-ray machines for cancer therapy convinced AR&D to pick High Voltage as its second

66 Wildes, 194.

45

investment. '[MIT President] Compton's advice to Doriot was, 'You should put this Van de Graaff/Trump company in your portfolio,' 'he recalls.' [...]'They probably won't ever make any money, but the ethics of the thing and the human qualities of treating cancer with X-rays are so outstanding that I'm sure it should be in your portfolio.' [...] ' AR&D invested $200,00067 in High Voltage, and, despite Compton's pessimistic prediction, the investment was worth $1.8 million when High Voltage went public eight years later'.”68 69

It is a bit of a surprise to read that Compton said that they probably would not make any money. I

suspect he was playing a bit coy. After all, he had spent so much time and energy bringing the whole

Van de Graaff enterprise to MIT, then trying to get the TVA deal done, then seeing the successful

deployment of the technology in science, health, and war. It does not make much sense to say it may or

may not make money for ARDC but that having such an altruistic company in the portfolio would be

good ethical investment? Again, I think Compton was playing it down on purpose because he knew it

would succeed and succeed very well thus making the modest investment look even wiser in hindsight.

Even more surprising, Van de Graaff originally declined to be a partner in High Voltage!

Van de Graaff had his wife Catherine and two young boys to support. Logically, one would think

he would jump at the chance to be part of a company that was coming into existence because of his

technology. Yes, there was some risk, but the potential for reward was great. Conceivably, it could put

Van de Graaff back into the wealth he knew growing up in Tuscaloosa. But no, Van de Graaff appears

to have been content with his life and demurs citing his poor health and lack of business acumen. His

colleagues can go ahead without him. In a display of complete loyalty and respect, Trump insisted that

Van de Graaff take part. John Trump's sense of honour would not let his colleague and friend slip away.

Denis Robinson recalls the moment:

67 Spencer Ante also quotes this number. He also notes the unit under development at startup was a 2 MeV generator that was “eight times more powerful than existing X-rays machines” which certainly made it an attractive prospect for capital investment.

68 Rosegrant, 112.69 Ante, 122: “After two years of struggling, the generators built by High Voltage were used increasingly for cancer

therapy and nuclear physics research. 'General Doriot understood that this would be a slow thing,' said High Voltage CEO Robinson.”

46

“John Trump, from the beginning of our plans, wanted Van de Graaff in as an equal partner with himself. Van de Graaff said, 'Oh, you'd better leave me out of this. I’ll be glad to help in any way possible, but my health' and so on and 'I'm no good at business. I wouldn't know how to help you, so just leave me out of it, but I'll help you anyway I can.' We had three of four luncheons where John Trump insisted over and over again, we wanted Van de Graaff in it as an equal partner with him. As the thing was set up, American Research and Development was willing to let us, the scientists, have 40 percent of the stock...”70

Van de Graaff relented. Of that 40%, shares were divided up between Van de Graaff (one third),

Trump (one third), Robinson (one sixth), Buechner (one twelfth), and R.W. (Bob) Cloud (one twelfth).

I have little information on Cloud save for mentions in Buechner and Trump's interviews and a note on

the company's organizational chart listing him as a consultant. They would be now become industrial

scientists as well as academic ones. While one could say they were “organization men”71 - but they

were themselves the organization so it was in their best interests to maintain whatever culture and

processes were working for them; at least for the time being. They were used to doing their own

“grubby work”72 for many years. Just because they were now formalizing a corporation, it was likely

going to be more of the same until they could hire more people to do it for them. HVEC would be

scientific vocation but it would be no less intellectually challenging or scientifically virtuous 73 than the

research and work they were performing at HVL. It was just upscaled, relocated, and commodified into

a proper commercial operation. They had all worked many years on these devices, why should they not

make more of them for the greater benefit of all? And, if there was a bit of money to be made, there

was nothing wrong with that, either.

Honour aside, the fledgeling company would need investment support. Van de Graaff, his name,

and his technology were world famous. They had demand for their instruments. They just needed

70 Robinson, Denis Morrell. Oral History Interview with Michael Wolff. HVEC. 1978 May 23, AIP, OH 484571 Shapin, 235.72 Shapin, 248.73 Shapin, 250-251.

47

money. President Compton had just the solution – something radical and different – and had

connections from the war years to try something new with innovative leadership. The man was Georges

Doriot, head of the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC).

Figure 9: General Georges Doriot.(Source: http://hbs1963.com/wisdom/careers/

Harvard Business School, Class of 1963)

ARDC, like HVEC, was the first of its kind and, often, the progenitors look and operate

differently than their polished inheritors. Vanguards have few or no models from which build. They are

the model. And creating new models was part of Georges Doriot's World War II experience. Doriot

knew Vannevar Bush, Bush worked for Compton in at MIT, they were all closely connected to one

another in a tight MIT-Harvard-government/military circle thus giving HVEC a startup advantage via

great connectivity to powerful buyers in Washington, DC trading zone.

General Georges Doriot was a kind of fifth wheel on the HVEC wagon but he was an essential

member of the High Voltage executive. He was the man with the money. Doriot did not run the

company but he absolutely had some influence over its affairs.

In his memoir, Doriot describes himself as “French-born professor of industrial management at

48

Harvard Business School and World War II brigadier general.”74

During World War II, he became a general and head of the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps. There

he was credited with innovations to the organization of supply systems, to improving the quality of

goods supplied thorough those networks, and to the creation of Natick Army Labs,75 a significant

research and development centre for the U.S Army to produce products such as meal rations, body

armour, and services such as food irradiation. One of the many uses of Van de Graaff accelerators were

(and are) as food irradiation machines to make foods safe to eat by killing pathogens. Further research

would be required to determine if Doriot and Van de Graaff machines had a connection prior to Doriot's

becoming head of ARDC and financier to HVEC or if Natick Labs got those devices after HVEC came

into being. However, Doriot's skills in procurement and supply-chain management plus his extensive

connections across the nation from his stint as quartermaster would certainly be of great use to HVEC

in building up the business. Business and technology journalist Alan R. Earls writes:

“Denis Robinson was president of High Voltage Engineering, a company that was launched right after World War II with funding from American Research and Development and moved to quarters on Route 128 by 1954. When asked about the role of Doriot in his success, Robinson told the author, “He meant a great deal to me. He stayed on our board for 20 years, for which I was incredibly grateful....He never failed to be aggravating and stimulating. He intended that. He did not care to be loved. He wanted to be useful.”76

Being a Harvard business professor and a no-nonsense general with a track record of innovation

and success, it seems logical that Doriot would be chosen to found and run ARDC (technically, Ralph

Flanders was the first but only for a matter of months at the start) – an innovative enterprise that could

soar and create a whole new paradigm for financing, or it could land with a thud and become an

unique, if failed, experiment. Fortunately for HVEC, and later DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation),

74 Doriot/Gupta, 80.75 Common short name for United States Army Soldier Systems Center (SSC) in Natick, Massachusetts.76 Earls, 47.

49

and countless others to follow, ARDC was for many years a great success. But it was not a cakewalk.

Wall Street Journal business, technology, and culture journalist Spencer Ante explains:

“Doriot would battle for the next twenty-five years against an array of domestic forces that included clueless government regulators, shortsighted lawmakers, and ultraconservative investment managers.”77

Fortunately, High Voltage gave him few troubles. Never afraid to speak his mind and offer advice,

Doriot remained a practical man willing to take calculated risks toward positive outcomes for the

greater good. He was the quintessential big picture kind of man who led by example and suggested

humility as good practice for his protege's in business. Substance over style, humbleness over hubris.

Earls illuminates:

“Venture capitalist Gen. Georges Doriot was the éminence grise behind many of the region's high-tech companies. He was most famous for having funded Digital Equipment Corporation with an initial $70,000. He also mentored the company's management for many years. He was well known for his paternal advice, such as telling Digital founder Ken Olsen to keep mowing his own lawn so he would not get too taken with his own success. In addition to his leadership of American Research and Development (ARD), Doriot also had a long and distinguished career at the Harvard Business School, where he taught a course simply titled 'Manufacturing' from the 1920s through the 1970s.”78

Doriot was ARDC and ARDC was Doriot. They were two sides of the same coin. Doriot was

always a general and his leadership style reflected that. He commanded his ARDC army and by

extension his corporate investments were regiments. Each had their mission, their staff, their duties,

and their leadership. Where it differs from the military analogy is that Doriot did not often order his

executive leaders as a general would. He managed by persuasion. He did not interfere often. He relied

on his staff to act to the best of their professional abilities and to the duties for which they were

charged. If he needed information to make an informed decision, he sought it out:

“You must get correct information. I do not expect to know many specific facts but I

77 Ante, 107.78 Earls, 46.

50

will insist that you know where to find them. ...You have to find out who you can rely upon for correct facts... You must [...] stay abreast of new business developments. You must have this technique of staying informed in order to be a manufacturere. In order to develop it you have to start now determining methods of finding out what is going on in the world and who is getting things done in the world. [...] If you have been aware of the world around you, then you will be able to meet new problems as they come along.”79

It appears Doriot acted more like a teacher or educator than a general or a hard-core financial

manager. “The best teaching is based on a good example and you must be able to set this example in

order to help those with whom you live and work,” said Doriot. “To be a good teacher in business you

must be able to understand this idea of framework...”80

In speaking to his students on what it means to be a be a successful manufacturer, Doriot said,

“...then you will have the privilege of the greatest profession I know: converting plain material into

useful, beautiful, helpful products. This takes some of the greatest qualities man possesses, but it also

pays high returns in creative satisfaction.”81 I believe Van de Graaff and his colleagues at HVEC shared

the same philosophy.

Despite being in charge of a vast amount of investment cash, Doriot did not seem to like or trust

bankers much – even though many of them were associated with ARDC directly or indirectly. This

suggests to me that Doriot did not himself act like a banker, either. He was on the boards of companies

in which he invested ARDC's money, but he did not act as if he himself owned these businesses – a

position he felt too many bankers on corporate boards felt themselves to hold, therefore, he preferred to

not have bankers on his boards. Also, he felt they were too hard to remove. Doriot said, “If you put a

banker on your board be very careful that you do so with your eyes open. [...] The head of the business

generally cannot take care of the daily surveillance of financial matters. He must put the responsibility

in the hands of another whom he can trust and with whom he can work effectively.”82

79 Doriot/Gupta, 6.80 Doriot/Gupta, 14.81 Doriot/Gupta, 14.82 Doriot/Gupta, 38.

51

There is no mention of Doriot by Van de Graaff in his estate's papers. Van de Graaff's sons have no

recollection of Doriot or his being mentioned by their father. Neither Trump nor Buechner mention

him, either. And there was not much mentioned in the Robinson materials I investigated save one, a

reference to a letter in which Doriot gets testy with Robinson's leadership:

“When ARD believed that a company it had invested in had been naive in its dealings with another company, General Doriot wrote to its president: 'I would suggest that you call a Board Meeting of High Voltage whenever Dr. Compton can be there. ... You have wasted a good deal of time. You have trained A.D. Little to be 'the world's greatest experts on the use of high voltage,' you have given them many of your ideas, techniques and secrets so that they can get good fees peddling you information. I think we should quit.' [...] An informed observer commented on the ongoing relationship between the head of ARD and the company: 'The General keeps popping in and out throughout the company's early history. He let Robinson run the company, but he is there one day telling Robinson that his sales organization is inadequate. He is there a few years later urging Robinson to take advantage of the Common Market and put up a manufacturing plant in Europe'.”83

Robinson heeded Doriot's advice and set up HVEC Europe in Amersfoort, The Netherlands in

1960 as a base of operations to serve the European Common Market. It was a wise move. Sales came

quickly and the manufacturing facility expanded several times over.84

On what it was like to work for Doriot, one of his later protege's Dan Holland, a junior banker

hired in 1969 but who for three years prior was an industrial liaison officer at MIT, stated that a lot of

ARDC's staff were students. Doriot liked hiring sharp young minds and giving them opportunities.

Holland also stated that “[Doriot] had no children. Very few people within ARDC had children.”85 Even

though ARDC had been around for over two decades and had some major successes, it still had

challenges getting financial backers. Doriot's co-biographer Udayan Gupta explains:

83 Etzkowitz, 94.84 As of 2014, the Amersfoort company still exists and bears the High Voltage Engineering name and logo. It is not clear,

however, if the Amersfoort company bought the remnants of the liquidated parent firm in the late 1980s. Their website home page states “High Voltage Engineering Europa B.V. (HVE) is the largest and most diverse manufacturer of

particle accelerator systems for science and industry.” There is no company history on the site and no mention of their progenitors anywhere. They make accelerators, ion accelerators, mass spectrometers, and much more. Not one of them bears the name Van de Graaff. I attempted contact with the plant a few times to talk about their history but they never responded. Website: http://www.highvolteng.com/

85 Doriot/Gupta, 66-67.

52

http://www.highvolteng.com/

“In those days venture capitalists had to work hard to unearth investment opportunities. There wasn't a network. People didn't know venture capital existed. Doriot loved working Saturdays. Saturday had been a standard workday in ARD for years by that time [1969]. If a special project came up the General loved to have everybody meet on Saturday to discuss it. There was no training program, just come in and go to work. He obviously had people in there who were very dedicated to him and that was important to him.”86

I cannot determine if Doriot's work regimen at ARDC was also imposed at HVEC – especially in

the first decade or so. I suspect not. HVEC's executives were family men. Van de Graaff would often

attend executive meetings but given his preference to stick to the technology and work at home or

spend time with his family on the weekends, I doubt HVEC had many Saturday meetings of the board

of directors. If they did, I suspect it might have been in the mid-1960s when federal defence purchases

started to decline87 forcing HVEC to diversify their products and find new clients outside of Federal

government. Further investigations into HVEC's records may shed some light here.

u

ARDC was founded in part to try something new. Compton and Bush had a considerable hand in

putting the ARDC machine into motion88 but it was Doriot's operation to command from early on.

Private capital had been the norm. This new idea of venture capital funded by public and private

backers in a publicly-owned corporation was a calculated risk.

New kinds of companies were sprouting up, many of them new technology companies – all were

rather risky opportunities with no track record of private investment and likely never to attract that kind

of investment. This new scheme would pick some very promising new technologies, hand them some

86 Doriot/Gupta, 67-68.87 For more information on the decline in defence funding, see the section “The Crisis of Defense Research, 1965-1970”

within: Geiger, Roger L. "Science, Universities, and National Defense, 1945-1970." Osiris. 7.1 (1992). Print. 88 Rosegrant, 72.

53

money and, hopefully, watch them grow over time – a longer period of time than typical private

investments would allow – for the potential of even greater rewards.89

It would not be a smooth ride and Doriot had to appease his critics and his investors (often one

and the same) “The Corporation [ARDC] does not invest in the ordinary sense.”90 Some investments

would fail – such as a shrimp farm, which was ARDC's first investment before HVEC – but some

would succeed, a few would succeed better, and one, DEC, would become legendary. Regardless of

their outcome, most investment prospects would come from MIT's progeny. Formerly scorned,

“longhair projects” by upstart startups “were taking on giant corporations such as GE91 and DuPont and

beating them at their own game” and starting to show profits – good profits – by 1952.92 High Voltage

was well ahead of competitors GE and Allis-Chalmers but would not turn a profit until 1954, the year

Karl Compton passed away. Doriot eulogized, “Dr. Compton's foresight and vision were responsible in

great part for the formation of American Research and Development Corp., the affiliated companies,

and particularly Tracerlab, Inc. and High Voltage Engineering Corp., on whose boards he served, will

miss his wisdom and counsel.”93 Biographer Gupta quotes Doriot's praising MIT:

“Most of the successful companies at ARD came out of MIT. You tried to prove the technology where you could and understand as well as you could. The first company ARD invested in was a shrimp farm and that almost felled ARD. The next investments were in engineering and high tech and they all came out of MIT. [...] To look at ARD, it was basically started by MIT. The first three advisers were MIT professors [most notably Karl T. Compton, MIT's president]. There were four or five college endowments involved when the fund raised money and MIT was one. ARD was very heavily MIT oriented in the early years... For Doriot most of the excitement was in new technologies. He would get intrigued with anything that was new and revolutionary.”94

89 Hsu, 589.90 Ante, 127.91 General Electric physicist Frederick Seitsz said, in 1937, on why GE did not establish its own nuclear research program

during the early and middle 1930s, “I think it very improbable that nuclear physics will be taken up in the near future” (Lassman 319). Westinghouse and its chief physicist Edward Condon left GE in the dust with their commitment to industrial nuclear research.

92 Ante, 135.93 Ante, 140-41.94 Doriot/Gupta, 68-69.

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ARDC's first investors were a mix of individuals, brokers, and companies together with

educational institution endowments (MIT, Rice Institute, U Penn, and U Rochester), insurance firms

(John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, State Mutual Life Assurance – both Boston and area firms), and

an assortment of investment companies mostly from the New England area but also one each from San

Francisco, Minneapolis, and Canada (the latter being Commonwealth International Corporation) for a

total of over $3.5 million.95

One recent scholarly article on the rise and fall of ARDC called ARDC's investment in HVEC

“very profitable” but downplays ARDC's role in the modern venture capital as “an exaggeration”96 in

great part because of ARDC's “problematic organizational form.”97 I find this a bit unreasonable

because no company quite like this had been done before and no funding model like this had been done

before. Also, none of the physicists had any business experience so Doriot, who had business

experience and taught business at Harvard but, moreover, had an outstanding career organizing the

entire U.S. Military's WWII supply chain. A bit of that skill was likely embedded into the HVEC

model. One could hardly blame him. There were bound to be a few wrinkles to be ironed out no matter

what form was used. Those that follow learn and build (or fail) from their forbears just as Trump, Van

de Graaff, and Buechner learned from building their accelerators; and just as Compton and MIT

learned from the failure of the TVA deal. Build, test. Succeed, fail. Tinker, try again.98 Henry Etzkowitz

notes:

“ARD's objective was to identify a technically superior product with commercial potential and find people who could bring it into production and to market. The

95 Hsu, 591. For a recent analysis of ARD, see Hsu & Kenney's article “Organizing venture capital: the rise and demise of American Research & Development Corporation, 1946–1973" which contains in-depth analysis, tables, financials, and timelines. HVEC gets only a brief mention, however.

96 Hsu, 603.97 Hsu, 603.98 See also: Lerner, Josh. "Venture Capital and the Commercialization of Academic Technology: Symbiosis and Paradox."

In Industrializing Knowledge: University-Industry Linkages in Japan and the United States, edited by Lewis M. Branscomb, 385–409. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

55

guidelines for making an investment were as follows:

• Research and development carried on to date indicate that the enterprise will be

commercially practicable.

• Satisfactory profit potentialities exist.

• The competitive position is intitially protected through patents of specialized

knowledge and techniques”99

ARDC succeeded, slowly but significantly, for a full decade. However, despite being a “freakish

philanthropic enterprise” it did not make a profit and pay a dividend until eight years after inception 100 -

the same time HVEC first started making a profit.

How did ARDC go about investigating their potential investments? It seems, mostly by instincts,

intangibles, and gut feelings stemming from recommendations or references through Doriot's

extraordinary network of contacts from his backgrounds in academia and the military. From his

autobiography, again:

“It was a combination of good people that were always first, and the technology. You did everything you could in terms of talking to people who knew about the technology, using all the General's contacts in various industries.” [...] During ARD's time, there was a heavy emphasis on finding great entrepreneurs. The characteristics you run down are intelligence, dedication, energy, vision, but mostly it's like perfume—you can't really describe it, but when you smell it you know it's good. You have to spend a lot of time with somebody and getting to know them and getting inside their head and making sure that you have a good feeling that they have entrepreneurial capabilities. You spend a lot of time with them in different settings: sales calls, labs, workplace, dinner with the wife, mostly just spending a lot of time and getting a feeling for how they approach and solve problems.”101

I cannot say with certainty that HVEC was subject to such investigations at the start. Doriot's

connections with MIT and the fact that Compton, for one, was on ARDC's board of directors likely

meant that the investigative process may have been skipped or minimized for Van de Graaff's company.

99 Etzkowitz, 93-94.100 Doriot/Loehwing, 80. David A. Loehwing has a chapter in Doriot's book. Chap: “Investment Pioneer – Scientific Risk-

Taking Keeps Paying Off for American Research & Development Corporation.”101 Doriot, 70.

56

However, going forward, I suspect that as HVEC grew and expanded with purchases of subsidiaries,

these methods may have been employed more frequently.

ARDC's investment in HVEC was a profitable one. It was not as profitable as its legendary

investment in DEC years later, but it was a good investment and, more interestingly, the first high-

technology firm funded under publicly-funded venture capital and to also be profitable. In the late

1950s, HVEC was contributing very substantially returns to ARDC's investment. According to Doriot

in his autobiography, patience was finally paying off:

“ARD scored its greatest gains in Airborne Instruments Laboratory, Ionics Incorporated, and High Voltage Engineering. An investment of $214,677 in Airborne Instruments [...] now is worth some $2.5 million.” Similarly, ARD invested $402,843 into Ionics which became worth $6.5 million. “Best of all, the funds $200,000 stake in High Voltage Engineering appreciated to $13.2 million

Through investments like these, ARDC has prospered to such an extent that it has made some distribution to stockholders in every year since 1954. In 1956, 1957, and 1958, it spun off part of its holdings in High Voltage Engineering Corporation, and last year it paid $1 in cash. Early in the year, the stock was split 3-for-1, and at midyear a 31-cent payment was made on the new shares. Altogether, those who originally bought ARD shares at $25 have received dividends of cash and stock amounting to over $42 (at current market values102), some of it tax-free. More importantly, the asset values of the shares has tripled, and the rate of growth is accelerating.”103

Since the days of Vannevar Bush having the ear of presidents Roosevelt and Truman, HVEC still

had the attention of The White House from time to time. President Eisenhower and General Leslie

Groves (of Manhattan Project fame) were regularly supplied, by former general Doriot, the annual

reports of ARDC to which Eisenhower replied in a letter to Doriot: “It was nice to hear from you, and I

am, as you suspected, enormously interested in the report of the American Research and Development

Corporation.”104

102 Circa 2004 when the book was published.103 Doriot: Loehwing, 82.104 Ante, 143.

57

One week later, Eisenhower invited Doriot to an “informal stag dinner”105 at The White House.

Doriot's star was rising and with it, hopefully, everything in ARDC's investment portfolio. And why

not? They were World War II generals all, their influences, extensive and well-respected, and that could

be of great benefit to HVEC. The Atomic Age was under way, the Cold War was on, and atomic science

was a leading science of the 1950s.

Figure 10: Typical imagery and an early HVEC logo paired with one of its subsidiary companies on HVEC literature. Note that Van de Graaff's name is a registered trademark. (Courtesy John Van de Graaff.)

Now a full decade old and now doling out profits and dividends for a couple of years, HVEC was

a solid and successful enterprise. ARDC was making money but it was having some balance sheet

issues. Its investments were good and HVEC was not a problem but ARDC needed some money. In

1956, it was maxing out its reserves with new investments and had less than $1,000,000 in liquid

capital. Its existing method of distributing dividends out of capital realizations. Once again, High

Voltage would be at the forefront of something new, radical. Spencer Ante explains:

“In order to increase last year's dividend, ARD came up with the ingenious idea of distributing one share of High Voltage Engineering stock for each ten shares of ARD, amounting to a dividend of $1.90 per share. [...] Thanks to ten years of trial and error,

105 Ante, 143.

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ARD had begun to codify the principles of venture investing. It had nurtured several innovative and successful businesses, most notably High Voltage Engineering, Tracerlab, Camco, and Ionics.”106

ARDC did not perform well financially during the bull market of the early 1950s, but it did

survive the recession of 1957. In 1959, Ante continues, ARDC's stock start to climb sharply:

“Something else was at play. Portfolio companies such as [...] High Voltage [...] were all reaching escape velocity.107 At the end of 1958, ARD's stock price hit an all-time high of around $38, nearly twice the previous year's value.”108

ARDC made great money – particularly from DEC – and made good earnings through the 1950s

from HVEC until it eventually pulled out in the 1960s when HVEC hit some financial hardships due to

the federal governments curtailment of big purchases such as accelerators. ARDC eventually fell into a

slow decline, finally ceasing in 1973.109

u

MIT's attitude on patent policy development during the early Van de Graaff years demonstrates a

strong desire to change the direction from the status quo. If MIT were to attract new professors –

particularly those who were developing or intent on developing commercializable ideas, products, or

services – they would have to forge a new model towards those ends. Not a surrender, but more of an

arms-length partnership.

Compton shook things up and reorganized the rules and relations between MIT and industrial

partners. Shortly after HVEC was founded, Compton, in 1948, created the Industrial Liaison Program

106 Ante, 146.107 Escape velocity is a term economists and financiers use to describe a company or an economy that, after struggling for

a period of time, is now strong enough to sustain itself and its momentum and make returns on investments. 108 Ante, 159.109 Hsu, 611.

59

which Rosegrant said “became ubiquitous among other institutions” and that “MIT's plan was certainly

the inspirational progenitor.”110 I can only speculate that Van de Graaff, Trump, and/or HVEC in some

small or not-so-small measure via its relationship with ARD, was part of reason for that program's

development.

Before Trump and Van de Graaff began modest manufacturing-like operations at the High Voltage

Laboratory, MIT was busy changing its patent policies. The old ones were just that: old. They needed

modernization and needed to reflect the new direction MIT was taking but also to entice or encourage

professors and graduate students by giving them new liberties and more potential revenue.

In 1932, Compton established a new patent policy at MIT giving more responsibility and control

to professors and less to MIT.111 I would argue that it was Van de Graaff's electrostatic accelerator

technology, along with Trump's ideas on how it could be used, plus Van de Graaff's ideas on high

voltage distribution that drove Compton and Bush to change MIT's antiquated policies. If it was not the

sole technology, it was certainly the most conspicuous one at the time with the most to gain from the

changes. It does not seem as if Compton was overly concerned about any serious kinds of “conflicts of

commitment.”112 He would not leash his professors nor keep them on a short rope but he would tether

them to MIT and give them a fairly long line, but that line could be tugged and made taught at any time

if the Institute felt anyone was straying too far away from their academic duties or MIT's “key

mission.”113 It was a delicate and daring balance between virtuous scientific objectivity and valuated

scientific entrepreneurship.

Until Van de Graaff came aboard in the early 1930s, MIT's patent policy was laissez-faire.114

Sometimes rights went to or favoured the Institute; other times, the academics. Stanford's Henry

110 Rosegrant, 64.111 This, Compton felt, would encourage scientific entrepreneurship on the one hand but keep the university's focus on

education and in the protection of patents, and not commerce and profit-taking. 112 Shapin, 216-217.113 Ibid.114 Etzkowitz, 59.

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Etzkowitz writes that MIT wanted to “avoid conflict” with the private sector and preferred to enter into

“business-like relations with industry” while still keeping traditions of “open publication and

disinterested research” as part of their continuing legacy, not pressing too hard on general principles of

ownership. Etzkowitz continues, “MIT's goal, in becoming involved with the patent system, was to

reconcile a new academic mission of capitalizing knowledge generated on campus with existing

academic missions.”115 This was not problem free. MIT was keenly aware of The University of

Wisconsin's patent problems; they were the stuff of national headlines and not the kind of publicity

Compton would want for MIT. Wisconsin was making lots of money from patents but thoroughly

enraging the scientific community because of the way it was handling patents, too. Etzkowitz again,

“Essentially, UW was attempting to exercise power over industry that control of its patents made

possible.”116

It was a nationally-famous case which had broad implications. In order for MIT to succeed in

setting up its professor-scientists to become potential entrepreneurs, Compton had to finish getting his

ducks in a row. I believe Bush helped him because, in his autobiography, he notes how he felt in

changing the patent structures at universities the “university's equity” must be “properly recognized.”117

MIT learned from its own mistakes but it also learned from the University of Wisconsin's.

Compton would move MIT to the role of protector of intellectual property. They were not the first

to do this but they were very early among their peers. I cannot say Van de Graaff was a prime mover to

effecting this change, but he was certainly a beneficiary. Etzkowitz describes the situation:

“... intellectual property considerations as well as disciplinary contributions were taken into account in faculty hiring. In 1931, when Robert J. Van de Graaff was appointed to the department of physics from the same department at Princeton University, MIT's administrators were well aware of the potential commercial implications of his research on high voltage. MIT viewed the purchase of his electrostatic research equipment from

115 Ibid.116 Etzkowitz, 59.117 Bush, 160.

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Princeton not only as a contribution to the continuity of his research but also as a way of restricting the participation of Princeton University in future patent rights. Nevertheless, since the decision to file an application for the patent was left to the inventor, the Institute had no institutional claim upon intellectual property created by members of its academic staff.”118

Van de Graaff's technologies had commercial potential but that was not the only reason for MIT to

change their policyies. Patent rights were a problem at other universities as well. The matter needed to

be overhauled anyway and Van de Graaff's generator was a good reason to build for the future. Little

could they know how much that change would affect so much.

Interestingly, the University of Wisconsin's WARF119 patent woes regarding one of their

professor's patent rights to oleomargerine also drove MIT to revitalize their policy. Wisconsin was

home to physics professor Ray Herb who would eventually work at MIT during World War II, but also

become a consultant and, arguably, Van de Graaff's nemesis when he broke away from HVEC to form

his own company to compete with HVEC – the National Electrostatics Corporation. If Herb was not

embroiled in Wisconsin's patent problems, he was certainly affected by them. Later, Bill Buechner

would accuse Herb of industrial espionage against High Voltage:

“Ray Herb has been the most successful – at least in taking orders – he hasn't been successful in making them work according to his specs. He had stolen them quite often in the last 10 years. That, to a considerable extent, accounts for the demise of the Science Division [of HVEC]. The fact that we had this increasing competition – not in our opinion always a fair competition – but nevertheless Ray had a habit of convincing people that he could do it better than High Voltage Engineering. And while didn't succeed to often, he did manage to get the contracts.”120

118 Etzkowitz, 59.119 Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation – the first technology transfer office at a university. A landmark and influential

1930s case involving allegations WARF and the University of Wisconsin restricting professor Harry Steenbock's patents on oleomargerine from being used widely in the dairy industry. Ironically, Steenbock was a key influence in the establishment of WARF. See: Etzkowitz, Henry. "Bridging the Gap: the Evolution of Industry-University Links in the United States." Industrializing Knowledge : University-Industry Linkages in Japan and the United States / Edited by

Lewis M. Branscomb, Fumio Kodama, and Richard Florida. (1999). Print. 120 Buechner, William W. and John G. Trump. Interview with John Van de Graaff. Personal interviews, audio recording,

unpublished. Winchester, Mass., 17 May 1984. Van de Graaff Estate.

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u

After World War II, other loose ends needed to be closed before HVEC could launch into

business. One such loose end was the licence Westinghouse121 had from MIT to build generators.

Trump and Van de Graaff met with John Bunker, Acting Chairman of MIT's Patent Management

Committee to get the license back. Westinghouse had done nothing with it, Van de Graaff and Trump

needed it to start up the company, and Doriot's ARDC was demanding exclusive rights via that licence

to protect its significant investments. There were also some concerns regarding exclusive licences to

HVEC or anyone else. Once again, HVEC was at the forefront of change because of the long-term

investment needs of ARD. The Institute, via Compton, would figure out a new model. Compton

declared, “My objective is to point out that a formula must be found which recognizes the special

position of educational institutions if any satisfactory working arrangements are to become general

between corporations such as American Research and institutions such as MIT.”122 MIT agreed to

Doriot's demands granting ARDC exclusive license for ten years only. Both parties seemed satisfied.123

u

Selling particle accelerators was truly a unique enterprise. It would require Van de Graaff's team to

transition to new financial models and realities; and would also require some adjustments to the new

university-government-industry paradigm as well as exposure to a new media cultures hungry for news

on anything atomic. They would also have to learn how to sell and market their products and services

or support those would be doing those jobs. Fortunately, they were not strangers to attention by

121 For more information on Westinghouse Electric's nuclear research program, see Lassman, Thomas C. "Industrial Research Transformed: Edward Condon at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, 1935-1942." Technology and Culture. 44.2 (2003): 306-339. Print.

122 Etzkowitz, 74-75.123 Etzkowitz, 75.

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outsiders and Van de Graaff's name already got the proverbial foot in the door.

Some accelerators had been made and sold by Van de Graaff and his team at MIT in the past.

Other accelerators were built and sold in similar academic laboratory environments. What made HVEC

unique was mass production. Others would follow but High Voltage was the first to do so. How does

one go about selling powerful devices that can split apart the building blocks of all things? According

to the HVEC brochures I have reviewed: First, you do not talk about the atomic bomb. Second, you

play up your past successes – peacetime, pre-war successes – as providers of life-saving, cancer

fighting, X-ray machines, and anything else that was positive and beneficial. This is reflected in the

literature quite extensively. You also talk up the famous man who invented these amazing machines.

Van de Graaff's name still resonated in the public mind so you mention that and put his name and

image in your brochures and literature. You talk up how these devices are instruments of peace and

healing. You dazzle and amaze with impressive pictures of friendly, working-class men and strange-

looking, futuristic technology of the benevolent Atomic Age of wonders.

High Voltage was covered in the media from time to time. For the early years, I could find no

evidence of a marketing department of any kind so it I presume journalists would contact the

executives, the business office, or the sales office for stories – or the other way around.

Another way to help win the hearts and minds of a curious public is to reach out and talk to them

in the newspapers. In March of 1958, president Robinson wrote a series of articles in a national

newspaper and were aimed at the everyday investor, someone they had not tried before. They also seem

written alleviate any trepidation American families had about Cold War science by outlining all the

good and peaceful work these atomic machines were doing for you and your children. They needed to

engage in a bit of old-fashioned public relations – take your case straight to the kitchen tables and

living rooms across America.

Denis Robinson wrote a series of three articles for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper on

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March 8, 10, and 11 – Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday respectively. It is a curious choice and I cannot

explain why it was chosen unless HVEC was looking for new investors to buy shares and were tapping

into a sector of society that was perhaps reluctant to invest or ignorant of HVEC and their devices.

The first article, “High Voltage Engineering Plays a Key Role in Atomic Research”124 with a sub-

head of “Refinement of Machines For Peaceful Uses Seen,” gives a clue. Robinson gives a thorough

and positive the history of Van de Graaff, Trump, their machines and their successes, and ends with a

bit about the superiority of their invention and where it is built. It is accompanied by a nice photo of a

smiling Robinson and another of their research and manufacturing facility in all its modern

architectural glory.

The second article, “Electron Accelerators Spur Development of Nuclear Theories”125 with a sub-

head of “High Voltage Firm Promotes Research” takes it a step deeper. It discusses the differences

between basic research and applied research, what the “new physics” offers, how about half their sales

goes to educational institutions (and hinting that your son could become an atomic scientist), demand

for the machines is high, and expenditures for research is vital (hinting at support now), the role of

nuclear physics in industrial science, a note on how efficient Van de Graaffs are (recall this is 1958 and

1957 was a recession year) and, last but not least, a caution that “the Soviets have developed advanced

machines of the Van de Graaff type” and an acknowledgement that these machines may not mean as

much to the public as satellites (Sputnik I had only a few months earlier made history) but were

“certainly much more vital research weapons” and that HVEC would do their best to help the free

world stay ahead.

The famous photo from Round Hill with the monstrous prototype machine sparking furiously

accompanied the article along with a photo of a man working on one of the 10-ft (3m) tall glass tube-

124 Robinson, Denis M. "High Voltage Engineering Plays a Key Role in Atomic Research." Christian Science Monitor 08 March 1958: Page 12. Print.

125 Robinson, Denis M. "Electron Accelerators Spur Development of Nuclear Theories." Christian Science Monitor 10 March 1958: Page 12. Print.

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shaped126 accelerators with the nifty shiny coils inside. The two shots are clearly demonstrating how

much has changed in a quarter century but also tapping in to the memories and fame of Van de Graaff's

most conspicuous device. If memories could be jogged favourably, then it might be easier to invite the

to invest because they might trust a name – a man – that was familiar to them.

Figure 11: A typical horizontal layout of a laboratory using a Van de Graaff accelerator. (Source: HVEC literature courtesy John Van de Graaff).

The third article, “Low-Cost Ionizing Radiation Looms as a boon to Home and Industry”127 with a

sub-head of “Electron Accelerators Many Uses” gets down to business. Robinson makes the pitch that

their accelerators will help business processes, make food safer, cut production costs, detecting flaws,

and so on. Accelerators still cost a lot of money but the are working on smaller, specialized machines

that are “more financially attractive” and that labs like yours are aching to get them (hint, hint).

An illustration of a 10 MeV Tandem Van de Graaff is shown in cutaway – rather like the 20 MeV

shown above. The article closes by acknowledging that nuclear weapons emphasized the “harmful

126 While not quite as blatant and sexually charged an image as displayed on the cover of Kary Mullis's autobiography shown in Shapin's book (on page 227), there are plenty of these kinds of images in HVEC's literature, but always in good taste. An example can be seen in the middle image of Figure 12.

127 Robinson, Denis M. "Low-Cost Ionizing Radiation Looms as a boon to Home and Industry." Christian Science Monitor

08 March 1958: Page 14. Print.

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effects of radiation” but the accelerator is a tamed instrument for good and peaceful uses with all kinds

of safety features, locks, shielding, and so forth to protect operators and end-users (consumers) of

products, too. By the way, their plant keeps expanding to meet ever-increasing demand. Fears allayed,

readers of the Christian Science Monitor could now invest their money in this cutting-edge atomic age

technology with a clear conscience.

In 1960, a feature article128 of four columns filling most of a page in the Business Section in the

New York Times included a photo of Robinson behind an HVEC accelerator showing Robert Colton,

the manager of atomic, electronics, and science division of the National Securities & Research

Corporation (NSRC), an HVEC brochure. NRSC was a mutual fund investment firm and the article

was singing the praises of investing in research and development in high technologies. High Voltage,

its products, nor its people appear in the article, just the photo. A picture may be worth a thousand

words, but it may also speak to a thousand potential investors. Good public relations would help in

some ways, but it was not a substitute for good marketing and, clearly, HVEC was diversifying its

investor pool.

u

When Van de Graaff joined HVEC full-time in 1959 it may have helped with the company's

marketing efforts to say the famous inventor was now devoting his full time and attention to creating

more powerful accelerators and to creating and developing his insulating-core transformer (ICT)

technologies which had as great, if not greater, potential for revenues because ICTs could be marketed

to many more buyers than the accelerators. Whether having Van de Graaff in the plant was helpful to

their marketing efforts or not is unknown. It sure could not have hurt them. Potential customers and

128 Smith, Gene. "Mutual Funds: Research Receives Backing." New York Times 07 November 1960: Page 58. Print. Note: The sub-head reads “Increase in Outlays for Such Work is Held Essential” which underscores the need for patience in these kinds of investments. Technology is a long-term investment.

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investors would certainly want to meet the famous man and Van de Graaff was too much of a

gentlemen not to oblige almost no matter how much pain he was in.

Like any other manufacturer, HVEC produced a newsletter, manuals, and sales literature. These

bulletins were often quite substantial in size and content. Bulletin H129, for example, titled “Van de

Graaff Particle Accelerators for Research and Industry” (see Figure 12) was typical of their late 1950s

and early 1960s product line. It featured on the cover an image of the machine, a person (for scale), and

the company's name and logo set upon a background of yellow with red highlighting/headers and a red

cirrlox binding. Inside the 32-page booklet were many more photos, diagrams, illustrations, graphs,

charts, data, and plenty of text to answer their every question and concern while simultaneously

explaining every ease and advantage to you.

Figure 12: HVEC brochure booklet circa late 1950s (Source: National Museum of American History Library).

To help sell accelerators, but also to help researchers understand ways in which to use HVEC's

accelerators in their research, they published a booklet called The Place of the Particle Accelerator in

129 Bulletin H, High Voltage Engineering Corporation. Record ID: SILNMSAHTL_21531, National Museum of American History Library, Washington, DC, USA.

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Research.130 In it were 12 technical data sheets demonstrating to clients and potential clients the

versatility of the Van de Graaff accelerator product lines. Basic science, nuclear physics research,

biological research, micro-organisms, water studies, teaching physics, and so forth were listed to entice

interested parties from a broad variety of disciplines and requirements. The following is the Table of

Contents from the aforementioned brochure:

• High-energy Electrons in Solid-state Physics – I

• Lattice Bonds

• Type of Particle

• Applications

• Accelerator Versatility

• Pulsed Neutrons for Reactor Research and Teaching – II

• Subcritical Assemblies

• Pulsed Neutron Sources for Teaching

• Particle Accelerators in Biological Research – III

• Energy-transfer Mechanism

• Effects of Light and Heavy Particles

• Effects on Man

• Necessary Equipment

• Particle Accelerators for Nuclear Physics Teaching – IV

• Scattering Experiments

• Nuclear Reactions

• Neutron Production

• The Effects of Ionizing Radiation in Liquid Systems – V

• Experimental Techniques

• Water Studies

• Energy Levels

• Atomic Displacement by High-energy Particles – VI

• Determination of Displacement Threshold

• Thermal Spike

• Monoenergetic Neutrons – VII

• Accelerators Gave Control

• Fast Neutrons Needed

• Variable Monoenergetic Beam Needed

• Nuclear Spectroscopy – VIII

• Studies of Nuclear Structure

• Van de Graaff Accelerators

• A New Van de Graaff

• Radiation Effects in the Gaseous Phase – IX

• Organic Research

• Inorganic Studies

• The Van de Graaff as a Radiation Source

• Radiation Effects on Microorganisms – X

• Microbiological Factors

• Chemical Changes

130 The Place of the Particle Accelerator in Research. Burlington, Mass: High Voltage Engineering Corp, 1958. Print. This is a rare document. Only one was found in my research. It is at Cyclotron Library at the University of Illinois.

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• Van de Graaff Accelerators

• Neutron Activation Analysis – XI

• Advantages in Activation Analysis

• The Van de Graaff® as a Neutron Source

• Accelerators at the Research Frontier – XII

• Energy

• Intensity

• Pulsing

• Energy Stability

Having a series of your own branded technical manuals, data sheets, operators manuals, and other

supporting documents helps sell any high technology product far more easily than those without or

those produced by a third party. Self-publishing helps create an impression of confidence in potential

clients. Excellent publications set you apart from the competition. From what I have seen, and as a

producer of high-quality technical and marketing documentation myself, High Voltage produced

excellent documentation for both sales and support.

The language contained in the aforementioned booklet was fairly plain English and always

positive and suggesting helpfulness to the prospect's research needs – often by citing a previous client

or use where these accelerators helped make leading discoveries. Most were interspersed with a

diagram, an illustration, a graph, or table that helped break up the text but also accentuated it.

All but two of the 12 sheets had at least one citation referencing an article in a scholarly journal,

conference proceedings, or a book. The Physical Review and Modern Physics were the most referenced

journals. A small note in the corner offered the prospect a free copy of HVEC's new particle accelerator

bulletin. One sheet offered an invitation to visit HVEC's exhibit at the upcoming 2nd International

Exhibition on Peaceful Uses of the Atom being held in Geneva, Switzerland.

Clearly, HVEC was positioning themselves away from the yang of apocalyptic mushroom clouds

of Cold War weapons research and highlighting the yin of the miracles of atomic science to benefit

humanity through peaceful means. They already had an excellent track record on that front with the X-

ray cancer therapy machines, so it would be sensible to push technical advantage to some of their

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potential clients using that as an example.

u

Van de Graaff accelerators were – and still are – renowned and respected for many reasons but the

four major reasons are durability, reliability, adaptability, and precise attenuation (voltage and current

regulation). In the early days of atomic physics research, Van de Graaffs were more popular than any

other machine. They were easy to build and were easy on research budgets. It was a highly-reliable

scientific instrument because the million-volt131 streams (or more) of protons, electrons, and what have

you could be very precisely regulated thus giving finer ranges for experimentation. A machine of high

quality, great reliability, and useful versatility is far easier to position and sell against competitors

creating similar but inferior machines. After all, who knows better about making these kinds of

accelerators than the man who invented them?

Van de Graaff accelerators have, over the decades, proven themselves very reliable and highly

adaptable. While some were scrapped or mothballed, many made by HVEC during their heyday are

still in use at top American research facilities such as the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne

National Laboratory132, Yale's Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory133, and the Research Triangle

Institute in North Carolina. Cyclotrons were fairly easy to build and had higher voltages but they could

not be fine-tuned like a Van de Graaff. American Institute of Physics historian Thomas Lassman

illuminates:

“An electrostatic generator of the type pioneered by Robert Van de Graaff possessed

131 In November of 1931, Van de Graaff's generator was the first accelerator of any design to break the 1,000,000 volt threshold and was demonstrated at the inaugural dinner of the American Institute of Physics. It must have been quite the sight and sound.

132 Press Release 66-23 (14 June 1966), Argonne National Laboratory. MS-9-55, Box 14, Folder 14, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC, USA.

133 Wright has the world's most powerful tandem Van de Graaff Accelerator capable of up to 20 MV – a goal which eluded Merle Tuve.

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certain performance features that the cyclotron simply could not match. Cyclotrons normally generated higher voltages and more powerful particle beams, but they could not produce reliable data in cases where precise measurements were required. They operated by brute force, clumsily accelerating ions to extremely high energies before directing them onto heavier targets. The tightly focused, homogeneous particle beams produced in the straight vacuum tube of an electrostatic generator proved ideal for quantitative investigations, such as the measurement of atomic energy thresholds in nuclear reactions. Van de Graaff exploited this on a grand scale at [MIT].”134

In 1950, HVEC's two biggest rivals in terms of sales were two giants: General Electric in first

place and Allis-Chalmers in third (HVEC came in second).135 If HVEC was to succeed, it would have

to do it against formidable competition. Little did High Voltage know at the time, but one competitor

would come from within. In the 1960s, Ray Herb's NEC was not only a personal betrayal, but a

corporate and scientific one that hurt HVEC's accelerator developments, sales, and client base.

u

Despite particle accelerators being a new and highly-specialized technology, there were plenty of

companies, large and small, wanting to get into the business of making them. I believe HVEC was the

first to incorporate (in the USA, at least) exclusively for that purpose. They were, at one time or

another, the leader in sales and quality versus their rivals. As we have seen, HVEC was a special firm

in many ways. The company and its products were influential in changes to the way universities – and

certainly MIT – developed research and funding relationships with government, industry, and

entrepreneurial scientists. Patent policies were changed. Rights were reassigned and renegotiated.

Licences were drawn up and changed. Radically new financing in the form of publicly-funded venture

capital was established to kick-start new, university-based, high technology spinoff corporations. New

schemes of stock-splitting were developed. At the centre of all this was High Voltage Engineering

134 Lassman, 317.135 "Supervoltage Machines." Fortune April 1950. Print.

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Corporation.

While HVEC was selling to a niche market, they did have a leg-up in terms of marketing: they had

Van de Graaff in the fold and his name was trademarked and on every machine. The company still had

to communicate to their customers and prospects, but they also communicated to the public at large.

They produced technical and corporate communications of very high quality and very modern in their

design at the time. They reached out to shareholders and the public with annual reports, semi-annual

reports, quarterlies, newsletters, and newspaper articles that promoted their products and vision but

without bombast or high-brow language. They made scientific instruments, but their style was open and

approachable – rather like a family-run business. This softer style, according to Buechner's accuation,

may explain why Herb took off with insider information and created a competing company.

Part IV: The Entreprevirtuous Scientist – Van de Graaff's Demo-Paternalistic

Leadership Style.

Robert J. Van de Graaff was a somewhat solitary figure yet fully versed in the social graces –

courtesy of his upbringing in the family mansion in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His academic boss, John

Slater, called him “isolated” but I believe Van de Graaff was more accurately modest and mild-

mannered as a Southern gentleman of his generation would typically behave. Also, Van de Graaff was a

thinker – always cogitating and calculating – which, in physics, is often a solitary act. Additionally, for

Van de Graaff's entire adult life he lived with pain – often extreme and debilitating. This may have

contributed to disposition somewhat but there is not much evidence to support that. He had a fractious

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relationship with Slater, it seems, but with his peers and his students, he was well-liked and well-

respected. Van de Graaff enjoyed good conversation and loved to share a laugh in the telling of a joke

or a funny story.

The culture of HVL and HVEC revolved around Robert. It had to, it was his technology and his

intellect behind it. Trump, too, was significant because he figured out ways to apply the technologies to

be useful to science, industry, and healthcare. Van de Graaff was no Teddy Roosevelt leading his posse

of men to charge up San Juan Hill, he was more like Abraham Lincoln: quiet, polite, persuasive and, at

times, stubborn. Robert, like his colleagues, was a scientist and engineer. Academic and virtuous. He

was not a businessman nor does that seem to ever be a goal. Entrepreneurship was an outcome or

byproduct of his successful inventions. Demand for more and better inventions demanded

industrialization and commercialization. Instead of selling out, he straddled both worlds. Van de Graaff

was a unique blend of old-school academic in the virtuous pursuit of advancing scientific knowledge

and new-school corporate scientist-engineer who reluctantly embraced corporatization principally

because it would serve his academic and scientific interests (and those of other scientists). He was, I

believe, an entreprevirtuous scientist.

u

Van de Graaff was an engineer but he was also a physicist – an experimental one. To break new

ground in a new field of research, sometimes, like Lawrence and Cockcroft and Walton and others, you

had to build a machine from scratch. There was no shelf from which to draw from, you had to invent

the machine(s) you needed. In either lab, Trump was the applications and ideas guy, Van de Graaff was

the design guy, Buechner was the wrench turner but also an idea guy. They worked well together and

the relationship was, I believe, friendly, professional, and respectful. Each could discuss anything with

the other(s). The only thing that mattered was the instrument. Each machine had to bet the best it could

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be. And each had to be better than the next. That was their culture. J. Craig Venter would have hated

them.136

Slater, in his autobiography137, called Van de Graaff “one of the most ingenious of the young

experimenters” Compton wanted to bring from Princeton. “He never took any interest in teaching, and

was regarded as essentially a research man.” It is true that Van de Graaff did not care much for teaching

but to say he never took any interest is, I think, not true. Van de Graaff preferred to be in the lab and

preferred to mentor there as well. Classrooms were tedious and he did not much like public speaking.

Moreover, his endless back pain precluded him from being on his feet for hours as is expected in

typical classroom situation. Moreover, Van de Graaff and the Physics Department were never much on

good terms – especially regarding teaching. Van de Graaff was world-famous, but he was not quite the

classroom teacher like Slater and others were. Robert was a deep-thinker always cogitating on his

equipment and how to make them better; but his preference regarding students was to mentor graduate

and post-graduate students.

In an interview with Charles Weiner138, Slater speaks positively of Van de Graaff's machines but

negatively of the man himself which is in contrast to anything else I have read about people working

with Van de Graaff. Slater “felt that his generator was a fine idea, and that that would get us into the

machine business” and “we were very anxious when Van de Graaff’s machines began to operate to see

to it that these were used for real nuclear experimentation as well as just practical things” but that Van

de Graaff was “isolated” and that “he never mingled very much with the department” but does not say

why. It gets worse: “...Van de Graaff never did much in teaching courses or trying to attract students. It

was just mostly a question of getting apparatus built. Van de Graaff never personally cared much about

doing a thing with this machine. He just wanted to build it. [...] I think he wanted to get a machine that

136 Shapin, 225.137 Slater, 169.138 John Clarke Slater, Oral History Interview, 1970 February 23 & August 07, AIP, OH 4893

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could be used for all kinds of purposes. But he showed very little interest in actually making use of it.”

This, I suspect is Slater's bitterness coming through. For whatever reasons, Slater is being disingenuous

regarding Robert or just did not really know him at all despite his long contact with him. Van de

Graaff's fame and that of his equally-famous generator attracted graduate students from around the

world. Van de Graaff was the guru at both MIT and HVEC so his methodologies – and the effects of his

physical limitations – would likely be consistent. Although he ran the lab, he was never the “scientific

statesmen.”139 Perhaps that was another reason why Slater did not like him. Van de Graaff did not play

the Ivory Tower game.

It is true that Van de Graaff did not publish often and did not much like teaching, but Van de

Graaff did want to do research. However, his physical health interfered with that goal and quite often.

Worse, a serious car accident in the 1950s further exacerbated his mobility and pain. His tenacity to

adapt and overcome would suit him very well as an engineer, scientist, inventor, and reluctant

businessman. His force of will to continue working despite suffering terrible back pain would inspire

his team, command their respect, and instill great loyalty. Despite this, Van de Graaff was not

appreciated by everyone – especially his department head.

Slater had to know of Van de Graaff's accident and chronic problems with back pain and mobility

and that this interfered with his work – all of his work – so it is strange that Slater would be so unfair in

his assessment of Van de Graaff except to suggest Slater was perhaps envious of Van de Graaff's fame,

envious of his relationship with Compton, and later, the success of HVEC – something he was never a

part of.

High Voltage had lots of customers in medicine, science, and government140, a world-wide

reputation for excellence, connections to The White House, and lots of cash. According to Buechner,

139 Traweek, 101.140 NASA was a frequent client. They used Van de Graaff accelerators to simulate radiation damage and micro-meteor

impacts on spacecraft, spacesuits, electronics, food, etc. The New York State Atomic and Space Development Authority was another customer who bought HVEC products when the Federal government's budget shrunk in the 1960s.

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Van de Graaff was dissatisfied with the Physics Department's infighting and backbiting. He was losing

interest in the teaching he was doing and the physicality of it and becoming more interested in research.

“[Van] worked like the devil for the students but it took a lot out of him.”141 He wanted to resign from

MIT, not retire, and become a chief scientist somewhere. Of course, High Voltage would be the obvious

choice, but, for a man of his intelligence, reputation, and fame, it was not his only choice.

In 1959, Robert J. Van de Graaff, displeased with MIT's Department of Physics and disappointed

he was not offered a more elevated position than associate professor, turned in his resignation and

joined High Voltage giving it all the attention and time his deteriorating body could muster. “MIT was

horrified,” said Buechner. “They wanted to make him emeritus.”142 It was too late. They broke his heart

and infuriated his wife.

It was not until Van de Graaff finally left MIT behind that he spent all his non-family time and

energy with HVEC. It was not a matter of being “brave enough”143 to cut himself from MIT. He was

never motivated to make a lot of money. He, like Trump, was motivated to help people and help

science through his inventions. He was motivated too, I believe, by his health. He was not in good

shape and if he wanted to get any personal pet projects done it would have to be now. He had “free

space”144 at his own company. He was free from MIT and free to do whatever he wanted. And he did

just that.

Denis Robinson remembers Van de Graaff as “extremely polite; a Southern gentleman. He was

brought up on a plantation in Alabama and his forebears for two or three hundred years, had been in

this country and they were slave owners. But he was the perfect Southern gentleman. He never raised

his voice in anger, never showed any temper. He was steely in his determination, first to somehow



143 Shapin, 261.144 Shapin, 263.

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counteract his own pain, because he was constantly in pain. [...] Whenever he tried to sit up and work

for more than an hour or two at a time, you could see the sweat, even in cold weather, come right out

on his brow, trying to hold down the agony. So this was a big strain on him. But he was devoted to the

idea of his machine. He would never let you call it — he never wanted to call it the Van de Graaff

machine, he would call it the electrostatic machine. We had to persuade him to let us use his name as a

trademark. He didn't want glory for himself, but he was devoted to the whole idea of getting this work

for physics, and he was very far-seeing close up. He had written a memo to Compton in 1931, when he

came to MIT — which talked about accelerating uranium. This was before the atom was even split by

Cockcroft and Walton in England, and he wanted to bombard uranium with uranium even then. If he

had been a well man, with good health and thoroughly backed by MIT, a lot of that might have

happened here, instead of other places, because he was right there. It actually happened much later, in

‘39, so he was 15-18 years ahead. But like many other people, he was seeing into the glass darkly and

wasn't given the backing to go ahead.”145 146

It was only shortly before his death that Robert J. Van de Graaff got to experiment with

accelerated uranium – a basic research project he wanted to do for decades. Also, I think Van de Graaff

enjoyed designing and building his machines for others for their research experiments. It was

intellectually stimulating and it had to make him feel himself to be a useful, contributing member of the

scientific community even if he was not performing a lot of basic scientific research himself. His

contribution would primarily be in creating a fantastic and fundamental scientific instrument that would

be used by thousands of researchers around the world for countless useful applications.

With a department head like Slater, and a culture of friction and discord, it is not difficult to

145 Robinson, Denis Morrell, Oral History Interview with Michael Wolff. HVEC. 1978 May 23, AIP, OH 4845146 I think Robinson might be calling out Slater here rather than Compton when he says MIT did not back up Van de Graaff

thoroughly because this is the only time I have heard anything along the lines of MIT not giving Van de Graaff whatever he needed whenever he needed it. Unless, perhaps, Compton was prioritizing Van de Graaff's research towards OSRD and other government and military requirements and did not see how such a uranium acceleration experiment would be useful.

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appreciate why Trump and Van de Graaff would want to eventually move out and focus on the

company exclusively. Strangely, they were in no hurry to leave. Van de Graaff would not quit MIT for

HVEC full-time until 1959. Trump worked with HVEC only part-time for the entire time he was with

the company. He remained with MIT and the HVL until retiring in 1980.

Not everyone was unhappy with the prospect of working at MIT under Slater. MIT physicist

Milton Stanley Livingston who was E. L. Lawrence's protege at Berkeley and who co-invented and

helped him build the first cyclotron was lured to MIT to build a cyclotron for the Institute, seemed

excited at the prospect. And, again, it is counter to Slater's claim that Van de Graaff was not attracting

people. Livingston, attests to his motivation for joining MIT: “Van de Graaff came to MIT at the same

time, and we had his challenging development of electrostatic generators going on in the same

department. Van de Graaff’s team of people were also working on accelerators and nuclear physics, and

that made it an exciting place for me.”147

Another perspective comes from a PhD student from the University of Bergen in Norway, Harald

Anton Enge,148 attending MIT in 1955 in the Foreign Students Summer Project.149 Enge was helping

build a Van de Graaff in Norway and wanted to study at MIT and to work with the team at High

Voltage. They hired him on retainer – paying him up front – because they had a good experience with

him in 1952 when he consulted for them back then when he designed a spectrometer for the University

of Strasbourg that HVEC built. Enge said, “Professor Buechner, ...was the acting leader of the Van de

Graaff group. The reason for that was that Van de Graaff had quite a bit of problems with a back injury.

[...] Professor Buechner was the actual daily leader of the group, so he was my boss then when I came

147 Milton Stanley Livingston, Oral History Interview, 1967 August 21, AIP, OH 4746 w/Charles Weiner & Neil Goodman148 Harald Anton Enge, Oral History Interview, 1987 August 6, AIP, OH 126 w/ Jan Vaagen149 The FSSP was one way MIT boosted its student enrolments – particularly PhD students. For more insight into the post-

WWII boom in physics graduates, see: Kaiser, David. "Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists After World War II." Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences. 33 (2002): 131-159. Print.

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here. [...]”150

This is particularly interesting. If a student could determine for himself why Van de Graaff was not

the front man for the group and thus less conspicuous, why could Slater not? Enge, again:

“Van de Graaff, like me, was a scientist on the technical end of it. He was remarkably inventive. He not only, of course, invented the Van de Graaff machine, but all the new things like the tandem. He was the driving force to build the first tandem accelerator, and he invented the alternating gradient tubes. He invented the so-called insulated core transformer, and so he was really more an inventor151 than a professor of physics. Of course, as you probably know, he retired from MIT early because he couldn't stand up giving a lecture, because of his back problems. In his college years he was a football player at the University of Alabama, and he got serious injuries in the back and in a knee, and during the war, when his group here at MIT was involved with making Van de Graaff accelerators, two megavolt accelerators for the US Navy, he should have had an operation. He never took time for it, and then after the war it was more or less too late, and the spine had worn so badly that it couldn't be repaired. He had three operations and in one of them, he got infectious hepatitis and almost passed away.”152

This is confirmed by Van de Graaff's sons. William Van de Graaff, a pulmonary surgeon, told me

in an interview153 much the same thing but said his father endured at least two operations to fuse some

vertebrae. The first one in 1948 failed, the second one two or three years later succeeded somewhat but

he still suffered chronic pain syndrome and mobility problems. His father suffered from chronic fevers

and took “thousands of asprins – high doses. To the best of my knowledge he avoided narcotics. [He]

couldn't use narcotics because he wouldn't be able to function as a scientist.”154 Bill stated his father

was depressed at times by his poor health and that his troubles meant he could not carry on his

teaching. Van de Graaff still wanted to teach but his health forced him him away from it. It was

150 Harald Anton Enge, Oral History Interview, 1987 August 6, AIP, OH 126 w/ Jan Vaagen151 Van de Graaff held seven patents: Electrostatic Generator, US1991236, 1935. Electrical Transmission System ,

US2024957, 1935. Apparatus For Reducing Electron Loading In Positive-Ion Accelerators, US2922905, 1960. High Voltage Electromagnetic Apparatus Having An Insulating Magnetic Core, US3187208, 1965. High Voltage Electromagnetic Charged-Particle Accelerator Apparatus Having An Insulating Magnetic Core, US3323069, 1967. Multi-Disk Electromagnetic Power Machinery, US3239702, 1966. Inclined Field High Voltage Vacuum Tubes, US3308323, 1967.

152 Harald Anton Enge, Oral History Interview, 1987 August 6, AIP, OH 126 w/ Jan Vaagen153 Van de Graaff, William (Bill) Boyden. Interview with Edward Fenner. Burr Ridge, Ill., 19 August 2011. Audio

recording.154 Ibid.

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involuntary.

Bill read to me a 1966 letter from his father's physician that his diabetes is now under control but

that he also now suffered from aortic valve disease. Undaunted, Van de Graaff could enjoy life, his

family, his work, and simple pleasures. One of those pleasures was good food – a holdover from the

wealthy days of his youth back at the mansion in Tuscaloosa, Alabama:

Jan Vaagen: “His taste for good food and also the quality of food is kind of a legend that the 'young' men like me have heard. Was that accentuated?”

Harald Enge: “Oh, I don't know. At least he showed, physically showed, that he had good taste for good food, that's for sure. I guess I wasn't that close to him really, because he was very little at MIT after I came here. Either he was in a hospital, or he retired. One of the strange things, I must say, is that Van de Graaff, with his name, never was made a full professor at MIT. He retired as an associate professor. And I think that's a black spot on the physics department of MIT.”155

Strange? Certainly. And who was head of physics? John Clarke Slater. Enge goes on to state that

Van de Graaff was not an outstanding physicist in the traditional sense but rather an “outstanding

inventor” which may be true but which also may be the root of Slater's animosity towards Van de

Graaff. Enge also explains that there is room for all kinds of people who, like himself, were not

outstanding physicists but better designers within physics making contributions to physics via

apparatus used by others such as Van de Graaff and Livingston.

Despite Slater's claims to the contrary, Enge was also doing basic research with Van de Graaff and

they jointly published a paper together (with Buechner and A.Sperduto) in 1952 called "Search for

Alpha Particles from the 16O(d,α)14N* Reaction”156 which flowed from a suggestion by Buechner to

Enge to tackle a theoretical problem regarding selection rules. Given that Van de Graaff was co-

performing basic physics research at MIT and co-writing a paper in 1952, one has to wonder if Slater

155 Ibid.156 Physical Review 86, 966–967 (1952)

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was deliberately being disingenuous about Van de Graaff (and why). It is one thing to not like

somebody, it is another thing to not bother to know why one of your professors acts the way he does,

but it is unprofessional to make false claims about them.

Van de Graaff, Enge said, was also a man who “sparked off a tremendous number of ideas” and

“not only in technical fields, but also fundamental ideas in science.” Enge continues, describing Van de

Graaff's demo-paternalistic leadership style:

“He was very quiet, and very modest. I can remember in particular when I had worked on the first spectrometer -- that eventually became the broad range spectrograph that we had in this building -- he had an idea of a smaller spectrometer that he could still use on the old machine. He came to me with the idea, and asked me to look at it and see if I thought it was any good, and he was so modest. He approached me as the expert in the field, and he was just almost a student. And of course, the situation was completely the other way around. And that's the way he was. And he was also very difficult to communicate with, in the sense that if I had an idea, it was extremely difficult for me to explain it to him. And so, he basically worked alone, and also at High Voltage, because of his back problem, he was spending most of his time lying down. He had a sofa in his office there, lying flat down on his back and dreaming up ideas, and then he conveyed them to other people, so he had people like Peter Rose for instance, as one of his close associates at High Voltage, who was sort of the interpreter of bringing out the ideas to the rest of the company.”157

Both sons confirmed that their father had a sofa in his office at High Voltage but also several

around HVEC so he could rest and ease his back wherever he happened to be at the time. It was

unusual but it seems nobody though poorly of it, they had too much respect and sympathy for the man

to whom they were very loyal. The family home had similar arrangements in his home office and

around the house. His colleagues, ever helpful to Robert and ever mindful of his sense of humour,

found a way to get him around the factory with ease and comfort. Son Bill explains, “At High Voltage...

he had bad legs... he really didn't walk very well, he used a cane, but anyway they called a little golf

cart they had reserved for him and called it the Van de Graaff accelerator.”158 Robert found it hilarious.

157 Harald Anton Enge, Oral History Interview, 1987 August 6, AIP, OH 126 w/ Jan Vaagen158 Van de Graaff, William (Bill) Boyden. Telephone interview with Edward Fenner. Burr Ridge, Ill., 08 February 2011.

Audio recording.

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Van de Graaff, despite tremendous pain and difficulties with his mobility remained ever the

professional, collegial, Southern gentleman. He showed up for work every day he could and if he could

not, he would work from his office in his home. No moss would grow on Van de Graaff and he would

accept no pity, either. It would be undignified. Bill Van de Graaff continues:

“They [MIT] actually offered to give him a post-mortem promotion at MIT, is what I was told. My mother turned them down. He paid his travel expenses on behalf of the company, at High Voltage. His final salary there, I was told by my mother, was $20,000 a year. Does this sound like a man who was pushing himself on people?”159

Robert J. Van de Graaff was not a man to push himself on people, his sons both recalled. Neither

son could recollect his father bringing any of his prizes home. They certainly were not on the walls of

his offices at home, at High Voltage, or at MIT. They were not part of Robert's personal effects returned

to his family and they certainly would not be discarded by them.

I thoroughly rummaged through both William's and John's boxes and files of their father's papers

and keepsakes and only one item was found: his honorary doctorate of science from Florida State

University. No Elliott Cressen Medal. No T. Bonner Prize. No Duddell Medal. Bill told me wished the

medals and awards were still around so they could be given to Robert's grandchildren but his

impression was that his father probably just gave them away to friends and colleagues. “My take on

him would have been that nothing could have been less interesting to him. ...I think he was a very non-

self-promotional, non-boasting person.”160 The material object was not important, the recognition itself

was. His name was already on every machine High Voltage made. It was also attached to every

machine of its kind made by others based on his designs. It was not even his idea to call it a Van de

Graaff generator. He would never be so vain. But, ever the kind man, he appreciated that others wanted

to call it thus and he was too modest to get difficult about it.

159 Ibid.160 Van de Graaff, William (Bill) Boyden. Personal interview with Edward Fenner. Burr Ridge, Ill., 21 August 2011. Audio

recording.

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Robert was offered (at least once) to write his memoirs – either solo or with Trump but he never

did write them. Bill Van de Graaff: “Oh, I suspect he never would have responded. That's completely

consistent. If he had responded it would have been a gentle “thank you for your interest” ... or

whatever. He would have been polite.”161

Van de Graaff did not keep much in the way of notes, either.162 His personal papers in his sons'

possession contain his research notes as a student at Oxford including his first musings about the

generator for which he would become famous. Also in the files were old address books, speaker's 3” x

5” cards, HVEC brochures and annual reports, some letters, but no memoirs or reflections of any kind

and none were in his files at MIT's Archives & Special Collections, either.

I did find one old quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape recording of Van de Graaff speaking on various

topics. It was pulled together by High Voltage as a gift to Robert's wife Catherine and their children

after Robert died. It contains about an hour of snippets from talks and lectures, a TV interview, and

some other technical discussions. The reel was in John's files and when I dug it up he said he must have

forgotten it or possibly was even unaware of it. Bill said the same thing. That reel and a spool of

corroded film from a BBC interview were put in my custody to take back to York University for

dubbing and, if possible, restoration. The film is yet to be determined if it is recoverable, but I was able

to dub the audio tape. It appears to be the only known surviving audio recordings of Robert J. Van de

Graaff still in existence. In it, Van de Graaff describes his process and why he procrastinated in writing

things down:

“...I've been thinking about it. Because I looked down the tabulation – I've been over

161 Van de Graaff, William (Bill) Boyden. Interview with Edward Fenner. Burr Ridge, Ill., 21 August 2011. Audio recording.

162 Apparently, physicists are still not very good at keeping notes, generally speaking. An interesting report on modern physics entrepreneurship (however, it does not cover Van de Graaff's era) with a section on their record-keeping practices can be found in the Engines of Innovation: the History of Physics Entrepreneurship (HoPE) Study now know as: Anderson, Joseph R., Orville R. Butler, and M. Juris. “History of Physics in Industry – Final Report.” AIP.org. Web. 5 Jan. 2013. < http://www.aip.org/history/pubs/HOPI_Final_report.pdf >

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http://www.aip.org/history/pubs/HOPI_Final_report.pdf

this in my mind – It's one reason I find it so darned hard to write, I visualize the thing... and... I want to get them more perfect and yet in one way they are very clear in my mind. I want to get them more perfect so I can't bring myself to put down what I visualize but it serves my purpose in the mean time (laughs)...”163

Figure 13: Robert J. Van de Graaff chuckling in his office at HVEC. (Source: HVEC publicity photograph courtesy John Van de Graaff.)

Bill Van de Graaff recalled a story John Trump told him about an incident in his father's lab at

MIT and someone had dropped a very large, very expensive vacuum tube. It broke. Instead of getting

angry, Van de Graaff simply said, “These things happen.” Very rarely did Van de Graaff raise his voice.

It would be undignified for a Southern gentleman such as he to lose his temper. John Trump comments

on Robert's character:

“...[everyone] remembers his enjoyment of life, and his humour, his wonderful sense of humour. The stories he told of the Old South and things like that. And his way of looking at things was a very happy one, I think. Very encouraging and very nice. I think on top of that he was a strongly supportive person. He would encourage people and stimulate them to creative efforts of their own. He didn't insist on pushing everything himself. Although he did push some big ideas himself very hard. [...] Van wouldn't hesitate to tell a story again, either, which was nice because you didn't remember it too well the first time. And he always told it with that nice Alabama accent. And then he would get into gales of laughter before he finished telling it which was contagious so

163 Van de Graaff, Robert Jemison. Interview sound bite contained in audio recording circa 1964 of several recordings of Van de Graaff compiled onto one reel. Original interview circumstances unknown. Estate of Robert J. Van de Graaff.

85

everybody would be roaring before he was through. When the punchline came we would be beside ourselves!”164

Buechner joins Trump a little further along and they discuss Robert's activities and ideas at High Voltage with John Van de Graaff:

Trump: “High Voltage Engineering was also a refuge for your father. His health was no longer so good. He tended to think in the direction that he had always thought – but in the direction of still grander enterprises. Physics was changing. The financing was changing, the competition was coming up. I think it might have been a little rough on your dad. Now whether he could have gone out and been a consultant I don't know. The treatment he got from MIT's physics department was not encouraging. He found the atmosphere at High Voltage much more supportive [...]”

Buechner: “...Van was not a person who gathered around him large groups. He didn't really want to work with a large group.”

Trump: “He wasn't an Ernest Lawrence, was he?”

Buechner: “No, no.”

Trump: “Just the opposite, probably.”

Buechner: “He was much more interested in developing fundamental ideas. For example, in our particular group, he really never had much to dowith the group as such. He and I would spend hours discussing these various ideas and so on. Then it was up to me to go out and get them done, you see. He'd done it the same way with you. And the same way with the company. He would tour around the company and talk to a few people about what they were doing but he spent most of his time just talking to a few people in any deep way. About what we'd done, what the future might be, and so on. Van was a great idea man but not a leader of men, as such. He just wasn't interested in having a bunch of people around him like an army; do this, go do that, and so on. It was just foreign to his nature.”

Trump: “Yeah, I think that's right.”165

Genteel, kind, soft-spoken, encouraging, supportive, humourous, and largely unflappable – all

while dealing with great pain. He was not a leader of men, it just was not his style. However, he still led

by example and by democratic means – always deferring to others to do their work, lead their teams, or

164 Buechner, William W. and John G. Trump. Interview with John Van de Graaff. Personal interviews, audio recording, unpublished. Winchester, Mass., 17 May 1984. Van de Graaff Estate.

165 Buechner, William W. and John G. Trump. Interview with John Van de Graaff. Personal interviews, audio recording, unpublished. Winchester, Mass., 17 May 1984. Van de Graaff Estate.

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whatever. Or, he would lead by paternalistic means by being there for anyone and seemingly happy to

talk shop. But he was charismatic and he was the chief scientist so Van de Graaff's style was also akin

to “charismatic authority.”166 His leadership was based on ideas, great ideas, that his peers could put

into products and solutions. If Van de Graaff could envision it, his team wanted to build it for him. No

man is perfect and he had his run-ins with colleagues and competitors, that is only natural. He was

proud of his accomplishments but he was not boastful.

Van de Graaff's friends and colleagues were loyal to him for life but he had his rivalries, too.

Particularly with Lawrence for which son John Van de Graaff said his father had a “healthy disdain”

but for what reasons, I cannot yet determine.

John Van de Graaff told me a story his mother Catherine would joyfully tell. Around the time of

Robert's death on 17 January 1967, the Soviets were busy photographing the far side of the Moon and

were busy naming craters. They proposed naming a twin crater167 after him. It was accepted in 1970.

Catherine stated that her husband would have been enjoyed the honour but would have been especially

delighted that there was no Lawrence crater on the moon. Lawrence would get a crater years later but,

it was a recycled one originally named Taruntius M; and it was to be shared with another Lawrence, a

deceased astronaut trainee, first name: Robert.

According to a letter168 issued by his estate's law firm Foley, Hoag, & Eliot of Boston, Robert J.

Van de Graaff's estate was worth, at the time of his death, $2,357,659.81. Most of that, $1,734,495.00

came from 66,076 shares of HVEC. He also invested heavily in municipal bonds worth $442,914.41.

The remainder of the estate was a mix of land,169 property, stocks, insurance, and annuities. He was

166 Shapin, 266-267.167 The Robert J. Van de Graaff crater is an unusual one. It is a figure-8 shape, 233 km long and 4 km deep, and is located

in the Mare Ingenii. More unusual is a localized magnetic field in the vicinity that is stronger than the natural lunar field and is higher in radioactivity, too. Lunar coordinates: 27.4°S 172.2°E. <http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/6305>

168 Foley, Hoag & Eliot. Letter to Catherine, John, and Bill Van de Graaff. 30 April 1968. Van de Graaff Estate Papers, Northampton, MA, USA.

169 Van de Graaff still had massive tracts of land near Tuscaloosa that were remnants of his inheritance and his family's former plantation. Pieces of it were expropriated over the decades to build a highway and to build (just before WWII)

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http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/6305

survived by his wife Catherine and sons John and William. Van de Graaff recovered his wealth but he

surely would have traded every penny to recover his health to spend more time with his family and

with his life's work.

Van de Graaff and the Modern Scientist in Traweek, Galison, and Shapin

Although, HVEC was still a decade away and there was a war still to come but John G. Trump and

Robert J. Van de Graaff had found their niche market as future entrepreneurs while also retaining their

credentials as virtuous scientists creating technologies for the advancement of science and medical

treatments. Essentially, I would argue, they found their entrepreneurial soul without selling out their

scientific virtue.

One has to wonder if the war and the ORSD had not come to pass, would Compton and MIT have

been as successful? Would HVEC? There were certainly living up to MIT's motto: “The MIT motto,

Mens et Manus [Mind and Hand], continued to be a living force in the educational process, as both the

people and the new knowledge they created through their research went back to reinvigorate the

curriculum,”170 explains Wildes.

The changes made by Compton and Bush made that motto more manifest. HVEC would come to

embody that in spirit and practice. Here would be a company that would create devices from the mind

and build them by the hand to smash apart the basic elements of matter and to feed the minds of science

and later expand (in the 1950s) the Tuscaloosa Regional Airport which was originally identified Van de Graaff Field. It is still called that but now is subordinate to the TRA moniker.

170 Wildes, 106.

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and humanity. HVEC not only became the corporate embodiment of MIT's motto, they exceeded it.

Growth would come quickly and MIT would assist by providing new frameworks in which HVEC

could interact with the university, government, and industry and also help develop innovative funding

to help niche technology start-ups like them get off the ground. Many start-ups compete to grow a

customer base. Years before HVEC would exist, the HVL would enjoy plenty of demand from an ever

eager marketplace.

u

Sharon Traweek's anthropological immersion into and investigation of the culture of Japanese

physics provides some interesting comparisons to the team at HVL and HVEC in the United States. I

am not an anthropologist, but Traweek would probably describe Van de Graaff's and Trump's physics

“style”171 as Japanese – taking greatest emphasis on closely training the next generation of physicists –

rather than American. Her book “is an account of how high-energy physicists see their own world; how

they have forged a research community for themselves, how they turned novices into physicists, and

how their community works to produce knowledge”172 and broadly parallels my narrative. Like

Traweek, my narrative is framed, or perhaps more influenced, in part by war; and with it: organization,

money, power, and motivation. I will compare Traweek's studies of community in Japan with the

communities of pre-war HVL and post-war HVEC.

Sharon Traweek's community of Japanese physicists and administration are easily distinguished

from each other. Administrators wear business suits, engineers and senior technicians adopt a business

casual form of attire, and the physicists tend to dress casually in jeans and rolled-sleeved shirts.173

There are clear, self-imposed clustering of communities, subcultures, and status here. In the case of

171 Traweek, 146-147.172 Traweek, prologue.173 Traweek, 215.

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HVL and HVEC, theses divisions are less clear. All photographs I have seen of Van de Graaff, Trump,

Buechner, Robinson, Compton, Doriot, Bush, Slater, PhD students, and so forth – whether staged or

candid – all show them wearing business suits, lab coats, or lab coats over suits. The divisions are less

obvious, but this was a time when wearing such garments were the norm for everyone. Status might be

gleaned from the condition or style of suits worn, but since all of the players in my narrative are or

were academics, this makes it difficult to support Traweek's subcultures and identity by fashion not

viable in this timeframe or location.

Traweek also describes the culture of her physicists, namely “full-fledged physicists”174 worrying

about splitting their time between performing basic research and going “on the circuit”175 of lectures,

conferences, and job rotations; and that “senior physicists know that what one needs to be concerned

about is obsolescence”176 and that a career-preserving measure is “to make a transition into being one of

the statesmen of the field.”177 I am sure Traweek's observations are correct for the situation she

observed, but the same cannot be said for Van de Graaff or his peers at HVL and HVEC. I can find no

evidence that Van de Graaff or Trump worried about going on the circuit versus time in the lab or

classroom. If anything, Van de Graaff seems to have preferred spending time in the lab with his

instrument, his peers, and his students learning hands-on. Trump, Van de Graaff, Buechner, the Van

Atta brothers all contributed to a handful of papers on the Van de Graaff accelerator and, presumably,

attended physics conferences to discuss their published findings. Given the decades these gentlemen

worked at HVL and HVEC, and aside from the temporary dispursement of some personnel due to

World War II, there was no concerns about obsolescence. Why would there be? They were at the

forefront of electrostatic particle accelerator technology and stayed that way, more or less, from the

early 1930s through the mid-1960s. Their careers were secure at MIT and at HVEC. Van de Graaff

174 Traweek, 101.175 Ibid.176 Ibid.177 Ibid.

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would quit MIT in 1960178 to focus solely on his interests at HVEC while Trump would comfortably

split his time between both until he retired from both in the 1980s. Trump would become a “statesman

in physics” of sorts following Van de Graaff's death but he would forever be in his shadow. Van de

Graaff, on the other hand, could fairly be considered a statesman of sorts in physics since he became

world famous in the early 1930s. His name was synonymous with the accelerator. Later, he was more

of an anti-statesman. Always modest and gentlemanly in the Southern way, Van de Graaff seemed to

carry his fame reluctantly. He did the necessary media interviews, met with important people when

they came to visit, and answered some requests to speak about his technology but it was always at a

minimum. Part of this can be attributed to his constant battles with his health and his pain. However,

two things stick out that suggest he just did not have a big ego and that it was just not his style to do a

lot of self promotion.

Van de Graaff's files have many requests for guest visits, lectures, and books. If it was not too far

away, he would go and give a short talk with students. Mostly, though, Van de Graaff would politely

decline or according to his son Bill, in later years he would just not answer – he preferred to devote as

much time as possible to his remaining work while his health would allow it. Additionally, Van de

Graaff won a number of prestigious awards including the prestigious Elliot Cresson medal179 in 1936

and the T. Bonner prize180 in 1965 and nobody knows what became of it. Robert's heirs do not have it

and cannot recall even seeing it. It was certainly not on display anywhere nor was it in his effects when

he passed away. They feel he likely gave it to a friend or colleague as a thank you. The physical

artifacts were not important, the recognition was important – but this did not translate into any kind of

178 Often inaccurately reported as happening in 1959.179 The Cresson Medal is the highest award given by the Franklin Institute for discoveries, inventions or improvements of

useful machines, and other areas. Ernst Lawrence would win it in 1937 for his invention of the cyclotron. 180 The Tom Bonner prize is an annual prize awarded by the American Physical Society's Division of Nuclear Physics “To

recognize and encourage outstanding experimental research in nuclear physics, including the development of a method, technique, or device that significantly contributes in a general way to nuclear physics research.” Ray Herb would not win this award (established in 1964).

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change in his behaviour or status, insofar as I can determine.

Van de Graaff's style was to maintain his lifelong persona as a Southern gentleman and hard-

working, dedicated physicist, engineer, and inventor. All the rest was very nice but kept tucked away

and never flaunted. That would be gauche. Van de Graaff, Trump, and Beuchner all much preferred to

keep to the business of research and development, mentoring students, and cultivating their own small

community of scientists old and new to move the technology and the science forward. World War II

had no impact on the way the HVL team did their work other than to focus it on helping the war effort.

I would contend this then crystalized their culture which helped it survive the war but also maintained

it after the war when HVL's team transitioned to HVEC. Their community produced knowledge but,

perhaps more importantly, their team produced the instruments desperately needed by others to created

new knowledge in the new field of atomic physics. And there is nothing to suggest they were not

perfectly content with that. HVEC, while it commercialized their raison d'être, it enabled them to

expand on it.

There can be little doubt that the High Voltage Laboratory at MIT and the High Voltage

Engineering Corporation that followed were unique microcultures heavily influenced by the scientific

materialism of their work. The men of HVL and HVEC were devoted to their device. Van de Graaff,

Trump, and Buechner spent their entire professional careers with those two organizations. Aside from

their families and a very little basic research not related to the development of the accelerator, these

men had one task: keep improving the instrument. Indeed, if one wants to make claims of technological

embodiment, look no further than Van de Graaff the man and the Van de Graaff machine. His name was

on the machine but it was his brain that invented and reinvented that machine. Moreover, Trump could

not envision High Voltage without Van de Graaff as its chief scientist. Everything the team did revolved

around Van de Graaff and his machine. Their loyalty to him was strong and they had great sympathies

for the suffering he endured daily so they ensured that his offices all had sofas so he could lie down and

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rest his back. At HVEC, and in the best of spirits and respect, they bought a golf cart they dubbed “the

Van de Graaff accelerator”181 to assist Robert's mobility around the spacious factory floor. I feel this

was not only a demonstration of Van de Graaff's team's great respect for him but also their great

affection for him.

Ray Herb also had his loyal followers and was, I would suggest, far more embedded in the

materialism of the Van de Graff accelerator and its capitalistic potential. Galison discusses Herb and the

physicists of the University of Wisconsin with regards to their contributions to the Manhattan Project at

Los Alamos. It was Herb's version of Van de Graaff's generator that would be used there in support of

the war. Once the atomic bomb became public knowledge, Wisconsin physicists were, for a time,

media darlings.182 Post-war investments in physics departments grew substantially and competition for

the best and brightest minds was on. Yet, while MIT was a beneficiary of this new-found interest and

moneys, I am not aware of any changes at HVL.

Galison references a letter from Julian Mack, head of the optics and photographic group at Los

Alamos on hiring new faculty for Wisconsin “We have all seen the growth in importance in team

research. If the department wants, and can very soon definitely offer as a prospect, a teamwork program

involving a major construction problem, as for instance on further Van de Graaf [sic] work or a billion-

volt accelerator, [Edward] Creutz [at Carnegie Tech] becomes very important.”183 Wisconsin, it seems,

was aggressively trying to expand their research lab even if MIT's HVL was not. Perhaps, HVL had all

that talent they needed. Given that HVL was in the shadow of the Rad Lab, this is perhaps a good thing

for them in terms of keeping what they had intact.

Slater, Galison notes, felt that World War II (that is, the great attention of the public, industry, and

181 Van de Graaff, William (Bill) Boyden. Telephone interview with Edward Fenner. Burr Ridge, Ill., 08 February 2011. Audio recording.

182 Galison, 281-288. Galison does not state if Herb was among the Wisconsin group on the radio and giving lectures. It may be he was not because Herb was stationed at MIT's Rad Lab at this time.

183 Galison, 284.

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government in the atomic bomb) should do for physics research what World War I did for research on

chemistry.184 Assuming Slater meant the best of intentions regarding basic research into atomic physics

for its own sake, this is reasonable. However, if Slater was thrilled with that kind of attention on

academic pursuits, why then did he always seem to have this contentious relationship with Van de

Graaff and HVL? Van de Graaff certainly brought attention and money to MIT (that is, HVL), but not

necessarily to the Department. Perhaps therein lies the rub. Slater would go on to create the Research

Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, a kind of postwar Rad Lab which, so far as I can ascertain, had

nothing whatsoever to do with Van de Graaff. Galison also describes how MIT needed a new lab “to

serve as their Los Alamos”185 but it would not be HVL. Galison writes, “...before the war MIT had

possessed the valuable high-voltage investigations of Robert Van de Graaff and John Trump, but the

Institute had not sent a large contingent to Los Alamos or Chicago. [...] MIT were determined to

remove that deficiency by transferring skills, instruments, information, problems, and personnel from

Los Alamos to MIT.”186 To say that Trump and Van de Graaff's “investigations” were “valuable” is, I

feel, an understatement. No, the HVL team did not go to Los Alamos. Van de Graaff's health problems

would have likely ruled that out. Besides, HVL was a small group and they were very busy supplying

accelerators to the war effort. They had nobody to spare! I also find it curious that while Galison writes

a great deal about the Rad Lab, its culture, and its materiality, he writes almost nothing about the High

Voltage Laboratory or its fine team. Why? The Rad Lab was huge and much more complex a culture

and perhaps too big to be appropriately be called a microculture. HVL was a very tight microculture of

dedicated scientists and engineers working to build better instruments of science and scientific

investigations. It was cool in its own way – any kind of work in atomic physics in the postwar decades

was certainly a conversation starter.187

184 Galison, 290.185 Galison, 291.186 Ibid.187 The Van de Graaff's hosted cocktail and dinner parties so common to the era. Robert's papers contain several catering

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Galison calls the period between 1952 and 1964 as a “renaissance in instrumentation”188 as good

as any in history. He writes of cloud chambers and bubble chambers, of timers, analyzers, and

computers – but not of accelerators – the devices that begat all these supporting instruments. I would

suggest Galison dial back his renaissance by a decade to include the rapid inventions and developments

of Van de Graaff, Lawrence, and Cockcroft & Walton (among others). Without their contributions,

some of the instruments Galison writes about would likely not have been invented for they would have

no purpose. Lastly, Galison writes that “the character of twentieth-century physics cannot be

understood if one ignores the powerful practical and institutional forces that drove theorists,

experimenters, and instrument makers into separate interacting communities,” that borders are in

transition, and trading zones are shifting. I can agree with that but if you are going to claim that, you

should not, to my mind, ignore a very conspicuous group of instrument makers at MIT making very

conspicuous, powerful, and practical instruments in a unique and very narrow trading zone of

accelerator design and production! I am not saying Galison's focus on the Rad Lab or Los Alamos are

wrong. Not at all. They are large microcultures. What I am saying is that by focusing on the highly

conspicuous, widely researched, and perhaps obvious laboratories, he is thus missing out on the smaller

labs doing equally important work in truly micro-sized microcultures. By doing so, Galison can obtain

an even deeper understanding that is more inclusive and with a renaissance that goes back farther than

he is currently suggesting.

I saved Steve Shapin for last because I feel his insights into scientific entrepreneurship are fairly

close to my narrative. Although Shapin writes of the life-world of contemporary scientists as

entrepreneurs from the 1970s to the early 2000s. I believe, however, that he, like Galison, need to go

back deeper in time to the pre-World War II era to find the roots of modern scientific entrepreneurship.

One could go back into the late nineteenth-century to Tesla's relationship with Westinghouse, for

menus and lengthy guest lists far beyond the scope of the small HVL. 188 Galison, 565.

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example, but that was a more atypical than typical.

Shapin compares academia versus industry as sites of virtue.189 Until the idea of the university

started to change – where the borders between universities and industry started to blur, virtue belonged

to the academics exclusively. However, once scientists started becoming entrepreneurs and universities

entertained and then supported entrepreneurs, the idea of the virtuous scientist started to slip away

under the vail of commerce, capitalism, and profit.

Van de Graaff, Trump, and his team, I believe, were at the start truly virtuous scientists. They were

not “organization men”190 in the industrial sense Shapin notes. Their work at HVL and MIT generally

did fill their days and many nights but I do not believe it dominated their personalities. It certainly was

a major aspect of who they were but nothing suggests they became their work. They were still Robert

and John and Bill. It just so happened they worked at MIT on cutting edge atomic instrumentation

research. They seemed to keep their egos in check. Even after they formed HVEC, there does not seem

to be any noteworthy change in their attitudes or behaviours. They all still taught at MIT, they still

performed the usual “grubby work”191 at HVL mentoring students, and they still kept up their family

lives and responsibilities. They remained virtuous throughout their time at HVEC but they also were

practical enough in business to understand that business itself was not a virtuous enterprise. HVEC

made money. It took eight years before it turned a profit but when it did, the money was great. They did

not start cranking our more accelerators just to make more money. That was not the point. The point of

HVEC was to make scientific instruments quickly and efficiently to meet the great demand for them.

Those accelerators they were manufacturing were practical and virtuous machines to heal the sick, to

sterilize food, to conduct mass spectrometry, and to help unlock the secrets of the atom.

If this technology was not virtuous, then what was? If it was not for the investment of ARDC

189 Shapin, 232-242.190 Shapin, 235.191 Shapin, 248.

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which got HVEC off the ground, I feel they would have made accelerators on a non-profit basis if they

could have gotten away with it. But that was not practical so commercialization was the only realistic

option. They could remain virtuous scientists with a hand in entrepreneurship (what I call

entreprevirtuous scientists), Robinson could be the organization man. They were, despite certain

differences, still the same core team and Van de Graaff was their inspirational “captain”192 – that is what

is important. Shapin writes, “...teamwork – whatever moral and scientific values were placed upon it –

was a substantial feature of how many researchers described the life of the industrial scientist. In many

respects, these sensibilities were traditional.”193

Van de Graaff's team were not truly industrial scientists. The were academic scientists that also

worked industrially. I think they preferred it that way. They had worked together as academics for more

than a dozen years. Scaling up their academic research, design, and build to an industrial scale seems

only a practical formality. They could make more machines to help people with whatever they needed it

for. The money was secondary. The fact that it took so long to turn a profit lends credence to that.

Nobody was sure HVEC would even work. It was a risk. To me, that says a lot about the culture of

HVEC. Success did not change them. They remained true to themselves and their microculture.

The only indulgence I could note along the lines of Shapin's discussion of “free space”194 was

when Van de Graaff, now retired from MIT and devoting his time to HVEC indulged in some

experiments – basic research experiments – he had wanted to perform for decades but for which life got

in the way too many times. These experiments were not for the company, they were not entrepreneurial

in any way, they were for him and for science. Such was the respect his peers and his partners had for

him. He was returning to pure virtuous science. As a scientist, he was coming full circle. He was back

home.

192 Shapin, 259.193 Ibid. 194 Shapin 263.

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Conclusion

Van de Graaff was a new kind of physicist – a Big Science experimental physicist and engineer –

who envisioned and built a massive instrument to investigate the basic properties of atomic structure.

Einstein was cool, but hard to understand. Smashing atoms was equally cool and a lot easier to

understand.

Van de Graaff was invited to MIT to help build MIT's credentials in hard-core physics and to help,

I believe, expand MIT's reach and relationships with industry. I believe Compton saw Van de Graaff's

technologies as a game-changer – possibly more than one – and that is why he secured the man, the

technology, the rights, the royalties, and everything else from Princeton because, if this technology

worked as promised, it would put MIT on the map as a serious player in experimental physics research.

Compton needed Van de Graaff and his technology badly to start the realization of his vision for the

future of MIT.

I have shown that Robert J. Van de Graaff never set out to be an entrepreneur. He was, like much

of his team, a scientist-engineer and inventor. I have shown that his academic mission was to

continuously design and improve his accelerator (and also his insulated core transformer, is other key

technological contribution) to advance scientific investigation into the structure of the atom in the new

field of atomic science. I have demonstrated that Van de Graaff was surrounded by a loyal team of

peers who assisted in improving his accelerator but also in broadening its practical applications. I have

show that Trump was key to developing the accelerator into an X-ray machine that was used to treat

cancer in human patients and to scan equipment, devices, ordnance, and bombs in support of America's

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World War II efforts. I have demonstrated that William Buechner was important to the development of

specialized accelerator vacuum tube technology and thus important to its highly-valued performance

and reliability that would provide them with a technical advantage over their competitors. Also, I have

shown how this triumvirate formed the core brain trust behind the successful accelerator technology of

High Voltage Engineering Corporation but also how they formed a decades-long professional

relationship that was only broken by the death of their father-figure, Robert J. Van de Graaff.

Regarding the relationships between university, industry, government, and capital, I have

demonstrated how MIT president Karl Taylor Compton, together with Vannevar Bush, changed the

policies of the Institute that not only encouraged entrepreneurship and changed policies on patents,

rights, and licenses to support that goal, but created a new paradigm in the process where these

relationships could be rendered anew, be tested, grow, and flourish in ways previously not thought

possible. This changed the very nature of MIT – transforming it from an engineering school to an

innovative powerhouse for the investigation of basic scientific research. I have demonstrated that a

second paradigm developed from Compton's management. Compton, with Georges Doriot and other

participants, developed and trialed a new model of funding high-technology star-up companies:

publicly-funded venture capital. Privately-funded venture capital had been around for centuries,

perhaps eons, but using taxpayer dollars as investment funds on risky, untried technologies was radical.

I have shown that HVEC was the first high-technology firm to be funded under such a scheme and,

although not the most successful of ARDC's investments, it was, in the long run, an outstandingly

profitable one under the careful stewardship of Denis Robinson, who would make up the group a tight

quartet.195 Further, I have demonstrated that prior to HVEC, Van de Graaff's technologies were also at

the heart of the failed, but historically novel, TVA deal Compton co-managed that can reasonably be

195 There were many other people involved in HVEC, of course, but Van de Graaff, Trump, Buechner, and Robinson made up the four cornerstones of the company. As I noted earlier, on the fifth cornerstone, Bob Cloud, I have found little information.

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seen an early progenitor to the HVEC-ARDC funding relationship.

I have outlined the genesis of these new paradigms and the genesis of the corporation that was a

the centre of both these developments. I have also demonstrated how high-level government and

military connections may have assisted in providing HVEC with a market before they were even

incorporated and certainly afterwards. I have shown how HVEC's team was an extension of HVL's

team which was solidified at during their years at Round Hill creating innovative science that offered

the core trio of Van de Graaff, Trump, and Buechner their first opportunity to work together on a big

and important project in a proto-entrepreneurial manner.

Media, I have shown, played a strong hand in helping keep the Van de Graaff legacy alive which,

in turn, was likely used as leverage to help market and sell his accelerators. Similarly, I have shown

that media relations and public relations were slow to develop at HVEC and were likely influenced by

the ebb and flow of the Cold War and of public opinion on atomic science throughout the 1950s.

I have related Van de Graaff's strained relationship with his department head John Slater and have

suggested that Slater had little appreciation for and possibly a great deal of jealously of Van de Graaff's

success and attention because it did not seem to reflect back on him. I have related how HVEC may

have been betrayed by colleague Ray Herb and suffered industrial espionage before he started a

competing business. I have shown how Van de Graaff's style of leadership was by example and in the

democratic-paternalistic style. Van de Graaff was not worshipped by his colleagues, but he was deeply

respected and admired for his intelligence, his wit, his Southern charm, his friendships, and his grace

under insufferable pain. I have demonstrated that Van de Graaff's legacy and the role and influence of

HVEC is currently perhaps misunderstood and much under-appreciated.

It is my sincere desire that this paper has appropriately, if only briefly, documented the significant

impact the man, his machine, his peers, and the company to which they all belonged had upon science,

industry, venture capital, university relations, and the modern high-tech start-up. I have suggested that

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Shapin and Galison could push back their timelines for entrepreneurial science to the 1930s and include

Van de Graaff and his team. Towards that I have also suggested a new term, entreprevirtuous scientist,

to describe the unique roles they played as they straddled the worlds of academia and commerce.

I also hope I have been able to better connect all these stories in one narrative to tell a larger story

of how one young virtuous scientist can have an idea to build an an instrument to help kick-start basic

research into the structure of the atom yet end up somehow assisting or influencing, if by proxy or

fortunate circumstance, by stretching or changing the boundaries of so many institutions, policies, and

relationships that would affect capitalism itself. Not a bad result for a young man who wanted to be a

football hero like his brothers.

Postscript

The families Trump and Van de Graaff were fairly close until sometime after Robert's death. John

Trump kept in touch with Robert's sons now and then and John interviewed him and Buechner about

Robert and High Voltage in 1984. However, Bill feels that John Trump's kin fell out with the Van de

Graaffs because the Trumps sold much of their shares shortly after Robert died when the price was

good, unlike John Trump, who hung on to his shares as they fell and fell and fell. Bill Van de Graaff

explains:

“[The Trump kids196] are somewhat angry at the Van de Graaffs. There were a couple of things that happened that I think make this not inappropriate on their part. One of them was that the name Van de Graaff got on this machine – as it should have – because

196 Internationally-famous financier and TV personality Donald Trump is not one of those kids. However, he is John Trump's nephew.

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Trump came along later and Van de Graaff invented it. But then Trump did a lot of very important work including putting it in a pressurized container and worked with my dad for the rest of his life. And they were very much devoted to each other and I think they liked each other. Trump had a very Germanic sort of... harsh is a strong word. He was an extraordinarily gentle man but a very... tightly-wound person with very high standards. He was totally dedicated to High Voltage and he never sold any stock. My dad, for better or for worse, had the good fortune to die when the stock was relatively high. And our executor insisted that we sell at least half our shares – we should have sold them all. ...in essence, John Trump kept on his holdings and my understanding is he carried them all the way down and the family ended up with very little. [...] I sold my last shares on the 20th October in 1987.197 The company was certainly independently listed at that time.”198

Indeed it was. Shortly thereafter, the once mighty HVEC filed for bankruptcy protection, assets

were sold off, and the Dutch subsidiary continued the business from Europe, still at its Amersfoort,

Netherlands location. All that was left of the company that Van de Graaff and Trump founded is the

operation in Amersfoort (that does not even acknowledge its own origins!) and many of the 500+

accelerators the original company built are still in use around the world because the people who

designed and built them, designed them to be useful, to be upgradable, to be adaptable, and to last.

Figure 14: The original Round Hill prototype at the Theater of Electricity in the Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts. (Source: Wikimedia.)

197 See Appendix II for a New York Stock Exchange stock performance sheet on High Voltage (stock symbol HVE) dated 10 August 1984 courtesy William Van de Graaff.

198 Van de Graaff, William (Bill) Boyden. Telephone interview with Edward Fenner. Burr Ridge, Ill., 08 February 2011. Audio recording.

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Van de Graaff generators were so well made that the Round Hill prototype still exists in their

conjoined arrangement. Safe and spectacular lightning shows continue with the same historic

machine199 at the Museum of Science (MOS) in Boston, Massachusetts. Before the machine was

offered to Bradford Washburn, head of the MOS, it was offered to John Trump. Trump declined and

suggested that the machine was a historic machine – it was the first such machine to crack the

1,000,000 volt barrier (among other achievements), it should be offered to science, perhaps to a

museum. As they did in the old days of Round Hill, they fired up the machine, it sparked ferociously in

a demonstration for Compton and Washburn. Unfortunately, no money was available and there was no

museum yet to put it into. It was mothballed but Washburn never forgot. It took about 25 more years,

but it became the featured attraction at the Museum of Science in Boston and still is to this day.

However, when I visited the historic machine on 05 August 2010, the machine was still working just

fine but the Textolite columns are deteriorating and will need to be conserved or replaced within 20

years – around the time the great machine turns 100 years old.

199 In the summer of 2010, I visited the MOS and was given a tour of the machine by Mike Alexander, director of public programs, who maintains the working artifact. The instrument still works fine but the ozone generated by the lightning is deteriorating the Textolite columns. The MOS is currently trying to determine how to repair the damage (if possible) or whether to replace the columns. They estimate the columns might last to the machine's 100th year.

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Appendices

Appendix I Table of Organization (Org Chart) for HVEC in 1950

Appendix II New York Stock Exchange data sheet for HVE

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Appendix I

105

Appendix II

107

References

There were two challenges to this undertaking. First, all the major participants from the first two

decades are deceased; everyone else is either dead or their whereabouts are unknown. The only living

executive of HVEC that I have been able to find is, unfortunately, suffering from dementia and thus not

able to provide information. His wife, whom I talked to briefly, passed away before I could speak with

her again about her husband. The son of another HVEC engineer contacted me a few days after his

father, Charles H. Goldie passed away. Jim Goldie looked up High Voltage and found me and told me

he wished he had done so years ago. His father was perfectly lucid and would have loved to have talked

about working as an engineer at the High Voltage Lab at MIT and about working at HVEC for many

decades.

There are, fortunately, some written records, media articles, oral histories, and other bits and

pieces of material and artifacts from which to extract useful research. Books and articles on Van de

Graaff, his peers, and on HVEC are few and far between. Early histories of particle accelerators

provide some context; more recent histories almost ignore them altogether. Unfortunately, the

sparseness of historical information on my subjects and the lack of living witnesses adds difficulty to

validating some claims made by myself and by the existing record. Context may be everything but

supporting evidence aids context and argument. I am having to make reasonable conjecture and fill in

some of the gaps via careful speculation unless (and until) something or someone surfaces to argue to

the contrary or otherwise clarify this history.

Second, Robert J. Van de Graaff's family name is Dutch and unfamiliar in terms of spelling to the

Anglophone ear. His name is frequently misspelled in databases, articles, books, and even archives. His

first name Robert is never a problem. His second name, Jemison, and usually just shortened to the

initial J, is misspelled as Jamieson, Jemmison, and Jameson. His family name is where it gets really

108

tedious when using online search engines that do not use fuzzy logic. It is, properly, Van de Graaff.

Variations I have encountered include: Van der Graaff, vande Graaff, vande Graf, von der Graaff, van

de Graf, Van de Graf, Van de Graaf, Van de Graff, and countless others with one “a” or two and/or one

“f” or two an added “r” or various spacings. This is not a serious challenge but it does muddy the

waters considerably and create the opportunity for valuable information to be missed or lost because of

the variations from the accurate name.

u

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Earls, Alan R. Route 128 and the Birth of the Age of High Tech. Charleston, S.C: Arcadia Pub, 2002. Print.

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Hsu, David H. and Martin Kenney. "Organizing venture capital: the rise and demise of American

Research & Development Corporation, 1946–1973," Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol. 14, No. 4 (2005): 579-616. Web. <_http://www.management.wharton.upenn.edu/hsu/inc/doc/papers/david-hsu-development-corporation.pdf >

Lassman, Thomas C. "Industrial Research Transformed: Edward Condon at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, 1935-1942." Technology and Culture. 44.2 (2003): 306-339. Print.

MIT Department of Physics website, “New Labs and New Frontiers: 1916-1939.” Web. http://web.mit.edu/physics/about/history/1916-1939.html

Morse, Philip M. In at the Beginnings: A Physicist's Life. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1977. Print.

Owens, Larry. "MIT and the Federal 'Angel'": Academic R & D and Federal-Private Cooperation Before World War II." Isis. 81.2 (1990). Print.

Owens, Larry. "The Counterproductive Management of Science in the Second World War: Vannevar Bush and the Office of Scientific Research and Development." Business History Review. 68 (1994): 515-576. Print.

Press Release 66-23 (14 June 1966), Argonne National Laboratory. MS-9-55, Box 14, Folder 14, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC, USA. Print.

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http://web.mit.edu/physics/about/history/1916-1939.html

http://www.management.wharton.upenn.edu/hsu/inc/doc/papers/david-hsu-development-corporation.pdf

http://www.management.wharton.upenn.edu/hsu/inc/doc/papers/david-hsu-development-corporation.pdf

http://cds.cern.ch/record/1005042/files/p95.pdf

Robinson, Denis M. "High Voltage Engineering Plays a Key Role in Atomic Research." Christian

Science Monitor 08 March 1958: Page 12. Print.

Robinson, Denis M. "Electron Accelerators Spur Development of Nuclear Theories." Christian Science

Monitor 10 March 1958: Page 12. Print.

Robinson, Denis M. "Low-Cost Ionizing Radiation Looms as a boon to Home and Industry." Christian

Science Monitor 08 March 1958: Page 14. Print.

Rosegrant, Susan, and David Lampe. Route 128: Lessons from Boston's High-Tech Community. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Print.

Samson, Helen. Interview with Deborah Douglas, “The Van de Graaff Generator.” Lexington, MA, 01 September 2000. MIT Museum. Print.

Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Print.

Slater, John C. Solid-state and Molecular Theory: A Scientific Biography. New York: Wiley, 1975. Print.

Traweek, Sharon. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988. Print.

Van de Graaff, Robert J., "A 1,500,000 Volt Electrostatic Generator," Physical Review, Volume 38, 1931, pp. 1919-1920. Print.

Van de Graaff, R.J., K. T. Compton, and L. C. Van Atta, "The electrostatic production of high voltage for nuclear investigations," Physical review, vol. 43, no. 3, February 1933, pp. 149-157. Print.

Van de Graaff, John Hargrove. Interview with Edward Fenner. Northampton, Mass., 16 June 2010. Skype audio recording.

Van de Graaff, John Hargrove. Interview with Edward Fenner. Northampton, Mass., 20 June 2010. Skype audio recording.

Van de Graaff, John Hargrove. Interview with Edward Fenner. Northampton, Mass., 30 November 2010. Skype audio recording.

Van de Graaff, Robert Jemison. Interview sound bite contained in audio recording circa 1964 of several recordings of Van de Graaff compiled onto one reel. Original interview circumstances unknown. Estate of Robert J. Van de Graaff.

Van de Graaff, William (Bill) Boyden. Interview with Edward Fenner. Burr Ridge, Ill., 08 February 2011. Skype audio recording.

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Van de Graaff, William (Bill) Boyden. Interview #1 with Edward Fenner. Burr Ridge, Ill., 20 August 2011. Audio recording.

Van de Graaff, William (Bill) Boyden. Interview #3 with Edward Fenner. Burr Ridge, Ill., 20 August 2011. Audio recording.

Van de Graaff, William (Bill) Boyden. Interview with Edward Fenner. Burr Ridge, Ill., 21 August 2011. Audio recording.

Wildes, Karl L, and Nilo A. Lindgren. A Century of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at

MIT, 1882-1982. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985. Print.

Bulletin H – Van de Graaff Particle Accelerators for Research and Industry. High Voltage Engineering Corporation, Print. (RecordID: SILNMSAHTL_21531, National Museum of American History Library, Washington, DC, USA.) Print.

Story of High Voltage Engineering Corporation, The. Cambridge Massachusetts: High Voltage Engineering Corporation, circa 1952. Print. AIP folder: "Biographical file of Robert Jemison Van de Graaff."

Place of the Particle Accelerator in Research, The. Burlington, Mass: High Voltage Engineering Corp, 1958. Print. (Source: Indiana University Library.)

Table of Organization, Drawing No. B–Pl–48. High Voltage Engineering Corporation. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 17 November 1950. Print. Van de Graaff Estate. [Appendix I]

"Many years of atom smashing preceded bomb." LIFE. 20 August 1945: 88-89. Print.

Other Reading

Bedell, Barbara F. Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green and the World He Created at Round Hill. South Dartmouth, MA: The Author, 2003. Print.

Kaiser, David. How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. Print.

Lécuyer, Christophe, and David C. Brock. "From Nuclear Physics to Semiconductor Manufacturing: the Making of Ion Implantation." History and Technology. 25.3 (2009): 193-217. Print.

McKibben, Joe. Oral history interview podcast with John Van de Graaff. Personal Interview. Undated. Los Alamos Historical Society. <http://www.losalamoshistory.org/podcasts/jmcKibben1.mp3>

Noble, David F. America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. New York: Knopf, 1977. Print.

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http://www.losalamoshistory.org/podcasts/jmcKibben1.mp3

Roberts, Edward B. Entrepreneurs in High Technology: Lessons from MIT and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.

Saxenian, AnnaLee. Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994. Print.

Wiescher, Philipp. "Early Days of Nuclear Physics at Notre Dame and the Manhattan Project." Notre

Dame Univ. n.d. Web. 30 Dec. 2012. <http://www3.nd.edu/~nsl/General_info/ND_Manhattan_project.pdf>

Major Collections

MIT MC0045 Van de Graaff, Robert Jemisonhttps://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc45.html

Robert Jemison Van de Graaff papers, MC 45, box X. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

MIT MC0153 HVEChttp://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc153.html

High Voltage Engineering Corporation records, MC 153, box X. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Estate of Robert Jemison Van de Graaff

Robert Jemison Van de Graaff's personal papers and other artifacts are currently (2014) located with his sons John in Massachusetts and William in Illinois. The family has asked me to help them determine where this material should be archived for posterity. I expect most will go to MIT with the balance going to AIP.

Miscellaneous

For a list of particle accelerators around the world (excluding those used for medical or industrial purposes, visit http://www-elsa.physik.uni-bonn.de/acce lerator_list.html and http://www.triumf.info/hosted/iupap/icnp/Report41.pdf.

Physics laboratories (past and present) named after Van de Graaff (man and/or machine) and

where HVEC accelerators can be found as of January 2014: Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Atomic Energy Establishment/Commission (Trombay, Bombay, India), Banaras Hindu University (India), Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fondazione Scienza et Technica (Florence, Italy),

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http://www.triumf.info/hosted/iupap/icnp/Report41.pdf

http://www-elsa.physik.uni-bonn.de/accelerator_list.html

http://www-elsa.physik.uni-bonn.de/accelerator_list.html

http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc153.html

https://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc45.html

http://www3.nd.edu/~nsl/General_info/ND_Manhattan_project.pdf

Laboratório Van de Graaff da PUC-Rio (Brazil), High Voltage Engineering Corporation, National Bureau of Standards (USA), NRC Canada, Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee (NuPECC), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Ohio State University, Osaka University (Japan), Research Institute of Physics (AFI) Stockholm, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM, Mexico City), University of Chile (Santiago), University of Kentucky, University of Tennessee (Knoxville), University of Texas at Austin, Utrecht University, Vanderbilt University, and the Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements, Joint Research Centre at the European Commission.

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