Don’s
Life in Science
(Updated May 2014)
I always knew that I wanted to be a scientist, and
successfully followed that path through school and with several high-tech
employers. I plan on spending a
significant fraction of my retirement years doing science-related
projects. Some of those projects will be
built on the foundation laid in my childhood.
These pages show some images and provide some commentary on my life as a
scientist. Many of the images are new
photos of hardware I still have, or scans from the original magazines or
journals.
The first page describes my earliest memories and
photographs, with some of my favorite articles.
To keep this section shorter, other pages contain more details of my Tesla
Coil paper and high voltage projects, my weather
station papers and experiment on remote sensing,
my laser
experiences at Hughes Aircraft and Kaman Sciences,
my Stellar
Products company that designed and built the AO-2 and AO-5 adaptive optics
systems, and my long career
at Trex Enterprises.
********************************************
My first
science experiment was an attempt to understand the
evaporation of water. I was about four
years old. I learned by watching ‘The
Romper Room” on television, that if you left a glass of water untouched, the
water would disappear in a few days. It
took me more than 50 years to successfully complete the experiment!
My next experiment was also based on a television
show, probably a “Tom and Jerry” cartoon.
I watched with amazement as one of the cartoon characters ran quickly
across a wire that was neck-high. After
running through the wire, his head popped off.
A few feet later, demonstrating conservation of momentum, his head
landed back on his neck and he continued to run without injury. I tried to repeat the experiment by stringing
a wire between two trees and asking my twin brother Ron to run across it as
fast as he could. He refused, ending my
first biology experiment. I was still
about 4 years old, living in Nebraska.
I remember playing with magnets in kindergarten, and
thought they were fun. Maybe this led me
back into physics.
When I was 6 years old, I spent my life savings ($6)
and mail-ordered a microscope from Montgomery Ward. I still have it in my lab at home, and still
occasionally use it. Some of the tools
and all of the original glass slides are gone, but the clips that hold the
slides to the stage, as well as the rotating mirror that illuminates the
specimens, are still intact. I remember
looking at bugs, snot, spices, pollen, and sand. The name on the case inspired me when I started
my adaptive optics company fifty years later.
I also played with a magnifying glass in elementary school,
about 3rd grade. I remember
getting into trouble with Mrs. Ellwein, a teacher,
when I was showing some classmates that I could concentrate the rays of the sun
and burn my initials in a piece of wood.
The magnifying glass was able to char the wood and create a little
smoke, but I could never get a flame. I
must have dropped the magnifying glass sometime and broken the handle off, but
I still have the lens. It’s about
60 mm diameter with a focal length of 220 mm.
My parents bought a set of youth encyclopedias while
I was still in elementary school in Wyoming: “The Golden Treasury of
Knowledge”. My mom bought one volume
each week or so from the grocery store, until we had all 16 volumes. I remember reading them from cover to cover,
omitting only the biographical entries.
I remember reading that the 200” telescope mirror on Mt. Palomar was
frosted glass. I thought that I could
make a mirror by freezing glass, so I took one of my microscope slides and put
it in the freezer. It did not turn into
a mirror. I was young enough to know a
little science, but also knew that I did not know everything, so at the time, it
was worth a try!
I did do some chemistry experiments in late
elementary and early junior high school, sharing a chemistry set with Ron. I got a little jar of mercury from a classmate
(who got it by breaking open some mercury switches that were common in homes). He showed me how to make copper pennies look
silver by rubbing them with mercury. One
day I took an aluminum wire that I had scraped clean with a razor blade, and
then placed a few drops of mercury on it to see if it would stick. The mercury just beaded up, but when I looked
at the wire a little later, I could see white whiskers growing out of the
wire. The whiskers grew so fast, I could
watch them get larger in real time, perhaps at 1 mm per minute! I acted like an experienced scientist and
recorded this discovery on paper, so I would get credit and it would not be
lost to mankind, should something happen to me!
I never pursued this chemistry, but was able to repeat it in college
when I had a good camera with a close-up lens.
The wire shown here is about 3 mm in diameter.
In 1963, I bought my first telescope (a small
refractor with about 60 mm aperture) for $11. I pointed it at the moon, and saw
craters! I was so excited, I had to go
inside and watch television with my family in order to calm down. I didn’t tell them what I saw, but I went out
a little later and looked again. I
imagine Galileo must have had a similar reaction the first time he saw lunar
craters. I was also able to use this
telescope to see the bands on Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, although the
maximum magnification was only 50x.
Years later, the achromat glass elements
started to separate, so I threw it away.
About this time, I also learned to identify the constellations by using
a planisphere.
That skill has been useful for the next fifty years.
Since my father was a carpenter and built homes, I
always had some nails and wire. About
1965, my dad taught me how to build a small commutated motor by wrapping wire
around some nails, and make the rotor bearings from holes punched in metal strips
cut from tin cans. The motor was no more
than 50 mm long. We used an old
model train transformer to power the motor.
It probably spun at 1000 RPM, and was fun to try to optimize the
performance by changing some of the variables.
My skills in electronics started when I was about 13
years old. I took apart some old radios
to get parts to play with. My uncle Lou
had taken an electronics course through the mail, and helped me with parts,
too. He even had a Heathkit
oscilloscope that he showed me, and explained how some radio circuits
worked. I remember making a crystal
radio set, using a real crystal of galena I had found at a gold mine dump in
Colorado. I used a safety pin to probe
different parts of the crystal until I got the rectification I needed to make
the radio set work with headphones. I
also built some simple one- and two-transistor circuits with a kit (the
breadboard is shown in the figure below).
Later, I got a library book with some circuits to try, including a metal
detector and AM radio transmitter.
I was confirmed at Immanuel Lutheran Church in 1966,
and some of my relatives gave me gifts of a few dollars. I spent all of it that summer on one purchase
from an electronics catalog, including a volt-ohm-meter that cost $12. My mom was not happy that I spent all of my confirmation
money right away, but I felt I really needed that tool to become a better
scientist. I also purchased some small
compartmented plastic boxes to organize my parts. I remember building an FM radio transmitter
with a small microphone, which had a range of perhaps 10 meters. While I still have (and use) this analog
meter, the test cables have been replaced several times. I stopped building a lot of electronics when
the magazines started using new-fangled integrated circuits. They required a 3.3 volt battery to operate,
and I didn’t want that kind of restriction.
I even cancelled my subscription to “Popular Electronics”. Years later, I learned about integrated
circuits in college courses, and found out how powerful they could be. I can still design circuits using
transistors.
One of the class projects all students were required
to complete in 9th grade (with Ms. Doerr)
was to choose a career and write a report on it. I wrote to the American Institute of Physics
for some information. They sent me these
two booklets on what it was like to be a physicist. When I re-read these now, I see they were
pretty accurate! They confirmed my
desire to be a physicist. The opening
sentences of the first booklet: “Someone
has said that the only people who get paid for doing exactly what they like are
physicists and baseball players. This is
an exaggeration, of course. But it is
true that physics and baseball players both offer prestige, income, pride in
the work and, on top of it all, the day-by-day satisfaction of stretching one’s
skills to the limit.” The figure on
the right is copied from the second booklet, and I think it accurately
described my typical day during much of my career. The booklet lists a number of current
problems in physics, but severely underestimated the problems in producing
cheap energy from fusion.
Science fair projects were required of all honors
students in high school. My sophomore
project compared using long-range analog television antennas to receive Denver
stations from Colorado Springs. It only
got as far as the regional fair. My
junior project on “Flame Amplification” was inspired by an electronics
magazine. It was successful enough to
send me to the International Science Fair held in May of 1969 in Fort
Worth. Unfortunately, even though I
built my own power supply and did a decent job of testing various chemicals, I
only won a few minor awards. The medal
is now a little tarnished, but the silver-and-gold medal still hangs in my
home. I’ve judged a few regional fairs
since then, and still enjoy the experience.
My senior project was on the effect of a magnetic field on the
transmission and reflection of light. I
grew my own crystals (about 20 mm diameter) of alum, electroplated my
other samples, and used a photocell from a camera to monitor the reflection of
light from a fluorescent bulb. I used
the strongest horseshoe magnet I could find, but I could see only small effects
on the metallic samples. This project
only went as far as the Colorado state fair.
I was always interested in high voltage, and built
Tesla Coils and Jacob’s Ladders powered with a neon sign transformer. I guess I was lucky that I never got
electrocuted! I also loved to watch
lightning strikes, and still do. One day
in Colorado Springs, about high school age, I was touching the aluminum window
frame while my bare foot must have been grounded on the floor furnace
ductwork. When a lightning bolt hit a
mile or so away, I felt a small shock; the window frame acted like an
antenna. I immediately got a little neon
pilot light and wired that between the window frame and ground. Whenever a lightning bolt flashed nearby,
either one or the other of the electrodes would flash orange. This showed that I could measure the polarity
of the lightning strike! I never pursued
this discovery, but it made for a very inexpensive experiment.
I started getting serious about astronomy in high
school. Edmund Scientific sold a 6”
diameter spherical primary mirror with a 60” focal length. The catalog explained that for this focal
ratio, the difference between a sphere and a parabola was less than ¼ wave, so
spherical aberration was negligible. It
was cheap, so Ron and I built the Newtonian telescope shown here. We followed the equatorial design described
in Norton’s Star Atlas, building the mount from oak and steel rods. A coffee can filled with cement was the
counterweight. There was no drive
mechanism, and Dobsonian designs were not yet
invented, but we had fun manually moving the telescope to see nebulae and
planets from our driveway in the outer part of Colorado Springs. I think I am
the one pointing to the finder scope, but that could be Ron.
While Ron seemed more interested in observing
nebulae (and sketching on paper), I was interested in photography. I used a hall bathroom as a darkroom. I used Kodak Tri-X film, the highest-speed
standard negative film at the time, and used either prime focus or eyepiece
projection with a Minolta SRT-101 camera body.
The pictures here were probably contact prints from the negatives. They were short exposures, maybe
0.1 seconds, since there was no tracking.
Multiple images of Saturn and Jupiter were taken by not advancing the
film between exposures, and simply allowing the planet to fall on a different part
of the film.
I attended the University of Colorado in Boulder as
an undergraduate, just as the physics department was moving into a new
building. I was the first student to get
some of the standard laboratory experiments to work in the new labs. The professors were particularly delighted to
find that the optical pumping experiment was not broken, as all earlier
students had suggested! I was the only
student to sign up for an elective optics laboratory course in my senior year,
but the professor was happy to let me take the course alone. I used modern microscopes and a Questar telescope, but I don’t remember the experimental
details. I also worked a short time
helping to rebuild a Cadmium-Helium laser which used a purified isotope for a certain
spectral line. These experiences proved to me that I would always excel in the
physics lab, and I would have an outstanding career.
I was awarded a fellowship to attend the University
of Illinois in Urbana. I was recruited
by Professor Nick Holonyak (who is considered “The
Father of the LED”) to join his group at the Engineering school. My physics department head encouraged me to
stay in his department, and I worked the next few years with Professor Klein,
who authored the optics text I used as an undergraduate. I was able to use visible lasers and learned
spectroscopy after building a novel dual-grating spectrometer based on concave
holographic gratings. I also learned to
troubleshoot commercial electronics without a schematic, and align optical
systems. My one trip to a conference was
in Washington D.C., where I presented two papers. My thesis was on the light scattering
properties of a thin 2-D layered metallic compound that was popular at the
time.
I accepted a job at Hughes Aircraft Company in Los
Angeles in 1978, partly to get out of the cold Illinois winters. I always wanted to publish papers on my
hobbies, independent of the work done at my employer. My best paper was published in Applied Optics
in 1983, as a result of attempting to design a new technique for testing a
telescope I was thinking of building.
The paper was well received by one of the reviewers, who even called me
to congratulate me before it was accepted, breaking confidentiality
protocols. A few years later, the same
paper was reprinted in an SPIE “Milestones in Optics” volume, a book which
includes many other famous names in optics.
Another paper I especially enjoyed writing was
accepted in “The Physics Teacher” in 1988.
My wife Carol and I enjoyed playing on the swing set at the local
playground, but we found it difficult to hold a conversation when one of us were
swinging faster than the other. I
realized that our rates could be synchronized due to non-linear effects at
large amplitudes. Carol helped me take data that was published in the journal,
making this paper a sentimental favorite.
About the same time, I published a paper on Tesla
Coils. That paper was also well
received, and has been used in different physics lab courses at several universities. The idea was that it was a low-voltage, hence
safe, demonstration, and the output followed the theoretical model very well.
My sister-in-law had a friend whose hobby was
shooting pistols at various targets in quick succession. The object was to see how quickly the shots
could be fired from a 45-caliber pistol.
A small computer from Radio Shack had just come out with an LCD display
and a port that allowed access to the microprocessor. An article explaining the machine language
code showed how it could be programmed.
I added a microphone and a threshold detection circuit, then interfaced
it with a built-in clock. This small
package could be used to time the individual shots and display the results on
the LCD. The device was called “FIST”,
and I sold a few of them. This was my
first experience in the business and manufacturing world.
I’ve
subscribed to “Science News” since about 1975, and have religiously read every
article. I’ve sent in a few comments,
but this one about cause-and-effect was my first one to get published, in 1985.
When President Bush announced plans to put a man on
Mars by 2019, I thought of my nephew Court.
He was very athletic, a little smaller than average, somewhat interested
in collecting rocks, and a perfect candidate for the first Mars astronaut
crew. The letter here was published in
“Rocks and Minerals” magazine in 1990, and I have seen posters of it re-displayed
in mineral collections at various rock shows.
Too bad, that NASA never received sufficient funding for the program. Court grew up to be a gymnast/trainer, and now
works in the Texas oil fields analyzing drilling operations. I think I had a good guess!
After developing adaptive optics for amateur
astronomers in the mid-90s, I started to see more and more images of planets in
the astronomy magazines. They were taken
with small webcams, and image processing made it appear that the resolution was
much higher than one would expect based on the laws of physics. In response, I wrote an article that was
published in “Sky and Telescope” magazine in 2005. I took some ideal pictures and processed them
through webcam software to show what you can really expect to see. More recently, better cameras with low noise
and high frame rates are available, but I don’t think that the results in the
article would differ.
In retirement, I want to start some projects that I
never had time for. With modern
technology, the Internet, discretionary money, and computer-aided design and
high speed digital control, some of the projects will be easier or even more
successful. One of these is growing
crystals. I will probably start with the
standard technique of using a water-based, super-saturated solution, but I hope
to change techniques and materials to grow more exotic crystals. I have no illusions that they will rival some
of the specimens in my real mineral
collection, but it will be fun updating the original plans in
this book I got in 1964. Fifty years is
enough time to wait!
Tesla
Coil Paper and High Voltage Projects
Laser
Experiences at Hughes Aircraft and Kaman Sciences
Stellar
Products Adaptive Optics
Weather
Station Papers and Remote Sensing Experiment