00:00:00 I think we'd rather have her here than anybody else.

00:00:15 Hey, he won this one.

00:02:33 First of all, I want to thank John Haas very much for his hosting of this gathering of the very special friends of Chalk that we have here today.

00:02:45 Especially, we're pleased to acknowledge the help that we've gotten from the chemical community in general,

00:02:53 and of course, from our major co-sponsors, the American Chemical Society, which is represented here by Ernest Eliel,

00:03:02 the chairman of the board, and by Stan Proctor, who's the chairman of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

00:03:13 Stan is, well, right here.

00:03:19 And since Stan, I gather, will not be able to be with us tonight, I wonder if you have anything you'd like to relay a message to Stan.

00:03:28 Thank you, Charles.

00:03:30 I'm very pleased to be with you today on this day of celebration.

00:03:35 And I'm glad to bring you greetings from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

00:03:42 I'd like to make two observations with regard to this celebration in this city.

00:03:47 The first of which is that 79 years ago, in 1908, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers was formed in Philadelphia.

00:03:58 And the second observation I'd like to make, and we discussed it during the cocktail hour,

00:04:02 is that in 1922, Dr. Beckman, recognizing the opportunities existing in the new field of chemical engineering,

00:04:11 received his degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois.

00:04:15 So I just simply want to say thank you very much for the opportunity to be here,

00:04:20 and I wish much success to the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry. Thank you.

00:04:26 I want to assure you I'm not slighting my old friend Ernest Elio, because he will have a chance to talk to you this evening.

00:04:38 I'm very proud of the fact that the very first appointment I ever had to make as a chairman of a department was Ernest Elio.

00:04:46 And I take great pleasure and pride in the fact that we picked a winner in Ernest Elio.

00:04:53 But you'll hear from him tonight.

00:04:55 I'm sure we're all pleased with the role that CHOC has assumed and with the extra impetus that Arnold Beckman has given to our endeavor.

00:05:06 The programs at CHOC have met with wide acceptance around the chemical community.

00:05:12 The efforts to bring the message of the contributions of chemistry and the philosophy of chemistry,

00:05:23 its intellectual as well as practical contributions to society through all kinds of activities,

00:05:33 our CHOC news, our oral histories, there's all kinds of activities that are going on,

00:05:41 has been very well received, and I believe it's a very important contribution to the broader society

00:05:51 to understand better what chemistry has done and what chemistry can do to make this a better world.

00:05:59 So we think that message is an important one.

00:06:03 We have a big challenge to our little endeavor here at Penn.

00:06:08 Arnold's faculty has done a marvelous job of getting this group organized.

00:06:14 We've been scattered for the first, was it four years now, four and a half, almost five years.

00:06:21 Oh, six, one on six.

00:06:23 Well, that shows my age.

00:06:26 Five or six years that we've been in business, we've been scattered all over the campus here

00:06:31 in attics and basements and one thing and another,

00:06:34 and with the very great help of Arnold Beckman, we're now going to be moving into the new building

00:06:40 that's just a little less than a block in that direction.

00:06:44 You may see it's still under construction.

00:06:46 Hopefully, in the spring, we'll be moving in, Arnold,

00:06:49 and we'll be able to see the results of your help to our endeavor in a very fine facility

00:06:57 that will be used until we get to the point where we may build our own facility for this endeavor.

00:07:04 But certainly, we are very pleased with the way things have developed.

00:07:10 We have here two of the, I guess, the most important founding fathers of the Center for the History of Chemistry.

00:07:19 John Haas has been one that's been with us right from the very beginning, and John is another.

00:07:25 John is a distinguished alum of the University of Pennsylvania.

00:07:28 He was a long-time trustee of the University of Pennsylvania.

00:07:33 He's a former chairman and CEO of the Rohrer Group.

00:07:38 He's a chairman of the Beckman Center's campaign for financial support, a steering committee of that.

00:07:48 He's a former chairman of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Association.

00:07:52 I'd like to call on John Heckman to say, hopefully,

00:07:55 John is over here at the number one table, of course.

00:07:59 We want to put him out first.

00:08:02 Wherever Arnold Beckman sits today is the number one table.

00:08:09 It's interesting that Charlie mentioned this.

00:08:12 I'm chairman of the, I guess it's officially called the Campaign Steering Committee for the capital campaign that we are mounting.

00:08:24 I guess I first got to know Charlie at a University of Pennsylvania capital campaign program some years ago,

00:08:32 which, incidentally, was for a good bit more money than we're talking about here.

00:08:37 It lasted a good bit longer, I think, than this campaign is today.

00:08:41 We got to become fast friends and, I think, sort of a mutual admiration society here.

00:08:50 Charlie, come back.

00:08:54 As Charlie said, I've been in the pharmaceutical industry for many years, in fact, all of my working life.

00:09:05 One of the things that one notices quite prominently over the years is the need for an improved public understanding of science and technology.

00:09:22 And in fact, the pharmaceutical industry, the birth of science and technology, of which I was engaged.

00:09:31 You have to think for a minute about the lack of public understanding in terms of the grand name versus generic name.

00:09:39 Pharmaceutical argument, things of that sort.

00:09:42 You begin to see the kinds of problems that the entire science and technology area has.

00:09:52 Specifically, I think that the average person nowadays thinks of science and technology almost as equating with environmental pollution,

00:10:07 rather than with the advancement of our standard of living, for example.

00:10:13 And I think that that's one of the great problems we have as an industry and one of the reasons why I have been so enthusiastic about the Center for the History of Chemistry,

00:10:24 which today we are renaming the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry.

00:10:33 As I think you probably all know, we are mounting a capital campaign for the center for five million dollars.

00:10:47 Thanks in large measure to the vision, generosity, and the encouragement of Ronald Beckman,

00:10:58 who is, as you know, a noted California industrialist, inventor, academic, an engineer, philanthropist,

00:11:08 and whose name is enshrined forever in the name of Smith, Klein, and Beckman.

00:11:14 And I'm the honorary president of the non-existent Smith, Klein Alumni Society.

00:11:20 But I still have this august position.

00:11:27 Very late one night at a convention at a Greenbrier, after a good many drinks over the bar,

00:11:33 the then chief executive officer of Smith, Klein decided that maybe I could handle this.

00:11:41 And then when the company changed from Smith, Klein & French to Smith, Klein & Beckman,

00:11:46 you know, I was able to roll with the punches too.

00:11:50 I let Smith, Klein & Beckman, just to give you an idea of the time frame I'm talking about,

00:11:56 I let Smith, Klein & Beckman handle all this in 1952.

00:12:01 That's a long time ago.

00:12:04 It's a big challenge for us to raise $5 million,

00:12:10 even in the face of Arnold Beckman's generosity in challenging us for the first $2 million.

00:12:21 But we have, I think, had a really imaginative response in the efforts of the American Chemical Society,

00:12:31 which has agreed to join with us and we with them in making our campaign a part of the ACS capital campaign.

00:12:44 And so we think that with the Beckman match being a high-priority item in the ACS campaign,

00:12:55 that we should have no problem at all in leading Dr. Beckman's challenge and matching his kit.

00:13:03 We're well on our way and we're going to be looking to philanthropic leaders in the industry in the months ahead

00:13:11 in order to make our pitch, our ask, as they say in fundraising circles,

00:13:18 for help in the ACS campaign for chemistry so that we can meet our $5 million goal.

00:13:25 I have addressed a number of letters to chief executive officers of pharmaceutical companies,

00:13:33 and I think universally we've gotten a strong and favorable reception.

00:13:38 In one case, we got a definite commitment.

00:13:44 In other cases, we have said, hey, wait a minute, we are just in the process of working this out with the ACS campaign,

00:13:51 and we'll be back to you as soon as we have that all ironed out in terms of coordinating.

00:14:01 The $2 million for our $5 million goal has really started us off with a bang.

00:14:09 Dr. Beckman has encouraged us to aim high, raise our sights,

00:14:15 and the campaign is really off and rolling and is making excellent progress.

00:14:23 I don't want to appear to be over-optimistic, but I don't see how,

00:14:33 unless we meet with unforeseen time delays, which we are somewhat concerned,

00:14:41 I don't see how we can fail to meet, accept, and rise to the occasion I imagine Dr. Beckman is getting.

00:14:58 Now I'd like to introduce Dr. Arnold Beckman and hope he'll say a few words.

00:15:04 I have mixed emotions. First of all, I feel like an imposter.

00:15:11 Being amongst so many chemists, it's been so many years since I've lived in a test tube.

00:15:16 I'm trying to call myself a chemist. I do have a certificate.

00:15:22 I'm not a chemist, but a chemical engineer.

00:15:25 Well, it doesn't really say that. What it says is that I satisfied the academic requirements.

00:15:37 I have very many fond memories of Philadelphia.

00:15:41 Some of this may be in your history, some may not be, Arnold.

00:15:45 When I first came out with the Ph.D. here, I had a problem.

00:15:51 It had to sell for $195.

00:15:54 At the time, you could buy a bottle of Lipman's paper for about five cents.

00:15:58 Those of you who worry about your competitors' prices, you know,

00:16:01 for $195 versus a few cents for Lipman's paper, it could have been sold.

00:16:06 What happened was the American Chemical Society had its annual meeting in San Francisco

00:16:11 in the late summer of 35, and I put the instrument up their shoulder

00:16:15 to a chemical chemistry professor.

00:16:18 He said, you can sell this for $195.

00:16:21 At that time, this is 1935, you're all too young.

00:16:25 But this is, you've heard of the Depression.

00:16:27 This is the bottom of the Depression.

00:16:28 That was at least a month or two months' salary of an analytical chemist at that time.

00:16:33 For a chemist to go out and ask his boss to spend $195 for something that did nothing but measure acidity,

00:16:40 it was pretty much a toss-up whether or not this thing could be sold.

00:16:45 Well, the professors, they hedged.

00:16:46 They said, we don't know.

00:16:48 You should go back and talk to the operator's supply house, the dealers.

00:16:51 They have a much better idea.

00:16:53 And so Mr. Beckman and I got on the train.

00:16:55 I met the young president, Jane.

00:16:57 Came across the country.

00:16:58 Stopped in Denver.

00:16:59 Denver, Clark County, Chicago.

00:17:01 Son of a scientist, Ph.D.

00:17:04 On to New York.

00:17:13 Well, most of the dealers were pretty pessimistic.

00:17:16 They didn't think it would sell.

00:17:17 The price was just too high.

00:17:19 But the son of the sales manager at Arthur H. Thomas, Ed Patterson, he was a young fellow.

00:17:26 His enthusiasm had not been grunted by much period of time.

00:17:30 So he thought we might sell it at $1,500 or $1,600 over a 10-year period before we started into the market.

00:17:39 Well, fortunately, this was a depression.

00:17:42 We thought, well, good.

00:17:44 So we went ahead, which is all.

00:17:47 We had no initial capital.

00:17:49 So we sold a meter of jute and go out and buy some parts for the next three or four meters.

00:17:54 And the thing just gradually built up.

00:17:56 Well, as I say, as a market researcher, that's a pretty lousy job.

00:18:03 Instead of selling 600 and saturating the market, we made several hundred thousand.

00:18:08 And now over the years, we can't see any end of the market.

00:18:12 We're still coming up with new models and new direction.

00:18:15 So I'm so thankful to Ed Patterson and Philadelphia for giving me the encouragement enough to get started.

00:18:24 You might have another experience here.

00:18:28 That would be Dr. Sumner.

00:18:30 He was talking about, if you study things enough, people begin to believe, even though they may not be true.

00:18:36 In between the matches and Dr. Durand, I spent a couple of years with Western Electric Engineering.

00:18:43 That's what's now known as Bell Telephone.

00:18:47 Not doing chemical work, but working on an application of probability theory to sampling and inspection.

00:18:53 You take a sample of a certain size, what's the reliability of that property?

00:18:58 It's probably to the whole universe.

00:19:01 Well, I was sent down here to inspect solar joints and relay contacts on the penny factory screen.

00:19:09 That's what penny factory had just been put in.

00:19:11 I thought, well, that's a odd name. I never heard it before.

00:19:15 I think it was the William Penn Hotel.

00:19:18 I'm not too sure.

00:19:19 It was a hotel about a block or two away from a street where they had the Sideshow Barker's office.

00:19:26 They had their snake oils and this thing like that.

00:19:28 I was wandering down there one night.

00:19:30 Here was a fella playing the banjo.

00:19:33 Excellent banjo player.

00:19:34 I happened to have the light.

00:19:36 That's why I stayed and listened to him.

00:19:38 I played and played.

00:19:39 Finally got a big crowd running.

00:19:41 Then the barker came around.

00:19:43 With his snake oil.

00:19:45 He gave a tremendous pitch on the purchase of this snake oil.

00:19:48 It cured dandruff, indrum, toenails, gout, anything you might have.

00:19:52 Only a dollar a bottle.

00:19:54 Wasn't a single kicker.

00:19:56 This fella must have looked pretty low.

00:19:59 After all the expenditure he'd given this banjo player.

00:20:02 Not a single kicker.

00:20:03 He sat down and he broke out into a big smile and said,

00:20:06 Friends, you don't know how happy you've made me.

00:20:09 Show me. You've just got gullible push over.

00:20:11 You don't know me.

00:20:12 I can tell you anything.

00:20:14 But you don't have to take my word for it.

00:20:16 You can read it on the label yourself.

00:20:18 Laughter.

00:20:28 Well, thank you all very much.

00:20:30 Applause.

00:20:42 Good afternoon.

00:20:43 I'd like to welcome you all to this symposium.

00:20:46 Today is, of course, a very special day of celebration for us.

00:20:50 That we're celebrating the transformation of the Center for History of Chemistry

00:20:54 into the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for History of Chemistry.

00:20:59 Among our distinguished roster of speakers is Arnold Beckman himself

00:21:04 who will be telling us some things about his own experience.

00:21:09 We're especially delighted that this symposium this afternoon

00:21:13 is going to be chaired by a distinguished member of the chemical community.

00:21:18 Dr. Franklin Long is Professor Emeritus of Science and Society

00:21:23 and of Chemistry at Cornell University.

00:21:26 He is a physical chemist by training, a Berkeley PhD.

00:21:31 He did important work in the kinetics of solution reactions.

00:21:36 And, of course, more recently he's been known to us for many years

00:21:40 as a very active participant in the important dialogue about arms control.

00:21:46 Armed participant in and commentator on the scientific scene

00:21:52 and we're very delighted that he's with us.

00:21:54 He is a member of the Beckman Center's advisory board.

00:21:58 And, Frank, thank you.

00:22:04 It is a great day and I'm very pleased indeed to be here.

00:22:08 It is a day of celebration to have this new program.

00:22:13 This is a very new program, this program of history of science.

00:22:17 It was founded only in 1982 and it's had a lot of good fortunes.

00:22:23 One of them was that it was rather promptly sponsored

00:22:26 and given a home by the University of Pennsylvania,

00:22:29 or maybe I should say a series of homes.

00:22:32 But that's been very important.

00:22:36 It was equally fortunate in attracting an exceedingly able,

00:22:40 vigorous and effective head who you've just heard from, Arnold Thackeray.

00:22:45 And it's true that it was recognized by chemists very broadly and quickly

00:22:51 as a very significant thing to happen,

00:22:53 to have a program that focused on the history of this science.

00:22:59 And I think historians of science have been equally pleased.

00:23:02 The program has had the strong backing of the American Chemical Society

00:23:06 and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

00:23:09 But in spite of all these pluses, and there were many,

00:23:13 it is, I think, fair to say that over these recent years

00:23:16 the program has not felt either secure or that its program was of the optimum size.

00:23:25 Well, suddenly and quite dramatically, as you gather, this has now changed.

00:23:29 This very imaginative man, Arnold Beckman, has seen this as something

00:23:36 that merited the support of himself and his wife, Mabel,

00:23:40 and has given this very handsome challenge grant to the program.

00:23:45 And needless to say, the sense of pleasure and gratitude to Arnold Beckman

00:23:52 is pretty substantial, and that's a lot of what we mean when we say celebration.

00:23:57 Now, we do have a very nice group of people discussing today.

00:24:01 The topic is chemical instrumentation yesterday, today and tomorrow.

00:24:07 And it's really exceedingly appropriate that the first man we will end up hearing from is Arnold Beckman.

00:24:13 But first, let me tell you just a little bit about this really remarkable person.

00:24:18 He was born in 1900. He was a chemical engineering student at Illinois,

00:24:24 taking an A.B. degree in 1922 and a master's degree in 1923.

00:24:30 He came here to work what we would now call the Bell Labs for a couple of years.

00:24:34 And for some reason, which I have not heard from him, he decided he really should go back for a Ph.D.

00:24:40 and he went back to Caltech.

00:24:42 And it was there that, as part of his own work and responding to a few of his friends,

00:24:47 he began to apply electronics to instrumentation.

00:24:52 And it really started a quite unique and clearly very successful

00:24:57 innovative developmental entrepreneurial career.

00:25:02 First came the Beckman pH meter, which was a great step forward.

00:25:07 Then came, at least to me, then came the DU spectrometer, which was equally important.

00:25:13 And it's fair to say that these two alone really changed the face of chemistry and also biology.

00:25:19 Neither has been quite the same since those two were made available.

00:25:24 And they became very, very attractive and appealing, widely used, widely sold.

00:25:30 And the Beckman Instrument Company, which really was to follow by a year or two, was effectively on its way.

00:25:38 And after this innovative and entrepreneurial and clearly successful career,

00:25:44 Arnold and Mabel Beckman have, in recent years, been being innovative in another area,

00:25:50 which is that of philanthropy.

00:25:52 They have made a set of really imaginative and insignificant gifts

00:25:58 for things that relate to science and have made a vast difference in programs.

00:26:04 I'll mention just a few.

00:26:06 There's a wonderful building for the Western Center of the National Academy of Sciences coming up in Southern California,

00:26:13 due entirely to Arnold and Mabel Becker gift.

00:26:17 There's a laser medicine unit at the Medical School of University of California, Irvine,

00:26:23 with their support and initiation.

00:26:27 There's a new biotechnology building and some endowment at Caltech,

00:26:34 which is another one of his really major imaginative gifts.

00:26:39 And then, of course, we come to what we've got.

00:26:42 Well, now, it's very gratifying, given that background,

00:26:45 that he's been willing to be the first speaker at this occasion.

00:26:50 And what it's going to be is a video program, excerpts from videotapes,

00:26:57 that I guess the center has actually taken,

00:27:00 which will give you some flavor of him and something about his impression of his programs and activities.

00:27:09 And then there will be, from him, a few comments of the videotapes.

00:27:15 So maybe we can turn to Dr. Strucci, is it, who will be doing the videotape?

00:27:27 As the Illinois chemists, as a matter of fact, they did play an important role.

00:27:30 For no other reason than Glenn and I got very well acquainted.

00:27:34 Glenn left Illinois, went to Wisconsin to get his doctor's degree,

00:27:38 and finally came back here to Southern California, working for the Sunkist Fruit Growers Exchange.

00:27:44 Whereas I went out to Caltech and finally got my degree there.

00:27:48 Well, Glenn had a job of making byproducts from lemon juice, pectin and citric acid.

00:27:55 And he had the problem of measuring the hydrogen ion concentration.

00:27:59 And lemon juice had been heavily dosed with sulfur dioxide.

00:28:03 That's a very difficult thing to do by conventional, by the ordinary hydrogen ion measurements.

00:28:09 And he was using, properly, a glass electrode.

00:28:12 The trouble was the glass electrode was very, very fragile at that time.

00:28:16 And he was using a galvanometer, even though it was a high-sensitivity galvanometer.

00:28:22 The current required was so great that the glass electrode had to have very, very thin walls

00:28:28 and a sizable diameter on the thing.

00:28:32 So he came in to see me one day complaining that one or the other was always breaking.

00:28:37 Either the glass electrode was breaking or the galvanometer was breaking.

00:28:40 So I suggested to him that he get rid of the galvanometer

00:28:44 and substitute a rugged, what we called a vacuum two-volt meter in those days.

00:28:48 An electronic amplifier, we called it.

00:28:51 And so I built him one.

00:28:53 This is the original Beckman pH meter, an instrument introduced 21 years ago.

00:28:58 Today, the pH meter has been dressed up and redesigned,

00:29:01 but its function is still the same to determine acidity or alkalinity.

00:29:06 Now let's join our success story reporter, Ken Peters,

00:29:10 as he chats with founder and president of Beckman Instruments, Dr. Arnold O. Beckman.

00:29:15 Well, Dr. Beckman, after seeing all of these amazing operations,

00:29:18 I can't help but wonder how an organization like this ever got started.

00:29:22 Well, we got started very casually just 20 years ago, Ken.

00:29:26 I was teaching chemistry at Cal Tech

00:29:28 when an undergraduate friend of mine came in and told me his troubles.

00:29:32 He had to measure the acidity of lemon juice,

00:29:35 and he had difficulty with the equipment which was then available.

00:29:38 So I built an electronic amplifier for him to help him out of his troubles.

00:29:43 He came back in two or three months and wanted to know

00:29:45 whether I wouldn't build him another one because someone else was always using the first one.

00:29:49 I said that was enough to start a business.

00:29:51 So we built a commercial model,

00:29:54 and in the fall of 1935,

00:29:56 I took the instrument across the country to talk to dealers

00:29:59 to see whether they thought it would be a saleable item.

00:30:05 ...to change the acidity in the external solution.

00:30:09 Also in 1909, a biochemist in the Carlsberg Brewery in Copenhagen invented the pH scale.

00:30:17 As you all know, these numbers representing hydrogen ion concentration

00:30:21 are very awkward numbers.

00:30:23 Zero, then a decimal point, then a whole string of zeros, something like that.

00:30:27 So he got the idea of using the negative logarithms

00:30:30 as they concentrate to the power of 10.

00:30:33 That was in 1909.

00:30:35 These ideas lay dormant for 25 years, almost dormant.

00:30:39 A few biochemists used pH, but almost no chemists.

00:30:43 So I realized that that would simplify the construction of the instrument

00:30:47 because that gave us a linear relationship between pH and the electromotive force,

00:30:54 whereas we'd have a logarithmic ratio if we used the Nernst equation.

00:30:58 So that made the construction of the instrument easy

00:31:02 and also made the concept of acidity easy

00:31:05 because now people had just a simple scale of small positive numbers

00:31:09 from 0 to 14 instead of all these very complicated numbers.

00:31:13 Well, that was how we got started.

00:31:16 The trouble was that this instrument would have to retail for $195.

00:31:22 Now, you're all too young.

00:31:24 You all heard of the Great Depression, I'm sure,

00:31:26 but you have no comprehension of that.

00:31:29 You haven't lived through it.

00:31:31 But that was a couple of months' salary for an analytical chemist in those days.

00:31:36 To ask the chemist to ask his boss to put out that much money

00:31:39 for an instrument that did nothing but measure acidity

00:31:42 in competition with a piece of litmus paper

00:31:46 wasn't surprising.

00:31:49 So Mr. Beckman and I went up to San Francisco

00:31:52 in the end of the summer of 1935.

00:31:55 It happened that the American Chemical Society

00:31:57 was holding its annual meeting out there,

00:31:59 and I showed the instrument to some of the analytical chemistry professors.

00:32:03 Well, they very wisely refused to commit themselves,

00:32:06 said that they were not experts,

00:32:08 that we should talk to the apparatus dealers.

00:32:11 So we got on the train and went across the country then

00:32:14 and stopped at various places, Denver, Chicago,

00:32:17 New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, some,

00:32:20 and talked to the dealers.

00:32:22 Most of them were pretty pessimistic.

00:32:24 But fortunately, here in Philadelphia,

00:32:27 the son of the sales manager of Arthur H. Thomas Company

00:32:31 was eager.

00:32:33 He said, you know, you might sell as many as five or six hundred of these

00:32:36 over ten years before you've saturated the market.

00:32:41 Well, fortunately, this was the Depression.

00:32:43 I had a fat salary.

00:32:45 I was an assistant professor at Caltech at that time

00:32:47 with a steady month of the income.

00:32:49 I think it was $250 a month,

00:32:51 but it came in every month.

00:32:52 That was the important thing on there.

00:32:54 So I thought this would be a way to make a few extra dollars.

00:32:58 So it started with no more planning than that.

00:33:01 I didn't realize I was ultimately going to end up in business.

00:33:04 It shows how naive I was then.

00:33:06 Still am, I swear.

00:33:08 But we started making these things.

00:33:10 One thing led to another.

00:33:13 After we were selling the pH meter in considerable quantity,

00:33:17 I realized there was a need for a photoelectric spectrophotometer.

00:33:22 Visual range spectrophotometers were widely used,

00:33:25 colorimetric and that sort,

00:33:26 but they could not be used out in the ultraviolet region.

00:33:29 Many compounds, as you well know, are colorless,

00:33:32 so you can't measure them on visual range spectrophotometers.

00:33:36 I realized we had in the circuitry of the pH meter

00:33:39 an ideal circuit to work with a vacuum-type photocell.

00:33:43 That led to the development of the spectrophotometer.

00:33:47 Well, one thing has led to another throughout my whole life here.

00:33:53 As I look back, I thought we were going to show one here.

00:33:57 Arnold, you said you had a picture of Alvere Oritz in painting.

00:34:02 It's coming in a second sequence.

00:34:04 Coming in a second sequence later on.

00:34:07 Oh, okay. I won't say it.

00:34:09 I will say it now. Do I have to talk after that?

00:34:12 I'll save it for them.

00:34:18 I could regale you here with many instances of experience we had.

00:34:23 Seeing Dr. Seaborg here.

00:34:25 Dr. Seaborg almost worked with me at Caltech.

00:34:30 Unfortunately, according to him, I just learned today here

00:34:32 that Caltech had run out of scholarships right at that time,

00:34:35 so he went up to Berkeley and said to my great detriment,

00:34:38 I'm sorry, but enjoy the relationship.

00:34:43 Well, I don't know what to say,

00:34:50 because I don't know what's coming on the next film on here.

00:34:53 Why don't we proceed forward in due course without the second film?

00:34:57 Okay, fine.

00:34:59 I'll try to think of something to say later on after seeing the other film.

00:35:02 Thank you.

00:35:15 Thank you very much, Dr. Seaborg.

00:35:18 And we will have more cake.

00:35:21 Next on the program is an old colleague of Glenn

00:35:25 that I'm really delighted to introduce him.

00:35:28 This is Glenn Seaborg, whom you've just barely heard about.

00:35:33 He and I were graduate students at Berkeley together.

00:35:37 That was many years ago.

00:35:39 There's a difference between us.

00:35:40 When I look at the extraordinary number and variety of really important things

00:35:44 that Glenn Seaborg has done in the subsequent 50 years,

00:35:48 I have a feeling he's got some inner talent

00:35:51 that's probably not even known in the books

00:35:54 that makes his use of time about three or four times as effective

00:35:57 as that for almost all of the rest of us, certainly.

00:36:00 Anyway, he's had a very impressive, useful, significant career.

00:36:05 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry.

00:36:08 Ten years as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

00:36:12 Chancellor or Vice Chancellor of Berkeley for a while.

00:36:17 Important author of recent books on arms control and government affairs.

00:36:22 A remarkable and fine person indeed.

00:36:26 His topic is instrumentation and nuclear research,

00:36:29 and I'll give you Glenn Seaborg.

00:36:31 Thank you very much, Frank.

00:36:40 It was 54 years ago, Arnold,

00:36:43 when I was in my last year as an undergraduate at UCLA

00:36:49 that I drove over across town to Cal Tech

00:36:52 to see whether they might have a scholarship, a fellowship,

00:36:55 a teaching fellowship for me to do my graduate work there,

00:36:59 and I had in mind perhaps working with Arnold Fechman.

00:37:03 But they told me that they had run out of fellowships,

00:37:08 or maybe I didn't qualify.

00:37:11 I'm not quite sure what the reason was,

00:37:15 but anyway, I did wind up doing my graduate work at Cal Tech

00:37:23 and went up the next year to Berkeley,

00:37:26 where Frank was already, I guess, a second or third year,

00:37:33 a second year graduate student at that time.

00:37:36 I've been asked to speak about the early instrumentation in nuclear science,

00:37:42 and in order to help me do this,

00:37:45 I picked out a couple of dozen slides

00:37:48 from a collection of a couple of thousand slides that I had

00:37:52 to see whether I can cover this topic.

00:37:57 And I'm going to begin at the very beginning with a picture of Brentkin.

00:38:04 I think this is perhaps the beginning of nuclear science

00:38:08 with the discovery of the X-rays.

00:38:12 And here he is with some of his apparatus.

00:38:15 And here is a picture of Rutherford,

00:38:18 surely the chief nuclear physicist,

00:38:22 and Otto Hahn, the leading nuclear chemist historically in this field.

00:38:30 Here is a famous picture of Otto Hahn with Lisa Meitner

00:38:35 in their laboratory in Berlin, taken in 1913.

00:38:41 As you probably know, Otto Hahn and Lisa Meitner were a research team

00:38:47 over a period of three or four decades.

00:38:53 This is a picture of the Cavendish Laboratory,

00:38:56 where in a sense it all began, where Rutherford worked,

00:39:01 and which wasn't changed very much when I visited there about 20 years ago.

00:39:09 And in the hallways there you can see in cabinets

00:39:15 much of the early equipment of nuclear science

00:39:18 that was used in those early days at Cavendish.

00:39:24 This is a picture of a balance for the weighing of radium

00:39:30 in the Curie Laboratory sometime after the turn of the century.

00:39:40 And this is a piezoelectric electrometer

00:39:46 used to measure the intensity of radioactivity in those early days.

00:39:57 And this is a picture of one of C.T.R. Wilson's first cloud chambers,

00:40:04 which of course was further developed and served as a very important instrument

00:40:10 for the detection of radioactivity.

00:40:13 In fact, as a matter of fact, I believe it was a cloud chamber that Carl Anderson used

00:40:18 in his discovery of the positron at Caltech in the early 1930s.

00:40:25 This, of course, is the crude method for reducing pressure

00:40:30 so that you could get, in the expansion of the cloud chamber,

00:40:33 the condensation of the vapors upon which the ionizing particles condensed

00:40:46 in order to give you the fact that you could see.

00:40:51 And this is an early apparatus for producing anhydrides of the radioactive substances.

00:41:08 And this is the apparatus that was used by the Joliot-Curies

00:41:14 in their discovery of artificial radioactivity.

00:41:19 They bombarded aluminum with the alpha particles from natural polonium

00:41:26 to form an isotope of phosphorus

00:41:30 and then they chemically identified this isotope of phosphorus

00:41:35 with this simple apparatus here.

00:41:37 I think that what is notable about so much of this early equipment

00:41:43 is how simple it was, but at the same time functional,

00:41:48 making it possible to make some of these extraordinary discoveries

00:41:53 as, of course, the discovery of artificial radioactivity

00:41:56 in early January of 1934 in the Paris laboratory of the Joliot-Curies would represent.

00:42:05 This is the actual apparatus that Hahn and Strassmann used

00:42:13 in the discovery of fission in December of 1938.

00:42:19 He had the presence of mind somehow,

00:42:23 which unfortunately not all of us have had,

00:42:27 of preserving his apparatus

00:42:32 and it is now in the museum,

00:42:36 the famous Museum of Science in Munich, Germany.

00:42:42 And here you have everything from the Geiger counter that was used

00:42:48 and then the various amplification circuits,

00:42:53 the crude vacuum tubes of those days

00:42:57 and the recording apparatus and so forth.

00:43:01 They made their chemical separation, as you know,

00:43:05 in an attempt to prove that a product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons

00:43:12 was radium, which they thought it was,

00:43:14 in an attempt to prove that it wasn't barium,

00:43:17 which they were using as a carrier.

00:43:19 To their surprise, they found out that it was barium

00:43:22 and that the uranium was splitting approximately in half

00:43:25 and this constituted the discovery of fission.

00:43:28 But this is how simple the apparatus was

00:43:33 that was used in this extraordinary,

00:43:39 you might say almost, well, not almost,

00:43:42 a world-shaking discovery,

00:43:44 namely the discovery of the nuclear fission of uranium.

00:43:47 This is a letter, a copy of a letter that Lisa Meitner wrote to me

00:43:54 on January 6th, 1939,

00:43:58 which would be just exactly at the time

00:44:01 after she had been forced to leave Germany

00:44:04 and was doing the experiments with Otto Frisch

00:44:06 to confirm the nuclear fission of uranium.

00:44:11 I had written her to comment on one of her interpretations

00:44:17 of nuclear isomerism and the decay of uranium-X to uranium-X2,

00:44:24 which exists in isomeric states.

00:44:30 And this is the letter that she wrote back in German

00:44:34 commenting on my comments on her work.

00:44:41 Now, here's a picture of Hans Geiger,

00:44:44 the inventor of the Geiger counter,

00:44:46 which, of course, is one of the most important instruments

00:44:50 used in nuclear science.

00:44:55 The Geiger counter and then the modification of that

00:44:58 to put it into tubular form, the Geiger-Muller counter,

00:45:01 which, of course, all of us used in our early work in nuclear science.

00:45:09 And this is a picture of the type,

00:45:13 well, of the actual Geiger-Muller counter assembly

00:45:16 that I used in my work before World War II.

00:45:19 And the Geiger counter is here inside of this lead shield,

00:45:25 which could be shielded from cosmic rays

00:45:31 and other sources of extraneous radioactivity

00:45:34 by closing the door here.

00:45:37 And then the pulse from the Geiger counter

00:45:39 going through the simple electronic circuit amplifier here

00:45:47 and then recorded on a simple dial counter over on the left.

00:45:53 And this was the sort of system we used in all of our work in World War II.

00:46:01 This is a picture of Ernest Lawrence's first cyclotron,

00:46:08 five inches in diameter.

00:46:11 Ernest got the idea, as you know,

00:46:15 that by using a small voltage on what he called the beads,

00:46:19 this bead and this bead,

00:46:21 by superimposing a magnetic field

00:46:24 so that the particles that were accelerated from here to here

00:46:28 at the small voltage, maybe a few kilovolts,

00:46:32 would be bent by the magnetic field so that they would come back here

00:46:37 and then accelerated from this bead or semi-circle to this one

00:46:44 and get the voltage again,

00:46:46 because in the meantime the sign of the voltage had changed.

00:46:50 And then the magnetic field bent it back around

00:46:56 so that it came here and then the sign of the voltage changed in the meantime

00:46:59 and got that voltage again

00:47:01 so that he was able to develop with a machine like this

00:47:04 something like hundreds of kilovolts.

00:47:08 And this simple device is really the forerunner

00:47:15 of all the huge accelerators that are being built today.

00:47:20 The largest one, of course, being the hope for superconducting supercollider,

00:47:27 which would be something like 20 miles in diameter.

00:47:33 That we hope to build in the United States.

00:47:36 This is the 5-inch cyclotron.

00:47:38 This went into operation in January of 1931.

00:47:43 This is the old wooden building,

00:47:50 the radiation laboratory,

00:47:53 where Ernest Lawrence then began to build his other cyclotrons

00:47:59 a little later in the 30s.

00:48:02 This is a...

00:48:04 Oh, this is a picture of the...

00:48:06 I just threw this in.

00:48:07 This is a picture of the apparatus I used working in the radiation laboratory

00:48:12 although I was in the chemistry department.

00:48:14 I got my degree in chemistry.

00:48:17 I did my work in the nuclear field.

00:48:21 They were very broad-minded at Berkeley in those days,

00:48:24 in the chemistry department.

00:48:26 And this was a so-called...

00:48:28 This was a deuteron-deuteron accelerator.

00:48:30 We accelerated deuterons, the heavy hydrogen ions,

00:48:34 to strike a target of heavy hydrogen,

00:48:37 which was kept at low...

00:48:42 in liquid...

00:48:44 in solid form at low temperatures.

00:48:47 And then the reaction of deuterons on deuterons to form neutrons.

00:48:51 And we were studying...

00:48:53 David Graham, my research partner, and I

00:48:56 were studying the properties of these neutrons

00:48:58 for our thesis work.

00:49:01 This is a picture of the 27-inch cyclotron,

00:49:07 which was built by Ernest Lawrence in the 19...

00:49:12 later in the 19...

00:49:13 still in the early 1930s, about 32 or so.

00:49:17 And...

00:49:19 1933.

00:49:20 1933.

00:49:22 And then in 1937,

00:49:25 he built the 37-inch cyclotron.

00:49:30 I began some of my work

00:49:33 on the 27-inch cyclotron in 1936

00:49:37 and on the...

00:49:39 and 37...

00:49:40 and on the 37-inch cyclotron in 1937

00:49:45 and...

00:49:47 1938.

00:49:49 This is a picture of the 16-inch cyclotron,

00:49:51 which was built not in that wooden building.

00:49:54 The 27-inch cyclotron and the 37-inch cyclotron

00:49:59 were housed in that wooden building

00:50:01 of which I showed you a picture a moment ago.

00:50:03 This was built just across the way,

00:50:06 a few hundred...

00:50:07 a few...

00:50:08 10 or 15 feet across the way

00:50:10 in a new building called the Crocker Laboratory,

00:50:13 where they built a cyclotron

00:50:16 that could accelerate deuterons to energies

00:50:19 of 16 million electron volts.

00:50:23 The 27-inch cyclotron accelerated deuterons

00:50:25 to 5.5 million electron volts,

00:50:28 and the 37-inch cyclotron accelerated deuterons

00:50:32 to 8 million electron volts.

00:50:34 But he was striving ever for higher voltages,

00:50:37 higher energies,

00:50:38 and this went up to...

00:50:42 16 million electron volts.

00:50:44 And here is Ernest and his brother John Lawrence,

00:50:47 who...

00:50:48 John Lawrence is really the father of nuclear medicine.

00:50:52 He came out to Berkeley in 1937

00:50:55 and founded the Donner Laboratory

00:50:58 and led the work there with neutrons

00:51:04 and artificially produced radioactive substances

00:51:06 that are...

00:51:07 that became so...

00:51:10 made such vital contributions to nuclear medicine.

00:51:15 Now, one of our main influence

00:51:18 that we used in our work

00:51:20 on detection of radioactivity

00:51:22 was the Lorentzen quartz fiber electroscope.

00:51:26 Now, Arnold will...

00:51:27 this will strike a responsive note

00:51:30 in his memory

00:51:31 because it was one of his colleagues,

00:51:33 Lorentzen,

00:51:34 at Caltech.

00:51:35 It's interesting how much of this

00:51:37 originated at Caltech.

00:51:39 Invented this electroscope,

00:51:40 which just took over the field.

00:51:42 We all used the Lorentzen quartz fiber electroscope.

00:51:46 All it was was a quartz fiber

00:51:49 that was charged

00:51:50 and had two arms like this.

00:51:52 And when it was charged,

00:51:55 this was repelled from that,

00:51:57 so this swung out like that.

00:51:59 And then the rate at which this thing moved back

00:52:02 was related to the radioactivity.

00:52:05 You couldn't think of anything simpler,

00:52:07 but it was just a tremendous instrument

00:52:09 for the measurement of radioactivity.

00:52:12 And we all used it.

00:52:13 And this is an example of such a...

00:52:17 an electroscope.

00:52:18 Here's the charging mechanism.

00:52:20 Here is the electroscope.

00:52:23 And the eyepiece over there

00:52:26 with the light

00:52:27 so you could watch the rate at which it discharged.

00:52:30 And then your sample was placed

00:52:32 on these shelves below,

00:52:34 either up close to measure it

00:52:36 or maybe down on a lower shelf

00:52:38 so that you could put absorbers in between

00:52:42 in order to measure

00:52:44 the rate of absorption of the radiation,

00:52:47 which, of course,

00:52:48 enabled you to determine its energy.

00:52:50 This is the electroscope

00:52:52 that Jack Livingood and I used in the 1930s

00:52:56 in all of our work,

00:52:58 which included the discovery

00:53:00 of a number of isotopes

00:53:02 so useful in nuclear medicine today,

00:53:06 iron-131,

00:53:08 cobalt-60.

00:53:11 And this is a picture

00:53:13 of Jack Livingood and I

00:53:16 at Sader Gate in Berkeley in 1938

00:53:22 on our way to mailing

00:53:24 to the physical review

00:53:27 the letter to the editor

00:53:28 announcing the discovery of iron-131.

00:53:31 We had no idea then, of course,

00:53:33 that it would be so useful

00:53:37 in the diagnosis and treatment of disease,

00:53:40 but it's now used something like

00:53:42 a couple of million times per year

00:53:45 in these functions in nuclear medicine.

00:53:49 So that's nearly...

00:53:52 that's 49 years ago.

00:53:55 And here is another type of instrument

00:53:57 that was used that Sebrey and I used,

00:53:59 a little more sophisticated

00:54:03 than a Lorentzian electroscope.

00:54:05 That was an ionization chamber

00:54:08 in which the sample was placed on top,

00:54:11 and then as the radiations went through,

00:54:13 the breakdown in the resistance there

00:54:17 led to a current

00:54:19 which was amplified by a

00:54:21 General Electric FP54 vacuum tube

00:54:25 and then read off on a galvanometer

00:54:29 with a mirror scale.

00:54:31 And this is the actual picture,

00:54:33 the FP54 and the mirror scale

00:54:40 in which we read the rate of discharge

00:54:42 by the deflection of the galvanometer.

00:54:51 And with this, Sebrey and I

00:54:54 discovered also in 1938

00:54:57 Technician 99M,

00:54:59 which is today the workhorse

00:55:02 in nuclear medicine.

00:55:04 It is used in the diagnosis

00:55:06 and treatment of more disorders

00:55:11 than any other isotope.

00:55:13 Many millions of applications

00:55:16 of Technician 99M are used per year,

00:55:22 are made per year at the present time.

00:55:25 And of course when Sebrey and I did this,

00:55:27 we had no idea that our isotope

00:55:32 would have these applications.

00:55:34 Actually, what we did in discovering

00:55:36 Technician 99M

00:55:38 was the first isomeric transition

00:55:42 in a nucleus.

00:55:44 I don't really have time to go into that.

00:55:47 This is a more advanced type

00:55:51 of a Geiger counter that we used

00:55:54 still before World War II

00:55:56 in which it was still tubular

00:55:59 but the central wire came down here

00:56:02 to a window at this point

00:56:04 so that you could put...

00:56:06 and then there was a thin window

00:56:10 made of thin mica at this end

00:56:12 and then you could put your sample here

00:56:15 and the radiation went through that window

00:56:19 and you got your discharge

00:56:21 in the Geiger counter.

00:56:22 Oh, and by the way,

00:56:23 this bell jar type Geiger counter

00:56:27 was invented by Dick Dodson

00:56:29 who was at Caltech at that time.

00:56:35 In case you don't recognize it,

00:56:38 this is a picture of me

00:56:40 at one of our Geiger counters

00:56:43 before World War II.

00:56:44 I hasten to point that out

00:56:45 because sometimes when I show this picture

00:56:48 people ask, who's that?

00:56:51 This is a...

00:56:55 Ernest Lawrence, of course, as you know,

00:56:57 won the Nobel Prize

00:56:59 for his invention of the cyclotron

00:57:02 and this is a picture

00:57:04 of the blackboard there

00:57:06 on the day that the news came

00:57:09 that he had won the Nobel Prize

00:57:12 and I will let you read that.

00:57:18 My wife, Helen, who is here today

00:57:22 in this audience

00:57:24 was Ernest Lawrence's secretary

00:57:27 at that time

00:57:29 and she had the responsibility.

00:57:34 She was in the office

00:57:36 when the word came from Stockholm

00:57:38 that he had won the Nobel Prize

00:57:40 and he was on the tennis court

00:57:43 at the Berkeley Tennis Club

00:57:46 and she put in a call there

00:57:48 to inform him

00:57:50 and she had a great trouble

00:57:52 getting the call through

00:57:53 because they said that

00:57:56 Ernest didn't like to be bothered

00:58:00 on the tennis court

00:58:03 and she insisted

00:58:08 and she was able to get through

00:58:10 and give him the news

00:58:11 that he had won the Nobel Prize in physics.

00:58:14 It was, of course, in Ernest Lawrence's office

00:58:17 that I met Helen

00:58:21 and a few years later we got married.