JACKIE WRAY WAS WEARING HER “BEST LITTLE OUTFIT,” COMPLETE with pumps and white gloves. It was the fall of 1952; she was nineteen years old and a sophomore student at Simmons College, a women’s university in Boston.
Her friend Nancy Bodenstein had bullied her into coming to a guest lecture, which was being given by Nancy’s neighbor from nearby Wilmington and one of his colleagues from MIT. Jackie had been told by Nancy to get to the lecture “without fail.”
The lecture began at 7:00 p.m. sharp. One of the men was young, quite handsome but boyish looking, with a slide projector under his arm. The other was older, slightly balding, and carrying a briefcase. Jackie assumed it was the older man who was there to lecture, but when Dudley Buck’s name was announced it was the lean young man with the mop of brown hair who sprang to the podium as his balding accomplice loaded the slides.
Buck gave a brief introduction, then turned to the blackboard and printed the term “DIGITAL COMPUTER” in three-inch-high letters. “They are called computers, not computors,” he said, as he turned to the blackboard again and carefully underlined the letter E.
Computers would eventually fly planes automatically, operate robots that could build cars, translate languages instantaneously and shoot Soviet planes or bombs out of the sky, Buck explained. All this would be achieved, he continued, with a computer that was small enough to fit in a matchbox. The whole room was gripped. It may have been a complicated subject, but Buck broke it down so that anyone could understand, not just the science majors. Jackie could not stop staring at his clear blue eyes and the perfect teeth shining through his smile.
Buck was bombarded with questions at the end, mostly from the professors. They huddled around him after he had stopped taking questions and answers from the lectern. When the fuss started to die down, Nancy made sure that Jackie got a chance to chat to the young scientist.
Jackie was smitten. Buck, too, was quickly taken in by her coy smile and bouncing blond curls. When the young computer scientist called a few days later to ask if she wanted to come see his lab, she jumped at the chance. Both maintained the pretense that they were just following up the detail of his speech with some more in-depth information.
Buck, age twenty-five, had been working for eighteen months on Project Whirlwind by this point and was well known around campus. Buck took his date on a tour of the giant building, where the enormous apparatus of the Whirlwind computer was running its calculations day and night.
Then they went to a Chinese restaurant a short walk away in Central Square. “One conversation led to another,” Jackie remembers. “On our third date, Dudley casually dropped his idea that he would like to marry me. He was six years older than I and eager to settle down and eventually raise a family with lots of children. Luckily, he didn’t press further. My instant internal reaction was sheer panic.”
That night, Jackie told her mother what had happened, and her mother erupted in tears, proclaiming, “Oh my baby, so young.”
Yet the worries soon faded. Buck’s time away from the lab was so scarce that young love had time to blossom at a slightly more sensible pace. Dating was squeezed in around the edges. The young couple would meet for lunch at Durgin-Park, the famous dining room in Boston’s Faneuil Hall marketplace, which did a pot roast dinner for ninety-five cents. Or they would go to the Blue Ship Tea Room, a tiny restaurant on the second floor of a building at the end of a wharf overlooking Boston Harbor. Jake Wirth’s, a German restaurant in Boston’s theater district, was another favorite.
When time was scarcer, Jackie would make her way to the MIT Faculty Club. It was hardly romantic: the big round tables sat ten people. It was a place where professors from various departments argued about all manner of things, often across multiple academic disciplines, sketching out ideas on the paper placemats. Jackie loved to listen in.
On weekends they would take walks through the Beacon Hill district or the Boston Public Garden; at the latter they never missed a chance to ride the famous swan boats, even though they were usually bombarded by pigeons while doing so.
Buck had a small Plymouth sports car. They would drive to the countryside, or sit and watch the planes taking off and landing at Logan Airport while eating sandwiches. They went to see Carousel, South Pacific, and any other musicals that came to town.
In the spring of 1953, only six months after they first met, Buck and Jackie became engaged. At Shreve, Crump & Low, Boston’s preeminent jewelry store, Buck bought the ring. It was a small solitaire, but, the salesman assured, a perfectly balanced stone. In any case, it was all that he could afford.
Jackie had come to terms with her fiancé’s odd living arrangements, including his teenage foster son. “I just thought it was wonderful that he had taken this boy in,” she recalls. By this point, there was another new lodger in the small house in Wilmington.
Virginia had finally left to take up her post with the US Foreign language school in Washington, and had then been shipped off to Bonn. Working under John Foster Dulles, the new US secretary of state, she was involved in arranging his many trips to the capital of the newly created West Germany for summits with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
Before she even got to Germany, however, Virginia met a nice German boy. Her Pan-Am flight to Germany was grounded in Ireland for four days by a thick fog. Georg Schick, a graduate student from Bavaria, was also stuck. He had just spent a year in California studying at Stanford University on a Fulbright Scholarship, and was on his way back to the University of Munich.
In those four days trapped in an airport, Virginia and Georg became close. Once their epic journey to Germany was over, they started to meet on Virginia’s leave days. Soon they were planning a new life in America together.
In the summer of 1952, Virginia asked Dudley to sponsor Georg—or Schorry, as he was nicknamed—on his application to become an American citizen.
Schorry was twenty-five, just like Buck. Even though Schorry was said to be financially independent, Buck had to detail his own financial position in the application form. He listed his weekly earnings of $53.75 and made a declaration of assets, which showed he had $15.22 in the bank in cash, and property worth about $10,100—the (heavily mortgaged) house in Wilmington and a plot of land on Vashon Island near Seattle.
“My sister in Germany knows applicant and applicant’s family; applicant has had three years of college, has studied for one year in US, desires to be school teacher,” wrote Buck in the “Remarks” section of the form.
In a letter dated May 4, 1953, Virginia wrote to Dudley to tell him that “Schorry’s home packing” and added, “May Day was quiet in Berlin for the Americans. We had strict orders not to be in the eastern sector for the big parade since ‘hate American day’ was in full swing.”
Two weeks later, Buck met his future brother-in-law—and housemate—for the first time when Schorry stepped off a boat in New York City, dragging an enormous wooden trunk that was so big it barely squeezed into Buck’s car. He had brought curtains, bedsheets, paintings, crockery—as well as the remains of a large fruitcake. Schorry had baked the cake with a ring inside, which he had used to propose to Virginia before he left.
Schorry enrolled in a master’s program at Boston University. He also taught gymnastics to children at a Turnverein gymnasium in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a short train ride away, and worked as a singing waiter at a Hofbrau in Boston. On slow evenings in the restaurant, he marked papers for some of his professors at a rate of fifty cents an hour—until the restaurateur found out, and Schorry was fired.
On his rare evenings at home, Schorry would usually read the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe aloud in German by the light of the fire. The grate was usually filled with their household rubbish, or with fallen branches from the neighborhood trees. When Jackie went to visit Buck, she was quite often greeted by the unmistakable smell of kidneys cooking—Schorry’s favorite meal.
Buck was away from home a lot. It often fell to Schorry to keep an eye on Glenn around the house. And then, increasingly, to Jackie too.
By the time he proposed, Dudley Buck was on a more secure professional footing. He had just completed his master’s thesis on an invention called ferroelectric memory, a solid-state computer memory with no moving parts that could be developed to operate at lightning-fast speeds.
It would be more than thirty years until that technology was developed into a commercial product —what we know today as FeRAM, which drives many of the fastest tablets, laptops, and smartphones. Nonetheless, the thesis certainly brought Buck attention from the highest levels of the military and security services.
In May 1952, about six months before he met Jackie, his relationship with the military was put on a more formal basis. The army’s ballistics research lab sent a delegation to visit Buck at MIT in response to his thesis. In a letter to a fellow computer scientist that summer, Buck claimed that several military labs were attempting to develop his technology. “At one laboratory, an entire two-story building (plus basement) is being devoted to ferroelectric memory research,” he wrote.
Bell Telephone Laboratories, the hothouse of invention in America that had won international acclaim for developing the transistor, was very keen to hire Buck. Bell offered him a relatively handsome salary of $440 a month, but he chose to stay on at MIT, where his monthly salary as a research assistant had just gone up to $215 a month.
Around this same time, an old contact from Washington got in touch. The organization that had subsumed Seesaw and was about to be rebranded as the National Security Agency (NSA) wanted to hire him as an “expert”; he would be paid at a rate of thirty-five dollars a day—about three and a half times more, pro rata, than he was paid by MIT.
The demands on Buck’s time would not be sufficient to force him to give up his studies or research, and this was clearly an attraction. Yet the chain of correspondence suggests Buck did not get much say in whether or not he took the job. He was already being passed through the application process before he got clearance from MIT to take on the extra work. He sent a somewhat bashful memo to his direct line manager asking if it was permitted for a junior research assistant like him to take on such high-profile external consulting work.
While Washington’s interest in Buck seemed to raise eyebrows with his professors at this time, no one at MIT ever said no to a government agency—and especially not one that worked so closely with the university and provided so much of its funding.
In 1952 the NSA was so secret that no one would even confirm its existence. It was nicknamed No Such Agency among other branches of the military for the comedic frequency with which US officials denied knowledge of it. It first got a fleeting mention in a US government organizational chart in 1957, but the letter from President Harry S. Truman sanctioning its creation remained classified for much longer.
“In the first half of the 1950s, the NSA was the prime consumer of digital electronic computers,” explains David Brock, director of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. “It was foundational for the digital electronic computer industry in the United States. It was the first customer for all the digital electronic computers made by mainframe manufacturers. They were buying the first, and most expensive, units—often several of them. In that, the NSA helped to make further units cheaper and so promoting their use in science and engineering, then soon into business and bureaucracy. The NSA was extremely important.”
Although the White House was still denying the NSA’s creation, Buck was receiving letters from the organization on headed notepaper—and claiming back travel costs by attaching receipts to official government expense forms bearing an NSA rubber stamp. Years later, the carbon copies of those NSA travel receipts were among some of the extraordinary items found among his notebooks and diaries. The receipts place Buck in some interesting places, at some interesting times.
For example, around the time that America started testing hydrogen bombs, Buck returned from one trip to the West Coast with a collection of extravagant seashells that he explained were only available in the South Pacific. Had he witnessed the test explosions firsthand? Or had his trip simply been a coincidence? It is clear from Buck’s notes and diaries that he knew the individuals involved in the tests.
Correlating his travel plans with his diaries and lab books show a similar pattern emerging over a period of years. Frequently, at times of geopolitical crisis or intrigue, Buck would travel to Washington or to a military installation around the country—and file an expense claim back to NSA headquarters at Fort George Meade, Maryland. Then shortly afterwards, diary entries show, a meeting would take place at MIT between Buck and another scientist from a different institution or branch of the military that we now know to have been involved in a particular classified project of note. Sometimes the meetings were listed in his diaries under their military code names. Sometimes just the name of the individual. In some of those instances, lab book entries show that he devised experiments to solve particular problems. In other cases, he seems to have been used simply as a sounding board. For it was already clear from his achievements that Buck’s brain was wired slightly differently from even those of his respected peers.
“Dudley Buck was seeing stuff well into the future,” explains Brock. “People are still grappling with things today that he saw sixty years ago. Some of it is quite far out there—neuromorphic computing, for example. He was trying to build a computer, in a three-inch cube, to replicate the human brain. People are only now getting back into that.”
AFTER BEING REHIRED into a formal role in clandestine military operations, it seems that Buck’s first task was to be brought up to speed with what had been occurring in his two years as a civilian. He was asked to attend a science conference convened under the auspices of the NSA at government research labs in Corona, California, in May 1952. The order to attend came before he was even officially sworn in to his new role.
It was an important affair. Among the other scientists attending was Seth Neddermeyer, one of the top physicists from Los Alamos, New Mexico, home to the Manhattan Project—where America’s first nuclear bombs were conceived and created. Neddermeyer was twenty years Buck’s senior and a revered figure in the science community.
Also attending was Joseph M. Pettit from Stanford University, who had received the President’s Certificate of Merit for work he had done with radar during World War II. Pettit brought along his colleague Lester M. Field; the two men were already developing a highly advanced radio amplifier called a traveling wave tube that would be used in the communication system of Telstar satellites.
Then there was Zoltan Bay, from George Washington University, a Hungarian professor who left his communist homeland to come to the United States in 1948. Though he had worked with the famous mathematician John Von Neumann and other Washington-based computer experts on their early computers, Bay was most famous for successfully devising a way to bounce radar signals off the moon, a technique he had perfected in his lab in Budapest in 1946.
Buck was to spend three weeks in California mingling with these big brains. It was not only his first mission as an NSA expert but also one of his first trips back to his home state since he had set off on the train to Seattle as a wide-eyed teenage navy cadet. The trip would be a chance to catch up with his Grandma Delia, his little brother Frank, and the rest of the family in Santa Barbara, where his return would catch the attention of the local newspaper. He brought Glenn with him to meet the family. A clipping in Buck’s papers showed that the Santa Barbara News-Press told its readers that the town’s prodigal son had returned for a “summer job” at the National Bureau of Standards lab in Los Angeles, adding, “The twenty-five-year-old Santa Barbaran will return to MIT this fall to work on his doctorate.”
Buck’s trip was a little less innocent than this cover story suggested, however. The invitation had come principally from Joe Eachus, Buck’s main mentor from his time in the navy. Eachus was now the chief of the NSA’s Analytical Equipment Machines Division in the Office of Research and Development. Loosely speaking, he was the NSA’s top computer scientist. Howard Campaigne, the other wartime codebreaker who had taken a shine to Buck during his time at Seesaw, held a similar post to Eachus in the still-new NSA, but with a slightly different title. The two men flew out to California to see Buck, spending a day with him at what was described as a “mathematical symposium” at the University of California–Los Angeles.
No one else attended this “symposium” other than a professor from UCLA, it appears. At this time, the NSA was at war on two fronts: laboring over the Soviet codes, and battling the ever-changing demands of the Korean War. After his briefing, Buck was sent to the secluded mountain laboratories of the National Bureau of Standards in Corona, to join the other assembled brains.
The Corona lab was different from the rest of America’s computer facilities in one key respect: unlike its peers, the Bureau of Standards avoided developing its own components, preferring to perfect technologies that others had patented. Yet it was also developing high-speed computers. It had built a machine called the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) that went into service in 1950. SWAC briefly held the title of the world’s fastest computer, until MIT’s Whirlwind machine came along.
Buck became a regular visitor over the years that followed, handing over information about what he and his colleagues were developing as well as advances he had learned about elsewhere. On that first trip, however, the secluded lab in the Santa Ana Mountains was mostly just playing host to this odd congress of scientists. Buck, Neddermeyer, Bay, the two Stanford professors, and a handful of other scientists with links to various government programs spent a fortnight holed up together in Corona. Part of Buck’s role was to send notes on the discussions to Colonel George Campbell in Washington. He distilled two weeks of discussions down to a two-page memo.
Based on the account he sent back, which was found among his papers, a large part of the meeting focused on the magnetic core memories that Buck and his colleagues had developed at MIT, which was now driving the mass roll-out of computers. Some slightly wilder ideas also emerged, however.
The Korean War—which began in June 1950 and lasted until July 1953—had raised the stakes for America’s scientists. Throughout the conflict, America’s upper hand rested partly on the threat that it could do what it had done in Japan a few years earlier: drop the bomb. The technology was still evolving, and rapidly.
Four months after this meeting in the Californian mountains, America used technology devised by Neddermeyer to detonate the world’s first hydrogen bomb—a device up to a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that had exploded in Japan. Ivy Mike, as the bomb was called, represented a significant symbolic strike against the Soviets. Film footage of the explosion was broadcast around the world after it had been approved by the censors.
The Ivy Mike detonation used a particular form of hydrogen: one thousand liters of deuterium, kept in liquid form by a giant cryogenic freezer that generated ultralow temperatures. Deuterium had only been discovered in 1931. It is also known as heavy hydrogen; it is heavier and less stable than hydrogen. Deuterium is found in trace amounts in the world’s oceans, and it is generally believed that all the deuterium found in nature has been present since the Big Bang. Water containing deuterium is referred to as heavy water, or deuterium oxide.
The Nazis dabbled with heavy water during World War II in their attempts to build a nuclear reactor and as part of their attempts to produce an atomic bomb. A sizable Allied sabotage plot was undertaken to shut down the Germans’ secret heavy water factory in Norway. After the war deuterium came back into fashion as a bomb-making material. It was of strategic importance, therefore, but it was also difficult to procure.
The first American experiments with deuterium took place at the National Bureau of Standards’ other facility in Washington, DC, where a new state-of-the-art physics lab turned it into a liquid form of hydrogen by freezing it at ultralow temperatures.
During the two-week conclave in Corona, it was resolved that procuring more heavy water would be a wise idea. In the months following the seminar, this subject became a homework project for Buck and Lieutenant Commander M. Scott Blois, a navy scientist and former colleague from Washington, DC.
Heavy water is about 10.7 percent denser than normal seawater. Normal tides and ocean currents stop it from sinking to the bottom of the sea, however. That was the accepted wisdom, in any case. Blois and Buck posited that in the deepest parts of the ocean, at depths of ten thousand meters or more, higher quantities of deuterium may be present. As they theorized more formally, they concluded that sub-sea pressure could mean that seawater in deepwater trenches could be 11.7 percent heavier than normal seawater. Thus, it was possible that sizable quantities of bomb-grade hydrogen may be simply lurking in the mud of the world’s deepest ocean trenches.
Their interest was not just with a view to building bombs. Buck, Blois, and the rest of the experts assembled in Corona hypothesized that deuterium could also be used as a basis for high-speed computer memory.
Buck outlined the concept in his notes, describing it as “nuclear induction memory.” In certain states, this highly explosive nuclear fuel could be moved and manipulated by magnets, and used to store images. Buck and Blois formed the view that the same idea could be applied for the ones and zeroes; a magnetic pulse sent into a deuterium store could be used to fashion ones and zeros as a computer memory.
The physics behind the idea had been understood for a while. The concept is central to the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner used in hospitals everywhere to survey and analyze the human body.
Buck’s debrief for Colonel Campbell described the deuterium idea as “quite exciting from a computer memory standpoint.” He added that there was “considerable effort” going into this research in other labs across the country, and that the group of scientists that had convened in Corona would “keep in touch with the developments.”
Blois soon procured samples of deuterium from the Tonga Trench and the Philippine Trench—two of the deepest spots in the world’s oceans—after tracking down a local marine biologist who had been aboard a Danish research ship a year earlier.
Some brief experiments proved that their theory was right: the mud had a much higher concentration of deuterium than did normal seawater, making it much easier to turn into a nuclear bomb, a computer memory, or both at the same time: a bomb that was controlled by a computer built out of its own payload.
Blois wrote an excited letter to Buck, explaining that their theory had received a favorable response in the Office for Naval Research (ONR). “I sent the proposal to ONR,” he said. “They talked it over with physicists and oceanographers there and stated that they thought the idea an interesting, a promising one and suggested that it be followed up. I therefore proposed an approach which is compatible with my main job here and will see what happens.… I have mentioned you in my letter to ONR as the co-author of the proposal, so you are involved to that extent.”
On his return to MIT, Buck drew upon the resources of various departments at MIT to assist with the analytical work for the “nuclear induction memory.” Project Galathea, as it was christened, rumbled on for a few more years before it became overtaken by more pressing laboratory work. While Buck and Blois experimented with deuterium as a computer memory, scientists elsewhere in the United States were trying to do the same thing with everything from lemon Jell-O to a particular type of hair gel called Wildroot Creme Oil. The hair oil responded to a pulse or radio signal when they were in a strong magnetic field. Such was the desperation in the search for new computer components, and the willingness to entertain any possible alternative means of creating a switch that could flip from an on position to an off position at the fastest speed possible.
Buck and the other scientists who had gathered at the summit in Corona became a forum of sorts within the NSA named the Working Group on Ultra High-Speed Computer Circuits. Ultimately they were working toward building the first generation of the NSA supercomputers.