The Cryotron Files

FAME

FROM THE MOMENT DUDLEY BUCK’S PICTURE APPEARED IN LIFE magazine, reporters from all over America started to turn up unannounced at MIT, on the hunt for the famous professor behind the “tiny electronic brain.” Even though Buck was still a long way from satisfied with its performance, the hype about the cryotron had become self-sustaining.

Initially Buck seemed to enjoy the attention—as did his cash-strapped researchers. As Chuck Crawford remembers,

Particularly after that Life article, Dudley was world famous in this area. These reporters would come by—I would be sitting at my bench. Somehow they would get into the institute, find the right place, and come in to knock on Dudley’s door. The door was always open, he was open for everybody. So they would go in and talk for a little bit.

The reporter would then invite Dudley to lunch, which was great for him because he could get quotes he could use about the future of computers that could turn into an article for him. Dudley would say, “Is it okay if I bring a couple of staff members with me?”

The reporter is trapped at that point, as you can imagine. He says, “Yes, of course, Doctor Buck.” Dudley would then get out of his chair, walk over to his office door, step just outside, and then he would hold his right hand up and put two fingers in his mouth and make this tremendous whistle. He could do a very loud whistle.

Everybody would then pile out—they knew this meant free lunch. This poor journalist has now got six or eight people to take to lunch. Dudley would give him a few quotes—he would give him something for his money.

By now, Buck had a sizable crew of technicians. They rigged up some experiments that served as good party tricks to demonstrate the invention. According to Don Burrer, one of the students working there, Buck rigged up a set of cryotron switches to some sound components so that it could play simple musical tunes for the admirers who came to the lab.

The media attention was followed by serious scientific recognition. In January 1957 Buck received a telegram from the Institute of Radio Engineers to tell him he had been awarded the Browder J. Thompson award—a special medal recognizing achievements by scientists under thirty. It was named after a former General Electric scientist who had invented vacuum tubes and was killed in World War II while operating a radar on a plane that got shot down over Italy on a night flight. The prize had been awarded for the paper Buck had presented to the institute the previous spring, explaining the full working detail of the cryotron. He was to be honored at a lavish banquet in New York City that March, the telegram told him.

The trickle of interest then turned into a torrent. Suddenly the cryotron was on the front page of The New York Times, illustrated with a close-up shot of Buck’s hand, holding a vacuum tube, a transistor, and a tiny Z-shaped piece of wire that looked like a splinter.

“Devices so small that 100 of them can fit in a thimble may open the way to a revolution in electronic computer design, according to the engineer who developed them at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” the newspaper said. “The devices, called cryotrons, suggest the possibility that computers occupying only a cubic foot of space may do the work of machines that now fill whole rooms.”

None of the reports mentioned the cryotron’s possible role as “navigational brain” for nuclear missiles, however, as it had been previously described in the Life article. Although this potential military application was presumably a key reason behind the interest in Buck and his device, that information was missing from the coverage.

Radio stations and TV networks wanted to talk to Buck. After a prime-time appearance on one of the Boston TV stations, he became a local celebrity, and the Buck family’s neighbors finally understood what Dudley did for a living.

Everybody wanted a piece of him. Howard Rodman, the screenwriter who would go on to create The Six Million Dollar Man, came to MIT to meet with Buck about the possibility of dramatizing his story for CBS. It seems that nothing ever came of it, but the meeting was logged in Buck’s diary.

The US Information Agency Broadcasting Service sent Buck two half-hour rolls of film and a long list of questions, coupled with instructions on how to record and interview himself. It’s not clear from the correspondence who the film was intended for or how widely it was to be distributed.

MIT seems to have been caught off guard by the level of attention Buck had started to receive. The university gave him airtime on the campus radio station, but all the exposure had highlighted an embarrassing failing on the part of the department of electrical engineering.

Although he was being called Professor Buck informally by his students, MIT had still not yet awarded him his doctorate. It appears that he was led to believe by his thesis adviser that his work on the cryotron would not be sufficient to qualify.

Brown wrote,

Dudley Buck’s status with respect to thesis is a matter that bothers me greatly. At the present time Dudley is under the impression that he still has ahead of him his Doctorate thesis research. He is somehow reporting to Dr. Von Hippel on this matter. I consider the whole affair ridiculous and worthy of immediate action by the Graduate Committee.

The facts are these. Dudley has been recognized for some time as a rare and extremely capable experimentalist. He has achieved considerable recognition in the professional world for a fine piece of work. He has been recognized by the top professional society in the communications field. He has been the victim of a great deal of publicity in the interests of publicizing MIT. It looks to me as though, unless something is done, he will be two or three years completing for the Doctorate. Even this will be one of the shortest Doctorate theses that anyone has ever achieved under Von Hippel’s guidance.

I think a special committee should be formed with the clear authority to extract from Dudley a manuscript that reports on what he has done, get it typed and have it submitted before June 1957 as a doctorate thesis.

MIT decided to lighten Buck’s academic teaching load to help fast-track his doctorate, with several professors acknowledging the “embarrassing” situation the university had gotten itself into.

Now that there was a degree of pressure from MIT to prioritize his academic paperwork, the media attention was starting to become a little tiresome. The timing of his newfound fame was also a little inconvenient. In December 1956, a month before he learned of his award from the IRE, Jackie gave birth to their second child—a baby boy named Douglas who weighed in at a whopping eleven pounds and one-half ounce after arriving almost five weeks overdue. Carolyn, Buck’s daughter, was only fifteen months old when her brother was born.

Now that he had become an internationally recognized figure, there were additional constraints on his time. After the press reports and the TV appearances, letters started to flood into Buck’s office from all over the world, soliciting business, offering work, or seeking information.

W. Nijenhuis from the Dutch electronics giant Philips flew from Eindhoven to meet the creator of the famous cryotron. Professors from France, Italy, and Uruguay wrote to demand papers and information. Some of the British newspapers then caught on to the story. Old friends from the V-12 program got in touch. One university friend, who had become a teacher in Menlo Park, California, joked that he would be “looking for a computer that fits in the vest pocket, with an A.D. Little liquid air machine trailing behind.”

The most bizarre request came from a leather tanning firm in Barcelona. While the letter was cryptically addressed to “Dudley Buck, engineer, Institute of Technology, Massachusetts,” it somehow reached him:

Dear Dudley,

We have heard that you have succeeded in the production of a small electronic brain.

As our firm is very interested to be informed as wide as possible with regard the possibilities to introduce the said machine in our market, we should be very glad if you would be so good to get us in touch with manufacturers of the same.

Thanking in advance for your kind reply, we remain Dear Sir

Yours faithfully

Comercial Serra

Buck sent an exasperated reply, telling the Spaniards that “the newspaper coverage of our research has been a bit misleading” and that there was nothing yet to sell them.

The large amount of publicity which appeared in recent newspapers was rather embarrassing. Actually we do not have a computer using cryotrons under construction at MIT, but rather we are studying the fundamental properties of super-conductors and cryotron circuits. The Arthur D. Little Company of Cambridge is engaged in building a unit containing a large number of cryotrons for the United States Government, but this is not properly called a computer. In fact, it could not be properly called a computer memory either. It is a very special device which gives one a YES-NO answer as to whether or not a, let us say, book is in his library.

The example of finding a book in a library combined two Buck inventions: his content-addressable memory system that governed the filing process and the prototype cryotron circuit that was providing the computing power. Yet Buck told Ducrocq that, contrary to the information in MIT’s press releases, the cryotron would not be in a position to replace the transistor in computers of the near future. It was all a project for “some years from now.”

Buck’s foreign correspondents all got the same tale of complications, drawbacks, and delays. When American companies like Boeing, IBM, or RCA got in touch, however, Buck told a rather different story. He still cautioned that the cryotron was less advanced than they all hoped. Yet he would go on to elaborate about the cryotron-based research programs that had been launched all over the country—many supported by funding from the NSA. One of Buck’s recent graduates who had been hired by General Electric had already developed a cryotron that was switching so quickly that his equipment could not measure the speed.

The cryotron was progressing about as well as could be expected. Yet Buck was now reticent to indicate just how quickly it was advancing to any party outside the broad sweep of NSA influence.

The vision of the future that Buck had been portraying for years was starting to become a reality. Computers were no longer the preserve of military codebreakers.

The US Census Bureau was the first big computer user, buying a Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) to keep track of the American population. By the time Buck shot to fame, big corporations were starting to use computers to handle their accounts and run their payroll systems.

As the Wall Street Journal wrote in a lengthy article on the burgeoning computer industry on August 15, 1957,

An electronic hum, a clackety-clack of robot typewriters, a few red lights blinking—and Sears, Roebuck workers pick up their pay checks every week. The hum-clack-blink routine is a giant electronic computer grinding out weekly a massive payroll that Sears couldn’t complete in less than two weeks back in the old pre-computer days, even using a small army of clerks. It goes without saying that the more frequently paid Sears folk greatly admire the work of the electronic brain they seldom see.

The whole computer world, in fact, is basking in general satisfaction, almost to the point of smugness. Computer users, including retail stores, steel mills, drug manufacturers and insurance companies are saving time and money by feeding an increasing variety of chores to the machines. And computer makers can hardly keep up with demand for their brainy products; the value of computers sold or rented may hit $350 million this year, nearly four times last year’s $94 million figure and all but out of sight of the $47 million 1955 total.”

The machines were far from perfect, the article pointed out. Long Island Lighting Company had sent a monthly electric bill for $1,266.80 to one family. “The householder, one Raymond Carr, didn’t think he’d been that careless about leaving the lights burning and complained. Long Island Lighting re-checked, evidently using a slow but trusty pencil, and sent Mr. Carr another bill for $11.83.”

Then there were examples cited of other companies that were now able to perform calculations they had never thought possible previously. Great Lakes Pipe Line spent five and a half years and $140,000 developing a computer to handle its network. The number of products being shipped through its pipeline had quadrupled in the previous twenty years, the company complained. Thanks to its new computer, the company could have up to two hundred different types of oil or other liquids sloshing through its various pipes at one time, which could be loaded or unloaded at sixty different points along the way. Before the computer, the job had been done with “a great deal of intuition,” the company confessed.

Then there was Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, which had bought a computer to help it buy coal more effectively. By tracking the quality, source, and transportation costs of different types of coal available for sale in the market, the company was supposedly shaving tens of thousands of dollars from its annual energy bill. The system must have been one of the first commodity trading programs in existence.

Abbott Laboratories, meanwhile, was using a computer to track its inventory. The giant pharmaceutical company told the Wall Street Journal that while it spent $60,000 a year on computers, it had saved $40,000 by stopping the rental of other tabulating machines and another $20,000 in salary costs. The big payoff, however, came in the fact that it could carry less inventory in each of its warehouses because it knew exactly what was stored where.

America’s big insurers, Allstate, MetLife, and State Farm were all quoted in the article, bragging about the cost savings they were seeing from their new computers.

A. N. Seares, the vice president for management services at Remington Rand, said that “the estimated market potential in the U.S. and Canada for large-scale computers is more than 1,200 systems by 1960 and 1,500 by 1965.” He was only referring to industrial demand, ignoring the incalculable needs of government and the military.

A 600 percent increase in the size of the market over just five years was a bold prediction. One of the key restrictions to the market, other than the cost, was the amount of space needed to house a computer. A typical commercial computer at the time, such as the IBM 700 series machines, still needed about two thousand square feet of office space.

That was partly why Buck’s cryotron generated so much excitement. It was very easy to comprehend why a small computer would be of benefit: computers at the time were inordinately large machines. In media terms, one could also assume there was an appetite to find new heroes from inside this technological world of the future to help sate the public interest in computer technology, which was being fueled by science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov as well as the dawn of the space race.

Buck had a pithy wit and easygoing manner. Yet he also had a much rarer talent for a scientist: he could explain his work in layperson’s terms. His easily quotable predictions for what the cryotron would do ensured that more and more people wanted to talk to him. Given the novelty of computing technology and the general level of ignorance about it, Buck’s ability to break down this complicated new area of research would have been equally useful to senior military officers.

BUCK’S CONSULTANCY CONTRACT with the NSA had been renewed in the summer of 1956, with a glowing recommendation from Solomon Kullback and a new fee of forty-five dollars a day for every day worked.

Project Vanguard, the code name for America’s attempts to launch a satellite, became one of the assignments that required Buck to have a material involvement—albeit somewhat laterally.

In July 1955 President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced that he planned to launch a man-made satellite into orbit around Earth as America’s contribution to the International Geophysical Year. The American public was largely disinterested, but large parts of the science community sparked into life.

Satellites had been considered a slightly offbeat area of science until this point. Senior figures in the American defense establishment were opposed to the idea of devoting so many resources to something that sounded fantastical. At this early stage, the objective was solely to put something into orbit. The purpose in doing so was unequivocally military.

After Radio Moscow announced in January of 1955 that the USSR would be launching a satellite soon, the issue drew more attention in Washington. Most of the science community was skeptical that the Russians were telling the truth, but Eisenhower’s advisers decided to kick-start the American program nonetheless.

Whatever happened, the United States had to ensure that its Cold War enemy could not claim ownership of space, as Wernher von Braun had warned.

Braun and the other scientists working on long-range missiles had done extensive research on the technicalities. They had already calculated, for example, the velocity a projectile would have to reach in order to escape Earth’s atmosphere at various angles and trajectories.

A handful of satellite feasibility studies had been conducted since the tail end of World War II, but there were still a great many elements of the project that no one had properly examined.

Eisenhower had proposed his Open Skies policy at the Geneva Summit in 1955, where the Big Four—Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States—had met to discuss ways to end the Cold War—including disarmament and the reunification of Germany. The Open Skies proposal would have allowed “mutual aerial observation.”

In short, Eisenhower offered the Soviet Union the chance to see blueprints of every military installation in America and Europe and to send “peaceful” planes to take aerial photographs to verify the information. In exchange he wanted the same courtesy from his Cold War enemies. The Soviets rejected the proposal.

To keep hope alive of resurrecting disarmament talks, Project Vanguard had to be presented as a civilian project focused entirely on the advancement of science. It was run by the US Navy with direct oversight from the Pentagon, yet it had to appear nonthreatening.

If the Americans could get into space first, and do so with an object that was clearly scientific in its goals, perhaps they could persuade the Russians to approach its space program in the same spirit. Then everyone could avoid the horror of living under orbiting nuclear missiles.

For this plan to work, however, the science on board this first satellite had to be legitimate, and convincingly so. A panel was formed to decide the experiments that could be conducted from orbit. The general remit would be to observe the planet and find out more about conditions beyond Earth’s atmosphere, communicating back to Earth using a telemetry system—the same type of radio transmitters being used to control missiles.

One of the winning ideas came from Maurice Dubin of the Geophysics Research Directorate at the US Air Force research center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He proposed designing a system to measure how often Vanguard would be hit by tiny meteorites. Dubin was given a grant of $89,045 and told to create a system so sensitive that it could measure particles as small as one one-thousandth of a millimeter in diameter.

With deadlines looming, Dubin called Buck asking for help. It does not seem that the two men knew each other previously, although they could have met through any one of dozens of military science conferences.

Dubin appears to have believed that Buck could build a cryotron-based system to count meteorites. Buck explained that his cryotron was not ready for such a job. He could, in theory, build a computer using vacuum tubes, transistors, or even magnetic cores that would perform the task. There was no prospect that such a computer could ever be small enough to fit inside a six-inch ball, however.

Buck put forward an alternative solution. There was no need for a computer to fulfill the task, he posited. A watch mechanism could count the meteorite strikes; it was reliable, small, and unlikely to be affected by any extreme temperature swings experienced when leaving the atmosphere.

Buck’s notebooks show the design he sketched out after Dubin’s call. An electric sensor could be used to detect the impacts, relying on the theory of piezoelectricity; the basic principle is that certain substances give off a tiny electrical charge when a force is applied to their surface. The small electrical signal from the sensor could then be used to nudge the watch mechanism one notch every time there was a collision.

Quietly, Buck and Shoulders had played their part in the very early phase of the space race. Their work is still in space, so far as anyone knows. Vanguard 1 beamed back information to Earth about meteorite collisions until NASA lost contact with it in 1964. It is not expected to drop out of orbit until 2198, however.

This minor supporting role in Vanguard 1 was by no means Buck’s only contribution to the emerging space race. Another much more secretive satellite plan had begun, one that was only fully declassified in 1995 under the orders of President Bill Clinton. The WS117L program was conceived by the Surprise Attack Panel, chaired by MIT president James Killian—the same body that commissioned the U-2 spy plane.

While a high-altitude plane could be used to fly over suspected missile sites to take pictures, a satellite could do so even more discreetly. If it was in permanent orbit, spying on Earth, the cache of information would be unprecedented—it could peek behind the iron curtain completely unnoticed.

Buck’s close friend Louis Ridenour, the chief scientist at Lockheed Missile Systems, was heavily involved in the program, having been unofficially handed a contract to build and launch the satellite in March 1956. The project was given the official green light in October of that year. Buck took several meetings with regard to the research; the code name WS117L is sprinkled through his diary entries at this time, with little additional information.

Lockheed’s interest in Buck was escalating, not only due to this satellite program. The rockets that would propel satellites into orbit were the same as those on the missiles that could carry a nuclear warhead.