ON NEW YEAR’S EVE 1958, WHILE MOST OF HIS STUDENTS WERE preparing to go out partying, Dudley Buck was in his usual spot in the lab in Building 10 at MIT, fiddling around with combinations of chemicals. His wife, Jackie, six months pregnant with their third child, was waiting for him at home.
Project Lightning, the government supercomputer scheme that was developing cryotrons, was gathering steam. Demands for newer, faster computers to fuel the space race and the other needs of the Cold War were coming from all directions, including from the top echelons of government. At the time, the core assumption of the US military and the major computer manufacturers was that this new generation of computers would be built using cryotrons.
That New Year’s Eve, Philip Cheney, an executive from Lockheed, wanted to meet Buck. Cheney worked for Lockheed’s self-organizing systems division—the euphemistic technical name for the department tasked with working out how to direct a missile back on track after it had been buffeted by the wind.
Buck was spending almost all his time in the lab anyway. The theory behind his invention was now proven; he just had to resolve the practicalities of manufacturing.
On New Year’s Morning 1959 his lab books and diary entries show that he made tantalum pentachloride for the first time, a key step necessary to make his microchip cryotron work. It was something of a breakthrough.
On the other side of the country, his old lab partner was also putting in hours over the holidays. On January 2, 1959, Ken Shoulders wrote to Buck from Stanford University looking for help. Shoulders wanted to secure new government funding for Stanford’s work in microminiaturization and was pitching various ideas to different agencies. He was trying to strike while memories of Buck’s presentation in Philadelphia were still fresh in the minds of those who mattered in Washington. He had a problem, however: the chemicals they needed for the experiments were extremely difficult to come by. Shoulders wanted to know if Buck could “spare a small sample of triphenysilalol.” In a postscript to his letter, he then added, “Say hi to Jackie for me and tell her that we lost the little one. We were expecting in June.”
Stanford was still trying to reunite Buck and Shoulders. The university continued to attempt to lure Buck to take the job as head of the electrical engineering department. John G. Linvill, who was leading the charm offensive, was more of a kindred spirit than most of Buck’s MIT colleagues. He was also an inventor, and a veteran of Bell Laboratories. Linvill later found fame by inventing a device that could convert ordinary text into Braille; he designed it for his blind daughter, Candy.
Buck had promised to come out to Stanford in April to discuss the position further. Linvill was pushing him to come sooner, but Buck fended him off.
Stanford was not the only place offering him a post as head of department, however. He was now being pursued aggressively by the University of Kansas too.
Buck’s fame was leading him in strange directions. On the same day he received the letter from Shoulders, the US Junior Chamber of Commerce wrote to tell him he had been nominated for an award. It was a slightly odd nomination, given that the cryotron was not yet being produced commercially.
Cryotron research was becoming something of an industry in itself, however. In January 1959, Arthur D. Little, the firm that had begun the cryotron research in earnest with Buck as a consultant, wrote to say that it had agreed to a “standardization of terminology for superconductive electronics” after liaising with a body referred to as Committee 28. One of the key things it did was to pin down a clean definition of a cryotron for all those using the device.
MIT was still a little wary of Buck, and his growing army of fans around the world. A handful of the more commercially orientated individuals on campus were starting to worry about the extent to which Buck was broadcasting his progress to the world and distributing copies of his papers.
On April 22, 1959, Malcolm Stevens from the MIT patent department wrote to David Black at Research Corporation, the company that commercialized the university’s work, to warn him to be alert:
Dear Dave,
Do you remember the “blue sky” talk by Prof. Dudley A. Buck during your Institute visits of October 2 1958, when he spoke about the electron beam writing of circuits that could serve as memory components? It appears now that he has brought this technique much closer to reality.
Prof. E. W. Fletcher points out that at the present time the minimum dimensions for which adequate resolutions may be obtained for printed circuits and the like are in the neighborhood of two or three mils. His group is now thinking in terms of resolutions in the neighborhood of 2000 Angstrom units, which is more than three orders of magnitude superior to the present practice. One of the methods for achieving this result is described in the enclosed Buck-Shoulders paper, and on pages 6 and 7 of the enclosed Quarterly Progress Report no. 4 of the High Speed Computer System Research Program.
Prof Fletcher believes that they have a two or three year lead over some of the larger companies working in this field. The Buck-Shoulders paper or informal talks with industry may soon have them thinking along similar lines.
Your informal advice on this development would be appreciated.
Sincerely
Mal
The letter was immediately acknowledged by Research Corporation, although it would take months for the company to get second and third opinions from various legal experts and MIT bigwigs as to whether the technique of writing circuits itself was patentable.
There was good reason for concern. Dudley Buck and Ken Shoulders’s paper was already spreading like wildfire through the computer industry. And others were catching up. Jean Hoerni, an engineer working with Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor, had set out some principles in January 1959 for creating an integrated circuit with what he called a planar transistor. Hoerni was a theoretician who tended not to bring his ideas to fruition; it would be the autumn of 1960 before Noyce’s development of Hoerni’s principle turned into an operational chip.
While Buck remained immersed in his work, family life continued to take a back seat. David, his second son, was born on March 14, 1959. As with the birth of Douglas, it seems that Buck was barely away from the lab. Entries from his notebooks on the day after the birth are full of experiments on further combinations of chemicals and their reactions to electron beams. A few days after that, the MIT graduate committee approved Chuck Crawford’s proposed thesis on “effects of fine focused electron beam,” allowing work on the cryotron to continue apace.
There was still a steady stream of people wanting to talk to Buck about other projects. Frank Rosenblatt from Cornell University—the expert in self-organizing systems—became a regular fixture in Buck’s diary. According to sources who worked in the lab, they were working on a system to guide navy torpedoes.
Interestingly, the navy bureaucracy was ignorant of this work. Although he had avoided active service in the Korean War, Buck was still a member of the US Navy Reserve. While working on all of these multitudes of projects for various branches of the military, Buck received a letter from the Naval Officer Disposition Board telling him that it planned to honorably discharge him. He had failed to qualify for the next higher rank, partly because he had not completed a navy correspondence course on basic electronics. He had also failed to show up for Naval Security Group drills for the past three years.
Clearly hurt, Buck fired off an angry response demanding that he be retained. As an assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT, he thought he could be forgiven for missing out on the navy’s correspondence course. As for missing security drills, that was even more offensive: “I have maintained a close working relationship with my former duty station and with naval Security Group Activities. For the past six years I have been a consultant (expert, when actually employed) with the National Security Agency, Washington D.C., making visits to work on security problems approximately once per month. I feel myself to be in an excellent state of readiness to participate … in the event of an emergency.”
This letter arrived while Buck was in the midst of work on the WS117L satellite program, elements of which have never been declassified. In early 1958, WS117L was divided into three main projects: Discoverer, Midas, and Sentry. All three projects were related to surveillance satellites of some kind or other.
The third of these programs, Sentry, was the largest and absorbed the most funds. Its budget soared from $10 million in 1958 to $159.5 million in 1959, according to a 2009 article in The Space Review. Yet Sentry was seen as only deliverable in the longer term.
Midas was an early warning satellite designed to detect heat signals from Soviet missiles. Discoverer, meanwhile, was the first part of the program that would be launched. Although it was officially billed as an engineering project, Discoverer was actually a cover for a covert program named Project Corona.
It was managed by the same joint CIA and Air Force task force that had successfully overseen the creation and launch of the U-2 spy-plane, and under the same project manager: Richard Bissell, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans. Yet the majority of the work was being conducted by Lockheed Missile Systems, where Louis Ridenour was chief scientist. It was a “black” project for the intelligence community, meaning that it was not permitted to even confirm its existence. Corona was declassified under the Clinton administration, leading to some interesting revelations. Much of the surveillance intelligence that had previously been credited to the U-2 had been gathered instead by Corona satellites. Lockheed had been unofficially working on it since March 1956.
One of the key problems with using a satellite for reconnaissance was recovering the photographs. With the U-2, the plane would come back to Earth and then the film could be unloaded and processed as it would with any other camera. If the camera was on a satellite that was to remain in orbit, the pictures had to be recovered somehow.
The images captured by Corona would be too big and detailed to beam back to Earth via the telemetry radio connection, it was decided; there would be too much data to beam back. Although Ridenour was an expert in telemetry, thanks to his old television business, other branches of the WS117L program continued to work on this problem.
Yet to get Corona up and running, it was concluded that the film would have to be recovered from space somehow. Thus, a ludicrously complex plan was devised: they would release cartons of film after they had been exposed in a container strong enough to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. As it dropped back toward Earth with the aid of a parachute, it would then be caught in midair by a plane employing a large fork-type device.
Bizarre as it may sound, the scheme eventually worked. There were dozens of failed launches, and multiple problems with recovering the film. The shiny capsules of film falling to Earth were also responsible for a number of UFO sightings—and sparked diplomatic incidents when they landed in the wrong place. One was found by Venezuelan farmers, who stripped it of precious metals before handing it over to the country’s army. The American government then had to pay to get it back. Another fell in the Arctic Circle, prompting a rush to recover it before the Russians found the film—a scenario that later provided the inspiration for Alistair MacLean’s thriller Ice Station Zebra. Nonetheless, Project Corona was ultimately a huge success.
Eastman Kodak was contracted to develop the film for the satellite. Itek, a start-up formed by former Eastman Kodak employees who had bought out a research lab from Boston University, won the tender to build the camera after submitting an extremely high-tech design. As the launch date neared, both of these companies spent an increasing amount of time with Dudley Buck, with appointment after appointment from individuals at both companies noted in his diary.
Itek won the contract for Corona after designing an ingenious system that would allow the camera inside the satellite to remain pointed at specific targets on Earth, even if the satellite itself was rotating.
In January 1959, a week before the first Corona launch, Norm Taylor, an MIT alumnus who had joined Itek, called Buck to ask for some help. Taylor wanted to know whether Buck’s process of writing with electron beams could possibly be used to store photographic images. What they discussed was, in essence, whether they could build a digital camera.
Eastman Kodak, which had won the contract to design the film for the Corona satellites, soon had the same idea. Shortly after the second Corona launch (both of which were failures), Buck started receiving panicky, unsolicited messages from the company’s research and development department.
“Some of our people recently attended the Eastern Joint Computer Conference where they heard a presentation by you of some remarkable results in the field of miniaturization,” wrote Eastman Kodak’s M. G. Harrison on April 1, 1959. “I am working on the information capacity of storage media, in particular photographic films, and would like an opportunity to talk about your work from the storage point of view.”
While Buck was always keen to help, his interest was in creating the first functioning microchip, not in developing this other strand to his work that was nothing more than a theory at the time. After Buck tried to delay a meeting, Harrison started pushing quite aggressively to see him as soon as possible.
“Several weeks ago I wrote to ask for a time when we could discuss your ideas on microminiaturization in relation to information storage,” Harrison wrote in his next letter. “Since this subject has generated considerable interest here I would very much like to have an early interview with you if possible.”
Corona was in trouble by the time of Harrison’s second letter. It would be another year before they successfully launched one of the satellites and got it to maintain orbit and to release an exposed film at the correct point.
Eventually Buck relented, agreeing to meet Harrison that June. By that date, however, Buck was dead.
MORT ASTRAHAN LOOKED at his watch nervously. He had been waiting for hours in the terminal at Idlewild Airport in New York City. The delegation of Soviet scientists he was about to show around America’s top computing installations was running late. They had been due to arrive the day before, on Saturday, April 18, 1959, but they hadn’t shown up. There had been no phone call or telegram to warn that they were no longer coming. When the plane showed up without them, a check of the passenger records showed that they had missed a connecting KLM flight in Amsterdam. Neither Astrahan nor his contacts at the US Department of State knew whether the group was still coming.
The following morning, however, the IBM executive got word that the group of scientists was on a flight. Their inbound plane from Moscow had been late the previous day, which was why they had missed their connection. The trip was still on. So Astrahan returned to the airport for a second day of waiting.
Astrahan, age thirty-five, worked in the Advanced Systems Development Division at IBM, based in San Jose, California. He had been building computers for IBM since 1949, starting out with the IBM 701. He had acquired a modicum of fame while working on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense system, having devised one of the first computers to be operated by a typewriter—the prototype for the computer keyboard.
Astrahan had started to learn a little bit of Russian, and claimed to his peers that he was able to translate, unassisted, the last of the fourteen cables from Moscow arranging the trip. Nonetheless, he had brought a translator with him to the airport who would shadow the Soviet group throughout the trip.
Eugene Zaitzeff, the appointed translator, had been made available by Bendix Systems, another computing giant of the day that would go on to design and build many of the instruments for the Apollo moon landings. Zaitzeff was computer literate, but was not a groundbreaking scientist like many of the others who joined the delegation for the Soviet visit. He was there because of his excellent command of Russian. Zaitzeff and Astrahan would later coauthor an article for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Communications of the ACM that detailed the whole trip.
A second translator had also been included in the group. Professor Lipman Bers, a Latvian-born mathematician from New York University, was also waiting in the terminal, along with his wife. Bers had also been asked to act as translator for the corresponding American trip to the Soviet Union, the details of which had yet to be arranged. He and his wife had volunteered to act as hosts to the group of scientists while they stayed in New York, showing them a slice of what the Big Apple had to offer.
Astrahan, Zaitzeff, Prof Bers, and his wife waited together in the terminal, keeping an eye out for the arrival of the next KLM flight from Amsterdam. It was well into the evening before Sergey Lebedev and his delegation finally appeared.
Although they had been expecting eight men to turn up, only seven did. Vsevolod Burtsev, one of the scientists who had been part of the delegation to the University of Michigan conference the summer before, had pulled out at the last minute.
The remaining seven scientists were an impressive group. Lebedev in particular had an incredible track record. In 1951, eight years earlier, he invented the first computer in the USSR in his lab in Kiev, Ukraine. It was named the Malaia Elektronnaia Schetnaia Mashina, which translates as “small electronic computing machine.” Lebedev had produced the machine with a staff of only a dozen or so engineers.
As soon as it was operational, Lebedev started lecturing the military on how his device could be used to run calculations that would be useful in the construction of nuclear bombs or, ultimately, as a guidance system for missiles. He produced an official report stating that computers could help in everything from jet propulsion to the production of energy.
It appears to have been similar in content to the report that Jay Forrester prepared for the administration of President Harry S. Truman in 1948, or the countless speeches and lectures that Buck had made about the potential for computers to change the world.
Lebedev’s report on the future power of computers was passed on to Joseph Stalin. The Man of Steel then requested that Lebedev be placed in charge of a new computing institute that would be tasked with building a bigger computer. Imaginatively, they called it the BESM, the Bolshaya Elektronnaia Schetnaia Mashina (“big electronic computing machine”).
A large new building was built for Lebedev in Moscow to house his research team. New premises were a rare luxury for the head of any government program in the postwar USSR. When the building was opened, the new institute was given the full endorsement of Nikita Khrushchev, the future leader, who at the time was head of the Moscow Communist Party.
The BESM had been a success, and one that the Russians kept secret from the West for several years. The only problem was that Lebedev had not devised a way to mass-produce the machine; the prototype was the only one that existed.
Nonetheless, by the time Lebedev set foot in New York, he was already working on a bigger and better BESM II, with a staff of up to 150 dedicated to the task.
There is no doubt that Lebedev, who was fifty-seven at the time of the trip, had connections to the very top of the Kremlin. His right-hand man was Vitaliy Ditkin, assistant director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ computing center in Moscow, a dedicated mathematician who specialized in using computers to create complex calculation tables and mathematical graphs.
Then there was Yuriy Bazilevsky, an engineer who sat on the USSR’s Committee of Radio Electronics. Bazilevsky had designed several computers, including the Strela system that was being used by the Soviet Air Force for calculations related to missile defense. It had also been used to determine how missile warheads could be expected to explode on impact. His primary interest on the trip was to find out about American techniques to manufacture better computer components that could become part of his new machine, called Ural.
Bazilevsky had been on foreign trips before with Lebedev, not the least of which had been to Darmstadt, West Germany, in October 1955. That was when they had unveiled the BESM machine to the world—the first time the Soviets had acknowledged publicly that they were even developing multipurpose computers as opposed to dedicated single-task machines.
One member of the delegation, Sergey Mergelyan, had spent two months studying at the University of Rome. He was the director of the Institute of Electronic Computers in Yerevan, Armenia, where he was building three new computers at the time: two that operated from the old vacuum tube technology and one called Razdan that would become the Soviet Union’s first computer to be built with transistors.
Viktor Glushkov, the fifth member of the delegation, would go on to become one of the USSR’s most decorated computer scientists. A talented mathematician who had produced groundbreaking work on some of the classic problems of pure mathematics, Glushkov was a relative newcomer to the world of computers. Nonetheless, he was director of the Kiev Computing Center that had been set up by Lebedev.
Glushkov, then thirty-six, went on to win a string of state science prizes throughout the 1960s for his work on cybernetics and artificial intelligence—concepts that were being pioneered at MIT at the time of his American visit. Under Stalin’s rule any such work would have been totally taboo—and life-threatening if uncovered. Glushkov was leading the Soviet charge to change this.
“The negative ideological image of cybernetics in the late Stalinist period did seriously narrow the range of the first Soviet computer applications,” writes MIT professor Slava Gerovitch in his book Newspeak to Cyberspeak. “Soviet computing was shaped by the tension between the practical goal of building major components of modern sophisticated weapons and the ideological urge to combat alien influences.”
Building machines to drive robots that could replace humans in a production line, or devising computers that would attempt to replicate the human brain, was considered by Stalin to be a capitalist evil. That was why many of the Soviet machines had been built to handle a single specific task: computers were just another machine, not an electronic brain.
Perhaps the most elusive member of the delegation was Victor Petrov, the director of the Moscow Computer Factory. Even after the two-week stay was over, Petrov’s American hosts had gleaned little about his work. His factory mostly made mechanical, analog computers, he claimed, and had not yet delved far into the digital world. “Very little information on his factory could be obtained from him,” wrote Zaitzeff after the visit.
The last member of the group was Vladimir Polin, an engineer who worked directly for Lebedev. He was a molecular physicist by background, but was now tasked with building a translation machine. He appears to have been the most junior member of the delegation.
When the delegation arrived in the airport terminal after their long flight, the seven appear to have been in a fairly foul mood. Although they exchanged friendly handshakes, the trip had taken its toll. Their hosts bundled the group into their cars and whisked them into town to their Manhattan hotel. Astrahan and Zaitzeff, both out-of-towners themselves, were staying in the same hotel as their Soviet guests.
As soon as they had checked in, Lebedev got down to business. The Soviet computer guru made it clear that he was not entirely happy with the itinerary that had been planned for them. The key problem, he explained, was that he felt they needed more time at the IBM plant. “He stated that in his country changes of schedules such as this could be very easily and swiftly arranged,” wrote Zaitzeff.
To the Russians, IBM was something of a mystery. Soviet computer technology had been kept firmly inside the military. All the machines that the delegation had designed and built were being used to calculate ways to battle America. While IBM had more than its fair share of military work, an increasing amount of its equipment was being used to run payrolls for businesses across America, work out tax calculations, or crunch numbers on census data.
Mort Astrahan, conscious that the itinerary had been agreed through extensive diplomatic coordination, flapped a little. He said he would “try his best” to fit in a second tour of his employer’s factories toward the end of the two-week stay, and suggested that they might be able to replace one of the other visits that had been planned with a second trip to IBM. It was something of a hollow promise, but it seemed to go down well.
“Although the visitors must have been very tired, they then invited their hosts to a vodka and caviar party in one of their hotel rooms,” wrote Zaitzeff. “After friendly conversation a few arrangements were made for the last two days’ stay of the group in New York, which would include dinner at Professor Bers’ home, and also a Saturday trip through the stores on Fifth Avenue conducted by Mrs. Bers. Then the group broke up and each retired to his room.”
That Monday morning was wet and miserable. After breakfast, the first stop the group had to make was to the Park Avenue building where Soviet diplomats to the United Nations were based. They were given bankers’ drafts—their allowance for the two weeks they were in the United States—and told to cash them at the First National City Bank.
They went to the nearest branch, but were told that the drafts they had been given could only be cashed at the bank’s head office on Wall Street. Already the trip was taking on a farcical tone.
As Zaitzeff wrote,
Since the group was expected in [IBM headquarters at] Poughkeepsie by 1:30 that day, time was running out. We decided to check out of the hotel and pick up the cars which were rented for the trip to Poughkeepsie. Somehow, in the confusion, the first cab took off without any English speaking individuals inside. Dr. Astrahan and myself found ourselves with the rest of the group in the second cab. Thus, upon arrival at the Hertz office and paying off the cabs we found that Mr. Glushkov forgot his briefcase inside the cab, not knowing that this was his final stop, and thinking that the cabs would be used to take us all the way to Poughkeepsie. Everyone became even more concerned when we were told that it contained three bottles of vodka and about six pounds of black caviar. It was never found.
In the rented cars the group was driven to Wall Street to get their cash. It was noon by the time the two cars got on the road, leaving just an hour and a half for the trip. Even by twenty-first-century standards, they were cutting it close.
“After being separated on the Taconic Parkway, we each thought the other was ahead and were almost arrested for speeding,” wrote Zaitzeff. “We were reunited by a flat tire, just as the police closed in, and all was well!”
IBM had lined up some Russian speakers from among their ranks to join the welcome party. Some of them were wartime emigrants from Eastern Europe. After a quick round of introductions in a conference room, the delegation was led on a tour of the plant. The first thing they were shown was an IBM 705—the machine that was being installed in offices across America. Then they were taken to the third floor, where they saw the production of magnetic core memories—the technology that Buck had helped invent, leading to the legal battle between IBM and MIT. Afterward, they were brought right through the main production line for the IBM 704 and 705 machines just as the day’s work came to an end. Then they were shown IBM’s state-of-the-art transistor factory.
Of all the questions peppered by the Russians, the theme that struck their American hosts as the most telling was their concern with the reliability of the IBM machines. They were particularly intrigued by the magnetic tape that was used by these computers. How could information be reliably written onto these tapes, they asked?
After dinner Astrahan took the group to meet some of his friends from IBM, presumably to give them a flavor of ordinary family life for an American computer scientist. Then they went to their modest motel, “which, by the way, they liked more than any of the hotels they stayed in later,” according to Zaitzeff.
The next morning saw more presentations and more demonstrations, interspersed with coffee breaks. The Soviets also handed over some books and papers that they had brought for the IBM team, detailing some of their work.
They were shown an early attempt at artificial intelligence: an IBM 704 machine was running an experimental program for playing checkers. Ditkin, Lebedev’s number two man, decided to take up the challenge: the machine conceded after only a handful of moves.
A lecture on machine learning followed, where Glushkov led the questioning. Most of the rest of the delegation were still obsessed with asking about the reliability of the IBM machines, apparently incredulous at the fact these computers could run for hours on end without breaking down.
Under cross-examination the Russians then started to reveal a little more about their own work. They were not developing machines that could play board games, they said; their only dabbling in machine learning was strictly related to improving industrial processes. To translate languages, they believed that a dedicated special-purpose system was required; they were still just formulating the specification for such a machine. As part of this, the Russians said, they were devising a new system of abbreviations that could help reduce the amount of memory this new computer would need.
This must have sounded strange to the Americans, who were already dedicated converts to the belief that all progress in computing depended upon faster and bigger memories. Reducing the complexity of a task to make it easier for a computer to handle was already an outdated way to look at the problem.
The Russians then started to talk about their weather forecasting computer, named Pogoda, which translates simply as “weather.” It could do one-month forecasts or twenty-four-hour forecasts, they said, and it took about a half hour to run the calculations.
When the IBM executives started to ask for a little more information on which data points they used to produce these forecasts, “Academician Lebedev stated that he did not know” and shut down the conversation.
By the end of the day Lebedev received some good news. The State Department and IBM had agreed to his schedule change. They could come back to IBM on their last Friday before returning to New York.
In exchange, Mergelyan assured the Americans he would let them come to Yerevan to see inside his Razdan machine when they made their corresponding trip. There had been no plan to take the group on the long trip to the Lesser Caucasus region of the Soviet Union before then.
It was a relief for the Russians to hear that they would get to come back. They had only just started to scratch the surface of one of their main themes of interest: the cryogenic computers that IBM was making; they knew they could find out more about that on the next leg of their trip.
At 4:30 p.m. the group was driven to LaGuardia Airport to get a flight to Boston. The next day they would meet Dudley Buck.
It is only logical to assume that Soviet intelligence had a sizable file on Buck. His involvement in attempts to convert Konrad Zuse to the American cause back in 1948 would have been known; Zuse was hot property at the time. Further, from at least the summer of 1952 Buck was being approached by agents from Amtorg, the Soviet import-export agency in the United States. This was a fact known to both Allen Dulles, the US director of central intelligence, and his predecessor, Walter Bedell Smith. By the time the Soviet delegation had arrived in the United States, Dudley Buck was an extremely high-profile computer guru.
Given that Khrushchev had instructed his rocket scientists to read every technical report they could procure on American missile developments, one has to assume that Buck’s widely distributed paper on the cryotron had made its way into the hands of the KGB. And given the games that were being played by the likes of Louis Ridenour—who believed in letting the enemy know bits about what was going on in America to sustain the bleak logic of mutually assured destruction—it is only logical to assume that the Russian delegation knew all about it.
The seven Soviet computer scientists were eager to meet Buck. They sat at one of the big round tables in the MIT faculty hall, waiting for lunch. They had spent most of the morning in a conference room being shown diagrams of how MIT organized its departments and research programs.
After the Russians handed over some of the documents they had brought with them detailing their work, Frank Verzuh, one of the MIT computer experts who had worked on Project Whirlwind, took them on a tour of the university’s IBM 704 installation.
In the afternoon they were scheduled to see MIT’s famous cryogenic computer lab—home to the tiny computer that Life magazine had proclaimed two years earlier could become the guidance system for America’s long-range nuclear missiles.
Buck strolled into the room and introduced himself. He had brought with him Norbert Wiener, the world-renowned mathematician and expert in cybernetics. Mergelyan, the Armenian who was building the USSR’s first computer based on transistors, had met Wiener before on a trip to India. Wiener believed that automation of industry could alleviate poverty by creating more efficient economies, and he was an official adviser to the Indian government at the time.
Wiener’s views were the polar opposite of what Stalin had believed, but they would soon gain credence in the Soviet Union, mostly thanks to scientists who were on the trip.
Mergelyan’s English was good enough for the two men to chat without Zaitzeff acting as interpreter. The Armenian computer expert was so excited by what he was hearing that he didn’t touch any of his lunch.
For Eugene Zaitzeff, the translator from Bendix Systems, it was a rare opportunity to finish a meal. “I usually had to time-share eating with being an information flow channel,” he wrote.
After lunch the group was led up to the third floor of Building 10 and into Buck’s lab. The room was a hive of activity, as usual, but no one was making cryotrons or trying to build microchips.
Buck told them that the helium canisters needed to operate the cryotron were being refilled and thus a demonstration was impossible. Given that the visit had been in the diary for months, it seems unlikely that the Russians would have believed this excuse. Ever patriotic, Buck clearly just didn’t want to show them his work.
“Nevertheless, a very detailed and comprehensive explanation of the work was presented,” wrote Zaitzeff. “The Russian group was quite interested in the way the helium is saved in operation in the laboratory, and were surprised to learn that this is not being done. Since helium is quite cheap in the United States, there is no necessity for saving it at the present time. On the other hand, in Russia helium is not found in natural state, and thus it is imperative that it be circulated without a large loss of the gas during experiments.”
Buck had already devised ways to recycle helium, and fears of a helium shortage had emerged not long after Buck started his work, when the naval dockyard in Boston shut down the free supply of the gas for MIT’s work with superconductors. Abundant helium was clearly a line of propaganda that Buck was feeding his visitors.
The Soviets were soon on their way to the servomechanisms lab, where they were shown a computer-controlled milling machine. Then they were shown the TX-0 machine that had been built at MIT using transistors. It was hooked up to a cathode ray tube with a light pencil, similar to the one Buck had invented years earlier to operate the Whirlwind machine. It was programmed to play tic-tac-toe. The Russians experimented with the setup by writing ever smaller with the light pen until Whirlwind could no longer tell an X from an O.
Then they were given a lecture on the new TX-2 machine that was replacing the TX-0. They didn’t get to see it, however. The group left MIT that night full of questions, not least about the cryogenic computer they had not been able to see.
They spent the next day at Harvard University, then flew to Philadelphia before spending a few days in Washington, DC—which included time for shopping. They were given a tour of the National Bureau of Standards office, and the Bureau of the Census, where a Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) was processing the data. Then came the Federal Aviation Agency, and the Patent Department, both running off automated data processing systems courtesy of computers installed within the previous few years.
It was an extraordinary level of access to America’s top facilities in both the public and private sector—a fact that was frequently acknowledged by the visitors. Their visit was no secret, however. Local newspapers were waiting for the group with photographers at many of their stops along the way. Most nights ended after dinner with vodka and caviar provided by the Russians for their respective American hosts.
Zaitzeff, who had stuck by the group throughout their trip, was bombarded with questions every step of the way. The group asked the population of each city they visited and were astonished when Zaitzeff told them he did not know, or gave only a rough approximation. They were baffled to see the number of skyscrapers that were being built in New York—they had been told in the Soviet Union that America had concluded this was an inefficient way to build that always lost money.
They grew a grudging respect for American cars, and asked a torrent of questions about the cost of each make and model they encountered on the road. The answers “were not readily believed when the conversation involved used car lots,” wrote Zaitzeff.
They wanted to know the salaries of everyone they met—even taxi drivers. One taxi driver in Boston explained that he earned more than the average cabbie because he owned his car. The Russians did not believe him, as he had a radio in his car, “to which the taxi driver explained that five or six of the fellows got together and organized their own small cab company each owning their own automobile. That impressed the group quite a lot.”
Eventually, at the end of their two-week stay, the Russians were taken back to IBM headquarters in Poughkeepsie, New York. This time only Bazilevsky, Lebedev, and Petrov went to the computer giant’s plant, while Ditkin and Mergelyan gave lectures at New York University; Polin and Glushkov stayed in town to finalize the plans for their return trip.
IBM showed the group how it manufactured the magnetic cores that ran its machines, then took them to the company country club for a round of golf—which was of particular interest, given it was famously President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s favorite pastime.
“Each of the visitors had a chance to use a 9-iron and putter later on the green,” wrote Zaitzeff. “To the great delight of everyone present, they were quite good considering that none of them had ever held a golf club before.”
That night they drove back to New York City, confident that they had seen the IBM factory “from top to bottom.” Zaitzeff then took them to see a production at the Cinerama—one of the widescreen movie theaters that were the height of fashion in 1950s America, as Hollywood tried to fight back against the new threat of TV.
The Russians concluded that, technically, Cinerama was probably superior to what they had back home but that the “direction was inferior” to that with which they were accustomed.
After two days of shopping and sightseeing, and a dinner party hosted by Bers and his wife, the group was shipped back to Idlewild Airport to catch their flight.
The Russians had a colossal stockpile of intelligence to take home to Moscow. IBM clearly had nothing to hide, having opened its doors twice to the Soviet delegation. The famous young engineer at MIT who seemed to be building the Americans’ missile guidance system had been nowhere near as forthcoming, however.