ON SUNNY WEEKEND MORNINGS THE BUCK FAMILY HAD STARTED to take the mail boat from New Bedford, Massachusetts, out to Cuttyhunk Island, part of the Elizabeth Islands chain that runs south from Cape Cod. It was a quiet spot, just across the sound from Martha’s Vineyard.
Buck had plans for Cuttyhunk. He had met a Boston wool merchant named C. W. Wood at a meeting of the Navy League who had told him about some land he owned in the area that he wanted to sell—a miniature island right by the harbor at Cuttyhunk, with no electricity or running water and a tiny strip of beach to itself. The Woods invited the Bucks to come and visit them so they could take a look. After a couple of trips, Buck decided he would build a vacation house there and reached an informal agreement with the Woods to buy the miniature island.
“The land was wonderful,” remembers Buck’s wife, Jackie. “It overlooked the harbor, and the open ocean beyond. It was quiet and peaceful, except for the occasional mournful sound of a distant fog horn, and the bell of the buoy. We fell in love with the place instantly.”
Buck wanted his kids to learn to sail, a skill he had mastered as a student in Seattle. He wanted a place where they could roam free. The idea of a house on Cuttyhunk was one of the factors that gave him cause for hesitation about making the move to California.
He had just been given yet another honor for his work, the prestigious Eta Kappu Nu society’s Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer Award.
With the original wire-built cryotron still making waves, the microchip version nearing completion, government work flooding through his door, and some of America’s top universities fighting over his services, Buck was feeling good about life. Soon, he reckoned, he would be able to fulfill his long-held ambition of owning a sailboat. He started to tell Jackie that everything was about to click into place, that their days of using old bedsheets as curtains were now far behind them. He joked about their early married life when he used to remark that it was “purifying to be poor.” He invented stories about how they used to go to the store to buy a single tin of beans to share between them, just to hear Jackie laugh.
Wilmington had evolved into a nice, suburban family town, just as Buck had expected it to when he had bought the newly finished house. Their kids were growing up with a big group of friends from the neighborhood who were constantly in and out of one another’s houses. The parents would take turns to babysit.
Buck was starting to talk openly about how life was about to change. He never specified how or why, but he gave Jackie the impression that money was about to start rolling in.
Earning money was already getting easier. Buck had just been offered four hundred dollars to write an article for Scientific American magazine. When he had started out on the Whirlwind machine nine years earlier, it would have taken him three months to earn that much.
Since the birth of David, a sturdy redheaded baby boy who had weighed in at nine pounds, seven and one-half ounces, Buck had taken his wife on a couple of dates, including one to the opera. They were planning a trip to Europe—Buck had been invited to speak at a conference in Paris that summer, all expenses paid, but they were extending the trip. He had gotten in touch with one of his many uncles, Dudley H. Buck, who was living in Italy with his wife Mabel. Uncle Dudley, who had been posted to Verona with the US Army Corps of Engineers, said he would drive up to Paris and take Dudley and Jackie back to Italy for a few days.
The family were also planning another summer driving trip across the United States, taking in Seattle, where Buck still owned the plot of land on Vashon Island that he had bought as a student and cleared with his automated stump-pulling machine. They then planned to drive all the way down the coast to Grandma Delia’s place in Santa Barbara, California. Delia had not met her great-grandchildren.
The gas money for the mammoth cross-country trip was to come from the University of Michigan, which had secured Buck’s services for a three-day series of lectures that he planned to give en route to the West Coast.
Buck wrote to Glenn Campbell, his former foster son, to invite him along for the trip. Glenn had just finished his two years’ army service and was back in Washington, DC, lodging with Joe Keller, the Washington lawyer who had helped Buck to clear the paperwork for fostering Glenn Campbell all those years ago. Buck was worried that Glenn would go off the rails without the structure of the army. Through his role on the Wilmington, Massachusetts, school committee, he was trying to get Glenn a high-school diploma—he had failed to graduate after running back to Washington just before Dudley and Jackie’s wedding. All Glenn had to do to receive his diploma was take one exam.
“I wish it were possible just to take one of the diplomas and put your name on it, but I am sure you would have none of that,” wrote Buck to Glenn. “The piece of paper will have meaning for you only when it has been earned.”
Buck celebrated his thirty-second birthday three days after the visit from the Soviet scientists. On the evening of his birthday, another controversial foreign dignitary came to town. Fidel Castro, who had swept into power in Cuba four months earlier, was on a publicity tour of America.
He had been invited to the country by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. With his olive-green military fatigues, shaggy beard, and tales from the field of combat he was a natural draw. In between his pledges to nationalize all industry in Cuba, he ate hamburgers and hot dogs for the cameras, went on a tour of Yankee Stadium in New York City, kissed models and babies for photographs, and took trips to the zoo.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to meet the revolutionary and his entourage. Within the year, Ike had ordered the training of a Cuban-born force that could reclaim the island nation, which would lead to the famously botched Bay of Pigs invasion two years later, once John F. Kennedy was in the White House. Castro did hold a conference with Vice President Richard Nixon, however, in what was reportedly a frosty encounter.
Although Eisenhower and Nixon had already formed their view, America as a whole was still working out what to make of the thirty-three-year-old Cuban president. The former secretary of state, Dean Acheson, the architect of the Marshall Plan for postwar reconstruction of Europe, also met Castro and subsequently described him as the “first democrat in Latin America.”
The lecture tour of America was a provocative affair. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Castro pledged not to accept economic assistance from the United States, and then stormed out in protest at some of the questions asked by the audience about his brutal rise to power.
Harvard University was one of the stops on the tour. Buck bought eight tickets at a price of ninety-five cents each. He and Jackie took their neighbors Nancy and Paul Bodenstein, John and Jeannie Collins, friends through the school committee, and Dick and Shirley Harding, the new minister and his wife.
Harvard held the event at the university sports stadium, but kept the capacity down to six thousand people due to security concerns. As a result, it was something of a hot ticket. It was viewed by Dudley, Jackie, and their friends as a fun night out to see the new celebrity in the world of global politics.
“It was a huge event because he was very much in the news at the time,” Jackie remembers. “He was the revolutionary, and everyone was wanting to listen to him. We really didn’t know the full extent of what he was up to.”
Certainly no one knew that three years later Castro would become a crucial figure in the Cold War by agreeing to house launch sites for Soviet R-12 nuclear missiles with a sufficient range to hit Florida.
Four days after going to see Castro’s speech, exactly a week after having brushed off his Soviet visitors, Buck was summoned again to Washington. It was a formal invitation to attend the first full meeting of the new computer advisory panel created for President Eisenhower and led by Louis Ridenour. It was to take place over two days at the new headquarters of the NSA at Fort George Meade, Maryland, on May 25 and 26. The main topic of discussion was to be Project Lightning, the key NSA program to turn Buck’s cryotron into the American government’s first proper supercomputer.
With missile tests going on at locations across America, the space race well and truly under way, and secret projects like the Corona spy satellites struggling to get off the ground, the pressure to perfect this new, slim-line, ultrafast computer microchip was mounting.
BUCK HATED WAITING. He would climb staircases two or three steps at a time. He never had enough time to do all the things he wanted to do. His patience was being particularly tested now that he knew he was close to finding the definitive process to create the first microchip. A whole team of undergraduate and postgraduate students was working under him in the ordered chaos of the lab in Building 10. Each had been allocated a thesis subject to test one particular aspect of Buck’s work.
Each experiment came a little bit closer to success, but there were still glitches. They had found ways to make films of superconducting tantalum. Now they were perfecting the methods to layer different metals between the superconductors and write whole circuits using the electron beam. Sometimes the chemicals did not react to the electron gun as expected, and sometimes the gasses emitted during the reaction would pollute another part of the experiment. Buck had sent photographs of some of the lab results to Ken Shoulders at Stanford University to see what he made of it all.
In the meantime, the group in the lab was tinkering with all of the variables in their experiments: adjusting the temperature or altering the chemicals involved, the length of exposure to the electron beam, or the size of the current passing through the superconductors. The electron guns were replaced, then modified to try to improve the results. Different sizes and shapes of glass vacuum tubes were used in the experiments.
Buck decided he needed someone in his lab dedicated to producing custom-designed glass tubes for variations on the experiments. He found a physics student from Little Rock, Arkansas, named Jim Simpson willing to take on glassblowing alongside his other duties in the lab.
The pace of work in the lab was extreme, and the learning curve steep. Chuck Crawford ended up being awarded his bachelor’s degree and his master’s degree simultaneously, then got a doctorate about ten months after that—all on the back of his experiments with the electron gun.
The experimental setups got ever more complicated. Simpson, in particular, created some bizarre contraptions after he started dabbling with diborane—an extremely reactive chemical with six hydrogen atoms per molecule that explodes on contact with air. The Russians were using it as a rocket fuel, but Simpson was using it to try to create a superconducting chemical film.
Glass containers, glass stopcock valves, and various other self-created glass fittings were rigged together on his workbench behind two protective screens of heavy-duty wire mesh.
“Jim, I think I hear a tiny hiss, I think you might have an air leak,” Crawford remembers saying one morning to Simpson while walking into the lab. He strolled on toward Buck’s office as Simpson leaned into his experiment to see if he could work out if anything was wrong. The moment Crawford got through the office door there was an almighty explosion.
“I feared that I would see Simpson dead,” recalls Crawford. “The entire apparatus was utterly demolished. Then I saw Simpson wipe his forehead, so I knew he was alive.”
Two large glass stopcocks had flown within millimeters of Simpson’s head, blowing through both protective screens and leaving behind two perfectly round baseball-sized holes. At the moment it all went up, Simpson had been crouching with one ear next to the apparatus, trying to locate the hiss. Although nothing had hit him, the blast had damaged his eardrum—he was never again able to hear a high-pitched noise above about three thousand hertz.
The lab was fairly comprehensively destroyed, but Buck covered it up as best he could to avoid upsetting the MIT administration—and to ensure they could press on with their work unhindered. The formal report on the incident recorded it as a “small explosion.”
The next morning Buck had to confront the quiet, conscientious little man who came each month from the Boston Edison Electric Company to read the electricity meter. There had been a “small accident” the night before, explained Buck. Without saying a word, the visitor walked to the spot on the wall where the meter should have been. There was just the grubby outline of the meter left on the wall. The rest of it was blown into a dozen pieces, scattered across the room. In the far corner, the meter reader spotted the dial. He walked across, picked it up, recorded the numbers in his book, and then said goodbye and left.
From that point on, diborane was scrubbed off Buck’s list of potential chemicals that could be used to make ultrafast cryotrons. There were still plenty of chemicals that they posited could be turned into thin, superconducting films if an electron beam was fired at them, however. He was ever more determined to get to the solution.
Buck could see clearly how their experiments could change the world. At home with Jackie, he had started to talk a lot about how computers could aid the field of medicine. He was sketching out loose ideas in his basement office at home on how to design a computerized health diagnostic system. His mind was running quicker than his experimentation.
“It was the end of my senior year, April of 1959, when Dudley had the idea that we have got to get electron lithography working,” remembers Crawford. “With his knowledge of organic chemistry he picked out maybe a dozen or fifteen chemicals that he thought could be catalyzed by electron bombardment to change into something else. That’s what you needed.”
The chemicals he needed were not all easy to come by. Without the new materials, it was difficult to do very much. Eventually, on May 18, 1959, he got word that the United Parcel Service delivery from his chemical supplier was on its way.
There was just a week to go until his first NSA summit on Project Lightning. Maybe he would find the magic formula before then.
The day dragged on as he waited for the parcel. Buck sat at his plain wooden desk, overlooking the lab, filling his day with jobs he had been putting off. First, he wrote a character reference letter for Jackie’s sister Gwen, who had applied to be an assistant nurse at the nearby Foxborough State Hospital, a mental institution.
“I have known Gwendolyn Wray for five years and have employed her as a student technician in the MIT Digital Computer Laboratory during one summer,” he wrote. “She is a reliable worker who follows instructions and at the same time demonstrates resourcefulness. She is a very steady worker and a pleasant team member. I would judge her personality to be well adapted to the care of mental patients, especially in situations where kindness and warmth are essential. She is, of course, a person of unquestioned loyalty.”
He wrote some internal memos to other MIT professors, chasing up thesis grades for some of his students. Then there was also the usual pile of fan mail from academics and corporate titans around the world to wade through, all asking for information on his tiny supercomputer in the making.
L. G. Bishop from General Electric’s defense electronics division, another of the big contractors developing cryotron technology, had written for more information “regarding the technique of writing circuits with an electron beam.” Bishop was coming to Boston at the end of May and wanted to meet.
Charles H. Clark from Boeing’s pilotless aircraft division in Seattle had also written, asking for a meeting to discuss the cryotron and his new method of writing circuits. (Today this is the division of Boeing that manufactures drones.) At the time, it had just installed the fleet of Bomarc antiaircraft missiles across the United States and Canada, tasked with knocking Soviet bombers out of the sky should they appear over the horizon. The missiles, which looked like ultrasleek fighter jets pointed toward the sky, were hooked up to the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense system that Buck had worked on.
It was a remote-controlled guided missile. The SAGE radars would pick up a target, and the missile would be fired and directed remotely toward the incoming plane via a radio signal. Boeing, like its archrival Lockheed, was trying to move the technology on to the next step where the whole guidance system could be stored on the missile itself. Although Buck had been working with Lockheed on possible guidance systems for two years, he wrote back to the Boeing executive and agreed to meet him.
As Buck finished dictating the letter to his secretary, Carol Schupbach, a parcel was delivered to his office door. It was his shipment of chemicals. He shouted across to Chuck Crawford to come into his office. “He had such enthusiasm, which was characteristic of everything that he did—enthusiasm that you rarely see in anyone other than a small child going to a sports game or a movie or something like that,” remembers Crawford.
The deliveryman placed the box on Buck’s desk and asked for his signature. Buck started ripping into the cardboard, desperate to get his hands on his new toys.
As Crawford explains,
He was really anticipating that one of these chemicals would be the breakthrough. They were basically bottles of slightly different sizes and shapes. Dudley just kind of looked at these things. He looked at a bottle and unscrewed the cap and looked inside—it was typically some kind of powder that we were going to evaporate on some kind of deposit and then hit electron beams on it to see if we could make anything happen.
He looked at all these chemicals. He didn’t eat any of them, he might have stuck a finger in a bottle. We paid no attention whatsoever to the potential hazard of taking a bunch of organic chemicals that hadn’t really been studied that carefully and messing around with them. The thought hadn’t entered our heads.
It was quite late by the time they had worked through the whole box. Buck started complaining that he didn’t feel too well. He left Crawford to plan their next phase of experiments with the new chemicals and headed for home. George Moss, one of his other students, had just handed him the first draft of his thesis. Buck stuffed it in his briefcase, which was bulging with papers and notebooks as usual, and promised Moss he would work through the draft that evening so that they could talk about it in the morning.
Carol Schupbach was still in the office, typing up students’ papers for cash; it was how she made a little extra money on the side. As she saw Buck walking out the door, she stopped him to ask a question.
“He was carrying his briefcase as if it weighed a hundred pounds,” said Schupbach. “He stopped to answer my question and put the briefcase down—it was just too heavy. When I commented that he looked like he wasn’t feeling well, he said, ‘You cannot tell what is wrong with something until it finally breaks down.’”
JACKIE HAD NEVER known Dudley to be sick in his life. He was a man of boundless energy. That night, not long after he walked through the door, he announced that he was going to bed. It didn’t look like there was much wrong with him—he didn’t appear sickly in any way.
By 3:00 a.m., Buck was coughing heavily. By 5:00 a.m. he had a high fever and was barely able to move. Jackie brought him a glass of water, which he sipped slowly. “This will be the last glass of water I take in this house,” he said.
Jackie called the local doctor, who ordered an ambulance immediately to take Buck to Winchester Hospital, where he had been just eight weeks earlier to pick up Jackie and baby David. When the ambulance arrived, one of the neighbors, Irene Ely, volunteered to look after the kids while Jackie went to the hospital. David started crying as soon as his mother left. Carolyn, age three, and Doug, age two, sat on the front porch while their dad was strapped onto a hospital gurney and pushed into the back of the ambulance.
“Tuesday morning Jackie called up and said that Dudley wouldn’t be in—he wasn’t feeling well,” recalls Crawford. “In the middle of the day she called back again to say that he was quite sick, the doctors were concerned that he had been exposed to some toxic substance or something because he had been close to all these bottles. I had been just as close as he had. They wanted a list of every chemical. I prepared a list and transmitted it to the doctors.”
MIT hit the panic button. Harriet Hardy, head of the university’s occupational health service, was dispatched to Winchester Hospital straightaway. Morton Schwartz, an infectious disease specialist from Massachusetts General Hospital, a teaching hospital associated with Harvard University, came soon afterward, accompanied by David Rudman, professor of infectious diseases at the Harvard Medical School.
They pumped all kinds of antibiotics into his system, but nothing worked. Fearing the worst, Jackie called for Dick Harding, their local minister, who then hovered in the background while the doctors pondered the case.
The assembled doctors were desperate for another opinion. By about midnight that night they had decided the chemicals were not to blame. They concluded it must be some kind of lung condition. They had been trying to reach Max Finland from Boston City Hospital, a world expert on lung infections and pneumonia who had invented an antiserum for a virulent flu strain that plagued Boston in the 1930s. He was in Switzerland at a conference, but when they eventually tracked him down, Finland’s advice was clear: give Dudley penicillin only.
“But by this time Dudley’s body had been swamped by the latest high-powered antibiotics in a frantic rush to save him,” remembers Jackie.
At 8:20 a.m. on May 21, 1959, a little more than forty-eight hours after he was admitted to the hospital, Dudley died.