According to my birth certificate, I was born Sydney Abramovich, July 7, 1913. In the fall of 1923 our family made a troubled move to Venice, CA where one of my Dad’s siblings was (since then I have been very shy and have a poor rote memory). My uncle had changed his name to Bertram because he had a job as a bookkeeper and his immediate superior liked him. The owner of the business, however, didn’t want foreigners to work for him so my uncle and his superior just removed his last name. We also became Bertram.

I had just entered the fifth grade and when asked "B5 or A5?" I said A5. The Canadian schools were ahead of the American schools, so for the spring semester I went to an adjustment room where I studied and took tests. Three weeks before the end of the semester I went into B7. My math teacher gave me an A, but the other teachers didn’t give me a grade. During the summer the family moved into L.A. and the new school, seeing my math grade, put me in the A7. It was a mistake; I wasn’t ready for the seventh grade and my eyes were going bad; I felt that the family couldn’t afford to buy me glasses, so I never told them.

With no thought of college, I took a vocational electrical course in high school. I hated geometry, probably because of my poor memory, and had no more math classes. Graduating in 1930, there were few jobs. I worked on a radio assembly line but was let go because I was too slow. I bought my first pair of glasses and managed to keep up on another line. At three cents a radio I made as much as six dollars a day when they didn’t run out of parts.

By fall I knew I needed more education and entered Los Angeles Junior College (LAJC). It was in its second year on what had been the UCLA campus. I had failed the English entry test so started in a special English class. The teacher soon felt I wasn’t that bad and released me.

Still with no thought of college, I took a semi-professional course in electrical engineering. I had marvelous teachers, graduating in 1932 with a very good record. The only open job was with LA Power and Light but, not being a citizen, they couldn’t hire me. Thinking of more education, my advisor thought I could get a scholarship at USC so I wrote them and Caltech.

USC said I could enter as a freshman if I promised to make up my high school deficiencies. Caltech was more interesting. They wrote that I could enter as a sophomore if I passed special closed-book exams in math and physics; but that they gave their sophomores open-book exams to qualify them for junior standing and I could enter as a junior if I passed them. In either case, I would have to make up freshman chemistry.

I entered Caltech as a junior, but gave it up after two weeks because I couldn’t fit freshman chemistry into a junior program and hadn’t been able to arrange financing. The next spring I went back to LAJC to make up my deficiencies and had time to take a course in radio; it changed my life.

That summer I made a chart that was published in 1935; it provided a simple solution to a problem from the radio course. In 1959 I was in another engineer’s office and was leafing through a trade publication on his desk and saw a familiar chart. I found that it had been copied from a company’s in-house book with some modification of my text. When a representative of the publisher saw mine they put my name on the reprints and paid me $75.

In 1933 I entered The Radio Institute of California. With my LAJC background I was way ahead of the other students and was asked if I would teach a lab class. I soon started to teach the elementary theory class which gradually became more advanced.

In 1936 I decided to try Caltech again. With more money, and more coming in from a New Deal program in which I helped graduate students with their dissertations, I graduated in 1938 (with honor, #6 in my class).

I had consulted with the International Geophysics Company and worked there for a year after I graduated. They were making electrical measurements to locate places to drill for oil or water. They were also measuring the potential output of oil wells by exploding blank shotgun shells in their mouths and counting the small sound reflections from the tubing collars to the much larger reflection from the oil.

I next went to Ohio State University for graduate studies. I soon became involved in the Antenna Lab that had started on a contract to model aircraft antennas to check on the pilot’s ability to communicate during maneuvers. Since the planes were using the shortest wavelengths available and our models were much smaller, we had to use experimental vacuum tubes to attain the needed signal. One late afternoon I absent-mindedly grabbed parts of my experimental set-up that seemed to be coming apart and got my two hands across 2,000 volts. Luckily, the shock caused me to fall backwards and pull everything off the table so I survived; the one person who heard the noise came running and said he had never seen me so white.

I received my MS degree in 1940. My advisor had said he would accept my thesis for my Ph.D. dissertation but I had failed the German exam twice, so I couldn’t anticipate satisfying the language requirement.

With WW2 starting I joined the Underwater Sound Lab at San Diego, run by the University of California. Disney engineers had come there when a strike in the movie industry put them out of work; they had developed a one-target sonar system. My first job was to make their system’s aim follow a compass so that it could hold its target as the boat turned. Then they got the idea that the sonar would be more useful if it could map the whole area in front, instead of seeing just one target and I was asked to work on it.

I completed the job. One of the chassis had 20 tubes and the shop had mounted their sockets tubes too close together; not realizing it until I had assembled the other parts, I filed the tube bases to get all the tubes in; it worked well.

The system was tested aboard the lab motorboat. Admiral Lockwood, who was in charge of the Pacific Submarine fleet, visited the lab, saw our equipment in action and decided to have it put on an old sub for tests. The tests went well and a version of the equipment was later installed on the Spadefish, a WW2 sub.

I flew to Hawaii to be with the equipment for tests. The amphibian plane landed in the water and we were sprayed with insecticide because Hawaii then had no insects.

I went down 300 feet with the Spadefish and went with it through a dummy mine field. The admiral was pleased with the tests and arranged to have more equipment sets made for other submarines. Nine were used to plot the minefields off of a number of Pacific islands and, finally, they used their sonars to go through the minefields into the Japanese Sea where they destroyed many Japanese ships. I was given a citation for its development.

The submariners thought that dropping the atomic bomb was not necessary; no invasion was needed to end the war since, with the European war over, we could concentrate our forces on Japan and the subs could cut off their supplies from the mainland. Truman later wrote in his memoirs that Japan had enquired earlier about peace; he ordered the bomb dropped to end the war before Russia moved into Japanese territory. It was the first shot of the cold war! I married Esther before the war ended.

We moved to Seattle, Esther’s hometown, where I worked with Boeing on their guided missile program; it was supposed to follow a radar beam to the target. Before I had been there a year, my advisor at Ohio State called and invited me to be an Assistant Professor and head the EE department at their new graduate center at Wright Field, with the chance to complete my Ph.D.. With only ten days notice before classes were to start and Esther’s concurrence, I left her behind with our 5-month-old son and her parents close by.

I enjoyed teaching the smart post-war students and managed to pass the language tests. I then found I couldn’t get a Ph.D. in electrical engineering because of my professorship; only a few of us that had finished most of our work before the war were allowed to work towards our Ph.D. but it had to be in a different department; I got my Ph.D. in physics in 1951.

I was then invited to join the Rand Corporation where I became a member of the countermeasures group. Radars had become very effective, so our planes were in grave danger of being shot down. As a first counter measure, aluminum strips were cut in lengths to have maximum effect on the radars and were dropped in bundles behind the planes, drawing off the radars. Soon the radars were changed to avoid following any signal whose speed changed too fast -- a first counter-countermeasure. The group’s intent was to explore all the possibilities that the Air Force should be aware of. They held an international conference on the subject and, as the newest member I was delegated to write its proceedings; it became a Rand classified book.

Another group at Rand decided that the Air Defense Command should be able to follow enemy aircraft behind mountains and proposed using small radars in the gaps with their signals recreated on the screens of the appropriate larger radars. Slowed down radar signals were to be sent over telephone lines to recreate the images at a distance. I worked with an outside company and showed we could recreate the pictures as transmitted over a local telephone line but the system didn’t work over a long distance line. The long distance lines were carrier lines where every voice line appeared as a radio station that could be tuned in for the recipient. The problem was that AT&T was removing the carrier of the stations to save transmission energy and recreated it too sloppily at the receiving ends. It didn’t affect speech but it had a profound affect on the shape of pulses (like today’s digital signals) – AT&T had to correct their system! I went to Cambridge for six months to consult with MIT’s lab on combining the recreated image with the radar picture.

Rand recommended that the Air Defense Command create a way of exercising their system without the use of real bombers that behaved like enemy bombers. Rand had simulated one radar station using a large computer printer as the display and programmed it to show all of the local air traffic and, occasionally, an enemy bomber. UCLA students acted like the radar operators; when an enemy “bomber” got through and “bombed” LA the operators were quite shaken. The Air Defense Command was sold on the program so The System Development Corporation was set up to implement it and I became its chief engineer; we had the mandate to produce equipment that could be used simultaneously at all of the Air Defense radar sites, so simulated planes could be followed throughout their flights over the country. Referees were to be given scripts to enable them to determine if a simulated interceptor was within range of its target so it could be “shot down.” They were also to brief the crews after the exercises to help them improve their responses.

The first unit went to the radar site at Boron in the high desert of California. Later, five more sites in Southern California were integrated into the program, all getting related data at the same time so “flights” could be passed from one to the others. When we went to the radar at Cambria we couldn’t find it until the locals told us to look for the "weather station;" it still carried the title given it during the war to cover up its purpose. Later all the Air Defense sites in the country were involved in the simulations. I visited the site at Sioux Lookout in Canada.

After losing interest in the project I joined Ramo-Wooldridge. They had set up a manufacturing site in Denver because the services thought that LA was too vulnerable because of all the work there and I was asked if I would go there and help them get contracts.

They had a project to simulate the analysis of the anticipated satellite imagery. It was cancelled when it was learned that RW ex-service officers had finagled to get the contract; it put the company in trouble with the services.

I had prepared a proposal for a simulator for training the operators of mortar-locating radars and got the contract. When the first unit was tested, the group adjusted it more accurately than the contract required; the army decided they wanted it that way to test the radars. Since the group couldn’t guarantee that the equipment would keep that accuracy, the Army gave RW a new contract to ensure it. However, there was too much delay and RW gave up Denver. LA said they couldn’t build the simulator as designed and the contract was sold to Hughes. The Army should have bought the initial design.

I returned to LA. RW’s problems led it to break up and I stayed with Bunker-Ramo in the San Fernando Valley. I wrote a proposal to automate a Kelsh Plotter, a device used in preparing topographic maps from stereo pairs of aerial photos (there is probably a company in Santa Cruz with Kelsh plotters to map the local terrain); we got the contract. The Army delivered equipment made by a prior contractor and we made it work and then built a better one. We then got a contract to make a digital stereo plotter and it worked too; it used a computer with a delay-line memory that worked fine until it was delivered to the Army; they turned their air conditioning off at night and the computer wouldn’t work in the morning until the delay lines were adjusted.

A later contract called for handling a greater variety of photographs, like panoramic, and on larger films. We had it going with 9 inch conventional photography but never got any others to test (they were classified). The system measured ground elevations to one-foot accuracy from photographs taken at 10,000 feet and did it at 50 measurements a second except in mountainous regions where it slowed down.

I gave talks on the state of the equipment in Lisbon in 1964 and on the finished equipment in 1968 in Switzerland. I was asked to repeat the 1968 talk in Israel. Then I was told not to hand out the 1964 and 1968 papers together; the equipment had become “confidential.” Later I was asked to give my talk at Baguio (Macarthur’s site in the Philippines). Esther was with me on these trips.

With Bunker-Ramo’s continuing problems I moved to Hughes Aircraft in the earlier RW buildings that were closer to our home. There I started them on a device to help on the production of electronic chips, but they gave it up, thinking it wasn’t necessary. They later regretted it because they had to buy similar equipments from other companies. I also helped write some proposals and worked on a study to find a way to have missiles follow a trail as set on a photograph; it was to follow the trail in any weather. This was later replaced by the use of the GPS and digital maps as produced by my equipment.

I saw an ad from Cal Poly for an instructor and decided it was time to retire from industry. I was at Cal Poly for a few years, teaching electrical engineering. In a course in electromagnetic theory I found the solution to a question I had from my Ohio State days – how to teach the way electrical currents set up magnetic fields. I wrote it up and tried to have it published, but it was rejected by all the journals I tried.

I sent a copy to the Caltech Alumni office for help. When I inquired about it I received the following reply:

"I well remember the paper by Dr. Bertram since I scanned it and noted what appeared to be an inconsistency with the principles of relativity. I did not have the time to do a proper analysis to be certain that my immediate impression was correct."

I also sent a copy to a friend who was a Professor at Penn State. Some time later I received the following from him:

"I finally had a chance to read your paper carefully, I cannot disagree with your treatment or your model and I believe it should be a useful approach to understanding the force-charge relations in relativistic situations.
"Although I believe your paper should be published, I would anticipate some difficulty in getting it accepted because of the way most referees have been taught to think. Nonetheless, I think it should be submitted because it would be a definite contribution."

I have written a second paper on a related subject and I still hope to have the papers published.

When I retired from Cal Poly I sat in on some science and math classes at a nearby middle school.

In 1998 I was talked into giving my papers at the University of Connecticut. I had been told to take the airport bus to town where I would be picked up and taken to the school. Nobody came for me, but I was finally rescued by a policeman and taken to the police department where I got something to eat and they called the school. The school sent a car to take me to the University. My talk was well received.

I have been writing letters to editors and have met with a company that provides seminars on how to install and test high quality audio systems in auditoriums and similar structures.

When our daughter was in the seventh grade she was put in a then-new Modern Math class. When I saw her book I tried to convince the school that it was nonsense and decided to write my idea of how math should be taught. I sent a copy of it to the California Department of Education. When I didn’t hear from them I added some chapters on science and engineering and published it about 10 years ago. In 2005, I sent a copy of it to a teacher of remedial math who had written a syndicated column on teaching math and she put the following comment in nation-wide syndicated papers:
"When his daughter was put in the “new math” in seventh grade he considered it so bad he decided to write his own idea of how math should be taught. Dr. Bertram’s ideas, like using rulers for sum tables and using coins to introduce the decimal number system, are numerous and clever. I’ve used some of them with my students and found they produce real results in ways I hadn’t envisioned."

I recently finished a two-chapter book of arithmetic and elementary science based on the first two chapters of the earlier book. I hope to see it published.