I traveled east by Trailways Bus. On the way, I stopped at Salt Lake City where I took in the sights including a demonstration of the "marvelous acoustics" at the Mormon Tabernacle. It was designed as an ellipsoid of revolution, so a pin dropped on the stage at one focus could be heard at the other focus far out in the audience area (I don't remember whether I heard it). I've never been able to figure out what that has to do with good auditorium acoustics, but it made an impressive demonstration.
On the journey from Salt Lake City to Provo, Utah we encountered a cloudburst. Turning into a railway underpass, we met a car stalled in fairly deep water and hit it, driving it out the other side. Fortunately, no one was hurt badly, but after the event I found my foot rest had broken -- I had put too much force on it while the bus was stopping. We also found that the bus had lost its side view mirror against the side of the underpass! When we finally were able to move on, we found much of the road in very bad shape and were many hours late getting to Provo.
In Columbus I dropped off most of my things at a Jewish Fraternity and went on to New York where I spent a day at the Worlds Fair. Among other things I saw a demonstration of a stereoscopic movie (using color filters) and some of the city and the "Rockettes" at the Radio City Music Hall. Returning to Columbus I decided against staying at the Fraternity and found a room with the Curl family, my home for the next three years.
That year I was occupied primarily with study. A course in rotating fields (the magnetic fields in ac motors) given by Dreese, the Department Chairman, was interesting as were Everitt's courses in advanced networks and electromagnetic field theory. Complex variables and advanced calculus reinforced my math background; the course in real variable theory reinforced my understanding of math, but it was not really my thing.
Most interesting was a course in "electron optics" given by Professor Boone. It used a new book from England that had more mistakes per page, by far, than I have seen in any other book. We speculated that the author had developed most of his ideas some time earlier and had lost his notes, so his students had reworked the details for the book. The end results were usually correct, but the intermediate steps were frequently a mess. Working out the details was rewarding and I learned a great deal from it.
During this period I made use of my knowledge of basic electronics by making the intercom between the main Electrical Engineering office and the office in the Communications building work. The building was a holdover from WW I days when, as I understood it, it had been used as a stable! Professor Everitt had the graduate students over on a number of occasions and I was introduced to his ping-pong concept -- there should be a sufficient number of balls so one didn't have to chase each one; there was always another close by.
The second year at O.S.U., I had a fellowship to work with Professor Bibber, with most of my activity in the "high voltage lab" and started to audit a course in probability theory, an area I was unfamiliar with. However, I soon became very occupied with another project and dropped the course.
Everitt had proposed a method for measuring the radiation patterns of aircraft antennas using a reradiated signal, rather than requiring a transmitter in the model, and received a contract from Wright Field in 1940. With WW II in progress the patterns were needed to ensure that pilots would not lose communication when maneuvering. His scheme promised to make it possible to measure the patterns without having a very high frequency oscillator in the model (a procedure that was becoming increasingly difficult as the frequencies used in our military planes moved higher.)
George Sinclair and I started the "Antenna Lab" for this work. George worked mostly on the modeling and I mostly on the instrumentation. I used a vibrator intended for car radios to modulate the antenna in the model (to differentiate the reradiated signal from the original) and, after some struggle (including almost killing myself when I got across 2000 volts), got a satisfactory 10 cm (3X109 Hz) oscillator working using the new "light-house" tubes. I ordered a 4Hz wide wave analyzer to detect the reradiated signals and, when it arrived, the project was off and running.
Everitt had suggested that I take on what are now known as "transversal filters" (the use of tapped delay lines for filtering) for my M.S. thesis, but I must have had something else on my mind because the subject didn't seem promising to me. Instead I tackled a problem in electrostatics that had come up in Boone's electron optics course, so he became my advisor. My final thesis was eminently satisfactory. Preliminary work on it led to a paper in the Proceedings of the I.R.E. and the completed dissertation went into the Journal of applied Physics. Boone suggested that I could use it as my Ph.D. dissertation 1 but I was then a long way from satisfying the language requirement (I had failed the German test twice), so I was elected to get an M.S. degree in 1941.
Two items from the period: Occasionally I would go to a movie with other roomers at the home I lived at. One of them, from a farm, was a character! Before going to a movie he would eat garlic and then, if his view was blocked, he would breathe heavily on the person in front until his view cleared. Also, the Curl's radio stopped working one week end so I used the available tools to repair it -- a screwdriver to diagnose the problem (by checking for sparks at various points) -- it revealed a break in the coil of small wire used in the "dynamic" speakers of that day and, heated on the stove, it became my soldering iron; there were no further problems with the radio while I was there.
I thought highly of Professor Boone. I was later dismayed to hear many stories of his misadventures. An ardent mountain climber, he was caught in an avalanche in Switzerland. He was rescued, but lost most of the flesh from one side of a leg and some pieces of bone. The Swiss doctors put his leg back together and sometime later he resumed climbing! After retiring from O.S.U. he lost a finger in a saw accident. Later he was mugged and left to die on a lonely rode near the University Airport; he was found and recovered from that too, but he apparently had lost some of his mental faculties. He died in 1988.
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