a wonderful sounding board. Though he didn't tell me what to do, he pointed out that my undergraduate engineering studies were a very good background for medicine, if I wanted to follow that route. Then he asked me, "What kind of a doctor do you think you would be?"

"Well, to be honest with you," I answered, “I think I could be a better engineer than doctor." I realized I had taken naturally to engineering sciences during my undergraduate career and had had no difficulty getting top grades in the field. That seemed to be an indication of how I might make out professionally. Biology had not come as easily for me. The subject matter didn't fit as neatly in my mind. For me there was an intellectual difference between medicine and engineering. As a doctor, I'm sure I would have liked working with people and trying to figure out what their problems were. But it appeared to me then (and still appears to me now) that there's a lot more mathematics in engineering, that medical practice is much more a question of remembering things-anatomy, symptoms, prescriptions, and so on. I'm sure a practitioner has to be fairly nimble mentally. But doctors are often writing a prescription they've memorized for a set of symptoms they've also memorized.

The upshot of my meeting with Haertline was that I decided to go back to Harvard to do graduate work in aeronautical engineering under Bill Bollay. I was not quite sure that I was physically ready for a full load, so I signed up for just two graduate courses that fall. A good friend and classmate of mine, Richard E. ("Dick") Lewis, was entering the same program. The day after the semester began, he said, "I wonder if we're doing the right thing. If we're really interested in this field, shouldn't we be at MIT?"

By this time I had realized that Professor Bollay's course in aeronautical engineering was not very different from what we had taken as undergraduates. The other course I had signed up for was being given Fridays and Saturdays by an adjunct professor coming up from the ChanceVought Corporation in Stamford, Connecticut. Dick quite rightly said, "Look, if you go over to MIT, you're going to have full-time faculty members, not adjunct professors." Then he said, “I'm going over to MIT this afternoon to see the dean of admissions. Do you want to come along?"

I knew very little about the institute, but I said, "Sure, why not?" So we went over to Dean B. Alden Thresher's office.

"Okay, boys," he said, "tell me a little bit about yourselves.” When we were finished with our brief oral résumés, he said, "You two did quite well at Harvard. I think we can get you started here as sophomores, although you may have a few deficiencies."

We both stood up and said we weren't interested in starting all over again towards a bachelor's degree. "Well," he said, "maybe I'm underestimating the extent of your engineering background. Here are some forms you can fill out. Take them around to the various departments and see how much credit they'll give you."

When we had left the dean's office, Dick said, "I'm going to stay at Harvard." I took my form home, read it, and filled it out. Then I read the MIT catalog and went around to the departments, as Dean Thresher had recommended. I did some bargaining over equivalencies and quickly found that I was well beyond the sophomore level. My last stop was at the office of Professor R. H. Smith, acting head of what was then called aeronautical engineering (now aeronautics and astronautics). By this point, I was beginning to visualize myself taking one undergraduate year at MIT. I liked what I saw, walking up and down the corridors: all those labs and machine shops! Compared to Pierce Hall, the single building devoted to engineering at Harvard, MIT had so many interesting alternatives and possibilities.

Smith said, "I just can't understand why you want to be an undergraduate. Why don't you come here as a graduate student?" That sounded fine to me. "Let me call Thresher," he said, picking up the phone.

He and the dean had quite an argument on the phone. At one point Smith turned to me and asked, "Have you had descriptive geometry?" "Sure, I've had it," I answered.

When he finally hung up, Smith said, “We can admit you to graduate studies in aeronautical engineering." I later learned that it is the prerogative of each department to admit whomever they wish to their graduate school.

“Well, all right,” I said, "but now, how long do you think it will take me to get a master's degree? You've seen my record."

3 Dick Lewis received his master's degree from Harvard in 1941, designed aircraft for Chance Vought during World War II, and had a successful career in the aircraft industry.

Smith said, "You haven't had very much aeronautical engineering, so you're going to have to do a lot of work...unless, that is, you decide to specialize in instrumentation."

"What's that?"

"I'm not sure I can explain it well. You ought to go and see Dr. Draper. That's his province."

I was pretty excited about what I had seen. I went home and told my parents I was going to MIT. They were quite upset at my vacillation. First I had talked about going to medical school; then I was going to graduate school in engineering at Harvard; now suddenly I'm going to MIT! Classes started the following week, and all of a sudden I was taking a full set of courses. I did well. I had a cumulative average of 4.8 (on a scale of 0 to 5). I not only enjoyed the courses, I worked hard at them and didn't fool around with a lot of other things.

Doc Draper

Dr. Charles Stark ("Doc") Draper, the instrumentation professor, was a Stanford University graduate with a bachelor's degree in psychology. After Stanford, he came through Cambridge on a lark, stopped at MIT, and decided he wanted to study there. Before he was through, he had taken more MIT courses for credit than anybody has ever taken before or since, earning a B.S. in electrochemical engineering in 1926, an M.S. without specification of department in 1928, and an Sc.D. in physics in 1938. He became especially interested in propulsion and engines. He found that there were no reliable instruments to tell a research engineer, much less a pilot, how an engine was performing. A pilot himself, Doc became increasingly interested in gyroscopes, horizon indicators, and the like. Then he moved into the field of fire control, the science of aiming guns at moving targets.

I didn't get a chance to see Doc Draper before my first day of classes at MIT, but I did attend the first lecture in his introductory course in instrumentation, number 16.41. (Everything at the institute is by the numbers!) It was standing room only in the largest classroom in the building. Doc Draper came bouncing in wearing a green eyeshade. He was quite short of stature and heavyset, but I could see right away that he was one of the most dynamic people I had ever

met. He had a broken nose because, I later learned, he had once been a prizefighter.

"I'm delighted you're all here," he said, "but let's not kid ourselves. If you're going into this profession, you're never going to make a lot of money. Face it right now. You'll be lucky to earn $10,000 a year. You're not going to have money for race horses or for buying a mink coat for your wife. But," he added, "you'll have a hell of a lot of fun."

At that point $10,000 seemed like a lot of money to me. But that was secondary. I was intrigued immediately by the material. The discussions were lively, with a lot of give-and-take. Doc Draper was running MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, and he brought material from his lab work into the classroom. I quickly realized that I was faced not with somebody who had never practiced but with a person who was leading the pack and telling you what he was doing. I reacted differently to him than I had to other, more theoretically oriented professors. Doc Draper was making a living doing something important! All I wanted was to know more about it myself.

The Instrumentation Lab was working with the Sperry Gyroscope Company on vibration-measuring equipment, so we students were soon experimenting with accelerometers and vibration pickups and all the electronics connected with them. The lab was also doing classified work (which we students had nothing to do with) on anti-aircraft fire control for the British navy. Why the British navy? Because the Sperry Corporation, which manufactured the U.S. Navy gunsights then in use, had convinced our military that their system-much more complicated (and therefore more expensive!) than Doc's system-was the only option. After Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), the government commandeered all foreign research, and Doc Draper's British navy work was turned over to our military by fiat.

That first year of graduate studies at MIT was far and away the most exciting academic year I had ever had. For example, I took a course in Laplace transforms and spent a whole weekend solving problems using the theory of complex variables. Suddenly I understood this type of mathematics, and the power of it was quite a revelation to me. To think of the problems it could solve! But nothing could match the excitement of instrumentation. The real fun of it was to do the studies, then actually build the hardware based on the

theory. And sometimes it worked! Doc Draper would describe the fun of making something work as "defeating Mother Nature." Design something, build it, and test it successfully—and you've made something useful for a small part of our society.

It was the first time in my life that I could begin to visualize what it would be like to go into a field as a professional rather than just to study it in books. I was becoming very intrigued with airplanes-what permitted them to fly efficiently, what powered them, and what controlled them. Before the year was over, Doc Draper had taken us through all the major instruments that are required to pilot, to navigate, and to test a plane, and I could clearly visualize the possibility of working either for an aircraft or instrumentation company or for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The whole business was fascinating.

In Love

I didn't miss watching any varsity games while I was at Harvard. During the fall of 1940, while I was beginning my work at MIT, I invited three young women to go to three different games with me. While at a party at Avalon, I invited Gene Merrill. She didn't answer yea or nay right away, but as I was leaving through the foyer, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Gene, saying she would like to go to the game. I had a wonderful time with her that Saturday afternoon. We drove to Cambridge in my old beaten-up Dodge coupe and parked near Leverett House. After the game, we came out to the car and found a window smashed. Several things had been stolen, but fortunately Gene's fur coat was not one of them. It was a cold night, and on the drive back to Avalon she had to sit a little bit closer to me than she otherwise might have.

Before Christmas 1940, I was invited to Gene's coming-out party in Washington. By then I had developed a strong interest in her, and I was disappointed by my three days there. I found her a bit distant. I came up with the idea of taking a trip to Annapolis in order to have an opportunity to be alone with Gene. My cousin Jim Seamans lived there, and I thought that the hour's drive back and forth would give us a chance to talk. When I broached the subject, Gene said, "I've talked to Mother, and she said take the station wagon"-meaning I was to go