On Day 1175 I spoke about my friend Nat Kobitz, who died earlier this month.
There are a few more stories that I’d like to relate.
where my parents retired
One involves my dad. He worked for Perkin Elmer. Dad was the seventh employee. He was hired directly by Dick Perkin. The company eventually grew to over 20,000 employees (and then the MBAs took over and ruined it.)
Perkin Elmer was famous for optical systems. They put the optical guts in, as far as I know, ever major telescope installed in the U.S. and every camera that went into space and every military aircraft. From the camera that went into the B-29 to film the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima to the mirror for the Hubble Space Telescope (with the periscope for Alan Shepard and the U2 camera in between ).
Many of these systems were designed by Jim Baker. He worked independently and handed the designs off to PE to manufacture. My Uncle George did the work on Stratascope I, a Jim Baker design, that used a high altitude balloon to do photography from the edge of outer space.
My dad said Carl Shapley, head of the astronomy department at Princeton University, used to say that he could never figure out who was smarter Einstein or Jim Baker.
One of Dad’s big projects was The Baker-Schmidt Camera system. These were cameras designed for recording the paths of meteors as they entered the atmosphere. Dick Perkin had been talking to Stan Whipple (I think it was Stan) at the end of the war (WWII) and PE was looking for work. Mr. Perkin called up my dad who was running the shop while Mr. Perkin was out looking for business. He told Dad what they wanted to do and wanted to know how much it would cost to do the job. Dad told him not to touch it for under $50,000. Mr. Perkin came back with an order for two and a check for $10,000. He told Dad, “that’s all the money they had and when they get more they said they’d give it to us.”
Just an example of the good old days. Yes, they got more money.
To cut costs on the project Mr. Perkin went to the Bureau of Standards and got them interested in the project.
The basic idea was to have two cameras spaced at a set distance apart. Each camera was to have 150 degree view of the sky. When an astronomer saw a meteor streaking across the sky, they were to push a button which would have both cameras being taking photographs. The cameras shutter, as my father described it, was like a whirling fan blade. In this way when the photo was developed the streaking meteor’s tail would be interrupted by the fan blade. The two cameras’ photographs could be compared against background of stars and by triangulation they could figure out the altitude of the meteor. The interruption of the meteor’s tail and the measurement of its length could be calculated because they would know the speed of the fan blade and thus figure out the speed of the meteor. Dad used to say once they put the first set in place they had more data on meteors in a month than had been collected in the rest of time.
When I told this story to Nat he said, “You know that shutter was very interesting. It was really two prisms that tumbled …”
Now, how many people in the world know what the Baker-Schmidt camera is, let alone how the shudder operated?
In a minor addendum, to make such a lens at the time was very difficult. I think it was on this job that they were looking for the best naturally occurring quartz they could find. There was a fellow that showed up at Perkin Elmer and he had the best quartz they had ever seen. He said he got it from a hidden location in Mexico. He took off in a plane for Mexico and was never heard from again.
When I told this story to Tom Crouch of the Smithsonian he said, “No that’s not true. He crashed in Mexico.” He sent me the copy of the file clipping. I’d love to see that again Tom!
And a final final note on this story, polishing a lens or mirror is a real art. The best guy to polish such a lens was a fellow Perkin tried to hire. He said he wasn’t interested. He wanted to be a sculptor, and according to Dad, he is the artist who did the giant bust of Kennedy in The Kennedy Center Grand Hallway.
But, as Arlo Guherie is want to say, “That isn’t what I came here to talk to you about.”
Nope, what I wanted to tell you was on the last visit with Nat, the one where we went back to the house after the matzo ball soup, we got onto the subject of computers and what I had done with my life. (Teaching people about them.)
He told a story of a woman who came into his shop and all the other women seemed to really like her. Actually, to be in awe of her. The lady had lost her command and was thinking of leaving the Navy. Nat didn’t know who she was but he determined that the other women thought she was someone special. He gave her a job.
He couldn’t think of her name, but she had had something to do with computers. “What was her name?” he asked himself.
There was only woman I knew who had been involved with computers in the Navy. It was a long shot, but I said, “Grace Hopper?”
“Yeah, that’s it. That’s her name.”
“Grace Hopper, the woman who started coding on the Mark I, created one of the first linkers that led to the invention of COBOL (Seems New Jersey could use her now.)
“The woman who used to walk the halls of Congress with a coil of wire on her shoulder and another piece of wire about 2 1/2 feet long so she could show Congressional people the difference between how far light traveled in a millisecond versus a nanosecond.
That Grace Hopper?”
“Yeah, that’s her name.”
Dad actually did tell me the story about Grace 😂. There are a million of them.