Sciences : histoire orale

EAGAR Thomas, 2002-05-06

Sophie Jourdin — 2011-09-19T08:55:20Z

Thomas Eagar

Lord Professor of Materials Engineering and Materials Systems, MIT.

Pour citer l'entretien :

« Entretien avec Thomas Eagar », par George Smith (Acting Director of the Dibner Institute) et Arne Hessenbruch, 6 mai 2002, Sciences : histoire orale, https://sho.spip.espci.fr/spip.php?article83.

GEORGE SMITH (GS) : I am NOT, as such involved, but I'm starting to get interested, and this book [referring to Robert Cahn's Coming of Materials Science] has drawn me in very heavily. I've tended to be very skeptical, because of course the people, all the people I work with are really metallurgists, not Materials Scientists. [Richie Glue] knows less quantum mechanics than I do, and that's not saying very much. And you ! I would think of you very much as a metallurgist, trained at MIT. And you became chair of Materials Science ! What's your picture of the change from metallurgy to Materials Science ?

THOMAS EAGAR (TE) : Well, I have baggage, in that as a sophomore I took Cyril Smith's course, and the book The Search For Structure, and all that stuff, right ? If we go back to the beginnings of Materials Science, and... ... this is sort of a Cyril Smith view, it was at the Sorby Centennial Symposium, you may have come across that back in the 1960's. Cyril edited it. When I became a metallurgist, in the early 70's, they talked about metallurgy being structure-properties relationships. And then, Mert Flemings and a few other people kind of felt left out by that, so they started calling it processing-structure-properties, so by the time I was a Senior and a graduate student, it was processing-structure-properties, in about 1970, or actually 1972. Well, in '71 and '72 I served on an undergraduate committee to revise the undergraduate curriculum, I was the token undergraduate. Then they had a committee to revise the graduate curriculum, then I was the token graduate student the next year. That was the Morris Cohen committee. That committee was at the same time that Morris Cohen was coming out with the National Academy of Science report. You know that ?

ARNE HESSENBRUCH (AH) : COSMAT.

TE : Got the whole thing ?... I actually... [Marge Meyer] left me somewhere, the whole thing, I mean there was only one copy, you know this was before they made lots of copies of things. Anyway, I also, in 1973, while he was writing [Cosmat], was TA'ing for Morris Cohen, basically lecturing his course. And then in 1989, when they came out with Fleming's report, the NAS follow-up report, where they had the tetrahedron, processing, structure, properties, and performance, that's kind of where it was, but really, that... and I say "1880," I kind of subscribed to the Cyril Smith view that it was the Sorby's ability to do metallography and look at an internal structure. They always knew, if you go back a thousand years before, people would see crystalline structure on fractures or things like that, and Cyril goes through all that in The Search For Structure, but they really never could begin to explain it until Sorby basically gave them the tool of metallography. Then in the 1920's, x-rays came along. So they had several... they started developing new tools. In fact in 1985, I wrote an article for the Journal of Metals, where I kind of said that Materials Science had matured because it now had a theory, quantum mechanics, to explain what they could measure in characterization, and they could now produce (by things like molecular beam method, things like that) on an atom by atom scale. So Material Scientists have this whole range of structural scales, from atoms on up. Sorby started out by showing them that you can measure structure in the microscope and correlate that with properties. But they didn't have a theory to tie the two together. And they really didn't have very good first principles fabrication schemes to build up if they did have a theory. So anyway, the theory came along, the characterization tools came along from 1880 through, they're still coming along today, but I mean it was first Sorby, and then it was x-rays, and then you have the transmission electron microscope in 1950, and things like that, and they could start to measure things on an atomic scale, and all kinds of other scales in between. But measuring something doesn't allow you to do much with it unless you have a theory to go with it. Well quantum mechanics gave the theory, except the problem was quantum mechanics didn't have the power until the 1980's when the computer allowed them to do something more than a hydrogen molecule. In quantum mechanics, they had the fundamental equations, but they just couldn't solve the complexity of the equations. Now, we actually can design materials on a computer that have never been built before, and predict what the properties are. And now we actually, in the 1970's, 80's, and 90's have developed techniques so that with something complex you can actually build things up atom by atom if you have to. That's not necessarily what you want to do, but you can. So I said, this is the 1985 paper I wrote, I said, "That's what was placing Materials Science in a whole new realm to move forward." Because they had this triad of theory, characterization theory, and fabrication and processing techniques to build what they predicted. And I compared that to Biotechnology in 1985, and said, "It would be wonderful... Well, recombinant DNA gave you two of those : the characterization technique and the building technique." You got both, but you didn't have the theory. And at that time everybody said or people were saying Materials, Biotech, and Information Technology were the waves of the future. This is in 1985, now this is 17 years ago. I said "Well look. Information Technology is growing," (I didn't say too much about that but you could see the growth in 1985) "and Materials" I said, "really was poised, to be able to do some great things." And then, Biotech... and I was in favor of doing the human genome and stuff, although I'm not sure that was even out yet, but I was in favor of that, but I said "Until they develop a theory, they're not gonna be able… just because they have the characterization tools and the assembly tools, unless they know what they want to build, they're still gonna be doing things empirically." And that's a much slower process. And I think that's still true to a certain extent. Now they've got the human genome, and they're starting to develop others, then someone's gonna come along with the theory at some point, and figure out how these genes actually create these proteins and everything else. But they're not there yet, so there's still a lot of empiricism....But my thesis was that once you get past empiricism you have to have a theory to tie everything together. In Materials you have to have characterization, theory and then experimental assembly. Anyway, that was kind of my view of Materials Science. I wrote another paper about two or three years ago, where I said "Ok, lets look back and see if we can see what happened." Everybody has seen the growth of the Information Technology, and everybody still talks about biotechnology and growth. This was three or four years ago. The biotechnology boom hadn't quite taken off, although to a certain extent it has much promise still. But the thing about Materials is I called it, the paper was called "The Quiet Revolution in Materials Science and Engineering," and it's the "quiet revolution" because it has been a cost avoidance rather than a new business. Everybody in 1985 was predicting that Materials Science, Information Technology, and Biotechnology would create new businesses. And in Information Technology, and communications, and biotechnology, they have ! But what are the new businesses in Materials ? The employment is going down in the manufacturing industries. Steel companies have become four or five times more productive in the last 20-25 years. But the growth and the consumption of steel isn't going up, because there's only so much you can "eat." So the problem is there actually has been a revolution in Materials Science and Engineering, because we have this triad of theory, experiment, and stuff. We actually have had tremendous gains in productivity. I mean, the steel industry had doubled the productivity of the rest of American Manufacturing in the 1980's. For a whole decade ! That might be necessity.

GS : By how much did it grow ?

TE : It was like 6-8% a year versus three or four in manufacturing. And one percent, or zero, in the economy as a whole. I mean, you went from something like 6 man hours a ton to 1 man hour a ton to produce steel in a ten year period ! Well that was partly because they cut all the fat, they probably got half of that by cutting the fat, but the rest of it actually came from technology improvements and rethinking the way they did things. Part of that is that "necessity is the mother of invention." They were going to go out of business if they didn't ! Now it turns out they are eventually going to go out of business because we don't have the raw materials advantage that we had in the 1800's. We don't have the labor cost advantage we used to have. So frankly, the heavy metals producing industries, they're not glamorous industries that society wants to keep. They think of them as "dirty" industries they'd rather do offshore. Export your pollution, right ? That's not to say that Materials Science, and you can take steel or you can take silicon, you can take either one, the productivity gains were tremendous. But nobody notices that because people don't purchase a material, you buy a computer. You're buying functionality, you're not buying a material. That was my thesis in 1998 or whenever I wrote that article on "The Quiet Revolution." Which was sort of sequel to my 1985 article, on the idea that you have to have this triad of theory, fabrication, and characterization.

GS : A quick aside first and then I have two lines of questioning.

TE : Well, by the way, I've got a student who has applied for a patent on a, he calls it a "linear metal foam," but basically it's just holes in a substrate. The application is to blow air through this thing for a semiconductor cooling heat sink. Well, what you need now, because this thing is less than a cubic inch to cool the semiconductor, whereas the actual pins inside your computer now are maybe 50 cubic inches. You have a tremendous space advantage, but you need an air compressor ! You only need 30 psi, but we'd like to...

GS : No, we can do that...

TE : We want something...

GS : No, no, but that we can do.

TE : I know.

GS : We are doing things like that.

TE : In fact, I told Chris, he's trying to get venture capital and all this other stuff and start a business, he was actually one of the finalists in the 50K competition, but he finally pulled out, because it looked like he was close to getting real venture capital money. Intel's interested... it's the limiting thing on servers right now !

GS : Ok, let me pursue. These are two totally separate lines. You talk about theory, and I understand the point. Except I'm worried. You're right, but the ability to do computations in quantum mechanics beyond the hydrogen atom took off in the 1980's. But those are still not real computations. They're like the CMD computations. You make extraordinary simplifying assumptions, in order to get any kind of numbers out, and I look at them and I think of them more as engineering tools than physics.

TE : I'm not sure I disagree. I think I will agree with that, however, in some cases they've done very well, and the example I used to use when I was department head was Gerd Ceder who's now a full professor over there. He was an untenured associate when I became department head, and his claim to fame was lithium electrolytes for batteries. People used lithium cobalt and lithium manganese. I don't know what the anion was... maybe it was just lithium cobalt oxide and lithium manganese oxide. Basically, what they did is... Gerd basically developed this model, he was one of the first guys who could do ceramic systems as opposed to metals, where the bonding is non-directional, and everything. Anyway, and people couldn't do the ceramics because the bonding was longer range order, and as you say, they have to really do some very simplifying assumptions, and they can only do their calculations at absolute zero. We can't handle the entropy and so forth. I don't disagree with what you're saying, but what he did in that case is he was able to take out the cobalt and the manganese out of that oxygen lattice, which you can only do on the computer. He showed that the highest voltage you would get is if you completely removed the cobalt and the manganese part of the anion, and you just had lithium and oxygen in that crystal structure. Well that's an impossible thing to make physically, but from that, they basically came up with an alloy, lithium aluminium manganese or something, oxide... I don't remember exactly what it was right now, but the compound, which basically they predicted in the computer, what they need in terms of the interatomic spacing. That was really all it was. You can change the lattice spacing in the computer a lot easier than you can in the lab. Then [Nyet Ming Chang] went off as part of this team and made it. And Don Sadaway and Anne Mayes measured its properties and it was the best of the lithium electrolytes, solid electrolytes, for batteries. That was kind of one of the things that helped Gerd's whole tenure case and promotion case. He was really, so far as I could tell, the first person to predict the properties of a material in the computer before it had ever been made. Everybody else was always, "Ok we made the material, now lets go do our fudge factors and show..."

GS : Yeah, we well realize that what you're doing there is self-fulfilling prophecies.

TE : Yes.

AH : When was this ?

TE : This was about 1995 or so they did this. But it was the first, and you know, I took his tenure case forward, and the letters came through, and he was the first person to ever have, I mean that's what everybody was saying. And now the physicists looked down on him, because the physicists wanted to, they were interested in developing the fanciest new tools. Gerd was someone who basically said "Well what are the tools that are out there ?" He would pull whatever tools off the shelf, from the physicists, that made sense to solve this problem. He was an engineer ! He likes to think of himself as a scientist, but if you really get down to it, he's really an engineer, an engineer uses tools available, and engineer's not out there creating tools. That's the scientist's job. So, the physicists, I had to be very careful when I went out for letters, that I didn't try to get too many physicists who were going to look down and say "He doesn't have a computer program, a code, that he is the father of. Basically, I convinced Bob Brown, who was the engineering school dean, was that Gerd was a star because he could use any tool that was out there. He was intelligent enough to take the tools developed by others and apply them. Yes, they all have approximations, but he was able to put the right couple together, to come up with a prediction, which was a very useful prediction. And by the way, predicted the voltages out of 4.5 volts, predicted them within like a tenth or two-tenths of a volt. That's not too hard to believe that you can do that. All you're doing is changing the lattice spacing between the oxygen atoms. The other thing he did was that everybody really thought it was the lithium that was carrying the charge, and it turns out it was the oxygen vacancies. He kind of, not only did he, you know, predict it in the computer, but he actually, the computer told him what was counterintuitive to everyone else's assumption. Everybody figure, lithium's a wide ion, and it moves through there quickly, but no, it turns out it was the oxygen vacancies that were moving in the opposite direction. That came out, all those predictions, came out of the computer before anyone ever made the material. They made the material in almost the first time they made it, and they confirmed the theory. I'm not sure I can give you another example in the last seven years, that's maybe because I'm not department head anymore, and I'm not following all that, but it is going to come.

GS : Ok, fair enough. You realize the same thing is going on in quantum chemistry and physics. Long thought on the simplifying assumptions...a real interest in it. In the last few years, as computers have become more powerful, and being used to synthesize molecules. Now, let me ask the follow-on question, do you see any sign so far, of feedback from Materials Science Research into physics as such ?

TE : No. Do you think that physicists would even think of talking to a Materials Scientist. I mean, this is the hierarchy of snobbery !

GS : Well, I understand all of that, but remember there was a Scientific American article, roughly a year ago, by a physicist out in the Midwest, I think it was Wisconsin, talking about the design of materials along the lines you're proposing. I found the article to be a sales pitch.

TE : Well, they're worse than that. I don't remember that one, because I probably just looked at it and threw it away, you know, read a few of the figure captions and decided "This guy is a physicist and doesn't know what he's talking about." I remember the one that was in Technology Review, about 4 or 5 years ago, maybe 5 or 6 years ago. They had a little linear induction motor made out of atoms. I forget how, I said this... oh, they called it a planetary gear. It wasn't an induction motor, it was a planetary gear. And they actually had four or five atom molecules that were the gears. They tried to draw these things as if each little atom... this came out of Lawrence Livermore, right ? Some computational... basically it was a mathematician, who would work with some materials scientists, and it was all a big sales pitch. And I said "This is not a planetary gear, this is an interplanetary gear !" And the reason is anyone who has ever worked in Materials, knows that the surface atoms are extremely reactive, and if you put this in an oxygen environment, all these atoms would, you know, would oxidize, and you wouldn't have this structure anymore. The other thing is, there's no lubrication here, the atoms, one on one, actually like to bond. I had three reasons why it was an interplanetary gear : you had to operate it in an ultra-high vacuum, and I don't remember the other two, but it was absurd !

GS : Briefly, the Scientific American article starts an unusual paradox, if you look at boundary constraints, there's so much larger material strength. But this is the paradox, that we now, in quantum mechanics are understanding, in such a way that we can now start constructing better.

TE : Well you know, and I read all this stuff about carbon nanotubes, you know, having calculated the strength of them. We did iron whiskers in the 1950's ! They actually experimentally measured them, and it's not a theory, ok ? And actually, one time in my class, three years ago, I was pointing out surface tension in my welding class, and I was talking about Van der Waals bonding and stuff, and I pointed out that, you know, the strength of an atom-atom interaction is millions of psi, and that should be equivalent to the surface energy created and one student said "How do you do that ?" So I went back to my office, I had an hour after class, and I worked it out ! It's actually just, you integrate F dot dx to get the energy of the Leonard-Jones potential, and you compare that energy, per atom, to the area of surface, of what's the unbonded state. You predict that iron, to pull two iron atoms apart, F dot dx, that energy is equivalent to the surface energy created by iron, 1.5 Joules per square meter. You know, yes, I had to work it out, it took me an hour to work it out, mostly because I had to go back and remember my units conversion, right ? It wasn't a hard calculation. This is a freshman physics type of calculation. But the units conversion got me all screwed up. But it works out. You can prove, all these people are presenting this as if it's a wonderful revelation ! 50 years later ! People worked this out ! I don't know whether it was Cahn, whoever it was, but people worked this stuff out, I don't know, years ago. It's because they don't read the literature, or they need to sell something, to people today and say "I'm new, I'm different, I predicted carbon nanotubes are the strongest things going." You know, I got criticized once, because I said the carbon-carbon bond was the strongest bond. This was in some Technology Review article I wrote. And some chemist spoke to me and said "No, it's the silicon-oxygen bond in silicons." You know, one's like 2.2 eV and the other's like 2.3 ! Or 2.25 or something ! And "Oh ok, so I'm wrong !"

GS : Ok, quick comment and then I want to pursue this one step further. I don't know if you realize that this is something I followed in quantum chemistry. The Jones-Leonard potential has been derived, was derived for the first time successfully in the 1980's. And at that, only for helium.

TE : Oh yeah ?

GS : If you actually tried to do the derivation from first principles, you get totally wrong results. And they got it for helium, it was a huge computational endeavor. The problem is you have to integrate, average, across all possible orientations. So they finally broke it enough to say it actually works for helium.

TE : Because helium's symmetric.

GS : You got it ! Except it's not symmetric in electron orbits, so you have different orientation. Let me ask you a different question. Arne made me look at your curriculum. Which I guess has changed recently, and Suresh has changed it still further, but I'll leave that alone. What I noticed, and he was calling to my attention, is a bunch of solid-state quantum physics courses. Do you presuppose the material in those courses, in your classes, you are very seriously giving them quantum mechanics. Do you expect your students to understand that ?

TE : No. In fact, don't ask me to defend that new curriculum. That new curriculum is heading in the exact opposite direction of where I think the department ought to be heading. That curriculum was put together by some people who have never worked in industry and still think that we're producing PhD's to go on to academic jobs. As 10% of our doctoral students. 85% of our students go into industry. So our department, in their quest in this hierarchy of snobbery, likes to consider themselves, or they are more and more trying to consider themselves research or materials scientists. In materials engineering, there have been relatively few hires. In fact it's getting to the point where it's questionable whether we can even teach heat and fluid flow anymore. We were innovative in 1995 by requiring heat and fluid flow. We were the first Materials Department to even require heat and fluid flow of the undergraduates. But we're about one year away from having no one, except me, teach it, and I'm not going to. But they have not replaced the people, the materials engineers who could do that, and more and more, because all the students want to go into photonics. Which is one of these waves, I mean, this wave may be a fifteen year wave as opposed to a five or ten year wave, like advanced ceramics in the mid-1980's to early 90's. So maybe electronic materials is a longer wave and then biomaterials is coming along as a wave. But there's going to be something else. Whether biomaterials takes it over, you know, takes over electronic materials, but the industry is going to saturate. It's the old story of you know, the functionality... well I say old story ! Christiansen got his claim to fame for the Innovators' Dilemma, that the technology outstrips the need. And people are going to quit buying functionality that they don't need. Do you need a 1.8 GHz computer to do word processing ? Lets face it, most of the PC's in the world are just secretaries typewriters.

GS : Except for the internet.

TE : Except for the internet, yes. But, well, you don't need a, do you need 1.8 GHz for the internet ?

GS : Well they make sure you do by... put more crap on there !

TE : Well given that last mile speed, you don't need that !

GS : You're not really presupposing...well what you probably teach is practical, right ? You're teaching welding among other things.

TE : Well, yes, but I teach it from a completely different point of view, but that's only to graduate students. When I taught undergraduates, I used to teach the sophomores physical chemistry. And that we did expect them to have a good foundation in thermal and physical chemistry. And they were supposed to get it with mechanics in the old curriculum. And they were supposed to get a structural properties course, which unfortunately, we had some of our materials scientists think that teaching space groups was teaching structural properties. Well that was never... I mean I was on the committees ! Both the undergraduate and graduate committees, I was on the committees that formed the curriculum when I was an undergraduate student and when I was a graduate student. I served on the lunch committee and the Cohen committee. The idea is that you would give some student the appreciation for the types of structures over the scales of size. Well, it turns out that of all the people who teach the course for 20 years, we never could get anyone to teach it properly, until finally, Sam Allen and Ned Thomas wrote a book in our curriculum series. Which began to do it, and that's the first book, but it hasn't really taken off because frankly, there's not really any single materials scientist who knows all that material from the get go, from atoms to [Regie Blue], you know, if you talk about size scales, you talking about eight orders of magnitude ! Or seven orders of magnitude.

GS : Now, you're not presupposing...what about evidence ? In his undergraduate and graduate, David Parks tells me that in the graduate program, really does presuppose the quantum mechanics principles - in higher courses. I'm dubious.

TE : When they talk quantum mechanics, they're talking about the concept that electrons can tunnel through an energy barrier.

GS : Let me use mine as a philosopher now, my terminology. I easily see quantum mechanics playing a profound heuristic role and serving as the basis for computation. But that's a little different from the science of quantum mechanics. Actually infusing the discipline. Which is it ? Infusing or is it primarily heuristic and an underpinning concept ?

TE : It's conceptual underpinning. I don't even know if I would give it the glory of being heuristic. As a graduate student, I taught the chemical metallurgy course, which the first half of the course was Tom King, the department head, teaching blast furnaces. And the second half was Keith Johnson teaching quantum mechanics.

GS : (Laughs)

TE : And I said there's never been a broader course taught at any other materials department in the country ! We went from

GS : [To Arne Hessenbruch] You have to see a blast furnace to believe it !

TE : We went from particles in a box to blast furnaces all in one course, and I was the TA for it. Nobody remembers this, this was basically teaching two separate modules. But frankly, [Tom King] was doing the old, traditional "teach them what the practice is out there." And Keith Johnson had been hired, I guess he worked with Slater, but he was a chemical physicist. He was using the x-alpha technique, if you're familiar, this was a way of kind of, when computers weren't as powerful, of just solving a single atom and coming up with symmetric boundary conditions. As far as I understand. Keith never got into something that complex, because that was research, and I remember Tom King once saying that Keith had just come to listen, this was when Keith was coming up for tenure, and he was all excited because he just figured out why permanganate ion was purple. Somehow in the calculations he had found some energy band or spectrum that gave the wavelength of purple. That was about the strength of what you could do, is you could predict that "the sky is blue." Bob Rose used to joke at that time that the computational materials scientists were able to predict that copper melts below ten thousand Kelvin ! That was about the level of their accuracy in 1970 ! Today, it's not really quantum mechanics first principles, but using Thermocalc and things, you can actually predict the melting point of metals, complex alloy systems, 12 component systems, more accurately than you can measure them. You can predict them within ten degrees with a fair amount of reliability. That's not quantum mechanics. That's basically just taking huge databases of thermodynamic data and fitting and finding the best fit.

GS : Which to me is engineering science.

TE : That's engineering science. Yes, it's not basic science. If we go to what people do today, yes, actually, people use the old x-alpha technique as kind of a tool. They don't use it for undergraduates, but they use it for graduate classes now. People are trying to use some of these programs—actually one of these programs came out of the biology field— for first principle calculations. But there was a $50,000 program that Gerd got inexpensively, and he teaches a course on computational techniques in materials science. He's basically teaching them how to use some of the tools that you pull off the shelf. Physicists are developing them.

GS : I may try to take the course.

TE : I don't even know if he's still teaching it, but anyway. Basically, he's just pulling tools off of the shelf and showing them how to use them. It's interesting to me to see the tools the graduate students can pull off the shelf, whether it's Thermocalc or whether it's a first principles type of thing. The first principles things are certainly, as you pointed out, are coming up with very very simplistic models, but that doesn't mean that they're not useful.

GS : Well, let me now summarize. You said one thing earlier that I now want to understand. Mainly, the time is coming, for these calculations to become more and more pervasive. Fair enough. What it sounds to me, is the science side of this is in contrast to the metallurgists I grew up with. Now remember, what I know as an engineer dates starting in the 1950's. These metallurgists literally taught me on the spot. They wouldn't have known about quantum mechanics, or anything !

TE : They didn't even know "particles in a box," right ?

GS : They were in another world. What's happened, is the application of fundamental science to specific problems in the materials realm, there's been a transition from virtually no attention to the possibility of using highly current science in application, to a great emphasis on it. Is that a fair summary ?

TE : I think you're going back a little too much to the physicist, of what the latest thing is. I'll accept there's a ten or fifteen year delay.

GS : Ok. Fair enough. But twentieth century physics, fairly recent physics is being taught.

TE : Oh yes. I mean...

GS : And that's not true to the metallurgists who were coming up in the 1940's.

TE : In 1970, when I was taught, I was taught k-space, and reciprocal space, lattice to understand the band structure of metals. Which really was what Slater and others were doing in the 1930's. Right ? It made it down to the undergraduate curriculum, by 1970.

GS : Ok, that's impressive.

TE : It was just probably in the graduate program in the 1960's, and so the time lag might have been 25 years at that point. I would say the time lag now it ten to fifteen years. But it hasn't shrunk to three or four years or five years,

GS : And it's only when it shrinks down to something like that, that the possibility of feedback into the science starts growing.

TE : That's why the physicists look at what the materials scientists are doing, and they say, "These are not sophisticated models. What Gerd Ceder did is he's using models that are ten years old." Well why is he using models that are ten years old ? Well first of all, it takes about three or four or five years to recognize they exist, and then it takes a few years to learn how to use it, right ? And then by the time you use it, by the time you get a result out, it's ten or twelve years at the earliest ! Plus you have this kind of series of recognizing that technology exists, learning it yourself, and using it and applying it, and you have those three things, and that's going to take 12 years. I remember in 1984, when I worked for the Navy in Tokyo I went to Australia, and I met the guy who was the science master for Australia, and he happened to be a metallurgist. He worked for BHB. We were at a conference together, and he told me that the Australians had just done a study, to find that it took eight years for Australia to recognize—actually Australia was eight years behind in most of their science. Seven years of that was just recognizing that the work had been done somewhere else. It only took them about a year to catch up, once they recognize that the work had existed. But just sifting through the literature and realizing that over here, or at this institute in the Ukraine, or over here in Germany, or over here at Stanford or whatever, someone had come up with something really similar. It took them seven years to recognize these seminal contributions. Lets face it. They don't all come, they come from disparate places at disparate times.

GS : In physics, people are very aware of one another, of what they are trying to do in the backdrop. So there's very quick dissemination. Here it's individuals picking things up sort of in isolation, and playing with them until they become productive enough that it spreads. That's because you're not really doing research in these tools. You're doing research in the application.

TE : Right, and it may explain why [Bob Ranek], who was at NSF for like 30 years, kind of heading up a lot of their materials sciences, and he used to say, "Look. The physicists don't murder each other on proposals like the materials people do." Why ? Because the physicists, as you said, they all kind of know what they other guy is doing, and even if the other guy has a harebrain idea, you're a physicist, your kind of a liberal, and hey, you say "Maybe you'll come up with something." You don't have this arrogance that you know everything. In the materials science field, there's a few people who think they know everything, and no one else has ever learned anything. "Hand me down from on the high," you know ? A transfer of knowledge. It's a very dysfunctional approach to assume that all your colleagues are buffoons. Now it may be true that 98% of them are, but none the less, to assume that all of them are...

GS : Let me put the capstone on this line of discussion, and then start the second line. So if Bob Brown asked you, you wouldn't recommend moving the Materials Science & Engineering Department into the School of Science ?

TE : No.

GS : Is there anybody in your department who would be inclined ?

TE : Oh there are three or four very arrogant people who think that they are great scientists and great physicists, and what they don't realize, and Bob Rose (Bob was my assistant advisor) and I always talked about the fact that they are half solid-state physicists.

GS : What's the size of the department ?

TE : It's about 32 or 33 faculty. How many people did we train in physics ?

GS : PhD, graduate trained ?

TE : No I know. Not that many. Maybe two or three, I'd have to go back.

GS : Chemists ?

TE : Well, chemistry, you know, Gus Whit, who is retiring this year, had a degree in physical chemistry from Indiana. But most of them come out of Materials or Chemical Engineering departments.

AH : Wuensch is crystallography, sort of physics...

TE : Bernie had a joint... who's the great crystallographer in the physics department at MIT... [B.E. Warner]. Bernie did a thesis in our department, but [B.E. Warner] was his thesis advisor. Bernie's the guy who thinks that teaching space groups is teaching structural properties. I had to, as a tenured professor, had to mount a revolt. He was chairman of the undergraduate committee, he was head of the committee that created the curriculum. And I knew that what he was teaching was absolutely worthless to these student engineers. I mean if they were all going to go off and be physicists, it was probably the perfect course, but that's not what they were going to do. I had to lead a revolt. Bernie, who was usually a very kind and gentle person, Don Sadoway remembers it, one time I had finally brought it up again, and the undergraduates backed me up. None of the faculty dared to back me up, because Bernie is one of the most articulate people in the Department, and Bernie, when we had the vote, and the undergraduates on the committee sided with me—and the other faculty actually voted to make it a broader course rather than just space groups— and Bernie just lit into me, in front of the undergraduate students and everybody else. He told me how an ignorant welder couldn't appreciate blahblahblah

GS : [laughs] You're not an "ignorant" welder.
AH : When was this ?

TE : This was like 1978 or so, I was probably still an assistant professor when I had led this revolt.

GS : Tom's never been known not to hold back on a strong view !

TE : Hey, you know, if they didn't want me for a faculty member, they could have denied me tenure, and so what, I've got a life, I could go on somewhere else ! Which is what has bothered them ever since, you know ? Because they know they can't shut me up.

GS : Let me go to the other line. When Mel Bernstein talks about Materials Science (he was really the first person I was around), he taught at Tufts for a while...

TE : Where is he now ?

GS : [?]

TE : Oh.

GS : [Backow]...[?] He had the feeling that [Backow] was not going to listen to him and he wanted out. These are two people he knows pretty well...

TE : And he's absolutely right ! A single conversation with [Larry Backow] will tell you that he doesn't listen to what you're saying.

GS : I know, and that's what happened. A single conversation, in private, and he came out of that office and wanted out. When Mel talks about Materials Science, what he emphasizes, is the generality of materials over the word metals.

TE : Yes ?

GS : And to the extent that he was teaching a cute, a nice undergraduate course on materials, in which he emphasized the substitution of non-metallics for metallics and vice-versa. He went through the history of different bicycle materials.

TE : A typical approach. I've seen it many times, students like it.

GS : It's a good course and I'm very impressed by it. I'm curious about that in some ways, and I'll do it in my polemical way, which is probably surely wrong. As an outsider watching, of course you know I have a very slanted picture of the aircraft engine industry, and in effect applying the knowledge I got here to turbines, but generally, I got the impression that the metallurgists saw various materials coming to the forefront that might potentially replace metals. And they didn't want research on those materials to fall into other departments. They wanted to absorb it, but at the same time, the most widely used material in the world, concrete, they showed no interest in.

TE : Well, I think you're giving too much prescient knowledge to these metallurgists, ok ? I look at it as first of all, when our department was started, it was course 3. There was Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering (course 2 at MIT), and there was Mining Engineering. Now there's not a lot of mining that goes on in New England anymore. There's not a lot that goes on in the United States. But it was in 1888 that they added the title "Mining and Metallurgy." And you have to remember where metallurgy was, you had Bessemer. Who had come along twenty years before, and all of a sudden the steel industry was growing. Andrew Carnegie was the richest man in the world. He was the Bill Gates of today. So why did you go from mining to mining and metallurgy ? Well because metallurgy, the steel industry, was becoming the dominant industry. They were the semiconductor manufacturing industry of the day. And in fact even until 1961, remember when U.S. Steel wanted to raise prices and Kennedy had to stonewall them down, because it was going to cause worldwide inflation. It was like raising the price of oil, before the price of oil became the gold standard of...

During World War II, we bombed out most of the world's steel making capacity, so at the end of World War II, the United States had 75% of the world's stainless steel making capacity. Bethlehem and U.S. Steel had 40% of the world's steel making capacity between the two of them. You developed an arrogance among these businessmen that is unbelievable. From the days of Andrew Carnegie through Charles Schwab, who started Bethlehem, through, who was it Martin ? Well, anyway, the guy that ran Bethlehem through the depression. It turns out that during the depression, the ten most highly paid executives in U.S. industry, six of them were at Bethlehem Steel. And I can't remember the guy who ran Bethlehem Steel at the time. He made a profit when Bethlehem lost money during the depression, because he got paid a bonus as CEO, for every pound poured, every ton poured. It wasn't how much money they (the company) made. When I joined Bethlehem Steel in 1974, they had just had their most profitable year ever, 1973. They had been almost bankrupt in the late 60s, when they built the last integrated steel mill in the world to be built by a company. Every one since has been built by a nation. Bethlehem built Burns Harbor Indiana plant.

GS : You realize I worked on that.

TE : Did you ? Ok. So anyway, you know Burns Harbor, but Bethlehem was close to bankruptcy in the late 60's, but then when Burns Harbor started, it was an efficient mill. I remember in 1975, as a "looper," A "looper" was... Nick Grant had been a "looper" at Bethlehem Steel. They had the "loop" course, and back in the 1930's, late 30's, when Nick Grant went through it, he had been an undergraduate at Carnegie-Mellon before he came back to MIT.

GS : This is a term I don't know.

TE : The "looper ?" They had the Bethlehem Steel loop course, it was very famous. They took all their college graduates, and for one year, they would put them six weeks in the blast furnace, six weeks in accounting, six weeks... you did these six week stints for a whole year, until as a management trainee, you learned the entire loop of the company. You couldn't go through the whole thing, but you went through like eight of these things, eight of these modules. Then you were a "looper." I was hired, I was one of 500 college graduates, hired into the loop course. Well, when I went into the loop course, it was no longer a year's training. I was hired in the research department, and I had been working there for seven months. So when the next summer, they ran it for 2 weeks at corporate headquarters in a great big auditorium. And in the mornings we would have lectures from the vice presidents. Tells you something about 2 weeks worth of vice presidents, about how many vice presidents we had. And in the afternoons we would take tours of the Bethlehem plants to see how steel was made. With our white hard hats to show we were management and such. We would just walk through like a bunch of prima donnas through the steel plant. That was the loop course and how it had changed. But I remember the vice president of finance gets up, and he says "It doesn't cost Bethlehem Steel anything to make steel because our coke ovens were built in 1911 and our blast furnace was built in 1912, and they're fully depreciated." and out of 500 ignorant little people who were supposed to be impressed, and I had the audacity to raise my hand and said, "I don't understand why it doesn't cost any money to make steel just because something's been depreciated." And his answer was, "That's because you don't understand finance." And, you know, that was true. I did not understand finance. But it wasn't until two years later that I took a finance course at Lehigh, that I realized that he didn't understand finance either ! You don't save money by using something that's old and low-productivity just because it depreciated. On the books, on his books he might but in reality, you don't. And that's what killed the American Steel industry. But the point is why did we take metallurgy out ? The department over there has got like 23 endowed chairs. Something like 17 of them come from the steel industry or steel people. Ok ? If you look...

GS : You're even less that extreme at Carnegie-Mellon.

TE : Oh yeah.

AH : "Over there" being the department...

TE : The department, yes. In our department. And one of them is actually a chair of ferrous metallurgy. This is a guy gave four chairs, a Greek steel man, he gave them when I was department head. The first chair, or two chairs, he gave two chairs. He actually gave about 7 chairs to MIT, one in Chemical Engineering, his Master's thesis advisor, and he upgraded a junior chair to a full professor chair. Then he gave four million dollars with which we created two chairs, the [Metoulla ?] and the [Establa Solophotus ?], two chairs he gave for his parents. And he gave those gratis. No strings attached, didn't have do anything. When he came in to form the [Tom King] chair, of course Tom King was his thesis advisor, and the chair in his and his wife's name, and [Vicillian ?], [Venet ?], and [Solophotus ?]. The Tom King chair is a chair of metallurgy. And the [Solophotus] chair is a chair of ferrous metallurgy. I called up Bob Brown, after he came into my office and said he was going to give me three millions bucks, after he had already given us four million bucks, and this was like a year and a half later, and I said, "Bob, can we accept these ?" And Bob said, "Oh sure !" Bob has no compunction whatsoever. He would take it, and what does he care ? Screw him ! Solophotus will either be dead, or if he comes back, he can't get his money back. That's the ethics of Bob Brown. And that's the ethics of MIT, so far as that goes. But that's one of the things, I mean I always tell people that's one of the reasons I stepped down. There's a thousand reasons I stepped down. But that's one of them ! I know, and Vicillian calls me, every time he comes back into the United States, because he realizes that he can trust me, and I say, "Vicillian, you know..." what I did is, I created a good friend of his, [Claude Lupus], Who was an MIT graduate student at the same time. They're both of Greek origin. When Claude's mother was dying in Egypt, and he was living in Australia, he had to fly through Athens to get to Egypt, and he stayed at Vicillian's house. This was back in the 1970's. They're best friends, and I got Claude, well Bob Brown killed it, but Claude was a full professor at Carnegie-Mellon, and went off to Australia and worked with the World Bank and other things. He had a degree from France, it was the equivalent of a doctorate in economics before he came to MIT to get his doctorate in metallurgy. He made full professor at Carnegie-Mellon and went off to become the advisor to the CEO of [A-Max] or whatever, and worked in industry, basically as a consultant for the World Bank type of things, and made mega billion dollar projects around the world for twenty years. He wrote... at the end of that, wrote a textbook that's being used at about half of the materials departments to teach graduate thermodynamics. He also won an award, a practical award from AIME, ok ? He wanted to come back because his kids were going to start college in the United States, and I figured this was the perfect person, sixty years old, twilight of his career, make him a professor at MIT. Bob Brown wouldn't have it. It was basically, you know, give this guy...well anyway, what he did was let me make him a visiting professor for five years. So Claude's treated as a second class citizen, but he has the name [Vicillian Solophotus] on his chair ! And Claude is as much as a physical metallurgist as anyone else. Vicillian is very happy, but what happens when Claude's five years is up ? I don't have to find anybody, I'm no longer part of that ! Well it's not as if Tom Eagar's going to be quiet about the fact that MIT is going to use this to hire some photonics person in the chair of ferrous metallurgy ! Ok ? It's deceitful, it's dishonest, it's unethical, I don't care what you call it, but it's the MIT way of doing business.

GS : Can I read you correctly ? This is still...
AH : Yes, I have it all on tape, but you haven't signed anything yet !

TE : I'll sign it !

GS : So there's not a metallurgy department in a very real sense ?

TE : No, no, no. They have not hired, actually, they did hire one metallurgist, who will show up in the next year, but that's probably the first metallurgical hire in ten years. Mert Flemings actually fought very hard, got a lot of flak from the steel guys, to drop it down to 25% metallurgists. When I was a student it was 70% metallurgists, 25% ceramists, and 5% polymer people. Or polymer "person," I guess. Just one or two ! And they wanted to build up polymers in the 70's and 80's, and then Flemings actually, for all of my problems with Mert Flemings, he actually did a very good job of balancing it so it was 25% electronic materials, 25% ceramics, 25%..., well he never got it down to below about 30% metallurgists, and 20% polymers people. And, well, I mean I completed it. And at some point while I was department head, we were 25% of each. But it never had this thing where the steel guys wanted to bring the other things in—the steel guys wanted to keep the other stuff out ! Why is concrete out ? Because it's a competitor to steel !

GS : I understand. But I gather there's somebody in Civil Engineering taking a Materials Science approach to concrete right now.

TE : Well they have to, because there's more tons of that used than steel. However, they've hired several people in that field, but it's very hard for them to get tenured, because you have people like Bob Brown at the top, who says, "We don't want someone in concrete," just because it's one of the most heavily used materials, and it has the potential to be improved dramatically. Ok ? And the science has been done to show that, now you just need someone to show and prove the processing economics to do that. But Bob Brown wouldn't be interested in that because he gets his Materials Science off of the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

GS : Let me try something. Of course his background is applied mechanics.

TE : Yes, but he considers himself a Materials Scientist, because when he first started Mert Flemings gave him some money, some seed funds out of the Materials Processing Center, to do some problems on silicon crystal growth. So Bob Brown thinks he knows more about Materials Science than I do, ok ? Actually, he thinks I'm a dinosaur in Materials Science. We actually shifted to 15 or 20% metallurgists, and that's mostly just because some of us can't wait until we die. The department now is trying to shift to almost all electronic materials and biotechnology. Which is interesting, because when I started out as department head in 1995, I determined that we wanted a soft-tissue biotechnology...They had an opening, supposedly, for a biomaterials person, but Mert Flemings and everyone else in the department was thinking what I call a "hip corroder." Basically, looking at vitality and how metal implants corrode in the body because that's all they ever knew, from the 1960's on. That was what they thought of biomaterials. I went, and I talked to Doug Lauffenberger, and I realized the type of stuff that Bob Langer's doing, the type of stuff that they're doing in Chemical Engineering on soft-tissue engineering was the real future. And that's where people would be using the principles of polymer science. It took me two years of bringing in candidates for a faculty position in biomaterials before the faculty finally got a vision. We must have brought in a dozen, some of them very senior, and some of them, well most of them junior, candidates. And I was getting faculty coming to me and saying, "What are you bringing this person for ? This is a Chemical Engineer, they don't belong in the Materials Department !" It took me two years, and all of the sudden, after about two years, the faculty had the light hit them. They realized that soft-tissue engineering was what really the future of biomaterials is, and so now, they're running "whole hog" into it. The pendulum swings too far to a certain extent. But none of them, I mean fortunately, you know, the wicked leaders, he who they despise, the good leaders, he who the people revere, and the great leaders, he who the people say, "We did it ourselves !" I actually was the great leader in biomaterials in that department, because nobody in that department would now associate me as the person who forced them into soft-tissue engineering. But I fought them for two, two and a half years !

GS : Ok. I want to continue this line, but I want to do something different. I mean, from my background, when I hear ceramics, when I hear composites, my eyes tend to roll.

TE : Well, same here ! I wrote articles on that !

GS : Well, you know, Rob's article on the heart valve is one I constantly pull out, and tell people these are materials whose time has not yet come.

TE : And will not come.

GS : And will not come for forty years ! Well that's Rob's view. But now, David Parks offered the following description of the change in Materials Science. He said, "The old organization," and he was at Illinois, "Was a group of specialists defined by the Material they worked on."

TE : Yes.

GS : And a curriculum built around the individual. And that's just not true anymore. What you're doing is generalizing across materials constantly.

TE : Yes. That's true, and that came from... it came actually first out of the [Wench] committee. It was led in part in the background by Morris Cohen. If you want to go up to Swampscott, you might want to interview Morris Cohen. Morris, who was a steel man, he was revered by the steel industry, was the guy who led the charge nationally to take it from a metallurgy field to a broader field that covers Materials Science and Engineering, and looked holistically at the structure and properties relationship you had been looking at in steel and copper for all these years. The same things apply to other things. Which is why I laughed at Buckytubes being so strong when we were doing iron whiskers in the 1960's and the 1950's.

GS : I had lunch yesterday with [Dudley Hershey], and he of course, created the technology...

TE : You know these are people reinventing the wheel. Morris actually had the vision, and through COSMAT, he pushed that vision that it really was a holistic field of Materials Science and Engineering. I think, although you'd have to talk to Mert and Morris I think [Herb Polyman] was one of those, where all but everyone hated the man. And I only met him at few times in my life. He was one of the more arrogant people, but he was at MIT,

GS : Yes, I understand.

TE : But not in the Materials Department.

GS : He was incredibly arrogant from everything I hear.

TE : He belonged at Harvard. I mean there was absolutely no question.

GS : See I saw traces of him at GE.

TE : Well, you know what I always say. MIT is the second most arrogant school in Cambridge. You can quote me on that too.

GS : You don't have to be quoted, everybody knows that ! That's simple truth !

TE : So the industry in the 1960's and the 1970's was still feeling they were on top of the world. And I remember when I went to Bethlehem Steel in 1974, as a young employee, they had 25% of the world's steel industry sales, where they had 75%, but the guys that had been hired after World War II were now the managers 25 years later. They still thought in terms of "We control 75% of the world's steel industry." But they only had 25% of it, but they had the arrogance to try to do it. And that was the beginning of the end of the steel industry in the United States. They would not change, they were proud of their 1912 blast furnaces, because that was what made them profitable for all they knew. They were idiots, they were morons, I don't care what everybody else says. They were not looking at new technology. They were living in the past, they were flying, they were taking corporate jets from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, down to Florida on the weekends to play golf. I can give you all kinds of stories. Just total corruption, I mean, well I don't know about "total corruption," but they were not businessmen. They were just people who had worked themselves by the corporate lobotomy to the top of the heap, and now they were taking all the perks they could. And I could tell you, we could spend hours on the perks these guys had. The automotive companies, and Kodak, and all these others never topped the steel company in terms of taking care of their executives. So those steel companies Were very upset for the next 15 or 20 years that MIT and other people were moving to this more holistic view of Materials Science, rather than metallurgy.

GS : I would think they resisted perhaps ?

TE : Oh yes. And I don't think we were the first department to change to "Metallurgy and Materials Science" as the title.

GS : No, you weren't.

TE : Ok. There were one or two others, but it was only because they didn't have as many politics to fight at the other schools that did it. I think you'd probably find that an individual at each one of these schools who was on the COSMAT committee and stuff, and so they did it earlier than we did, but only a few years earlier.

GS : It's interesting to know that the steel people resisted. [Bernstein's] an interesting case, because of course the handbook of steel, he co-edits and co-authors, and he had become just an outspoken proponent of broader materials.

TE : Well, it's a no-brainer ! I look at what the polymer folks are doing today, and I say, "They've discovered alloying." Ok ? What was discovered 150 years ago, they've now discovered !

GS : Well, 1500 !

TE : Well 1500. Well in terms of starting to understand, but yes. We've been doing it for years before, but we didn't really understand what zinc did to copper. But in any case, what it was that it was harder to alloy in polymers. You can't just throw them together, you actually have to synthesize them together as block polymers, but that's nothing more than alloys, the polymer analog to alloying in metals. And now, guess what ? Instead of monolithic silicon, they're going to silicon germanium, and the compound semiconductors and stuff. Well, surprise surprise ! When you marry two materials, you can actually enhance some properties at the expense of some others, which is something people don't always realize. That you don't get your bang for your buck in every area.

GS : There's no free lunch.

TE : There's no free lunch. Anyway, so the metallurgists still dominated the industry. A lot of them were wealthy and gave a lot of money to the department to create chairs, but they have been somewhat chagrined to see that the department shifted. Although in the late 1990's, many of them actually have acknowledged the wisdom of the department for having switched. Because most of the steel guys realize that the steel industry is gone. You have to remember that the steel industry was where our students went ! Where did Tom Eagar go when he graduated ? Bethlehem Steel ! They hired 70% of the graduates, and that's why 70% of the faculty were steel people. Why is the department swinging towards electronic materials and biotechnology ? Because that's where they're hiring students. The problem is the faculty still think that they're producing professors. Not students for industry. And the faculty don't like to think of themselves as engineers. My tenure case, one of the letters, and I know the person who wrote it because I got to read my whole tenure case when I was department head. This is one of my colleagues on the faculty. He described me as a "pure engineer."

GS : I would describe you that way.

TE : Yes. I describe myself as a pure engineer. I am proud to be an engineer. I'm one of the only people I know who is proud, working in academia, who is proud to be an engineer. I've always said that it would be wonderful if more than 20% of the faculty in the School of Engineering at MIT were engineers !

GS : Parks is another one.

TE : Parks is another one. Yes, he's one of the 20%. Now I also say I wouldn't hire more than 20% of my colleagues as a consultant ! Most of them are scientists who wouldn't be able to figure out any complex problem, make a decision on it, in the face of uncertainty, and have a chance of being right. I'm a pure engineer, and so I've accepted the fact that I'm a pure engineer. I'm proud of the fact that, although I don't like to use the proud word for religious reasons, but I actually am "pleased" to describe myself as an engineer. And I've come to realize that I am in a tremendous minority among academics. And it has created, I'm somewhat of an outcast because of that, or looked down upon by these other people. But I realize they're all third rate scientists. The people in the engineering schools who like to parade around pretending they are scientists, if you took them into a physics department, they'd be laughed out of the room, ok ? And anyone who looks at it objectively knows that. But these people, I mean some of them have a tremendous amount of arrogance. They think that they're doing the most wonderful stuff in the world, and all they're doing is second rate engineering. If they would recognize they were engineers, and accept it, and be pleased with the fact that they are engineers, they would do a much better job than they do. But they like to think of themselves...

GS : You're preaching to the choir.

TE : But you understand that this hierarchy goes from the scientists at the top, down towards the lower lever, the engineers. What I learned, in biotech, is that clinicians are beneath the engineers. Ok ? Because they are totally empirical. But there are very valuable clinicians out there. The thing is all these people add value to society, but what irritates me is that they can't respect each others' contributions.

GS : I have one last question, and then I'll be... this is the sort of thing you like. Is to hear this hierarchy. I have a minor question, in a way it's a selfish question. They pay very little attention to the mechanical behavior of metals, thinking of fracture mechanics. Which of course is the one area of your entire field that I know little about.

TE : That's because the scientists, don't even...do you know fracture was left out of the graduate curriculum 20 years ago ? And I brought it up in a faculty meeting and [Reggie] looks at me and says, "Yeah you're right !" I said, "We're not going to teach fatigue or brittle fracture in our graduate curriculum ?" And everybody kind of looks around the room and Reggie looks at me and he says, "Yeah you're right it's not here !" No one in the room had even realized they had left it out.

GS : Of course, you know my view is you learn from failures more than anywhere else in the real world, but you know that.

TE : Yeah, I know that.

GS : Now it's a hybrid field, because it's both Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. Is that right ? Should it be a hybrid field ?

TE : I actually think it's one of the strengths, in fact as a freshman, the way I chose Materials Science and Engineering, first I happened to have 3.091 with [John Wulff], and I had [Jack Hash], who won the Goodwin Medal as the best TA at the institute. And my house tutor was a Materials Scientist. But the real reason I chose it was it was the only department in the school of engineering that had both science and engineering in the name. I didn't know if I wanted to be a scientist or an engineer. I didn't even know what a scientist or an engineer was at the time ! But I knew I wasn't ready to make the choice. And because of a host of reasons, but one was because science and engineering were both in the field. And I actually think that's a strength. I wish the faculty actually recognized where they lie on the spectrum of science and engineering. They are all on one end of the engineering side of that spectrum. What they consider Materials Science, the physicists would consider applications. They don't understand that there is this other half that goes all the way back to the fundamental science. You're talking about feedbacking control, well that's because they don't even recognize that Materials Scientists think that they are fundamental physicists, ok ? And the fundamental physicists look at them as these applied guys, and so there's a total disconnect. There's no feedback at all, and maybe you could speed things up a little in the world if maybe they developed a little respect for each other. But that's the whole respect thing that irritates me so much. These people don't respect other people's contributions. I'm used to people in my department looking at me as the far end, the engineering end of that spectrum. And I don't mind being there, but I have had a lack of respect from my colleagues for the work I do because of that, and I think that John Wulff can go back and point to that, and there's some other faculty who could go back and point that they were on the further engineering side. It doesn't bother me, because I got a better record than any of them. Ok ? So I can kind of thumb my nose at them and say, "Screw you !" But it would be a heck of a lot better if the collegiality were better.

GS : The collegiality is pretty good though. The mechanical behavior of materials with mechanical engineering, and of your people, I hear nothing but respect from [McClintock], Parks, yes, all of those guys.

TE : Subra has his own appointment over there, and he graduated from that department. And I think they...

GS : That's the problem. It's that that department doesn't know very much metallurgy.

TE : You said [Rob Ritchie] ? Yes, he was in that department, and he is very much in my work, he's more of a mechanical engineer. I think they get along. As well as anybody. And they had a certain respect for Reggie. Well, they did.

GS : But [Reggie] had a lot of respect for them.

TE : Reggie had a lot of respect for everybody. Reggie was one of the few people, who, you go around the country, and everybody asks how he's doing, ok ? He's genuinely loved by many many colleagues. I keep trying to get [pointing to Arne] his counterpart who's French, Bernadette, to interview Reggie in French, because I think they would hit it off profoundly. But because he's not a central figure in Materials Science, as you look at the literature, and they don't realize that he's a giant ! In fracture mechanics.

AH : Well, we're not just interested in the central figures.
GS : I understand, but Reggie would be a very interesting person, especially with her interviewing him, with his Parkinson's disease, his English is really difficult.

TE : Reggie bridged Mechanical Behavior and Materials extremely well. And he is a wonderful person, he respects everyone, and therefore had a lot of respect from a lot of people. But within the materials community, he was looked down on for the quality of his work.

GS : That's strange.

TE : Well that's not strange, he's at the engineering end of the spectrum !

GS : I know, but his work is a model of excellence.

TE : Well, still, I could say the same thing about mine compared to any colleague I know in my department, ok ? and I'm not trying to be arrogant here.

GS : Well, I know, I hired you !

TE : You can walk through my office and look at the awards up there ! And that's another thing that maybe we ought to bring up. You mentioned that at other schools there was one or two people. That is the model of Materials Science. Back in the 1940's and 1950's, and I can't go back any further, from what I gather from people, in the 40s, 50s and 60s there were five or six "dons". There was Morris Cohen in physical metallurgy, there was [Norten] in x-rays, there was, it became, Kingery in ceramics, there was [John Chipman] in chemical metallurgy, and there was the other Norten in physics of solids, the two brother Nortens. These people controlled the department. There were five or six fiefdoms in the department. They told the department head who they wanted to hire as junior faculty, they typically would hire two junior faculty to compete with each other, and these guys were basically slaves for the don, and they would cast one aside or both aside when it came to tenure time. [Ken Russell] likes to say that he was the guy who broke the system, because he and [John Breetus] were hired in to work with Morris Cohen and [Ben Averback]. John Breetus was, well, Tom King basically chose Ken Russell over John Breetus, Breetus is now at [Olin], against the wishes of the physical metallurgists. So Ken likes to say he was the guy that broke the system. Why did Tom King do that ? Because he and [John Elliot] were hired in to be John Chipman's gophers back in the fifties. And John Elliot had risen to the top, but this was a case where both of them got tenure, and Tom King actually went on to become department head, and he wanted to break the system. That's the way Ken Russell tells it. Tom Eagar likes to say that he was the first junior faculty member who refused to go on and work as a slave for a senior faculty member. I was offered the opportunity my first year. My first year budget was fifty dollars, and we can go through that, well actually I'll tell you this story, because this is on tape, you might as well hear it.

AH : Exactly !

TE : I was hired in to fill [Bob Moravian's] spot. You know Bob Moravian ?

GS : Yes.

TE : Bob had been told he wouldn't get tenure if he stayed in solidification, the same area as Mert Flemings. I was a graduate student at the time, I was going to borrow a strip chart recorder from him, and I had worked in his lab with Flemings back when I was an undergraduate. I was a graduate, and I needed to borrow a strip chart recorder, and I went to Bob's office, he wasn't there, I walked out and here he is coming up the steps from [Walter Owen's] office on the third floor, we were on the fourth floor. He walks in, and I say, "Hi Bob," and he says "Hi," and he walks in and I follow him into his office, and he's literally picking up books and throwing them across the room ! Bob was never a very calm guy ! And I said, "What's the matter Bob, you look upset ?" And he says, "You're damn right I'm upset, you know what Walter Owen just told me ?" And I said "No, what did he tell you ?" And he said, "He told me that if I stayed in solidification I wouldn't get tenure, but if I switch to some other field like welding, I can get tenure." Because MIT already had Flemings, who was only in his forties, and we didn't want two people in the same field. I said, "Well what are you going to do ?" He says, "I'm not going to switch to welding, I'm going to stay in solidification !" And I said, "Well then you won't get tenure ! Can I borrow your strip chart recorder ?" And two years later, he didn't get tenure, he went to Illinois, and they hired me to fill the slot.

GS : Welding.

TE : No, no. They didn't hire me to do welding, Nick Grant wanted me to do powder metallurgy and become his gopher. Mert Flemings wanted me to run his laboratory in solidification. But I knew that welding was a possibility and they were interested in that, so I basically said I wasn't going to work for anybody, because I had seen what had happened to these people when I was a student. And I didn't work for anybody, and they basically, within the first three months that I was on campus, the department wrote me off. And they gave me a secretary, who was on the fifth floor of building 13, I was on the first floor of building 8, had the little short door (if you know the short door). That was my office. I was sharing it with a graduate student. He got the better chair because he had been there longer, ok ? And had this old desk from the nineteen tens or something. I went to [Joe Docey] and I asked him, "Can I get some decent furniture ?" Because this was graduate student furniture, basically from the graduate student office. In any case, they gave me [Kathy Liden] as a secretary. Kathy Lidenwas a wonderful young women, but she was not too bright. She had been John Elliot's secretary, and he was over in Japan, he called her up long-distance, which back in the seventies was a big deal to call long-distance from Japan, and he says, "Send me this manuscript immediately !" This was before we had word processors or email. So she sends it to him, surface mail ! Kathy, well that was kind of her level of intelligence. And I was behind Ken Russell...

GS : These things don't get...

TE : I was behind Ken Russell and [Joel Clark], I was third in line. Joel Clark was another assistant professor, Ken Russell was a professor. They were over right next to her. This was before word processors, and I would handwrite out something, and she was supposed to type it up. I could write a three line letter and it would take me a week to get it back. Anyway, so Kathy came down one time to give me back one of my short little letters, and she says, "Oh Professor, what account do I charge your stamps to ?" I didn't even have an account, because in the old days, you always went around in one of these fiefdoms of one of these dons and they took care of you. Well I hadn't been willing to go along with this old system, of the fiefdoms so I had nothing. So I went up to Joe Docey, who was the administrative office, and Joe refuse to admit this anymore, and I said, "Joe, I don't even have an account number to pay for my stamps !" And Joe kind of hems and haws and says, "Well Tom, why don't you go ask some of the secretaries and they'll give you some." I'm supposed to go beg, as an assistant professor my job is to beg for stamps from secretaries, alright ? So I immediately go across to Walter Owens office, he's the department head, one of the three times I saw him before tenure. And I said "Walter," I gave each one of them a different problem, "I don't even have an account to pay for my long distance phone calls." And Walter thinks about it and he says, "Well, we'll give you an advance on your [Deserd] liaison program funds." So he's going to give me a loan on what I can earn. That's discretionary folks, ok ? So I went up to Mert Flemings, who was head of the committee that had hired me, Mertie had always liked me as an undergraduate when I worked in his lab, he always thought I was a Senior when I was actually a sophomore. That's what scared me away from working in his lab ! But I used to fix all the equipment, and the graduate students all liked me because they would break the equipment and I would fix it. Anyway, I go up to Mert, he's sitting on a million dollar a year DARPA contract, which was a lot of money back then, and he's got the only chair in the department, the ABEX chair. And I go in, and he'd hired me, he felt some responsibility at that time, and I said, "Mert, I don't even have an account to Xerox my proposals !" And he hems and haws as Mert will often do, and he says, "Well Tom, I'll give you an account number, but let me know if you spend more than fifty dollars." That was my first year budget ! Ok ? As a faculty member. I went back down to my office, that little door, and I sat there at my desk and I looked around at the walls...

GS : You didn't throw books ?

TE : I didn't throw books, I said, "Oh. So that's how it is. It's sink or swim." And I swore to myself, "Ok, it's sink or swim, we'll see whether I can swim or whether I'll sink, but if I do swim, I'm going to make sure that no junior faculty member ever has to go through this again." So anyway, I like to think that I broke the system. And the way I broke the system had nothing to do with me necessarily. In 1980, or 1979, I got my first ONR contract in 1977. My first contract, August 1st 1977. One year to the day that I had actually started on campus. And two years later, [Bruce Batuddle] at ONR, my contract monitor, calls up and says, "What would you do with half a million dollars a year ?" Well, that's a lot of money back then. What was happening is they were starting to get an increase in their ONR funding, but they couldn't hire any new contract monitors, so ONR had decided they were going to pick key areas of interest to ONR, and put a big slug of money in. And the first one they did, they did it with [Newnam] and piezoelectric materials at Penn State in 1978. And the second one, they chose an untenured, assistant professor...

GS : But on a topic of great interest...

TE : But on a topic of tremendous interest and at a university where they would love to see some students coming out in that area. And it turns out I only got $405,000, but nonetheless, all of the sudden, come 1980, I had a DOE basic energy sciences, an NSF, and an ONR, and I had $600,000 a year in research, which was only topped by Harry Gatos and [Kent Bond] in the department. And they both had junior faculty runts working for them, and big organizations and everything. I had more money per individual manager than anybody in the department. Mert Flemings was starting the Materials Processing Center, and he came over and begged me to put my contract through his center. Because that would all of the sudden show his center, he had a $360,000 NASA grant, if he had a $400,000 grant from me, he would all of the sudden have a nearly million dollar center overnight. He was begging me to put...

GS : You see the irony of this, given the questions of the website, is you're talking about a very complex social-political structure in this department. It essentially has nothing to do with the issue of Materials Engineering versus Materials Science. It has to do with the hierarchy of MIT, whether wrong or not. The obvious question is whether this is peculiar to MIT, or is this just a distortion ? Now at this point, I basically have to drop out for two reasons. I've got a board meeting, but has this been useful to you ?
AH : Oh yes, very useful. Very useful.
GS : I apologize for taking...

AH : Are you in a rush ?

TE : I'm going to have to leave in a little bit, I was supposed to be on the 10:45 but it was cancelled this morning, so I'm taking a later one. But, no, we've got a little bit more time actually.

GS : You want to ask the question, I see you've prepared...

TE : He's got characterization in here !

GS : That looks like a damn good book.

TE : It actually does.

AH : There's actually very little characterization in it.

TE : Well it says optical microscope, that's Sorby. He doesn't have x-rays in here, but he does earlier have Braggs...

GS : Yes. [Grines] are featured in chapter 30.

TE : No. R.W. Cahn is one of the great guys in Materials Engineering and so forth. And he's also a colleague of Morris Cohen's.

GS : [To Arne] Have you interviewed Morris Cohen ? [To Tom I want to thank you.
AH : No. This is actually something I'd like to do.

TE : Well you better do it soon ! I don't know really how much of this does go on to other schools. We produce 15 or 20%. Actually we produce 15% of all the doctorates, or we did, in the country, so I would expect that some of this probably gets carried over.

AH : I'm sure it does. That's the way of the world.
GS : Well, MIT... you should understand, I'm on the visiting committee at Caltech, MIT's is very very different from other schools. The department heads have incredible power.
AH : But political structures have an impact wherever they are.

GS : Fair enough. David's the one who made me realize that book existed. You'll see my pad. It has [Jed Buchwald's] name on it.

TE : Ok, well good to see you again.

GS : It's good to see you, and I may get you involved in this [world of steel]. The problem is to figure out why the step is vital.

TE : Oh, ok. [?]

GS : Yeah, but they're doing...getting 40,000 psi...

TE : So what are your questions ?

AH : Well, one of the things that I would like to get at is the impact of the processing on the field as a whole. Because while I tend to get stories coming from the other end saying about the impact of the development of the theories and so on. We've talked a lot now about the institutional inertia perhaps, something like that ? But a lot of the story of the field of materials research is really driven by market, by processing, and is a demand rather than a supply story.

TE : That's definitely true industrially. There's no question about that. In terms of the field being defined among the academics as having processing, as much as he and I don't get along now because of the way he treated me as department head, Mert Flemings really is the guy who has carried the banner. You have to understand, Flemings was not the brightest of students. He was ok, but he started out, and there was a guy named Taylor (I'd say Frederick, but it wasn't Frederick Taylor). Anyway, Professor Taylor in the Materials Department. Flemmings and [Dave Bergoni] ; and Dave Bergoni's and interesting person, you should talk to Dave. You've have probably come across his name. He was President of Case Western Reserve. Actually, his MIT number is [...Eagar writes number down...] (Because Dave is a very thoughtful guy) I'm pretty sure that's it. 4252. Dave and Mert Flemings and another guy Ed Hucky, were three roommates as graduate students. And they all worked for Taylor, who had the foundry. And Taylor had come from industry and had fantastic industrial contacts in the foundry industry. MIT had a foundry, they could melt several tons of steel in their foundry. It was on the top floor of building 35. They had a weld lab at one end, which was [Mel Adams], and they had Taylor's lab at the other end. And Taylor had a consulting business. It was quite a lucrative business, and it turns out that Dave, well they all graduated, and Hucky went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison I think, as a faculty member, Mert went off to ABEX and then came back two years later, working with Taylor. Dave Rigoni went off to, I can't remember where he started out, but he was dean at Dartmouth, he was Provost at Michigan, he was actually the guy who gave Chuck Vest his tenure at Michigan. When Chuck Vest was offered the job at MIT, he called up Dave to find out whether he should take it. I've heard this from both Chuck Vest and Dave. And Dave says, "Well there's two reasons why you might consider it. One, is they don't have a medical school, and two they don't have a football team." Anyway, Dave ended up as President of Case Western Reserve University, and then in his mid-fifties, he actually sort of got kicked out, I don't know the details at Case Western, but he sort of got pushed aside. He came back to his friend Mert, and he got an appointment as a senior lecturer, and he wrote the two undergraduate books in thermodynamics, Dave and I used to teach thermodynamics together to sophomores. And anyway, Dave will know some of these stories and stuff, back from the fifties, and he's a very thoughtful guy. He's not a typical metallurgist, he has been at manager at the universities, and I actually have a lot of respect for Dave. So he would teach his thermo in the morning, and he'd do venture capital in the afternoon. He's now seventy years old, and he still does his venture capital, but he no longer teaches for the last four or five years, but I think he probably still has a phone number here at MIT. You can leave a message and it will actually probably give you his venture capital firm in Wellesley. But Dave's a very interesting guy, but in any case, Flemings, the three of them used to go, these guys used to go out and do the consulting for Taylor's business. ... Mert was brought, Mert was kind of working along the old Taylor-ism stuff, as a young assistant professor working for...Taylor who was one of the dons, one of the bigger dons, but you know Mert was the junior faculty grunt working for him. And when Taylor died, Taylor had done very industrialized, very applied research. The dean at the time, Gordon Brown, a New Zealander, a prim and proper New Zealander supposedly, he was the guy who took MIT into engineering science in the late 50's. Around the time of Sputnik and everything else. And basically, Mert was brought in and told by John Chipman, who was department head, and sort of like Moravian, said, "If you stay in the foundry business, you won't get tenure. You're probably not going to get tenure around here because we don't want this kind of applied engineering science." Mert actually has told me this story, he went home, and he said that night, he was basically told he wasn't going to get tenure because he was in too applied of a field. He's told me the story. He went home and he that night decided to get rid of the huge furnace, you know, and just turn the whole thing into solidification science overnight. Because otherwise he wasn't going to get tenure. So he basically threw out the Taylor empirical stuff, and he rebuilt it, and he really built up the field of solidification science, which is, well he followed along some things that [Guy Rudder] and [Chalmers] Rudder and Chalmers were up in Canada. Anyway, he kind of followed along some of the stuff that they had started, but he really, with the quality of MIT students, really took it off. He did tremendous things for the field. And certainly deserved to get tenure and he did get tenure because he switched to engineering science. But, then you come along with COSMAT, and Morris Cohen pushing that we're going to have Materials Science and Engineering as opposed to just metallurgy. We need to look broadly at the field and all the classes of materials, although concrete was excluded. I never heard anyone bring up concrete and I think they always said, "Well it's a commodity or something." They didn't think of steel as a commodity, but they knew that plastics was a growing business.

AH : Bernie actually had a feasible argument for this kind of thing, he says that if you have something where very little capital and research goes into it, a cheap material, like concrete, than it's not a topic in Materials Research. It has to be...

TE : Well.

AH : An expensive material, one that you sink stuff into in order...

TE : I have a plot that I've used, actually, I stole it from [Jack Westboro]. It's an internal GE report. And it shows this on a log scale. The log of tons used, [drawing] yeah the log of tons versus the log of price. Ok ?

AH : Of any material ?

TE : Structural materials.

AH : Ok.

TE : Structural materials. And you have diamonds over here, at about a million dollars a ton. It might have been $100,000 a ton back then. And you have stone up here, crushed stone, at like ten to the thirteenth tons, I mean something incredible. You have concrete, it's not tons it's pounds. And you have steel. Ok ? Steel is like ten to the eleventh, I think stone is ten to the thirteenth, and concrete's like ten to the twelfth or something. And it goes all the way down here, and you have, you know, there is a wonderful correlation in this very narrow band, I can get this for you if you want, but it if you look at the...

AH : What time is this ?

TE : This is 1962 that he actually did it, and if you look at iso-market size lines, and they look like this, so this is steeper than the isomarket size. Which means that if it's a, if you can drop the price of the material by a factor of 2, you should increase the usage by a factor of four. Ok ? Based on the slope here. Which means that your market doubles. So if you actually, and I've used this argument a number of times, that we really should be pushing for reducing costs and processing of materials, rather than looking at more elaborate materials that are always going to be boutique materials that no one uses much. In any case, getting back to Flemings, and the COSMAT stuff, basically that's when Flemings started politicking with Morris Cohen that he should do processing-structure-properties. Because in the sixties it had always been the structure of properties. And Flemings started saying, because he was in the processing side of the department, he was one of the only guys ! He was the one arguing that we should add fluid flow, he taught a heat and fluid flow course. He is basically trying to carve out a niche for himself in a department that he didn't quite fit in. Ok ? And he did ! Very effectively. And he convinced a bunch of the rest of the people. Now the people in industry loved it, because they knew processing was where they made their money. So you're right about the fact that industry knew it, but if you look at academia, I think I have to give credit to Mert Flemings, for really being the guy who led the country ; you notice in here actually, he's quoted about as many times as anybody.

AH : We could talk about it then in a similar way to the way we talked about physics sort of seeping in with a time delay, that the market is sort of seeping into the academic world with a time delay.

TE : Yes.

AH : Does that make sense ?

TE : Yes. There's, the problem is the time delay, well there is feedback between the two, and it goes both ways. Ideas and knowledge seep into industry with a time delay. And in fact, this idea that the field is broader than just metals is something that came from academia, and has seeped back into industry with a time delay. Industry now accepts it, but in the seventies and eighties, they were fighting it tooth and nail. They were very upset, and threatening on withdrawing their support. It turns out they were going to withdraw their support because the profitability was going down, ok ? But they used it, and they come in and say, "Well we're not going to support you anymore like we used to, because you're not supporting us like you used to." And so in a sense, the whole broadening of the field to look at other materials was kind of a major thing. Another person you might want to talk to is Harry Gatos.

AH : Yes.

TE : You know Harry ?

AH : Yes, well I don't know him but...

Te : But Harry was really the person who brought electronic materials into the department. And he had been an undergraduate in the department, and I think he worked in mining. I don't remember exactly what he worked in as a student. He went out to Lincoln Lab and he became head of the whole solid-state division within a few years. Of course they were growing semiconductors. Harry became "Mr. Gallium Arsenide," you know, before it was popular. And in the mid-sixties, he was offered a full professorship in the department, and he brought a million dollars worth of equipment, which was a lot of equipment, with him from Lincoln Lab. And basically set up his own little fiefdom, he was another fiefdom, all of the sudden we had a new fiefdom in electronic materials they've never had before. And Gus Whit, who could be an interesting person to interview, to show you what they did to junior faculty, I don't know if you're interested in the internal politics. Gus was a physical chemist, he had been hired to work with [Phil DeBruin]. Phil DeBruin was a Dutchman who was a great man at [froth flotation], which is a way of recovering a good part of ores from the ores. DeBruin was kind of the last man standing in mining. And in 1962, they had a vote on whether to continue mining in the department. And with one dissenting vote, John Elliot, the department decided to drop mining. Well Phil DeBruin was still at MIT, and he became head of the graduate committee and graduate admissions and stuff. Gus Whit had been hired originally to come and work for Phil DeBruin. Gus was a surface chemist, a physical chemist from the University of Innsbruck or somewhere in Austria. And when he got here, he went in to meet with Tom King. 1962 was when John Chipman had stepped down, in '65 and Tom King became the department head, and Tom King called Gus in when he first came to MIT, and Gus thought he was coming over to work and be a gopher for Phil DeBruin in mining engineering, and Gus says, "We no longer have mining engineering in the department, we've eliminated it. You should go over and work with Harry Gatos in semiconductors." Ok ? And Gus says, "What do I do ?" Well, he went over and worked with Harry Gatos in semiconductors. And the two of them from the mid-60s through 1990 were the powerhouse, basically, in electronic materials. Until we finally started hiring some more in the eighties, and then the two of them retired. Well Gus is actually just retiring this year, but Gus really hadn't done anything for the last twelve years in terms of real science or research. But anyway, that's how they brought in electronic materials. They imported Harry Gatos. And that was one of the first electronic materials groups in the country.

AH : How do you see the impact of national politics and funding, lets say DARPA, and the NSF grants ?

TE : DARPA was very important in setting up the Materials Science Centers around the country. That was a big move, there's no question about it, in the early 60's, a tremendous boost to the whole field of Materials Science.

AH : Was there a field before that ?

TE : Well actually, it's not clear that there was, I mean you really have to talk to Morris Cohen or some other people of that genre. I was in elementary school, I was in grade school, or high school or something during that period. But certainly, that was one of the things that switched, helped push it from, helped push the academics from thinking of it as always "metallurgy," because certainly the Materials Science centers were not set up just be metallurgy. The military, you know, knew they needed all types of materials and they wanted to support all types of materials. NSF only inherited it because of the...

AH : Mansfield ?

TE : They inherited it because of Mansfield. And they continued to support it although they do a lot of sabre rattling, but it's still kind of a central thing to to the whole thing. So I think DARPA's deciding to fund the material science centers was or it might be that it was the beginning, but I can't tell you though.

AH : Yes. No it was. Then in your time, what's the, has it shifted...

TE : The funding ?

AH : Boundaries around ? Is it ?

TE : Well...

AH : That must've been...

TE : Yes. It has, I mean it used to be. After Sputnik it was mostly government funding. I mean I remember my old thesis advisor Bob Rose had all kinds of money in the sixties. In fact he used to tell us the story, the joke was "While you're up, get me a grant !" All you had to do was kind of... Well actually, to tell you a little more of the story that I had heard, because of the Manhattan Project, in World War II, you had John Chipman working on a lot of the physical chemistry. He was working on trying to create crucibles for uranium and stuff. There was no material, Uranium is too reactive, and so they were working on the physical chemistry of what they could use for crucibles to melt the stuff. And Morris Cohen was working on, well somehow, I don't remember what he was doing. But there were projects going on for the Manhattan Project. And I remember John Wulff telling the story, he was on the outside, he was one of these processing guys that they looked down on. But he knew uranium was very important, but he didn't know exactly why. And he had been studying trace elements in oils around the world. And he dropped in at a cocktail party and said, "You know there's a lot of uranium in the oils in the Balkans," or something like this, and the next morning there were two secret service agents in his office asking him what he knew about uranium. That type of thing. But anyway, what happened is because of their help on the Manhattan Project, Norton in ceramics, Cohen in physical metallurgy, and I think someone else. There were two or three grants that came from the Atomic Energy Commission that basically just funded these guys for the rest of their careers. I mean the Atomic Energy Commission became the Department of Energy and stuff. And it turns out I remember in the early eighties, Kingery and [Kobel] still had Norton's old grant. That was the last one remaining of this kind of gravy train of funding that you get as the equivalent of one and a half million dollars or two million dollars today. They would just get it for just kind of telling people in Washington, "This is how much money we need next year." It was sort of a reward for what they had done on the Manhattan Project. After Sputnik, it got to be very easy for even junior faculty to get funding. I remember when I started on the faculty in 1976, 25% of all NSF grants got funded. And if you were from a place like MIT, you probably had a 50% to 60% chance, probability of getting a grant funded. Today, or in the mid-nineties, it dropped to like 5% of NSF grants are funded. And if you're from MIT, it probably cuts your odds by half, because the other schools out there. What happened is in the seventies, a bunch of other schools found they couldn't compete on quality of proposals, so they started competing in Congress. And then at NSF, they started competing by sending more of their faculty off to be rotaters.

AH : This is in the seventies ?

TE : This is in the seventies and eighties. And a lot of these people basically just had it in for the schools that have been on these gravy trains, ok ? I mean in the late-eighties we lost the National Magnet Lab to Florida, and that was a pure buyout by the state of Florida. Alright ? And MIT was judged to have the best proposal, but the politics at the NSF were such that they decided they couldn't turn down the money from Florida, plus they wanted to send the message to these elite schools, that they weren't going to continue to just get things just because they had better proposals.

AH : I talked to Dale Corson at Cornell, and he spent half of his life in D.C. He said this is the way it always worked, there's no way you can run a department or a school without taking D.C. seriously.

TE : Well, yes and no, I mean that's one way to do it. And in a sense you could say the guys who worked on the Manhattan Project and made their contacts in D.C. were using their "old boy" connections to get their grants. But that's not what happened to me. Ok ? I was hired on as an assistant professor, I was still working at Bethlehem Steel. I talked to some professors on the phone and they said, "Well you ought to go talk to so and so in Washington." And I called up some of these guys. One of them was Bruce MacDonald at ONR. And Bruce actually was willing to let me come down from Pennsylvania to talk to him before I even started at MIT. And he told me what ONR was interested in. Now Bruce happened to be an old MIT grad, he was one of Morris Cohen's students. And he was in charge of the welding program, and he wanted, you know, and I was a welding engineer at Bethlehem, and that's how I got to know Bruce. I then talked to my old house tutor, who actually was a welding, head of the welding group at Union Carbide. They were doing a project on submerged dark welding of titanium, they didn't see a market for it, but they did have some useful results for the Navy, and they were not going to ask for a renewal. So Dave says, "Well why don't you write to the Navy, maybe they're interested in this." And I did, that was my first contract at ONR. I found out what the Navy was interested in by working connections, and that's why it helps to be at an elite school, because you have some of the connections. Bruce MacDonald was an old MIT person, and so he wanted to help if he could, but Bruce is an honest enough guy that if you didn't write a decent enough proposal he wasn't going to help you. But I found that when Dave Hill told me that, you know, the Navy is interested in this, and we're not interested in pursuing it as a company anymore, why don't you write a proposal ? That was my first proposal, and the first one funded, and since then, I did a good job for the Navy, and I'd serve on committees for them, or I'd spend part of my summer working with their engineers, but not politicking. Ok ? I've continued to be funded by ONR, but I have not had to do politicking. I have been continuously funded since 1977, 25 years by ONR, based on the quality of my work. Ok ? Now at NSF, I wrote a proposal to this guy [Bob Ranig] Bob Ranig was a very ecumenical guy, he was from UPenn. I called him up and said I'd like to come and meet with you, because that's what Tom King and Bob Rose and other people, the faculty of MIT said, he was head of materials science then and Bob says, "You don't need to come see me. Just write me a proposal. Tell me what it is you want to do, how you're going to do it, and if you're successful, so what ?" Ok ? That's been the outline of my proposals ever since. Those three things. I had continuous NSF funding until two years ago. I got kicked out for what I consider one of my better proposals because they kicked me over to the engineering side, not the materials side, where they do these panel reviews. And those things are vicious. You have a bunch of people from these other third-rate schools who come in and they don't even know what they're talking about and they say, "Oh this one's from Stanford, this one's from MIT, we're going to kill it because we hate these guys. They always get the money and we don't." Ok ? It's a terrible system, and I lost my NSF because of that, but I had continuous funding from NSF. Now that's partly, not necessarily because of the quality of my work, in terms of NSF peer review, but it was because when Bob Ranig, and when he left, Bruce MacDonald went over there. They knew I did engineering applied work, but did good science behind it, I mean I had good fundamental science behind it. And they liked my type of work. Bob Ranig told me once when I was a young un-tenured professor, I said, "Bob, I understand you had, you wanted, you had a lot of proposals on Fermi surfaces, and that's the type of work you do." And he said, "Tom, last year I had 33 proposals on Fermi surfaces, and I funded one of them. I had one proposal on welding, yours, and I funded it." Ok ? So there were all these materials scientists trying to be pseudo-physicists, and Bob didn't care about that. So it was really Bob Ranig and then Bruce MacDonald who liked the quality of my work. I never even walked through NSF until the early 1990's. I never walked through the door of that building. And so I've had people tell me the same thing you were told at Cornell, and I say, I've said, "Not true." Ok ? The department of energy, I ended up getting in, there was a committee that looked at what materials science the DOE should be funding, and [Kent Mullen] who was a faculty member here, served on that committee, he might have even been chair of it. He was kind of a golden boy that had gotten in with the DOE group from the old AEC stuff. During the Kingery and Kobel ceramics stuff. So he was in tight with those people because of some of the "old boy" connections, and Kent comes back and he tells me, "Oh we said welding was a high priority item. So it'd be good to send the proposal in to DOE basic energy sciences. So I got together with [Joe Sekelly], and we sent one in and we got it funded. Now that was rocky for, well they funded us for six years and then they dropped us the year we won an award for our paper. Which I always thought was sort of interesting. And then a year later, there was another report at DOE, the Packard committee report, which basically says the national labs and the universities should get together and do joint research. [Ken Hansen] in Nuclear Engineering over here was on the board of Idaho National Lab. So they got together and they said, "Oh, well we ought to do some joint MIT/Idaho National lab thing." And they put together this big program. Dave Parks was part of it, and I was part of it, and all of the sudden it turned out to become eventually, for a while, my biggest contract for DOE. That stayed for about ten or twelve years, and finally I got refunded separate of that program, and I'm still funded by that program. I've had a six month hiatus one time, just because of their funding cycle. But I still never have walked into the DOE, Gaithersburg building. Ok ? So you can say this but I mean yeah, I've worked closely with ONR, but they took a plier on me before, I did walk in that building and talk to Bruce MacDonald, because he's willing to take the time to talk to me, but in terms of all this other politicking ? Now since then I now have another DOE contract that came because some guy from the University of Alaska came six or seven years ago and said, "What can MIT do to help the University of Alaska ?" And so we set up this thing, and we actually have been going through Senator Stephens, who's head of the Senate Appropriations Committee and is from Alaska. And we've been able to get some funding, which now is my biggest contract, when it starts up again, and that's pure pork ! Ok ? If you want to call it that.

AH : You can call it whatever you want.

TE : But that basically is pork. It's pork going to the University of Alaska and then they ship some to us. So it's not as if I've never played that game, but I didn't start playing it until like 1996, and I've been here for two decades before I started playing the game. So yes, there are the "old boy" connections in Washington, and those are probably the most common. But is it absolutely necessary ? No. I guarantee that it's not absolutely necessary.

AH : I mean Dale Corson went up to a very senior position within the university administration, probably in that kind of position it's more important.

TE : And frankly, MIT has not been playing that as well as they used to. Our senior guys, well Chuck Vest is down there, but you look at our Provost and other people... Nam Suh is down as Director of Engineering at NSF, but I can't think of anything, and that was more than ten years ago. I can't think of anybody else. We've had Millie Dresselhaus who was number two at the Department of Energy, she was head of the energy sciences, but she only did it for a year. [Ernie Monitz] was down there in physics and energy sciences, but I can't think of anybody else at NSF. And we haven't really done rotations through ONR, other universities have done that, but MIT hasn't, MIT faculty haven't been willing to do that. It's not lucrative enough.

AH : Hasn't there been a shift in funding in some way, government funding ? Has it become more and more private ?

TE : Well, and the reason for that is there used to be a 50% chance of getting an ONR, or NSF contract, if you sent it in from MIT, but now you have a 2% chance. Ok, less than average. So what happens ? You go for industrial funding. Well, there's been more and more industrial funding as industry has dropped off its own in-house labs, so there's been more funding. Actually, I've always said, "Well if industry decides to go fund people, MIT will do just fine, because they're going to look for the best places. And we get the best students." So they're going to come and fund us and we have more industrial funding than anybody else by a factor of two. And that's true. We no longer can get the government funding like we used to, because we don't have the inside tracks, and in fact being from MIT is now more of a detriment than a plus in many cases. Sometimes it's political, but sometimes it is merit based. So there's not...I'm going to have to go here and catch my flight.

AH : How much time do we have left ?

TE : Another 5 minutes.

AH : Let's just make sure I ask this question. You said before that for religious reasons you couldn't use the word proud, were you being flippant or ?

TE : No. I'm actually a Mormon, ok ? I'm a Latter Day Saint. And pride is a sin. Now most Mormons don't do this, but I actually have tried to expunge the word proud from my vocabulary. Now actually when I used it, I used it in terms of other people being proud, but in terms of saying "I'm proud," I actually have done pretty well, I'll now say I'm pleased. I don't say I'm proud of my children, I am pleased that my children have done well or whatever. It's just more of a psychological thing than anything else. But yeah, it actually, it is something I've done. It's not typical Mormonism but it is more of a philosophy that you're not supposed to be proud and arrogant.

AH : The MRS, the Materials Research Society, is a different kettle of fish from the MIT department.

TE : Yeah, but Harry Gatos was the founder.

AH : Harry Gatos was one of the big guys, but in my opinion it would be Rustum Roy...

TE : Well there were a few others but..

AH : Rustum Roy always claims to be the...

TE : There's an arrogant guy. Rusty's fine, but Rusty claims lots of things that aren't necessarily true. Rusty was one of, he got it together, but it was really Harry Gatos', if you just look at what they were doing originally, it was Harry Gatos as the brainchild. He was the loner, he was this electronic materials person among all these other people who didn't even know what electronic materials were. He knew the people at Bell Labs who were decent physicists and stuff, and he decided that he ought to do something. And he got a few people, like Rusty and a few others, but it was the group of them that did it, but the guy who really was the brainchild behind it was Harry.

AH : Were you a member of the MRS when they started ?

TE : No. Because they were a bunch of scientists, physicists, and I'm on the far engineering side of it. I didn't join it for years.

AH : So in the 80s you also didn't join them ? Did you go to their meetings ?

TE : I've never been registered at one of their meetings, I've been to some of them when they're over here. I've been to some of them when I've been asked to talk, but I, usually it's the Boston meeting, and I just kind of slip in without registering, that way I don't have to pay the registration fee. I am a member now, and I think I joined in the late-80s just because they were growing and it was important to kind of read the things, and I edited one of their MRS bulletin things in the early eighties. But it's the same type of thing. I've never been part of the Center for Materials Science and Engineering, I have never put in a proposal to them. Why ? Because I've been able to get plenty of funding on my own, but they gave it out in smaller lumps, and it was just a bigger pain. I mean I can get better funding, and again, I'm on the far engineering side, they were trying to sell to the NSF that they were this wonderful Materials Science group, as half baked physicists, right ? And I didn't fit that model, ok ? Everybody thinks of me as the industrial guy, but it turns out it's sort of funny to me because I've had relatively little industrial funding. Ok ? I've had mostly basic energy sciences, NSF, and ONR. Ok ? And I've always basically had more fundamental science funding than all these other guys who claimed that they were the fundamental scientists.

AH : But from my understanding of the MRS, it is that it's focus is actually much more towards the application end and the engineering side, but certainly...

TE : Well, from a physicist's point of view, that's true. From a materials science view they're into fundamental science.

AH : Is that right ?

TE : Well yeah, they're kind of middle of the spectrum. Ok ? The physicists look at them as more applications oriented, but the materials scientists look at them as, oh, they're more fundamental. Because that's what, I mean there's a lot of support from industry for MRS, but, but even so, I think it depends on whether you're a physicist or whether you're really a materials scientist. You know, the spectrum I talked about before, where you have a physicist here.

AH : Sort of the pure, applied...

TE : Pure applied, and you have engineering all the way over here, well Tom Eagar is over there, but The materials science is right here in the middle. Ok ? The physicists look at materials science's applications. Materials Science and Engineering is really here, and this is Materials Engineering, and this is Materials Science.

AH : So the MRS is not really your place.

TE : No. The MRS is primarily, well, actually, I probably ought to, they're probably more central than Materials Science and Engineering.

AH : I should have asked you before with the Mormon question. Do you have any, do you do your science differently because you're Mormon ?

TE : No.

AH : It has no connection ? Two different worlds.

TE : I think I do it more objectively. Because, well more honestly, and I don't know if that's necessarily because I'm a Mormon, although it doesn't hurt. But I've always had a problem with these people that say, "Oh, well Buckytubes are wonderful." Ok, I've written all kinds of articles about people running off on these bandwagons of materials. Back in the 80's when, again, when people said ceramics were the future of everything, just like George doesn't believe it because of the fracture toughness, I never believed it, and I used to write articles that said this is, you know, that the ceramists don't know what they are talking about. They had never discovered fracture toughness. And that actually happens to deal more with my honesty, ok ? Now, and the other thing I think is I manage my lab quite differently. The reason I've got nine best paper awards, whereas most of my colleagues have zip, ok ? And I have lots of other types of honors and stuff, is not because I get along well with my faculty colleagues. I mean my department head now, Subra Suresh, is a politicker. I mean he's the fellow of this society, a fellow of that society, a fellow of that society. I think he has one best paper award. Ok ? He's actually a very distinguished person and very well thought of, but I have nine best paper awards, and he has one. I'm a honary member or a fellow of two societies, and he's an honorary member of seven or eight ! Ok ? He goes to the meetings and schmoozes. I don't go to any of the meetings and schmooze, because I'm not interested in that. I lead my department, I lead my research group, I don't manage it. And there's a distinct difference, and a lot of that comes from my leadership and management training as a member of the Mormon Church. Ok ? I'm a Bishop for the church right now, as far as that goes, but... I'm here to educate the students to learn to be professionals. SO I have to define a problem, and let them flounder for six months, or sometimes more. And if they flounder completely, I have to be able, you know, in a few weeks, to completely repair the damage and get them a thesis and get them out. Which has occured a couple of times. But in general, I'm there to give them a lot of flexibility. I provide the resources, the research money, and the resources, and I critique what they do, but I actually let them do it. And I actually sometimes, with some people I end up forcing them to work on one of their weaknesses and other people I let them work on their strengths, and it really depends on where I think they're going to grow and develop the most. And I think actually that is part of my religious upbringing. It is that the important thing is developing the person, and I don't really care about the research results. And I've actually, a few say, "Oh well," and then other faculty say "Well I proposed this and then they have a timeline of what they're going to do." And that's what they try to do. Once I get the money, other than the general topic area, I don't care what I do. I let the student go off and do whatever they want. And the thing is, when you have bright students at MIT, that's the way to manage them. You lead them. You don't manage them. And they will produce much better things than I could ever produce. And they have ! And that's why, you know, I have these nine best paper awards. Because they are bright students, and they actually, I've had a number of them come in and they're used to being told what to do. I mean John Elliot used to bring students in once a week and he would go over their lab notebook line by line. He would tell them how to clip the ends of the thermocouples, ok ? If a student doesn't come see me for six months, I might say, you know, ask my secretary to get an appointment, just tell them I want to see them and find out how they're doing. But usually I will walk through the lab or a luncheon seminar or something, and we'll talk. But I'll let them go for six months and I'll never bug them about what they doing. They know what their problem is, I've told them, you know, and they have to get back to me. And at first, some of them figure this out very quickly by talking to their older colleagues. Some of them don't learn it for six months, but after a while, all of the sudden, they learn it, and lo and behold, then they catch fire, because they realize the thesis isn't going to get done if they wait for me to do it. And I've had a number of them, I take them to lunch when they finish their doctorate, and one on one they ask me about things, and I've had a number of them say, "You ought to push the students harder." And I said, "You didn't feel a lot of pressure to finish your thesis ?" And they said, "Oh I felt a lot of pressure." I said, "But it was self-motivated." "Yeah. Because you weren't pushing me." I said, "Yeah, well don't you think you actually felt more pressure than if I had been pushing you ?" "Yeah !" Ok ? "And so you learned to do it yourself, right ?" And that actually comes from my religious background of the progression of the individual is more important than the task.

Fin de l'enregistrement

haut de page

accueil du site

Entretien avec Thomas Eagar, par George Smith (Acting Director of the Dibner Institute) et Arne Hessenbruch, 6 mai 2002

Lieu : Dibner Institute, MIT, USA.

Support : enregistrement sur cassette

Transcription : Arne Hessenbruch

[George Smith (Acting Director of the Dibner Institute)].

Édition en ligne : Sophie Jourdin.

DRESSELHAUS Mildred S., 2001-10-25

Sophie Jourdin — 2011-06-18T22:59:55Z

Mildred Dresselhaus est née en 1930 à Broolkyn, New York. Elle étudie la physique au Cavendish laboratory de l'University of Cambridge en 1951-1952. De retour aux États-Unis, elle obtient en 1953 un Master Degree au Radcliffe college et un PhD en physique à l'Université de Chicago en 1958. Elle se consacre alors à la physique du solide, à la supraconductivité et à la magnéto-optique. Elle intègre ensuite le Lincoln lab du Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT). Avec son mari Gene Dresselhaus, elle oriente alors ses travaux vers l'étude de la structure électronique des semi-métaux – et en particulier du graphite. En 1967, Mildred intègre le département d'Electrical engineering du MIT comme Professeur associé. Elle dirige ensuite le Center for materials science and engineering du MIT. Elle devient Professeur de physique en 1983. En 1985, elle est la première femme à être nommée Institute Professor - le plus haut titre d'un membre de la Faculté du MIT. Mildred Dresselhaus accède ensuite à des postes à haute responsabilité en matière de politique scientifique et de financement de la recherche où elle soutient activement les programmes de recherche en nanotechnologies. Milldred Dresselhaus est particulièrement connue pour son travail sur les propriétés électroniques et photophysiques des allotropes du carbone : le graphite et ses composés d'intercalation, le carbone microporeux, le charbon activé, les fibres de carbone, les aérogels de carbone, les fullerènes, les nanotubes de carbone et les matériaux thermoélectriques de basse dimensionnalité (de zéro- à 2-dimensions). Mildred Dresselhaus a coécrit plusieurs livres sur la science du carbone. Elle a aussi travaillé sur des matériaux autres que carbonés, tels les nanofils de bismuth. Elle a reçu de nombreuses distinctions scientifiques, et a été récompensée à plusieurs reprises pour ses efforts visant à promouvoir la participation accrue des femmes en sciences et en ingénierie. Enfin, "Millie" a encadré plus de 60 PhD, a quatre enfants adultes et plusieurs petits-enfants.

Biographie détaillée

BERNADETTE BENSAUDE-VINCENT (BBV) : How did you make the choice of superconductivity at the University of Chicago in the 1950s ?

MILDRED DRESSELHAUS (MD) : We were encouraged to be independent. Brian Pippard from Cambridge was there for a year and helped define a topic for my thesis. He had been working on Fermi surface of copper. He suggested studying the response of a superconductor in a magnetic field. I made many measurements with various materials in various conditions. And I got unexpected results.

BBV : Was it before the BCS theory ?

MD : Yes it was before the BCS theory and when I published my results Bardeen became interested in them because they could not be explained by their theory. He gave the problem of finding an explanation for it to someone else. I worked with my husband on the model but we did not get a good one. Somebody solved the problem 20 years ago. It was not a consequence of BCS and it was not an important effect for superconductivity.

BBV : What was the situation at the Lincoln Lab when you moved there ?

MD : It was a Defense Lab there was a bunch of interesting projects going on. These were the wonderful years in solid-state physics. Lasers came. I was given so much freedom that I did not have to work on lasers.

BBV : How did you choose your new research topic ?

MD : It was a wonderful career change. I started up magneto-optics. There were new techniques to be learnt, optics in particular. I was working at the High Field Lab, in the basement of Building 4. John Goodenough was my neighbor. I wanted to be independent. Each material has its material science. I decided to work on graphite. There was no competition at that time. The materials science on graphite came from the UK. A highly oriented pyrolytic graphite came from Imperial College in London. The synthesis of diamond had raised interest in the phase diagram. There was an interest in carbon because of its different phases, interesting especially for space programs.
For my experiments I needed a good crystalline structure for the electrons to circle. For the theory problem Joel McClure from Chicago University helped me. A paper was published in the IBM Journal for Research and Development in 1963. Then every year we improved the model. With my second graduate student we turned the established view of the structure of graphite upside down : we put holes were electrons were supposed to be and vice versa. The paper came out in 1968. It turned out to provide the explanation of many effects. It was a real pleasure to hear McClure at the Conference of Low Dimensional Materials in 1970.

ARNE HESSENBRUCH (AH) : Did you have any connections with the Interdisciplinary Laboratory that was set up at MIT in these years ?

MD : I had contacts with A. von Hippel. He was a good friend. The whole idea that Materials Science was interdisciplinary was his idea. He had suggested interdisciplinary laboratories in 1936 and WWII reinforced his view. He started an interdisciplinary laboratory of his own. The Magnet Lab where I was working was separated from von Hippel's. Ben Lax had started a new interdisciplinary lab with Defense money.
I was at home in an Interdisciplinary Lab. My PhD thesis was prepared in an interdisciplinary environment. The Institute of Metals at Chicago University had been sponsored by industry. There were chemists, physicists, all disciplines. The Institute's chair, Cyril S. Smith, advocated interdisciplinarity. He became an historian like his wife in the last 20 years of his life. He did both physics and history.
At MIT, Gordon Brown, the Dean of Engineering, had the idea that engineers should think like physicists. I was asked to teach physics to engineers not in the physics department. This is the MIT tendency to emphasize the practical side rather than the theoretical side.
I had no prejudice for engineers because I needed them for what I was doing. I was affiliated with Electrical Engineering before I got a Chair.

AH : What was the situation when you became Director of the MSE Department in 1977 ?

MD : I was the 3rd director. The Lab was in big trouble because the NSF grant was about to be lost. I tried to keep funding coming in like all directors.

BBV : How did you come to the subject of intercalation compounds ?

MD : I entered the field in 1964. Ted Gaballe of Bell Labs had discovered superconductivity in alkali metal intercalated graphite. How could it be superconducting when none of its constituent were ? He knew my work on the electronic structure of graphite. So he asked me to look at the structure after intercalation. I had no idea of what the experiments should be. In 1971 Moore from Imperial College did the first experiment. So in 1973 I decided to the same with optics.
I wrote a proposal to get funds after some exploratory work. For the first time the proposal was refused. The reason was that my proposal concerned a complicated chemistry that I could not possibly get into : I did not get the money. I received my first grant on intercalation in 1977.

BBV : What was the situation in intercalation compounds when you entered the field ?

MD : There was an important conference in France at [?] near Nice organized by Jack Fischer and Vogo, a company manager who was influential in raising money. In fact the participants did not know each other and they started talking together. This conference had a great scientific impact. I wrote a review article for my students in 1978 that was published in 1981. It turned out to be quoted often, and often because I had few results to report. I pointed out it should go like this and that was the way it did go.

AH : Did you interact with Stan Whittingham ?

MD : Whittingham was there but I had no connection with him

BBV : Did you meet with Jean Rouxel ?

MD : Oh yes, I met him in Nantes two months before his death.

AH : Who were the leaders in intercalation compounds ?

MD : Researchers in few countries are active in this field. The US has been active for a time. France had been active long before the USA and to a certain extent Germany also. Japan entered the field later with batteries but are still there. The first patent was taken in 1972.
We worked on intercalation compounds until 1989. Then I stopped because I did not have ideas big enough. You know the MIT rule : each PhD thesis should be innovative, bring something new.

BBV : Would you say that conferences and review essays were crucial in the emergence of this research field ?

MD : Yes review essays are a pedagogical style useful for shaping fields. I was asked to do the same for fullerenes and later for carbon fibers.

BBV : You've had a number of international collaborations. Did you notice different national styles in the domain of Materials Science and Engineering ?

MD : There are more personal styles than national styles. Science is a universal language.

Fin de l'enregistrement

BERNADETTE BENSAUDE-VINCENT (BBV) : So, we want to focus on certain materials on this site, because we want to discover, especially because it's imploding or exploding and one major problem, we have always put some stuff on on solid state batteries, intercalation compounds that you know very well.

MILDRED DRESSELHAUS (MD) : Yes, I know my contribution to the battery business is much more limited than the big deal of intercalation physics.

BBV : Yes, and also you've been working on superconductivity and especially materials when it was quite unusual and in the 1950s, so if you could just tell us, try to remember, the situation with superconductivity in the late 1950s when you came to Chicago University.

MD : OK so that's where you want to start... well that's kind of the beginning of my foray into materials science. So I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and looking around for research topics because at the University of Chicago at that time the students worked very independently. They found their own topics and figured out how to work them out and they basically did everything, sort of, very much different from today. But I was a special case, so I did it even more independently than others who did it independently. It was a little bit of a sociological thing (I don't know if in the history of science, you like to have a lot of things that we don't report in our regular papers...). I had an advisor that believed that women should not be graduate students, and that it was a big waste of resources to have us, there were very very few of us at that time, about two percent of the graduate student body nationwide - in these fields. So, because I got so much harassment from him, I stayed away from him therefore I worked a lot more independently than I would have, so I didn't have many people to go to to ask questions. He was the only advisor for materials physics or solid state physics. Well I stumbled upon this field partly because of a visit of Brian Pippard who came to the University of Chicago in 1955 for a year to work out the Fermi Surface of Copper, which was a big breakthrough, it was how to do an experiment back then to predict in detail and also measure what was there. So he was there, and he was a big man also with superconductivity at that time, so he interacted with me a lot for the year I was there and we started on this project, he gave me a bunch of ideas, which was very helpful. So it wasn't that I was totally in a vacuum because it started out with an interaction. Then he left, to go back to Cambridge University, and I stayed on and we had intermittent contact by letter, or maybe we had three or four letter exchanges until my thesis was done so it wasn't very much. But for me, I learned, and reading the papers that he and others had written that you could measure something about superconductors by measuring microwave properties. So that's what I learned from him and then formulated a problem to see what a magnetic field does. As you know magnetic fields kills superconductivity at the transition temperature. When you put on a high enough magnetic field, it's the end of the superconducting phase - and it goes normal. So my project was to monitor what happened on the way to ending superconductivity, on the way to the phase transition. And so I measured several materials. My main material was tin because it was a convenient temperature range and you could make the samples pretty easily. But I also studied other samples.... (MD turns off machine). Okay it's off. So I had magnetic field and different superconducting materials with different transition temperatures, and therefore also critical different magnetic fields. I did different orientations of the magnetic field. You know... all the various things you might think of, but I was stuck with one frequency range, because when you build microwave apparatus you're in one frequency range because everything hooks together and this was all homemade equipment because I had no money. But that was the time that you made your own equipment, it was all war surplus stuff that I found in some kind of stock room and throw it away here or there, and most of my equipment was like that, the rest of it I just made in the shop. So I learned how to do that get people in the shop to get me some instructions.

ARNE HESSENBRUCH (AH) : So you did have help on that score at least.

MD : No, I built it myself and designed it, but I had instruction because I never built equipment, I was just a graduate student I never was learning how to do all of this. But people were very helpful, so I got a lot of training like that, but that was the way we did a thesis in that time.

BBV : And did you have any idea of the BCS theory ?

MD : No it wasn't yet, no that came at the very end. So I go along here and I came up with some results that were somewhat counterintuitive. Because I expected that when you go from here to there it would be a continuous thing but instead I'm going toward the normal state before it got to the normal state it got sort of more superconducting, before it went normal. So it was a kind of anomalous effect. I saw it under many conditions and it always would seem to be there. And that was before BCS. I had all these results before BCS and then when BCS came out, BCS had nothing to say about anything anomalous like this. So, Bardeen was actually very interested in my results, because it couldn't be explained by his theory. Bardeen is B of BCS, a Senior person. So he invited me down to University of Illinois to talk to BCS. But I gave a colloqium there as a graduate student - which was pretty amazing - and I just remembered that because I just did a lecture series earlier this week at the University of Illinois, and I could tell them I was there in 1957, giving a lecture, and that I'm still alive and kicking ! They were kind of interested in that. So, well he got interested in my effect and he gave somebody else a project of trying to develop a theory, a detailed theory of application of BCS to microwaves and magnetic fields, et cetera. So it started a research direction for him, and from the experimental side, Pippard was surprised at what I got, so he assigned this project to two other students both of whom became probably people that you're interviewing, became well known in their own right.

AH : This was back in Cambridge then, right ?

MD : Well, it's a little more complicated. One of them was Paul Richards, who was an American who happened to be there, he may be on your list of people that you're interviewing. He was a postdoc, maybe he was a graduate student, I think he was a postdoc at the time, working in the Pippard group. So he did it at one frequency and Brian Josephson was another person probably on your list, he did it at another frequency after Richards. Paul Richards was, after me, he did it at a different frequency. One did lower, one did higher, something like that. They got basically the same results, more or less. Of course, different frequencies, different circumstances. So that was what happened and now their results spilled over into the 1960s, and my papers were published by 1958. They went on for maybe another three years, in different frequency ranges doing complementary experiments. But what happened to me, I didn't stay with this project for very long. I wanted to do more with it and I tried to develop some model with my husband who I got married to in 1958. So we worked on this, I don't know that we really got a good model, we didn't get a model for it, I would say we tried to follow up and improve what we had done.

AH : Sorry, your model, did you incorporate BCS and then try to also explain the effects from your experiment ?

MD : Yeah, what we were trying to do, take into account the details of fields and external fields, and we had RF fields [radio frequency fields] and external fields. We had different directions, RF fields and external fields.

AH : So what was your model ?

MD : I don't remember a whole lot about what we did at that time ! So many years ago ! And part of the reason I don't remember so much about it is that it didn't really have a big impact on anything. And for me, I had to switch fields, because when I got my next first job that was at Lincoln lab, I was told that that wasn't an area to work on because everything was solved. Of course my problem wasn't solved but it turned out that it was actually solved by somebody maybe ten or twenty years later... quite a long time later. And it turned out to be kind of an obscure, not so interesting effect that didn't have that much to do with BCS theory, but had something to do with the intricacies of all of these things interacting and the internal perturbations between them. But it wasn't an important effect as far for electromagnetic theory and it was not an important effect about superconductivity, although a lot of people's attention was attracted and there was some good work that was done, that is, the electrodynamics of BCS was worked out as a result of this. But that stood its test of time when later on high-TC [High-temperature superconductors] came along and gave another push looking at these things. So I moved off into a totally different field.

BBV : Who told you that you had to work on another field ?

AH : Did you choose it yourself ?

BBV : How was the prevision of working on this field formulated ?

MD : Well, you start a job, and you discuss what you're going to do and they were very delighted to have me, to do pretty much anything I wanted. I was working in a Defense lab, you know Lincoln Lab was a Defense lab, and they had a whole bunch of different projects that they had to get done. But they had a few people like me that could do anything they wanted in sort of the basic research area, we don't have jobs like that, so it's hard to explain to somebody what I was doing. But when somebody needed some advice about some solid-state physics topic, that was working on some kind of Defense project, so they would come around and I'd tell them what I knew about it, that was sort of the way that part worked. So I had a lot of freedom, and so, I came around there, I saw what people were working on, and it was just so many exciting things going on. This was really the heyday of solid-state physics. I arrived there in June 1960, these were wonderful years in solid state physics. Lasers came along in 1960, and in fact, most of the people in the division, solid state division, went to work in lasers. But I didn't, I was one of the people that had so much freedom, that I didn't even have to do lasers like when everyone else had to do lasers, was sort of doing what they wanted, but was urged to go into lasers, but I didn't do that. So I started in this magneto-optics business because I thought that this was a really hot topic. And I was right. So I learned totally new technique, I didn't know anything about it, and so it was a lot of new things that I had to learn to do all those experiments.

AH : What's the new technique ?

MD : Well, optics, I had never done optics before, and it was magnetic field research. Well I've done magnetic fields, but that was little tiny fields that I worked with, that I was doing superconductivity work with ; 1000 Gauss was as high as we went. These are little solenoids was all I worked with, and I had a chance to work in that high-field facility. That was just, just beginning to come online. That was a very good research direction, I worked in that field until the Magnet Lab disappeared from MIT, mid-nineties. So I worked in that area for many years, not necessarily on magneto-optics, I worked on a lot of things with applied magnetic fields. So this career change that was imposed on me was wonderful, it was an exciting field. It's good when you're young to work in areas that are new, and maybe superconductivity was not as active at that point. Now when you turn around and look at high-TC superconductivity, we could have discovered it at that time, because I knew about this, and my almost next door neighbor was John Goodenough, who was working on just those materials that were involved in High-TC. Actually we talked to each other but we never worked on any project, because it wasn't, I wasn't supposed to be working with him. No, we didn't have an idea to try his materials, down at low temperatures with the superconductivity, no one had an idea like that.

BBV : How can you explain, because you tried a lot of materials, you were free...?

MD : No, I didn't try a lot of materials, I wasn't doing superconductivity. I made a switch to semiconductor physics basically at that point. So I was doing something different, and he was working with highly correlated materials. But not only studying magnetism, not studying superconductivity, that was.... But very very soon, after I learned of what they were doing I moved, I didn't want to work in the same areas that everybody was working on there was quite a large group, and most of them were doing very similar things. To me, the physics was not different, of course every material has a little different materials science, but there were no really new concepts, not much, it was working out a lot of details for each new material, which I could do. But I decided that I didn't want to do that, so that's how I started into graphite. My first work in graphite was maybe 1961 could have been the end of 1960, but 1961 for sure, and I've been there ever since, as you know. But I got the idea, there were several events - you know you never write about this exactly, so this is history of science - there were several events that happened in 1960 that made this all possible, and for some reason, I happen to know about some of this. In the UK, there was this discovery of how to make HOPG : Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite. To do the experiments that I needed to do with the high magnetic fields we had to have samples that were a little bit bigger than the flakes of graphite that are normally found in nature. So the materials science of this project was worked out in the UK.

AH : What did they come out of ? Was there an industrial interest in this or what ?

MD : Well, different bases of carbon were interesting in 1960 because that's what I was going to mention to you, the year that diamond was artificially synthesized. So there was interest in the phase diagram of carbon diamond, and perhaps the work of Opaloda [?] in making HOPG was related to it.

AH : Do you know what the institutional setting was ?

MD : Yes, certainly, that was Imperial College in England, London, and I had occasion to visit him very very soon thereafter because there was a conference. The conference where the Josephson effect was announced, maybe, could have been that one, or could have been one before that. But I happened to be in the UK, and I dropped in at Imperial College and we met at that very early time, but when we met I already had quite a number of results. So we had something to talk about, because otherwise he wouldn't have been that interested in meeting a young person whom he didn't know anything about. So one thing was the material, and the second thing was there was kind of an interest in the field of carbon. Carbon became interesting when it was understood that were different faces... it wasn't only graphite which people had known well people knew diamonds but they didn't know how to go from one to the other, that wasn't really understood.

BBV : Were they trying to make carbon fibers over there ?

MD : The carbon fiber business came a little later, and my entry into it came later. If you want to go into that, I can, after. But maybe we should talk a little bit how the experiment started because that's never written up any place, so you might find some of that interesting. So all the different carbons that I tried because Raytheon was making carbons for, I don't know, military purposes, and the space program was already starting around that time and carbon was a lightweight material so there was quite a lot of interest. I tried some of their graphites but they didn't work, they just didn't have enough good crystalline quality. To do the experiments that I was after, an electron has to go through a whole cyclotron orbit before being scattered, that was the criteria. So if you have defects, impurities, whatever, that would interfere with that process. So I needed to have a high-quality crystalline material. Maybe a single crystal would be good but it wasn't big enough to get enough signal. I was looking for small defects.

AH : You're doing a magneto-...

MD : Optics, experiment. Well see ! I started out in the beginning doing my first couple of papers were magneto-optics and what other people were doing and that was kind of my learning experience ; and then I took a sidestep and I started another area which people considered too hard so we had virtually no competition because people considered the system too hard. It had a whole bunch of couple bands, four bands, and all people at that time only were thinking about two bands, valence and conduction bands. Anything beyond that was too complicated. So and the experiments could have been tough because it was a materials science problem and all that. But my materials science problem was solved by Opaloda, and there was a fellow at General Electric Laboratory that I found out about in 1960 and he was working in the US with this process of Opaloda. He followed the original work and he made me a sample and the first time we tried it it was beautiful So we were launched. So that might have been the beginning of 1961. We began to get a lot of spectra. Then we tried to figure out what it was that we were seeing. We now had a theory problem. Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly how this happened but when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, one of my colleagues, maybe two years older than me, but somebody I knew pretty well, was Joel McClure. He figures into this picture because somehow I made contact with him because he had moved into this graphite area, he wasn't doing that when he was a graduate student, but he became the person that developed the theory for the energy band structure of graphite. So we made contact and I remember him visiting me maybe the fall of 1962, before my third child was born. We were talking about how to deal with the band structure of graphite, explained all the spectrum, and I really got a lot of seminal ideas from him. My husband Gene understood immediately how to translate what he was doing to the experiments that I was doing. We developed a theory, and for our case adapted what McClure had done and extended it to explain the experiment and it worked very well. And so we were able, for the first time at that time to understand many of the details about the electronic structure of graphite. So that was 1962 or so, and I remember publishing a paper the first time this became kind of known on the outside was I was invited to an IBM conference, I don't know exactly the dates of that, but it must have been either late 1962 or early 1963. And that paper is published in the proceedings of the IBM journal. The IBM journal had a special issue for this particular conference and it was my paper on the Fermi surfaces of graphite. So that was one of the very early papers on Fermi surfaces of graphite, and we learned a lot of things. You know that it wasn't just ellipsoids that had more things associated with it and that was, we really did very detailed things with it. And actually what we did, that was interesting and new, and inspired by the work of McClure, but also kind of different as we had some kind of model that is still used today, basically. But it changed - I'll explain all the changes that happened because that's an interesting story for history of science maybe. So we have electrons in holes in graphite, and they were understood at that time and then I... (see every year, science moved slowly in those days relative to now, and I think we wrote a lot of papers on different aspects of this always getting better). Then some time in the mid-1960s, my very first graduate student, Sam Williamson and we did cyclotron resonance and van der Hofstad-Alfven effect, all of those things explaining about the Fermi surface. So we brought to bear all the different experimental techniques we could think of to look at this, and Sam Williamson went on to a very distinguished career. And he has a similar position to what I have at NYU, Institute Professor is my title here [at MIT]. He has similar position, but that was my first student. But his claim to fame isn't this, although his thesis I think was really very good. But he had an interesting career : he went to Rockwell International, got into semiconductor physics, like many of us did and superconductivity after that, and SQUIDS, magnetometers, came in at that time so he learned that technique and he had the idea just around 1970 of using that technique to look at the human brain. That's how he's known, a big name in brain science, using this technique. Yes, but related to what we were doing back, not so far off from what we were doing together in the late 60s. And with my second student after that we went (maybe he was my third student, but it was in very early times), we had the idea that if we took polarized light, doing the experiment in polarized light rather than circularly polarized light, we would be able to look at specific transitions, linear. Electrons go like this and they have different charge, the electron goes this way, the hole goes that way and they rotate in different ways, so we would be able to separate the transitions, and as soon as we did that everything fell apart because what we thought should have been electrons seemed to be holes, and what was holes seemed to be electrons. So this was pretty crazy ! Basically, the result of doing that polarized experiment, we found that everything that had been done on the electronic structure of graphite up until that point was reversed. That the electrons were holes and holes were electrons. Which was very sensible on the basis of fairly elementary considerations. That's why we thought that we were right. So when I submitted my first paper on this subject to the Physical Review, maybe it was Physical Review Letters, I don't remember exactly, but one of those journal articles, the reviewer was Joe McClure. And he was an obvious reviewer of this kind of paper, because he is a most knowledgeable person. And he revealed his identity ; they're not supposed to do that, but he revealed his identity. And he told me, "You don't want to publish this, people have been doing for the last twenty years all kinds of work with electrons this and holes that and how could you reverse it ? You must have something wrong with your experiment". So we checked and we checked and we checked and we said to him that "we think that we're right and if we're wrong, OK, we'll take our chances". And we went ahead and we published it. And as soon as it came out, the paper came out, we started getting letters and comments from different people. "So this is the explanation of this effect, and this is the explanation of that effect", and they had all these data in their drawers and they wouldn't publish them because they couldn't understand what was going on. A : The Emperor's New Clothes ! And then when we straightened out the electron/holes everything started fitting into place. And I had the real pleasure, so this is 1968 or so when we discovered that effect. In 1972, or maybe it was 1970, they had an international conference on low dimensional materials in Dallas, TX. And Joel McClure gave the invited talk on semimetals, or graphite semimetals, something like that. And he focused the entire talk on turning the electronic structure of graphite upside down bringing everybody's work, well we had done that also, but he did it on this occasion for everybody, and it was a very nice thing. And at that time, I gave the corresponding talk on the group V semimetals business because we had been working on that as well, in those early days, working out the electonic structure, the relation of all the group V semimetals. So that was kind of that early period when I was in magneto-optics. I was already at MIT because I joined the faculty in 1967. So 1968 when we turned the band structure of graphite upside down was my first year on the faculty.

AH : I wanted to ask you about the beginnings of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory at MIT. We actually talked to John Goodenough and I asked him if he had anything to do with it and he said "no, no, no, sitting out there at the Lincoln Lab, there was nothing", and it was almost a hostile atmosphere, they didn't want to have anything to do with him.

MD : Well, I was kind of a part of it. Let me give you a little background. You may have some difficulty but some of the people are still alive. The person who really started all of that was Arthur von Hippel. It's hard to interview him now ; you missed your window with him. He will have his 102nd birthday on the 19th of November [2001]. But he was a big factor in my early life ; he really liked all the things that we were doing. Now, when you're a young faculty member – a young female faculty member - it's maybe not so easy. But to have people who appreciate what you're doing makes things a lot better. So, he was always a good friend. Of course he escaped from the Nazis and all that. He came to the US. He came here, maybe '36 or '37, many years before me, and he started the Interdisciplinary Laboratory, which grew. They worked on many things, properties of dielectrics. See, we had this common background. That's a little bit how we met in the early times. They had ferroelectrics, piezoelectrics, they were growing crystals of all kinds, and phases of ice. There were a lot of books written. He was a big influence on the early solid-state physics. It's too bad because he was coherent until about five years ago, '97 or '96. He knew everything still. He was with it, but now he doesn't even recognize me. I think this is off-base, but there may be some people who know details about the lab. There's John Gelatis who is a microwave person and worked in this laboratory. He is still alive ; he must be in his 80s. He retired a long time ago. He wasn't really a PhD scientist, but he worked in the lab and might be a useful source. He may be able to tell you some other people who may still be alive. Most of the people that I can think of are no longer with us. There's George Pratt, who is faculty still, who came to MIT before I did and had quite a lot of contact with von Hippel, but I don't think he was a member of the lab per se. And he came after the 60s. In 1960, the Interdisciplinary Lab was formed, that I became Director of, but the origin of the lab goes back to the 1936 period and it evolved with von Hippel and he had different groups doing different things. It was his idea.

AH : Here at MIT ? The whole idea that materials science was all fields was his and he was ridiculed and took a lot of flak for that. But when the war came, the lab that he had and the people that he had were very much appreciated. That was the way to solve problems. So he got very heavily involved with war work. And he was anxious to be that because he had had such a bad time in Europe. A lot is written about this, I am sure the history books... You can find out a lot about it.

But you said that when the IDL was set up you were involved.

MD : Well, I wasn't involved. The idea was von Hippel's. I came and started working in the lab in 1960. I was working in the High-field [lab] which wasn't on campus. The High-field lab is not at Lincoln Lab. I was an employee of Lincoln Lab and maybe I analyzed some of my data, did some of the calculations, at the Lincoln Lab, but when I was actually doing the experiments I was here. And it was in the basement of Building 4. That basement of Building 4 is still there. I could show you exactly where that whole thing started. But von Hippel was in a different location : that was the Magnet lab. The Magnet Lab was really separate. The Magnet Lab had people doing all different things, so it was very interdisciplinary in the Magnet Lab. The Magnet Lab had, when I started, maybe a handful of people – we ran our own experiments. In 1962 or maybe 1963, Ben Lax who was my boss got the idea to start something called the national magnet facility and got the funding from the Airforce. They built the building in a bakery over in Albany Street and that became the Magnet lab but the pre-magnet lab, when I worked on it, was in Building 4. When we discovered the magneto-optics of graphite, that was done there, in Building 4.

AH : With all this interdisciplinarity, I presume you felt like a physicist. So, when the IDL was started with the name of Materials Science & Engineering, did you feel that this was a strange concept ?

MD : No. There were two reasons that I was very much at home in it. When I did my PhD-thesis I did it in an interdisciplinary environment. This will sound very strange to you but I got my degree at the University of Chicago. The laboratory where I had my equipment and where I was actually working was called the Institute of Metals. It had physics, chemistry, and metals. It was Cyril Smith, who was boss of the lab. He was the person I knew. It was totally funded by industry. Have you done any work on Cyril Smith ?

AH : No, but we have his books here in the basement – he bequeathed them to the Burndy Library.

BBV : Is he still alive ?

MD : No, no. He died in 1988 or something. He would be a lot older than me.

AH : He has left his papers to MIT.

MD : He had an impact on many things. His wife was an historian and the last 20-30 years of his life he did both history and science. He was a very interdisciplinary guy. He had been in industry and we had an id atmosphere. I didn't have much help doing my thesis but the people that helped me were from different people of all walks of life. I got people who knew how to do machining, vacuum systems, I got chemists. I used all these types of people that I felt comfortable with. So later at the Lincoln Lab we were also solving all kinds of things, and then you need all kinds of people. So I was very comfortable with talking to people, explaining physics principles to them. That was my function. I was brought to MIT as professor to teach physics to engineering students. I had a mentality already. The physicists here didn't want to teach physics to engineering students. They wanted the engineering students to come and take the physics courses exactly as they were doing it. They made no effort to have the physics have any relevance to what they were doing. This was the year of semiconductors and they weren't teaching the physics in any way related to that. When I came Gordon Brown was Dean of Engineering and he had the idea that the engineers missed out on WWII because they didn't know enough physics, and he wanted it changed by having people trained in physics teaching them, in addition to having experience with the engineering side, which I did. That's why I was attractive to them : because I had this dual background and didn't have a prejudice against engineers.

BBV : Did you adapt your physics course to engineers, and how ?

MD : Oh yes, ever since I have been here I have been teaching physics to engineers. I get physics students who come in also. Over the course of the years the physics department's students have moved towards what I was doing, because physics now has a lot of solid-state whereas when I arrived it had nearly none at all. Ben Lax, my boss, was a member of the physics department and he didn't get along very well with the others on the department, so that wasn't a great help in getting this... But he's still alive. You might want to interview him. And he is in order upstairs. He is still working in the lab.

AH : Well, we talked to Sam Schweber, who is also working with us on this project, and he has given me an account of the development of physics at Brandeis from theoretical physics asking philosophical questions towards a physics that can be used, towards engineering.

MD : They have focused a lot on theory at Brandeis, but the MIT experience was somewhat different, because it was favored a lot by WWII. The Radiation Lab, and also the materials group developed. There was a practical side also here. But it was not in the physics department. There was something in the Physics Department, but it wasn't very much. There was John Slater.

AH : Would you tell us something about your time as Director ; if it's not jumping too many years.

MD : Well that's 1977, so it's jumping a lot. I was the 3rd Director and when I took over the Lab was in big trouble ; it was about to lose its NSF funding. I had to keep the money coming in. That's what a Director has to do. The first Director was from Physics, the second was from Materials Science, and I was from Electrical Engineering. I did get a Chair in 1973 which gave me some independence and also some funds to do what I wanted. That's how the intercalation work started.

AH : Shall we drop the IDL and turn to the intercalation story ?

BBV : Yes please.

MD : My first contact in intercalation physics was Ted Gaballe.

AH : We have talked to Stan Whittingham, by the way, so we do have that perspective. I don't know whether that helps you.

MD : There was no contact between us for a long time so we both entered it very much independently I entered the field my first contact with intercalation physics came in 1965 or maybe 1964.

BBV : That early ?

MD : It's not written down, so you wouldn't know. But you could verify it. I got into it through a person called Ted Geballe he is a very well known person in this area. I strongly recommend that you talk to him. He is about 10 years older than I am. Because he really knows a huge amount of the early history. He was involved in many, many things in this field he is retired now but works pretty much every day in the lab. He discovered superconductivity in intercalation compounds when you add potassium in an alkaloid metal to graphite, it becomes an intercalation compound and he found that these materials were superconducting That's 1965 or 1964. I think it's referred to in my list [on the web].

AH : Yes, it is.

MD : Because it was a very important part of my thinking. He knew about my work on the electronic structure of graphite. We hadn't turned it around yet, it was still the old way. But he knew about our magneto-optics work and was sufficiently impressed with that and wanted me to do some kind of experiment that would illuminate what happened to the electronic structure after you made an intercalation compound out of it. Okay ? So that was what he wanted. And he invited me down to Bell Labs and we talked and I listened to what he had to say and I put it somewhere in the back of my mind. I didn't have an idea of what the experiment should be, so I didn't do anything and then in 1970 or 1971, there was a paper by a fellow called Moore (maybe something else) an Englishman, I think also from Imperial College He did the first experiment on the Hausser-Alfven effect in one of the intercalation compounds he showed that you could have cyclotron orbits long enough that you could get magnetic resonance data. When I saw that I knew that if I did an experiment that was similar with what he did with optics it would [?] We tried to make the samples and did the experiment, and I guess our first experiment would have been done about 1973. Because it took me a little while to find out about this paper I didn't see it the day it was published the reason that I mention this Chair is that doing this experiment was that I had this income that I could use for hare-brain experiments and things that maybe you couldn't get funding for. You always try to do an experiment first to make sure that it works before you send off the proposal, because if it's not going to work... I don't want to work there either so you do a little exploratory work - I think everybody does. It's certainly the way we do it. I used a little resources from my Chair to check it out and we got some interesting, encouraging results, so I said well, uh I'll put a student on it to solve it for a season and then of course we had to fund the student with research money so I tried to get money. In my career there have been very few proposals that have not been successful because I am really very modest. I don't ask for money unless I really need it and have a good idea I think that's the reason I have been successful in getting funding but that was one where I was not successful. The comments of the reviewers basically said, that a person with a physics background and my kind of background should not be mucking around with chemistry-related things that were so complicated that we would never understand. So there was a big potential barrier put up by funding agencies. I wasn't able to get anything. And those were the heydays when it was very easy to get money. Maybe I got a tiny little bit of money from the Materials Center, but they said : hush hush, don't tell anybody that you're doing this ! But I believe that as soon we began to get some more results and publications, I think I got my first grant in 77 so it was quite a few years when we were quite unable to get funding. What happened in 1977 was the first conference in intercalation ; the first big conference ever, in southern France, [Lanapour ?]. It's near Nice. Southern Riviera, very nice ! It was a very influential conference it was well attended and had an impact on almost everybody that went there. It revealed what was going on in intercalation physics and chemistry, it was mostly chemistry.

BBV : Who was the organizer ?

MD : Jack Fischer and somebody called Vogel whom you probably don't know he dropped out, he had a company he dropped out of the whole business five years after. He was an influential person in making it all happen maybe not so much for the science.

AH : I am sure Stan Whittingham was there ? You must have met him there ?

MD : Yes well, we could look back and find out. I believe he was there and there were people from all over the place that was the very first time that I met any of these people - total news for me.

AH : Because they were chemists ?

MD : No, almost everybody was new to the field. I'd been there much longer, but nobody knew I was there. Publishing in all these different journals there was no connection and listening to all the things they said ; then I knew what to do. You know, it had a big scientific impact and we came back to MIT and we started working in all the areas. I all of a sudden had a really good picture of what was going on in the field and then my students had a very hard time understanding what was going on in the field and I wrote an article now that article must have started about 1978 or very early 1979 ; I must have been Director of the Materials Center at the time, right ? Because 1977, when I went to Lanapour I must already have been Director because I am just figuring out the dates here - so anyway.

BBV : So you wrote this article.

MD : You know it takes a while to write these articles. Okay, so the article has a lot that should go like this, and it turned out that it should go like this is the way much of this did go. So that article is still referred to now, if somebody wants to look at the article on intercalation compound they often go to that ancient article that was written very early in the time of the field. Because of that, I was asked to do a similar thing for fullerenes, that's my big black book on fullerenes, and that came from Bell Labs researchers who felt that my pedagogic style was useful for researchers. And I guess they said, "I'm an old lady now, it's ok if I spend a few years studying everything that's been done in the field and digesting it and telling students what to do". But I'd done another one on carbon fibers, since you asked about carbon fibers, I did that one many years earlier.

BBV : So you suggest that this kind of review articles take a lot of time.

MD : They take a lot of time.

BBV : They are very useful to shape a discipline.

MD : Yes, and I had the opportunity to shape a few fields in this way. And the first one was the intercalation, you know at the time I was doing it, I of course had no idea that it was going to affect other people, I did it for my own students because they were working across such disparate areas and it was hard for them to figure out what it is that we were really doing. Because there's a lot of interdisciplinary research, and somebody's doing X-rays, someone's doing magnets, and another ones doing optics or infrared. Many many different things, and so they had to learn the field that they were doing, they learned the techniques and so forth, and they had to learn intercalation physics and see how it goes together and how it goes together with all the other guys. So having the review article helped a lot and it helped them in writing chapter one of their thesis too. So I found out how useful that was and that encouraged me to write more things like that later on. We were in intercalation physics until roughly 1990. I did a couple more things later on with with fast optics. We did some kind of elegant work.

BBV : And why did you stop ?

MD : Why did I stop ? Because I got into fullerenes and nanotubes, and their behavior too. It wasn't that ... I didn't have so many ideas, we'd done so many things already, the field had become mature as a result of other people who'd moved in, moved out. But I moved somewhere else and I, everybody's finite, you can't work on everything.

BBV : Do you have students who went, or are working on intercalation compounds because they need the technique ?

MD : No, not really, not really, let me explain about that. Maybe when you interview other people on the project, the ground rules are different. I'm at MIT and the expectation of the graduate student here is that they develop a new field, basically. So when I give a thesis topic, we develop some kind of thesis topic, every thesis I try to make like they're breaking some really new ground. There's a finite number of things that you could do. So maybe one thesis was on the structural properties of intercalation and we got into some interesting things with electron diffraction and we could do the surfaces. And then Raman processes. But after I finished all of those forays, big things, then I moved to something else. Okay ?

BBV : So you moved to fullerenes.

MD : Yeah, well I saw fullerenes as opening up totally new areas so and it's something I could understand in depth because it's only graphite that's rolled up in a scroll, I already knew about that. When I select topics, you know people always ask me, "How do you know what to work on ?" This is graduate students, so I say : you want to work on something new that people don't know much about, and so you take your chances, maybe it will develop into something, maybe it won't. But if it does, then you have a chance at doing something that's really quite new. Otherwise, you're just doing the same thing as somebody else did, and that's not really an MIT PhD. Being a thesis advisor here, I'm a little bit limited, sometimes I have some ideas, oh it'd be nice to do this and this, but that's just an extension of what somebody else did, and that's not appropriate for a PhD thesis. So you asked me about why I got out of intercalation physics. Well I didn't have ideas that were big enough and it's hard to find, when you get to the point where the field is mature, it's hard to find these kinds of good ideas.

BBV : And just one more question about intercalation compounds, did you have contacts with the French people in Nantes, Rouxel...?

MD : Oh yes, oh yes, I did. Yes. And in fact, still. I was with Rouxel two months before he died. We had an interview with the French TV, the two of us together I don't know, we had some kind of interview, it was in Nantes. They had a conference and somehow they sort of took me one day some place, and he was there, I was with him because he had ... Yes, the French, now I see why you're interested in intercalation physics, and chemistry in fact, is not sort of spread around the globe. There are few countries, the US was a player, for a while it was a big player, but only for a short time. France was working on it long before the US, we had one person here that was at Argonne National Lab who passed away, dear heart, I've just forgotten. But he was the big person, he was a giant in the field, but he was working in isolation. He passed away in 1965 approximately. He was originally from Europe, maybe came during World War II, or because of World War II, something like that. The French were very big, and the Germans were somewhat into it, but not as big as the French. And then the Japanese entered later and stayed longer. They're still there. And they were the ones that really started the battery business or aspects of the battery business in a big way. I think they had some of the very early patents on them.

BBV : Yes, on intercalation compounds. The French are not much interested in industrial applications.

MD : Well, yes, that's right, but the Japanese companies have pursued that. It was the first patent, I think in 1972 and well I remember that.

BBV : One question I would like to ask you because you give a lot of collaboration with the Japanese. Carbon fiber.

MD : Yes, oh you want to know that ? Well that happened because of intercalation. In 1980, there were some important collaborations in my career. The first one was not with carbon fibers, it was with Jean Paul [Lycee ?]. And that happened in 1970, we were in Dallas, TX, for this conference that I told you Joe McClure explained about the band structure of graphite and I was explaining about the group five semimetals. Well, they had the conference, it was a very small conference, and that evening, one of the evenings of the conference I went to a concert and I was on a bus going from the conference site to wherever the concert was. And on this bus was Jean Paul Lycee. And I had my badge and he had his badge. We were the only people on the bus with the badges. So I walked over and I introduced myself, I was older than him by a few years. It was okay to approach him I thought, and he of course knew who I was, but didn't know me. That was how we met, and then we started talking about our science. At that time he was working on bismuth, or antimony or something like that, and so I heard what he was doing, and I said, "Oh I know about that, and I know about that" and we started working together and we're still working. I just had something from him yesterday, so we're still working together.

BBV : You have been working together on different topics ?

MD : Oh, we worked on many many topics, we must have a hundred joint papers. But it started on that bus, going to the concert. And that was the beginning of, later on, twenty years later, of low dimensional thermal electricity that came from that meeting because I don't know if that would have happened otherwise. Because we had a dinner party and he invited somebody from France to meet me, and wanted to talk about the, the French navy wanted to know something about thermoelectrics, they had a guy from the ministry that came, and that conversation started the field, so, interesting thing, but I've written that out for the conference proceedings. Did I cover what you wanted on Endo ? Yes, let me tell you about Endo, because he started... 1970 was EC. We met at a conference. And 1980 I met Endo at another conference, and that was the second conference on intercalation physics. The first one was in France in [Lanapour ?], and the second one was in Provincetown, Massachusetts. And he came to that conference, and I was absolutely blown away by his talk on carbon fibers, it was nothing intercalation, well maybe he had intercalated by that time. But what I saw was that he could make these very long thin things and I said that those would be wonderful agents to do transport measurements. I just saw this vision when I heard his talk of all the things that we could do with those samples. And I didn't know that these things existed until that day. And I went up to him and I said, "I just loved your talk. Wonderful ! And we should do an experiment together", I said something like that, and we've been working ever since. So we have many papers too. Yes, but my collaboration with the Japanese is much older than Endo. Endo was not my first Japanese collaborator. But he's my first sort of applied. He's in applied areas, the other people that I worked with before are in more fundamental physics areas.

BBV : And when you have collaborated with Belgians and Japanese, would you say that you noticed different national styles in the field of intercalation ?

MD : Well, yes, there's national styles but there's personal styles too. Yes, not every Japanese is like every other Japanese and not every Frenchman… and Jean Paul Lycee is originally from Alexandria. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, so I'm not sure he's exactly a typical Belgian either. So maybe he is, maybe he isn't.

BBV : It's much more personal ?

MD : Well, you know science is a universal language, so we can relate to everybody doing our science ; it breaks down all barriers. When I was doing something, I was president of AAAS and I was advocating with Madeline Albright the importance of the state department, this is the US state department, it should have scientific attaches at as many embassies as possible, because that was a ground where Americans at least would be respected and could talk to people. Rather than being hated and staking the battle on military operations. Think about things we could do together, we could, amount this crazy war on terrorism but maybe if we had a way to work with the populations that are disadvantaged, all the money that's spent on the bombs were spent on food, and improving people's living standards, maybe we would be much better off in the end.

BBV : So you still think that science wins peace among the people.

MD : Well it also brings war, all these tools for more destruction than ever before. So it's kind of a double, science has to be used in the right way too. Well I think we're all getting tired, and we have other things to do, maybe we could get together another time after you get a chance to look at what you have, and what you still need.

BBV : Yes, you can go and have a look on the site.

MD : Here ? Oh I used to be an advisor, I was on the board here in the institute for two full terms. I was here doing my thing until I started working for the US government, you know I was working for the Department of Energy. So I had to relinquish everything I was doing in the private sector.

AH : Why did you participate here [at the Dibner Institute] ? Why are you interested in history of science ?

MD : Well I was always interested in the History of Science and well I knew so many of these people, I was a student of Fermi, I just gave a talk for Fermi, on being a teacher and well so I gave the talk and I thought I had such interesting material it wasn't scholarly in the sense that I did a lot of research about Fermi but I just told stories that I knew. And I thought maybe someone would invite me to write an article on it because I thought it was, maybe, a little bit unique perspective, I just gave my talk, if people liked it, maybe they would record it, and that's it.

AH : So why don't you write it ?

MD : Well I don't have enough time. I always do things when I'm invited. You know how it is, we're pretty busy individuals. Well I have been interested in science and I've known just, you know when I started science was so small, everybody knew everybody. I'm talking about my student years, it was just handfuls of people. This wasn't like today, two orders or magnitude smaller. So many of the people that you're interested in, I knew them. Maybe most of them. In one way or another, our paths crossed. Even if we didn't write papers together, maybe we had some influence. But you know when I, I didn't realize it was Dibner, nobody tells me E56, they say Dibner Institute, I say, Oh okay I know that place. I've been here many times.

BBV : Do you think that you could help us to make contact with the Japanese materials scientists because we would like to have a case study of the US, and a case study on France.

MD : Are you willing to go over there ?

BBV : Yes we would go to interview people in Japan. For that we would need introductions. So if you could be kind enough to give us a number of names and contacts it would be really helpful for us, because it's very difficult, we cannot just come and say.

AH : Japan requires special entry.

MD : Okay, I'm very well known in Japan.

BBV : Especially in carbon fiber, because it is the topic we would like to investigate and you know everybody in the field.

MD : I do, well I don't, I wouldn't say I know everybody : I know a lot of people. I think that the book I wrote maybe was helpful. That book is out of print now, they want me to do a second edition. No time. But I'll do it, I'll do it. Carbon nanotubes are so exciting now that I'm- I don't have the time to write a book like the one I did the first time. It needs to go back in the literature for twenty years, I haven't been involved in everybody's doing, just what I'm interested in. Write a book it's a little different, you have to do the scholarly stuff. When nanotubes subside a little bit maybe it's a good time for me, basically if anybody's still interested. Well I'd be happy, what's your time scale ?

BBV : I'm leaving on Sunday but Arne is still here.

AH : To go to Japan, we were thinking the first half of 2002.

BBV : Sometime in there.

MD : Well, I'll get Endo, I'm going to see him in two week, I'm going to his lab he runs me ragged, he brings me to lecture in two different places in one day and that's my regular schedule there, it's kind of unbelievable because it's long distances and running around, very tiring, and you can't and every lecture is on a different subject of course.

BBV : But you can write on the train.

MD : (laughter)

AH : Well thank you very much !

BBV : It was really very rich for us.

MD : I'm not exactly sure what you're after so you'll have to sort of tell us a little bit.

Fin de l'enregistrement

Pour citer l'entretien :

« Entretien avec Mildred Dresselhaus », par Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent et Arne Hessenbruch, 25 octobre 2001, Sciences : histoire orale, /spip.php ?article82.

Pour citer l'entretien :

« Entretien avec Mildred Dresselhaus », par Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent et Arne Hessenbruch, 25 octobre 2001, Sciences : histoire orale, https://sho.spip.espci.fr/spip.php?article82.

Lieu : Dibner Institute, MIT, USA.

Support : enregistrement sur cassette.

Transcription : Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Helena Fu, Arne Hessenbruch.

Édition en ligne : Sophie Jourdin, Sacha Loeve.

ENDO Morinobu, 2002-08-26

Sacha Loeve — 2011-06-07T20:19:40Z

Morinobu Endo, né en 1946, est Professeur à la Faculté d'Ingénierie de l'Université de Shinshu à Nagano (Japon). Après un Master's degree à l'Université de Shinshu, et une Thèse en ingénierie à l'Université de Nagoya, il intègre l'université de Shinshu comme chercheur, Professeur associé puis Professeur en 1990. Il y fonde un laboratoire au sein du Department of electrical and electronic engineering. Ses recherches sont dédiées au carbone sous ses diverses formes ; elles vont du fondamental (propriétés physico-chimiques du carbone dans ses multiples formes allotropiques : graphite, nanotubes, carbone nanoporeux) à l'appliqué (fibres de carbone, composés d'insertion au graphite pour batteries et condensateurs). Morinobu Endo est notamment un pionnier des nanotubes de carbone (caractérisés en 1974 lors d'un travail effectué en collaboration avec Agnès Oberlin en France à la Faculté des sciences de l'Université d'Orléans). Ainsi en 1991, date généralement retenue pour la découverte des NTCs par Sumio Iijima, Morinobu Endo avait déjà développé et breveté un processus de fabrication donnant lieu à des usages industriels des NTCs comme composés d'insertion dans des accumulateurs lithium-ion (batteries d'usage courant pour l'électronique portable). Morinobu Endo a co-dirigé des initiatives pour la coopération université/industrie au sein de la Japan society for the promotion of science (JSPS). Depuis 2004, il préside la TANSO (Japan society of carbon). Membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Carbon, il est auteur d'une trentaine de livres sur la science du carbone et de plus de deux cent articles. Ses recherches lui ont valu de nombreuses distinctions : Carbon society of Japan Award, (1995) ; Charles E. Pettinos Award (American carbon society, 2001) ; Lee Hsun lecture series Award (Institute of metal research of China, 2002) ; ShinMai Award (Shinmai Bunka foundation, Japon, 2003) ; Ishikawa Award (Ishikawa carbon science and technology promotion foundation, 2003) ; Medal of achievement in carbon science and technology pour la découverte et la synthèse des nanotubes en 1974 (American carbon society, 2004) ; The Minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology prize for contribution to intellectual Cluster (Japon, 2005) ; Honorary citizen of Suzaka-city (2006) ; Small Times magazine best of small tech lifetime achievement Award (2006) ; JPA lectureship Award (2007).

BERNADETTE BENSAUDE-VINCENT (BBV) : In which discipline did you take your degree, and your PhD ?

MORINOBU ENDO (ME) : I started 30 years ago. I graduated from Shinshu University in 1971. Then took a Master in Electronics. I spent one year in a company, Statch. Then I came in this university in 1972 as a Research Associate.

BBV : So you spent your entire career in this University. How and when did you come into carbon science ?

ME : I became interested in carbon as a research assistant. At that time, carbon was considered as a dirty, dusty science, in comparison with the more attractive semiconductor science. But I found it promising.

BBV : Were there people already working on carbon here in the early 1970s ?

ME : Yes my professor Tsumeo Koyama was working on carbon. He was aged already but he asked me to incorporate here.

BBV : Why did you find carbon so promising ?

ME : I read a few pioneering papers by S. Mrozowski and by M. S. Dresselhaus. This encouraged me. At that time, there was an activity in carbon fibers based on Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) for aerospace industry. Industrial companies were most active in this field, especially Toray. There was a concern for new methods for preparing this promising material because PAN-based fibers were high-cost fibers. Professor Koyama asked me to prepare carbon fiber from vapor. This is a carbon fiber directly grown from the decomposition of hydrocarbons such as benzene. Vapor Grown Carbon Fibers (VGCFs) were totally different from the commercial PAN fibers. PAN Fibers are continuous while VGCFs are shorter. They have a unique structure. In the early 1970s I was able to prepare the fiber without understanding the mechanism at work, or what elements were essential.

BBV : So you had the technique but no knowledge of its structure and properties.

ME : Fortunately I had a chance to work in France with Madame Agnès Oberlin at the CNRS in Orléans.

BBV : How did you come in contact with her ?

ME : When I was a Research Associate in this university, I wrote a paper in Japanese showing that very beautiful carbon fibers can be grown by gas pyrolysis. A nice Japanese professor who was a good friend of hers, introduced my work to her. He invited her in Japan as a visiting professor and she asked to meet with me. I traveled to France with my fiber in 1974 and I worked in her laboratory for one year. In Orléans they had an electron microscope in 1973. I found that there were small opaque particles at the tip of the fibre (figure 1). In order to use the electron microscope it was necessary to use very thin fibers. For that it was convenient to stop the growth process at an early stage. I thus found that the fiber had an hollow core and later in the growth process the diameter of the fiber increased. Here on this picture you can see the particle. I found with Agnès Oberlin that this particle was iron. This result was published in France in 1976 in a paper entitled “Filamentous Growth of Carbon Through Benzene Compounds” (Journal of Crystal Growth 32 (1976) 335). In this paper we argued that VGCF had a “hollow core” which is the strongest part of the fiber. It never breaks when the fiber breaks. Sometimes you have cross-linkings of the fibers. Here just at the center of the fiber you can see the single wall nanotube (figure 2).

Figure 1. “Hollow core” in a vapor grown carbon fiber, 1976

Courtesy of Morinobu Endo.

Figure 2. Cross-linked single-wall nanotubes, 1976

Courtesy of Morinobu Endo.

BBV : Nanotubes ? You did not name it as such in 1976 ?

ME : We called it “hollow core” or “central tube”. Here you can see the fine particles at the tip (figure 3). By using bright- and dark-field image I found that they were Fe3C. This is the chemical product after cooling. At the end of the growth the particles should be iron. I suggested a growth model : the fiber first forms over this fine particles of iron then grow in the radial directions.

Figure 3. “Central tube” in the core of a vapor grown carbon fiber, 1976

According to Dr. Endo, this “central tube” is a double-layered carbon nanotube. Courtesy of Morinobu Endo.

BBV : Where this iron came from ?

ME : We were able to understand where it came from. We used a special sand-paper as a substrate. Without this sand-paper, no fiber. With this sand-paper that we used in France, we got beautiful fibers. We analyzed the electron barriers and we found that it was Fe2O3. Iron oxide coming from the sand-paper proved to be very important as a catalyst to generate the carbon fiber.

BBV : So you understood the mechanism when you came back to Japan ?

ME : I came back in 1975. I clearly described how the fiber grows, including the seeding methods, in a paper published in 1988, “Grow Carbon Fibers in the Vapor Phase” (American Chemical Society - ChemTech 18 (1988) 568-576). In a way this fiber grows in two steps : 1) this very thin fiber, the hollow core ; 2) the secondary process is the thickening of the fiber.

BBV : Do you mean that it took you about 10 years to understand the process ?

ME : No in 1988 it was already established. It is a review paper. So we put the small particle on a substrate (we used a ferrocene). Then we can grow that fiber as you can see on the screen (figure 4). As a result we got this very nice fiber. From an academic point of view, it was a full success because I was able to grow the fiber, to reproduce the product (there were many observations of such fibers but nobody could reproduce them). I clarified the growth mechanism – that the small iron particle acted as a catalyst for the decomposition of hydrocarbon, that the thin hollow tube grew then thickens to a carbon fiber. As a result we got a fiber with a diameter similar to that of the PAN fibers prepared by Toray.

Figure 4. Endo's vapor grown carbon fibers

Courtesy of Morinobu Endo.

BBV : Did you collaborate with industry in these years ?

ME : Yes we had collaborations. Showa Denko tried to develop this VGCF. But its productivity was very low. Because we put a substrate the growth rate was too slow. We tried to reduce the cost by using a continuous process. But in the same period the cost of the PAN fibers was drastically reduced so that we could not compete. Our VGCF are just beautiful fibers.

There had to be a breakthrough.

BBV : What kind of breakthrough ?

ME : I developed another method. This is the Endo-Japanese patent. I introduced the catalytic particles, which are derived from organic-metallic compounds such as ferrocene, into the reactor, in the three dimensions. The main difference is that there is no substrate. Here in this region, the particle reacts with the hydrocarbon and makes the hollow tube (figure 5). On the hollow tube then the deposition takes place. The process is in hysteresis. As a result we can get another type of fiber. It is totally different. This one is very competitve and commercialized.

I should add that at the early stage of the growth of the fiber, this is a carbon nanotube grown by a catalytic process. So it is now possible to grow carbon nanotubes by this method.

Figure 5. The Endo-Japanese patent, 1987

Courtesy of Morinobu Endo.

BBV : So you have already answered my next question : “How did you move from carbon fibers to carbon nanotubes ?” In fact, you prepared carbon nanotubes before this name came into use.

ME : We used to say “hollow core”. I get a little bit irritated about how the story is told. Here are my laboratory notebooks written in France (1974-75). Agnès Oberlin signed them. You can see a two-layered carbon nanotube. This is the TEM (Transmission Electron Microscope) photograph. I envisaged the possibility of very thin carbon nanotubes. Here you can read “mince cylindres” (thin cylinders). We had found the possibility of very tiny tubular structures.

BBV : Why did Mrs Oberlin signed this notebook in 2002 ? Was there a priority controversy ?

ME : Because I visited her in France last June. And because people said you should get the evidence that you had observed such nanotubes in 1975.

BBV : So nanotube was not discovered in 1991 by S. Iijima in his paper in Nature as people usually say..

ME : People say that Iijima clarified the structure of nanotubes. But Endo observed them in 1974. This is a recent understanding. I clarified the growth mechanism and the mass-production of a thick fiber out of a very thin cylinder.

BBV : The irony is that I came in touch with you through MIT thanks to Millie Dresselhaus and not through your French connection although I live in France.

ME : Mrs Oberlin lives near Montpellier in a mountainous area. She is now 75 year old. She gave me many evidences that I observed nanotubes in 1975.

BBV : Do you also know Bernier in Montpellier ?

ME : I know him but I am not as friendly with him as with Mrs Oberlin. He is a newcomer in science while I have been in carbon science for 30 years.

In my process the carbon nanotube is essential to grow the fiber but we can easily extrude the carbon nanotube. Now we can easily expand the technology to make carbon nanotubes. Several companies such as Showa Denko manufacture carbon nanotubes based on my method. Recently in order to make electronic circuit with carbon nanotubes people used this catalytic process. They put the small particle of iron on the electrode and expose this substrate to hydrocarbon to grow the nanotube. Here is a nanotube paper I am not too happy with ; they don't cite my old paper. Many people are not fair. They only take into account recent science and never go back to older papers…

Anyway this catalytic process is now applied in the mass-production of carbon nanotubes, whether they have single wall or double wall. To me it is very important to produce carbon nanotube and use them for practical applications. So coming back to your question about the date of discovery of nanotubes : in 1975 there was no practical use of carbon nanotubes. The interest was in carbon fibers. So we designed a process to get a thicker fiber.

BBV : When did the interest shift from fibers to nanotubes ?

ME : Carbon nanotubes quickly developed after the discovery of C60 in 1985. But they still have no practical application because they are still high cost. For carbon fibers, by contrast, we already had the technology, the know how to produce them. However my nanotubes are already commercialized for Lithium ion batteries since the late 1980s (figure 6). It is useful to provide safe small-size batteries for mobiles and camcorders. For safety reasons it is better to use only Li+ instead of metallic lithium. For this, we need to intercalate carbon at the anode. Almost most of the Lithium ion batteries manufactured in this country use my fiber in the anode. It is the only material that can work in this application. There is no alternative, no substitutional material. Only my product. So finally what the Japanese companies produce is based on my carbon nanotube.

Figure 6. Mass-producing and commercializing Multi-wall carbon nanotubes since 1988

Courtesy of Morinobu Endo.

BBV : Which Japanese companies manufacture the Li-ion batteries with your patent ?

EM : Many companies (Sony, etc). But, now this is not my patent. It is the company who manufactures my fiber who owns the patent. Only the production system is my patent. And I am happy with that. Even French companies like Alcatel who have a battery division need to use my fiber. Recently we got the allowance to export this material abroad. The Ministry of Industry (MITI) gave us permission to export this material. Now Alcatel and a number of American companies can use my material.

BBV : Do you mean that a Japanese company cannot export one its products without permission from the Ministry of Industry ?

ME : It is only for strategic materials with potential military applications because it is a strategic material for military uses (although I don't know which one). In such cases we are under the control of ICOCOM. Anywhere we can get such allowance.

BBV : Coming back to the earlier period of carbon science, what was your reaction and the reaction of your colleagues in 1985 to Curl's, Smalley's and Kroto's paper on the fullerene structure ?

ME : I felt very nice because it was familiar to me. I was very excited with that kind of nanosize particles.

BBV : After this publication did you get more funds to start research programs on nanotechnologies ?

ME : There was an impulse to work on nanotechnology. And the government gave us substantial funds. 95% of the research budget went to nanotechnologies.

BBV : If you get such substantial funds from government do you also have support from industrial companies ?

ME : Most of my research is supported by industrial companies. Only a small part of the basic science is supported by MITI. For carbon nanotubes we work in close collaboration with industrial companies. We have a very nice cooperation. We are always aware of pratical purposes. So in my research science and applications are closely intertwinned. It is our policy.

BBV : But industrial companies have their own research laboratories ?

ME : Yes, we collaborate with them. Presently I have about 100 collaborators who run joint projects with me. More exactly, I should say 50 researchers who come to join me. It becomes big science when you want to reach the commercial applications because you have to do all kinds of tests : safetyness, production cost, optimizing the size, the diameter of the fiber, its packing...It requires a lot of time and a lot of money. The PAN-fiber, for instance, was designed in 1965 and Toray spent more than 20 years of R&D before the commercialization of PAN fibers in the early 1990s. For the batteries we took 7 years.

BBV : Do you have a kind of division of labor with Research conducted in academic laboratories and development in industrial laboratories ?

ME : We have a lot of feedback. For any specific material we need a lot of time and money. Carbon fibers still need a lot of additional technology for commercial mass-production.

BBV : So your financial resources come both from industry and from government ?

ME : Fortunately we get a lot of money from industry because I contributed a lot to industrial applications. We also get money from the Ministry of education for scientific development. I am acting as a bridge between science and industry, and also as an interprter for tax-payers. We do a lot of coordination with social demand, between university and industry and also of education for industry. We are very busy.

BBV : In your career is there a close connection between teaching and research ? In particular how important was the book on carbon that you co-authored with Stan Mrozowski and Millie Dresselhaus ?

ME I have been deeply encouraged by Millie Dresselhaus. Our book was not intended as a textbook. Rather it was a review book. When it was published in 1996 most of the people were rather interested in fullerenes. This book triggered the interest in nanotubes. The publisher Pergamon is very active in carbon science.

BBV : As historians of science and technology, we learn a lot from success but failures are even more illuminating for us. Would you tell mes about a case of failure in your career or in your field ?

ME : I don't remember any project of mine which failed. I spend a lot of time selecting my research projects. It is important because lot of Japanese companies trust me. I have no right to fail. Every problem has a solution. In a sense the tiny cylinder of the nanotube is a miracle. How can we control particles at the nanosize !

Carbon is an old but new material. Professor Kroto who got the Nobel Prize in 1986 said in his Nobel address : the 21st century will be the century of carbon. I believe that. Carbon is a key material. Carbon fibers and carbon nanotubes are vital in three respects : for energy, fuel cells in particular ; for information technology (mobiles and computers) ; for environment, especially for the purification of air and water. The question of water is crucial : 2 million of people die every year from impure water and 20 million are sick from impure water.

BBV : How can you use carbon for the purification of water ?

ME : It is possible. We can use activated carbon to take off bacteria. Developing countries need clean water at a reasonable cost. So carbon is and will be in the future a key material. My own research is focussed on carbon nanotubes, their action, their preparation, growth mechanism, control of the structure and applications. We study batteries, new devices for energy storage in new cars, devices for water purification for the developing countries.

BBV : You mean that in one laboratory you can afford to conduct all these projects altogether ?

ME : Yes, as they are all related to carbon. Carbon and its properties are important everywhere. I'll show you a very nice table. Carbon is not the most abundant on the earth like silicon. It is only 0.04% of the material resources. But carbon is localized, concentrated in some places so that it is easily accessible and easy to extract.

BBV : How many people are working in your laboratory ?

ME : I have 25 people including students and post-doc. We have ten research projects. They come from materials science, electronics or electrical engineering, physics and two post-doc chemists.

BBV : Do you have financial constraints for the purchase of laboratory equipment ?

ME : We have few constraints to buy instruments. For instance, we have got a very sophisticated Transmission electron microscope, all computerized (figure 7). It is a unique model made by a Japanese instrument maker. It has three functions : EDX (Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy), EELS (Electron energy loss spectroscopy), and Mapping.

Figure 7. Endo's Lab TEM

BBV : Did you acquire it with industrial funds or state money ?

ME : It was state money. We also have various analytic instruments for carbon materials such as STM (scanning tunnelling microscope), TGA (thermal gravimetric analysis), FE-SEM (Field emission scanning electron microscope), Thermal conductivity analyser, Raman, XRD (X-ray diffraction), pore distribution analyser, etc.

BBV : Do you have a lot of routine reporting to your sponsors ?

ME : We have obligations towards the university. The annual report mentions how much money I get from the Ministry of Education. But how much support I get from industry this is included in the global amount of subsidies provided to the university. The annual report does not mention openly how much Endo gets from industry. I think I am one of the most funded.

BBV : Publishing or patenting ? What is the priority ? Which one is the most important for the credit and reputation of a laboratory in materials research in this country ?

ME : It is now the Japanese policy that patenting and publishing should run parallel. For me publication is more important. But as part of the national community I should keep a balance between publications and patents. The Ministry of Education recognizes and rewards patents.

BBV : Do you file patents in your own name ?

ME : It depends. If the research project was financed with state money as a national project, then the patent is a state patent. If the patent comes out of a project financed by industry or by the university then it is your individual patent.

BBV : Who gets the royalties ? you or the university ?

ME : We have a judge who decides. If we invent a product with funds from the unviersity, most of the time it belongs to ourselves.

BBV : The patent on vapor deposition carbon fiber belongs to yourself ?

ME : Yes it is my patent.

BBV : Do you have international collaborations : in which countries ? How much do they matter ?

ME : With Millie Dresselhaus, it is a private collaboration. I also have collaborations with Sussex University (U.K.) and with Mexico. In France I have friends but no more collaborations.

BBV : Did you notice differences in the research styles of various countries ?

ME : I cannot see any difference in research styles. The Japanese style is very much americanized. Or rather, our style is between the French and the American styles.

BBV : What is the French style ? And how would you characterize the American style ?

ME : American style is top-down with the state at the top. French style is rather bottom-up. In Japan it is half-half. I feel rather close to the French style but for patenting we are more like the USA. In France it is difficult to file a patent.

BBV : You have spent 30 years on one single material, carbon. But do you think that the materials generic perspective with its basic notion of structure, properties, performances and process, is useful for your research ?

ME : I think that I have a very general concept of carbon. I generalized the concept from structures to properties. Process is very important to get up with the structure in the case of carbon. Carbon science developed by studying its structures but now processing is important. You get different structures with different processes.

BBV : What aspect is the more important for you ?

ME : I am neither a specialist in processing, nor a specialist of structures. I am a carbon scientist.

BBV : What is the place of materials science in general and carbon science in particular in Japan ?

ME : Unfortunately carbon is a minor field. Semiconductor is the major field. In the minor field of carbon I should say I am number 1 or number 2.

BBV : Does carbon science attract students ?

ME : Yes many students come to work with me, because we have advanced equipment and there are job opportunities in this country : in car companies or electric companies.

BBV : Where do you locate the leading centers in the field of carbon science ?

ME : The major countries are Japan, USA, France and Germany. Then come India, then China, England and Canada.

BBV : Do you see Japan as the leader ?

No. Japan, USA, France and Germany are at the front. It depends on the field. Certainly Japan produces 70% of the carbon fibers by the aerospace applications in the USA.

BBV : Where do you locate the strengths and weaknesses of Japan ?

ME : The human network is too strong. More open competition like in the USA would be necessary. In France the system is too centralized, too concentrated.

Fin de l'enregistrement

Pour citer l'entretien :

« Entretien avec Morinobu Endo », par Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, 26 août 2002, Sciences : histoire orale, /spip.php ?article8.

Pour citer l'entretien :

« Entretien avec Morinobu Endo », par Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, 26 août 2002, Sciences : histoire orale, https://sho.spip.espci.fr/spip.php?article8.

Lieu : bureau de Moronibu Endo, Endo lab, Université de Shinshu, Department of electrical and electronic engineering, Wakasoko, Nagano-shi 380-8553, Japon.

Support : enregistrement sur cassette.

Transcription : Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent.

Édition en ligne : Sacha Loeve.