Did Bob Davis ever gain instrumentation capability?
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He is an observer; he can use a telescope just fine. The Kron camera was my opportunity to learn about vacuum systems, and about making cathodes, and measuring the performance of cathodes. In this country, yes. Of course, there were centers of interest in electromyography in Europe. The Lallemand camera, for example, and in France especially.
I made cathodes out of raw materials like with antimony beads, cesium, and…. You have to get the vacuum just right, and then you have to evaporate the materials so that it spreads uniformly on the inside surface of the front window. Gerry developed all this stuff. Very hands-on. Trial and error.
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We stood beside Gerry and watched him make a couple, and then we tried it on our own. Just from intuition or feeling. Oh, sure. The main trick was to achieve the vacuum that you needed. You need a good, high vacuum to make a cathode. There was a cookbook that we learned from Gerry on how you do that.
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What was the biggest technical hurdle in making it a good cathode? Was it getting an even coating? I believe we monitored the sensitivity of the cathode — the amps per lumen we were getting out of the cathode as we applied the material, and we stopped before they got to the magic number. So I had a proper appreciation of photocathodes when it came time to make my first detector system that really worked. This was a team with Marc Davis and John Tonry, of course. That was the first time we got one running. The year before. We did that in, I think, almost exactly one year, when Herb Gursky took over.
Marc Davis came in, and Marc and I started working together on projects. He supported it.
We built the high-resolution spectroscopic capability, the echelle spectrographs, and tried to get quantitative detectors. The electrographic cameras. The other thing I was busy doing was teaching because Owen invited me to join him teaching in a natural sciences general education program. For 28 years.
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A lot of them. Well, I have two new post-docs and two Ph. A couple of undergraduates. So I have maybe six people working with me. It keeps me busy. No, I think he was allowing Fred Chaffee and me to pursue this because we wanted to. It was support of the stellar atmospheres, doing quantitative spectroscopy, doing abundance analyses. They were sticking with photographic plates and worrying constantly about calibrating each plate and all of that sort of thing.
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I had seen, through my experience, all the shortcomings of photography, and I knew we had to do better. The most important thing is we had to get better quantum efficiency. In some ways, one of the most important of my early papers is in a physics volume. We needed that sensitivity. Yes, exactly. But you were never thinking at this point of solid-state stuff. You were looking at vacuum tube technologies. No, it had to be vacuum tubes because that was what was practical.
What we ended up doing with the Z-Machine is taking advantage of the night vision image intensifiers that were developed for the Vietnam War. We had a very good working relationship that we developed with Varo in Garland, Texas where we got to select the best of their tubes out of the thousands they were making. Yes, and then Al Milliken after. Well, they had tests they did. There was just cathode sensitivity, no wavelength sensitivity, and we were really interested in the wavelength sensitivity.
Sometimes we might want extra blue sensitivity; others, we wanted good red sensitivity. I set up a lab to make all those measurements. At the Smithsonian. Everything I did then was Smithsonian, for research.
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Harvard was the teaching. But I want to get back to detective quantum efficiencies. I was heavily involved in trying to understand how light was detected with photography. That was my main reason for working with photography experimentally. I was frustrated because the way that astronomers tended to evaluate the performance of photography seemed not to be fundamental.
It tended to look at the output that you got in a photographic plate—the density or the contrast. I thought this through and decided that what really mattered was how accurately you had measured the amount of light coming in, how accurately you determined the number of photons. I had even drafted the paper on this when I discovered, to my dismay, that somebody else had already had the idea. A guy named Peter Felgett had published it. I came up with the concept of detective quantum efficiency completely on my own, independently.
Actually, I felt, more confirmation that this really was the right way to do it. So all that work I did in photography was worth it in the end, although it sure was the hard way to do it. You characterized your work in photography as something that just — at first, it was a distraction because you were interested in it.
You simply were pursuing it for its own sake. No, I was pursuing it because I needed to make better observations. The early work on photographic detection did get some notice, and so when the American Astronomical Society decided to start a new small journal called the AAS Photo Bulletin, they chose me, a graduate student, to be the editor. I worked with Jack Brown at Kodak to put together these occasional, small journals that describe practical stuff about photographic detection. But to step back and look at the big picture, all that work I did with photography and then with electronography was an essential part of my education.
So when I got to building the Z-Machine, I had a much better idea of what I was doing and how to do it. Who was hiring the staff at that time in your area? Such as Marc Davis and…. I think that there was much better uniformity in the plan for where the CfA was going to go. For example, bringing the X-ray effort into the newly founded CfA clearly was very important, partly because it brought in the leaders of the field, who were just about to have great successes, but partly because they also brought a lot of money in, too, and overhead.
That there was friction? Did you ever sense it as a grad student or just after, as you were doing your instrumentation? I think I was driven by the idea that we were building a new observatory in the American Southwest. We dreamed of the day when we would be as good as Kitt Peak. This was a very distant goal. Really kind of amazing. I think scientific productivity at Mount Hopkins is excellent for the dollar. We have to take into account the two budgets.
The innovation, I think, with the MMT and a lot of the instrumentation that has been built in the last few years is more state-of-the-art; in some ways, more risky. Whipple, as you said, he would assign or allow a certain person, a junior person, to pursue a certain project and then give them a lot of room. And he had the resources so he could support them.
And very little administrative or bureaucratic hassle. Once she got married, her name was Derry Miller Allen. If we needed more money, a little more resources, we checked in with Chuck Lundquist, and if it was a big deal, Fred got involved. I think Fred actually watched most of the purchase requisitions.