Interview with William Pickering

WILLIAM H. PICKERING (I)
(1910–2004)

INTERVIEWED BY
MARY TERRALL

November 7–December 19, 1978

ARCHIVES
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Pasadena, California

Subject area
Engineering, physics, administration, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, space flight

Abstract
Interview in four sessions in 1978 with William Hayward Pickering, professor
emeritus of electrical engineering at Caltech and director (1954-1976) of the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, begins with recollections of his upbringing in New
Zealand. He enters Caltech as an undergraduate in spring term of 1929: influence
of A. A. Noyes; travels in Europe during his junior year. Remains at Caltech as a
graduate student in electrical engineering and then joins the faculty.
Recollections of life at Caltech during the Depression and the war years,
including emphasis on power transmission in its electrical engineering
department, under Royal Sorensen, and subsequent expanding into electronics.
Recalls his work with H. Victor Neher and R. A. Millikan on balloon-flight
studies of cosmic rays; travels with them to India and Mexico. Contrasts
leadership of Millikan and Lee A. DuBridge. Comments on barrage of Japanese
incendiary balloons during the war. Early history of JPL: Theodore von Kármán,
H. S. Tsien, Frank J. Malina. Long-range missile development for US Army;
JPL’s collaboration with Wernher von Braun at Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville,
Ala. Advent of Sputnik (1957); competition with Soviet Union. JPL’s move into
space program with Explorer 1, first US satellite; establishment of NASA (1958);
JPL becomes a NASA lab, administered by Caltech. Ranger program (lunar

http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1

probes); Ranger 6 video failure; success of Ranger 7 (1964). Simultaneous
progress of planetary and lunar exploration programs; Mariner 2 (1962 Venus fly-
by); Surveyor series (moon); Surveyor as precursor to Apollo program. His
reflections on JPL directorship; JPL’s relations with Caltech; advantages of being
administered by Caltech instead of by NASA as a civil service laboratory. The
interview concludes with his comments on his post-retirement work setting up an
applied research institute at Saudi Arabia’s University of Petroleum and Minerals.

Administrative information

Access
The interview is unrestricted.

Copyright
Copyright has been assigned to the California Institute of Technology © 1981,
2004. All requests for permission to publish or quote from the transcript must be
submitted in writing to the University Archivist.

Preferred citation
Pickering, William H.(I). Interview by Mary Terrall. Pasadena, California,
November 7–December 19, 1978. Oral History Project, California Institute of
Technology Archives. Retrieved [supply date of retrieval] from the World Wide
Web: http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Pickering_1

Contact information
Archives, California Institute of Technology
Mail Code 015A-74
Pasadena, CA 91125
Phone: (626) 395-2704 Fax: (626) 793-8756
Email: archives@caltech.edu

Graphics and content © 2004 California Institute of Technology.



ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM H. PICKERING (I)
BY MARY TERRALL

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

Caltech Archives, 1981
Copyright © 1981, 2004 by the California Institute of Technology


Pickering–ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM H. PICKERING

Session 1 1-25

Childhood and education in New Zealand; early interest in radios; coming to Los Angeles and to
Caltech; undergraduate years at Caltech; marriage.

Electrical engineering department’s emphasis on power transmission; R. Sorensen; Junior Travel
Prize (1931); A. A. Noyes; taking sophomore chemistry from E. Swift at Corona del Mar.

Building Geiger counters as Caltech graduate student; collaborating with H. V. Neher and R. A.
Millikan; using balloons to investigate cosmic rays; recovery of instruments sent up in balloons;
1939 trip to India with Millikan and Neher; Millikan’s stamina and enthusiasm.

Measurements made in New Zealand trip; problem of explaining cosmic-ray distribution;
Millikan’s explanation of’ the origin of cosmic rays; collaborating with Indian meteorological
service; l941 trip to Mexico; trips around the West; developing techniques of radio transmission
of data.

Session 2 26-55

Teaching electronics in 1930s; teaching pre-radar course in navy V-12 program; Engineering and
Science Management War Training program; changes at Caltech during war; effect of V-l2
program.

Investigating Japanese incendiary balloons; recovering them; microwave research at MIT.

Early history of JPL; long-range missile development; telemetry techniques; developing missile
guidance systems; T. von Kármán; Air Force Scientific Advisory Board; H. S. Tsien and
problems with US bureaucracy; loyalty investigations.

Appointment as director of JPL, 1954; moving from research into administration; relations
between Caltech and JPL; comparison of army and NASA as contracting agencies; JPL testing
grounds at White Sands, NM; L. A. DuBridge.

Early long-range studies of space exploration; development of WAC Corporal rocket; getting
into satellites; International Geophysical Year (1957-58); Vanguard satellite program of Naval
Research Lab; competition between army and navy; stimulation to U.S. satellite program by
launching of Sputnik (1957); public reaction to Sputnik; first announcement of Sputnik launch.


Pickering–iii

Session 3 56-72

Development of Explorer program by JPL (alternative to Vanguard); collaboration with W. von
Braun; IGY satellite committee; launching of Explorer 1; press response; discovery of Van Allen
radiation belts.

Sergeant missile system; development of US space program; origin of NASA; JPL’s switch from
army to NASA; changing from classified to unclassified work; choice of deep-space research as
focus for JPL; problems of designing and allocating space for scientific payloads; benefits of
having contract administered by Caltech.

Problems with Ranger program (five failures); successful launch of Ranger 6, failure of video
cameras; success of Ranger 7.

Session 4 73-86

Simultaneous progress of planetary and lunar exploration programs; Mariner 2 (1962 Venus fly-
by); Surveyor series (moon); live TV coverage of Surveyor 1 moon landing; Cold War
competition with Soviets; astronauts’ landing next to Surveyor 3.

Problems of administering large laboratory; trying to improve campus-JPL relations; government
policy of ceiling for number of JPL employees; retirement; consulting work for applied research
lab in Saudi Arabia.


ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview with William H. Pickering by Mary Terrall
Pasadena, California

Session 1 November 7, 1978
Session 2 November 29, 1978
Session 3 December 12, 1978
Session 4 December 19, 1978

Begin Tape 1, Side 1

TERRALL: I know you were born in New Zealand. Can you tell me what your parents did there?

PICKERING: Yes, my father was a pharmacist in Wellington. I was born in Wellington
[December 24, 1910]. When I was four years old, my mother died. So I was then sent to live
with my grandmother Pickering in a small town called Havelock. I went to primary school in
this small town. It’s sort of an interesting coincidence that this primary school was the same one
that Ernest Rutherford went to. And Rutherford, of course, later became a nuclear physicist; in
fact, he was one of the very prominent early nuclear physicists.
By the time I finished primary school, my father was working in the health department in
British Samoa, and rather than take me over there, he arranged for me to go to high school in
Wellington. It was a boarding school, so part of the time I was boarding and part of the time I
was staying with some friends.

TERRALL: You didn’t have any other family besides your grandmother?

PICKERING: I had a younger brother, who died of diphtheria when he was about four or five. My
father had lots of brothers and sisters—there were six or eight of them all together, I guess—and


Pickering–2

they were spread around the country. But there wasn’t any family in Wellington. So I stayed
with these good friends—a man by the name of Rowe, who was a banker and had a son about the
same age I was. They took me in, and I lived with them for I guess a couple of years, and then I
boarded a couple of years at the high school, that sort of thing.

TERRALL: So it was a private school?

PICKERING: No, a public school. It was called Wellington College—the terminology, of course,
in the English system is a little different from ours; Wellington College means a high school in
our terms. This was a public school. There must have been, say, 1,200 students and perhaps 200
or 300 of them were boarders.

TERRALL: Can you place your first interest in science back then?

PICKERING: Yes, I had an interest when I was still in primary school. About 1920, I got
fascinated with radio, which was just then coming out, and read about crystal sets. I remember
discussing this with my grandmother, and she said, well, she had an old broken glass which was
a nice piece of crystal. [Laughter] I also can remember reading—in some magazine, I
suppose—about the fact that in 1924 Mars was going to be in a close conjunction with the earth.
An astronomer—I’ve forgotten now who it was—had some scheme to go down into South
America, where there was a vertical mine shaft, and he was going to spin a large dish of mercury
at the bottom, which would make a parabolic surface, which would allow him to focus on Mars
as it went across the entrance of the mine shaft; and he was going to get a real close-up look at
Mars. Well, it was a wild idea, and as far as I know, it never materialized. But I can remember
reading about this and thinking that this particular conjunction of Mars was going to be the
closest conjunction for a lot of years and hopefully scientists were going to learn more about
Mars. That was about the time I went to high school, I guess. So, yes, I had an interest in
science in those days. I became a lab assistant, which meant sweeping up the labs and that sort
of thing, before I got through high school.

TERRALL: Did you play around with trying to build radios?


Pickering–3

PICKERING: Oh, yes. In fact, there at high school we put together one of the very early amateur
radio stations in New Zealand. Another fellow and I really did it—a fellow by the name of Fred
White, who stayed with radio and became quite prominent in radio research. He worked in
England for a while and then Australia. Back in those days, you had to build it essentially all by
yourself, out of bits and pieces around the laboratory. You didn’t buy very much stuff. We used
to be able to communicate with stations in this country, for example. That was back in the days
when you had to use Morse Code.

TERRALL: Were you learning from magazines? Would that have been the sort of source that you
were using?

PICKERING: Yes. I don’t think we got much from our instructors in high school; we got most of
it out of magazines.

TERRALL: Did you have teachers who were interested in and involved in these projects?

PICKERING: Oh, yes, we did. One teacher in particular, a man by the name of Gifford. He was
really a math teacher, but he was very interested in astronomy. He interested me in science a
great deal. In fact, interestingly enough, his son is now a doctor and came up to this country not
too many years ago, and I visited him. He was just passing through, but he was in this area for a
few days.

TERRALL: So were you thinking of going on with science?

PICKERING: Yes. I was interested in radio and electronics—the physics side rather than the
chemistry side of science. Astronomy also interested me. When I got through with high school,
my father was back in New Zealand. He’d remarried, and we were living in Christchurch, so I
started in at the university down there. My interests at that time were leaning towards
engineering; electrical engineering is what I thought I wanted to do.


Pickering–4

TERRALL: How strong was the engineering department there?

PICKERING: It was pretty good. The University of New Zealand did try to maintain good
standards. In fact, in the early days—and I think even when I was there—they were still sending
their final examinations back to England to be graded, so that they would be on a par with the
British universities. In fact, there was a legend around the high school about one of our teachers,
that the only way he got his degree was that the ship sank on the way back. [Laughter] Anyway,
I started at Canterbury College, but I only spent one year there; then I came over here.

TERRALL: How did you happen to come over here?

PICKERING: Well, at that time I had an uncle, really a great-uncle, who was living in Los
Angeles. But he also had a house in New Zealand, and he used to go back and forth. I spent
quite a bit of time with him, because his home in New Zealand was a working farm. I used to go
up on the farm and work during the summers. This man had been a mining engineer in South
Africa; in fact, he had worked with Cecil Rhodes in Rhodesia in the early days as a civil
engineer. He was retired, but, as I say, he had a place here and a place down there. He
suggested that I ought to come over to America for my education. My thoughts had been that I
would get a degree from New Zealand and then do graduate work in either England or in the US.
But he suggested that I come back with him. He lived in Los Angeles and asked why not come
to Caltech?
This was in 1928, you see, so it was in the early days of Caltech. I’d never heard of
Caltech. A friend of my father’s who happened to be an MIT graduate was down there, so I
went around and talked to him. And he said, well, of course, if I didn’t want to go to MIT, he
thought Caltech was a pretty good school.

TERRALL: What did your uncle know of Caltech? Did he have any direct contact with it, or did
he just know it was there?

PICKERING: He just knew it was there. So I said OK, and I wrote to Caltech. They, of course,
said, “Well, you’ve got to take exams, you’ve got to do this, that, and the other thing.” So my


Pickering–5

uncle said, “Well, why don’t you just come on over and try and get in when you get over here.”
So we did. I came in, then, as an immigrant rather than as a student. This was in March of 1929,
so it was the end of the second term at Caltech. They weren’t quite sure what to do with me, so
they gave me some of the freshman exams at the end of the second term. I took those exams,
and on the strength of that, they admitted me to take the third term of the freshman year and then
go on. So that’s what I did. I started out in electrical engineering, with the expectation that I
would graduate in that field and then go back down to New Zealand and work down there as an
electrical engineer. But [Robert Andrews] Millikan and [Arthur Amos] Noyes wanted me to
change over to science. So I got my bachelor’s degree in science [1932], the master’s degree in
physics [1933], and my doctor’s degree in physics [1936], with a minor in electrical engineering.

TERRALL: When you first got here, what was it like living in Pasadena and being at Caltech?

PICKERING: Well, it wasn’t so different, really, from New Zealand. After all, New Zealand is
another pioneering country, and California, particularly in those days, was a long way out in the
West. It was obviously different as a matter of scale and so forth, because this is a much bigger
country and many more people and so on. But I fitted into the educational system without any
great trauma and found that I could do the work without any trouble—well, not without any
trouble, but at least I fitted right into it. In other words, my background in high school down
there and the one year that I’d had at Canterbury made me able to go into this third term of the
freshman year without any problem. And I guess, in fact, I came out with honors standing in the
sophomore year. In those days, they used to have an honors section.

TERRALL: Were you living with your uncle, then?

PICKERING: No, I lived in a boardinghouse on South Wilson, because the dormitories were not
yet built. The last year of my undergraduate term, I moved into Dabney; that was the year that
they opened the houses.

TERRALL: How did you react to the Caltech environment intellectually, having all these high-
powered scientists around?


Pickering–6

PICKERING: Oh, I don’t know. I obviously enjoyed it. I did quite well in my studies. I very
much enjoyed the place and working here with these people. A year or two after I graduated, I
did go back to New Zealand, looking for a job. But that was in the middle of the Depression,
and there weren’t any jobs. Caltech wanted me to stay on anyway, so that’s what I did. I also
asked myself, “Why not? After all, there are lots of people who work hard to try and get a job at
Caltech and spend most of their time trying to move to Pasadena. If I’m already in Pasadena,
why not stay here?”

TERRALL: Now, you were married just around the time of graduation. Was your wife a local
girl?

PICKERING: Yes, she was a sister of a fellow student who was in the same boardinghouse that I
was in.

TERRALL: And she was not averse to staying in Pasadena, probably?

PICKERING: No. Although, at the time we were married, the probability was that I was going
back to New Zealand, and she was not averse to that either. In her childhood, she had lived in
lots of places in the Southwest. Her father was in the water development business, and so he was
going from one place to another, and the family was always on the move. The problem of
moving didn’t bother her any; in fact, she was remarking just the other day that when we were
married she thought we would be doing a lot of moving around, and in point of fact we didn’t.

TERRALL: As an undergraduate, did you have contact with Millikan?

PICKERING: No, not very much. As a graduate I did, but as an undergraduate I don’t really
remember any specific contact.

TERRALL: As an undergraduate, when you were working in electrical engineering, do you
remember who the people were who were particularly good teachers?


Pickering–7

PICKERING: Sorensen was, and [Francis W.] Maxstadt, and [Samuel Stuart] Mackeown.
Mackeown was teaching vacuum tube and radio. In those days, electrical engineering was
almost entirely power engineering. In fact, just to sort of jump ahead a little bit, when I did get
into the electrical engineering department in the late thirties, I was fighting to get some
electronics into the department. And I succeeded; I did get some work done. But when I retired
[1976] from JPL [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory] and came back here and had a look at the
electrical engineering department—in point of fact I didn’t really go back and do any teaching;
but if I had, I would have been fighting with them to get some power engineering into the
department. Because they have over-reacted. This happens in all academic areas. The academic
work is always a little bit out of phase with the needs of industry.

TERRALL: But at that time there wasn’t really any electronics?

PICKERING: Well, Sorensen, who was heading the department, was a power engineer. The
department had done some very useful work in helping the Edison Company develop the first
long-distance transmission lines—from Huntington Lake, up near Fresno, down here. That was
one of the first high-voltage transmission lines, and its development was done with the help of
our EE department. Sorensen got the High Voltage Research Laboratory out of that, which was
a very important laboratory. In fact, there was a test transmission line that went from the high-
voltage lab out to the present site of the Athenaeum; there was nothing out there but orange
groves at that time. So it was natural that the department was very heavily oriented towards
power engineering. Radio communications and vacuum tubes were considered not very
important. It was a problem to get the department turned around to recognize that there was a
whole new technology growing up here.

TERRALL: Were there other students in your position, who had gotten interested in radio?

PICKERING: Oh, yes. We had a little amateur radio station. There was one professor,
Mackeown, who was a good teacher, who was teaching one vacuum tube course; but we needed
more.


Pickering–8

TERRALL: Could you talk to New Zealand with your amateur radio?

PICKERING: Interesting question. I don’t remember.

TERRALL: You decided to go to graduate school in physics. I guess there was no problem in
getting admitted, since everyone seemed to have wanted you to stay?

PICKERING: That’s right, they wanted me to stay. I had taken some extra undergraduate work,
which gave me a degree in science. Let me go back a bit. Professor Noyes became interested in
me because at that time there was an undergraduate travel prize, which was a quite prestigious
thing, for which two juniors were picked. They left in March of their junior year and came back
in time for school in September, so they had roughly six months in Europe. This was an
anonymous prize, but my assumption, and I think everybody’s assumption, was that it was given
by Noyes, who was head of the chemistry department. They would pick about a half dozen
people from the sophomore honors section, and in preparation for this trip a man in the
humanities division by the name of [John] MacArthur would take the candidates for about six
months before the trip and give them some special courses on the art and culture of Europe. I
was selected as one of this group at the end of my sophomore year, and Noyes became interested
in me.

TERRALL: So there would have been a small group of people, out of which they chose two to go.

PICKERING: Yes, that’s what happened. We left in March [1931] and came back in September.
So we lost the last term of the junior year. We traveled during this period, and we made a report
to a student body assembly when we got back.

TERRALL: Did you travel with the other person who was selected?

PICKERING: Yes. As a matter of fact, traditionally, if some of the other candidates wanted to pay
their own way, they were invited to come. Now, in our particular case, we had two other people


Pickering–9

with us, so four of us traveled together. It was a very interesting and educational experience.
We started out by going to Detroit and buying a Ford, fresh out of the factory, and driving that
down to Washington first, then up to New York, and then shipping it to Europe, driving through
Europe, and then eventually driving back all the way to Pasadena.

TERRALL: Did you have introductions from Caltech people to people in Europe?

PICKERING: No, we had some records and diaries of previous travel-prize winners. This exercise
that we’d gone through with MacArthur was supposed to lead us to all of the worthwhile
museums and cultural things of various sorts that we ought to see. The emphasis was very much
on cultural activities, not particularly on scientific activities. Although it seems to me that we
did visit one or two factories. But there really wasn’t any tie-in to the universities.

TERRALL: You were very much on your own?

PICKERING: We were on our own, yes; in fact, that was the point of it. We were supposed to be
on our own and supposed to make a worthwhile trip through Europe and come back and tell
other people what we did.

TERRALL: It sounds wonderful.

PICKERING: It was. It was very nice. We got as far as Budapest, and up into Germany,
Czechoslovakia. The Depression had gotten started, but Hitler really hadn’t done anything yet.
We got down to Naples, and I forget how far north we went in England.

TERRALL: You went around England as well?

PICKERING: Yes, we did.

TERRALL: You had never been to England or anything?


Pickering–10

PICKERING: No.

TERRALL: Did you have family there?

PICKERING: No very close relatives. I do have some second cousins or something, but we didn’t
visit any. No, we were on our own. As I say, we didn’t have any particular introductions and we
didn’t have any particular objective of seeing scientific or educational things. At that time, by
the way, Caltech did have a strong notion that in developing its student activities it should draw
on experiences of other universities. The reason I’m bringing this up is that in building the
dormitories, the question as to how the dormitories were going to be managed and run obviously
came up. At that time, Caltech had some fraternities, which were not part of any national
system—they’d grown up just as local fraternities; all schools then had fraternities. The question
was, “What are you going to do with the fraternities? Are you going to abolish them?” Also,
another question was, “How are you going to actually furnish these dormitories?” Caltech asked
the students for advice in these areas, and student committees were formed to help them with the
selection of furniture. One student committee was formed to make a trip to England and see how
some of those schools ran their dormitories and so on. So Caltech was interested in developing
relations with European universities. And when I come to think of it, I guess it’s a little
surprising that on this travel prize, we weren’t instructed to go visit universities. But we were
not; we did not.

TERRALL: So [the universities trip] was a separate trip that they sent people on?

PICKERING: Yes. Two people, I think, went over and visited two or three universities and came
back and reported on how they were managed. Of course, Caltech eventually proposed a system
in which the fraternities were abolished, although in point of fact the fraternities were permitted
to move into a house as a unit.

TERRALL: So when you got back, you made some sort of presentation to the student body?

PICKERING: Yes, just a student body assembly.


Pickering–11

TERRALL: You said that Noyes had gotten interested in you.

PICKERING: Yes, and I’m forgetting my chronology here; because one of the things I was
missing was sophomore chemistry, which I hadn’t taken, as an engineer. It ended up that I took
this chemistry as a summer course between my sophomore and junior years. This was something
that Noyes arranged. Noyes had a house down at Corona del Mar. He had arranged, in fact, for
Caltech to buy the Marine Lab down there, and that had just happened. Another member of the
chemistry department, Professor [Ernest] Swift, had a summer home down at Corona del Mar.
Swift used to teach the sophomore chemistry, and Noyes arranged that Swift would teach a
special course in sophomore chemistry during the summer, down at Corona del Mar. There were
about four or five of us who took the course. We had a fine time, because we lived in the Marine
Lab there—slept out on the balcony. Noyes gave us a canoe, so that we could do a little
paddling around the bay. Swift would come down and teach us chemistry. It was a very
pleasant summer.

TERRALL: So you actually knew Noyes, but not through taking chemistry from him?

PICKERING: No, I never had him as a teacher. But I met him because he was the man who gave
this travel prize, and so he undoubtedly wanted to know something about the people. And then,
as I say, he arranged this summer program. But during that summer program we didn’t see much
of Noyes. In fact, I’m not even sure he was down at his house very much that summer. Swift
was the man we worked with.

TERRALL: When you got into graduate school and you started putting more emphasis on physics,
did you start working on cosmic rays right away?

PICKERING: Well, pretty soon. What happened was that I, first of all, did a little bit of work
assisting Vic [Henry Victor] Neher, who was doing some electron scattering work. I did a little
bit of work with him but not very much. Then Millikan got me interested in the problem of
building Geiger counters. At that time, the Geiger counter was just coming into existence as a


Pickering–12

useful instrument for measurement. So I started building Geiger counters and measuring cosmic
rays and developing circuitry so that you could measure coincidences between counters, and so
on.

Fig. 1. William Pickering uses an experimental telescope to investigate
the source and intensity of cosmic rays on the roof of Robinson
Laboratory of Astrophysics, ca 1939-1942. Electrical circuitry linking
three cylindrical ion chambers, mounted parallel to the telescope’s axis,
allows the simultaneous detection and measurement of high-energy
cosmic ray particles. Caltech Archives.

TERRALL: Were other people on campus using Geiger counters or building them?


Pickering–13

PICKERING: No, I had the first Geiger counters on campus. In fact, I gave the first counters to
Carl Anderson to put over his cloud chamber, because it was pretty clear that once we had
developed this coincidence circuitry, you determined when a cosmic ray went through a pair of
counters, and then it was obviously simple to say, “Let’s put the cloud chamber in the middle,
and then we’ll take a picture.” Up till then, Carl had just been taking pictures at random with the
cloud chamber.

TERRALL: So he didn’t really know what he was taking pictures of?

PICKERING: He didn’t know whether any particles were in the chamber. By putting a counter
above and below the chamber, and using coincident discharges to trigger the chamber, we
opened up a whole new technique.

TERRALL: What about other universities? Were Geiger counters being used experimentally?

PICKERING: Well, they were just beginning to be.

TERRALL: Did you have contact with anyone else in the process of developing them?

PICKERING: Yes, there were a few other people. But for the most part, we were developing it
ourselves. Neher and I tended to find ourselves working more closely together. He was a very
good experimental physicist and contributed a lot to the development of the counters and the
circuits that we were using. Also, at that time he had gotten into cosmic ray work directly, with
Millikan. He was building cosmic ray electroscopes for Millikan. Then he had gone off with
Millikan on some cosmic ray trips and generally had gotten into the experimental end of cosmic
rays. My work supplemented his, because the electroscope and the Geiger counter were two
different techniques for measuring the cosmic rays. So we both worked with Millikan, and we
went on trips together.

TERRALL: Was the Geiger counter something that was sent up in balloons?


Pickering–14

PICKERING: Yes.

TERRALL: Was weight a problem?

PICKERING: Well, yes, we had to make everything as light as we could, because we only had
small balloons in those days. But the Geiger counter lent itself very easily to sending a radio
signal back to Earth. It was really easier to record by radio than the electroscope was. So the
first balloon work was done with Geiger counters [Pickering later corrects himself on this
point—Ed.].

TERRALL: Were electroscopes used in balloons?

PICKERING: Yes.

TERRALL: I thought they were just used in the sea voyages. So they were sent up also.

PICKERING: Yes. But the Geiger counters were the first.

TERRALL: I see. Now, what about the problem of recovering the instrument?

PICKERING: Well, we liked to get them back, but if we didn’t get them back, we didn’t.

TERRALL: But what kind of recovery rate was there? Did you get a lot of them back?

PICKERING: We did, as a matter of fact. We did our first balloon flights from the lab here, from
the roof of Bridge [Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics]. Actually, the very first flight that we
made, we got back about two weeks later. It had come down near Blythe [on the Arizona
border]. It was about ten miles off the road, and I don’t know how the man found it, but he
found it and sent it back to us. Flights made from Pasadena generally went off to the east, but we
had them go in all directions. We had one that was fished out of the ocean down by Long Beach.
We had one that landed in a swimming pool out at Arcadia. This was amusing, because we sent


Pickering–15

the thing up late one afternoon; it had drifted away east, and then it had gone up higher and
gotten into a wind current which brought it back to the west. Incidentally, what we did was to
have two balloons, and one balloon would always burst before the other one. As soon as one
balloon had burst, it didn’t have enough lift, so it would start coming down and that took the
pressure off the second balloon. So generally, it would come down gently, all the way down to
the ground. So we knew it had burst fairly close overhead, and that it would land not too far
from Pasadena. But it was dark by then, so we didn’t know what would happen. Well, the next
morning, here’s a guy knocking at the door with our instruments. And he said he was the
caretaker out at the Arcadia municipal swimming pool. He was locking up for the night, and he
heard a splash out there, and he wondered what it was; he thought some kid was out there. He
went out and saw this thing in the water, and there’s a piece of cloth tape going up in the air. He
said he didn’t see what was up there, so he pulled it, and after a while the balloon came down.
[Laughter]

TERRALL: He must have been shocked.

PICKERING: Yes, he was shocked.

TERRALL: But were you monitoring the radio signals until the balloon burst?

PICKERING: Yes, and even on the way down we were monitoring as much as we could. We had
just simple direction findings, so we knew in a general way where the balloons were. I don’t
know what our recovery rate was, but it would certainly be more than half.
Now, we went off to do experiments in other parts of the world. The most ambitious trip
was when I went to India in 1939. Millikan was developing a theory that had to do with the
creation of cosmic rays. His theory required, in effect, a measurement of the energy of these
high-energy particles. Essentially what we were doing was using the earth as a great magnet to
sort out the energies. So we wanted to make measurements near the magnetic equator and other
latitudes. And the particular reason for going to India was that the magnetic field of the earth is
not quite symmetrical—it’s stronger on that side than it is on the other side. So we wanted to
make measurements there. We did, in fact, make measurements at three places: Peshawar, which


Pickering–16

is up by the Khyber Pass, Agra, and Bangalore. This was obviously a major expedition. Vic
Neher and I went over there with Dr. and Mrs. Millikan. Even on that trip we got a fair number
of our balloons back. I don’t remember how many we launched, but there was quite a batch of
them. We must have launched a total of twenty or twenty-five.

TERRALL: How high were the balloons going at that time?

PICKERING: Oh, about 100,000 feet.

TERRALL: I want to go back a little bit, to talk generally about what it was like to collaborate
with Millikan on these projects.

PICKERING: Well, he was a very interesting man, and I have a great deal of respect for him, of
course. I think he did a magnificent job in setting up Caltech and setting the standards for
Caltech and getting the kind of people that he did. To travel with him was a very interesting
experience. He was a man with an insatiable interest in and curiosity about everything around
him. He was a man who enjoyed very good physical health. He would eat anything. He had
stamina that was sometimes beyond what Vic and I had. I remember times when we were down
in Mexico. We would drive the truck all day, and we would stop someplace for the night. Vic
and I just wanted to collapse, but Millikan wanted to go off and see what the town was like or get
to work on something. He was an amazing man. In fact, my wife tells a story about those trips:
On this particular trip, my wife and I and Vic and Dr. Millikan were in a truck. By now the war
had started. This was December ’41—in fact, Pearl Harbor happened two days after we were
into Mexico. Anyway, Dr. Neher was doing some work at MIT at the Radiation Lab. My wife
and I drove the truck from Pasadena to Laredo, Texas—this was a panel truck with instruments
in it—and then at Laredo Dr. Millikan and Dr. Neher joined us, and we drove on down into
Mexico. Well, anyway, my wife tells the story that one day Dr. Neher was suffering from a
migraine headache, and of course migraines are a miserable sort of a thing. So Millikan was
commiserating with him a bit. Then she and Millikan were riding in the back of the truck for a
while, and Millikan turned to her and said, “You know, I don’t think I ever had a headache.”
And nothing more was said for a while. Then after a while he says, “Yes, I did have a headache,


Pickering–17

when I was about twelve years old.” [Laughter] On an occasion, he said, when he drank too
much coffee. But he did enjoy very good health, up until about a year before his death.


TERRALL: Did working with a person like that make you feel that you always had to do more?
Was it a very high-pressure thing, since he put so many hours into his working day?

PICKERING: Yes, that’s right, he put so many hours into a working day, and had so much
enthusiasm for the work that the rest of us did, too.

TERRALL: Was it hard to keep up that enthusiasm, though?

PICKERING: No, it was easy to work with him. His personality, of course, was very good. He
was called the Chief, of course, by the people under him. He really did inspire people to work
with him.

TERRALL: So there weren’t any feelings of resentment or tension?

PICKERING: No.

TERRALL: What about Neher?

PICKERING: Oh, he’s a very good man. As I said, he was a first-class experimentalist. He could
build things; he just had a knack for building good things. He was a very good man in the
student laboratories as well as building research equipment. Yes, we’ve kept in touch with him.
In fact, as a bit of history, you really ought to talk with him sometime. He’s living now up near
Watsonville. He retired and decided to build his own house. I admire him for this. After all,
he’s in his late sixties by now; he’s two or three years older than I am. He is building with his
own hands this very nice house.

TERRALL: When you first started going on these trips, I think I read about one voyage across the


Pickering–18

Pacific to New Zealand. Did you accompany the instruments on that?

PICKERING: Well, actually, I went down to New Zealand while I was still a graduate student; in
fact, I went down to New Zealand to see if I could find a job. I did take some Geiger counters
along with me to make some measurements on the ship on the way down. Then, when we went
off to India, we also made some measurements on the ship on that trip.

TERRALL: On that trip to New Zealand, did you find any variation in the intensity of the cosmic
rays?

PICKERING: Yes, there was a so-called latitude effect, which we measured; there’s a dip as you
get down near the equator.

TERRALL: Did that fit in with the theory that Millikan wanted to test in India? Or was that a
different test?

PICKERING: Well, no, it was related to it, in the sense that it showed that in point of fact in order
to reach the earth at the equator, the rays would have to have higher energy than to reach the
earth at a higher latitude. All it said is that there were fewer rays of higher energy than there
were of lower energy. Now, the difference is only a few percent. The interpretation of this
difference is a complex thing, but it is an indication that you are in fact measuring the energy
spectrum, as it were, of the rays. Now, to do this properly, you really have to measure the energy
at very high altitudes, where the situation is not complicated by the rays interacting with the
atmosphere. So that’s one of the reasons we did the balloon experiments. The sea-level
measurements tell you that there’s an effect, but it doesn’t really tell you very much.

TERRALL: When did Millikan first come up with the theory of the magnetic field of the earth
affecting the cosmic rays?

PICKERING: Well, I’m not sure that he did come up with that. He was one of the early
experimenters with cosmic rays, because he had developed this electroscope along with Vic


Pickering–19

Neher. He had found that there was an altitude effect, and he was interested in that. They would
go to a high altitude and then lower the electroscope beneath a lake, so that the mass equivalent
of the water would be equivalent to the mass of air down at sea level, and compare that with the
sea-level data. In fact, they went up to Lake Arrowhead—that was the first place where they did
this experiment. Yes, he was interested in trying to understand the properties of the rays as
evidenced by these altitude effects.
Now, the latitude effect, I think, was first proposed by [Manuel Sandoval] Vallarta, down
in Mexico City. He did an analysis of the effect of the earth’s magnetic field on the radiation and
pointed out that if these rays came from outside the earth, as Millikan was pretty obviously
showing, and if they were charged particles coming through the earth’s magnetic field, the
energy required to reach the surface would be a function of latitude. So, various people then
started trying to measure this latitude effect.

TERRALL: At that time, it wasn’t really known what the particles were.

PICKERING: No. There was a question as to whether they were photons or charged particles.
And various things had been discovered. For example, an east-west effect had been discovered,
which again, is related to the magnetic field and to the charges on the particles. As soon as you
start getting an interaction between the rays and the earth’s magnetic field, then of course they
have to be charged particles. But at first there was some debate as to whether they were charged
particles or photons.

TERRALL: So by the time you went to India, it was pretty well agreed that they were charged
particles?

PICKERING: Oh, yes. There was argument as to whether they were protons or electrons. But
they were certainly charged particles.

TERRALL: When you went on this trip to India, did your wife go along with you?

PICKERING: She went as far as New Zealand. By that time, we had had our first baby, so she


Pickering–20

took the baby down to New Zealand and stayed there while I went on to India, and then she met
me coming back.

TERRALL: Did you stop in other places to collect data?

PICKERING: What had happened was that Millikan and Mrs. Millikan went down to Australia
ahead of us, because he was going to give some lectures in some universities down there. We
were supposed to leave in August, and we weren’t quite ready to leave, so we delayed a month.
During that time, the war in Europe broke out. So we telegraphed Millikan: What do we do
now? “Just come on.” So we came on. We sailed in a British ship from Vancouver to
Honolulu, Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia. This ship carried some refugees from the first ship
that was sunk by a submarine in the Atlantic. It was a little tense on the ship, because there were
rumors that there were submarines in the Pacific also. In fact, the first stop the ship normally
made was Victoria, to pick up any passengers, and then go on. On this particular trip, they did
not go into the harbor at Victoria; they picked them up out in the channel, and the ship was
blacked out at the time we did it. So we knew there was a war on. Also on that trip, when they
had boat drills, everybody took it pretty seriously. As a matter of fact, that particular ship was
sunk by a mine, off the coast of New Zealand, about a year later.
Anyway, we didn’t have any troubles. When we got down to Sydney, the Millikans were
there, and we were informed that since there was a war on, our tickets for the rest of the trip
were, in effect, canceled. Although for the next leg, which was to be from Sydney to Singapore,
the shipping line—which happened to be Dutch—said they’d take us up to Singapore, but after
that we were on our own. And so we boarded. Now, on the way up, we did in fact launch one
balloon, when we were in port in Java—Djakarta, I guess they call it now. We launched one
flight, which, if I remember, wasn’t very successful—but at least we launched it.

TERRALL: So you knew you were going to get to Singapore, but you didn’t know after that how
you were going to get to India?

PICKERING: That’s right. What happened was we spent four days or so in Singapore. Then we
found a little British freighter that was going to Calcutta, so we took that. Well, everything went


Pickering–21

on all right, although we had originally planned to come on around the world, but by the time we
were ready to leave India the war in the Mediterranean was beginning to get pretty hot. We
didn’t want to go back through the Mediterranean; in fact, we’d have had great difficulty, I think,
if we’d wanted to. So we ended up by coming back across the Pacific. We got an Italian boat as
far as Manila, and then one of the old Dollar Line American ships from Manila back.

TERRALL: How long were you actually in India?

PICKERING: On the order of two or three months.

TERRALL: I presume it was all arranged before you got over there, in terms of where you were
going to go and so on?

PICKERING: Oh, pretty much. Millikan had things taken care of. And on this trip, of course,
there was a lot of contact with other organizations. For example, the Indian meteorological
service worked with us. They provided us with the hydrogen to send up our balloons. They had
not done any high-altitude work. In fact, one of the by-products of this was that we made some
of the first measurements of real jet stream winds. It turned out that we were launching from
Agra in December. That time of year is very pleasant over there. It’s clear and sunny and just
pleasantly warm, and there’s very little wind at the surface. So the balloons would go up
vertically for a while. Then they’d get in the jet stream and go tearing off to the east. We were
able to track them, from the instruments that the weather bureau had, and measure these
velocities. We measured a 200-mile-an-hour wind stream once, which is exceptional but not that
unusual in a jet stream. These meteorologists were fascinated, because they had never realized
that that was what was going on.

TERRALL: Were there any problems involved in collaborating with them?

PICKERING: No, we got along quite well with them. They assigned a couple of people to work
with us. Agra was the headquarters, and when we went from there to Peshawar and down to
Bangalore, they sent people with us. In Bangalore, we had a very pleasant stay at the Indian


Pickering–22

Institute of Science. The director was C. V. Raman, who was a Nobel Prize winner, the first
Nobel Prize winner from India. Millikan and Raman had met and had known each other; in fact,
I think Raman had been in Pasadena. He was our host while we were in Bangalore, and that was
very nice. I was back in Bangalore, incidentally, not too long ago, and met a man whose father
had given him a movie he had taken when we were launching our balloons. So he showed me
this old movie.
So, the Indian trip was in l939-l940; then when we came back Millikan wanted to get
some more data, down in Mexico.

TERRALL: Why Mexico?

PICKERING: Well, we had to get to certain latitudes. He was interested in taking measurements
at a series of specific latitudes. So we went into Mexico on December 4th or thereabouts.
Actually, on Pearl Harbor day, which was the 7th of December, Millikan and Neher and I were
out flying a balloon. We were staying at a place called Victoria, which is about fifty or seventy-
five miles south of the border, and we had gone out into the brush there, so as to get away from
the town to make our balloon flights. When we came back at the end of the afternoon, of course
my wife was in a great tizzy, because she had heard about Pearl Harbor on the radio. The news
was in Spanish, but she’d gathered enough about what was going on so that she was pretty
shaken. So again we had the same situation as when we were going to go to India—namely, we
asked Millikan, “What do we do; do we go home now?” And Millikan said, “Well, no, I don’t
see any reason to go home. Nothing’s going to happen in Pasadena that would make any
difference whether I’m there now or there a few weeks from now. Let’s stay with the work.” So
we did.

TERRALL: That was the trip that you drove down in the truck. Did you have any particular
adventures on that drive? It’s a long drive.

PICKERING: It’s a long drive. No, it was pretty routine.

TERRALL: Were the roads fairly passable in those days?


Pickering–23

PICKERING: Yes, they were all right. We drove down as far as Acapulco. But we didn’t have
any trouble.

TERRALL: Did you get good results from that trip?

PICKERING: We got some good measurements, yes.

TERRALL: And they fitted with his theory?

PICKERING: Well, more or less. Millikan’s theory had to do with the creation of cosmic rays by
annihilation of elements. The data more or less fitted his theory, but actually it turned out that
the data were more complicated than that, because there were changes in the cosmic rays as a
function of time, because of changes in the solar magnetic field and so forth. So you can’t really
interpret the data the way Millikan did. In other words, Millikan thought the data proved his
theory, but in point of fact things were a bit fuzzy. When you really look at the data in terms of
what we know now, they didn’t prove his theory.

TERRALL: But this was much later then, that this was realized?

PICKERING: Oh, yes. A few years later.

TERRALL: This would have been ’41. Were there other trips after that?

PICKERING: Yes. The last trip was to St. George, Utah. In the middle of the war, when Caltech
first got into the rocket business, they were doing some work on rocket fuels in Kellogg [W. K.
Kellogg Radiation Laboratory]. They had a major fire or explosion there in Kellogg. It killed
one man. A graduate student who was going to go with us on the trip, and we were supposed to
have left that day or the day before, was just walking between Throop and Kellogg, and he got
caught in the blast. It burned him fairly badly, although he lived. But it obviously upset our
plans. We did go off a few days later.


Pickering–24

Neher and I had made another trip earlier, to fly electroscopes. I said we flew Geiger
counters first; I’m not sure that that’s right. I think maybe we did fly electroscopes first.
Anyway, in 1940 we had made a trip by train, where we had gone on a north-south line across
the country—Bismarck, North Dakota, down to San Antonio, Texas, and someplace in
Oklahoma. There was another trip down to San Antonio in September 1941.

TERRALL: Now, had you been responsible for developing the radio technique?

PICKERING: Yes, I had worked on the radio end of it particularly, and the general techniques for
getting the signal back and recording it.

TERRALL: This was something that hadn’t been done?

PICKERING: No, there hadn’t been much of that sort of thing. The closest thing to it was that the
weather bureau was beginning to launch weather balloons, which had some instruments. Though
I think the instruments had to be recovered in those days. In other words, they scratched on
smoky glass and things like that. They got a trace that you then had to recover and look at.

TERRALL: You had to rely on people sending them back to you then?

PICKERING: Yes.

TERRALL: Millikan had been working with sending up balloons way back, right?

PICKERING: Yes, that’s right. Some of the early ones you had to send back, yes.

TERRALL: So it was only when you started getting involved that they started using radio?

PICKERING: Yes. They had launched some balloons down in San Antonio, but those were the
ones that had to be recovered.


Pickering–25

TERRALL: The weather service was not interested in cosmic rays, right?

PICKERING: No, they were just helping. They had instruments and they had hydrogen.


Pickering–26

WILLIAM H. PICKERING

SESSION 2
NOVEMBER 29, 1978


TERRALL: The last time we finished up by talking about all the cosmic ray expeditions. I wanted
to ask you about teaching during that time. Were you teaching undergraduates?

PICKERING: Yes, I was teaching in various places. In fact, for a while I was teaching current
events and sophomore history.

TERRALL: How did that happen?

PICKERING: Well, back during the Depression, Caltech was pretty shorthanded. Dr. [William
Bennett] Munro, who was running the history department, got me over there. I don’t remember
how long I was teaching, but I did teach both current events and sophomore history for a while.
Then I was teaching some physics and some electrical engineering. In a sense, the most
interesting work that I was involved in was just before the war and just at the beginning of the
war—the late thirties—where I was trying to get more electronics into the curriculum. Because
at that time electrical engineering meant mostly power machinery. Electronics was just
beginning to evolve, and since my interests were very heavily in electronics, I was interested in
developing courses in those areas. And I did develop a number of courses, both laboratory
courses and theoretical courses.

TERRALL: Were these graduate courses?

PICKERING: Well, both undergraduate and graduate. In fact, the closest I ever came to writing a
book was a book for an electronics laboratory. In fact I think I still have a stack of manuscripts


Pickering–27

around somewhere which never did get published—although there was a lot of interest in it, and
I had several publishers after me. But I never did get it finished.

TERRALL: Was this true in general at universities, that there wasn’t much electronics being
taught?

PICKERING: Oh, yes. Well, you see, if you go back to the twenties and thirties, radio
communication and radio broadcasting were beginning to develop, but the use of electronics in
control systems and all that sort of stuff was just unheard of. Some schools were teaching radio
and communications, obviously, but we were not, here at Caltech. And this was partly because
the head of the EE department was Professor Sorensen, a very good man whose interests were
very definitely in power engineering. So the department was centered on power engineering,
including the development of the long-distance transmission of power. The first long-distance
power line in the country, I think, was the one that the Edison Company put in from Huntington
Lake down to Los Angeles. Most of the engineering for that was done here at Caltech. Also, the
high-voltage laboratory was financed through the Edison Company and was used as a test facility
for the development of that line. In other words, the EE department was heavily involved in this
business of the evolution of power systems. In that period, then, the idea of long-distance
transmission of power was just beginning to be appreciated and it was beginning to develop.
This Huntington Lake to LA line must have been put in sometime in the middle l920s. By the
middle 1930s, a line was operating between Hoover Dam and Los Angeles. Generally, the idea
of large networks was beginning to evolve. In fact, the large power systems that we have now
really started in about that period. So Caltech was heavily involved in that.
But the idea of electronics was something new and something different. Professor
Mackeown was here and taught vacuum tubes and vacuum tube theory. Then I tried to expand
this into other areas of electronics, and did so in the late thirties and early forties.

TERRALL: Did you try to attract people to Caltech who might be interested in expanding this part
of the EE department?

PICKERING: I don’t know if we did any particular proselytizing of either faculty or students. It


Pickering–28

just sort of came about naturally.

TERRALL: Well, then the war came along. That shook everything up.

PICKERING: Yes, then we had the V-12 program for navy officers. We also had a special short
course in microwaves and radar.

TERRALL: It was one course?

PICKERING: Essentially one intensive course, yes, and maybe only given once.

TERRALL: And you were teaching in that?

PICKERING: I was involved in that, yes. In fact, I think I must have organized it. That must have
been towards the end of the war, when there had been enough developments that radar was
beginning to come into use and the military needed people trained in these techniques. It was
essentially a pre-radar course. People took that and then went to MIT, to the Radiation Lab
there, and learned the particular techniques needed for the particular equipment that was being
used. So we had that, and we had the V-l2 program, which of course was a year-round program.

TERRALL: You were teaching in that also?

PICKERING: Oh, yes, I was involved in that. Then we had another one, which we called
ESMWT—the Engineering and Science Management War Training. This was essentially a
series of evening courses which were given all around Los Angeles, and we organized it out of
Caltech. I was involved with the management of it and also did some of the teaching. This was
mostly done at the junior college level, and it was presented in different high schools around the
area. We must have had ten or twenty different courses set up under that program.

TERRALL: How did having the V-l2 students on campus affect the way things ran at Caltech?


Pickering–29

PICKERING: Several things. There was of course, first of all, the intensive effort to get these
people through as quickly as possible. There was also the fact that a fair sprinkling of the faculty
was disappearing off the campus to go into various war jobs. Then we had a kind of a running
argument with the navy on the question of maintaining Caltech standards—because we
obviously wanted to. But as far as the navy was concerned, what appeared in a man’s file was a
grade-point average, without real recognition that this was a Caltech grade-point average, which
meant a lot more than the grade-point average from Podunk College. This was hard on the
individual, because the computer—well, I guess this was before the days of the computer—but
the filing clerk would not recognize this difference. We used to worry about that and talked to
the navy about it. We probably bent the system a bit to grade a little higher during that period
than we otherwise would.

TERRALL: What was the system for admissions? The navy assigned people?

PICKERING: Well, the navy assigned people. I don’t really remember now exactly how that
worked. But there must have been some filtering, because we got pretty good people. Those
classes went very well. In fact, they were not exclusively navy people, because the regular
Caltech students were mixed in, too. The whole thing just went right along. There wasn’t any
significant lowering of standards during that time.

TERRALL: Did they come here for four years?

PICKERING: Three years, because we worked right through the year; therefore the three summers
made the equivalent of a year. They got regular degrees from Caltech—just in less time, because
they worked right through. Now, I could give you the names of some alumni of that group. One
of the most well known of the alumni is Eberhardt Rechtin, for example, who is president of
Aerospace Corporation. Eb went through with the V-12 class, and then he stayed on and got a
doctor’s degree.
But as far as the system was concerned, everything was speeded up because of the war
and there was high pressure to get these kids through. The numbers involved were a little more
than we usually had, but not very much more.


Pickering–30

TERRALL: What about some of the other war research projects you were involved in?

PICKERING: Well, I was doing some microwave work, which led to an association with some of
the radar work. I did go back to MIT for about three months to do a little work back there.
There were several war projects, but I think perhaps one of the most interesting was the
Japanese balloon project. As you remember, the Japanese were sending over these unmanned
balloons that carried bombs, and they hoped that these would drop in the US and cause trouble.
Most of the bombs were fire bombs. They frankly hoped to set forest fires with these things, or
else, if they were lucky, maybe to set some fires in cities. As a technique, the thing was highly
successful. These things flew from Japan to various points in this country. In fact, I think one of
them was picked up in Florida, so they really did travel long distances. However, as far as we
know, no damage was ever done by these things until after the war, when some picnickers up
near Ventura ran across one of them which had landed up in the woods. These bombs had a
block of TNT on them, to destroy them. These picnickers were fooling with it, and the TNT
went off and killed them. But during the war we don’t know of anything particular that
happened from these things.

TERRALL: So why were they not successful?

PICKERING: A fire bomb dropped at random isn’t necessarily going to start a fire. And when we
analyzed it carefully, there were a couple of technical problems [the Japanese] had overlooked.
One of them was that these bombs, when they were hung onto the balloon mechanism, had a
safety pin in the nose. The safety pin was a piece of piano wire, which was anchored onto the
framework of the structure, so when the bomb dropped, it dropped free for a little bit and then
the wire pulled tight and was supposed to pull out, you see. Well, after those things had flown at
30,000 feet for a couple of days, that wire became brittle and a good many of them broke, so that
the bomb fell with the safety pin still in it and didn’t explode on impact. That was one problem
they had.
They had another technical problem in the operation of the balloon. The thing was
designed to fly at a constant altitude day and night by dropping sandbags from time to time.


Pickering–31

Then when it got through dropping all the sandbags, it started dropping bombs, you see; that was
the general scheme—quite a clever scheme. There was a mechanism set up to drop these things,
involving an altimeter, and this whole thing was operated by a little battery. Now, to stop the
battery from freezing at high altitudes, they had made a little plastic box, which would hold
maybe two or three quarts of liquid, and they put a low-freezing-point liquid in there. This
plastic box, then, had the battery in the middle of it. During the day the liquid would warm up
and then at night it wouldn’t cool down too much, so the battery wouldn’t freeze. Again, quite a
nice idea. The only problem was that in order to prevent the liquid from evaporating, of course
they put a lid on the box, and they had a little hole through which to fill it and they put a rubber
cork in the hole. Well, what happened was that when the balloon got to high altitudes, a good
many of these boxes exploded or broke open, because there wasn’t any pressure relief on them.
So that meant that the liquid disappeared, the battery froze, and the thing didn’t work right. So
they had a couple of technical problems.

TERRALL: Were a lot of these balloons getting to the States?

PICKERING: Yes. I don’t remember what the numbers were, but a quite surprisingly large
number.

TERRALL: And they were found and sent to you?

PICKERING: Yes, we had an arrangement set up that any of them that were found in the area for
100 miles or so around here were sent in to us for examination, because nobody was quite sure of
just what was going on. So our task was to examine these and to understand them so we knew
what to do about them. This business of sending these things in had one amusing by-product.
We got a phone call one afternoon that one had been found somewhere and was on its way up to
Caltech, and we said, “OK, drop it down in the landing dock area,” near what’s now the
aeronautics building. So they did. Later that afternoon we went over there and had a look at it.
And here in the corner of the room was this pile of balloon, and underneath the balloon was the
equipment. You see, what happened on a good many of these is that the balloon would burst and
the thing would come down to the ground. You’d pick up the balloon and all the equipment, so


Pickering–32

you’d have this great mass of balloon fabric and the equipment, which was a metal ring about
three feet in diameter underneath, with various things hanging onto it. So we went over and we
pulled the balloon off, and sure enough, here was the equipment; and along with it was this block
of TNT, which we knew was tied into a detonator on the thing. [Laughter] Here it is, Friday
afternoon, sitting in the corner of the aeronautics building. By then we were familiar enough
with it that we knew how to disarm the thing. So we disarmed it, but we were still worried about
that block of TNT. We decided the best thing to do was to put it up on the roof of Bridge. I
don’t know why we thought this, but we did. At least it was in the open. So we put it up on the
roof of Bridge, and then we called the army to come and get it. [Laughter] They did, and it
didn’t go off, so all was well.

TERRALL: What was supposed to make the bomb detonate?

PICKERING: Well, there was a detonator that was operated from the battery. After it had dropped
the last bomb, it was supposed to light a fuse which would set off this block of explosive. So
that, in theory, nothing would land, you see; it would just shatter the thing—the idea being, of
course, that we would be mystified as to where these things were coming from. But because of
this battery failure, a lot of balloons landed with the block of explosive intact.

TERRALL: So the bombs themselves had already been dropped?

PICKERING: In that particular case, I think so. I don’t think there were any bombs on this thing.
But that block of explosive was about the size of a pound of butter. We were very nervous.

TERRALL: Imagine how the Japanese would have felt if the building had blown up.

PICKERING: Anyway, that was an interesting project. The other man who was working on that
was Bill Nash, who is back on the campus now, working in the Alumni Office. He and I handled
that project. Let me tell you one other interesting anecdote. We were interested in whether you
could see these things on a radar or not. We patched up the balloon and put the whole thing
together so it would look as if it was flying over here. Then we took it up to Oxnard, to a navy


Pickering–33

facility, filled it up with hydrogen and put it up on a rope until it was maybe 1,000 feet up in the
air. The idea was that various radars around could have a look at it and see if they could see it.
Well, while it was up there, the rope broke and the balloon took off. We had taken the
precaution to put a tag on it to notify the Los Angeles harbor defense if it was found. Sure
enough, the next day, the harbor defense people got a phone call from the sheriff in Flagstaff,
Arizona, that he had the balloon. They said, “That’s fine, bundle it up and send it in.” And this
guy says he’s not going to touch it. And they ask “Why not?” He says, “Well, just because it’s
got your name on it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t some kind of a Japanese trick. And I’m going to
have nothing to do with it.” [Laughter] And he wouldn’t. The army had to send somebody out
there to pick the damn thing up and bring it home.

TERRALL: How did you get the ones that came straight from Japan sent to you?

PICKERING: Oh, through the army defense people. In other words, people found these things,
and they notified the sheriff or notified the army. In those days, after all, if you found something
like that on the ground, you knew there was something funny about it. In fact, a good many of
them, if you looked at them closely, had Japanese markings on them in some places. I think they
were mostly turned in.

TERRALL: Was this something that people were aware of, that Japanese were sending balloons
over?

PICKERING: Not at first; not until we had a pretty good handle on the fact that it wasn’t very
serious, and then it was publicized. The Japanese made quite a to-do of it. We found afterwards
that at that time, this was announced over there as a new weapon that was going to attack the
Americans. They would launch these things with a public ceremony, usually down at a beach
somewhere, and crowds of people would come down and watch them be launched off on their
way to America.

TERRALL: It’s amazing that there wasn’t more damage done by them.


Pickering–34

PICKERING: Yes, it is. In fact, there might still be some bombs out there. Anyway, that was an
interesting project.

TERRALL: On the microwave project, were you considering going to MIT and working there?

PICKERING: Well, no, I was so tied up with the teaching program here that it really wasn’t
considered that I should do that. No, mostly I went to MIT to get up to date on some of the
things they were doing. So that even though most of it was classified, at least I could bring some
elements of it back into some of the teaching here.

TERRALL: Oh, I see. It was a question of getting it into the teaching.

PICKERING: Yes, getting myself acquainted with it.

TERRALL: So you weren’t involved in the development of wave guides.

PICKERING: Well, I was doing some wave guide research. Studying some of the electrical
characteristics of wave guides was especially what I did at MIT. In other words, I was not
working on a particular piece of radar equipment but rather on some of the basic research
underlying it.

TERRALL: Were there other people here at Caltech working on wave guides?

PICKERING: Oh, I don’t think so. No, all the intensive work on microwaves was done at MIT at
the Radiation Lab. The big thing that Caltech was doing during the war was the rocket work—
and actually there were two projects, the Eaton Canyon project and the JPL [Jet Propulsion
Laboratory] project. Of those, the Eaton Canyon project was much more active during the war,
because it was really manufacturing rockets. [William A.] Fowler and [Charles C.] Lauritsen
were the leaders in that. The JPL one was the aeronautics department, and that was [Theodore]
von Kármán and Clark Millikan. I got involved in that before the end of the war, too.


Pickering–35

TERRALL: Had you had anything to do with the aeronautical lab before that?

PICKERING: No. They got me into it when they got into some instrumentation problems. So I
went up there to try to help with some of those things.
To go back over the history of JPL a little bit: JPL, of course, started out in the late
thirties, when some aeronautics students wanted to do some rocket research. They got a little bit
of money to support that. Von Kármán’s interest at the time—in fact all of their interests at the
time—really aimed at how you could use a rocket to make an airplane fly better, or faster. And
the JATO—Jet-Assisted Take-Off—rocket was developed in the very early days of the war. As
soon as it was appreciated what could be done, they got a lot of support from the army, which
then had the Army Air Corps under its wing. But the thing grew so quickly that the Aerojet
Corporation was spun off as a commercial company to handle the manufacture of JATO rockets,
whereas JPL would continue with the research. Then, later on in the war, the army asked JPL to
look at rockets for missiles and to really begin the development of a long-range missile. By then,
the German V-2 activity was becoming understood, so we were asked to start a research program
aimed at developing something like the V-2—well, we didn’t put it that way, but to develop
long-range missiles. That happened about the time I went up there. My work tended to be more
and more tied up with this long-range missile problem.

TERRALL: Now was this soon after JPL was started?

PICKERING: Yes, in the ’44 period—it began to move in that direction.

TERRALL: At that time, they were physically where they are now, at the end of the Arroyo?

PICKERING: Yes. What happened was that when they started doing rocket research, they started
in the aeronautics building, until they filled the building up with nitric acid fumes one day and
they were told to get the heck out of there. So they went up in the Arroyo and arranged with the
city to get a little piece of land.

TERRALL: That was completely undeveloped then?


Pickering–36

PICKERING: Oh, yes. There was just a dirt road up there.

TERRALL: Did they have any problems with accidents in those early days?

PICKERING: No, the accident record at JPL has been remarkably good. I don’t know if JPL has
ever hurt a man very seriously with rockets; it’s been very good on that.

TERRALL: You mentioned last time that there was an explosion at Caltech; that was earlier?

PICKERING: Yes, that was the Eaton Canyon project. That was in the basement of Kellogg.

TERRALL: What was the relationship between the two projects? None?

PICKERING: They were quite independent.

TERRALL: So they had completely separate funding?

PICKERING: Yes, the Lauritsen project was navy-funded; the other one was army.

TERRALL: So there wasn’t any concern that the efforts were being duplicated?

PICKERING: No, they were going off in different directions.

[Tape recorder turned off]

TERRALL: You were saying that von Kármán asked you to get involved in the missile project.

PICKERING: Yes, so I got involved up there and went up there to do instrumentation work. As
the missile project started developing, I got more and more heavily involved in that. One thing
led to another, and I took over the lab in 1954.


Pickering–37

TERRALL: But the first project you were working on was telemetry?

PICKERING: Telemetry systems, yes. We started putting telemetry on some of the rocket test
vehicles. The first big project was a large test vehicle called the Corporal. Then the army asked
us to make it into a production missile from a research tool, and we modified it and came up with
the Corporal weapon system. I was project manager for that.

Fig. 2. The launch of a JPL Corporal missile at the US Army’s White Sands Proving
Ground in New Mexico, ca 1954. Photo from “GALCIT: The First Twenty-Five Years,”
Caltech Archives.

TERRALL: Did the telemetry technique you were using grow out of what you used in the cosmic
ray experiments?

PICKERING: Yes, it was an evolution from the cosmic ray stuff, because in that, we were sending
information down from balloons. So this was very much an expansion of some of the techniques


Pickering–38

we were developing.

TERRALL: But this was also a control mechanism?

PICKERING: Well, no. The telemetry is independent of the control. The telemeter is just sending
information back. The control involved something internal to the rocket, as to how you stabilize
it and how you guide it. We evolved a system for the Corporal which involved radio guidance as
well as some internal equipment.

TERRALL: The Corporal wasn’t finished before the war was over, was it?

PICKERING: Oh, no. No, work on the weapon system didn’t even start until 1949.

TERRALL: What about the telemetry; that wasn’t used in any of the earlier rockets?

PICKERING: Oh, yes, it was used in the test vehicles. The first Corporal test vehicle was
launched about ’46, I think.

TERRALL: Would you say that that project took longer than the army expected it to? Were they
hoping that it would be used in the war?

PICKERING: Oh, I don’t know. They wanted us to get working in the field when they realized
that the Germans had been doing something. So they wanted us to get started, but I don’t know
that they had any feeling that we were going to come up with something, unless the war went on
for many years. The Eaton Canyon rockets, on the other hand, were used in the war. They were
barrage rockets.

TERRALL: They were less sophisticated?

PICKERING: Yes, they were just simple rockets, with no guidance at all except fins on them.
They were used in large numbers on the landings on the Pacific islands. They were used as a


Pickering–39

barrage, because you could get a very large amount of explosives on the beach to clear the beach
before you tried to land.

TERRALL: Were you involved in Aerojet at all?

PICKERING: No. That had been established before I joined JPL. I had nothing to do with that
group.

TERRALL: But von Kármán was in both places, right?

PICKERING: Oh, yes. By the way, the first director of JPL in its present form was really Frank
Malina. I think Frank doesn’t like to call himself the first director; he wants to say von Kármán
was the first director. But anyway, other than von Kármán, it was Frank Malina. He’s now in
Paris. He’s an artist, and he enjoys life in Paris. Kinetic art has been what he’s working on, and
he also publishes an art and science magazine, Leonardo.

TERRALL: Is this just since his retirement?

PICKERING: Well, after he left JPL in 1946, when Louis Dunn came in [as director], he went
over to Paris and he worked with von Kármán, who was in Paris also, working for NATO.
Malina was with him, but developing his art. He went through various phases, finally ending up
with this kinetic art, which is abstract art using moving light.

TERRALL: I knew his name from the early days of JPL, but I didn’t know what had happened to
him. But von Kármán in those days was away a lot, in Washington and so on?

PICKERING: Well, during the war he was, although he was based here at Caltech. After the
war—I guess I don’t know when he moved to Paris—but he set up what was called AGARD,
Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development. It was a group of the NATO
countries, banding together in aerospace research. They were headquartered in Paris. Von
Kármán was primarily responsible for it, actually.


Pickering–40

TERRALL: How well did you know von Kármán?

PICKERING: Oh, not as well as I knew Millikan, but I knew him quite well. After the war was
over, for example, I went over to Europe with him on a fact-finding expedition. So I saw quite a
lot of him. He used to live down here; he had a big house down on South Garfield, with his
sister, Pipa. He never married, but his sister used to look after him.

TERRALL: Was he a very social person?

PICKERING: Well, not in the sense of having big society-type parties, but he was always very
sociable with his students. He was a very warm individual.


TERRALL: I wanted to ask you about the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Did you get into
that through von Kármán?

PICKERING: Von Kármán set that up. That was a by-product of his war work. I was a member
of the first board.

TERRALL: What was the purpose of that?

PICKERING: To help the air force with its research planning.

TERRALL: But you were involved in investigating the state of Japanese electronics?

PICKERING: Well, after the war, of course, everybody went rushing around to find out what was
going on in the enemy countries. I was involved with one of these trips with von Kármán, in
which we went over to Germany to find out what was going on there in aeronautics, principally
aeronautics—and then to Japan also. This meant visiting various laboratories and talking to


Pickering–41

people and trying to find out what we could.

TERRALL: What did you find out about the Japanese technology?

PICKERING: Oh, they were not very far ahead. In the electronics area, neither country was as far
as we were.

TERRALL: One of the other people in that group was [Hsue-shen] Tsien. Wasn’t he on that trip
to Japan?

PICKERING: No, he didn’t go on it. No, Tsien worked very closely with Kármán, and I guess
Tsien made one trip to Europe with Kármán, but he was not on the trip that I went on.

TERRALL: Had you worked with him at JPL?

PICKERING: Tsien? Oh, not very much.

TERRALL: He later had problems, during the McCarthy period.

PICKERING: Yes, Tsien, of course, is a very famous case of the bungling of the US bureaucracy,
really. Well, it was partly the McCarthy business but partly also just bungling on the part of the
US government. Tsien had been very close to Kármán, and Kármán regarded him as one of his
best students. Tsien worked very closely with him in the air force planning and research
activities; he was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board. He worked up at JPL, and one of
the things he did up there was to organize a rocket training program for the army people, to teach
them something about rockets. Well, a few years after the war, he wanted to go back to China to
visit his father, because his father was getting old. The Chinese, of course, have great respect for
their ancestors, and he wanted to make a trip back. One group in Washington decided that he
knew too much and he shouldn’t be allowed to go. They literally almost grabbed him off the
boat, and essentially put him under house arrest up here in Altadena. The excuse for it was that
they found a copy of his training manual in his luggage. At the time it was written, the training


Pickering–42

manual had been classified, but by then it wasn’t classified at all. But anyway, they held him,
because they just felt that he knew too much and they were afraid to let him go to China. About
six months or a year later, another group in Washington decided he was an undesirable alien and
ought to be deported. And they deported him. By then, of course, Tsien was so furious he said
he was never going to come back. And of course he didn’t

TERRALL: He had been here for quite a long time, and he had worked on all sorts of things,
hadn’t he?

PICKERING: Oh, yes, all sorts of advanced stuff with Kármán. He was a very bright man and he
is now in a very senior position in Chinese science.

TERRALL: So Kármán couldn’t intercede for him?

PICKERING: No, the thing just got out of our hands altogether here at Caltech. Now, if it had
been handled correctly, of course, they shouldn’t have stopped him in the first place. They
should have had a real discussion with him as to what his plans were and a real understanding.
And I think Tsien would have come back and worked with us. But, in the first place, grabbing
him almost off the boat and putting him under house arrest—he just couldn’t move out of the
Pasadena area. I guess he came down to Caltech and did a few things. Then this other bunch
just saying he had to be deported as an undesirable alien. The poor guy! In fact, things got
pretty tense. I think there was one incident of burning a cross on his lawn up in Altadena, of all
things.

TERRALL: But he must have had plenty of friends around.

PICKERING: Oh, yes, sure, and there were Chinese among them. There were quite a few Chinese
at Caltech in those years. In fact, one of them came back here on a visit not so long ago, who
was a physicist. He had gotten his doctor’s degree from Caltech about 1930, and he had worked
around here; actually he worked during the war on what was called the Morris Dam project,
which was a highly classified project that the navy had up here, doing some torpedo research.


Pickering–43

And then after the war he elected to go back to China. I don’t think he got kicked out; he just
wanted to go back. So he went back and stayed there, and he’s now one of their leading
scientists. He came through here a couple of years ago, and he and I talked quite a bit. He was
obviously getting homesick for Pasadena, because he was reminiscing about all the people he
knew here and wondering what had happened to them. And actually, as I say, there’ve been
quite a number of them through here.

TERRALL: Did anybody else have the same kind of problems that Tsien had?

PICKERING: No. I don’t know that any of the others were either kicked out or prevented from
going.

TERRALL: That was just sort of freak case, then?

PICKERING: Yes. Although there were loyalty investigation cases involving some of the people
who’d been up at JPL. There was a man by the name of [Sidney] Weinbaum who was jailed on
a perjury charge as part of this McCarthy business.

TERRALL: And what became of that?

PICKERING: Well, he was jailed for a few years. I really don’t know don’t happened to him.

TERRALL: Because, actually at Caltech, people really weren’t touched that much by it.

PICKERING: No, no, because Caltech generally is not politically motivated. But this involved a
question of whether there’d been some Communist cells, or something more or less equivalent to
that, in the thirties. You know, this touched all kinds of people. Of course, the really terrible
example here is Robert Oppenheimer. He was badly mistreated, really, for what he’d done in the
thirties, whereas he’d made a tremendous contribution to the country.

TERRALL: But this person at JPL, was it generally felt that this was exaggerated?


Pickering–44

PICKERING: Oh, I think most people felt that these guys were not in any sense activists—that
they were just sort of intellectually interested in socialism or communism. Particularly in the
thirties, in the Depression days.

TERRALL: During the time of the investigations, then, in the fifties, were people at JPL worried
about this sort of thing?

PICKERING: Oh, there was a little bit of worrying about it, but not very much. Let’s see,
McCarthy was about ’52; the Tsien case must have been pretty close to that time. I’m not
exactly sure when. I think the Weinbaum case may have been earlier; in fact, I’m pretty sure it
was earlier.

TERRALL: So this would have been someone who was working on classified research?

PICKERING: Well, in general, the work up at JPL was classified, up until the time we joined
NASA.

TERRALL: So everybody had to get security clearance?

PICKERING: Yes.

TERRALL: When you were appointed director of JPL [1954], did that come as a surprise to you?

PICKERING: Yes. Louis Dunn was the director at that time, and Louis and I were pretty close.
Louis told me, of course, that he was going to leave, but I was surprised when [Caltech president
Lee A.] DuBridge asked me to take it over. In fact, I wasn’t sure how long I wanted to keep the
job. At that time, we were working on the Sergeant missile. I told DuBridge that I would stay at
least to get the Sergeant missile project finished, but after that, I didn’t know.

TERRALL: You were thinking of going back to the campus?


Pickering–45

PICKERING: To the campus, yes. And of course what happened was, before the Sergeant missile
project was finished, the space project started, and then I got involved with that.

TERRALL: How did you feel about putting so much of your time into administration?

PICKERING: Well, it’s a different life. But on the other hand, I had sort of gone into it gradually.
In other words, if I may make a distinction between my case and that of Bruce Murray [JPL
director 1976-1982], who also went from the campus up to the lab, I had been spending a lot
more time and had been a lot more involved in JPL administration over the years. I had been
spending full time up there for several years.

TERRALL: You were heading up one of the sections anyway, right?

PICKERING: Yes, sure. I was doing less and less teaching as time went on, so that I sort of
phased into it. Whereas in Bruce’s case, although he had done work up there, he hadn’t been
involved in the administration of the place to the extent that I had. It was more of a switch in his
case.

TERRALL: But did you find that it took you away from the research end of things?

PICKERING: Yes, sure. I wasn’t doing research, of course, so I found myself just worrying about
people and projects and so on. And the teaching I used to enjoy. Particularly because this was a
period, after the war, when there was a lot of evolution in the curriculum. A lot of stuff that was
coming out of the war years was getting into the academic programs. There were lots of new
things and lots of interesting things to teach.

TERRALL: So you had actually been teaching between the end of the war and the time you
moved up to JPL.

PICKERING: Oh, yes. My last class was in ’52. I think I had a graduate student up until about


Pickering–46

the time I took over.

TERRALL: So how did it work out? Was it something that you found you liked to do—the
administration?

PICKERING: Oh, yes, sure. I was obviously already pretty deeply involved in it. And as I say, I
told DuBridge I’d certainly stay to see the Sergeant out. It was because of my interest in what I
was doing.

TERRALL: What was the relationship between Caltech and JPL at that time? Were there a lot of
people who had joint appointments?

PICKERING: No, very few. Historically, it started out as a very close relationship, because, after
all, everybody was a graduate student to begin with. In the early days of the rocket work, there
was a close association with the campus. And, actually, in the early days of the missile work,
there was a close association, because JPL had some equipment—namely, supersonic wind
tunnels—which didn’t exist on the campus, and there was a lot of interest in the aeronautics
department. So the aeronautics department and JPL were pretty close in those early years. But
they started to drift apart when JPL became more and more involved in the engineering of
missile systems; the security classification started getting higher and it became more difficult to
communicate. So by the middle fifties, the relationship between the two groups was pretty
slight. In fact, there was a period around 1950 when the Board of Trustees questioned whether
or not Caltech ought to continue to operate JPL, because we were getting more and more into
this highly classified stuff. The question, “Why do it?” came up. The army, in fact, sent out
some high-ranking generals to talk to the Board, and they agreed to maintain it.

TERRALL: So the trustees were actually also the trustees of JPL?

PICKERING: Oh, yes. JPL is legally a part of Caltech. And all the legal documents—the
contracts and so forth—have to go through Caltech signatures.


Pickering–47

TERRALL: And the army wanted to keep it that way?

PICKERING: Yes, the army was quite happy with it and wanted to keep it. As I say, they sent
some senior people out to talk to the trustees about it. But the day-to-day contact with the
faculty and with the students was pretty slim—partly because of this classification problem and
the physical separation and so forth. Apart from myself and Homer Joe Stewart, there were
some others—Frank Marble, Duncan Rannie, Pol Duwez; just a few people who were shared
between the two places, but not too many.
Then when we joined NASA [1958], both DuBridge and I said, “Well, now this is a new
ball game, because now we’re unclassified, and now we’re more scientifically oriented. And
therefore, we ought to develop more relationships.” And that has been a more difficult thing to
do than I think either DuBridge or I visualized. I think I understand why—it’s really because the
faculty and the laboratory have completely different motivations. The faculty are motivated to
do research that they’re interested in on a time scale that suits their convenience, whereas the
laboratory is motivated to respond to a request from a contractor—be it the army or NASA—to
do something for them, and we have to work on schedules and budgets and so on. Also, we have
to do things that somebody else wants to do, not necessarily what we want to do. So you end up
with people with different objectives in life. It’s not as easy to work together as it sounds at first.

TERRALL: When you took over, the army was still funding JPL. Were there problems in running
a lab for the army?

PICKERING: No, actually it was easier to run it for the army than it was to run it for NASA. [The
army] didn’t bother us. The army was very satisfied with us, because we were doing good work
for them, and they did leave us alone to a much greater extent than NASA did. Then the other
thing which was actually very helpful from our point of view was that because of the
classification business, we did all our field testing down at the classified site, down at White
Sands [New Mexico]. We didn’t have the TV and everybody looking over our shoulder. That
made it a lot easier to do some things. So, yes, we worked very hard for the army, and I think we
accomplished a lot for the army. But the army gave us a free hand to a very large extent. Then
NASA came in, and one of the first things they did was that the first director of NASA, Keith


Pickering–48

Glennan, and his deputy Hugh Dryden, came out and talked to me. One of the first things they
said was, “Well, now things are going to be different. Because instead of being run by a bunch
of colonels in the Pentagon, we at NASA have a headquarters staff of research Ph.D.’s. And
we’re going to have a lot more to say about what you do.” And that, as a matter of fact, led to
some problems in the early days of NASA.

TERRALL: But the army people [had kept] pretty close track of what you were doing.

PICKERING: Oh, sure, yes. But they did not have a whole lot of PhD’s in the Pentagon to
second-guess us. A small office in the Pentagon with one or two people in it essentially ran the
project. The result was that we would tell them at the beginning of the year what we wanted to
do. They would say, “Gee, we haven’t got that much money,” and then we’d argue abut it a bit,
and then they would give us the money and off we’d go.

TERRALL: And whenever you needed to do testing, you went down to White Sands?

PICKERING: Yes. As a matter of fact, if you look at some very early maps of White Sands, you
will find that they’re labeled ORDCIT, which was Ordnance Department, California Institute of
Technology. And in fact the original choice of White Sands was made by a group that included
Homer Joe Stewart. You ought to talk to Homer Joe about some of this stuff. The early maps
show it as the ORDCIT extension of the Fort Bliss Bombing Range—that’s what it was called.
And then it eventually became the White Sands Proving Ground.

TERRALL: So it was used originally just for JPL testing?

PICKERING: Yes, the first rockets that were launched down there were JPL rockets. In fact, the
first rocket launch from Cape Canaveral was a JPL rocket, too. It was a so-called Bumper-
WAC, where we put the WAC Corporal, which was a smaller version of the Corporal, on top of
a V-2, and that was launched from down there. So JPL has an involvement in the development
of both of those ranges.


Pickering–49

TERRALL: Did you know DuBridge before he became president of Caltech?

PICKERING: Well, I’d met him when I was at MIT for a while. But no, I didn’t really know him.

TERRALL: How closely did he work with you [when you were] director of JPL?

PICKERING: Oh, he supported me, but he didn’t really interfere with what was going on there.
With regard to the question as to whether or not JPL would continue to be a Caltech contract, he
was very supportive of us in that.

TERRALL: How do you think Caltech changed when DuBridge took over?

PICKERING: Well, Caltech changed, and I could almost say that if Millikan had still been the
president, Caltech would have changed, just because of the war and the way in which science
and engineering changed during the war. I was going to say that DuBridge was a lot closer to a
lot of the Washington activity than Millikan ever was. But I’ve got to reflect back that Millikan
in World War I was just as active in the war effort as DuBridge was in World War II. But after
World War I, the government didn’t play the role in the universities that it did after World War
II, and so there had to be a closer contact with Washington. And of course, DuBridge provided
that. DuBridge also ran what I would call a more businesslike operation than Millikan. Millikan
tended to operate Caltech more as a personal activity. He never called himself president, for
example; he was chairman of the Executive Council. And that was a reflection of the fact that he
wanted this thing to operate in a very democratic and a sort of loose fashion. And it operated
well, because he had some very good people and they worked together well. In DuBridge’s day,
you could say it was the next phase of growth; the very fact of growth called for changes in the
way you operated. DuBridge put in more businesslike methods of operation.
Both he and Millikan had the gift of language. They knew how to talk to an audience, no
matter who it was. They knew exactly the right things to say, and they did it very well. Whether
this was trying to get money out of somebody, or addressing a technical group or a bunch of
faculty or whoever it was, they knew what to say.


Pickering–50

TERRALL: It seems that one of Millikan’s main ideas was to have the best person in each of the
different fields, so that he could rely on them.

PICKERING: Yes, that’s right. He tried to get the best people and then turn them loose.

TERRALL: And that changed when the place got bigger?

PICKERING: Oh, I suppose so, although the ideal of excellence always remained.

TERRALL: But the idea of having one person in chemistry, one person in biology?

PICKERING: Yes. That had to change.

TERRALL: When would you say that space exploration was first seriously talked about at JPL?
Were people thinking along those lines?

PICKERING: Oh, yes. There were some studies made back in 1945 or thereabouts. As soon as
we began to appreciate what you could do with a rocket, some studies were made of satellites.

TERRALL: Did you approach the army [about this]?

PICKERING: No, these were just long-range studies. I don’t think that at that time we visualized
going into a satellite program. We were too busy trying to get a rocket to fly a few miles. But
we began to appreciate the scientific use of rockets for upper atmosphere exploration and began
to want to do some work in those fields. The WAC Corporal was the first high-altitude sounding
rocket capable of being used for that purpose. Now, in point of fact it was never used very
much, because the effort at JPL was switched to the development of the Corporal. The WAC
Corporal was picked up by Aerojet and became the Aerobee, which was used very widely as a
research rocket.
JPL has always been more engineering-oriented than science-oriented, but we recognized
the possibilities of scientific research in high-altitude rockets, and eventually in satellites, way


Pickering–51

back at the end of the war. When the US brought a batch of V-2s over here at the end of the war,
and they wondered what to do with them, some scientists came along and said, “Let’s use them
for upper-air research.” I was involved in that, in the sense that an upper-atmosphere rocket
research panel was formed. I was on that panel. But we didn’t have any experiments that we
developed at JPL. So JPL interest was more in the engineering capability required to do these
things. And, of course, when the decision was made that the US would launch a satellite, then
we dusted off some of this earlier stuff. By then, we were working pretty closely with the
Huntsville people [the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Alabama—Ed.]. They came
up with a proposal, based on using the Redstone and some upper stages. We took their proposal
and said, “They’ve got the wrong upper stages,” and we redid it for upper stages, which we felt
were the right ones. This was Explorer 1.

TERRALL: I think I saw somewhere that [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower announced support
for a satellite back in 1955. How did that develop?

PICKERING: Well, what Eisenhower said was that the US would have a satellite experiment
during the International Geophysical Year [1957-1958], and that this experiment would be
developed as a nonmilitary rocket system—completely independent of military rockets, keeping
it outside of the classified area. And he assigned it to the Naval Research Lab, which is a lab that
does classified research but that had been active in the upper-atmosphere research program as
scientists using the V-2s. In fact, NRL had developed a rocket of their own called the Viking,
which was a very junior version of the V-2 but which could be used for upper-air research. So it
was fairly reasonable to say to NRL, “OK, you guys take your rocket experience and your
science experience and go ahead and develop a satellite.” That was called the Vanguard.
By 1957, it was clear that Vanguard was in serious trouble and was going to have great
difficulty meeting the schedule. So we had, as I said, dusted off our old proposals and had
basically worked with the army, with the Huntsville people, to [the point] where we had
something we were pretty sure we could fly. At this time in history, there was very strong
rivalry between the three services for the rocket programs. They were [each] very definitely
going their own way in everything.
Anyway, this study we’d made with the Huntsville people turned out to have an


Pickering–52

application for the Huntsville work on what was called the intermediate range ballistic missile
[IRBM], which was a 2,000-mile missile. They wanted to do some reentry tests on it, so we took
our satellite study, and instead of putting it up to satellite speed, we said, “OK, we’ll leave off
one stage and we can do this reentry test at about the range you want.” So we had made a
number of tests of their reentry nose cone using a technique that could easily be modified to
launch a satellite. And so by the middle of 1957 we had a lot of confidence that we knew how to
launch a satellite. In fact, in about August ’57, Eisenhower publicly showed one of our reentry
nose cones, which was recovered 3,000 miles out in the Atlantic and brought into Washington.
So that program was going along.
Then, when the Russians launched their first satellite [October 1957], of course we were
very disturbed about it. But we got strict orders from the army to stay away from it. They told
us we had no authority to launch any satellites.

TERRALL: Why was that?

PICKERING: Well, because the Vanguard program was the official US [satellite] program, and
the Vanguard was coming along—so, “Stay out of it. That’s a nonmilitary program and you have
nothing to do with it.” Then, when the Russians launched their second satellite a month later, the
army got a go-ahead. Then we very quickly got together with General [John B.] Medaris and
[Wernher] von Braun and carved up the pie, and [we] got moving on it.

TERRALL: What happened to the Vanguard?

PICKERING: Let’s see, the first Soviet satellite was October; the second one was November.
Vanguard announced they would launch in December. We had been told in November—I think
literally a day after the [second] Soviet launching—to get moving, as a backup. We said we
could launch by about the end of January. Well, the December launch of Vanguard was a flop;
the thing went up about four feet and fell back in a ball of fire. It was on nationwide TV, so that
was pretty embarrassing for the country—let alone the navy and everybody else. So then we
were going to be next, because we had said we would make the end of January. It was pretty
tense because we knew that everybody was watching us—not only in this country but really


Pickering–53

around the world—because here the Russians were making a big propaganda hit out of how they
were launching satellites, and we were dropping rockets in a ball of fire on our launching pad.
We did launch successfully, then, at the end of January. That was a very interesting period to
live through.

TERRALL: When Sputnik was launched, do you think the alarm that people felt was just a
question of national pride or were they worried that it was a military event?

PICKERING: Well, first of all, I think, as far as the general public was concerned, it was an awful
shock to them that the Russians were launching something that was flying overhead in the US
and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. There was all sorts of talk about dropping
bombs on us from satellites, and all this kind of stuff. You’ve got to remember also that up to
this time there had been no intercontinental missiles. The Russians, by the way, launched their
Sputnik with their military missiles, as we did our Explorer. But I think the Russians launched a
test missile a little bit before they launched their first Sputnik, and I’m not sure when we
launched our first ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile]; I think it was later. So there was
concern that the Russians were ahead of us, and there had been talk about intercontinental
missiles but nobody really appreciated what they could do. And all of a sudden you wake up one
morning and here’s this doggone Russian thing flying overhead, looking down at the US every
hour and a half or whatever it was: “The Russians are doing this, and what’s the matter with us?”
Oh, no, there was a great deal of disturbance—not only in this country but around the world.
Because all of a sudden, the Russians, instead of being backward peasants, were coming up with
technology that the Americans hadn’t been able to achieve. Therefore there was tremendous
pressure to have us do something and do it quickly.
I mean, there were people who tried to discount it—official statements out of the
Pentagon—

TERRALL: That it wasn’t such a breakthrough?

PICKERING: Yes, that sort of thing. But the fact of the matter was that as far as the man in the
street was concerned, he was very shaken.


Pickering–54

TERRALL: There was the feeling that these could be used militarily?

PICKERING: Well, not only that but it proved that the intercontinental missile was a reality, and
therefore you could sit in Russia and drop a missile on Kansas City. After all, if you could shoot
something around the world, you could sure shoot it to Kansas City. That was the thing that
shook people.

TERRALL: In the International Geophysical Year, you were on the satellite panel, weren’t you?

PICKERING: Oh, I was on various things. When the US established this satellite program, they
set up a satellite panel, which was formed out of the old upper-atmosphere research panel, and I
was a member of that.

TERRALL: Now, did you have any information about what the Russians were doing?

PICKERING: Oh, things used to drift out of Russia a little bit, and there were various IGY
meetings. In fact, there was an IGY meeting in Washington that started a few days before the
first Sputnik launch. The Sputnik launch was on a Friday, and the meeting started on the previous
Monday and ran through the week, actually. This consisted of reports from various countries on
what they were doing in their IGY programs. The Russian, a man by the name of [Sergei M.]
Poloskov, happened to make his report on Monday. In his report, he said that the launching of a
satellite was imminent—although the translation at the time did not use the word “imminent”; it
used the words “in the near future” or something like that. But a man sitting next to me who
knew Russian said, “That’s not what he said; he said it was imminent.” And in fact, it was
launched that Friday.

TERRALL: That’s interesting, because it was played up as such a big shock, and here the IGY
was supposed to be international cooperation.

PICKERING: That’s right. No, the Russian said it was imminent. That was October, and I know


Pickering–55

a month or two before then, out at JPL, we were speculating on when the first Russian satellite
would go up. I don’t know what sources of information we had—mostly rumors, I suppose. But
the general opinion at JPL was that they were going to launch one in a few months, even then.
And that’s what was worrying us, because we felt we could do it in a few months also, if
somebody would say, “Go!”
Incidentally, an interesting anecdote on that actual launching: On the Friday evening, the
Russians had a cocktail party at the embassy for the IGY people. We were up there drinking
vodka and so forth. Walter Sullivan from the New York Times came in and he spotted me. He
said, “What have they said about the satellite?” I said, “What do you mean?” And he said,
“Well, my New York office told me to hightail it over here and find out about the satellite, which
Radio Moscow says they’ve launched.” So I got ahold of Dick Porter, and then we got ahold of
Lloyd Berkner, and we went off in a corner. Sullivan repeated this story to us. Lloyd, who was
the senior U.S. scientist present, said, “OK, I’ll handle this.” So he went over to [Anatoli A.]
Blagonravov, who was the senior Russian [scientist], and said he wanted to propose a toast. So
there was silence all over the room. Then Lloyd announces that the Russians have launched a
satellite. [Laughter]

TERRALL: He wanted to be the first to say it.

PICKERING: I don’t think the Russian knew it. I think Blagonravov knew the launch was going
to be soon but he didn’t know when, and his communications with Russia I don’t think were that
good. And it was the New York Times that picked it up from Moscow somehow and relayed it
down to Washington. That’s the way it happened. So Lloyd announced the launching of the
Soviet satellite.


Pickering–56

SESSION 3
DECEMBER 12, 1978


TERRALL: I think last time we’d been talking about Explorer.

PICKERING: Yes, Explorer and Sputnik.

TERRALL: Explorer had been held up because they didn’t want to use military missiles.

PICKERING: The IGY program was going to be done with nonmilitary hardware, and therefore
the US was going to build a new rocket to launch Vanguard. The new rocket got in trouble, and
the Russians went ahead and launched Sputnik. After the launching of the second Sputnik, we
were told to go ahead and use the army rocket and get a satellite up there. So we did. We used
the Redstone rocket, plus a three-stage solid-propellant rocket that JPL developed, which was put
on top of the Redstone. And we successfully launched the first US satellite.

TERRALL: How did the fact that this was during the IGY affect the way this went? The IGY, as
I understand it, was supposed to foster international collaboration, right?

PICKERING: Well, the International Geophysical Year was what it says—namely, a worldwide
attempt by scientists to gather scientific data about the earth. This meant a lot of people who
made simultaneous measurements of magnetic fields and all sorts of odds and ends. The satellite
was brought into the picture as a new tool for looking at the earth and gathering information
about the earth. It was in 1955 that both the US and the Soviets announced that they would try to
launch a satellite as part of their contribution to the IGY program. The IGY program was
formally organized on an international basis—each country had its own IGY committee. The
one in the US was chaired by Professor Joseph Kaplan from UCLA. These committees then
organized the work within the various countries, and then there was an international committee


Pickering–57

that put everything together. In fact, it was at one of these regular reports of progress at which
Poloskov made the announcement that the Russian Sputnik launching was imminent.

TERRALL: Were the data that the satellites were sending back open?

PICKERING: They were open data, yes. Yes, and in fact the Soviets have been quite good about
that. Scientific data from their satellites are published in the regular journals. In fact, they also
tend to publish quite a lot of it in their newspapers—at least they did in the early days. In fact,
one could even make the comment that the Soviets were more prompt about publishing data than
we were.

TERRALL: I was just wondering whether the obvious competition between the two countries
wasn’t counter to the principle of the IGY.

PICKERING: Well, the theory, of course, at that time was that there wasn’t any competition. In
fact, Eisenhower and the government tried to go out of their way in saying, “We’re not racing
with the Russians to do anything particular, we’re just doing science.” In fact, there were
members of the government who pooh-poohed the whole business when the Russians first went
up there. But as far as the man in the street was concerned, he was very conscious of the fact
that the Soviets had launched a device that was flying overhead at regular intervals and there was
nothing we were doing about it, or could do about it.

TERRALL: Now, when they decided to let you go ahead with Explorer out here at JPL, von
Braun was assigned to that project?

PICKERING: What happened was, it was done under the army. At that time, the army, navy, and
air force were each developing intermediate-range ballistic missiles, having a range of about
2,500 miles, and work was beginning on the intercontinental ballistic missile, with ranges of
nominally about 5,000 miles. Each of the services had conducted some studies as to how they
would launch a satellite. Although there was an interesting situation that existed at the time—
namely, the air force had put out an official statement that said that the air force was not


Pickering–58

interested in satellites and nobody in the air force was going to talk about space programs. That
was sometime in ’56, perhaps, that that was put out. Since the navy had the Vanguard, they were
not pushing other studies of potential satellite-launching mechanisms. So really, when it came
right down to it, the army study of how to launch a satellite was the only real competitor of the
Vanguard program. So when the country was in trouble, it was natural that the government
came to the army and said, “OK, go to it.” Now, that meant that General Medaris, who was the
general in charge at Huntsville at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, was given the assignment.
Von Braun and I met with Medaris, and we decided on how the work would be done. Really,
what it amounted to was that von Braun’s people would provide the Redstone rocket, the first
stage. In fact, they would beef it up a little over its normal performance. JPL would provide the
three upper stages, and would build the satellite itself, and would build the tracking system. So
we had most of the new work to do. Their assignment was essentially to take the Redstone and
get it launched.

TERRALL: Had you known von Braun before or worked with him before?

PICKERING: Yes, we had worked with him. In fact we had worked with him on the so-called
reentry test program, which was a part of the long-range ballistic missile program, which was
trying to solve the problem of getting a high-speed missile to come back into the atmosphere
without burning up. We had used this technique of solid-propellant rockets on top of the
Redstone as a means of throwing a test nose cone some 3,000 miles out in the Atlantic. So that
had been done already, and that’s why we were quite sure we could move ahead into this satellite
program with confidence. We had also developed a backup guidance system for the long-range
missiles, because although everybody agreed that an inertial guidance system would be the best
way to guide them, there was some uncertainty as to whether a sufficiently accurate system could
be built. So, as a backup, we developed a radio guidance system that would have done the job.
So yes, we were working closely with them.

TERRALL: So they did that work and prepared the Redstone.

PICKERING: Well, yes, they had the assignment within the army of developing this long-range


Pickering–59

ballistic missile. Now, the Redstone was not developed for that purpose; the long-range missile
was a thing called a Jupiter. The Redstone had been developed as a sort of a grown-up version
of the V-2, which might have some possible military applications. What happened was that at
the end of World War II, the US brought von Braun and a good many of his people over here to
this country, and then after wondering what to do with them, they finally decided that they ought
to go ahead and redesign a rocket that was something like the V-2, only a little bigger and better.
So they did, and they called that the Redstone.

TERRALL: How was it possible to get the Explorer launched so quickly?

PICKERING: We’d been working on the reentry test vehicles, and actually all we had to do was
add one more stage. In other words, the techniques for mounting these solid-propellant rockets
on top of the Redstone and of spinning them so that they would be stable in flight—these had all
been worked out.

TERRALL: What about the satellite itself?

PICKERING: Well, we whipped that up out here in Pasadena. I think I mentioned that there
existed an IGY satellite committee, which was doing the planning for the scientific payloads to
go in the Vanguard. I was a member of that committee. During the course of these discussions
[James] Van Allen and I got together on a what-if basis and decided that if the Vanguard was
delayed or didn’t work, Van Allen’s payload, which was being designed for the Vanguard, could
be easily modified to go on the army rocket. So when we got the go-ahead, it was necessary then
for me to get approval from the committee [to] use Van Allen’s payload—approval that was easy
to get. It was a little more difficult to get approval from Van Allen, because at the time he was
down in the Antarctic on a Coast Guard research vessel, doing some cosmic ray research. In
fact, we had a sort of an amusing situation, because what we did first was to go to the navy and
say, “Send this message to Van Allen.” After two or three days, the navy hadn’t gotten the
message through. So somebody up at the lab said, “Why don’t we try Western Union?” We did
and the message went right through. [Laughter] So we got the reply back from Van Allen that of
course said, “Yes, go ahead.” We then got hold of his graduate student—a man by the name of


Pickering–60

George Ludwig—and told George to pick up all the bits and pieces in the laboratory and hightail
it out to Pasadena as fast as he could. So he did. Then we put the satellite together out here.

Fig. 3. The design features of Explorer 1, built in Pasadena in 1957-58. The satellite plus rocket
motor measured only about 80 inches or 2 meters long. Caltech Archives.

TERRALL: This was all with Van Allen not present?

PICKERING: Van Allen was still down in the Antarctic until the time of the launch [January 31,
1958]. At the time of the launch, he was back in this country. In fact, at the time of the launch,
Van Allen, von Braun and I were in the Pentagon. There was a big JPL contingent down in
Florida for the launching, but the army wanted to have the three of us there in Washington,
assuming it was going to be successful. So we in fact sat out the launch in a room in the
Pentagon with the secretary of the army, whose name was [Wilbur M.] Brucker, and maybe a
half dozen other people. We had, by today’s standards, very primitive communications—


Pickering–61

namely, one teletype to the launching down at the Cape and the commercial telephone service.
So we would telephone from time to time to see how things were going. Then when the Cape
announced that the launching had gone, and that it looked good, we decided that we would not
consider it a success until the satellite had been heard on the tracking station here in California.
This had been arranged, and JPL had set up a receiving station down near Borrego Springs, at a
place called Earthquake Valley. Frank Goddard was up at JPL with a telephone line to
Earthquake Valley. There was a calculated time when they were supposed to pick it up. I placed
a call from Washington to Frank Goddard, and then Frank and I held the line open until we got
the word. It actually took about eight minutes longer than it was supposed to. That was a very
long eight minutes, because here we calculated we should be receiving it and nothing is
happening! So Frank and I were making small talk on the telephone line with all these people
glaring at me there in the Pentagon, until finally the word came through. [Laughter] -

TERRALL: That was your first track station, then? That was the first place that was going to pick
it up?

PICKERING: Yes. On the first round, yes. We had tracking stations also in Singapore and
Nigeria which we had set up in order to give us round-the-world coverage. But on this first orbit,
California was the first one to pick it up. And it was picked up by other people. Navy men were
listening for it down in San Diego, and they picked it up almost the same time we did. Well, it
was interesting, because this was now sometime after midnight in Washington, D.C. It was a
cold, rainy night, and they told us that they wanted us to go over to the National Academy of
Sciences for a press conference. So von Braun, Van Allen, and I went over there in a car to the
press conference and they brought us in the back door of the academy. I don’t think any of us
realized what we were getting into, but of course when we came into the room the place was
jammed to the rafters, in the middle of the night, with TV and movies and everything. It was a
very exciting period. There’s a classic picture, which you may have seen of the three of us
holding up a duplicate of the satellite. The satellite was only this big around and that long, so
that was the rocket engine plus the satellite on the end of it.

TERRALL: How long did the press conference last?


Pickering–62

PICKERING: Oh, a couple of hours; it went on and on. It was very exciting. Of course, that was
our first real realization of what this meant to the public. We knew that we were very much on
the firing line, and people were getting very excited about the satellite situation and the Russians’
ability to launch these things.

TERRALL: And the Vanguard had already
failed.

PICKERING: And the Vanguard had made a
very public disaster in December.

TERRALL: It’s a good thing it worked.

PICKERING: Yes, it’s a good thing Explorer
worked.

TERRALL: Was the fact that you picked it up
late at the tracking station just a
miscalculation?

PICKERING: It went a little faster than we

Fig. 4. (L-R) William Pickering, James Van Allen expected, so the orbit went out a little bit
and Wernher von Braun triumphantly hoist a
replica of Explorer 1 at the Washington press farther and so took a little longer to go
conference to announce the successful launch of around….It was interesting, though, at that
the first US man-made satellite. February 1, 1958.
Courtesy of JPL. time how much public interest there was in
this thing. For example, a few days before the launch, I went to a professional society meeting in
New York. Some enterprising reporter discovered I was out of town, and he was bound and
determined that I must be going to the Cape and that we were going to launch. We had not
announced when the launch date was going to be. That was being kept quiet. But my secretary
at the lab said I’d gone to New York. The reporter obviously didn’t believe her, because I had


Pickering–63

just checked into my hotel room when a United Press man [called] and said, “Just checking to
make sure you really are here.”
And obviously there was enough knowledge around so that they all turned out in the
middle of the night, but the exact time and the exact circumstances of the launch were kept quiet
until after the event. As a matter of fact, we did have to slip it a couple of days, because of upper
atmosphere winds. If you run these big rockets up through the jet stream, they’re subject to
some rather large and not very well understood forces. We didn’t want to risk it; so we had to
wait.

TERRALL: There was then a series of other Explorers, right?

PICKERING: Yes, some of which worked and some didn’t.

TERRALL: Were the failures the result of too much pressure to get them launched too quickly?

PICKERING: No, I think just that the whole art of rocketry in those days was not nearly as reliable
as it is today. We were obviously very careful with this first one, to make sure that it worked.
Maybe we got a little overconfident. It’s interesting to reflect on how an art like rocketry
develops. At the very beginning, you run a rocket motor test in the laboratory, and if it doesn’t
blow up it’s a success. And then when you think you know how to build a rocket engine, you
stick it on to a missile, and again, if it leaves the launch pad and heads in the right general
direction, it’s a success. Then a few years later, it’s not a success unless it lands where it’s
supposed to land. One can sort of go back and see that history. The first problem was to make
the engine work. The next problem was to make sure that you knew how to fly them, and then
how to guide them into a target.

TERRALL: But you can’t have test launches.

PICKERING: No, that’s right. Rocketry differs from everything else in that you can’t really run a
complete test of everything. The only time you ever really test is when you push the launch
button, and then it’s too late. In fact, that’s one of the things that has to get imbued into the


Pickering–64

consciousness of all of the engineers who work on these things—you don’t get a second chance.
You test what you can, but the only real test is the time you push the launch button.

TERRALL: So when [a subsequent] one didn’t go, how was that received?

PICKERING: I don’t know; I’ve forgotten exactly which ones didn’t work. Well, first of all, if
we go back to the first one, the data received by Van Allen were very difficult to understand. It
looked as though his Geiger counter was registering an increase in counting, right as you’d
expect it, and then it went dead, and then after a while it came back on again. But the data were
incomplete, because we had only these three stations scattered around the world, so you got a
little piece of data here, a little piece of data here, and a little piece over here. There was some
uncertainty as to just what was happening. It wasn’t until we launched the next one, and had
more data, that we put it together and realized what was happening. One of the properties of a
Geiger counter is that if you expose it to very intense radiation, it quits counting. This was what
was happening. Then we realized that there was intense radiation up there. From this, then,
came the Van Allen radiation belts and our first appreciation of the intense radiation in the belts.

TERRALL: Were the Russian satellites getting data on radiation as well?

PICKERING: They had some radiation measuring equipment, but they missed the radiation belts.
That was done with our Geiger counters.

TERRALL: But once the first Explorer was a success, the fact that several of the later ones didn’t
go wasn’t a big problem?

PICKERING: No, it wasn’t a big thing. People sort of expected those things to fail occasionally. I
think we ought to point out that the first Vanguard went only about a month after the first
Explorer. They, in fact, did launch one successfully in March. There was obviously a fair
amount of feeling between the two teams. The Vanguard people felt that we had, in a sense,
snatched all their glory away from them, and they were only a few weeks behind us. But the fact
remains that with what was going on at the time, it was essential that we go ahead and do it.


Pickering–65

TERRALL: Did you hear about Russian failures at all?

PICKERING: No. We used to speculate about them, but we didn’t hear much about them. The
reporting on the Russian stuff was done at the meetings of the International Astronautical
Federation or else the International Council of Scientific Unions, which set up an organization
called COSPAR, which was the Committee on Space Research. COSPAR meetings or IAF
meetings were the times when reports were made. Generally speaking, of course, these were just
reports of successes. In other words, particularly in the early days, the Russians didn’t give you
any engineering data. All they gave was scientific data—the argument being that, as the
Russians said, they were using the military hardware and the engineering data was all classified
and they couldn’t talk about it. So they’d just talk about science.

TERRALL: But the Explorer was using military hardware also.

PICKERING: Yes, I know. But in this country we’re more open with that sort of thing. Although
we didn’t publish all the engineering data on the Explorer I, either.

TERRALL: When you were working on the Explorer then, JPL was still working on other
military projects?

PICKERING: Yes. At that time our major project was the Sergeant, which was a replacement for
the Corporal missile. Sergeant was a properly engineered missile system, as distinct from
Corporal, which was sort of a patched-up research rocket made into a missile. And Sergeant was
a very good design. It put the laboratory in a very interesting situation, because between
Corporal and Sergeant, we had covered the spectrum of what you can do with long-range
missiles. Corporal was a liquid-propellant, radio-guided one; Sergeant was a solid-propellant,
inertially-guided one. Corporal, as I say, was a bit of a mish-mash of all kinds of research
equipment, and Sergeant was designed so it could be worked by GIs wearing gloves out in the
Arctic, that sort of thing. There was a real attempt to make it a real field-worthy piece of
equipment.


Pickering–66

TERRALL: How were decisions made about what was going to happen next with the satellite
program? There was no NASA at that time.

PICKERING: No, there wasn’t any NASA, but it didn’t take long. Let’s get the history here. The
first American satellite was the end of January 1958. The conclusion then was that the US must
have a space program. The Congress began to try to put together the way in which this would be
done. By the middle of the year, they had passed the bill that set up NASA—I don’t remember
the exact date, but sometime in the middle of 1958. There were various hearings, committee
meetings, and all the rest of it; I participated in some of those, and so did DuBridge. The
conclusion the Congress came to was that they should take the NACA—the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics, which had been very successful and had established a series of
laboratories and had done a great deal in developing the engineering knowledge necessary to
build good airplanes—they should take NACA and grow a space program onto NACA. This
was done then, and the new agency was set up to go into operation, either the 1st of October or
the 1st of November 1958. By about the 1st of December, they had incorporated JPL as the first
new lab to be added to the old NACA laboratories.

TERRALL: It was very fast.

PICKERING: Very fast. Actually, in setting up the agency, they had been told that they inherited
the old NACA and they basically had a hunting license to look for other laboratories the
government owned that would be appropriate to transfer into the space program. And they
grabbed us, over the protests of the army. There was an agreement that we would complete the
work on the Sergeant for the army—phase that out in a sensible fashion—but then we’d work for
NASA. At that time NASA also wanted to grab von Braun; the army dug their heels in on that,
because they were still in the middle of the long-range rocket program and they felt that they just
couldn’t give up both von Braun and JPL.

TERRALL: How was the army persuaded not to put up more of a fight over JPL?


Pickering–67

PICKERING: Oh, this NASA bunch had a lot of authority. If it had been a real showdown, they
could have gone to the President and said, “That’s it.” The other thing was that JPL wanted to
join NASA. In other words, we were very happy to do it. Also, looking at it from the army’s
point of view, they had their major rocket work going on in Huntsville. JPL was finishing up the
Sergeant, and it wasn’t obvious where we would go from there. And Huntsville, furthermore,
was owned by the army; it was a civil service laboratory, whereas JPL was a contract operation.

TERRALL: So in a way this was a logical breaking point?

PICKERING: Yes, this was logical. It did cause some problems for the army. I was invited in to
discuss this with the army chief of staff. But the conclusion was that this was a logical thing to
do. The country was going to set up a program and the army should make this contribution to it.
Now, on the other hand, as I say, when it came to von Braun’s bunch, the army did object, and
that objection stood for at least one year, maybe two years; I’ve forgotten now. What happened
then was that the Huntsville group was broken into two pieces on the same grounds in
Huntsville, which was a large army base, so that both the NASA laboratories and the army
laboratories were on the old base.

TERRALL: So you were in favor of transferring to NASA?

PICKERING: Yes. It wasn’t obvious what we should do next for the army. We were working on
a classified program, and here was a new program with an opportunity for a lot of imaginative
engineering and science to be done. It was unclassified. It had a closer tie-in to the campus—it
just looked like all sorts of good things. This was the wave of the future, as it were, instead of
just turning out another rocket for the army. Therefore, there wasn’t any argument about it. The
only argument at JPL was what part of the program JPL ought to go out for. You see, once we
had made the transfer, then NASA began to formulate a program, and we helped them. The
question then was: What role should JPL play in this NASA framework? The choices were
whether to get into the manned program—because by then, the manned spaceflight program had
begun—or do satellite work or do deep space work. I elected to go the deep space route, because
this was the route that had the most exciting engineering and science ahead of it, and also


Pickering–68

because this looked like a scale of activity that was suitable for JPL. The manned spaceflight
program was too big for JPL and obviously was going to involve all kinds of other people,
whereas this one looked like one we could get our hands on and do ourselves. Therefore we
stuck with the deep space.
That decision was made, I don’t exactly when, but sometime in ’59. Then we started
immediately to draw up what we thought a deep-space research program ought to consist of—
what kind of rockets, what kind of experiments and so on.

TERRALL: How did the relationship between the Caltech campus and JPL change with the
change to NASA? Was there really a change?

PICKERING: Well, there was not as much change as either DuBridge or I thought there would be.
Both of us welcomed the new directions and the fact that we were no longer classified. We felt
that this put a new emphasis on science which hadn’t been there when we were building rockets
for the army, and that therefore we should work much more closely with the campus. In point of
fact, the first thing that was really appreciated was the fact that this was a national program and
we were not going to make the science selections. The scientific payloads would be selected by
Washington, not by us. In fact, that very definitely is the way it should be, because this was a
national program. Therefore only some fraction of the science would come to Caltech; most of it
would be spread around the country. Secondly, JPL up to then had been an engineering
laboratory, and the interests and motivations of the people were still very closely tied in with the
engineering design of the devices that would carry these things out into space and communicate
with them and guide them and so forth. That’s where our skill lay and that’s where most of our
emphasis would be, particularly since the science selections were going to be made outside of
JPL anyway. So we found that although our relations with the campus improved, they did not
really become as close as perhaps both of us had thought they might.

TERRALL: Were there Caltech scientists who were advising NASA on the scientific payloads?

PICKERING: Yes, there were Caltech scientists involved. Most of the flights had some Caltech
people involved in them. Also, historically, we’ve got to reflect that we found ourselves in the


Pickering–69

problem of the engineers and scientists not understanding each other, which became a bit of a
difficulty in the early days of this program—not only for us but for some of the other people, too.
The difficulty was that a scientist, particularly an academic scientist, had always been used to
doing things the way he wanted them done, whether it was a case of making a particular kind of
measurement he wanted or whether it was using a particular instrument or designing a particular
instrument. On the other hand, we were under very strong pressures to make sure that the
engineering design of the thing really worked, and that in fact when this thing was 100 million
miles away it would do what we wanted it to do. Inevitably, then, we ended up with the
engineers feeling that they were not going to allow some scientist to come and stick something
onto their piece of equipment that was going to cause all kinds of havoc at some later time.
Therefore they were going to want to get deeply involved in the design of instruments and even,
for that matter, in the design of experiments. Because if a scientist, just for instance, says, “I
want to fly by this planet in just this particular way,” the engineer might very well say, “Look,
my guidance accuracy isn’t good enough for that; you’re going to have to fly in this way.” So
you ended up with arguments of various sorts. Or if a scientist says, “I want you to fly on the
sunlit side of the planet” and another scientist says, “I want you to fly on the night side of the
planet,” then what are you going to do? So, inevitably, there were arguments and there were
problems. These, I think, have been worked out to where we get along quite well with the
scientists now. But in the early days, the existence of this engineering versus science problem,
and the fact that the science was selected by Washington on a national basis, really meant that
the tie-in to Caltech was not quite as close as it might have been. But, on the other hand, I don’t
really find any fault with that. I think it’s just a fact of life, that that’s the way it was going to be.

TERRALL: But you kept up your appointment in EE, right?

PICKERING: Yes, I suppose I had the longest leave of absence of anybody in history. I was given
a leave of absence to take over the directorship of JPL, and it just went on.

TERRALL: But you never wanted to break that tie?

PICKERING: No, no, I didn’t want to break the tie. In fact, at various times during the first ten


Pickering–70

years or so of the program, there were occasions when people in NASA raised the question as to
whether or not this should be kept as a contract operation or whether we ought to be a civil
service laboratory. I always felt that there were all kinds of benefits of having a contract with
Caltech that were perhaps mostly indirect rather than direct benefits but nevertheless were
there—that it affected the quality of people we could hire and it affected the quality of work we
did, and that we could bring something to NASA that the government laboratories could not
bring, and therefore that they should let it continue the way it was.
Now, this problem reached its most dramatic period when we got into trouble with the
Ranger. The Ranger program was the first major program we did for NASA. It was designed to
go to the moon and collect data. The first five Rangers, for one reason or another, did not attain
their objectives. The first two were supposed to go into Earth orbit and check out various parts
of the system. The launching rocket in both cases misbehaved, so those two were wiped out.
The next three were supposed to fly by the moon. One of them had a launching-rocket problem
and two of them had a Ranger problem. But as far as the public, and in particular the Congress,
was concerned, the first five Rangers had all failed and a lot of money went down the drain, and
what’s NASA doing, et cetera. So this resulted in congressional investigations and in NASA
investigations and a general concern about the whole business and whether or not NASA
shouldn’t change the contract. Well, there were some very deep feelings at that time. It could
very easily have gone the other way. NASA might have just canceled the contract and picked up
the lab. But they didn’t, thanks to DuBridge, who supported us, and the Board of Trustees—
although they were plenty worried, because this was reflecting on Caltech. Nevertheless, they
had confidence in us and stayed with us.

TERRALL: So NASA’s other option would have been to take over the laboratory completely and
run it?

PICKERING: Yes, run it themselves. In fact, part of the option, of course, was to kick me out and
then take it over and set it up as a civil service laboratory. As a matter of fact, this was even
more complicated because of the fact that the man who was running NASA at this time, Mr.
[James E.] Webb, had a philosophical belief that a government laboratory was the right way to
do these things—that they should be done by government laboratories and not by this sort of


Pickering–71

contract operation. In fact, when he first took over NASA, he made a statement—I’m pretty sure
it was a public statement—to the effect that if he hadn’t already had the contract with Caltech, he
would never have started it. So it was pretty rough. Then the other complication was Ranger 6.
Let’s see, after Ranger 5 we said, “OK, we’ll hold for a year.”

TERRALL: This would have been in the early sixties?

PICKERING: It was ’63. So during the 1963 period, we said we would hold for one year and
then we’d launch Ranger 6. We did launch Ranger 7 [January 30, 1964], and it was a beautiful
flight, went all the way to the moon. It was supposed to crash into the moon and take TV
pictures for the last fifteen minutes. Well, the TV didn’t come on. That, I guess, was the real
low point in our history.


TERRALL: So it got to the moon but it didn’t give you the data?

PICKERING: It didn’t give us our pictures. It flew beautifully, as I say, to the moon. Let’s see,
the arrival at the moon was late in the evening, Pasadena time. There were a lot of people, a lot
of press and everybody over in the [Von Kármán] auditorium, waiting to get the word on the
pictures. Homer Newell, Ed [Edgar M.] Cortright, and I, plus one or two other people from
NASA, were up in what is now the spaceflight control center, which at that time had been built
but was not quite operational; nevertheless, we were up there. This voice from Goldstone came
on, “. . .and still no video.” We watched the clock running out. We knew we were going to
impact in about fifteen minutes. All this was happening, but still no video, and dead silence
everywhere. That was a terrible time, and it impacted with no video. There was nothing we
could do. They tried various things, sort of last-minute attempts. But nothing happened, still no
video. Well, after that, both the Congress and NASA were indeed on our necks. In fact, in
retrospect, I don’t really know why they had confidence in us, except that we did an analysis
pretty quickly that pinned down what that problem was. It turned out to be a problem with a
piece of equipment we had purchased from RCA. We had not really looked into that design as
thoroughly as we should have. We understood what happened. On the strength of that, we said


Pickering–72

we’d launch another one in three or four months. That was Ranger 7. And Ranger 7 not only
worked, it worked perfectly.

TERRALL: With TV pictures?

PICKERING: With TV pictures—beautiful pictures—coming from the moon, which were
presented live to a big crowd of press and JPL people. Everyone was chewing their fingernails,
of course, to see what was going to happen. That was a time when the laboratory really let go
and it’s the only time that we really broke out the champagne. I didn’t know the champagne was
all stashed away, but it was there.


Pickering–73

SESSION 4
DECEMBER 19, 1978


TERRALL: We got up to the successful Ranger last time.

PICKERING: Yes, we had the problems of the unsuccessful ones and the oversight committees
from Congress and from NASA that were worrying about what we were up to and threatening to
change the contract and change personnel, et cetera. But when it all shook down, we moved
ahead with the Ranger program, and the remaining three Rangers were completely successful,
100 percent successful. Since that time, JPL has launched numerous spacecraft, generally with a
very good record. In some cases, launchings were not successful because of rocket problems,
but the spacecraft generally have worked very well. In fact, the only one I can think of at the
moment that has been a bit of an embarrassment was quite recent—Seasat, which was launched
last June and operated beautifully for about three months, then lost its power supply and is now
dead. Fortunately, in that three months it collected all the key data that it was supposed to
collect. This is being analyzed, and I think it will essentially have accomplished what it was
supposed to do—namely, to demonstrate what you can do with a satellite of that type when it
comes to looking at the oceans. However, the expectation had been that Seasat would continue
to operate for a lot longer than it actually did. The flights to the planets, though, when we’ve
gotten one on the way to the planets, have worked.

TERRALL: I have in my notes that Mariner 2 was before the Ranger shots. And that made it to
Venus, is that correct?

PICKERING: Yes, that made it to Venus in 1962. It sort of staggered out there, but it made it, and
it collected the data that it was supposed to collect.

TERRALL: Did it crash into Venus?


Pickering–74

PICKERING: No, no. It was supposed to fly by Venus and look at the planet with various
instruments. And it did, and quite successfully—it sent back the data. It failed about two weeks
after leaving Venus; the temperature control was bad and it got too hot. It started out as a lucky
spacecraft, because the launching rocket actually went unstable for a time and then stabilized
itself again in the correct position. So it got a good start. Then it had some other troubles during
the flight, some troubles with the Earth-sensing equipment. In order to point its radio beam back
to Earth, it had an optical device that looked at Earth and kept the beam focused on Earth. And
this optical device was not working properly until about the middle of the flight and all of a
sudden it cleared up. So it was a lucky mission. But you’re right, it was before the Ranger. And
that was one of the things, which we had to point out to people, that while we were working on
Ranger, we were also working on Mariner, and Mariner did succeed in this mission.
Furthermore, Mariner was the first spacecraft to fly by another planet. That was one place where
we had gotten there ahead of the Russians. In the case of the moon, the Russians had gotten
there first.

TERRALL: Why did you decide to go to another planet before going to the moon?

PICKERING: Well, we had had a dual program—namely, a lunar exploration program and a
planet exploration program. We wanted to carry them both. And in fact, that continued. We
had Mariner 4 to Mars, at about the same time as the Surveyor program to the moon.

TERRALL: So the Surveyor program was the next one after the Ranger series, then, going to the
moon?

PICKERING: Yes, to the moon.

TERRALL: And that was successful?

PICKERING: Yes. Well, not every mission. There were seven Surveyors launched and five were
successful.


Pickering–75

TERRALL: Did NASA and Congress continue to give you a bad time when one of these missions
failed?

PICKERING: No, after the Ranger was so successful and was such a good public success, because
we were able to do live television of it flying into the moon—after that, we didn’t really have
much trouble with Congress.

Fig. 5. In the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, members of the
mission team keep tabs on a Surveyor moonship, September 1967. The
Surveyor series, run in 1966-1968, was the US’s first attempt at a soft lunar
landing. Photo by Western Electric News/Caltech Archives.

Just an anecdote on the live television: We had started out with some concern about
letting the networks handle this live, but by the time we got up the Ranger 9, we were confident
and we indeed let them handle it live. Well, when it came time for the first Surveyor [launched


Pickering–76

May 30, 1966], which was to actually land gently on the moon and then look around and start
taking pictures, we were much more nervous. So we were not at all sure we wanted the networks
to really do that live. But we finally ended up by agreeing to let them do it, and we kept our
fingers crossed and hoped it was going to be all right. But the thing that startled me was that
about a half an hour before it was due to land, one of the network people said, “Oh, by the way,
we’re live all over the world,” which really sort of shook me. [Laughter] Fortunately it worked,
and in fact sometime later a friend of mine told me that he was in Paris, and he just idly turned
on the television set and there was Surveyor 1 landing on the moon.

TERRALL: Do you think the fierce competitiveness of the space race was productive in spurring
NASA to work faster than it would have otherwise? Or was it counterproductive?

PICKERING: Oh, no, no. I think that the competition was recognized as a Cold War symbol.
Demonstrated capabilities in space were important. That certainly paced the program, both in
the US and in the Soviet Union. And when [President John F.] Kennedy made the very bold
decision to go to the moon in ten years, that really guaranteed that we were going to have a very
active program. Furthermore, it meant that we would put an awful lot of priority on the program,
because the nation was committed to doing these things in space.

TERRALL: But it wasn’t the sort of thing where you felt you were being pushed beyond your
capacity?

PICKERING: No, no. If anyone was pushed, it was the Apollo people, because they had a
deadline, and a tremendous amount of engineering to be accomplished. They could not have
accomplished it unless they’d had essentially a top priority to do the job.

TERRALL: And JPL didn’t have anything to do with that?

PICKERING: No, we were out of the Apollo program, except in some very fringe ways. But the
existence of the Apollo program guaranteed that there’d be enough funds for us to do a
reasonable deep-space program. And in fact, we regarded the Surveyor as a precursor to the


Pickering–77

Apollo in many ways—and the Apollo people did, too—because it was going to land on the
moon automatically. We were strongly tempted to put a sign on Surveyor that said, “Follow
me,” but we didn’t ever do it. It was arranged that one of the Apollos would land beside a
Surveyor, and that was accomplished.

TERRALL: So there were a number of Surveyors actually there?

PICKERING: Oh, yes. We had five of them on the moon. We were very interested in having the
astronauts land by one of them and bring back some of the pieces, because they had been on the
moon for two or three years before the astronauts got there. They did land beside Surveyor 3.
That was very interesting, because those astronauts [Apollo 12] came out to the lab and had a
look at the Surveyor and we discussed with them what we wanted them to bring back and just
how they would do it, and they would cut the pieces off, and what tools they would need and so
forth. So we had quite a lot of contact with those astronauts. Then, when they flew to the moon,
the particular program meant that as they were coming in for a landing, the astronauts looked out
a window, which was looking away from the moon and couldn’t see anything until they [were]
about 10,000 feet [from the surface]. Then the spacecraft rolled around 180 degrees, so they
could look out the window and see where they were going. I guess it was Pete Conrad who was
looking out the window, and the first thing he saw was Surveyor, dead ahead. Well, he just
about fell out of his seat. [Laughter] Incidentally, it was a very good example of the kind of
precision guidance that existed in these systems, working essentially under automatic control.

TERRALL: And they brought back pieces of it?

PICKERING: Yes.

TERRALL: Was that instructive?

PICKERING: Well, yes. We didn’t think anything much would have happened, but we wanted to
be sure. It was instructive to study them.


Pickering–78

TERRALL: I read something about one mission in which an American experiment went aboard a
Soviet spacecraft. I was wondering if you could remember how that might have come about.

PICKERING: No. There was a French experiment. The Soviets have flown French experiments
on their spacecraft; I’m not sure they’ve flown American experiments. There was a time when
the French were negotiating with the Soviets and negotiating with us at the same time, to fly their
experiments. In fact, they had experiments on both Soviet and US satellites. Both the Soviets
and ourselves had a stated objective to bring other people into the programs. The Soviets tended
to bring the Eastern Europeans—Czechoslovaks, Poles, and so forth—into their program, and we
tended to bring the Western countries into ours. In both cases, they were essentially scientific
experiments. In other words, when NASA issued a so-called AFO—Announcement of Flight
Opportunity—this announcement would go out worldwide. If a scientist in Europe wanted to
propose an experiment, fine. Some of them did get to fly.

TERRALL: In your years as director of JPL, did you have to spend a lot of time in Washington?

PICKERING: Yes, there was an awful lot of travel to Washington. I used to think that I made a
trip to Washington about once a month. My wife says it was more often than that. I don’t know,
it was an awful lot of riding in airplanes.

TERRALL: That was one of the things that Malina said. As he got more and more into
administration, he was going to Washington more and more, and getting farther and farther away
from his work.

PICKERING: Well, that’s true, and one just had to accept that. That was the job, really. In other
words, in the administration of a big laboratory like JPL, if you ask what the job really consists
of, you find that first of all it’s making sure that the laboratory has a good program, and that
means dealing with whoever the program sponsors are, in great detail. The second thing is that
internally the problem of managing a large organization is largely a people problem. You’re
more concerned with the relationships between people and who’s doing what and who reports to
whom, et cetera, than you are with the technical details of a program. Now, on the other hand,


Pickering–79

just to reflect philosophically, I think that this does not mean management of a technical
enterprise should be in the hands of a non-technical person. If I go back twenty or thirty years,
there was a tendency to think that managers were trained in business administration or as lawyers
or managers, and technically trained people were never top managers. But as time has gone on,
there’s been more and more appreciation of the fact that a well-trained technical man can much
easier learn something about management than a trained management man can learn something
about technical problems, and that in fact the technical training is a very good background for
management. So management of technical enterprises nowadays is usually done by technically
trained people, which was not true fifty years ago—not even very true twenty years ago. But it
does mean, though, that if a technical man gets into a top management job, he doesn’t do much
technical work. But he helps, of course, in technical decisions. If a certain program is being
debated as to whether it’s going to be done or not, the decision is going to revolve around
technical factors. So a technically trained manager is important. Certainly when a project gets
into trouble, the top management should be able to understand what the trouble is and what the
possible solutions are.

TERRALL: Did you ever consider moving to a different sort of job?

PICKERING: Well, when I first took the job, I thought I’d take it only for a few years and then go
back and be a professor at Caltech. But I guess as time went on, I got more and more involved in
it, and I realized that that was clearly going to be my life for quite a few years, particularly
because of the way in which the space program evolved. You see, I took over in ’54; and the
first Explorer satellite was January ’58. Quite obviously, after January ’58, I had one of the most
interesting jobs in the country, and I was going to keep it.

TERRALL: So when you took the job, you really had no idea where it was going.

PICKERING: No, that’s right. When I took the job in ’54, I would not have predicted that I’d still
be in it in ’74. But after ’58, I could.

TERRALL: But you kept your appointment on campus.


Pickering–80

PICKERING: Well, yes. The institute was interested in keeping me as a member of the faculty.
And I was very pleased that they did. So, yes, I kept my nominal association with the faculty.
But in point of fact, I did very little for the faculty.

TERRALL: How about in terms of contact with the campus in general?

PICKERING: Oh, yes. One of the problems that used to bother both DuBridge and me was, What
can we do to improve the relationships, particularly the working relationships, between campus
and laboratory? Both of us used to worry about this and we used to try to do things to help it.
One thing, for example, which we did come up with was this idea of the director’s discretionary
fund and a matching president’s fund down on the campus, which gave us some money that
could be used to support research activities conducted by faculty, in the sense that we were the
able to make the decisions. One of the problems with the laboratory program was [that it was]
really dictated from Washington. Now, that didn’t mean that we didn’t propose what to do, but
the decision that said, “Do it,” was made in Washington. Whereas when you talk about faculty
research programs, if you’re going to talk about working together, one thing that you have to say
is that this means that faculty research activities have to be related to JPL, and to some extent
vice versa. Which means, then, that you’d like to be able to make decisions out here locally, as
to what you do. And in the early days we couldn’t do that. But when we got this discretionary
fund set up, then that gave us some freedom, within at least the limits of those funds, to make
local decisions. And that helped a great deal.

TERRALL: What kind of project would that have funded?

PICKERING: Oh, I don’t know that I can name one offhand. Usually it was a case of the use of
some equipment that existed at JPL to help someone at Caltech with some research he was
interested in, or [let him] use some results that JPL had in some research that he was interested
in, or maybe even the use of JPL people to work with him. I mean, all of those were
possibilities, and all of them were exploited. In some cases, JPL would invite somebody on the
campus to do a piece of work for them.


Pickering–81

TERRALL: On a contract?

PICKERING: On a contract, yes—a transfer of funds. And occasionally, also, they would invite a
campus professor to come up as a consultant. But that’s a little different. The fundamental
difference between faculty research and the research that’s done in a laboratory like JPL is this
question of who decides what the research is going to be. And a faculty man wants to make his
own decisions as to what he’s going to work on and how he’s going to approach the problem.
Whereas if the government is funding JPL on a contract, they will make those decisions.

TERRALL: What about graduate students?

PICKERING: Yes, we use a few of them. That has been a problem right along, because it would
be nice to have some thesis work done up there. But a fundamental rule about thesis work is that
it must be done under the direction of a faculty member. So that means that the faculty sponsor
also has to be involved up there, and it gets a little messy. The result is that there’ve only been a
handful of graduate theses that have been done at JPL. Now, in other cases, this thing has been
handled somewhat differently. For example, at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which was
essentially on the campus, they did set that up so that lots of graduate students did their thesis
work in the laboratory. But JPL was physically eight miles away, and there were not many
faculty who were actually directly involved in the JPL program.

TERRALL: Is this something that is likely to change?

PICKERING: Well, I know that Bruce Murray is trying to change it, and Murph [Marvin L.]
Goldberger [Caltech president 1978-1987] is also interested in trying to change it. I’m sure they
will both work on it; and I’m sure they’re both going to get a little bit frustrated. Because the
fundamental problem is a matter of philosophical approach, which is basically different—
namely, the faculty professor determines what he wants to do and he does it at his own pace.
Whereas the JPL scientist or engineer has to recognize that he’s working under contract to the
government, and the government determines what he does and how fast he does it. Therefore,


Pickering–82

you have a different approach to problems. And that is always going to exist and it’s going to
make it difficult.

TERRALL: Do you think that this different approach over the years led to antagonism between
the campus and the lab?

PICKERING: Oh, I don’t know. From time to time, one senses antagonisms, usually sort of
focused around, “How come you guys have all that money to waste up there, and I can’t get any
money for my project?” There’s a certain amount of that. I think there’s also a certain amount
of subconscious jealousy about the fact that we get a lot of favorable publicity up there or a lot of
juicy jobs up there. Yes, there’s a little bit of that. But on the other hand, I would say that most
faculty appreciate JPL and recognize that the image of JPL is an important element in thinking
about Caltech. I personally think that the tie-in is important and that it should be maintained.

TERRALL: How would it be different, if JPL were an independent lab?

PICKERING: Well, if it were an independent lab, it would be a civil service laboratory. That does
give you a different flavor in the way the laboratory’s operated, because if you’re a civil servant,
then you are a lot more under the control of Washington than if you’re a contractor working for
Washington. In particular, the laboratory is clearly not a simple case of an industrial contractor;
here we’re a contractor in a very favored position. This has led to an openness and frankness, on
the part of laboratory people, which in the government laboratories you don’t see nearly so
much. In other words, we will be a lot more critical of the government than a government civil
servant will be. Also, we will be much more governed by the necessity to perform on our
contract. Now, I don’t mean that the government civil servants are lazy or incompetent or
anything like that. There are some very good people in the government civil service structure.
But they don’t have the same incentive to perform that we do. In other words, if NASA gets
disgusted enough with us, they can cancel the contract and we can be out of a job tomorrow.
Whereas a government civil servant can’t be; he knows he’s got a job. In fact, even the very way
in which they’re funded is different. If you look at the way the government laboratories are
funded, there is a line item in the budget that pays their salaries and the so-called operating


Pickering–83

expenses—the normal running expenses of the laboratory. That comes in whether they do any
work or not—that’s saying it a little harshly, but there is that basic funding paying your salaries
and operating expenses. JPL does not have that funding. The only way JPL gets money is by
contracting to do a project. Therefore, the emphasis on the project and doing it is much greater
at JPL than it is in the government laboratory. This means that the government gets something
different from a laboratory like JPL than they do from their own labs. I think that over the years
the government has gotten its money’s worth out of JPL, as it has out of other laboratories that
have been operated the same way—Los Alamos is one, operated by the University of California;
Lincoln Laboratory at MIT; and so forth. Now, I must admit that over the years the sort of
creeping bureaucracy has come in, to where detailed government control of the laboratory is
looking more and more like government control of the civil service laboratories. I regret this.

TERRALL: Do you mean in things like the number of reports that have to be filed or the amount
of paperwork that has to be done?

PICKERING: I heard of a case just the other day, which involved the hiring of someone up there at
the laboratory who happened to be a non-citizen. Now, the laboratory does unclassified work;
there’s no particular reason why we can’t hire non-citizens. But the hiring of this person
apparently was—well, Washington tried to turn it off. That I would regard as an unnecessary
and an improper interference in our affairs. Of course, I used to regard the fact that the
government put a ceiling on us as improper interference in our affairs.

TERRALL: You mean how big you could grow?

PICKERING: Yes, how many people. I used to take the position with them, “Look, you give us a
contract to do the job; we will give you a price to do that work, and we’ll also tell you how many
people we want. If you accept the contract, then OK, we ought to go ahead and do it.” Now, the
counterargument on the part of the government people was that they did regard us as a special
case, and they did regard themselves as providing a sort of institutional support for us. Therefore
if we hired, say, 500 people to do a certain job, when that job was over, they said to me, “You’re
going to come back to us and say that you’d better find some jobs to keep these 500 people busy;


Pickering–84

you’re not going to turn them out on the street.” And I had to admit that that in fact is right.
Because in the research activity I cannot have people coming and going in the way that you
might in some industrial facilities, and indeed I wanted to keep them on. And therefore they
said, “OK, if that’s the case, we have to make some extrapolation of the amount of work we
think we’re going to give you and how we’re going to keep the employment more or less level
and so forth. Therefore we’re going to have a say in what your total employment will be.”
That’s sort of an argument.

TERRALL: Did it, in fact, cause problems in any specific cases where you needed more people?

PICKERING: Yes. We would have liked to have hired a good many more people at various times
than the government allowed us. Of course, the other argument on the part of the government
was, “Well, even though you’re different from the other laboratories, you are still a member of
the family.” And the civil service laboratories are very tightly under this numerical control,
because the Congress tells them how many people they can hire. Because that existed in those
laboratories, if we rather blatantly ignored it, we would have a problem. But it was the way in
which the government started getting involved in our hiring policies and so on that I regarded as
unfortunate. I would rather have kept them out of it. Fortunately they did not try to put the civil-
service-type constraints on us, because in that case we would just as well have been a civil
service laboratory. You see, the Civil Service Commission does put very strict constraints on
what the government can do with civil servants. If, for example, the government has to reduce
the size of its staff, as NASA has had to do in recent years because the work has gone down, the
process of “Reduction in Force”—the RIF process—is very formally spelled out, which means
that you can’t fire Mr. A; you have to look at his past history and whether he was a veteran, et
cetera, et cetera. Instead of Mr. A being laid off, Mr. B may have to be laid off, because he’s
more junior or something or other. Whereas from the point of view of the work to be
accomplished, you’d much rather let Mr. A go. Well, that kind of constraint on the laying off of
people has been an awful headache to the [civil service] laboratories. Another one is that the
Congress put a constraint on them as to what the average employment grade could be in the
laboratory—the civil service has a series of different levels. The Congress would say that the
average grade for your laboratory must be so and so. Therefore if you wanted to move some


Pickering–85

people up into the more senior grades, the only way you could do it would be to move some
more people into the junior grades. And it may be that you were limited as to the total number,
and so therefore you had no choice; you could not move these people up to higher grades. So
they were under all kinds of problems, and I’m very glad we didn’t have that class of problem.
But as a function of time, the NASA interference in the internal JPL affairs has become
increasingly evident.

TERRALL: What about since your retirement? What have you been working on?

PICKERING: Well, shortly before I retired, I had some contact with a university over in Saudi
Arabia which was interested in setting up an applied research laboratory, which had some
parallels to JPL-Caltech. They were looking at the way in which these laboratories operated
around the country, and they came out to JPL and talked to me. One thing led to another until
they said, “Well, you’re retiring; why don’t you come over to Saudi Arabia and put this thing
together?” So I agreed to do that for two years. In fact, in the past two years I’ve spent about
half of my time in Saudi Arabia and half of it here—essentially planning, organizing, and trying
to set up the initial program for this research laboratory. The two years was just up a few months
ago, in September of this year. So I have been going back and forth to Arabia, because I told
them that for this kind of planning, I could do most of it better in this country than I could over
there. They agreed. I was last in Arabia in October and spent about a month there at that time.
In other words, my initial assignment was completed in September; but I’m expecting to
continue a consulting arrangement with them.

TERRALL: And that has nothing at all to do with Caltech?

PICKERING: No, no. Except I might comment that this university over there is called the
University of Petroleum and Minerals. It happens to be an engineering and science school of
about 2,500 undergraduate students. And this school, in turn, has a consortium of American
universities to help advise them on academic matters, and they asked Caltech to become a
member of that consortium. So, in that sense, Caltech has a little tie to it. But my activities over
there in setting up the research institute had nothing to do with that.


Pickering–86

TERRALL: Is the research institute going yet?

PICKERING: Yes, it’s going. The building will be finished in two or three years. It’s under
construction now.

TERRALL: How did you find it working in a completely different situation like that?

PICKERING: In a technical sense, it was clear that this research institute had all kinds of
interesting possibilities, because it was visualized as being an applied engineering research type
of thing, which would be supported by either industry or government in the country and would
concern itself with the problems which were of immediate interest to people over there. A close
analog would be the Stanford Research Institute. In fact, it was visualized that it would be
supported by contracts, which it would get from either government or industry. It was physically
on the campus of the university, and the university was prepared to build a building for it and
provide the initial support for it. It would have its own staff, like JPL, and its own administration
and so forth. Well, it was obvious that there’s a lot of opportunity for that kind of a facility and
that kind of capability over there, that it just didn’t exist in the country, and that there were
plenty of people who felt that this would be very useful to them. So it can be built up. Now, the
build-up has not been as fast as I had hoped it would be, partly because of different ways of
doing things than we would have and partly because of a physical space problem. Because until
we get the building, it means that we just have to go in various nooks and crannies around the
university. But it’s going along.


Interview with William Pickering

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