Mit Building 20: Short Stories

By Bradford Howland

Bradford Howland has had a long association with MIT.s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) which was housed in a World War II wooden building, known only as Building 20. It housed neurophysiologists, linguists, and the MIT train club, among others. Even while Brad worked at a daytime job Lincoln Laboratory, he had a lab in Building 20 where he spent many late nights observing and interacting with scientists, mechanics, students, secretaries, janitors, guards, and people who simply walked in off the streets. These are the stories of those interactions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499017922

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Copyright © 2014 by Bradford Howland.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2014908694

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-4990-1790-8

                            Softcover                          978-1-4990-1789-2

                            eBook                               978-1-4990-1792-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 05/08/2014

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CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1:   Representative Building 20 Stories

The Seventy-Five Dollar Fine

The Décor of Building 20

Married to the Model Train Club

The Phantom Has A Point

The Red Diner Nearby on Main Street

Mike’s Car Garage Next to the Red Diner

A Terrible Winter Morning in 1961

The Scream in the Middle of the Night

That Damned Bat Must Have Radar!

The Pirated Twelve Inch Klipsch Horn Speaker

The Wall of Books in Building 20

The Blizzard of 1978

You Don’t Measure Anything, Do You?

Why is There Something Wrong with Every Piece of Equipment in this Laboratory?

Chapter 2:   Rogues and Geniuses

The Maxwell’s Equations T-Shirt

Steve Wiesner’s Quantum Money

Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland

The Man Who Never Spoke Unless Spoken To

Only Seventeen out of Twenty-Four Telephone Books

Building 20’s Man of Mystery

The Monarch Lathe Sell-Off

Ralph Sayers, RLE’s Iron-Willed Manager

Norbert Wiener Declares War on the Research Laboratory of Electronics

Oliver Selfridge, British One Ups-Man

Chapter 3:   Cambridge and Boston

The 2:00 AM Trip to Chinatown

The Importance of Harvard Square to MIT

The Moron on the Trackless Trolley at Harvard Square

Quick, Call Arlington!

A Night Ride to Darkest Dorchester in Boston

The Car Fire on Storrow Drive

Chapter 4:   Jerry Lettvin’s Group in Building 20

How Jerry Lettvin and I Nearly Got Fired from RLE

How I Nearly Got Fired from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory

The Lady PhD in Microbiology from Harvard

The Trip to Philadelphia

The Trip to Yale Medical School

Was Newton’s Madness due to Mercury Poisoning?

The Tungsten Scandal

The Indium Scandal

The Depleted Uranium Artillery Shell

The Tetrodotoxin Scandal

Holding Hands with the Resident Head Physician at the Mass. General Emergency Ward

Chapter 5:   Jerry Lettvin, Personal Information

Jerry Lettvin—Dedicated Neurologist

Jerry Lettvin—Doctor Extraordinaire

Jerry Lettvin—Expert Punster

Jerry Lettvin—The Tease

What I learned at MIT about Jewish Matters

Mrs. Brady, Jerry Lettvin’s Mother-In-Law

The Lettvin—Leary Debate

Chapter 6:   Patents and Inventions

The U.S. Patent System

The Sputnik Satellite Crisis of October 1957

The Electronic Water Pipe Simulator Circuit

The Howland Current Pump Circuit

The Best Gadget at the Mechanical Engineering Conference

Optical Experiments and Designs

Vanishing Optotypes

The Zentrifuge Experiment

Chapter 7:   Concluding Stories

Reminiscences of World War II

The Contribution of Kay Aborjaily to World War II

Linguistic Peculiarities of MIT Speech

Crime at MIT in the Sixties

A Brief Note on Stealing from the Government

Rebecca and the Black and White Slides

Give Me His Name, and I’ll See That He Is Fired

Why was MIT’s Radiation Lab Staffed with Nuclear Physicists?

Some Key Accomplishments of MIT Alumni in World War II

This book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Jerome Y. Lettvin,

with all possible respect and gratitude

PREFACE AND

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Preface

Many members of the U.S. scientific community have heard the remarkable history of MIT’s Building 20, a temporary World War II building erected in 1943 for wartime radar research. With the highest possible priorities, it was hurriedly constructed of huge wooden beams and sheathed with pressed asbestos board known then as transite. Due to a tragic nightclub fire in Boston in 1942, it was fully equipped with sprinklers. Since it was demolished in 1995, MIT’s Building 20 has received a great deal of attention in academia, mostly in an effort to discover how a temporary building left over from World War II had not only survived for fifty-five years but had become an incubator of ideas and, without doubt, the intellectual center of MIT.

My connection with Building 20 is this: In 1950, after dropping out of the Harvard PhD physics program, I found employment in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), working for Professor Jerry Wiesner on pioneering speech recognition to aid the deaf. A year later, Jerry Lettvin arrived at the lab to do neurophysiology, and I found his electronics problems much more interesting than speech recognition. So, I joined his group, first informally, and eventually, more permanently. I had a laboratory in Building 20 for the next thirty-seven years—until I moved to Wisconsin in 1987. Due to budgetary difficulties, my later work with Jerry’s group was voluntary, while my regular salary was paid by MIT’s Lincoln Lab in Lexington, MA, with government support, for the work I did there. So I was able to enjoy the ambience and camaraderie of working, mostly nights, in Building 20 for much of its fifty-two year lifetime, and I got to know a good fraction of the people who worked there.

Building 20 had three stories and five wings, populated by a diverse group of people. Directly above my lab on the first floor were the campus police. The janitors worked the night shift, 11:00 PM till 7:00 AM, and the building was open to the public twenty-four hours a day. There were also hangers-on from the local technical community who had no connection to MIT, except perhaps with the Model Train Club. It should be emphasized that Building 20 provided a huge amount of all-purpose lab space, including two large laboratories, their machine shops, publication offices, etc. There were many young women employed there, which also added to the building’s attraction.

It was my greatest good fortune at Building 20 to have been adopted by Jerry Lettvin’s group. He certainly possessed one of the most original minds at MIT. Since he didn’t have a car and I did, I often played the part of his chauffeur and thereby learned a great deal from him. His strong suit was medicine, including neurology, psychiatry, and even ophthalmology. His career included service in World War II with General Patton’s 3rd Army as it swept through Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Jerry functioned as a psychiatrist, treating soldiers with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome); however, he rarely mentioned this period in his life.

Since he had trained in both Chicago and Boston, Jerry knew all the top doctors in Boston and was able to refer the top brass at MIT to specialists when necessary. Despite his significant standing, our group operated with almost no financial support, and we had to buy much of our equipment at Eli Heffron’s war surplus store.

With the obvious realization that Building 20 had developed into a fountain of ideas and with at least twenty years to plan its replacement, one would think that MIT would have done an especially fine job of planning for the new building. Instead, they erected a nine-story Gehry experiment, in which nowhere in the structure is there a right angle. But, and much more important, they left out space for the MIT Model Train Club, which was the social center of the building, open to all twenty-four hours a day. The train club had the largest HO gauge outfit in Boston, although rarely did the trains actually run!

This book is an account of some of the many bizarre happenings during my stay at Building 20. It is also important for me to highlight the career of a truly original mind, that of Jerry Lettvin, who died in 2012 at age 91.

Writing these stories involves little originality on my part; I simply recorded a few of the most interesting events. Some names have naturally been changed. It is my hope that these stories will show how the interaction of the students, the staff, and even the janitors and the MIT police force led to an interesting period. It has been said that a university is a collection of books. I would add: a collection of books, great minds, and sufficient scientific apparatus. We had all these in Building 20, including a huge wall of books in Jerry’s office, mentioned in a later story.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank many people for help in the preparation of this manuscript. In particular, my nephew, Prof. Jacob Howland, for suggesting the idea for the book, my brother, Prof. Howard Howland, for similar help, and my friends Fay and Julian Bussgang for their extensive work in editing, critiquing, and typing the text into the computer. Also, I am indebted to my friends in Building 20 who provided the ideas for most of these stories.

CHAPTER 1

Representative Building 20 Stories

The Seventy-Five Dollar Fine

As was often the case on a winter night in Cambridge, a severe snowstorm alert had been declared. Therefore, my little seventy-five horsepower Saab 96 front-wheel drive car was parked safely in the large three-story garage adjacent to Building 20. Shortly after 8:00 PM, one of the janitors came to my lab and said, Brad, there is a student in tears in the front lobby, perhaps you can do something. It was fortunate that he noticed this, because the story was this: The student had a Volvo 260, a rear-wheel-drive car, a considerably heavier car than mine, and his battery was dead after numerous attempts to start a very cold engine. Still worse, there was a $75 fine for parking on Vassar Street, a major truck route during a declared snow emergency. A nearby sign so indicated. Remember that this was the 1967 dollar!

I didn’t look forward to what had to be tried, so I rather selfishly made him put his set of chains (I didn’t have any) on the front wheels of my little car, a bone and finger