08/02/06

MIT Magnet Lab (1961-1982)

The MIT Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory was intended to generate the world’s strongest magnetic fields, both continuous and pulsed, for use by the world community of scientists. It hosted visitors from all over the world, and it was copied in France, Poland, Russia and Japan within five years of its dedication. It had four dc generators driven by two synchronous ac motors on two separate shafts, each generator capable of producing two megawatts of continuous highly regulated dc power, ten thousand amperes at 200 volts, and eight megawatts for two seconds, produced by a forty ton flywheel on each machine. This power is useable in eight working cells with a family of solenoid magnets producing up to 250 kilogauss (25 Tesla).

Construction was started in 1961 and dedication was in 1963. The MIT faculty insisted on building the lab on campus, although power would have been a lot cheaper in Lawrence from the hydro-electric plant on the Merrimack River. . I moved to a temporary office in the old armory on Mass Avenue while we bought a bakery on Albany Street and converted it into the magnet lab. I remember buying it in the name of a broker to avoid the inflated price they would have demanded from MIT, and I remember paying Cambridge twenty-two thousand dollars a year "in lieu of taxes". The lab used ten percent of the power delivered to Cambridge, and we got reduced demand rate by agreeing to shut down during high demand periods such as heat waves on fifteen minute’s notice.

Funding was ultimately provided by the Air Force and the National Science Foundation. I designed a new generation of Bitter Magnets, using the recently invented computer at Lincoln Lab, and I hired Bruce Montgomery, (then working at A.D.Little Inc. designing a machine to clean animal tendons for use in surgery ) to help me and to develop magnet design into a science. Bruce eventually wrote a classic textbook on the subject called Solenoid Magnet Design. I also hired Jackson and Moreland, an MIT spin-off engineering firm in Boston to design and supervise construction of the lab with its own powerplant comprising two large dc generators to develop 220 megawatts of regulated dc power. The plan was to have Francis Bitter run the lab, but Ben Lax played all the dirty politics he could muster to have himself appointed the director. Francis refused to stoop to Ben’s tactics and gave up the fight. When Francis was dying of stomach cancer in 1967, Ben Lax scoffed at my suggestion to have the lab named in Bitter’s honor. He wanted his own name attached, although he had done very little to create it.

It was with great satisfaction that I informed Ben at one of our steering committee meetings that MIT president Howard Johnson had agreed to name the lab in Bitter’s honor, and was planning to visit Francis on the Cape to tell him in person of the honor. Francis was dying of stomach cancer when Elizabeth and I visited him on his death bed at his Cape Cod summer home. I remember his apologizing for having uncontrollable hiccups.

I complained that Ben was running the lab for his own glory and the glory of his political supporters in the physics department doing "fashionable" and often meaningless physics, and that Ben had vetoed all of my proposals to pursue practical things like pulsed field metal forming and magnetic water filtration. I told him of the trouble I had in accepting graduate students from departments other than physics and from other universities.

Francis offered advice I always remembered: "Henry, if you ever feel that the lab is no longer a place where young scientists are free to pursue new ideas you should be the first to flush it down the drain. It makes no sense to waste your valuable time and talents on dirty academia politics". Ben’s egomania ultimately destroyed the lab. He had made enough enemies at NSF for them to award the next lab to Fglorida. I didn’t have todo the flushing.

In 1990 John Crow, who had spent two years as visiting scientist learning our expertise, returned to his home university in Tallahassee and hired a firm there to write a proposal against MIT. By then Ben Lax had made powerful enemies at the National Science Foundation, and they awarded the continuation contract to Tallahassee, despite the unanimous recommendation by all outside experts that it be awarded to MIT. The feeling at NSF was that Ben Lax had run the lab for the benefit of the MIT Physics Department, and not facilitated access by the outside community for other research. I could not disagree. Actually, I personally had jumped the sinking ship ten years earlier.

By 1980 I was managing a number of important high field applications barely tolerated by Ben Lax. He had vetoed all my contributions to the annual NSF proposal. Fortunately MIT had created a corporate committee under Prof Press to establish a parallel research hierarchy. As senior scientist (equal to full professorship) I had won faculty privileges, such as tenure and the right to supervise graduate theses and consult to industry. I was able to raise my own funding, and I was immune to being fired by Ben Lax. I had teams working on several applications, although Ben had blocked my forming them into official groups. He just didn’t want me to have the status and budgetary privileges of a group leader. Here is a summary of some of my research projects with other departments and with industry partners.

Pulsed field compression to form metallic hydrogen (Steve Bless PhD thesis)

Helical pulsed field coil construction

Spiral continuous field coil construction (with Magnion Co)

Supercritical Helium Cooling and stabilization of large superconducting solenoids for fusion (with Bruce Montgomery and Mitch Hoenig)

High Gradient Magnetic separation and filtration (with Huber Kaolin Co)

Pulsed field metal forming, swaging and die-casting (Convair Corp, General Atomics, Maxwell Corp Magneform and metallurgy Dept)

Pulsed field proof-loading of laminated aircraft panels by double-pulsed field (with Boeing)

pulsed field welding and forming of honeycomb aluminum and titanium panels (with Stresskin)

In situ heat treatment of niobium-tin superconductors (with Sprague Electric Co)

Pulsed and RF field impact welding and brazing (with Ted Morin, Thermomagnetics, Industrial Magnetics, Inductotherm)

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) analysis of organic compounds (Leo Neuringer)(now MRI)

Low field mapping of asbestos in Canadian miners’ lungs (with David Cohen)

Electromagnetic Launch Technology and linear synchronous motors (Navy catapults)(with Westinghouse and US Navy)

Disk generators and energy transfer inductors for pulsed power.

Magneto-chemistry, pharmacology and biology (with Harvard and UNH ( Theodore Metcalf )

Search for the Dirac Magnetic Monopole (with Ed Purcell, Eichi Goto, Ken Ford, Francesco Villa, Alan Odian)

Magplane, self-banking, synchronous, magnetically levitated vehicles (with Bruce Montgomery)

In 1975 Bruno Coppi and I invented the "ALCATOR" (alto campo torus, Italian for high field torus). It was basically the Princeton "Stellerator", a 20 foot diameter torus containing a magnetically confined plasma ring, reduced to a four foot diameter by using a much higher confinement field. Bruce Montgomery solved the difficult problem of fitting the confinement solenoids into the small available space, and an alcator was built in the magnet lab. It required a large dc generator, donated by New York Edison Co, to provide a burst of power for two seconds, . I soon concluded that if alcator ever succeeded, it would be much too complex and too expensive to compete in the energy market as long as there was a single barrel of oil left in the ground. I wasn’t interested in joining the plasma fusion center because I was sure fusion would share the fate of solar and wind power. It wasn’t a popular message at the time, and MIT formed the plasma fusion center across the street, as long as DOE was willing to fund alcator research. But eventually the DOE stopped funding all fusion projects except the one at Princeton.

In 1980 I reduced my magnet lab employment to eighty percent in order to buy academic consulting privileges. I enjoyed industrial consulting and was good at it. I had three major motives. Frustration with Ben’s refusal to support the practical high field applications I was interested in, refusal of the new and arrogant administration to reimburse my travel by private aircraft, and the final straw: refusal of the new vp for research, Ken Smith, who replaced Al Hill and Tom Jones to permit my participation in industrial ventures. I took two sabbatical years in 1980 and early retirement in 1982. Most of my colleagues thought only a fool would give up a tenured position at MIT to launch into industrial enterprise. I never regretted my decision, even though not all of my dozen start-ups were successful.

I used private aircraft extensively in my collaboration with Sprague Electric in Williamstown, with Westinghouse and Exxon in Pittsburgh, with Metcalf at UNH in Portsmouth, and other industrial parnters. In the mid-seventies, following a widely publicized aircraft accident, a new Comptroller suddenly decided that MIT was at risk if one of their employees flew his plane into the Empire State Building, and the travel office refused to pay my invoices for private aircraft travel even though I only charged for tourist class fares. I contacted MIT’s insurance underwriter, and was assured in writing that they had no problem with covering my flights, considering that I had a commercial pilot license. I presented the comptroller with this memo, got no response, complained to v.p.Al Hill, and eventually the MIT travel policy was amended with a clause which exempted Henry Kolm from the prohibition against private aircraft use. My victory was short-lived. In 1979 another new comptroller had my clause deleted, and the then v.p. Ken Smith ignored my complaints.

Ken Smith also vetoed a verbal agreement I had made with his two predecessors Al Hill and Tom Jones, under which I was to to endow a much needed chair in ceramics in the metallurgy department for 1.7 million dollars, and install a much needed ceramics lab in a building on Albany Street, for which MIT was to give me a fifteen year lease. Ken Smith also berated me in a string of the most infantile memoranda for being involved in several corporations (Piezo-Products, Magnion, and Industrial Magnetics), when I should have devoted all my time to MIT. Ken Smith considered technology transfer as prostitution, despite the fact that MIT had made money on my high gradient separation patents, and in spite of the fact that I had reduced my salary to eighty percent to buy one day per week consulting privileges. In response to my complaints, President Paul Gray appointed a committee under Professor Press, charged with giving MIT research staff academic status with faculty privileges. I was ultimately appointed a Senior Scientist with tenured status equivalent to a full professorship.

In addition, the magnet lab was given permission to accept industrial grants without the unacceptable patent conditions imposed previously. A v.p of Exxon told me "our patent attorney would throw me out of his office if I showed him the MIT patent policy" .

In 1979 I was fed up with the increasing hostility of the MIT bureaucracy. I took early retirement after the two year sabbatical I was entitled to. I built the ceramics lab at the PEPI plant in Metuchen NJ, and I told Ken Smith what I thought of his attitude. Soon thereafter Paul Gray was replaced by President Charles Vest, Ken Smith was retired, defense department grants dwindled, and MIT as well as the physics community began actively seeking industrial relations of the kind I had cultivated. In addition, government procurement regulations were amended so as to leave patent rights in the hands of inventors and their institutions, instead of killing them as unusable "taxpayer’s property".

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