Science, Cold War and the American State

Allan A. Needell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9789057026225
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135852795
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This book illuminates how Berkner became a model that produced the scientist/advisor/policymaker that helped build post-war America. It does so by providing a detailed account of the personal and professional beliefs of one of the most influential figures in the American scientific community; a figure that helped define the political and social climates that existed in the United States during the Cold War.

CHAPTER 1

Radio, Aviation, and the Origins of a Technocratic Vision

A BOY FROM SLEEPY EYE

The U.S. federal government at many junctures profoundly and positively influenced Lloyd Viel Berkner’s life and career. Even before his birth on February 1, 1905, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, federal policies, legislation, and institutions worked in ways that eventually would help direct his goals and accomplishments.

In 1898 Lloyd Berkner’s parents took advantage of the so-called Homestead Act of 1862, a federal law that granted 160 acres of public land to heads of families who agreed to maintain residence and make improvements for at least five years.¹ The Berkners (Henry and Alma) established a farm 25 miles south of the Canadian border near the town of Perth, North Dakota. Lloyd spent his first seven years exposed to hard work, horses and the harsh climate of the American northlands.²

Berkner’s recollections of these years focus on the pioneering spirit and, especially, cold weather. Forty years later he reported among his most vivid memories his father’s announcing an outside temperature of minus 53°F. Tutored at home, and as the oldest of three sons, Berkner observed that taming nature required skill, constant preparation and sometimes organized collective action.³

Although successful at farming (with the Berkner property expanding to four square miles), Berkner’s parents decided in 1912 to sell their land and establish a farm financing and insurance business. The family moved to Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, placing Lloyd in the third grade of the town’s public school. Already larger and stronger than his contemporaries (he would grow to six feet three inches and weigh more than two hundred pounds), Berkner was self-assured and cultivated strong personal interests. Chief among these interests was shortwave radio.

In the 1910s, amateur radio operators had begun setting up homemade “rigs” in many American cities and towns. Following a hiatus imposed by government prohibition of amateur broadcasts during the American involvement in World War I, a full-scale amateur radio boom began in 1919.⁴ Like so many other young men who would eventually make careers in science, Berkner became fascinated by radio. From his home at 117 East Dummit Street in Sleepy Eye, the fourteen-year-old boy set up radio station 9AWM. Radio helped Berkner look outward from Sleepy Eye to the world beyond.⁵ Later, encouraged by his parents, and sometimes by merchants of Main Street who allowed him to buy equipment on credit, Berkner decided to become a professional radio operator.

In 1922, having received his high school diploma in three years, and having developed the ability to send and receive Morse code at twenty-five to thirty words per minute, the now seventeen-year-old Berkner traveled to New York City, where he was hired as an instructor in the Radio Corporation of America’s operator’s school. He also studied for, and in March 1923 received, a commercial operator’s license.

Certified radio operators were in great demand. Again, federal legislation was key. The “Radio Act” of 1911 required that virtually all ocean sailing vessels carrying passengers from U.S. ports be fitted with wireless apparatus and have a skilled operator aboard. In 1912, after the sinking of the Titanic, the law was amended to require that shipboard radios be manned and functioning twenty-four hours a day, a requirement that meant that on any extended voyage there would have to be at least two operators. The law was also expanded to include cargo as well as passenger vessels.⁶

Berkner thus found himself easily employable. His choice was to accept a position with the Radio Marine Corporation of America. He worked through the summer of 1923 on a steamship sailing between New York and Norfolk, Virginia, and later on ships operating between New York and Vera Cruz, Mexico. Finally, at Vera Cruz, Berkner signed on as a radio operator on a ship operating (through the Panama Canal) between New York and the west coasts of South and North America.

Berkner could already sense that radio was far from living up to its vast potential. The early 1920s had seen a dramatic change in radio technology, from spark transmitters to continuous wave devices and from crystal detectors to detectors using the vacuum tube. The vacuum tube had been invented earlier, but its exploitation had been retarded by patent and licensing maneuvers.⁷ Remarkably, Berkner’s steamer was equipped only with an old spark transmitter and an equally outdated crystal receiver. Familiar with the vacuum tubes that were commonly available to hobbyists, Berkner decided to purchase the equipment he needed to construct a more modern detector for use aboard ship. With this far more sensitive device, which cost him about $11 ($83 in 1990 dollars),⁸ Berkner found he was able to relay messages all the way from Panama to San Francisco.

Apparently, the device raised suspicions at RCA, the company that held virtually all vacuum tube patents and licensed rights for commercial use. Such rights would have cost a shipowner something like $250 a month. According to a later, secondhand account, RCA inspectors boarded Berkner’s ship during a stop in San Pedro, California. Although hardly conversant in the high-stakes world of patents and licenses, Berkner apparently knew enough to hide the radio receiver he had constructed. If nothing else, he gained from this episode early experience with the intimate connections between the worlds of finance, technology, government, and law.⁹

Berkner’s summer as a marine radio operator triggered a lifelong enthusiasm for travel. It also provided the opportunity to hone his Morse code sending and receiving skills. But most important, it served to expand the eighteen-year-old’s sense of radio’s importance. He now understood how, with but a few adjustments in government policy, radio broadcasts could be received, often at extreme distances, by almost anyone.

Such adjustments were forthcoming. In the United States, in its small towns as well as in its corporate boardrooms and government agencies, a radio revolution was under way. By 1925, at the fourth of a series of government-sponsored national conferences to plan for the future of radio, the father of one of Berkner’s youthful radio contacts was an invited speaker. That lecturer was Herbert Hoover, who declared that the United States led the world in the development of radio and that it had done so “by voluntary agreements between experts in private industry and government.” “Four years ago,” continued the then Secretary of Commerce, “we were dealing with a scientific toy, today we are dealing with a vital force in American life.”¹⁰

In short, radio continued to provide Berkner with an appreciation of the interplay of technology, government, and society. Although in the big-business era of the 1920s Hoover’s philosophy that social improvement could best be accomplished by the voluntary association of private individuals, institutions, and individuals with government-sanctioned programs held sway,¹¹ the potential of government agencies acting as partners in the development and application of technology was brought home to the young Berkner through the earphones of his radio receiver.

In September 1923, a well-traveled and relatively worldly-wise teenager, Berkner returned home to study electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota. Above all, he hoped to extend his own mastery of the art and science of wireless communications. Except for the summer he spent at sea, Berkner had maintained 9 AWM in Sleepy Eye, which had grown by his own efforts and design into an impressive display of engineering prowess. In November 1922 Berkner had served as the intermediary between a Hawaiian amateur operator and another in Hartford, Connecticut, thereby helping to set a new official long-distance communication record. By the time he left for college the antenna on Dummit Street reportedly “dwarfed his home.”¹²

THE MAKING OF AN ENGINEER

The University of Minnesota had been authorized in 1851; eleven years later it became the land grant college for what was still the territory of Minnesota. Its growth was slow, but by the end of World War I it was a full-scale university and the center of the state’s system of higher education. Post-World War I enrollment was more than 8,000.¹³ The College of Engineering and Architecture dated in name from 1916. But it was in fact an outgrowth of the College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, which had been authorized in 1868. Courses in civil and mechanical engineering had been offered at Minnesota since 1871; electrical engineering was first taught in 1887. Quite naturally, the early emphasis had been on electrical machinery, power generation and transmission. Later, telegraphy and telephony were added. In 1920 the department hired its first specialist in the emerging area of wireless communications.¹⁴

As Berkner took up his program of studies at Minnesota, he increasingly came under the influence of C. Moreau Jansky. Since his arrival in 1920 Jansky had pioneered the engineering of broadcast stations and the collection of data useful for predicting when and by whom broadcast signals could reliably be received. As important for Berkner’s career, Jansky, unlike the power engineers whose contacts were primarily with industry, cultivated and maintained contacts within government bureaus in Washington, D.C. In 1922, in co-operation with the Radio Section of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Bureau of Standards, and using the signals generated by pioneer station KDKA (operated by Westinghouse Electric in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Jansky had assembled voluminous statistical evidence of the patterns of reception of a large-scale broadcast station.¹⁵ His findings had direct and immediate implications for the fledgling radio industry as well as for scientists and radio engineers.

As a certified radio operator, Berkner qualified for a special “three credit” course offered during each of the university’s academic trimesters. The course included responsibilities for “maintaining schedule” in the radio station and interpreting “data obtained on radio communication methods and apparatus.” It was “only open to a limited number,” with Jansky’s permission required for enrollment.¹⁶ Berkner soon became the leading engineer of the experimental college shortwave station, 9X1, and chief engineer for the brand new university broadcast station WLB (its call letters taken from the initials of its technical leader) and its commercial counterpart, WGMS (the first such stations in the region).

Radio was not the only technology that aroused Berkner’s passionate interest. Again like so many of his contemporaries, he had become fascinated with flying. Frederick Seitz, who served as president of the National Academy of Sciences from 1965 to 1969 and was a pallbearer at Berkner’s funeral in 1967, relates a conversation he held during that funeral with an unnamed admiral who purported to have been a high school classmate of Berkner’s. According to this admiral, Berkner had convinced him to apply for a summer Navy cadet training program for would-be aviators. He recalled that neither he nor Berkner was accepted into the program. Unwilling to take no for an answer, Berkner insisted that they go down and unofficially take part in the program, hoping to be allowed to replace the selected cadets should any drop out. That, according to the admiral, is what happened and how both had become Naval aviators.¹⁷

More formal records do not contradict the admiral’s story, but they show a different, slightly later and more structured association with Naval aviation. As a student of engineering at Minnesota, Berkner, in addition to pursuing a core curriculum of mathematics, chemistry, drawing, drafting, rhetoric, composition, and engineering, was obligated to meet specific military requirements. Those included joining the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). Berkner, as with everything else, took this requirement seriously. During his junior year, with ROTC approval, Berkner took flight training at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. During his senior year, although he was named Cadet Lieutenant Colonel and placed in charge of the University’s Army ROTC engineering battalion, Berkner forsook the Army and accepted a commission with the rank of ensign as an “aviator” in the U.S. Naval Reserves. From then on, Berkner strove to contribute to the combining of radio and aeronautical technology. The possibilities in 1927, the year of Lindbergh’s sensational flight from New York to Paris, appeared endless.

In 1927, Berkner earned his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering and enrolled in the University’s Physics Department to pursue an advanced degree. That department was home to W. F. G. Swann and John Tate, two of the nation’s most accomplished physicists.¹⁸ Although not yet himself a part of that elite world of science, Berkner had become well aware of it, largely as a result of his research with Jansky on radio propagation. He was also apparently quite impressed by the special status that the two Minnesota physicists held within his university. At this stage in his life, however, technology and its uses were still what excited Berkner most di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Radio, Aviation, and the Origins of a Technocratic Vision
• 2. Mr. Berkner in Washington
• 3. Radio Science and World War II
• 4. Science and Post-war Defense: Extending the Partnership, 1945–49
• 5. Extending the Partnership: Applying Technocratic Ideas Outside of the Military
• 6. Scientists, Project Troy, and the Direction of Cold War Strategic Planning
• 7. Career Choices and the Korean War Panic of 1950
• 8. Continental Defense, Secrecy, and the Scientist’s Role in National Security Planning
• 9. Stretching the Coalition: Scientists and the Distant Early Warning Line
• 10. Expanding Federal Support of Private Research: The Case of Radio Astronomy
• 11. Berkner and the IGY
• 12. IGY Satellites and the Launch of Sputnik
• 13. Horizons or Limits
• Bibliography
• Index