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Oral History Transcript — Dr. Richard Tousey
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Interview with Dr. Richard Tousey
Richard Tousey; June 4, 1982
ABSTRACT: Surveys Tousey's (b. May 18, 1908) family background and early interests before discussing his beginning interest in UV studies at Harvard during his graduate education (PhD, 1933, physics) and as an instructor there (1934-6). His pre-war years at Tufts University (1936-41) are briefly discussed before entering into the principal part of the interview concerning Tousey's work at NRL (1941- ), first as Head of the Instrument Section (1942-45) and then as Head of the Micron Waves Branch (1945-58). The interview provides a thorough discussion of Tousey's activities in this latter position, focusing on NRL's reorganization, and subsequent scientific research program as V-2s became available for upper atmospheric and solar studies. Tousey's own research is a central feature of the discussion, including his work in solar UV spectroscopy, in the innovative design of spectrographs for use in rockets, as well as other optical work, and in the use of photographic and photoelectric data recording techniques. Tousey also provides critical insight into the organizational and personal working relationships within NRL, as well as the research activities of other NRL scientists.
TranscriptSession I | Session II | Session III
DeVorkin:We've been talking about some of the correspondence materials you have, and trying to make arrangements to at least do a preliminary assessment of them, and it also has occurred to me that you may have seen from time to time various OSRD reports. There is one that I'm referring to in particular that was by Gerard Kuiper, who had done a study of German science at the end of the war, specifically V2's, and I know that it was read by a number of people who then suggested their scientific use, in American centers. Do you have any recollection of seeing anything from Kuiper?
Tousey:No, nothing from Kuiper. The one that I remember seeing was one that came right after the visitation of scientific people from here, this country.
Tousey:Yes. Lots of people went over there, as soon as the Germans were vanquished. Dr. Hulburt went from our division. I'm not sure who else from our division went. Some of us thought we were going, and went through all the motions, but it was decided that we shouldn't.
DeVorkin:Why was that?
Tousey:I don't know. I didn't much care, as a matter of fact. But there was some kind of report that came through, and it was probably classified. Things usually were then, confidential, possibly secret. That report covered the work of the Germans Hilsch and Pohl with their crystals that had built-in defects which were sensitive to extreme ultraviolet radiation and became color centers. They worked up equipment to fly in V2 rockets for measuring the solar ultraviolet in its broadest bands, using these crystals that, when exposed, would produce color centers. I've forgotten now exactly how it worked. They had some electrical way of reading them out as well. That was one finding. I think they may have flown them. Incidentally, Stuhlinger would probably have the best recollection of these of anybody I know.
DeVorkin:That would be good.
Tousey:The other thing was the spectrograph for the V2 rocket they built. This was described in this report that I can't locate and don't know the name of. That's the one that Stuhlinger was involved in. There is a report that covers that. I think it was an Air Force report of some sort, but I'm not sure. That's the only one I remember seeing, and it's quite possible that Kuiper probably was over there among the scientific personnel from this country. I don't know where Kuiper was in those days. Was he here in the country?
DeVorkin:Yes. He was a staff member at University of Chicago.
Tousey:Oh yes.
DeVorkin:And he did spend at least six months to a year. He wrote an article in POPULAR ASTRONOMY, but it was very sanitized, about German science, and he didn't say much in particular, but he did say that there was an enormous amount of scientific work that had been done.
Tousey:I wrote a chapter for his book, by the way, for him, on the sun. [in G. P. Kuiper, (ed.) The Solar System Vol. 1 The Sun (Chicago: University of Chicago, Press, 1953), 658-76.]
DeVorkin:That's right. That's in the Solar System Series, Chicago.
DeVorkin:Yes, that's a very important chapter. Let me move on. Did you begin to read any of the NACA or the upper atmosphere research panel reports?
Tousey:Yes. I guess I saw all the rocket panel reports. But I didn't go to those meetings generally. Off and on I went to some of the meetings, but not regularly. I think Ernest Krause, since he was in charge of the upper atmosphere research generally at this laboratory — with the exception of our solar work — took his cronies, if you like, to the meetings. He was, of course, one of the principal members.
DeVorkin:Did you want to go?
Tousey:I didn't much care, I guess. I went to the big one out at Michigan that resulted in the book on the possible scientific use of satellites. [James Van Allen ed., Scientific Uses of Earth Satellites (London, Chapman and Hall, 1956)]
DeVorkin:That was already in the fifties?
DeVorkin:That was a big meeting. Van Allen was the editor of that book.
Tousey:I thought about writing something for it, but didn't get around to it.
DeVorkin:Do you have a set of those reports? The rocket panel reports?
Tousey:No, I don't believe I do. Is Megerian still living? He was secretary for many years.
DeVorkin:Yes. He is retired up in New Hampshire, but spends time in the Boston area.
Tousey:That would sound right. He worked for GE in Lynn, Mass. And he was a very good secretary.
DeVorkin:In our last interview, you showed me, out of these files behind you, references for the V2 sun follower that Harry Clark had been involved in. Could we possibly xerox that? [Pause] We're still trying to look for Biberman, L. Radicals in Electro Optical Systems, Pergamon.
Tousey:Do you suppose I would have referenced that in that general article?
DeVorkin:The other one is the Kiepenhauer book on the sun that you said was valuable.
Tousey:That's a paperback, I think.
DeVorkin:Here are two others, "Solar Work at High Altitudes from Rockets," [in G.P. Kuiper (ed.), The Solar System Vol. I — The Sun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 658-76.] which you. indicated was an important review paper.
Tousey:We can look through the collection again.
DeVorkin:Here's the other one then, 1957, it says, "The French Report, commission to study the relations of solar-terrestrial phenomena." American Astronomer's report from SKY AND TELESCOPE, April, 1966, Volume 31, page 208. That's one interesting looking article. SKY AND TELESCOPE is a real gold mine for those things. Now, as to the pictures, just as an example, in this review paper that you wrote, "Solar Spectroscopy in the Far Ultraviolet," that appeared in the JOURNAL of the Optical Society of America, Vol. 51, April '61, page 384, there is a series of absolutely fantastic pictures in here: Figure 10 that shows you kneeling by a pile of rubble, all that was recovered from the crater after several weeks of digging; servicing the V2; digging in the crater; early pictures of the Gotz and Casparis solar spectrum. Do you have the originals that you gave to J.O.S.A. for the Gotz spectra, pictures of Lyman, but also particularly the kinds of pictures that are represented by this here, this picture of you?
Tousey:Well, those were Kodachrome slides that I took there — they're back in a bureau drawer at home, and they've been used on many occasions by various people, usually in color, and I think, do you have that color booklet that Friedman put out? [H. Friedman, Reminiscences of 30 Yrs. of Space Research, NRL Report 8113, 8/77.]
Tousey:I don't take it home because my wife would be so mad if she knew that Friedman had used those pictures.
DeVorkin:You mean your wife doesn't know?
Tousey:She doesn't know.
DeVorkin:I think that's it on the bottom — yes, that's what it looks like —
Tousey:No, that's not it. That's Hertzberg Institute. I think there's probably a copy, down in here. Well, he refers to them properly, but she figures they're my property and she doesn't want them to be used.
DeVorkin:Let me see if I can identify the book for the tape. It's REMINISCENCES OF THIRTY YEARS OF SPACE RESEARCH, NRL REPORT 8113, by Herbert Friedman, August, '77. As I recall after I saw it, there are a few pictures in there, but not too many.
Tousey:That's right. Yes, these are some, I guess those are my pictures.
DeVorkin:Right, that one looks familiar, on the left, the grey one. Smoke still rising from the "volcano." Are these your personal pictures?
DeVorkin:They're good pictures. The color balance is excellent.
Tousey:Well, I think that it used to be better in those days.
DeVorkin:What about some of the others that you have? I know you have many. Is there a chance that we could have a look at your collection? If we tell your wife?
Tousey:Well, I don't think she's quite that possessive anymore.
DeVorkin:Was it just something with Friedman, that he was sort of aggressive about that kind of stuff?
Tousey:Well, he wasn't really aggressive, but she always liked to support me, you see what I mean.
DeVorkin:Well, the kinds of pictures that I would be interested in would be in three broad categories — the V2 era, the Aerobee era, and the satellite era. The most interesting kinds of pictures would be where you or people who worked with you were seen working with the equipment, and what I would like to be able to do is to reproduce those pictures and then discuss with you on tape what was happening in them, so we can document visually what was happening.
DeVorkin:Has anyone ever done that with you?
Tousey:No. No, we — we've been very remiss about any historical work.
DeVorkin:OK. That's certainly what I want to do. I think that the pictures themselves are valuable, but nowhere near as valuable unless they're documented.
Tousey:That's true.
DeVorkin:So these pictures, I take it, are at your home?
Tousey:My 35 mm slides are at home. In addition, there are probably still a large number of 8x10 black and white prints and some negatives in the files.
DeVorkin:Are these prints of your slides?
Tousey:No, just other things, other pictures that were taken.
DeVorkin:We could go through that.
Tousey:Go through them, yes.
DeVorkin:Possibly a little later today.
Tousey:It's quite a little job to do.
DeVorkin:What I'd like to do is get an idea of how much there would be, and there certainly could be a time when we'd come out specifically to do that.
Tousey:People keep saying, why don't you go over those? You can't keep them forever. I sort of stall them off. A lot of them came from others, from Charlie Johnson, for example. When he cleaned out his files, he sent a lot of them down and I stuck them in the drawer. Last time I looked at the file cabinet, it was just jammed full of prints.
DeVorkin:Is it one full file cabinet, or several?
Tousey:I don't know. It used to be about three drawers. But I'm not sure what's there now.
DeVorkin:That's why I'd like to get a preliminary determination today.
Tousey:Of course, I wouldn't know, probably, I'd be lucky if I could tell you about 10 percent of them.
DeVorkin:I want to spend most of our time today on the Aerobee-era, and Viking-era, but primarily Aerobees, but I still have some follow up questions. Now, the first one is that in our very first session, I mentioned a report that I found of an attempt by Greenough, Oberly, and Rockwood to produce a photoelectric spectrometer in the period after the first unsuccessful V2 flight. This is when it was not sure whether a spectrograph could be retrieved. You didn't recall too much about this. I thought this time I would give you a chance to look at their paper. [NRL Report #3 8229-55, Chapter 3 Section H.] It's clear that nothing ever came of it, but they did build the instrument, and I wanted to give you a second or two to look at it and ask you your comments. It's NRL Report No. 2 or 3, I think.
Tousey:3, yes, I guess. The footnote here says, 8229-55 Chapter 3, Section H. Quoting: "It is believed that the instrument described here is capable, when installed in a V2, of obtaining a useful record of solar intensity in the band centered at 2900 angstroms. That's not especially interesting." "It is doubtful whether any record would be obtained at 1216 degrees unless the solar intensity in that region is very great."
DeVorkin:Which it later turned out to be.
Tousey:Yes. But they did use the lithium fluoride bead. I suppose I knew about this at the time. This was not a project of ours. It was a project of Krause's group, namely, Greenough, Oberly and Rockwood, in alphabetical order.
DeVorkin:Oh, that's right. You told us in the past that part of your group and part of Krause's group worked together.
DeVorkin:On general V2 spectroscopy. These were the people from Krause's group?
Tousey:Yes. Durand doesn't seem to be mentioned. Maybe he didn't care for it. I didn't have much use for it. I know that in those days, I would have said they're wasting their time. If they wanted to build it, they could build it, of course.
DeVorkin:And that would be it?
Tousey:That would be it.
DeVorkin:Why is that? Is that because of your feelings about photoelectric work?
Tousey:Yes. I was in favor, and still am in favor of photographic as the best way to retrieve data in a short time, with a rocket. I think Brueckner is too. In photoelectric retrieval, it's much slower, in spite of the fact that two dimensional arrays and so forth now exist in vidicons and all those fancy tubes, and, what's the newest one? The CCD's. Yes. As a matter of fact, using an image orthicon, we're getting fine results from our P78-1 coronagraphs. It was flown in Feb. 1979. It used an image orthocon. It was the backup for the OSO-7 coronagraph. [Orbiting Solar Observatory 7]
DeVorkin:That's interesting. So it didn't fly, that is, was the backup, and so you flew it on a sounding rocket?
Tousey:No. We flew it on the military P78-1 satellite.
DeVorkin:What is that?
Tousey:The Air Force has been launching satellites with research equipment in them, for a good many years. I'm having a memory lapse. It was instrumented by the Air Force Laboratory in California, the Aerospace Corporation. That's really a puppet of the Air Force, always was.
Tousey:So, we instrumented the P78-1 satellite. Our second experiment on board P78-1 didn't work, but the coronagraph worked very well, and the X-ray people also put in instruments which operated very well indeed. The main problem with it has been getting the telemetry and data out of the Air Force. I think it took about a year before we got anything to speak of. I don't believe they're caught up yet, in looking at the data. This comet that went into the sun, that's one of those pictures.
DeVorkin:So you have it in the data but they won't release the data yet?
Tousey:Well, they would release it if they had it in the form to release, but they have dragged their feet on processing the tapes. Anyway we're getting plenty of data now I guess.
DeVorkin:Let's return to the basic idea, before CCD's or area scanners or vidicons, where you only had stationery or moving photos cells, you felt that this just wasn't as good as photographic film?
Tousey:For a spectrograph, it's extremely slow, to put a photo tube in back of a slit and scan the spectrum. It's extremely slow.
DeVorkin:When you're on a sounding rocket, there's not much time. Who did you talk to at that time about this kind of a philosophy of technology? Were there people who disagreed with you?
Tousey:I don't know. There are probably always people who disagree. I don't remember any great disagreements as early as that.
DeVorkin:But there was yet this attempt in Krause's group.
DeVorkin:Did you ever argue against their efforts or just let them go?
Tousey:No, I think they just went along and followed their own desires obviously, it was put in the trash can more or less as soon as we got photographic spectra back, I should say. It was based on the idea that we couldn't recover the film.
DeVorkin:That's certainly what they said, yes. Could you speculate, if these people had worked for you and reported directly to you, would you have given them the chance to try it out? Was there any doubt in your mind?
Tousey:No, there wasn't any doubt at all.
DeVorkin:OK, we can move on from there.
Tousey:Incidentally, Greenough was an AB from somewhere, and Oberly probably had a Master's degree, not a bad physicist. Rockwood was kind of a physicist engineer.
DeVorkin:Are any of these people still here?
Tousey:No. Rockwood is no longer living. Greenough left in a couple of years for greener pastures. Bad pun. He had enough green. Oberly left also, and I don't know what's become of him.
DeVorkin:Let's move on. I'm trying to fill in a number of things from the early period so we can get up to Aerobees. After your first major talk to the AAS, where, as we've already discussed, people became very excited and Charlotte Moore Sitterly got in contact with you. I talked with her about that. I'm just curious, did you join the AAS at any time after that?
Tousey:Yes, I suppose I did but I have no idea when it was.
DeVorkin:OK. Did you give invited talks to astronomers during this time that were not necessarily published? Did you find yourself in demand by local astronomy groups?
Tousey:Oh yes. I guess so.
DeVorkin:Any particular ones that you recall?
Tousey:Well, that's kind of hard. I can't sort those out very quickly.
DeVorkin:But you do remember doing a number of talks?
Tousey:Oh yes. I talked from time to time. On a good many occasions.
DeVorkin:During this early period?
Tousey:During the early period, and off and on ever since.
DeVorkin:Well, was there a point in the early V2 period where it became a burden? Too many people were asking you, garden clubs? Did garden clubs ever ask you?
Tousey:Oh no.
DeVorkin:OK, so it was still professional people?
DeVorkin:OK, fine. In the late forties and early fifties, from some NACA reports that we've seen, it sounds like a group of unnamed astronomers, but I can imagine who they were, at Michigan, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, set up an astronomical consultant service for NACA, and for the Upper Air Rocket Research Panel, to advise on the scientific uses of space. And there was one particular report where it urged the members of the panel to take advantage of this consulting service. I can imagine that Goldberg was involved and possibly Spitzer and others. Does this ring any bells with you?
Tousey:No. I don't remember that I ever heard of them or that club.
DeVorkin:It was definitely a little club. OK. We finished the second interview last time talking about your study of the vertical distribution of ozone in the earth's atmosphere, and you listed that as one of the major studies that you did during that time, and it was of major importance. I'm interested to find out what your goals were in producing this distribution of ozone information. Was there any interest beyond aeronomy, in communications problems, in assessing how long range communications were propagated through the atmosphere, or ionization phenomena?
Tousey:No, not that very much. Mostly I guess the meteorologists were interested in this, and had been, over many years actually, ever since the effect of ozone in cutting out the ultraviolet was appreciated. I mentioned that Dobson had developed and built an instrument that was widely used for measuring the total ozone and they had some kind of network, and a lot of people were interested in the ozone distribution. Wulf at Cal Tech was very much interested in it. I don't know what's happened to him. He wrote a good many papers on it. If he were living, he would be in his nineties. There was a whole group of people interested in the vertical distribution and in the total ozone content. They also wanted to know how the vertical distribution of ozone, changed from day to day, how it influenced the ultraviolet that reached the earth, and in Switzerland they mentioned the strong solar ultraviolet content for publicity purposes, if you like, at their resorts.
DeVorkin:When were you first aware of the work of Goetz in measuring the ultraviolet spectrum of the sun from climbing the mountains in Switzerland in 1939? Did you know about that before your rocket flights?
Tousey:I suppose I did. Goetz and Dobson collaborated, actually, at one time, in the application of the Dobson spectrophotometer to the measurement of the vertical distribution of ozone, and Goetz pushed that aspect of it, making measurements of the ratio of intensities of the pair of wavelengths with the Dobson spectrophotometer as a function of solar elevation. From this he worked out a theory from which he calculated the vertical distribution of ozone. This led rather naturally into his trying to follow the ultraviolet spectrum down to the shortest possible wavelengths. To accomplish this he selected a period when the total ozone was minimum and the sun was at the highest possible elevation, and he made the measurements from the Jungfraujoch Observatory. Incidentally, I have some pretty good slides of the Jungfraujoch Observatory.
DeVorkin:Those would be very nice to have. In looking at your work on the vertical distribution of ozone, did you talk with anyone about it, or did anyone approach you asking you to do this particular study? Or did you read in the literature and decide to do it for yourself? Can you pinpoint in any way how that came about?
Tousey:As far as I know, we were sufficiently aware of the interest in it so that we just set that up as something to do. People were very much interested in it.
DeVorkin:That's fine. That makes sense. Let me just backtrack on the photoelectric vs. photographic point, because something came up while you were talking about the Dobson instrument. Can I, by putting words in your mouth, just say this? You have no objection intrinsically to photoelectric work, and it was rather the time limitations of the rocket-sondes that decided you on photography? Is this a fair assessment? In other words, you have no objections to it in satellites because obviously one needs it for satellites?
Tousey:Yes, I think that's a fair statement, but in those days there were no photo tubes that were sensitive in the far ultraviolet. That may be why they [Greenough, Oberly, etc.] said something about 2900. The ultraviolet sensitive photo tube was way behind in development. It was being developed more for its infrared sensitivity than for its ultraviolet sensitivity, and its visible sensitivity too, of course. I suppose RCA and Fransworth were in the forefront in those days. There were simple ways of extending its use, but they never were used, never were applied very much. For example, you could put a fluorescent material in front of the tube and convert the extreme ultraviolet into visible but that was not a particularly efficient way of doing it. You lose a lot that way, although this was talked about and probably used by various people.
DeVorkin:Who talked about it in the early period? In the forties and early fifties?
Tousey:I can remember the man who preceded me at Harvard, named Gleason. He went to Colgate where he was head of the physics department for many years. He was going to build a spectrograph for research, to continue research there in the physics department, and I remember his saying that he was going to try using a photo tube with fluorescent material in front of it. That's probably the first person that I can remember mentioning it. As far as I know, he didn't actually do very much. I don't remember anything in the literature by him.
DeVorkin:What was his full name?
Tousey:Paul R. Gleason.
DeVorkin:OK. We talked last time about the fact that while you were putting instruments on V2's, it wasn't obvious to you or to the people working with you that there would be chances to get up into the upper atmosphere after the V2, and so you worked very hard on doing as much as you could with the V2. As the V2 era ended, what, was your general goal in future rocket instrumentation?
Tousey:Well, the V2 era did not end until after the beginning of the Aerobee years. I don't remember when the first Aerobees were launched, but that's in Newell's book. [H. Newell, Be and the Atmosphere p. 38.]
DeVorkin:In the late forties?
Tousey:Yes, in the late forties.
DeVorkin:When did you first hear of the Viking project and the possibility that you could use that?
Tousey:Oh, as soon as it started. It started here. I don't know, I suppose I heard about it shortly after it started.
DeVorkin:Was it assured that you would have a place on that in the payload?
Tousey:Oh, I think so. I have forgotten pretty much about the way the Viking rocket project started here, other people knew much more about that than I. I suppose Milton Rosen started it, and Homer Newell. They felt that the Aerobee would never get high enough with enough load, I guess, so they decided to develop the Viking rocket for the purpose, aril we went along and we did instrument a few Viking rockets.
DeVorkin:That's right.
Tousey:I guess that was after we'd been instrumenting Aerobees, probably. It must have come a little while after the first Aerobees.
DeVorkin:I know that your spectrographs went through design changes, both for the Aerobee and for the Viking. The ones that we've already seen. They're quite a bit different.
Tousey:Oh yes.
DeVorkin:Was there ever any question that you were going to change the design? Can you recall why you changed from the two bead design to slits, in the Viking rocket?
Tousey:I guess the Aerobee really is the one that we designed around.
DeVorkin:Rather than the Viking?
Tousey:I can't remember whether the Viking was supposed to be capable of pointing or not. Whether it had stabilization equipment on it. I don't think it did.
DeVorkin:The Viking 3, number 3, which was launched February 9, 1950, had a rigid spectrograph in the nose cone. So it didn't sound like it was movable. The Viking 9, which was December 15, 1952, along with the Aerobee 11, which was September 3, 1952, had a one axis pointing control, which corrected for roll. Is that right?
Tousey:That sounds right.
DeVorkin:Clearly you were firing Aerobes and Vikings simultaneously?
DeVorkin:All right. It seems to me that this sounds like a moderately hectic procedure. Especially for spacecraft integration. Making sure your spectrograph fit and that it was going to work, that the housekeeping was going to be compatible. Could you give me some feeling for whether it was hectic or whether you had good enough organization so that everything went smoothly?
Tousey:I think it was moderately hectic. We had a lot of good technicians in those days. I think the spectrograph design for the Aerobee was pretty much compatible with the Viking. The Viking would just carry it to a higher altitude. I'm beginning to remember now why we redesigned the spectrograph. The bead system suffered various shortcomings, as far as producing good spectra, because you really need a slit spectrograph to get good sharp spectra, but without some roll sta131ization, we'd never get enough light in during our rocket flight. So we developed another spectrograph for the Aerobee that was stabilized in roll. How did it manage to look at the sun? I don't know. I guess Harry Clark's sun follower did it. I guess it was the one axis roll mechanism. [NRL Report #4267.] That turned the instrument so that the slit kept looking at the sun all the time. But the yaw of the rocket was still troublesome, because the field of view of a slit spectrograph in the plane of the slit jaws is not very great, and the rockets usually — Precessed, so we expanded the field of view as much as we could along the major axis of the rocket, and controlled the roll. That was the spectrograph built for that vehicle, and it worked fairly well. This was our slit expander.
DeVorkin:What was the slit expander, a cylindrical lens of some sort?
Tousey:Well, the simplest way, of course, is just a diffusing plate. We did use that in some instances. Then we also used a pair of mirrors with the slit down here, like this.
DeVorkin:Two flat mirrors set in a 'V', where the base of the 'V' is the slit?
Tousey:Yes, and by multiple reflection you can expand the field quite a bit.
DeVorkin:It's almost like Bowen's image slicer. Where he was able to bring much more light into a slit by making the slit jaws an optical surface, which brought it all in. Not exactly sure how he did it.
Tousey:Not exactly. Something like that, yes.
DeVorkin:Did you ever have any contact with Ira Bowen?
Tousey:Yes, I knew him. I don't know that I had any great amount of scientific contact. We never collaborated on anything.
DeVorkin:But was he ever interested in rocket borne research — right after the war he was made director of Mt. Wilson-Palomar?
Tousey:I think he was. Of course, his work on nebular lines sort of anticipated Edlens's work, so he was interested. Wasn't he a spectroscopist?
Tousey:Yes, of course he was.
DeVorkin:Worked with Millikan?
Tousey:I'm sure he was interested in this, just because of his early work in extreme ultraviolet with Millikan.
DeVorkin:Yes. But it's interesting that even though he had all this background, to my knowledge he never did anything because I think he was so thoroughly dedicated to ground-based work, considering his position.
Tousey:Yes, I think so.
DeVorkin:Did you have any hard data on that, like letters?
Tousey:I don't think so. I don't remember. I don't recall anything, I guess.
DeVorkin:That's one of the values of getting to your letters, just to see if there's anything there like that. To finish up that early period, was there any time before the Vikings came in, before the Aerobees, when you thought that when the V2's ran out you'd return to some other kind of research?
Tousey:Well, we hadn't lost interest in other kinds of research. We were continuing work in other fields, in the division and in my branch. But I don't remember that we were worrying about the future.
DeVorkin:I have a question about the structure of that research branch. I know you had three sections, your laboratory. We'll talk about that in a little while. Shea: I'm not real clear about the interface between the Vikings and the Aerobees. You designed equipment, spectrographs, to fit both of them, is that right?
Tousey:Well, I think they were designed primarily to fit the Aerobee, but it turned out that they would also fit the Viking, because the nose ojive wasn't all that different.
DeVorkin:That term "ojive" —
Tousey:What's that mean?
DeVorkin:I know from your model over here, there's something called the bend ojive.
Tousey:This part is the ojive.
DeVorkin:The nose cone?
Tousey:There's a dictionary up there if you want to look it up. It's a form of a certain curve. Shea: Do you know if the Viking was designed to be compatible with the Aerobee? Was that intentional?
Tousey:No, I don't believe so. It was designed on its own. I think the diameter was too great also.
DeVorkin:That in itself is a reason why you had to redesign. I'm wondering about the Viking. The Viking did have similar payload capacity to the V2. Were you ever thinking of putting the original V2 spectrograph in a Viking?
Tousey:No. Never did. Wasn't designed properly at all.
DeVorkin:For the Viking, or in general?
Tousey:For anything, but a V2.
DeVorkin:All right. Considering the Aerobees, we've already discussed your earlier interests but I'd like to know, when you first heard about the Aerobees, did you talk to Van Allen, to people at Aerojet? From whom did you get the specs for the payload dimensions and things like that?
Tousey:Oh, the Rocket Sonde Branch. Krause I suppose was still here. But then he got shunted off into the Pacific testing, and Newell took over fairly early. Townsend was instrumental in the Aerobee development and other rockets, but the Rocket Sonde Branch here at NRL had a strong interest in the development of rockets for further research. They went their own way on it, and they kept us informed of what was going on, but at first the Aerobee didn't look like a very good vehicle. It wouldn't carry the load or go as high and so forth.
DeVorkin:Did this make you think in terms of use of miniaturized components, the idea that the new transistors on the market might be of use, or was it still too early?
Tousey:No. Still too early.
DeVorkin:Yes. We had to keep the weight down.
DeVorkin:When did you first hear about transistors in terms of their possible applicability?
Tousey:I don't even recall when the transistor was invented, by date. So I forget.
DeVorkin:In the early fifties. You recalled in one of your review papers, "Extreme Ultraviolet Spectra of the Sun," [Richard Tousey, "The Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrum of the Sun," Space Science Review 2 (1963) 369.] page 20, a series of emulsions that were described by Roger Audran in 1956. The SEC-4, the SEC-5, the SEC-7. Were these always available during your V2 period?
Tousey:No. They weren't available. They didn't exist in those days.
DeVorkin:What was used earlier?
Tousey:You and I already talked about Schumann plates. Schumann plates were superseded by fluorescent-coated ordinary Kodak photographic film. This was first done by coating with oil. I think I covered that.
DeVorkin:That's right.
Tousey:Then Kodak, back in maybe the twenties or thirties, put a coating of fluorescent lacquer on ordinary photographic film and sold it as their ultraviolet sensitive emulsion.
DeVorkin:Their special one. But you also used the 103 series, I saw in a number of papers.
Tousey:Yes. Well, that's just a faster emulsion and not as highly resolving.
DeVorkin:Did you have contact with Kodak chemists and engineers?
Tousey:Yes, we had contact with them.
DeVorkin:With C.E.K. Mees, by any chance?
Tousey:Not with Mees. John Spence, I think, was the first one. We had contact with Kodak from a very early date. John Spence was the man, and Bill Swan, (I guess he's the son of Swan of Bertol) who retired five or ten years ago, was in the marketing end. He was a highly intelligent person with a lot of knowledge of science, and he pushed the development of films for us.
DeVorkin:You mean very fast, stable, far ultraviolet emulsions?
Tousey:Yes. He was interested in those. Of course that's only a small part of it, his marketing job. He was the man in marketing and John Spence was the man at the Kodak-Park Laboratory, and they worked very well together.
DeVorkin:I know that you had some problems with temperature sensitivity and also the existence of atomic hydrogen at high altitudes.
Tousey:Oh yes. That was a very mysterious thing.
DeVorkin:How did you explore that? Did you explore that with the Kodak people?
Tousey:I'm sure we did, and they had no explanation for it, at all. In fact, sometimes in the laboratory, film'" an instrument would get fogged, and we just couldn't imagine how this was. I think it's still not very well understood. It appeared to be associated with atomic hydrogen. We used a discharge through molecular hydrogen, as a light source with an open slit. Both molecular and atomic hydrogen passed through the slit into the vacuum chamber. Atomic hydrogen ions would pretty certainly fog Schumann-type photographic emulsions. But we didn't expect the hydrogen to stay in atomic form very long.
DeVorkin:I see. They'd recombine?
Tousey:Yes. But apparently they didn't quickly enough. We even went so far once as to put a piece of film inside an ordinary film can container, put it in the vacuum chamber. Be darned if that didn't get fogged!
DeVorkin:No kidding?
Tousey:Anyway Brueckner probably knows the present status of this problem.
Tousey:Gunter Brueckner, in our group.
DeVorkin:Here at NRL?
Tousey:Yes. That problem was most annoying, but more so in laboratory work than in space research. I don't know that we ever were sure that we had any fogging from that source in space. We did have fogging. But there are all sorts of possible causes. I think I'm almost getting ahead of ourselves, because this applies not to ordinary film, but to the SC types of film most particularly.
DeVorkin:Right. They were available in the mid-fifties.
Tousey:I guess so. I forget when they came out. I don't remember how we heard about them or why Kodak-Pathe went into the development of these emulsions. I guess they just felt like it. Something to do.
DeVorkin:It might have been the response to other requirements from other researchers.
Tousey:Perhaps. Nuclear people; yes, that could very well be, but Roger Audran was the one who pushed it. He's retired now. I guess he got up to be head of the Kodak-Pathe laboratory.
DeVorkin:Kodak-Pathe is European? Tousey: It's French. It's in Vincennes which is a suburb of Paris. I don't know to what extent it's a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak.
DeVorkin:With today's economy, it might be the other way around. Shea: I think you see that on movies — Kodak-Pathe. That's where I recognize it.
Tousey:That's right Pathe is French. I don't know who Pathe was. I suppose he was one of the first photographic people in France.
DeVorkin:So for the rocket flights at least, would you say that getting reasonable emulsions was never a major concern for you?
Tousey:No, I think it was always a major concern.
DeVorkin:Oh, it was? In what regard?
Tousey:Well, in the V2 days it wasn't so bad. Because there we used simply fluorescent-sensitized 103-0 W, that is Eastman 103-0 with the lacquer coating. So there wasn't any problem in using it in roll film, rolled up, rolling it through the instrument from one shoot to the other.
DeVorkin:You say it's Eastman 35mm 103-0 ultraviolet sensitized?
DeVorkin:Is that the lacquer?
Tousey:Yes. In addition there was another problem that we knew would arise. The problem concerned static electricity fogging. When film is rolled upon itself static electricity is produced and makes all sorts of trouble, by exposing streaks and all sorts of marks. Kodak was very helpful in this regard. They suggested putting on an anti-static backing. It was a black carbon coating of some sort, there was a special name for it, "rim jet black backing."
DeVorkin:Is it a commercial process?
Tousey:Yes, and it was developed mainly for anti-halation (optical) purposes, but it was also a conductor. So it eliminated the possibility of static fogging. But it was very messy when developing the film because you had to get rid of the stuff.
DeVorkin:Did you continue to use the 103-0 through the Aerobees, or did that change?
Tousey:I don't know. I think we changed pretty soon, because the Kodak-Pathe SC emulsions became available. To use them meant the other factor that we couldn't use roll film anymore because nothing could be allowed to reach the sensitive surface. Instead, we used a number of film strips, in little holders.
DeVorkin:Did you always use celluloid film or did you ever use glass backed plates?
Tousey:We never used glass backed plates. Bill Behring over at Goddard has always used them, perhaps even when he was still at Colorado. We never felt it was necessary. Bill Behring, in case you don't know him that well, is a perfectionist. He was interested in the most precise possible wavelengths, and wanted to get perfect spectra from the rockets, so he designed spectrographs from that point of view. In fact, although it's taken him a long time, he's been quite successful.
DeVorkin:When you created your double-dispersing instruments, in 1960 approximately, and even before then when you started to get very high dispersion, in your paper on the magnesium doublet, your dispersion there was on the order of 4/10 angstrom per millimeter, and that certainly was sufficient to be able to examine Doppler motion and you were looking at very precise widths. [R Tousey, E.S. Johnson, J.D. Purcell, N. Wilson, "A New Photograph of the MgII doublet at 2800A in the Sun," AP7 117 (1953) 238-239.] You still felt your acetate backing was stable enough? There was never any element of doubt?
Tousey:Not at all. Behring had more reason for using glass though, because Colorado specialized in grazing incidence spectrographs.
DeVorkin:Grazing incidence. That's for very high dispersion?
Tousey:Yes, and also for reaching the shortest XUV wavelengths. But you have to have a nice surface, a good curve to obtain the greatest precision of wavelength under these conditions.
DeVorkin:Maybe we should turn to the University of Colorado people and your contact with them. Who was this fellow you were telling me about?
Tousey:Behring. He's over at Goddard.
DeVorkin:But there are others. We talked about them briefly last time: Pietenpohl, Stacey, Stith, Runs Nidey.
Tousey:Yes, they were the first group from the University of Colorado physics department that became involved in this project. Pietenpohl was head of the physics department. It was his idea He was apparently well acquainted with the man from AFCRL whose name I wasn't able to remember before and Marcus O'Day can't seem to again.
DeVorkin:Not Walter Orr Roberts or Hinteregger?
Tousey:No. They got money from the Air Force, and Rense was on the physics department staff there and he got into it before very long.
DeVorkin:So Pietenpohl was in on it first?
Tousey:Yes. Then the others, I don't remember exactly when they started. I guess they thought they were an engineering group as well. The Air Force funded them to build a bi-axial pointing control for an Aerobee rocket. That I guess was their first project. But I'm a little uncertain as to the timing of all these events. Rense started right in to build a grazing incidence spectrograph for an Aerobee rocket.
DeVorkin:Right. That's correct.
Tousey:I think Pietenpohl was not involved in that very much.
DeVorkin:My impression is that Pietenpohl led the group in making the bi-axial mechanism, and that Rense was one of the first to make use of it in '53.
Tousey:That's the way it was.
DeVorkin:What was your contact with these people? Did you write to them often? Did you call them or meet them?
Tousey:We knew them. One contact was through the Upper Air Rocket Research Panel. I don't know who it was that was representing them on the panel, but we knew about them through that channel. [M.D. O'Day, AFCRL See Newell Beyond the Atmosphere p. 414.]
DeVorkin:Which of them would you have been most likely to correspond with, Pietenpol possibly, or Rense?
Tousey:At the beginning, I guess, the first time I went up there, I remember that I saw Dr. Pietenpohl, who was ready to retire by then. I suppose I saw Nidey, Stacey, and probably Stith.
DeVorkin:You later on thank Russ Nidey, and identify him directly in helping you with some of your own work.
Tousey:Well, he stayed with the project the longest of any of those people. The others — led by Stacey, who was independently well off, but enjoyed working, and edited WHITEWATER MAGAZINE, and enjoyed whitewater canoeing — headed the splinter group that formed the nucleus of the Ball Brothers operation at Boulder.
DeVorkin:Yes, that was later, in the fifties. I'm concerned primarily with how the pointing controls were developed, what, if any, input you had, because I know that the pointing controls limited the payload capacity of the Aerobee even more. How anxious were you to get those pointing controls?
Tousey:Oh, once we found that they really worked, we were very anxious to get them, because it was funded from an Air Force contract, there was no problem about it. Actually the Colorado people were anxious to make them available to anyone, (That is, the Colorado engineering group.) I don't know whether Rense felt that way about it or not, but he had access to as many as he could use. In other words, the competition was between us and Rense and his people, not with the pointing control people. We were always on the best of terms, with the pointing control people, not that we were on bad terms with Rense. Nidey was in charge of them for quite a while after the original people left for Ball Brothers. Nidey retained the University of Colorado bi-axial pointing control project, and the group that went into the Ball Brothers started another pointing control project that was not the same, but had the same purpose more or less, and also with Air Force funding. It became increasingly evident that effective bi-axial pointing controls would be extremely useful for upper atmosphere research.
DeVorkin:Was there any competition in the early fifties between those people developing pointing controls here at NRL, and the University of Colorado group? Was there any exchange of information on technique? Who would I talk to find out about that?
Tousey:I don't believe there was very much.
DeVorkin:Exchange or competition?
Tousey:Either, for that matter. This V2 sun follower started out in competition, I guess you'd say, with the Colorado group. The pointing control projects started at a very early date must have been in the forties. The most amusing thing was (I may have told you this before) the advertised excuse for Colorado to build a biaxial pointing control.
DeVorkin:No, I don't remember.
Tousey:It was to take color photographs of the sun's corona.
DeVorkin:You did say that?
Tousey:I did tell you that. It's absurd.
DeVorkin:Who was that, Rense?
Tousey:No. The man at AFCRL whose name I cannot remember. [Marcus O'Day] He needed some kind of excuse for the Air Force. He put that one across.
DeVorkin:And they sold it on that?
Tousey:Yes. It's possible that Menzel was involved in that too, because he was closely connected with the Air Force.
DeVorkin:Was it the High Altitude Observatory that was closely connected? That was Menzel's?
Tousey:Yes. That was separate from the University of Colorado in those days.
DeVorkin:Yes. Now it's somewhat connected with NCAR.
Tousey:Yes. But first it became part of the University of Colorado, when Walter Orr Roberts got tired of living up on the mountain. He built up quite a sizeable group at Boulder which became associated with the University of Colorado. John Evans was an important member, eventually moved from there down to the new Air Force observatory to be constructed at Sac Peak.
DeVorkin:Right. Those are beautiful places. I can't really imagine anyone who wouldn't want to stay on those mountains. So there were these various projects. You were sort of in competition with Rense's group. While I change this tape, the first thing I'd like to ask you on the next tape is how the competition, such as it was, was arbitrated, so as to find out who got what?
Tousey:Rense's primary objective was to photograph the sun with the grazing incidence spectrograph, at very short wavelengths, in particular from Lyman alpha down. And we wanted to do that too, but we were willing to put that as of slightly lower priority and do first what we, too, thought was important and thought we could do successfully quite soon. Rense, indeed, did secure the first photographic record of Lyman alpha, but we think ours, obtained a little later, was better. The same is true for an image of the sun in Lyman alpha. All this is covered in a paper that I wrote on Lyman alpha "The Lyman Alpha Line in Space," published in the 13th International Astronautical Congress, Varna, 1962, Proceedings 1964. [R Tousey, 'Lyman Alpha Line in Space' Proceedings of the 13th Int'1 Astronautical Congress, Varna 1962, (1964).] I remember writing that the first spectrum of the sun to show the Lyman alpha line of hydrogen was Rense.
DeVorkin:That's '52, yes?
Tousey:And then ours was in '54, ["The Ultraviolet Spectrum of the Sun" in RL.F. Seaton and M.J. Seaton Rocket Exploration of the Upper Atmosphere (London: Pergamon Press, 1954)] and Jursa, LeBlanc and Tanaka in '55 at AFCRL. Then there was also a great deal of competition getting the first image of the sun in Lyman alpha.
DeVorkin:That's right; you did that not too long after that.
Tousey:Yes, in 1959.
DeVorkin:Before we get to that, let me ask who was the arbitrator? Was it the Rocket Research Panel?
Tousey:No, no. There wasnt any special arbitrator. We just went ahead, each on his own.
DeVorkin:No, but someone had to determine who got on to which flight.
Tousey:Oh. In principle, the Rocket Panel did that. I don't know if they ever had to assert their authority, if they had authority. I don't remember any incidents; seems as if we all had as many opportunities as we could handle.
DeVorkin:I see. Through the fifties, with Aerobee?
DeVorkin:You were firing only from White Sands, or were you firing from Wallops?
Tousey:No, just White Sands. That was the only place where you could recover.
DeVorkin:Yes, you certainly had to do that. It seems though you had a standard design for a spectrograph on the Aerobee, where it had two chambers, and you could interchange within those two chambers different instruments, different optical systems. In the case of the imaging Lyman alpha monochrometer, that went in a chamber that had previously employed an extreme ultraviolet spectrograph. Did you intend to create a housekeeping unit in your spectrograph that would adapt to multiple uses?
Tousey:No, not really. The constraint was the pointing control and the space available within the Aerobee rocket. That determined the maximum size, weight and form of the instrument chamber, so that it would fit in the rectangular ring that the pointing control operated. I think we must have had several designs. There was one that we used for years called the Model 4, but I guess I don't keep in mind all the various instruments that were fitted in. They all pretty much used the most we could squeeze out of that space, and within the doors that were kicked off of the Aerobee. (See Figures 42, 43)
DeVorkin:You've given me a clue to something that might be very useful. You indicate that you have model numbers for these various spectrographs. Where do you think we could go, in your files or to other people that work here, so that we could retrieve all the characteristics possible for the Model 1, Model 2, Model 3, Model 4, etc.
Tousey:I don't know. J.D. Purcell is the one who would probably remember the most about the different models, because he was in charge of all of them. He was in charge of the design and construction of the rocket spectrographs for the Aerobee project from beginning till after the end. He has a good memory.
DeVorkin:OK. Let's talk, then, about the imaging. You were talking about the first detection of the Lyman alpha line; now, about the first image of the solar surface in Lyman alpha — were these identified as clear goals for you at the time, to achieve these successes?
Tousey:I don't know who may have been first to identify them as goals. It was obvious to many people.
DeVorkin:What was the basic scientific goal of creating a full image of the sun in Lyman alpha?
Tousey:To see what it looked like. Images in the Balmer alpha line of hydrogen had been available for years, of course, and also in Calcium K. But no one really knew what it would look like in Lyman alpha.
DeVorkin:You found very strong features?
Tousey:Yes. Rense built the first instrument.
DeVorkin:May I see this? Rense built the first instrument for imaging also?
Tousey:Yes, but it was a dreadful image that he obtained; hardly anything could be seen except photographic grams. Our other Lyman alpha project was the profile of the line, of course. That's the third aspect, the profile of Lyman alpha. The first solar image obtained by Rense was not very good. His image of the sun was poor. Somewhere, I put together a comparison of his image and a CaK image for the same day, to show how bad his was. I don't know where that is now. [R Tousey Applied Opt. 6, 2044-2077 '67 Figure 29. Also in the Liege volume.]
DeVorkin:When you did that, did he write you a nasty letter by any chance?
Tousey:I don't think he ever wrote me a nasty letter, but I think some nasty letters flew around.
DeVorkin:Between whom?
Tousey:It's hard to say, but the nasty letters started to turn up after we obtained our solar image of the sun in Lyman alpha and began publishing it, [refs. next page, and page 232.] and then we tried hard to reference correctly the extent to which our images were first or were not first.
DeVorkin:I think you developed a Lyman alpha solar disc camera in 1959. [See Figure 51, NRL 4.1.A RA-50].
Tousey:Let's see, we flew it in '59.
DeVorkin:I think it was March 13, 1959.
Tousey:Yes, that's right, '59.
DeVorkin:You indicated this was Purcell, Packer and Tousey, photographing the sun in Lyman alpha in space research. [R Tousey, J.D. Purcell, & D.M. Packer, "The Ultraviolet Spectrum of the Sun in H. Kallmann Bigl, ed. Space Research (New York: Interscience, 1960): 58189.] I believe I have it here.
Tousey:The first article came out in NATURE. [Tousey, Purcell, Packer, "Lyman alpha Photographs of the Sun," Nature 184 (1959): 810.]
DeVorkin:Yes. That I don't have.
Tousey:This caused a great deal of interest, actually.
DeVorkin:What were the nasty letters sayings?
Tousey:Well, I think there was a letter to H. Friedman from a gentleman named John Firor.
DeVorkin:Never heard of him.
Tousey:You never did? He's been head of NCAR most recently; he was then at HAO with Walter Roberts. He apparently supported Rense, and I think the letter came via the NEW YORK TIMES, saying that he was complaining that they had printed, in effect, a statement that we obtained the first Lyman alpha photograph of the sun, which wasn't true. We had to modify carefully what we said, and we tried to say that we obtained the first highly resolved Lyman alpha image of the sun, but as newspapers do, they often change things, and here's the first. Shea: Was this a press release?
Tousey:Oh, I don't know whether it was a release. Somebody had picked it up. Shea: You didn't write a letter? Did Walter Sullivan or someone from the NEW YORK TIMES come to talk to you about it?
Tousey:He may have. I can't remember any more.
DeVorkin:I have the article from the REVIEWS OF SPACE SCIENCE, "Photographing the sun in Lyman alpha." It references an earlier paper, G. Hass and Tousey, 1959. ["Reflecting coatings for the extreme ultraviolet," J. Opt. Soc. of America 49 (1959) : 593602.] Could that be the one? I think that was laboratory work. It was F.S. Johnson, Purcell and Tousey, PHYS REV 1954. [Johnson, F.S., Purcell, Tousey, R "An Extension of the Extreme Ultraviolet Solar Spectrum, Phys Rev 95 (1954):621.]
Tousey:That was the first short wavelength spectrum that we succeeded in getting. I guess that's the one.
DeVorkin:But that isn't the image?
DeVorkin:This is "Photography of the Sun in Lyman Alpha and other Wavelengths," Purcell and Tousey, MEMOIRS, Society Royal Science, Liege, 5e Vol. 4 (1961): 274.
Tousey:These are from the annual Liege symposia, they've been held for years. This is the comparison, at the same magnification —
DeVorkin:So the first one, this is Figure 1, page 274. First photograph of the sun in Lyman alpha, Mercure, Miller, Rense and Stewart, '56, compared with a calcium spectroheligraph from McMath-Hulbert, small image size. No, that's not a comparison of your work.
Tousey:Yes, I'm not remembering it correctly. That's all we did. But it's only a step to compare with our Lyman alpha for a different date by using the reflecting images in CaK.
DeVorkin:Right. With your images, which are on page 277. You compare the calcium K, the hydrogen alpha and the Lyman alpha. That's also in this article here. This is: "Photographing the Sun in Lyman alpha," SPACE RESEARCH, edited by Kallman, 1960. I'm curious — in that article I just mentioned, in Figure 2, you show a negative print of a flight film showing the entire sequence of exposures.
DeVorkin:Can you explain that? There are all of these irregular features. These are multiple images of the sun in Lyman alpha, so you must have had some sort of a mechanism to move the plate for different exposures?
Tousey:Yes. We did. The film was on a drum. I don't remember how it worked any more, except of course that the drum rotated. Now, as to how we moved it along the axis, I would have to refresh my memory on the mechanics of that.
DeVorkin:The important thing here is that there are great brightness variations.
Tousey:Different exposure times.
DeVorkin:And in some cases the sun follower didn't work as well as you'd want, but you hoped for a certain percentage of good shots. Which apparently you got there. Are these original prints still available; are they in your files?
Tousey:I believe they are.
DeVorkin:They would be quite illuminating, as to how one went about doing this.
Tousey:We never finished talking about the SC emulsions, which were fundamental to practically all the work. They were produced by Kodak-Pathe by Audran; it was pretty much a company secret. They wouldn't tell how they made them for a long time, but finally Audran did, and I think in some review paper I did explain about that, in one of the later ones. [R. Tousey, The Extreme W Spectrum of the Sun" Space Science Review 2 (1963): 3-69.]
DeVorkin:The one I reviewed or mentioned where you talked about Audran, yes.
Tousey:Yes. That's in there. But it was a very small operation. I should have mentioned one other way in which film once upon a time had been sensitized. The trouble is that the gelatine gets in the way, and absorbs the extreme ultraviolet. However, it's possible, by putting a piece of film in something — like sulfuric acid, to dissolve out the gelatine to just the right extent so that you still have some silver grains, but I don't believe anybody ever used that method very often, we never did.
DeVorkin:That's a rather drastic procedure.
Tousey:I guess Audran had the idea (I don't know who got the patent on it or if there is a patent) that he could make an emulsion that would be sensitive to the extreme ultraviolet, if he could only stick the grains onto a substrate support. Stick them on and let the grains — like sand sprinkled on something to hold it — receive the extreme ultraviolet and be developed. He did this with a centrifuge procedure. He made a cylindrical centrifuge, spinning it this way, and wrapped a piece of acetate or whatever he used around it on the inside of the wall, and then poured the emulsion into the cylinder, spun it up, and centrifuged it. He probably put a thin coating of gelatine on the substrate before he installed it in the centrifuge. Then the grains and the emulsion were forced and packed tightly onto the film. Then he took it out. You have to bake these emulsions to dry them and to get the sensitivity up. It wasn't all that simple, I'm sure. He succeeded in making very good emulsions by this process, very sensitive extreme ultraviolet sensitive emulsions. The original piece would have been, each piece coming out of the centrifuge, I think was about that big.
DeVorkin:That's about 8 inches long, 3 to 4 inches wide.
Tousey:Probably something like that.
DeVorkin:It's that plate that we just referred to?
Tousey:That was a piece of one.
DeVorkin:A piece of one of them, OK. That's very interesting.
Tousey:They worked on this quite a lot. I think they just gave us the material, via Kodak in Rochester. They had some formalities to it too, I guess. Obviously that was not a practical way to make large qua ities of extreme ultraviolet sensitive emulsions, this piece by piece method. Shea: Very expensive?
DeVorkin:Was he supplying the SC series emulsions also to Rense and others?
Tousey:Yes, I think he did. I think we maybe had the first. These are the emulsions that had the trouble with hydrogen, because it's just out there without any protection — an ordinary emulsion has gelatine over it and that protects the grains.
DeVorkin:How serious was that hydrogen problem? Did it destroy useful data?
Tousey:No. We found one way that we thought eliminated it. I think we put, I forget whether it was a strong magnetic or an electric field, just behind the slit, to try to collect the ions that came through. I think that helped. Then Kodak-Park decided that they ought to be able to make Schumann-type emulsions on a more commercial scale, and they went into the development I guess you'd say it's a prestige item. It certainly wasn't a money making item. They would never tell us how they did it. It was a company secret. But obviously it was done on an emulsion-coating machine and they coated 25 or 50 foot long sheets of emulsion in a machine, without putting any gelatine to speak of on it. Then they had to sensitize it by cooking it and slit it and wind it up. They couldn't adapt to any method of selling the film except by rolling it up, and we had a long series of problems with that, because you can't touch these emulsions and wrapping the stuff up was not possible without fogging, or making a black mark. So you couldn't roll them up. They said you could, and we had many arguments about this.
DeVorkin:Who did you argue with primarily?
Tousey:Well, the people at Kodak-Park I guess, principally. They tried and tried. They did pretty well. We told them they should put a spacer in between. It's simple enough to do. But they didn't want to bother with that. I don't know what the situation is now, but Kodak-Park over the years has had a tremendous amount of trouble making these Schumann emulsion materials. First they made SWR emulsion. That was made just about as early as the SC emulsions in Paris. Short wave response is what SWR stands for. It was not of highest sensitivity and not of nearly as high sensitivity as the Kodak-Pathe emulsions. Of course, that was a challenge to them, to improve it. So they went to work and did improve it. Nevertheless it was a very hard to make, and you never knew whether you were going to get good film or not so good film. We had a long series of discussions with them about setting up equipment at Kodak-Park to measure the sensitivity of their emulsions in the extreme ultraviolet, rather than relying on us. It went on and on.
DeVorkin:Whenever you got a batch of emulsions from them, I imagine you tested them at random here?
DeVorkin:Were they reasonably reliable?
DeVorkin:They weren't. So you were, sending emulsions up in rockets and you weren't sure that they were — reliable?
Tousey:Sometimes, they were fine. Sometimes they weren't so satisfactory. This culminated in ATM [Apollo Telescope Mount on Skylab.) by the way, because there we required an order of magnitude or two more photographic film than we ever had before.
DeVorkin:That's right; you used an enormous amount of film.
Tousey:They put a great deal of effort into that, and they came through. I don't know what the situation has been since then. I haven't followed it, but I'm sure that Brueckner is right up on the subject.
DeVorkin:Is he the one who would have control over the footage that is now here?
DeVorkin:OK, I'll talk to him some time. Well that's another topic.
Tousey:Actually, one more thing about these emulsions. It was years and years before we knew how to cope with occasional fogging of these short wavelength sensitive Schumann emulsions.
DeVorkin:They fogged also? Tousey: Yes. Aluminum nearby would cause fogging.
Tousey:Aluminum. All sorts of things would seem to cause fogging. Brueckner has followed this. I don't know whether it's completely solved yet or not. Very difficult problem.
DeVorkin:I know that you began to do a number of special things, and we've already talked about the full disc Lyman alpha camera. Now, that took a number of exposures on one plate. Somehow the plate was moved around. But this wasn't a scanning monochrometer in any way?
DeVorkin:How did you get the full disc? Was it instantaneous?
Tousey:Yes. It was a double-dispersing image-forming system.
DeVorkin:Had you worked with double-dispersing systems before in producing regular spectra?
Tousey:Well, I don't know. I don't really remember when our first double-dispersing grating spectrograph was flown on a rocket.
DeVorkin:I think it was about 1960, just after the Lyman alpha image.
Tousey:That is the Echelk spectrograph. That was double-dispersing.
DeVorkin:The Echelle was '57?
Tousey:Yes, but that started much earlier. I guess we thought it was rather the obvious thing to do.
DeVorkin:To get higher dispersion?
Tousey:No, rather to get rid of the stray light.
DeVorkin:I see. Let's talk about the echelle for a while. You obtained the echelle grating from George Harrison and Bausch7omb. Then you flew it September 17, 1957. That was Purcell, Boggess, and Tousey and it appeared in IGY Rocket Report Series No. 1, 198, 1958. First of all, what contact did you have with George Harrison? Did you know he was the man to go to for echelle gratings? He was at MIT still, wasn't he?
Tousey:Yes, but he was in close contact with Bausch and Lomb. I think he was a consultant. He had built a ruling engine at MIT. I don't know who paid for it. He and Bausch and Lomb collaborated very closely in the replication procedures that Bausch and Lomb was developing. They consulted back and forth. He consulted on the ruling engines at Rochester, and that was a longstanding collaboration.
DeVorkin:Had you maintained close contacts with him or was this your first contact?
Tousey:Oh no. I've known him for a very long time.
DeVorkin:Since you were at Harvard?
Tousey:Yes, I guess so.
DeVorkin:You mentioned that you weren't happy with the results of your first echelle. There was a lot of noise in it, it had very weak contrast. Was this due to the design of the echelle or the problem with the rocket flight?
Tousey:It was probably that the rocket didn't fly high enough. I guess that was the worst thing. Didn't we go to another pointing control after that? I think we did. Anyway, that first one showed that it would work, and it was potentially capable of giving excellent spectra, but I think it was redesigned pretty much completely after that.
DeVorkin:The echelle itself?
Tousey:The entire instrument. The first one, the pointing system, the contract for that was made by Aircraft Armaments, Inc. It didn't work very well.
DeVorkin:I see. Now, why did you contract with them rather than with Ball Bros. or University of Colorado?
Tousey:Well, that's so far back, it's hard to say. I guess Ball Brothers had hardly started then, and I don't think Colorado was very far ahead. It was very early. I think it followed immediately after the NRL V2 and Aerobee Printing Controls, some follow-up of that. Harry Clark probably had other things he was more interested in doing, so we went out to get some local company to work on it.
DeVorkin:That's how it worked. OK.
Tousey:Then after that, we improved the instrument greatly and put it, into the Ball Brothers bi-axial pointing control. We had never purchased any Ball Brothers pointing controls got them from the University of Colorado.
DeVorkin:Was there any reason for that?
Tousey:Well, theirs was first and worked very well. Ball Brothers was kind of a newcomer. We didn't see any particular reason to go with them for a while, but eventually we used theirs too.
DeVorkin:You always had close contacts with Russ Nidey. Did that have something to do with it?
Tousey:Yes. The man who took over after him was Fred Wilhusten and I guess he may have retired now. Nidey is chief engineer down at Kitt Peak now.
DeVorkin:Oh, really.
Tousey:I think so.
DeVorkin:That name has come up in that context. You found that you were always restricted in what you could do by pointing control. You always required better stability than could be had. But at one particular point in the fifties, you began using small optical telescopes to focus sunlight onto the slit to produce more light. This must have been about the same time that you were developing your imaging Lyman alpha work, and certainly the normal incidence required a predisperser and optical systems. Were there any people ever telling you that your requirements for pointing were just too much beyond what was available at that time? Or was it a different kind of a process, people struggling to accommodate you?
Tousey:No, I think they understood and were striving to do better all the time. The solar pointing control effort has been a continuing one. I forget how Goddard came into it.
DeVorkin:Goddard Spaceflight Center?
Tousey:Yes. But before that, the people at Ames Research Center got interested in it, and a fellow named Hanson was the one who started the effort out there.
Tousey:Hanson. I don't remember what his first name was. I guess that was probably before Hans Mark was head of Ames.
DeVorkin:That's a while ago.
Tousey:Yes. Ames did very well in their development. But they worked together with Lockheed in Sunnyvale, and the solar pointing controls that we had used to point the whole rocket, the whole Aerobee resulted from their effort. I don't know when that started. It must have been in the sixties.
DeVorkin:Yes. I've got a card on that and it would be good to ask you that one so we can continue on with pointing controls. In your 1962 review in SPACE SCIENCE REVIEWS of the extreme ultraviolet spectrum of the sun, page 4, you noted that you looked forward, at the time you wrote the review, to an Aerobee-Hi with three-axis stabilization that was under development by Space General Corporation and NASA. These were gas jets controlled by gyros. Is this what you mean by the full Aerobee being controlled?
Tousey:Yes, but this was an intermediate stage. Aerojet General planned to do this by themselves. It was also connected with the stellar pointing control systems which Goddard was instrumental in developing, and Space General was I guess their contractor. I guess I shouldn't say categorically that Aerojet never used any of those, but I think the Ames three-axis solar control's came along in time. I think this would be a good time to take a break for a minute.
DeVorkin:We've now moved into Dr. Gursky's office where some of the original spectrograph equipment is being kept, and we're now looking at the V2 spectrograph. Dr. Tousey, do you have any way of knowing which one of the spectrographs this is?
Tousey:No, I'm afraid I don't, except we know it isn't the first one.
DeVorkin:It's not the first one?
Tousey:Right. You have that. [At National Museum of American History from 10 October 1946 flight.] At least the first one that flew successfully. I don't know which this is, but it seems to be more or less all here. I think we decided, it looked as though it had flown. We also found a grating. We found that the day before you came, didn't we?
DeVorkin:That's right. It's in a box in your office. Can you recall any design changes or any way that we might be able to eventually determine which of the instruments this was? I know you had an initial batch of three spectrographs from Baird and then you ordered more. Did you make any design changes between the two?
Tousey:I don't remember any. I suppose we may have.
DeVorkin:Let's look at this one.
Tousey:No consequential changes, as far as I'm aware.
DeVorkin:OK. What are these gears here for, the three yellowish spur gears?
Tousey:Let's see, this seems to be the drive motor.
DeVorkin:On the bottom?
Tousey:Yes, this is the drive motor. If we can figure out how the film was moved —. This is obviously a drive motor.
DeVorkin:The thing that says "Logan Electric Products"?
Tousey:Yes, and this drives the film take up, directly.
DeVorkin:Were there any shutters or any other moving parts?
Tousey:I think there must have been a shutter system, which I've forgotten about completely.
DeVorkin:It's certainly sturdily constructed.
Tousey:I think that must be a shutter system.
Tousey:Why we needed a shutter? Oh, I guess we wanted to be sure that nothing got blurred when we moved the film. That must be it. [See photograph "40, NRL 13.1.9]
DeVorkin:Are the beads still intact?
Tousey:I doubt it, but they could be.
DeVorkin:Those could be the original beads?
Tousey:They could be.
DeVorkin:How big are they? They're extremely small.
Tousey:2mm in diameter. There seems to be something in there.
DeVorkin:In the other one too?
DeVorkin:Now, the way it worked then, light came through one or the other of beads then to a plane mirror. I see one mirror down here, there's another mirror on the other side?
Tousey:That's right.
DeVorkin:And their light came up to the grating.
Tousey:To the grating.
DeVorkin:And then down to the film?
Tousey:Down to the film.
DeVorkin:What was this dark black ring on the top above the grating?
Tousey:I think this just fitted into the conical sheet metal shell. It must have had a socket. Just a mounting device to make it easy to mount by pushing it into its seat and then bolting it to the back end of the case. Then the whole case was mounted in the V2.
Shea:In the nose?
Tousey:Well, in the tail by then. Only the first one flown was in the nose. After that they went in the tail fin, and each bead looked out one or the other side of the tail fin.
DeVorkin:Right. This is all that remains of the one you have. There is no shroud.
Tousey:No, I don't think so.
DeVorkin:OK, fine. And there's no way that you could tell, there's no stamp?
Tousey:Well, there is a stamp. And this leads me to think that it could have been one of the later ones.
DeVorkin:The yellow thing?
Tousey:Yes, that's an official Navy acceptance stamp of some sort. We had three built in the first instance, I think, and then, four more, if I remember. It could be one of those four. I forget, what's that for?
DeVorkin:This side tube here?
Tousey:Yes. I don't remember what that's for.
DeVorkin:Is that an open tube all the way down?
DeVorkin:Could it have been for the wires?
Tousey:Possibly. I don't know. I don't remember what that's for.
Shea:About how heavy is that?
Tousey:40, 30 pounds. Maybe.
DeVorkin:30 pounds and it was made out of iron and brass. This is machined steel; this is armor piercing steel down here, the film take-up canister. The canister was removed by unscrewing that heavy end-plug? [Figure 40]
Tousey:Yes. I think there's some film in here, just for exhibition purposes. I guess there's no point in trying to take it apart.
DeVorkin:Not at this point. Let's move on to this other instrument now, unless there's anything else you think we can squeeze from this one now.
Tousey:I don't think of much of anything else. It's a very straightforward design. Bill Baum is the one who watched over it, as I've mentioned before, in Cambridge.
DeVorkin:You're working with a little spindle. It has four or five arms coming out from it. That must have been some sort of a ratchet and pawl mechanism?
Tousey:I think so.
DeVorkin:Was that for advancing the film only a certain amount?
Tousey:I believe that the control of film advancement was probably arranged through that somehow.
DeVorkin:An electrical connection?
Tousey:Yes, but it isn't very clear, at this point. There are probably people who remember more about it than I; probably Baum does.
DeVorkin:Or possibly Johnson?
Tousey:He might too. [Moving on to another instrument] This thing, what's in here?
DeVorkin:This is about the same weight as the V2 spectrograph.
Tousey:It's not as heavy.
DeVorkin:It's made out of aluminum?
DeVorkin:Did this fly on a Viking?
Tousey:It's possible that it did. I'd have to go back and look at the designs to figure it out.
DeVorkin:Is this the machine that you got those strange ghosts from? You were telling me about one of them. [To be photographed at Silver Hill.]
Tousey:Yes, I think it is.
DeVorkin:Because the light came inside, here.
Tousey:That's right, and then into this mirror.
DeVorkin:Here's the mirror, the grating is up here, two gratings?
Tousey:No, only one grating (crosstalk).
DeVorkin:There are several possible places you could put the film. Was it here, or here, or further down?
Tousey:There was some film here and some here. Two different cassettes. The grating is cocked although, I don't see how in this one we'd have gotten that imaging, but maybe did. Normally the grating obviously came down about there.
DeVorkin:This is in the back?
Tousey:Yes. So, the entering beam was here. That meant the shorter wavelengths would be over here.
DeVorkin:Shorter wavelengths would be dispersed more.
Tousey:Yes. I've got it twisted. It's the other way around. The shorter wavelengths would all go here, the incoming in here, so the shorter wavelengths would have been over here. They'd be dispersed less. The longer wavelengths dispersed more, over here. I guess the point is, the longer wavelength spectrum fell on the film in cassette, and some was simply reflected back toward the grating. Then, it was reimaged by the grating in zero order, just as by a mirror, over here, and fell on the film on the other cassette, where it looked as though it was a short wavelength spectrum. I think that is what happened.
DeVorkin:Is there any annotation on this box that we might be able to identify it against? Or do you think we might go back in some of your papers to see if this is there?
Tousey:This design is probably in some paper, or other. [F.S. Johnson, J.D. Purcell, R Tousey, K. Watanabe, "Direct Measurement of the atmospheric ozone to 70 Km altitude" J. Geophys Res 57 (1952) 157-176]
DeVorkin:Is there a bead in there?
Tousey:No, just a straight single slit. [Figure 41]
DeVorkin:It was an actual slit then?
Tousey:Yes. This was mounted in a roll control nose. During the powered part of the flight, when it was rolling rapidly, and there wasn't any precession to speak of. So, presumably we launched this at the right time of day so that the sun would have been at this very low elevation angle.
DeVorkin:Wide angle? Tousey: Yes, the slit was designed with mirrors to expand the field of view, and we probably hoped for the best after the rocket started to precess. Shea: What are the canisters out in front?
Tousey:Solenoids to operate the shutter, and film advance.
DeVorkin:That was the film advance also?
Tousey:I don't know what this is. This seems to work it.
DeVorkin:That rocks back and forth?
DeVorkin:I see.
Tousey:I don't know what those did. The film cassettes were back on there.
DeVorkin:They were at the very bottom?
Tousey:Yes. This must have has something to do with the mechanisms on the film cassettes, I should think. If I've got that straight.
DeVorkin:This has a 1 stamped into it over here. That would have a 1 also, on the very top, on the machine portion — that couldn't be an identification for the machine, could it?
Tousey:I don't know.
DeVorkin:Have you any idea where this was built? Could this have been built at NRL?
DeVorkin:This is definitely an in-house job? So it wouldn't have a Navy mark?
Tousey:No. There's probably some other instrument or device that was —
Shea:— it has a number on the front, it looks like 3573. Almost looks like a property tag. That's cased over with —
Tousey:Probably just the number of the casting or something. Something like that, put on to identify it.
DeVorkin:OK, well, we'd have to have a picture of this and then we'd have to go back and look at the diagram to see which one it would fit the closest.
Tousey:Have to do a little research.
Shea:I'm not very familiar with equipment. Is the length of the spectrograph determined as the appropriate length for the mirror; so the image comes in hits the mirror and goes down to the film?
Tousey:All our spectrographs of this sort were designed around a diffraction grating having a standard radius. It was 40 centimeters. That we decided on at the very beginning as a good compromise between too small and too big.
DeVorkin:What you are saying is that there were standard grating available?
Tousey:No. The grating manufacture and development business goes way back. The first gratings were obtained from Hopkins and you'll find a notation in Johnson's notebook about that. I had suggested 25 centimeter radius originally, and then I think Strong though 50 cm, and apparently he and I reached a compromise at 40 centimeters. It was better suited to the size of the instrument that we could get into the available space.
DeVorkin:So it was a function of how much room you had.
Shea:Practicality came first?
Tousey:Yes. We got blanks with that radius made at the optical shop of Naval Gun Factory, and gave them to Hopkins to rule, which John Strong did, and RW. Wood was involved in it for a while too, but only peripherally, I think. John Strong went to a lot of trouble. The man who worked for him, whose name I couldn't remember the other day, is Muffaletto. He runs an optical business in Baltimore now. He was a technician at Hopkins on grating ruling. He was not the top technician in those days, but he got to be after a while, as people do.
DeVorkin:I think they had this piece of paper there to keep it from rocking. OK — this thicker one went over there.
Tousey:They were afraid the thing would scratch. Hopkins made a total I think of more than 40 gratings for us, and went to a lot of trouble to try to suppress the stray light level from the gratings; and we went to a lot of trouble also to make measurements of the stray light level, and finally found a few gratings that were superior and used those, but none of these were replicas.
DeVorkin:They're all originals?
Tousey:Yes. And then when we went to Bausch and Lomb, they also ruled gratings for us, but they also made replicas, and we flew replica gratings, much to the surprise of a number of people, who thought that there was nothing like an original. Replicas have considerable advantage on their own because we finally got a really superior grating, we could have a number of copies of it that we practically as good as that grating.
DeVorkin:Yes. Well, is there anything else?
Tousey:No, I don't think of anything else yet.
DeVorkin:OK, let's try the other room with the other equipment.
Tousey:This looks like one of the late spectrographs. [As flown on August 22, 1962. See: R. Tousey, "The Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrum of the Sun" Space Science Reviews, 2 (1963) , 3-69, p. 5.] On the case it says, "Case contains two double dispersion normal incidence spectrographs covering the spectral range 460 to 2100 angstroms," and down here, "Grazing incidence XUV spectrograph, 150 to 550 angstroms."
DeVorkin:This is certainly the light aluminum completely encased Aerobee spectrograph. [Figure 42, 43, 52 etc.]
Tousey:Yes. It's probably also known as Model 4.
DeVorkin:This one is Model 4?
Tousey:It could very well have flown, have been recovered six to seven times. At least one of them was.
DeVorkin:Let's see, all the bolts are on the side, but the wires are still connected.
Tousey:Will it come off or what?
DeVorkin:If it does, it will come this way, because the wire is still hooked up.
Tousey:I don't think it's coming off.
DeVorkin:Something may be holding it in. All the large bolts are out, though.
Tousey:Well, this is where it was mounted in the bi-axial pointing control.
DeVorkin:And it could be put back in the bi-axial pointing control. This is what we'd like to exhibit. We're definitely going to exhibit this. Clean it up a little bit and then exhibit it with the nose cone. But my question is this. I see one entrance slit here, two entrances, there's another entrance slit here, and is there an entrance slit down there?
Tousey:Yes. There are three. Three instruments total.
DeVorkin:What's that little proportional counter up here?
Tousey:Some kind of a device to measure the absolute intensity of Lyman alpha, which probably didn't work.
DeVorkin:Looks like there's even more.
Tousey:Yes, there are probably some more little gadgets. There are two levels to this assembly.
DeVorkin:Yes, that's what I was thinking.
Tousey:There must be more instruments here than we can shake a stick at.
DeVorkin:There's an opening — that's closed for some reason. There's a heavy piece of lead in there. Any reason why that lead would be there?
Tousey:No, I don't see any obvious explanation for that. Oh, it's just a counterweight, probably.
DeVorkin:It looks as though there are four, possibly even five separate instruments.
Tousey:Yes. Maybe we've missed one. The label's probably fallen off.
DeVorkin:This is a grazing incidence XW, 150 to 550 angstroms.
Tousey:That seems to be. That looks right.
DeVorkin:That's up here. This case down here contains two double dispersion normal incidence spectrographs, down here, so that's three. Then you've got this one.
Tousey:It probably had a spectro heliograph down there. We may have had two grazing incidences. [Figure 43]
DeVorkin:That's really quite impressive in that small package.
Tousey:Yes, we packed a great deal in.
DeVorkin:There's a plastic tape over the back of it here. Do you know anything about that?
Tousey:No. That's covering an opening, to keep the dirt in, or out.
DeVorkin:It would be useful if we could open it and see more of it.
Tousey:I don't think you'd see much. It would be pretty dark. Oh, you mean the top?
DeVorkin:It's almost open, it's closed down there and open here?
Tousey:No, there's one screw. There's one screw right there. I don't think it's going to respond very well.
DeVorkin:No, let's not coax it too much. This is no place to do it. It would be very nice if we could get someone to look at it.
Tousey:Get Purcell to look at it. He'd be much better at explaining it than I am, because he put them together and used them.
DeVorkin:Is he here?
Tousey:No, he lives in Virginia across the river.
DeVorkin:But he's local?
Tousey:Yes. .
DeVorkin:We could bring him over and place the instruments in front of him. OK. Let's put this one back.
Tousey:Put that back, I've got this in the way.
DeVorkin:I'll loosen that one up for you. This is certainly the echelle spectrograph that you worked on in the late 1950's, '57. [Figure 44-48]
Tousey:Yes. I don't know which model this is.
DeVorkin:Well, you have an entrance here, comes all the way down to here. Your slit's right in here, which would be your slit. That must come up here.
Tousey:Yes, this is the mirror. This must be the 1957 unit.
Tousey:Because I don't see any predisperser.
DeVorkin:There isn't any. OK. What does this say here, ten 3 ounce. I have no idea what that notation means. So light's just reflected by that mirror into this slit?
Tousey:The aircraft armaments incorporated pointing system was a siderostat mirror, servocontrolled in roll and elevation, which was designed to reflect sunlight down the rocket axis into the instrument regardless of the roll and precision of the rocket. It was wholly successful. Anyway, the sun went down in there, was imaged on the slit, went down to this predisperser.
DeVorkin:Is that a mirror
Tousey:No, I think it's a grating. I think so. I don't know, I might be mistaken about it.
DeVorkin:I don't see any color in it.
Tousey:I don't see any either. In that case maybe this was a grating and not a mirror. Possibly.
DeVorkin:Would this have been the sun follower, with a sensor here? There's a reticle on the end.
Tousey:Might be. Some kind of a bore sighting device for alignment. This may be a grating that dispersed the beam up and down. It has to be crossed. The dispersion has to be crossed with the dispersion of the echelle, so that would work, I guess, if this is a grating dispersing this way and imaging out of this slit. Then this is collimated.
DeVorkin:That's a concave cylindrical concave mirror?
Tousey:Well, it's spherical. It comes back, it's dispersed and comes back here and is imaged.
DeVorkin:— By that tiny mirror there?
Tousey:Yes, by the tiny mirror —
DeVorkin:That goes into here some place?
Tousey:Oh. Yes. Now, I may be all off the track on this. I wonder, we had still another echelle instrument. I'll bet that's what this is. It was to obtain the profile of Lyman alpha at very high dispersions. [Figure 48]. I'll bet that's this. It doesn't make sense otherwise. I can get that paper out with the diagram. [Space Science Reviews 2 (1963): 3-69; 17.]
DeVorkin:Sure, that would be helpful.
Tousey:We flew it. In the laboratory it worked very well. In fact, the resolution was very high. I'd have to look it up. We flew it, and something happened, and the parachute didn't work, I think, and it was demolished. It had been such a job and expense to put the thing together. We never made another one, never flew another one, and this is probably the backup instrument for that. Anyway, we can look at it from that point of view, because it doesn't seem to match the other instruments with an echelle.
DeVorkin:OK, that's valuable. That's why we really should track down exactly what these are. You have no idea whether the imaging Lyman alpha system was included too?
Tousey:I wouldn't be surprised if there was one in there.
DeVorkin:Oh, one of those actually in there. You mean in the Aerobee multispectrograph?
DeVorkin:Yes, we'd love to find that out. What's the chance we can find a paper or two that describes the Aerobee?
Tousey:I think we might.
DeVorkin:Maybe we should pack up here and go on back. We're now back in Dr. Tousey's office.
Tousey:This is the diagram of the instrument that we were just looking at.
DeVorkin:The echelle.
Tousey:Yes. It's a Lyman alpha echelle. The sunlight came into a concave grating, was dispersed up and down, and imaged onto the slit. Then, you're right, it wasn't concave, it was an off-axis paraboloid which went to the echelle and then reimaged on the film, so that the echelle dispersion was this way and the predispersion is perpendicular to it.
DeVorkin:Is that an inventory number of the photograph?
DeVorkin:So it's NRL 13.1 .10. [Figure 48]
Tousey:And this is a spectrum taken in a laboratory with that instrument.
DeVorkin:That's quite nice, solar Lyman alpha.
Tousey:Yes. This is not Lyman alpha of the sun. This is Lyman alpha from a molecular hydrogen laboratory source arc spectrum, taken with the instrument on the ground. The predispersor, dispersion was this way, to separate orders. You can see the different orders of the echelle. The echelle dispersion was this way, and this shows the profile of Lyman alpha as produced by this hydrogen arc in the laboratory, which is itself reversed.
DeVorkin:Yes, we're looking at the reversal which can't be more than a 20th of an angstrom wide. The resolution is 0.007A. [Figure 33]
Tousey:Yes, it's pretty good.
DeVorkin:Very good.
Tousey:In flight — what is that? Oh yes. We tried to reduce the width of Lyman alpha somehow, I forget how, I guess we succeeded. [Figure 31]
DeVorkin:How can we get copies of these?
Tousey:I guess we can copy them.
DeVorkin:Is there some central place that has the negatives to these?
Tousey:We can look. That says hydrogen arc and this says nitrogen. [Figure 35]
Tousey:Well, I guess that's right. It is nitrogen. It's not the same. It looks as though it might be, but still, there's enough hydrogen in the nitrogen gas so that — . This is what we expected to get in flight, within the frame.
DeVorkin:This is NRL 12.1A.3. [Figure 36]
Tousey:We expected to get the profile of Lyman alpha, and also two of the lines of the triplet of oxygen I, the ultimate lines of oxygen I, which are very near Lyman alpha. This is Lyman beta.
DeVorkin:1025A. That's in a different order.
Tousey:Yes. 1031A. Six lines.
DeVorkin:Oxygen VI the 1031.9A line?
Tousey:Yes. We thought we could get quite a lot out of that small frame.
DeVorkin:This was only a one shot deal?
Tousey:Yes. Here's Lyman beta, and the oxygen. The shorter and stronger of the two oxygen VI lines, which are lithium-like, and the other one is oxygen I. The calcium lines are the next lines of those three.
DeVorkin:So you got some results, but they weren't very good?
Tousey:We didn't get any results.
DeVorkin:You didn't get any?
Tousey:No. Shea: That's the one where the sun follower didn't work or the parachute didn't work?
Tousey:The parachute didn't work. We had all kinds of trouble with parachutes in those days. What's that? That looks a little different. Oh, that's a different ruling echelle.
DeVorkin:Looking farther in here I see that you have very high quality glossies.
Tousey:Oh yes.
DeVorkin:Well, compared to what we've seen in publication. This is the classic one I've seen from Krause's papers where you have the V2 spectrograph compared to a pencil. [Figure 40]
Tousey:That's right, there was a shutter.
DeVorkin:So those gears controlled the shutter. That's basically all there is. We covered that. What is this next one? This is the one where you were talking about the slit that had the two aluminum surfaces or aluminized surfaces?
Tousey:No, this was an early Aerobee, Johnson, Purcell, Tousey and Watanabe. [Figure 41]
DeVorkin:Figure 1. Well, it's the next one after this that I'm interested in. I think this is the bottom of the Aerobee. Isn't this the one that has the Lyman alpha image in one of them, and the other one has the straight spectrographic image?
Tousey:Yes. That's not up there.
DeVorkin:Oh, this is not the Aerobee?
Tousey:Yes, it is an Aerobee instrument. It's probably the first one that flew the Lyman alpha camera image-forming system. We flew the image forming system and the spectrograph. I guess we didn't pack in everything.
DeVorkin:Let me get the number of that, NRL 13.1 . 6 RA-49. [Figure 42] Extreme ultraviolet solar spectrograph and Lyman alpha solar disc camera.
Tousey:This is probably what's in the lower section of that instrument that we looked at but we couldn't get it open.
DeVorkin:OK, so this is NRL 13.1.4 RA-52. [Figure 43]
Tousey:I guess it is the same one. The wavelength ranges don't seem to match what I expected, but there are two normal incidence spectrographs.
DeVorkin:What is the helium inlet for? Is that for purging?
Tousey:That's for purging beforehand. The one instrument covered a longer wavelength range than the other.
DeVorkin:These are the approximate ranges, I think, that you had on there. We can always check that later. This is another echelle.
Tousey:This is another. This is the photographic echelle that was the one that we used successfully, and this was. the combined with the small predispersor.
DeVorkin:I'm trying to identify these things for the tape. What shall we call this one? NRL 13.1.5 RA-52. The light, yes, I think I've seen that article where this is described. [Figure 44]
Tousey:That's the final instrument.
DeVorkin:These are the lithium fluoride lenses? Triplet lenses?
Tousey:Yes. This is the field curver or flattener, whichever you want to call it. That, combined with curving the film in the other plane, took care more or less of the various longitudinal aberrations. This was the small Purcell-designed predispersor. [Figures 46, 47]
DeVorkin:And this is a picture of it being held in the hand. [Figure 45]
Shea:That was in one of the last ones we saw.
Tousey:That would go in front. That would go out here.
DeVorkin:This is not in anything we're receiving.
Tousey:No. This is the diagram of that echelle, that predispersor. [Figure 47]
DeVorkin:These are very sophisticated prisms, the Fery prisms. Very difficult to make them.
Tousey:That's a double dispersion, zero dispersion system. You disperse into a spectrum, then you put it back together again. So it's zero dispersion. You get a spectrum in here, and when you put a knife edge in here, you cut out as much as you want of the spectrum.
DeVorkin:I see.
Tousey:If you set it for 3000 angstroms, then you simply chop out of the beam the wavelengths longer than 3000, and get rid of that part of the solar input, which is so intense.
DeVorkin:That's a wavelength filter.
DeVorkin:That's very ingenious.
Tousey:Here's the combination of the two.
DeVorkin:Again, this is the one we were looking at.
Tousey:That's the one we were looking at. This was the first Lyman alpha profile instrument.
DeVorkin:Let me get the number. NRL 13.1.2A RA-51. [Figures 49 & 50]
Tousey:This was a very successful instrument, and it obtained the profile of Lyman alpha and showed the central reversal. In particular the absorption produced by atomic hydrogen in the upper atmosphere between the earth and the sun, gave that image. It was also stigmatic.
DeVorkin:This is NRL 12.1A.1 [Figure 34]. It was stigmatic by design?
DeVorkin:Who had the idea for spreading out the line width and making the image stigmatic? Was that your idea?
Tousey:This was a joint design of Purcell, a man named Meltzer, who was working with us part time and is now at Bausch and Lomb, and me. I don't know whether any others were involved or not. It was very sophisticated, and we never wrote it up. Meltzer said he'd write it up. He did the calculations on it. As you know, concave diffraction gratings introduce a stigmatism into the spectrum image. There are various ways that you can avoid this. I guess there's no astigmatism on the normal this and that.
DeVorkin:But you used the astigmatism for some purpose?
Tousey:No. We eliminated the astigmatism by designing the system so that it was neutralized. In this way we got a stigmatic image. The slit went across the sun, and these are the limbs of the sun, so, this is indeed the image of a very narrow piece of the sun, like so. Whatever features were present on the slit, over the surface of the sun, are shown along here. This is the dispersed spectral image of that particular feature. For example, this may be an active region, very bright, and it disperses out here. [Figures 51, 52, 54]
DeVorkin:So the dark symmetrical shapes are the spectra of the features that are indicated in the central portion?
Tousey:Yes. This is the spectrum of the limb itself, and these are quiet regions. I don't remember what the resolution in this direction was. I'd have to look it up in the paper.
DeVorkin:Wasn't there something though about being able to compensate between the limb and the center of the disc, the relative brightness, that the stigmatism was supposed to aid, in some of your earlier papers? I'll go back and check. Anyway, getting back to this predispersor with the echelle — you said that was never written up?
Tousey:I think it was never written up.
DeVorkin:The description of the instrument itself? Tousey: Yes. The diffraction grating was used in the 13th order. The dispersion and resolution are proportional to the order. That is how we got high dispersion and high resolution out of the grating. Then there was the problem of stray light. We used a grating predispersor to eliminate the stray light. But, you notice, this is at some strange angle. Why did we choose that angle? [Figure 49 See especially Figure 52]
DeVorkin:The predispersor is, yes.
Tousey:This angle was chosen so that this grating would introduce exactly the same amount of astigmatism, but in the opposite sense.
DeVorkin:As the echelle?
Tousey:As this grating used in the 13th order. The astigmatisms of the two compensated.
DeVorkin:This is not an echelle?
Tousey:No. Still a 600 line per millimeter 40 centimeter grating. As a result of that little trick, it's possible to get this stigmatic image of the sun's spectra across the diameter.
DeVorkin:Across the diameter of the sun. That's very interesting. Is there any way do you think we could find a description of all the instruments in that Aerobee?
Tousey:In one place?
DeVorkin:Yes, is it possible?
Tousey:I don't know.
DeVorkin:OK, we'll change the tape now.
Tousey:This is the Lyman alpha camera, or spectroheligraph or whatever you want to call it.
DeVorkin:So the solar disc camera is really the same as the spectroheligraph? In the sense that it's slitless?
DeVorkin:So this is NRL 4.1.1a, RA-50. [Figure 51]
Tousey:Yes. Sunlight came in to first grating, which dispersed the spectrum in this plane, and produced a spectrum consisting of images of the sun. This hole was located so that the Lyman alpha image went through the hole, and the rest of the spectrum was rejected.
DeVorkin:A diaphragm?
Tousey:Yes. Then it went to a second grating, which dispersed in the same plane. This second dispersion it reduced the stray light still more. Actually it was arranged so that it enlarged the image somewhat as well, and we got a final image of the sun in Lyman alpha. The problem was to have a sharp image, because gratings almost always produce an astigmatic image, hence you can't focus it properly. If you focus it in one plane, it's off in the other plane. Well, Purcell and I worked out a scheme for reducing the astigmatism and compensating it. As far as I know, we're the first ones who did. People have talked about making cylindrical gratings on cylindrical blanks, or toric blanks, for years. Maybe they have by now.
Tousey:Toric, that's a doughnut shaped surface. [Torus]
DeVorkin:Sounds pretty tough.
Tousey:Yes. The problem was to grind a good cylindrical surface. So we decided, to try to bend the actual grating on its spherical blank in one plane sufficiently so it would become toric and neutralize the astigmatism, that is, to introduce enough astigmatism to neutralize the original astigmatism inherent in the grating mounting.
DeVorkin:Like warping?
DeVorkin:There are some very good opticians I know in California who were also amateur astronomers who experimented with warping mirrors into the right paraboloid surface, this must be the same thing.
Tousey:Same idea, yes.
DeVorkin:You had to construct a little vise of some sort that could be tuned? Did it work the first time?
Tousey:Well, it worked. I don't know how much fiddling Purcell had to do, but it's sort of interesting. First off, we didn't have the slightest idea of how to go about this, and we thought, mathematicians and people who work on stress must know how to figure this out, and tell us how to bend a piece of glass properly. So we went around to a bunch of mathematicians at NRL, and not a single one of them had the faintest idea of how to do it, how to attack the problem. I suppose now it would be much easier with the aid of computers and so forth.
DeVorkin:This was done in the late fifties, '59, '60?
Tousey:I guess so. We decided to give it a try experimentally, and we got a big piece of plywood and cut out a disc. It was probably half inch or ¾-inch plywood. It was fairly flat. We fiddled around with supports and pushing it here and there, and found out where to put the supports, so that when it was pushed by the supports, two down this way, two up this way, it would take on the most accurate curvature. Then we just scaled it down to this glass blank, put the supports on the thing at those places, and Purcell wiggled the screws and set up an optical system so that he could see the image; he just adjusted the grating until he got the best image. Hard work, but it paid.
DeVorkin:Can you check for astigmatism that easily?
Tousey:It can be checked pretty easily. It's just the difference in the distance between the vertical and horizontal foci.
DeVorkin:You did that on an optical bench?
Tousey:Yes. Then you had to get it so that each focus was nice and sharp. That is, that the surface was indeed well figured after it had been bent.
Tousey:Well, that was the reason why this thing worked. If we hadn't been able to do that, we would never have gotten a well imaged Lyman alpha sun.
DeVorkin:Did that form of distortion continue on through all your spectroheligraph?
DeVorkin:Even through ATM?
Tousey:Oh, no, not ATM. The ATM spectroheligraph used another principle. Oh, this is another diagram of a similar instrument.
DeVorkin:This is an oblique view, NRL number 13.1.3. [Figure 52]
Tousey:This is a double dispersion spectrograph. This is one of the two double dispersion grating spectrographs.
DeVorkin:Is it one of the ones in the Aerobee?
Tousey:Yes, and it's one of the ones that took the picture on the wall.
DeVorkin:You mean, the picture on the wall was taken from one of the ones in the Aerobee multispectrograph?
Tousey:It was one of the two instruments, the instrument that went to longer wavelengths, longer than Lyman alpha. The first predispersor started to neutralize the astigmatism, and produced images of the disc, dispersed up and down the slit. Then, the main grating dispersed this way, [horizontally] so that it gave you a slanting spectrum, slanting because of the dispersion introduced by the predispersor.
DeVorkin:I see.
Tousey:You can see if you look here that the lines are tipped, actually — the whole thing should be tipped over.
DeVorkin:That's the reason for the lines being tipped. They just made an oblique cut across the negative here, to line the edges of the spectrum. This is NRL 13.1.1. [Figure 54]
Tousey:We even had to use a curved slit.
DeVorkin:Oh God, for the same Aerobee?
Tousey:Same instrument. This slit had to be curved because it was so long, and was working out of the principal plate of the instrument.
DeVorkin:Could it be distortion to neutralize astigmatism, giving you a curved series of solar images?
Tousey:I'll have to think about it a while. I've sure lost the key. This is our grazing incidence spectrograph.
DeVorkin:NRL 13.1.14. [Figure 55] This has got a concave grating. You've got the slit with the polished sides that collects a larger cone of light.
Tousey:That's not the reason in this case. Just the opposite reason.
DeVorkin:Does it reduce scatter?
Tousey:No, it simply keeps to with light because you get more sunlight into it by reflection from the jams.
DeVorkin:In other words, the length of these aluminized faces geometrically defines a cone that illuminates the grating, more efficiently?
Tousey:I think we worked at 5 degrees from null, but I'm not sure any more. This grazing incidence instrument would not have worked had we not used a thin aluminum filter, and I think we were among the first to use thin aluminum filters. They cut out the longer wavelengths.
Tousey:This is the same, but it's a better diagram. The other one was wrong, the wrong circles. That looks as though it's a plane grating. [Figure 56]
DeVorkin:Yes, it does.
Tousey:Well, the draftsman missed again! [laughter]
DeVorkin:This one here has got the Rowland circle correct? [Figure 56]
Tousey:Well, maybe it has. No, the grating curvature, doesn't lie along the Rowland circle, it's twice the curvature from the optical design. Here we see the transmittance of filters. All of these are different materials, and their possible transmittances, but beryllium is very hard to use, boron very difficult. Actually aluminum and indium are just about the only ones we were able to make use of. [Figure 57 & 58]
DeVorkin:I see, these are completely different elements. The only ones that are continuous across the entire range from zero angstroms to 1000 angstroms are aluminum and magnesium.
Tousey:I guess the data weren't available for the other ones.
DeVorkin:Oh, I see, what is this?
Tousey:This is OSO-2 [Figure 59]. The NRL XUV Spectroheligraph.
DeVorkin:We're eventually going to get to OSO's. NRL extreme ultraviolet spectroheligraph, OSO 2 of NASA. Are you using channeltrons here?
Tousey:We were about the first ones to pry loose Bendix channel multipliers for this purpose and use them for this purpose. As far as I know, we were the first one to make use of channeltrons.
DeVorkin:Is this the same one? Yes, looks the same. [Figure 60]
DeVorkin:Except these are bent for some reason?
Tousey:Oh, they were bent because it worked better to have the image beam coming in at a slight angle to the channeltron.
DeVorkin:I see. I guess it doesn't make any difference.
Tousey:We had a terrible time getting Bendix to agree to those things. A question of patents and/or security.
DeVorkin:Why? Is this the same thing?
Tousey:No, this was a coronal scanner that we flew, in a rocket, or in OSO I [Figure 61, 62]. Maybe it is OSO 2, and OSO scanned this way.
DeVorkin:So this was your experiment in the pointed section of OSO-2? The section that also scanned, and it was basically a box.
DeVorkin:Do you know if the backup to this exists anywhere?
Tousey:I'm sure it does not.
DeVorkin:Why not? Who cannibalized it?
Tousey:I don't know. This was another thing, a photoelectric device we built to try it out, to test it in a'rocket. [Figure 61] We then flew it in the OSO? Rather than scan with the pointing system, we put in what you might call a mechanical scanner. [Figure 61]
DeVorkin:That looks like a gear on a motor —
Tousey:Two gears.
DeVorkin:Going through an irregular looking lens. Or is that just the projection with a regular lens?
Tousey:Let's see. Well, it was arranged with two slots. A radial slot, and a spiral slot. So that the scan did this kind of thing.
DeVorkin:Spiral, looking at different parts of the corona. So the direct sunlight comes into the concave grating, hits the channeltrons, the channeltrons, what do they do then? I don't quite understand that. The channel multipliers come out to something that looks like a tree frog, a plant frog there. It looks as though there are two instruments in this.
Tousey:We have two instruments in this.
DeVorkin:Yes, it does, it's peculiar.
Tousey:Well, we're talking about two things. This is the white light system.
DeVorkin:That has the little gear, OK?
Tousey:Yes. Now, this is an extreme ultraviolet instrument. I guess it was looking at wherever the unit happened to be pointed when we wanted to see if it worked. We weren't too worried about —
DeVorkin:You sent this up in a rocket?
Tousey:In an Aerobee. I don't know whether it worked or not. I don't remember that it did, though.
DeVorkin:This was in preparation for the OSO?
Tousey:No, that's from Hinteregger.
DeVorkin:That's from Hinteregger's diagram that I've seen various places. Did you have a number on that?
Tousey:No, I doubt it. Nope.
DeVorkin:What's this next? — (crosstalk) Let's see, I don't know — this NRL 12.20.2 [Figure 64]. That's this box with the drive motor, moving detector, amplifier, entrance slit.
Tousey:It's Hinteregger's. This is for OSO 5. [Figure 65]
DeVorkin:The basic structure is the same. Yes. Do you have a number on that? This is a diagram of stigmatic line profiles. [Figure 68]. That's really quite a collection. Now, the question is how do we get iit at least xeroxes? Can we keep that out?
Tousey:Did we pick up everything?
DeVorkin:Well, we picked up the V2. We picked up the echelle. We haven't found all four instruments or five instruments in the Aerobee, but we haven't found a thing on the Viking.
Tousey:This was basically obtained from three flights, Viking 3, in 1950, Aerobee 11 in '52, and Viking 9, '52.
DeVorkin:This is what's referred to as the Wilson group: Wilson, Tousey, Purcell, Johnson and Charlotte Moore, "Revised Analysis of the Solar Spectrum." [Astrophysical Journal 119 (1954): 590612.]
Tousey:The spectrograph in each case used a concave grating, 40 centimeters, 15, 00 lines per inch. Oh yes, this was the tripartite grating, that was another idea of ours.
DeVorkin:There were three parts to it?
Tousey:Yes. You know, diffraction gratings have been blazed ever since someone thought of it. Well, it occurred to us that we don't have to have absolute maximum theoretical resolving power, so why not rule the grating in three sections, each with its optimum blaze? We got about a factor of three times increase in intensity by doing this.
DeVorkin:In three specific wavelength regions?
Tousey:No, just for one. We were particularly interested in one wavelength. For anything we might want to have maximum speed, say, at 1300 angstroms, so rather than have the blaze move with the wavelength, why not blaze the grating in three parts, each optimal for 1300 angstroms? So we got increased speed. Those were the so-called tripartite gratings that were ruled for us by Bausch and Lomb.
DeVorkin:You say you thought this up?
Tousey:Yes. Actually David Richardson, who was the top man on grating ruling, and I thought it up at breakfast in the hotel across from the old station in New York, Penn Station. That's where the Optical Society used to meet, in the hotel across the street, was it the Pennsylvania Hotel? I don't remember the name. Shea: Yes. I think it's something like that, Hotel Penn, or something.
Tousey:Yes. We thought it up at breakfast.
DeVorkin:About when was this?
Tousey:Gee, I don't know, it must have been in the early fifties.
DeVorkin:Revised December 7, 1953, so it was earlier than that.
Tousey:Each spectrograph, had two cassettes, each carrying 10 strips of film on facets of a drum, and the facts were maximized to the proper curvature. In 1953 the two cassettes were located on opposite sides of the central image and received the first order spectra. I don't know which one we're looking at. In the Aerobee 11 and Viking 9, both were placed on the same side of the central image. The one was placed so as to receive the first order spectrum, from 550 to about 25000, and the other second order from 25000 to longer wavelengths. In the latter case, the overlapping first order of wavelengths greater than 5000 did not record, because of the lack of sensitivity of the film toward the red.
DeVorkin:So, does it sound like the spectrograph we are looking at?
Tousey:One of those.
DeVorkin:Viking 3?
Tousey:I would think it could have been Viking 3.
DeVorkin:It was located on opposite sides of the central image. It's hard to say.
Tousey:I think that's the way it was. I think that could have been the Viking 3.
DeVorkin:Would there be any NRL tech report, technical memoranda on these particular instruments, do you think?
Tousey:No, I don't believe so.
DeVorkin:OK. Well, that certainly narrows it down. It's a very early instrument, which is very nice.
Tousey:See, these spectra were Viking 9, in '52, Aerobee 29 in '55, and Aerobee 46 in '56.
DeVorkin:This is your reading from the solar spectrum paper.
DeVorkin:By Malitson, Purcell and Tousey — ApJ 132, November, 1960. This is much later. This had the optical diagram of the two normal incidence spectrographs, which you believe to be the bottom part of that Aerobee?
Tousey:Well, it wasn't too far different from that, but I don't believe it was the same.
DeVorkin:I notice you have a correction here, "The spectra on which analysis was based were obtained from three rocket flights." It's printed Viking 6, but you have in there Viking 9?
Tousey:I suppose I was correcting it.
DeVorkin:We've not yet seen anything about the small instruments on the top side, the three small instruments from that Aerobee.
Tousey:This was the bi-axial pointing control of the University of Colorado: Stacey, Stith, Nidey and Pietenpohl.
DeVorkin:The lower instrument is described by Johnson, Malitson, Purcell and Tousey, '58. ["Emission Lines in the Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrum of the Sun," Astrophysical Journal 127 (1958): 80-95.]
Tousey:That's the next paper.
DeVorkin:Is this diagram any different? I'm looking at them myself and they're so similar. They have the same wavelength ranges, 250?
Tousey:I see, lower on the page, I guess it means this paper describes the results from the lower of the two spectrographs.
DeVorkin:I see, so you had one paper for each instrument.
Tousey:The pointing control reference may be of some interest: Stacey, Stith, Nidey, and Pietenpohl in Electronics. I don't know that paper. Electronics, Volume 27, 1954, page 149. That looks like an early description of their pointing control.
DeVorkin:By the way, you do have a reference here, I notice in the same paper, Tousey, "Solar Work at High Altitudes with Rockets," in 'The Sun', G.P. Kuiper, SOLAR SYSTEM, Volume 1. That's this manuscript that you have here that has all of the illustrations of the lithium bead entrance window and in fact, a whole series of entrance windows. The lithium bead, the polished mirrors.
Tousey:Yes, including those of Hopfield and Clearman, I think. I must have used it somewhere, too. The original article is, "A Profile of Solar Hydrogen Lyman Alpha A," JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, Volume 65, No. 1, January 1960, page 370, J.D. Purcell and Richard Tousey. This is an early Lyman alpha profile paper. That's probably one of the early Lyman alpha papers, not the earliest, but here's another one. As you know, most people have the habit of giving the same talk in a number of places, and it looks as though we did. There's a different profile and exposures.
DeVorkin:I was going to ask you about that. This might be a good time to do it. I notice that around 1960, you gave quite a few papers, well over half a dozen. There must have been a tremendous number of requests for your time.
Tousey:Yes, I guess there were quite a few.
DeVorkin:Was this a direct result of Sputnik, or how do you figure it?
Tousey:Yes, that contributed.
DeVorkin:That I haven't seen. This looks like the instrument, the bottom part of it at least.
Tousey:That's the one. We wrote an NRL report on Progress —.
DeVorkin:Could we xerox that? We'd like to, because that's not the sort of thing we have in our library. "Photography of the solar disc with radiation for Lyman alpha line of hydrogen." [ Purcell, J.D., Packer, D.M., Hunter, W.R. & Tousey, R. "Photography of the Solar Disk with Radiation from the Lyman Alpha Line of Hydrogen" US Naval Res Lab. Rpt. NRL Prog. April 1959.]
Tousey:That's the instrument, up there.
DeVorkin:Who are in those pictures?
Tousey:This is Purcell and this is Wilsherson?
DeVorkin:Purcell is on top. That's Figure 3. We'd still like to xerox it. So this could have been part of what we have upstairs?
Tousey:Yes. This is the first version.
DeVorkin:Do you have the original photographs there?
Tousey:We have a few of them.
DeVorkin:You have the solar ones, but not of the two fellows with the Aerobees?
Tousey:They must be around somewhere, I imagine. I forget what I'm looking for, yes, the grazing incidence. Are either of these guys from Yale?
DeVorkin:No. Sputnik and cinnonoglue?
DeVorkin:"Search for Quarks in the far ultraviolet solar spectrum," PHYS REV Letters, Volume 17, No. 14, 3 October 1966.
Tousey:I had no business being on this.
DeVorkin:Oh, you're on this too, Richard Tousey.
Tousey:I don't know what a quark is.
DeVorkin:It's something with fractional charge.
Tousey:They came down and had some idea that they could find quark lines in the spectrum. We looked over the spectrum together, and I tried to be a stabilizing influence, let us say. They were just raring to get another paper out. They got the paper out. But, being from Yale, I thought that you might be amused.
DeVorkin:This is an interesting paper, "Highlights of 20 years of optical research." [Applied Optics 6, 20442077, December 1967.] That isn't in your collected works? Maybe it is, let's see.
Tousey:I think it is.
DeVorkin:No, this is different, I haven't seen this one.
Tousey:This tells about the SC-7 emulsion manufacture.
DeVorkin:Oh yes. Oh, that's a very nice one. That spectrograph looks more like the one —
Tousey:Yes, looks more like the one up there.
DeVorkin:But it doesn't say anything about it. (Figure 9). they just talk about the pointing controls. Could we take that out and xerox that one? This is "Applied Optics, Volume 6, page 20442077, December, 1967. You must have written dozens of these review articles.
Tousey:Quite a few.
DeVorkin:Look at that, complete with satellites. No, I haven't seen this one. That's very nice. That's a different kind of pointing control.
Tousey:That's the coronagraph. Rocket white light coronagraph.
DeVorkin:Is that the NRL pointing control?
Tousey:No, it is the Ball Brothers.
DeVorkin:Because it's completely exposed, [Figure 43]
Tousey:I don't know.
DeVorkin:Who is the person in the picture there?
Tousey:He's a former technician of ours; I've got the single channel multiplier in there.
DeVorkin:You've got everything in there. That's a great article. A color photograph of the sun's image from OSO.
Tousey:These bending gratings...
DeVorkin:Its all in there. Rockoons.
Tousey:Yes, I tried to cover it, all put in a couple .of sentences about everything. I don't seem to have a diagram of the grazing incidence spectrometer, but it doesn't make that much difference. This is the echelle. It is a relief not to have to write these things anymore.
DeVorkin:How did you regard your writing?
Tousey:Oh, I don't think I ever enjoyed it very much. Oh, that's the ATM spectroheligraph. This must be a much later thing.
DeVorkin:Yes, certainly. What is this, "Space Astronomy, New Era in the Making" reprinted from March '69 and May '69 issues of ASTRONAUTICS AND AERONAUTICS. [Series of related articles in March, April, May 1969 Astronautics and Aeronautics.] We have that at the museum. In there, your article —
Tousey:No, it looks as though Widing wrote this for me.
DeVorkin:There are articles by Carruthers and Widing. Those are for ATM.
Tousey:This is my man Tom Winter. He wrote this. He was a great person to have to help.
DeVorkin:What do you mean? You mean he was a popular writer?
Tousey:No, he was an extremely effective staff assistant, so to speak. He was a Major in the Engineer Corps.
DeVorkin:You were assigned staff assistants?
Tousey:Occasionally. He wanted to get assigned to us. I guess he got his doctor's degree eventually from Gordon MacDonald, and later, he was a staff member of the President's Environmental Council, among other things. He was assigned to us through most of Skylab and was a tremendous help in getting things done.
DeVorkin:These are very detailed drawings there. These pictures must have come from preSkylab, of course.
DeVorkin:UV heliograms. [Figures 81-84]
Tousey:Oh yes, that was another instrument. It was just a concave mirror and a thin aluminum filter. We used the thin aluminum filter in the ATM spectroheligraph.
DeVorkin:Well, did you test the ATM instrument designs on earlier OSO's or sounding rockets?
Tousey:In sounding rockets, and we had one terrible time getting enough sounding rockets. The politics of that was terrible. Some of it's on these tapes.
DeVorkin:We have to talk about these tapes and decide what to do about them.
Tousey:I don't know what to do about them, either.
DeVorkin:Well, we can certainly preserve them through duplication.
Tousey:They're mostly junk. Tapes are like that. They're mostly useless. Shea: But you said you haven't listened to them?
DeVorkin:You may be surprised.
Tousey:Can't spend the rest of my life listening to tapes.
DeVorkin:OK, we're going to finish up for this afternoon and morning. We're taking away from Dr. Tousey's office a three ring binder, marked 'Schelle and Miscellaneous Diagrams, Prints." We've been given a brief, but very informative tour by Dr. Tousey showing us his reprint files and the photographic files and some of the history and proposal files for Aerobee, and we also are taking away Computation Notebook, Naval Research Lab Registered Notebook No. 62 33, issued to Francis S. Johnson, for our immediate use and also for examination for preservation. So, thank you very much. We'll be seeing you again in the relatively near future, I hope. For the record, I would hope that we are somewhere right now around 1960, and in our next session I want to get up to Skylab, talking definitely about satellites. How does that sound?
Tousey:Yes, fine. I'll try to see if I can locate my old correspondence.
DeVorkin:Very good. That's very important.
Tousey:You have one of the French report's somewhere.
DeVorkin:Yes, we do, and I have a reference to it. [R. Tousey "Observational Results on the Far Ultraviolet Radiation of the Sun," Mem. Soc. Roy. Sci. Liege, 5e Ser. IV, 211, (1961)].
Tousey:C.R Detwiler, J.D. Purcell, "The Extreme UV Spectrum of the Sun," [Mem. soc. roy. sci. Liege, 5e Ser. IV, 253 (1961)].
Tousey:The others are in the same series.
Thank you very much. [Tousey & J.D. Purcell, "The Profile of Solar Lyman-alpha," mem. soc. roy. sci. Liege 5e Ser IV 274 (1961). Same authors, "Photography of the Sun and Lyman alpha and other wavelengths — same source and year pg. 283.]
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