Gerald L. Wilson '61, SM '63, ScD '65

INTERVIEWER: As part of the MIT 150 Infinite History project, we're talking with professor Gerald L. Wilson. Professor Wilson is currently professor emeritus in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. But his connection to MIT is long and varied. He earned a BS in electrical engineering from MIT in 1961, an MS degree in 1963, and an ScD in mechanical engineering in 1965.

Soon thereafter, he joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor. He later became the Philip Sporn professor of energy processing. In 1974, Professor Wilson created the Electric Power Systems Engineering Laboratory and became its director. In 1983, Professor Wilson initiated Project Athena, a program that would fundamentally change computing at MIT. And in 1987, he helped create the Leaders for Manufacturing Program, or LFM.

Professor Wilson served as department head of electrical engineering and computer science from 1978 to 1981. He then went on to serve as dean of the MIT School of Engineering from 1981 to 1991. Professor Wilson, thanks very much for coming in today.

WILSON: You're welcome.

INTERVIEWER: So, let's begin with the years before you came to MIT as a freshman. Tell me a bit about where you grew up, how you grew up, your early years.

WILSON: I grew up in a town in western Massachusetts called Holyoke. It was a mill town. I went to, mainly, the Holyoke school system. But from the time I was probably six or seven, my parents tell me, I was always interested in things and how they worked, and what made things work. So I had an interest in engineering very early on. And I pursued those kinds of things while I was in high school. And so MIT was one of several logical places for me to come to, giving those interests. And so I did that.

INTERVIEWER: What did your parents do?

WILSON: My father was basically in real estate. My mother was just a housewife and mother. I had five siblings and I was the oldest. And so when I came from Holyoke High School, I was the first one to go to MIT in probably 25 years. So it was big news in the newspaper. I thought I was really a big shot when I came here. And I learned later on I wasn't, basically, with respect to the environment at MIT.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that from a very early age, you really displayed an interest in how things worked. What are some of your early memories about developing interest engineering? Was there kind of an a-ha moment where you said, oh, this is what I should be doing?

WILSON: No, I think it was just that I always had an interest in taking things apart, clocks probably, early on. I remember taking apart tape recorders. I did a lot of-- learned about electronics, read a lot about ham radio. I wasn't able to afford that, but I knew a lot about the electronic side. And I won the science fair in high school. And that's the first time I came to MIT, actually, was to the science fair that was held here in April every year. So I think throughout my career-- I mean, as well as having an interest in academic things, and I also played some sports-- I had a very strong interest in how things worked, making things work, building things, go karts, all the same things loads of kids did back then.

INTERVIEWER: Was coming to MIT a dream that you had early on? Or did you first become aware of it when you came here with the science fair?

WILSON: I hardly knew a thing about it. I applied to a bunch of universities and MIT was one. It was a bunch of letters to me. The first time I really knew anything about it was when I came to the science fair and I was over in what's now called Rockwell Cage. That's about all I saw of it. But it wasn't-- I didn't know-- it wasn't high on my list one way or the other. I almost went to RPI.

INTERVIEWER: So what were your impressions of MIT upon arrival? Tell me a little bit about those early years.

WILSON: Well, I went through-- as I think I referenced earlier-- you come here, a member of the honors society. I had my honors society pin proudly on my lapel. And about the first day we came, we all were assembled over in what's now the armory, it was the armory then. So there's a thousand young men and women. And what I noticed was there were lots of honors society pins. When I went back to my dorm room, I remember taking it out and putting it in the top drawer. And about four or five days later when we reassembled, I noticed most people had taken it off. That was the first learning about MIT. You are amongst some of the brightest people around. And you were just lucky to be here.

INTERVIEWER: So I'm very interested in hearing a bit about your undergraduate experience in terms of developing interests, what sort of caught your attention as someone just starting out in the sort of serious study of engineering.

WILSON: Well, first of all, I got married at the end of my freshman year to my high school sweetheart. We'd been going from probably age 15. She was from Wales, went back home to Wales. And we couldn't stand being away from each other. So at the end of my freshman year, she came here. So I worked about 20 hours a week at the instrumentation lab as well as a student. And I, basically-- there was no UROP program here. So it was basically taking subjects, going to laboratories, and I was, by the junior year, I had begun to question what I was going to do when I graduated. I figured-- another year I'm going to graduate. I was in electrical engineering, generically. Most of the jobs that you were aware of then where in the defense-related businesses. And I thought about that and looked into that. And I'm not a pacifist, but I decided I didn't want to work for Raytheon or whatever making electronics for bombs, for missiles, and so on.

And so I started looking around and I found this undergraduate project program that I went to work, and went to meet the faculty member-- his name was Herb Woodson-- and he was working on energy. And that was a transformative experience for me. I did a project for him as a junior and I moved and decided I was going to work on energy and energy-related activities. And that's what I did.

INTERVIEWER: And so is that what led you to make the decision to continue your education at MIT?

WILSON: Yes, yes. So I did my Bachelor's degree for Herb. And that was on making a shock tube to make plasmas. And the big area of interest then at the time was an area called magnetohydrodynamics, which was using magnetic fields to interact with conducting material, in this case a very hot conducting gas. And they were having trouble taking pictures of the shock tube and trying to measure the velocity. And so I made a-- they would have a camera that was spinning and they'd push the trigger and once out of 10 times they'd-- it was a spinning mirror-- it would be at the right position to record this. So I made some electronics that synchronized the camera mirror and had the camera fire the shock tube so it would always take a picture. And that was a very satisfying, successful, junior project.

So as a result I did my Bachelors' thesis for Herb, I did my Master's and my PhD, all in areas related to magnetohydrodynamics and plasma physics.

INTERVIEWER: So today, of course, energy is one of the key issues facing all of us. Not just engineers but politically, socially, it sort of seems to pervade everything we do. At that time, was it-- you mentioned the defense industry being kind of preeminent-- was there a different sort of feeling about energy? What were the key issues and what really led to your interest on it?

WILSON: Well, the whole area of magnetohydrodynamics was to try to make more efficient energy conversion. And there was interest in that, but it was certainly in the background. And it's interesting you ask that. When I finished my doctorate, Woodson and I decided to work in the area of electric power. The reason was, after the first Northeast blackout had occurred and he took a leave of absence and went to work for American Electric Power, just on a year's leave, to learn more about the electric power industry, and asked me to stay to teach his courses and work with his research students. I had no intentions of being a faculty member or staying at MIT. So I did this-- he'd been my adviser-- so I did this as a favor. And good ol' Herb, he suckered me in. He said, well, when he finished up, why don't you go down to AEP? So I did.

And we came back, and in fact, that's where the-- it was first called the Power Systems Engineering Group. When I came back, we formed that group and I got what was the Ford Foundation faculty professorship, which allowed me to stay for several years. And I stayed to try to help him build that up. What's interesting was it was unpopular at MIT, in particular in our department.

And as an aside, the existing department head and Herb lived on the same street and they would commute in together from Watertown. And there would be times people would see them get out of the car screaming at each other because the department head felt that going back and working in the electric power area-- MIT always was at the forefront of new things, and you guys are working on this old stuff that we finally got rid of a long time ago. And in fact, one of the key contributions of the EE department, in the earlier days, was in making a device to analyze power systems. And there were probably 15 faculty-- rotating machine, transmission-- all working in that area.

And when Gordon Brown became dean of engineering, after being department head, he drove all of that out. He pushed faculty out. There were some faculty that stayed, but their whole area was kind of-- the equipment was given away to the University of Puerto Rico. He just cleaned the decks. So now here's his successor as department head saying, you guys are going back to the old days. And so he and Woodson would have terrible arguments about that. But the problem was that Woodson had gone to the dean, which was Gordon Brown, and Gordon was helping at least finance some of this, in spite of the fact he'd driven it out. But it was a very contentious period.

And so I found myself in a bit of a pickle. Because Herb, after all of the troubles here, was asked to be dean at the University of Texas at Austin. So after I was on the faculty about two years, and supposedly going to be finishing up pretty soon, he leaves. And I'm here with this lab with a bunch of graduate students working on electric power. And now I would meet with the department head. And the meetings were not fun always. One time he referred to us as a bunch of garage mechanics. Now, to his credit, years later he put me up for a promotion twice. So it's not like he carried a grudge. But intellectually, at that time, work in the energy area was not the most popular thing to do. But we believed it was the right thing to do and we did it.

INTERVIEWER: Well, it's fascinating how things turn, with the intense focus on power grids, on the power grid now, it's--

WILSON: Total flip.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Very interesting. You've spoken a lot about Professor Woodson. Were there other colleagues, classmates, mentors, memorable people from your early years as a student and young faculty member that are worth talking about?

WILSON: Oh sure. Well, there's certainly-- I didn't have anyone else I interacted with as strongly. But there were people in the department-- Sam Mason and Zimmerman-- who were very influential in terms of their approach to life. Sam Mason was a very smart, older, experienced faculty member. And he was really one who looked out for students. And I remember one time we were having a doctoral oral exam. And this poor fellow was up at the blackboard. And there would be three faculty members in the front row. This one would ask him a question, then the one to the middle, then the one to the left, then the right. And the poor guy is going back and forth. And Sam finally stopped and said, why don't we-- you keep coordinating and maybe we can get him to totally spin around while he's up there. He really was very good at caring for students.

Another person that had a lot of influence on me was a man named Charles Kingsley who was a rotating machinery expert. And he and I became very fast friends. And until he died, we were good, good friends and colleagues. And one of my former students took over-- Kingsley and Fitzgerald, who was here, wrote a text on rotating machinery. That text was and has now, internationally, probably the largest distribution of rotating machinery textbook. And in the United States it's printed in many languages. And my former student started work with Charles. Charles has long passed away but the book is in its fifth edition. Steve Umans is the author of it. And we've carried Charles' legacy on for a long time. But he had a lot of influence on me and other students.

INTERVIEWER: So I'm also interested in the environment of MIT in the early to mid-1960s. I would imagine that there were things that were very different about MIT if you compare it to now and things that might have some continuity. What--

WILSON: Well, the first thing that happened when I was-- I came here in 1957. And within a year or year and a half, I believe, after I was here, the Russians launched Sputnik. And all of us commented, within the next year and a half, we noticed a sudden, significant increase in the intensity with which the faculty and the whole place was focused on science and engineering, and our position, and the position of this country. And it made for a very intense environment anyway.

And it is very-- and was very-- different than it is today. We had classes on Saturday mornings. I could not spend a weekend goofing off if I was going to survive. You studied on the weekend. And I wasn't alone. Most of my colleagues-- there was very little time for fun and games.

That's very different today. I have students today that tell me, oh I don't do homework on weekends. So the intensity of the place has changed. Now, a lot of people say for the good. Paul Gray used to-- probably still does-- refer to drinking from a fire hose. But that was what it was like. There were more subjects. And I think the demands on your time were much more stressful than they are today. I'm not saying it's all to the good, but that's certainly the way it was.

There was a lot less opportunity to experience what being an engineer really was like here. You went to classes and trotted through all. You did some labs. But you never had the opportunity to find out how it related to the real world. And engineering really is bringing science for the benefit of mankind. So you really need to understand the other side of where it's going. And there was very little opportunity to do that. I did that with that junior subject. But that was an accident. And it shouldn't be an accident. Well, the UROP program that exists today, that Margaret MacVicar started, is a major influence on the change in students lives. Students have an opportunity, from the freshman year on, as you know, to-- you don't have to wait four years before you can try to do something. You start working with faculty and students and people in research. And you get an opportunity to see what it has to do with. And you can make a lot of decisions about your career. And it certainly made a serious decision for me. It helped me make a very serious decision about what I was going to do. The business of staying here on the faculty was an accident. But certainly, being in energy was a result of that experience.

INTERVIEWER: So, turning back to energy, tell me a bit more about the formation of EPSEL and its development over the next few years-- its goals, difficulties.

WILSON: So we started what was called the Power Systems Engineering Group. It was focused on the electric power system. Well, both of us went and spent a year at American Electric Power. We came back and brought back problems that that utility was having. At the time, it was one of the largest utilities in the United States. It still is. So we had practical experience in that entity and came back with projects related to it.

When I was at American Electric Power, I was up on catwalks 300 feet, out checking out control systems, installing, designing control systems. So I came back with some fundamental research projects to work on. And that was the genesis of the early laboratory. But the other thing that Herb and I did was we began to find other people, either who were on the faculty or recruited to MIT, who would go and spend a year at American Electric Power. And by the time we finished, there were like nine faculty members who had gone there, both in mechanical, electrical, one in chemical.

There was a fellow, Fred Schweppe, who was at Lincoln Lab studying state estimation theory for defense systems. And we convinced Fred to come here. Fred Schweppe unfortunately passed away probably 15 years ago. He had a heart attack while driving. But Fred brought those tools to the electric power industry. And one example is something called state estimation. It is now used throughout the world as the way of estimating and controlling a power system. It started with Fred here.

There's, right now, a thing you hear about co-generation and co-energy. Fred had ways of thinking about that and thinking about the pricing in a power a system like pricing on a stock market. This was 20 years ago. Well, those ideas now are part of-- when you hear a lot of the hype, but there's also some useful things about smart grid. That's Fred Schweppe.

Now, that happened because we brought him from Lincoln Lab. He spent a year at American Electric Power. He changed that industry. So the lab had a lot of influence. I worked on 765 kilovolt transmission. American Electric Power's building lines, they had trouble with something called audible noise, where fog would drift in, condense on the wires, and because it was in a very high electric field, it would make a hissing sound. So people living near the transmission lines not only objected to their looks but now would hear frying eggs in the morning if it was foggy. We worked on a way of solving that.

We built with Herb-- Herb still started it. I finished it after he left. We used superconductivity to build the first superconducting generator in the world. That all happened here. Superconducting generators are not yet used on the large scale in power systems. But there's a lot of work on superconducting motors and an application to superconductors to transmission. So the lab evolved and grew. When Herb left, there were seven or eight graduate students and two or three faculty. Before I became department head, we had grown to probably six or seven faculty. There were about 30 graduate students. There were probably seven subjects, graduate and undergraduate. Before we started there were none. And so, it had a major influence on MIT in terms of that electric power side of the energy area.

INTERVIEWER: And then later it became LEEs, right?

WILSON: Right. Later on, after I became department head, we brought a fellow named Tom Lee who-- I brought him here. He was a General Electric engineer, researcher in the circuit breaker area in Philadelphia. And we brought him here. And they changed the name to LEEs, for Laboratory for Electronic and Electromechanical systems. So they broadened it to include electronics. So it all came from that.

INTERVIEWER: So, earlier you mentioned the very significant involvement in the defense industry that MIT had in the 1960s and some of the contention that created.

WILSON: Right.

INTERVIEWER: I wanted to ask about the environment on campus at that time, I guess, at that point when you were a young faculty member just making that transition of being in the faculty-- what that was like and how you were affected by it or had to deal with it.

WILSON: You mean in terms of the contentiousness? Oh yeah. Well, it was-- I'm not going to be very good with dates here, but-- probably the early 70s. The student feelings about the instrumentation lab had students working on making multiple reentry vehicles, which were missiles with multiple targets. There were students doing their theses on this. And there was a great objection to the Vietnam War. And those on this campus came together. There was a Students for a Democratic Society started collecting and organizing to object to a lot of this. And it grew. We had, as I said earlier, an AWOL soldier. It grew to finally students trying to prevent workers from going to work. So there was this police activity that was necessary, from the administration's point of view, to push them out.

There were days you couldn't walk up the front steps of Mass Avenue. There were students trying to block you from coming in. There were a lot of bad feelings generated on both sides. The faculty got somewhat polarized. And I never saw it break out in terms of arguments or very strong arguments between faculty that got at all physical. But there was a quiet disparity between those that supported the war in Vietnam and those that did not.

Its affect on the place was twofold. First, Howard Johnson came in here as president. And there was an opportunity, and I think he had an agenda, for making some positive changes at MIT. And he was totally deflected by this. So his whole administration really was focused on this business. And it culminated, finally, where there were discussions about what MIT does with its relationship with what was called the Instrumentation Lab at the time.

Now, it was started by a man named Doc Draper out of the aero department. And it became the focus of faculty meetings where lots of heated arguments went on month after month. And it was finally the point where the students were pushing for us to divest. And it finally culminated in a faculty meeting that was held in Kresge normally we go to faculty meetings, we have 1,000 faculty. I don't know, maybe it's more now. But you might find 80 people there. These faculty meetings were packed. And it was held in Kresge because there wasn't room in 10-250 where they normally were held. And then were contentious issues about, should the people from Draper have a right to speak? Because they're not faculty members. And the rules are, only those who are members of the faculty could speak. And yet this was affecting their lives. And so there were all these kinds of-- so there'd be committees to try to deal with that. And it was-- it was bad. And it certainly de-focused MIT from its main mission of education and research. And finally, the decision was made to divest. And Draper eventually moved-- I'm sorry, Instrumentation Lab eventually move to where it was. And to show us how they felt about us, they renamed it, Draper, a man they really respected. And it moved off and separated. And finally the war went away. And things eventually got back to normal. But for five to seven years, it was a harmful process for MIT. And yet, at the end we went through it. We worked out answers through it. And so people were probably more prepared to deal with problems in the future having gone through that without the place blowing up. And it never came close to blowing up.

INTERVIEWER: So I'm just curious, you mentioned that you actually early on as a student worked at the Instrumentation Lab?

WILSON: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever have any interactions with Doc Draper or-- it sounded like you decided early on that that wasn't the path you wanted to take.

WILSON: Right. Well, actually the things I worked on were fun. It was to do with the moon shots and missile shots and space. So I got to work on a lot. No, I met Doc a couple times. I didn't know him well. I have a lot of colleagues that knew him well. And he was around here a long time. There were a lot of well-known people here. One was Draper. Norbert Wiener used to walk along the halls, you'd see him. But I didn't know Doc on a personal basis.

INTERVIEWER: So, moving sort of back to the 1970s, eventually you became the chair of EECS. Tell me a bit about how that came about and what some of your vision and goals were for EECS at that time.

WILSON: Well, the department at the time had about 100 people, faculty members. I was located in the basement of Building 10. The department had built the new building that it now is in, either 36 or 38-- RLE and the department together. I was fairly isolated. And I didn't know much about-- I would go to department meetings. But my head was focused on-- first of all, Herb Woodson had left. I had inherited a bundle. I mean, I was now carrying a huge load in terms of fundraising and number of students. I think I had 15 students at the time. And I was director of the lab, and faculty, and space.

And so I was dealing with all that. And what happened to me was that one day the institute came and asked me, would I chair the commencement committee? It looked like a pretty innocuous thing, so I looked at it and talked to the guy who had been-- aw, you just chair meetings and they get ready, they run commencement. Don't worry about it. So I agreed. And within months I learned-- I used to always go to commencement-- I learned that the students get, on average, two tickets. There's room for two tickets per student. They can go around begging to faculty members. Each faculty member got a ticket. And students would go round trying to get another ticket so maybe their grandmother could come or their brother or sister as well as-- I thought that was terrible. And so, I went and sat through and we ran the first commencement. But I said, we've got to find another place to have commencement.

So we started-- and when I say I, I chaired a committee. The ideas were not Wilson's. The ideas came from all over the place. For everything I've done, the ideas came from all over the place. But we began to say, we ought to move this thing to Killian, which was called the Great Court at the time. It's now Killian Court. And we started talking about that. We had someone from Physical Plant. We had someone that ran and gave out commencement tickets. And we started working.

And I'll make this shorter so it isn't too long. I was given pictures of tents that had been put up in Killian, Great Court, in the '20s-- pouring rain, tents laying on the ground, all folded over in mud. This is what's going to happen if you try and move commencement. Don't move commencement. There was a lot of opposition.

Jerry Wiesner was president at the time. I never asked him. I just kept working on this. But Jerry Wiesner used to say about MIT, don't go around and ask. You see something you really think you want to do and should be doing? Go ahead and do it. As long as it's legal. But don't go around asking to do it. So we started working and to make a long story short, pretty soon we were going to move commencement to Killian Court. We made plans for that.

One of the questions was a stage. And the stage that you see out there now we had designed and was built in Physical Plant. And one of the major arguments is you'll see a sail that's over there to cover the faculty so, god forbid, they should get sunburned while the parents do. And the sail was designed by Jerry Milgram who was a faculty member in ocean engineering. And I got Jerry to design the sail. And now, we were going to tie it to the parapets of the Killian Court. And the Physical Plant said, you can't do that. The building can't withstand that. So Milgram and I, but mainly Milgram, did a lot of analysis and calculating loads-- if there's a wind on the sail, how much will it lift? And where are you going to tie it? We decided we're going to do it. And we went ahead and had a sail made and put it up.

And so we're all-- everything's wonderful and we're going to have our first commencement there. And most of the community is supportive. People are saying, you wait until it rains. And so the night before, Mary Morrisey, who used to be the one who ran the area that distributed tickets and ran a lot of the flowers inside, et cetera, and the organization of commencement. And Hank Leonard from Physical Plant and I came the night before. And Leonard and I stayed at the Hyatt Hotel and heavy rain was predicted for the next day. We had 6,000 chairs out in the court. And what was a side issue was we were in a bar at the Hyatt down the street and Howard Cosell-- you probably don't know who Howard Cosell is.

INTERVIEWER: I do actually.

WILSON: Right? Howard Cosell was there for I don't know what. But there was a football game or something. Maybe Muhammad Ali was punching somebody. But anyway, he was there. We ended up drinking with Howard Cosell until around 1:00 in the morning instead of going to bed.

We got up real early and rain was predicted. Disaster. A person in the MIT meteorology department-- he was doing the weather for us-- he said, this rain will stop at 9:30. Then the sun's going to come out. And he was-- we thought, this is pretty precise stuff. So he said, it'll end. So we got, I don't know, 40, 50 people with towels. And they went out. And at 9:30 it stopped raining. They went out in the court and wiped all the 6,000 seats. And commencement started at 10:00, and the sun came out. It was fine. Thank goodness. Luck.

And so, the reason I tell you that story-- no one knew who I was. And I think within a year or two, out of the blue, I was asked to be department head. But I think that's what got me into trouble. So I don't know. I mean, there was a search committee. I never played with the politics. I didn't know who they were thinking about. I believe they asked someone else first who turned it down. And then they asked me.

INTERVIEWER: Because the sun came out?

WILSON: I suppose.

INTERVIEWER: So was there a back-up plan? Were you going to move to Rockwell Cage, or?

WILSON: No.

INTERVIEWER: There was no back-up plan.

WILSON: Now there's back-ups and all that, we load up chairs all over. But for the first six or seven years-- but a lot of things we did there that had some influence. For example, there was a proposal that the parents should be there, the students should march in and sit down, and then the faculty should come in and go up on the stage. And I said, this is upside down. The students are the ones who are to be honored here. The faculty come in and wait for the students. And that's still what's done. But there was some push.

INTERVIEWER: So, when you were offered the EECS, when they offered to make you department head, did you feel then that you were-- I don't know if outsider is too strong a word-- but that you were kind of coming in, in a way, having been preoccupied with other things and not really expecting it?

WILSON: Well, I certainly-- the outsider is not strong. I certainly felt-- I probably knew 20 faculty members. There was a whole computer science side and there was a lot of argument and discussion about whether electrical engineering and computer science should be separated or kept together. The genesis of computer science came from the department and so on. But they were over in Tech Square. They felt isolated. I knew none-- I didn't know any of them. And I did not know most faculty. I was surprised that they asked me.

But I'd always been probably vocally critical about a lot of things. And so when I was asked-- it wasn't something I was looking to do, but-- I thought, if you don't take it then you're in no position to criticize in the future. You're going to have to shut up. I didn't think I could do that. I couldn't teach myself to do that. So I took it and decided I'd do it.

And I chose Richard Adler who I did know, from the EE side. And I asked around and Joel Moses, I asked each of them to be associate department heads. And I just jumped into the bath and started.

INTERVIEWER: So what were your goals? What did you feel were the burning issues of the moment?

WILSON: When they asked me, I had no goals, of course. Right? People always-- after they asked me to be dean someone came and said, well what's your goals? I had no idea. I wasn't going to be dean, what the hell do I know about goals? But I spent a couple of months. I talked to every faculty member. And I learned a variety of things. I learned that it was the EECS, but there was a need, and there was already some motion, to try to develop subjects that integrated the two disciplines in the sophomore year. And so we had people working on that. There was the whole area of integrated circuits. We, MIT and some of our earlier faculty were certainly some of the contributors to the ideas of taking instead of discrete components, and now making them on an integrated plane and using that technology.

The department had made a decision about five or eight years before that they were not going to have a facility to make integrated circuits because it was too expensive. We'd never be able to afford to run it. And the strongest opponent-- proponent for not building that-- was Richard Adler, who now is the associate department head.

So I started talking around. And meanwhile, students at Stanford and Berkeley could have integrated circuits made. And I thought, MIT is always criticized for doing all the theoretical stuff and not enough practical. And I thought this was a case where students-- there's a big difference between laying out something and how you hope it's going to work and building it and seeing if it works. So I became convinced that it was a real hole and probably part of the reason that the East Coast, which was initially the electronic mecca, was being displaced by the West Coast. Because Berkeley, Stanford were pouring out students that had these skills. And we were pouring out students that had the skills, but they didn't have the practical side.

So I started going around talking. And I was convinced we should do this. Not by my own ideas, but loads of people told me that we should do it. But there were some who felt that the earlier decision was right, one of whom was Richard Adler. We would have arguments, good arguments, in my office about doing, not doing. And I finally said, I'm not going to do this if Dick doesn't agree. And over a couple of months I convinced him.

And it was a huge undertaking. Because now we were going to go raise the money. We had to find a building. So we found Building 37. We had to move people out. And we had to get MIT to sign on. And Paul Gray was president. Paul Gray never turned me down on any proposal. He was always very supportive. And we gave him-- I had people in the department give a price. We gave him what we thought the cost would be based on their analysis. And we went out and started raising the money. Paul discovered, or we all discovered, it was going to be three times what we thought. Paul never let me forget that. But he forged ahead and we all-- and Richard Adler worked to raise money. He worked very hard. We finally found a director, Paul Penfield, who was a faculty member who now believed this changed his field and became very knowledgeable about that. And we started hiring young faculty.

So in the three years I was department head, we started that-- the Microelectronics Center. And it's still out there cooking. You can go out and see the liquid nitrogen freezing all the pipes. So it's a facility that students use and a lot of faculty use. And so it was one of the things that I did.

INTERVIEWER: So, I'm always very interested in hearing people's takes on balancing research interests, and how those are evolving, with the kinds of demands on time that having a position like that, let alone dean, make on you for fundraising and organizational management. How do you, or how did you, manage to balance that?

WILSON: One of the things I stopped doing I really missed is I stopped teaching. I mean I couldn't be out running around trying to raise money for that and some other things and trying to meet a schedule of students. I really think it's disruptive if you're teaching a subject but half the time it's someone substituting for you. So I stopped teaching. I continued to run the laboratory while I was department head. And I just spent a lot of time here. But I had a lot of help. I mean, one of things-- if you, at this place, if you do something that there's a subset at least of people that believe you're responding to a need they really believe in, they put their money where their mouth is. And so a lot of people helped. And in that integrated circuit facility, a lot of faculty came together. We started hiring people. They went and identified faculty. They started developing subjects. And I didn't micromanage this. I just sort of said, we build that facility and around that the faculty just responded.

So I didn't do all that myself. I had a lot of help. And so it was not a killer. The other thing was that there were two buildings there, 36 and 38. There was supposed to have been a building between them. And so we had built this facility. There were no labs. There were offices. If you go look at those two places, there were offices, there was no lecture hall. There were no new classrooms. So EE was still-- the classrooms were all over the place.

So I got it in my head that I wanted to try to build a building there. And so I decided-- I think I talked some with Paul Gray about this. But I decided that we ought to build a building. And we'd say, there's lecture halls, there's labs, there are classrooms. There's no offices. We're not even building bathrooms. We'll use the bathrooms in Building 38. But it should go in that spot.

And so I went to Physical Plant and to Bill Dickson, who was a friend of mine. And Dickson said, you can't, you can't get a building in there. It's really going to be hard. I don't give up easily, so I found a classmate of mine who was building a lot of construction in the Boston area. And from Holyoke, my father's good friend was a guy named Daniel McConnell who ran a big construction company. And so I asked them to come and look at the site and tell me, could we build a building there? Oh yeah. And they looked at it and came back. Yes, this is how you could do it. And there were issues of fire trucks getting through and all of that. Then we finally got that. And then it was a matter of money. And so you've probably heard a lot-- you must have heard a lot about Harold Edgerton. So I won't--

INTERVIEWER: Oh, no. No. You should--

WILSON: You could go on and on.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, you could. Please.

WILSON: I knew Doc really well. And Doc and I had a long history because me with my plasmas and capacitor banks, and so on. And he would lend me equipment and high speed cameras, so I knew Doc. So I went to Doc and I said, I want to build a building here. And I told him what it was. And I remember, we took him-- there was a walkway between the two, 36 and 38. And I brought him up to the third floor and I said, I'd like to put it about here. I said, I want a lecture hall. Oh, he said, well that's easy. You want a lecture hall, you get a blackboard and you get a bunch of chairs. I'll help you. We'll get a bunch of chairs and there'll be a place, right down outside. He was giving me a-- but he finally agreed that he would help pay for part of it.

And then Paul Gray said, why don't we go to Germeshausen and Grier, the other two partners that started EG&G? And Paul went out-- I don't think I went with them. I think he did this entire thing. He was president. He grabbed it. And he got the money-- I got it from Edgerton and he got it from Germeshausen and Grier. And we built this impossible building. And the faculty was totally benign. I kept saying-- what do you want in this? Oh, whatever you want, because they didn't think it was-- it had been tried so many times. It's not going to happen. So it was going to be a three-story building.

And then when it started to look like it was going to happen, a bunch of faculty came to me and said, we really need a lab on the fourth floor. And I said, well why didn't you-- but I went back and we put a lab on the fourth floor. I think it's the fourth floor. I think it's the fourth floor. Maybe it's the fifth floor. But anyway, when we went to build that, Doc came over. And Doc liked doing time capsules. So down there, he and I went into a hole and digging with a shovel-- there was a group of people taking pictures-- and we put this time capsule with all the remnants of the time and built the thing.

INTERVIEWER: So, in this space of one story, you've mentioned a couple of MIT legends, and certainly Doc Edgerton is someone who looms large. And in a different way, Bill Dickson also.

WILSON: Oh yeah.

INTERVIEWER: And I want to ask you about each of them. What were your earliest memories of Doc Edgerton? Do you remember how you first met him and what was going on?

WILSON: Yes. There used to be a Course 6 steak fry. And I don't remember what the reason was or whatever. But they would barbecue steaks and would use the laboratory in the basement of Building 10. And they'd unroll brown wrapping paper on top of all the lab benches and they'd be cooking steaks. And the students would all get together with faculty. And Doc-- there was this guy playing the banjo going around-- I think it was a banjo. No, maybe just a guitar. But anyway, it was Doc singing. That's when I first met Doc. And he also could play the spoons. So he would go around bench to bench, doing as he always did, making small talk and jokes with students. I mean, he was already very well known. And students loved to be around Doc and that's where I first met him.

And then later on I interacted with him in a variety of ways, mostly with equipment and banter. If you met Doc in the hall and he didn't know you, he'd come up-- hi, I'm Harold Edgerton. He'd give you a postcard with a bullet going through an apple, or a drop of the milk in a red bath. And he was a legend.

INTERVIEWER: And Bill Dickson as well. Now, Bill-- I don't know if you would have overlapped with him or not as an undergrad. He might have been right before you.

WILSON: No, he was-- I think he was '52 or something. He was about five years before.

INTERVIEWER: So tell me a little bit about that friendship or that relationship, how that developed.

WILSON: Bill-- I knew of him. And our lab moved to the base of the Building 10. We started in Building 3, but now we had expanded. We moved to the base of Building 10. And several times there were instances where the floor would be flooded with an inch or two of water. And it turned out to come from a work room next door that provided cooling for the president's office. And once in a while, a pump seal would fail. And the pump is sitting there. No one's watching it. And we'd come in in the morning and we'd be sloshing in water. It happened once, they cleaned it up. About eight months later it happened again.