Walter E. Morrow, Jr. '49, SM '51

INTERVIEWER: This is the 150th anniversary interview with professor emeritus Walter Morrow. Let me start by asking you where were you born and where did you grow up?

MORROW: All right. I was born in Springfield, Massachusetts in a day when it was a big factory town. Lots of armament, the Springfield Armory was there. Many other factories of different types around. That's all gone today, I'm afraid. At any rate, it was a very technical town. I, from an early age, had technical interests.

When I was maybe eight or 10 or something like that, I had my own chemistry laboratory, for instance, in the house. It was a special room filled with chemicals and whatnot. My father was in charge of large electrical construction projects in the Boston area -- not the Boston area, Springfield area and north of there. So he was much into the side of electrical systems. But I became interested in electric systems and this is a fall-out from the chemistry business in which I got sort of bored after a while from electricity. It was a fall-out into electronics, which was just beginning to be a big thing.

So while I was in the schools there -- and I'll talk about the schools in a minute -- I'm busy building things around the house: telegraph systems, short-wave receivers, and later a large antenna on the house to receive TV from a long distance, because there was no TV station in Springfield.

Now, the school system then in Springfield was an entirely different thing that you couldn't find today. This was in the depression, and there were people desperate for jobs. So the teachers that were chosen were the very best people that they could hire. They were at the top of their classes graduating. As you're probably aware, that situation is inverted today, and the teachers are taken from sort of the bottom of the intellectual scale.

In particular, the high school that I attended, Springfield Technical High School, I think it was called, was staffed with people who couldn't get jobs in the depression, but were very, very skilled. For instance, the chemistry teacher came from running a chemical plant. He was the real thing. The physics professor the same way, and taught multiple subjects not only of physics, but he taught electronics and aerodynamics and so forth.

This was a school, a technical school, that was really intensive and there is no duplicate that I've ever seen since then. There were machine shops run by people who used to run machine shops and all kinds of things of the sort. It was a very, very intense place.

The education there was at a level when I came to MIT, and I'll talk about how that came about, I essentially knew everything in the freshman class, all the different courses and whatnot, with the one exception of calculus, which was not taught in that school at that time.

Now, when it came time to graduate it was at the end of World War II, 1945. There was great turbulence, you might say, in the universities at that time because of the draft and all the rest of it. So when I began to look around for places that I'd like to go to, I was looking for technical places, and the two that interested me the most were Yale and MIT.

In both places because of the things that I'd done at the school, building experimental systems that were shown in the classrooms, not by the teacher but by myself, there was an instant acceptance at both places. No test, nothing. Just all they did was talk to the teachers in the school. I got some kind of an award at the end of the time in technology, and it was a unique award. Only one person got it and I was that person.

So, I come to MIT at the end of the war and the place is still in the war when I come because it was July. The course at MIT was a all the year around course. It was a three term course, there was so much rush to get people through the course for the war. So it started in July, the war hadn't ended yet in July. There's still a war in the Pacific. The Radiation Laboratory, which I knew about I guess by other people telling me about this place, was in full bore operation here at the Institute.

That included operations on a number of the current buildings, and included one building which has since been torn down to make the new building for research and artificial intelligence, I guess is what you'd say.

At any rate, I came here at the age of 16 in that spring of 1945. It was a pretty rough place. There were no tutors or anything. It was live or die by the exams that came every three weeks. That was not a big problem for me because of the high school which had covered all of that, essentially, except for calculus before.

The biggest problem came in the sophomore year. There was a transition from professors teaching the classes to assistants covering the classes, teaching the classes. Their quality was definitely different than the professors. These were graduate students who were teaching assistants and they handled most of the classes. So it was a struggle in these classes to get what they were trying to convey and not conveying it terribly well.

INTERVIEWER: Let me back up for one second. Why did you choose MIT over Yale?

MORROW: Yale had very strong chemistry courses and professors, but it had essentially nothing in the electronics area. I knew about the Radiation Lab, and that was the beginning, as I mentioned to you before we came here, of MIT growing to be what is today. MIT's current situation is directly the result of the Radiation Lab being here and being staffed by professors from the Institute.

INTERVIEWER: Do you want to tell that story now since we're--?

MORROW: All right.

Well, when World War II began, there was a serious problem about detection of submarines and detection of aircraft, and so forth. The radars that existed at that time were so-called long wavelength radars -- they operated at 200 megahertz with wavelength of a meter or so. They were not able to do a lot of things that were very desirable. Very hard to put them in an airplane, for instance, because the antennas were too big. The English had been working prior to that time on microwave vacuum tubes, not with the thought of particularly being used to build radars, but just as a new kind of a vacuum tube.

The British, in part for the exchange of the destroyers, the 50 destroyers that we gave the British before we got in the war, came here with a cavity magnetron, one of them, and it was about the only one in the world that existed. That appeared on the scene I think roughly '40, 1940, maybe 1941, but it was right in that period.

The decision was made by people in Washington, and ones from MIT had a large impact on this, that the development of that device into microwave radars for all of the military forces would take place here at MIT with an organization that was separate from the Institute but was using their professors, their facilities, and their buildings. Extra buildings were built for this enterprise.

The speed with which that single device was transmitted into capabilities for naval fleets and aircraft was incredible. Inside of two years they had 1,000 ships equipped with these radars. There's nothing like that that could be done today, but they did do it. A variety of other kinds of radars that were also developed were carried through and deployed in the field.

This effort was not solely carried out here. There were companies that were, you might say recruited, to build the equipment, so nothing was built here except prototypes. Raytheon was one of them, and the other was Western Electric. Those two companies were told you will build them night and day right through Sunday, you will build them by the thousands, and they did. Those things played a very significant role in defeating the German submarine attacks in the Atlantic.

People were crossing the Atlantic with help from the British and later from the US forces over there. Finally with the radars plus new aircraft plus little aircraft carrier to launch the aircraft, and also as a result of the British breaking the German cryptographic systems, these oceans were swept clean of the Russian -- not the Russian, but the German submarines, by about three years after the beginning of the war. They were all found and destroyed.

So there's an incredible impact on war that this place had. In some sense, equivalent to that are the nuclear weapon. It was, at the time, viewed as a balanced thing. They were both equally significant.

INTERVIEWER: Then what happened at the end of World War II?

MORROW: At the end of World War II, the government said, well, we built them all and industry can carry on. So they folded it. The only thing they did is in the final year of '46, they had a year spent to create a series of books that listed all the technology. There are about 20 books in this thing called the Radiation Laboratory Series. They're not much looked at today because they're pretty old.

But in the beginning of the Lincoln Laboratory, which occurred several years later -- and I'll go into that in a minute. These were the textbooks that you looked for. No one else had anything like this. They were unique in the world. Foreign countries desperately scooped them up to look at them, and many places in this country used them. Just about everybody in the electrical engineering department would have a set of them on their shelves to look at to see what was described there.

Now, the question that you're asking is where did Lincoln Laboratory come from. The Lincoln Laboratory came from the Radiation Laboratory rather directly. There were a number of professors who were at the Radiation Laboratory still at the Institute. Wiesner, Jerome Wiesner was one, and Radford, Bill Radford was another. These are two people in my undergraduate years that were closest to me and gave me special tasks to do. Not theses, but things they wanted done, and they called on me to do these technical things of one sort or another.

When the Cold War started there was a big concern about Russian bombers. It turned out that this was, because of poor intelligence, this was an assumption that was incorrect. The Russians were not building large numbers of bombers. They were building ballistic missiles, as we learned later. But at any rate, it was decided that we needed to have a very good air defense system for this country. The people who had been involved with the Radiation Laboratory were on advisory committees in Washington in the Defense Department.

The capabilities of these people were widely known in Washington, and the decision was made in Washington that basically the Radiation Laboratory would be recreated. It was put together here in the buildings -- actually, we're practically sitting on one of the buildings. It's been torn down and rebuilt since then. Building 20, left over from the war days was made part of it. There were several other buildings here that were put together to make a start on this new thing, which at the beginning did not have the name Lincoln Laboratory.

The reason Lincoln Laboratory is Lincoln Laboratory in name is that these buildings occupied space that the Institute needed for expansion. The expansion was occurring because the Institute was viewed as the leading place in the world in electronics. There were all kinds of expansions in the courses in Department 6, which was the electrical engineering department -- and in other areas in chemistry and whatnot. They needed the space that was left over from the Radiation Laboratory.

So, Lincoln -- whatever it was called then and I don't remember the name -- at the beginning was told get out of town, and the place it was decided was Hanscom Airfield, which is a state-owned airport. But in World War II it was a fighter aircraft base to attack the bombers. So, the decision was made let's move there. In '53 roughly they started construction in that area -- the lab starting around '51 or so. I was here in the lab as it began, and I'm the last person in the current Lincoln population that was there at the beginning. Everyone else is gone.

At any rate, a big building was built out in Hanscom which had a lot of land. The government owned sort of half of the land from the fighter airplanes, and the commercial people had the airport itself. It's actually something that Massachusetts as a state owns. It's a state-owned airport still to this day. But on part of the base is a piece of land which was set aside then and is still there for development of military electronics. Lincoln is on that land, as well as a large, I guess it's Air Force set of buildings and people who purchase electronic systems, some of which come from the laboratory.

So it's a combination base. There's no actual fighter airplanes or anything like that. It's a laboratory plus a procurement organization is what you're looking at there today.

The building as it began held everybody pretty well. Now how was everybody -- it's about 1,800 people of which maybe 600 or 700 were professional staff people of one sort or another. About an equal number of technicians and another equal number of people to keep the building running and provide the power and the telephones and everything you need to keep a thing like that going. So it was sort of a three to one split of the 1,800 people.

The reason I mention this is later in its life, 1,800 will be looked back on as a very small number in terms of what happened.

The transformation of myself from MIT as a graduate student into the lab really occurred because of Radford, Professor Radford. Now, Radford was a professor who taught electronics, and Wiesner took up teaching about radars. So these two people I knew very well in those days as a student. When I came out of graduate school there was a question, my wife and I, where would we go. There were demands from all over the country for anybody that graduated from MIT at that point.

So we took a look at several locations, one of them was where the atomic bomb was built. Well, not that, it was the support company that made the thing a real device. Not the laboratory, not Los Alamos, but the organization that still continues to this day that manages the whole business. That was one place.

Another place was in western New York State in Buffalo where there was an aircraft company that was working on air-to-air intercept and ground-to-air intercept systems. That was something that I had worked on here as a thesis, a telemetry system for that.

The third place was MIT, the new laboratory. By the way, the new laboratory when it moved to Hanscom originally was going to be put on a piece of land that was entirely in the town of Lincoln. So the name of Lincoln was attached to it. But that's not where the laboratory is located. It turned out that the Air Force wanted that land because it was nice level land, and they wanted to build a laboratory up there for themselves in the electronics area primarily. So they said you take the land that's over there, and the land over there was on the side of a hill -- not the greatest place to build something.

But that's where Lincoln Lab got built. It turns out that Lincoln Lab has a little bit of Lincoln under it, and it has a little bit of Concord under it, and it has a little bit of Lexington under it. All three towns come together under that place -- still called Lincoln Lab though.

INTERVIEWER: Bedford, too. Doesn't it have Bedford there?

MORROW: What was that?

INTERVIEWER: Some of it is Bedford, too?

MORROW: No. Bedford's connected to the airport, but the land doesn't reach where we are. Yes, Bedford is there. No question about it on that airport. At any rate, it got its name incorrectly applied. I don't know what name would have been appropriate for three towns. The building that was built was built at speeds I have never seen replicated anywhere around Boston since then. It was an event which took about, well, about a year roughly.

Then inside of a year they built a huge laboratory of maybe 400,000 or 500,000 square feet, and built to the ideas of people from the Bell Laboratories, because one of the people that joined the Lincoln down here came from Bell Laboratories and was in an administrative position. He brought with him the notions of an accounting system for a research laboratory for a personnel system.

I'll talk more about the personnel system in a little bit. The structure, organizational structure. So his direction was followed. It mounted to having a director's office with a few people -- maybe an assistant director or associate director, and six or seven divisions, each of which had a division head and then there were groups. So it was a structure there that comes from Bell Labs because that's the way it was built at Bell Labs.

The thing that's very significant, most significant I think that came from Bell Labs with that person was the personnel system. The personnel system from the beginning was different than on campus. It's a separate system to this day. It follows the Bell system. This is a very controversial matter. I've ended up in court at least once when I was Director in a fight about that system. The system involves the following.

Each year the group leaders and the divisions rank the people in the division. A division will have, I don't know, maybe 600, 700 people -- no, not that many, 300 people, say. Something like that -- some of the smaller divisions 100. These would be the staff only, not the technicians or any of the support. The promotions and the wage increases were directly connected to the positions of the people on the ladder.

As a matter of fact, the people at the bottom of the ladder were urged to leave -- the bottom 2 percent or 3 percent by one process or another. That process with a lot of change goes down to these days that we have now. Many things happened over the years to tune up the system. They probably went through four or five or six variations, but the basics are still there to this day.

Now this is a very significant thing to the laboratory because what it means is that you are maintaining the quality of the people. Each time you go out to hire people, because some retire or they move to business or to industry or something like that, you replace them. When you do hire them, you or they sometimes make mistakes. It was in the large percentage, maybe 2 percent, 3 percent, maybe 4 percent, something like that. You make a mistake and they make a mistake for coming to the lab.

They just aren't able to contribute -- it's not their world. It's something they're not up to for some reason or other. They may teach very well in a university, but they can't quite take the research game with intensity that it has, or it did have, still has.

So, there is an examination every year for each of the divisions of the whole list and who's on the list and who's going to be promoted off the top of the list and who is going to be asked to leave off the bottom of the list. Now the result of this is that you maintain the quality over decades because you do not allow the accumulation of people that are not too well suited to the situation.

This turns out to be an enormous advantage for the laboratory, and for MIT, for that matter. Because in the government laboratories in the Defense Department are under the Civil Service system. Civil Service system does not allow anybody to be fired. It's sort of like the teachers' union and you fill in the blank, the fireman's union, and so forth. You don't fire someone unless they commit a heinous crime or something like that.

The result of that, and I've done analytic studies on this over the years trying to help the government with its laboratories, is that you accumulate after several decades a population which is not very noteworthy, shall we say. The government is upset about this, of course. But the control of the Civil Service system is not within the control of the Defense Department or any of the other departments. It's a separate piece of Congress that manages it and it's not very easily changed. Athough small changes have occurred recently, mostly due to my pushing on the government to change to allow good people to get more money, and so forth.

At any rate, that personnel system lives on today, and the quality of the people lives on today. So they turn out then to be as attractive as Bell Laboratory turns out to be as attractive source for people that want technical problems solved in the government, mostly in the Defense Department, but also the FAA and the energy people and several others come to the lab to get help in solving some difficult problems.

INTERVIEWER: I'm very interested in something you said a few moments ago about the research game. As somebody who's been involved in research for a lifetime, can you talk a little bit about the kinds of people who are suited to the research game, and what the research game is about?

MORROW: Well, anyone looking at a research laboratory and the people in the research laboratory, there are several classes of people that do the job, do the work. There is a small group, and I would say it's less than 10 percent of the professional staff who are creative. You present a new problem to them and right on the spot they'll start spouting out solutions to the problem. They are the source of solutions to problems that are brought to the laboratory. Or even where we go out to try to help people outside that are in trouble.

Then there's a large party who are very good at the design of advanced systems that no one else has ever built before. These would be the vast majority of the people there. There is always at the edge of this community, people who can sustain a continuing program and a continuing thing that the lab does. A lab doesn't just develop technology. It's not widely known, but it also operates operational systems.

I can't discuss what those are here, except I'll mention one, and that is the case of the FAA. We have provided many of the improvements in safety of air travel over the years, and play a fairly deep role in running experimental advances in these systems. What are these systems developed at Lincoln for the FAA? One example would be the collision avoidance system. I don't know whether you're familiar with that, but we've had air-to-air collisions occur, the worst being in San Diego, I don't know, four decades back maybe, something like that.

There was a severe need of being able to provide pilots and aircraft information that they were about to run into another airplane. The airplanes are equipped with beacons, and we devised a way that you could use the deacons to run a little box that sits in the cockpit of every plane that flies today in this country, every commercial plane. The little box looks at what's around, says, we see several planes, those planes are not dangerous, and so don't worry. If it sees a plane that is likely to be too close to the thing, it shouts out at the pilot, dive or climb. Those things are running all the time in all the airplanes to this day.

That's not the only thing that came out of our work for the FAA. There were other things that were done which involved weather prediction for preventing accidents from planes trying to land in the wrong kind of weather and so forth. Those involve large experiments in the field at airports far from here. Logan was never one of them. They're all scattered through the country. So this lesser group or end group, you might say, or the staff, is heavily in this kind of operation of experimental systems in the field to learn did they work or not work? What were the problems? How could we improve them? So you really have a three class society. You have some geniuses, maybe 10 percent, whatever. People's opinion can vary on what the number is. Then the large class of people who are skilled at transforming new ideas into reality. Then a separate group, a smaller group, that take the stuff into the field and run it experimentally.

I might say certain programs I can't discuss here. We run them for the government all the time. We literally run sensor systems that are unique and no one else has and can build. But they're very important. I'll just say mostly they involve looking at spacecraft, making sure they're not going to run into each other and things like that. But they're all highly classified. I can't discuss the details of those here.

So if we go back to the beginning, these discussions have been sort of generic on the laboratory. If we go back to myself, a few words on what I ran into as the thing opens would be interesting, I think.

The fact that some of the professors in Radiation Lab joined the lab, Radford in particular,

led to an interest in the lab together with Wiesner in the communications area, which was somewhat off the main core direction of the lab, and building new radars and new computer systems to use the data and the airplane sort of run the FAA planes. Basically, as I'll mention in a minute, all of the FAA system basically is based on what was developed at the lab for military purposes.

At any rate, I was not in that core, I was with Radford and Radford was a division head who was interested in communications. He and I knew each other from undergraduate days at the lab in graduate school. He was a graduate advisor, in fact, for myself.

So I arrive at the lab in all innocence at the age of 21 or 20 or something like that. I get told that we want to have you build a radio, but it's a radio made out of transistors. No one knew what transistors were when this was being told to me and I certainly didn't know. They said that these transistors will come from Bell Laboratory and they are experimental and no place else on the earth can you find these things. But we want to have you build the smallest possible radio out of these devices.

What was the motivation? The motivation was that these very small things, if they could be built cheaply enough, could be distributed in countries that were not friendly, shall we say, to receive radio messages from radio transmitters. The State Department operated overseas radio systems, which still exist in one sort or another. They had visions of distributing thousands of these things.

So in the course of a year or so, using transistors that Radford and I got from Bell Labs by going to Bell Labs and getting them handed to us as if they were treasures -- they were treasures -- these first transistor radios were built. As far as I know they're the first that were ever built in the world, and there's one or two of them sitting in my desk still to this day. As soon as they became known, there became demands from Japanese electronics firms that came to see, the US electronics firms came to see. Then the whole transistor radio business burst into the open after the transistors got into production.

INTERVIEWER: Mid to late 50s?

MORROW: Yeah. It didn't happen that first year or two that I was there. It took quite a while to get the transistors understood and get production rates that were reasonable, and get properties of them that were better than the first ones. The first ones are very, very difficult to make anything out of. They had a lot of defects in them, electronic defects that made it difficult to build these things.

So that was my first year, year and a half on the job. At the end of that I was switched suddenly to another area in the communications division. This was to develop long range radio communications for the military, for the country for that matter. You see, up to that point, the only communications overseas basically was short wave radio, which is very flaky, you might say, it doesn't always work. Half the time more or less it doesn't work. The ionosphere does not go along with your intent to get across the Atlantic. We had large numbers of nuclear forces that were beyond reach of control from this country, from the president, because the communications didn't exist.

So it was started there two years after I was there, a program to develop communications that could reach across oceans. The first steps in this came I think from Wiesner's interest, maybe Radford's as well, in something called scatter communications. Most reliable communication systems are line of sight systems and they don't break up because of the direct connection between the transmitter and receiver.

When you go beyond 20 or 30 miles you're beyond line of sight and so then becomes a problem. How do you build a reliable thing that will go more than 20 or 30 miles? Well, somebody in the business of examining the ionosphere had discovered that there were fluctuations in the ionosphere that were independent of whether it was able to communicate radio signals or not strongly. Small fluctuations in the scattering of signals sent at them. By using large radio transmitters with big antennas, you could communicate 1,000 miles reliably through the scatter.

Similarly, with shorter wavelength systems, meter systems or fraction of a meter systems, you could get tropospheric scatter. So, a large program began and I was dragged into the middle of this thing to build systems, experimental systems, to test it out, see how well it would work. We built systems that were based, at least in the beginning, down in Rhode Island, I think it's in Rhode Island -- it may be in Massachusetts.

Anyway, there's a place that was given to MIT by donation from a very wealthy person. A large seaside location with a big house, and so forth. The first links were put down there, and transmissions from there to Bell Labs at Holmdel were started at maybe a 200 mile link, and successfully.

So then the military people said 200 miles won't get us across the Atlantic. We want more. So, in successive steps, one was built at 400 miles, one was built at 600 miles, and one was built at 800 miles to see if it could be done. It could be done. So there was a surge of construction of these systems to try to get connections to the nuclear people that were based overseas. Several of them in Greenland, and some of them in Europe and various places.

Now, at their best, they did not cross the Atlantic, that has to be understood. They could go 1,000 miles without fading. However you could get across the ocean if you're willing to suffer some cold weather. But you go north into Canada and in the upper parts of Canada you can cross to Greenland because the distance is small. So you can go across the top of Greenland, then come out the other side and go to Iceland, and then you can get to Europe.

INTERVIEWER: Sort of hopping?

MORROW: Hopping from one to the other. So, the system was built like that. It was also built for the so-called DEW Line, which we were involved with very heavily. This is a set of radars across the north of Alaska to see the Russian bombers coming, if they ever did come. The only thing that came were birds that set off the system. Pods of birds were migrating all over the place and they were tripping the radar signals. That system now is I don't think operational, but for decades it was operational. All the communications on that were scatter communications to connect the various pieces of it together and to connect it back here.

So there was a big period in there for 10 years, maybe less than 10 years, where I was directly dragged into this business and sort of the leading person. It turned out I also became of interest to international science groups that specialized in radio propagation. So I found myself giving lectures in Russia, believe or not, in France, and Japan. These are yearly meetings of this group and they wanted to hear all about the scatter communications because it was a fabulous new thing that had not been in existence before. These were people interested in radio transmission of various types. This is the international group that had meetings on the subject. So, my wife and I have traveled to a lot of places during those few years.

Well, all this proceeded along satisfactorily until Sputnik. Now before Sputnik had gone up, I had a small discussion/lecture group in one of the groups I had control of at that time. This was based on science fiction books that I had read assiduously earlier. In those books you will find satellite communications described by one of the people -- I've forgotten his name now, but he was one of the writers and he spelled out the whole, how you would do it basically.

At that point in time, and this is before Sputnik, I was thinking about could you do this thing. But there were no abilities to get things into the sky, excepting when Sputnik occurred. Suddenly it was a changed situation. The thing that we started to work on was an artificial ionosphere which became notorious before it was finally finished, and so forth. This was to put into orbit a band of very tiny metallic reflectors -- a little thing about this big, so very thin, and to use scatter communications off of this artificial environment.

There were violent attacks on this whole idea on the part of the astronomers. So part of my involvement with that overseas group, of that international group, was explaining how we were going to get all these things back on the ground. They weren't going to stay there forever. It was a pretty hot political situation, nationally, internationally, and so forth.

INTERVIEWER: This is the Westford program.

MORROW: This is the Westford program.

It came to pass, it did go up, it did work, but we had put it in an orbit that would get it all back down on the ground again. The view changed pretty quickly that building satellites would be a better scheme because you could get more capacity and you wouldn't have this problem of the potential of these things running into things, although they're pretty safe. They're so tiny they would hardly do anything to a satellite if they hit it. But I never thought it would be deadly. So I got into a lot of meetings, international meetings and whatnot, explaining all this and it was a fairly stressful thing.

At this time, the Department of Defense decided they wanted to build communication satellites because Bell Labs was showing that they could probably build -- I think they put up one or so. The first one in low orbit. The department asked the Signal Corps part of the Army to develop a program to build a satellite. This was to go on a launch vehicle that was in existence. The Army proceeded to get a contractor on the west coast to build this thing, and the weight on the vehicle went past the weight that the launch vehicle could lift. It was a terrible controversy.

The general running the thing demanded that the weight be less and the weight wouldn't be less, and the whole thing got hung up and nothing was happening, and the department was pretty furious about it. The people involved in the department at that time were what's now known as DDR&E -- it's a defense development research organization. In those days it ran the show. The people that ran it were two people -- an Italian -- I can't remember his first name. Let's see -- I'm not even sure I remember his last name now. It began with F. Something like Feno or some name of that sort. He was the person in the DDR&E that was furious with the Army not delivering.

So a decision was reached in secret to tell the Army stop, we don't want you to do anything more. We will have Lincoln Laboratory develop the military satellites, which we proceeded to do, and we built a number of them. They were launched and then systems were built by contractors afterwards. Let's see, the man's name was Fubini I think, or something close to Fubini.

The beginning of this whole affair connected with a problem at the laboratory. The problem at the laboratory was that the air defense system, so-called SAGE system, which the majority of the lab was working on, got itself designing the first really big computer in the world that was built to be used in it -- a vacuum tube computer, by the way. My transistors didn't get into it. At the beginning. 60,000 vacuum tubes in this thing. It was being tested around New England with radars and it was successful and it was moving forward and it was going to go into production.

So the government turned to the lab and said, now we're going to have to have you get it into production. The president of the Institute decided, and perhaps others, that it would be not fitting for the Institute to be in the business of procuring huge quantities of radars and computers and things like that.

So a thing called the MITRE corporation was formed, which you may know about. They were given the job of doing that. There was a fairly close relationship between us as we moved the technology into their hands.

Then arose a question. What will Lincoln Laboratory do now that the major program has been handed off to MITRE? There was a great concern inside the laboratory. I was still, at that point, only a group leader -- it was about 30 people or so who had been working on the earlier communication systems that I talked about. The proposal was made to Gene Fubini -- that's the fellow's name -- that the Institute could move on to some other problems that were of concern to the government, to DDR&E. Not the Russian bombers coming over the North Pole. They weren't going to come over the North Pole, but there were new problems.

Two were selected. One because I had been in the communications business and it was a going on thing, and that was to take over the development of the military satellite communications business. The second was to play a leading role in defense against ballistic missiles, which had clearly shown up on the horizon by that time in Russia. So the funding of the laboratory through those early years of the SAGE, which was around $20 million a year was continued. But it turned out that Fubini wanted to feel the goods a little bit about what he was buying for his $20 billion -- $20 million a year. I think I said billions, it's not billions, millions.

So he wanted to meet me because I was clearly a key person for one of those two areas. So I was told to go to the west coast and meet with him and talk with him for 20 minutes and cross back across the country again, all in a short time. That's the only time I've ever gone across the country for a 20 minute discussion with Fubini. He liked what he saw and said, OK, you lead it. A similar thing occurred with the ballistic missile defense area.

So at that point, which would be '61, '62, somewhere in that area, the laboratory suddenly had blessings to go in two directions. So funding would continue, and in addition, more money would be coming into it from other interested parties in the government.

We, in the very early years, stuck pretty much to this business excepting it had fall-out, which got us into other areas as well. One of the things that we built were fairly large radars to be used in the ballistic missile testing to see if you could find things that are in the sky, and so forth. These are very big antennas. They're 50 feet across, 60 feet across. There's 120 foot one up in northern Massachusetts still in existence that was built, and it's still being used now.

There weren't ballistic missiles to look at particularly, hopefully. But these things did exist and they were tried out on satellites. Satellites were going over head, and as you remember, the first Russian launches were detected here by a radar that we had up at Millstone Hill.

So a new phase, a new direction in the lab appeared on the scene, namely find satellites. Find out how many there are, who's launching them, where are they, and so forth. That remains a very strong component of the laboratory to this very day, and we run a number of operational systems, not just experimental systems, but actually checking what's going on upstairs.

There's one curious little thing that we do for group of commercial companies that have satellites up there, communication satellites. There's a patch of the orbit, the synchronous orbit where there are several of these satellites all living together, separated. One of the satellites went berserk and lost its control systems and started drifting -- doing whatever the gravity gradient caused it to do at that point.

The people with the satellites got scared because what happens if it runs into our satellite? We spent $200 million to build this thing and get it into orbit. So they came to us and said -- with industrial money, and by then the Congress had allowed Bell Lab to take industrial money for transfer of technology -- would you please keep track of all the satellites and tell us who to move, where and when to avoid this thing when it comes back and forth through our investments, which are a billion dollars easily at that point. So we've been doing that for a number of years. We're still the people who keep track up there for those people.

We also keep track on a lot of other things that go on in various orbits for intelligence people and whatnot to see who's doing what and where. We're a central factor in the design of a new system to do this even better. So this is a branch sort of thing that I'm talking about.

Another branch occurred because of the SAGE system, and it's with the FAA. The FAA had a terrible air control system in those years gone by. It didn't have radars that could follow the airplanes, it didn't have computers that could present the data to the controllers. It just didn't have anything. So they came to us and said we want to build an air control system that's like the one that you designed for Russian bombers.

So that technology was literally picked up by its root and dropped into the FAA, and that to this day, is their traffic control system. It's an old tired system at this point, needs replacement with a satellite-based sensing system. But to this day, we're very tightly connected to the FAA as a fall-out from that effort with the Russian bombers. Now, that fall-out business, you can see it through several different areas at the laboratory.

INTERVIEWER: Why don't we start by talking about the nature of the relationship between Lincoln Laboratory and MIT.

MORROW: Fine.

There has been a relationship from the very beginning. There was a period in time, however, where this became a controversial matter. It happened not because of the laboratory and what it was doing, but because of what is now known as Draper, but was then known as the Instrument Laboratory. The Instrument Laboratory was the place in the world that developed the high precision navigation devices involving gyros, three gyros. If you use them right you can find out where you are in the airplane in particular. But you can also use them to guide a ballistic missile with nuclear warheads. They designed a system and built prototypes, and so forth.

This became known on the campus and it was considered unworthy of something connected to MIT. So it began a great crusade, maybe not so many people, but they certainly were vocal, to separate the Draper Lab -- that's a latter/late name. The early name was Instrument Lab -- and Lincoln from MIT. There was a very intense few years that went on where the laboratory took the position that we were development place of technology, but we were not actually building anything that goes into nuclear weapons, and so forth, and that it was all radars and communications, which it was very much.

Nevertheless, a distinction was difficult to be seen in the eyes of the protesters. The protesters arrived at the gates of the laboratory on at least one occasion. They certainly arrived at the gates of the Instrument Lab down here in a much larger group. There was a lot of high level discussion about this. I was not director in this period of time. But one of the assistant directors, Gerald Dinneen was asked to run a committee for a year or so to examine this and make some conclusion about the laboratory, maybe about the other place, Instrument Lab, I don't know.

Which I was given the nasty little task of sitting into a meeting each week where programs that were being proposed for the lab and the Instrument Lab would be discussed with a group which included some of the protesters -- they were students. This may be 10 people or something like that. So for a whole year I'm there and I am basically defending these programs that come into the lab -- they're little ones and big ones.

There's not just one program, it's a whole slew of things. Each time I'm explaining how this thing is going to be a good thing to have for the military and it isn't going to be flying with nuclear weapons, which they weren't. It was mostly ballistic missile defense and communications, and a few other things as well.

At the end of the year, a settlement was reached which disconnected the Instrument Lab from the Institute, and kept Lincoln Laboratory connected to the Institute. But there was a desire coming out of it that the people in the leadership here at MIT would keep a closer watch on Lincoln. This led to the notion that there should be reporting to the provost pretty periodically. In my experience as a director, it was one month intervals, on what was going on, and in addition that we should have a committee to review the lab from the outside, including faculty members, to come once a year and see the program listed in front of them for a day or two or something like that.

Those two things were undertaken, and they continue to this day, without a whole lot of change.