Warren Seamans - ‘Doc’ Edgerton and his Legacy

[MUSIC PLAYING]

INTERVIEWER: I'm Jim Sheldon. It's February 15, 1995. And I'm with Warren Seamans, director of the MIT Museum. And we're going to talk today about Harold Edgerton, one of MIT'S most famous folks. So I just thought it was important that we get some of the history down, so that it doesn't go by the boards. And you're someone who knew Doc very well, was connected with him over what? The last 40 years of his life?

SEAMANS: No. 30 years.

INTERVIEWER: 30 years of his life. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that.

SEA MANS: I guess I first met Doc very shortly after I came to MIT because I was in personnel. And personnel offices at MIT, at those days, were in the basement right where his lab was. And he just moved to Building 4, what we think of Strobe Alley, he'd moved there just shortly before. And I always had an interest in sort of exploring and electrical engineering was one of the departments that I worked closely with.

So I got through Strobe Alley and I met him like almost every everybody else did in those days, by simply walking down Strobe Alley and there he was. He'd come out and say hello, or you'd see him and that not only ultra friendship, but sincere friendship that he managed to exude with anybody he came in touch with, whether if he would ever see you again, or whether he'd never seen you before, you were his friend. We actually worked in trying to, while I was in personnel, trying to find some sort of technician for some short-term program that he was in. I don't recall much about that.

But shortly thereafter, I moved to the Department of Humanities. And one of my first things I remember was Doc trying to save the birds that were dying because they were flying into this glass breezeway between the library building, where humanities was, and Building 2. So he put these big cutouts of birds, of hawks, to scare the birds that were flying into this glass thing. So Doc's presence was always, always around you. You knew he was here. And even in those days, he was obviously, he was a mythical character. He wasn't just another professor. You knew that he was somebody that was very important in MIT's history.

After we started what is now known as the Museum in the summer of '71, and we moved into where we are now, in this Building, in 52, in February of '72, one my very first visitors in this very fledgling program was Doc. Doc came along because he'd heard that there was something trying to save MIT's history. And Doc, by this time, obviously was relatively certain where his place in history around MIT was going to be. But he was concerned that we were only going to save paintings, and portraits, and vases, and that sort of thing.

He thought MIT stood for a lot more than that. We didn't even know what we were saving at that point. We were saving anything we could get. And one of the things we'd found early on, in this scouring of the MIT campus to find MIT memorabilia, was an exhibit that Doc had worked with with [? John ?] [? Mealy, ?] a photographic exhibit that had been taken in the late '50s to try and document the student body at that time. And this eventually came out in a little booklet. But it was actually a photographic exhibit that had been done and [? Mealy ?] gave that to MIT.

And we found it. And it was in terrible condition. But we put it up around our very makeshift offices. And Doc heard about that. And so it was probably the second time he ever came around, just poking around, and he brought [? John ?] [? Mealy ?] in with him. So we all hit it off very readily from that point of view. And it's at that point he said, we've got to save the history of the Institute. And the history's in the instruments. It's not in this other stuff.

So really, he was a big supporter of our operation from the very beginning. And I would say over the next-- as we developed, and as I was able to spend more and more time in this, and as I got to know the Institute better, I would get a call probably oh, at least twice a week if Doc was around asking about something or other. Do you want this? Or should I throw these photographs out? You don't really want this sort of stuff do you?

It developed into a relationship that was-- I was always able to say yes to. And that's an unusual relationship because he was helping us to build our collections and he spread word far and wide about what we were trying to do. So he had the ear to the president, to the upper administration. And they were always there to listen to what Doc said.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think-- right now, it hasn't been that many years since Doc passed away-- but what do you think the long-term legacy of Edgerton is going to be to the Institute?

SEAMANS: Well, I think Doc personifies what was traditionally the MIT's way of teaching people, of the way that MIT thought people learned best. I think Doc personified that when he came here in 1926, I guess it was, the learn by doing, the hands-on method, all of these things. I think Doc not only personified that, but then went on to develop it by his own personality pulling people in. I think, if anything over Doc's period of time, and that probably there were some things that weren't particularly happy in Doc's career here, was that MIT moved very far away from that with influx of computers in one sense and so forth,

And with various people who wanted much more of a theoretical Institute, MIT moved away from the hands-on thing. And Doc ended up, toward the end of his life, as one of the really last outposts of where a person, a student, could go and actually do something with his hands, his or her hands, at the end. I think Doc's legacy is to really show the importance of that. And what Kim Vandiver and the whole Edgerton Center now is doing is pulling that back in. Now it's an ongoing thing.

And there's a lot of other people like Steinberg and, well, I can't think of the names right at this point, but that really see this importance and are pulling people back in, teaching people, students, MIT students, that there is something beyond theory. That there's something you need to-- as for example, and Doc used this example himself, that in his age, and certainly in my age, the average kid that came to MIT would have known how to take his Model A or his '49 Ford apart and repair it. Well, in the last few years, you just don't take most cars apart today and get them back to run.

So the average student coming in today doesn't have that hands-on experience. So not only was the Institute moving away, but society itself was moving away. You can't take your digital alarm clock apart and put it back together and hope to have it run. So Doc, I think, was very disappointed toward this and did everything he could to keep his course alive, bringing in Charlie Miller and other people to help keep that thread alive.

And of course, his own magnetic attraction throughout-- Doc in his darkest days of health could pull himself back together to give the most phenomenal lecture that would fill any auditorium at MIT or wherever else he gave. So he, by his own personal magnetism, he held this spirit of learning by doing, hands-on thing together. And now again, now people see the importance of this thanks to again, as I said, the--

INTERVIEWER: Not just here at the Institute, but really across all of education to some extent.

SEAMANS: I think that's true to some degree. I don't think most of the probably other technical institutes got as far away from-- well, Caltech's probably an exception to that-- but most of the others did not get as far away from hands-on education as MIT did for a long period of time. And a lot of Doc's contemporaries, I think particularly Jay Stratton, Julius Stratton, who was president and exact contemporary of Doc's felt very strongly that MIT was moving much too far away from the method you actually need to teach to understand technology basically. And I think a lot of those people, I think their opinion is being upheld very strongly today by a lot of things, not only Edgerton Center, but other things are showing a movement back toward hands-on approach.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think about the sort of-- what kind of influence did Doc, when we try to describe him oftentimes, some people will say engineer. Then they'll say artist. Then they'll say entrepreneur. Then they say inventor. Then they say humanist. And they say teacher. Depending on who they are, those words come in different order. Do you think that that represents an example of perhaps the kind of education, or the kind of person someone can be, if they come out of the kind of education at the Institute--

SEAMANS: Well, I think Doc was truly exceptional in every way along that line. I don't think the average engineer per se, has the great appreciation of what made art that Doc somehow encompassed. I can't answer your question specifically, because he certainly was a humanist because he understood the necessity of the human involvement in teaching. And that magnetic attraction made him a good teacher, of course.

I think the last thing Doc probably would have ever called himself was an artist. Yet he was very proud of the fact that one of the negatives that he'd thrown out ended up at the Museum of Modern Art, is hanging on their wall. So he wasn't afraid of that. He had a wonderful artistic eye because Doc, I think we pointed out this many times, if you look at a lot of Doc's negatives, they don't look very good. But Doc had that genius to go focus right in to a certain part of the negative, blow that up, and get the phenomenal shot of a golf swing or whatever it might be.

So he could understand the artistic merit of something within something else that very few people-- most people would have just printed the negative, and said, that doesn't look very good. We either throw it away or we'll use that as the print. So I think you can-- almost every point yes, he was an engineer. Yes, he was a true artist, I think, in a real sense.

He was a humanist. He loved to teach. But primarily, I think he was that-- it got right back down to that engineering, wanting to know how something worked, and making sure that people understood how it worked, and the importance of making people understand how it worked. So it isn't an easy question to answer. But I think he was all of those things and a lot more.

INTERVIEWER: Well, as a-- did Doc, a fellow Midwesterner, that's fair to say, right, or?

SEAMANS: Yes, that's very true.

INTERVIEWER: How do you think that ever figured in Doc's life, in terms of, here he was as everyone always says around here, boy from Nebraska makes good, comes to MIT, stays the rest of his life with his wife Esther, who is also from Nebraska. What kind of--

SEAMANS: I've just had reason recently to do a lot of reflective thinking about it, because my mother was Nebraskan. And she was born in the same town five years to the day before Doc, April 6, 1898. Doc was born April 6, 1903, both in Fremont, Nebraska. My mother has just recently passed away. And I was in that area talking about the nostalgia. And you think of what happened over the century that these people lived, the 20th century, how simple life-- I mean, we can't even imagine how simple life was in those days in the Midwest Western part of this country.

And Doc came from that knowing that life was basically a very simple thing. And you could enhance it by strobe photography, you could do it. But I think he always had a great appreciation for the straightforward simplicity and he never was a very complicated-- I mean, I don't think he knew how to be complicated, or obtuse, or oblique. I mean, he was straightforward. And that was his Western way of doing things, his mid-Western, I should say. I think based upon that-- my mother also happened to be a teacher-- I think that was that Western way of looking at things that followed him through MIT.

It was, to some degree, his charm, the straightforwardness, this saying, telling it like it is but always having people with you and the importance of that. I think that the fact that he came from that section of the world gave him such a different view of what MIT was that he could literally capture MIT, and look at the other people in that period that were also either Westerns or Midwesterners. Jay Stratton came from Seattle. Charles Stark Draper came from Missouri. Jim Killian came from South Carolina, which isn't west, but at least, it's a different atmosphere.

And a lot of our people that really-- well, Compton, another contemporary who really made MIT different was an Ohioan. A lot of these people came from that part back here and really saw, perhaps appreciate MIT more for what its potential was then people who had sort of grown up around here. That's a pretty hard thesis to really prove in great depth. But my thinking is that Doc's power came from that personality, which was primarily a simple country boy, as he loved to say. He loved that part of the country.

INTERVIEWER: Although Doc, certainly, you'd be the first to admit it, Doc was a great showman.

SEAMANS: Oh, of course.

INTERVIEWER: I mean, Doc understood his country charm and yukked it up--

SEAMANS: Of course.

INTERVIEWER: --more than once.

SEAMANS: He played it for all it was worth simply because he knew it worked. But it was always a simple message. It was not a complicated message. He never fooled people. He never tried to work around people. It was always a head-on approach, from everything I know about him, certainly, that's true.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any good Doc stories that we ought to have in--

CREW: Before you go into that--

INTERVIEWER: --for the record?

CREW: I think that drill is going to render your audio useless.

INTERVIEWER: We just wanted to just--

CREW: Okay. Whatever you really want.

INTERVIEWER: Favorite Doc stories, that was the thing we wanted to close with.

SEAMANS: I think one of my most precious memories of Doc are probably not individual stories about idiosyncrasies or any of that sort of stuff, there were enough of those. But it was his sheer fortitude, and drive, and determination to do what he wanted to do. And that's always been a model for me. I don't succeed nearly as well as Doc was always able to do, or nearly always.

Doc saw one of his students, Paul Gray, become president of MIT. And this was in 1980, in the spring of-- actually, in mid-July of 1980, Doc had a very severe stroke. He was not really expected to recover from that. And he had overexerted himself carrying stuff from his car back down to Memorial. But Paul Gray's inauguration was not until September of that year. And Doc announced through emissaries, early on, that he was, by God, going to march in that parade for his student.

And by God, he was there to do it. And it was a wonderful tribute to Paul Gray, but even more so to Doc that he could come from these, literally depths, people had not expected him to live after all, he was pretty well along in years, he was almost 80, at that point, I suppose, 77. And but by God, he was going to do it. And he was going to see his person inaugurated, and he did.

I mentioned it slightly before, Doc had the amazing ability to have these very low spells and then when a group, no matter where that group was or what that group, if they'd invite him to speak, Doc would get up for it, literally, up out of bed to do it. And I think Jean Mooney, his long-term, longtime secretary and assistant, really did a wonderful job of protecting him from this. And when she disappeared from the scene, he had no protection. So even at the end, if somebody in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, would call and invite him to speak, and he got on the phone, he would say yes.

And this, I think Charlie Wyckoff indicated the same thing, if somebody in England who had gotten him on the phone and said, will you come? Oh, yeah, I'd love to come. But what I really want to emphasize here is the magnetism that he had for the MIT student body. Now he hadn't actively taught any courses for more than 20 years prior to his death. And yet, every student knew him. Every student would frequent Strobe Alley. They all knew him. They all had his postcards.

And if he would give a talk on two days notice in Kresge, which seats 1,200 students, he'd have the place jam-packed and have them entrenched no matter what he talked about. He just had that ability to do it. And I remember the dedication of Edgerton Hall where he was again, had had a bad period of health. And he wasn't really actually, as I recall, expected to come to that event. But nothing in the world would have kept him away from that.

If we go through our files, there is one fascinating thing about Doc that he became interested in time capsules. Any Building that was built on the MIT campus from about the mid '40s on has a time capsule. Now sometimes these were Coke bottles with wax stuck in them. But Doc was involved in every one of those. He had a fascination of trying to preserve the time that you're doing something and make it so that somebody in the distant future would find that.

And when the EG&G branch-- or the wing to the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building was being completed, I should say when that third part of the building was being added, which was to be the EG&G building, Doc, of course, had to have a big ceremony to bury his time capsule for that. And it was a weird collection of materials that he put there.

Now I hope that that building never is destroyed so that we have that material. But someday, somebody will find a wonderful collection of material that Doc-- and there was-- when the Media Building, Media Arts Building was being dedicated, Doc-- and this is verified-- Doc would sneak out at night. He and Esther would sneak out around the edge of the building and plant time capsules around the edge of that building simply because he had this fascination with time capsules and could not stand the thought that there was not going to be a formal time capsule ceremony for that building. Lord knows where he got involved in this. I've never talked to Esther about it. But it'd be one of these wonderful--

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel like you have a responsibility of-- you said, I'm here to take care of the Edgerton time capsule, at least for a while?

SEAMANS: Well, I think what we've tried to do, literally from working with Doc from the beginning throughout his life, was to gather just as much of his history as possible. And then with the cooperation of the Edgerton Foundation and other things that have happened over the last two years, I think not only will his legacy be well-preserved by having all the photographs in one spot, easily accessible to a very wide audience, such as seeing the instruments that are actually used, seeing that so there will be a in-depth understanding of his genius when it came to figuring out how to do something. If it didn't work this way, he tried it that way. You learn by the failure.

So I think what the Museum has literally been trying to do with a lot of assistance from a great number of people is to make this legacy a very much part of the available literature about MIT. MIT and Edgerton are almost synonymous, from a point of view. He personifies the best things of MIT. And MIT is sort of personified-- the best thing about MIT are personified in Edgerton. The two are almost inseparable when it comes to-- so if you understand one to some degree, you understand the other one to an equal degree.

I think the average student today is a little-- who goes to MIT, coming in as a freshman say, today-- leaves here a little less prepared to face the world because he or she did not know Doc personally, had never met him. Most of them heard about him because of Strobe Alley. And that, I hope, will continue. I also hope that the material that we're getting into our database for this whole project will enable them, sitting in their dorm rooms working at their own computers, to sort of explore through Doc's fascinating life and understand more about it.

I think just from what I know of, and what we've been able to see of it thus far, they will be able to do that. And I think they will. MIT students love to explore. And what a better way to explore than having your own hacking dig through a database of Doc Edgerton materials. I think it will be heavily used that way. And I think greater understanding will come about Doc and MIT thanks to it.