David E. Hogg, interviewed by Kenneth I. Kellermann, 2013
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Please bear in mind that: 1) this material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) an interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event.
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Kellermann:
This is Ken Kellermann and I’m here with Ellen Bouton and Sierra Smith and we are going to be talking with Dave Hogg, who was on the NRAO Scientific Staff from the very early years in a variety of capacities.
Bouton:
And it’s March 26, 2013.
Kellermann:
Thank you. So Dave you first came to NRAO as a student.
Hogg:
Yes, that’s right. I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto. My professor there, Donald MacRae, was a colleague of Gart Westerhout. And Westerhout and MacRae had created a table of conversion of the Galactic Longitude 1 to the new system Galactic Longitude 2 back when it was difficult to do that because of the absence of computers. So they knew each other that way. And Westerhout had come to North America, I guess eventually to get a position. This was after his thesis was published with the Westerhout catalog of sources. I was slated to help build a solar radio observatory in Toronto and then later in Algonquin Park. I had done a master’s degree in swept frequency observations of the Sun. I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about it. My other professor was Alan Yen. I took an electromagnetic course from him too. And Westerhout came and he was coming to Green Bank to begin observations at high frequencies using Drake’s traveling wave tube radiometer at 8 GHz as a new system. And Westerhout was going to do spectral indices and detailed mapping work in HII regions. So MacRae arranged that Westerhout invite me to come and watch him observe. I came down to Washington for the spring URSI meeting, which was held in April in D.C. in those years. I attended that, and then rode with Findlay and Emberson to Green Bank. I stayed in the Hill House and watched Westerhout try to observe at 8 GHz.
Kellermann:
What year was that?
Hogg:
1959.
Kellermann:
’59.
Hogg:
After that, it seemed that it was a good thing to try to – MacRae said I could do a thesis in HII regions. I did W3, W4, and W5. W3, of course, has since then achieved some notoriety. I liked W4 which is IC1805, a big region which I postulated had been swept clear by stellar winds, but it was only later that, I think, proved to be perhaps correct. In any event, I did that, I mapped them. So I came back to Green Bank at least three times, mainly using the 85 foot. The 140 foot of course was not available and the 300 foot was not either. In the later years I did a little HI work but mainly it was continuum emission from HII regions. I finished all the observing in 1961, I guess, and finished my thesis in draft form in the summer of 1961. I accepted an offer of employment in 1961 fall. I had a visa to come to work, and it was for the summer. My wife Carol at that time was pregnant and there was some urgency to get here. My thesis wasn’t going very well, so I called the consulate saying we couldn’t make it in time for the visa. He said, “I’ll just put in the drawer. You can call me when you want it and I’ll issue it again.” That was the way it worked in those days. So I came without finishing my thesis and I worked for the Observatory and finished the thesis.
Kellermann:
As a staff appointment?
Hogg:
As a staff appointment. I supposed it’s incorrectly called a post doc; it was a Research Associate.
Kellermann:
Oh, was it?
Hogg:
Well, I think it was a research position. We didn’t have post docs.
Kellermann:
It was a Research Associate? Was that what you had or was it Assistant Scientist?
Hogg:
Oh no, it was a Research Associate. [Looks at document.] It says Assistant Scientist. This must be right. It came from the…
Kellermann:
That’s an important question that we did want to ask—whether people went immediately into staff positions? By the time I came it ’65 people were coming is as Research Associates.
Hogg:
Post docs?
Kellermann:
Right, including myself.
Hogg:
I can’t remember.
Kellermann:
Well, this must be right though.
Hogg:
Well I presume I was getting those things accurately when I did this. So I guess there were no post docs, or at least I wasn’t one. And then I finished my thesis and graduated formally in 1962. The production of the thesis was a problem because the University [of Toronto] wanted a number of copies and the Observatory wanted some copies and it was hard to do. So in the end we decided it would be typed on the copper sheets and put into the pseudo-printing machine. And so it put a premium on typing accuracy because whiteout doesn’t work on copper sheets very well.
Kellermann:
I’m not even sure if whiteout had been invented them.
Hogg:
I don’t think so. So I hired a secretary from the Observatory, a close associate of Beaty Sheets. This was a young lady, Joanne Rose, and she was really, really good. I would go down to Slaty Fork, which is outside Cass, back in the hollows. I mean she was back in the hollows, trust me on that, and this was through the winter. I would go down and get her Saturday morning and bring her up. She’d type for three hours. Her boyfriend, Brooks, was an engineer in the Works Area, and would come pick her up and take her away at lunch time. So that’s the way the late fall went. It finally got printed. Carol collated it together, all laid out on the kitchen table. The kid was crying in the background. She would walk around the table collating.
Kellermann:
But you were on the staff then, an employee?
Hogg:
I was on the staff, employed.
Kellermann:
So did NRAO pay for this typing or did you have to?
Hogg:
I paid for it. It was my thesis. She was working Saturdays for me. It was a private deal. Her sister, by the way, she was really quite striking, attractive, and young men tended to follow her down the hallway. This guy Brooks ended up marrying her. And I was devastated. Sadly, she died when she was only 40 years old or so. It just broke my heart. She and Brooks had gone off where he was working somewhere. I don’t know what she died of. I assume cancer or something similar. Her younger sister Sandy, who was a computer person for some years and married Al Braun, and resides now in Socorro.
Kellermann:
So you partly answered one of the questions I wanted to ask about why you came to Green Bank or to NRAO. NRAO was a US national observatory and I was going to ask if you or MacRae had thought about any other place like Caltech? When did you say you first came? What year?
Hogg:
1959.
Kellermann:
So by that time Caltech had a 90 foot antenna.
Hogg:
Yeah, but I don’t know that they had a visitor policy.
Kellermann:
Well that was the question. NRAO was originally established for the US scientists, to bring them into the modern era. Was that at all a constraint at the time or a non-issue?
Hogg:
I don’t know whether it was a constraint for Heeschen and later Struve and Berkner and those people. That was slightly above my pay grade. They didn’t discuss that with me. For me, the border was transparent. I was back and forth across because my mother was American.
Kellermann:
Right. Westerhout at that time was still visiting from the Netherlands or was he already at Maryland?
Hogg:
I can’t tell you that. I thought he was visiting from the Netherlands, but I suspect it wasn’t long thereafter that he came to Maryland. And he may have already been there. [Note added 2014: Westerhout came to Maryland from Leiden in 1962]
Kellermann:
But anyway your coming was more or less a private deal?
Hogg:
The first instance was a private deal with Westerhout and MacRae, and that showed me the place. But the second time when I started my thesis work, of course, had to be done properly and approved by NRAO. I put an observing proposal in.
Kellermann:
You did?
Hogg:
Yeah. By then Westerhout was out of the picture. It was between me and Heeschen basically. So they were interested in starting a student program.
Kellermann:
Do you still have that proposal by any chance, or the letter? How extensive was it? Do you remember? Just a letter?
Hogg:
At best a letter, it may have been a phone call from MacRae to Heeschen probably. It was not quite as formal. But it was an agreed upon thesis proposal and de facto NRAO kept an eye on me because MacRae was never here.
Kellermann:
Right. And you used NRAO instrumentation? You didn’t build anything yourself?
Hogg:
Correct.
Kellermann:
And that was…
Hogg:
It was primarily the Ewen-Dae 21 centimeter receiver, for continuum, and I would have to look up my thesis, but I had some 10 centimeter stuff, I think. I tried the 8 GHz thing. But it’s kind of interesting to look back now and say, of course, but back then, there was a huge friction between Westerhout and to some extent Drake, whose receiver it was, and the technical staff, because the receiver was never as stable as Westerhout wanted. He was badly disappointed when he came. It was never as stable as he thought it was going to be. And the quick answer was that none of us appreciated how significant the water vapor was, and the clouds.
Kellermann:
At 8 GHz?
Hogg:
At 8 GHz, yeah, all atmospheric. So these lads would come out and they’d work the receiver. And they’d do their load tests and it would be straight down the page. And they hook it up and point up to the sky and it started going back and forth. And Drake would cuss and Westerhout would cuss and they'd storm off.
Kellermann:
And who finally appreciated…
Hogg:
I don’t know who. By the time I was doing stuff, they knew that you better get a nice day there to have luck with that receiver. I’m sure Drake. He was doing his Venus stuff.
Kellermann:
I think it was important if it was somebody at NRAO as opposed to elsewhere.
Hogg:
I can’t tell you that.
Kellermann:
Marc Vinokour, wasn’t he involved?
Hogg:
After the fact.
Kellermann:
After the fact. He made quantitative measurements or something.
Hogg:
Well he wasn’t there during any of this time. He wasn’t there when I was doing my thesis. I probably saw him for the first time maybe when I came in the fall of 1961. I’m not even sure if he was there then. My thesis people were Menon, Wade, Roger Lynds.
Kellermann:
You say your thesis people, these were all people who helped you, advised you?
Hogg:
Yes. Actually I was kind of really shocked when I came back. Roger had a grey back publication of a W3 region, which was my thesis. So I had to do a little fast shuffle. What could I say?
Kellermann:
This existed when you came, or came out after you came?
Hogg:
It came while I was in the process of my several trips here.
Kellermann:
So who else was around then? You’ve mentioned Wade, Menon, Drake…
Hogg:
Heeschen.
Kellermann:
Findlay?
Hogg:
Findlay. Hvatum at some point, before 1962. I can’t remember Sebastian, when I first got to meet him or when he first came. Hugh Johnson. I can’t remember when he was there. Struve. During the time I came, Struve came as Director. He wasn’t when I first came with Westerhout. And Struve brought [Roger] Lynds and Beaty [Lynds] and Beaty did her famous sky surveys of dark and bright clouds. Most of that work was here working from Palomar.
Kellermann:
What, sorry?
Hogg:
Working from the Palomar prints. I’ve forgotten which was which. I guess she did the bright HII regions first and then the dark clouds. But Lynds dah dah dah is a famous dark cloud. The dah dah dah had done molecular studies and stuff. I believe it was that dark cloud survey that was done under Struve while she was here. Miss Ness [Lillian Ness], Struve brought her. She was his principal assistant. She morphed into being a librarian after Struve left. And then there was Mary Jane Wade. I guess she had basically assisted Struve, but I can’t remember with what. And Struve had a couple of collaborators. If you look up papers by Struve at that time, some of these collaborators would parachute into Green Bank. They’d knock out a paper and then parachute back out.
Kellermann:
This is unrelated to radio astronomy in general?
Hogg:
In general. One of the guys that I really was impressed by was a fellow called St. Temesváry, really a bright guy. And he taught I believe at SUNY-Albany. And he and Sebastian and a couple of other intelligent guys wrote this book on star formation back circa 1960 and it was a really great little monograph. I think these may have been prize essays. I can’t quite remember. One could look that up. [Note added 2014: Die Entstehung von Sternen durch Kondensation diffuser Materie, G.R. Burbidge, F.D. Kahn, R. Ebert, S. v. Hoerner, St. Temesváry (Springer-Verlag, 1960)] But this St. Temesváry guy was a contemporary of Sebastian. He came to see either Struve or Sebastian or both, and what a gracious, warm, smart guy that fellow was.
Kellermann:
Excuse me for interrupting, but in transcribing other interviews Sierra and I agreed that all proper names should be spelled out, because when it comes to transcribing them afterwards the (unclear), What was the first name?
Hogg:
I can’t remember what the first name was. The last name was St. Temesváry.
Kellermann:
Oh, that’s his last name. I thought that was - spell it out for me.
Hogg:
I can’t! No. I’ll have to look the book up. Whether his first name was the German equivalent of James or John or -
Kellermann:
I thought Saint was - I thought Temesváry was his last name. Anyway, when you first, when you were here as a student you were here alone?
Hogg:
One trip alone, one later trip with Carol, then third trip alone. And then I had three trips for my thesis, and one with Westerhout. I was probably here four times? I was here twice a year until I had my thesis (?) done.
Kellermann:
So you were here - “here” being Green Bank.
Hogg:
Yes.
Kellermann:
You were in Green Bank both alone and with your family -
Hogg:
Yes.
Kellermann:
Could you say something about personal relations between you and your family and the local Green Bank people.
Hogg:
Well, when I was here alone, I was here alone, I had no relations with the local people, except with those that worked at the Observatory. One time I was here, it was probably the summer of 1959 to 1960, was a time of great storms, so we had of order 150 to 180 inches of snow that year. And it happened that these storms were falling towards the end of the work week, and the roads would be closed because they couldn’t plow them fast enough. So the chief field foreman for the 140 foot and I were in residence in the residence hall, and that was hard shifting because the people couldn’t get in to support the residence hall. I would keep the fire going and all that stuff. And he wanted to go back to Detroit, which is where he lived on the weekends, and he couldn’t ever get out because the roads were blocked. So that was one of the deep relationships that I formed. He was a very nice fellow.
Kellermann:
But he wasn’t really a local.
Hogg:
He wasn’t a local at all. He was from Detroit. When my wife was down, we had no children, we lived in the Low farm, which is Whit Low’s house, which was grandfathered under the agreement until the death, I think it was of his mother, and when she died the house would revert to NRAO. The summer before we came it was occupied by Robert Fleisher who was at that time from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was here to help us establish a summer visitor program in astronomy. I remember he and I didn’t overlap much. And then he subsequently went on to fame and glory in the NSF. I moved into his house with Carol, and we inherited Whit Low’s mother’s chickens, which we raised. However, we tried help from Trent’s Store to advise us on the kind of feed that we had to get. Carol and I got well versed in animal husbandry at the time. So we looked after the chickens, and when we left, with the permission of the Observatory, we gave the chickens to a friend we had developed. They were only good, they were scrawny hens by then, they were only good for stew chickens, I think she told us. So we lived there, and we still mainly, that was the year of the Kennedy-Nixon election, and we went to the election party and the Lynds’ house. There were also the cheap televisions then. Television was an art form in the Radio Observatory. We’d have very spirited discussions (?) goal a crossfire Yagi was the one that could get you two or three stations, but you had to have a lot of (?). Anyway, so we were quite good friends with Beaty and Roger Lynds, the Drakes were very kind to us. They lived – you would know it as the Fomalont’s, that little house back of the (?). The Heeschens were very kind, Riffes were very kind to us. We knew the people from the store, Trent’s Store. There wasn’t, of course, a Henry’s back then. There was a store on the corner of the recreation grounds road. They were pretty reserved people, they were civil but they weren’t warm, so we were Trent’s Store people. And we had a good relationship with Clarence Sheets, he looked after our cars. But it wasn’t until we lived here that we started to know these folks.
Kellermann:
You want to elaborate on that, after you started to live there for a while?
Hogg:
Well, once we lived there, we had kids, we got in the school system, the second time we lived there Carol became quite active -
Kellermann:
Sorry, second time being?
Hogg:
1970. She got into Garden Club, and they had plantings around, our kids were in the local Green Bank elementary school. By then (?) was the high school – I’ve forgotten when the high school (?). In any event she was involved. She offered to paint the school for them, and so she did. And I don’t know if she had a paintbrush or not, but I sure did. A lot of the Observatory people. The Board of Education gave us the paint, the brushes. And this was a real school, ceilings were 12 feet, 14 feet. In the upper grades, when you were washing and then painting, you had to paint over the tobacco stains, from chewing tobacco. I was amazed how the kids could do that on a 12 foot ceiling!
Kellermann:
This was the elementary school or the high school?
Hogg:
Well, it was one and the same at the time, but I can’t remember when the high school kids moved out. Whether in the 1970s the high school kids were still there. When was Pocahontas High School built? I was there the inaugural year, it was sometime in the 70-74 time.
Kellermann:
It was while I was there, certainly.
Hogg:
I was there the inaugural year, it was 1970 to 74, sometime in there. Whether it was the start or the end of that period I can’t tell you. But there may have been seniors in that school when my kids started there first.
Kellermann:
So what other interactions did the staff have with the school? People taught?
Hogg:
No. AUI gave money. Mary Brundage taught. Eventually Michele taught, after West Virginia decided to provisionally accept the California education system and licensing. Michele still had to take qualifying courses.
Kellermann:
No, no. She had, I don’t think she had any educational training at all.
Hogg:
Wasn’t she a teacher in California? I’ve colored that story. Whatever. I was always borne away by this bureaucracy not accepting a California graduate for its teaching program, but it’s typical of the way they run their business. They had the highest standards for barbers, masseuses, etc., etc., almost impossible to get a license in that state.
Kellermann:
That was more a protection rather than -
Hogg:
Well, it was something that somebody – follow the money. Anyway, that’s a side issue. I don’t want to be quoted on it – that’s a side issue with little to do with astronomy. Back to your questions.
Kellermann:
Were the schools a consideration in your leaving to come to Charlottesville?
Hogg:
Minor consideration. The schools, my son started, the older, in grade four and the younger in grade one. And when they came to Charlottesville they moved seamlessly into the Albemarle County system, and in fact were better prepared than their counterparts in terms of reading, writing, and arithmetic. They had a little band, but not much, zero lab and the other stuff like that. We weren’t at high school level. Had we been at high school level it would have been a very serious consideration. But why we came back, we missed a larger city. Towns were nice, they were friendly, but they were small. Fifty-five, sixty miles to get a decent grocery store, a decent medical situation – that’s too much. I had lots of times, you must have, too, I had lots of times, I had studded tires, I had chains, Carol slid off the road into a pond, and that was bad. There were just times you couldn’t drive.
Kellermann:
Aside from your own experience. You must have been around when the whole discussion came up, with the thoughts of moving to Charlottesville, not you personally, but -
Hogg:
I was, I was, but not a part of it. Carol remembers a famous Board dinner in which she was nonplussed. Board person after Board person would come up to her and basically say, “Well, how do you like living in Green Bank?”
Kellermann:
Do you remember what year?
Hogg:
No. It was close to the decision time. But that decision was going on at a level above my pay grade. But we knew this was happening. I did not know of the tension between Rabi and Heeschen. That was never discussed until after the fact. I did not know that there was even serious consideration of such a remote place as Princeton. It would have been really hard to operate the Observatory (?) there in that day, with the communications, since we had (?) road there or (?). I’m not sure that, other than for political reasons, West Virginia, the university, was ever a serious challenger. I don’t know that.
Kellermann:
Was it discussed among the staff, a) do we want to move somewhere, and b) where?
Hogg:
At my level there was desultory discussion, but serious discussion of those two questions was upstream.
Kellermann:
The staff was never really involved in any of the -
Hogg:
This staff person was not. Ask Wade or someone like that whether he and Mary Jane -
Kellermann:
Well you were all young.
Hogg:
No, he was quite a bit older than I because he had done military service. He had graduated, I mean he went to Australia in 1958 or something, so he was three, four years ahead of me in PhD, plus two, three years in Army, so no, we weren’t all the same age. He was a very tight colleague, a respected colleague of Heeschen’s. So when I say, it’s not a frivolous suggestion to ask Wade, because he was much more involved in the Observatory management than I was.
Kellermann:
Well, as you know, we talked to Dave Heeschen about it [see Heeschen interview] but it would be interesting to get the perspective of junior staff. Let’s go back to the working relations in Green Bank between the scientific staff and the support staff. Fred Crews was there, and Omar Bowyer, who else were the other key players?
Hogg:
First three or four telescope operators were Fred, Omar, Bill Meredith, very important, Troy Henderson, very important. And in this kind of way, Howard Brown, Bobby Vance, Bobby Viers, one more, one more, so there were eight probably. They had a radio engineering background. So I think both Omar and Fred Crews were at radio stations. I believe that to be true. I’d forgotten about – oh, and George Grove, don’t forget George Grove. He had had extensive technical training in the military service. He was also from MIT, but did not graduate from MIT. I learned my electronics from the Bureau of (Nav?) Ships Electronics Guide for Technicians, which you must know, and which was the handbook in 1957, ‘58, circa, for anybody starting out in electronics. You had to have that book. It was a great book, it was designed to teach untrained technicians how to maintain shipboard radar and gunnery control systems. So one always, for amplifiers, closed circuits, looped circuits, servo systems, it was a great book.
Bouton:
What was the title?
Hogg:
Bureau of Nav Ships? Bureau of Navy? I can’t remember.
Bouton:
The book title?
Hogg:
I’m grasping for it.
Kellermann:
It was a soft cover 8 by 10 format, there was a whole series of them.
Hogg:
800 pages, 600 pages -
Kellermann:
And it was for non-academics.
Hogg:
Electronics. Naval electronics. I don’t know what the title was. I don’t even know if I can put my hands on it. I think it was Bureau of Nav Ships or some strange thing -
Kellermann:
I think I still have one or two of them, not that particular one, on transistors of something.
Hogg:
Anyhow, so Grove was well-founded in math, and some of the other guys I’m sure were. But they were important. And the works area people were important. So Paul Devlin was kind of the site officer, he did everything around the site.
Kellermann:
That was a bit later, wasn’t it?
Hogg:
No, he was there pretty early. I mean, may have been the – he may not have been there in 1959, but he was around a lot of time. I mean, I got to know the telescope operators, the Gum brothers and the - One of my memorable moments -
Kellermann:
He wasn’t an operator, he was -
Hogg:
He was a telescope mechanic. But one of my memorable moments was some time in that period, but in the winter, maybe in the first winter I was wintering there, Heeschen said I should go and set the panels on the 85 foot telescope. I can’t remember the month, but it was winter, trust me it was winter, and I can’t remember the temperature, but it was certainly below zero, and it had to be a clear night, you didn’t want to do it in the sunlight. So I and Sidney Smith, who was running the theodolite, I was there to see the process, check them, and Basil and Mackie Gum were there to turn the screws. And you stood up there in the dish at midnight, and let’s say zero, maybe 10 below zero. I’d come from Canada, and you say, “Well, that’s good.” I must have, this latitude was sub-tropical, so I had my winter topcoat but not my – I had flying boots, lined flying boots, that I used when I observed at the telescope at Richmond Hill – but I did not have them there because of seeing, you know, spring blossoms, cherries – and I’m standing in regular shoes on this metal surface which was a heat sink, just pulling the heat out of your body. And the guys who were dressed properly, they were getting in half an hour and they were so cold they couldn’t work. So they’d work for half an hour and then we’d go down and go in the control building, and it’s just agony. It’s so cold it went right into my bones.
Kellermann:
I can verify that, Dave, because I did the same thing with Wade on the 140 foot, in August, and I thought we were in equilibrium with the 3 degree background. It was cold.
Hogg:
Nasty stuff. But the bonus was the Mackie boys, no not Mackie boys, Gum boys, plus one or the other climbers would entertain us with stories. So Mackie was sure that he had seen the Abominable Snowman when he had lived up near Snowshoe. But it was so cold. But mainly it was (?)
Kellermann:
The people on the scientific staff, to what extent did you have what we now call functional duties? Particularly when you came, when you were hired?
Hogg:
Well, when I came my functional duty was to get my thesis, to avoid embarrassment. Very shortly thereafter, yeah, I had functional duties. So Heeschen, when the 300 foot was about to come online, assigned people to use the 300 foot. So, was Ivan [Pauliny-Toth] there? Somebody had to do point sources and calibration. I and Johnson, Hugh Johnson, were doing extended galactic sources. So I started doing supernovae. And so on the one hand it was to get supernovae papers, on the other hand it was to understand the telescope. And it was shortly thereafter, ‘63 maybe, that we formed an interferometer.
Kellermann:
We’ll come to that. We want to spend a lot of time on that.
Hogg:
Now I would say ‘61 to early ‘62 I had to do my thesis, ‘62 to ‘63 I was doing 300 foot under assignment from Heeschen specifically.
Kellermann:
Assignment to work on the calibration and commissioning or to use it for science?
Hogg:
Well, both. I mean, to use it for science you had to commission it. There was no arbitrary separation.
Kellermann:
I know. I did the same thing on the 140 foot.
Hogg:
But I was offered the opportunity to use the 300 foot to study supernova remnants, and so I took it. When Heeschen offered, you can’t refuse him.
Kellermann:
Do you know what responsibilities other people had?
Hogg:
Well, Lynds had gone by then. Drake, I can’t remember -
Kellermann:
Scientifically he was doing planets, Millimeter -
Hogg:
Yeah, he had gone out somewhere and met Frank Low, and Frank Low got (?). So Frank was doing his millimeter stuff, not on the big telescopes. He had his own telescopes. Menon, when he was there, he got into a mode of oscillating [between NRAO and elsewhere]. When he was there he was doing 300 foot galactic stuff. Lynds was doing H II regions. I’ve forgotten who was doing extragalactic sources.
Kellermann:
Ivan.
Hogg:
Ivan was there by then.
Kellermann:
Pauliny-Toth, Wade, and Heeschen had their project on the 300 foot.
Hogg:
That’s right. That’s who it was. Sebastian [von Hoerner] was there, I can’t remember which years, and I can’t remember when he got so involved, it must have been a bit later, with occultations of Crab Nebula sources. He developed those in a Sebastian-like way, this elegant theory of occultation analysis.
Kellermann:
Did he do any on 85-1, or was it - I know he did it on the 140 foot? In fact, I think he had the first scientific observation on the 140 foot even before it was finished.
Hogg:
To do an occultation.
Kellermann:
In May or something.
Hogg:
The Crab was being occulted in ‘64, ‘65. Spurred a lot of interest.
Kellermann:
And what about Struve? We’ve heard lots about him -
Hogg:
He was very much a bi-modal guy. You read Osterbrock’s book about Yerkes, and you see the Struve that most people know. A man of absolute iron, high standards, and rigid, tough. The Struve I knew was not that guy. The Struve I knew, well, to begin with, I didn’t know him that well. And, you know, he had changed somewhat, he was in failing health, he was burdened by the problems of the 140 foot. And he socialized with women. So my wife was, in order that – neither one of us could work because we didn’t have visas -
Kellermann:
When you were a student.
Hogg:
When I was a student. That was when I got to know Struve best. So neither one of us could work, and yet we were there and they arranged so we had a house, but the house had rent attached to it, so my wife worked off the rent by assisting Beaty Lynds in the Observatory library. So she became one of the women, Lynds, Mary Jane, Carol, there was this other lady with whom he wrote a book, and she was in residence -
Kellermann:
Oh, yes. Starts with a (D? Z?)
Hogg:
Zelberg? No, that’s wrong. Anyhow. So they would kind of wander on, and he would come by and take them off for coffee, and they’d talk about the most recent Marilyn Monroe movie. Excuse me? Struve? Talk about this? That’s what he was into. So he’d go up to DC to the AUI meetings and he’d go out to the most recent Marilyn Monroe movie. But we saw him just a little bit. Of course, he was writing his Sky and Telescope articles, and we were all reading them, because you had to read them, that’s how you got through graduate school, was to read Sky and Telescope’s Struve articles. And I do remember one time, 1960 plus or minus, when Minkowski wrote an article, probably about Cygnus, and Struve had it, I don’t know whether he saw a pre-publication copy in his position, but he came into the coffee – well, he’d do the ladies in the afternoon and the staff in the morning – and (that’s how you do science?). And, “That Minkowski! I will smash him like a bug!”
Kellermann:
What was the issue?
Hogg:
I can’t remember, but he was just livid. He though Minkowski had got the science wrong or something.
Kellermann:
Colliding galaxies?
Hogg:
Maybe it was colliding galaxies. Anyhow, that was the one time I’d ever seen Struve like the old Struve. I mean, he was very sharp. He hadn’t lost his edge that way. Just physically he looked tired.
Kellermann:
He wasn’t that old by our standards.
Hogg:
His body was.
Kellermann:
Well, he’d had a tough life.
Hogg:
He apparently suffered in the detention camps.
Kellermann:
Right. But aside from the morning coffee -
Hogg:
Well, there were AUI meetings.
Kellermann:
No, about his interaction with the staff.
Hogg:
Not with this staff. I mean, you had to understand, there was a distinct pecking order.
Kellermann:
Ah, there was. You know, one imagines this was a small group in an isolated – usually that kind of environment reduces the impact of class distinction.
Hogg:
It depends on the issue, doesn’t it? So we would talk science. Heeschen was the director of the scientific effort, Struve was the Director of the Observatory and doing the 140 foot.
Kellermann:
So Heeschen was the main scientific interface.
Hogg:
Yes. So did I talk science with Heeschen, Drake, Wade? Yes. Did I talk science with Struve? Much less so, because my intersection, cross section, with his was much less. Did Drake and Heeschen talk science with Struve? I’m sure they did. Struve was a Herr Professor. I don’t care how small or big the group was, he was a Herr Professor. Heeschen wasn’t, right? I don’t know about Bolton, but Struve was a Herr Professor. And Herr Professor, that term carries a certain protocol. And that’s the way it was. So, not even a graduate student, right, well a graduate student but not even a post-doc. There are other low forms of life but I don’t choose to associate with them either!
Kellermann:
So he brought the European traditions with him.
Hogg:
To some extent. Now he was forced by circumstance, he had some bright lieutenant, right? Heeschen. Findlay for that matter. We couldn’t all be (unclear)
Kellermann:
Findlay was hired by AUI, is that right? Do you remember?
Hogg:
I believe that’s correct.
Kellermann:
Rabi – There was some personal relationship.
Bouton:
He came in November of 1959, no 1958, November of 1958.
Kellermann:
Before or after Struve?
Bouton:
Wait, wait, no, earlier than that. November of 1956 [27 December 1956].
Hogg:
Oh, before Struve. It could well have been Berkner through the atmospheric connection, because Findlay had some knowledge of atmospheric physics in England.
Kellermann:
Can you comment on Project Ozma? What you knew, when you knew it?
Hogg:
Well, I certainly knew it. There was no secret about it. Struve made an important decision at the critical moment. I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s subsequently been quite well documented. But he was a strong supporter of trying it. I did go to the briefing which Drake held for the telescope (operators?) at which the confidential nature of the project was discussed, how it was absolutely critical that they not blab their mouth about it. So who was there? Well, I don’t know. Fred. George Grove.
Kellermann:
Had you discussed the project at coffee, you know, in a casual way, or -
Hogg:
A little bit. Nothing that stayed in my - So I was surprised when Carol, I was talking with Carol, and I was here and Carol was in Toronto. And the CBC had an article about Project Ozma, and she didn’t know anything about Ozma, but she knew about Green Bank. And she, when I talked, she said, “What do you know about this?” That was about it. There were, after the fact, were there reporters? I can’t even remember that. Drake had one or two tame guys that he gave permission to. I can’t remember that.
Kellermann:
It wasn’t thought of as a big deal. I mean, was it just another observing project?
Hogg:
No, no, it was more than that. It was recognized that this was a very high profile thing that had a lot of public interest. I can’t remember, when did we learn the highway in New Mexico. That was before Ozma, right? What’s the name of the famous town in New Mexico?
Bouton:
Roswell.
Hogg:
Roswell! Roswell was pre-1960, wasn’t it?
Bouton:
‘47.
Hogg:
Thank you. So the public was attuned to this topic. And we were savvy, we the Observatory, were savvy enough to appreciate that if the thing were not properly managed, it could go non-linear very quickly. It was not just another look for another HII region by some graduate student.
Kellermann:
Now about the 140 foot. You know a lot about the problems, Heeschen’s written about it -
Hogg:
I have very little to add to that. I mean, it was always there in one stage or another. As I say, the guy whose name momentarily escapes me, he was the first contractor, but the successive ups and downs of it were known to the staff. It was not a happy time.
Kellermann:
Were you chomping at the bit waiting for it?
Hogg:
No, I was not.
Kellermann:
Was it critical to your research?
Hogg:
No, absolutely not. Had the 300 foot come, not come, would I have been, well, I think it is again fairly well documented the Observatory would have been in deep trouble. But as it was, the 300 foot was a front line instrument. Slow, yeah, good, yeah, got some good stuff on it.
Kellermann:
But as far as your own research opportunities, that was -
Hogg:
That was it, yeah. And it wasn’t long before we were into the interferometer, we had the two element interferometer got going before the 140 foot, didn’t it? 1964?
Kellermann:
I don’t know. I came in ‘65.
Hogg:
Was it running then?
Kellermann:
Yes.
Hogg:
Was the 140 foot?
Kellermann:
Oh, it was just being finished. That’s right. So the interferometer was running first.
Hogg:
The two element.
Kellermann:
What do you remember about the first outside visitors? You must have been one of them, I guess.
Hogg:
I think I was the first PhD student, thesis. I think I was the first NRAO thesis. I don’t remember much, there would have been some familiar names. I wasn’t there much in the summer. Whether by design or action I don’t know. So I missed the famous summer students. I didn’t know Fomalont. I didn’t know Dickel. I knew of their reputation after, I didn’t know George Field. I didn’t know the summer visitors because I wasn’t there.
Kellermann:
I mean visiting observers. At what point did NRAO become a major user facility as it was designed to be, as opposed to being used by the resident staff.
Hogg:
It must have been after I showed that it was possible to do a thesis there. I’m sure that was it!
Kellermann:
I wasn’t talking about a thesis so much.
Hogg:
I wasn’t either. I was just – my memory is that there weren’t that many visitors, but after all, think of it, the 85 foot was not that much better than what was happening in California, maybe Illinois, certainly Michigan, even Harvard with the 60 foot. So there wasn’t that draw. I remember clearly Burke bringing the, after the 300 foot it began, perked up, Burke brought his DTM correlator, no, no, not correlator, spectrometer to the 300 foot to do HI stuff. I can’t, I could think about it, but right this instant I can’t think of other observers, but I’m sure there were some.
Kellermann:
NRL?
Hogg:
Oh, yeah, the NRL guys, they were on the 300 foot. I don’t remember many people doing the 85 foot.
Kellermann:
For the reasons you said.
Hogg:
Yeah. NRL, when did they get their Maryland Point telescope? It was contemporaneous -
Kellermann:
They were frequent visitors when I was there.
Hogg:
To the 300, 140 foot.
Kellermann:
Both, both.
Hogg:
And the 300 foot. But not 85. Or interferometer.
Kellermann:
Nobody used the 85 foot after the 140 foot, as a single dish -
Hogg:
Right, right. So it wasn’t a philosophical objection, it was a -
Kellermann:
Right. I’m trying to establish at what point NRAO fulfilled its role -
Hogg:
I would say the 300 foot. It was so large a gain in competence.
Kellermann:
And how much support was given to visitors?
Hogg:
Well, the telescope operators obviously. You had to be there, there was no question.
Kellermann:
Some people brought their own equipment, front ends, even, like NRL, I think.
Hogg:
Yeah, that wasn’t, certainly with time it became less and less. Now Hvatum and I built our own front end to do Jupiter polarization, in 1967 or some time like that. I kind of thought we had it on the 85 foot.
Kellermann:
‘67 you said.
Hogg:
Yeah, that’s why I’m confused. Whether we had it on the 85 or the 140 or both -
Kellermann:
You actually participated in the hard core -
Hogg:
Yeah. So I bet you it was before ‘65, but as soon as cryogenic receivers came, that was the end of guys like me who - Now people, I won’t say nobody, but it was unusual, but you had to be technically quite strong.
Kellermann:
Well, the NRL -
Hogg:
The NRL, for example.
Kellermann:
But around that time, then, NRAO began to assume full responsibility for antennas, for receivers -
Hogg:
Yes, stock. So we said that any competent radio astronomer should calibrate and reduce his own data. And only competent radio astronomers would pass through our rigorous proposal system. So therefore, in the syllogism, there was no need for NRL to provide software or calibration support. And it was a tenant of faith, one that I endorsed completely, even to some extent still today, that the observer has to assume the responsibility for his calibration. And back then, pointing was an adventure. And receiver temperatures and gains were an adventure. And not only could the staff not guarantee them, but they couldn’t keep up with the changes in time. So the observer had to do his calibration. And after that, well, it was a big breakthrough when we got around a correlator, and we decided that the visitor couldn’t do the Fourier transform of the autocorrelation, a valid assumption, in retrospect. So we had to have a lot of correlator reduction programs. But it just spat out profiles, and you were on your own after that!
Kellermann:
Who developed that software? Vance? Bobby Vance?
Hogg:
No.
Kellermann:
We didn’t have a -
Hogg:
Art Shalloway did basic hardware and whatever -
Kellermann:
Firmware. [long pause] Vance was the only software person.
Hogg:
No, no, there were people here. This was after, I mean we got really serious after Charlottesville. So we had guys – I’m trying to think of whether it could have been George Conant?
Kellermann:
That was later, I think.
Hogg:
OK.
Kellermann:
Should ask Shalloway.
Hogg:
Shalloway might know that. There is no doubt that Vance understood it and maintained it and kept it up and all that stuff. The heavy duty processing was here. They’d send the tapes here, we had this big processor.
Kellermann:
Right. But that meant in order to use the NRAO facilities, you had to be a, more or less, black belt radio astronomer.
Hogg:
Yes, or be trained by someone who was. There was a problem about whether students like me could just come into town, and the answer was, “No, they can’t.” They’d have to come when there was somebody to show them around, or make arrangements for Kellermann or Fomalont or somebody to tutor.
Kellermann:
I mean, this meant that somebody, Machalski, for example, couldn’t come and use -
Hogg:
No. So that became part of our institutional duties, particularly with the interferometer. I can’t speak so much about the single dishes later on because I was full time – so I would, Hjellming, and Wade, would do students. So we did Frank Bash, and all the early students of the interferometer.
Kellermann:
That’s right. The interferometer required a higher level of black beltness.
Hogg:
That’s probably true. I will tell you this, because I think it’s an interesting reflection on radio astronomy. So I came with Westerhout. He took a strip chart and a ruler and he measured the heights of the bumps. When I started my thesis I was really happy. Because the NRL technology had changed, and they had an analog to digital converter, which took the chart signal and turned it into numbers. And I no longer had to actually – I’ve forgotten if I had to do the ruler bit for a while or not. But most of the time I didn’t have to, I just had numbers I could work with. And so you’d do the scan and there were the numbers. And they were printed out on a batch tape, the same kind of thing you’d see in a grocery store checkout. It was like a revolution. You’d take the batch tape, you (gave?) it to see what it was, and there was your thesis. But, that wasn’t good enough for the NRAO. Very interesting and cunning as technology. So instead of printing it, they got themselves a teletype tape punch thing, and they fed these numbers in and so they got out those punch tapes. And that was even better, because we then eventually got a computer that could read these punch tapes. So I first sat, writing the numbers down. There was a big red chair in the 85-1. And you’d read the A-to-D converter and you’d write the numbers down. That was my first (?). Then you moved to this tape and you could tuck that in your pocket and go home. But all the time you had to somehow get this into the computer. Why we didn’t have a tape to tape to get it into the computer? Well, that was pretty cool except that the particular teletype machines we got were a little less reliable, and so occasionally they would screw up. And you knew they screwed up because they always had a check sum on it, which said whether they had check error or not. And if they had a check error, the paper (?) So what you had was, you had your printout, right, and you had your paper tape, and you’d see where the parity error came to it, and what number it was that you’d missed. Then you’d look around in the paper tape to find that same number, on the printout, you’d fiddle the paper tape until you found that number, then you’d put it back in, and you’d go along for a while. It would happen only a few times an hour and that wasn’t too bad. But when they went bad it would happen all the time. And then you just went back to just keying the number yourself off the - That was astronomy in the good old days.
Kellermann:
Anything else?
Bouton:
You want to do the interferometer next time?
Kellermann:
Yes, we want to do the interferometer leading into the VLA. Sierra?
SB: Was there a difference in culture in your experience from going from Canada to the United States in radio astronomy?
Hogg:
Well, there was no radio astronomy culture per se in Canada. The Canadian students interested in radio astronomy and such, with only one exception, all went to Cambridge or Manchester. Maybe a couple to Australia, but mainly to Cambridge and Manchester. So some of the names you know of the Canadian radio astronomers for the first generation were trained in England, by and large. The exception was me. I don’t know where I would have gone had it not been for this connection. I might have stayed – But when I finished, there was still no radio astronomy in Canada as such. So to work in radio astronomy in Canada, I might have gone with Covington in Ottawa with the solar group, if he had a job, I’m not sure. But I had a nice job here, so - The difference, people would ask, Carol particularly, “Wow! You’ve left Canada. You’ve gone to the United States. There must be a big difference.” And she would say, “Yes, there’s a huge difference. I Canada I was living in a city of a million people. In the United States I’m living in a city of 75 people. That’s the big difference.” And that was the cultural difference. When we lived in Canada, that was a big city.
Kellermann:
Were you offered the job as opposed to applied for it? Did Dave just say, “Why don’t you come here on the staff?”
Hogg:
No, he initiated it. But I can’t remember. It began as a conversation. And I suppose, well, I must have had a letter to get a visa.
Kellermann:
A formality.
Hogg:
A formality.
Kellermann:
OK. [end of part one of interview with David E. Hogg]
======
Kellermann:
It’s April 9th [2013] in Charlottesville, Ken Kellermann talking to Dave Hogg about the NRAO interferometer leading to the VLA. And also here is -
Bouton:
Ellen Bouton.
Burchell:
Tania Burchell.
Smith:
Sierra Smith.
Kellermann:
Actually Dave, before we start, something just came up in the last days about open skies, and – did you send Dave the thing you just found?
Bouton:
No, no. October 1959 announcement that NRAO visitors – Visiting Scientists Program at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. This was published in AJ and it also went in Science, although I haven’t looked to see where it appeared in Science. It says, “The National Radio Astronomy Observatory was established by the National Science Foundation to make available to scientists from any institution facilities for research in radio astronomy. The Observatory now has in operation an 85-ft. diameter radio telescope, together with receivers for work at various wavelengths in the range of 75-cm. to 3.75 cm. Miscellaneous other facilities are also available. The facilities of the Observatory are open to any competent scientist with a program of work in radio astronomy, regardless of institutional affiliation.” And then it goes on to talk about how to write the Observatory.
Hogg:
That’s clearly the document Tony [Beasley] was seeking. That’s the basis. The stuff I sent Tony is fine but it’s not as central as that document, so that was good that you found it.
Kellermann:
All that document does is specify or document what was already to be established NRAO policy.
Hogg:
Yes.
Kellermann:
And it doesn’t touch on the more delicate or sensitive issue of foreign use.
Hogg:
Well, “any” seems to cover anything.
Kellermann:
Nevertheless, it was sent to Science, AJ, and PASP. As you well know, the radio astronomy journal at the time was Nature, and it wasn’t sent to Nature. So my interpretation is, of course, any competent scientist, it didn’t exclude foreign scientists, but it didn’t go out of the way to -
Hogg:
Yeah. I think that you’re spending too much time parsing the English language. That’s all that you’re going to get. So it better serve for open skies because there’s nothing else. That established the policy that was then implemented at the Observatory, and which I then discussed in my note. But my note is derivative, it’s not the basic. That’s it.
Kellermann:
Well, as far as Tony is concerned in policy for the NSF, I agree. As far as reconstructing history, that’s not the full story.
Hogg:
I don’t know what other story there is.
Kellermann:
You weren’t, you were here then?
Hogg:
I was here in 1959 as a graduate student. I certainly wasn’t advising anyone on that policy.
Kellermann:
But you don’t recall any discussion on that policy?
Hogg:
I was here as a Canadian graduate student observing with the 85 foot telescope. That was kind of a demonstration of policy.
Kellermann:
That’s a good point, yeah. What’s your recollection of when we started to get significant numbers of users from outside US institutions? I recall in the early 140 foot days there was some Canadian use, but not much else, I think from outside the country. Metzger went back to Germany and that crowd -
Hogg:
Well, I thought the Germans were using the 300 foot. Wasn’t Vinokur and those folks, weren’t they ahead of the 140 foot? I’d have to look that up, but -
Kellermann:
That was when he was here, though. That was when he was on the staff. I mean, we had lots of foreigners on the staff.
Hogg:
Then you mean people coming from their home institution, they probably didn’t start being significant until the 36 foot, I guess, just offhand. Even the 140 foot didn’t attract that many foreign people, although if you looked in the logs, because of VLB and that kind of stuff, you’d see guys at foreign institutions.
Kellermann:
Who were the big foreign users of the 36 foot?
Hogg:
The French. Francois was there a lot, (Combes?). The French chemists. I don’t think the Germans came much. I think it was mainly the French.
Kellermann:
And then, of course, the VLA really opened it up.
Hogg:
I was starting to say the VLA, and then I realized that’s 1980 and we were probably having foreign visitors before the VLA.
Kellermann:
But that’s when it really became -
Hogg:
That’s when it became a truly international observatory in the sense that you were trying to define it. Because it’s not just foreign guys here. Right.
Kellermann:
OK. Well, let’s go back to interferometry and the beginnings.
Hogg:
OK.
Kellermann:
What was the first – various people have their own interpretation. Of course, we’ve heard from Dave Heeschen and others about the origins of the VLA. Do you have any recollection of early discussions, motivation for building the interferometer, where the motivation for the VLA came from? Was it from the staff, was it from the outside, all of the above?
Hogg:
I think it was more internal. I ascribe most of it to Wade. I really hope and expect that you would talk to Wade. Because I think he was the central figure. Heeschen understood and probably stimulated Wade to think about these things. But as soon as Wade began to think about these things, he became the prime mover. He wrote a couple of important internal documents that motivated interferometry. And basically the idea, over a period of some months, probably, and possibly a year, took root. In the sense that we should do interferometry, that we should start making interferometric studies of sources, we could see that this is the way to get more detail about source structure, about source positions, the way Caltech and England.
Kellermann:
What year was this?
Hogg:
Well, it would have been ‘62, maybe ‘63. I don’t think it was ‘61, because when I came we were still single dish people. So I would guess Wade’s first paper that I remember was maybe late ‘62.
Kellermann:
But to what extent would it be (?) of the interferometer, two element at that time, motivated by its own merit to do interferometry and to what extent was it motivated to – I’m sorry, to what extent was it motivated to do science with the two element interferometer and to what extent was it motivated as a learning about interferometry toward the VLA?
Hogg:
I think, my memory, suspect though it is, is that in the first year, let us say, the interferometer as a concept was to have an interferometer that we could get our hands on and do science with. But within a year, probably, let’s say in the end of ‘62 plus or minus, was “Let’s do an interferometer,” and the end of ‘63 plus or minus, “Let’s do a real imaging instrument, probably unnamed at the time, and use the interferometer to hone our skills and our technology. And so we went ahead with the two element interferometer. It didn’t take long to realize that a two element interferometer was a (?) as an instrument, and so we added a third element for speed and one new station for short spacing. And then we had a synthesis interferometer, although a very slow one. But with that we made pictures of half a dozen important sources. While in the background there was then formed a synthesis array group. So I would have to look at the date, whether it was 1965 or 1966, I was employing site testing hydrometers in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Wade had already identified these three states as being likely sites for an interferometer. So during the late ‘60s – I kept offering these data to Ellen and she kept turning her nose up at it, I add parenthetically, I had to throw them mostly out! During these time we were getting the first estimates of site. It was clear the East Coast was no longer good for a site. Then the VLA has its own story about how we took 35 sites and winnowed them down to seven and then to three and then to one. But that was through the ‘70s. So by the site testing, which my memory was in the ‘66 to ‘69 region, it’s in the book, we were firmly committed to try to design, build, and operate a synthetic array. But the days of the interferometer were clearly numbered. But we were learning a lot. Now, the two element interferometer was a chore. Not only did we have to learn a lot of electronics, we had to learn a lot of science. So we took the output of the interferometer, without fringe stopping, and we’d put it on a chart, and we found where the pole of the interferometer was, which was about four and a half hours west (?), that’s when the fringe went to zero, and we’d roll them down the hallway of the second floor of the Jansky Lab, and we’d count fringes from the zero fringe crossing of the pole down to the transit. And that’s how we told where the positions were. Yes, basic science!
Kellermann:
Who is “we”?
Hogg:
Well, I for sure. I think (Richard?) Clark caught a fringe or two. Certainly Wade. Wade was doing a lot of theory. Clark wasn’t here for some of that. Nigel Keen, he was doing the fringe tracking. He had almost a (??) for the fringe tracking. Clark was very (prominent?), (?) encouragement (?). But we did nothing on it. But we did some two element interferometer stuff, yeah.
Kellermann:
What about the radio link interferometer, the 45 foot.
Hogg:
That was purely VLA prototype
Kellermann:
It was.
Hogg:
Well, in 1964 there was an IAU meeting in Hamburg, right. I went to that, that was the first IAU meeting. The Hamburg meeting was fine, but what was more important was, I was sent to Paris, and Vinokur was there, and he was our guy, he’d been here a number of years, very bright guy. Parenthetically, really sad story, this guy was a disciple of Emile Blum, he was from the French school, brilliant people, (?) This guy had diabetes, refused to be treated for it, and died. I mean, he was a young man. Really. Carol was so angry with him! As a nurse, she kept screaming at him to – but he really blew her off. Anyway, he was good enough to take me around, took me down, put me on the train to go to Nançay, on the train to Nançay I met Hinder, who had just published the paper. Ryle and Hinder were saying in essence the VLA wouldn’t work, more or less, so that was very interesting. I went to see, I met the man himself, at Cambridge, and I went up to Jodrell, and saw all the shakers and the movers. But the important thing was we had to contend with the future Nobel Laureate saying we couldn’t do the VLA at 35 kilometers. And that was probably the genesis of the radio link interferometer. Started at 10 kilometers or 11, whatever it was, but eventually went to 35, and it worked. Now, (?? after work), you have to define “work.” It worked only sort of part of the time, because of the bad atmosphere, but it did work. Mainly we couldn’t have done the VLA without Clean. Without Clean and Self-Cal.
Kellermann:
Well, we could have.
Hogg:
But it wouldn’t have been the VLA.
Kellermann:
No. It would have met the specs. The original specs, which was only 1%. Hundred to one dynamic range, or fifty to one even.
Hogg:
On the five days a year. No, I’m serious. Hinder and Ryle were right. We were right. But the only way the VLA became the dominant instrument that it did was because of technology that neither Hinder and Ryle or Wade, Clark, or Hogg knew at the time we stuck our neck out.
Kellermann:
Do you have any memory or interaction with Jan Högbom when he was using the interferometer and then to develop Clean
Hogg:
Not clear memory.
Kellermann:
You didn’t discuss it at all.
Hogg:
I don’t have a clear memory of it.
Kellermann:
What about the – at some point the competition developed with Caltech.
Hogg:
The competition was very one-sided, right? Caltech was in competition because they felt they were getting rolled. We didn’t have a competition with Caltech, other than the fact that Caltech thought that they could run a major instrument, and we were absolutely persuaded there was no way they could. Now I don’t know if you call that competition. They did, and as a sometime alumnus, you probably felt that more than I. The total amount of time I personally spent worrying about Caltech, apart from one misguided trip that I made with Moffet to Owens Valley, along with probably Heeschen and others. I can’t remember who all was on that trip.
Kellermann:
We could probably find out.
Hogg:
That was my most serious - apart from that trip, the amount of time I spent worrying about Caltech is infinitesimal compared to the amount of time I just spent talking about it.
Kellermann:
Could you tell us about that trip? What was the purpose of it?
Hogg:
The dominant thing I remember – I’ll try to remember something else – but the dominant thing I remember was flying into LA and being parked in a hotel in the outskirts somewhere so it would be a convenient drive to Owens Valley. And sitting there kind of bleary-eyed because we had to get up, I think even before dawn, and we had breakfast while we waited for the Caltech guys, and particularly Moffet was the one, because he came screaming into the hotel, “You’ve got to come out, you’ve got to come out and look.” And we staggered out. There’s, you know, whatever mountain it is. “You only see that every two or three weeks! That’s great! It’s so clear today!”
Kellermann:
Baldy. South Baldy.
Hogg:
Is it Baldy? Anyhow, that was my introduction to LA smog. I mean, for us in the East it just looked like a regular day, but for a Californian, it was something to be admired, treasured. Well, we went up and we looked around Caltech -
Kellermann:
Excuse me, Dave, do you remember what year this was?
Hogg:
No, I couldn’t begin to say.
Kellermann:
Again, we can find out.
Hogg:
And the purpose of the trip was to see if Caltech and NRAO could jointly build a major synthesis instrument.
Kellermann:
And?
Hogg:
And the answer was no.
Kellermann:
Why?
Hogg:
I think we had much too – It was not dissimilar to ALMA. Some people wanted a few big telescopes and some people wanted a large number of small telescopes. And there are good reasons for making those choices. And the Caltech people wanted a few large, nine, if I remember, nine large telescopes, 35 meter, whatever they were, and we wanted, well, 40, whatever it was to begin with.
Kellermann:
36.
Hogg:
Mmmmm – was it 36? I suppose it was 36.
Kellermann:
What was the Caltech argument for a small number of large dishes?
Hogg:
Easier to calibrate. Better collecting area. I mean you did a lot of single dish calibration. The advanced calibration now done by synthesis arrays in interferometer mode was certainly not done by us much then, and I don’t think it was done much then by Caltech either. So you did a lot of work with the single dish to get it. Ryle took it to the extreme. He measured his tracks to a gnats eyelash so he didn’t have to do calibration. We tended, we and Caltech too – tended to be a little more rough and ready, thinking we could take this stuff out by calibration, which, in fact, is true. But the bigger the dish, the more sources you could see to do calibration with. Pointing with – I mean, the 85 foot, the pointing curves on there, they were hairy.
Kellermann:
So what was the argument for using a large number of smaller dishes?
Hogg:
Better filling in the uv plain. It’s the ALMA argument, exactly, between the Europeans and the North Americans. How many meetings have you sat through where you have curves crossing the cost of the receivers and cost of dishes and cost of that and cost of something. Tell me about SKA. You want big things or little things, right? It’s an argument of 40 years standing.
Kellermann:
So was that the only major area of disagreement?
Hogg:
No. Caltech wanted proprietary time, as I remember. They weren’t in it pro bono. I believe that. Heeschen and somebody, Moffet or somebody, went off to a corner and some point and talked about this. We just talked about – we admired what Caltech had done. When I talk I don’t want to indicate any lack of respect for what Caltech had done. It was an outstanding program. It was just, we never felt that a university could handle a state-of-the-art major telescope.
Kellermann:
Various federal advisory committees didn’t exactly agree with you.
Hogg:
That’s true. They are all stacked, of course, with university people. To it’s the classic Kitt Peak- NOAO situation. You stack the Board of Directors at Kitt Peak with a bunch of university directors from observatories, and you wonder why the US National Optical Observatories are a disgrace. I don’t wonder this. You stack the board of the NRAO with a bunch of brilliant Nobel Laureate physicists and you wonder why NRAO has a first class world instrument? I don’t wonder that either. So the fact that some bunch of astronomers from universities thought that universities could run the VLA doesn’t surprise me, but that doesn’t make them right.
Kellermann:
The Dicke Committee, Committees, I can’t remember, aside from Dicke, who was, my impression was that they weren’t radio astronomy observatory directors. But were people like Dicke, but I honestly don’t remember.
Hogg:
Well, they weren’t radio astronomy, they were university observatory directors.
Kellermann:
No, they were physicists. They were from universities, I agree.
Hogg:
Well, anyway, through the ‘70s I think there still was discussion every time a project came up as to whether it should be done by a university, by a university consortium, or by a national center. It was particularly true in optical astronomy, so there was the program of Mayall telescope and CTIO, and for a brief shining moment, the 4 meter telescope, outdid the Palomar, better instrumentation, etc. etc. But the big players, the Caltechs of the world, even the Licks and the McDonalds, they had a bureaucracy that they had to feed.
Kellermann:
There’s a fine line between the university consortium and the national center.
Hogg:
Very fine line. And we’re really seeing it now, aren’t we, in the 30 meter telescope or whatever the (?) is named now. Caltech and Keck, I don’t know if that’s the last major telescope probably built that way.
Kellermann:
Well, by “that way: you mean a university consortium?
Hogg:
University dominant.
Kellermann:
That’s what they were discussing for TMT and –
Hogg:
Yeah, but look who’s in there.
Kellermann:
That’s what I mean about it’s a fine line between –
Hogg:
Yeah, it’s becoming a national center by perhaps another name. But I think that these projects have cost $500 million to a billion dollars are beyond being at a major technical university. And, with due respect, the VLBA, in my opinion, demonstrated that the universities couldn’t play in this game. Caltech had to bail out of the correlator, and Lincoln Labs was sucking wind to finish the recorders. And the maser the clock.
Kellermann:
Let’s let the VLBA –
Hogg:
I’m not going into the VLBA because I didn’t know that much, but I watched with horror when for political reasons those guys got subcontracts and screwed them up.
Kellermann:
Well, that’s what I want to discuss about the VLBA. We’ll come back to that later. Spectroscopy.
Hogg:
[Laughter] I should ask for your birth certificate – you may not be old enough to listen to this kind of language!
Kellermann:
Spectroscopy.
Hogg:
Greisen.
Kellermann:
Now as I recall, that wasn’t considered for quite some time for the VLA.
Hogg:
Yes, true. (?) certain sense of (?)
Kellermann:
That was part of the reason perhaps for the Caltech argument for larger dishes because they had more interest in spectroscopy.
Hogg:
What did that have to do with it?
Kellermann:
As you said, sensitivity. Surface brightness, sensitivity.
Hogg:
Don’t we have the same collecting area, I mean, to take this technical argument to the extreme, the VLA and the Caltech array had the same surface sensitivity in terms of aluminum, and that’s again a millimeter array argument. So spectroscopy was not in the original concept in the middle ‘60s that we’ve talked about, any more than it was for Ryle.
Kellermann:
Yeah. So what brought it in?
Hogg:
Caltech, I would guess, the success. Clark came, of course. He had a very distinguished background in interferometry, spectroscopy, Caltech effort. We eventually got Greisen to help us. We did spectral line correlating. And Greisen then made it work.
Kellermann:
The first correlator was purely continuum.
Hogg:
That’s my memory, that’s my memory.
Kellermann:
Caltech always put a greater emphasis on spectroscopy, and at one point they even proposed just a spectroscopic array. That was a last ditch attempt to get something.
Kellermann:
(??)
Hogg:
Now we all, the core group of Drake and Wade, Menon, those guys, they were continuum people, right. They had had line work on the single dish, but in their hearts, Menon was doing the HII regions, Wade and Heeschen wanted to do quasars and Cygnus A and all that stuff. There wasn’t a scientific motivation until, I suppose, Clark and certainly eventually Greisen. McDonald was so important to us, but he was a continuum man. Miley, very important to continuum. Mezgers, Gordons, Browns of the world were all at the 140 foot doing good things there, but not –
Kellermann:
The 36 foot.
Hogg:
The 36 foot, of course. As soon as you did any calculation of surface brightness, you started to figure out that you’ve got a lot of heavy lifting to do to do interferometry. I mean, Clark was what, he was all absorption, wasn’t he?
Kellermann:
It was his thesis.
Hogg:
If you do emission and line, trust me, it’s not for the faint of heart. Now it’s fine, but back then, no, there wasn’t a lot of motivation.
Kellermann:
But to what extent was including spectroscopy in the VLA a political decision, that is to placate, or to address the competition form Caltech?
Hogg:
I can’t answer that. I think that by the time, let’s say, early ‘70s, when Greisen was here and the interferometry was being exploited, and of course there was a lot of interest then in the 36 foot, 12 meter, it was clear that the line science was in and of itself enough to require that the VLA do line work. Forget whether we had to beat Caltech or not. I don’t know that at all. I think it just is self evident that the VLA had to do, the concept had to be expanded to do line work. I don’t know when that happened, if there is any document that would talk to that point, but I – you’ve got to get away from this Caltech focus crap, if I could speak bluntly. We did lots of things without worrying one bit about Caltech. Now Caltech may have been proposing a 6 element line array. If we made the VLA into a line system, my confidence at the 92% level is that we were doing it because it looked like there was good science. Westerbork was starting to do it.
Kellermann:
That was built for HI.
Hogg:
Yeah! So it was clear that there was science in interferometry at the line. Forget Caltech! I don’t think it was a motivator.
Kellermann:
Let the record show that there are a couple or more Caltech graduates who came to NRAO along with Dr. Hogg –
Hogg:
Absolutely, and they were the front – after the Harvard crew, which got the Observatory going, it was the Caltech crew that made the Observatory successful! I don’t denigrate Caltech. But what you’re saying is, “Well, did the NRAO look over and see Caltech trying to do a line thing and then rush the VLA to do a line thing to beat Caltech.” No. They rushed the VLA to do line partly because of Caltech, partly because of what was going on in Australia, and partly because of Holland, it was clear that there was a big future in line work in interferometry, and that’s why the VLA was morphed into a line thing. Not because Caltech was proposing – you’ve got to get away from that. I mean, you and Clark, and Fomalont, and Greisen, they were core people for the development of the NRAO. That’s the (?) You don’t have to make a footnote. What I want you to stop doing is saying, “Did you do this in order to beat down Caltech?” Most of the time the answer is we didn’t give a think about what Caltech was doing! We were doing science!
Kellermann:
Nevertheless, the VLA proposal on two or three occasions, got deferred in favor of the Caltech instrument. Recommended to be deferred in favor of the Caltech instrument.
Hogg:
OK.
Kellermann:
But the Caltech instrument, the NSF, shall we say, in their wisdom, did not take on this advice, and kept convening committees until the decade review, the Greenstein Committee.
Hogg:
This is probably all true. I have not worked with this. I don’t care about this. I have no experience one this. I’m not even going to discuss this. It wasn’t part of my world.
Kellermann:
But you did participate in that visit.
Hogg:
Oh, absolutely I did. I went out there. (?) ticket to California (?)
Kellermann:
One of the arguments against the Owens Valley Array, as I recall was the size of the Owens Valley.
Hogg:
Right, right. That was an important argument in our view, in the Caltech view much less important because they were doing line work and you didn’t need 25, 30 kilometers. In fact, we weren’t doing 30 kilometer line work really much at the VLA. Do your surface brightness. So the line work, that was one of the fundamental differences between Caltech’s array and ours, was that they stuck to shorter baselines.
Kellermann:
I think Heeschen reports someplace or other that he even agreed to build the Owens Valley design.
Hogg:
I remember that.
Kellermann:
But not in the Owens Valley, for the reasons you just said.
Hogg:
Right, right. I believe that to be true.
Kellermann:
Was that discussed at this –
Hogg:
Well now you’re really asking hard questions. It’s certainly a vaguely familiar (?), it wouldn’t surprise me if that was true. Of course the Caltech array had a lot of attraction to it. There were some competent people. It’s just it was physically small, we had the one second of arc in our head, 35 kilometers. And we, you know, this grave concern that a university, even one as eminent and technically strong as Caltech, couldn’t do it. Might even go further and say in our philosophy they shouldn’t do it. It should be open, no perks, no guaranteed time.
Kellermann:
Well the proprietary time, or guaranteed time, is one component. One can imagine a university operating facility that didn’t have, a university operated national facility, that didn’t have the proprietary time, like Arecibo, in principle. But Caltech didn’t want that, you said. They would only do it if they had –
Hogg:
That’s my memory. I’d hate to go to the stake over it, but that’s my memory.
Kellermann:
OK, then what about the VLBA.
Hogg:
You know much more about it than I. I was very much on the periphery of it. I was certainly around for the Rumsford Prize work stuff, I remember Claude Bare, and what a sad story that was. And, of course, a coincidence was, I also knew Chisolm, who also died early. No, who was the Queens guy on the VLBA?
Kellermann:
You mean Allen (Alan?) Yin, who died later, but also early.
Hogg:
No, no there was a – either Chisolm or –
Kellermann:
I never knew him. I wasn’t talking so much about the VLBI days, but actually the VLBA, and at that time –
Hogg:
[laughing] How you guys screwed us on the 25 meter, is that what you want to talk about?
Kellermann:
Well, we could talk about that! I meant more, you were Associate Director then maybe, or Deputy Director, or Assistant Director.
Hogg:
Well, I don’t think we had Deputies then, I was probably Associate. If I had ever gotten around to talking to Tavia, I guess it was I spoke to, she told me how to get my vita up to date and I’ve never done it because, you know, I had other pressing commitments.
Kellermann:
So I would, referring to the comment you made earlier, in the context of your role as an administrator at NRAO, the one scenario, once the VLBA proposal was approved, can you tell us a little bit about subcontracting of various things, and your interpretation, which you started earlier, how that went and why.
Hogg:
Of course, I have a completely warped and twisted –
Kellermann:
So do I!
Hogg:
So I’ll just give you my story. My story is that after the failure of the 25 meter millimeter array project the Observatory turned its interests towards creating a major state-of-the-art long baseline interferometer, which eventually became the VLBA. The general outline for that is [somewhat?] more understood. It had to be earth diameter, it had to be multi-frequency to do phase correction, it had to do high frequency to get the resolution, it had to have enough baselines to do imaging of expanding quasars and the like. So by then we were, and the world was, competent enough in interferometry to know generally what we had to build. And generally what we proposed was generally what we have today, crudely speaking. Of course the technology, the instrumentation evolved, the tapes, the times, everything else has evolved a lot. But in configuration, that was what the – But how do you get there? Well, there were competing proposals. So my memory is that Caltech wanted to do a VLB array. Right? There they were again, the upstarts, we had to beat them over the head again, except this time we had a senior Caltech alumnus who was wielding the cudgel to beat them on the head! Now, having put aside the 25 meter in a painful discussion, which we need not make today, we turned full-hearted to the VLBA. But it was a hugely political thing. Because all of these observatories that were running VLBI stations, Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts of some kind or another, California, Harvard-Ft. Davis. All of these guys had income from these dishes. They each had a little grant to run their VLB program. They had students at the universities learning VLB at the universities. So it was clear that if you made a VLB array you’d kill all these observatories off. And indeed, that’s what happened. So, in some kind of Faustian bargain made above my pay grade, the universities agreed to allow themselves to be killed off, but they had to have access to a powerful instrument, the VLBA, and some of them were more equal than others. So, in particular, Caltech, who wanted their own array, said they would build this correlator, which was a choice piece of technology and would keep their students in, etc. etc. And Lincoln Labs, who had a lot of connection with the NASA timing and space motion program, a lot of money going to Clark and those guys, brilliant people, Rogers was one of the iconically bright guys who ever walked this earth as far as I could see.
Kellermann:
That’s Alan Rogers.
Hogg:
Yeah. So they had a piece of the action, too. Well, what could we do. Well, somebody, it couldn’t have been Kellermann because Kellermann doesn’t smoke, well somebody got into a smoke-filled room and they said, “You’ll get this, and you’ll get that, and we’ll get this, and everybody will be copacetic.” Well, that’s the way it happened. So NRAO ends up being the prime mover of the VLBA. But we had (?) contracts, Caltech would build a correlator, and Lincoln Labs would build tape recorders, and I’ve forgotten how we ended up doing ties, maser ties, that was always a lot of heartburn. Now it’s pretty straightforward, but back then there was only one maser supplier of any consequence.
Kellermann:
That was Harvard.
Hogg:
That was Harvard.
Kellermann:
Smithsonian, to be exact.
Hogg:
Yeah. And then there were some other things that really ticked me off. We’re doing calculation of feed on this, on the synthesis array. And we find that we can get point triple-aught percent better if we put the antenna not in Green Bank, but in New Hampshire. And we are so wedded by getting point triple-aught percent better that we move the damn antenna out of Green Bank and into New Hampshire. Over the bitter objections of our Caltech alumnus site manager at Green Bank, and the bitter objections of probably not Associate Director Hogg by then, but somebody, but certainly me, whatever my title was. Crazy decision.
Kellermann:
Well who made that decision?
Hogg:
Beats the living devil out of me! Somebody who had taken complete leave of their senses. Was it Paul? I don’t know.
Kellermann:
(?)
Hogg:
Mort? Anyway, whoever made it should have been taken out and flayed. It was just incredibly stupid. But I, perhaps, still have the wounds, so speak intemperately. [Laughter] Do you agree? Was New Hampshire a better site than – ? It was, of course, a package deal. I had found a reasonable site in Puerto Rico, but you had to go to St. Croix to do New Hampshire and get this point triple-aught percent better. So Puerto Rico and Green Bank gave a perfectly good beam, but our highly skilled Caltech alumnus Walker found that by point triple-aught percent you could go to Sat. Croix and New Hampshire, and so it was. Over the objections of Seielstad and over the objections of Hogg, who really didn’t count, because I don’t think I was a player then. I think I was just a wise sage.
Kellermann:
Couple of things. To any extent was the New Hampshire decision coupled with placating Haystack?
Hogg:
No, no. It was pure uv plane.
Kellermann:
OK. Because you alluded to having to satisfy Lincoln Labs.
Hogg:
Well, we did that by throwing money into the tape recorders.
Kellermann:
OK, Alright. But just to clarify, we abandoned Puerto Rico for St. Croix, not because of Green Bank vs. New Hampshire –
Hogg:
They were chained. My memory was they were paired. Green Bank, Puerto Rico.
Kellermann:
My memory is that two distinguished NRAO staff members at the time –
Hogg:
Caltech alumni.
Kellermann:
Only one of them was a Caltech alumni.
Hogg:
Fomalont and Walker?
Kellermann:
No no, let me finish.
[Laughter]
Hogg:
These Caltech guys! If you eat with a Caltech person, you’d best have a long-handled spoon!
Kellermann:
This has nothing to do with Caltech. Two NRAO staff members happened to be in Puerto Rico for other business, and went to visit the potential site on the south coast of Puerto Rico, and became aware – and it was an ex-CIA place that they were abandoning.
Hogg:
Yes, you and I.
Kellermann:
Yes. And we became aware that next door they were building a Voice of America –
Hogg:
Proposed.
Kellermann:
Planning to build a Voice of America, and that’s what moved us to St. Croix. And that station never got built.
Hogg:
That’s probably right. That’s probably absolutely right. So the question is when did we know that they weren’t going to do Voice of America.
Kellermann:
And it was Frank Drake that convinced us that St. Croix was a dry site, and it was a good place for – he had been advocating that for a millimeter telescope.
Hogg:
There but for the grace of God.
Kellermann:
Yeah.
Hogg:
You’re absolutely right.
Kellermann:
I don’t disagree necessarily with your other comments about Green Bank and New Hampshire –
Hogg:
In fairness you’re correct about the Voice of America.
Kellermann:
But it wasn’t coupled with Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico and St. Croix were in the same place. And you argued that New Hampshire and Green Bank were in the same place, which I don’t disagree with.
Hogg:
But I really, I felt badly about that decision. When you think about, when you have to monitor a station that way, we could have had it right in Green Bank, we could have done our testing and VLBA equipment there. It just would have made quite a difference in our operation, I believe. In the same sense, that we’ve done a lot of stuff at Pie Town.
Kellermann:
Yup.
Hogg:
Because we’re there. We don’t have to hire it done. We can do it.
Kellermann:
If you remember the NRAO VLBA proposal, used as recording system a bank of VHS, commercial VHS recorders, what’s your recollection of how that ended up as essentially modifications of the Mark III system, which is very different?
Hogg:
I was never sufficiently close to that recording system to know what was going on at the time.
Kellermann:
Did not the Associate Director and the, well there were two Associate Directors, the Associate Director for Operations and the Associate Director for Engineering pay a visit to Haystack to discuss their role in the VLBA and –
Hogg:
You understand that in the ‘80s I wasn’t in management except for one year in Tucson.
Kellermann:
This was late – did you not go with Hein to Haystack?
Hogg:
I could have. I went with Hein a lot of places. But I’m telling you, I resigned as what’s called Associate Director one year into Morton’s term, right. I was still Associate Director fighting for the 25 meter. The VLBA didn’t get going until after the demise of the 25 meter, although it was being designed. It’s possible that while I was Associate Director I went with Hein, the Associate Director, to Haystack. But, comma, when the VLBA was going hard in 1981-1982, I was not Associate Director.
Kellermann:
OK, what role or title isn’t important.
Hogg:
Well, it’s really important, because in 1980 or ‘81, or ‘82, or whenever the 25 meter was dead, I hied myself up to Bell Labs to do the Millimeter Array. I wasn’t fiddling with the VLBA. So ask me about Millimeter Array, but don’t ask me – I did a site test as a favor for the company. Ah, Heeschen would die, is rolling in his grave to hear me call it a company! That was his bête noir. No, I’m very serious. As a good guy –
Kellermann:
Sorry, which site test?
Hogg:
I did site testing for the VLBA in Hawaii and in Puerto Rico. Alright? I’ve got those records. I haven’t bothered to offer them to Ellen! That was cool. You go to the saddle road in Hawaii, and to the right is Mauna Kea, to the left is Mauna Loa, and at the saddle road is a high altitude research lab where they try to preserve endemic bird species of Hawaii. The nene, the Hawaiian crow, the nene, the Hawaiian goose, and a couple of other things. I tried to hire that guy to run our site testing, because the saddle would have been one place for an antenna, but he was too busy. He was very once he found out I did birds and showed me nenes and stuff like that. Very cool.
Kellermann:
We looked at Mauna Loa, as I remember.
Hogg:
We did, we did. No, we ran – yes, we ran a site monitor on Mauna Loa. Mauna Loa Solar Observatory – Solar? Atmospheric Observatory, anyway, is the source of the carbon dioxide measurement that is now used to demonstrate global warming. So at the end of the Second World War, they began testing atmospheric things, amongst which is CO2, and they’re at 12,000 feet or so. You drive up there to the left across the lava flow, right, which is now cool (?), it’s very, it’s compacted lavs so it’s fine, but right at the road edge it’s uncompacted and it’s very sharp. You drive there and you’ll tear your tires to pieces. So I took my machine up there, I hired those guys to run it for us, a couple, two weeks, and they were very gracious about it. But, they said, we don’t want you up here because all the traffic will screw up our atmospheric tests. But we’ll run your damn machine for you. So In install it, I came up the next day – I was staying in Hilo – to train them, right. So I get up there, and there’s this blinding snowfall. It was snowing to a fare-thee-well even at 9,000 feet, well 10,000 feet. So I start up this black cinder road, knowing that if I go off into the black lava I’ll tear my tires up, I can’t see beyond the hood of the car, I’ve got a rental car that you’re not meant to take to the saddle road. But I made it. And I trained them. It’s hard to train somebody how to use a solar telescope in the middle of a snowfall. But yeah, we tried. We would have had to build a dam. I thought they were crazy. But in fact, you build a lava dam. So here’s the telescope, and you put a big dam upstream, so when the thing erupts, the lava flows around. We would have been fine. But they didn’t want us.
Kellermann:
Yes, as I remember, it was both of those. The lava and the disturbance. And the earthquakes.
Hogg:
The earthquakes, yes. I mean, they are bad on Mauna Kea, but they’re worse on Mauna Loa.
Kellermann:
But let’s get back to the Haystack contract.
Hogg:
Ah!
Kellermann:
My memory is that the decision was made by you and Hein on a trip to Haystack, and it was essentially to buy them off, to get their support for the funding.
Hogg:
Before?
Kellermann:
I don’t remember, Dave, whether it was before or after.
Hogg:
But you see, I’m telling you I had no management responsibility except in Tucson in the 1980s. I resigned one year into Mort, and we were still doing the 25 meter, because I went with Mort and we got slaughtered up at the NSF and lost the 25 meter.
Kellermann:
We’ll come back to the 25 meter.
Hogg:
There was a movement at the time that the money would be better spent on VLBA, as I recall.
Kellermann:
Let’s come back to that. You may be right. You may not have been there, but Hein, I certainly know that Hein went.
Hogg:
Well, Hein would have been, because he was technical honcho for all of that stuff, VLA, VLBA.
Kellermann:
He was also the project manager.
Hogg:
I could have been, but if it was, it was either a) not, it was either before the VLBA per se, when I was still in management and it was a reconnaissance, but I can’t believe we would write a contract and no money for it then. We may have let a design for VLBI, could have done that.
Kellermann:
No, no.
Hogg:
Well then I wasn’t in management. I may have been advising. But I was doing the Millimeter Array then. You have to look the dates up. I could be wrong, but –
Kellermann:
I always felt we got sold out, or I got sold out.
Hogg:
Strange you should feel that way. [Laughter] (?)
Kellermann:
But you made some comment earlier about the nature of these contracts and the performance of Caltech for the correlator and MIT-Haystack for the record system. You want to elaborate on that?
Hogg:
Well, Caltech eventually, they couldn’t keep up with the correlator, is my memory. So eventually they had to reassign the contract to us, back to us, and we had to do the correlator. In the case of Haystack, they in fact delivered the recorder (we used?), but it was long and costly. And I think probably over budget. And certainly over time. Because, well, they were in better shape than Caltech, because they had a big research program partially sponsored by NASA. So they had good with good money. But even so, it was technically very challenging. We were pushing the state of the –
Kellermann:
But they were more into the industrial mode. Caltech couldn’t get out of the research mode.
Hogg:
Right so Caltech was almost doomed from the very signing of the contract. Whereas Haystack was just faced with a technical challenge that I would say honestly we probably all did not appreciate. So it’s a bit unfair to blame them. Indeed, without Haystack, we would not have done very well.
Kellermann:
Well, we would have built the record system based on the VHS tapes.
Hogg:
But it would have been a different instrument. Those tapes didn’t have the competence of the proposed Mark III.
Kellermann:
Didn’t have the?
Hogg:
Competence, is my memory.
Kellermann:
It was the other way around, they were very reliable.
Hogg:
Competence. Bandwidths, speeds. That’s my memory. But I would completely defer to you.
Kellermann:
They didn’t have the bandwidth that we ultimately got from the Mark III, that’s right.
Hogg:
Now if the tapes were (proven? improvement?), I agree. We used them and used them and used them.
Kellermann:
Your impression, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but is it your impression that we entered into both of those arrangements to get support, moral support, political support, from those institutions?
Hogg:
It is my impression that certainly in the case of Caltech we did, because we had as good correlator people as they did. It’s a little less clear with Haystack, because we didn’t have the kind of competence in that area that they did.
Kellermann:
Well, we had proposed a different system, based on the VHS recorders, and – oh, I forget who our engineer was at the time, but he had designed the whole system, block design. Maybe it was Benno Rahrer.
Hogg:
Could have been. So it’s less clear in mind, although if you tell me that we could have gone another way without Haystack and we did Haystack to get their support, I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t know how we persuaded Iowa and Illinois to give up their VLB efforts. Once they closed their VLB station in Iowa, they stopped being VLB people, didn’t they? I mean, it was really painful.
Kellermann:
After a few years of this – they were no longer interested. It’s no fun operating a 25 meter or a 20 meter dish to record tapes and send the tapes off somewhere with no intellectual involvement. That’s separate from the science that they were doing.
Hogg:
Well, they dropped out of the science, too, didn’t they?
Kellermann:
That’s because nobody appreciated that when they lost the contract to operate, they agreed they didn’t want to operate. It wasn’t a good thing for students or anything. They didn’t want to operate these facilities. But nobody, either at the institutions or us at NRAO, I think, appreciated that when they lost the contract to operate the telescope, they lost their funding to do research. They were coupled, of course. Because that’s where they were getting their research money. And then the NSF, because of the usual competition for grants –
Hogg:
They got killed.
Kellermann:
Yeah. Including Caltech. People like [Tony] Readhead? Went off to do cosmic background and stuff.
Hogg:
Yeah. So we basically almost lost a generation of VLB astronomers.
Kellermann:
Of users. By the time we built the VLBA there weren’t any American users left. OK. Let’s finish up with the 25 meter. You seemed to think that somehow the VLBA, or people advocating the VLBA, undercut the 25 meter?
Hogg:
25 meter telescope was proposed at the height of the pressure on the 36 foot to become the 12 meter. In fact, I guess at the time it was proposed, it was the 36 foot. I think the 12 meter didn’t come till maybe after the death of the 25 meter. Is that right? I think that’s probably right. We could look those dates up, it will be in Mark’s book. I believe at the time we were pushing the 25 meter we had a 36 foot telescope. This is important, not because of the size – 36 feet is equal 12 meter more or less. But the 36 foot surface was not capable of doing precision work at short millimeter wavelengths, whereas the 12 meter was, very. Plus the dome, etc. etc. etc. But anyhow, we pushed the 25 meter as the next logical step, and I note in passing that 30 meter in Europe has been quite successful. There were those who said the 25 meter wouldn’t have any science to do, those people, of course, in retrospect, were shown to be abysmally ignorant of the situation. So the 25 meter was blessed by the decadal review, and became one of the approved programs of the NSF. However, comma, it was blessed at the same time that the wretched Arabs locked up a bunch of our guys in Iran. And inflation went crazy, and the budget went crazy, and the President froze all new projects, including the 25 meter. So then a new President got those wretched Iranians to let our people go, and the oil started to flow like water, and the price of a barrel of gasoline dropped to reasonable numbers, and the NSF said, “Let’s do a new survey.” And the 25 meter was left out of that survey. Because it was an approved project. It was just not funded because of those wretched Arab people. However, in the course of deliberating this, the spending priorities came up, and our man in Arizona, said to himself and the rest of the NSF committee at the time, this is Mr. Strittmatter I’m speaking of, “You know, this 25 meter, it’s not a good expenditure of money, even though it’s approved. Why don’t we do this shiny new VLBA thing? That’s new science.”
Kellermann:
Strittmatter?
Hogg:
Wasn’t it Strittmatter? No, no, it wasn’t. It was the –
Kellermann:
McCrea?
Hogg:
No. McCrea was certainly sold, but there was the solar guy. That’s the – He came up to me afterwards –
Kellermann:
After what?
Hogg:
This meeting.
Kellermann:
Which meeting?
Hogg:
This meeting at the NSF. I don’t know when the date was. It may be important to you, but at the moment what’s more important is me trying to get the name of this guy. Because he then ended up in Chicago. But he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Dave, I know you’re disappointed, but you will look back at this later on and see that this is, that the Committee made the right decision.” Now I thought he was the Chair, not McCrea. Whoever it was. Anyhow, whoever it was, this guy, with his arm around my shoulder, was pouring the salt into the wound. Anyhow, they felt that the time of the 25 meter had passed. We had screwed around with sites for the thing, and we ended up in Hawaii. People wanted to put it on Mt. Lemmon, but we ended up pushing Hawaii, with the same arguments that would take the Millimeter Array to Chile. That wasn’t good enough, it made it more expensive, and Native rights, and - . So anyway, it was formally turned down. Bill Howard was Director of NSF astronomy at the time, and Mort made a pitch. Turner came up and made the science pitch. I was there, and I was Morton’s associate, and I was making a pitch. But the Committee said that the 25 meter shouldn’t be funded. I’m not sure whether they said the VLB should be funded or not. But amongst the millimeter community, the VLB was considered to be the black hat in this whole episode. Fairly or unfairly. I state that as a fact, not as an opinion. It may have been a fair assessment, it may have been an unfair assessment, I don’t take a position on that. I just state the fact. And in the millimeter community, there were certain VLBA person who were not at all welcome in that company. Fact. Then the millimeter committee, community rather, basically said, “You know, NRAO doesn’t know what they’re doing, they screwed this up, they couldn’t make a proper pitch for an improved telescope, we’ll go off and do our own thing.” So they got Bob Wilson to do good things. And there were some loud voices –
Kellermann:
Barrett? Al Barrett?
Hogg:
No. But there were some loud voices that thought NRAO had let them down. And eventually of course, everything was all lovey-dovey and we got together and made we a millimeter array that got hijacked by RG. [Laughter] [Note added in 2018: Riccardo Giacconi] But that’s another story. But at the time, it was very painful. It wasn’t a decadal review. It was an NSF astronomy panel. Oh, what’s the name of the guy! [long pause] Beckers! Jacques Beckers!
Kellermann:
Ah, yes!
Hogg:
That was the guy. He ended up with a bimbo in Chicago.
Kellermann:
I remember during the deliberations of that Committee –
Hogg:
Were you there?
Kellermann:
I’m surprised you don’t remember that.
Hogg:
Well, the scars, you know! Big scabs.
Kellermann:
I’ll explain this offline later. But my memory was during the Committee deliberations, open deliberations, we were all there, it was (?) that first made the suggestion that the time had passed for the millimeter telescope.
Hogg:
Yes, that is my – and we were surprised, because McCrea, I knew him very well through his stellar wind stuff, and the 25 meter was a perfect place to look for it.
Kellermann:
Part of the argument was, you mentioned the 30 meter, that part of the reason the time had passed was the 30 meter was already in operation and it would just do routine things or something.
Hogg:
Right, right. That’s correct.
Kellermann:
OK. Anything else on your mind?
Hogg:
That’s enough!