Reminiscences of the Early Years of the Association

Abstract

It is about 15 years, now, since research men at M.I.T. began to talk lightly about their budgets in terms of a new unit, the “megabuck.” About 15 years before that time, even a thousand dollars looked so big and awesome to most of us that we did not think of calling it a kilobuck, though in a less lawful, but more lucrative, industry it was called a “grand.” Going back still another 15 years or so, we may recall the time before World War I, when the whole shop equipment of the Stanford Physics Department was just one pair of pliers. Even this had been bought by my good friend P. A. Ross with his own money. Research was not quite impossible in those days, “the days of string and sealing wax”—it was in one of those days that C. T. R. Wilson set fire to a piece of string to start the operation of the world’s first cloud chamber—but research physicists were still few and far between. More so in America than in England, France, or Germany; and a trip to a meeting of the American Physical Society was a great event.