MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

MIT's Building 20: The Magical Incubator Story, Anecdote, or Reminiscence

The Building 20 Penthouse Was a Blast

Douglas T. Ross
dougross@MIT.EDU

Looks to me like "Servo Lab" could have been squeezed on to complete the last line of the "MIT's Building 20 Occupants Include:" inside cover of the celebration brochure. At least some of the time in the early 1950s, at least, John Ward's Airborne Fire Control System Evaluation Project, where I cut my teeth, starting in the summer of 1952, occupied the Building 20 Penthouse as overflow space. Maybe we were just borrowing some RLE space, I don't know.

I think you took an extra flight of C-Building front stairs to get up there. I'm not really sure why I was moved up there or what year it was, but maybe was the brief period when I was actually writing up my Master's thesis in the Spring of 1954. In any case, I essentially had the place to myself. Several times a day, however, a guy would come clumping up the stairs carrying one thing or another, open the window around the bend from where I sat, and climb in and out doing something on the roof. I could hear thumping and scraping noises. Neither one of us introduced ourselves, at the time, as we each just did our thing. This went on for several days. A tangle of boxes and wires, some draping out the window, a strip chart, and an oscilloscope grew on his table beside the window. It was warm, dry weather. Without opening the window and climbing out, I couldn't see where the wires went outside, and I didn't want to disturb anything, so I just went on with my work. With growing interest, I decided to ask him about it the next day, though.

The next day came, but I was right in the middle of concentrated work when he came up the stairs and did his usual in-and-out the window, making the usual sounds. When all of a sudden KABOOMMM!!! -- the whole place shook with a tremendous explosion! I was shocked to my bones, and swung around in my swivel chair -- gasp! -- only to come face-to-face with a wildly-brandished 45 automatic pistol waving right under my nose! I jumped up and back yelling "What that was that?! Warn me before you do /that/ again!" -- and we finally got around to meeting each other.

Turned out that he was an MIT Electrical Engineerinng student when John Ward was, as well, and they knew each other. His current project was to develop an ultra-high-speed, ultra-high-current emergency circuit breaker -- implemented with a blasting cap! It would mechanically sweep the spark plasma away faster and better than any other scheme, he said. He had discovered a huge collection of lead bricks, probably 10 or 15 kg. each, left over on the roof from some earlier radioactive experimentation. He didn't know whose they were, but they suited his purpose very well, for he just built a floored igloo, with lots of mass all around, and let Newton's inertial law do the rest! -- But the reason he was so worked up and waving his pistol around to let off steam was that, after all his setting up, he hadn't gotten good data! I was still rattled, so I simply took off.

Within days I was moved back to more suitable quarters in Servo Lab. In the meantime, I found out more about him from talks with him and John Ward. He always carried a very large Crescent wrench in the opposite pocket to balance the loaded 45 (for which he, of course, had a permit). He also was the only private citizen in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts licensed to own a machine gun -- which he did! He was working on an improved firing mechanism invention, for that. He also was quite a radical, and for months on end he parked his pea-green station wagon all day every day on one side or the other of Vassar Street, with both right and left front doors adorned, each with half of a very large, very bright yellow, very realistic, 3-D PLASTIC LEMON -- as he had round after round of an ongoing dispute with the manufacturer and the local car dealer. Finally, ads appeared in newspapers offering cheap tickets to see him drive the clunker off the edge into a deep quarry! Somebody put a stop to that, and I don't know the resolution. ... His wife also was a skilled engineer who, among other things, was responsible for the colorfully-painted pipes of the Gas Dynamics Laboratory building on Vassar Street, near Massachusetts Avenue, John told me.

Later on, the final assembly of the Digital Flight Test Instrumentation (DFTI) hardware also took place in the Building 20 Penthouse. Designed to record, among other things, 14 bits of optically-encoded data, the first time its amplifiers were fired up and probed with an ear phone they had 14 crystal-clear channels of a local rock and role radio station! I was there to observe the first power-up which culminated weeks of close work by our skilled technicians. Accompanying the staged lighting of the indicator lights -- out came a wisp of smoke! Just testing! It turned out to be a mean little practical joke, for a long, fine, hollow length of plastic insulation tubing artfully disappeared around yet another corner in that infamous Penthouse. Beside it was a small flick of cigarette ash.

Those were the good old days.