MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

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

A Reminiscence of Building 20...

Bruce Bailey
BBWPI51@aol.com

My most truly interactive associations with Building 20 had to do with the Lab for Nuclear Science machine shop. Until the 1970s it was confined essentially to B Wing between A and D Wings, with a couple of hundred square feet into D Wing. With the Bates Linear Accelerator starting operation in the early '70's, the rest of D Wing, a high-bay area occupying the space of two stories, became available to LNS as the little 20-mev Linac built by Peter Demos and his colleagues was dismantled.

My responsibility to LNS included overseeing general operations of the machine shop. We learned that a surplus 5-inch Giddings & Lewis horizontal boring mill (that was a BIG machine tool for a shop at MIT!) had been offered to us by the government. This was going to be a truly useful, major addition to the shop. The logical location was at the rear of D Wing running parallel to Vassar Street. We designed at 25-ft-span overhead traveling bridge crane of 10-ton capacity in order to install the G & L horizontal mill, and for access to it subsequently.

For installation of the rails to support the trolleys at each end of the bridge, as well as the bridge and crane itself, we turned to old friends of LNS (and MIT), G.H. Harnum, Inc. of Wilmington, MA. I was much concerned because it was a very difficult installation due to space constraints, but it turned out to be another of many cases where there were unsung heroics in our help from outside MIT. The riggers from Harnum were superb, completely cool in what struck me as perilous situations while rigging the big bridge into position on the rails so close to the high-bay ceiling.

The 5-inch G & L mill did legion service for users of the LNS shop over the next couple of decades, first while the shop was supervised by Ralph Lewis, and then by Mario Aloisi.