Piercing the Horizon. Sunny Tsiao
his wartime experience on the Pompon made him an ideal choice for the Navy research program.
Under O. Cutler Shepard, a pioneering metallurgist and the department’s distinguished professor, Paine conducted laboratory research whenever he was not in class. His thesis research was to find out how liquid metals could be made to interact in a useful way with high-temperature alloys. A nuclear reactor requires a great amount of cooling. The Office of Naval Research had asked Shepard to see if liquid metal could be used (instead of water, for example) to cool a reactor. Led by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the reactor program was one of a number of highly classified postwar Navy efforts involving the universities, and one of the largest. Eight students under Shepard would receive their PhD degrees by working on the project.
Paine recalled finding the highly theoretical work “intensely interesting.” The hours were long. He often sat alone at night performing experiments. The university had a stress-rupture machine in its Mineral Sciences Laboratory that was his primary research tool. Paine became quite proficient at using it to test the compression, shear, and tensile limits of different kinds of materials. Using the powerful lens of an electron microscope, he scanned for traces of cracks and fractures in a variety of steels and alloys.
Stanford did not pay him much, just $110 a month. An additional graduate student subsistence allowance of $90 made a big difference. It was enough for him and Barbara to get by. After two semesters, he received his Master of Science degree in Physical Metallurgy on June 15, 1947.2
He continued to study for his doctorate. In his second year, Shepard made him his lead graduate student. For the next two years, he wrote papers on the results of his research; several written with Shepard were published in classified Department of Defense literature.3 In April 1949, he passed his comprehensive examination in General and Metallurgical Engineering. This put him into the School of Mineral Sciences PhD program. The Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies approved his dissertation on May 20, 1949. Ten days later, he successfully defended his thesis, a technical treatise titled “The Effect of a Molten Lead Bismuth Eutectic Alloy on Steel.”4
He now had a decision to make. A doctorate in the very specialized field of Physical Metallurgy meant he could either teach at a university or work in the burgeoning high-tech industry. Shepard asked him to stay, and offered him an accelerated professorship in the department. Paine wanted to teach, but just not yet. He recalled telling Shepard that he thought it was important, before teaching someone, to “first acquire a broader level of practical work experience for himself.” So he reluctantly turned his professor down.5
In its heyday, General Electric was the preeminent technology company in the world. No other had quite the cachet of GE. Young engineers and scientists came from all parts of the industrialized world to try and make their mark at the flagship company of modern high technology. Paine was no different. In the fall of that year, he and Barbara packed up and headed east to Schenectady, New York. That was where Thomas Edison had first set up shop in 1892. On October 1, 1949, he joined the GE Research and Development Center as a research associate. Throughout the industry, the campus was known as Schenectady Works, or “The Knolls.” To the public, it was a wondrous place of modern marvels at the dawn of the space age. Many simply called it “The House of Magic.” GE had it all: electric blenders, washing machines, fluorescent lights, refrigerators. Every Sunday night for ten years, millions gathered in their family rooms in homes all across America and watched the General Electric Theater hosted by a Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan on live television. Everything that made for the perfect image of American suburbia of the 1950s was embodied in General Electric.
Paine was now a new but highly trained materials engineer. For the next twelve months, he experimented on the magnetic properties of unusual metals. The work was very specialized. Hours of laboratory work were needed to return one data point. His team discovered that strong, man-made magnets could be formed by mixing iron-cobalt with lead powder. The magnets had a lot of uses. GE engineers could mold them into any shape they wanted using a process called powder metallurgy. The magnets could then be used in everyday microscopic applications. These ranged from hearing aids to automotive test equipment. His work led to GE’s patent on the Lodex permanent magnet. It has since been continually used in the commercial automotive, electronics, and communications industries.
When Paine first started, J. Herbert Hollomon, his supervisor, had given him a verbal promise. Hollomon was the laboratory’s assistant manager for metallurgy research. He told Paine that after being in New York for a year, he would have the chance to set up his own section at the Meter and Instrument Laboratory in the company’s Lynn, Massachusetts, facility. There, he could run his own programs and branch out into new areas of research. Hollomon kept his word. On December 1, 1950, he signed Paine’s transfer papers and sent him 150 miles east to Massachusetts.
Paine continued the research on fine-particle magnets while in Lynn. The work led to production of GE’s first one hundred thousand Lodex magnets. He and his chief scientists, L. I. Mendelsohn and F. E. Luborsky, ran and grew the laboratory. Over the next five years, the quality of its research reached new heights. In 1956, it received the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science award for Outstanding Industrial Application of Science. By 1960, the Lodex magnet was well on its way to becoming an industry standard, as annual sales surpassed $1 million.6
When his supervisor, M. A. Princi, left on November 1, 1955, to take a job as the GE executive engineer in Milan, Italy, the company promoted him to general manager of the Lynn Instrumentation Laboratory. At thirty-four, he got his first taste of directing a large technical organization.
The focus of his laboratory was to support the Lynn facility in its primary job of making jet engines. In the 1950s, jets revolutionized transportation and defense at an astonishing pace. Between them, General Electric and Pratt & Whitney made virtually all of the jet engines in the United States. His laboratory found ways to use leading-edge metals to improve engine performance at higher temperatures and pressures. The first of some two dozen patents he would receive was for a time-temperature integrator control system. GE used it to test aircraft ranging from the popular civilian Learjet to the super-sleek B-58 Hustler strategic supersonic bomber.
He also continued his work on shipboard nuclear reactors. The laboratory developed a first-of-its-kind solid-state instrument that could monitor the temperature inside a nuclear reactor. The US Navy would use the invention in its fleet of nuclear submarines and ships throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The USS Enterprise (CVN-65) was the most recognizable of these ships. It was the world’s first nuclear-powered super-carrier and was just then becoming operational.7
Back at Stanford, Shepard still wanted him back. But Paine was quite content now. Times were good for Tom and Barbara. They now had four small children: Marguerite, whom they called Greta, was seven; George, four; Judy, two; and their youngest, Frank, had just been born. They thought they just might stay a while in the Massachusetts Bay community. He wrote to Shepard, saying, “General Electric has been very good to me and can promise an interesting future.”8
It was late in the afternoon. Up until he heard the news, October 4, 1957, had been much like any other Friday. He was at his desk getting ready to go home when someone told him to come over to the lounge and listen to the breaking news coming over the radio. The announcement soon silenced everyone in the room. The announcer said that the US Air Force had just confirmed that the Soviet Union had launched the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit. They were told that in the early morning sky the next day, they would be able to see the light from the satellite that the Soviet Union called Sputnik.
Before sunrise the next day, he and Barbara put jackets on the children and went down to the beach. Standing on the shore of the Atlantic, they gazed into the sky and waited. Then four-year-old George suddenly looked up and yelled, “There it is!” They looked to where the boy was pointing and saw Sputnik gliding effortlessly across the dawn’s morning sky. He remembered feeling only a stark sense of awe.9
Ralph J. Cordiner was an influential businessman. In 1958, the iconic CEO of General Electric ordered the complete decentralization of the vast high-tech company. He separated the various