Interview with Charles B. Duke by Babak Ashrafi in Webster, New York January 23, 2007

Transcript

ASHRAFI

Today is January 23rd, 2007. This is Babak ASHRAFI at the home of Charlie Duke, with Charlie Duke in Webster, New York, the interview for the AIP oral history collection. So Charlie, you were born in 1938, in Richmond, Virginia.

DUKE

Correct.

ASHRAFI

And your father was?

DUKE

Charles Joseph Duke, Jr.

ASHRAFI

And he worked at the William and Mary College, did you say?

DUKE

My father’s family members were farmers by trade. They had a farm in Portsmouth Virginia. It turns out that his father was the Democratic ward boss for Norfolk County, so he was a major force in Virginia politics. My father, for a living, had gone into the insurance business. He went to William and Mary, and shortly after he graduated from William and Mary, he was appointed to the Board of Visitors. The reason for that, of course, was that his father was well connected, and the Board of Visitors’ job is to raise money for the college. Money came from the state and the state rewarded the ward boss from Portsmouth and Norfolk who influenced who got elected. So my father was very well known in political circles. He reorganized the state government of Virginia for Governor Bill Tuck, and the Byrd family, who at the time were very good friends of my family. So my father was well positioned in Virginia politics. When John Stuart Bryan, for whom I’m named, a Richmond publisher, was asked to be the president of the College of William and Mary (in Williamsburg VA) he said that he would only come to the college as president, if my father came as Bursar. For your listeners, you should think of the president being the analog of the CEO, and the Bursar as the analog as the COO of a firm. Once someone asked John Stuart Bryan, how he ran the college, and he said that any time he had a problem, he only had to say two words “Hey, Charlie”. That’s how my father came to be Bursar. I was born in Richmond, because the hospitals were in Richmond. My father was Bursar of the college at that time.

ASHRAFI

And your mother?

DUKE

My mother was the daughter of a wealthy merchant. There was a firm called Smith and Welton in Norfolk and Portsmouth, VA. Her father was the Welton of Smith and Welton. She was one of four girls and two boys. The Welton family was at the time, I suspect, quite wealthy. In retrospect, I would say that I do not know what my mother’s financial situation was. My guess is that each of the girls must have been millionaires or close to it when the parents died. And so my mother was well endowed with financial acumen, and she, in fact, invested a lot of that money in my father. She built a house at Virginia Beach, where they entertained the power elite of Virginia. I still remember one Christmas when Bill Tuck (who was governor of Virginia at the time) came to discuss a reorganization of the state government with my father, that my parents had bought me a big train set, and I couldn’t get near the train set. Bill Tuck and my father sat there on the sun porch, playing with the train that was -presumably [chuckles] my Christmas present. So my recollection as a child, really, was of a father whose job was Bursar of the College of William and Mary, but whose profession was doing a variety of jobs for various governors of Virginia. You didn’t get paid for doing such jobs in those days, so my father’s career was largely financed by my mother. So that was my early upbringing. I might add since we’re on tape here, that when I was 13, my father died intestate with substantial debts. Thus, my mother suddenly had lost her meal ticket. She had made these very large investments in my father, and all she had to show for it was debts. This situation made her a very unhappy and frustrated woman. I had to work my way through high school and college because the money had been spent for a political career that never materialized. So in my youth, it was feast as a very young child and then famine as a teenager and young adult.

ASHRAFI

Any siblings?

DUKE

I have a sister, Ann, who is a Ph.D. in psychology. She lives in Ottawa. She moved to Ottawa, when she got married and her husband took a job at Carleton College. He was a professor, and she got a job in the school system. She also experienced an untimely death of her husband when her daughter, my niece, Lee was a few years old. So she went to work, and became the head of all of psychology for all of the school systems in Ottawa. There are several distinct school systems. There’s the public school system, and there’s a Catholic school system. So she’s a very well known person in Ottawa. When I go up to visit her, she knows everybody when we go out [chuckles]. So she’s the heir of my father’s wide acquaintanceship.

ASHRAFI

I see. Were there some early influences in direction of science or technology, or early interest that manifested it in you somehow?

DUKE

I am a scientist totally by accident. My interest as a youth, frankly, was in the ministry. I was licensed to preach in the Methodist church. I used to go to youth camps every summer. And I went to Duke University in Durham NC, largely for financial reasons. I got a good scholarship there, and I didn’t want to go to William and Mary because everybody knew me in Williamsburg. So the notion of going to William and Mary was very unattractive. Duke was a viable option. They had a good Divinity school. So I went to Duke and majored in Religion. During my first three years at Duke, I took a lot of religion courses, which I later used to teach Sunday school in various and sundry places. But after a summer’s experience as a minister in Hamlet, North Carolina, it became plain to me that I was not suited to be in the behavior modification business, and was not going to be successful in that business. I was somewhat disillusioned, so I shifted my major to mathematics and graduated as a math major.

ASHRAFI

So you went to, did you say, North Carolina?

DUKE

Hamlet, North Carolina.

ASHRAFI

Hamlet, and to teach what…

DUKE

No, I was a minister. I was a minister there for the summer. In the Methodist church, they allow ministers to have sort of assistant ministers. And the people who are interested in becoming a minister in the Methodist church can go around and what’s the right word, you become apprenticed to the minister. So when the minister goes vacation, you can preach and so on and so forth. So I was sort of the summer assistant minister, of I believe the First Methodist Church in Hamlet.

ASHRAFI

You entered Duke in, let’s see. You graduated in ‘59. Did you enter Duke in ‘55?

DUKE

Yes. I graduated from high school in ‘55.

ASHRAFI

Okay. So had you been taking math classes all along?

DUKE

Yes. When I first went to Duke, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was interested in religion, so my strategy was to take the distribution courses first. One of the things I very quickly learned was that if you were going to take courses like religion and history, you had to do an awful lot of reading and it took a really long time. Whereas I could take math courses, not work all that hard, get an “A,” make 100s on everything. So it became clear to me that I was good in math and so I sort of drifted into a math major, although my formal interest was in religion.

ASHRAFI

So was this an aptitude that you discovered while you were at Duke, or before?

DUKE

I presume, while.

ASHRAFI

Okay. And so in your junior year, you switched to a math major?

DUKE

I may have switched actually to a formal math major earlier than that, but I think it was probably my junior year. The answer your question is in the deep, distant past.

ASHRAFI

Was there any interest in physics?

DUKE

I took freshman physics, from a gentleman who some of your readers will know, named Bill Fairbank, who was a famous low temperature physicist. None of the students had studied Calculus, so he had all these magic formulas to pick up extra numerical factors, because you had to do an integral, but he couldn’t tell you that. So you had to introduce an extra factor of two that resulted from the integral. My roommate and I took freshman physics, and both of us were very competitive and we did reasonably well in freshman physics. But Fairbank was kind of a, what’s the right word—a free spirit. He didn’t take the course very seriously. He never prepared for the course. We’d sit there and we’d do little problems in the classroom, and so I was kind of disgusted. I sort of thought, you know, this was not serious. So I got a good grade in freshman physics, but I would have never taken physics again, except as I mentioned to you over lunch, my senior year I had so many credits, that if I took more than one course, I’d graduate. Since my roommate was a physics major, I audited a nuclear physics course, and another physics course, I can’t remember what the other one was. And as I mentioned to you, I took all the tests. The top graduate student score would be a 32 or a 33, and my roommate and I would make a 97 or a 98. So the physics professors thought I really ought to go to graduate school in physics. And so they encouraged me to do that. I applied to five schools. I know Princeton was one, Harvard was one, and Wisconsin was one. I don’t know, Yale might have been one. In any event, they were all five top schools, and I got in all of them. I got fellowships from four of them. I didn’t get a fellowship to Princeton, but by this time, I had really had it with studying. Incidentally, I had the best academic record in the history of Duke University. I had a straight-A record that had only happened once before in the history of the entire school when I was there. Apparently, it’s common these days. But in those days, it was unheard of, and to do that, you have to really focus on getting that job done, right? I’d had enough of that focus. I was not going to spend my life studying all the time to get A’s. That was not going to be my life when I left Duke, period. And although Princeton was the only graduate school that did not require additional course work for a PhD (students had to pass the general examinations and write a thesis) I didn’t get a fellowship at Princeton. They give entering graduate students assistantships. But my mother felt that I really ought to go to Princeton. She was highly insistent that I go to graduate school in general, and Princeton in particular. She’d wanted me to go to Princeton, as an undergraduate but I couldn’t get in, of course. And if had gotten in, I couldn’t have afforded it. I mentioned to you that I drove up to Princeton, in anticipation of seeing how this might all work. I went to see Eugene Wigner and had lunch with him and his wife, a delightful lunch, after which he assured me that if I managed to get through the generals okay, he’d be happy to take me on. And so that’s how I decided to go to Princeton.

ASHRAFI

Now, do you remember which professors at Duke encouraged you to go to graduate school?

DUKE

Well, certainly, Bill Fairbank did, and also the chair of the department, whose name I cannot recall.

ASHRAFI

Okay. And you said you picked out Wigner, because you’d seen his name mentioned in…

DUKE

In our nuclear physics textbook, D. Halliday, Introductory Nuclear Physics (Wiley, New York 1958) second edition. Eugene had written the theory of nuclear reactions, in which I was interested. So that attracted me. Most important, Eugene was at Princeton. Since Princeton was the only graduate school option that did not require further course work, I had to find somebody at Princeton that I might be interested in working with. You’ve got to remember from my point of view the question is, “Why do this sort of nutty thing?” So I decided to go to graduate school in physics at Princeton largely on the basis of that delightful lunch with Eugene and his lovely wife Mary.

ASHRAFI

Right.

DUKE

Right. When I got to Princeton, I first worked for Don Hamilton, who was the Dean of the Graduate school at the time, as a graduate assistant in the Beams Lab. So my initial assistance ships were in the Beams lab and then I worked for a man named Ruby Sherr, who’s still alive, and an emeritus professor in the physics department at Princeton. It turns out that Duke had an IBM 650, so because of my math background I knew how to program a computer. Well, I was the only person in the physics department who knew how to program a computer. So Ruby latched on to me, because he wanted me to do nuclear physics calculations for him. He sent me out to UCLA in California to work with Mike Melkanoff and John Nodvik who had written a code for elastic proton nucleus scattering. I learned to run that code, brought the code back to Princeton, and went up to NYU two or three nights a week to analyze Ruby’s data. I’d leave early in the morning and spend the night in NYU, running this code all night. I wrote two papers one on proton carbon scattering [Phys. Rev.125, 975-987 (1962)], and the other on proton oxygen scattering [Phys. Rev.129, 975-987 (1962)]. That experience during my first two years of graduate school was my introduction to becoming a physicist.

ASHRAFI

So you first arrived at Princeton. And when you get there, you have to pass the general exams.

DUKE

Correct.

ASHRAFI

And you don’t have to take any classes?

DUKE

Right.

ASHRAFI

So can you give me a chronology of the things that you just mentioned; what happened first, what happened second?

DUKE

Well, the first thing that happened when I got there was after about three or four weeks, I quickly recognized that I didn’t know any physics. I went to classes, but I could see that I didn’t understand very much of what was happening. I got some old generals, because I understood that passing these exams was my task; and quickly realized I could not work any of these problems. I did not have a clue. And I still remember the Chairman of the Department was Robert Dicke. I went to see him. He let me know in no uncertain terms that better men than I had flunked out of Princeton, and this was no shame. [Chuckles] At that stage of the game, I decided I was going to make a go of this. So I spent my time studying course material.

ASHRAFI

So you weren’t discouraged; you were challenged.

DUKE

Well, I was pretty discouraged, but I guess it might have been some combination of Eugene and Don Hamilton who convinced me that I should continue to give it a go. Don Hamilton had group meetings every week. So I got into his group, got to know the people in the group, and he was very encouraging. Eugene was always very encouraging. So the faculty really encouraged me a great deal. It was the beginning of my second year when Ruby Sherr recruited me from Don Hamilton. I was in the Beams lab filling cold traps, and doing the minutia of keeping the experimental arrangement working, which is fine. But somebody figured out that they wanted to use the fact that I knew how to run computers and Ruby Sherr was the indirect or direct beneficiary of that. I don’t know. And that’s how at the beginning of my second of my second year, I got shipped out to the western data processing center at UCLA. I spent quite a bit of time out there. As I mentioned in one of the materials I gave to you, when I came back at the end of that year, I got married to my wife, Ann. Mike Melkanoff was going to Paris, and so three days after I got married—I got married in Williamsburg on a Saturday, we spent Sunday in transit-- on Monday night, she was in our apartment in Princeton cooking dinner for Mike. The dinner was served on a card table, because we had a bed, two chest of drawers, a couch that someone had left behind, a card table, four chairs, and a stove. That was it. So Mike had dinner on a card table covered with a tablecloth that we had received as a wedding present. Mike prided himself on being a gourmet. He went on about this all the time, and I was a bit nervous. But my wife passed this test with flying colors. I don’t even remember what she served, but he had multiple servings of everything we had, and talked about how wonderful the meal was. I was unbelievably impressed with my wife’s cooking.

ASHRAFI

So at what year did you take the generals?

DUKE

It would have to be ‘61.

ASHRAFI

And that was your second or third year?

DUKE

Second year.

ASHRAFI

So you went through a series of textbooks, and then had to do problems.

DUKE

Right.

ASHRAFI

And was the atmosphere that everyone was on their own? Were students helping each other a lot?

DUKE

Students helped each other a lot. At least, other students helped me. Without the help of my fellow students, I’d have never made it.

ASHRAFI

Were there particular ones who acted as mentors to you or were particularly helpful?

DUKE

Well, I worked with a guy named George Renninger who is now a professor of physics at Guelph in Canada. Art Jaffe was a year behind me, and he was helpful. I think there was a chap named Minayak Dutta Roy who worked problems with me. And there was one more gentleman, Oscar, I can’t remember the name right now. So the answer was, there were several people who worked and helped me along. I wasn’t shy about asking for help, and these guys all knew how to work the problems. I didn’t get a room in the graduate college. It was a very elaborate place where you ate as well as roomed. So I had to room in town. And I roomed in town with another graduate student in the same rooming house, Jack Kossler who is now a professor at the College of William and Mary. I got to know him before he later married to his wife, Peggy. So I got to know Jack and Peggy Kossler. I also got to know Franz Gross fairly well, who also became a professor at William and Mary. So the answer is yes, I got to know several people reasonably well. And these people, again, were willing to help you if you have a well-defined problem. Besides I was working on the generals problems, and other people were interested in working general problems, too. It’s just that they could work them a hell of a lot faster than I could. [Chuckles].

ASHRAFI

So then you did fine on the generals?

DUKE

Yes. I can’t remember if I was third or fourth, but I think I was third in the class. That produced another crisis, because I was one of three people in the class who did not have fellowships. And if you had an assistantship, you had to have a teaching assistantship for the final two to three years, not a research assistantship. So I thought I would get an NSF fellowship. Since I was now third in the class, and since 22 people had them, why shouldn’t I get one? Well, I didn’t get one, and I had just gotten married. So, I was going to walk. I figured I’d earned it, right? I had proven that I could be among the best, why was I unworthy of an NSF scholarship when 20 of my classmates had NSF scholarships. So I told this to Eugene, and I was out looking for a job. And Eugene said not to worry, not to worry, right? “You’ll have a research assistantship, and all you’ll have to do is your thesis.” I just didn’t believe it, because the department policy was that you weren’t going to do it. So I left a little bit skeptical. Later that afternoon, George Shenstone who was the chairman of the department, called me in, told me I had a research assistantship, [chuckles] and I had a research assistantship working for Eugene for two years. So Eugene not only got me to go to Princeton by being kind to me, but he saved me from leaving when I didn’t get a fellowship at the end of being successful in doing the generals. Of course, I know now that things like this happen all the time when professors take care of talented students. As a kid, however, you don’t know these things.

ASHRAFI

Right, right. And so then you had to start working on a problem.

DUKE

Yes. Well, it turned out that the work that I’d done on proton carbon scattering, and proton oxygen scattering, had revealed that the absorptive part of the optical potential was peaked at the surface of nuclei. So…

ASHRAFI

Now this is work that you did before your generals?

DUKE

Yes. I told you I was at the western data processing center, running these codes on proton nucleus scattering. I ran them for proton carbon scattering out at the western data processing center, and proton oxygen scattering at NYU. I guess Ruby Sherr must have gotten those data. I was doing this work in collaboration with Ruby’s group. Ruby had recruited me somehow. But I didn’t actually work for Ruby except in the second year. As we just discussed, the first year of graduate school I worked for Don Hamilton; the second year I worked for Ruby; and the third and fourth years I worked for Eugene. The proton-carbon and proton-oxygen scattering calculations revealed that the absorptive part of the optical potential was peaked at the surface of the nuclei. So the question was, “Why is that?” Well, when I first started working with Eugene, he was trying to give me some hints as to how to go about answering this, which I was too ignorant or stupid to be able to understand. Eugene’s theory was that a student had to do it himself. He wasn’t going to. He was willing to help you with anything else in the world, but not your thesis. Your thesis had to be yours. So about the end of third year, I realized if I was going to write a thesis, I just had to go do it. So I went and took some of the solid-state notions on many-body theory, approximate single particle motion, and quasi-particles, and I did a little calculation. I took the nucleus as a bunch of nucleons and asked if I put another nucleon in, how it would scatter off of this array. And what you discover, of course, is that as the density of nuclear matter gets bigger and bigger, the Pauli exclusion principle gets more and more restrictive whereas as the density gets smaller at the outside, the Pauli exclusion principle becomes less severe. This happens because as the density increases you decrease the volume of phase space available in the final state of the nucleon-nucleon collisions. So what happens is that as the density increases as you go in the nucleus, then the amount of nucleon-nucleon scattering you get decreases. So there’s a peak in the amount of nucleon-nucleon scattering right at the edge of the nucleus. Far outside the nucleus the absorption potential is zero, because there is no nuclear matter there. Deep inside, the absorption is constant and constrained by the Pauli principle suitable for nuclear matter at the density of the nucleus. But at the surface, the density of nuclear matter decreases smoothly to zero outside the nucleus, and in this region the Pauli principle is less effective. Thus, more nucleon-nucleon scattering occurs which looks like absorption from the perspective of elastic nucleon-nucleus scattering. And this is the standard way of calculating optical potentials, I might add, in solids, or anything else. And so it turns out that this is purely an exclusion principle effect. At very low densities, there’s not enough nuclear matter, so you don’t scatter from anything, because there’s nothing to scatter from. Then you start to scatter from it, and there’s an exclusion principle that isn’t very effective, so there’s a lot of scattering. And as you get further in, the density gets higher, and exclusion principle sets in, so you go down until you get in the center, and you get a flat amount. And so I was able to calculate the optical potential associated with nuclear matter, and that was my thesis.

ASHRAFI

So how did you become familiar with condensed matter of many body methods?

DUKE

When I got to GE, I mentioned—so you want a historical, a chronological?

ASHRAFI

Yes.

DUKE

So I wrote my thesis. Eugene looked at it. He clearly wasn’t too thrilled with it, but his view of life was, you know, it was okay. Get the kid out, let him get a job and see what the hell he does. And [chuckles] Eugene was a very kind man. He never phrased it that way, but nevertheless, that’s what his attitude was. So he arranged for me to have interviews at GE and RCA because he believed that any competent theoretical physicist needs a few years of practical industrial experience to ground him in the “real world”.

ASHRAFI

Can I just interrupt for a second?

DUKE

Yes.

ASHRAFI

You said you used many-body methods in your thesis.

DUKE

Right.

ASHRAFI

So how did you, how were you familiar with application of those to nuclear phenomenon?

DUKE

Oh. That was a popular research topic at the time. Brueckner had written a book on the Nuclear Matter, great big blue book, and there were courses on many-body theory. So I just got a couple of sets of lecture notes on many-body theory and just worked the problems. I mean, this is how I do physics, right? I get a book or a couple of papers; I figure out what problem I want to work; and I go work the problems. That’s how theoretical physicists do it. At least [chuckles] that’s how I did it. That’s how Eugene did it. I’m not sure that I understand the question.

ASHRAFI

Oh. I was just trying to see what background you brought to the problem. That’s all.

DUKE

The ability to read a textbook and learn how to work problems.

ASHRAFI

Fair enough. So then you finished, and you were talking about how Wigner got you to talk to industrial laboratories….

DUKE

Right, he got me interviews at GE and RCA. I interviewed with Bob Parmenter at RCA, (now an emeritus professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson) who basically told me, come back when I know some solid-state physics. I found that interesting, because many years later, I did come back when he tried to recruit me from GE to become a professor at the University of Arizona at Tucson. So I did eventually pass that test. But at the time I was disappointed and went up to interview at the GE Research and Development Center in Schenectady NY. Roland Schmidt headed a group, Metallurgy and Ceramics, which did work on superconductivity, biophysics, and theoretical physics. Walter Harrison, now a professor at Stanford, was in the group. Charlie Bean was in the group. Howard Hart was associated with the group in some way, but my records do not show him as a member. Both Howard and Charlie remained at GE and are now in national academies. Who else was there? Ivar Giaver, who was about to win the Nobel Prize for tunneling in superconductors. So it was a group of people that were doing basic solid-state physics. When I went out to interview with them, Roland wasn’t there. They made me an offer, so I went to work at GE. Roland and I always used to joke that I was the only person he’d ever hired without ever having seen him. Now when I arrived at GE I knew practically no solid-state physics, so I worked with Walter Harrison. And my first problem was on magnetic breakdown. When you have a magnetic field and a periodic potential, as the field gets bigger and bigger, then the periodic potential becomes ineffective and you just get cyclotron resonance. But at low fields, then the electrons diffract off the crystal lattice so you don’t observe cyclotron resonance. If you look at something like the magnetic susceptibility you observe there’s a change in the shape of the signal as a function of the magnetic field. It’s been a long time now. I don’t remember the details. This was a big problem that Walter Harrison was interested in. So I brought my mathematical techniques to bear on it. I wrote the equations down, learned how to get all the asymptotic solutions and derived a very elegant solution, which Walter helped me with. And then went down to The Eastern Theoretical Physics Conference to give a paper on this. While there I believe it was either Quinn or Luttinger who pointed out to me that Clarence Zener had already solved this problem in 1932. So all this elaborate work getting the asymptotic solutions and matching the phases on the boundaries of the different regions went for nothing: The problem had been solved 32 years earlier in another context (electric breakdown in dielectrics). Thus, my first research project in solid-state physics was a false start that wound up published in proceedings of The Eastern Theoretical Physics Conference. My second solid-state project was calculating the optical absorption spectrum of impurities and solids with Gerry Mahan. It came to a better end with a paper published in the Physical Review 139, A1965-A1982 (1965).

ASHRAFI

We’re talking about Gerry Mahan.

DUKE

Gerry Mahan had come to work at GE in a different group at about the same time I had, and he was a solid-state physicist who had experience in the finite temperature many-body theory. My calculations had all been zero temperature. And so I had some experience in doing such calculations, and he was interested in working with someone, so we worked together. Basically, Gerry taught me solid-state physics, I have very little doubt about that. My career in solid-state physics got started with Gerry Mahan. We wrote a number of papers together on what we call the Matsubara formulation, which is the finite-temperature formulation of many-body theory. In many-body theory, you try to calculate the ground state at zero temperature. When you do the finite temperature formulation you calculate a partition function, because all the equilibrium properties come from the partition function. So it’s, either you’re doing that or you’re calculating the linear response diagrams to evaluate transport coefficients. So you’re calculating different things. I’m trying to remember. I believe both of them were in the book A.A. Abrikosov, L.P. Gorkov and I. E. Dzyaloshinsky, Methods of Quantum Field theory in Statistical Physics (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1963) that was basically our textbook. So we taught ourselves how to do these calculations. Well, as I say, this was how it was done in those days.

ASHRAFI

Can I ask you; I found in a brief bio here, that you were an affiliate professor of the Physics Department, University of Washington, and ‘63 to ‘69.

DUKE

No. I got the wrong dates, then. The University of Washington would have been ‘88 and ‘89. So I missed that, too.

ASHRAFI

Oh, no, this was in American Men and Women of Science.

DUKE

In American Men and Women of Science?

ASHRAFI

Yes. They have their dates wrong.

DUKE

Well, they screwed up. That all occurred when I was at Pacific Northwest Lab when I was Deputy Director and Chief Scientist at PNNL.

ASHRAFI

Okay, I was wondering because it seemed out of sequence. Okay. So you were talking about learning about solid-state physics from Gerry Mahan. Let me ask you one other question. So what happened to theology?

DUKE

What happened to theology? Well, I wound up teaching a lot of Sunday school.

ASHRAFI

At, where?

DUKE

Well, it turns out, in Schenectady. Ann, I and our two daughters belonged to the First Reform Church. And I taught courses in Old Testament and New Testament history. So I’ve taught high school students and that’s what I did on Sundays.

ASHRAFI

Did you do any of that at Princeton?

DUKE

At Princeton, the answer is no, I didn’t teach. I don’t really remember the details of the arrangement, but every Sunday we went out with a little boy, who was I think retarded in some essential respects, and we took him to church and so forth. I can’t remember the details, but the religious experience at Princeton was not so much associated with using the knowledge as it was extending personal contact.

ASHRAFI

And you never ventured into the theology department at Princeton?

DUKE

Oh, no. Believe me, I had all I could do. [Chuckles].

ASHRAFI

Okay. So after Gerry Mahan and your, you said you used the Matsubara formulism for many-body theory.

DUKE

Yes.

ASHRAFI

Okay. Did you ever come in contact with Matsubara? Do you know anything about him?

DUKE

No, I’ve never met him.

ASHRAFI

Okay. I’ve tried to look for information about him. It’s hard to find.

DUKE

I could believe that. I mean, why was it called, “Matsubara”? I presume the answer is that he wrote the key papers.

ASHRAFI

Yes, right. He was one of the sources the Russians used a lot.

DUKE

Right. Well the key point was, that you had a lot of these sums to do, and you had to convert them into contour integrals. So the technique is for converting the sums into contour integrals at finite temperatures. I can still remember worrying about what the contours were, and where the poles and cuts were. You had different kinds of poles for fermions and bosons. So there was an elaborate set of things you needed to do to get a formalistic looking like sum over poles into an integral that you could actually do by mapping the sum into a contour along a cut and doing the integral along the cut. That turned out to be the trick that enabled you to actually get numbers out of all of this stuff. I think that trick must have been due to Matsubara.

ASHRAFI

Okay. So in the period between ‘63 and ‘67, in Schenectady. Right. In ‘67 you went to Urbana.

DUKE

As a visiting professor at John Bardeen’s invitation, for six months. John had been a consultant to Roland’s group in Schenectady. —When I got to Schenectady in ‘63, superconductivity was hot. And there was a superconductivity conference at Colgate, at which several of the members of Roland’s group were giving papers. I got to go to that conference, at which John was in the middle of his controversy with Brian Josephson over what is now called the Josephson Effect (the flow of supercurrent in a tunnel junction at zero bias). Since John was a consultant at GE, Brian came to GE, John came to GE, and many other famous solid-state physicists (e.g., Brian Pippard and Morrel Cohen) people came to GE in conjunction with the conference. . So I got very rapidly immersed in solid-state physics through that, as well as working with Walter. But that’s how I got to know John. Of course, as John and I had both been students of Eugene, I suspect we invited John over to the house. I’m not sure we did at that time, but I got to know John then. He was very enthusiastic about my coming out to The University of Illinois at Urbana, and so I did that for a semester. I liked it. I taught a course in magnetism. I enjoyed it very much. But I went back to GE. I’m not sure why. I don’t remember the calculus at that time. Ann and I had two little kids. I suspect I probably wasn’t sure how I was going to make a living as a professor. So if you had had my financial experience of having started off as a fairly affluent young child and wound up working your way through everything when your mother was never convinced she was going to put food on the table, you would be fairly conscious of taking jobs that you could see were going to pay the bills.

ASHRAFI

Can you tell me something about how problems were picked in Schenectady? How was the research direction selected?

DUKE

Well, the process in our group was that every year we had a review of all of the work that the group had done, and in front of the whole group. Everybody got up and gave presentations. I gave presentations on these various calculations that I was doing. Everybody participated and there was some discussion about what would happen, at least for people like Walter Harrison and myself. Subsequently Seth Silverstein and Alan Bennett joined the theory group, which consisted of Water Harrison and Ed Hart before I arrived. As far as I could tell, it was those group discussions that really led, to individual decisions on what problems to study. You’d have to pick something that was hot, that people were interested in, but it was more of a social conversation, a consensus was not required. It was just a question of what was interesting and what was not interesting. Now for the experimentalists, the other efforts in the group were radiation damage in solids (Jim Corbett, Bob Fleischer, Bueford Price and Bob Walker), electrons in metals (Bob Doremus, Tom Moore, and Ben Roberts) and far infrared spectroscopy (S. Roberts). In a closely related group Howard Hart and Warren Solidar studied type two superconductors like niobium-tin in high magnetic fields. This work was clearly pertinent to GE businesses because they wanted to create large superconducting magnets for medical electronics. So they did fundamental studies. We were talking about how the flux lines move. In a Type 2 superconductor, you get flux penetrating the superconductor, and as you change the field and the flux lines move about. It is of interest to study how the movement of the flux lines depends on how you process the material. Their relation to the metallurgy of the sample is analogous to that of dislocations. So there was a lot of practical interest in that topic. Howard and Warren were much more closely coupled with the manufacturing operations and the development operations, because they were studying the microscopic of strength and heat generation in high-field magnets. And then I think there was another group of people who studied ceramics. They were interested into things like phosphors and the coatings, the very strong coatings of gas discharge lamps. You had to put them inside of a container when they were high-pressure. And the containers had to last and not be eroded by water or by other things. So that was another dimension. So I recall extensive experimental activities that were associated either with the lighting or with high-field superconducting magnets. Later, I was asked to consult for the Lamp Division, and I wound up going out to the Lamp Division for almost three or four weeks every year. Not at the same time, but I would go out there regularly. And I worried a great deal about how energy got transferred from the discharge into the phosphor. We talked a lot about what kinds of doping you could put in to make that energy transfer more efficient and how you would prevent the defects from arising from the radiation. I became somewhat of an expert on that, wrote some papers on it, and consulted with them. So I eventually got absorbed into a practical problem, and I was the guy who went to the Lamp Division from the group.

ASHRAFI

So let me see if I understand. When you first arrived at Schenectady, you worked on issues that were of interest in the literature, say in the academic literature. And you were…

DUKE

We worked on things that were of interest to people that were in the group at the time, and they were very highly oriented toward hot topics in solid-state physics.

ASHRAFI

Okay, and not necessarily towards the needs of GE.

DUKE

The needs of GE set the context. Think about it as strategy versus the operations. I’m now going to give you an interpretation, since I’ve been a high level manager determining these things. I’m sure that the Guy Suits (VP for R&D at GE at the time) had a portfolio, that he knew what his growth businesses were, that he knew he had a stable business in the Lamp Division, and that he wanted some support work to make sure that that business kept growing. And I’m sure we were a little piece of that. He had a growing business; he wanted to do superconducting alloy magnets for medical electronics and circuit elements for electricity transmission. So he wanted a piece of these businesses, and I’m sure we were the leading edge of his investments to achieve this strategic goal. So he had a R&D portfolio, and he had the guys who were doing technology development work. In the Lamp Division, the division VP had the guys doing the product development work and the manufacturing work. And he counted on Guy Suits to support a tiny little research group out at the front end, whose job was to go out in the world, find out what’s going on, and figure out how to get GE ahead of the curve. That’s what Roland’s group was about. It was, go out and get ahead of the curve. Now, how do you judge a group like that? And the answer is, in those days, you judged a group like that by its recognition in the peer group. So it was wonderful when Ivar won a Nobel Prize, and Walter was very well known. Charlie Bean was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Howard Hart became a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The judgment made on that little, teeny piece of the portfolio was excellence, as measured by peer recognition in the community. Now that didn’t mean, if you were the manager of the group, if you were Roland or if you were subsequently his successors, that would be the only thing you were judged on. It may not even be the primary thing you were judged on. But if you were part of the little group of people who were doing that kind of work, that’s what you were judged on. That is certainly how the Xerox operated from 1972-1992, and how GE operated until the mid 1970s. These are things I know. You have a portfolio; a tiny little piece of the portfolio is devoted toward outreach and bringing new stuff in. By “a tiny little piece” I typically mean five percent of your total “R” investment. Ten percent would be a large number. So if you have, say a hundred people working on a subject, and certainly in the Lamp Division, there were hundreds of people, you can afford four or five people going out there, fiddling around with energy transfer and phosphors and so forth, to find out if they could find out something interesting. I think actually we did make some change that reduced the damage to the lamps, and increased the light by 20 or 30 percent, and everyone was thrilled. It was probably an accident [chuckles], but one that added a lot more to the profits than the cost of the research. You get the flavor!

ASHRAFI

So you’ve given me now, a manager’s perspective of that. Can you recall what your perspective was? Were you aware that you were at GE and not Bell Labs, and not at Princeton or Illinois, and that your role—was there an awareness of a distinction in your role at GE, as opposed to these other places, or was it all the same, you were all doing the most interesting solid-state things you could?

DUKE

No. GE was out to make money, and they had to make money by selling things to customers.

ASHRAFI

And as a physicist in your group, you were aware of these things?

DUKE

You bet you were aware, absolutely. Now that didn’t mean that you personally and your personal work had to fit rigorously into that mold. But everybody knew that Bell Labs was a sinecure i.e., they were basically paid for by taxes on the phone system. Bell Labs didn’t have to sell anything. From GE’s point of view, Bell Labs were a joke. They were a great place, but boy, if we got paid for by taxes, all we’d have to do is this great fundamental research. We didn’t get paid for by taxes. We got paid for by an overhead on products that were sold to customers, and that’s a very different way of getting your funding. I can assure you that everybody who worked for the General Electric Company was keenly and acutely aware of that fact. So that’s one of the main motivations for getting hooked up with the Lamp Division. Prior to that, since I’d been a nuclear physicist, I consulted at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (KAPL) with the people in the Reactor Division. Staff members at the GE Schenectady Research Laboratories were keenly aware that you were expected to expand your interests and eventually come up with something that would be profitable for the company. But that, especially for young people like me, wasn’t what got you a raise for the year. You did what was expected of you during the year in which you were embedded. It was pretty clear that you were not going to be doing basic science all your career, and that you were going to have to figure out what you were going to do when you grew up. And the attitude of folks, I think Walter Harrison was the one that made it pretty clear, was that if when you grew up you wanted to continue to do basic science, you went to a university. The notion was that going to a place like GE was a good initial stint because the standard physicist’s arrogance was that if you were any good and you wanted to do basic research, then of course you could get a job—Walter went to Stanford, Ivar and Charlie went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and I went to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. The notion was that if you were any good, you could get a professorship at a good university. In those days, it was even true. We’re talking about the [chuckles] late sixties and early seventies. Universities were expanding. I got offers from a number of universities when I decided to leave GE. But I obviously was going to go to Urbana because of John Bardeen.

ASHRAFI

So in this period, ‘63 to ‘69, you wrote in this very nice outline of the biography some of the other work that you did. Should we talk about some more between ‘63 and ‘69 or move on?

DUKE

It’s up to you.

ASHRAFI

Well, why don’t we talk about some of the work you did, you mention here electronic tunneling, surface science.

DUKE

Well, the surface science work was a totally different thing. The tunneling work emerged from the work with Gerry Mahan. He and I had done Matsubara sums. I never had done the superconducting tunneling. Well, Walter Harrison was interested in tunneling, so I got interested in tunneling. It became clear to me that there were things called zero bias anomalies; there were some mysteries, because the tunneling current did not follow the one electron model nice and smoothly, even for ordinary metals. Close to zero bias, there were little dips and peaks and all kinds of interesting things. And they depended on the magnetic field and the temperature. So there was a field called zero bias anomalies, which I got interested in, because it was the application of many-body theory to tunneling. That led me to systematize how to apply many-body theory to electron tunneling in solid-state junctions. John had written a model called The Transfer Hamiltonian, which he had used for superconducting tunneling. But that was not terribly useful for the kinds of things we needed to do. So I basically took the Matsubara formulation, took John’s Transfer Hamiltonian model, and mapped it into a Matsubara form similar to linear response theory. This enabled me to evaluate systematically the many-body processes that happened in the barrier, the many-body processes that happened in the electrodes, and to produce a systematic Matsubara formulation of the tunneling problem. In that context, I could then go back and do the superconducting tunneling. I could calculate all the various magnetic effects with people had seen. I could calculate phenomena like phonon-induced zero bias anomalies. I could calculate inelastic tunneling. So all the tunneling phenomena that before had each had been their own little world, I could write in one systematic, simple formalism. I could and did write a book that had a chapter on this, a chapter on that, reviewing each one and showing which kind of diagrams they were; this is what you got, this is what the experiments were. So I basically took the group’s interest in tunneling plus the technology of the Matsubara formulation and converted them into a book [Tunneling in Solids (Academic Press, New York, 1969)] that covered the whole subject, which turned out to be, as you know, immensely popular. And that’s how that book came about. The surface science was a fundamentally different activity. There was a researcher at GE named Gert Ehrlich, who also ultimately left to go to the University of Illinois, but many years after I did, who was in a completely different group. I’m trying to think of what that group’s job was, catalysis, fuel cells, perhaps. In any event, Gert’s expertise was electron field emission, and he made field emission tips. In those days, field emission was done in glass tubes, so you’d have to make the tip, and a detector and put it all in a glass vacuum tube. And the reason that you did that in a place like GE is because nobody else had any technology for doing all this glass blowing. So the places where that work was done were industrial labs, especially GE and Westinghouse. So we were the centers of expertise for the experimental work in that field, because of the expertise in glass blowing, and the technology of being able to make the experimental apparatus. Gert had discovered, or maybe he didn’t discover it, but anyway there was a big mystery. Field emission was described by the Fowler-Nordheim equation: an equation that says you get field emission from a metal, because the emitted electron goes through a triangular barrier at the surface A field emitted electron goes through; a thermionic emitted electron goes over. The free parameter is the work function. So you could discuss how the current should scale with the work function. The mystery, then, was why when you adsorbed nitrogen onto tungsten the work function went up, but the current went up, too. If the work function went up, and the Fowler-Nordheim model was correct, the current has to do down. That was the problem that was posed to me.

ASHRAFI

By?

DUKE

By Gert Erlich. How could this be? Having been working on tunneling, my response was, “Well, of course. It’s resonance tunneling.” I had a summer student, Mike Alferieff from MIT, so we just simply worked the problem. We took a one-dimensional potential, we put a little potential for an adsorbate in front of it in an external electric field, and we calculated the tunneling current. And lo and behold, if you calculate the energy distributions, you get a huge peak right at the virtual energy level of the adsorbate, no fantastic surprise, frankly. But it instantly solved the problem, and we became famous. But of course, lots of people didn’t believe it. There was a huge debate over whether this was really the solution to the problem. So a whole bunch of folks went and tried to look for the resonances in the energy distributions of the field emitted electrons. But they were not immediately successful. It turns out that the reason for that is that these resonances on most metals are down so far from the Fermi surface in energy that you’re down into the noise when you do the measurement of the currents. So Ward Plummer (elected to the National Academy of Sciences just this year) at NBS wanted to go to a low-work function metal and also put on an adsorbate that had a high-energy resonance, so you could get it up to higher energies. I forgot what he used as the metal, but he was putting the divalent elements on it. Eventually he actually resolved the first peak in the energy distribution. That was a huge thing: The first new thing in electron field emission in decades. So that is how that all came about.

ASHRAFI

And this was all while you were at Schenectady? Yes.

DUKE

Yes. That’s all while I was at Schenectady.

ASHRAFI

Now, can I ask you how it came about that you were consulting for the Lighting Division? Did they seek you out? Did you volunteer?

DUKE

Well, I don’t know how it got started but I think people were expected to consult for the operating divisions, several of which like the Lamp Division and Switchgear Division had their own regional R&D labs. I was happy to consult for the Light Division, because my wife’s family lived in Cleveland. So after I had gone out there once or twice, I realized that I could take my family with me on those trips. Of course, that meant the grandchildren got to see the grandparents. Unfortunately, they lived in Lakewood on the other side of town from the Lamp Division facility at Nela Park. I can still remember driving through snow storms for an hour to get to the Lamp Division from Lakewood, but I was very keen on going out to the Lamp Division because that meant that we got to take the children out to see Ann’s parents, and that was regarded as a highly desirable thing. So I’m not sure this completely answers your question. You asked how it got started. I don’t really recall. I became quite interested in lighting. The Lamp Division was a large business. They had a nice customer center in Cleveland at Nela Park, where they educated customers all about lights, e.g., how the lights were made and the color spectrum. So there was a lot of good physics there. I got to work with a young man named Tom Soules . So I had all of the things you would want: A good collaborator and a pressing reason to go to Cleveland. I enjoyed the work. I learned a lot. The people wanted me. I had a young colleague who worked with me. And I got to take the grandchildren to see the grandparents. What’s there not to like about this?

ASHRAFI

During this period Schenectady, ‘63 to ‘69, did you have any kind of managerial role?

DUKE

No.

ASHRAFI

Okay. Were you involved in funding or fund-raising?

DUKE

No. I was solely an individual contributor, and my recollection is that I was reasonably hard to get along with.

ASHRAFI

Oh, really?

DUKE

I was naive enough to believe that you ought to tell people, quote, “the truth” i.e., what you think. Fortunately, I had a number of managers who found that not only not offensive but also somewhat amusing, but that’s not true in general, as we both know.

ASHRAFI

What about when your notebooks, was there was some procedure for preserving these for controlling how the notebooks moved in and out?

DUKE

Yes. Everybody had a lab notebook. Now, for a variety of reasons, I constructed my own lab notebooks. I didn’t use the official one personally, but I kept detailed records of my calculations in loose-leaf form, because I was constantly making mistakes and putting additional material into the notebooks. Since I was doing such basic work, nobody seemed to care very much. I was telling you earlier about the experimentalists and the theorists. Experimentalists, especially the guys working on the superconductors, all kept very careful notebooks. When they got filled up, they went to the library. So that was a very rigorous scheme. If you were doing any kind of experimental work, you kept a meticulous lab notebook. Theorists tend to keep loose-leaf notebooks, but they were not expected to file a lot of patents. The main use of the official notebooks was to establish the priority of a patent claim if the patent was litigated. I tried to explain to you about the portfolio, earlier. The people at the front end of the technology development process were not judged by exactly the same criteria as the people at the other places in the process. Since we were judged essentially by the public recognition of our work, we were not subject to, let’s call it, excessive rigor when we didn’t follow the internal procedures to the letter. Again, since we’re on record, this is one of the attributes of an outstanding research organization, where you tailor what you do to people where they are. Roland Schmidt was a superb manager. He eventually went to become GE’s VP of R&D and then president of RPI, and Chairman of the Board of the American Institute of Physics. But I guarantee you, if he had been a guy who insisted that everybody toe the line; he’d have never gotten up that ladder. As a senior manager you’ve got to encourage people who work for you. They are the ones who are going to do the work. You’re not going to do the work. The best you can do is get them out there. What I’m describing to you is what I always believed as a research manager, later. The people who work for me, I don’t try to tell them what to do. I try to get them in contact with the people who have the problems so that they learn for themselves what to do. And then when they something, an idea, you encourage them. If a manager tells somebody what to do, there will be resentment instantly. The most important thing, if you’ve got talented people, is you get the talented people to the customers, you get the talented people to the source of the problem, you let them figure out what to do, and then you reward the hell out of them when they get something done well. And oh, by the way, you take up for them when they make a mistake, because you’re going to make a whole bunch of mistakes and you’re not living in exactly the same world as most other people. Sometimes the managers in the groups that you’re interacting with don’t exactly understand the attitudes of the people that you manage. The environment in Roland’s group was really excellent, and it was quite different from that in most other groups. I remember Gert Ehrlich was very unhappy with his group. He did not feel at all satisfied about how he was able to go to professional society meetings, and so on and so forth. So that’s a very pertinent question. Outstanding performance only comes from motivated people. No one is motivated if they are subjected to what they regard as excessive controls.

ASHRAFI

Okay. So, but just to make sure I understand; for your work, for your group’s work, there wasn’t any particular stringent control of your notebooks or who you talked to about what.

DUKE

Your proposed restatement of my answer to your question is not generally accurate. There was control but the control was not exercised uniformly across all the people in the group and across all the activities in the group. For the tiny number of people who were out at the front end, your statement is accurate. But there were a substantial number of people in the group who were associated with technologies with envisionable product applications for whom that statement is not correct. They kept notebooks religiously. They consulted with customers and manufacturing folks. They filed patents. So it’s where you are in the product development process that determines the appropriate procedures—that’s the intellectual structure that I want you to envision. Think about a value chain. At one end, you have customers; at the other end you have ideas. A whole lot of things have to happen to an idea before it’s useful to a customer. First, you must convert that idea into a technology option. People like we were talking about do this. Next you have to convert the technology option into some kind of a product option. Then you must convert the product option into a product. Next, you have to deliver the product to the end customers. Finally, you have to get the feedback from the customers all the way up to the front end. New products are created and delivered via this value chain. The model that I need for you to have in your mind, is that the behaviors and the management practices that are appropriate depend upon where you are in this chain. What is very appropriate for the guy who’s doing customer feedback is totally inappropriate for the guys in manufacturing, whose behaviors and practices in turn, are totally inappropriate for technology development.

ASHRAFI

I understand your point about the value chain and the different kinds of requirements for different people in the organization.

DUKE

So Roland’s group was generally at the front end of the value chain, but not all of its members were at the very leading edge of the value chain. Part of the group was trying to develop technology with a product in mind, and part of the group was trying to develop new ideas.

ASHRAFI

Okay. Your trip to Russia. Did you make many trips, either for these kinds of conferences—you said that they were good with you, better in your group than in other groups. And were they particular significant ones?

DUKE

Well, my first travel abroad was to a tunneling conference in Riso, Denmark. I believe that was in ‘67. And then the second trip was to Russia in ‘68. Those were the two that I certainly remember. The trip in ‘68 was to the International Conference on Semiconductors, which is a well-known international conference. People from GE went regularly, and so I was not exactly an exception, in any way, shape or form. As for the tunneling conference, Ivar had just won the Nobel Prize. So a bunch of us went. Gerry Mahan went, I went, Ivar went.

ASHRAFI

And in ‘69, you will be?

DUKE

In ‘69, I went to the University of Illinois, quote, “permanently” unquote, as a professor, i.e., not on a visiting appointment, on a regular appointment.

ASHRAFI

And you went there in large part, because of John Bardeen?

DUKE

Yes.

ASHRAFI

Okay. So what was it like there? How was it different than being in the GE group?

DUKE

Well, the first thing that’s different is that everybody is his/her own boss. I had an appointment in the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL). I had the office and some money in the CSL. I also had an appointment in the Materials Research Lab (MRL), so I had money and I had facilities in the Materials Research Lab. I had an academic appointment in Physics, with a salary paid for teaching by the University of Illinois, and ultimately, I had contracts. From the point of view of operations, if you are a researcher at GE or I suppose, any industrial lab, you do not control your own resources; your manager controls your resources. At GE we had very enlightened management, so they let you control your own sources of problems. Nevertheless, they had total control of all your resources, from travel to computers to any sort of junior help like postdocs or summer appointments. Every time there was a budget cut, you got forcefully reminded that you were a peon controlled by a system that did not care at all about what you needed to do your job. In addition, as I learned many years later at Xerox, most mangers want to tell their people what to do, which in my opinion is lethal for this kind of activity. So the first difference is that at a university you have control over your resources. You have control over what you do. On the other hand, your resources are not guaranteed. If you don’t do good stuff, the money doesn’t come. So you’re an independent businessman, as opposed to a hired hand who gets told what to do. Now I’m casting this in black and white terms, but you have to understand that at a research university faculty members really are independent businessmen. You do get paid, but you get paid to teach, and that’s made pretty clear to you. And oh, by the way, it’s okay in Illinois, at least in my day, to teach graduate students, but there were formulas. You had to have so many graduate students and so on and so forth. You had to acquire so many points, either by teaching courses or graduate students or by performing other duties. So for your salary from the University of Illinois, there were things that you had to do. They might give you a little slack at the beginning. But in general, there was a formula and the formula was expected to be followed. It was a teaching formula, for your teaching salary. My research money came from the Materials Research Lab, from CSL, and from the Air Force. I don’t know where other professors’ research funding came from, but they came from whatever they came from. For those monies, you had to please the sponsor, so you were doing things that the sponsor was interested in. Now in those days—You’ve got to remember we’re talking about the late sixties and early seventies-- things were a lot looser than they are now. The view was that if you have good people you turn them loose to do good things. So it was more of, “Gee, Charlie Duke is an okay guy, and he’s doing stuff that’s publishable, and he’s going to conferences,” and so on. There weren’t a whole lot of extra questions asked, at least that was my impression. I didn’t feel oppressed by it. I think today, young people have a much tougher time. I have served on some Boards for the Military. It’s not really that way with military funding these days. The NSF has its own unique features. There is a lot more control exercised by funding agencies today than in the early 1970s. So I don’t think young people today live in that world to the extent that I did. I think the world has changed profoundly. But in that day, that’s the way it was. That was totally different from GE, where you were expected to work on what you were told to work on. For reasons that were to some extent accidental, I was a tiny part of a tiny group the members of which were allowed to work on what they were interested in as long as they had some customers out there that were happy. So that’s the first big difference. The second big difference was the sociology. And I must say that at GE, the sociology was much closer to Urbana than at Xerox. At GE, we had visitors fairly regularly. My wife occasionally threw parties. Other people threw parties. I still remember those parties because we have little picture books from them. I can show you pictures of Volker Heine at a Christmas party, and John at parties. So there were people coming through and parties being thrown fairly regularly. Not as often as at Urbana, but every few months or so. The only big different was the fact that GE tended to pay for the parties, whereas at Illinois, everybody had to do everything themselves. Our group (at GE ) was very congenial. But its environment really was very local.

ASHRAFI

When you say, “our group,” do you mean at GE or Urbana?

DUKE

At GE, Roland Schmidt’s group, Metallurgy and Ceramics. So when I got to Urbana, it was just more of the same. Visitors came every week. There was a group of people in the physics department who entertained. The Dukes entertained; the Bardeens entertained; the Pines entertained; the Holonyaks entertained; the Schlichters entertained. There was a group of people that entertained, and various people had visitors through. My wife learned to cook for fairly substantial numbers of people. And as I mentioned in one of notes that I gave you, we bought wine by the case from Hans Frauenfelder. If you want that story on the tape, one of the more interesting things occurred I believe at Nick Holoynak’s birthday party. The wine had just arrived, and I had bought a couple of crates of the cheap stuff and one crate of the good stuff. So I took three bottles over and we did a blind testing with David Pines John, Nick, and Charlie Slichter; all these guys who claim, they knew the good stuff from the bad stuff, absolutely. We did a blind test. The only person who got it right was John Bardeen. That was the last time I ever believed in this mythology of the difference between 20 bucks a bottle and five bucks a bottle. Today I guess that would be 60 bucks a bottle and 20 bucks a bottle [chuckles].

ASHRAFI

Right. So you were telling me about the differences in the sociology.

DUKE

Well, in Urbana, professors were all equal. You know, professors were professors were professors. The Deans were professors. And oh, by the way, the professors didn’t have to cow-tow to the Deans. There was no view that if the Dean or department chair tells you to do something, you had to do it. Persuasion rather than power was the order of the day. The Department Chair got along by getting along. The Department Chair didn’t get along by ordering people around. So it was a very, very congenial environment. At least I found Urbana very congenial. And even people who had very different points of view got along. I can remember David Pines, Charlie Slichter, and John Bardeen were very different people but they all got along. Nick was kind of the practical engineer, and he got along with everybody. There was a certain amount of grumbling and griping, but basically, the physics department at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign was a congenial, collegial environment. It was not a power-oriented environment.. The Deans got laughed at more than they got feared. At GE, I was fairly insulated, I guess you would have to say. I saw my own, narrow little thing, and I had good bosses. Roland was an excellent boss, and he was followed by an equally good boss named Bill Johnson. So I had exceptionally good managers at GE. But my colleagues like Gert did not have comparably good managers. As you begin to recognize that if you’re going to stay around you’re not going to have exceptionally good bosses forever, you’re going to go some place where you think you’re going to have a little more freedom. This is what made the University of Illinois an attractive proposition relative to GE, although I had been treated exceptionally well at GE and have always had the highest opinion of most of my personal managers and colleagues there. Xerox was much less congenial than GE. It was and remains very power-oriented, a fact that I learned too late.

ASHRAFI

When you were at Urbana, what were your contacts or relationships with industry? Did you do any consulting?

DUKE

Oh, I continued to be a consultant for GE. Nick Holonyak, with whom I collaborated regularly on III-V semiconductor tunneling and light emission was actively involved in something called The Industrial Affiliates, within the context of which I consulted for Ford and for GM. I’ve forgotten the specifics but we had a group of companies and almost every month we went around to visit them. But they didn’t pay us personally. They paid into a kitty that we could use to support research. So there was a group of us who participated. I think it included Nick, myself, and Dale Compton (then director of CSL), I can’t remember who else was in the group. But we had an Industrial Affiliates program, and companies were very anxious to work with us. So we would take the students. I remember I went to Cocomo, and to some plant in Chicago. I almost got killed flying into Chicago Midway on a small plane. I didn’t do that again. So the answer is yes, there was a very active consulting activity.

ASHRAFI

And was it all through Nick’s industrial affiliates program?

DUKE

It’s wasn’t Nick’s program. Nick and John were my Godfathers. Nick connected me with the real world, and John took care of me. Both of them were close personal friends. John was like Eugene. If I needed something done, I’m sure I could have gone to John. I never had to. I got to Urbana with a very generous package. That generous package didn’t come from the air. Nobody in Illinois knew who the hell I was. John did the same thing Eugene did. He told them to fix it, which I have done many times for kids coming to Xerox and when I was at PNNL recruiting people. This is what perceptive bosses do. They pick the people they think that are going to be the winners, and they arrange to make life pleasant for them. That’s what you do. That’s your job. So there was an industrial affiliates program at Urbana, and Marv somebody or another, ran it. It was a university program, but certain people were the backbones, who went out regularly. Nick and I, and I believe Dale and another chap from Electrical Engineering, went out regularly. You’re getting a very biased view of this, because I had a circle of friends. They were the people I knew, and I knew they participated. But the industrial affiliates program was much bigger than us. There were many other participants. We were not the only people who were driving this thing. It’s just that we had our little group of companies that we went to. Nick seemed to know everybody, in my view.

ASHRAFI

Do you want to talk about some of your research between ‘69 and ‘72?

DUKE

Well, that’s at Urbana.

ASHRAFI

Yes.

DUKE

Well, when I got there, the tunneling book had just been published. The first big thing that happened in Urbana was that some work that I had already done at GE on surface science became hot. I had started a project with Charlie Tucker, who worked at GE, on Low-Energy Electron Diffraction (LEED). While I was still at GE I went to a LEED theory seminar with Charlie for reasons that I don’t really recall. What does “low energy” mean? Well, low energy is low, relative to nuclear energy. So we’re talking about 50 eV. to 500 eV. “Low” to a semiconductor physicist is a millivolt. LEED is not on the same scale. At the time “LEED theory” was high-energy band theory. But if you look at the LEED intensities, —remember you talking to a guy who did his thesis on nuclear matter and optical-model absorption. -- it was clear that electrons in this energy range were moving through a highly absorptive medium. I tried to point that out to folks at the LEED theory seminar, and they all laughed at me. So, I went back to GE and Charlie Tucker was interested in pursuing this topic. He did experimental Low-Energy Electronic Diffraction. His interest was metallurgy. He used it to study what was on the surface of things that would cause them to break in difficult environments. So he was at the technology end of the spectrum. He was thrilled to work with a nut like me. We wrote a little paper in which I worked out the scattering of an electron in a periodic potential in the presence of strong absorption, which was not exactly hard for me to do, since I’d done my thesis on a similar topic.

ASHRAFI

When are we talking, now?

DUKE

This actually occurred in ‘67. The paper was published in ’69. It was submitted in early ‘68. That paper created quite a stir, but it was pointed out to me, very forcibly, that my model was incomplete because I used isotropic scatterers. So I had the damping right, but I had the scattering wrong. So one of the first things that I did when I got to Illinois was that I worked with a Post-Doc, George Laramore to correct this shortfall. At first we constructed a full quantum field theory of electron-solid scattering. So that instead of calculating LEED intensities via an ansatz, I had a real theory, and it turned out to my amazement that we had a solvable quantum field theory. Renormalized is perhaps a better word. You could actually calculate all the diagrams, all the standard stuff. So that was cute. When we got around to putting it into code form to make approximations to do the elastic scattering calculation, we put in multiple phase shifts to describe the scattering of the incident electron from the atoms in the solid. That put the theory on a firm, complete theoretical basis. We predicted both elastic and inelastic diffraction. Inelastic diffraction is when the electron loses energy but still diffracts, so you can observe what looks like a LEED pattern, but a LEED pattern for electrons that have lost a plasmon’s worth of energy. After we constructed the theory we first applied it to the LEED from the (100), (111) and (110) faces of aluminum. That was to calm my critics. People were yelling at me fairly substantially. Now the party line at the time was that the outer atomic layer spacing at surfaces was expanded because the atomic vibrations at surfaces were larger than those in the bulk so that all surface atomic layers would relax outwards from the bulk. But it turned out that the top layer spacing of aluminum (110) was contracted, and that was really a shock, a big shock. The reason for this behavior turns out to be associated with the electrostatic restoring forces between the electrons leaking out of the solid at the surface and the charged ion cores left behind. If you have a very open surface, then you’ve got these ions sticking out in the tail of the electron distribution and they want to pull back. So it’s an electrostatic effect, that subsequently, and nowadays, people compute routinely, for all kinds of surfaces. But at the time, that was a big discovery. So we did a lot of new things: We constructed a unique quantum field theory; we applied it to elastic scattering and discovered these contractions that were new an unexpected; and we applied it to describe inelastic diffraction, which had never been done before. So we had a theory of inelastic diffraction, and that was totally novel. And then we learned how to apply this theory to determine the energy versus momentum relationship of surface plasmons. So we converted the notion of electron solid scattering from high-energy band theory into a real quantum field theory that could do lots of other things. It could be used to determine surface atomic geometries. When it was, we discovered that these geometries weren’t what the world thought they were supposed to be. It could be applied to determine energy versus momentum relations of surface plasmons, that had never been determined before. Consequently, this theory greatly expanded the reach of what the study of electron diffraction from surfaces could do. Now at that time (1970-72), I was becoming active in the American Vacuum Society (AVS). I had been invited to their 1968 meeting in Seattle, and had given a talk there on the electron density distribution of low index metallic surfaces, which Alan Bennett and I’d been working on. But then I was involved in the planning of the Surface Science Division meetings. It turns out that the Surface Science Division was formed at that meeting. Peter Hobson was the first Chair. I was the second Chair. But the year before I was Chair, there was going to be an International Union of Vacuum Science and Technology (IUVSTA) conference. Bob Park and I proposed that we initiate a new international conference on solid surfaces (ICSS) at this meeting. In Seattle, they had this boat trip that goes out to an island, and at the island, you get some salmon along with an Indian ceremony. The AVS sponsored “all that you can drink” on the boats back and forth. So Bob Park and I took this trip, and we got thoroughly potted. We talked about, “Well, this organization (AVS) is kind of nowhere where science is concerned. Why don’t we have a real conference, invite some Nobel Prize winners, and show these people what real science is all about.” We proposed this to the AVS leadership, and probably no one was more surprised than we were when, in fact, the leadership actually thought it was a good idea. They were willing to sponsor the conference with real money for speakers. So we planned the first International Conference on Solid surfaces (ICSS), which was in ‘71 in Boston. John came, Eugene came, and Bob Schrieffer came. All my buddies from the old days [chuckles] came and chaired sessions. Bob Schrieffer even gave a paper.

ASHRAFI

Now you mentioned that you turned to the American Vacuum Society because the American Physical Society wasn’t interested.

DUKE

Oh, yes. All of us were physicists and we were all used to giving papers in American Physical Society (APS) meetings. This turns out to be a famous story that still gets told in Council and Executive Board meetings in the APS. We went to, I guess, the Condensed Matter Physics Division, although it would not have been called the Condensed Matter then, and asked for some invited paper sessions and other sessions. We were turned down flat.

ASHRAFI

How come?

DUKE

You’ll have to ask the people involved. My recollection is that they argued that surface science wasn’t “real” condensed matter physics. In other words, it was outside the scope of what the big wheels thought they wanted to do. That would be my interpretation, in retrospect. All professional societies have this problem as became very apparent to me in the American Chemical Society at a later time. The people who run these societies have their own personal interests and agendas. They got to be leaders because their interests were similar to the people who ran it before, so they tend to be fairly ingrown. Since there are only so many sessions the leaders don’t particularly welcome anybody coming in with something new. At the time, I thought they were a bunch of really bad people. I’ve subsequently realized that this is life. But I was very annoyed about their unequivocal rejection of us, and the American Vacuum Society was welcoming us. So the surface science community, which had a lot of physicists in it, basically just deserted the American Physical Society (APS) and went to the American Vacuum Society (AVS) for a while. Leading edge papers were given at the AVS meetings. The APS eventually caught on and started having sessions, reversing their initial stand. But this occurred only after I had become president of the AVS, surface science had become a big thing, and Physics Today had special issues on the topic, like once a year. So it had become clear that Surface Science had become a big deal in physics. It was also clear that many of the people involved thought the APS had missed one of the major new physics frontiers of the 1970s, and this was a new experience for the APS. [Chuckles] And they were not real happy with it. I still remember that when I was on Council and the Executive Board (1995-98), Judy Franz (Executive officer of the APS) would remind people regularly when Materials Science, or some new group came up requesting more representation at the meetings, that I was sitting there, and the reason that Surface Science had gone off to somebody else was because they had done that to us. She didn’t want them to do that to this next group. She must have brought in Materials Physics and at least a couple of other topical groups that became divisions into the APS because of her lectures at the Executive Board meetings. So it made a big impression on Judy, and she made the APS a much more welcoming institution. Everybody learns. It’s not like it’s a big deal.

ASHRAFI

You mean Judy Franz?

DUKE

Judy Franz, right. She was not the secretary then. Bill Havens was the secretary then.

ASHRAFI

So then in ‘72—now, is there anything that is important that we should mention before moving on to ‘72, Xerox?

DUKE

Well, I don’t have my crib sheet here. I’m not sure what I had covered. No. I gave both of the key things that I had at Urbana; namely, good friends, surface science in the AVS, and the ICSS, right. All those things were good.

ASHRAFI

Okay. But in ‘72, you decided to move on to Xerox. Can you tell me how that came about? Are you okay? Do you want to take a break?

DUKE

No, I’m okay. As I indicated in the little crib sheet there, leaving Urbana was probably the most difficult and traumatic decision I made of my entire career, and it came about in a very unfortunate way. The Chairman of the Department when I came to Urbana was a gentleman named Gerry Almy. He was a wonderful, wonderful person, as was his wife, Ruth. And they were good friends of the family. But in 1972, or maybe it was ‘71, he retired and was replaced by someone else. Now in mid-year of ‘71, I had four programs in Urbana. I had a III-V semiconductor program with Nick Holonyak; I had a silicon program with Dale Compton; I had a surface physics program with Frank Prost; and I had my own little theory program that was centered in the Materials Research Lab.

ASHRAFI

Can I interrupt? Can you tell me about how these different programs were funded?

DUKE

Yes. Nick’s program was funded predominately, I believe, by some combination of the NSF and the military. He had his own contracts and had at least one Bell Labs employee among his students. He was a member of the Materials Research Lab, just like I was, but that was not a big feature of his program. He had mostly his own funding. My program was in the Materials Research Lab (MRL), which was an ARPA lab, a wonderful arrangement under a man named Bob Mauer. Then there was an entity with its own building called The Coordinated Science Lab (CSL), which was a Joint Services Laboratory. It was directed by Dale Compton. And Frank Probst’s surface science was in CSL. At a later time Gert Ehrlich left GE to come to CSL to do surface science. Dale, who was the director of CSL, had a silicon program that was funded by the Joint Services. So we had Nick, who had somewhat independent funding but also was a member of MRL. Most of my money came from MRL. The money that funded Dale’s experimental work and Frank’s experimental work came from CSL. So the experimental programs of the two people that left were both associated with CSL. Frank left to do something else He was involved in a computer-assisted project called PLATO, and he decided he would prefer to do PLATO. This turns out to be a long story. Frank is a very interesting person. He was almost blind, and he really never felt like he got the scientific recognition he deserved. He had complicated reasons for going to work for PLATO. Dale got the offer to be head of Research at Ford, so it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. So here I am with these four programs, and we are publishing five or six papers in each program each year. Nick’s group published more, but I was only involved in five or six papers. So I went to the chairman of the department, and asked him, was he planning to replace either Dale or Frank? Both Dale and Frank were professors of physics. CSL and MRL could not make academic appointments. They offered lab space, and research money. But they were not academic units, so they didn’t give PhDs. Hence both Dale and Frank had their academic appointments in the physics department. Nick was in the electrical engineering department with a complimentary appointment in physics, but Dale, Frank were both in physics.

ASHRAFI

Okay, and you were in the physics department?

DUKE

I was in the physics department. So from the physics department’s point of view, two-thirds of my program has just left. So I went to the new chairman of the department and asked him, was he going to replace these folks. He said he’d think about it. Then he came back and said no, he couldn’t replace either one of them. I asked him why, and he said it because he had asked the dean, and the dean told him that he just didn’t have any positions. So I said, “Well, can we go see the dean together?” He said sure. So we went. The dean was Dan Drucker, who I also knew independently. It’s a long story but to tell a brief version, I had been associated with computing on campus ever since I arrived. I felt that I could reduce the cost of computing by a factor of ten, so I had been empowered to design a new computer for MRL, which I had done. Subsequently it eventually did reduce computing costs by a factor of ten. But after this computer had been purchased, I had been asked to sit on the committee overseeing the university’s central computer facility. I had made one very simple suggestion to them: Namely, that if they disconnected the job scheduling program then they would be able to improve their throughput. Well, they improved their throughput by a factor ten instantly, because it turned out that they had a lot of very small programs and the scheduling program was just spinning trying to schedule them optimally. Suddenly they didn’t even need to buy a new computer. So I was a very famous guy on campus, very famous. Dan Drucker knew who I was, not because I was a physicist in the physics department, but because I was the guy who had sorted out the campus computer problem. You’ve now got the scene set, right? The Dean of Engineering, who ultimately controls the appointments, the Chairman of the Physics Department, and a young Turk in the physics department, who, oh, by the way, has just solved a historically huge computer problem, which I’m not even sure that this chairman of the department was aware of, are all to meet to discuss the young Turk’s problem with keeping his research program alive. So here we are, and I was asked to start the conversation, which I did. I said, “Dan, you know…”, and explained to him what I just explained to you, and that I thought it would be very reasonable to replace these guys. I pointed out that we were talking about several million dollars’ worth of funding and it seemed to me that it was a good financial investment as well as a good intellectual investment. Then, to my absolute amazement, Dan said it was the first he’d heard of it. I turned to Ralph, and I said, “Ralph, you told me the you had told Dan.” Well, Ralph sort of sheepishly admitted that he’d never brought it up to the dean

ASHRAFI

To the dean.

DUKE

To the dean, right. The conversation just ended. Drucker was clearly upset.

ASHRAFI

So you were saying that both you and the dean were upset.

DUKE

Right. But this conversation just ended, and I went home and talked to my wife, got on the telephone, and I had job offers in a few weeks.

ASHRAFI

Uh-huh [yes]. Can I ask who you talked to, and how you go about, from your position, looking for a job? Were you looking for other academic positions? Were you specifically looking for industry? Did you do a broad search?

DUKE

Oh. I was going to go back to the industry.

ASHRAFI

Oh, you had decided that.

DUKE

Well, that’s where my contacts were. I had contacts at GE, I had contacts at Xerox, because Xerox came down as part of the Industrial Physics Program, and so I had been sending students and people. In fact, Larry Schein who was one of the people I worked with, who was in Dale Compton’s group, had just come to Xerox. So I knew the people here at Xerox, and I knew the people at GE, so they were the people I immediately contacted.

ASHRAFI

And you didn’t try to do a search in academia?

DUKE

Could you imagine how I would have thought about academia at that moment? Put yourself in this situation. I have lots of friends in the department. Ann and I are entertaining all the time. As I mentioned, I had John over the night that the man on the moon landed. My mother was there, and John came over. We watched the man on the moon. Here’s my mother, sitting there with the guy who invented the transistor that made it all possible. I mean this is a wonderful place, right? And here, this person…

ASHRAFI

Oh, wait. Something’s wrong [technology glitch; tape stopped].

ASHRAFI

So moving on to Xerox now, can we talk about how you chose Xerox out of the… You said offers started coming in a few weeks.

DUKE

Well, I talked to people. And it turns out that there was a man named Mike Shahin who came to Illinois regularly. He was thrilled with the notion that I might be willing to come to Xerox, so he set up an interview for me at Xerox, and I interviewed. Actually, Xerox had two research organizations. They had a basic research organization, and they had an applied research organization. I was not interested in the basic research organization. I knew enough about industrial labs to realize that this was not where you were going to have a good career in industry.

ASHRAFI

Can you explain that?

DUKE

Yes. I think I already did, when I described to you the value chain and the fact that at the very beginning of people’s careers they could be right up at the front end of the value chain. But, people cannot stay there for a whole career. In order to have a successful career in industry, you’ve got to find out what the business is, what the customer wants, and you’ve got to do something that makes a difference. And you can’t do that effectively in the fundamental physics laboratory. If you want such a lab to be effective, you have to a certain extent, to isolate it. But on the other hand, an individual contributor can’t think about having a career there because a good career in a business has got to be delivering value for the business, not going out doing great anything. I mean, it isn’t that science is bad; it’s that you can’t be peripheral. It doesn’t matter that what you do is great. You could be great in something else, and it would still be peripheral. So Mike arranged for the interview, and I came to Xerox. Peter Wharter offered me a job reporting to Mark Myers under some very favorable conditions. They almost doubled my salary. They allowed me to set up my own research group in surface science; although it turns out I never really wound up doing. But that was a very important criterion. And I knew the Mike Shahin very well, and the job could start whenever I wanted to start. So they met all my terms and conditions with an almost 100% pay increase. So who’s not to like it? And oh, by the way, when I took one look at the benefit booklet, I couldn’t believe it. Not only did you get a salary, but also you got healthcare (I didn’t have that). You had a pension (I didn’t have that). The benefits were really wonderful. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. You remember, now, I had to earn my way through high school and college after having a wonderfully prosperous early childhood. So, I’m paying attention to that dimension. And I might add I had left GE three years earlier. I think I made about $16,000 a year when I left GE. This offer was for $33,000 a year. It was a factor of two better than GE’s salary. This was a good offer. So I leapt at it.

ASHRAFI

Okay. And can you describe what you were hired to do? Was it primarily to set up a surface science group?

DUKE

My first assignment was to set up a surface science group. Remember, I came to Xerox in June 1972. I was writing a lot of papers, especially on LEED. I had gone to Czechoslovakia to deliver a series of invited lectures on LEED at a surface science conference there (1971), which I had to edit for the proceedings. I finished an article with Nick Holoynak on light emitting diodes, which got published in Physics Today (August 1972). I was preparing presentations for a NATO summer school on electron emission spectroscopy in Ghent Belgium (August 1972), a surface science summer school in Milwaukee WI (September 1973), and the Enrico Fermi Summer School in Varenna Italy (June 1973). I was writing a massive invited review article on the “Determination of the Structure and Properties of Solid Surfaces Via Electron Diffraction and Emission” for Advances in Chemical Physics 27, 1-209 (1974). So in my first year at Xerox, mostly I was finishing up nationally recognized stuff and traveling around the world to give invited lectures. My managers were thrilled with that. There was no doubt about it. In May 1973 Mark Myers went to Canada to start the Xerox Research Center of Canada. His boss, Peter Wharter, asked me to take on Mark’s job of managing the Materials Research Laboratory. So I did that. And oh, by the way, the other thing that his boss had asked me to do, which I appreciated, was my direct contribution to Xerox in my initial year. I became part of the team that planned Xerox’s future products. We put together a big booklet on all the products describing their attributes, the customers and the markets. So while I was finishing up the surface science work, I was managing the applied materials science effort and spending my time learning about Xerox products and markets. Believe me, I understood what an industrial career was all about. I recognized that doing research in industry is an avocation. It may be a sponsored avocation, and you might love it—you might get a little extra money and benefits from it—but don’t kid yourself. It’s a hobby. [Chuckles] I knew that way back in ‘72. So I’m not sure if I’ve answered your question, but the answer is that for my first year I was in principle setting up surface science activity. I was writing papers. I was hiring people. I brought a post-doc named Uzi Landman with me, and he was doing some surface science calculations. We were trying to hire an experimentalist, which we eventually did—a chap named Dave Adams. Those two chaps were working together. What happened eventually is that they went off and did their own thing, and I went off and did other things. That’s how it eventually worked out. But surface science was never a big deal for Xerox as it turned out, whereas other stuff I did, e.g., my work on organic solids, was a huge deal for Xerox.

ASHRAFI

And then within a year, you moved into management.

DUKE

No, I really didn’t, actually. Although for a little while I appeared to. As I noted earlier, in the spring of 1973 my manager, Mark Myers, went to Canada to start the Xerox Research Center of Canada. I was asked to take his place as head of the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), because I had done product planning, so I knew what the products were. At about this time, Xerox became involved in a patent dispute with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) so I realized we had to have something fundamentally different in order to deal with the prospect of losing patent protection on Xerox’s current products. Following a thorough review of the activities in MRL, it looked to me like the use of organic materials to make flexible photoreceptor belts was something that we could patent. Hence I focused materials research on these devices. They offered new architectural advantages so that you could design desktop and hallway machines with capabilities that would have required much larger machines using the drum inorganic photoreceptors of the time. It was cost effective. I could see there was a lot of potential here. And there was a small amount of research going on in the fundamental research lab that could be built on. The next thing that happened, barely six months later in October 1973, was a massive reorganization in which the applied research organization (where I resided) was merged with a smaller local corporate research organization to create The Webster Research Center, known locally as WRC. I was promoted to Research Fellow, a rather exalted position that was the individual contributor analog of a Vice President. There was only one other Research Fellow in the company at that time, Bob Gundlach, now a member of the National Academy of Engineering. I started a little group called the Molecular and Organic Materials Area. . The group consisted of an experimentalist who did transport, an experimentalist who did photoemission, a chemist who made the materials, myself, and another theorist. We went off to try to figure out how to get charges through polymers because in those days electronic transport in polymers was range limited transport. Namely, if you cast a polymer film and shot charge into it, the charge just stayed there. Polymer films just wouldn’t support current flow. That’s characteristic of localized charges. The charges go in, they lose energy, and boom; they’re trapped. So we studied the electronic structure of polymers and molecular solids. We learned that there were certain kinds of polymers that you could get charges through. They had to have certain attributes. You could dope them with other materials so that you could get the charges through more readily. You could put other things on the surfaces to manipulate the surface contacts. Other applied groups were picking up on these things, so Xerox was developing quite a technology out of these ideas. Of course, as usual, there was a lot of competition, some conflict. We were on the fundamental end saying, “Gee, here’s a good system. Mumble…mumble. And here are the things you ought to do.” The applications guys were trying a million things, and mostly they weren’t working. Every now and then, they worked. So they thought we were not very useful; we thought that trial and error would not get them to a satisfactory outcome fast enough; and so on and so forth. So all of the standard stuff is happening, right? Then about three years into that, the management of the company realizes that it has got to have another generation of technology because of the patent situation. In about five years Xerox had gone from 80% market share down to 15% market share as measured by new copier placements. The company was falling apart. There are books about this. I’ve nominated Xerox for a National Medal of Technology, and for this nomination I documented the history of this period in some detail. We had a new president—David Kerns. And Kerns said, “We’re going to introduce a new technology set, and we’re going to do Leadership Through Quality. We’re going to turn this company around.” So a big chunk of the research lab was transferred off to the product development organization, and the 10 Series technology—it was called Third Gen—was developed. The first product came out, I believe, in ‘81, and then there were several follow-on products. The rest, as they say, is history. Xerox clawed its way back. We owned the market from 60 pages per minute to 120 pages per minute for 15 years. All courtesy of this technology set. So it was a “save your company” thing. It was big.

ASHRAFI

And this came out of the group that you set up.

DUKE

Yes. But of course our group didn’t “do” it. Thousands of folks in the Xerox development organizations actually designed and delivered the 10 Series products. Our group created the new knowledge and insight revealing that going the route of organic belts and their associated radically new developer packages was technically feasible and could produce materials with the properties needed to make commercially viable devices. Also, in 1978 I led a company-wide effort on modeling the xerographic process. This effort resulted in the models that were used to demonstrate this feasibility before the products were built and tested. For these contributions I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1993.

ASHRAFI

Can you describe for me the organizational structure of Xerox? So you got authority from whom to set up this group, and how did you communicate to Xerox once you got going?

DUKE

Let me begin by answering your question about the organizational structure of Xerox. When I arrived at Xerox in 1972 R&D activities were funded at both the corporate level and within individual product development groups. For example, I was hired into the Research Laboratory Department (RLD) of the Information Technology Group (ITG), the product development group for xerographic copiers in Webster NY. At that time there also was a corporate funded research organization, the Rochester Corporate Research Center (RCRC) in Webster. As I noted above, however, in late 1973 RLD was merged with RCRC to form The Webster Research Center (WRC). Jack Goldman, who had recently formed the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the Xerox Research Center of Canada (XRCC), was the corporate executive in charge of all three Centers. This structure, a Corporate Research Group consisting of geographically distributed Centers, was to be the organizational structure of centrally funded research in Xerox for the next 32 years, enduring until 2006. Later, additional centers were added in El Segundo CA and Grenoble, France before the whole structure began to disintegrate associated with Xerox’ near brush with bankruptcy in 2001. It finally ended in 2006 when what was left of the Corporate Research Group was merged back into the organization responsible for product programs. Next, let me disabuse you of the notion that somehow the accomplishments described above were all planned. In 1973 there were groups in both RLD and RCRC, which were working on organic materials for photoconductors and developer materials (i.e., carriers and toners). From the applied research organization there was the Materials Research Laboratory that I had headed. From the corporate research organization there were physics and chemistry laboratories. They were working on some photoconductor materials, too. The “Molecular and Organic Materials Area” (MOMA) that I formed in WRC was a combined group that did theory and experiment, physics and chemistry. We were actually working on materials that were not terribly interesting to the company because we were interested in generating the design rules for a new generation of photoreceptor and developer materials packages. I was publishing, going to conferences, entertaining the external leaders in the fields of interest, and generally trying to make sure that I understood the fundamental physics and chemistry that would lead to useful design rules. So there were several competitive groups, and they all had their own management chains. The only common place that we all came together was at the head of WRC, who happened to be—amazingly enough—Mike Shahin, the person who had recruited me from the University of Illinois. So I was a special case. Mike knew that I had done the detailed product planning and managed the applied materials research organization. I was a Research Fellow, which was a big deal. I told him I wanted to go do this, why I wanted to go do it, why I thought it was going to be valuable, and he let me do it. And so I was doing it essentially in parallel with the groups whose official job it was. Mike had a chemistry laboratory that was supposedly making great new polymers and finding out great new uses for them. He had a physics laboratory that was studying photoconductors, and in that laboratory there were one or two guys in there who were working on organics. Everyone was competing for resources. The situation was chaotic. So the notion that this was a carefully orchestrated thing where we knew exactly what we were doing and we went out and figured out how to do it; that’s not the way it happened. It happened via the usual chaotic situation where you had one group of people saying, “Well, you should go this….” One guy says go south; another guy says go north; still another guy says go east. And you’ve got to figure out which one is right. We figured out the answer to the question of whether it should be north, east, or south, but our group didn’t actually go there. In the fall of 1978 another massive reorganization occurred in which the chemistry and physics laboratories were restructured and large portions of them moved to the development organization to form the nucleus of the 10 Series development teams. These teams developed the 10 Series products. And oh, by the way, because it was early in my career and I hadn’t learned some of the elemental things that are required to be an effective manager, stupid us, instead of getting them on board and giving them all the credit, of course, we wanted some of the credit: Stupidest thing in the world. I’ve long since learned that if you want the development groups to do something, what you do is arrange for them to discover it for themselves, and then you encourage them. Well, I was too young , inexperienced and stupid to do that. So that it probably took a year or so longer than it should have because we were always arguing with each other in front of the various review boards about this, that, and the other thing. It was not a pretty process; it was an ugly chaotic process, but it eventually got done.

ASHRAFI

So you were at Xerox from ‘72 to ‘88. That’s a long period. Can we break it up into different kinds of work that you did or different positions you held so that we can talk about it in pieces?

DUKE

When I first came to Xerox in June 1972, I joined the applied R&D organization in Webster called the Research Laboratories Department of the Information Technology Group. I expected to establish a surface science research group but wound up doing product planning. Then in the spring of 1973 I took my manager’s job as head of the applied materials science effort when he went to Canada to found the Xerox Research Center of Canada. As described above, a massive reorganization occurred in October of 1973, and I became a Research Fellow in a new Corporate Research entity called the Webster Research Center (WRC). At that time I set up and directed the small interdisciplinary Molecular and Organic Materials Area (MOMA). In the fall of 1978 there was another massive reorganization at Webster and I wound up managing the Material Science Laboratory (MSL) in WRC, which was a bigger group again. That was all happening where in the cheat sheet I have myself being the head of MOMA. But there were three phases to that. There was the initial phase where we were a little group. Then there was a phase when I managed MSL from October 1978 through October 1980, but MOMA still existed in MSL. So I had two jobs at the same time. I was running both MSL and the little group, MOMA, which was where I thought the action was. This is why you said I was a manager. The answer was no. I wasn’t really a manager; management was a task assignment. My heart was in getting these polymers developed. In October 1980 the MSL management assignment disappeared because we had another change in management, and I went back to just directing the research in MOMA. In 1978 I was promoted from Research Fellow to a newly created position of Senior Research Fellow, the highest technical rank in Xerox. That was my official job title for the rest of my days at Xerox. In1982, after the first 10 Series copier was introduced, MOMA ceased operations. I carried forward my physics research as director of a small 4-5 person Theoretical Physics and Chemistry Area. Then there was another change in management, so I wound up doing imaging science, electronic publishing, electronic reprographics and digital color systems architecture and design. This initial portion of my career at Xerox terminated when in June 1988 I left to become the Deputy Director and Chief Scientist of the Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL). What happens in industrial labs is that there are management changes at the top, and they precipitate further changes downward. This is one of the reasons that for my entire management career, I have always avoided (if I could) having my management assignment as my primary job. I have always tried to have a technical job that was being done solidly at the same time that I held a management responsibility because my notion of these management jobs is that they’re two or three year assignments. When I ran the whole show, I made that official. I wouldn’t allow people to keep the job for more than three years. It was three years and over or up. People get used to these jobs, and they get stale. And oh, by the way, one of the bad things that happen is that they start to think they know what they’re doing. Then they start telling other people what to do. That’s exactly what I do not want research managers to do. I want them to encourage the people to go out to the customers; go out, find out what’s going on, and figure it out for yourselves, guys. And if I happen to know how to do it, then I’m still going to send them out to discover how to do it for themselves. I’m not going to sit here and tell them what to do. It’s the kiss of death. Then it’s my problem. I want it to be their problem. This is actually a very important point unrealized by many managers.

ASHRAFI

You’ve got a lot of these interesting points, but I wonder if you could talk about the process of your learning about management.

DUKE

By example. You learn what works and what doesn’t somewhat on your own. I guess the most I ever learned about management was when I worked for a man named Chip Holt, which was in 1994. We’ll discuss this later, but that’s when I came to the Wilson Center. At that point I sort of formalized my thinking about management practices and even led the Wilson Center Senior Team in offsite sessions to scrutinize and improve their practices. This occurred, however, too late in my career. It would have been a lot better if I’d done it 20 years earlier. Chip was an outstanding manager who created the DocuTech product line for Xerox. He was very clear about the processes that he followed to manage. I had the opportunity to see him up close in action as the Wilson Center developed the image-on-image color xerographic marking engine that became the iGen3 product line. Thus, Chip was the individual primarily responsible for both of Xerox’s major new product lines in the two decades between 1987 and 2007. He was a R&D manager who understood very, very clearly that his job is not done until the product is in the hands of customers. The notion that you must manage the whole value chain from concept to customer turns out to be the central element of management success in innovation. This fact has now been documented by several studies. The one that I recall is a 1990 study by Hewlett Packard of 20 or so product programs half of which had been successful and half of which had not. It turned out that the key ingredient distinguishing between the two was that all of the steps in the value chain had been executed acceptably by the successful programs whereas one or more had been executed unacceptably in the failed programs. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This notion was not part of the mental models of most of Xerox Corporate Research’s executives. Their point of view was that they generated options for someone else in the company to exercise or not. Most often it was “not”. Xerox’s hero research managers, like George Pake, from my point of view, never understood what their job was. If George had understood his job, Xerox would be a $70-billion corporation, not a $16-billion corporation. George took the academic ethos and put it into an industrial setting. The net result is that he founded a wonderful lab —PARC, The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center-- I’m sure you’ve heard of it. But he didn’t get many of PARC’s amazing discoveries into profitable Xerox products because he didn’t understand what his job was. I’ve been telling you about the value chain, right? Well, George didn’t perceive that his job as research manager encompassed the first three and last steps in the value chain—create the concept, define the product, design the product, and get feedback from the customers --not just the first step. We can talk about how I know that and what the specific decisions and things are, but from my point of view, that is the root cause of why PARC never was as successful from Xerox’s point of view as it should have been. Its founder and manager, who was so incredibly successful at producing this front end organization that generated all these wonderful new concepts and technology demonstrations, never recognized that if you are going to create value in an industrial context, you can’t manage just the front end. You’ve got to manage the interface between that front end and the rest of the value chain, and ensure that you have heard and acted upon customer feedback.

ASHRAFI

And if we’re talking about beginning in 1972, you’re feeling your way through. You’re learning through trial and error.

DUKE

Yes. By trial and error.

ASHRAFI

Okay. So what were your relationships with academic scientists while you were at Xerox?

DUKE

Excellent. The lessons that I had learned at both Illinois and GE were that if you were going to do new things, you’d better stay on the cutting edge. Maybe you weren’t doing exactly the same thing as the leading academics, but you needed to stay in on their radar. In that era, the popular organic materials were quasi-one-dimensional organic crystals. These were never going to do anything for the Xerox Corporation, but we had a little effort in it, it turns out, simply to stay in touch. Xerox people participated in the surface science conferences, the chemistry conferences, and the physics conferences on these kinds of materials. We had a plan to make sure that we covered all the conferences. We had a systematic plan; we identified the leaders in the area in each of those areas; and we had a game plan where we invited them to Webster and showed them what we were doing. We hired a few as consultants based upon a series of interviews where we carefully identified all of the people we thought were key players. We made sure that we had contact with them and that they came, visited us, and maintained some sort of contact with us. So there was a very systematic effort to make contact with the university community, to stay in touch with the university community, and to use that for relationship purposes primarily. There was a pot of money that we used to just give these people—$10,000…$15,000 for whatever—because we wanted to sponsor their research groups. So there were a number of vehicles that we used to ensure that the leading groups knew about us and were connected to us loosely in some form. That was a very productive enterprise. I think that I mentioned in there that I chaired two Gordon Research Conferences. I chaired the Gordon Conference on the Chemistry and Physics of Solids in ‘77 on molecular solids. It was associated with the Conference on Quasi-One-Dimensional Materials in New York City. We mixed and matched the people who did the traditional organic molecular solids, guys like Martin Pope who did research on anthracene, with our guys, who were studying polymers and more complicated but still largely molecular solids, with the quasi-one-dimensional guys like Alan Heeger and Alan MacDiarmid. We got all those groups mixed up and talking to each other. That was really exciting and interesting. People enjoyed it, a lot.. In ‘83 when the technology had matured, I did the same thing again. I got the photoconductor guys together with the display guys together with the “charge bleeding off” guys who make the rubber mats. So we got all the technologists together talking about where organic materials were going to go. These were great conferences, really great conferences that jump-started the field of organic electronics. And they changed-- I mean, the conference didn’t change, but people changed. They learned things they’d never heard of before, and they changed what they did. So progress got made a lot quicker. I’m a great believer in the Gordon Conferences. But again, you’ve got to have an attitude that you’re not going to just have all the old guys who’ve been coming all those years to do this same old stuff. You have to find people who are doing similar things who are going to mix it up and call each other nuts and have some real good wars and so on—get everybody to think, which is, as you can tell, my philosophy of research in general.

ASHRAFI

So at Xerox, especially when you were managing the larger group, can you tell me how decisions were made about what kind of research to support and what kind to give up on or to not support?

DUKE

First of all, I want to say that there is no process or set of values that is stable over time. So the way that happens is very time dependent. Now, again, I’m going to oversimplify for the purposes—So I’m going to do the two endpoints. In the Xerox of 1975, we knew we needed a new product line. We had some notion of the direction, and so the primary investment decision was to start some new things that we thought had the possibility of nucleating something that would get us from here to there. We weren’t putting a lot of money in the back end. We were trying to put money in the front end; we were trying to put money in a diversified portfolio. (I’m using words I wouldn’t have used then.)

ASHRAFI

What’s front end? What’s back end?

DUKE

The front end is the idea end of the value chain. And the back end of the value chain is the customer. The back end of the product development chain is the development of the product as it is to be manufactured. So when I’m talking about front end, I’m talking about the research at the beginning. And when I was talking about the interface, I was talking about the interface between research and product development. PARC was founded in the early 1970s on the basis of a prescient vision of Peter McCullough then CEO of Xerox: That Xerox could be the leader in the next technological revolution by pursuing the architecture of information and creating new products to implement that architecture. PARC was founded with the mission to turn this vision into reality. George Pake, PARC’s founder, executed the first step in the value chain brilliantly. PARC created the concepts that are the basis for today’s networked PCs and their associated software. But to make them the basis for Xerox’s growth, these concepts had to be incorporated into business models and converted into profitable products. That’s what George didn’t orchestrate effectively. Had he done so, Xero