Interview with Theodore Dunham, Jr. by David DeVorkin in Cambridge, Mass. 30 April, 1977

Transcript

 

Session I | Session II

DeVorkin:

Dr. Dunham, I know you were born in 1897. And that was in New York City. But I don't know anything else about your family, and your early life. Who were your parents? What did they do?

Dunham:

Well, my father came of a medical family, with a strong medical background for two generations at least before him. His father was a doctor in Irvington, N.Y. My father was a physician in New York City. He was a graduate of Harvard College in '85, and the Medical School in '88, He spent a year in Vienna. Then he started to practice medicine and surgery in New York. He was very keen on using what at that time were the most modern methods he could.

He carried a microscope with him in his bag in New York; and up in Maine in the summer, where he practiced in Northeast Harbor, on Mt. Desert Island. He was up there about four months every year. Some of his patients were up there, and my brother and I went out in the motor boat with him to the islands, in the dark and the fog and everything , we learned a bit of navigation very well that way. Also how to pick up lobster pot buoys with a boat hook, when they caught in the propeller in rough seas. He had a small laboratory in our house on 63rd St. in New York. He did all sorts of things, on working up the opsonic index of pneumococci, to see what they'd react to in the way of serum. As I look back now, I realize that I learned a great deal from him about how to really find out answers about things, and not just to do things by rote.

He did quite a bit of research: Stretching the esophagus by using a series of bougies of increasing diameter, when many of the youngsters in New York drank lye, which wasn't good for them, and so on. He was always developing methods, as well as being Professor of Surgery at the Babies' Wards, at the Postgraduate Hospital, in New York, on 23rd St. in those days. Then up in the country, when we were there, he had the first X-Ray machine in that part of Maine, I'm sure. My brother and I were fascinated by the 15 inch spark, especially in the dark, that those coils gave in those days.

DeVorkin:

-- 15 Inch?

Dunham:

Yes, 15-inch sparks, blue sparks in the dark. 0h, it was terrific for us boys to see. We'd turn it on sometimes when he was out seeing patients!

DeVorkin:

When was this approximately?

Dunham:

Well, we were old enough to know what we were doing, so it must have been 1910 to '13, or so. I guess we left off after that, realizing it wasn't exactly cricket to throw out of adjustment somebody else's scientific equipment. He had a 2 1/2-horsepower gasoline one-cycle engine out in what we called the Engine House, for the generator that ran the X-Ray machine. We'd turn that on. You'd crank it, you know. It made a terrific noise.

DeVorkin:

What was your father's name?

Dunham:

Theodore Dunham. I'm a "Junior," yes.

DeVorkin:

What was your mother's background?

Dunham:

Josephine Balestier. Her grandfather came from Martinique. Her great-grandfather, I was told, escaped from the French Revolution and all that. One of my mother's sisters married Rudyard Kipling in 1891. I think. they lived in Sussex until 1935 when he died. They spent several years in Brattleboro, Vermont and built a house there. This doesn't make me a literary character in any sense. It was just an accident as to who married whom, in England when the two Balestier sisters were over there.

But anyway, we have a little background up in Vermont, and still have 32 acres of woodland there, and we don't know what to do with it. It's an island. You can't get to it. There's no right of way, A helicopter's the only legal means of access. Well, my mother's family had been in Denver, Colorado, and came to Rochester, New York, where my grandfather ran a small business for some time. But he died quite young, here in Boston, in the twenties. And my grandmother brought up the family, my mother and her sister and a brother who stayed as a farmer and businessman in Brattleboro, Vermont, and a younger brother Wolcott Balestier who was a publisher, and a friend of Kipling.

My mother's grandfather was a lawyer, Erasmus Peshine Smith, who was counselor in the State Department, who spent four years in Tokyo. That's something we're looking into now, He advised them on making early treaties with western countries in the 1870's.

DeVorkin:

That's just about when Japan was opened,

Dunham:

Yes. Just after Comodore Perry had opened it, He went over to help the government make their treaties with Westerners. They didn't know how to handle this strange bunch of people that came flocking in on them, and he did a pretty useful job for them, I think. We have a sword that the Mikado gave him when he left, which nobody understands the exact meaning of. We're trying to learn about Japanese swords, but we haven't got very far yet.

Anway, when we went to Japan in 1970, we made a point of seeing if we could learn anything about this back history. We talked to the people in Tokyo. And we talked to some of the people who know a good deal in the Foreign Office there, and they had looked it up ahead of our coming, and had some documents describing my great-grandfather's activities there to some degree. But I'm afraid the bombing burned some of the records, in fact, many of them. But they had some, written in Japanese script, of the earlier era. I think when the Meiji emperors came in they changed the script.

I'm not sure how that was done, but it was different. They found some old timers who could translate it into modern Japanese, and from that into English. These are not very extensive, but there's several pages. I haven't asked the Japanese scholars here, people who must know. But I think it is worth looking up, because this was one of the first cases of an American trying to work with Japanese, to see how they could get on together.

DeVorkin:

That's very interesting.

Dunham:

Yes, that's all Mother's side, of course.

DeVorkin:

Very interesting. Your father's occupation, all the while you were at home, as a family, was as a surgeon --

Dunham:

As a physician and surgeon, and he insisted on doing what was natural, in the earlier days. Doing both: practicing medicine, and knowing about surgery and being able to carry out major surgical procedures. The super-specialists were only just coming in. He died in '52, and of course he covered that transition. So, he did both, especially up in the country, where he took care of all the people there on the big island of Mt. Desert, and all the little islands dotted around it. That's where the Acadia National Park is you know. We have 25 acres on the slope we're trying to make into an observatory site, if the Park doesn't take it over first, We're having a minor battle.

DeVorkin:

How's the weather for that?

Dunham:

About 48 percent clear, at the Bangor airport. Weather isn't the only thing. In winter it runs from about 25 percent clear at Erie, Pennsylvania, the low spot, to about 50 or 55 percent along the Atlantic Coast. The coast is much better than inland. So that isn't unduly bad. We just happen to have the land, and we love the island, so we're trying to persuade the universities and colleges to join in building a 31 inch telescope, up there. But that's another story that hasn't happened yet. It's on its way. My father worked up there, on both medicine and surgery, and with other doctors up in Bangor, when they needed hospitals for the patients. Of course there wasn't anything in Ellsworth then. There is now.

DeVorkin:

Could you describe your home life, and how you developed your early interests? What your early influences were on you? I'm sure your father was a very significance influence.

Dunham:

He was very much tnterested in what any of us boy's thought was interesting. I have one brother, Wolcott Dunham -- I'm the oldest of the four -- my brother Wolcott is 2 1/2 years younger. He's been working on virus research and cancer research on mice and tumors and what affects their growth at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor Maine. And my two sisters, one of them here in Boston and one in New York, have been doing social work, and teaching in schools on special problems, and are still very active.

My sister Josephine is active in music, following her social work. She wanted to do the hardest kind of thing, of course, because that was supposed to be the Dunham tradition; use all your energies as well as you can. So she went for psychiatric social work, which I think is devastating, and she agrees that she wasn't made for it.

She sat up all night, every night and weekends, writing reports, you know, that nobody else would do of course. There were four of us. We boys went to school in New York, all the way to college. And of course, we didn't have much time to do other things. I was playing with astronomy, and writing letters to telescope manufacturers, reading in the public library in New York everything I could get about stars. I first looked at them out of the windows on West 76th St., before we moved to East 63rd. I think, and wondered, what do you suppose those are? And I got quite fascinated in star charts and the names of them.

DeVorkin:

About how old were you then?

Dunham:

I was seven or eight or nine, when I was first going to school and first became interested in astronomy.

DeVorkin:

Were the stars the first thing that you saw that got you interested in astronomy?

Dunham:

I think so. And then I realized that some of them were planets, and they were interesting too, I got interested in constellations. Frightfully scientific. Down in the Southern hemisphere where we've worked a lot, no astronomer knows the constellations. They just set the telescopes with circles; and the night assistant checks. But constellations aren't much good down there, except the Southern Cross, of course, I was interested in telescopes, and was getting catalogues to see if anyone could buy a small telescope, since hardly anyone had the nerve to try to make one in those days, and I didn't have that kind of nerve at that age (about 13).

So I saved up small allowances of 50 cents a week, when it got that high. It built up slowly, and finally the family chipped in and made it possible for me to buy one that we saw in a store window in Philadelphia one day, and I used it in Hampton, Virginia, where we were going for a month. We had a great time showing stars and planets to the students.

DeVorkin:

Was this a French telescope?

Dunham:

It was French. It was sold by Williams, Brown and Earl who were dealers. That always sticks in my mind, as I was trying to get together enough money to buy the thing. It's down in Australia now, and it's with a lot of equipment that's got to come back here from the Australian project, that has no further use down there. It's got to find its way back.

That's one of my other main jobs, to get all that equipment sorted, by means of photographs, tapes, and by listing down there, so we can get the right things to the University of Rochester, where much of it was borrowed, and to the FAR project, and some of it is our own. We're sorting it by mail now, to get it shipped to the right places. But that telescope's among those things. We used it in Hampton for a while, and had a great time with all those students, looking at the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn and star clusters. It was my first experience with a telescope, as well as for most of the students.

The next thing I did was to put it up on the roof, not in New York but in Maine, on the roof of a porch up there, and looked at stars, and I thought I was a great astronomer when I saw my first variable star change brightness. I made out one of those forms that the Variable Star Association used. It was the first form I ever filled out, I guess, for the government or anyone else.

DeVorkin:

For the AAVSO?

Dunham:

Yes, for the AAVSO. I was one of the early members with Tyler 0lcott and some of the others, but I was too young to know just what I was doing, of course.

DeVorkin:

How did you find out about the AAVSO?

Dunham:

Goodness, I don't know. I suppose, reading in the public library in New York. That's a guess, I had no previous contact with Harvard at all. But I remember, on a rainy afternoon, I thought it was so urgent, I brought this first form, with six entries, I think, of great observations of variables against their comparison stars, and rang the bell at the Observatory, which was not enclosed by the Perkin Building or by anything else at that time.

DeVorkin:

On Garden Street?

Dunham:

Yes. And Professor Pickering himself, with his great beard, came to the door and looked very severe, rainstorm and all. I said, "Oh Sir, I have a little sheet of paper about variable stars. I didn't want it delayed. I thought it might be useful. I wonder if I might bring it in?"

DeVorkin:

You came up from New York?

Dunham:

No. We went back and forth twice a year, you see, up to Maine and back to New York. Anyway, I felt this was, oh so important. I have the original red notebook, that I put all those observations in. There weren't very many of them.

DeVorkin:

What was Pickering's reaction? Dunham; Well, he was very pleasant. He smiled and said, Won't you come in?" as any good gentleman would in those days. Rather than, "See my secretary for an appointment."

DeVorkin:

You were about 16?

Dunham:

I was about 16, 1 guess, something like that,

DeVorkin:

Do you have any recollections of Pickering?

Dunham:

I saw him, occasionally, later, going back and forth from Maine, and I went to some meetings and talks at Harvard and saw him a little. But he was not exactly the kind of person to take a youngster in and say, "Sit on my knee and I'll tell you about astronomy," as some others have been since,

DeVorkin:

Did you meet any of his staff? Henrietta Swan Leavitt?

Dunham:

I saw her in a back room. I didn't realize it was an historic sighting at that time; but she was in the back room, where I think Cecelia Payne has been since then, and several other distinguished people -- Cecelia Payne Gaposchkin of course. I didn't respond correctly, ask her about classification of spectra, which I didn't, I suppose, know existed. I knew there were prisms, and that Sir Isaac Newton had broken up sunlight into colors, and that this had also been done on stars.

But I had no idea of what some of the good British astrophysicists had done on that in the earlier days, first, and then there at Harvard. Annie Jump Cannon, of course, we knew very well here, in the early days, and we talked about all sorts of things. But that came later on. No, I just played with variable stars, and thought they were rather worth doing, They justified having fun with the telescope. That's what it came to, really. And that was as far as it went, in school, because of course, we were pretty well occupied in school,

DeVorkin:

What about your early schooling? Was it in public school in Manhattan?

Dunham:

No, it was at some of the private schools in New York, First at the St. Bernard's School and then at the Browning. We used to have little red caps at St. Bernard's that said "STB" on them, and we used to roller skate down Fifth Avenue and count the ratio (my first study of statistics, I suppose) between horses and automobiles, whipping down the stretch from 63rd St, to 48th St. I at least knew enough to put brackets with a question mark on the result, because I knew it would be more commercial downtown, and different up along the park, perhaps. So we got the ratio. I remember it crossing the 50-50 line, I can't say what date that was. It might have been about 1910. I don't know exactly.

DeVorkin:

What strengths were there in your early schooling? Did you find mathematics and science in your schooling? Was that available to you?

Dunham:

Yes. The science was distinctly low there. St. Bernard's School was run by two English headmasters who came across from England, and they of course were very strong on the classics. So, we went further than usual, not excessively far, in Latin and somewhat in Greek. But our closest contact with Latin was Richard's FIRST STEPS IN LATIN, hurled at our various foreheads, as a suggestion that you buck up and work a little faster at your desk!

DeVorkin:

Yes. What about your mathematics?

Dunham:

Well, there was just the standard mathematics, arithmatic: and then at the Browning School for a couple of years after that, we used to have 15 minute sessions for the whole school where they had competitive addition and multiplication examples. You had trick cards you could cover up here and there and get different sums and products. There were some nice things about it. It always came out 15, as you checked it, if you did certain things, and you knew it was right.

DeVorkin:

What do you think stimulated you to do this interesting little statistical study while you were on your skates on Fifth Avenue?

Dunham:

I suppose, seeing diagrams on astronomy and physics in the public library, where I used to spend the weekends and evenings reading a good bit. The 42nd St. Library, you knov.

DeVorkin:

The 42nd St. Library. This was primarily then a self- taught interest?

Dunham:

Oh yes, almost entirely, yes. I don't think I knew anyone in astronomy. There weren't any amateurs around, that I knew about anyway. I just got interested in it.

DeVorkin:

Did you talk to your father about it at all?

Dunham:

Oh yes. We talked somewhat. He didn't delve into it with me. But he did supply a continuity of steady background in practical application of the subject, with a scientific attempt, an experimental attempt, to follow through on understanding factors, and get your feet on the ground, on how medicine worked, as far as you could. Medicine was just coming over the threshhold of what could be called proper science -- biology, and physiology of course, We hadn't distinguished biochemistry and biophysics at that time, all these hybrid names hadn't quite come over the horizon.

You just looked at it either as a perfectly definite subject that was practical and applied, or you looked at it to see why. And he tried to do both, and he did it very successfully. He was very calm in his approach, didn't get excited, had a delightful manner with patients and with the family, and gave us the stimulating feeling that we belonged to something, that he'd help us to get started to go further, in whatever field we thought was fun. He didn't drive us into medicine. I had two uncles besides my father in that generation who were physicians. They were doing research, both of them. Edward K, Dunham did important work on emphyema during the war. He was for many years at New York University, working in pathology and biochemistry.

DeVorkin:

What was this?

Dunham:

Laboratory research in biochemistry. He had a good laboratory, up at Seal Harbor, Maine, near where we were at Northeast Harbor. He worked up there in the summer. My other uncle, Dr. Carroll Dunham, didn't have very good health, so he didn't practice medicine, but he watched it from the sidelines and we all talked together. It was a kind of a background. My grandfather, Dr. Carroll Dunham, whom I never knew, was in Irvington, N.Y. He became very much interested, for several years, in homeopathy, At that time (about 1860) it looked more logical than it does now. But when you read some of the papers that he read and collected, it's very interesting to notice the similarity with the present field of immunology.

Because although their equivalent of antigens, if you were to call them that, which they supposed would stir up an immunity, were quite different -- they gave people small doses of the actual drugs and chemicals that would produce a condition similar to the disease in question -- now they give patients live or killed bacteria or toxins, or some other kind of antigen, that produces immunity. But for all we can see, they were looking at it in a somewhat similar way.

It was a justified scientific approach, to look into it, and it was, a small team of people, quite intelligent people in this country and in Europe, who went into homeopathy, and tested it quite hard, for a number of years; and then dropped it in favor of microscopes, vaccines, and other methods. But my grandfather worked on it quite hard, and he was one of the officers of the Homeopathic Society for a number of years, and I'm quite intrigued when I look over his records.

He wrote some very interesting accounts of it. He was the Dean of the Homeopathic Medical School in Philadelphia, I think. He wrote a very excellent, highly impressive valedictory address that had nothing to do with homeopathy, on advice to young physicians -- how they ought to think about the subject, about their patients and about themselves. It would stand very well as an address by any Dean of the Harvard Medical School at the moment -- possibly better than some.

DeVorkin:

Did you appreciate these ideas, which seemed to be highly empirical approaches to medicine and research -- did you appreciate them while you were in your teens?

Dunham:

No, I don't think so at all. I thought they were probably nonsense. These people had all gone crazy on a queer tack. It wasn't approved. One grew up, in those days, at least I did, supposing that the way that the most successful or effective people in their subject were looking at their subject was, in fact, what you called the "right way" to do it. I didn't realize the great importance and propriety of looking at any problem from several aspects.

The crazier, the better, in a sense, because whoever brings up an idea deserves to have it looked at, evaluated, and thrown down or brought into the mainstream at some point. But in recent years, looking back over those papers of my grand father -- I have several volumes of them up In New Hampshire -- I find them extremely interesting, to see how he came to think the way he did, and to see the perfectly rational, scientific common sense of it, at that time, in the .5860's. I have a cousin, Edward K. Dunham III here in Brookline on the staff of the Harvard Medical School. He is also at Beth-Israel and in private practice. He is working in immunology, and I want to get him to look at the early approach to homeopathy, because I think there's a very interesting comparison or point of view to be derived from attacking the same subject in quite different ways, depending on which century you're in. A hundred years later, it will be a different approach, but it's the same problem. We haven't got it yet. Well, that's medicine.

DeVorkin:

In your early schooling -- it was private primarily?

Dunham:

It was primarily private, but rather mixed and somewhat self-taught. I did all my mathematics up in the country between scraping the paint on the house and re-painting it, and working on calculus and analytic geometry and things like that, just enough to get into college here at Harvard.

DeVorkin:

How old were you then?

Dunham:

Well, I suppose I was around 16.

DeVorkin:

That was around 1910?

Dunham:

1914. I'm always two years older than the year.

DeVorkin:

How come?

Dunham:

I don't know-- just having been accidentally born the wrong side of the century mark, in 1897, practically '98. I always just add two. That's the only way I can keep track of anything.

DeVorkin:

Do you remember Halley's Comet?

Dunham:

Yes -- just. I was 12, and I think I had the measles. I was picked up by my mother and taken to the window, and the first time it was a failure, because the comet wasn't doing very well. It hadn't come far enough along. And then there were three or four nights when I was led to the eastern window -- I think it was the eastern -- and saw it coming up before. sunrise. Of course I've seen pictures of it since, and this is a disturbing influence, but I really think I remember the great big fuzzy tail, going way up, and would like to be around to see it do it again.

DeVorkin:

Do you remember the excitement?

Dunham:

Yes, I certainly do, and I was quite intelligent enough to realize the question of cyanogen that some people raised, and whether we'd all survive to the end of May or only till about the 20th. It went by in the teens of May, didn't it'? It was a dramatic expexience. Every- one was talking about it. I was perfectly aware of what was being said. I think it was the measles that had me down a bit. But I remember all the papers with their flaring headlines and pictures, and people talking about the dire risk to the human race. It had been a bad race and done badly. Some said it was going to get it now. This was as far as it (the race) would go.

DeVorkin:

What did your father say about the comet? Do you recall how he felt about it, whether he was worried about the cyanogen?

Dunham:

No. Nobody had measured the absorption spectrum of cyanogen in that comet! We had never heard of it then, but I'm sure he thought that, just looking at that tail, whatever came from the nucleus must be so dilute that we could stand a few particles of cyanogen for a few hours. After all, it takes more than one molecule of cyanogen to knock a person out. It has a powerful reputation. One of the most violent nerve poisons, I suppose, in existence, But it isn't that way quite. It takes a few dozen, if not a few thousand, if not a few million molecules, to do you much, harm.

DeVorkin:

Did you have any formal religious instruction?

Dunham:

Perhaps not instruction, so much, as just growing up in a family where it was more or less assumed that everyone went to church and thought about the meaning of life. I don't think I even went to Sunday School. We just went to one of the New York churches, as a matter of course, generally to St. George's. Sometimes way down to Trinity. We knew William T. Manning there, who was the rector and then the bishop of New York, and quite a colorful character, highly conservative and had strong opinions on everything. We knew his family pretty well, and his daughters, and saw them up in Maine. They went to Seal Harbor, Maine.

They were patients, among other things, but that was entirely, incidental. They always kept well! But there was a connection there, and at other churches, St. James and some others, up town in New York. We just picked religious experiences, but didn't have any formal instruction, no Bible school, no official anything. We went through the usual procedures. I was confirmed in the chapel of the Episcopal Theological School here on Brattle Street in Cambridge when I was in college, but I don't think it changed my life completely.

DeVorkin:

Did you ever go to the Columbia University Observatory, the Rutherford Observatory, at that time? Did you ever see the telescope?

Dunham:

I saw the telescope there, probably the year before I went to college. I had a family that had definite ideas about some things, and one was that you shouldn't go to college too early. They were probably right entirely about it, I realize now. So I held up a year and tried to think what I'd do about it. I came up to Cambridge and took the famous, ten or twelve entrance exams in roaring hot weather all through a week, the way you did it in those days.

There was no scoring of people ahead of time and admitting them on paper, you know. They do it now on computers. I went to Columbia. I got myself worked in somehow to do a course in physics there, for a year, before coming up here to college. And this was very stimulating indeed, to do actual experiments in the lab with real equipment, I didn't have to put together myself in the basement, so as to try things out.

DeVorkin:

Who were your teachers?

Dunham:

There were two of them, Professor Davis, I think and Mr. Parwell, who was younger and with whom I talked primarily. My connection with Professor Davis wasn't personal contact, more than just enough for him to say: "Go ahead and take this course," and later; "Now you're doing pretty well." I got through it officially, with grades. It did get counted a little at Harvard, after the war. I had 16 2/3 credits or hours or whatever they call them nowadays, for my degree, my AB degree here, and they forgave me the missing 1/3 of a credit. We went on over third year terms during the war, and I was off doing chemistry in the Army, and the course at Columbia counted a little bit, that physics, to get me through without spending another year at Harvard.

DeVorkin:

What did you do in World War I?

Dunham:

World War I. Well, that goes back a year to 1917, when I entered Harvard college, when I was terribly interested in chemistry. And of course, everyone was saying, "Do I enlist in the Army and rush off to France?" My family had an idea, maybe it was wrong, maybe it was right, that it was better for me and my brother to be doing something in a scientific way.

Whether they wanted to save me from the risky maneuvers in France, or whether they really thought so completely, I never will know, and I don't think it's very important. But they thought that science was the way for us to do something useful here at college. So, I concentrated, I wanted to anyway, pretty heavily in chemistry. We'd known Professor Theodore V. Richards, who worked on the atomic weights, had the Nobel Prize and all that.

He was a tremendously calm but very wise advisor and thinker, and guided much of my, first contact with science. How to do everything carefully and well, and thinking about it from every point of view. He used to have me around his house here on Fallan St., two streets down, quite frequently. We got to know his family very well. Patty Conant, his daughter, finally married Jim Conant while he was a professor of organic chemistry with Kohler. We got to know him that way.

Richards' point of view led me to make an intensive effort in chemistry, apart from English A and one course in economics that I never could understand. I don't understand economics as a science yet. No one ever looks back to see whether the predictions came out right, They never say how they predict; they never look back to see how the score was. They always say, "It's going to happen." I think it"s very interesting. But I took two courses, as a Freshman and then about four courses more in chemistry. I was too young to enlist in the Army.

Jim Conant, who was a young professor of organic chemistry at that time, and Professor Lamb, the head of the chemistry department on the organic side here, both went down to Washington and set up two laboratories for the Chemical Warfare Service, one on offensive materials and one on defense, at the American University. I got in on the defense, as a private, when I was allowed to be inducted in August, .59.58, when the Congress finally passed the great historic Draft Act. I went and watched Congress vote on it. The temperature was over .5.50 for nine days. It was the highest record that the Weather Bureau has ever had, then or since.

DeVorkin:

110?

Dunham:

Over 110. It went to 117 one day, on the recording thermometer on Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway down between the White House and the Capitol. It was so hot that everybody was exhausted, but they all col-lected in the evening to see whether it had made a record that day.

When it gets really hot, they get excited, There were no refrigerators, of course, just a little ice, and of course it melted and all the food went to rot and ruin. But we watched Congress pass the Draft Act, and then I took quick steps to get inducted under the draft, because you couldn't enlist. I was able to be assigned to the American University Experiment Station, up on Wisconsin Avenue, where Jim Conant and Professor Lamb had set up a very fine laboratory, with chemists from all over.

We went out and sprayed mustard gas in the field outside there. Our immediate leader, Captain Carleton from Wisconsin, was very enthusiastic about the five-liter vacuum bottles in which we collected samples of the air. We went out and exposed them on racks at different heights above ground, different numbers of hours, after spraying it with mustard gas, to see how long it would last if the Germans should use it. And the thing I'll never forget was his insistence we be very scientific, and try the experiment not only in the middle of the day and at midnight or a little after, when it was cold, but also when the moon was shining, the full moon. And so we tried "full moon" vacuum bottle -- tests of mustard gas concentrations.

We said nothing, but we have it in the notebook there, the warfare records. No general could possibly say, "Well, did you try it in moonlight?" We'd be able to say, "Why, yes sir, I certainly, did" and then he'd be promoted to be a major-general, I suppose. Well, I think Carleton was a very good chemist. He tried to do everything throughly, and he knew his Army technique -- that you mustn't miss a point. So we worked under the moon. And it was more pleasant in the moonlight than it was at 100 degrees in the daytime, with rubber suits on to keep the mustard off you, and off your clothes of course. Well, this, hasn't much to do with astronomy, but it was a scientific experience about how you do things. It was so different from Theodore Richards and his very careful work on atomic weights, and my first work on real research in his laboratory, on the potential of the zinc electrode.*

DeVorkin:

You did that with Richards?

Dunham:

Yes, with Richards, during my senior year here. He let me work full time on a research project, in his new Gibbs Laboratory, right here up the street beyond the Law School.

DeVorkin:

Would you talk about how you came to work for T.W. Richards?

Dunham:

Well, only because the family had somehow known him a little, I don't remember just how. I went to see him to ask if he could be my advisor in college. In those days you had an advisor right through four years, unless you didn't get on together or something. He watched and talked with me about all my planning. It had a great effect on decisions that were made. He thought I ought to go to Germany and study chemistry further, for a year, after I got through here. I concentrated on chemistry heavily in college, and took almost all the undergraduate and graduate courses.

They let me take an examination for honors with an examining committee that included Richards, Forbes, Kohler and Conant. This was rather fun in a way, and resulted in my getting my AB with Highest Honors in Chemistry which had not been done at Harvard for quite some time.

DeVorkin:

Who would you have studied with in Germany?

Dunham:

I don't know exactly. We didn't quite get to making the plan, because I had to decide between that and going to the medical school. And with all the family background in medicine, that was where, if you call it that, a long-continuing conflict began between astronomy and medicine. It wasn't so strong a conflict while I was in college, but it was when I graduated in `21, and it has been there ever since. Actually, I have managed to resolve any conflict that may exist by using experience and equipment from one field where it applies for selected problems in the other field.

DeVorkin:

That was more a conflict between physical chemistry and medicine, at that time?

Dunham:

Yes. Probably research in biochemistry rather than in physics. I hadn't gone as far in physics and optics as I did later. But that was the real choice. One possibility was to go to Germany and continue in chemistry. Or here, but in those days you went to Germany quite normally.

DeVorkin:

Even right after the war?

Dunham:

'21. In the First World War, they didn't smash everything up as much as they did during the second war.

DeVorkin:

Right, And to your recollection, there weren't feelings of *Dunham and T.W. Richards, J. AM. CHEM. SOC., 43, 1921 hostility that continued? In other words, it was still considered very very important to go and study in Germany?

Dunham:

Yes, I think it was. Certainly, if you really wanted to go ahead and get ideas on research, and talk to the people who had profound ideas. There were certainly several, I suppose many individuals in this country, in different universities, who were top notch on thinking and planning. But of course, in those days people in one university like this one* didn't know nearly as much about what was going on in the Middlewest and the West. As you know, the general theme was that if you were in Massachusetts., you were somewhere.

If you were at Harvard, you were really somewhere. And other universities existed, but they weren't quite as important, and you didn't have any catalogues that would quickly tell you the quality of other universities such as the Universities of California, Chicago, and many others. They had very good men, but they weren't understood as well from an eastern center. If you'd been out there, you'd have had a much better look at the whole country, and realized that Harvard was just one of the good places.

DeVorkin:

What about astronomy at that time? Was this the feeling in astronomy, too -- that Harvard was the place?

Dunham:

No, not nearly to the same extent. Because in those days, it was observational astronomy that was done at Harvard, rather than theoretical. Theoretical astronomy was very limited in this country. There was more in England, and still more in Germany. So, here in the U.S., the bigger the telescope, the better the astronomy. I am very strongly opposed to any such overall point of view now. I think the middle-sized telescopes with first class photoelectric detectors, and computers following them automatically right down the line, and dropping photography as fast as you can, but not too fast, is the way to do it now. And it doesn't matter if the telescope is even 20 inches if you have the right kind of detectors on it. You can do a terrible lot that's never been done. If it's 30 or 40 or 50 inches, you're well set. I'm now trying to compute the optimum size of a telescope, to get the most data for a dollar. I don't think that's been done very carefully.

DeVorkin:

That's a very important thing to do.

Dunham:

I think it is. And I'm trying to get figures on the Space Telescope. We're very much interested in the program of space telescopes now. Individuals are putting in proposals. That's what they want now at NASA, rather than big teams and universities. And we're trying to work out just what it costs, per dollar, and then see how to plan. Whatever I propose probably won't be accepted; it will just go into the mill.

But I want to see now, using my proposal, what could be done in space for a given expenditure, to see how nearly you could come to the same result if you used the absolutely best on the ground. It is very expensive in space. If you used the space apectrograph and recorder for just limited *Harvard regions of the spectrum, one spectrum line of interstellar this or that, going way out into space, with its perfect images above the atmosphere, as compared with the best you could possibly do with image slicers and glass fibers and the best detectors down here. How nearly could you beat it? And how would the cost compare, per dollar?

If you built ten telescopes down here, and only spent a tenth as much for these ten as you would for one telescope in space, it would cost .500 times as much up there, and ten of them down here might go just as far, except for the ultraviolet, which you can't ever get when the light comes through the atmosphere. All that kind of thinking comes into it now. Theoretical people now get observations out of Kitt Peak and other places, where they can have the telescope for a few-nights and get data; and then they bring the data back to home base and run computer print outs on them.

DeVorkin:

Right. Let's go back now to the point where you were to choose between chemistry and medicine. What were the arguments on both sides?

Dunham:

Arguments on both sides, yes. Well, of course, on the medical side --

DeVorkin:

-- there was your family.

Dunham:

I think tradition had an important bearing. In those days youngsters thought sometimes they ought to do what was most useful for the world. I don't know how often they think of that now. I think they say, "If I can get any job first, I'll take it, and then I'll think what I want to do, and what I probably am adapted best to do." But in those days you thought about usefulness, and medicine has a human side to it that looks useful, and my family had done quite a bit in this area that seemed useful, and I think it was useful. And so there was a draw, a pull slightly that way. But medicine also used the best that was known at that time in chemistry.

It was just developing very fast and was very exciting. Penicillin hadn't been latched onto, of course, until the second war, and even insulin came in during my first year in medical school. But nevertheless, chemistry looked as though it had powerful applications. Organic chemistry in particular. And so it looked as if research in medicine could be both very exciting and stimulating, although I didn't know much about it at that time. On the other hand, all this work in chemistry, from the physical approach with Richards and other people here was most exciting. I never took a full course in physics here and only one course in astronomy, which had two students, myself and one other, Carpenter.

DeVorkin:

Who was that?

Dunham:

It was Astronomy 7, in about 1920 by Harlan True Stetson. He was strong on photometry, measuring the brightness of stars -- measuring photographic plates, with a little photoelectric machine that he fixed up in the basement of the Jarvis Street Observatory. That's since been submerged by the Law School. Carpenter went out and ran the Steward Observatory, before it became the big thing that it is now.

DeVorkin:

Carpenter?

Dunham:

Yes, Carpenter. He and I sat side by side and talked mostly photometry, of course, with Stetson, and went and ran the telescope. It might have been an eight or ten-inch, out there on Jarvis field?

DeVorkin:

Yes. When was the last contact you had with Carpenter?

Dunham:

Out there in Tucson, when I was at Mt. Wilson, we used to go through Tucson. It had dirt streets and all that, a little bit of a town, and we used to see him there at intervals. He operated the 30 inch at the University of Arizona.

DeVorkin:

He built it?

Dunham:

Yes, I think he built most of it.

DeVorkin:

How did he end up at Arizona at that time? That was very early. Did he set up the Steward Observatory?

Dunham:

I don't know. But one ought to know the history of the Steward Observatory. The Steward people gave a small grant and helped to start it, I think. And I don't know if anyone was before him. He may have set up the 36-inch.

DeVorkin:

We should try to find out. I'm going to Tucson some time.

Dunham:

I'll ask Fred Chaffe out there. We work pretty closely.

DeVorkin:

Who's that?

Dunham:

Fred Chaffe, here on the staff of the Smithsonian and Harvard. Chiefly Smithsonian, but you can't tell the difference any more here. He's out there running the 60-inch program on Mt. Hopkins, you know, the Harvard-Smithsonian station south of Tucson.

DeVorkin:

Then he would know possibly.

Dunham:

Well, he'd know who to find out from, and he has his office there in the Steward Observatory. It's a Smithsonian office. And he's out there continuously.

DeVorkin:

The course then with Harlan True Stetson was the only one that you had.

Dunham:

That's the only course in astronomy. I used to talk to people up here, and to Harlow Shapley. He was director then, of course, he'd taken over from Pickering, and I used to go and see him.

DeVorkin:

I'd be interested to hear about Shapley.

Dunham:

Well, I can tell you a little about him. He had his office up on the uppermost floor of what we now call "Building C," one of the first office buildings of any sort here, and he and all the middle-aged women with "fly swatters," you know, on small glass plates, held by a wire handle -- photographic sequences of stars, brighter and fainter, that they'd compare, with variable stars, many of them in the Magellanic Clouds from the telescope in South Africa.

There were four or five of them. And they'd sit there assiduously writing down magnitudes from plates out of the plate vault. But Shapley was there in his office, and you got in to see him without too much effort. He had a secretary who kept track of him, to save him from too many students and queer people. He always was very friendly about anything you were doing. I came up here and spent three or four months, when I was a graduate student at Princeton, to get observational material in spectroscopy.

DeVorkin:

That's right.

Dunham:

At that time spectroscopic material here was entirely from objective prisms -- one, two, three and I guess even four prisms, in front of the objectives of the ten-inch telescope here; and the one in Chile, at Arequipa, in the early days. And that was where I first saw the spectrum of Canopus, which I've become profoundly interested in since. And in the 1960's I photographed an extensive series of very high resolution spectra of Canopus from Mt. Stromlo. I now have them up here at Harvard to work on.

DeVorkin:

What were your experiences with Shapley?

Dunham:

With Shapley, they were primarily making plans about using equipment, using spectrum plates, and who to talk to about specific problems.

DeVorkin:

Oh, this is after you were at Princeton.

Dunham:

Yes. When I went into the Harvard Observatory, it seemed to be a dramatic place where you had a feeling of awe; that you were entering something that really was it, don't you know, on a subject that you'd first touched as an amateur. The word "amateur" had hardly been invented then, I guess -- you were just interested in astronomy. But interest wasn't classified either way.

We just talked and had fun. But the thing about Shapley that I remember most, of course, was his big revolving desk, that went round and round. And as you probably know, his son Allan -- in Boulder-- has that desk now. There's a photograph of it. I want to see if I can get enough details, or a sketch, to make something a little like it, if he'll let me, and put Harlow Shapley's name plate on it, giving credit to its inventor, because it is wonderful. I think it probably had 12 sections around the periphery, with shelves at the back and desk space in front, for each of 12 subjects.

He had subject matter, data and whatever he was working on, correspondence, anything at all, in a slightly confused way. But at least they were separated. He'd have them partly out on a triangular shelf, in front of those shelves, and partly in the shelves, and then he'd just spin it and say, "Oh yes, about that subject," and then he'd spin and come to a halt at the right place. "Yes, I think I have that here" -- and if he didn't, he'd call his secretary, and get it out of the file. But people didn't live with great big files the way they do now. And I thought this was simply terrific. I've managed it in a somewhat different way, this problem of papers on various subjects.

When I was at Rochester, at the university, in the Institute of Optics, I knew the people up at Eastman Kodak pretty well. Somehow,I found out that they were selling off some of their wooden frames, each with 36 shelves, that they used on the assembly line in the Camera Works to hold parts, and they'd roll them around on rollers to people who put them together. They, were selling those off at $2 apiece, so I bought two of them. I find them invaluable, by putting labels, under each compartment, I had 72 possible subjects and sub-subjects. Strangely enough, it isn't enough! I had those in my lab in Rochester, under the library building, where we finally built a laboratory for microspectroscopy, using a Burch reflecting microscope.

I took them to Australia, and now I have them back in New Hampshire. They're very good for shipping paper, because you just stuff them in, and put the two shelf frames together with. a steel band coupling them around, and so you can ship papers from one continent to another, and they're still all sorted. They have been very useful. I painted them green, and they're screwed to the wall above the desk. Well, that's my version of Shapley's invention. Entirely different. His was much better. I want one like that, if we can get enough space. It would take up this whole room.

DeVorkin:

What were your experiences at Cornell? How, did you choose to go to Cornell?

Dunham:

I have the feeling that you want to get primarily at what all of us knew, about Henry Norris Russell, and other greater characters in physics and astronomy.

DeVorkin:

Certainly, but we're getting to that. I would like you to talk a little bit about how you finally chose to go to Cornell, and just a bit about your experiences there. And then from there, your decision to go to work with Henry Norris Russell.

Dunham:

Oh, yes. Now, that was really historic. I wish I had a tape on that. That evening in Princeton, when we talked about the relative merits of a future in astronomy against biophysics.

DeVorkin:

When was that?

Dunham:

That was in the early spring, certainly of 1925, because I had to make that decision, what was going to happen. I graduated here at Harvard in `21.

DeVorkin:

How did you decide to go to talk to Russell specifically?

Dunham:

I knew he was a great character. I don't know how I knew, but at that time it was recognized that he was the leader. He was in the East. He was profoundly interested in -- I'm skipping a few years here, but that's all right.

DeVorkin:

We're talking about `21. You initially met Russell in 1921. Do you have a lot of correspondence with Russell?

Dunham:

Well, I have some, yes. A fair amount.

DeVorkin:

Let's try to think about that first meeting in 1921.

Dunham:

I'm only supposing, but I should think it must have been thanks probably to Shapley, who of course had been through Russel's mill and knew him very well, and it must have been through talking with him. We had very friendly times with Shapley, and we went to his parties, which were the great thing up there, and I suppose Sunday evenings mostly.

He had the whole staff in and students. There weren't 350 of them as there are now. We all sat on the floor and drank cold drinks, chatting, and had a wonderful time. I don't know, it just went, with Mrs. Shapley to make it go, too. It was tremendous. But I think it must have been just by elimination. I didn't know any other great astronomers. I was just struggling along here in college in chemistry, trying to do what I could. I was thinking about biochemistry quite a bit, and of course Shapley was an astronomer.

He thought I was a somewhat promising young chap who might do something in astronomy if I did go into it. I suppose it was like that. But anyway, I don't think I would have said to him (that I wanted to see Russell). I don't think I realized the importance of people at a distance all around the field, talking with them as I would now and have since, in making decisions. We always go and talk to other people, of course, about this Australian project and everything else. But he must have said, "Before you make a decision to go into biophysics, why don't you go and talk to Henry Norris Russell"? He's a very wise person about the whole field, and the values in science, and he isn't over-biased. He thinks in wide terms. I think that was it.

So I must have written him one of my notes. In those days you didn't just call people up so simply on the telephone, telephones didn't always get connected. I still like to write notes, rather than call people on the telephone, if I don't know them a bit. I just work that way. I think better on the typewriter than on the telephone, perhaps. At least I never can sell anything very well. I never went in for selling the. HARVARD CRIMSON or selling newspapers or magazines. I think I'd have done better if I had, in my freshman days. It's a good experience. Gives you self confidence, But anyway, I arranged to go down and see him, and I did go down to Princeton and spend an evening there, as I remember.

DeVorkin:

At his home?

Dunham:

At his home, yes, He had his office in those days in a little building on Prospect St. The observatory and a few offices and Charlotte Moore's place where she did all the Multiplet tables.* It's a small place. But he did most of his talking to people (at home). He went up to his office and got out his pads of yellow paper, and did things with them, up there at the office. He went back and forth every morning and afternoon, and went back for lunch. But I think it was more likely an afternoon, leading into an evening, -- he had me stay for supper, and Mrs. Russell was always tremendously cordial to any young people who turned up. And so I spent quite a few hours there, talking back and forth and also having a nice time. I'd never met any of them before.

I got to know them all exceedingly well since, of course, the whole family. I just told him the facts, as plainly as I could -- that there was a great case, I thought, for putting chemistry to work on medical research, of an unknown sort. Partly you could foresee it, and what would follow, probably. And at the same time, having worked on detailed chemistry and physics, or realizing physics without ever having taken courses in it much here. The whole thing went together, physical chemistry here, the idea of getting at the ultimate, or smaller simpler atoms, and molecules, but chiefly atoms in those days. It was getting to the ultimate of simplicity where you could really hope to understand the workings of things. M. Saha had just got out his ionization equations, and Russell hadn't yet applied them to astrophysics in and interpreting stellar spectra.

DeVorkin:

Did you talk to him about Saha?

Dunham:

I think a little. Yes, this was the case, of course, the Saha application there of physical chemical equilibrium -- the same simple equilibrium equations we're still using right now today, in interstellar space. The ratio of Calcium I to Calcium II to get electron densities. About as simple an equation as you can think of, if you put the right numbers in, and it was just coming over the horizon, in 1919, if I remember now. And I'd read some of the very good summarizing books on astronomy and astrophysics at that time.

DeVorkin:

What were they?

Dunham:

Dingle, wasn't it? Wasn't it Dingle who wrote his book on astrophysics?

DeVorkin:

That was in 1925, approximately, MODERN ASTROPHYSICS** *MULTIPLET TABLES OF ASTROPHYSICAL INTEREST, Nat, Bureau of Stats, **H. Dingle, MODERN ASTROPHYSICS, (Macmillan, 1924)

Dunham:

Well, it could have been 1925. That led me to think I'd better go and take a pretty strong shot at astronomy again after all.

DeVorkin:

Well, that was when you got your MD. I'm interested still in 1921.

Dunham:

Well, it is interesting. I talked with Russell and, from my point of view, as I put it to him, I think, medicine was really applying chemistry to biophysics, and patients in the end, but I thought of patients only as something you ought to do to understand the problems of biophysics.

I insisted on keeping my hands on a stethoscope occasionally, and knowing something about how to read an EKG and a few things like that, and going over patients. I haven't done it now for several years, it's time to go back to it. But I have managed to do that sort of thing, and not get entirely out of it. But it was primarily chemistry, going toward solving problems of biochemistry, on the one hand -- that's organic chemistry.

Much simpler and clearer cut and understandable in those days, physical chemistry, going to individual atoms. And I'm sure the ioniza¬tion equation had a great deal to do with my thinking about it at that time, what Saha did. So I put these two approaches to Russell and said, "Which do you think is the thing for a young person to go into?" And I am pretty nearly sure that his reaction was, as usual, that of any intelligent person, "You'll have to see which you're drawn to most, of the two. They're both useful, there's no question about it. They're both logical. You can't say medicine's no good, and let it go its own way.

You could probably have a very interesting time and perhaps contribute something useful on the chemical side." It's rather alarming to read what they're doing now. I haven't any idea whether I could even keep up with it mentally. I suppose, if you went step by step, you probably could. Other people have. They're not super-geniuses. I suppose you could. But it looks terrific, now.

DeVorkin:

Did you talk about astronomy at all, the possibility of going into astronomy at that time? Or was it just physical chemistry as opposed to organic!

Dunham:

No, you see, physical chemistry and organic chemistry, leading to biochemistry; or physical chemistry, leading to astrophysics. And what is there in astrophysics? I asked him, "What do you think astrophysics is good for, as you might say? Where do you think it will get to? Or will it just collect a few more numbers?" I hate people who do tables and numbers. And yet, at the moment, I'm trying to collect, out of .585,000 stars in the SMITHSONIAN STAR CATALOGUE, a sequence of stars, successively centered in each of six six degree squares, to aim the Space Telescope on. Fantastic. You have to learn about these things, but I hate catalogues and I hate just raw data of that kind about real astronomy, (what comes of it is) interesting, the structure of the Milky Way that Bart Bok is so thrilled about. Well, it is of course fascinating to see how it came about. But I get more interested in the ultimate things.

DeVorkin:

Did you talk this way with Russell at that time, about your relative likes and dislikes?

Dunham:

Yes, I think astronomy is fascinating as a subject to look at, just as anyone else might find it. And I think felt that way about it. But he had a very wide range of vision and understanding, and he enjoyed the constellations. He'd lie on his back at Mt. Wilson and look at them, and watch meteors in 1932 come across the sky, and all that kind of thing.

DeVorkin:

Really? Were you there with him?

Dunham:

Oh yes. We both lay flat on our backs. We had a f ast spectrograph camera that I had put together quickly in wood and mounted on the 10-inch Ross telescope for the night of the meteor shower in 1932. I used a prism, the biggest prism I could get. It was bought by G.E. Hale, years before, for the big tower telescope spectrograph, before gratings came in. So I took the prism from the optical shop, and put it in a wooden mounting and mounted it on the 10-inch Ross photographic telescope. We sat or lay on the ground till we saw a meteor. And then we rushed up to the telescope and snapped the plate.

DeVorkin:

Did you get anything?

Dunham:

We got a few spectra, yes. It was rather difficult. But there weren't as many meteors in `32 as they'd predicted from '99. So, we had a great time talking astronomy that night about all sorts of things -- but that was several years later, of course.

DeVorkin:

We can talk about that later.

Dunham:

He went out to Mt. Wilson every year, gave everyone there a shot in the arm about what's worth while in astrophysics, and then went back to Princeton.

DeVorkin:

I certainly hope we'll talk about that later. Have we finished with the talk in 1921?

Dunham:

Yes, except that he was, I thought, remarkably broadminded about it, and felt that both fields would lead to a great deal. They wouldn't be dead ends at all, just an exciting stab. He thought astronomy would go much further when you really understood new things about it from Saha's work on the ionization equation. It had been applied to the sun first, and then to the stars, right afterward -- in getting abundances of elements, by knowing that all atoms are not in the same state of ioniza¬tion, but that some of them are hidden in a state that's far in the ultraviolet and you don't see them. And if you know what the ionization is, you can get the total abundance of each atom moderately well, because you've got quite a lot of data, between 3000 and 8000 or 9000 angstroms, that you had in those days. I still don't like the nanometers.

DeVorkin:

Yes. This is a very interesting period in Russell's life.

Dunham:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

When there was still a lot of changing in his own career. Did he talk about that at all? About the new types of work that one could do, with. Saha's work, and with theoretical foundations?

Dunham:

Yes, you're thinking of changing his emphasis more from eclipsing binaries? I've never known as much about his earlier work, frankly, as I ought to have, or as I would have. I barged in on it at Princeton there, as a graduate student. We didn't go into the past, because the exciting thing was the present and the immediate future.

DeVorkin:

The difference was more in the philosophy, of the way he worked, because he certainly was involved in his great synthesis in 1914, where he put together the H-R Diagram -- he used just about every observational clue that he could, to support his work. He did not rely to any great extent upon theory. By 1921, especially with Saha and with A.S. Eddington's radiative transfer work, he had changed tremen¬dously, and become far more concerned directly with the analysis of spectra, on the theoretical side, as well as the laboratory observations.

Dunham:

I don't think he ever went much into it -- except to know about it, he knew everything, of course. He just scanned something and he knew it and remembered it. But he didn't go into the development of theory, like Eddington on the constitution of stars and so on, to any real degree, did he?

DeVorkin:

Somewhat he did, he constructed a number of polytropic models in the thirties.

Dunham:

Yes. I never followed that in detail. I knew he did some of it. I mean, he never made a frontal attack on it the way other people have, as a basic tool. He was great on using what other people had developed, and using it very quickly, and immediately plugging it in on a new problem, to interpret observations, such as the spectra of stars, using all the Mt. Wilson data that he could handle while he was out there for a month, and bringing it back to Princeton.

DeVorkin:

Of course, the LS coupling work pretty much developed from a completely theoretical side. And his work on alkaline earths.

Dunham:

Yes, that was. He was very strong on that. That's where he worked with so many other spectroscopists, doing the details on that, and had a terrific time.

DeVorkin:

Well, with Shenstone and with Saunders.

Dunham:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

Well, we should deal with you in the center of interest. During your Cornell years, when did you start thinking seriously that after your MD you were going to go to Princeton and study with Russell?

Dunham:

Well, of course, I had another choice then, when I got towards the end of the work at Cornell.

DeVorkin:

This was 1925.

Dunham:

Yes, `25. At Cornell, they never told you what your marks were. All of us thought, in the class, that we were probably going to fail. And it was very fantastic. Just by accident, I happened to come out with the highest record in the class, I don't know why. But we never knew anything about our standing until a couple of days before graduation. Then we got various prizes distributed, and all sorts of things, and I got a prize in otology, among other things, on the way up.

That was apart from the general records in class. Well, I felt a terrific responsibility, naturally, to go ahead with doing something medical, because I had used up all this effort by Cornell. I was just aware enough to realize that the university puts a good deal into somebody's education, and the class and the professors and all, and it wasn't a proper thing to just throw it away. So I had to see what I thought about that. But the normal thing that everyone else, the other 49 in the class, was doing was getting good internships in New York and all around the country, and going through hospitals to practice medicine, and a few of them to do research.

But I had a feeling that I also had a background in this other area of basic science, from what I'd done here for four years, and that I had to really look at the two, and see what about it, and in particular about astrophysics. I think that's where Dingle's book came in. Whether or not it was published earlier and I saw it before. Well, at some time when I was in medical school -- I don't know how I came to see it. Because medical school is quite a grind, and you get involved. You don't go reading other things.

DeVorkin:

Well, certainly Dingle's book was out by then.

Dunham:

Yes. It produced a very tremendous impression on me, probably more than anything else I'd read. Seeing what the possibilities were, and realizing how it would probably develop from there on. So I was led to go and talk with Russell, for whatever reason I did it. I wasn't at Harvard, and I wasn't in contact with Shapley much then probably in '25. Anyway, I did have that very good thinking through conversation, and I suppose perhaps I've always been adventurous enough, or whatever it is, to think, not that I'll drop what I have been doing, but that I'll try to do something in addition. I had a feeling I'd get back to doing some medical thing, and I did, for very different reasons, somewhat later. But it wasn't entirely a waste. I just had to choose between the two, and I can't make out why, exactly. I have a wife to whom I wasn't married at that time. She was in Radcliffe, here, one year behind. We used to talk about this quite a lot. She'd say, "Of course, you ought to do what you think you'd do best," which didn't help at all. But she always hoped it would be medicine, I think.

DeVorkin:

You'd met your wife by that time?

Dunham:

Oh Yes.

DeVorkin:

You were married one year later, in 1926.

Dunham:

'26, yes.

DeVorkin:

That was after you were already at Princeton.

Dunham:

Well, the spring of '26. I'd been a year at Princeton then.

DeVorkin:

What was the final thing that decided you upon Princeton and further study with Russell.

Dunham:

I think, just the feeling that I was more drawn to, and perhaps would do better at simple models, elementary particles, than complicated molecules, working up to viruses, which weren't really understood at all. They were only just recognized. And all the complications, leading on toward clinical medicine. The way a scientist ought to start is with the simple building blocks, if you're really sincere about it, and understand them fully. We didn't realize they were there in interstellar space, of course, quite, at that time, in '25. I don't think, very well at all. Calcium I lines, Calcium II lines, had been detected.

DeVorkin:

V.M. Slipher had detected something by that time, and people had known about stationary lines in spectroscopic binary stars. But they just couldn't believe that these were interstellar?

Dunham:

They pretty well thought they were just on the edge of the stellar atmosphere. I don't think they were bold enough to think the whole space was filled with atoms. And when they first did realize it, we all had the feeling it was more or less evenly distributed. And then it got to the point where almost all of it is in bunchy clouds, and much less between. That's just what we're trying to unravel now. No, I don't think that came into it.

That is to my mind the most fascinating ultimate atomic physics that there is. You've got these atoms one at a time. And I once tried to figure out how often they get disturbed, and I think the calcium atom perhaps is absorbed and jumps up once in -- I wouldn't like to be quoted -- but it may be three weeks, something like that. The rest of the time it rests there waiting for a photon to get near enough. So it was rather fascinating. I once made a cubic meter of interstellar space, a box, for the Carnegie Institute to exhibit from Mt. Wilson, as we had to get up once a year, you know.

I made a glass box, with three sides glass, one meter, and had little balls in there of pith and various things, that would balance with an air blower under them, throwing them around, more or less the right numbers for what we, at that time, in the middle thirties or late thirties, thought was a good population for a cubic meter of interstellar space. But we didn't know much about it in the beginning, of course. We only know a little now. But anyway, it went on. I think it was that look to the ultimate that finally made it turn out that I'd go and try Princeton, at least for a year, and perhaps go through as a graduate student, at least give it a chance for a year.

DeVorkin:

Russell was happy to have you? He was not wondering why you weren't going into medicine?

Dunham:

No, he didn't think I was entirely queer, because I'd had a little experience with fairly significant chemistry. I probably over¬concentrated on it. My father gave the last Greek oration here at Harvard; it hasn't been done since, and he did that exactly because he wanted to do the opposite of what he was going to spend his time on later. He said, "I'll never get a chance to do something really classical and literary again. I'll be entirely enmeshed in science as a profession." So he went for Greek in his last two years in college, I guess, and did quite well at that.

So I pushed the chemistry pretty hard, and I finally got Highest Honors in chemistry here, which wasn't generally done. I thought maybe this would help me get started on something. It was really quite fun, because you had Jim Conant and several other people, Lamb and Richards, on the committee, asking you fantastic questions, on the blackboard. It was all very friendly and it was stimulating. But you know, I've noticed a very interesting thing, that perhaps ought to be brought to the attention of undergraduates.

Anything that I did in getting the records in my class here in college has never, so far as I can make out, done a particle of good, or otherwise. It's entirely submerged, except for the fact that two or three men on the staff, professors, knew that I was doing things pretty accurately and moderately well, and that probably did quite a lot, more than you'd realize, to help me get a start at Mt. Wilson, and on other things that I've done since. But it's absolutely submerged otherwise. You could burn that record, and it wouldn't make a particle of difference now.

You go to NASA and try to put in a proposal for the Space Telescope -- they don't ask anything about your academic record at Harvard. They want to know what you did last month and might have published. And that kind of thing. It doesn't count. It's only for locating your very first job, I think, that any of that record counts.

DeVorkin:

Did Conant, Richards and others write the recommendations for you that helped you get to Mt. Wilson?

Dunham:

Well, my National Research Council Fellowship for work at Mt. Wilson was due, I think, almost entirely to Russell.

DeVorkin:

We'll talk about your years with Russell, then. This would be of tremendous interest.

Dunham:

Yes. Well, I got down there, and he got me a fellowship there the first year. Arthur Fairley, who's since been at Colby College in Maine, was the only other graduate student at the time that I was there. Don Menzel had just finished, a couple of years earlier I think. And Cecelia Payne had just arrived on the scene here at Harvard while I was at Princeton. I came up and talked to her, and she was such a dramatic character, and so impressive in every sense.

It hasn't anything to do with this, but I really seriously wondered whether it was worthwhile to keep on in astrophysics, if anyone who had that kind of background and ability, coming from working with Eddington, was working up all the Saha theory on the interpretation of stellar spectra. It seemed to me she would finish the field quickly. There was just that much to do, and there wouldn't be any more astrophysics to do. She would do it all. I said, "What's the use for a young graduate student at Princeton to go much further in this field?" But then I said, "I'll probably find a way around, there'll be some fragments left." But I was hugely impressed by what she was doing.

DeVorkin:

What did Russell say about it? Did you talk to him about that?

Dunham:

I don't think I admitted it very much. It was just one of my silent worries -- that perhaps I'd made a mistake. It looked, you know, as if one person who took the right approach, on analyzing stellar spectra -- and there were only that many lines in a spectrum -- and they were all similar -- would finish it off. I didn't realize how special some stars are. Nobody knew it. And I thought, one person could clean it up in about three or four years. And that would be it. Well, that's just incidental, but it is the way people got affected sometimes, by a dazzling meteor coming in on the scene.

Dunham:

Russell did some extraordinary things. One incidental thing he did was, he made it possible for us to get married down there. You know, there isn't any fellowship at Princeton that covers anyone who is married, and we needed one very much indeed. There isn't any that is, except one, the Jacobus Fellowship down there, which is a very high grade fellowship.

It's a distinguished fellowship, and we had no right to it or anything else, but it's the only one of the fellowships at Princeton that can be given to anyone that's married. So he said, "You must have the Jacobus Fellowship, of course." So he went to work, and I got appointed in my second year, and we lived in the little upstairs apartment on Nassau St. in Princeton, having a very nice time. Then the next year, we moved out to the new observatory in the polo field. It had a little apartment, and he fixed it that we could live in that apartment, and have breakfast and look out and see the polo players. We could look down the field in the morning, and then I could go in and play with the telescope when I wanted to, on variable stars.

DeVorkin:

The telescope was built then in 1925?

Dunham:

No. That was an old telescope. It was up on Prospect St. in the old observatory building, a wooden building, where Russell had his office. I don't know if those buildings are there still, as a matter of fact. I'm not sure.

DeVorkin:

The Halsted?*

Dunham:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

The Old Halsted Observatory.

Dunham:

Yes. But the observatory was right on the end of that, on an angle, as it came in and met with one of the college dormitory buildings. But these old wooden buildings were there. And that telescope was simply moved a little over half a mile down to the field near the lake, where they rowed. This was near the polo field, and it was halfway into the polo field, more or less. So it was a very pleasant place to live, and also, to have an astronomical setting right there in front of the apartment.

DeVorkin:

The dome is still there. There's a 36-inch reflector in it now.

Dunham:

I wonder what happened to the refractor?

DeVorkin:

Well, the refractor was purchased by the Naval Observatory. But anyway, the important thing is to identify your educational experiences, as a graduate student at Princeton. I'd be very interested to know what kinds of courses you took, what you think you found the most fascinating studies in astronomy at that time, and what Russell was working on, and how you got along with Russell. OK?

Dunham:

Oh yes. Well, as far as what I did in courses, of course it wasn't organized as heavily as it is at some of the great big institutions now. It was pretty informal. It was a question of who would you like to go and take courses with and learn something from, and talk about problems in astrophysics with? In physics, it was almost entirely K.T. Compton and a little bit Shenstone. K.T. Compton was giving a course in general physics, atomic physics I think probably mostly.

I can't recall exactly what the coverage was, but he was a very stimulating person, and very good to talk to, as well as to go to lectures with. These were small courses, of course, relatively. And Shenstone was very good to talk spectroscopy with. Russell got me to work on trying to analyze the Manganese I spectrum. When I first got there, I think, he said this hadn't been done. Catalan in Spain came out with a partial significant analysis of it. I wasn't aiming to publish it at all particularly, but just to get practice in analyzing spectra, as far as the spectral energy levels went.

DeVorkin:

How was Russell's relationship with Shenstone and Compton?

Dunham:

I think very good. I don't think they were terribly close friends exactly, but scientifically I wouldn't know absolutely. Russell lived very close to his family, walking back and forth with his old briefcase swinging, across the campus, every morning and noon and evening. And he'd stop in Physics, and talk to them on the way sometimes. The *23-inch refractor at the time, now a 36-inch reflector conversations that I heard were almost entirely about energy levels. And which way do you think this works? And are we getting anywhere? And how about these high ones we don't quite understand? And so on.

I think it was that way. I don't know that they had much personal interest in common, exactly. They didn't go out and look for wildflowers, which was one of Russell's great passions, of course, or other things, humanly. Children and wildflowers came very high on the list of priorities of what he really cared about, emotionally. But he cared about these energy levels and spectra almost emotionally, I think. If he'd given them names, he would have, but he didn't have time to.

DeVorkin:

Did Russell ever talk about his work with Shenstone and with Saunders?

Dunham:

Oh, I think so. Because he shouted back and forth with them all the time.

DeVorkin:

No -- to you.

Dunham:

Oh, yes. I'd go in and chat with him, and he had his little office in there and his yellow pad, desk all covered with yellow sheets he'd torn off, and thought rather the worse of. And then he tried another start. And he was mostly analyzing spectra at that time. Various parts of the periodic table, all the way up, and he was always fascinated by rare earths, that didn't get untangled entirely by a long shot.

DeVorkin:

How was his feeling about working with physicists? Did he ever complain about them, or did he feel that the physicists were doing all they could, or did he hope that they should have a different direction, especially in atomic research?

Dunham:

Well, I think he was always a little impatient with the fact that they didn't work faster. I think he thought, if he had time and if it wasn't their job already, he'd take it over, and very many times, unless I'm mistaken, they'd get stalled and say, "You take a shot at this for a while," and give him all their data. Now, I'm not sure about this, but I think that's the way it seemed to be, down there at Princeton. Because whenever he went to Washington, the Bureau of Standards, and talked to all those people there -- and back and forth to other universities -- he would often come back with all sorts of partially worked out spectra. And I think they were very generous in the point of view of letting him take their data, as far as they'd got.

There wasn't any feeling that "I own Chromium IV or something, or "Iron" or something. I think that they had a terribly good working relation, so far as I know. There wasn't any feeling of -- very much at any rate that was obvious to a graduate student -- any competitive feeling about it, that: "You mustn't know what I'm doing, because I may make a ten-strike tomorrow, and I'd better make it myself if I can." I think they worked as a rather widely distributed team, whenever they had any common reason for meeting.

There was a very fair amount of correspondence, I thought. I only saw this on the side, going back and forth with physicists all over Europe. He had quite a correspondence with Catalan on the Manganese I business. Not only that but about other spectra, I think, and others in England and Germany. He was pretty well in touch with them. Of course, the numbers of them were limited. Meggars was a great one, of course. Charlotte Moore put it all together very perfectly, and spent practically her whole life on it, of course. It's been very valuable.

I spent the other night with her multiple tables again, making a list of all ultraviolet interstellar lines and a list of all the pairs of neutral and ionized lines that will be revealed immediately by the Space Telescope that we can work on, for ionization ratios. Now, we have nothing but the very faint Calcium I line, in the blue, 4226, and the H and K lines of Calcium II. That's the only ratio that's any good, in the visible, except for inter-combination lines and one or two others. This will open the whole thing up. Magnesium I and II and Carbon I, II. 16 of them in all visible from space. So, I realized all over again what a perfectly devastating job Charlotte Moore did. She did realize it would be very useful. But I don't know if she realized people would read it in bed, in the planning for the space age, where you have to make a program six years ahead of what might be done with the first pointing of the telescope.

DeVorkin:

Were you at Princeton while Charlotte Moore was there?

Dunham:

Oh, very much so. She was living upstairs in a little apartment there at the observatory. It was a wooden apartment building, and the offices were all downstairs, where I was and Russell was. Arthur Fairley was the only other graduate student. He had an office there and that was about it, except for our friend who was the secretary. It was a very calm affair. And John Q. Stewart, who came in at intervals. He worked at home, and did much of his work there, but he came in.

DeVorkin:

Was Dugan there?

Dunham:

Yes, and Dugan lived in the other end of the building, in what was the original house before it was built on. He had his wife there and two children. Yes, he lived there. Very friendly to people like myself who were trying to find out how to do things. Of course he persuaded me to run the 23-inch telescope with the polarizing photometer, that went around and required 16 measures reversing everything. Finally you got one number out of it eventually, if you could do the computation later without a little H.P. calculator. It took a while. But this was great fun, and very good experience in running telescopes. I used to ride down there on a bicycle, from the graduate school, about a mile away, whenever it cleared, down on the ice and snow in February -¬- pretty near blow off the road. I would open the dome and then the clouds would come back and you'd shut it again, but we caught as many intervals as we could.

DeVorkin:

As many what?

Dunham:

Intervals of clear sky.

DeVorkin:

You were doing sky polarization?

Dunham:

No, polarizing photometer measurements on the eclipsing variables. We had to do that or we weren't properly on the team at Princeton, you know. It was a very good experience. It gave me a feeling for site testing that I carried to Australia and other places.

DeVorkin:

Tell me a little bit about some of Russell's interests at that time. During the years that you were a student there, he was finishing up his book with Dugan and Stewart.

Dunham:

Yes, they certainly were.

DeVorkin:

And as I recall it, from his correspondence later, with Eddington, his chapters on stellar constitution and stellar structure, when they appeared in the book, were actually new contributions. He had never published his ideas before. And he was coming to a realization at that time that many of his early ideas had to be modified, quite extremely, because of the new ideas on internal constitution of the sun and stars.

Dunham:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

Did you talk to him about these new ideas about evolution?

Dunham:

I never really talked to him much on that as a semi-equal even, because I never followed into that. I was too much involved in the spectroscopic work as a graduate student to really read all that. I ought to have, of course, as a graduate student.

DeVorkin:

What about your impressions of what he was up to at that time? How was his thinking?

Dunham:

Well, everyone got drawn in on working on that book, of course. I remember drawing the orbit of Eros, for instance, and various other diagrams, for ink drawing later. But we all worked up tables and tabulations and facts and numbers, to some extent, on the side, not as an official job or anything, but just for the experience, and it was great fun to do it. And he was very stimulating. So in that sense, I got to see and hear quite a bit about the discussions of what was going into the different chapters. He'd call in Dugan and sometimes Stewart, and they'd talk together, "How shall we modify this draft?" He certainly was in correspondence with quite a number of people. Was it H. Vogt, in those days, who was developing it* and had to do with the internal constitution input, there?

DeVorkin:

That's right.

Dunham:

I thought it was at that time. I never understood that or went into the theory of it, because I was so much involved in other things, but I had the feeling that he was tremendously anxious to have that book *The Vogt-Russell Theorem stand as really an adequate representation of the best idea of how things worked, in astrophysics and stellar interiors, at that time, as he possibly could, right up to the immediate moment. It wasn't ever possible to really do this, but he came, I thought, remarkably close in many ways. I had a feeling that he was in close contact, and very friendly and cooperative contact, with the theoretical people in Europe particularly, who were working in these fields. And they were very glad to have him use their data, in its form, as far as it had come, up to that date, to have him use it in those final chapters in the book. And it got in there.

DeVorkin:

Do you remember any specifics about the discussions that he had? What was he most concerned about or excited about?

Dunham:

No, I can't quite think, except the overall fitting together of the picture. I got that impression when I wasn't working on the details or going in on the detailed discussions. He wanted to see a complete picture of how a star works, and how the relation ran, between absolute magnitude and mass, and why -- as far as you could explain it at that time. Eddington had a lot of it, and the other theoretical people added quite noticeably to it certainly, as we all know.

But he wanted to see that overall picture, complete, from the point of view of the student, of course, partly; but for his own satisfaction, of course, first, really, and put it down that way. I'm afraid I can't get into the specifics, of the theoretical controversies that came and went. He added interpretations, certainly, that he sent back to people, like Vogt and so on, in Europe, and they sent over numerical calculations on what this might mean. Whether it would be trying to interpret what must or probably went on, from what the atmosphere was, from the side, as I saw it. I wasn't concerned with it, and I thought I'd never go into that kind of thing.

It didn't somehow appeal to me as much as observation of the surface of a star, and how far can you bore down into it, as Eddington would like to think, with observation from the surface. What he and E.A. Milne did on the atmosphere of the stars was as far as I got inside a star. I left the period-luminosity curve and the Russell Diagram to the people who knew about that, and let them work it out. I saw a little bit of the other side of it here at Harvard when E. Hertzsprung was here. We used to go out and have lunch up at the corner, where there isn't any place to get lunch any more.

DeVorkin:

What kinds of talks did you have with Hertzsprung?

Dunham:

Well, of course, I didn't understand the internal structure of the star, and he was working mostly on the empirical relationship, from observations, putting it together. He was a very stimulating person, who would sit and eat a sandwich and suddenly come out with something about a star and how it must work -- "I think I see it! I'll go back to my paper now, quickly, and see if this works." He was always drawing diagrams, always thinking in stimulating terms. He rather startled us young students, undergraduates and graduates, who were around about.

DeVorkin:

You met him in the early twenties?

Dunham:

Yes, that must have been along '23 or '24, about there.

DeVorkin:

Did Hertzsprung ever talk about Russell, or Russell about Hertzsprung? In front of you?

Dunham:

I think, very little somehow. How much were they really aware of what the other was thinking and doing?

DeVorkin:

By 1910 they were aware of each other.

Dunham:

I think they must have been. Yes. I don't know if they had any direct correspondence much, did they?

DeVorkin:

Yes, they had some.

Dunham:

I never heard about that much at Princeton at all.

DeVorkin:

Did Russell ever talk about Hertzsprung in a lecture?

Dunham:

Oh yes. He'd draw the old diagram and he'd give him credit for at least a considerable part of bringing the observational data together there.

DeVorkin:

Did Russell ever talk about how he developed the diagram himself?

Dunham:

Yes. He talked about that. I'm afraid I'm not awfully clear at this second on saying much, which you know much better, about the actual degree to which each contributed to the whole picture there. I know it was quite different.

DeVorkin:

Well, I know something about it, but I'd be quite interested in Russell's own ideas, as you recollect them.

Dunham:

Yes. That, I think, is an area I couldn't say very much of anything about, because though he brought it in in his discussion of astrophysics and stellar structure and luminosity and all -- at the time I was there, what he was more keen about, certainly, was the interpretation of stellar spectra. And that meant forgetting the spectrum for a while and going at the summary of the stellar atmospheres.

DeVorkin:

Was he becoming interested in the hydrogen abundance and relative abundances of elements?

Dunham:

Well, he was beginning to. But that really came more after I moved from Princeton to Mt. Wilson in 1927. That's when he began to dig it out, with W.S. Adams particularly, and A.H. Joy and R. Sanford a little less, about the intepretation of stellar spectra in terms of abundances and ionization. So in his lectures at Princeton and his talk with graduate students, he foresaw that this could be done, and he was the one who did much of it, certainly, but he didn't have the data to support it at all.

DeVorkin:

Did he have suspicions that hydrogen was very abundant?

Dunham:

Oh yes, I think he had. There's no question he had the strong impression that it would be the most abundant. He thought it was too bad you couldn't get at the 1215 line. But he knew what it looked like and he'd draw pictures of it on the blackboard, "This is about how wide I think it ought to be..."

DeVorkin:

Oh, that must have been very impressive.

Dunham:

Very impressive. We didn't know whether to believe it or not, since hydrogen was a little element down there at the beginning of the table, and it is known to be pretty abundant, where you can get at it, but only because it's part of hydrocarbons, here -- and not much of our atmosphere, except a skin at the top. A lot of water, of course, locked up hydrogen. Hydrocarbons in living material must be a very small percentage of the total hydrogen that you know is here.

So, to infer that it was vastly abundant in the sun and the stars, interstellar space, was not something you could be sure about -- except that it probably ought to be that way. It would be interesting to look, now, from the early twenties, how strong was there reason to suspect it, before you either measured it or got at it indirectly? It wasn't needed, I suppose, to produce the ions that were part of the ionization equilibrium of the elements heavier than hydrogen. They produced a good many electrons by themselves. If you took hydrogen out, you would still have a stellar atmosphere that would work, on paper. I don't know what would happen to the average stellar atmosphere if you instantaneously abstracted every hydrogen molecule? It would collapse and change, certainly, the relative strength of lines. I suppose hydrogen's more important down under, isn't it, in the star?

DeVorkin:

Well, I was going to just ask that, because people were looking, at that time, at hydrogen as a possible source for thermonuclear fusion. Proton synthesis was something that was coming into consideration by Eddington and others, for the source of solar energy, stellar energy, and you had to get the protons from somewhere. It seemed like hydrogen --

Dunham:

No, you wouldn't get protons from the heavier elements, because you couldn't strip them all down and produce the proton.

DeVorkin:

Right, but you could from hydrogen.

Dunham:

You could from hydrogen. And then helium became recognized pretty soon, perhaps after hydrogen, I don't know, about the same time, it isn't important really. Now, that may have been why interest began -- why interest focussed on hydrogen first.

DeVorkin:

In terms of hydrogen, though, that later created the problems that I'm wondering if Russell foresaw. With Eddington primarily, it was the problem of opacities -- if you have so much hydrogen there, how do you get the opacities? Did Russell ever talk about that?

Dunham:

I don't think he was too much concerned about the opacities. That seemed like a theoretical box that other people could work on. I mean, he didn't try to do everything. He was interested, and he talked with them an awful lot, but I don't think he brought it back into the shop at Princeton very much, at the observatory there. He knew what they were doing awfully well, because he put these opacity expressions into his calculations when they were needed, and he followed Eddington and Milne on the stellar atmosphere development, back and forth, as it went in every issue of the MONTHLY NOTICES for a good long time.

He knew that absolutely, and that was what he liked to talk about, on the blackboard, to us graduate students, probably more in quantity than anything else, over and over again, this process of opacity, and different lines being formed, primarily different levels. I never could see why they had to do that, because the lines formed at all levels, and it's just different. And now, of course, the computer does it all, if you just feed the things in right. Well, about how the interactions go. But he was keenly interested in this, and when I got back, lecturing to these graduate students in '35 and '36, after I'd been at Mt. Wilson several years.

I did this for graduate students as well as I could. I found it quite a stress, compared to running telescopes and developing spectrographs at Mt. Wilson. I didn't have time to work any of this out. I'd sit up all night reading all the papers and trying to make simple outlines. I didn't go into profound theory about it, but just enough to make it look as if it was a story of how stellar atmospheres worked in those days. One didn't have models, of course, in the sense that we do now. Up the street here, you can just plug in A and B and C, find out how a spectrum ought to look, and vice versa. It is different. But he liked that part of astrophysics; to talk to graduate students, and about stars in general and what kind of animals they are. He knew them all by their first names, I think, probably not as much as you do, but he'd know what was special about more stars than anyone I've ever struck. "Oh yes, this one (that I'd hardly heard of) -- it has a very peculiar spectrum, this way," and so on -- "This one really needs watching with a powerful spectrograph." Terribly strong, of course, on getting the maximum detail possible out of the spectrum of a star.

That meant the highest possible dispersion, or more properly resolving power, as it's called nowadays, and that was why, when he was out at Mt. Wilson, after the first year I'd been at Princeton, he brought back a roll of film which had the spectrum of Alpha Persei on it, in somewhat enlarged form by Ellerman from ten-inch plates. He had two of these rolls, for the blue-violet and near green, and he said, "Here's your thesis!"

DeVorkin:

You mean that's how he gave you the thesis?* *"Spectrum of Alpha Persei" CONTRIB. PRINCETON U. OBS. No. 9 (1929).

Dunham:

Yes. Just pulled it out of his left pocket, I'm sure it was the left pocket of his jacket. He had it rolled up, without any elastic on it or anything to protect it -- he didn't need it. I don't know where that film is now. It may be down at Princeton. I don't think that I have it, though I may. I may have taken it back to Mt. Wilson.

DeVorkin:

Did he ever explain to you why he was interested in Alpha Persei?

Dunham:

No, except he'd seen the plate that Adams had taken, of course, with the one-prism, 15-foot camera that was in use at that time, soon after Hale had the vision to get that long 50-foot path, down in the pier of the 100-inch where you could bolt every known thing onto the concrete, or onto a steel plate you'd put on the concrete, and then hook on lenses, prisms, concave gratings, one after the other, as we did in the next few years, and try them all out. This was the standard spectrograph of that time, when I got there, before I messed things up by trying other experiments with concave mirrors and things. I don't know why he picked that one of Alpha Persei. It was just a fairly bright star that was easily available, with high dispersion there, about two angstroms and a half to the millimeter.

DeVorkin:

What he basically wanted you to do, then, was simply to analyze it exhaustively?

Dunham:

To analyze. First, identify all these lines, which had not been done adequately on that resolution. It approached the resolution on the solar spectrum, not all the way, but most of the lines were there, not with as much resolution. It had resolving powers I suppose 80,000 or nearly 100,000. About like that.

DeVorkin:

The question is, how did he give you the project? Did he really just pull it out of his pocket, give it to you and say, "Here is your thesis"?

Dunham:

Exactly. That I remember very clearly. He explained why. He said, "These spectra out here at Mt. Wilson are an extraordinary achievement in observation, due first to Hale and then to Adams following through on making good use of Hale's big prism for the solar 75-foot spectrograph which has been replaced by a Michelson grating. Second, Adams' determination to go over bright stars one at a time, first. This was before he did the big interstellar survey of Calcium lines. He did 300 stars, which he concentrated on in the late thirties and forties.

DeVorkin:

That was with you?

Dunham:

He did that survey himself measuring radial velocities and structures of lines, the Ca lines, and some of the other lines too. Then I did this separate thing mostly about the ionization ratio, which fascinated me.* But at any rate, he just set up this .55-foot spectrograph.

DeVorkin:

Adams did?

Dunham:

Yes. At about 2.9 angstroms per millimeter, at H I think, and the resolution varied, of course, violently since it was a prism spectrograph, more in the near ultraviolet and less in the red. It was a dense lead-glass prism, which of course Hale got to be the densest he could, from Zeiss, so as to get the maximum resolution on the sun in the visible and into the red where the resolution collapses. This was used by Adams all the way through, to the red, as far as plates went in those days -- not beyond 6600, about -- and down to about 3500, where the lead glass would cut it right out, bang. He went over Arcturus and Capella and Alpha Persei and Vega -- in fact, anything that was up to the second and sometimes down to the third magnitude, if there was a reason. But the exposures were fairly long.

DeVorkin:

I'm just wondering why he chose Alpha Persei, as opposed let's say to Capella, which would be a solar type star, more than Alpha Persei, wouldn't it be?

Dunham:

Yes. Yes, it would. I don't quite remember what happens with Capella, with its two components. I think the second component shows and smears the first, doesn't it? So you either have to accept two stars, and that would be complicated, if you couldn't tell them apart. We worked extensively on the two components of Alpha Centauri, down South, where they are now I think 12 seconds apart, and we could get two spectra separate, if the seeing was anything reasonable at all. But if you kept it so that the other component was way off the slit you could get pretty good spectra, I think. But you never could with Capella. It's about 2/100ths of a second, isn't it?

DeVorkin:

Oh, is it 2/100ths of a second?

Dunham:

About like that.

DeVorkin:

OK, I didn't know.

Dunham:

It hasn't been seen, separate, has it, except with the interferometer.

DeVorkin:

Anderson was the only one who measured its position angle and separation, with the interferometer. *Dunham, PASP 49, 26 (1937); NATURE 139, 246 (1937), Proc. Amer. Philosoph. Soc. 1939.

Dunham:

He got that straight, then. Of course, now, at Narrabri* they've been doing all sorts of remarkable things.

DeVorkin:

Oh yes.

Dunham:

But that's a different chapter in history now. Done very differently.

DeVorkin:

At any rate, getting back to Russell and your thesis, did you have any guidelines for how you were to identify all the lines?

Dunham:

Yes. The first job was to identify lines, in his opinion, because you can't do a lot of theory on it, and we didn't have any spectrophotometry anyway. These were uncalibrated spectra. I realized that pretty soon, after I got to Mt. Wilson. It was silly to take any spectra without being able to use them photometrically, just to look at and measure. So his suggestion was, "Go ahead and measure every known thing you can see or think you see, even if you're not sure of faint lines, and we'll see whether they have enough evidence from multiples." He was great on the multiple structure, which was just available then, for a very large number of the lines.

Probably more than about three-quarters to 80 percent, anyway, were tied into multiples. There were only a moderate number that couldn't be identified somehow. So with his advice -- he gave me a steer on how to begin -- I pulled out everything, from the big German tables of all the individual lines of all the elements, done with every kind of an arc and a spark and flame and everything, and they were all different and disagreed on wavelengths and everything else. And I put them together as well as I could, made up a perfectly devastating card catalogue of all the lines from all these sources and where they came from, and how reliable some of us guessed they were.

And Charlotte Moore was a great help on this, of course, because she had a mass of unpublished data on the multiplets, as she always has, in the top drawer somewhere, and knows how to get them immediately on any element. And so, I just wrote everything down that I could. Then on each line of the spectrum I used what seemed to come somewhere near possible agreement in wavelength, close enough to be considered. I looked for possible blends, and so on. And then I talked it over at intervals with Russell, and he was very helpful about it. But it ended up by being a situation (where) for every one of those lines in the star, you had a fairly significant number, half a dozen or more often, of possible contributors. And often a principal component that did most of it.

So I worked up a code, as I remember with .5 plus or 2 pluses or something, how much they contributed, and put them all in, with perhaps a decimal wavelength, if there was room on the typing sheet, and put them in opposite. So we had the story, as far as you had it, we thought, out of the literature of what they were. And then we looked at the multiplets *Intensity interferometry. See: SKY AND TELESCOPE. 28 (1964), p. 64. of every one of them, every component that had any classified mul¬tiplet elsewhere in the spectrum, looked to see how that was doing. And finally, in a mental balancing game, I judged how much the principal contributor was responsible, and how much the others contributed something worth mentioning, at least, and put them all down, as far as I could.

Well, that wasn't a very theoretical and highly intelligent undertaking. But it led you to know about where the status of atomic analysis of spectral structure was at that time, and how to apply it. And I think it was a good experience. There wasn't time left to do much theoretical study. If there had been, I don't think I'd have done much with it, because the theory wasn't really developed, and you couldn't stop and wonder whether you could develop it all yourself at that stage. We knew the ionization was there. I talked at intervals with Cecelia Payne, not too much, about all this.

She was very much interested in it. But she was a little more interested in a broad look at the sequence of spectra and how they changed. And that of course is the thing you want to do next. But I wanted to know all I could about one spectrum, so I just dug into that one spectrum, to see what I could find out, in .5927, on what was known about it, and realized that a lot more observing with photometry was needed, and that was why I was rather keen to get out to Mt. Wilson and begin to see if I could get some photometry on these, with calibrating the spectra and building a microphotometer that would record the spectra.

DeVorkin:

Well, considering that you worked for Russell, I assume that's how you got to Mt. Wilson.

Dunham:

I think, almost entirely. He said, "Mt. Wilson is the place for you next. We'll have to see how you can get there."

DeVorkin:

And how did he do that? How did you get there?

Dunham:

Well, the informal way, not just to write and ask Adams if he'd take a youngster on his staff, which I don't think was done in those days -- people invited people. You didn't write letters of application, as is done quite a lot more, like the British, nowadays.

DeVorkin:

That was a National Research Council Fellowship?

Dunham:

Yes. Well, I think by knowing that these fellowships existed. I'm sure Russell put me onto it, and I wrote a letter outlining what I would like to do there in developing equipment and using it. I can't remember whether I have that letter or not. But I think I must have said that I had been working on one spectra.

I thought it would be wonderful if I could look at the spectra of some other stars, and have a basis for getting photometry on the profiles, and density dips in the total intensity of the lines, as we then understood them to be. This required developing a system of photometric calibration which wasn't available, certainly, at Mt. Wilson and not at most other places at that time. Also a microphotometer, which wasn't available anywhere at that time, to run them through and put them against the calibration curve.

So I think that was about it. And I'm sure Russell must have given it some approval and recommendation to the National Research Council. But I just don't think the National Research Council was as much overwhelmed with applications as they must be now. So it was more obvious, from Princeton and Russell, to go and spend a year or two years -- it was extended for a year, two years. And then they invited me to be a member of the staff and work along with them, and so on, for a number of years. I think it worked that way very simply; it was the National Research Council. This was the impersonal means for entry into a Western obser¬vatory. The chance of anyone getting an invitation, in those days, to join the staff at Mt. Wilson wasn't very high. It was looked up to as quite an exalted institution, of course.

DeVorkin:

You must have felt pretty happy to go.

Dunham:

I certainly was. Family was here in the East. It was an interesting reaction, because they all thought I was taking a wife to the ends of the earth in California.

DeVorkin:

Was there any serious resistance from your family or your wife's family?

Dunham:

Not really, no. My wife's family thought this was terrible. The interesting thing was, when we started to go to Australia in '57, they didn't pay much attention. Said, "Oh well, we'll see you now and then..." It's interesting.

DeVorkin:

Things have changed.

Dunham:

It really did look isolated. But it wasn't, really. Of course, you went on the train in those days, and it was the California Limited, and it was hot as all get out, going through the West.

DeVorkin:

When you got out to Mt. Wilson, did you go directly to Los Angeles?

Dunham:

No, Pasadena.

DeVorkin:

Well, yes, to the area. You didn't come down from the north or see any other observatories?

Dunham:

No, actually. I'd never seen Lick. I'm sure I'd never seen Lick in those days, or Victoria, it wasn't till some time afterward. We went out on California Limited, no, on the Santa Fe, I think. We didn't have any car at that time. It was afterwards that we made a number of trips and drove back East. We brought Rupert Wildt back one time when he was out there, and wanted to get back to Virginia, if I remember correctly. We drove East in February and had wonderful weather till we hit the lower tip of eastern Tennessee and lower Virginia, and then there was .56 inches of snow overnight. We could hardly go anywhere. But we got to Charlottesville somehow.

We drove back and forth quite frequently in those days, to save money, primarily. And of course we could take things with us. We were great on developing all sorts of photoelectric equipment out there, and trying to take it and use it later at Oxford, on the solar spectragraph, to try to get contours of spectral lines, and so on. But we got out there, and rather quickly got involved in photographic spectra on the Coude spectrograph of stars, with the instrument as it was.

DeVorkin:

When you went to Mt. Wilson, I'm very interested to find how you felt, as you got there. What were your impressions of the entire structure for doing research? And how was it socially? What was the general environment at Mt. Wilson when you arrived?

Dunham:

Well, I'd say it was largely what Merriam once told me, when he was the president of the Carnegie Institution, "We have this observatory set up, with the biggest telescope in the world." I don't think he knew whether to say "the best," and I don't think he did, but he would have because being Carnegie it must have been, and it was, of course, terrific. But just because it had a 100-inch as its aperture didn't impress me all that much. It seemed probably better than the 60-inch.

Of course the mounting had some advantages, but some disadvantages. It didn't go all the way up north. Certainly neither of them would go to the north, with the Coude, of course. But my impression was that he said "We've got the finest telescopes anywhere," or the best or the biggest, "and we've got a team of very fine astronomers. We've got an operating budget to keep them going, and we can buy them photographic plates. Now it's rather up to them to produce astronomy. They've got what they need in equipment, running supplies, salaries -- " Mine, I think, started at $3000 a year out there in the beginning, and worked up slowly into the $4500 level, or something like that, before I came East to Rochester. "We've got the running show, and this ought to produce astronomy." But the thing that struck me, more forcibly as I went on, was that I came at it more with the approach, although without any extensive experience at all, of a physicist.

There weren't any other people out there who looked at it quite that way, except John Anderson and Sinclair Smith, of course. They were all very friendly, and we got on very well together, but we represented a different sort of look at the thing, I think. The others were top notch observers, really top notch. They picked intelligent programs that, looking back even a few years afterwards, looked as if they were, I think, well selected. And they measured plates like mad, worked very hard at it, between runs, and were up there on the mountain three and four nights, usually, sometimes five at a time each month. The observing program was posted on the ground floor, and it was very exciting to look at, and to see how much time you'd get each month. Then they wrote papers describing these results and interpre¬ting them as far as they could, but not too far in the physical direction, you know. It was Russell who got that to happen, insofar as it did, very much more.

DeVorkin:

You mean when Russell would come out?

Dunham:

He'd come out, once a year. I don't know who arranged that. I suppose it must have been Hale. He got him to come out and stir up the plates and data. And he'd go rushing around with his yellow pads, and people would come in to ask questions, and he'd suggest what would be a wonderful thing if only they could get the data, and then they'd work it out together. He'd talk with them a great deal, and they'd publish many of the papers, but he published some of them based on their measuring and his interpretation. But he really revitalized the place, every September or October, when he was out there.

DeVorkin:

Well, Hubble and van Maanen were there.

Dunham:

Oh yes, they were very much there, all the time I was there, practically.

DeVorkin:

There were other people there at the time too.

Dunham:

Oh yes.

DeVorkin:

I'm interested, just a few more comments about Anderson. He did some remarkable instrumental work, and I think that he was largely responsible for the successes that they had with the inter¬ferometer.

Dunham:

I think he was. He put the scientific physics into the thing, and the better engineering. F. Pease had the thing designed in detail and drawn and put through the shop, and set up and adjusted. I rather feel sure that Anderson was up there with them at nights, quite a lot, adjusting it. I don't think Pease had that physical imagination -- pictures of rays of light doing this and that in your head, the way some people do easily. Anderson did, and he knew what would probably work, if you did it this way. What you'd have to adjust and change in order to make the result come out on these fringes and so on. So between the two, I should suppose that they supplemented each other. I wasn't in on working on this at all. I only heard them talking, and watched the thing happen.

DeVorkin:

But Anderson moved off into administration. I was wondering why? He never really produced a lot.

Dunham:

No, he was there, on the early development of the 200-inch project at Cal Tech largely. I didn't see an awful lot of that early stage of the administrative planning of the 200-inch, the design. I saw it as it went along, but I wasn't really working on that part of it at all. I think he just got roped in, probably. He was not a very strong character in resisting a request, if not an invitation, that he was the one person who could do it. I suppose he was the only person on the Mt. Wilson staff who could tackle the thing. He'd never done much administrative work, had he, before that?

DeVorkin:

Not to my knowledge.

Dunham:

I don't think so. You see, the people at Mt. Wilson certainly had no experience in administrative projects, as they call them nowadays. There weren't any projects. People were just on staffs of institutions and pretty much did what occurred to them. They didn't get ideas or plans more than slightly suggested to them by any director. I've never been able to make out what the real power or position of a director in an observatory is. It never seems to get written in any constitution at all. The good director watches what's happening, apparently, and suggests to people what would work well if they did it with or without the effort of other people, and trying to get funds from budgets that would make work that seems important go further. But I've never seen the director of any observatory I've had to do with really lay down the law.

DeVorkin:

No.

Dunham:

Some of them have. I imagine W.W. Campbell did.

DeVorkin:

What about Adams?

Dunham:

He never laid down any laws. He talked in a very friendly way with me and with other people, and he was very sympathetic. If we seemed to have the confidence to try something out, he'd be strong for an experiment. But not a great experimental project. That wasn't part of Mt. Wilson, as I was trying to say before. From Washington, the word came down that you have your observatory, and with occasional exceptions, you'd better be content to use it.

There's an awful lot to be had from just what it is. It never was said just that way, but that's what I think Merriam was saying. Most of the time I was there it was Merriam and Vannevar Bush later. But I was all messed up with war work at the time that he took over the Carnegie. So he wasn't the direct policy maker when I was there. It showed up most in the early days in trying to see whether you could get any new physical experimental equipment at all.

The striking example I remember was trying to persuade first Adams, and through him Merriam, that it would be an awfully nice thing if we could somehow have a Leeds and Northrup galvanometer. I gave him the specifications, the sensitivity, and resistance coil that would match, and all that. I wanted to use it with a photomultiplier. In those days. It was a photo cell, in fact, in the beginning. And measure line intensities, first in the sun, where you had enough flux, and later a photomultiplier on stars, where you could do it. I did it perfectly well on the sun, when I got a galvonometer. But it was a longwinded battle to get one galvonometer -- nothing else.

Everything else I picked up from the junk heap there, a wonderful organized junk pile out in one of the sheds they have there. I think they sold it all off a few years ago. I think that's a real mistake. That means that you can't walk down that pile between shelves for inactive equipment, parts of spectrographs that were on the Cassegrain of the 60 inch, parts of all sorts of mountings, with screws to adjust and cranks and worms and that stimulated me when I had an idea of what we might do, say, with the concave grating mounting, in the Coude of the .500 inch, which turned out to be very successful on the infrared spectrum of Venus.* That was done with the concave grating, which had enough resolution to get those C02 lines in the infrared spectra of Venus.

DeVorkin:

You mean they got rid of all that stuff?

Dunham:

I think they sold it for junk. I'm pretty sure, but I'm not certain. It would be interesting to know. Because I wouldn't have done that. The reason is that the way to start a new project is not by looking for inactive equipment