James West

Busch-Vishniac:

Good morning. This is May 16th, and we are in Louisville. I am Ilene Busch-Vishniac and I am here with the inimitable James Edward West. We're here at the ASA meeting, and we thought we'd at least make a good start on the interview as required for the archives. What is your present address? [Response redacted] And your present employer?

West:

Johns Hopkins University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering.

Busch-Vishniac:

And I don't think we have to describe their business. You've given your job title. Do you remember how long you've been with Hopkins?

West:

Yeah. Since 2001, so 18 years. Forty-five years at Bell Labs before that.

Busch-Vishniac:

Well, like most of the people I know and like, I would describe you as someone who has failed retirement. [laugh]

West:

[laugh] Very definitely so. I can't imagine what retirement for me would be like without a lab and without students and fun things to do.

Busch-Vishniac:

Do you remember roughly when you joined the Acoustical Society of America?

West:

Roughly '61 or '62. Somewhere in that range, because that was when we were pretty sure we understood charge storage and transport in polymers well enough to know that we had a permanent charge on the Teflon film we were working with. Polarization is not the right word, because there are no dipoles in Teflon. And that was when I was encouraged by Manfred Schroeder, who was my department head at that time, to join ASA I think—

Busch-Vishniac:

So, at that point, do you remember your title?

West:

I think it was a senior technical STA, assistant, I guess. I was not a full member of the technical staff at that time.

Busch-Vishniac:

Ah, OK. So that's interesting. And, from what you've just said, do you remember whether you were interested in the physical acoustics or engineering acoustics?

West:

At that time, the transition between the two was reasonably easy. In fact, when I chaired the engineering acoustics technical committee, one of the things that I did was to have many joint meetings with physical acoustics because of the fuzzy line between the two at that time.

Busch-Vishniac:

That makes a lot of sense. And, aside from Manfred suggesting you should join, did you have reasons for wanting to be part of the Acoustical Society?

West:

I was a greenhorn so I wasn't quite sure what all of that meant, but I think Gerhard Sessler may have joined the Society before I did, and he also encouraged me to join.

Busch-Vishniac:

That makes sense. You and Gerhard were well along on getting into trouble at that point.

West:

Yeah, we were. [laugh]

Busch-Vishniac:

[laugh] And I've heard you talk about this a couple times, but it would be really nice for history to have your impressions when you joined the Acoustical Society.

West:

I not only looked at the Acoustical Society in whatever year that was, but the American Physical Society. There were a number of IEEE organizations, and the Audio Engineering Society that I considered. But the major difference between all of the others and the Acoustical Society of America is that I was made really to feel at home in the Acoustical Society. And I can remember many potential conflicts that came up that, in any other organization, would've gone against me, but in the Acoustical Society it was made clear that they understood what was right in the treatment of people of different religions and different races. A good example is that, when I was president, one of my first major encounters was with the treasurer at that time. When I took over, I was told that the treasury reports were delinquent so I asked for a meeting with the treasurer and, in that meeting, I was basically told that he didn't take orders or suggestions from a person like me. I don't think it was quite the N-word that he used, but it was close enough to the N-word for me to become perhaps a little bit uncontrolled, and I fired him.

Busch-Vishniac:

And I'm glad you have not encountered that sort of behavior very much from this society.

West:

No, I have not. And, when I did that, I think in other societies that are not as openminded about diversity, they would not have ruled in my favor. I think the treasurer would've won that battle.

Busch-Vishniac:

And I've certainly gone with you to other conferences where I've been appalled at the way you’ve been treated so I can just imagine what you had to go through.

West:

Yeah.

Busch-Vishniac:

I'm used to thinking that everybody who walks by when we're at an ASA meeting is someone you know. Are there people in the ASA who you would say in particular have been a big influence on you?

West:

Absolutely. And too numerous to really name, but there were a few of the senior members that come to mind immediately. I want to mention Harry Miller. He was one who was particularly helpful in encouraging me to join the engineering committee. And I remember Betty Goodfriend, who was then secretary of the Society. She was also very helpful in guiding me through meetings. You know, I've really been lucky wherever I go. I always find that people are willing to mentor me. And I have been very diligent at returning that through my attention to mentorship.

Busch-Vishniac:

I'm glad you said that, because that would've been my comment as someone who has been mentored by you. I know you are willing to give of your time and to give advice, so that's great. We’ve been very lucky at the Acoustical Society because we have had staff who have stayed on for their entire careers and have become our walking encyclopedia of all things Acoustical Society. That makes a big difference and the fact that they're also nice people matters. I can't walk into an ASA meeting now without Elaine Moran coming up and saying, "How are the girls?" [laugh] So I get it.

West:

Yeah. I get a big hug from her, too.

Busch-Vishniac:

Before I leave the discussion of the ASA, was there anything you wanted to say about the past or what you see coming in the future?

West:

Well, there are bifurcations in everybody's life, and the one thing that I sorely regretted in the Acoustical Society was when the participation of people who were working in transducers and microphones waned. It's kind of interesting, all of that went away after the electret microphone because it was hard to beat in terms of the quality. It was very difficult to beat in terms of cost. Really, I've never thought about it from that standpoint before, but in the Acoustical Society and the Audio Engineering Society there was nowhere to go to talk about the generic sensors. Wherever you needed to pick up sound, the electret microphone was hard to beat. I think there were one or two areas where electromagnetic microphones were better, and I can't even describe where that was now. So maybe it was our research that may have wiped out the need for meetings or for sessions on transducers. Early in the game, one of the very interesting things, I'll never forget, at Bell Labs, when I was looking at directional microphones, the only sensor that worked was the Western Electric 640AA and those things were a couple of thousand dollars apiece.

Busch-Vishniac:

Ooh! I didn’t realize they were that expensive.

West:

Yeah. They were very expensive. In fact, condenser microphones were not used due to their cost, although they were very linear. I think, Bruel and Kjaer and a couple of other companies came out with condenser microphones that were a couple thousand dollars apiece.

Busch-Vishniac:

Now let’s talk about some of your personal history. This is labeled "The Early Years, The Precollege Years." [laugh]. When and where were you born?

West:

I was born in Farmville, Virginia in 1931. And we lived in a house that my grandfather built with my grandmother. I didn't know my grandfather, but I act as if I knew him. That's one of those things my grandmother told me -- that I said things to her that she never said to me about my grandfather. My mother was committed, because, I think, the state paid for part of her university work, and so she had to teach on a Native American reservation for a couple of years. And I think I was, I don't know, maybe from 3 to 5 years old or something like that. But she didn’t want to take me on the reservation because she felt it was too depressing and she thought that I would be better with my grandmother, which was good for me. In fact, my mother would get jealous because I talked about my grandmother more than I did about her. [laugh]

Busch-Vishniac:

[laugh] That's interesting. And I know I've met your brother. You have just the one sibling?

West:

I have one sibling and two half siblings. My dad’s first wife was killed in an automobile accident.

Busch-Vishniac:

Oh. I haven't ever heard you talk about your half-sibs.

West:

Well, one of them, Leroy [sp], always teased me, "You know, I used to change your dirty diapers." [laugh] So, yeah, I loved him. You know, alcohol has been a serious—and it probably still is in some of my relatives—a tremendous problem. And one of my half-brothers died from cirrhosis. So did my father, for that matter. But Leroy—I pulled him out of a derelict car dead drunk in Newark, New Jersey and got him dried out. And I told him, "You can live with me as long as you don't drink." And so, he became Ellington's best friend, taught her about baseball and really was a nanny for her. I don't like that word, but he did a good job. She really loved him. He lived into his 90s, so once he stopped drinking, he did real good. I scared the living daylights out of him. I don't know whether I would've done what I threatened him with if he had kept drinking.. But, yeah, I took care of him because he took care of me.

Busch-Vishniac:

You said your mom was a teacher. How about your father?

West:

He did a little bit of everything. He was a pullman porter on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He had a funeral home. He had some investments in other little stores and stuff. So he was all over the place. I think he may have finished high school. I'm not sure.

Busch-Vishniac:

Growing up, did you think you were going to end up as an engineer or a scientist?

West:

Very interesting question. My curiosity got me in a whole bunch of trouble, and it did because I loved to take things apart. I wanted to know what was in it, and why it worked. And there are two experiences that kind of stand out. One is, I think chronologically, one hot summer, humid day in Virginia, I had found a radio that somebody had thrown away. And I figured that, oh, this will be fun. I took it and I looked in it and there were these vacuum tubes that looked OK to me, so the only outlet in my room was the ceiling light. My bed was one of these that had brass head and footboards. So, I wrapped myself around so I could get up to the lamp. Took the bulb out, put the adapter in, plugged the radio in and got stuck there. 60 hertz was going through me. Anyway, I was stuck there and my brother, Sunny, heard me and came and just knocked me off. But it was a good lesson because now I wanted to understand how electricity behaved so I learned to the point that I could open any of these outlets here without turning the fuse off and replace the socket. It's very simple once you understand what's going on.

The second was even more dramatic from the standpoint of punishment, and that is I took my grandfather's—this is my father's father’s - pocket watch. It was very beautiful with a lid that opened and closed. I found out how to open it and get in it. And, of course, I took every screw out that I could find that I could manipulate, and I can tell you it was something like 100 parts in that watch. But the problem was I couldn't get it back together again.

Busch-Vishniac:

No! [laugh] And I'm guessing people weren't real happy when they figured that out?

West:

Oh, my gosh. I don't want to talk about it. [laugh]

Busch-Vishniac:

[laugh] So when you weren't busy taking things apart, what were some of the other things you did as a kid?

West:

Climbing up my grandmother's apple tree and monitoring the ants as they went about their business. I, of course, tried to prevent them from their beaten path, and found it very interesting that they never lost sight of the target, because whatever obstacle I put up they either went over or around to get back and go. So, it was only a detour from the standpoint of the work to be done. And I started piano lessons, but that didn't work out because the lessons were not attractive from the standpoint of music. I inherited from my father’s ability to play what he heard. My father could hear something and pick up the guitar and reproduce it.

I lived next door to my first cousin, because my grandfather built two houses right next to him, one for each of his sons. There was my brother and I, the two boys, and next door they had two girls, so there were four of us that played together and learned together. And Edna, who’s always been baby sister, won the state of Virginia's concert pianist with a full scholarship to the school in Boston. It's not the Boston Conservatory but—

Busch-Vishniac:

The Berklee School of Music?

West:

Exactly. And there they found, for the first time, that she couldn't read a note of music. But, if she heard it once, she could play it. So, they rejected her scholarship. It was kind of devastating, because she was so good.

Busch-Vishniac:

Well, they could've taught her how to read music.

West:

I know, but she's Black. Well, there are a lot of stories about, not only with me, but others that were not given the opportunity that they should have had because they were Black. And it happened to me. Hampton didn't offer anything in engineering. The best thing I could do at Hampton—we moved to Hampton when I was about 12, 13 years old primarily because of the poor school system in Farmville. I really wanted to go to Virginia Tech but they would not admit me. Black people, at that time, were not permitted to go to those white schools. They disqualified me because they said I never would be able to negotiate that. The best thing that I could do—I've forgotten now exactly what they suggested, but something like, dishwashing—service oriented—that's what I probably ought to look toward.

Busch-Vishniac:

Ugh. Well, this has been a repeated story, and I know that you have worked on this hugely. Even in this day and age, people who think of themselves as progressive, when they look at a person and see a dark skin color, somehow the expectations are flavored by that. It’s a hard habit to break.

West:

It is, but I'll give you a good example, a present example. When I joined the board for Ingenuity, it was 80% white, but still it was supposed to represent the demographics of Baltimore, which are two thirds Black. And the many members on the committee who I consider progressive were hellbent on having to change the qualifications for the programs if we wanted to make it more diverse. In other words, Black kids are never going to meet the standards that we have in place. I wasn't about to let that happen. But I was little bit scared when that point came up, because I wasn't sure whether there were enough kids in the city of Baltimore to be able to level this program. But it turned out to be a very interesting experience, because, not only were we able to find qualified students from the public school system, we found more than we could serve. Every once in a while, I win that battle. I've compensated with my kids in just the opposite direction, because ever since I was that big, I was my family's son the doctor.

Busch-Vishniac:

So your family moved and you didn't get into Virginia Tech so you went to Hampton? What was that like? What was your area there?

West:

Biology was interesting, but it just wasn't what I was looking for, and it was the only science that I could do. They had a few physics courses, but they were very elementary physics courses and so the best thing I could do was not quite science but math. I did that for two years and basically said, this is not for me. I quit, got disenfranchised and drafted into the army all within a very short period. I found the army experience really not what I was cut out to be, so my next job was to figure out how I could get out of there fast but I wasn't fast enough. I got shipped over to Korea and learned what war was all about.

Busch-Vishniac:

So were you actually in a platoon that fought?

West:

Oh, yeah. I lost a piece of my finger. That was the result of somebody tripping what they call a "Bouncing Betty," a landmine that jumped up to give a wider distribution. That set it up so that I could figure out how to get out of the army. But my wounds were minor compared to others that were with me on that day—yeah. I haven't thought about that in a long time. I don't like to think about that.

Busch-Vishniac:

Posttraumatic stress?

West:

PTSD, right. I probably had that, because I very definitely went through a period where that was all I thought about. It's kind of interesting. I got wounded, and I wanted to go back. I never could figure out why I really wanted to go back and put my life in peril, but I did. Fortunately, they didn't let me go back. They wouldn't ship me back, and so I said, OK, if I can't do what I want to do, let me out. I have one of those kind of personalities that, if I can't do what I want to do, I'm not going to do it at all. See, that happened with piano. Because, when I couldn't play what I wanted to play, I wouldn't play at all. So they let me out of the army.

Busch-Vishniac:

All told, how much time were you in the army?

West:

Somewhere around 18 months.

Busch-Vishniac:

You had started at Hampton. You had done two years and then you left and got drafted, and a year-and-a-half or two later you're then back in the States. Did you come back to Hampton?

West:

Well, I was all over the place. It was hard to settle down. But, eventually, one of my aunts who lived in Philadelphia made it kind of comfortable—I don't know why. Maybe it was where it was, a lot of activity in the city. Then I started studies at Temple.

Busch-Vishniac:

And what did you study at Temple?

West:

Physics.

Busch-Vishniac:

So did you complete a degree at Temple, then?

West:

Kind of. [laugh]. That's an interesting story all on its own because, what happened was I had the GI Bill, but that was about it, so I didn't have much money. I looked for summer jobs and there was an ad from Bell Labs. I had no idea what Bell Labs was but the ad was for an internship. So I applied and they said, we'll accept you. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but acoustics sounded interesting. I had no idea what acoustics was really about, but I kind of knew that, from the wave equation, that I could change a few things like Avogadro's number and a few other constants that applied differently in optics and the longer wavelengths. I said, I can do that so I said, acoustics, and they said, OK. I think Ed David was department head at that time. My assignment was to help psychoacousticians who were trying to measure the interval time delay and they were using condenser microphones, Western 640AAs, as transmitters because they needed a very narrow pulse in order to get results. I think the integration time is 15 milliseconds or so. I haven't thought about this in a long time, either. Only a very few people could hear these pulses because the 640AA was not able to produce the intensity that was needed. I was told “see what you can do to help these guys out.” So, OK, I understand the problem, I can hear it, but I can imagine that there would be people who couldn’t hear it. I went to the library and I found a paper in Acustica by Kuhl, Schodder, and Schroeder. They described these solid dielectric headphones, and I got them built and required a 500-volt battery in order to get them to work. I have some brown spots probably still in my ears from when I tried on the first ones, when I was trying to make sure that they were reasonably safe, or to learn how to make them safe. But, anyway, it worked for everybody. Everybody could hear the pulses coming from the drivers so I got a nice gold star from Bell Labs on that.

I went back to school and in, I guess, December, around Christmas, I got this call that the drivers are losing sensitivity. Oh? So I went back and I had a copy of the paper and finished reading it, because I read only what I thought I needed to know originally. And, in the paper, they said that the sensitivity of these things goes down, we don't know why. But if you reverse the polarity of the voltage it comes back to life. So, I told them what to do, and they said, oh, this is not working right because the polarity of the pulse changed because the bias changed. And so, I said, OK. Maybe I should come up and take a look at them and see what I can do. So they sent me a ticket. I spent the Christmas break at Bell Labs with these things. And so, there I was with a 500-volt battery, an oscillator, and headphones, right? Nope, they really don't work. OK. So I was taking the thing apart. I disconnected the battery, and the leads. When I took one lead off, put it down, took the other one off and put it down, and it completed the circuit with the oscillator and the headphones. And I could hear them. Oh, OK. This is interesting. Now, what's going on here? Maybe—OK, it's the capacitor, right? So I took the thing out again, short-circuited the headphones, plugged it back into the oscillator, and it still sang beautifully. It changed my life, because I had to know why and what was going on. This is really what got me involved in electrets. School was over for me after that.

Busch-Vishniac:

So you would've been in, what, your senior year at that point?

West:

Somewhere in there, yeah. Because I had some credits transferred. I attempted several times to go back and see what I could do to fix that whole thing, but lost interest in trying to fix it because I had a challenge. I wasn't paid very much, but what an interesting problem. And so there I found out about electrets.

Busch-Vishniac:

Which explained the phenomenon you were seeing. So that's interesting. Today, certainly, there aren't too many people who could say that the company they went to for their first job is the place they stayed with for almost their entire professional career. You not only did that, but you stayed really in the same department the whole time. Or at least the same center.

West:

Well, that's kind of an interesting story, too. When Jim Flanagan took over the department, I started looking at physics to move into a different department. I did because—and I think we all do that—anybody with a deep southern drawl and with all the outward characteristics of a pure racist—I just didn't feel that I could survive in that. Peter Eisenberger was department head in physics at that time and they were doing some stuff that I was really interested in. There's a tricky thing about how you jump that bridge. You can't recruit someone from another department. I think what happened is Peter called Jim and said that he would like to have me transfer. And then Jim talked to me and wanted to know why I wanted to transfer. I pointed out that the mechanics of understanding charge storage and transport is not acoustics, it's really physics. That was my rationale to Peter. Jim wanted to know what I needed that he wasn't providing for me to do what I wanted to do. And I said, "Nothing." He said, "Well, why do you want to transfer?" And so, it got down to the nitty-gritty of why I wanted to transfer, because my experience in the past has been I don't survive very well with managers who are Southern gentlemen. I made Jim glow red hot and I made him go in the other direction of really overcompensating for my perceptions of his behavior. We became very good friends, and I did not transfer.

Busch-Vishniac:

One department, and really a job that you held for most of your career. And at what point did Gerhard Sessler enter the picture?

West:

Very early.

Busch-Vishniac:

I know that you and he published in '63.

West:

No. Even before that. I think '61, maybe. Well, Gerhard was doing plasma acoustics at that time. We were co-located - my office and his office were right next to each other. I talked to him about what I was finding, what I was confused about. He got very interested also in the problem, and we got joined at the hip at that time. Gerhard is one of my oldest and best friends. I think I counted something like 50 joint publications with him.

Busch-Vishniac:

Right. And you both were inducted together into the Inventor's Hall of Fame, right?

West:

Absolutely. And several other awards that we were jointly blessed with.

Busch-Vishniac:

I remember when I came to Bell Labs, Bernhard Gross was also there.

West:

One of the most interesting characters, one of the most rewarding experiences of my life for a lot of reasons. In fact, Bernhard left Germany in 1933 and he went to Brazil. We had many, many discussions on what he perceived that others didn't in order to escape Germany early. He asked why are you so curious about that? And I said, "Because I want to be able to read the tea leaves in the way that you did." And, guess what? Many of the things that he told me about—the early signs -- are the same thing that's happening in this country right now almost to the letter. Disqualify the legal system, disqualify the press. And so on and so on. Yes. Bernhard was a theoretician basically. He really discovered the Compton effect before Compton and he has publications to prove that. The problem was he didn't isolate and define it as a separate thing. This was connected with a lot of other things that he was doing around radiation. And, by the way, he was Brazil's representative for the Atomic Energy Commission. He retired from that position. But Bernhard was able to make sense, mathematical sense, out of what we were finding experimentally.

So, we had a round-robin eventually, because Gerhard had gone back to Germany to the Technical University of Darmstadt, and Bernhard was in Brazil, and I was at Bell Labs. We hopped between the three locations for many years to try to understand charge transport and storage in polymers. My best suit is experimental science, and Bernhard would come up with these theories, and I'd find that I could design experiments to be able to prove or disprove the theory. Initially, he'd come up with a theory and I'd be able to match it. He thought, how can this guy be so complete in showing that the theory was right? He put in a ringer and I spent sleepless nights and nights in the lab trying to make the experiments work in the same manner. Eventually Bernhard said, "Stop." He said, "I must confess. I didn't have full trust in you because you were so accurate with the experimental results that I had to find out if it was made up.

Busch-Vishniac:

And how long did it take you to forgive him? [laugh]

West:

[laugh] Funny thing is that I didn’t hold it against him. I saw it more as an exam for me. And, yeah, because I was very happy with what was coming out of all the theory and the experimental results, with all the bends and shapes of the functions agreeing. I mean, Bernhard was very humble, he was very apologetic, so I couldn't hold it against him.

Busch-Vishniac:

So talking about Gerhard and Bernhard leads me to a question. All of us have people who are our mentors, our heroes, who we really appreciate having known. They've been influential in our lives. Who besides Gerhard and Bernhard would you name, at any stage in your life?

West:

Well, I wasn't certain whether I wanted to be at Bell Labs or not at one point. You know, maybe it's time for me to branch out, even while I was trying to unlock the secrets of electrets. I looked at a move to IBM. I looked at GE. I looked at Xerox. The reason that I chose Bell Labs in a permanent situation was because there were people that looked like me that I wanted to be like when I grew up. One of the main ones was Lincoln Hawkins. Linc learned to cure polyethylene so it wouldn't degrade under UV radiation, which allowed it to be used as sheathing—replaced lead as sheathing on, not only telephone cables, but on power cables. Linc became my mentor. I told him that, "I need some advice. I think I want to stay here and have a career here, but I need help." He said, "I'll teach you everything I know about surviving a research environment." And he, Charlie Miller, Ray Story, all chemists, as a matter of fact, became a team of supporters.

Ed David was really a good mentor. And many people in the Acoustical Society of America were there to support my career, to give me good advice. I think I mentioned Harry Miller as one that I can very definitely remember. Vern Knudsen in acoustics was another. We worked together on a paper on a concert hall—I've forgotten what it was called then, but it's now Avery Fisher Hall.

Busch-Vishniac:

So, suppose I flip it. You've also had a long and illustrious career, and have paid it forward, if you will, by mentoring lots of people. Are there particular people you've enjoyed mentoring who you'd like to mention? I know some of them. I'm sure I don't know all of them.

West:

Yeah. I'm not sure I can even remember some of the names. I can see their faces but—oh, boy. Charles Thompson was one of my very early mentees. It's kind of interesting what goes around and comes around if you live long enough. His daughter, who is on the faculty at—I've forgotten the university in D.C. -- but she invited me to give a lecture there. I didn't realize who she was until we started talking. She said, "My dad sends his warm regards." "So who's your dad?" [laugh]

Well, one of the most successful programs in generating underrepresented minority and women PhDs, were the Bell Labs programs I helped originate. It was kind of interesting how that whole thing came about. We had an organization called ABLE, the Association of Black Laboratory Employees. It involved everybody, all of the Black employees, from the people who kept the place clean to the highest levels. One of the things that we wanted was to increase the number of under-represented minority and women at Bell Labs. I'll never forget, when we petitioned the council and got a meeting with them and put this question before them, the statement came back, we hired you; go find them. We'll definitely consider them. This so completely deflated our balloon. We had many questions and we were ready to go in for a hard fight, and they turned the tables on us. OK, so let's see what we can do about that. But I think anyone with any sense at that time, or with the big picture, would've known we wouldn't be able to find them because they didn’t exist. So, we petitioned the council again and said, "Your suggestion was good. We've hunted all over the country, but we just can't find anyone." They said, "Well, we kind of figured that that would be the outcome." We proposed to begin programs that would attract more underrepresented minorities into STEM.

The first program was a summer research program in which we brought in students from mainly HBCUs and wherever else we could find them. This program grew to something like 2000 to 3000 students throughout the Bell system, because all of the Baby Bells and so forth adopted the same program and had these. It's kind of interesting. I don't know whether a program like that existed ever before. But it was very attractive. OK. So, now, we've got this big bunch of kids that are interested in STEM, and—boy, what was his name? He was a department head in physics. Oh, wow. Sid Millman was it? He wrote the Corporate Research Fellowship proposal which became the next step for these kids who had been there as summer interns.

Then that success led to the program for women. Well, that, in itself, is an interesting story. There was a women's organization like ABLE, and I was chairing ABLE at that time, and so I talked to the leader named Sheila [Paflin?], I can't remember her first name, but I know her last name was Paflin. I went to her and said, "This is what we're planning to do. Would you like to join us?" They came back and said, no. We don't want to get involved in anything that's not going to work in the first place. Well, anyway, when it did work, they said, we gotta have one, too. So there are two programs. But the very interesting thing about those programs, over a period of 30 years there were about 300 Black PhDs awarded through that program, and about the same number for women. It was a very successful program. One of the things that we learned in making it successful was the importance of mentoring; the importance of recognizing shortcomings in their university experience to fill those holes and to give them a level chance, and this worked so well. Gary May, who's now Chancellor of UC Davis was one of the early CRFP as was Lance Collins at Cornell. I just saw he has a promotion. I think he's Dean of Engineering. But those are just two of many very, very successful products from that program.

Busch-Vishniac:

You've had lots of projects you've worked on, and we've touched on some, talking about the electrets. And you mentioned directivity. And now you've mentioned some of the fellowship programs. Are there other activities that you have been involved in, either in research projects or diversity initiatives that you would like to make sure get mentioned?

West:

Absolutely. One of them is architectural acoustics, and the other is hospital noise—noise in hospitals. And if I take them chronologically, it would be concert halls first. This work was in support of Manfred Schroeder and Jim Flanagan and John Pierce and Max Mathews. It was a conglomerate of people who were very interested in this problem of this wonderful hall in New York City that was a total flop from the standpoint of acoustics. It was an appeal from somebody in the City of New York, probably the controllers—can you help us? What can you do to help us? The charter of Bell Labs prevented us from overtly being a part of that, so we had to find a strawman, I guess. That turned out to be Vern Knudsen who was a great scientist. He agreed to be the front man for us so that we could get work done. We created this program called [BLUDI?]. Manfred and Max Mathews were trying to build a model, a computer model of the hall. We wanted to measure the impulse in the hall and then use that as the basis for the model. So we got starter pistols, but they had nowhere near the amount of energy that was necessary to make that work in such a large hall.

I had been to a football game at Rutgers, and they had this little cannon that they fired when a touchdown was made. I thought about it and I said, that might just do it. I arranged to borrow the cannon, got it to Avery Fisher Hall, put it on stage, distributed microphones throughout everywhere to measure this impulse. I said, "We've got to check to make sure these mics are not overloading, so let's do a practice shot." I pulled the trigger on that thing, and the whole hall filled up with smoke. The manager heard the boom and came down and saw the smoke and was, oh, my gosh. And there was a concert that night. They didn't know how they were going to get all of the smoke out of the hall. But the interesting thing is that, out of failures of that magnitude came the—let's see, I've forgotten what we called it—but where you broke things up and then put them back together again to—what the heck did they call that? Bishu Atal was one of the architects for that. A series of tone bursts that shifted in frequency and then you'd go back and then the time domain, you'd collapse it.

Busch-Vishniac:

Well, you also mentioned hospital noise which is, of course, some work that I remember very well.

West:

Well, you should, [laugh] because that was the second big peak in my publications. I don't know how your publications go, but when we got together, my rate certainly had a bump. When I joined Hopkins, one of the obvious points is that everybody in the Whiting School was some way involved with the hospital in terms of research. I teamed up with Ilene Busch-Vishniac to look at noise in hospitals. There's a lot in the literature, but some of the things that were obvious from the beginning was that this was a serious problem that very few people were paying attention to. The WHO had standards, but it was kind of obvious in the beginning that very few, if any, hospitals met that criteria. We had a lot of fun with some great students quantifying and qualifying this whole problem.

And I think that—although nobody but me is saying it right now—but I think that our work not only brought this to light but even introduced methods of monitoring noise in hospitals that are now carried out by many other people in many other laboratories. What we found was interesting, more in terms of the high intensity of the sound in the PICU, which was one of the venues that we looked at, where the paging system was so loud that you had to stop talking when it lit up, which was very frequent. The cure for hospital noise, again, was not an easy one, but the oncology center at Hopkins allowed us to do some experiments with absorption. I'll never forget that, as we were putting these panels up around the upper periphery and in the ceiling, thinking oh, this is a very interesting architecture. If you would ask me to build a wave guide for speech, you couldn't do better than have 45-degree corners as we found. We could actually hear sound circulating around and around the halls. The panels went up and the phone rang, and it startled me. Everything was 10 dB or more louder than necessary. And things that you didn't hear before, like the pneumatic tubes that carried lab materials, were now audible. I didn’t even know those things were there until we quieted the place down. Then they became predominant noise factors. Well, there were four symmetrical wards on each floor, and when people would walk into the one that we had treated, they were startled because it was so much quieter. The other three wards decided they had to have the same treatment.

Before our work, ceiling absorbers and other absorbers were not permitted because these things couldn't be cleaned. What Ilene and I did was to figure out that a very inexpensive material, Tyvek, which covers buildings, had very little effect on the absorption characteristics of fiberglass. And I've often thought about the physics behind that. But it's all out there now. This material has micropores. There are some things that we know now about sound absorption through micropores, but, again, I can say that we discovered that ahead of those that are now making a living with it. But that's OK, too. That's the way science works. That was a very productive, very interesting area that I knew very little about until I got involved in it. And I had a good mentor and a good teacher, namely Ilene, on those things that I didn't know and didn't understand. What else?

Busch-Vishniac:

Well, you might want to say a little something about what you're working on now, because, as I pointed out at one point here today, you're a man who has failed retirement. You retired from Bell Labs and moved to Hopkins. And at the young age of 88, you are still working, of course, in acoustics. So you might want to talk about some of what you're doing now.

West:

Well, two directions. One, I've always said that if the electret microphone ever meets its end, that I want to be the one that comes up with the sensor that replaces it. So we're looking at piezoelectric polymers, other than PVDF. In fact, we make our own with PDMS. I had a collaboration at Cornell Medical while I was at Bell Labs on monitoring blood pressure. And this came about in a very interesting way. Bill Baker, who was then president of Bell Labs, had to wear a monitor to check his blood pressure continuously; a big, big pack that he had to carry around with him. He was very disappointed in that more than half the data was not usable. Bill came to me and said, "You know, I had to wear this thing and I'm very disappointed that I gotta wear it again, and I'm not sure why this thing is messing up, but I suspect it's the sensor" because electronics are pretty stable. It's the front end that gets you in trouble. He said would I mind taking a look at the sensor. The sensor was a thin metal plate suspended that was piezoelectric for picking up the brachial pulse. It was very obvious to me that this was the problem right from the beginning, because it is just like a tennis racket. If the artery is right over the center, it works well. But the interesting thing is that you get tremendous movement of the artery relative to the skin. The skin is pretty stable, but the artery moves around. And so, the sensor was very sensitive to position of the arm. This is very interesting. And this brings Ilene Busch-Vishniac back into the picture, because this was one of our collaborations. So I had concluded that, gee whiz, the electret microphone ought to work pretty damn well on this because it's uniformly sensitive across the surface, but how in the hell can we withstand the pressure that's put on it as the cuff is inflated and deflated? And so that's where Ilene came in again. Between us, we figured out how to solve that problem.

That kind of got me a little bit interested in signals from the human body. I looked at a listing of some of the seminars that were being given, and there was one in Bloomberg Public Health on stethoscopes and monitoring pneumonia. So, I said, OK, I don't have anything to do right now. Let me go over to Bloomberg to this meeting. And, lo and behold, the same problem crept up. One of the big concerns was that half the data that they were collecting in the field was unusable. The protocol was to send a high school trained person with an electronic stethoscope and a recording device to put the stethoscope on the chest of the infant, record some of the data, and ship that data back to Bloomberg where it was evaluated by experts. Then they had to go back and find the kid if pneumonia was suspected. As usual, my mouth gets me in a lot of trouble. I said, "We ought to be able to do better than that." I had no idea how to approach the problem but they jumped on my comment immediately, and asked “how much money do you need and what do you need in order to be able to make that happen?” And I said, "Well, let me see what I can do."

I found a couple of very bright students to work with and especially Ian McLane, who was about ready for the terminal degree. The reason that this data was unusable was noise contamination. They showed us pictures of where this work was being done in the third world, very-crowded environments, other babies in the room, or on the corner of a street with a line of women with babies to be tested. Cars rolling by. As you listen to the recordings you can hear babies crying, you can hear cars going by, you can hear people talking. And this device is supposed to be picking up body sounds. OK. So we know about noise-canceling headphones. They work very well. That's kind of a simple problem to solve in the vernacular of generalizing that process. I teamed up with Mounya Elhilali, my very good friend and colleague now. We took the Thinklabs stethoscope, stuck a microphone on the head of that thing, and I think we probably made 50 of those things, and they went to I know Peru, Bangladesh, and a whole lot of other places. They would record both the sound under the head of the stethoscope and the one in the microphone that was on top. And then, we got that data back to see if there was any possibility of generalizing the noise cancellation process.

The main contributor there was from Dimitra Emmanouilidou who is now at Microsoft Labs. She and Mounya were able to show that noise suppression may be possible even with moving noise sources but there was a problem in that what worked for one set of data didn’t work for another set of data. You couldn't use the same function. It turned out that the problem was that the microphones were inaccurately placed on top of the stethoscope and tied down. So one mike may be a little bit further back than others or the distance between this mike and the source was the important variable. This plagued us for a long, long time before we finally figured out what was going on there. But we solved it and that was one great thing that we were able to do in order to quiet the sound that was picked up by the stethoscope.

Once we were able to do that, the demand on the part of our medical colleagues was, well, can you build something that could do the same thing? So that was the next step. These very rough devices with some electronics on the inside but an external microphone on the outside wouldn’t be appropriate for use in the field. The other thing that we had to do was to make sure that either the system would be precisely placed on the chest, or we had to make the sensitivity more uniform over the area of the head of the stethoscope so that placement on the chest was less critical. We put an array of microphones on the stethoscope to make it less place specific and an external mic to measure the sound on the outside. And this was really, really great. We could get very good noise cancellation. The only problem was that it also distorted the signal that we wanted to receive, so we had to back off on the amount of cancellation. Fortunately, this all worked out, because we could reduce the noise to the level that the signal that we were really interested in was picked up loud and clear.

Then, the next step was, OK, we can do that, we can get rid of the noise. What else can we do? That that led to using artificial intelligence to train an algorithm to be able to identify pneumonia in the signals that we had. It turned out that we were in the 80s percentile in terms of agreement with doctors originally. Mounya and Dimitra were able to tune this algorithm based on more and more data to train and some adjustments to the algorithm until we got to the 91st percentile in identifying pneumonia relative to non-pneumonia compared to a listening panel of experts. This is the same level of accuracy that trained physicians can do. And this lack of perfection is understandable if you listen to some of the outliers. Everybody is a little bit different, but there are some sounds that are tremendously different from the norm. This great technology—if you look at the cycle when we got involved, it was a minimum of two days between taking data, shipping it back, evaluating the data all while somebody is sitting there waiting to receive the diagnosis. With the new technology, we can detect pneumonia, anybody can detect pneumonia, in 15 seconds. You don't have to be a trained person to do this. You either get a red light or a green light from the device. And so now we have a device that can process these long lines of kids that are waiting to be checked for lung contamination.

I continually complained to anybody who would listen that there's great technology here. It's not gonna go anywhere and look at all the lives that we can save. Perhaps someone who has a secret to clean water or to improving the environment and I really want to save those kids' lives. So, my daughter, Ellington, said one day at dinner, "I'm gonna quit my job." She was, I don't know, making 130K a year, something like that. "I'm gonna quit my job and I'm gonna start a company to make these devices." And I think it was kind of an, all right, I'm tired of hearing you, Dad, complain about that, so I'm gonna do something about it. But, anyway, this has turned out to be very, very successful in that there's now a company called Sonavi Labs. If everything goes right, we'll have our first products within a month or two. We still have some hoops to jump through in terms of approval, but I don't think we'll have any problem there since, from its outward appearance, it's no different than the other electronic stethoscopes that are on the market. So I expect that to be approved and that soon we'll be able to ship some units to the third world that hopefully will save a bunch of lives.

Busch-Vishniac:

Is there anything that we've missed that we should be talking about?

West:

Yeah. One thing that comes to mind, when I was president of the Acoustical Society of America—it's a shadow that always hangs over me, why aren't there more people who look like me? Why aren't there more women doing what we're doing? It's always been a concern of mine. It's called the Acoustical Society of America, but it's really an international society because there are people from all over the world that are members of the Acoustical Society, including a few from Mexico. Not many but a few. And Sergio Beristain was one of the ones from Mexico that was at most of the meetings that I was in. We talked a lot, and so I suggested to Sergio that it would be nice if we put an S on America, to make it Americas. Sergio said, "That's really a good idea." I said, "OK. What I'm going to approach the council with is to arrange to have, periodically, meetings in Mexico in order to attract more Hispanics to acoustics." The council approved. They said, this sounds like a good idea. Let's go—there were some objections to it, but what the heck.

So, we started that during my tenure, and it's been a very enjoyable, very productive meeting, mainly held in Cancun. And Cancun primarily because it's one of the few venues in Mexico that can accommodate the size of the acoustical society. But I get many, many very positive comments on that. You would expect those comments would be from the standpoint of the venue, which people certainly appreciated. Cancun is commercialized but it's still a pretty nice place to be. But I also get comments more from the technical aspect that we've really got to do something to mentor our Hispanic colleagues in order to bring them more into the tent. Mexico suffers from, in education, many of the problems that third-world countries have, although I don't consider Mexico a third-world country. In science they're kind of behind and need to catch up. And so, I'm very proud of having something to do with getting that off the ground and getting that started.