Thomas Giallorenzi

Duncan:

This is Mike Duncan, and it is November 19, 2019. I’m here with Dr. Thomas Giallorenzi to do an oral interview. Tom, first of all, thank you very much for being willing to do this. I appreciate it.

Giallorenzi:

You're welcome.

Duncan:

So, as we talked about, I’d like to start right at the beginning. Where were you born? When were you born, and what were the circumstances of your early childhood?

Giallorenzi:

Let’s see. I was born in the Bronx, New York in the ’40s. We lived there for about six months and then we moved to Pittsburgh. My father had a job with Esso at the time, which became Exxon, and as a result of that job, we moved actually several places. So, I spent the really young childhood in the Pittsburgh area, and in 1950 we moved to Washington. My father was transferred. He was loaned by Esso to the Petroleum Administration for Defense for the Korean War, and he was actually put in charge of scheduling oil deliveries to the Korean area. We did that for a year and then he was transferred again by Esso to Baltimore and we spent my grammar school years in Baltimore. Then he was transferred again to the New York area, Manhattan initially and then Bayonne. He became the head of the marine department. We lived on Long Island and I went four years— Well, I lived there four years; they lived there longer. Lived in South Hempstead, New York and went to the Catholic high school where I met my wife, which was a long time ago. [Chuckles] Those were formative years because those are the years you're getting ready for college.

Duncan:

Was your father in a technical area or managerial?

Giallorenzi:

He was managerial. He managed, as I said, the marine department, which put a lot of refineries and ships under him. We used to always have people out to the house. One notable one was we had several ship captains out, and in the course of conversation, they found out that one of the ship captains was a U-boat commander and he sank the ship of one of the captains that was there. [Laughs] So, they got together. They didn't realize that before the meeting, but that was kind of an interesting discussion. Esso lost a lot of ships during the war because tankers were a prime target. So, I went to high school there and did the usual thing with high school—football, baseball, track every year.

Duncan:

So, how big was this high school?

Giallorenzi:

High school wasn’t too big. It was about 800.

Duncan:

And this is in Bayonne in New Jersey?

Giallorenzi:

No, this was in Long Island. It was St. Agnes in Rockville Centre on Long Island, which was a diocese high school, which was actually interesting because I thought I’d play basketball because I’m tall, but since it was a diocese school, they recruited kids from the whole diocese. They had a terrific team and they were state champions for like five years in a row. When I was there they hadn't lost a game in like six or seven years, and so the team was quasi-professional. That just outclassed me totally, so I had to play on a recreational club league after football or whatever.

Duncan:

What did your mother do?

Giallorenzi:

My mother basically stayed at home. She raised the kids.

Duncan:

So, how many brothers and sisters?

Giallorenzi:

One brother and one sister. My brother was younger. He became an oral surgeon. He just retired, and my sister was a guidance counselor. But she did something really smart. In the ’70s she bought a couple seats on Wall Street at the stock exchange and rented out one or two of them, and then Steve, her husband, used one of them. They bought it at $50K each because the stock market in the ’70s had crashed or something, and so they were giving them away almost. Of course, when she sold them they were worth about $15 million each, and so she made a little bit of money there. But she was a guidance counselor at a school in New Jersey, and he worked on Wall Street the whole time, and so they did okay.

Both my brother and sister have retired. They have places in Naples, Florida and are trying to get me down there, too. My brother had a fairly successful practice. His son took over the practice. My brother’s son was an oral surgeon also, so when Albert retired, he took over the practice. It’s actually a very big practice, has multiple surgeons working there for him and so on.

Duncan:

So, when you were in high school, what influences did you have? Was this a time when science and technology were beginning to form as an important part of your life or not?

Giallorenzi:

Well actually, yeah, it was. Actually, it started earlier. The thing that really interested me or got me going was when we lived in Pittsburgh, my parents bought a train set for us and I made kind of a labyrinth layout for the train set. My father had an engineer from Esso over for dinner and he came down and saw it all and said, “You know, you are a natural engineer.” That actually influenced me.

Duncan:

How old were you at the time?

Giallorenzi:

I was probably about seven.

Duncan:

Wow.

Giallorenzi:

So, here was this engineer telling me I could be an engineer, and that stuck in my mind the whole time as I was in school. And then of course I liked science. I was inclined to be very analytical, so I didn't ever stray from wanting to be an engineer or a physicist or whatever.

Duncan:

So, in high school, it sounds like, in a school like that, you might have had a classical training, Latin and…

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, we had all the… You had religion. You had Latin. You had English. We had physics, chemistry, and math, and all that. That was almost my downfall because after I graduated from high school, I went to Cornell, applied there as an undergraduate, and when I got to Cornell, they asked if you had any advanced classes and would you want to opt out of classes? The school led me to believe that I had advanced calculus and advanced physics and so on, and so I opted out of them.

So, my first year at Cornell was tough because I went to the second-year stuff without having the first-year stuff. I was afraid I’d fail out, but I didn't do that, obviously. It actually was interesting because there were a lot of kids that were kind of breezing through because they really did have very good preparation, and myself, I killed myself to stay up. Then the sophomore year, the work ethic was there, whereas with a lot of other guys it wasn’t because they had it easy the first year. So, from second on I did very well. I was able to pull ahead of a lot of different kids.

Duncan:

Let’s go back to high school just real quick. Was there anybody there who really influenced you? Any teachers that stood out?

Giallorenzi:

Well, we had nuns and so they were not terribly technical. The ones that were teaching the science courses barely had enough background in it, but they were nurturing and they encouraged doing it. I did very well. When we graduated, they had one award for science at the high school which they gave me for doing well in the science. Yeah, it worked out pretty well, actually.

Duncan:

This was in the late ’50s, and so was the space race or anything having to do with global politics, did that impinge anywhere in what you were doing?

Giallorenzi:

Well, global politics didn't, but the space race obviously did. Also, nuclear power was hot then. So, I read a lot on that, read a lot on relativity because that interested me. I just read a lot, basically. My parents bought us the World Book encyclopedias, and any spare time I was looking at the World Book. So, I read a lot. I don't think there’s any substitute for not reading. I still read a lot because it’s quite entertaining. I find it entertaining.

Duncan:

So, it sounds like you had quite a varied high school career in terms of both doing academics and doing sports.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. I was very active in high school. I would get home from practice or games at 7 or 8 and then start homework around that time, so it was a busy time. Multi-task, so to speak, a lot.

Duncan:

What about summers?

Giallorenzi:

Summers in high school, we went to the beach a lot. It was senior year. We used to cut lawns, and that’s another story and that’s an important story, actually. We started cutting lawns, me and another fellow, okay. We went around and hustled and got more lawns than we could cut. We really got overcommitted by a large amount, so we hired our friends. So, we’d take $1 or $2 out of the $10 or $12 and we got up to like 50 lawns, okay. That went into college, too. We did that during the summers somewhat, but in high school mainly, Bob and me. Then we started spreading out. We started painting buildings. We got jobs at restaurants and things to paint them. Then we went into finishing basements for people.

Then the one that was really interesting was we went to some lady. We were kind of marketing. You know, “We finish basements.” She said, “Well, can you build a garage?” and I said, “Yeah, we could build it.” “Do you have experience?” “Oh yeah, we have experience.” Typical salesperson. So, we didn't really know anything about building a garage. She wanted a two-car garage behind her house, stand-alone structure. We said, “Yeah, yeah. We can build that,” and so she said, “Okay. I need it done by a certain date.” “Okay, fine.” So, we contracted with her. We actually wrote a contract with her, and this is in high school. We started…

We left her and immediately went to the library to see what a garage looks like and how you build it and talk to a few people, figure out how we were going to build, and designed it. Ordered the lumber and figured out… We had to lay a cement pad and put the anchor bolts in and things like that. It turned out there was a cement strike right then which threatened the whole thing, and so we went around to all the cement vendors and no one had any cement, okay. So, we finally found one guy that said, “I don't have any cement, but I have a bunch of ripped bags. If you cart them off, they're yours for free,” so what a deal. We made a cement-rich mixture since we had free cement. You know, mix it with sand and gravel, all that. Laid the foundation and then put up the frame and built the garage. It’s still standing today. That’s important because… Well, let me just finish that.

Those summers we made a lot of money, it turned out. We made the equivalent… Well, we made like $5K to $10K each for a couple summers. To give you a metric, a GTO sports car, which Bob, my partner, bought was $2.5K, which was top of the line, souped up and everything, a big engine in it. I don't know what a comparable thing would cost today—$30,000 or $40,000 easy. So, we pocketed at least $5K each year, each of us, so that was a nest egg for when I went to college and got married early.

But in any case, to finish the story on the construction, when I was applying to colleges, one of them was MIT and I applied… The three primary ones I wanted were Cornell, MIT, and Caltech. So, I applied to those three and then I had two backups. So, the MIT one, if you got through a certain bunch of hoops, you had an interview. So, we had a local interview with the president of Grumman, which is out on the island. He was a graduate, obviously, of MIT and he did this in his spare time.

So my father drove me out there. I didn't have a license then. We went to the guy’s house, which obviously was a big house, impressive. Went through the interview with him where basically I probably sounded like a hundred other kids, all the boxes checked: great grades, great SAT, sports, you know, lots of activities. So, I’d call it a nondescript interview. There was nothing that stood out. So, the interview ended. He was walking us to the front door and he was talking to my father and he said, “Well, you must be proud of your son, what he did, grades and all.” He said, “Well, what particularly impressed me was the garage.” He said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, they took a chance. They built this garage. It turned out well,” and he invited us back in. So, we sat down and he asked me lots of questions about the research we did on it and how we went about it and then all this business stuff that we did.

Duncan:

Did your father know what he was doing when he mentioned that or was that just pure luck?

Giallorenzi:

I think it was pure luck, but you can't… You don't know. I never asked my father was it pure luck or whatever. So, the interview was a homerun, basically, as a result. So, in the not-too-distant future from then, I get a letter in the mail from MIT with a full scholarship. I hadn’t received an acceptance letter yet, but I got this letter. Okay, so I got into MIT, full scholarship. So, my head was swollen and I wanted to go there and all that. My father said, “Well, let me talk to a few people.” He came back and said, “I think you should go to Cornell.” I actually did get a half scholarship there. Those were the days where on academics you could get a scholarship. He said, “You’ll be more well-rounded if you want to go into business or other things later on.” They have a business school there and so on and so forth, not that MIT didn't. He said, “People consider Cornell more well-rounded and so on for business.” I said, “Okay, I’ll go to Cornell,” and so I went to Cornell.

Duncan:

Wow. What about Caltech?

Giallorenzi:

I got in there. I got into every place I applied, but Caltech was really kind of number three.

Duncan:

And certainly MIT and Caltech would have been much more science, engineering focused and Cornell would have been--

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, yeah. I mean in those days, those were the two top schools, period. Their reputation was bar none.

Duncan:

So, what was expected in your high school? Was it expected that the graduates would go to college or were you an exception?

Giallorenzi:

Most of the kids went to college, probably almost 100% from our school, which was a problem. I should mention that problem, too. It came back to bite me later on. You know, most kids went to college, so it was a middle-class neighborhood. In those days, middle class kids went to college, so I went to Cornell. I went there and went into engineering and physics, which was a double major in EE and physics. They said the first year didn't go so well. They really thought I would fail out, which I didn't, but from then on it went pretty well.

Duncan:

So, did you know what you wanted to do, or just in general you knew science and engineering was what you wanted?

Giallorenzi:

Well, I was interested actually in nuclear physics and so I was thinking maybe nuclear physics, some aspects of that. I took a couple courses in that area. I remember… Well, actually it was in graduate school, but Hans Bethe and Ed Salpeter—those are two nuclear physicists and astrophysics types. They were both very, very impressive teachers.

Duncan:

So, you took courses from both of them.

Giallorenzi:

Yes. They were both very impressive. So, I went through undergraduate there, and then they encouraged everybody to leave Cornell and go to another graduate school.

Duncan:

Now was this five years you spent because it was a double degree?

Giallorenzi:

It was a five-year course, but what happened was at the end of my fourth year, they changed it because they felt kids with five years with a bachelor’s were at a disadvantage. So, five years… My year was the first year they did it. We got a bachelor’s and a master’s and had to do a little thesis.

Duncan:

And that master’s was in engineering physics.

Giallorenzi:

Right. So, I was looking at colleges to go to, just to apply to. In the EE course, EE school a new professor came, Professor Chung Tang, and he was a laser physicist. He had been at Harvard and then he went to Raytheon and then he came to Cornell. In chatting with him, he was interested in me and I was interested in him. He was a theorist and he wanted me to do experiment. Lasers were just getting hot then, and so I said, “Okay, I’ll consider doing it.” So, it was an uphill battle to stay at Cornell.

Duncan:

Because they wanted you to leave and go to someplace else.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. There were only two of us that stayed out of the whole class.

Duncan:

So, did you do any of the research during your undergraduate years or was it all coursework and then you transitioned into graduate school?

Giallorenzi:

Well, in those five years I had to do a master’s thesis and I did it on magnetometers. I had to build a magnetometer and lock-in amplifier and things like that. You know, it was a good thesis, measured hysteresis in certain materials and related properties. But then I was able to get into the PhD program with Tang. You had to take courses and perform research, of course. Let me jump back in time to the comment I made that everybody went to college in my neighborhood. So, Bob, my friend who I cut lawns with and I, went over to Freeport to register for the draft.

Duncan:

So, this must have been 1966, ’65?

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, ’66, somewhere around there. Since I just got my master’s and I also just got married. So, we got married on September 5th and I had to appear before the draft board on the 7th or 8th. But the problem was we registered in Freeport where in Freeport, it was known that most of the kids didn't go to college because it was a lower income area at the time. So, we figured, if we registered in Rockville Centre, we’ll be up against everybody who wants a deferment, so we go over to Freeport and register. Well, we outsmarted ourselves because it turns out that in those days, if you had any criminal record or you didn't finish high school or any number of these things, you weren't considered for the draft.

Duncan:

And there were a few more of those types?

Giallorenzi:

And there were a lot of them! I had to appeal the draft because I was drafted at the end of my master’s, so I appealed the draft. There were 102 of us appealing the draft that night in the room, and there were three Rhodes scholars among them because the area was pretty high level of education in general. But there were 102. In preparing for it, I asked my advisor Dr. Tang, who was just starting with me, to write a letter of reference, and he said, “I don't know what to do. I don't know how to write a letter of reference.” He was a young guy at the time, too. He said, “You write it for me and I’ll sign it.” I said, “Well… okay.” I didn't know how to do it, either, so I asked my father to do it. I was going to be funded on an Air Force research grant, and so he weaved this thing in there about how important it was to national security and all that, just a masterpiece of writing.

So, I go in front of the board, which are all Second World War veterans and crusty old guys. They said, you know, “I did my part; you do your part.” The thing wasn’t going so well, and they asked me a question. “Why should we send somebody in your place?” This is kind of a no-win question, and so I said, “Before I answer that, can you read this letter?” because I knew there was no answer to that question.

Duncan:

And they hadn't read the letter yet.

Giallorenzi:

And they hadn't read the letter. So, I gave them the letter and they asked me a few questions about it. Passed it around to the different members and they asked me to step out. Then they called me back in after a few minutes and they said, “We’ll give you a deferment.” Out of the 102, only two of us got a deferment that night.

Duncan:

Out of three Rhodes scholars.

Giallorenzi:

The three, they were absolute targets, it turned out, because they had to go to England and we weren't letting them out of the country. You're not going out of the country, period. Because I sat next to one of them and he knew the other two. I talked to them after it. One of them had gone before me and he was nailed. So, I got my deferment.

But going back to history again, as an undergraduate—summer jobs. My father said to me, after we built the garage and cut all the lawns, “Why don't you get a regular job where you work for somebody instead of being on your own? This will help you for your resume,” and all this. So, the first job I got was in a custard stand, ice cream stand, and didn't eat dinner for like two months because I had so much ice cream to eat. [Laughs]

But for the rest of the summer he got me a job at AT&T, and we repaired switches there. That was okay. It was kind of a boring job because they had more people than they needed. They had all these people there sitting on their thumbs in case the switches went down, and then you put a bunch of people on it to fix them instantly. So, you had all the spare parts and everything there ready to go, and of course they were reliable. I never had to fix one of those switches in the main switching banks. But I did volunteer a lot of times and go fix the switches for the operators because they still performed manual switching. You know, that at least gave me something to do. So, that was the first year.

The second year, I got a job at the New York port authority. The port authority runs the airports and the harbor in New York. Their building was downtown. So, what we would do there was quality control. I was in the engineering department and we would go test concrete. You would core concrete. Coring is you drill it out. You take a core that’s about eight inches in diameter and about a foot and a half long of concrete. Then you bring it back and crush it in a crushing machine and see where it failed. Also, when the trucks came with the concrete, you would measure certain parameters and if it didn't meet those parameters, you’d reject it, which was interesting because they always had a secondary place where they’d bring the truck where they didn't have inspectors. So, we would do that. We’d go out to New Jersey, Newark, or LaGuardia, or Kennedy, and Newark airport and do all the coring. They’d bring it back and crush it, and so I did that for the first year.

The second year they had bought an instrument, which I think was a gamma ray back scatterer. It had a radioactive source in it, and from the back scatter you could tell the density and thickness of the concrete. This was to eliminate coring, and so my job was to get this instrument into operation. So, I spent about the first half of the summer learning about it, and I was interested in it anyway because it was radioactive and I was interested in the nuclear things. What I would do is take this instrument which was about a foot and a half long by about a half a foot wide and put it on cores of concrete that they had brought back from the field and previously tested and use them to calibrate the instrument.

So about halfway through the summer, I told my boss, “I think it’s calibrated, so let me go out and do it in the field.” He said, “Okay. The port authority had just finished an apron for the container ships out in Newark.” And it was a huge area, like several miles by several miles. This is where they stack all the containers and store them, and then this goes all the way to the dock. They take the containers up to the ship and load them aboard the ships. They had just finished this whole area, so we had all the engineering reports. You could tell where they cored because it’s got a hole that they filled in. So, I had the engineering report and would go out and find the spot, put down the instrument, and make a measurement. None of my measurements agreed with the engineering reports, so I went back and told my boss this. He said, “Spend another week calibrating and doing what you're doing.” Okay, so I did that and went out there. Again, it didn't agree at all. So, he said, “Look. Take a coring truck out. Put the instrument down, make your measurement, then core it and bring it back and measure the core properties yourself in the lab.”

Duncan:

And you're like 17 years old?

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, I’m 17. Yeah, something like that. So, I did that. I went around wherever I wanted to do it and brought the cores back to the lab and: right on. Everything was right on. So, I went and told him this. This is my boss and he said, “Don't tell anybody anything. I want to bring you to some people known as the Elliott Ness Department,” figuratively, and it was the internal investigation department at the port authority. So, I told them the story and gave them the data. “Okay, don't tell anybody. Be quiet. Just do your work in the lab.” About a week later, a whole bunch of people are arrested—inspectors and the people that I was working with in the lab, engineers, and so on. There were like 50 of them, a large number.

Duncan:

So, this is all because they falsified and had bad concrete, or substandard concrete.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. They falsified all the reports. They were all on the take, and it turned out that the concrete was supposed to be, I don't know, about a foot thick, and it was more like seven inches. That’s a huge amount of material. So, the company, the president and all, were arrested. The company went bankrupt very quickly after that. I wasn’t called on to testify or anything. They just took my data and did it. But for the rest of the summer, they assigned two cops to me. [Laughter] Wherever I went, I had these two policemen.

Duncan:

Were you frightened?

Giallorenzi:

Well, it was a little odd, certainly. They let me do anything I wanted to do. I’d go out and core, or whatever I just asked them to do. But I went to them and said, “You know, these two cops are with me eight hours while I’m here.”

Duncan:

[Laughs] What about the other time?

Giallorenzi:

“What about the other time?” And they said, “Well, you should tell the local police about it and maybe they can help you,” which they were of no help at all. But I said to my boss, “You know, the mafia doesn't work 8-to-4.” Indeed, they don't. It was also interesting because when we used to have to go to the various facilities like the airports or docks, we’d go out and core, every once in a while police would borrow our truck. They’d say, “You guys go to a diner. Stay there for four hours or whatever. We want to use your truck where we can do some observations.” Okay, and so they would do that and we’d just waste time while they used our truck for whatever they were using. A couple of times they pulled bodies out of the water and we had to bring these bodies to the morgue on our truck. It was a weird summer job, okay, but I survived it. That took care of my undergraduate summer job years. So, it was interesting, you know, a little more exciting than most summer jobs.

Duncan:

Different from cutting lawns for sure.

Giallorenzi:

Different from cutting lawns, right.

Duncan:

So, when you were in as an undergraduate, what did you do during summers in that? Was it the same sort of thing?

Giallorenzi:

Well, this was during undergraduate.

Duncan:

That was during undergraduate, okay.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. It’s in graduate school I stayed up at Cornell the whole time.

Duncan:

Okay. So, you came back home in between…

Giallorenzi:

Right, as an undergraduate.

Duncan:

But you lived at Cornell otherwise. You were there during the?

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, for graduate. Yeah, all for the rest of the year.

Duncan:

For the rest of the year during undergraduate.

Giallorenzi:

The academic, yeah.

Duncan:

Right.

Giallorenzi:

It was an interesting childhood. [Chuckles]

Duncan:

Did you ever take any of the business courses or anything besides science and engineering at Cornell as an undergraduate?

Giallorenzi:

No, I didn't, actually. I didn't get around to them because I took every science course I could fit in, whether it was chemistry or material science or high energy physics or whatever. I fit in whatever I could fit in.

Duncan:

So, how big was Chung Tang’s group?

Giallorenzi:

When I got there, I was number two. Jules Walder was the first guy. He had a ruby laser and he was doing Brillouin scattering in liquids. Then my job was to do parametric scattering. So, we had a lab. Dr Tang asked me to move his lab, which was a room, from the third floor to the second floor in the EE building. So, I did that and went back and reported, “It’s all done.” He said, “Well, that just took you a second.” We only had a power meter! That’s all he owned. Everything else was borrowed! [Laughter] So, as time went on, we built up the lab; he had me build up the lab. In those days, for the parametric scattering, you needed an argon laser, so I had to learn how to build lasers.

Duncan:

So, you built an argon laser.

Giallorenzi:

I built many. I learned how to do the glassblowing for the glass. He got an RF power supply from Raytheon, which was big, as tall as I am, power supply which would scare the hell out of me all the time because it was overkill. But we used that to excite the laser. Yeah, learned glassblowing. The laser goes in a magnetic field, and so you had to calculate that and figure out the field and buy the magnet that you needed and all that, and that worked out okay. And the mirrors and things like that. In those days they were pretty primitive. I built lasers. I built argon lasers for just about everybody on campus then after that. I was a pretty good glassblower. Then we did parametric scattering.

Duncan:

So, nonlinear optics had already been shown, second harmonic generation.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. Pulse parametric scattering was done by people at Bell Labs, and so we were trying to get a crystal from Bell Labs, lithium niobate. We had KDP, but the threshold was too high, and that’s what most people were using.

Duncan:

This is CW that you were doing it with, obviously.

Giallorenzi:

This is CW, trying to use CW. We were in a race with Bob Byer.

Duncan:

Who was my thesis advisor.

Giallorenzi:

Who was your thesis advisor. He inherited… Before he got there, a guy named Ken Oshman set up the lab that I believe Bob used, and Ken I think didn’t make a CW parametric amplifier for some reason. He was one of Harris’ students, too.

Duncan:

This is all at Stanford that that was happening. Yeah.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. So, we were in a race to get the crystal from Bell Labs. We both had the setups, and Bob got a good crystal several weeks before us.

Duncan:

And Bell would grow these crystals. They had the ability.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. Bell would grow them, polish them, and send them to you. So, I thought Bob also got his a couple weeks before I did from Bell Labs. Subsequently, Bob told me his crystal was grown at Stanford. He was able to publish and get it done about two weeks before because once you popped the crystal into the cavity, it worked. I was talking to him again at the OSA Lasers conference last month. We were talking about it and he said they grew all the lithium niobite crystals themselves.

Duncan:

Of course?

Giallorenzi:

So, he beat me there. I had to change my thesis, then, around a little, so I did spontaneous parametric scattering, which basically hadn't been done before, actually, believe it or not, where you measured all the parameters in the parametric process. So, we developed a theory, and Dr. Tang was very good at theory and so he helped me a lot. He said, “Use Glauber pairs,” because he had worked with Glauber at Harvard. So, I used Glauber notation throughout the whole theoretical thing, which in retrospect was correlated pairs. You had a creation and annihilation operator. Everything was there, and how do we do pairs today and entanglement? We do it with spontaneous parametric scattering. I must say that Dr. Tang was an excellent advisor, very nurturing and a true professional. I learned a lot from him which helped me in later years.

Duncan:

But you were doing parametric scattering and competing with Bob Byer, and that meant that you put your argon beam into the crystal. But then you were looking for amplification?

Giallorenzi:

Yeah.

Duncan:

You were looking for the scattering and then amplification.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. Well, the crystal was in a cavity.

Duncan:

Okay. It was phase matched and you got the buildup.

Giallorenzi:

Right.

Duncan:

So, that was a coherent signal, and in this other case, the spontaneous was simply fewer photons.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, fewer photons. I was able to photograph the rings and things like that, and we published things. I had a couple of Phys Rev papers out of it. As I said, the interesting thing is that folks are still doing basically the same things with entanglement using spontaneous parametric scattering to generate entangled pairs. We wrote a nice Phys Rev theoretical paper on it.

Duncan:

So, the key was to understand from first principles, from quantum mechanics, where the thresholds were.

Giallorenzi:

Right.

Duncan:

Did it act like you expected based on the number of photons that were in the system?

Giallorenzi:

Right. The line shapes and all that stuff was done. It was a detailed study into parametric scattering. It was the first one. No one had done it before then, and so it was a good thesis topic. Then I started growing lithium iodate crystals there, and they were starting to grow. Dr. Tang thought I had done enough, so he said, “Okay, you can leave.” At that point I was married and had a kid and I wanted to leave to make ends meet, so…

Duncan:

Did you get a stipend? Were you a TA? Were you an RA?

Giallorenzi:

I was an RA and I did get a stipend. That’s where that money that I made in high school came in handy, because we were relatively well off relative to other graduate students because they had a little bank account.

Duncan:

So, you graduated with your PhD in 1969, so that was relatively quickly. I mean you already had your master’s degree, but that was fairly quick, three years.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, three years, which was pretty reasonable, or pretty fast considering I had to set up a lab from scratch and do the experiments and things.

Duncan:

When did you get married? Right as you got your MS in 1966.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah.

Duncan:

But you had known Mary, your wife, for years.

Giallorenzi:

From high school. Unfortunately, we didn't have a honeymoon. We had to cancel the honeymoon because I had to appeal my draft notice and then go right to Cornell and start working there. Unexpectedly she got pregnant right away, and that put some pressure on getting things done. I was different than most of the other graduate students because most of them worked at night. They screwed around during the day and worked at night, and I worked during the day and as little as I could at night because I had a wife and kid that I was totally committed to.

Duncan:

So, who else at Cornell was an influence? You talked about Bethe and Salpeter. Anybody else who made an impact?

Giallorenzi:

I mean I had to think about it. There were a lot. I mean the Cornell staff was excellent. They had a lot of big names and they were pretty easy to interact with. Professor Hardwick was another one. He was my master’s thesis advisor, and he was a solid state physicist. He was also very good. There was Professor Wolga. He was a laser physicist, and Professor Ballantyne and so on and so on. There were a lot of them that were actually very good. The impressive ones, as I said, were Salpeter and Bethe. Both of those, even today I’m reading their papers. Bethe came up with the CNO process in the Sun, and Salpeter came up with the triple alpha process in the Sun. So, they were extremely well-known. And Bethe, of course, was awarded the Nobel Prize. So, it was a good time there. Learned a lot. Did a lot.

Duncan:

So, as you approached the ending of your PhD, what did you think you wanted to do?

Giallorenzi:

I wanted to get a job. That’s what I wanted to do, in science. It was interesting. That was also interesting too because I applied to 11 companies, had interviews with 11, got 10 job offers. The year after I graduated, the market just collapsed and the graduates the year after me had a terrible time finding a job.

Duncan:

In 1970.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. People that graduated a year after me would have like 30 interviews and maybe one offer. So, it really slowed after I graduated. It made it interesting timing-wise. So, I got all these offers and…

Duncan:

And these were all with companies or…?

Giallorenzi:

They were mostly with companies. There were two government ones. One was with NASA in Boston, which was subsequently closed, and then it was NRL [Naval Research Laboratory]. I remember going back to Cornell after the interview with NRL and telling my wife, “The work there seems to be the most interesting. The people there seem to be most enthused and on the ball, but the place is a dump and I don't want to work there.” So, I turned them down.

Duncan:

What about universities? You didn't apply to any universities?

Giallorenzi:

I didn't apply to any universities, only industry.

Duncan:

Were you not interested in teaching?

Giallorenzi:

I had no interest in teaching. I wanted to do research and wanted to do it in an applied environment. The other thing also that comes into play here is going back to the draft board, when they said that I was exempt, that they would exempt me, they asked me, “Would you do some national service later on?” I said, “Yes, I would,” so when I was looking for jobs, I was looking for the military-industrial complex.

Duncan:

You wanted to fulfill that commitment.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. I mean I gave my word I would do it, and the few times I give anybody my word, I do it. So, I went to GT&E [General Telephone & Electronics Corporation, later GTE] Laboratories, which was doing some military stuff at the time, but when I got there, they said, “No, we want you to work on laser development for displays.” They had a display group and they were trying to make a large area display using lasers. Okay, this is 1970 and of course the lasers then were pathetic in the sense of efficiency and power.

Duncan:

So, again, you did your thesis in a very, very fundamental topic.

Giallorenzi:

Right.

Duncan:

Why did you want to do something more applied?

Giallorenzi:

Well, Chung Tang said something that has stayed with me all along. He said, “Every three years you should plan on changing topics, because you're either going to get the answer and solve it or it’s time to move on.” So, while I was interested in basic research, I was more interested in lasers, and so since I built all these argon and krypton lasers, I knew laser physics pretty well. They wanted me to work on helium-cadmium, which was a blue laser because they needed blue for the display, so I said, “Okay, fine. I’ll do that.” So, I worked on that for about half a year and published a few papers on that, and you know, we did some pretty good work there.

Then they had hired another fellow, Ralph Jacobs, who was Bennett’s student from Yale, and of course Bennett was a pioneer in laser development. Ralph kept bugging me. They hired him to work on lamps, and he kept bugging me about switching jobs with me because he didn't want anything to do with lamps. So, I said, “Yeah, okay. I’ll switch with you,” and so I switched with him, left laser development to work on lamps.

We had a small group. It was me and my boss and two technicians, and we were doing arc lamps. They had a bigger group, the main group, which had 40 PhDs in it doing lamps because Sylvania built lamps and Sylvania was part of GT&E. So, I was in this small group and it was with Sam Ahmad, a fellow who was all about trying things. He wasn’t that good himself in the laboratory, but was very energic about trying things out. So, he let me do all the laboratory stuff. We did a very Edisonian approach to lamps. The other main group were very methodical in their approach. They did all the spectroscopy and theory methodically. Our thing was, “What can we test in the lab today?” I learned quick and dirty sometimes works pretty well.

Duncan:

What was the goal? More power, more efficiency, what?

Giallorenzi:

Better efficiency and good color rendition in arc lamps was the goal. So, we would make educated guesses of lamp fills and just try them out. We’d look at the periodic chart and say, “That one should do good with that one over there, so we’ll put some bromine in with nickel,” and so on and so forth and just had the technician make up a lamp and try it.

Duncan:

You didn't have to use your glassblowing skills at this point, though, right?

Giallorenzi:

No. We had two technicians who were actually glassblowers. Yeah, they had that capability, and so we’d make lamps, make maybe two or three lamps a day, put them in the setup and test them and see how they worked. The laboratory had never made a successful lamp that was transitioned to production at Sylvania, and to make a long story short, we made three which went into mass production—you know, into streetlights. They’re all over the place. So, we were the golden boys of the laboratory.

Duncan:

Did you get two policemen assigned to you after work and during work?

Giallorenzi:

No, they didn't do it, but that’s interesting. They did have policemen inside the building. Sylvania used to make the best TVs and the best lamps on the market at that time. They had an employee store there, and they’d give you discounts—you know, 30% off, a nice discount. So, one day, they had a great sale on lamps and you’d see everybody walking out with armfuls of lamps. About a week or two or three later, everybody’s up in arms. All these lamps were failing. It turned out that they were all seconds and rejects and they were selling them to the employees. [Laughs] So, the employees were so pissed off that they went in and ransacked the company store, and so that’s why they had cops there.

Duncan:

Engineers gone wild! [Laughs]

Giallorenzi:

Engineers gone wild. So, that was kind of funny. So, we did develop new lamps. We were very successful. We had one interesting thing. These lamps—I used to wear two or three lab coats, and I had a welder’s mask on the front and a welder’s mask on the back because they gave out so much UV. With all that on and two pairs of pants, you still had a nice tan. These things were really UV producers.

So after we did the third lamp, they were having a corporate meeting in New York City, and so the president of our laboratory invited all the corporate people to come out and see the lamp. It was in my lab, of course. I had a big metal shield there and so on and so forth, wore a hat. He said, “You can't do any of that with these guys here.” I had laid out all the glasses for them. “We’re not going to use those glasses.” I said, “You’ve got to use those glasses!” “No, no, no! We’re not going to use those glasses! Take them out of here,” and ordered the technician to take them out. I said, “I’m going to wear my stuff.” He said, “Well, we’re going to put you behind the shield, then.” Okay, so I’m behind this thing.

So, all these guys in business suits come in and look at the lamp and he says, “Turn it on.” I said, “Are you sure you don't want protective gear?” “No.” “Okay. Well, I’ll turn it on and turn it off.” Quickly, I turned the lamps on and then off just as fast. Just like that. “Wow, that was bright!” All cornea burns. Most of them went to the hospital.

Duncan:

At least that’s not permanent. That’s just outer layers. Whew!

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, yeah. It could have been really bad. I just literally did that with the rheostat. Tony Campillo, who you know was in the next lab over, he took over my lithium iodate growth apparatus at Cornell when he went up there and did some parametric scattering with lithium iodate. As things developed, he also became employed at GT&E labs. But he had an argon laser and they were trying to improve its performance. He worked for Sam Ahmad, too, at that point, trying to make it more efficient. So, Sam said, “You know, when you put alcohol on your hand, it’s cooler than when you put water, so let’s put the laser in an alcohol bath.” The laser tubes were normally with water.

Duncan:

Water cooling.

Giallorenzi:

Water cooling.

Duncan:

I know what this is going to end up with, yeah.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, so he took a tesla coil and lighting off the tube, the whole lab, the whole thing went up in smoke. [Laughter] They were just lucky they didn't really get burned, but it burned the whole lab room.

Duncan:

So, you stayed at GTE for a year, two years?

Giallorenzi:

Just a year. They were having a layoff then and moving it up to the Waltham, Massachusetts lab. They laid off our technicians, which we weren't happy about. They had two layoffs. The first layoff, they laid off our technicians and we weren't happy about it. So, Sam called the president of the Sylvania lighting division, who called our president, who said, “You're not going to lay these people off.” So, we got our people rehired.

Duncan:

And this based on your success.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, I mean we were the golden children, so with the second layoff they were closing the lab and moving it to Waltham, which became Verizon labs.

Duncan:

And where were GTE labs?

Giallorenzi:

They were in Bayside, New York, right near Throggs Neck Bridge. They had a gorgeous piece of property, and they decided that they could sell it and make a bundle with it, which they did do. So, we were going to move to the Boston area. I didn't want to move north, basically, so just about every division in Sylvania-GTE offered me a job. There was a Sylvania laser lab out in Silicon Valley. I don't know if you remember them. They were doing a lot of the early laser pioneer work. So, they offered me jobs. I didn't like how they laid people off. They were really brutal in doing it, and so I said, “No, I’m not going to stay with this company.” The other thing I knew is that they were investing 5%. They were putting enough into retirement to cover 5% of the employees, and so I said, “This is not for me.” So, I called up NRL and said, “Is the job still open?” and they hadn't filled it in a year. So, “Oh, yeah. Come on down,” and so I got the job there.

Duncan:

Now this is during this difficult time for jobs?

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, yeah. So, I got the NRL job and went down to Washington.

Duncan:

And that job specifically was in the Quantum Optics Branch.

Giallorenzi:

Right.

Duncan:

What did that even mean?

Giallorenzi:

Well, I mean that was a basic research branch which did just about every aspect of quantum optics.

Duncan:

Who was branch head at the time?

Giallorenzi:

Herb Rabin. So, I got that job, and GT&E kept pestering me for about six months after that to come back and work for them. They offered me equivalent of a branch head, 50-people group, to go back when I was a just bench scientist at NRL. I was tempted to do it, and then my wife said to me, “Just remember we’re down here because you didn't like the culture. Why would you go back to the culture?” I said, “You're right.” So, that would have been three steps up promotion-wise to do that and more money, but I turned it all down and stayed at the lab.

Duncan:

So, of course that was also government; you were a government employee at the time.

Giallorenzi:

Right.

Duncan:

Was that any kind of a change from the private sector? Now all of a sudden you're government.

Giallorenzi:

No, that wasn’t a change. But going back to GT&E days, we worked on all these lamps, as I mentioned. There was an RFP that came out from NRL, as it turned out, and this was during the Vietnam War. They wanted UV lamps to be able to read maps at night so that no one would see the flashlight. The maps were printed with fluorescent material, so you put the UV on it. The flashlights at that time were incandescent filtered, and so you had something that was about two feet long with batteries in it and you try and do it. So, we said, “Oh, we can do that. We can make a little fluorescent lamp, basically.” So, we had a little lamp about an inch in diameter and put it in a flashlight case with a little oscillator because you needed AC to run the glow discharge in the lamp. It was about this big, regular flashlight size.

Duncan:

About eight inches long.

Giallorenzi:

Yes, it was, I don't know, 100 times more efficient than what they were using. So, we went down to NRL, Sam and I, and showed it to them. “Oh yes. We’ll give you a contract right now.” So, we went back to GT&E labs and said, “Okay, the government wants to give us a contract for these things.” So, the first question we were asked was, “Well, how many?” “Oh, they want 5,000,” and they said, “Well, we’re not interested in that. We do 20,000 an hour on our production line.” So, that was my second exposure to NRL.

Then the third one was when I took the job there. We were in Building 12 at the time, which was a dump, but the equipment was good. We always had good equipment. That’s when fibers came along. So, I was working on, of all things, parametric scattering when I first went there. Wrote a paper or two on it, and then my NRL boss said, “Look into fiber optics. Is it something that maybe you should be interested in?” This was at the branch level. The division head was not interested in fibers at all. He was a high-energy laser person.

Duncan:

Who was this?

Giallorenzi:

Walter Soy. So, he, you know, “Don't bother me with fiber optics,” and this and that. So, I looked into it and said, “Yeah, it looks pretty good. We could probably make some sensors out of it and telemetry and things.”

Duncan:

And these are multi-mode, large core?

Giallorenzi:

They were multi-mode. Yeah, this was about 1971, so right after it was announced. So, they said, “Okay. Well, if you want to work on it, go ahead and work on it.” I said, “Well, I need funding.” “Well, go to ONR [Office of Naval Research] and get funding.” I hadn't done that at that point, so I went over there and talked to a few people and got them excited about it.

Duncan:

Who did you talk to? Who was the principal?

Giallorenzi:

What was his name? I forget the name.

Duncan:

I remember Hirsch Piloff.

Giallorenzi:

No, it was before Hirsch. Hirsch worked for this guy. But in any case, I convinced them and they agreed at their level to fund some work in the area. We sold it to the admiral who increased funding to the ARI level.

Duncan:

Advanced research initiative.

Giallorenzi:

Right, which was a lot of money in those days, $1 million, because a man-year was like $50K in industry. So, he had some money there. ONR was totally dependent on us for ideas, and so I started to look at the different areas. There were two areas that I decided we would start. One would be applying it to RF, to microwaves, and this actually was the birth of RF photonics. Then the other area was sensors. We figured that the telecommunications companies would do the telemetry stuff. In the sensors we had choices of what type of sensors to work on. Bernie Brown—I don't know if you knew Bernie. He had done in ’67 an analysis of a fiber gyro versus a ring laser gyro and concluded the fiber gyro to be superior. So, I was familiar with that and so that was one of the sensors that we tried to build. We also funded universities to work on the gyro. And then acoustic sensors were the other one, and in talking to people around the lab, the acoustic ones were of higher interest. So, we decided NRL internally would concentrate on acoustic sensors and we’d contract out the gyro and other sensors. We contracted under this ONR program with Vali and Shorthill in Utah and one or two other groups. Vali and Shorthill made the first fiber gyro, which Bernie several years earlier had analyzed. So, that was interesting.

We were doing the acoustic sensors, and we were doing amplitude mode acoustic sensors first where you’d have something vibrate and you’d measure the light scattering off of it. Those worked pretty well. Then we moved on to interferometer scattering with Joe Bucaro and his group in the acoustics division at NRL. So, we teamed with them in the Acoustics Branch and our branch to build acoustic sensors.

Duncan:

So, the fiber gyro depended upon the length of fiber…

Giallorenzi:

Correct.

Duncan:

…the long distance that you could make compact. But what you just described for the acoustic, the first applications had nothing to do with the amplification because of long length. It was just using a physical vibration and you detect it with a…

Giallorenzi:

Correct, and they worked very well. You could make them with good performance. Well, accelerometers we made that way, too, and other devices, but the sensitivity wasn’t as high as we wanted. It was barely competitive with piezoelectric ones and things like that. So, we went to the interferometric, which was first demonstrated at John Carroll University where Joe Bucaro got his Ph.D. So, he was a new Ph.D., and he just was hired by the lab. It was a question of whether he was going to switch over to our division or not. He decided to stay with acoustics. Well, we collaborated and started doing the interferometer Mach-Zehnder. They couldn't fabricate them in acoustics division, and so we fabricated them. I got a little bit of single-mode fiber, made interferometers with mirrors because we didn't have 3 dB couplers in those days.

Duncan:

Why single mode?

Giallorenzi:

Pardon me?

Duncan:

Why single mode?

Giallorenzi:

Well, because it was an interferometer.

Duncan:

You needed the single mode for the frequency control and mode control.

Giallorenzi:

We needed the single mode fibers for interferometric sensors. Otherwise, every other mode—you know, if you had a multi-mode, every mode would interact with every other mode. So, we made this interferometer and it worked like a charm. We set up a little demonstration. We had it in one room and we had the speakers in the other room. We invited a lot of VIPs over and we did like Alexander Graham Bell did. “Hey, Joe. Come here,” type thing. It impressed people. We got a little more money after demonstrating a working acoustic fiber optic microphone. We had a lot of fun in those days doing something totally new.

Duncan:

Okay, sorry. Continue on.

Giallorenzi:

We were making interferometers. Let’s see, where we were? With that success, I was able to get a little more money from the Navy.

Duncan:

And again, the eventual use was acoustic sensors for underwater?

Giallorenzi:

Acoustic for underwater applications. At the same time, we were trying to do microwave photonics, and the lasers at that time could go up to 1 GHz. If you looked at the performance curve, it was a resonance of 1 GHz, and there were a bunch of theories that came out from other labs saying you couldn't get beyond 1 GHz.

Duncan:

How were you modulating at that speed?

Giallorenzi:

You’re just driving a current on and off, okay? We also were using lithium niobate modulators, too, so the lithium niobate ones worked at the higher frequencies. But the direct laser, which is what we wanted—we wanted to get rid of lithium niobate even in those early days for various applications. We couldn't see deploying a system with too many components. Well, we were making these delay lines in other devices that would only go up to 1 GHz. So, I talked to the electronic warfare people and the radar people, and they weren't interested unless it was X band, which is 10 GHz. So, I went back and talked to a lot of people about modulating lasers faster, and at least half of them said, “You can't.” And then people like Yariv and others said, “Yeah, we think we can if we drive it hard or if we do this or we do that.” So, we funded about five or six laser companies and universities to do higher speed modulated lasers, and Ortel was one that performed successfully. I don't know if you know Ortel. That was Yariv’s company, for which we were basically a venture capitalist for, through our funding.

Duncan:

These are diode lasers?

Giallorenzi:

Diode lasers, semiconductor diode lasers. With time they were able to push it to 2, 3, 4, and so on up to 10 GHz. Of course, now you can do 50, 60, or even better. So, we developed the componentry needed for the microwave photonics through contracts because we decided not to try and do any diode lasers in-house. We had to make some conscious decisions along the way. Also, another thing that was clear is we needed more single-mode fiber. The whole community at that time was totally sold on multi-mode.

Duncan:

That’s where all the telecom was going.

Giallorenzi:

Right. I would argue with people in the community that single mode is the way to go in the future, and it fell on deaf ears, by and large.

Duncan:

So, what year was this about?

Giallorenzi:

This was like ’73. It was early.

Duncan:

Yeah, okay. So, you were still just one of the bench scientists, as it were, but you became section head in that period.

Giallorenzi:

Right, section head right then. Right. So, I got ONR to give me some money for single-mode fiber, and so I convinced them to provide $500K. So, I put an RFP out in the United States for 1-km single-mode fiber, and I had $500K for a 1-km piece. Corning and Bell Labs both responded to the RFP, roughly $3.5 million each, best efforts. So, that was a nonstarter. The best-efforts contract was certainly a nonstarter.

So, I was actually a big fan of the Japanese and I thought they were ahead of the U.S. So, I talked to the people at ONR Tokyo and said, “I’d like to come over and talk to a couple of companies. Can you set up the visit?” So, they contacted NTT and NTT agreed to host a visit. They assigned somebody to me, a guy named Shamada, who I’m eternally grateful to, and we went to different companies around Japan—Sumitomo, Fujikura, Furukawa, others. They showed me their fiber drawing and fibers components and I was very impressed. I thought they could do my job. Maybe it was ’74. I forget the exact date of when this was. It could have been ’75 even.

But I was impressed with their fiber and so I said, “Look, I’ll issue an RFP through ONR Tokyo for Japanese fiber.” But before we did that, the guy in ONR Tokyo was actually a real mover-shaker, and so he said, “You know, we should thank these people for hosting your visit.” I said, “Oh yeah. Absolutely. Would ONR have a little reception?” He said, “Let me see what I can do.” He got the ambassador to host it at the embassy. So, we invited all the people that we visited, contacted, plus their bosses, and everybody showed up. The ONR had paid for a spread there. It was beautiful and everybody was impressed.

Duncan:

This is all in Tokyo?

Giallorenzi:

This is all in Tokyo. So, the NTT guys cornered me during this reception and said, “What do you think?” and I said, “Well, as far as I’m concerned, there are three qualified bidders.” They said, “Well, we want you to pick company X,” and I said, “Well, I can't just pick company X. Because I think there are three qualified ones, I have to put it out on bid and see what comes in.” He said, “Well, what criteria will you use?” I said, “Well, you know, unless they misled me, I think they’re all qualified and they all will check that box, so it will probably come down to cost.” He said, “Well, what’s a reasonable cost?” You know, they’re pushing me. He totally caught me off guard and I said, “$50K for 5 km.” He said, “Okay, fine.”

So, the bids come in. One is $50K. The other two are 10 times that. So, I let the bid out, or let the contract, and shifted money to ONR Tokyo and had a little bit more left over. Sure enough, the company delivers 5 km of single-mode fibers to spec, which Corning and AT&T couldn't do at that time, or wouldn't do.

These other two companies came in to visit me at NRL. They send senior VPs. I think it was a senior VP and a president. They come in to visit me at the lab and, “Oh, we’re so sorry we didn't win and all this. How did you pick company X and we’re company Y and Z?” I said, “Well, it was all in cost. You were all qualified.” “Well, what was the cost they bid?” and so I told them because it’s public record, right? They turned white, you know? You knew they were set up and they knew it. So, they said, “Well, we do good work, too, and we want the Navy to know we do good work. So, we will give you gratis 5 km of single-mode fiber.” So, for $50K I got 15 km of single-mode fiber. That trip paid for itself a million times over. So, now we were in business, because now we could do all the microwave photonics we wanted to do and all the fiber sensor stuff we wanted to do.

Duncan:

Now these fibers were low-loss, but they weren't the germanium-doped…

Giallorenzi:

I don't remember what they were. They were reasonably low-loss, like 4 dB per kilometer. I mean they were good things. There was nothing wrong with them. They met our specs, whatever the spec was at the time. I don't know if it was 4 dB or what it was, but whatever we put out, they met. [Break]

Duncan:

Okay. Go on.

Giallorenzi:

Okay, so we had the fiber now. We had almost the world’s supply of it and we were able to do the microwave photonics research in earnest. So, the next thing on the agenda was 3 dB couplers because we were using mirrors. So, Sang Sheem ― who you probably didn't know; he was a Korean fellow that worked at the lab ― he and I discussed a single-mode 3 dB coupler. So, we came up with a scheme (and he implemented it) of etching down to the core and then putting the two cores together. We put it in a bottle where you twisted the fibers around each other to change the coupling, and that was the first 3 dB coupler.

Duncan:

So, the cladding was stripped over the whole area that they touched, and then you could change that ratio, whatever.

Giallorenzi:

Right. You could change the coupling ratio by adjusting the tension. It had an index-matching fluid that it was immersed in. These things actually didn't break, but they obviously were not very good for applications, only lab devices. But for almost a year we used them in the lab. We made a nice, compact little sensor.

Duncan:

Were these the first 3 dB couplers?

Giallorenzi:

These were the first 3 dB couplers anybody made. Then we did the fused fiber couplers which were fabricated by Carl Villarruel. He took two fibers and fused them together and pulled them. That was very successful and we did it first. The community thinks that Hill and Kawasaki from Bell Northern did it first because they published first, but we consider it a controlled technology because once you have that, you can make a sensor that was practical. So, we started making different sensors and putting them in the water.

Duncan:

Now, did you all do internal memos, internal reports for these things?

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. They were around, I believe.

Duncan:

But it was classified at the time, or at least…

Giallorenzi:

It wasn’t released, controlled technology.

Duncan:

Wasn’t released. I got it.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, so we had that. We were 100% single mode then and everybody else wasn’t. So, we were pushing the higher frequency in the diode lasers. We were also pushing for higher current in the photodetectors. We funded a lot of people to do that and did some in-house. Keith Williams did that, but it was Joe Weller before that and before that was me.

Duncan:

So, when was the Microwave Photonics Branch broken off as a separate…?

Giallorenzi:

About 1975-6. It became NRL code 5670. It’s still that branch. It’s still down there.

Duncan:

Yeah, but I mean when did it start? So, you―

Giallorenzi:

Oh, it was done in parallel.

Duncan:

But I mean it was there when you came and the…

Giallorenzi:

No, it wasn’t there. We started it.

Duncan:

Yeah.

Giallorenzi:

We started that just like we started the fiber sensors. I built it up from scratch, got funding and had folks assigned to it. After the acoustics sensors, we did temperature sensors and magnetic sensors. Magnetic sensors were interesting ones because there were a fair number of labs doing fiber magnetic sensors. Everybody in the community—and there were a lot of papers—were at a certain performance level, and we were three orders of magnitude better than they were because we had the magic sauce on how to do it. For about a year or two, the people working on it would come and fuss at me about releasing it. I said, “No, no, no, because it’s sensitive material at this point.” So, finally I gave in and it was interesting to watch the community. Within three to five months you saw papers that had roughly the same sensitivity we were seeing. We had moved on beyond that. It really kind of showed how the community reacts to new information. That was very, very telling. From then on, I learned my lesson not to release things early.

Duncan:

Because people would catch up.

Giallorenzi:

Well, people would catch up. Sure.

Duncan:

So, what was the trick? What was the key for the magnetic sensors?

Giallorenzi:

It was met glass, a metallic glass that stretched.

Duncan:

Okay. So, it was sensitive enough to the magnetic field that it itself would move and you just had to have enough of it and you got that sensitivity.

Giallorenzi:

Yes, we were able to achieve a performance level that was better than many of the then current magnetometers.

Duncan:

Who made the fiber?

Giallorenzi:

We did it all in-house. We built a couple systems they deployed in Norway. We were looking for little Russian submarines that were going into the fjords at the time, and we didn't find any because they stopped it right when we started. So, we used it for other applications that you can't say anything about. But it worked very well, and the acoustic ones worked very well. We put those all over the place.

Duncan:

In the beginning those were all just passive acoustics in some fixed location.

Giallorenzi:

Right. We developed the telemetry that went along with it and basically developed coherent communications years before ’84, when the commercial people started looking at it. It was interesting watching them reinventing things that we had already in the water deployed working.

Duncan:

So, coherent in this case meaning you controlled the phase so that when you detected it, you could do heterodyne or you could do…

Giallorenzi:

Yes, it was heterodyne, homodyne or heterodyne detection. So, we had the technology better than anybody else at the time. Much better. So, we developed it. We had a lot of successes, and each success you had the problem of what are you going to do next? That’s when I came up with the concept and patented it of All Optical Towed Array which had no electronics in it at all. Everything was powered from the ship or the shore, and developed a telemetry that went with it and solved these problems. That patent we considered the basic patent in the fiber sensor area because that allowed everything to happen that was really useful other than onesie, twosie type things.

Duncan:

So, all optical meaning you didn't have to regenerate the signal anywhere. Out in the path of the sensor you had…

Giallorenzi:

Yes. You didn't have a little laser out there or anything active.

Duncan:

The laser would go down the fiber and then everything coming back, so you only had to have one spot for all of that.

Giallorenzi:

Right, right. Yes, it made a more robust system. We used it for towed arrays and for planar arrays on the ships, and you know, today it’s on Virginia-class subs.

Duncan:

As part of their hull now.

Giallorenzi:

Part of their hull. It gets deployed working.

Duncan:

So, in 1976 you became branch head for the Optical Techniques Branch, so that’s where the fiber optics work was being done at that point?

Giallorenzi:

Yes. The rest of the division was doing one of two other things. Like 90% of the work in the division was either high energy lasers for weapons or laser fusion. The laser fusion group is worth commenting on because that wasn’t in my branch; that was in John Emmett’s branch. That effort grew from a few people to a section to a branch, and then DOE came to the lab and said, “We want basically division-level activity in it,” which meant building a big facility. Berman, who was a Director of Research, said, “No, that’s not Navy work. It’s DOE work. We’re not going to do any more than a branch,” which really annoyed Emmett, Soy, and so on and so forth. So, they all quit and they went out to Livermore and started the Livermore laser fusion program.

Duncan:

I knew John Emmett did. I didn't know Walt Soy had left as well.

Giallorenzi:

He left. John Holtzrichter left. I can't remember all their names, but there was probably a dozen of them that went out there to start that program. So, those were all people from the division. So, when Soy left, that left the division head opening. Let’s jump back one step to get the branch.

To get the branch, I was a section head running all the fiber optic stuff. We were in the quantum branch, and the head they hired was Walter Faust, a co-inventor of the CO₂ laser. He was a character. He told the division head that he wasn’t going to do any budget and that the division was supposed to give him the money he needed to run the branch. That’s how he was going to do it. Walter Soy didn't believe it that a person would be so naïve, but he found out six months into the year that Walter had spent the whole branch budget. [Chuckles] So, I was called into Walter’s office and said he either had to furlough everybody in the branch or had to find money. So, I hustled my back off and actually was able to bring in enough money to cover the rest of the branch for the half a year.

Duncan:

And this is through fiber optics work?

Giallorenzi:

It was through a lot of things.

Duncan:

And ONR was the main source of that money?

Giallorenzi:

No, many different sources. Any place I could get it, like DARPA. So, we started several new activities like Joel Schnur’s activity on liquid crystal stuff and so on. At the end of the fiscal year, Soy said, “Okay. Well, do it again next year,” and I said, “No, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to work for Walter. It’s his job to do it. If you want me to do it, I want to be my own boss.” So, he reluctantly moved Walter to senior staff and made the branch a research group because it looked like an adverse action against Walter otherwise. So, after about six months he made us a branch and we became a branch. So, we had the liquid crystal stuff going and other stuff in the branch. But it was mainly fiber optics research and development.

Duncan:

But that was under the umbrella optical technology.

Giallorenzi:

Optical technology, yes,

Duncan:

Optical techniques, sorry. Optical Techniques Branch. Okay.

Giallorenzi:

Yes. So, then George Heilmeier became the head of Defense Research and Engineering, and he was the inventor of the liquid crystal display. He came in with a pronouncement that “there will be no liquid crystal research in DOD because I’ve done it all.” So, I mean a little bit of arrogance there. George was good, but he wasn’t as good as he thought he was. So, I got called down and said I’ve got to stop all liquid crystal research. So, I had a group, a section in the branch at this point, of five people, who I had to find work for all of a sudden. And you don't do fibers. You don't do EO. You're chemists, by and large. So, we looked around and I spent a lot of time with these guys. We came up with two things: desensitization of explosives. It turned out that I found out that ― they used to use microcrystalline A wax, which was a sludge on oil storage tanks, to desensitize explosives ― it was no longer available and a substitute was needed.

Duncan:

Desensitizing simply meaning making them less volatile so that they wouldn't explode.

Giallorenzi:

They wouldn't explode by themselves. If you drop them, they wouldn't explode.

Duncan:

Ah, okay.

Giallorenzi:

This was kind of a crisis, so it was easy to get money there if you had any ideas. So, we proposed a couple research ideas on how do we desensitize explosives? So, that took care of half of the chemists. The other half, led by Jim Sheridan, was interested in doing some biological stuff. So, I went up and talked to the people at NMRDC (Naval Medical Research and Development Center) up in Bethesda. “What are you guys interested in?” and got some ideas of work to do. We went back and proposed to them several ideas and started the program. It turned out that that grew. The desensitizing explosives—the problem actually got solved with new materials, and so those guys were out of work again. So, they moved them all over to the bio stuff and Sheridan took over that. That grew to a section, to a branch level also within my branch.

Duncan:

And that work was what, concerning bio?

Giallorenzi:

We were looking at a couple of things. We were looking at chemical biological warfare. We were looking at membrane physics, transporting membranes, things like that. That grew, as I said, to be a branch within the branch, basically. The director of the lab, [Timothy] Coffey, said, “What is bio work doing in Optical Sciences?” That came later on. I’m jumping ahead saying that, but let me finish that. So, they moved my bio group to Chemistry over their dead bodies. They didn’t want to move to Chemistry. They liked it where they were. After about a year in Chemistry, they revolted and the director had to move them into a separate group, which is now the Center for Biological Research, at the lab. So, that started with Heilmeier saying, “You can't do any more liquid crystal work.”

So, going back to the branch, it was growing and we lost the people on the laser fusion and Soy left. So, Dr. Ted Jacobs became the division head. He was a TRW guy that did high-energy lasers. Would only talk to branch heads. Wouldn't talk to anybody below that, so that didn't ingratiate him with the staff at all. I finally convinced him that, hey, people are really getting disgruntled that you won't talk to anybody, and so he said, “Look, why don't we go tour the labs? I’ll set that up.” Ray Patton was a branch head then, so I talked to Ray and everybody said yes. So, I arranged to have my branch be the first one to host him.

We went in the different labs, and at the end lab in Building 12 before you go to Building 30, we were going to that lab and they had an I-beam where they had the optics attached to the I-beam. The I-beam went beyond a table about a foot or two, and Ted somehow impaled himself on this thing. He could barely make it back to his office, really bruised. He wouldn't talk to anybody else anymore after that. But in any case, he got sick, and he finally passed away from it about two years later. But he got sick and so he had to retire. Actually, before he retired he went over to ASN’s office for a couple months in a holding pattern and then he retired. So, that left a division head open. Lou Drummeter was the acting superintendent then, and he wanted a division. Berman, for some reason, didn't want him.

Duncan:

Now Lou came from where?

Giallorenzi:

In the division. He came from the Solid State Division before that, but then he was the associate superintendent to Soy.

Duncan:

Got it.

Giallorenzi:

So, he figured that he would get it. Somebody asked me to apply and I said, “Yeah, sure.” I applied basically because another branch head in your branch, he was going to apply. He wanted it really bad. I didn't necessarily get along that well with Bill. I applied for the job almost out of defense and got it. History.

Duncan:

Now you had a good relationship with Coffey at that point?

Giallorenzi:

Not Coffey. It was [Alan] Berman at that point.

Duncan:

Oh, it was Berman at that point. Right.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah,

Duncan:

You had a good relationship with Berman.

Giallorenzi:

I had a pretty good relationship with him. I had argued with him several times and he didn’t hold that against me. In fact, he liked staff to push back and show initiative. He would go around the lab and twice a year the branch head would have breakfast with Berman, which was basically Berman going over everything in your branch—personnel, budget, everything down to the fine detail. He prided himself on being able to stick it to the branch heads. So, he’d ask you, “What about Mike Duncan? How is he performing?” and then you’d say, “Oh, he did great,” you know. “Well, what about this? What about that? Okay, what are you going to do about it?” You know, and so he got you. And the budget thing—he had your budget down pat to the penny.

Duncan:

So, when I first came, I heard about those breakfasts with Berman.

Giallorenzi:

Yes. Everybody kind of was scared of him, and during the ones I had with him, I argued with him a lot and basically came in on the right side on every one of them, or just about every one. That must have impressed him, so he selected me as the division head. This was right at the beginning of SES. I missed being a plank holder with SES by a month.

Duncan:

Hmm. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay.

Giallorenzi:

They had just started that.

Duncan:

So, that was 1979 when you became Optical Sciences Superintendent.

Giallorenzi:

Right, which was very unusual because I was 34, and you know the mean age of division head is 50 that they are selected in the lab. So, I got that. Fibers were doing well. The high-energy laser program was still dominating the division’s work. We had built a series of high-power lasers. We built a tri-service laser down at Chesapeake Bay. That worked like a charm.

Duncan:

That was an HF (hydrogen fluoride) laser?

Giallorenzi:

That was HF/DF. It was a high-power laser and we would shoot it across the bay to targets on the other side. Then NACL was the next one (Navy Advanced Chemical Laser), and that was going to be more powerful than we can safely do down at the bay, so we built that out at Capistrano with TRW, and we did start a bunch of brush fires out there doing that. It would hit three hills beyond where the target was. So, we built that and then we built MIRACL, which was built at White Sands.

Duncan:

Mid-Infrared, yeah.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, which is the world’s biggest laser to date, I still think.

Duncan:

And that was at White Sands?

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, it’s at White Sands.

Duncan:

So, this was lab personnel that would do the design, the calculations, but then the actual fabrication was by a contractor at these different places?

Giallorenzi:

Yes, by a contractor, by several contractors—Boeing, TRW, and so on and so forth.

Duncan:

This was funded through DOD?

Giallorenzi:

Through Navy.

Duncan:

Through Navy. Okay.

Giallorenzi:

The Navy had taken the lead now because of the tri-service lasers, there were three lasers. Only one worked, and so we won the job that way.

Duncan:

So, the airborne laser was not in existence yet.

Giallorenzi:

No, that was iodine. That came after this. But we did the pointer-tracker technology, hotspot tracking, and all that stuff, beam trains and atmospheric propagation. So, about 80% of my division was in high-energy lasers.

Duncan:

Now excimer lasers were also part of this mix, right?

Giallorenzi:

They were coming along.

Duncan:

But Stu Searles had been…

Giallorenzi:

Stu Searles invented the excimer laser, yes, at the lab there. We did the ARI (advanced research initiative) with KARL, which was kilojoule advanced research laser.

Duncan:

I remember that.

Giallorenzi:

That was an excimer laser at the kilojoule level, which we built in-house, basically. We did a little bit with plasma physics. We involved them in it, too. But in any case, most of the division was working on this high-energy laser program. We did at-sea experiments for propagation and so on.

Duncan:

It sounds like there were two main things, then: laser physics and fiber optics.

Giallorenzi:

Right. But fiber optics was 20% of the activity at that time. Actually, that’s not correct because there were three things. Ray Patton had the Countermeasure Branch, and he was low-powered lasers. But most of his people were working on a high-energy laser program with propagation and things like that.

So, we had a couple branch heads that kind of got on my wrong side because we had an experiment out at the bay of propagation through fogs. He had eight people in one branch doing the fog experiments at the bay, charging full time to that project, and I kept asking, “Well, if a fog doesn't come in, what else are they doing?” and he always gave me some BS. So, the year went by, and it was time to report to NAVSEA, who was the sponsor. No fogs had come in the whole year! It was a year with no fog in the bay! And nor did they go anywhere to find a fog. You could have gone out to California and found one just about every day. “Okay, you guys didn't do anything, so what did you do down at the bay?” “Oh, we had lunch.” They didn't do anything. “Okay. Well, I defended you to NAVSEA, because the progress reports were based on what you were telling me. So, you let me hang out there to do it. I’m not going to defend you anymore and I don't want you around anymore.” So, basically I got rid of a whole branch.

Duncan:

And this was what branch?

Giallorenzi:

Uh…

Duncan:

Well, it’s on record that there was a branch and then it disappeared…

Giallorenzi:

There was a branch, right.

Duncan:

So, what was the branch that disappeared?

Giallorenzi:

I don't remember the name of it; I remember the branch head.

Duncan:

Oh! You don't remember the name. Okay.

Giallorenzi:

Advanced Optics or something. So, we were doing testing with MIRACL and shooting things down, and it did what it was going to do. We found an Achilles heel in something, which I won't say anything about. You know, I was honest enough to report it to the Navy with the expected result the program will be canceled, and the program was canceled.

Duncan:

This is in the early ’80s?

Giallorenzi:

It’s the early ’80s, yeah. So, now I have 100 people roughly that are out of work, so I had to hustle around a second time. It wasn’t like the Walter Faust one—finding work for a lot of people, which with time we did. We didn't have to let anybody go, but we did let people go, the people that I wanted to go in the “fog” branch.

Duncan:

But typically they weren't fired because that’s hard in the government. But they found other things, other divisions, other opportunities?

Giallorenzi:

Yes. Well, there’s another side to this firing thing. In the government, you're right. It’s absolutely very difficult to fire. On the other hand—my wife doesn't like me to say this, but she worked at OPM [Office of Personnel Management] and her job was firing people throughout the government. So, she was a government expert on how to fire somebody.

Duncan:

So, she could help you with that.

Giallorenzi:

So, from start to finish, it didn't take me more than a month.

Duncan:

How many people overall did you have to do that with? It was just…

Giallorenzi:

Fifteen, twenty. And replaced them right away in the new programs that we were starting. So, the division was restructured pretty dramatically as a result of that. We got out of high-energy laser. Kind of a postscript to that—it was costing me about $1 million a year to mothball MIRACL, and coming out of division, I had to squeeze that out. So, one year the Army came by and said they wanted to use MIRACL for some tests, and I said, “No. You can't use MIRACL for tests. You can have it, but you can't use it.” [Laughs] “If I give it to you, you can do it,” and they took it and now they’re the ones that use MIRACL. So, that was a stroke of luck. The division went along and grew in different areas.

Duncan:

Now during this time when you had to find either new money, new programs, you were dependent upon the technical staff at NRL to help come up with these things.

Giallorenzi:

Oh, yeah. Sure.

Duncan:

But then you had to go with, I assume, branch heads to go to various activities and to actually convince them that they wanted to fund NRL because you had these great ideas that would help them in the future.

Giallorenzi:

Right, right. Yes. No, in the ’80s and in the ’90s I was in the Pentagon just about every day.

Duncan:

And this was NAVAIR, NAVSEA…?

Giallorenzi:

No, it was the Pentagon. The NAVAIR, NAVSEA, the different system commands… NAVAIR was in Crystal City. NAVSEA was in Crystal City; then they moved to the Navy Yard. So, those were different. Had to go to them, too. The advantage of working for NRL is everybody’s in town, and so I could get in the car and just drive over.

Duncan:

So, when you went to the Pentagon, who did you talk to? Where did that money come from?

Giallorenzi:

Those were OPNAV people. The structure of the Navy is the operational Navy, or OPNAV, controlled the programs and controlled the funding and gave it to the system commands, and so, in a sense, going to the Pentagon, you're going over the heads of the system commands.

Duncan:

You're going to the source of their money.

Giallorenzi:

You're going to the source of their money.

Duncan:

So, OPNAV would give you, would agree to a certain level of funding that would go directly from OPNAV to NRL?

Giallorenzi:

Correct. Yeah, and I got to know a lot of people in the Pentagon then. I knew many admirals on a first-name basis. I was able to do a lot of things that normally you couldn't do.

Duncan:

So, let’s go back to the SES and kind of your experience as a manager. So, you say you were in basically the first cadre of SES.

Giallorenzi:

Right.

Duncan:

So, SES was created as a Senior Executive Service to help make a level of management that had certain skills and certain capabilities and certain recognition.

Giallorenzi:

Right.

Duncan:

You had a certain responsibility for a certain budgetary amount and so on, and you had to go to school for that, right? You had to go to a… I heard charm school was the name of it?

Giallorenzi:

You had to go to charm school, but I didn't… If you got certified, which OPM did, you didn't have to go to charm school.

Duncan:

And you were certified just because…?

Giallorenzi:

Just because I was in the position and the position had that rank. So, yes, I never went to charm school, nor would I have ever passed it, probably.

Duncan:

So, what training? or why was that meaningful to be in SES? Did you have a certain…

Giallorenzi:

Well, the thing about it was it was a flag-level, admiral-level position. So, if I went to a military base, I got admiral quarters, or if I went on a ship, I’d be piped aboard and get admiral quarters aboard the ship, which I’ve done once in a while. It also allows you… You were talking as an equal to an admiral.

Terry, my secretary, was absolutely excellent at getting me appointments. I’d say, “I want to go talk to Admiral X, but I don't know him. I want to talk to him about this.” So, she would call the guy up, the admiral’s secretary, and say, “Dr. Giallorenzi wants to talk to Admiral X, and he’s got these times on his calendar. Can you arrange the admiral’s calendar for Dr. Giallorenzi to come over?” You know, normally they call you back. “Here are the windows on the admiral’s calendar.” So, she would, you know, “Can you move some things around and get him on? Here’s when he’s free.” She made it sound like he was an important person coming, and nine out of ten times I’d get the appointment I wanted. She was really good at it. Terry was such a wonderful… There was no one to compare with her. She was terrific.

Duncan:

So, what’s your favorite… You were a scientist and you went into this upper-level management position in the Navy. Was that a hard transition? Did you naturally come to it? Did you like it?

Giallorenzi:

Well, I mean it’s interesting because I set aside two hours every day to do scientific work on the project of my choice, which tended to be fiber optics or things of that type. The other thing also is, after I moved up to division head, we hired Henry Taylor as the branch head to replace me. Henry was a very smart person, but a terrible manager, and so basically I had to run the branch. So, I ran that branch, which was kind of a hobby. I did a lot of the marketing for it and all that and did division head and kept that two-hour window. You know, you fit everything into a time. And you had visitors all day, or you were in the Pentagon, so you were pretty busy.

Duncan:

Was this like a 10- or 12-hour day or did you manage to do it in a more-or-less 40-hour week?

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. Well, yes and no. I had a carpool that left at 4, and the reason to be in the carpool was I was leaving at 4. Otherwise it could have been at 8 or 9:00 each night. So, it was an eight-hour day and then I’d bring work home and do work at home. My study is actually called the playroom, because the kids used to play around while I was working at my desk, or if I had to do reading, the kids would sit on the bed and read or do their homework with me while I was doing my reading. So, they always kept… while I was doing my stuff or when they went to bed I’d continue to do some more. But I always focused on keeping those hours kid-oriented. “You can't get up, Dad.” They’d build a town right next to my chair, so you’d have to gingerly do it. It was good, but it really was very… I did a lot of work then. I have to admit that. I was fairly efficient. I just did a lot of volume. I wrote papers; I continued to write papers and be active in the research and think of things.

Duncan:

During that time you also did a number of volunteer jobs with different societies, so tell me a little bit about that. You got involved with LEOS (IEEE Lasers and Eletro-Optical Society, now known as the IEEE Photonics Society).

Giallorenzi:

Yes. I did mainly mostly my volunteer work with the IEEE, and we started the Journal of Lightwave Technology with them. I was chair of like CLEO, OFC, other meetings. Somewhere I had a list of them up to a time. I had over 100 conferences on the list that I participated in; I was a program committee or a chair or whatever. So, yeah, I did a lot and it was always good because you were interacting with people. I would meet a lot of our contractors at the meetings or people at universities, the Bell Labs people. I mean, you find out what’s going on other than what you're doing, and it gave you contacts where if you wanted to let a contract in a certain area, you knew somebody in that area that you could give them a call and say, “Would you bid on this?” So, yeah, the professional work was really very important. It kept us going. It kept us in contact quite a bit.

Duncan:

And I know you encouraged staff to do that as well. You were supportive of that.

Giallorenzi:

Yes, it used to drive me crazy when we’d go to a meeting and find staff all talking to each other as opposed to mingling with researchers from other labs. I’d go and break the group up and say, “Go talk to other people. You can do this back at the lab.”

Duncan:

So, there must have been always a tension between the openness of these meetings, which were just that, scientific conferences, and the work that you were doing that was either classified or you couldn't let out, or there was some tension there.

Giallorenzi:

There wasn’t a real conflict. It was basically very clear-cut in my mind. I mean, everybody kind of knew where the boundaries were. In some cases, it played big-time to our advantage. The case in mind is when the fiber bubble was coming.

Duncan:

Around 2000.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. I lost about 30 or 40 people to the fiber bubble, all the people that were publishing. All the people that were working classified—didn't lose a single one of them. It would have been hard to replace the classified guys.

Duncan:

Why weren't they tempted in the same way? Or they just weren't as well-known and they―?

Giallorenzi:

They weren't as well-known. They weren't approached and they were more dedicated. They were some of the best, anyway, so… You know, when somebody would leave, I would say, “Adios. I can replace you,” even though it didn't look like it right then. But as soon as the bubble burst, it was true that I would replace everybody we lost. It was interesting also in exit interviews with people. I would show them the S curve of technology maturity. You're familiar with it, right? I’d say, “Where do you think you are on this curve?” and everybody would tend to put in the lower half, and I’d say, “No, you're at the top.” They’d say, “No, no, no. You're wrong. You're wrong.”

So, one day driving home, I’m speaking to myself. You know, there’s an old saying: “You're in trouble when you believe your own bullshit.” That saying kept coming up in my mind, because I had just talked to somebody who was leaving, and I said to myself, “Should I believe my own bullshit about where we are on that curve? Yeah, I think I do.” So, what I did was take a lot of money out of the stock market.

Duncan:

You turned out to be right.

Giallorenzi:

It turned out well. So, that saying has a place in my heart now. [Break] The fiber stuff was going along pretty well. We formed a Fiber Optics Program Office to continue to manage the different aspects of the program since it had grown to developing all types of sensors. NRL was basically the center of the universe for fiber sensors. Most of the people that were doing advanced work in the area were either funded by us or our guys. We funded the Stanford people. We funded all these different companies and things, so we really were driving that. The microwave photonics was maturing. We were starting to put it in telemetry lengths for radars and delay lines and signal processors and things like that. We were funding a lot of companies. All the laser companies in the area were working on that and were funded. Along that time, in the ’80s, the cable TV people started to use what amounts to microwave photonics. So, all the technology we developed for radar and things went directly over to the cable TV companies.

Duncan:

So, those are their microwave links.

Giallorenzi:

Their microwave links were now the microwave links we had developed with these companies. We kind of jumpstarted a big part of that industry. Then one of the days I was over in the Pentagon talking to an admiral and he said that there was a reconnaissance program that needed help and would I go talk to them. I said… Well, they had talked to him because he was in the Navy surveillance area. I said, “Sure. I’ll go talk to them,” and went and talked to General… What was his name? Some Air Force general. I forget his name—and Kevin Minors and a few others. They were looking to develop electronic cameras. This was about ’89 or so.

Duncan:

So, the first digital cameras had come out commercially, but they were very small and low resolution.

Giallorenzi:

They were very small, yes. They were nothing. They were 128×128. We wanted to develop them in the infrared as well as the visible, and so this office—it was called a Defense Advance Reconnaissance Office (DARO). I talked to them on several occasions after that and said, “Well, we can do some of that work for you.” They said, “Okay. Well, why don't you start off by running this contract with ROI?” and I said, “Okay.” We went back and talked to Ray about it. “It’s in your branch. Who are you going to put on it? I got it for you. [Laughs] Now, who are you going to put on it?” I forget who we put on it initially. Probably John Lee.

Duncan:

So, ROI was a company that was well-known at that point for having film cameras, having a long history of making reconnaissance film cameras.

Giallorenzi:

Yes. They had some of the best reconnaissance cameras in the world, film cameras, and the interest was to convert those to digital focal planes. So, this involved developing the focal planes, integrating into the cameras, and getting the cameras to work. The Air Force and the Army also wanted pieces of this work, which we were successful in not letting them get. So, we developed a couple. We developed a 4-megapixel camera in ’92, I think it was, ’91. I think it was 256k cameras were commercially available at that time. Yeah, I think so. I think we had?

Duncan:

So, this is a huge, huge step.

Giallorenzi:

A huge step forward to do that. We did that and we flew it and it worked almost like a charm. We had our growing pains with it.

Duncan:

And this was TARP CD then.

Giallorenzi:

This is TARP CD. Right. Then we developed the whole TARP system, which included the management system.

Duncan:

And TARP means tactical air reconnaissance pod?

Giallorenzi:

Right. This went on the F-14s.

Duncan:

Right, and the CD is completely digital.

Giallorenzi:

Right. We developed that, which actually was flown during the first Gulf War to great avail. Then we developed continually bigger focal planes, 16 megapixel, 25 megapixel, and we did 100 megapixel. It was actually 130 megapixels or something like that.

Duncan:

That larger one never got deployed, right?

Giallorenzi:

No, it did.

Duncan:

Oh, it did. Okay.

Giallorenzi:

It was used in open skies by the Air Force, not by the Navy.

Duncan:

Okay, and parallel to that was the development of the IR arrays.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, which went 2, 4, 16, and continued on beyond that.

Duncan:

And at the same time hyperspectral instrumentation was developed.

Giallorenzi:

Yes, we developed a whole family of hyperspectral instrumentation, both for big platforms which were big spectrometers to very small spectrometers. It’s for a whole range of applications. So, the division started in that and the whole branch, Ray Patton’s branch which became Dale LinneVonBerg’s branch, basically has a very big business in that area, which is continuing to grow. The other thing in that branch was the countermeasures, countering IR missiles with lasers or other optical techniques. Just about every jam code… In fact, I probably can say every jam code that the military uses was developed in the lab, and a lot of gear. They have developed a number of systems. We were the first to fly a jamming system on a tactical aircraft. We have now developed a very small system for very specialized applications. Just about everything that that group does has been transitioned into use.

Duncan:

And of course a lot of the motivation for wavelengths drove some advances in IR sources and IR detectors and in materials and components.

Giallorenzi:

Yes. We funded a lot in industries to develop what one could call the latest technology in imaging, whether it’s multi-spectral or panchromatic or whatever.

Duncan:

But I’m just thinking of the laser wavelengths that that drove, too, in the mid-infrared.

Giallorenzi:

Yes, we drove a lot of wavelengths, and the Laser Physics Branch, which you came from, developed a lot of solid state lasers. Leon Esterowitz developed numerous new solid state lasers for counter measures and later for medical use. He did a lot of Nd:YLF and other laser systems that were transitioned into the medical community. That work was all justified under countermeasures but then moved into medical lasers.

Duncan:

So, this seems to be an ideal situation for dual use, where a lot of the original motivation and money came directly from DOD, but it has found so many other uses because of that developmental work.

Giallorenzi:

Right. It was very profitable years. Our division, for the last ten years that I was in it, each year had the most patents, had the most publications, had the largest income, and had the largest number of transitions. So, we checked every box that you could check.

Duncan:

One of the people I’ve interviewed for this series has said that they had a division in another context performing extremely well, better than any other division in that company, and they felt extreme pressure and hostility because of that. Did you ever feel like the other divisions at NRL were hostile because of your success?

Giallorenzi:

No. The divisions at NRL tend to be a little independent, and so that wasn’t a big issue. By the way, to answer the previous question, we cooperated with a lot of divisions on different projects, so there wasn’t real competition.

Duncan:

It wasn’t a zero-sum game, either.

Giallorenzi:

It wasn’t a zero-sum game, either, but sometimes control was the issue. On this one project we were teaming with the Space Division and the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office), and the project we were developing was taking off. We had sold Congress on this project to the tune of about $2.5 billion based on an invention that came out of our division which was classified. The Director of Research saw that I was working so closely with the Space Division and with this admiral which was in one of the buildings in the lab, Building 259, that he was losing control of the division which he felt should be more research-oriented. So, he said, “If we sell that project and do it,” he was going to move the fence so that we would be blocked off from the rest of the lab.” I said, “We’ll see where it goes. Yes, I want to work with the lab, but this is also in the national interest and we’ll have to see where it goes and what can be worked out.” It made it through Congress and it was canceled at the last minute because the Berlin Wall came down, so it was a definite go. It went through appropriations and authorization totally.

Duncan:

So, your perception of the mission of the lab was in a certain way, and of course the lab director’s perception was in a slightly different way, and of course that sets up an interesting division between the fundamental research that the lab historically did and then the much more applied work, a lot of which you talked about.

Giallorenzi:

Right, yeah.

Duncan:

How do you see that?

Giallorenzi:

Well, Tim Coffey was by trade a theoretical plasma physicist, and so he favored the research aspect of the lab. He didn't have as much an appreciation for the applications side of the lab as I did. My division had both applications and research in it, so it was pretty well-integrated. The difference was the research was probably never going to hit the big money, whereas the applications were. The other aspect of the applications was you had the opportunity to solve national problems, and so if you had the opportunity and the expertise, would you not do it? That’s what it comes down to. There were some that we turned down that we probably could have done that we didn't do. This particular one was such a high national priority at the time that you would be remiss not doing it.

Duncan:

So, what’s your view? What was your view then of the kind of creeping movement of the basic research being more and more applied? There was pressure from the government. There was pressure from ONR to do that sort of thing. Was that hurting that seed research that all of the other advances eventually come from?

Giallorenzi:

Well, I always tried to protect the basic research with the understanding it was not a growth area because the division is a business center. If you're going to grow, you're going to grow in these other areas—not that we tried to grow, but if you had something that was unique, you tried to at least get credit for it. This space thing turned out to be very important. Working with the Space Division, they take care of the spacecraft and the spacecraft engineering, and we did the payload. Could they do it without us? No. Could they find another place to do it? Yes, but it would be in industry and the lab wouldn't have the control, nor would the sponsors who wanted to have the control. So, this was a unique situation.

But like when we did the fiber sensors, we did a lot of applications there but continued the basic research involved with that. The other thing also was—and you may not have been familiar with this, but historically we won in the research, in the RAC proposals. We used to rank very highly. I always used to go up and fuss at the RAC people that, “We rated higher than these people, but you didn't fund it.” The director said to me, “Do you want me to give you all the money and I’ll go home?” and I said, “Yeah, that will work,” because every year we were chipping away. So, our budget was growing, controlled, very slowly, but we were fostering research. That part we always tried to keep going very strongly.

Duncan:

Political in that case.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, it was political. Yes, it wasn’t technical.

Duncan:

That it was charity. Right, exactly. Over your career you received a number of honors, a number of prizes, some from OSA. What’s the most meaningful to you?

Giallorenzi:

Well, it’s interesting. The Senior Executive Service Awards—I got two distinguished and three meritorious. When I left the department, when I retired, I had the most of anybody in the whole department, in the whole government. No one had had five of those at that point. So, that was kind of gratifying. But the one that I think is the most gratifying was getting the Distinguished Achievement in Science Award medal, and the story behind that is?

Duncan:

That’s the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Science Award?

Giallorenzi:

Right.

Duncan:

Got it.

Giallorenzi:

Okay. Not that it’s the highest award necessarily, but one year when my kids were young—they were in high school—we went to the Navy museum. They had all the medals there and my daughter was reading them and pointing. She came to the distinguished one and she said, “Do you have that?” I said, “No,” and she said, “Are you ever going to get it?” I said, “Probably not.” She said, “Well, you're nothing until you get it,” or something like that, you know? So, when I got it, it meant something more because of that. The DOD Distinguished Civilian Service Award is a higher award. Oh, that one also, the Distinguished Achievement in Science, when I won it, no one had won it for ten years before that. They don't give it out every year, so they had to find it. [Laughs]

Duncan:

“It’s here somewhere,” opening drawers.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. The nicest one is the Conrad Award. That’s an ONR award. It’s their highest award, I think. That one is a medal, but it’s a gold medal, 22-karat gold, five ounces. It’s a ridiculous medal because your shirt is pulled off you almost, putting it on. But it’s really a beautiful piece of work, and it’s solid gold almost, 22-karat. And it’s big. It’s about that big.

Duncan:

Wow.

Giallorenzi:

That was a nice one. But I think the Distinguished Achievement in Science. When I got the Conrad Award, I got it with, what’s his name, Ballard. Ballard had won it the year before, and so we both got it together at the same ceremony.

Duncan:

And of course that was, I see here on your CV, “For fiber sensor and ultra-low fiber development programs.”

Giallorenzi:

Right, right.

Duncan:

Among those, yeah.

Giallorenzi:

Yes, that reminds me, we tried the ultra-low-loss fiber program. I convinced each sponsor to try and do chalcogenide glass. Theoretical projections were two orders of magnitude better than silica.

Duncan:

At 1.5 μm.

Giallorenzi:

No, at about 2 μm. Solid theoretical work says that, that’s correct. The only problem is you have to purify the material for that level, and chalcogenides are crappy materials to work with. So, we started the program and actually we were making pretty good progress. Got a lot of money for it. We did a lot of it in-house. We got down to 1 dB per kilometer, which was amazing that we could get that far because that glass had phase separation. It had a lot of little problems that silicon doesn't have, plus the purification problem. A lot of money went into purification. The idea there was to do transcontinental telemetry without an amplifier. At the time you had regenerators, actually; you didn't have amplifiers. That project ended when the erbium-doped amplifier came along, and so we jumped on that immediately to do what we wanted to do and stopped the research. But we got pretty far, considering everything.

Duncan:

Hmm. So, theoretically you could do a lot better still.

Giallorenzi:

Theoretically, yes. No, that’s one of the frontiers in fibers if you really wanted to push that frontier. It’s two orders of magnitude better than silica.

Duncan:

So, during your career, you must have served on different boards, research review, things of that nature. Can you mention a few that might stick out in your memory?

Giallorenzi:

I did a couple National Academy ones, but the ones that were really interesting were NRAC (Naval Research Advisory Council). In those, how those were set up is for a couple months you would get briefings from people on different projects. It could be—well, Navy projects, undersea stuff or airport, air stuff or whatever. Then you’d go out to San Diego for a month in the summer in your group and work the problem, deep dive into the problem. Then you would report to the Secretary of the Navy, usually a Saturday briefing because I did it several years. I learned a lot. That’s for sure. You had top-notch people, the top-notch people in the field. It was very senior people generally. You deep dived into a topic that was really very educational both in terms of the science and in terms of seeing how real experts attack a problem.

Duncan:

Were these all Navy people or did they draw from universities?

Giallorenzi:

They draw from across the spectrum.

Duncan:

And each person was expert in their area.

Giallorenzi:

Right.

Duncan:

And then the board would get together to do the combined?

Giallorenzi:

Yes, there would be like 20 people or so on one of these study groups. Yes, they would be high-level people typically that they got there because of their technical expertise, and generally very well-known people. So, you were exposed to pretty smart guys for a long time. You did a deep dive into whatever projects you were looking at.

Duncan:

Is that still going on?

Giallorenzi:

I don't know if they still… NRAC is still going on, but I don't know if they do it the same way still, because it was a huge commitment of time. But they were fun. They were really good studies.

Duncan:

Did you have any interaction with the Office of the Secretary of the Navy or Secretary of Defense or higher-level DOD activities?

Giallorenzi:

All the time. I was always over in the Pentagon briefing the ASN (the Assistant Secretary of the Navy) or Assistant Secretary of the Army, or once in a while the Secretary of the Navy, but mostly the assistant secretaries, DDR&E.

Duncan:

Did you ever have aspirations of becoming lab director or going to ONR and becoming one of the?

Giallorenzi:

Definitely not ONR. Yes, I thought about the NRL director job. I ran against Coffey for the directorship and they picked him for it. That made more sense. He was my senior by several years. He had more experience and all, and I hadn't been a division head that long. So, it was a little arrogant on my part to do it, but I did it and I didn't get the job, which was fine. Then they offered it to me before I retired. Well, they offered it to me twice before I retired, the ONR job, but then the director job after Tim retired. I didn't want it at that point in the career. They promoted me to Level 5 in the SES, which was equivalent to a three-star. So, I was the highest-ranked person at the lab and equal to the highest in ONR.

Duncan:

So, the director of the lab was only a Level 4?

Giallorenzi:

No, there wasn’t a director then. It’s a Level 5 position. So, they promoted me to that and I said, “It doesn't matter. You can promote me as high as you want, but I’m not going to take the job,” and so Montgomery got it.

Duncan:

After you left as Superintendent of Optical Sciences, you became a Senior Scientist for the Naval Center for Space Technology, so what was that?

Giallorenzi:

Okay. Well, NRL builds a lot of spacecraft. They’ve built well over 100 that they’ve launched, and very highly capable payloads on them. They asked me to look at certain types of problems with satellites, which I did do, and about four or five months into it the thing over there, I came up with an idea to do something. We didn't patent it because it wasn’t going to go anywhere anyway. You know, it was top secret. Before long, I’m running a group of 30 people, trying to develop what we’re talking about.

That was a two-year appointment. You couldn't renew it. So, at two years they were still going strong, strong funding. That was interesting because I went over to Optical Sciences Division again as a contractor, and the space people called me up and said, “Come on over. We want you to work on this problem with us.” So, I went over there and in chatting with them, they said, “You know, my clearances are on hold right now because they’re moving to the contractor,” and so they couldn't talk to me about my invention. [Laughs] They did that. But then when I came over, I brought the thing that Jim Waterman wanted, the satellite one. What was it? It was to map the stars.

Duncan:

Oh, yeah—to get star positions mapped to ten times better than…

Giallorenzi:

Yeah. What was that? It’s the same thing as the Gaia satellite does now.

Duncan:

Yeah. I forget the designation for that.

Giallorenzi:

Yes, So, I brought that over. I think it was Ron… Yeah, I guess Ron was the division head.

Duncan:

Ron Driggers, yes.

Giallorenzi:

So, I said to him, “Here’s this project. Who can you put on it?” and he dragged poor Jim into it and it went where it went.

Duncan:

So, you retired as superintendent and you also… And so then your work with the Naval Center for Space Technology was half-time at that point?

Giallorenzi:

Yes.

Duncan:

And then you became Senior Science Director at OSA at the same time.

Giallorenzi:

Right. Yes, it was half-time because you could only do one man-year worth of work under this NRL program they had, so I broke it up into two half-years, which was fine because I had plenty. I had this whole group then, and so they did the work that I directed. And then I advised Pete Wilhelm, who was the director of all kinds of other space projects and sat in on lots of reviews and radar stuff and other stuff.

Duncan:

So, what made you want to come to OSA to do work here?

Giallorenzi:

I wasn’t ready to retire, okay? Part of it was… We have to roll the clock back a little bit. Mary had cancer and it didn't look good at one point. So, that’s why I wasn’t willing to take the director of the lab job, even though it was handed to me on a silver platter. It was, “No, I’m not going to take a job where I can't leave right away.” So, my priorities were not with the job, period. So, the half-time job in Space Division is consultant-like, which turned out to be more than a consultant. It was fine. Then OSA was another way to keep busy and also keep in contact with the community and the technology.

Duncan:

So, you had been involved with OFC obviously during your career. You had done various jobs for that, including being chair. It really was your conference...

Giallorenzi:

I knew that community.

Duncan:

You knew that community. So, when you came to OSA, was that one of the main responsibilities, that you continued to help oversee that to some extent?

Giallorenzi:

Yes, well, one of the first things Liz asked me to do was reorganize the—what was it called?—the SEC (Science and Engineering Council) and then the other council board. She said, “These aren’t working well. Can you reorganize?” and that became the Board of Meetings and the Meetings Council. So, I worked on that and then I also worked on the whole organization, which she didn't like, like the Strategic Committee. I basically said, “These people aren’t being effective. Here’s how you really would organize a strategic thing. Here’s what they would do,” and so on and so forth. It was water off a duck’s back to do that because I’ve done that so many times before. She rejected it basically out of hand. But that’s basically kind of where they’re moving now.

Duncan:

And this is Liz Rogan who is CEO of OSA.

Giallorenzi:

Right.

Duncan:

Was there ever any conflict with the fact that you came from a very senior managerial position to work for a…?

Giallorenzi:

No, no. I didn't. I always had a different attitude to the job. I always viewed it (OSA) as an advisory position. At the lab, a lot of people reported to me, and I reported to other people. So, my job was to make these people productive and their job was to make me productive.

Duncan:

You were just in the food chain somewhere, and so were you equal?

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, they were doing a different job than you were doing. You were there because you liked to eat. My mother kind of had an influence in that respect. They went to the CEO of Exxon Corporation reception once, a party at his house, and she came back saying, “He was so arrogant and talked down to everybody. I hope you never do that to anybody if you ever get up there.” I said, “Yes, well, I’ll try not to do that,” and I tried not to do that.

Basically, if you did your job, I’d cover your back. That’s why we never let anybody off because of money. Just about every other division in the lab has done that. We never came close to doing that, and I felt that was my responsibility to make sure there was enough money in projects for people so that… You know, if they wanted to leave, they could leave, but we weren't going to force anybody to leave because we didn't have a project. There were really two times that I really had to produce there. One was the Walter Faust time and then the other one was when we lost the high-energy laser program. You know, I viewed that as my job. You take care of the people who are making you look good.

Duncan:

So, this is maybe a related question, then, and this can maybe be our final question.

Giallorenzi:

Oh, yeah. It had better be. I have a call.

Duncan:

Why do you think you’ve been successful in your career overall?

Giallorenzi:

I like the work. I really like the work. When you like what you're doing, you have a leg up on people that are just struggling. And I’ve always liked to work for people, with people. It’s interesting because at Cornell, as an undergraduate when we graduated, I was exactly in the middle of the class, exactly. The bottom half of the class mostly went into medicine and the top half all went into high-energy-physics-type stuff. Literally, I was the middle guy, and so I decided to stay in physics because I didn't want to have to interact with people. History showed that that was the wrong metric for me to use to make a decision.

Duncan:

Well, and thank goodness you weren't bad at interacting with people because then it really would have been a disaster.

Giallorenzi:

Well, I would have been in medicine… [laughing] …where I would have interacted with people because a lot of my family are in medicine, medical people.

Duncan:

Interesting. Interesting. Well, Tom, I want to thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Giallorenzi:

Yeah, I’m glad to do it. Hope you got what you wanted.

[End of recording]