John Midwinter

Duncan:

We're recording. Okay, terrific. My name is Michael Duncan, and I'm here to interview John Midwinter, and this is August 14th, 2019. John, tell me exactly where we are.

Midwinter:

We're at my home in Great Bealings, which is in Suffolk, England. 

Duncan:

Okay, fantastic. Thank you for being willing to do this, and I'll just preface this to say that we've had some interesting discussions already. You sent me a brief biographical sketch and some history that I have taken some questions from, and we'll go over those in some detail in this interview. That forms kind of the basis of a lot of the questions which I'll be asking and some of the things you'll be talking about. So, let me start out by just asking you to describe briefly your early experiences in where you grew up, and how that influenced you in terms of the science, the engineering, that you went into at an older age.

Midwinter:

Right, well I was born in Newbury, in Berkshire, which is midway between London and Bristol, in 1938, and grew up, of course, during the Second World War. I had very good parents, and a very stable home. My parents had a family business, which I would have been the fifth generation to go into, and so it was assumed from the day I was born that that was what I would do. I won a place at the grammar school, which is the academic school, at age 11, which was fortunate. So, I had, by British standards, a fairly academic training. I left school with very good grades in maths, physics, and chemistry. At that time, all school leavers had to spend two years in some form of military service. 

Duncan:

So, John, let me interrupt you real quick. You mention in your biographical sketch that you had done, and always had done, a lot of building type of activities when you were a child. 

Midwinter:

Yeah, I had a very good Mechano construction set. It's not very common these days. Lego is more common these days. Mechano was a much better construction set, which involved gears, it involved nuts and bolts, and axles, and hinges. So, you could really build quite serious working models with it. 

Duncan:

I think this would be equivalent to our Erector sets that we had in the U.S.

Midwinter:

It's close to that. It was something like that. Of the ones I've seen around the world, I believe it was the best, but I don't think it's in production any longer. I spent a lot of time doing that. I also built up a nice workshop, which enabled me to do woodwork and metal work, and make models -- aircraft and car models. 

Duncan:

Was your father involved in this as well?

Midwinter:

Not a great deal, no. It was primarily me. I just liked making things, I suppose. I found it quite satisfying. At school, every year, there was a hobbies exhibition, which all kids were invited to put on demonstrations of what they'd been doing during their hobbies, and I always had some rather super model that I'd made to take to the next hobbies exhibition, which was quite a challenge.

Duncan:

What education did your parents have?

Midwinter:

Not much. They left school at probably age 14 or 15, which was normal then. I mean, they were finishing school -- Dad was born in 1900, so he would have left school in 1917, I think, and had to go and join military service at the end of the First World War. Mother would have been very similar. There wasn't much education around in those days. 

Duncan:

But it sounds like they encouraged you in your activities.

Midwinter:

Oh, for sure. I think they realized that education was a way to a good life, and so they certainly encouraged me all the way. I was an only child. I had an elder brother, but sadly, he died in 1939, when I was still a baby. So, they were very, very keen that I should develop as much as possible, I think. 

Duncan:

So, in terms of your early schooling, what we would call elementary, middle school, and high school, did you have any teachers, or was there any great influence that turned you towards science or engineering during that period?

Midwinter:

Well, yes and no. I remember my physics classes, the deputy head of the school in my last few years at school was also the senior physics master, Mr. Herbert, who was generally regarded as a crusty old man, who wouldn't tolerate any messing around by anybody under any circumstances. We used to have problem classes once a week, and he'd stand up at the blackboard, and he'd write out problems, and you had to calculate such and such, or whatever it was, and I discovered that I could do most of these in my head. So whilst he was writing the problem on the board, I was busy working out the answer in my head. When he'd finished writing it, I'd put my hand up and say, "Mr. Herbert, I think the answer is 23," or whatever it was. He'd either say right or wrong or how did you get that? Many years later, of course, once I was doing teaching of my own, I looked back at that time and having thought I must have been an absolute pain in the butt in that class, I realized I was a sheer dream, because all the other kids in the class were trying to beat "Midi." So, he had a super keen class. It must have been an absolute dream for him. 

Duncan:

Okay. And then, go on. 

Midwinter:

Well, I had to do National Service. I finished high school at 18. I had a place booked at agricultural college to prepare me to go into the family agricultural business, but I had to fit in two years of military service, and I chose to do that before going to agricultural college. I went into the RAF, the Royal Air Force, and in their wisdom, they decided I'd be good at radar, and put me on a radar training course. For my second year of national service, I stayed on as a radar instructor. Very quickly during that phase, I decided that physics and electronics was much more interesting than agriculture. I told the family, and told the girlfriend, who later became my wife, and still is. It was agreed that I should read physics rather than agriculture but it condemned the family business to death some years later.

Duncan:

Let me go back. You told me earlier that you had to take some sort of placement test for the Royal Air Force about where you would be placed.

Midwinter:

Yes, all young men leaving school had to do military service, so you had to complete a spectrum of abilities. They would look at your formal school-leaving certificates, and if it looked promising, that you could do something useful, then they would give you their own tests, because they wanted to be sure. If you passed all those with flying colors, then you went off to do whatever. I was lucky that I got put on the radar training course, which was brilliant. 

Duncan:

What did you actually learn in the radar training course? Was it simply practical electronics about how radars work?

Midwinter:

Well, first of all, about electronics. I'd never really done any electronics before I went into this area. It was all vacuum tubes in those days. There were no transistors. We had basic courses in electronics, and I learned how the Gee airborne navigation system worked, and more specifically, how the airborne receivers worked in my new detail. I spent a year teaching others how to find, repair, tune, and adjust these airborne Gee Mark 3 receivers. Gee was developed during the Second World War to enable our aircraft to find Berlin, and such like targets. It was still being used when I was in National Service in the late '60s.

Duncan:

So, was this classified? Was this a system that the military then put under classification, or was this free to talk about?

Midwinter:

I don't think it was classified at that stage. It must have been during the Second World War. But, I think by the time I was doing it, I don't believe it was classified. Certainly, there's no memory of being told that this is top secret and we mustn't talk about it.

Duncan:

So, what did you do that first year that made them, in your opinion, choose you to be an instructor for the second year?

Midwinter:

Well, it wasn't the whole year, but a good chunk of it. Well, we sat in on classes on basic electronics, and how electronic systems worked, and learned about vacuum tubes and resistors and capacitors, and all that basic stuff about electronics. Then, of course, got put onto learning about a particular piece or radar equipment, which we would later either service out in the field, or in my case, teach. How they did that selection, I don't know, but that was what I got put on. I did a training course to be an airborne radar fitter, which meant I was qualified to go out and service these kits out in the field.

Duncan:

Did you feel any great attraction towards the technology at the time, or was this just a job?

Midwinter:

It was an interesting way of doing my National Service. A lot of National Servicemen at that time got put into the Army. It was the time of the Cold War, and we had large numbers of military personnel manning camps along the East German border, who just sat there in camp in case something happened. They spent their two years effectively cleaning rifles and polishing boots, and never doing anything. So, what I did was brilliant. 

Duncan:

Again, at this point, you were not really focused on what you were going to do for the rest of your life for your career.

Midwinter:

Well, I made the decision early on in my national service that I wanted to read physics at university. That was settled. I told the good news to my parents, who happily were very supportive, and my girlfriend was very supportive. So, that was settled, and I had a place at King's College, University of London, to read physics. So that was settled. National Service was '56 to '58, and I did my first degree at King's College London from '58 to '61. 

Duncan:

So, at the time, every male had to go through the national service. 

Midwinter:

That's right, yes.

Duncan:

So, this was expected, and so universities were set up so that you could apply after your end of school at that point, and then there would be that place, as you said. So, this was kind of a normal situation. But did you feel like those three years, especially doing what you did, uniquely helped you to do well in school, and set you up for success later on, or was that just one more thing that you did?

Midwinter:

What, my three years in university?

Duncan:

No, in National Service.

Midwinter:

Oh, that was two years National Service. Oh, yes, it was a hugely valuable experience, because I had a very, very good home. I had wonderful parents. But they were very caring, and looked after me very carefully, but when you leave home, you've got to look after yourself. So, in National Service, there was no mother to hold my hand. You had to cope. Do your own washing, check you're eating enough, and so on. So, it was very much a maturing experience. That would be true for everyone who leaves home initially. But, in my case, it was also mentally very stimulating, because I was doing things that were all new and very interesting to me, which provided a wonderful background, really, for later studies. Working as an instructor, teaching classes just one year out of school was interesting. Particularly, when I used to get classes of officers from overseas air forces, whose uniform was plastered with what we used to describe as scrambled egg, Gold braid everywhere. You're talking to this class of scrambled egg, and you're just a mere kid. But it was fun. 

Duncan:

So, it must have been a great way to increase your self confidence.

Midwinter:

I think it probably increased my self confidence. Of course, by this time, having elected not to go into the family business, and knowing effectively that I had condemned it to death, after 100 years of its existence, and with a girlfriend who was generally encouraging me from behind, when I went to university, I was a very dedicated student. There was absolutely no debate I was going to succeed, and I probably worked a great deal harder than most undergraduate students.

Duncan:

At the time you went to college, how common was it to go to college?

Midwinter:

Quite rare. I think about 8% of the school-leaver population went to university. It was a pretty select group, and it was very competitively selected. I might be wrong, but that's the number that springs to mind when you ask. 

Duncan:

How did you choose -- remind me where you went to study.

Midwinter:

I went to King's College London, which was at one end of the Strand, the opposite end of the Strand to Trafalgar Square. I didn't particularly want to go to Oxford or Cambridge. They didn't appeal to me. London looked much more attractive, and I applied to several London colleges and was offered places at all of them. In fact, my girlfriend was training to be a State Registered Nurse at the Charing Cross Hospital, which was at the Trafalgar Square end of the Strand. So, I went to King's College London, which was at the other end of the Strand and we could meet up before lectures and have a cup of coffee, or whatever.

Duncan:

So, as with many major decisions in life, this was determined partly by a girlfriend/spouse.

Midwinter:

Yes, yes, that's right. My parents were very concerned about this because they thought the girl was probably taking too much of my time and would detract from my studies, but I think in reality it was exactly the opposite because I was very committed to the girl, and we intended to get married. I'd, as it were, burnt all my other boats. I had to succeed, period. 

Duncan:

How was your time at college? You say that was three years. Again, was there anything that really stood out in terms of your influences there, or how that set you up to go further?

Midwinter:

I don't know. As you've already discovered, we were a pretty heavily selected group of youngsters, by no means a cross section of the population at large. It was competitive. Because of my particular background and decisions I'd made, I was absolutely determined I was going to get a top quality degree, so I was very focused. I found the physics course very interesting. I enjoyed it. I was living in a Hall of Residence for three years, which was very comfortable. At the time, I had a single study bedroom with private bathroom, which for undergraduate students was fairly unusual. That was very nice. So, it was a very, very enjoyable three years, all around, and very productive. 

Duncan:

Any instructors stand out, or any influences that pointed you in any certain paths that you took later?

Midwinter:

Not really, I don't think. One unique thing about King's College London then, and I suspect to this day, was that among the London colleges, it had a Theological Foundation, and part of its setting up arrangements were that the 9 till 10 lecture every Monday morning during term time would be on Theology and no other lectures were scheduled anywhere. All students, no matter what they were studying, were able to attend this lecture. They ran a three year rotating cycle course covering, one year, the New Testament, next year the Old Testament, and the third year, the Philosophy of Religion. It just cycled around, and you could join at any point. Each year stood alone, and you took an exam in the March of that year of whatever the course had been run that year, and if you passed all three exams, then you became an Associate of King's College (AKC), which I am. So, I have a theological degree, unusually. It's a very low class degree, but maybe that had an impact-- I don't know whether I'd have been different without it. It was, again, quite philosophical, and made me think about life in general.

Duncan:

So, it sounds like the education experience there was fairly well rounded. It wasn't only science and engineering. 

Midwinter:

Oh, yes. That's right. The other thing that perhaps is relevant, since you mention that, is that the Hall of Residence where I spent three years as an undergraduate was populated by students of all faculties. In fact, my closest friends during that three year period were a couple of people who were reading Law, and another one who was reading English. So, again, I had a very broad contact range there. In fact, it was the friend who was studying English who introduced me to classical music, for which I have a love to this day. 

Duncan:

You mentioned it in your biographical notes that it was during radar school that some of the practical things that you had learned in school -- mathematics -- had started to coalesce and come together and be reasonable in your mind. Was there any kind of peer pressure, or anything like that from that period in the radar training school that made you want to go into physics, or go onto science?

Midwinter:

I think physics had been the subject I probably enjoyed most at school. The other thing that might be worth mentioning was that during my second year of National Service in the RAF, I, and several of the other instructors, took advantage of a facility that the RAF arranged, where every evening there was a coach laid on that would take us to a local technical college. I went along and attended a course which was billed as a first year BSc General Degree Mathematics. We had a very, very good instructor, who was way superior to the Maths teacher I'd had at school. Every week we'd go along on a Wednesday evening to this class, and we'd listen to Terry Garrett, who was the lecturer. Every time you'd come away thinking, finally I understand what that was all about. He would have explained something that finally clicked. That must have been a great advantage, I think, when I went on to university, because though I'd passed the A level Maths school-leaving exam with very good grades, there was a lot of it I really hadn't understood. Listening to Terry, it finally really slotted into place. 

Duncan:

Wow, great experience.

Midwinter:

Yes, very lucky. 

Duncan:

Was that a formal course? Did you have homework?

Midwinter:

No, no, no. You just went along to the lectures, and if you didn't like them, you didn't go. Very casual. The other chaps I went along with were all going on to university to do similar things to me, and we sort of sparked each other. 

Duncan:

So, when you were an undergraduate taking your courses, and liking physics and wanting to do more in physics, did you have any idea what you were going to do afterwards?

Midwinter:

No, no idea at all.

Duncan:

So, you didn't know if theory, or the math part, or the experimental part?

Midwinter:

No, I had no idea what I was going to do afterwards. What I actually did was to join the Scientific Civil Service at a lab called The Royal Radar Establishment, which was in Malvern, in Worcestershire. I had applied to the Scientific Civil Service, and I was offered places at a number of different government research labs.

Duncan:

So, this one application went out to various places, then?

Midwinter:

Yes, you applied to the Scientific Civil Service, and it got circulated, and quite a few of the labs looked at my details and decided I could be an attractive employee and made me offers, and I did a few interviews. Malvern appealed, particularly, because I had an aunt and uncle who lived in Malvern, and Maureen and I had spent holidays up there together. Malvern is a beautiful town, which sits on the side of a line of hills with beautiful views over the Severn River valley. We both thought it would be lovely to go to live in Malvern. 

Duncan:

So, when you were getting close to graduation, what was that next step like? Were there formal paths that you would apply to different companies? Did companies come, or did institutions come to --

Midwinter:

Well, there were, but I had applied and had already agreed that when I graduated with suitable grades, then they would employee me in Malvern.

Duncan:

Why did you decide to go then to that route, rather than a company, or a university? Why choose that? It sounds like you made that decision early. 

Midwinter:

I must have done, yes. I don't really know, to be honest. The physics department, which I joined at Royal Radar Establishment, did have an extremely good record of academic research, so in essence I was joining a rather well funded university level research department in beautiful surroundings. I think that was by and large the package that appealed. So, that's what we did, and two weeks after I graduated, we got married. We went off to honeymoon not knowing my degree results, I might say, and therefore not knowing whether I had got a job. We came back from honeymoon on the day that the results were posted in London. I discovered I had got a first-class honours degree and therefore was likely to get employment. We moved to a friend's apartment, which was a little tiny apartment in Malvern and was vacant because she was a school teacher and was away on holiday, and that was the start of our married life.

Duncan:

So, remind me what a first in physics means. Is just like with honors, or cum laude, or summa cum laude?

Midwinter:

It's first-class honors. That's as high as you can go. There's first, second, third, and pass. I couldn't have done better, in that sense. People at that time, graduates from a good university getting first class honors were pretty few and far between. So, it was a nice little accolade. 

Duncan:

So, again it sounds like your decision was based, not primarily on the institution you went to, but surrounding factors as well.

Midwinter:

Surrounding factors. All sorts of things all came together, and it looked like it would be a nice place to work, and also with interesting work, challenging opportunities, good facilities.

Duncan:

Had you gone there to interview, or had someone come to you?

Midwinter:

I think I interviewed with the Scientific Civil Service, probably in London. I don't remember. I think they would have passed it around to the different labs. I don't think I went to an interview more than that -- I don't remember but I already knew Malvern well having holidayed there with my Aunt & Uncle.

Duncan:

But you knew the type of work that you'd be doing?

Midwinter:

We knew the place, because we'd been up there. We knew it more than well because we had had holidays up there.

Duncan:

I see. Now, it's the Royal Radar Establishment. So, it's a government lab, but not necessarily a military. 

Midwinter:

Well, they were doing a lot of military work. There were sections that were highly classified. The area that I was working in initially was unclassified. 

Duncan:

But it would be termed more a national lab, like we would think of in the U.S.?

Midwinter:

Oh, it was a national lab, yes. Well, like NRL, probably.

Duncan:

Well, NRL was definitely a military lab.

Midwinter:

Well, this was a military lab. They were there for military purposes. The particular projects I worked on initially -- well, because I didn't have a PhD when I joined them - it was only a first degree - they had an arrangement known as "the tour," which meant your first two years in the lab, you had to spend three eight-month periods working in different areas of the lab. That gave you a broad appreciation of the things that went on in the lab. For me, it was intensely frustrating, because you go into a completely new field about which you knew nothing, after three or four months you're beginning to understand it and think you can start doing something. By eight months you're just getting the results, and then you get moved on to do something completely different. And that happened three times. Again, you can't rerun the experiment, but looking back, I would say I think it was a very broadening experience, and probably a very valuable experience. 

Duncan:

So, describe those three different projects you went through.

Midwinter:

The first one I worked on was superconductors. They were interested in high-field superconductors, because they needed high magnetic fields for some of the infrared detectors, which they wanted to fly around in aircraft, and the like. So, a much more senior man than me was studying niobium-tin superconductor that had recently been discovered as a superconductor material that would remain superconducting at high magnetic fields and they wanted to study the properties of that. So, I got landed with an experimental program for that, which involved taking titanium blocks, each about two centimeter diameter, and etch in them a groove, about a millimeter deep, and a millimeter wide, and a centimeter diameter, and fill it with niobium-tin powder, sinter that into the block. Then, I had an apparatus where you put that in a Dewar flask with liquid helium, or liquid hydrogen, and you placed it between the jaws of the high-field magnet, and wound the field up and down, which induced currents in the ring. You could plot what the critical field was in the superconductor as a function of the magnetic field. It was a hideously frustrating experiment because you had to have a Dewar Flask with a very long, thin tail, about 3-4 centimeters diameter, and about a meter long, that dangled down between the great jaws of this whopping, great magnet. With horrible regularity, probably three or four times during my period, the jaws of the magnet would sort of ping together under the residual magnetic field, and there'd be a tinkle, tinkle, tinkle of broken glass.

So, that was that project. Anyway, that was fine. Then, I moved into airborne radar department, and I wasn't going to be working on some top secret project, but in fact, we were developing a fighter aircraft at that time, called the TSR2, which subsequently got canned. It needed some quite sophisticated optical signal processing for its radar which would pick up moving targets against the background. There was a team in the States, I think it was in the Boston area, who were working on optical signal processing. Lasers were just sort of coming over the horizon at that time, and you could use optical signal processing to pick out the moving target from stationary targets. They asked me to build one of those, which I managed to do in eight months. Then I got moved on, and my final project was with a group in which they were trying to build the first ruby laser in Britain. I worked on that, and also it led on into nonlinear optics, which really set the course for my subsequent research life.

Duncan:

So, during all of these projects, did you understand the fundamentals of what was going on? Did you do any of the theoretical parts, or was this purely a logical, experimental, "here do this, make this work?"

Midwinter:

Well, I can't say I ever really understood the physics of superconductors, but for the others, yes. They would feed me lots of reprints of papers to read, and so on. I wouldn't have had the depth of understanding that I would have if I had spent three years doing a PhD on the subject, but I still got quite useful background knowledge. Then, of course, I stayed on and after that last project, I worked in nonlinear optics, and that was the work that led to my book on Applied Nonlinear Optics. I was able to write up quite a chunk of that work as an external London student for a PhD in my PhD thesis. 

Duncan:

So, when did you decide that that's what you wanted to do? You wanted to have a PhD, and go through that process. 

Midwinter:

I didn't decide that I wanted to work on nonlinear optics, I was told that's what I was going to do, I think. But it was fun. I enjoyed it, and I had no problem with that. The PhD, I think it was a slow realization that a high proportion of the other scientists around me had obtained doctorates, and I hadn't. When I discovered that because I had an internal University of London first degree, I was indeed eligible to submit a thesis to the university for an external PhD, that looked like a good idea. So, Sunday mornings for about a year were spent writing up a thesis on work that I had already done, and then I sent it in to the university and attended for an interview with the examiners a short time later.

Duncan:

So, how long was that after you started at Malvern?

Midwinter:

Well, I went to Malvern in '61, and I submitted my thesis in mid '67. I think that by the time we emigrated to America in January of '68, I knew that I had passed, and I had obtained my doctorate. The actual degree presentation ceremony I never went to, because it was early in '68 when I was in America.

Duncan:

So, you started in Malvern in '61, and you had to do two years of rotating projects, and then at the end of the two years, you decided, or were you assigned to stay in the group you were doing project work in.

Midwinter:

Yes, I was assigned to this new nonlinear optics group.

Duncan:

Okay. And the purpose of that, as you say in your notes, is to look for ways to do upshifting of infra-red to the visible where there were much more sensitive detectors.

Midwinter:

There were a variety of objectives that they had in mind. It was all new technology and new ideas. Nobody knew whether it was going to be useful or not. So it was very much exploratory research, obviously with potentially military objectives in mind. 

Duncan:

Specifically imaging infrared up to a visible wavelength.

Midwinter:

Well, the imaging work I did later in the States. But before that, I was just looking at infrared up conversion to the visible, and using nonlinear optics.

Duncan:

So, during that time, because this was a research lab, you were encouraged to do publications, and presentations at conferences?

Midwinter:

Oh, yes. Well, they all had to be approved, of course. They had to be cleared. So, you had to write your paper and submit it to the security department. It had to get approval before you could submit it to a conference, or to a journal. For the sort of things I was doing, that wasn't particularly difficult.

Duncan:

How many people were in the nonlinear optics area?

Midwinter:

I think there were four or five of us.

Duncan:

So, fairly small group. And this was part of a larger optics division?

Midwinter:

That was good question. I don't think it really was, no. I don't think there was other optical work going on at that stage. I can't think of anything, anyhow. I'm not sure. It was a very long time ago. 

Duncan:

Was there other laser work being done.

Midwinter:

I think there was other laser work. Well, there was the optical signal processing that I spent eight months working on. That was continuing in another part of the lab. So, yes, there was certainly that. But, again, being a government lab, a lot of the work was classified. You didn't go around poking your nose into things all over the place. 

Duncan:

So, in the last few years you stayed with the nonlinear optics group. Is that when you wrote your book, or was that later?

Midwinter:

That was later. I started it in the states at Perkin Elmer, because Frits Zernike at Perkin Elmer, was a coauthor on that work. I think we must have started it when Frits and I were both asked to give some lectures at the State University of New York on Long Island in nonlinear optics, and I think the book essentially came out of those lecture notes.

Duncan:

So, during the time at Malvern, then, when you were working on nonlinear optics, you were doing enough in depth research, but this was all from reading papers, and from doing the experiments, and having the practical knowledge that then led to your PhD, but that worked together. But there was no formal training or classes other than your own reading?

Midwinter:

Well, we had a Theoretical Physics Group in the Physics Department which I was working in. It was about three or four full time theoreticians, who were very bright lads. They got very interested in nonlinear optics, and gave a series of lectures for the staff in physics, which I went to, which provided very useful background for the book.

Duncan:

And that also helped the fundamentals of not just understanding, but then the mathematics of it?

Midwinter:

Yes, that's right, very much so. 

Duncan:

Okay. I see. And then you, as you say, put together that work. You wrote up your thesis on Sunday mornings, and that was your formal submission to King's College?

Midwinter:

No, not really. The submission was actually to the University of London Senate House because I wasn't associated with the college at that point. I was a University of London external student, and they appointed someone at the labs where I was working who they agreed could be my PhD supervisor. I think I went up to London to have a formal interview. I don't remember who with, somebody the university appointed to me. 

Duncan:

You mentioned in your biographical notes that you had to get special permission because of the short amount of time between when you started your work formally through the university and then by the time you submitted the thesis. So, that was a fairly short period of what?

Midwinter:

That's right, only a year or two. That was unusually short, but again I could demonstrate that I had got all the results. I had been working in the field well before the time I'd registered, that was the point. On paper it looked like I'd only been working on it for six or nine months or something. In reality I'd been working on it for quite a few years.

Duncan:

So, was this a good or rigorous process that you went through to get your PhD?

Midwinter:

Oh, for sure. University of London doesn't mess around. 

Duncan:

Okay, so after your PhD, you had kind of already accepted a job in the U.S. Is that right? So, what made you decide to leave Malvern and go to the U.S.?

Midwinter:

Because by that stage in Malvern, we had three kids, a dog, and a fourth on the way, and we really couldn't live on the money they were paying me. Perkin Elmer offered me double the salary, which was attractive, and it was exciting to think of going across the Atlantic and living somewhere different. It looked interesting. So, we decided that's what we would do. There was, of course, the downside that at the Scientific Civil Service, I was guaranteed employment until I got to normal retirement age, whereas I think at Perkin Elmer, I think I was probably guaranteed employment for a month. The big laugh, I've told many people, was that after six months, I had a summons to go see the Director of Research at Perkin Elmer -- so this would have been June, '68, or something like that. I thought this was it and I was going to be laid off. So, I went to see him, and he was a very nice guy. He looked at me with a very serious face, and he said, "John, I don't know how to put this..." and I thought, oh just stick the knife in and twist it. He said, "We've decided you're seriously underpaid, but the rules of the company only allow me to double what we're already paying you. Is that alright?" So, in six months I had a fourfold increase in income, that was quite something. It didn't do one's ego any harm.

Duncan:

I would say that was an unusual situation. 

Midwinter:

I'd say it was pretty unusual.

Duncan:

So, back in Malvern, what were the conditions like there, besides, you know, it sounds like a very beautiful location? What were the working conditions like?

Midwinter:

Good. We had very good working conditions, indeed. I think as good as anywhere else at the time. It was a well-funded laboratory. They just didn't believe in paying their staff very much.

Duncan:

In a way, you were like a new graduate with your PhD, so in essence, that was a good time to start a new adventure. 

Midwinter:

Oh, yes. It was all very good. It worked well. Of course, the other little hiccup going to the states was that six or eight months before leaving, we adopted a little Chinese baby girl from Hong Kong, and she was legally adopted by us in June or July of '67. So, she was our daughter, period. When I contacted the embassy in London about getting our visas to come to America, they said, "That's fine, no problem at all and we can provide you with papers for yourself, your wife, and the two children of your own birth, but you do realize your adopted child isn't eligible for a visa until she's been adopted for three years?" -- I think it was three years. So, blind panic in the Midwinter family. Perkin Elmer excelled themselves. They had, I believe, a congressman who they paid a retainer to, and I am told that he wrote into a bill going through Congress that on exceptional humanitarian grounds, Kim Midwinter should be allowed into the United States. Then a very short time before my existing job packed up, and everything felt like it was crashing around our ears, a telegram arrived from Perkin Elmer saying, "Problem solved. Come." And I went. I then had to phone the State Department to inform them when our adopted daughter was coming. 

Duncan:

I might just add that I don't think a Congressman could take a retainer, but I'm sure Perkin Elmer was very supportive of his re-election campaigns.

Midwinter:

Well, I don't know the setup, but something like that. Anyhow, the result was brilliant, and we came to America. 

Duncan:

So, Perkin Elmer, at the time -- I remember some of the Perkin Elmer work maybe a few years after that -- they were certainly active in optics. So, what sort of thing were you hired to do there, or were you hoping to work on?

Midwinter:

As I recall it, there was something called IR&D money, Independent R&D money, which these government contractors could add to the bill, to the funding agency, whoever it was. They were able to add 5-10% onto the bill for independent R&D, which was essentially money they could spend on independent R&D, not linked to the specific development project. As I understood it at the time, the group that I joined with Frits Zernike, in fact, just the two of us, were funded by IR&D money. So, it was essentially money without strings attached. We did get visitors to come and see what we'd been doing. Presumably, if they hadn't been happy, they'd have given someone in Perkin Elmer a ticking off. But that was it, and it was a happy arrangement from my perspective.

Duncan:

And Frits was your senior?

Midwinter:

He had been instrumental in me moving to America. I met him at a conference here in Europe, and he had floated the idea that I might go and join Perkin Elmer. He was a very nice guy. His father, of course, was a Nobel Prize winner. He invented the phase contrast microscope. He was a lovely guy. We got on wonderfully well together. 

Duncan:

But he was an American at the time?

Midwinter:

He was by then an American. He went out to America, I think, to do an MSC at MIT from Holland, and never went back. He'd been there ten or twenty years, maybe longer. He's dead now, sadly. He was a great guy to work with, and we got along very, very well.

Duncan:

He knew about the nonlinear work?

Midwinter:

He was also interested in nonlinear optics. I'm not sure what he was doing, but sort of vaguely related things. He liked what I was talking about at the conference he met me at. He said, "Hey, John. Have you ever thought about coming to America?" And I said, "No, what have you got in mind?" 

Duncan:

So, were there any specific projects, or you just went to work with him and do fun things?

Midwinter:

Just went to work with him and do fun things. They wanted to see results. I think when I was at Perkin Elmer -- I was only there for two years -- I published two, three, or four papers in good journals.

Duncan:

And this was the timeframe for your book as well.

Midwinter:

Well, the book was taking shape then. I don't think it was actually finished until after I moved on. I think it was published in 1973, if I remember rightly. We came back to England in '71. By and large, it was written by the time we left America and came back here.

Duncan:

And you said you and Frits had been invited to give some lectures at --

Midwinter:

We gave talks at the State University in Stony Brook, Long Island, New York on nonlinear optics. That was a factor in forcing us to put together lecture notes and so on, which was a good starting point for a book.

Duncan:

Did you all deal with some of the other nonlinear work that was being done around the U.S.? I know Stanford was very active at the time. 

Midwinter:

No, not very much. I think I visited a group at Bell Labs once, maybe. I remember I got friendly with a Professor Chung Tang, I think. He was at Cornell, in Ithaca. I visited him once, but other than that, no, not much. I mean, I was a junior boy in the department. You've got to get your nose to the grindstone, and get on with it. 

Duncan:

And I know in your notes, you said you and Frits were asked to look at a very practical problem, and you had great fun with that.

Midwinter:

Yeah, so that was a great laugh. American Airlines, at this point, were about to introduce the jumbo jet -- the 747. They were worried sick about how they were going to deal with the deluge of bags that would come off a jumbo jet. They approached Perkin Elmer, and got referred to Frits and me as to whether we had any ideas on what Perkin Elmer could do to assist in this problem. What we identified was that you needed to be able to identify the destination for each individual bag, and do it electronically. So, we came up with an idea of using binary printed labels that were very cheap to print, that could be read by a laser system. In a sense, it's the beginnings of what we call bar code readers, but they didn't exist in those days. We built what was known as the Bag Tag Project. I remember we bought a conveyer belt in the lab about twenty feet long, and lots of bags with tied, printed labels on them, and had them zipping down the conveyer belt, and a machine up in the ceiling whirring around and reading the labels, and giving the signals back to the computer. We demonstrated it worked. Perkin Elmer, very sensibly in my view, decided that this was not a business for them, because the bag tag reader was a very small, relatively cheap thing to make, but it would only be useful if you had a massively expensive, highly automated belt system to deliver the bags to different places. So, I think they sold the technology on to somebody. I had a hunch it was to Sperry, but I may be wrong on that. That's pure hunch. Sperry had a lab just down the road from us, and I think a lot of the current bar code stuff comes from that project. 

Duncan:

But you never got any patents from that?

Midwinter:

Oh, I'm sure Perkin Elmer did. Not me, personally. They would be Perkin Elmer's property, which they presumably would have sold on, anyhow. 

Duncan:

It sounds exactly like all of the systems that are in use now. 

Midwinter:

That's right, yes. I mean, every time I go to the supermarket now, I think "Oh, this is Bag Tag all over again." It's a bit more cunning these days, but it's basically the same concept. It was a huge, fun project. 

Duncan:

It sounds it. And you had to travel all over to visit the --

Midwinter:

Well, we had to learn a bit about what goes on what goes on in airports, and so on. So, I don't think I'd be giving away state secrets here, but we went to LaGuardia airport and looked at the baggage handling in the American Airlines terminal there. You'd better stop me if I'm going to put my foot in it. But the check-in people put the bag onto a conveyer belt, which went very smoothly along the back of the check-in desk, and turned at right angles, and went through a wall, through a slatted screen. Then we were taken around to the back and watched in amazement. Behind there the conveyer belt sloped down at about 45 degrees, the bags went boompity boompity boompity boom, down the conveyer belt, and there was a big brick wall at the bottom, which they smashed into. There was a whopping great very muscular man -- very friendly guy -- who stood there, and picked up each bag in turn, read the label on it, and threw it into the appropriate bin. It is etched in my memory for life. The contrast between what the passenger saw and what really went on was dramatic. We went to a few other places along the line, and saw what went on in real life. 

[Part 2]

Duncan:

Okay. John, we're back, and we had just been talking about your time in the U.S. and your time with Perkin Elmer. You had described some of the projects there, so why don't you go on from there? You worked at a second place in the U.S.

Midwinter:

That's right. I'd been at Perkin Elmer just short of two years, I think, when I was approached by someone from Allied Chemical in Morristown, New Jersey. They were setting up a new research center, which was to be called the Materials Research Center. They wanted someone to put together and lead a group of researchers working on nonlinear optical materials. I talked to them and visited Morristown. It seemed like a quite nice place to live. The challenge, really, was to go around the best universities in America and try to recruit a new group of really bright, young PhD graduates, which I have to say was a very attractive prospect. So, I accepted their offer and we moved to Morristown, New Jersey.

The problem was that my parents were coming out to visit us that summer, and my father died in mid-Atlantic on the QE2 boat from a heart attack. So, a very distraught mother arrived in New York. We met her, and while she was staying with us, I had to change jobs, move house, and set up in Morristown. I took a week's unpaid compassionate leave to take her back to England. Of course, it was all very unsettling. So, I think I could have stayed with Allied Chemical for quite a long time, but I had a mother who was terribly disturbed, back in England, and other family reasons. So, the offer of a job eventually emerged from what was then the Post Office Research Center, and is now known as British Telecom Research Labs, to move into optical fiber communications, and that's what I did. 

Duncan:

Let me just explore a teeny bit more about Allied Chemical. So, you also mention in your notes, that that was a time -- even though it was exciting to start at the lab, that you quickly became aware of conflicting requirements from your boss, and then your boss above that.

Midwinter:

Yes. This may be my imagination, but I sensed that, well, I knew that the director of the Materials Research Center, whose name I've forgotten, had been a Professor in Chicago, I think. He seemed to make it pretty clear to us that he wanted to see really good research papers, in really top research journals. That was fine, I could do that. But I also got to know his boss a little bit, who was a Vice President of Allied Chemical, and I got the very strong impression from talking to him that his interest in the Materials Research Center was how rapidly Allied Chemical was going to see a decent return on its investment. My own feeling was that while I could organize my research to give a fairly rapid return on investment, or I could organize my research to lead to really good, long range research papers in top journals, I couldn't do both. So, this was very unsettling. Plus the fact that mother was very unsettled back in England. So, all in all we started to think that perhaps moving back to England was going to be the answer.

Duncan:

If there hadn't been the family situation, do you think you would have stuck it out at Allied and tried to make it work?

Midwinter:

I don't think I really know the answer to that question. What I can say is that I kept in touch with quite a lot of the young chaps who I'd recruited, and within a very short space of time of me leaving, the whole group had essentially left, they'd all flown and gone to pastures new. So, I wasn't the only one who was feeling pretty unsettled. What happened to the Materials Research Center since we came back in 1971 I do not know. I probably kept in touch with some of the chaps in 1972, 1973, but frankly I haven't heard of it since. It may be blossoming and doing well, or it may be nonexistent. 

Duncan:

Do you remember any of the names of the people you recruited?

Midwinter:

Oh, gosh. Well, my immediate boss was called Alton Gilleo. We had a Talin Hsu. He was a very bright young lad and I know he went back to Taiwan, which is where his family came from. They were quite high in the Taiwanese hierarchy. Who else was there in that group? Gosh. Joe Barrett. I have a feeling he came from Perkin Elmer. A lot of the technicians came from Perkin Elmer. I don't remember any others.

Duncan:

Okay. That's fine. So, being in the U.S., besides the research environment, what did you like the best, what did you like the least, and what did you think about the difference between how research and how the companies were doing research in the U.S. versus your other experience, mostly I guess in the U.K.?

Midwinter:

Well, in the research lab, I'm not sure there was any obvious difference. Obviously, you could be at a research lab where the clear objective is very long term research published in top journals, or you could be at what is more of a development lab of which you're seeking to generate return on investment. That's fine, but that happens here in Britain. That happens all over the world. I could live with that. That was no different.

I think the thing that interested me most about living in the states was that when we went to America, it was obvious that we shared a more or less common language, not absolutely identical, but very nearly the same, and that led one to believe that we had a very common culture. But what began to emerge as we lived out there was that, yes, we shared a common language, but there were many things in life that were different. Typically we had grown up in a welfare state in Europe, and that was common throughout Europe, and it clearly wasn't the case in America. This led to quite significant differences in the structure of society and the way people interacted and so on. So, much to my surprise, I began to realize that I was not just a Britain, but I was also a European. The Americans we met were lovely people. We had very good friends out there, and we were very happy there. But we realized that they were in many ways foreign in a way that the French or the Germans weren't. This was a completely unexpected discovery. 

Duncan:

Would this have affected your thoughts about staying permanently? Would you have said at the time, "I now understand I want to go back to Europe."

Midwinter:

I don't think it had any affect. No, I don't think it affected that decision at the time. That decision was driven by family considerations, mother, work considerations, where was the most interesting job, and where do we want our children schooled, all much more near-term things. I really wasn't thinking long term at that stage, and I'm not sure that you do at the age of 30, or so. 

Duncan:

So, you had decided for these various reasons that you needed to go back to the U.K. What did you do to try to find a position, or a job? You ended up, obviously, at the British Post Office Research Laboratory.

Midwinter:

Well, I started applying for jobs in America, and also because I worked for the Scientific Civil Service in Britain, they had an office in New York, in which they interviewed people who wanted to join the Scientific Civil Service in Britain. I applied to them, and I think I probably interviewed with them when we were in Morristown. I traveled into New York one day and had an interview with somebody, and indicated my interest in going back to Britain. I had several offers through the post as a result of that. At the same time, in parallel with that, I was talking to people at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, and they offered me a chair in Tucson, which was quite attractive on the face of it. I went out and interviewed there in probably March or April of 1970, and I have to say I was actually stunned at the gorgeous location. We went up Mt. Lemmon at the back of the city, and could look out across the valley through crystal clear air, and the blue sky, and there was Kitt Peak on the far side of the valley, standing there like you could almost reach out and touch it although it was 60 miles away. It was pretty attractive, I must say. It was Steve Jacobs, who I was talking with I think, who did tell me to watch out for rattle snakes. It was very, very attractive. Then I went back a few months later, and of course, the heat had set in, and there was a dust storm blowing over Tucson, and I thought, "Oh, my God." So, that rather put the downside on Tucson.

By then I had had this offer from the Post Office in Britain. Bizarrely, it was a very detailed offer I had from them, spelling out terms, conditions of service, pay, leaves, responsibilities, the lot. I was immensely impressed by the sheer dynamism of this organization that could produce such a detailed proposal so quickly. That was a factor in coming back, plus the fact that we had family reasons that we were motivated to move back to Britain, although it wasn't desperate. The joke was, of course, that after I got back, we discovered that the Post Office at that time was really an extremely dozy organization, and never did anything rapidly. Quite what happened to my job offer, I'd never discovered. Anyhow, that's another story. It happened, and we did it, and it all worked out really well.

Duncan:

Did you have to take a pay cut to come back to the U.K.?

Midwinter:

Almost certainly, yes. 

Duncan:

So, one of the things you mentioned in your notes was that the job description -- the job of the technical part of the post office research lab was to make sure that there was knowledge about technical aspects of any contracts or equipment that the Post Office would be purchasing. 

Midwinter:

Well, you see, at that time, the Post Office Research had no manufacturing arm. I think, the only reason they existed was to insure the Post Office was an “informed customer” when it bought equipment from telecoms manufacturers wherever in the world. So, the prime requirement was to be able to pick holes in proposals, and to know how to do it, and be factually correct. My immediate boss, Mr. F.F. Roberts, I have to say, one of his strengths was that he was absolutely brilliant at picking holes in things. This was not a problem. I used to meet up with him regularly. I was placed here in Suffolk, and he was still based in London. I used to go down every Monday morning and spend an hour or so with him, discussing what we were doing and what we wanted to do.

Quite subconsciously on my part, it was only much later that I put two and two together and made five, I used to go down with various ideas that we'd been floating, talk to him and say, "Mr. Roberts, I think it might be quite interesting to do this, and we thought we might just do that, and what do you think?" And absolutely for certain, he'd come back with a great long list of queries or suggestions or whatever. I would say, "Thank you very much. That's very helpful. I made a note of them. I'll think about them, and we can talk about them next week." Then next week, I'd have thought about them, and had answers, and his response every single time was, "That's great. When can you start?" Whereas, a fellow colleague in another section used to go to see him and ask him to approve something, and he never approved it. I didn't rationalize this at the time, but in retrospect I can see exactly what went wrong. He was just great for me.

Duncan:

But you were innocent in any politics?

Midwinter:

I wasn't playing politics. I was just operating what seemed naturally, and realized that he had a very lively mind. He wasn't always right, but he had a very lively mind. It was the smart thing to do to ask his opinion, get his advice, get his experience, go away and think about it and come back with some answers. Worked brilliantly.

Duncan:

So, one question would be, you had been involved in research now for a number of years, and the Post Office job seemed to be slightly different from cutting edge research. Of course, we'll talk about how it was cutting edge that you did, but it sounded just from some of the description that it might not have been as challenging as you would have hoped. Did you have any issues in that way?

Midwinter:

I don't think so, no. I mean, I was really very busy, and of course, it was an emerging field. There were real problems to try and solve, and we were busy working on them. I was part of quite a big team. There were two or three other sections in it, and we all worked together as a pretty free-wheeling team, which was great fun, actually. I used to meet regularly with a colleague who became a close friend but who has died since. He was a chemist by background. We got along very well together. The whole team was multi-disciplinary, multi-skilled and was great fun to work in. The project was very popular at the time, and became more so, of course. 

Duncan:

That was the idea of using fiber optics for telecommunications?

Midwinter:

Yes. The original proposal Charles Kao had made of using optical fiber to transmit optical signals was what we were all working on. So, it was clear what we were trying to achieve. But there were a whole slew of technological problems that really had to be licked before you could get close to achieving it. My chemist friend, for example, was very much involved in the problems of trying to make ultra-pure glass, and how to convert ultra-pure glass into fiber without screwing it up. Mind you, I was primarily involved in characterizing the glass that he made, both as bulk samples, and as fiber, and starting to think about how would you get this into the ground. How would you cable it, join it, and so on. These were quite mundane engineering issues, all of which had to be solved. Also, of course, sources and detectors were needed, and so on. It was an interesting experience. It was very much aimed research. It wasn't blue-sky research. 

Duncan:

You had mentioned, or this came from another source, that F.F. Roberts was a convert to this way of thinking, that fiber optics were the future.

Midwinter:

Yes, he'd been persuaded by Charles Kao that this was something that needed to be thought about very seriously. There was no certainty that this was going to work. I think he saw, as we probably all did, that if we could lick the technological problems that needed to be solved, then this was going to be a big business. It would indeed transform the network. In fact, of course, what actually happened was that those problems got licked to a much greater degree than any of us, I think, originally realized would be possible. Hence, the transformation to the network has been vastly greater. I remember just before I left BT, there was a little study initiated to see what the payoff to BT had already been relative to the cost of the program. They'd only been deploying fiber for a couple of years then. I don't remember the numbers, and it probably would be confidential if I did, but I remember the message was that this project had already paid off in a very short space of time, the benefits were so colossal. 

Duncan:

As you say, there were a host of problems to solve, and one of them was sources, another detectors. Did the Post Office work on those?

Midwinter:

Yes, we had a group working on those. Again, also contracting out work to places like STL. So, yes, they had a finger in every pie.

Duncan:

And the work to make the glasses, this was going on all over the world at different places. You all were trying to make the fiber. Again, it seemed you were trying to make some fundamental advances to reduce the attenuation, and things like that.

Midwinter:

Well, my group wasn't actually involved in that. We were involved in characterizing in great detail what had been made. But George Newnes, who led the materials group, was up to his ears in trying to solve the problem of how to make low-loss fiber. That meant, how do you get super-pure material. They had a number of development contracts with chemical companies around Britain, trying to get super-pure starting materials. Actually, my group was involved in the fiber pulling. At the time, we were using what's known as the double crucible method. So, you have two platinum crucibles, each with a nozzle in the bottom, and one sits inside the other, so you put the core material in the inner crucible, and the cladding material in the outer crucible. It runs down and you pull a fiber filament from that and wind it on a drum. We tried to do that without adding any extra impurity. We made sub 20 dB per km fiber, which was pretty damn good. I mean, that was the original objective. Unfortunately, by then, the vapor deposition approach, using silicon tetrachloride, and germanium tetrachloride was getting down to something like 10 db per km, or better, or something. So, we switched over to that.

Duncan:

And that had been pioneered at Corning?

Midwinter:

I think it was Corning who really pioneered that, yes. Corning had a very big business making pure silica mirrors for these big telescopes. Huge things, you know. Ten-foot diameter. If I got the message correctly, they made those using flame deposition of pure silica. So, they would have a huge turntable and then they'd just spray the Silicon Dioxide soot, as it was called, onto that as it rotated, to build up this huge piece of material, and sinter it layer by layer, and so on. So, they had a lot of experience of making silicon dioxide from silicon tetrachloride. Whether they also used germanium, I don't know. That's what I was told by somebody. So, they were rather well placed, as it happened. They had lots of experience of working in this sort of material, and probably realized quite quickly that they could make super-pure material that way.

Now, Bell Labs also got involved early on, and they had described what was called the MCVD process - Modified Chemical Vapor Deposition. What they did was to take a silica tube on a glass blower's lathe, and then feed down the center of it a mixture of silicon tetrachloride, germanium tetrachloride, and oxygen, and then heat the tube with a blow lamp from the outside. The tube was very hot. The gasses reacted and put down very thin layers. As the tube was rotating, the flame moved up and down along the tube, and so they built up layers inside. That's, in fact, how that preform sample I showed you was made at BT labs. That way you could build up layers of different composition, and finally you could heat the whole lot really hot and collapse it to make a solid preform. 

Duncan:

So, again, a lot of your research was oriented towards understanding how to make this material, even though the British Post Office was not ever going to make the actual product.

Midwinter:

That's right. Again, if you're going to be an informed customer, you better know about the processes. So, I don't know what patents they built up on it. They probably built up quite a lot. I don't know. 

Duncan:

So, I read in Jeff Hecht's book that the measurement capability that was built up at the Post Office Research Center was one of the things that had been done so well, it put you all in a very uniquely good position to understand all of these different details in the fibers. 

Midwinter:

Yes, I don't remember that specific quote, as it were. My group was devoted primarily to characterizing fiber and/or solid materials. One of my PhD graduates built a very elegant apparatus for measuring the attenuation at different wavelengths of pure solid glass in the form of cylinders, about a centimeter in diameter, and five centimeters long, small samples that you could fabricate from relatively small amounts of experimental material. I think that was the only facility in Europe that I know of that could do that. So, if you're trying to make super-pure material, you need to have a way of knowing whether this sample is better than the previous one, and we could do that. 

Duncan:

How was it like working for F.F. Roberts, someone who has been described as being a little bit rigid?

Midwinter:

Well, I got on with him very well. I just mentioned I had my morning meeting with him every Monday, virtually, throughout the year, and I never had a problem. His usual reaction was, "That sounded great. When can you start?" But I had always tried out ideas on him a week or two before, and got his own reactions, and his queries, and his thoughts, and his suggestions, and then incorporated them in what we were trying to do. So, he was happy, and I was happy. So, I never had a problem. 

Duncan:

Was he a good manager in general, you think?

Midwinter:

I would doubt he would make a good manager in an industrial context, no. But he was a nice guy, and we got on very well. But he was very formal, and very stiff. I have a lovely picture of him. We went together to a conference in Ulm, in Germany, on the Danube. We got there early, and we went for a walk down the tow path beside the River Danube, and there was a picture of me and several of the other members of the group paddling in the Danube, and F.F., strutting up and down the tow path in a dark navy blue pin striped suit, collared shirt, and tie, looking as though he is ready to go to a funeral. He just never seemed to be able to relax in that way. But that was him. He was fine. I never had a problem. 

Duncan:

So, you went to a number of conferences during this period, and you talk about a little bit in your biographical notes about the Optical Fiber Conference, and about the European conferences, the ECOC series. How important were those conferences during that time, to exchange ideas and to understand what other groups were doing?

Midwinter:

Well, I can't replay the experiment, obviously, to find out how things would have gone if we hadn't gone to those conferences, but I always found them very interesting and very stimulating. For the members of my group, I struck a deal with the Director of Research, a man called Charles May, who I got on with very well at BT Labs, in which he agreed that if we got a paper accepted at a major international conference, one of the authors would be paid for to attend and present it. And for young PhD graduates, I could tell them that, and this was a huge incentive. There were no bonuses in those days. It was a fixed salary. But if you could guarantee a trip to Japan, expenses paid, you worked like hell. So, it had the impact, I think, of leading to an explosion of output from my division. No one else in the labs appeared to have thought of this. But in the last few years, I had the feeling, and it could only be a feeling and I might be quite wrong, but I had the feeling that the swords and the knives were being sharpened for John Midwinter, because his bloody communications team was spending all this money on international travel, when the other staff weren't doing any international travel. Of course, one could point out that they weren't publishing any papers, and weren't invited to go to any conferences.

Duncan:

And this was after F. F. had retired, and you had become Division Head? Is that right?

Midwinter:

It was after F. F. had retired, and I was then Division Head. That's right. It was the Optical Fiber Communications Division, and we were in the new lab building there, and the whole thing exploded, frankly. I mean, it took off with huge increases in productivity, which is immensely satisfying. 

Duncan:

So, in trying to understand the technical advances during that period, there seemed to be a lot of these fundamental advances up through the very early '70s, and then it seemed to be a problem of implementation. So, that's when it became a little bit more of an engineering problem. Is that how it was?

Midwinter:

I think that's right, yes. The challenge, as I saw it from '75, '76 on, was that you began to realize that the Post Office, or maybe it had become BT at that stage, was pouring money into this project, but they wanted to see some concrete evidence that it was really going to work. As I told you, and I think we may have already discussed, it was quite clear that some of the competing technologies were moving rapidly into production, and would be going into the field in the near future, so if we didn't get off our butts and demonstrate that fiber was for real and not just a toy in the lab, we were going to be left in the cold. That concentrated the minds wonderfully. Because we had this very free-wheeling team, with very rapid exchange of ideas between the members, and we could agree on what we were going to try to achieve, and how we were going to do it, we could do it very fast. That led us, of course, to various trials of fiber cables in the field, and demonstrating that you really could do it, for real.

Duncan:

How big was the group that was involved in that aspect?

Midwinter:

Oh, dear. If I hazard a guess, 30 or 40 graduate scientists, I should think I might be wildly wrong on that. 

Duncan:

How many engineers were in that mix?

Midwinter:

I'm not sure there were hardly any, actually. These were mainly science degree people but obviously with strong practical interests. But then we could work with the telecoms manufacturers. So, for example, I showed you the cable that we laid from the labs, the first cable in Europe to carry optical fiber communications in the real world. It was actually made by one of the cable manufacturers but we were able to initiate it and pay for it and arrange for it to be installed in what would turn out to be very challenging conditions. 

Duncan:

So, you all could more or less specify the possible performance but then you left the engineering up to the company that would make the cables, or the fibers, or whatever.

Midwinter:

Yes. I mean, they had lots of experience with cable manufacture. So, we weren't going to tell them how to make cables. 

Duncan:

Okay. So, this culminated in this 1977 trial that you just alluded to. So, could you describe the that period?

Midwinter:

Sure. In a lead up, in 1975, two other cable technologies were being deployed by BT. One was a multi-tube coaxial cable, which was immensely heavy, very difficult to install, and unreliable, because of dry joint problems and the like. The other one, which was getting very close to mass deployment was millimeter waveguide, which was a two-inch diameter tube. But that was very expensive to install, because it needed laser beam straight ducts to lay it in, which meant new ducts, and lots of digging up of banks and pavements to install it. As a transmission medium, it was a high performance transmission medium so it was potentially a real competitor. We knew that was getting very close to initial working trial deployment. I think there were some routes being identified, which they were going to try and put this in on.

So, the message came through that we'd better get fiber into the network, and show that it can really be done. We had a cable design that came from BICC -- British Insulated Callender Cables. It was a very simple two fiber cable with two steel strength members and very cheap. Very easy to move, you could carry a kilometer of the stuff around your neck if you wanted to whereas the competitors would require several trucks to carry an equivalent length. We talked to the local Telephone Engineering Center (TEC) in Ipswich, and identified a route from the labs in Martlesham, Suffolk, through to the nearest telephone exchange, which is in Kesgrave, Suffolk, which turned out to be eight kilometers away. We got local TEC cable gang to pull in the lengths of this cable, in kilometer lengths, into ducts, which were absolutely filthy, often flooded, and filled with other cables. It was done in January and February, 1977, and I remember going out to watch some of the guys pulling this cable in. They had snow, they had rain, and sleet. The conditions were absolutely appalling. As it happened, all this worked wonderfully to our advantage, because the installation actually went remarkably smoothly. There weren't any real major hitches. We put in eight kilometers length of this cable. It was joined up, and we could transmit 140 megabit/sec data rate over it, equivalent to 1920 voice channels. This was the highest data rate being used at the time in the BT network.

I took great pleasure in visiting Network Planners down in headquarters in London to report on this trial that we had completed, and how successful it had been. The real bonus was that, of course, we had done it in the most ghastly conditions, and it had worked. So, for the doubters who said anybody who imagines they're going to join a fiber in a manhole must be out of their mind. It's too small, they couldn't possibly do it. Suddenly, they had to face the reality that it had been done, and it had been done in hideously difficult conditions. 

Duncan:

Did you have to come up with the equipment, or the procedure to actually do that jointing?

Midwinter:

Yes, we built a little joiner for that. One of the chaps in the lab was very dab hand at that sort of thing. He built a little joiner, which since then has been all automated, but he had a little jig for doing it. Essentially, we used a V groove, you know, a miniature V block. If you put a circular thing in the V block, it lines up. If you put two circular things in a V block they line up perfectly with each other. That's what we did with fibers. Then we just glued them in with a bit of Araldite glue. But it all worked. That was the point. There were standard waterproof housings that the Post Office had then, and still uses to this day in which you could bring the cable up into the housing. There were little blocks you could mount things on, and tie them on so they didn't flap around. Then you put a lid on and sealed it up and it was waterproof. So, we used a standard kit for that.

The whole thing was done on a shoestring. I remember the millimeter wave guide people had spent a huge amount of money on getting specialized test gear, and getting specialized test fans fitted out, and all the rest, for their trials. We went to the local Post Office used vehicle dump and found a four-wheel drive van that looked as though it would do what we wanted, brought it back, and put some kit in it from the lab. So, the whole thing was done on a shoestring, because it had to be done fast. As I said, apart from the fact that it was all very successful, which was nice anyhow, the fact that it had been done in terrible conditions and on a shoe string, really, really made the doubters just bite their tongues and shut up.

Duncan:

In many ways, it sounds like your effort was almost a renegade, or an upstart effort. Did you feel like you were pirates subverting the whole system?

Midwinter:

I think we knew that if we succeeded in achieving what we believed was going to be possible, we would indeed revolutionize the system. And indeed, in the process, would put a whole lot of other groups out of business. I don't suppose they got the sack, but they would have their work closed down, and they would have been transferred to work on something else. So the result was we probably weren't the most popular people in the lab. The planners in London who, of course, want value for money, and the best performance they can get, and so on, they were really interested, and we ran a whole series of seminars for them explaining what we were doing, how it was working, and what the results were. Educating the planners in London on the progress of the fiber project was a major part of the project. 

Duncan:

So, this was all done with this -- sorry, I forgot the name -- the larger fibers with the greater dispersion.

Midwinter:

That was Graded Index Fiber on the first trial, and then we extended the cable on into Ipswich so we had a 13 kilometer route we could experiment with. 

Duncan:

You mentioned something in your biographical notes about matching the dispersion, in some cases, to get longer lengths without the pulse spreading too much.

Midwinter:

Oh, yes. Well, that was some experimental work we did in the lab, but it was never used in anger. If you think about a graded-index profile fiber, if you have a rectangular index profile multi-mode fiber, then the steeper the angle of the ray bouncing down it, the longer it takes to get to the far end, because it goes further. As you round the profile off towards parabolic, it turns out that all the high angle rays and the low angle rays begin to travel at very similar speed, and if you'd go on and make a triangular profile fiber, then it turns out that the high angle rays get there first, and the low angle rays get there last. So, if you have a whole load of graded index fiber, which we did in the lab, and I had some very skilled scientists working for me, they characterized these in immense detail and discovered that in these very early Corning Fibers, some were under compensated, and others were over compensated. In other words, in some, the high angle rays took longer, and in others, the high angle rays took less time. Provided you put them into cable structures which had very low mode coupling and you didn't bend the fiber, which would tend to bounce high angle into low angle, and low angle into high angle mode coupling, then if you took an under compensated fiber, and an over compensated fiber and joined them, the net result was the pulse spread out in the first fiber and then compressed again in the second. We did some very elegant experiments in the lab showing exactly that.

Duncan:

But you say that was never implemented in networks?

Midwinter:

No, because in the real world, this required a level of detailed characterization, which I think would have been impractical for the Telephone Engineering Center to contemplate it. It also meant you had to get all the fibers in exactly the right sequence. Of course, when you come to cabling, you just put the fibers in at random and then join them. If you have eight fiber cables with over and under compensated fibers, the complication would get ridiculous.

Duncan:

And yet, some of the fibers that were made in later years, were single mode but some of them had a dispersion characteristic that people tried to get to zero dispersion. They found conditions for that in the choice of operating wavelength. But that had other problems, so they made fibers that would be slightly off zero dispersion. Sometimes it would be negative, and sometimes positive. At some point, some of the fiber deployment was used where they matched the plus and minus.

Midwinter:

Hm. Yes, I think that is right. The single mode fiber is single mode so you haven't got different ray paths in it although you've got two polarizations. But different wavelengths of light will generally travel at different speeds in the glass. That is called Material Dispersion but in a given glass material, there is likely to be a wavelength where that effect is zero. We caused further shock waves in British Telecom in 1982 by laying a single mode fibre cable on a 15km route and transmitting high data rate signals through the looped 30kn fibre length at one of those wavelengths. This was very significant because on the BT cable network, there were power-feed buildings at 30km separations so the experiment pointed to the possibility of having no amplifiers or repeaters in manholes along a major cable route, making for huge financial savings.

Duncan:

Maybe that was what I heard about.

Midwinter:

Now, you can make fibers with different zero dispersion wavelengths in single mode by changing the size of the core a little bit.

Duncan:

This must have been for WDM later on when you had a wide window. 

Midwinter:

Yes, if you want a wide window for WDM, then you'd probably have to do some compensation.

Duncan:

And what was found was that at zero dispersion, you hit the four wave mixing conditions, so signals got scrambled.

Midwinter:

Yes, then they had to make fibers with deliberate dispersion. 

Duncan:

Exactly. So, that gave you the plus and minus, and then they finally figured out that they could manage the whole system by combining. 

Midwinter:

Yes, that's right. That happened long after I left the subject. 

Duncan:

Exactly, but it struck me as being the same idea. 

Midwinter:

It's somewhat similar, yes. There's some commonality there. 

Duncan:

Yes, very much. Okay. So, you all had this success by showing this in a quick time frame, and then, of course, you had the issue that you described with things beginning to get a little tense at the British Post Office, then BT. So, at some point then, during this exciting period, but clearly you had made these advances, you decided that maybe it was again time for a change. 

Midwinter:

Well, by the time I'd gotten to that stage, BT was rolling out fiber cable across the country. They'd made the decision that henceforth all long-haul communications would be single mode optical fiber, which it still is to this day, and really it seemed like job done. The only other thing really left to do would be perhaps local distribution. That seemed like a very long way off. In one sense, it seemed to me we had a fantastic run for our money, and we've just completely killed all major problems, killed all the major objections, and it's just into volume production. Go. And it's time to do something else.

Various things sort of drifted in front of me. I applied for a chair in Cambridge, but after the event, I discovered that two of us were short listed for it -- myself and Alec Broers, who had been at IBM in the Watson Lab in the States. They chose Alec and he came back to Cambridge, and then later became Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge. He's a good friend of mine. He was offered the chair in engineering, and I wasn't. Eric Ash, who was Head of Department at University College London - Electrical Engineering - was on the chair panel for Cambridge, and he'd seen my application, and realized I was getting itchy feet. He really knew me quite well. He phoned me up one evening and before the Cambridge appointment was officially published. He was probably behaving improperly, but he said, "John, I've got some bad news for you. This is just between the two of us, but you're not getting the chair in Cambridge. Have you ever thought of coming to UCL?" To which I said, "No." "Would you be interested?" he said. I said "What have you got in mind?" And the rest is history. I went to UCL three or four months later, and had a very enjoyable twenty years there. 

Duncan:

So, was it difficult making a transition to where you were in the thick of a very applied project making these seminal advances in doing something that then benefited directly the company and the people who used it, to an academic setting?

Midwinter:

No, I don't remember it being difficult. It was interesting and challenging. I remember going into Eric's office within a week or so of joining UCL, and asking him what I should do. Eric had a very good sense of humor, a very dry humor, and he looked me straight in the eye and said, "John, one of the beauties of university life is you can do absolutely anything provided you can persuade someone to pay for it." Which, of course, is true. “Thank you, Eric.” So, problem defined.

Duncan:

So, you had no preconceived ideas of what you might want to work on?

Midwinter:

No, no. I went there with an open mind. Fiber was done. It was finished. What did interest me around that time was that there was a group at Heriott-Watt University, up in Edinburgh, led by Desmond Smith, who claimed to have invented the world's first all optical computer. They were hitting the headlines right, left, and center, about the wonders of optical computing. I thought this was quite interesting and wanted to look at what they were really doing. I started to read some of their papers and began to realize that what they had actually built was a one-cycle-per-second ring counter. Yes, it used optical logic, but a 1 hertz ring counter wasn't going to shake the world once people looked at it hard. But on the other hand, there were interesting things you could do with optics, perhaps in the computing environment, or perhaps in switching. So, you will notice that two of the books I brought out to show you were entitled Photonics in Switching, which I edited, and I wrote one or two chapters in them. That was really what I started to look into at UCL, trying to look at it from a much more serious point of view. Given that optics clearly is the supreme information transmission medium, is there a role for that in switching systems, or in computing, and so on? Then, after a while I moved on to other things, but that was an initial interest. 

Duncan:

So, you did research in parallel optical switching, and in WDM kind of aspects, so multi frequency.

Midwinter:

I didn't get involved in that. One of my undergraduate students, Polina Bayvel, who I taught in her final year, moved to STL, and a year or so later, she came back to the Department, I think, as a junior lecturer. She's now a Professor in the Department. She was passionately interested in WDM systems. So, she built up a group, which is, to this day known as the Optical Networks Group, and has been very successful. It's a big group.

Duncan:

Her name again was?

Midwinter:

Bayvel. Polina. Her family have Russian origins. Looking back, she was very competent, a skilled scientist, but probably not a Nobel Prize winner. On the other hand, what she was absolutely outstanding at was networking with people. If you just look at the makeup of her group they are from all over the world, all through her personality and her ability to network. So, she had the most diverse group with huge numbers of interesting people with different backgrounds interacting and generating new ideas. I've never known anybody quite like that, before or since. It's a unique capability. So, that's probably the nearest thing to what my interests were. There's an electronic components group down there now. I left UCL in 1984, and have hardly been back since. 

Duncan:

And during that time you were involved in some conferences having to do with photonic switching. 

Midwinter:

Oh all over. Yes, because I was very much involved in the British Institution of Electrical Engineers and in the IEEE Communications Society.

Duncan:

And with the Optical Society meetings. 

Midwinter:

I wasn't involved in the Optical Society as such, but with its meetings, certainly, like OFC. You probably find my names as author of umpteen papers in them. 

Duncan:

Well, there's one or two on photonic switching, which also, I think you were interested in.

Midwinter:

That's right. I think I might have been on the organizing committee for some of them. That was all good fun, but once I retired in 1984, I essentially retired from all that. It was clear that in fields like that you either work in them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, or you don't bother.

Duncan:

So, during that time, you taught courses as well?

Midwinter:

Yes.

Duncan:

And this was at graduate level, or undergraduate level?

Midwinter:

Undergraduate and post graduate. Masters and BSc or BEng. Of course, because we ran an MSc program for British Telecom staff, the so called Martlesham MSc which was delivered on their Martlesham research site up here, I also taught one or two of the modules out there.

Duncan:

Were you involved in the typical political structure of the university, on committees, doing things like that?

Midwinter:

Well, I became Head of Department in electrical engineering when Eric retired. Actually, no, when somebody else retired. It was Eric, and then somebody else, and then me. It was probably for my last five years, or something like that. I was inevitably on quite a lot of college committees. I was a Vice Provost at the college. In University College, the Head of the College is not a Vice Chancellor, he's a Provost. That is because there's a Vice Chancellor of the University of London, which is very much a figurehead position. Then the individual Colleges have their own heads. In the case of UCL, he was known as the Provost but in essence, he's the Vice Chancellor of a very big, powerful university. I was a Vice Provost, equivalent to Deputy Vice Chancellor in most Universities. 

Duncan:

And what was your experience then? Was that a good experience? Were things working out well? Did you have a lot of politics going on? Were there any real issues?

Midwinter:

When I first started, yes, there were issues, because we had just a man who I had known beforehand join us as the new Provost from industry. He introduced an accounting system for the college, which is not an unreasonable thing to do, because we hardly had any accounts before. So, for the first time, each department got a monthly statement, or six monthly statement of the state of their finances, which showed your income, your expenditure, your salary bill, blah, blah, blah. Usual things. And that was fine, but one of the things that I discovered very, very quickly once this happened was that my department was turning an enormous profit, and there were certain other departments that were turning an enormous loss. I won't name what they were. This information leaked out to some of my staff in the department, you see, and they were pretty pissed off by this. They said, "What the hell are we working our backsides off making all this money just to keep those layabouts over in such and such, in the style they've become used to?"

I knew the Director of Finance, who was also on the Provost and Management Committee. She was very supportive of doing something about this. I remember putting this proposal that we really needed to discipline these loss making departments. The Provost, I will not name, I remember vividly stuck his chin out and basically said, "No. We will not do this. You're rocking the boat, you know. No, Midwinter, shut up." I was really pissed off by that. He left a little while later, and a new Provost came in, who I overlapped with by one or two years. Not very long. He was a great guy, in my view. He started to make serious attempts to sort this out. You can't just do it overnight, of course. It requires tact and skill and time. But he started to take the problem seriously, which was great.

Duncan:

Why was the EE department so well funded? Why was it doing so well?

Midwinter:

Well, we had lots of students. We had lots of overseas students, who paid hefty fees to study at UCL. I think we probably had more overseas students than most other departments. We had a huge reputation internationally, which helps. We had a lot of contract research. It was a very successful Department, we were one of the top rated research Departments in Electrical Engineering in the country. 

Duncan:

And the money that you were being taxed of, was that going to support other science departments, or the whole college?

Midwinter:

Well, whatever departments were making losses. They just sliced the profits and set those against the sum total of the losses. Hence, they balanced their books. So, in a simple-minded view, everything was wonderful, except that once notion gets out that the guys working off their backsides after bringing in all those contracts, and what not, are not seeing the benefits they start to get rather pissed off. So, I think I maybe initiated change in that direction. I don't know what's happened since, but I know the person who took over as Provost, and I had a very high opinion of him. 

Duncan:

So, your experience overall, as you did these things, you moved into being head of EE, a chair. Did that then affect your research? Were you not able to do that much research?

Midwinter:

No, no. It didn't, because you can delegate a lot of things. It didn't affect it at all, I don't think. I mean, one had to chair staff meetings, and so on, which is not a big job. We didn't have too many of them. I'm a great believer in not wasting too much time sitting around yakking in the conference room. 

Duncan:

So, what research during that period would you say had the most impact, or was the best?

Midwinter:

Gosh. I don't think I know the answer to that, to be honest. To know what the impact is, you've had to hang in there for another ten years, and I didn't, of course. I just moved on to do other things. There were amusing years working there. 

Duncan:

Did you like academia in general?

Midwinter:

I had twenty years at UCL, and they were very happy years. One of the bonuses from our point of view was that we had an apartment a five minute walk from the College in Bloomsbury, which is very strategically placed for taking part in professional activities and professional societies, like the IEE, Institute of Physics, Royal Society, and so on. So, having that apartment, Maureen could come up and stay at the apartment, and we could go to professional society dinners, probably one or two a week, even. So, we made lots and lots of friends, and had a really good social life. Once I retired from UCL, it clearly made no sense at all to keep the apartment on, so we sold it. Now, if we want to spend a night up there we have to stay at the Royal Society, but you've got to book ahead, and you've got to travel up, and you've got to travel back. So we go to London very little. It was just a phase of life that was different to working for BT, but had all sorts of rewards, and so on. 

Duncan:

In 1974, you were awarded the OBE.

Midwinter:

1984! Just after I went to UCL and the same year I was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Then in 1985, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Duncan:

So, that must have been very gratifying. 

Midwinter:

It was a very, very nice experience, yes. 

Duncan:

Would you consider that to be the highlight of the awards you've obtained, or is there something else that holds a stronger position in your heart?

Midwinter:

I think the things I'm probably most proud of, and make use of is having being elected Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, indeed Life Fellow of the IEEE -- those sort of things. Those are pretty rarified groups, and to have that mix is even more rarified. To me, it says there are a lot of people out there who really appreciated what I've done, which is a very nice feeling. 

Duncan:

Were those awards mainly based on your fiber optic experience in BT?

Midwinter:

I think, certainly, the OBE definitely was. Yes, I think the Fellowship of the Royal Society would have been -- I think it was probably reflecting - I didn't sit on the panels, of course, that made the awards, so I don't know what they were saying. But I think what stands out in my memory was, particularly at BT, the fact that very unusually, we were doing really quite long range, innovative science in the subject, and at the same time, applying it in the field with very, very fast turnaround. I think that was our huge strength. It's pretty unusual. I think that was probably what was recognized there. That little folder there is stuffed with certificates I've collected along the way, if you want to have a thumb through. 

Duncan:

So, you described to me recently that you had a demonstration where the Queen was involved. Can you describe that?

Midwinter:

Well, when the new building at BT Labs was opened, in 1974, I think, the Queen opened the building at the official opening ceremony. Before that there'd just been some wooden huts on the runway. I was asked to meet the Queen and tell her about the wonders of optical communications, which I duly did, and she shook my hand, and so on. There were photographs taken -- I've got photographs upstairs -- of me talking to the Queen.

Then, 40 years later, in 2015, BT was celebrating its 40th anniversary of the new building, and I was asked if I would go back in to talk to the press and on the television about the early days of the building and what we'd done, and the wonders of optical communications, and all of that, which I cheerfully did. So, I was talking to members of the national press, local press, national television, local television -- there were clips of me on ITV and BBC television that evening talking about all of this. Of course, I have these photographs of me shaking the Queen's hand. I did what was required, and I told the press about the wonders of optical communications, and how brilliant it was, which indeed it is. Then, after they'd all gone and I was just left with the BT guys, I did say to them, "You know, you've got a bit of a cheek because I only live 3 km away over there and I'm lucky to get 2Mbit/s download speed." They looked at me as though they couldn't believe it. Sure enough, two or three years later we suddenly found optical fiber being laid up on our little street outside. I just showed you the sample of the optical fiber cable that comes right into my home, and every home on the street, I might say. It's not special treatment for John Midwinter. Whether the two events were linked, I don't know. Maybe better not to know. So, I now have the deep satisfaction of having fiber to the home and 70Mbit/s or more download speed. End of story. 

Duncan:

You described to me the fact that when you started at UCL, you had two kids who were also there. Could you describe that period briefly?

Midwinter:

Yes, well my son wanted to read electrical engineering when he left school. He managed to win a BT sponsorship, which means he had a year in BT training schools, and climbing telegraph poles and what not, before going to university. He went around to lots of universities to interview, and was offered places at many of them. He finally selected at University College London to read electrical engineering, because he told me it the time, it was the only department in which they hadn't asked if he was my son. What he didn't know was that I actually chaired the panel that funded much of their research, so they knew me very well indeed.

Anyhow, he went to UCL to read electrical engineering. Fine. My eldest daughter, a year later, went to the geography department at UCL to read geography, and a year later, I was invited to join the electrical engineering department at UCL as a professor. Of course, the first thing I had to do was call my son and ask if it was okay with him, because the last thing I wanted to do was mess up his undergraduate degree studies. He said, "Oh, no, dad. That's fine. No problem at all." So, I went to UCL, and in the first term, one day I was asked if I'd like to give a seminar to the third year students about my research, and I said, "Yes, of course. I'd be delighted to." So, I prepared this talk, went to the tiered lecture room, which was full of the third year students, probably a hundred or so of them, and there sitting smack bang in the middle of the front row was my son. He grinned at me, and I grinned at him, and I started to give my presentation.

Now, when he'd been a BT student, each student had been given a project they had to work on, and having worked on the project for a month or two, they had to give a presentation on what they'd achieved to senior staff. In preparation for that, they had been told to "um" rate each other. In other words, count the number of "ums" and "ers" in their presentation, which ideally should be zero. Now, there's my son sitting in the front row listening to the new professor in the department, and he had a pencil in his hand, and a little pad of paper. After I'd started talking, I looked at him, and I thought, "Damn kid. He's "um" rating me." And he was. And he looked back with a big grin on his face. I grinned at him and gritted my teeth and so I thought, no "ums" from now on. It was brilliant. I've often said I think that year was one of the best years of my life, because I suddenly went from head of the family, with all these underlings, to being junior partner with my two eldest kids being superior to me in the organization. We used to meet up once a week for a meal in the local Italian restaurant. I would always have a list of questions. How do you do this in UCL? Where is this to be found in UCL? And they always knew the answers.

Duncan:

I want you to tell one more story, which you describe in your biographical notes, and that is of a lecture you gave. This was the invited lecture at -- I can look up the reference, but this is the one that had to start exactly at 9:00pm.

Midwinter:

Oh, that's at the Royal Institution Discourse. Yes, that was an interesting experience, because it was another one of these big tiered lecture theaters in London, at the Royal Institution, a very ancient and esteemed institution. They had this Friday Evening Discourse given by somebody eminent, and I was asked to give one of these talks. In preparing for it, I met the director of the institution, and he explained to me that at the back of the auditorium, there's a clock between the balcony and the lower tier, which goes "ting" once each hour, on the hour. In front of the semicircular lecturers bench, and a wall behind that, there are two double doors, one on each side. The lecturer stands behind one set of double doors, and the director of the institution stands behind the other set of double doors, and when the clock goes "ting" on the hour, the doors are thrown open, the director goes and sits in the middle of the front row, where Maureen was sitting next to him, and the lecturer goes into the lecture bench, delivers his lecture, and the tradition is, if you can do it, that when the clock next goes "ting," you're in your final sentence.

This was a challenge I couldn't resist. I have to say, I had quite a sizable backup team from BT, from the labs here, because they all thoroughly enjoyed this. Anyhow, they set up a digital clock on the lecture bench, which counted down as precisely synchronized to the "ting," so I could time my talk. We had piped in live TV pictures over an optical fiber link that had just been laid in London and into the auditorium to show that fiber really worked. It piped in a live TV picture of the clock on St.Pauls Cathedral for additional timing! We did all sorts of other demonstrations. One used a lovely reel of high numerical aperture fiber, that we made specially for the job. So, you shine white light in at one end, and the reel glowed blue from Rayleigh Scattering, and ruddy orange light came out the far end. Blue sky and sunset. It was a beautiful demonstration. I lost the reel years later, unfortunately. Sure enough, I was watching that digital clock and managed to be in my final wrap-up sentence when the clock went "ting." Great joy.

Duncan:

Mission successful.

Midwinter:

Oh, yes. It was a very satisfying experience.

Duncan:

So, why don't you describe briefly, you were involved in the IEE, the electrical engineering society in Britain, and you had been involved with them at different points over the years, but you became higher and higher in the organization as time went on. So, can you describe your experience there?

Midwinter:

Well, I started off just as a member, like everybody does. There was an electronics division, and electronics division board. I chaired one of their committees, the optics and infrared committee, for a long time, which is part of the electronics division. Then I became chairman of the electronics division for a year, I suppose, or two. Finally, in 2000, I became President of the institution, the top nob! IEE had groups all over what was the British Commonwealth - Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and so on. The President typically would do a presidential tour of the institution's units around Britain, but also worldwide. So, Maureen and I spent much of the year 2000-2001 in an aircraft, jetting around, which was good fun. After that there was really nowhere to go but down. 

Duncan:

What was your most favorite -- obviously, maybe, the travel -- your most favorite part of your interaction in the society, and maybe your least favorite part about your interaction with the society?

Midwinter:

Well, obviously, in a society like that, you're meeting your fellow engineers from all branches of the subject. So, you meet all sorts of people, and that was interesting and enjoyable. The electronics division board had a monthly dinner. The IEE has a very nice headquarters down on the embankment in London. In the top floor there's a restaurant with views looking out over the Thames. I think every month we had a divisional board dinner there. So, we'd turn up for that, it would be preceded by a lecture. Then we'd all go off and have dinner.

We also had IEE concerts. For a while they organized a whole series of classical music concerts by small groups. They'd invite in a quartet, or quintet, that sort of thing. We'd have a concert in the main lecture theatre, and then we'd go upstairs for dinner, and the members of the musical group would come. Maureen and I would nearly always find ourselves on a table with one of the players, which was a new experience. You could talk to these people and learn about their lives. The lives they led were horrendous. They were jetting off to New York next week, and then they were going to Los Angeles, and then they were coming back to Paris. I cringed at the thought. They were young, and they were enjoying it, and that was what they did. So, things like that were great fun. I guess it was mainly meeting people. We also had talks, of course. We had regular lectures down there. Particularly when we had the flat in London, it was very easy. It was a five minute cab rid to get down there and go to a lecture. There were lots of interesting lectures on things you didn't know anything about. So, you gained a way of learning what's going on in the world. 

Duncan:

You were involved, I believe, in some committees that were either based on an award, the Rank Prize, or maybe on other aspects of deciding on funding. So, what stands out in your mind for those?

Midwinter:

Frankly, nothing, very much. It was a job that had to be done. You wanted to try to do it to the best of one's ability, and make sure the money went to the most deserving courses. But I wouldn't say it was enjoyable. If you're a senior professional, and you take responsibility for your profession, these are one of the things you have to do. 

Duncan:

Were you ever on a government panel deciding on funding to different research groups?

Midwinter:

I was on a group called the Science and Engineering Policy Studies Unit, I think. It was a group in which we met up with members of the upper and lower house -- the House of Lords and the House of Commons -- monthly, to discuss matters of science and engineering with them, and to offer advice, and so on. Whether this had any effect, is a moot point. I found it quite interesting, and we got to know a number of these senior politicians quite well, through meeting up with them regularly. It was probably a one hour, or two hour meeting of an evening, down in the Palace of Westminster. It was an opportunity, of course, to walk around the Palace of Westminster, and see what's inside there. That was fun. I think I was on a number of Department of Trade and Industry advisory panels at one stage. I've been on so many of these things, they all blur into one, I'm afraid. I think once you put your head above the parapet and say, "I'm a committee man," everybody wants you.

Duncan:

You've written a number of books. We've talked about some. The Applications of Nonlinear Optics. 

Midwinter:

It was called Applied Nonlinear Optics. That was the first one. 

Duncan:

You've written some chapters, or edited books on photonic switching. What else?

Midwinter:

Well, the famous one, of course, is Optical Fibers for Transmission, which was published, initially, by Wiley, and has been spectacularly successful. I got to know the editor there, a lady called Beatrice Shube, who was a lovely lady. I imagine she's gone to better places now, but she was a lovely lady to work with, and she was responsible for processing my manuscript. I do remember vividly having a meeting with her, probably in their New York office, to discuss the manuscript. She said, "How would you like us to handle this? Do you want us to publish it in English-English, or American-English?" And I said, "Whichever you think would sell the most." She said, "Oh, American English." I said, "Fine." She said, "Would it be alright if I get one of our retired editors to go through it and point out any mistakes?" I said, "Of course, I'd be delighted." She passed it to a lady who I gather was a former senior editor in Wiley who had retired. I never knew her name. She went through the manuscript. The manuscript was a heap of typed A4 pages, probably about an inch and a half to two inches thick. She went through this with a tooth comb. Almost every single line, there was something underlined, and a comment. And, of course, because they'd agreed to do it in American-English, frequently she'd underline something and write in the margin, "Pompous." It was a lovely reflection of the American view of English-English, you see? But that's fine. She picked up numerous typing errors. When I first saw it, my heart sank. I thought, oh my God. But actually, it was wonderful, because you could go through it page by page. Tick that, yes that, oh yes that, check, check, check, and it was done.

And I think the book that emerged was virtually perfect. It sold like hot cakes. It paid for my family holidays with four kids in Europe for many, many years. Then it was reprinted in English by another company. Krieger. Don't know when that was. It was translated into Polish. I have a copy in the Polish language. It was translated into Russian and I have a copy in the Russian language. I can't read either, but it's quite entertaining. There was a front page in each case which says, in English, "This is the Optical Fibers of Transmission by John Midwinter." That was done officially. Rumor had it there was a Chinese edition, but I've never seen that. 

Duncan:

And that was written when?

Midwinter:

It was published, I think, in 1979, the original edition. 

Duncan:

And this was something that you wrote on your own time?

Midwinter:

Oh, yes, it was done on my own time. We'd had the success of the Applied Nonlinear Optics that Frits Zernike and I wrote together. That had done very well. 

Duncan:

And that's the one that had been reproduced by Dover. 

Midwinter:

That's been reproduced by Dover, only about five years ago, to my astonishment, I have to say. It would seem there was frankly nothing better that had emerged. Somebody was telling me they saw a copy of Optical Fibers for Transmission on Amazon. It was only £900. And now there's nothing on Amazon. I checked.

Duncan:

It was a real collector's item.

Midwinter:

It's a real collector's item. So, I've got a few thousand pounds worth of them upstairs. I don't know what it says. It says either there are idiots out there, or it's a very good book.

Duncan:

Did you ever write any popularization, besides your lectures, which you've done a number of?

Midwinter:

If you go through my list of publications and CV, there must have been a lot of general interest articles I wrote for not full-blown scientific journals, but other things, yes. You could turn those out very quickly.

Duncan:

You've mentioned your wife numerous times. Can you just give us a quick background for her? Her education and what she has done during her years, her career.

Midwinter:

Maureen and I met during the start of our last two years at school, at a ballroom dancing class.

Duncan:

In what we'd call high school.

Midwinter:

What you'd call high school, yes. She went to a very posh private ladies' school, St. Gabriel's. It was a Church of England school, and she was the head girl at that school. I was at the state boys grammar school in my final two years. During the first year, when we knew each other, we were not courting, or anything, and indeed, there's an apocryphal story that one day Maureen was with her mother in Newbury, our home town, and I was with my friend, Brian Abell, on the other side of the road. She saw me on the other side of the road, and said to her mother, "Oh, look, there's that awful Midwinter boy. Quick, let's get in the next shop." And they disappeared from view.

Anyhow, that didn't sound very promising. I didn't know that at the time. I learned that much later. During our final year, both of our final years at school, still at ballroom dancing, we got to know each other much better. We started dancing together quite a lot. The lady who taught the dancing classes, the dancing mistress was a giant of a woman. Miss Brooks. She was as strong as an ox. I vividly remember her saying, "Midwinter, put that Holt woman down." And if I didn't do it quickly, she'd grab me and tell Maureen to go sit down. Holt was her surname. Maureen Holt. And she would forcibly dance me around the floor, and then deposit me at the feet of some other girl who would like to have a partner. So, that was how we started off. Then Maureen elected to go into training as a state registered nurse, and moved to Charing Cross Hospital in London to begin a three year state registered nurse training course. I, of course, elected to go to National (Military) Service, but I used to meet up with Maureen in London on the weekends whenever I could.

Then I had to choose a university, and I chose to go to King's College London, which was the other end of the strand from Charing Cross Hospital. So, they were about 400 metres apart, which was quite convenient. We could meet up before my lectures, and so on. We got engaged around that time, and we both remember I had an exam one morning in my first March at college, on theology, as it happened. We rushed into a jeweler shop on the Strand. Maureen selected the ring she wanted as an engagement ring. I think I gave her enough money to buy it. I rushed off to take my exam and left her to pay for it. Well, as they say, the rest is history. We got married two weeks after I graduated, and moved on to Malvern. Maureen's father was a professional cartoonist, a very, very, very talented cartoonist. She obviously inherited a lot of artistic ability from him, because she has turned a hand to all sorts of things. She's done a two year training on wood carving and gilding. So, our home is filled with examples of her superb wood carving, some of which is gilded, some of which isn't. She's a painter in oils and in watercolors. She's done pastels. Everything she touches, in my view, is done absolutely superbly. She's very artistic. She's been a fantastic partner for me. Of course, of our four kids, she produced three, all of whom are lovely, and the fourth we chose. I think we've had a great life together. We're still going strong, long may it continue. 

Duncan:

Hear, hear. We're really kind of in the final few questions that I might have for you. One, of course, is: have we left anything out that's important?

Midwinter:

I've covered most things, I think.

Duncan:

We've covered a lot, for sure. But the other might be to ask, you know, there's been a lot of interesting work that you've described, especially at BT, and at the Post Office Research Center. Do those records, besides your obvious production of the archival journal papers, and the books you've written, are there any other records that would be of interest historically that might exist at BT, or some other organization?

Midwinter:

BT has a museum in London. I have no idea what's in it. I've never been there. There might be interesting things there. I don't even know where it is. It's somewhere down in the east end of the city, I think, near to the BT headquarters. I know nothing about it. Obviously, published papers are out there in the literature. But nothing that would come to mind, particularly, no. I presume there must be a great pile of patents with the name John Midwinter on them, but I don't have copies of those, and I don't have records of those. BT has almost certainly traded them on. What I gather these companies do is they take some scales, and they take a pound of their patents and a pound of somebody else's patents, and say, "Are you happy with that?" and they swap. Or something like that. 

Duncan:

Maybe the final question would be, in the history of fiber optics and the advances that have been made to bring us to where we are today, is there anyone you might think of who would make a good interview subject that we haven't talked about? I think your side of things from Britain and from this perspective is different from some of the other U.S. people that I met.

Midwinter:

Sure, might well be. Well, the U.S. scene was dominated by Bell Labs, AT&T, and Corning, until recently. The team at Bell Labs was so big I find it hard to name just one or two although I remember Arthur Ashkin and Gary Boyd, Peter Runge, Hans Melchior, Peter W Smith, Paul Shumate to name a few. The original work at Corning was done by Don Keck and Robert Maurer. My view is clearly dominated by the experience here in Europe. But in a programme as far reaching as optical fiber, there were many others.

Duncan:

Well, you can think on it.

Midwinter:

I'm wondering who else should be mentioned. People of my generation have all retired long ago, and probably a lot of them are under the ground, so we're looking back a long time. 

Duncan:

Well, this has been a fabulous interview, and I want to thank you very much.

Midwinter:

I enjoyed it. It's brought back a huge number of memories for me, which has been fun.

Duncan:

Good. Excellent.