Grote Reber, Interviewed by Kenneth I. Kellermann, Spring 1995

Description

A set of 10 interviews conducted in spring 1995 when Reber was at NRAO in Green Bank to help unpack and identify the extensive collection of items, artifacts, and documents he donated to AUI/NRAO and shipped from Tasmania to Green Bank. Interviews by Kellermann, with participation by Fred Crews (NRAO) and David Jansky (Karl Jansky's son) in some interviews.

Creator

Papers of Kenneth I. Kellermann

Rights

NRAO/AUI/NSF

Relation

See the 1975 and 1978 interviews of Reber by Woodruff T. Sullivan III.

Type

Oral History

Interviewer

Kellermann, Kenneth I.

Interviewee

Reber, Grote

Location

Green Bank, WV

Original Format of Digital Item

Digital audio file

Duration

Tapes 1A, 1B, 3A, 9A, 9B, 11A, and 11B are all 31 minutes. Tapes 3B and 8A are 28 minutes. Tape 8B is 17 minutes.

Interview Date

Spring 1995

Interview Topics

Note: Chronological sequence and tape numbering differ; interviews are presented in chronological sequence.

Tape 1A – Grote Reber, Ken Kellermann, and Fred Crews discuss Reber's work in Wheaton and at the National Bureau of Standards, followed by discussion of Reber's equipment that had been shipped from Tasmania which they were unpacking in Green Bank.

Tape 1B – Grote Reber, Ken Kellermann, and Fred Crews discuss Reber's early work while they go through boxes of Reber's old equipment.

Tape 9A – Grote Reber, Ken Kellermann, and Fred Crews discuss receivers as they work to reassemble a receiver using parts shipped by Reber from Tasmania to Green Bank.

Tape 9B – Grote Reber and Ken Kellermann discuss early radio astronomy experiments, Reber’s early work in Wheaton, Reber’s arrival in Australia for a visit in ~1950.

Tape 3A – Grote Reber and Ken Kellermann discuss Jansky’s career, then Reber and his Wheaton dish.

Tape 3B – Ken Kellermann and David Jansky (Karl Jansky’s son) discuss Jansky’s work, life at Bell Labs, Jansky family, Reber’s work.

Tape 8A – Grote Reber, Ken Kellermann, and Fred Crews discuss Reber’s Wheaton antenna, reconstructed at the entrance to the Green Bank Observatory. The audio is sometimes faint and difficult to understand because it was recorded outdoors while climbing on the Reber antenna.

Tape 8B – Grote Reber, Ken Kellermann, and David Jansky discuss Karl Jansky, Potapenko, and Reber’s early work with his antenna; includes Reber’s statement about following up on Karl Jansky’s work: “I thought to myself, ‘You know what? If anybody's going to do anything, you're it.’”

Tape 11A – Grote Reber and Ken Kellermann discuss Reber’s ham radio equipment and activities, Jansky’s working conditions; latter part of discussion also includes Sue Ann Heatherly and Fred Crews, discussion Reber’s antenna in Tasmania.

Tape 11B – Grote Reber and Ken Kellermann discuss Reber’s plan to launch rocket to make observations, origin of Reber family names, Jansky’s antenna replica, reception of Reber’s early observations.

Notes

Tapes 1A, 1B, 2A and 3B transcribed by Sierra Brandt in 2018; remaining tapes transcribed by TranscribeMe in 2023. Reviewed by Kellermann, and Ellen Bouton, and prepared for the Web in 2025 by Bouton.

Places where the audio is unclear are indicated by (?) or [inaudible].

Please bear in mind that: 1) this material is a transcript of the spoken word rather than a literary product; 2) an interview must be read with the awareness that different people's memories about an event will often differ, and that memories can change with time for many reasons including subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and one's feelings about an event.

Series

Oral Histories Series

Transcription

Begin Tape 1A

Reber: ….at the end of the year, maybe September or so. And he came to various Observatories, including Yerkes Observatory at the University of Chicago. And they suggested that he come and see me. So Kuiper, Van der Hulst, and a couple of others came down one afternoon and looked the whole thing over. So I had an opportunity to talk to van der Hulst and he told me that he had done these theoretical calculations about how it was changing the level of energy of the hydrogen atom depending on its polarity. And he computed this at 1420 megacycles and he wondered if it could be found. Well at about that time I was just completing my 480 megacycle equipment and was getting it going pretty good. So I told him I thought it could be. And I started out to build a single generator and some other stuff. You have to remember that you start out on these things, you’ve got nothing, literally nothing. The first thing you have to do is to build some test equipment. Once you’ve got some test equipment then you can worry about receivers. So I built a single (?). It’s probably over there.

And I started out to build a receiver and about that time people from the Bureau of Standards showed up. And they were quite impressed. And they had the money they didn’t know what to do with. So they thought they’d like to buy up my stuff and I could come to (?) and put it together. So I did. But that put the 1420 megacycle activity on the shelf. This was about 1948. And when I got done there, I put my dish together and I succeeded in getting three German Würzburgs. They’d been hauled in by the military and the military dug all over and decided that they wasn’t anything they could learn. And so they were giving them away. And I fixed them up for Sun tracking. And they were pretty successful. And then I thought we’d get out to this 1420 megacycle stuff. And we had a director named (Ed Conlin?) and he was a well-educated, rather handsome, personable fellow with a good gift of gab. But he was a fool. He got himself fixed up in this Joe McCarthy racket. And so Ed was so busy arguing with Joe that he didn’t have any time to run the Bureau. So things went to pieces. He didn’t know what was going on, literately. So went the Radio Division got kicked out of the radio building, it was time for me to leave.

In the meanwhile, I had been making overtures to people out in Hawaii and I decided to go out and have a go at that thing. So I left the Bureau of Standards in 1951 and I spent about three years out in Hawaii. And in the meantime the Bureau of Standards had pulled everything apart, literally pulled everything apart, and hauled it out there to Boulder, Colorado. And my dish was taken all apart.

Crews: Including your dish?

Reber: Yeah. And so it’s easy to pull things apart. It’s more difficult to put things together. So it didn’t get put together. It’s just laid out in the open. And this was an invitation for vandals to come and help themselves. So they helped themselves to about half of the sheet metal dish. The other half they beat up beyond hope. And the wooden members, some of them were stolen and some of them were just let rot. And they got (?) rot at the ends.

So I can’t remember the name of the fellow in New York who was head of this show. It was, I think… he died a dozen years or so ago. Well anyhow, he thought it would be a good idea to salvage what they could. So he made arraignments with the Bureau to get ahold of the remnants and he invited me to come put them together. It was about 1960, I guess, by this time. And so I came up here and looked at the mess. And it was pretty hopeless. We were going to have to replace all the wooden members and all the sheet metal members. And we decided we might as well do it properly. And so all wooden members were made out of this material that was used for park benches. It’s been impregnated with some kind of anti-rot compound. And it was (??). Fortunately, I kept all the drawings and they are still up there.

Crews: All the original drawings?

Reber: Oh yeah, all the original drawings. And they are still up there. At least they were a little while ago. They are in a filing cabinet there.

Crews: He told me, “Be sure to tell Grote I still have them.”

Reber: So you can build another one if you want.

Crews: If you can find the old parts.

Reber: That’s right.

Kellermann: Was it Frank Emberson from New York? From New York, Frank Emberson, was he the person who… Who is?

Crews: AUI? Sort of second in command was Richard Emberson. Yeah, Dick Emberson.

Kellermann: Yeah, that’s right.

Reber: He thought that up and he invited me to come supervise the (?) of it. And he got sick of this (?) and he quit. And I got a job working for the Federal Telephone Company. Wasn’t it?

Crews: I don’t know.

Reber: Anyway he was supervisor of some publication.

Kellermann: What was the year when van der Hulst came to the Bureau of Standards and saw? What year was that?

Reber: I didn’t see van der Hulst at the Bureau of Standard. I saw him in Wheaton.

Kellermann: Oh, he came to see you in Wheaton.

Reber: That’s right. Right after the War, 1945. Quite a few European scientists came to America to catch up on what they had missed. And he was given some kind of a scholarship to come. And he spent some time at Yerkes Observatory. I know he was at Harvard and a couple of other places.

So the Bureau of Standards’ effort was sort of unfortunately. That we had this rather good director but he was diverted to other activities, which were entirely irrelevant to the Bureau of Standards. And then the Bureau of Standards ran out of a group of committees. And you know the definition of a camel is a horse that was designed by committee. So these committees… well, I remember distinctly that they had a committee which was supposed to investigate the feasibly of a variety of proposals testing the 21 cm line.

Kellermann: This was a committee at the Bureau of Standards?

Reber: Yes. And they were composed of (??) and hydraulics and woodworking and all. People who didn’t even know the words much less have any idea of about what they had to do. They had one fellow there who kept harping about how awful it would be if it became known that the great Bureau of Standards conducted an experiment which didn’t work. Well, he wanted to do high school physics. Anyhow that was the kind of stuff that I was faced with. I had other things to do in life besides ragging around with that kind of thing. It’s sort of funny in retrospect but it wasn’t then. But I never finished it up.

Bureaucrats have everything under their control so they make everything as complicated as possible. And (?) sent me some literature, which he didn’t realize what the was showing me, but in this literature is this statement that these rockets can be had for free to anybody who is not going to use them for setting up satellites. This is obviously an attempt to protect the manufacturers of satellites and rockets.

Kellermann: That’s correct. That’s right. That’s what I found out when I started to look into it.

Reber: So now all we got to do is find out where these rockets are and whose got them and then make the necessary representations. And they can’t turn you down because this says that you can have them for free. So I thought I’d put in for half a dozen for free. Well what’s going to happen is if no one is going to use them or acts interested in, the bureaucrats are just going to smash them up. It’s pathetic.

Kellermann: You haven’t set up a specific appointment? Is he a Congressman? Is this a Congressman?

Reber: Yes.

Kellermann: For Illinois?

Reber: From the district of northern Illinois. He knew quite a lot about me when he answered the letter.

Kellermann: I see. Good.

[Tape breaks for approximately 1 second.]

Kellermann: My suggestion would be to go to Charlottesville on Saturday or Sunday, June 11^th, and then it’s Tuesday, June 13^th, that I’d like to get you to talk to the radio club.

Reber: The 13^th, that’s a Thursday, isn’t it?

Kellermann: No, it’s a Tuesday. The club meets once a month on Tuesday, so that would be the regular meeting if you can do it.

Reber: Is that the 13^th? I thought the 14^th was a Friday. I could be wrong.

Kellermann: This is the calendar, isn’t is Fred?

Crews: Yep.

Kellermann: You’re leaving on a Sunday…

Reber: No, I’m leaving on a Friday.

Kellermann: No, you’re leaving here on Friday.

Reber: I’ll have to look at my letter.

Crews: Yeah, the 13^th is on Tuesday.

Kellermann: Tuesday, right.

Reber: It’s a Tuesday?

Crews: Yeah, the 13^th.

Reber: Then I must be leaving on a Wednesday then. I’ll have to look it up. Maybe it is on the 18^th, a Sunday.

Kellermann: I think that’s right. And then if it’s not asking too much, I’d like to get you to talk to the NRAO people in (Palo Alto?) also.

Reber: Alright.

Kellermann: We can adjust that day depending on what day you go to Washington.

Reber: Sure. Sure.

Kellermann: Oh, that’s right. And then you are going to stop for a day in California because Jesse Greenstein wanted to see you.

Reber: Yeah. I’ll have to get out these letters because I can’t remember but Jesse didn’t write me. Somebody else did.

Kellermann: Marshal Cohen did. Marshal Cohen.

Reber: And he wanted to know if I could stop over a day. And I said, “Well, my schedule is very tight. I don’t have a day there but I can take a day out of Vancouver. In other words, see, I’m to go from Vancouver to Los Angeles to Sydney. Now, if we moved the flight from Vancouver to Los Angeles forward one day, it will take one day out of Vancouver, which I don’t need, and put it in Los Angeles.” And I gave him the flight numbers and times and stuff. And said, “Now you get the same ticket one day earlier.”

Kellermann: He may not have received this because he told me that he hadn’t heard from you.

Reber: I’ve got the letter. I’ve saved the letter. Maybe we should fax it to him.

Kellermann: We can do that.

Reber: If you’ve got the fax facilities, it’s pretty good. It’s better than fussing around with the mail.

Kellermann: The mail is very slow now. Actually it’s not too bad for… it was only about a week for your letters.

Reber: Well, going east it’s sometimes even less than that. I got up on a Monday morning and left Bothwell at a quarter till eight. And then we flew from Hobart to Sydney and I think I left Sydney about 2 pm. And we flew for thirteen hours. And when we got to Los Angeles, it was still 2pm Monday morning. In other words, we just moved up in to the next day. And then we kept on going and we covered, I think, 8500 miles in 13 hours. It’s about 650 miles per hour. But boy, that’s rugged.

[Break in tape from 14:55 to 15:21]

Reber: …480 megacycle equipment on display because it was successful and useful. And there is some microwave stuff there too. All we’ve got to do it find it.

Kellermann: Yeah, I’ve seen it.

Reber: And there is a magnetron, with a magnet and all that stuff. And then there are a lot of stacked horns. And these were used for determining the directional pattern so that if you designed the right kind of thing to look at the dish, if the pattern is too wide it will slip over the edges and if it is too narrow it doesn’t illuminate the dish. And this was done at about 6 centimeters or some such wavelength. And that was published too. I think it was in a journal called Communications, about 1935. See, I was living is a pretty preferential position, that is I wasn’t living in an apartment in the big city. I was in the country and we had a lot of empty space around where I could build things. And I worked for a radio manufacturer and so I had connections in the radio industry. And I remember when it came to getting this magnetron, there was an article in the Proceedings of the IRE about a 6 centimeter end-plate magnetron. And it was by somebody at RCA. And the salesman for RCA used to come through there and try to sell us vacuum tubes to put in our radio sets. So I button holed him and showed him this article and told him I wanted him to get me one of these magnetrons. And he said it would see what he could do. And the next time he came around, which was in a couple weeks, he had one in his pocket.

Kellermann: Where did he get it from?

Reber: Well, he apparently went over to the engineering laboratory and got an extra one he had.

Kellermann: Wait a minute, what year was this again?

Reber: About 1934, -5 maybe

Kellermann: Because during the war, I thought all the magnetron research was very classified. There is this story about Taffy Bowen bringing the design over from England.

Crews: That was the multiple cavity magnetron.

Kellermann: Right.

Reber: Well, magnetron is an old device that dates back to 1910 or so.

Kellermann: Yeah, it’s very elementary.

Reber: And this one that was described in this article was a small one that had end plates on and you controlled the amount of charge in the space by the voltage on the end plates. And thereby you could get an optimum condition. So all it needed was a magnet to produce a magnetic field. And the people I worked for obligingly had their machinist make one up. And there had facilities for winding coils and so I had that coil man make experimental coils. And the boss signed them out and that was that thing. In other words, I was a valued employee and they were willing to put up with me on some of these wacky things because I was building good receivers and that kind of thing. And they wouldn’t lay themselves out for a big expense but as long as I asked for things which were in their capability, they were obliging. And I thought that was pretty decent. It didn’t cost them anything.

Kellermann: Should we go over and look at the… because I haven’t seen it….

[Break]

Crews: Was it a transit telescope?

Reber: It was just a transit telescope.

Kellermann: But you had plans to put it at an azimuth location.

Reber: As a matter of fact, all this stuff was in fabrication when the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor. And about six months later, the mechanic who built it said it was ready. But I said I can’t do anything with it. So he brought it all over and stored it in my garage until after the war.

Kellermann: What were you doing then?

Reber: When?

Kellermann: What were you doing at that time? Were you still working….

Reber: I was still working at [Stuart Moore?].

Kellermann: Still, okay.

Reber: And we worked on military equipment.

Kellermann: Okay. And prior to that you had been working on broadcast receivers.

Reber: That’s right. And a lot of receivers. They built a heck of a lot of sets for Firestone and Sears and Roebuck. In other words, probably only one third of their factory output went out under their own name. The other two thirds went out under other people’s names. But it was pretty civil. That is, we built something that was pretty good for under our own names. And then we would make a few modifications and change the tubes around a bit and sell it to Sears and Roebuck. Sears and Roebuck was happy to have it.

Kellermann: I think I still have one except they don’t change the name anymore. They just put a different name tag on it.

Reber: So there are a huge number of cables over there. See all down those pipes. They’re the ones that are coming out over there. And that is a big bunch, because each one of those that we see has about four or five in it. And who made all that? I haven’t the faintest idea or what they are four. See, you only need four wires for each motor. Two for the starting winding and two for the main winding. So the most you’d have would be 16. And then plus a couple more for the azimuth indicator.

Kellermann: Fred, who has been mostly involved in…? Some years ago, I mean there….

Crews: Some years ago, it was Mike but he’s not here anymore.

Kellermann: Mike Balister?

Crews: Mike (Wasworth?).

Kellermann: Mike (Wasworth?). That was way back. No, no. He left when I… no, no.

Reber: Somebody cut those…

Kellermann: I see that, yes.

Reber: And where they went, we haven’t the faintest idea. I didn’t go….

Kellermann: No, about twenty years ago everything was brought back. They were using it for students. It was in working order. I can’t remember who organized all that.

Reber: Now what do you think is in that box? That is, only the cables go down on the end of the box. What’s in the rest of the box?

Crews: I think the cables there would be fanned out.

Reber: Fanned out?

Crews: I think so.

Reber: Well, we ought to open up the box and find out what gives.

Crews: Okay. I’ll climb over there and do that. Let me just climb over…

[Break]

Reber: It was spray painted because you can see the spraying on one side of the wire. And then they came up behind here. I can’t reach it.

Kellermann: This tape was from May 25^th in Green Bank and the discussion is with Grote Reber. It started with his activities at the Bureau of Standards in Washington just after the war, in response to a question from Fred Crews about his early 21 cm equipment. This is Reber and Fred Crews looking at the control panel for the first 160 megahertz receiver from 1939.

Reber: And here’s some more stuff.

Crews: There is one of your (acorn?) tubes.

Reber: That’s right.

Crews: 954, I bet.

Reber: Probably a 954.

Crews: RCA 954.

Reber: And there are a bunch of little washers and things. I don’t know what they are for.

Crews: Now, we know what that tester was. If you got into the tester, then there are little leads clippable here on each end to the plate and probably, what, the cathode or something.

Reber: That is the plate and this is the grid. I think one of these, or both of them, is a screen and the heater of the cathode. (All the ? tape when to pot?).

Crews: Do you know what came out of this box?

Reber: No. That didn’t.

Crews: That didn’t. This did.

Reber: Something else. Isn’t there some packing that went in there?

Crews: Just a piece of paper. Here it is. So this was made to hang up on some nails or something like that?

Reber: Must have been.

Crews: Alright. It looks like it would have gone in easier than that.

Reber: This switch was for something but I don’t know what. It’d be necessary to take it apart and find out.

Crews: You think we ought to try to fix this?

Reber: (??).

Crews: We’d have to make one. We could make it out of copper probably.

Reber: Yeah, in order words, your man who did so well on that thing could probably make up a piece for this.

Crews: We might be able to hard solder or (braze?) just a piece on there. I don’t know. We could call him to come take a look, if you want to.

Reber: Sure. These are the (?) for something but I don’t know what.

[background noise and distant talking from 26:30 to 28:59]

Reber: A lot of this stuff has got nothing to do with this receiver. This has to do with a wideband receiver.

Crews: Did the (?) receiver ever get on the telescope?

Reber: Well, it’s around here somewhere.

[Lots of moving around of equipment, ambient noise]

Reber: Oh, cables.

Crews: I don’t see it in here.

Reber: I don’t think it’s for this receiver. Obviously I built it for some specific purpose. Let’s see if we can find these receivers.

End Tape 1A

Begin Tape 1B

[Starts at 00:22 seconds]

Kellermann: Side 2, May 25^th. Fred Crews and Grote Reber.

Crews: So here’s another thing for display, Ken.

Reber: This is the first 160 megahertz signal generator. It uses a couple of 76 tubes down there. And if you take these screws out and this cardboard out…

[Break from 00:47 to 00:55]

Reber: …it will all get smashed up and it’ll trash it.

Crews: Do you want to take that out now?

Reber: Might as well.

Crews: Well, I can do that by hand.

Kellermann: Give me that screwdriver.

Crews: Just so you know, this is an environmental hazardous.

Kellermann: The plastic? Ok.

Crews: Just hold your breath.

[Break]

Reber: This was before Michaelson and his oil drop experiment.

Kellermann: We are talking about the, was it the 9^th edition of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, from, what did you say? 1906?

Reber: Look at the next page.

Kellermann: 1922.

Reber: 1926. Where do you see that?

Kellermann: 1922. Right here.

Reber: Was that it? I was reading that in 1922.

Kellermann: Yeah, that’s what I said. 1922.

Reber: Oh, you did? I thought you said 1926. In other words, this is before Michaelson and his oil drop experiment.

Kellermann: Millikan.

Reber: Millikan and his oil drop experiment.

Kellermann: What we can do with some of these very old books is put them on display in the building. We can put it behind glass or something on a bookshelf.

Reber: Sure. You can do that. And these are the books I used when I was in school. Analytical Geometry, Palmer and Kratzwell. I don’t know who Palmer was but Kratzwell was an instructor here at Armour Tech in 1921.

Kellermann: Well, analytical geometry hasn’t changed.

Reber: No, it hasn’t. That’s still good. Forty Years of Radio Research.

Kellermann: Yes, that’s a good book. I’ve read that, yes.

Reber: And if you look in here, you find very interesting things that don’t appear in the record elsewhere. “Composite array of 42 power (?) together with a connecting (radiograph?) for producing a scanning radar.”

Kellermann: We certainly want to keep that.

Reber: No, I think it went in this way.

Kellermann: I see. There’s Shklovskii. Did you ever meet Shklovskii?

Reber: No. Translated by Rodman and (Barsovskii?).

Kellermann: Did you ever meet him, Shklovskii.

Reber: No. I don’t know. He’s a Russian, isn’t he?

Kellermann: Yeah. Now, he died about five years ago. Very interesting man.

Reber: There goes the Cosine, Sine, and Exponential Integrals. International Astronomical Union Transactions 1950. Simplified Filter Design. (?) Astronomy.

Kellermann: Well, what we can do with some of this is put it in a special section in our library in Charlottesville. We can put your name on it for display.

Reber: Well, now, that cable we saw was obviously not the cable to use with that power supply.

[Break from 5:27 to 5:50]

Reber: Let’s look in some of these boxes and see if we can…

Kellermann: This is the 480 megahertz feed, isn’t it?

Reber: This is the 480 megahertz antenna, the broadband one, and it seems to be inside of something else. I don’t know how this got banged up like that. Oh, this is my amateur radio receiver.

Kellermann: That’s your ham receiver.

Reber: Yeah. Pull that out of there.

[Noise of activity but no conversation from 6:25 to 7:01]

Kellermann: It’s all one piece.

[Noise of activity but no conversation from 7:02 to 7:44]

Kellermann: That’s the receiver, isn’t it?

Reber: Set it down on something. “13 ounces of metallic…” Can you read what that says?

Crews: “13 ounces of metallic (?)” or something. “Metallic bismuth” something. It also says 10-32 screws, Grote.

Kellermann: Here’s some coils.

Reber: Those are the 20…

Kellermann: Right.

Reber: Those are the coils that are in there… there are hardly any in there. Yeah, the coils are in there. These must be the 10 meter coils.

Kellermann: The sign says just 20 and 40.

Reber: Yeah. That’s an extra tube I think. Or is it the tube?

Crews: Another coil set.

Kellermann: I hope I didn’t destroy your bicycle. You had a guard on the chain there that came off.

Reber: Some more coils.

Kellermann: That’s another set of coils.

Crews: I’m not sure what this is, Grote.

Reber: I don’t know what the tubes are but they may be in that in that concoction. What is this stuff?

Crews: I think it’s bismuth. Is there such a thing as bismuth steel?

Reber: Could be.

Crews: It looks like Bismuth ST period.

Reber: Metal.

Kellermann: Look at this.

Reber: That’s my telegraph key.

Kellermann: Still a member of CW?

Reber: Yeah. I only had CW. I didn’t work on phone. In that day hardly anybody had a phone. See, I put this contact on there. That’s because we keyed in the (?) power.

Kellermann: Oh my god. Really?

Reber: Yeah. It’s a 120 volts in the (?) power.

Crews: So, you have to keep your hands off of it, right?

Reber: At least part of the time we did. Come to think of it, not all the time.

Kellermann: Hold that.

Reber: It doesn’t flash.

Kellermann: That’s okay. It’s high speed film.

Reber: Okay. Well now, some where there are some tubes but I don’t know where.

Kellermann: Well, there’s some more things…

Crews: Ken, do you have aim for that?

Kellermann: Well, yeah, but…

Crews: Box numbers?

Kellermann: Yeah, but this hasn’t been unpacked yet.

[Activity noise but no conversation from 12:33 to 12:58]

Reber: A hacksaw! I don’t know what we are saving that for. I’ll put that in my suitcase and take it back. That hacksaw must have had some special purpose.

[Distant talking while rummaging through stuff]

Crews: What’s in there?

Kellermann: Screws and nuts.

Crews: That’s some waveguide, Grote.

Reber: What’s that now?

Crews: Slotted line.

Reber: (Sliders?). Yeah, this is for antenna testing. What’s that?

Kellermann: These are the coils.

Reber: More coils?

Kellermann: No, those are the same ones.

Reber: Well, now leave them out for the moment.

Crews: We’re still looking for cables, right?

Reber: Yeah.

Kellermann: Thanks.

Reber: Where are the covers you took off of here?

Crews: Right up there. Oh, the covers. I saw them. They are right here. Grote, I don’t know why you (?) coil forms.

Reber: I think probably some of this stuff that found its way here doesn’t belong here at all. I think that’s some of the 2 mg stuff. Where’s our (???)? We can (pound?) these out?

Crews: He took off this afternoon to take care of his (?).

Reber: That’s alright.

Crews: We’ll get him up here tomorrow, ok?

Reber: Yeah. Now, somewhere there’s tubes but I don’t know where.

Crews: I didn’t help inventory the tubes but I know that somebody told me there were a bunch of tubes somewhere. What’s this?

Reber: (??).

Crews: These are knobs.

Reber: (??).

Kellermann: Here’s Hein’s inventory. Do you remember what kind of tubes you were using? What kind of tubes?

Reber: Yeah. I think a 47 goes in there. It’s a small triode.

Crews: That’s a 24, number 24 tube. I got them at home.

Reber: Some of this is falling apart. Anyhow, that should be soldered on there. It goes on to (?). And this (grid leak?) goes in here.

Crews: You have (grid leak?) in here somewhere?

Reber: Yeah, but I don’t know where it is. In other words, that’s the (grid leak?) that goes in there, across there. And that (?) goes in there.

Crews: Save that list, Ken.

Kellermann: Yeah, it’s right here. I’ll read it.

Reber: More coils. Well, here’s what I wanted to talk about. This receiver was a predecessor to the radio astronomy effort. And this thing got radio astronomy too but didn’t know it. I should sit down. Is there a box around here somewhere?

Kellermann: There are some chairs, right? Good. Here you are, Grote.

Reber: Ok. I spent a lot of hours with this thing and the headphone jack seems to have departed. That’s the antenna switch. This is the RF tuner. This is the oscillator tuner. This is the on and off switch that seems to have gone bad. In other words, this is going to require some fixing. But it had one tuning capacitor for the oscillator and another one for the RF stage. So you could tune them independently. Now you’d set the oscillator for some given frequency with the antenna off, tune the RF stage through that frequency and there’d be a rise in the hiss noise. That’s because the impendence when up and it went up as to a frequency that it was tuned to. And you could hear the rise in the hiss noise in that day because my hearing was good. Now if we put the antenna on and do the same thing and again we get a rise in the hiss noise, but many times, eight or ten times, which got into the receiver. So there was stuff coming in on the antenna. I didn’t understand what that was. Now this only works at night when the ionosphere was transparent and the stations were all (?) out. So my suspicion was that this was celestial radio waves coming in from space in the antenna and showing themselves up when you this thing up when you tuned it into the resonance.

Kellermann: What year was this?

Reber: About 1930. Maybe a little earlier, about 1929.

Kellermann: So this is before you knew anything about Jansky’s…

Reber: That’s right. This is before anybody knew anything about this.

Kellermann: And you suspected it…

Reber: Well, I didn’t suspect it. I just wrote it down in my mind as an anomaly. That is, this happens so there is obviously something coming in on the antenna but I had no idea as to what form or why or where from or a blessed thing. And it was always there at night when the ionosphere was transparent. So it wasn’t a one off shot. It was uniform. And it was pretty certain because you could get this every time you tuned the receiver. But I tried it at 7 mgs; this was 14 mgs. I tried it at 7 mgs and it was there too but very rare because the ionosphere didn’t get transparent at 7 mgs much. But when this band when dead that mean the ionosphere was transparent. When the band dead it would do that at 7 mgs. This was only an occasional hour now and then. So this thing is a predecessor to radio astronomy but I didn’t know it. And I suspect there were other people. So this could only be found out where you had separately tuned stages. If they were ganged you couldn’t find it out. And that’s the reason this was a good receiver, that I could tune them separately. But not for this cause. It just turned out that this was a by-product of what was turning up. So I think this receiver should be fixed up and put on display.

Kellermann: Ok.

Reber: This was part of the general effort although it wasn’t realized at the time.

Kellermann: It led to…

Reber: And we’ll find some tubes in here somewhere. I don’t know why I didn’t pack them in here with the rest of it.

Kellermann: There are a number of boxes of tubes.

Crews: ??

Reber: That’s the sharp cutoff (??). 6C6, I think it is.

Kellermann: 6C6?

Reber: 6C6 (6D6?) is a remote cutoff.

Crews: ??? [talking distantly in background]

Reber: Ok, we need two of those and a triode. This says 224 but I know that’s not right.

[Activity noise but no conversation from 23:19 to 25:00]

Reber: See now there is considerable (?). That’s broken off. I think it connected on there. And this is broken off. I think it connected on there. See, that’s the ground fault, which would be what you’d have to bypass for the grid lead. And this this here had a flexible lead going out to the grid of the 6C6.

Kellermann: Not a grid, a plate. A grid cap.

Reber: That’s right, a grid cap. And this one here is the same. I guess there’s the grid cap. And I don’t know where that goes. The capacitor.

Kellermann: But what I think we can do is we’ll put some tables, some benches over by the antenna now and then we can move everything over there that we want to have on display. You can sort of arrange it and then we can work on it there for repairs and…

Reber: (???).

[Break from 26:14 to 27:20]

Kellermann: Now, what’s this?

Reber: This is a signal generator. When you are going to build a wideband receiver, you had to have better thing than what I showed you. And this can change the… I don’t think this is the one. This is a 1400 mg signal generator. Let’s take a look at that other one.

Kellermann: It’s here. We brought it out.

Reber: Don’t break your fingernail.

Crews: What do you need? A knife?

Kellermann: Yeah.

Crews: Here’s yours.

Kellermann: Don’t throw it.

Crews: (???)

Kellermann: You’ll break the blade though.

Crews: Oh, yeah. That’s a worse problem.

Reber: Yeah, this is the one.

[Only background noise from 28:24 to 29:22]

Kellermann: What frequency was this for?

Reber: This was the second 160 megacycle signal generator. And this was the oscillator tube, which was a 5 watter, Western Electric 316-A.

Kellermann: Why don’t you hold that.

Reber: And that’s the oscillator tube that’s in that can. And this tells something about the characteristics of the oscillator tube. (??) were vacuum tubes. This is generalized stuff and then about this particular tube. Now this thing had not only an accurate oscillator, which could be changed easily…

End Tape 1B

Begin Tape 9A

Note: The first part of this tape records efforts of Grote Reber, Fred Crews, and Ken Kellermann to assemble a receiver from parts shipped by from Tasmania to Green Bank. Some of the recording is inaudible because the speakers are too far from the microphone. There are a few comments made by an unidentified fourth person. The last ~5 minutes is recorded in the cafeteria in Green Bank with a great deal of background noise.

Reber: 00:04	Radius to this – all you have to do [inaudible]--
Kellermann: 00:06	May 25^th [1995]. Tape two.
Reber: 00:08	--[inaudible]. This is the frequency. You can adjust that to suit yourself.
Kellermann: 00:17	We're talking about the 160 megahertz signal generator.
Reber: 00:20	When you turn that out and you read the DB off here directly-- this plugs into the receiver that goes down there.
	[noise of equipment being adjusted]
Reber: 00:52	[inaudible] this worked.
	[noise of equipment being adjusted]
Reber: 01:08	The diode has to have a heater. So this connected on-- oh, sure. There, that screwed on there just like that. Then you ran this thing in and out. This was on top of the receiver. That touched the grid. So you had an accurate indication of how much [inaudible] voltage you were putting in. That pushed down in the grid. And this thing screwed on there like that. We did it.
	[silence]
Reber: 02:25	It must have connected up in there.
	[silence]
Reber: 02:40	We'd have to take that out and look at it. But that obviously plugs in to something in there.
Crews: 02:48	Here, [inaudible] out.
	[silence, equipment adjustment noise]
Reber: 04:14	So, anyhow, that wire's gotta be gotten out of there because it's jammed.
Reber: 04:28	Now, it should be possible to run this thing back and forth. [silence, equipment adjustment noise]
Reber: 05:03	Now, so far, so good.
Reber: 05:28	Well, let's take a look at that receiver. [silence, equipment adjustment noise, voices at a distance from mic]
Reber: 06:06	That stuff's got nothing to do with [inaudible]. My low frequency [system?] somehow got damaged.
Reber: 06:46	Now, that's the first one. Where's the--
Crews: 06:48	Right there's the [inaudible].
Reber: 07:05	Now, these things connect through there. And this sticks on here like that. And then you read the output. [inaudible]. And then, this [inaudible].
Reber: 07:51	A couple of extra covers on here. Anyhow, those are the [inaudible] and it goes in there first, and it then you measure for gain and bandwidth, and then you turn this whole thing over. That's the fifth stage.
	[silence]
Reber: 08:24	Then you do it again at the fourth stage. Well, that's the cable.
	[silence]
Reber: 08:50	There. It's the fourth stage. And you measure that off and you turn it over again and measure the third stage, like that. Then turn over again, get the second stage, and that does the first stage. So with this signal generator, you're able to line up this receiver accurately and determine its performance, which is impossible with the first true thing I had. And like everything else just needs some [inaudible] added, [inaudible] for placing and removing pins at the bottom of coaxial few lines.
Reber: 09:52	Yeah.
Reber: 09:55	That was stuck on here, but the stickum got off. So that takes us up to the latest on 480 to 160 mgs. It probably can be made to work, without too much trouble. But you got to have something to feed this receiver into. In other words, you got to have the control panel. I don't know where that is. It's around here somewhere.
Crews: 10:30	I found the tubes.
Reber: 10:32	Well, it's about this size. It's a 19 inch panel and it's about eight inches high.
Crews: 10:36	Want me set the tubes?
Reber: 10:39	It's got a couple of meters on the front.
Crews: 10:43	These are the vacuum tubes for something. [6P?] to [1650?].
Crews: 10:47	You were looking for a while. [inaudible] in that box.
Reber: 10:51	5G3, 6P4, 4A1, 9,002 with special [diodes?]. I must had these guys making stuff [for me?]. 4A1.
	[silence]
Reber: 11:33	6P4, [inaudible]. I doubt if any of the tubes we're looking for in here, but they may be.
Crews: 11:41	Yeah. 6P6 and 6D6 are in there.
Crews: 11:51	We're looking for them for that receiver over there.
Reber: 11:53	Okay.
	[silence]
Crews: 12:15	I can't remember what you were looking for. Whatever it was, was sitting here and had a cover on it. And they had two brass, no, copper covers on it. And it was right here where we were. [inaudible]. Hey, Cam?
Unidentified: 12:43	Yeah.
Crews: 12:45	These are all [inaudible section with faint voices and background noise].
Crews: 13:28	There's a 6D6. What do you need? What tubes do you need?
Reber: 13:34	Yeah.
Crews: 13:36	Oh, what tubes do you need put in here?
Reber: 13:38	Well, I don't know what, we’ll keep them together. So they don’t get lost.
Crews: 13:41	These are the tubes right here.
Reber: 13:43	[inaudible]?
Crews: 13:44	Yeah.
Reber: 13:45	These aren’t tubes. These are [inaudible].
Crews: 13:46	Oh, okay. But you said you needed tubes for in there.
Reber: 13:50	Oh, no, there's no tubes.
Crews: 13:52	Okay. What's in there?
Reber: 13:55	There's no tubes there.
Kellermann: 13:57 S3:	Yeah. But Fred has the tubes. I've got the tubes to plug in. I think you say that's a 6C6?
Reber: 14:08	[678?].
Crews: 14:15	[inaudible].
Reber: 14:17	I think it's 6C6 or 6D6.
Crews: 14:20	We got both right here in this box. [inaudible].
Reber: 14:29	What about that one?
	[silence]
Reber: 14:52	This must be a brand new tube. Never been out.
Crews: 14:54	I think. There's a little trick.
Crews: 15:02	Thank you.
Crews: 15:09	Almost.
Reber: 15:13	Pull the whole thing out. I think the whole thing will come out.
Crews: 15:17	Make those things fit in the corner so you can't take them out. One is a sharp cutoff and the other one is a remote cutoff?
Reber: 15:32	6C6, I think, is a sharp cutoff. And the 6D6 is a remote cutoff. Can you see which of the two big holes?
Crews: 15:43	Yeah. Now we need a soldering iron and a grid cap.
Reber: 15:55	Yeah, and a grid cap. And that goes on there, and that solders on there, and we have a grid leak that sits in there.
Crews: 16:02	All right. And what tube is over there, do you think?
Reber: 16:05	Well, this is a trial, 76 I think. Says 224 but that doesn't mean anything.
Crews: 16:11	Yeah. 224 is [inaudible] number.
Reber: 16:13	Is that a [triode?]? [inaudible].
Crews: 16:17	I don't know what 224 is, but it's a tube. But they're none on this list.
Reber: 16:21	Let's see what you got in the way of the [64 triodes?].
Crews: 16:29	[inaudible].
Kellermann: 16:32	We're looking at the 116 megahertz equipment.
Reber: 16:37	[Heater supply?] control. So you can control your heaters. And this is cable from batteries, and then this is [inaudible] the supply control. It's a cable with two batteries, [inaudible] supply control.
Crews: 17:06	This I recognize. How are we going to do this, fellas?
Kellermann: 17:15	Turn it upside down.
Crews: 17:16	All right.
Crews: 17:20	I'd say that's from a reel.
Reber: 17:23	We got a [inaudible].
Crews: 17:25	Yeah, [I noticed that?]. I mean, where you do it, you got to get this bit of a lip off.
	[silence]
Crews: 17:42	Operating manual. [Need to brush up] on the manual?
Reber: 17:48	[inaudible]. That's the recorder all right, and it runs on AC, doesn't it?
Crews: 18:02	Leave room for me.
Reber: 18:10	That recorded [inaudible]. That's three quarter.
Crews: 18:17	Yeah, [electric?] [inaudible]. Where's the [inaudible]?
Reber: 18:25	And that went on a panel, and apparently it's been taken off the panel.
Crews: 18:29	Oh, we know where the panel is.
Reber: 18:30	And nobody knows what's happened to the panel--
Crews: 18:32	Yeah, we do.
Reber: 18:33	--or the rest of it. This, and then we had the power supply for wherever it is. Went above that, and then the recorder, and then on top of the whole thing went this business. So it was a complete setup for 160 megs.
Crews: 18:55	How about this?
Reber: 19:01	That looks like it.
Crews: 19:07	Says diode voltmeter. Phones. Time constant.
Reber: 19:13	Yeah, that--
Crews: 19:14	[inaudible].
Reber: 19:15	Yeah, that there belongs is on the front there-- is probably a fit, if you try it. Screws in from the rear, I think
Crews: 19:25	It's got some screws and bolts and things.
Reber: 19:28	Oh, that lid to go on. It should.
Crews: 19:30	We sure need that 19-inch rack, don't we?
Reber: 19:33	Try putting that cover back on. I think it will go on. It used to.
	[silence]
Reber: 19:52	Now that should stay on there if you tip it up. This is the instructions that that goes with it [inaudible] there.
Crews: 19:59	Are you reading the instructions?
Reber: 20:01	We’ll that whole is still together. I think so.
Crews: 20:06	I think it was done with the lid off, myself.
Unidentified: 20:09	I think it comes in here somewhere.
Crews: 20:10	Do you think it slides in the front?
Reber: 20:11	It said four screws, one in each corner.
Crews: 20:15	Yeah. It's used to hold that plate there.

Crews: 20:20	What the heck?
Reber: 20:21	Fred, can you find those screws?
Crews: 20:22	No screws on the back. There's a screw hole.
Reber: 20:27	Will that set into the opening [inaudible], or does it stick over the opening? Just lay that panel down flat.
Crews: 20:36	Let's lay this down. Put that on.
Crews: 20:42	I think it was intended to go there somehow.

Reber: 20:45	No, it sticks out in the front. Put it down the back.
Kellermann: 20:49	Yeah. [inaudible] on the back [inaudible].
Reber: 20:51	Lay it down.
Crews: 20:57	Okay. I don't know about this. The same problem. It's too big. Bigger than the hole. But it could be if that back comes off if there's something there.
Reber: 21:10	Lay that down on its face. Go ahead.
Crews: 21:13	Just on its face?
Reber: 21:14	On its face.
Crews: 21:15	Let me put it on this piece of cardboard.
Reber: 21:18	Yeah. Now put the panel on the back of it and see how it fits. That's right. Now do the holes match up?
Crews: 21:33	No. No.
Reber: 21:34	They don't?
Crews: 21:35	No.
Reber: 21:38	Turn it around, half a turn.
Crews: 21:46	No.
Reber: 21:48	They still don't. There they are. [inaudible], does this come off? Yeah.
Crews: 21:53	Does this back come off?
Kellermann: 21:54	Not too much.
Crews: 21:58	[inaudible].
Reber: 21:58	There's something. [inaudible] clue [inaudible].
Crews: 22:02	Wow, some more screws [inaudible] that thing, yeah.
Unidentified: 22:05	[inaudible].
Reber: 22:10	Let me look at it.
Crews: 22:15	I think if we take this off it might work somehow. [inaudible] like that--
Reber: 22:21	These screws--
Crews: 22:22	--one [inaudible] got that on the back of it.
Reber: 22:24	don't fit there.
Crews: 22:25	No.
Reber: 22:26	Yeah. That's the cap up here, isn't it?
Crews: 22:33	Yeah. [inaudible].
Reber: 22:44	Medium-size screws.
Crews: 22:46	Now, look, that's a whole group of [inaudible].
Reber: 22:49	Yeah.
Crews: 22:49	Now, [inaudible] that nut [inaudible] down inside, and I can’t--
Reber: 22:54	Put those screws back in. The insides are [inaudible].
Crews: 23:00	Yeah. They will. some of them already did.
Reber: 23:04	Oops.
Crews: 23:07	I'll have to get back in there to see if I can just do what [inaudible] about that one. But I still think that's probably the right panel somehow. Do you think there's an adaptive plate or something somewhere?
Unidentified: 23:23	I don't know if it's in the box.
	[silence]
Reber: 23:37	It sure should, but it doesn’t fit anywhere near. Well, there may be another one of these around. I remember the one was black instead of grey. It just needs to be something else. See if you can find one of these that's black.
Crews: 24:04	[inaudible].
Reber: 24:05	One of these.
Crews: 24:07	There’s another panel for [inaudible]. Here, see.
Crews: 24:33	I've got to figure out what [inaudible].
Unidentified: 24:41	[inaudible].
Reber: 25:07	[inaudible] to take care of them so on my way back I’m going to stop there for a day and hand this junk over to them, and sit around and explain what they are, and they can make notes like you're making, and put them in their archives. Because the [inaudible] were back there about 1850 or before. This is pretty early. The railway only came through here in 1846. I don't know what they did, but maybe we can guess from the pictures. They got these people all posed like they were made out of steel.
Kellermann: 25:43	Yeah, right [laughter].
Reber: 25:46	[inaudible]. [inaudible]. This belongs with that, stick it to one side. That ought to do it.
Crews: 25:59	[inaudible]. [The next section is in the cafeteria with a great deal of background noise.]
Reber: 26:02	The theory says that if a light wave goes near a massive object then the force of gravity bends the light wave. And so, [inaudible] went down there about three months ahead of time. He took pictures of those regions of the sky, and then he did it the night of the eclipse, then he did it three months later. And the first and third pictures were pretty much in agreement, the stars hadn't moved an inch. But on the middle one, it shows that the stars moved towards the center of the sun at an amount inversely proportional to the distance. That is, if the stars were far out, they looked [inaudible] close in, and they whooped it up and said this proves the relativity. And I said [inaudible] without thinking it. All it proves is that the starlight is bent and probably would bend because of the fact that there’s atmospheric refraction in the atmosphere of the sun. If you put a beam a light through a region which has density [inaudible] distance, you get this effect.
Kellermann: 27:20	I think that experiment now is considered somewhat controversial, whether or not they really measured anything. But that's been done now with radio interferometers with really high accuracy, 1%. Better than 1% accuracy with radio interferometers.
Reber: 27:41	And they get the same results?
Kellermann: 27:46 S1:	Right. Well you should! If you didn’t there would be something the matter with [inaudible].
Kellermann: 27:47	That's right. But it's done at two wavelengths to correct for the [inaudible]--
Reber: 27:58	[inaudible].
Kellermann: 28:08	So by doing it at two wavelengths, you can correct for that.
Reber: 28:34	Well, when I was with the University of Chicago, we used to have those [inaudible] graduate students. And they tried to trump up enough business to make it into a degree [inaudible]. [inaudible] pretty hard. Actually, I don't much care, I mean the whole business is nothing to me. It doesn't affect my life one way or the other. My heroes are people like Tommy Edison, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, [inaudible], Gugliemo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell. They were the people who made our lives so different from that of our ancestors.
Kellermann: 29:22	This year is Marconi’s hundredth birthday.
	[background noise].
Reber: 30:04	I don't spend much time searching through the literature for these things. But there were a lot of people before Marconi that tried to do long distance communication using Hertzian waves. The advancement Marconi made was the antenna. Marconi put antennas up, then he got results. These other people who were just trying the do [inaudible].

End Tape 9A

Begin Tape 9B

Note: This tape was recorded during a meal in the Green Bank cafeteria and there is a great deal of background noise. From 8:45-11:11 there is unrelated conversation with an unknown person.

Kellermann: 00:04	Yeah, well, it's certainly been used optically, but had it been used at all in radio communications, or?
Reber: 00:11	I don't think so. Least I'm not aware of it.
Kellermann: 00:15	I think I've read that Hertz actually [crosstalk]--
Reber: 00:21	But there were other people who reported, or would like to, or intended to follow up Jansky's results. But none of them did anything. I forget their names but there was-- well, I know that Harlow Shapley was interested, and he wrote to Jansky and made an inquiry about what was needed and how much it was going to cost. And Jansky gave him an outrageous figure.
Kellermann: 00:58	I have that letter, yeah.
Reber: 00:59	And then he retracted it, but finally, Harlow [inaudible] off because he realized there wasn't anybody on his staff that knew what to do first. And then out in California, there were some people.
Kellermann: 01:23	At Caltech, yeah. Potapenko, yeah?
Reber: 01:28	Yeah, but as far as I know, he didn't do anything. He hired this [inaudible] fella to draw some pictures. As an artist, he made pictures of the [crosstalk]--
Kellermann: 01:39	200-inch, yes.
Reber: 01:41	--the 200-inch dish.
Kellermann: 01:44	Oh, I know who-- yeah, I can't remember.
Reber: 01:46	Well anyhow, the artist drew up that picture of a diamond antenna on a turntable that took complete lack of imagination. If you're going to duplicate somebody else's results, you do it better, not worse. But that never turned out. And then-- oh, I think I know who you're talking about. They wrote a note, in one of the scientific journals, saying they propose to building equipment to make observations similar to what Jansky made, and the name of these two people were Potapenko and Folland. Folland was a student, but they never did other than get somebody to draw a picture.
Kellermann: 02:47	No, they built something.
Reber: 02:48	They did?
Kellermann: 02:52	Yeah, in the Mojave Desert. But I think like you their first experiment didn't work, and then they just stopped.
Reber: 03:05	So I didn't know this at the time - I found this out later - there was also someone that Jesse Greenstein [inaudible] Caltech, and he proposed to go out in the dessert and put up a dipole, a rod, and then turn the dipole around, and [inaudible] different regions of the sky. If he got anything it would be a miracle. And [I understood from Jesse?] he actually did do something, but he never published the results. Apparently he didn't know what he was doing.
Kellermann: 03:52	No, I think that's [inaudible].
Reber: 04:02	I was in a fortunate position. That is, like I said, I lived in a small country town, which was electrically pretty quiet, especially at night. And there was ample empty room around to put up things, [inaudible] if I lived in a city apartment. And furthermore, I worked in the radio industry where I had connections so I could get things [inaudible]. So I was in a very auspicious position and that's the reason [inaudible] they're now.
Kellermann: 04:44	Well, the same with Jansky. I mean he had access to the most modern laboratory equipment and--
Reber: 04:51	Sure. Sure.
Kellermann: 04:57 Reber: Kellermann:	When your first experiments were unsuccessful at the higher frequencies – I could have given it up. I might have concluded that it was a narrow-band phenomena. Why didn't you think that?
Reber: 05:14	Well, I didn't know. I conceded it might be some form of a thermal parameter. I didn't know what.
Kellermann: 05:25	Right. Yeah, but when the first experiments were unsuccessful at [inaudible] megahertz.
Reber: 05:31	But then it wasn't a thermal.
Kellermann: 05:32	That's right. I mean you got the right answer but I'm trying to understand, at that time I would have thought that the natural conclusion-- because non-thermal phenomena were not well known, or understood, then.
Reber: 05:50	That's true.
Kellermann: 05:50	And I think, under the same circumstances, I would have concluded that it was a narrow-band phenomena and I would have gone back to 20 megahertz and looked around there. 25 megahertz, 15 megahertz instead of 160. But you never tried to go back to meter wavelengths?
Reber: 06:12	No. Because it was going to require something beyond my capabilities, as far as area and [inaudible] control. And, furthermore, Jansky had [inaudible]. It wasn’t very good. That is, he couldn't see down to the galactic.
Kellermann: 06:30	No, that's right.
Reber: 06:33	And it sort of looked up because it reflected [inaudible] and for the purpose it was intended, it was quite satisfactory. But if you're going to do, for this secondary purpose, you should redesign the equipment for that secondary purpose. That's what I did. That's the reason I chose a dish. Because that would operate over a very wide range of wavelengths. People say, "How did you choose 160?" I think I told you. I found out that was the largest sheet of aluminum that [aluminum company could make?]. [laughter]
Kellermann: 07:11	Do you know, that's how Jansky fixed his wavelength, also? The size of the elements there is a standard piece of plumbing. It's 10 feet or something.
Reber: 07:20	Yeah?
Kellermann: 07:20	Yes.
Reber: 07:21	Well. It makes sense you make use of that stuff that's normally available. You don't make it three inches longer.
Kellermann: 07:30	That's right.
Reber: 07:31	Because you don't waste it by cutting it off way too shorter.
Kellermann: 07:44	We used that antenna some years ago in the 15-meter amateur band. It worked very well.
Reber: 07:55	Well, around here you'd get mostly [inaudible].
Kellermann: 08:00	No, we're using amateur radio band. [inaudible] 15 meters.
Reber: 08:09	What [inaudible]?
Kellermann: 08:10	15 meters.
Reber: 08:11	15?
Kellermann: 08:11	Yeah. Very close to his [inaudible]. 21 megahertz.
Reber: 08:17	20 meg. Excuse me. It's still there. I had to get to the top of [inaudible].
Kellermann: 08:45	the second [inaudible] background on this whole thing [inaudible]. They're college teachers.
Unknown: 08:56	They're all college teachers. Not all of them get into the course to help the college teachers teach [crosstalk].
Kellermann: 09:05	It's the same thing.
Unknown: 09:06	They're all science teachers.
Kellermann: 09:07	Not necessarily just [crosstalk].
Unknown: 09:09	Very few of them have a degree in astronomy. [inaudible] but half of them have taught astronomy before.
Unknown: 09:13	And half of them are worried about doing it the first time. But it was [inaudible] took the [course writers?]. I don't know if you were involved with the NRAO course.
Kellermann: 09:30	Yes. I wasn't.
Kellermann: 09:32	Who's a starter? Who do you--?
Unknown: 09:37	It's difficult to talk--
Kellermann: 09:38	Yeah, I know that. [inaudible] what that means.
Unknown: 09:39	[inaudible]
Unknown: 09:45	It's the [connotations?] that have several home bases that [inaudible] from his [inaudible]. They get a lot of NSF money.
Unknown: 10:00	For the people who actually [inaudible] got no [inaudible] of logic but I believe there's no registration fees and so it's for the program, So I've been given this course about four or five times.
Kellermann: 10:16	Yeah, I know. They'd gotten in here before. So it's getting a good group of people, you see? So who did the whole thing? You do the whole thing?
Unknown: 10:25	I do the whole thing. Yes.
Kellermann: 10:26	Oh, oh my God. I thought you just directing.
Unknown: 10:29	No, no, actually, I did it, but that's it. The thing is these guys [inaudible] of talk anyways. It's up to the normal college class what they say. So half the time I just sit back and let the discussion go on. You know what I'm saying.
Kellermann: 10:44	I didn't realize you were involved in this. You'd do it again? [inaudible] are allowed. update on the. But then that's the real problem.
Unknown: 10:53	Yes. Already I know because I bet [inaudible].
Unknown: 11:07	So do you spend much time out at Green Bank?
Kellermann: 11:09	No. hardly. I lived here for 20 years.
Unknown: 11:11	Yes, I remember that.
Kellermann: 11:13	But since I moved -
Reber: 11:17	I've stayed a couple days there, and then they flew to [inaudible]. And they were there long enough to fuel the plane. And some people had the temerity to ask, who owns Johnson now? They were very quiet. But apparently, nobody owned Johnson now. It was run by a coalition of the British and the Americans at that time, but that didn't last. Well, then they went to land in Fiji, Auckland, New Zealand, and Sydney. The first one they cut out was Johnson Isle. Then they cut out Auckland, then they cut out Landy, then they cut out Honolulu, and now they fly straight through.
	[silence]
Reber: 12:23	Here we had the division of Radiophysics at the CSIRO. He invited me to come and see them in Sydney. Wasn't anything I wanted to see in Sydney.
Kellermann: 12:36	Sorry, when was this?
Reber: 12:38	About 1950. It was after the war. But I was still in Washington. I left there in '51, so it couldn't have been any later than that. Maybe a little earlier. Then I went out to Hawaii in '51, and I saw Fred White, and Taffy Bowen. And they invited me to come and see them in Sydney. And then in Sydney I was, so that was your [inaudible]. And in the meantime, I had done a lot of ionospheric studies and decided that the electron density that I observed was lowest out there in southern Tasmania. And there was a fellow named G.R. Ellis wrote up a paper in one of the magazines. And he was from Hobart. So I wrote him and told him what I would like to do. He said, "Sure, come along, we can take care of you." But they had just moved out at one field station and had gone to another one, and there were several big, tall poles with antennas on them. And there was a part for light, heat, power, and water, and I could use that help. And all things considered that this would be pretty well fixed up. So I put together some electronic gear and shipped it down there.
Reber: 14:19	And now at that time, Bill Ellis was just a technician at a fuel station. And foreign scientists were not invited by technicians in one of those field stations. They're supposed to be invited by the hierarchy, see? So they had to do something. And Bill worked, not for the CSRIO but for the Ionospheric Prediction Service. And the fellow in charge of that was in Sydney named-- oh, I forgot. Anyhow, he was up there, and he and Bill cooked it up. This fellow in Sydney was to meet The Orion [inaudible]. And he did. And that was 8 o'clock Monday morning, the 1st of November 1954. And that morning the workers struck. So you see things haven't changed much.
Reber: 15:22	Now, it turned out there was a weakness in the striking arrangement, that the work is limited to unloading freight, that the passenger's baggage could be unloaded by the crew. So this fellow who is in charge of the Ionospheric Prediction Service came out to the vessel in searched around and finally located me and I was quite pleased. This was service beyond the call of duty. So I explained to him that they were having trouble with the [inaudible]. And in the meantime, the captain had decided he would have his crew unload all the passengers’ baggage. And they had a big mesh net, with meshes about ten inches square. They laid it out on the deck, about the size of this room, and they invited the passengers to put all their baggage on this net. Then the ship's crane picked it up by the corner and swung it out over the dock and let it down, and the suitcases all tumbling like this. And they did that three or four times until all the baggage was on the floor.
Reber: 16:44	Then they say up to this point they would allow passengers to come on board, but they wouldn't allow any of the passengers to go off, and once the baggage was all off, then they allowed the passengers to leave. So we went down there they packed, to the wharf. They had fixed up one of these wharf sheds as an immigration entry point and they had some officers there behind counters, and a lot of paperwork. And people were standing in line and it was getting to be a hot morning and the whole thing looked pretty unhappy. I said, look, if this is going to be sort of a long, drawn out. This is not how--Just come with me. Baker says, come with me. What about my bag? He says nobody will bother it. Just leave the bag where it is. They'll take care of it. And so it turns out that he had a vehicle on the other side of the dock shed. And we went down a stairs and across the road to his vehicle. We got in and went over to his office and he introduced me around his office. And made some telephone calls and dictated a couple of letters. And then the day was free. And at the south end of Sydney Bridge used to be a small observatory there.
Kellermann: 18:29	Yeah.
Reber: 18:30	And then we went over and saw that and went over and made acquaintance with the people at the university. And then we had lunch and we went back to his office again for a little while. Then we went out and spent the rest of the day at Bondi Beach. Killing time. And finally, about 5:00 we came back and he went to his office again for a little while. And I said, “How about my bag?” He said, “We’ll get it, don't worry.” We went over there to this wharf shed and came in the back door. And the only thing there was two very disheveled looking immigration officers. So I introduced myself and I say, “I got a couple of bags here.” He says,"Do you know where they are?" And I looked around and I said, “They over in that corner there.” He said, "Go get them out of here."
Reber: 19:31	So we got the bags and took him out to his car. Oh, in the meantime, we had registered in my hotel, so we took them over to the hotel and we made out very good, which it turned out. You see, I hadn't had any papers filled out. I was an illegal immigrant, and that didn't catch up with me until much later. About nine months later, I decided to go back to America. So I pass in these papers, go there for inspection. And the fellow looks at the papers and he looks at me and he looks at the papers. He says, "These papers say you're still in Hawaii." I said ,"I'm not in Hawaii, I'm here." And he looked at me, and I was there. So he didn't want an argument, so he stamped the papers, all pretty informal. But by the large, I've gotten good treatment in the years I've been down there that people aren't naturally argumentative. That is, they will try to see it your way if it's possible, because it's easier for them. And so we made out quite well.
Kellermann: 20:56	I liked Australia. I lived there for two years.
Reber: 21:04	Well, I wouldn't go back and live in Wheaton Illinois for anything.
Kellermann: 21:08	That's not a small country town anymore.
Reber: 21:12	It’s part of the greater Chicago area.
Kellermann: 21:13	Yes, I saw that.
Reber: 21:16	High rise apartments and all the troubles that go with it. You got this amount of people, you got a lot of other troubles in the form of parking, [inaudible], crime, the lot.
Kellermann: 21:37	So you still have any relatives, anybody living there?
Reber: 21:42	Yes, I have some. But they're not near relatives. There’s a niece, a couple of nephews, and I've got some next-generation cousins or whatever they are, second-generation cousins, but they're all much younger than I am. They're not interested in science and they don't act interested in me. They never write me a letter telling me what they're doing or where they are. They don't send me a Christmas card. They're completely uninterested. And so, well, I don't exactly reciprocate but there isn't anything for me to be interested in, as I have no knowledge of them. That's the reason I'm giving that stuff to the historical society. I'll bring some more paperwork over to you. I found some more and I put it in my bag. You can add that to the paperwork that's already there. In fact, perhaps it's not all in vain. That is, some people don't save anything. They just throw everything away, right immediately. They don't have history older than about twenty-four hours. I think that's a mistake. You like to look back and see what circumstances were, what you were doing, and who you met, what you talked about and so on.
Kellermann: 23:25	I think that's important.
Reber: 23:31	And apparently, Jansky didn't have any relatives that worried about this, and they threw everything away.
Kellermann: 23:41	No, it wasn't his family. It was the laboratory.
Reber: 23:44	His family saved all his stuff?
Kellermann: 23:45	Yes. And in fact his son would like to meet you. I'm going to call him tonight.
Reber: 23:55	Oh, I'm glad to hear that but that was not the impression I got.
Kellermann: 23:57	Well, I'll explain to you. I think for many years-- well, first. Did you ever meet his wife? Did you ever meet Mrs. Jansky, his wife?
Reber: 24:09	I don't know her, no.
Kellermann: 24:10	No? I met her about ten years ago we had this symposium here that you wrote a paper for, and she came, the whole family came. And she, in fact, did understand a lot. She appreciated the significance of it and everything.
Reber: 24:37	She has changed a lot.
Kellermann: 24:38	Yeah, but, no, she understood everything. And she appreciated the importance of it. And she was very, very unhappy at the treatment he got by Bell Laboratories and that he wasn't allowed to continue the work and so on and so forth. But she's saying-- well, I have it in Charlottesville. I should have brought it, but I'll show it to you, a lot of the correspondence that they saved from him. And I think his children up until that time didn't really understand. But when they came here and they heard all the discussion, I think they did appreciate it for the first time.
Reber: 25:28	Well, I'm glad to hear that.
Kellermann: 25:29	And so we have this Jansky lecture every year and they come quite often. He lives in New Jersey.
Reber: 25:36	Where?
Kellermann: 25:37	New Jersey.
Reber: 25:38	New Jersey.
Kellermann: 25:39	He's in the
Reber: 25:41	THis was his son.
Kellermann: 25:42	Yeah, and he's in the-- I'm not sure exactly, radio broadcasting and entertainment, sort of production, not technical. He doesn't have any real technical background.
Reber: 25:55	Something to do with the programming.
Kellermann: 25:57	Yeah, I think that's right. And then Karl Jansky's brother, CM Jansky [inaudible]--
Reber: 26:16	CM Jansky. was that Karl's brother?
Kellermann: 26:18	Yeah,
Reber: 26:19	But CM was a lot older.
Kellermann: 26:21	His older brother.
Kellermann: 26:24	Or is it his uncle?
Kellermann: 26:25	No, it was his brother. No, it was his brother, I think. But, his children, one of them works in Washington in some sort of business, I'm not sure what. And the other one works, or least used to work for, it's not the FCC, but NTIA, the National Telecommunications and Information Agency, which does the frequency regulation for government services. And so he certainly has a technical background, Donald Jansky.
Reber: 27:14	Were these brothers of Karl younger than Karl?
Kellermann: 27:17	No, these are his nephews, Karl's nephews, the children of his brother.
Reber: 27:25	Oh, okay. Because you see, time flies. And Karl was born about 1905, and he didn't live long. He died at about 50. So he’d be pushing 90 at about this time.
Kellermann: 27:48	Well, his wife is in-- she's still alive. She lives in Florida. Yes. Well, I saw her 10 years ago. She must have been in her middle seventies. That's right. She's 85 now, about your age. But she's still very active.
Reber: 28:09	It's sort of sad, but time flies. And last December, I was 83. And I lived to see the year 2000, but that's about the most I can expect. Your physical anatomy's got some limitations. It's just like everything else. Even vegetation wears out.
Kellermann: 28:38	Oh, you've managed to keep going.
Reber: 28:43	Well, I got quarter to seven, and these people want to get out of here.
Reber: 28:53	Boy, you went through those pancakes in the hurry. I think you're a high-strung person.
Kellermann: 29:03	It's probably going to kill me someday. Are you still getting support from the Research Corporation?
Reber: 29:16	Well, not really. I have gotten several grants over the many years. But I haven't had a grant in six or eight years. But I haven't pressured them. Because they've been pretty decent. That is when I really need the money, they come through.
	[silence]
Kellermann: 30:16	You mentioned yesterday, [inaudible] the amateur radio work that you started. John Kraus claims that you built the antenna to do moon bounce experiments.
Reber: 30:29	What? [inaudible].
Kellermann: 30:32	Moon bounce.
Reber: 30:35	Well, I'm glad to hear that. It's something new.
Kellermann: 30:38	John Kraus, that was his claim. Is that not true or did you?

End Tape 9B

Begin Tape 11A

Note: Sometime the voices are indistinct as they are unpacking boxes. Beginning at ~21 minutes, Fred Crews and Sue Ann Heatherly join the conversation. There are several other unknown people speaking occasionally on the tape.

Kellermann: 00:09	So there was lot of ham radio stuff and the ionospheric records and--
Reber: 00:15	Yes, and things of-- in Hawaii and there's maps and a whole string of photographs and things taken out of Bothwell, Tasmania. How they got in here I don't know.
Kellermann: 00:34	Well, what we thought we would do is some of this other material, that's not of such historical interest, we'll just store somewhere.
Reber: 00:48	Well, I suppose we can store it away.
Kellermann: 00:51	Yeah, we have room.
Reber: 00:54	T-H-E-R-M-O-M-A-T-E-R. Because when I disappear down there, everything's going to be tossed out, you just watch. They have a museum down there but-- and I've approached them a couple of times, but their attitude is we already got more junk than we can handle [laughter].
Kellermann: 01:20	This is from your work in Tasmania.
Reber: 01:23	In Tasmania, yeah.
Kellermann: 01:27	Now there's some things like this whole box here is full of cables and--
Kellermann: 01:50	[inaudible]. Oh, well, here's the-- this is just full of--
Reber: 01:58	Yeah, there's cables there--
Kellermann: 01:58	Full of cables
Reber: 02:01	--but it-- I'd have to take a good look at them before I could tell you anything about them.
Kellermann: 02:06	Yeah, here's more cables so we're just going to store that away somewhere. That's not of any-- I mean, I don't think-- well, maybe just throw it out because I suspect the insulation is all gone.
Reber: 02:18	Well, before we throw anything out, we'd better look at it.
Kellermann: 02:21	Right, okay.
Reber: 02:24	Somebody else might be able to use it. I don't know.
Kellermann: 02:26	Well, I suspect the insulation is pretty bad.
Reber: 02:29	Well, actually, it's so old that the rubber's all going to pieces.
Kellermann: 02:33	Yeah, that's right.
Kellermann: 02:49	Hey, would you like-- in the display in the building, shall we put up some of the old QSL cards?
Reber: 02:56	Yeah, include some of those. And I think in those QSL cards there's probably a group for representing WASA.
Kellermann: 03:06	Yeah, I saw that. Yes, I did. Right. Yes, and I thought--
Reber: 03:09	At one time, they were all in a big picture frame.
Kellermann: 03:13	It's here. It still is, yes.
Reber: 03:15	It is?
Kellermann: 03:16	Yes.
Reber: 03:17	I hadn't seen that frame in years.
Kellermann: 03:19	Okay, well, I'll try to find it. It's a cardboard thing, I think, but we can remount it. Now here's your licenses.
Reber: 03:31	[inaudible].
Kellermann: 03:42	You've written somewhere that your license was signed by Herbert Hoover.
Reber: 03:47	Yeah, but it was a white one. It was something like this. What is this? This is an operator's license. Yeah. What's that?
Kellermann: 04:20	Oh, it's the ARRL certificate. This hasn't changed. They still look exactly the same. Oh, here's a station. Let's see. James Baldwin.
Reber: 04:43	1930. It would be earlier than that. This is 1928. It was something like this.
Kellermann: 04:56	Here’s something from '25.
Reber: 04:57	Yeah.
Reber: 05:01	'28.
Kellermann: 05:03	Oh, yes. '28. These are later. These are '30,'31,'32.
Reber: 05:11	This must have been the first one then. Well, there's two kinds, there's a station license and an operator license. I think this is a station license. Is it?
Kellermann: 05:29	Yes. Station license.
Reber: 06:06	Well, these are two operator's licenses. One of them signed on December 1st, 1928. The other one is signed on December 11th, 1930. So I don't know. That must have been the first one. This was there for two years. Are they?
Kellermann: 06:34	Okay, well I don't see one signed by Hoover.
Reber: 06:38	I'm looking for that too. But apparently it's gotten lost or I was mistaken.
Kellermann: 06:45	Well, it may still be somewhere else.
Reber: 06:48	Who are these folks? That's me.
Kellermann: 06:53	Yep.
Reber: 06:55	Emerson Squires. Jim Wilson. I don't know who the rest of them are. [inaudible].
Kellermann: 07:10	Oh, is it? What's this?
Reber: 07:20	Yeah, that's it. It's just been here, I think.
Kellermann: 07:22	Yep. Now, what's this for?
Reber: 07:26	Contact with the WWE, WDDE. It's Schooner Bowdoin.
Kellermann: 07:36	I suppose, in Iceland.
Reber: 07:38	I took messages from the Schooner Bowdoin in 1930 or before. Doesn't say Bowdoin on there, though, does it?
Kellermann: 07:50	Yes, it does. Yes, it does. Yes. Right here.
Kellermann: 07:54	Schooner Bowdoin.
Reber: 07:55	So it is.
Kellermann: 07:59	Well, shall we include that in the display, the amateur radio [inaudible].
Reber: 08:04	That won't hurt. You got room for it.
	[silence]
Reber: 09:02	Yeah, Asia, Africa, Oceania.
Reber: 09:07	What's that say?
Kellermann: 09:08	South America, Europe, North America. Now this is the WAC.
Reber: 09:10	Yeah
Reber: 09:11	Okay. That would be a good thing to frame up and put up.
Kellermann: 09:14	Right. Okay.
Reber: 09:15	Because it was in a frame once, but apparently, it needs to be a pretty big frame.
Kellermann: 09:19	Oh, we can get something to-
Reber: 09:22	Very good condition, they haven’t deteriorated.
Reber: 09:26	Because they haven't been out exposed to the light.
Kellermann: 09:28	Right.
Reber: 09:31	That's [inaudible].
Reber: 09:42	Pretty far back, aren't they?
Reber: 09:52	1929, 1929, 1929, 1931, 1932.
Reber: 10:03	Well, okay,
Kellermann: 10:06	How many countries did you come up with?
Reber: 10:08	Oh, I don't know. Probably about 40 or so.
Kellermann: 10:12	I think there's about 375 now. Every little island almost counts as a separate-
Reber: 10:19	You got to have its own thing.
Kellermann: 10:20	Right. Well, now all the new republics in Yugoslavia.
Reber: 10:35	I used to know these people. That's me. That's Emerson Squires. This is Jay D. Wilson. That's this man Davis who made the cups available. Yeah, I should know these other people, but I don't. At least I recognize the faces, but I don't attach any name to them.
Kellermann: 10:57	This is all part of a radio club or-
Reber: 10:59	Well, no. This man Davis was a stockbroker in Chicago. He had a son, which I don't know who he is. He's one of these here, I think, who was on the WDDE.
Kellermann: 11:15	Oh, I see.
Reber: 11:16	And so the father set up these trophies for people to contact his son on WDDE, and it was pretty successful. Yeah, put that in here.
Kellermann: 11:35	Right.
Reber: 11:39	Will these go in? No.
Kellermann: 11:42	Well, we'll leave these out for now.
	[long silence]
Kellermann: 14:31	Well, what were the uncertainties? You said there are a lot of uncertainties and anxieties that-- you said there were a lot of uncertainties and anxieties that--
Reber: 14:42	Well, yes. You didn't know whether you're going to be able to make these things work. And if so what you're going to get because it was very obvious that what I was dealing with was quite different than what Jansky was dealing with. And [inaudible] other people that were considering duplicating or confirming Jansky's work, but Jansky’s equipment was pretty crude at least for this purpose. And they were going to try to confirm his equipment using even more crude equipment. But if you're going to confirmed somebody's equipment, you do it better, not poorer. And well, I don't know. There was a professor out at Caltech, I think, called Potapenko. And he had a student named Folland and they were going to do something. But as far as I know, they never did. They just wrote a couple of preliminary articles about it.
Unknown: 15:58	Well, many thanks. That was an excellent talk. They enjoyed it very much.
Reber: 16:02	Well, yes, I talked about it twice as long as I--
Unknown: 16:05	Oh, that's fine. It went down very well. They really appreciated it.
Reber: 16:09	You see, you got to try to put yourself back in that day. And economic circumstances and others were very different than today. And today, then, it was a small country town, about 25 miles out of Chicago. The population of the whole area was probably about a quarter of what it is today. You go out and fly over that area now and there's a solid bunch of lights all the way from about 50 miles right to Lake Michigan. So you just couldn't do anything there today. You'd be completely hopeless. Well, Wheaton has changed from a town of about 1,500 to about 55,000. And they got high rise apartments and overpopulation and now building emissions and crime and everything goes with a high population density. I wouldn't live there for [inaudible].
Unknown: 17:10	Let’s hope Greenbank never gets to have a population of 55,000.
Kellermann: 17:15	Greenbank doesn't change. Well, actually it has.
Unknown: 17:20	I'll talk to you later. I've got to get back to my class. Thank you very much again.
Reber: 17:33	Well, I find out from Fred what we're supposed to do. He wants me to come over to Huntington. Oh, I gave you that.
Kellermann: 17:44	Right.
Reber: 17:47	And you can have Phyllis fill that up.
Kellermann: 17:53	Yeah. I'll check myself.
Reber: 17:55	And find out what they want to do. See it’s immaterial to me. I'll go talk to them for an hour or so some evening.
Kellermann: 18:06	Yeah. I think Jesse would like to see you.
Reber: 18:08	Yeah. Jesse Greenstein was at Yerkes. He was one of the few that seemed to have any interest in the matter.
Kellermann: 18:18	So that's when you first met him then, Yerkes?
Reber: 18:20	Yeah. He had graduated as a graduate student from Harvard. And apparently, he had seen Jansky’s articles somewhere before he came to Yerkes, while he was still at Harvard. And he thought that they were probably pretty imaginative. But then after I had a chance to talk to him. He changed his mind. There might be some future in radio astronomy.
Kellermann: 19:05	You said that Jansky when he came to Bell Labs, was a recent graduate. Wisconsin Electrical Engineering Department. I think he was a physicist.
Reber: 19:16	I don't know. I thought he graduated as an electrical engineer.
Kellermann: 19:18	Well, in fact, I've seen some correspondence with his family. A lot of the electrical engineering things were new to him, and he said he had to learn about attenuators and things like that.
Reber: 19:35	Well, yes, whatever he graduated in, they [inaudible] job that he had.
Kellermann: 19:40	No. That's right, that's right.
Reber: 19:41	Because it was clearly new, and he wasn't getting much interesting support from his superiors. They were merely doing it because [inaudible] to protect themselves. I know Friis has been criticized for not supporting Jansky. I wasn't there, so I don't know, but I read the record quite the reverse. Friis kept Jansky on salary and provided him with a modest amount of [inaudible] support for about five years while Jansky mucked about with this absolutely useless thing. So I think Friis supported him quite well.
Kellermann: 20:29	Well, I've always thought if he really was interested in following up he could have done the same thing you did.
Reber: 20:34	Well, now [inaudible]--
Kellermann: 20:36	He had access to the laboratory and equipment-.
Reber: 20:41	But that's still-
Kellermann: 20:42	But his health wasn't good, of course.
Reber: 20:45	It still doesn't explain why Jansky got interested in this.
Kellermann: 20:51	[Speaking to someone else] Is Fred still down there?
Unknown: 20:53	No.
Kellermann: 20:53	No, he's not.

Unknown: 20:54	[inaudible] took that camera stuff to the [inaudible].
Kellermann: 21:02	Yeah. That's right, he did. Yeah, okay.
Unknown: 21:05	[inaudible].
Kellermann: 21:06	Okay. Why don't we--
Kellermann: 21:07	Sorry. You were saying about Jansky?
Reber: 21:10	Well, if it'd been most people, assigned a task to find the direction of [inaudible] atmosphere, he would have done it, and ignored all these other little dribbles, and said, "That's not my job, so [inaudible] doesn't make any difference anyhow." They would just pass it over, and then the whole thing wouldn't have been missed. But Jansky had some kind of innate curiosity that tells him to follow on to these matters. And that's where he was the right person at the right place in the right time, the solar activity minimum in the early 30s. Everything stacked up to have a discovery.
Crews: 21:51	Well, I've heard that quote [inaudible].
Kellermann: 21:53	That's right.
Heatherly: 21:53	That's right.
Reber: 21:55	[Inaudible] that too [laughter].
Reber: 22:00	Yes. I was working in an auspicious environment. That is, I lived in this small country town, 25 miles west of Chicago, and we had quite a lot of empty, open land around. And the people went to bed at sunset, and so there wasn't a lot of automobile emission noise. And I had an indulgent employer who let me muck about in his laboratory and get things done. [inaudible] It was very different compared to, suppose I had lived in an apartment in Chicago. Hopeless.
Heatherly: 22:40	You would have probably moved though and done it somewhere else [laughter].
S4: 22:51	That's funny how a lot of things work out [inaudible] personal life [inaudible] by chance.
Kellermann: 22:56	Yes, that's right. But you never know what the other alternative might have been. I got into this business by pure accident.
Heatherly: 23:02	Really?
Kellermann: 23:04	I was a radio ham also, and I was a graduate student at Cal Tech and was going to do high energy physics. And I was looking for something to do with [inaudible] particularly interesting.
Heatherly: 23:16	[inaudible] were asking, you know, if every astronomer here at NRAO had a little optical telescope and used it, and I said, "Why, I no, they probably don't even know where some of the bright stars are in the sky.

Kellermann: 23:28	That's right.
Heatherly: 23:28	If they don't give off radio waves, they don't know where they are.
Kellermann: 23:32	I think it's changing a bit now, but for a long time, most radio astronomers had a background in physics and electronics, not astronomy.
Crews: 23:38	Jay Lockman said about the same thing. Hey, [inaudible], use this.
Kellermann: 23:42	I don't know [inaudible].
Kellermann: 23:43	Jay's background is a little more than astronomy.

Heatherly: 23:46	I know that Ron Maddalena, for instance, he had a childhood interest in astronomy.
Kellermann: 23:50	Oh, yeah, I always had an interest.
Heatherly: 23:51	One of--
Kellermann: 23:52	I always had an interest.
Heatherly: 23:52	Oh, did you?
Kellermann: 23:53	But I never--
Heatherly: 23:56	To the point of having a telescope as a kid and so forth?
Kellermann: 23:59	Yeah.
Reber: 24:01	And even recognize that. I think there must have been things that were given me. People would say, "Would you like to have this," and I couldn't say no. They don't know what to do with it, so they [inaudible]. [laughter]

Reber: 24:27	I can't say no because it would appear ungracious.
Heatherly: 24:30	That's true. Well, if you don't need him yet then that's okay, but when you're ready to start bringing things over you can use him then, or you can use him now or whenever.
Reber: 24:41	How long are you going to be here?
Unknown: 24:43	I’ll be here all summer.

Reber: 24:44	Oh, you are?
Kellermann: 24:45	Yeah.
Reber: 24:46	Well, we can probably find something for you to do in a couple of days. [laughter]
Heatherly: 24:50	Okay.
Crews: 24:51	What’s your phone number down there.
Unknown: 24:53	I'm not sure. I'm [inaudible].
Unknown: 24:55	Oh, okay.
Kellermann: 24:55	In here?
Heatherly: 24:57	No, not in here. He's sort of here in the--
Reber: 24:59	But anyhow, you'll hear from us.
Kellermann: 25:00	Okay.
Kellermann: 25:02	Sounds good.
Reber: 25:02	Thank you.
Heatherly: 25:06	Your boxes are well packed, huh?
Reber: 25:07	Uh-huh.
Heatherly: 25:08	To the gills. [inaudible]. Are you going to use one of your 40-foot poles? [laughter]
Unknown: 25:21	I will.
Heatherly: 25:23	[You want?] two of these bagels? They're frozen.
Reber: 25:24	[inaudible].
Reber: 25:24	I can get 40 [inaudible].
Unknown: 25:28	Yeah, [inaudible] days [to go out?].
Reber: 25:37	Are you the [inaudible] [Colin?] [inaudible]?
Unknown: 25:45	I should get all that.
Unknown: 25:48	[inaudible].
Heatherly: 25:48	Who's the interference person back there?
Reber: 25:51	Well, [inaudible] put together [inaudible].
Crews: 25:56	I've never been [inaudible]. I can handle [inaudible].
Reber: 25:58	Oh, yeah. [inaudible] here is used for something [inaudible].
Heatherly: 26:05	I understood that it was used--
Unknown: 26:07	[inaudible].
Crews: 26:10	[inaudible] name [inaudible]. He had that built [inaudible] thing, [that tower?]. I've only ever [inaudible].
Reber: 26:20	Like [inaudible]?
Crews: 26:21	Yeah, [mine?]
Heatherly: 26:24	Doesn't Fred remember?
Crews: 26:25	No.
Heatherly: 26:27	Huh. Well, he doesn't remember then we're in bad shape. What about [inaudible]? What did he get here? He's got a low employee number.
Crews: 26:36	Yup. [inaudible].
Crews: 26:38	It was when we were trying to [inaudible].
Heatherly: 26:42	He might remember a name,
Reber: 26:47	When they took it and unloaded a lot of the stuff in the equipment shed--
Unknown: 26:50	What are you doing? [inaudible].
Reber: 26:51	--out of this truck without asking too
Unknown: 26:53	-- [inaudible].
Reber: 26:54	--many questions what is what. See? In other words, [inaudible].
Heatherly: 26:57	Settle it out, yeah.
Crews: 26:59	[inaudible] is just a test. [inaudible] concepts.
Heatherly: 27:00	Who works with you in Tasmania? Who's--?
Crews: 27:02	He is [inaudible].
Heatherly: 27:03	Who helps you with your longwave work?
Crews: 27:05	[inaudible] part of [inaudible].
Reber: 27:07	Nobody.
Crews: 27:07	Should we put a tarp on that as well?
Reber: 27:09	I had all that stuff constructed on a [inaudible].
Crews: 27:13	He's picked out some stuff, and.
Reber: 27:16	It [inaudible] automatically so that I didn't need any help. And so did that for several days and I'd go out and collect the data and reset it. Oh, I had a fellow. You see this is on a big sheep ranch. I don't know how much he's got but a lot. That is I think he got 30 square miles.
Heatherly: 27:38	Wow. That's a lot. Yeah.
Reber: 27:40	Whatever that is. 30 times 6, about 18,000 acres. And he's got a certain amount of help which he doesn't know what to do with, so.
Heatherly: 27:55	You know what to do with it then. Right?
Reber: 27:56	So I surely [inaudible] to work for him towards the afternoon or whatever. I tell him, "I need a man." He says, "Okay, take Joe." [laughter] So Joe fires up the tractor and we go out and do some work.
Heatherly: 28:14	You're still using it, aren't you?
Reber: 28:15	No.
Heatherly: 28:16	Is it still operating or not?
Reber: 28:17	No, it's been demolished.
Heatherly: 28:18	Oh, I didn't know that.
Reber: 28:20	Well, it had worked itself out and it had covered the sky. And circumstances were deteriorating. That is, solar activity was increasing and the amount of observing time you could get was getting to be thinner and thinner. And maintenance was lousy.
Heatherly: 28:40	Oh, yeah.
Reber: 28:40	Things had to be kept up if you were going to use it. And finally I decided that we would just demolish it. So it is in the process of being demolished. There's 128 poles, each weigh 2 tons. So there's about 250 tons of firewood and his boys helped themselves.
Crews: 29:08	Firewood is sort of scarce.
Reber: 29:10	Yeah, it's good firewood too because it's straight grain that is dry.
Heatherly: 29:16	Very [inaudible].
Reber: 29:16	All you got to do is to cut it up with a chainsaw and feed it into the [inaudible].
Crews: 29:25	I don't think that your range-- it covered about over 200 acres, didn't it? Your antenna range that you have.
Reber: 29:32	I think it covered about 350 acres.
Crews: 29:34	Was it? [That was a big?]--
Reber: 29:36	It was over a half a square mile.
Heatherly: 29:38	Wow.
Reber: 29:40	It's a big [jump?]. The antennas were 422 [inaudible]. And I found a tape here somewhere. It looks like it but the only thing is-- well, I don't know, it's around here somewhere. It's a tape. It's a bright canvas container about this big in diameter, and if you open it up there's a measuring tape inside. I thought that was the tape [inaudible]. That one's down there. So it's the second one [inaudible].
Kellermann: 30:27	And this is what you wanted to--
Reber: 30:29	Well, not now.
Unknown: 30:34	How do you like the [inaudible]?

End Tape 11A

Begin Tape 11B

Note: Recorded in the Green Bank cafeteria, with considerable background noise, which begins to taper off about halfway through the tape.

Kellermann: 00:04	He was asking about the missiles that you were trying to get. I wasn't clear from your letter exactly what kind of experiment you had in mind.
Reber: 00:19	What kind of an experiment I had in mind?
Kellermann: 00:21	With the missiles. You wanted to expose some hydrogen in the atmosphere, right?
Reber: 00:27	Oh, now you're talking about something else.
Kellermann: 00:28	Yeah, the missiles.
Reber: 00:30	Oh, yeah. Well.
	[silence]
Reber: 00:47	What I was looking for was some scheme of reducing the electron density in the ionosphere. If you can reduce it enough, you automatically open up the possibility of making observations in still lower frequencies. And I consulted with several people and they're all very coy and very secretive. They don't want to tell you where they are or whose got them. So
	[silence]
Reber: 02:00	Finally I got a hold of a member of the House of Representatives from Illinois. He has a more persuasive way about him. And apparently he's not easily put off, because he got some literature that he sent me. And about two years ago Congress passed some law that said these ballistic missiles may be had for free to anybody who is not going to set up a satellite. It was obviously-- it was an attempt to protect the manufacturer of satellites. Sort of illegal but apparently so. So that was just a few weeks ago. And all I want to do is to hoist some liquid hydrogen gas up to the bottom of the ionosphere and release it and see if it'll sweep up the electrons and create an artificial air. If that's done at midnight, the hole will probably persist until sunrise.
Kellermann: 03:49	Get rid of the D layer, right?
Reber: 03:57	But there's always somebody in the background trying to themselves or protect somebody else
Kellermann: 04:03	Well, what kind of observations would you be making though? You don't have your array anymore do you--
Reber: 04:13	No.
Kellermann: 04:14	--to build something?
Reber: 04:20	Well, I hadn't decided that, but it would be something similar that had a more sparse and open scale. In other words, the [front?] antennas were 440 feet apart. I'd multiply that by about four, which would take it to the 880s, 1760s. But it would still have a pickup [effect?] covering the entire area.
Kellermann: 04:45	What frequency are you talking about? One megahertz? One megacycle or half?
Reber: 04:49	Half.
Kellermann: 04:50	Half. And What kind of resolution would you be looking for?
Reber: 05:03	Well perhaps, five degrees.
	[silence]
Kellermann: 05:24	Even if you get these missiles won't it be difficult to get them to Tasmania and get them launched and everything?
Reber: 05:34	Well, I've been consulting with several [people?] and the first thing to do is to find out if this system works. I was getting the [inaudible]. And send up a dose of this liquid hydrogen and see if the [inaudible] frequency really does drop. If it does, do it a couple more times to make sure, the first time it might have been a fluke or something. Or [inaudible]. Well, the first test would probably be made off the coast of Virginia because they have a like [crosstalk]--
Kellermann: 06:30	Wallops Island. Wallops Island, right. Yeah. Well, you don't need a big rocket for this, do you? You're only talking about 100 kilograms or something of payload, 100 kilometers or something--
Reber: 06:55	I was talking about 1,000 pounds.
Kellermann: 06:59	1,000 pounds, I see.
Reber: 07:03	That's about 500 or [something like that?].
Kellermann: 07:04	I see. Okay. Yeah, that's a lot.
Reber: 07:06	Well, whatever the rocket will take. In other words, the more the merrier. And now my friends that are supposed to be making some inquiries to find out what these rockets will do. At this rate, they should know. But you wouldn't need a lot of them. If you made a shot every couple of weeks with the [inaudible]. You wouldn't need a lot, [every day?].
	[silence]
Kellermann: 08:15	Of course, you'd have to release too much probably and put it in a satellite let the satellite release [inaudible] [material?]. You only have one [inaudible].
Reber: 08:28	[inaudible], yeah.
Kellermann: 08:30	Material, that'd [inaudible].
Reber: 08:34	We'd have to get a [hold of it?]. I think you'd have to use the [F layer?].
Kellermann: 08:41	[inaudible] layer anyway doesn't it?
Reber: 08:44	It could be [F layer?].
Kellermann: 08:45	[inaudible].
	[silence]
Reber: 09:08	This has been done at least once before. But it was done so badly you can't have any confidence in it. If they did as they said the shuttle and [inaudible] required a couple of minutes, is it went over. And the idea was that the exhaust would have this same effect of sweeping it up. And they did to a certain small extent. Dropped the [inaudible] frequencies from about two and a half to about 1.9. And I don't know how much they used but perhaps 1000 pounds. But it was poorly organized and the exhaust gasses were mainly carbon dioxide, [but it worked?]. Use a [heavy molecule?] but they didn't go up, they went down. And had a relatively short life, so their sweeping action was pretty trivial. So there's some of these kinds of things that you do because it’s easy to do. And not because they make any sense.
	[silence]
Reber: 10:49	The sweeping action depends, pretty much, on how many neutral atoms you've got. If you've only got a few, the sweeping action might be sparse and in the case of [inaudible] carbon dioxide you don't have many so cases of [inaudible]. What did you do? I actually weighed so high, they did about 20 times the [inaudible]. [crosstalk]
	[silence, considerable background talk that probably includes a question to Reber]
Reber: 12:42	The story I got was that his father was an admirer of an educator in Michigan named Karl Guthe. And so when this boy showed up he got hooked with the name of Karl Guthe Jansky. Now, that was a fairly common thing, especially in the 19th history. Because my grandfather was an admirer of a Pennsylvania politician named Schuyler Colfax because Schuyler Colfax was Grant's vice president so when my father showed up, he got stuck with the name of Schuyler Colfax Reber. I had some dirty trick myself. And I was lucky. Sometimes they hand the name down from the father to the son, so I could've been Schuyler Colfax Reber, yet I wasn't.
Unknown: 13:48	Well, where did that come from?
Reber: 13:51	Well, it's not all clear as my mother's maiden name was Harriet Grote. And usually, there's a bunch of people standing around with the sort of names to hang on the newcomer when he arrived, but not my parents. Right? They got to the point where they had to issue a birth certificate within the law - that's something like 48 hours - and put on the birth certificate, whatever your name is. Yet my parents haven't given me a name, so they just put on the birth certificate Baby Reber. So that's my name, Baby Reber.
Unknown: 14:36	I have seen that.
Reber: 14:38	But I had the wish to get my mother to sign a certificate stating that that Baby Reber on the birth certificate was one and the same person as Grote Reber. I'm legitimized. It is so ridiculous. Well, particularly, people will give the child as a middle name that's the mother's maiden name. So I should have been Henry Grote Reber or William Grote Reber or something like that, see? But they must have a [inaudible].
Unknown: 15:36	Come on Grote, somebody taught you something. I said somebody taught you something.
Reber: 15:42	Well, thank you. I read your inquiry in later years about how you pronounce that name. The English pronunciation is what I give it. Grote. That is the final E makes the O long. Some people give it a French pronunciation Grotee. Or G-R-O-T-E-E. But that's wrong, too. And it's a fairly common name along the coast of the North Sea between Denmark and Holland. And there seems to be a difference of opinion. Some people tell me pronounced Groteh. G-R-O-T-E-H.Groteh. And other people say it's pronounced Grotah. G-R-O-T-A-H. So take your choice. I decided to emphasize it.
Kellermann: 16:50	I've heard northern European, the Dutch call it--
Reber: 16:54	Grotah.
Kellermann: 16:55	Yeah. [crosstalk].
Reber: 17:07	Now if that was the worst of my troubles, that'd be no problem.
Crews: 17:12	What's the worst of your troubles, Grote? What's the worst of your troubles, then?
Reber: 17:17	I don't know.
	[laughter]
Crews: 17:19	You don't have to talk about that.
Reber: 17:26	Is this thing supposed to be running? It is, the red light is not on.
Kellermann: 17:31	It's not? [inaudible].
Reber: 17:40	Hold it. But Washington Irving Reber had no literary ability whatsoever. And the second one he named after the politician I told you about, my father had no aspirations of any political nature. He never ran for any office or anything like that. He was a prohibitionist, but he didn't even belong to the Prohibition Party. He was just a nonentity. And the youngest one he named after James Watt, the promoter of the steam engine. But James Watt really didn't know which was the working end of a wrench. So it was a complete poof out.
Crews: 18:38	So you're a member of a unique family Grote?
Reber: 18:41	I guess I am.
	[silence]
Unknown: 19:01	Hey, Grote, is the Jansky antenna--is the beam. It looks like the beam is, you know, looking straight into the mountains as the beam elevated above the [crosstalk]?
Reber: 19:16	The elements of the antenna are vertical. That would make the acceptance pattern horizontal. But the catch is that it's over a conducting plane, the earth. And so this tips the beam up about 20 odd, 30 odd degrees.
Unknown: 19:33 Kellermann:	I see. Okay. Like any [IA?] or beam antenna, it's 10, 20 degrees.
Reber: 19:40	So that's the reason he never could see down to the center of the Milky Way. He never could see below Aquarius because the beam was skidding around in the [inaudible].
	[silence]
Reber: 20:04	Of course, you have to remember that this antenna of his was built for another purpose. And it was pretty efficient for that desired purpose. But that's one reason when you go out to copy or follow up on somebody else's observations, you don't do it the way they did it. You do it better. And some of the people who were proposing to confirm or deny Janksy's results were going to do it [similar?]. Well, that's silly. If you can't do better than that, you might as well don't bother.
Kellermann: 20:44	Do you know exactly how the antenna was fixed?
Reber: 20:50	Yeah.
Kellermann: 20:51	It's fitted against a counterpoint. [apparently referring to a drawing in hand]
Reber: 20:53	Yeah. There was an extra halfway to here, and then--
Kellermann: 21:00	It was at halfway?
Reber: 21:02	That's right. And then--
Kellermann: 21:08	Set between here.
Reber: 21:09	Then a parallel wireline went through there into a--
Kellermann: 21:14	A matching network.
Reber: 21:15	No, it didn't get-- it went into a transformer. And the transformer changed it to a coaxial and it went down the center pipe of a turntable.
Kellermann: 21:36	Ahhh. This was fixed along the piece of the wood, or? Well, it went through one leg. This is only a quarter ways.
Reber: 21:47	Yeah.
Kellermann: 21:47	So this the halfway.
Reber: 21:48	No, I don't think it was at halfway. I think it was just a quarter. In other words, this extra piece that was put on here was the same length as that. I'm not too familiar with it, but-
Kellermann: 22:08	I've seen it described both ways and in Jansky's papers, it doesn't say.
Reber: 22:16	I've got a letter I'm going to show you, or could give to you, from A.C. Beck.
Kellermann: 22:23	So you know you guys [bonded?] with him and everything.
Reber: 22:27	And it describes these kind of things because Beck was a contemporary in the work.
Kellermann: 22:33	Yeah, I've met him.
Reber: 22:35	I think he's dead now.
Kellermann: 22:36	Yes, a few years ago.
Reber: 22:38	After he retired, he went down to Florida. And he just explained some of these things and he also explains what happened to Janksy's records, which are not very credible. [laughter] But Beck had a lot of records of his own and something else, I don't know what.
Unknown: 23:00	Could I impose on you to maybe just sign this for me?
Reber: 23:04	Sure. On the back?
Unknown: 23:07	Oh, just right on the front there.
	[silence]
Reber: 23:19	I thought that [inaudible] was still on that thing, is it?
Kellermann: 23:25	No. Well, whatever is on something that somebody else put [inaudible].
Unknown: 23:29	Thank you, sir
Kellermann: 23:29	it's even later. Hein and I put something on when we used it, but I think some [inaudible]
Reber: 23:33	[crosstalk]
Unknown: 23:35	Enjoyed your talk this morning.
Reber: 23:36	Thank you. I tried to give it that human interest touch.
Unknown: 23:39	It was very nice.
Kellermann: 23:42	I mean, we just did something to make it work. And we used the commercial matching network and everything here.
Reber: 23:48	Well, Janksy's records apparently were in some cardboard cartons and they were marked "Save." And Beck's records were also put in some cardboard cartons and similarly marked "Save," and they were put in the attic of some old building they had there. And people in New York City decided they were going to build a new laboratory on this site. And so they issued orders that everything had to be cleaned up. And so the folks in Holmdel decided they'd follow orders and clean up. [laughter] So they burned everything thoroughly. So you see it was the ignorant leading ignorant, or the blind leading the blind. And that was pretty bad because there wasn't anything you could do about it.
Kellermann: 24:47	Actually, one of his notebooks was found a few years ago in somebody else's office who has since died. I have a copy of it. I have it here. I'll give it to you, but it doesn't seem to contain very much of the radio astronomy stories.
Reber: 25:05	Well, yeah. I was in New York many years ago and inquired. And they had a notebook there and folded into the pages was a few of Janksy's recordings. So a few, maybe four, survived and they’ve still got it as far as I know, but they're not significant recordings. They're just some minor run things that he somehow stuck in there and forgot.
Crews: 25:37	He never sent you any of his recordings, Grote?
Reber: 25:40	Have I looked at them?
Crews: 25:42	No, did he send them to you when you corresponded with him?
Reber: 25:46	No. As you see, all this was before my time. I only got interested in this after he had completed his work and published the results. And as I think I mentioned this morning, I decided that there was something better to do than amateur radio and that I would like a job working with him on this kind of stuff. And so I wrote to him and asked about this. And he wrote back that there wasn't anything he could do for me because they weren't going to continue these observations, these experiments. And I cased around to several other people and got turned down. So the whole thing fell in a slot. That is, the radio engineering fraternity was very familiar with Jansky's work and had great confidence in the man and his results. And they understood it and believed that he knew what he was doing and the results were real. But the whole phenomenon was so faint that it had no engineering communication value. That is, nobody is going to spend money investigating this, but our knowledge is so faint that the interesting part is in interference. So they weren't interested. And the astronomers, they took the attitude that it must be some kind of a fluke. The only real astronomy was that in the optical region. That’s the truth, see. I guess that shows you that--
Kellermann: 27:23	Well, they still feel that way.
Unknown: 27:24	Yeah, I’m sure they did.
Reber: 27:27	See, them [bunch of nerdy?]-- were so conceited that they were [laughter] [inaudible] deny it as they--but you see, they were ignorant too, ghastly ignorant. They didn't know anything about radio. Had no confidence or understanding in these matters, and so their reaction was completely negative. See, my observations initially were made in the '40s and at that time, the Sun was inactive. There was not much solar activity. I don't know why, but I sometimes assessed that the surges that we frequently got were related to sunspots. And so I had a little telescope about this long and I built an extension on it so that the overall length was about like that. And it produced an image of the Sun about this big around. And every day that I was home I looked at this picture of the solar disk and made a note in my logbook showing the disk and where the spots were and how they moved across the face of the disk. And it wasn't highly scientific, but it was suitable for what I needed because it told me whether the spots were at one limb or the other or the center and how they moved across, and so on. But I can remember old Gerard Kuiper came down there and looked it all over, and he said, "These solar observations you're making are all right, but they're so poor." He said, "It's being done immensely better elsewhere." [laughter] "Sure it is, Doc. But I don't have access to that data and if I try to get it, I'll be about six weeks late. I want to know what the solar disks look like now." And this was doing the trick. In other words, if you can find fault-- if you want to find fault, you can find fault.
	[silence]
Reber: 30:19	Well, they were great days, and they won't be repeated at that wavelength. But in a measure, they've been repeated at a much longer wavelength. I didn't discuss it this morning, but I've been doing measurements at hectometer waves. And I was given the poo poo because there wasn't anything there that--
	[silence]

End Tape 11B

Begin Tape 8A

Note: The audio for the first 19 minutes of the interview is often faint and difficult to understand because it was recorded outdoors while climbing on Reber’s Wheaton antenna at the entrance to the Green Bank Observatory site.

Reber: 00:05	What members go where and how long.
Kellermann: 00:09	We're looking at the antenna
Reber: 00:10	Well, this thing was determined by the largest piece of two-by-four you could get at the local lumberyard, which was 20 feet. So it's about 20 feet and 2 inches from the center of that circle to the center of that circle because that piece there is 20 feet long. It'd be foolish to design it 20 feet and 6 inches and have to patch, or conversely, design it 19 feet and 6 inches and have to cut some off. So this was all built on a basis of expediency to fit what was available. Well, same thing with the wheels. In other words, I didn't know how big the wheels should be. They might have been smaller or bigger, but the foundry that made the wheels had a standard size, and they would form to suit me. So the wheels were determined, again, by expediency, and the whole thing was designed that way, just to fit what was available.

Reber: 01:17	And yeah?
Crews: 01:19	It looks like standard rail line, except it's real light.
Reber: 01:22	Yeah, it is. It's a lightweight railway iron, and the company that sold it was in the habit of rolling it to suit the customer's desires.
Crews: 01:35	They put the bend in it for you?
Reber: 01:38	That's right. See, by this time, I knew how big it had to be. And so, I could give them a figure for the radius of curvature, and they're pretty expert at rolling these things. Well, there's a patch down there. This is one piece there which looks to be about 20 feet long. In other words, it's-- see, that from there to here is about a quarter of a turn.
Kellermann: 02:17	Quarter of a turn. Let's take another picture.
	[Pause while photo is taken.]


Crews: 02:28	All right. All done.
Kellermann: 02:32	Thank you.


Reber: 02:49	Maybe you want me to stand back here closer? This is a better idea, besides.
	[Pause while photo is taken.]
Kellermann: 03:35	How about a hand shake?
Reber: 03:36	Okay.
Kellermann: 03:38	Did you get that?
Crews: 03:38	Nope.

Reber: 03:49
Crews: 03:50	Just a minute. Do it again,
Reber: 03:54	You want it close throughout?

Reber: 04:00	sorry.
Crews: 04:03	Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Reber: 04:06	You sure got some more.
Kellermann: 04:08	Gee, you want me to run back and get my other one with slides on it?
Crews: 04:19	Wait.
Reber: 04:19	Wait. Got it. More. Okay. Well, let's see. I guess you're right. What film? Getting warm out here.
Kellermann: 04:34	Yep. That it is.
Reber: 04:36	I don't need this sweater
Kellermann: 04:37	I don't need this jacket either. All right. I can relieve you of one.
Reber: 04:41	Oh, sorry, yeah.
S2: 04:42	All right. Don't worry. Who's more [right?]
Reber: 04:48	Good.
Reber: 04:48	Thank you.
Kellermann: 04:49	I'll put that in the car for you.
Reber: 04:51	Put that in the car.
	[silence]
Reber: 05:09	What does this thing do?
Crews: 05:11	It's a recorder.
Reber: 05:12	Oh, it is. Yeah. I can see it moving.
David Jansky: 05:14	He's recorded our conversation. So everything here is original? Maybe some of those cross members have been replaced, probably.
Reber: 05:25	Well, all the metal parts are original, but all the wooden parts are second generation, because they pulled it all apart and hauled it out of Boulder, Colorado. Then nobody was interested apparently, and they just let it lay outdoors. And so all the wooden parts had rotten cracks and distortions at the end, so you couldn't use them anymore. They were through. So we bought some new wood which was good straight grain stuff, and then we had it treated like they treat the stuff they put on park benches to prevent it from rotting. And then we painted over that. And so it should be indefinite. So it isn't exactly the original, but it's a reasonable facsimile.
David Jansky: 06:20	Good enough. 90% probably.
Reber: 06:24	Yeah. Well, for instance, somebody has put that gutter pipe--
David Jansky: 06:31	Oh, look at that.
Reber: 06:32	See, there used to be a lot of water run, fetched by the dish here, run down the center, the path [laughter] [crosstalk].
David Jansky: 06:38	Yeah. They run it off. Yeah.
Reber: 06:40	So they put in that plate and then the gutter pipe was off to the edge, or does it.
David Jansky: 06:47	Nope. It just stops halfway up there.
	[crosstalk]
David Jansky: 06:54	[Are you sure?] the gutter pipe has been added?
Reber: 06:57	Oh yes, definitely. That wasn't there originally. And these pulleys have been added, and the counterweights are different. I had some concrete counterweights hung on those two by fours right about there. And that set them down. And those got lost, and somebody has put these metal plates on as counterweights, but they're not enough. And yesterday, I agitated to get this off. See, that one has been turned loose over the left, but we've still got three that are tied up. And Fred wouldn’t undo them because he says the thing is top heavy, and if we undo them it’s liable to get away from us. So he's going to put some more counterweights on and then balance it up. When I had it, it was closely balanced and you could stand up there in the pulpit and spin it one way or spin it the other way. So it was perfectly balanced.
David Jansky: 08:06	Wow.
Reber: 08:08	But Fred says it's top-heavy now. I don't know why.
David Jansky: 08:12	And you always worked hand crank?
Reber: 08:15	Always worked the hand crank.
David Jansky: 08:16	Yeah, to tilt it. But you used motors to rotate it.
Reber: 08:22	Exactly.
David Jansky: 08:23	And they were on time?
Reber: 08:24	Yeah.
David Jansky: 08:25	Wow. Well, so you could continuously track it.
Reber: 08:31	This--
	[silence]
Reber: 09:00	I think there was a [inaudible].
David Jansky: 09:04	All right, all right.
Reber: 09:05	Well, you could stand in the pulpit, and turn the crank until the declination angle is what you desire and then you can lock it. The variety of people that are moving around in this thing-- and see that [inaudible] [that drags against?] [inaudible]. Apparently, it was [inaudible] and then it blows things off and [inaudible]. We have the [inaudible]. I think details like and then fabricated the whole [inaudible] and then putting it together and that's what I did. Of course--
David Jansky: 10:02	Physics is the same.
Reber: 10:04	Yeah. Well, as I talked to the foreman down there. I said, "[inaudible] this is only 10% of the size of what you're looking at and it's generally about 1% of the pieces. And so if you put them together [inaudible]." He says, "That's the reason we need a hovercraft." [laughter] Oh, yeah. Well, that's [inaudible] but we don't know what zero is.
David Jansky: 10:32	It's on the other side, but.
Reber: 10:34	Yeah, but we don't know which part [inaudible]. [We don't know it?].
David Jansky: 10:36	Yeah, right. I would think that-- well, wait a minute, I'm turned around a little it. Which was is north? Yeah, that way. So wouldn't you think zero would be up there?
David Jansky: 10:45	Yeah, but. See but they've got a 180 here.
Kellermann: 10:47	Well, here we all know where that pointer goes. See there's a pointer.
Reber: 10:50	Here's 180. That should be south. Is it south? I don't know.
Kellermann: 10:56	Yeah, yeah, that could be. Yeah, it's about right.
Reber: 10:59	Are you saying north end is up that way?
Kellermann: 11:01	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Reber: 11:03	Well, you sight through the center of this thing and you come out just to the left-hand side of that pier. So that should be north then. They do say north is up here.
	Well, any [inaudible] 90° will do.
Kellermann: 11:33	What did you do for rain? You cut a hole in the middle.

Reber: 11:35	Well, there was a hole in it and when it rains the dish would collect water over a big area and puddle it down the center, and then it would just pour down the center hole. And apparently, people didn't like that so they put that plate in and a gutter pipe but they made the gutter pipe too short. It should have been down here.
Kellermann: 11:58	Right.
Reber: 12:01	Well, it was a good idea, but it didn't pan out. So he can't [inaudible] to make.
Kellermann: 12:09	That's right.
David Jansky: 12:11	But if you track in World War II--
Kellermann: 12:13	You can't. You can't track. You can't track. There's movement, elevation, and the earth rotates around.
David Jansky: 12:19	Yeah, but he's got this thing to rotate.
Kellermann: 12:22	The distance, the distance, the distance--
Reber: 12:23	Now, [inaudible].
Kellermann: 12:25	The distance--
Reber: 12:25	[inaudible]--
Kellermann: 12:27	It's stationary.
Reber: 12:28	[inaudible]--
David Jansky: 12:30	Okay.
Reber: 12:32	Wheels are a later addition.
Kellermann: 12:38	Yeah.
Reber: 12:41	By about 1940, it became apparent that this thing was working. And that there was limitations due to the electrical noise of the environment. Also, it would be desirable to get it farther south, but we had to wait until after the middle of the night because that's when our [inaudible] make. So if you were going to do that and it seemed desirable to put it on a turntable when we moved it. So the scheme was dreamed up to move this down to West Texas somewhere.
David Jansky: 13:14	Now, that [inaudible]--
Reber: 13:15	The turntable was designed and all put together and fabricated. It looks exactly like [inaudible], then the War came on.
David Jansky: 13:28	Oh, yeah.
Reber: 13:29	So that's when the [inaudible] and all that. [inaudible]-- I don't know how to put that [inaudible section], I wonder myself.
David Jansky: 14:05	[inaudible] and the apparatus up top is all original?
Reber: 14:08	Well, there was another change. Three members of this [inaudible] are all the same, but the fourth member, the one going up there, [inaudible] had steps to climb up there. Because the original vision was that we'd have some kind of small microwave equipment at the focal point. Or better yet, [inaudible] go through that same [inaudible]--
David Jansky: 14:36	Oh, okay.
Reber: 14:38	And then you'd be able to operate it from the ground, but that all failed. And so by the time it got to be 160 mgs, it was much too big to be fooling around with up there alone, so we built that service tower. And the picture that you have there shows the service tower. And the big drum fitted into the service tower, and then we slipped it into the ring up there. So we never did use that stairway up and down that much. It was pretty high--
Kellermann: 15:16	Now when you say we, somebody worked with you?
Reber: 15:19	Yeah, I would get some of the neighbor’s kids to give me a hand occasionally.
David Jansky: 15:25	Neighbors' children and they never knew what they were doing probably or working on.
Reber: 15:29	Well, no. I'd explain it to them and they were greatly impressed. And they would give me a hand and that was about it.
David Jansky: 15:37	That's amazing. That is amazing really.
Reber: 15:42	Well, they weren't kids. They were--
David Jansky: 15:44	Yeah, yeah.
Reber: 15:44	--basically twenty years old. So I got pretty good cooperation around there. And this was about a block or so from the Longfellow School, and after school the kids would come and use it for climbing bars, and they would climb all the [inaudible], the overhang prevented him from getting up on top and around.
David Jansky: 16:14	On top and around, [inaudible], what a story. Has this story been written from day one?
Kellermann: 16:22	Yeah. He's written.
David Jansky: 16:24	He has.
Kellermann: 16:25	Pretty much. Yeah.
Reber: 16:26	Oh, yeah. Another thing, we saw that airplane-- well, when I worked on the focal point this whole thing was tipped down. So the focal point came in at the top of the service tower. So I'd be up in the top of the service tower quite a bit, fussing around with the gear. And you saw that little plane that and-- well, in that day, apparently [inaudible], and this thing must have been a curiosity from the air. Because these small planes would come and swirl around, and around, and back and forth. And I didn't pay much attention to them until one day I was up there and I-- it sounded like a motorcycle. And it appeared to be coming right up to the-- through the back of the side of the ditch and [inaudible] gun's fire. And it turned out it was a small plane flying down the beam. And so it had acoustical properties. It's just similar to the radio properties for having [inaudible].
Kellermann: 17:36	Audio wavelengths are comparable to-- the same size as radio wavelength. The speed of sound is somewhat slower, so you get the same focusing property.
Reber: 17:46	So there, the plane, as long as it flew down the beam, it was very loud coming in. And it didn't sound from the back. It sounded where the sound was coming from, which was back in the ditch. Oh, I don't know. I've forgotten a lot of this. It’s just as well--
David Jansky: 18:10	No. No. Interesting history.
Reber: 18:13	It is.
David Jansky: 18:13	Oh, my goodness. But he has written the book though.
Kellermann: 18:18 Reber:	No. No. There are various articles that should be collected somewhere. Definitely. Somebody's coming with a key.
Kellermann: 18:26	We have the key. We got it. We can get in.
Reber: 18:29	[Oh, you got it?]. Well, let's go in then. So [inaudible].
	[walking to another location indoors]
Reber: 19:27	And the very first one, [inaudible] around there.
David Jansky: 19:30	I hear a radio.
Kellermann: 19:33	Yeah. We left it on.
Reber: 19:35	Oh, it's [inaudible]-- oh, I know what it is. It's some sort of communication, push a light button.
	[inaudible].
Reber: 19:47	Oh, I love this one, so outside [inaudible].
David Jansky: 19:50	All this stuff came off [inaudible]?
Kellermann: 19:51	Yep. All this stuff came from-- they were 96 crates [inaudible] all this from Tasmania.
Reber: 20:00	Well, this is much later. It's got nothing to do with the Wheaton equipment.
Reber: 20:04	This was two megacycle stuff used in Bothwell in Tasmania and it got shipped up here by mistake.
David Jansky: 20:13	By mistake?
Reber: 20:15	Well, we had a lot of boxes, and I didn't know what was in the box.
David Jansky: 20:18	You're going to ship it back?
Reber: 20:19	No, no. [laughter] It was in the boxes and they took the boxes and this was what we found inside. The antenna comes in on this side, and its [inaudible] is behind here. And this is a TRS receiver with a local oscillator and you can change the frequency with that, and it comes out of here as an IF frequency. It goes in and we have an attenuator in three dB steps from zero to 33 dB. Then we can distribute the bandwidth from 6, 12, 25, 50, and 100. And these are a couple of power cables, and the IF goes to 250 KC and this is the local oscillator, the feed oscillator. And it comes up here to the dB amplifier doing [inaudible] slow or fast, integerate seconds from three milliseconds to one second. It's usually around about one-tenth of a second and so on. And these all ran on 1.4 volt tubes, and the output of that came to this brush recorder. Now the brush recorder was chosen before [inaudible] back and forth very rapidly. And the reason for that is we wanted to [inaudible] as rapidly as possible. But the structure coordinate didn't have any choices except for on and off. And on it was running about [six inches in?] about three-eighths of a second, which is much too fast.
Kellermann: 22:07	Oh!
Reber: 22:09	Yeah, that is fast. Because you’ve got to have a high speed pen if you want to record high speed phenomena you got to have a fast [inaudible].
Kellermann: 22:15	You use a lot of paper.
Reber: 22:16	Yeah. So I got another one of these brush recorder drive systems and used it to drive the-- well, this is [inaudible] use it to drive the brush paper and--
David Jansky: 22:39	That looks [inaudible].
Reber: 22:41	Yeah, I think--
David Jansky: 22:43	It looks [inaudible] that comes off, see? [inaudible] record [inaudible]. Yeah.
Reber: 22:51	And that's off, that’s [inaudible], and there's faster [inaudible] to what speed you want in a gross way, this was say six inches a minute-- or six inches an hour. But you could change it by changing these gears. So the whole thing is practically in working order today if we put in some new tubes and-- Anyhow, for what it's worth, it's probably better to have it sitting around like this than stored in boxes.
David Jansky: 23:32	Oh, sure. Just for the historical value alone.
Reber: 23:33	I have an amplifier and an attenuator for the Bothwell 2 megahertz receiver.
David Jansky: 23:44	That's true.
Reber: 23:46	Now go over and take a look at the first one. Well, this isn't really the first one, but this is the first successful one. Before this, I made observations I think at 6 centimeters and at 32 centimeters, but they were failures. I didn't get anything. And so finally I moved on to 160 mgs which is about 1.8 meters. And this was the signal generator, and the receiver is back here. Here's the receiver. This receiver sat outside on the back-- there was a big drum at the top about four feet in diameter and six feet long, and that antenna was inside of the drum. And that picked up the energy from inside the drum and fed it into this receiver. And to line up the receiver, we had to have a signal generator. This was a crude signal generator, but it served its purpose. So then the output of this receiver came down to here and this is [inaudible] and this is [inaudible], I guess and this is the output [inaudible]. And I used to go down there at about midnight-- well, I turned it on maybe at 9 o'clock or earlier and let it warm up. And then I'd go down there about midnight and spend the next six hours reading the meter indications minute by minute and plot it down. And after a few tries it became apparent what the [circle?] tests were, and I was beginning to get the results. And one way I knew they were real is that the bumps that I was recording moved forward a half an hour a week so they were definitely on sidereal time. And I got data across several places along the Milky Way from Sagittarius to Cassiopeia, and it always showed a distinct increase in activity when the beam crossed the Milky Way. So this was the first confirmatory results, and it gave me heart to do something more elaborate. And on the basis of more elaborate, of course, the obvious thing that was needed was an automatic recorder so that I wouldn't be losing sleep all night. And that's what this was. It had very small voltage so you used a DC amplifier to drive the recorder. And this thing would run about six inches an hour, and it proved pretty successful. So on the basis of that, I had more encouragement and built a more elaborate receiver. See, that one only had amperage for about 50 kilocycles.
	[items being moved about]
Reber: 27:26	This [inaudible], Ken-- somewhere in this concoction, there's a pair of tongs, brass tongs. I bet they got put into some other box somewhere.
Kellermann: 27:43	It's not underneath, is it?
Reber: 27:45	Nope.
David Jansky: 27:51	Now, that's obviously homemade. Did you do that?
Reber: 28:00	Well, the drum had that antenna taken out because it was too [inaudible] to move. And I had a couple of poles put in. And this receiver was built to work at 160 plus or minus--.

End Tape 8A

Begin Tape 3A

Kellermann: Grote Reber, June 13^th[1995]. Ok, we’re talking about Jansky.

Reber: And we didn’t have much to say, that is, he was a little shorter than I am and he had a lot of black hair, and he was a quiet person. He didn’t have much to say, but when he did talk it was worth listening to. And he told me a variety of interesting things—that it was pretty obvious that a dish was the thing to do. That is, the equipment he used was designed for another purpose, and this was an offshoot of that other purpose. So if you were going to investigate the celestial radio waves, you needed something which was designed for that purpose. And it should have a wide wavelength range. So obviously the dish was the solution. And he made up some rough sketches. His dish was to be 100 feet in diameter.

Kellermann: Excuse me, when was this? When and where was this discussion?

Reber: When? I don’t know. It was in Washington, I think, because he died in 1950 so it must have been in Washington.

Kellermann: After the war?

Reber: Yeah, after the war. See, I went down there, I think, in ’47, and I worked till ’51. I was there about four years.

Kellermann: So it was during that period?

Reber: It was during that period. And his dish was to be, I think, .3 focal lengths, but he never bothered to propose it to his superiors because he knew it was useless for communication purposes. And so, the matter was dropped. But the thing that struck me was that his thinking was the same as my thinking on the same subject. So we were of one mind. And that’s about it.

Kellermann: Did he ever say anything to you about his disappointment about not being able to continue? Do you think he was really interested in continuing?

Reber: Not really because when I saw him he was approaching the end of his career as he was in ill health. I don’t know what was the matter with him, something in his spine.

Kellermann: Kidneys.

Reber: Kidneys. And he obviously wasn’t going to be able to do any big performances, and so that was that.

~~~~~~~~2:49

Kellermann: Had you talked to him earlier, during the ‘30s or?

Reber: Oh, no. The first contact I had with him was when I was enchanted by his papers and I wanted the opportunity to work on these. And the obvious thing to do was to write him and see if he had a job, which I did. And he said they weren’t going to continue, and there was no opening. That must have been about 1935. And that was the end of that.

Kellermann: You know there has been a lot of discussion about why he didn’t continue the work- whether he really wanted to but wasn’t allowed to, or whether he didn’t push that hard?

Reber: Well, yeah. I wasn’t there so I don’t know anything firsthand, but my reading of the record is the reverse. That his boss was a fellow named Harold T. Friis, F-R-I-I-S, a Dane. And Friis has been accused of stopping Jansky from doing anything more or not providing him with resources and so on. I read it the other way, that Friis allowed Jansky to putter around on this utterly useless thing for five years and paid his salary. So you can’t blame Friis; Friis supported him for a considerable period.

Kellermann: In fact, he was a close family friend of Friis.

Reber: He was? I don’t know.

Kellermann: Yes, of the Jansky’s. He, in fact, was the godfather of their children, but in later years, at least Mrs. Jansky has stated that she felt that Friis restricted him.

Reber: I didn’t know that. Jansky never told me that. He didn’t tell me much of anything except…

Kellermann: He was aware of your work and everything?

Reber: Oh yeah, he was quite aware of it. He gave me to believe that if he had had an opportunity he would have done similar things.

Kellermann: Did you ever study astronomy?

Reber: No.

Kellermann: So what led you in this? You went to the University of Chicago for a while?

Reber: That’s right. But I couldn’t stand them, and they couldn’t stand me. Well, I don’t know. The whole thing was sort of in shambles. They had a fellow in there named Hutchins as president, and he was touted as a boy-wonder because he got the job when he was only about 32 years old. But Hutchins was an ignoramus. That is, he didn’t know or care anything about the physical sciences. And he thought that the University of Chicago should teach cultural (ideas?).

Kellermann: When was this?

Reber: 1934, 1935. And he proposed to teach what he called the great scholars. In other words, dig up the ancient scholars, the Syrians, the Greeks, the Romans, and their scholars, and teach their findings. This was fine and beautiful but he didn’t want to know anything about what was going in the physical sciences. He just didn’t care, see. And there was a schism between the physical sciences and the presidency. I didn’t want to get into this because I don’t know much about it, but they didn’t like him and him didn’t like them. And it piled on down. And they looked upon me as somewhat of an absurdity. That is, here I was proposing to fiddle around with this stuff nobody knew anything about. And a measure of that fell into Hutchins’ hands because Hutchins thought that they should do experiments on sure things, high school physics.

Kellermann: Well that’s a common thing that’s still true in government laboratories. I was just at a meeting last week discussing that with somebody. That’s still one of the problems with government laboratories.

Reber: Sure science, that is you’ve got to do an experiment which you know will turn out alright, because how awful it would be if it was found out that this committee approved something that didn’t work. What are we doing experiments for? They don’t even know that.

Kellermann: Well, that’s true now also. When you try to get observing time on a big telescope, you have to write a proposal… you almost have to tell what answer you expect to get in order to do the experiment. So, of course, you say something. You write down something that sounds good.

Reber: Well, I was there for a while and I was nominally connected with the Department of Physics under Hedrick Gordon Gale. But I took some of their physics courses but I also went over to the Oriental Institute and took some courses in the development of civilization and the history of religion, and things like that—cultural (ideas?). And Gale caught on about this and so he called me out and he gave me a reprimand that these kind of courses were absolutely useless for getting a degree in physics. I agreed but I didn’t much care whether I got a degree or not. And so he told me I should take courses under a fellow named, Mullikan, M-U-L-L-I-K-A-N. Not Millikan but Mullikan. And Mullikan’s claim to fame was his work on band spectrum, and I should learn about band spectrum, which was Mullikan. So I went around and talked to some of the other students about Mullikan, and found out that Mullikan was a poor professor. He didn’t know how to get his subject across and he dry as all get out. And his subject was pretty useless. So he wasn’t getting any students, and that’s where the trouble was. That is, Gale couldn’t have a professor on the staff who had no students, see. So he was pushing me out on Mullikan so that Mullikan could have some students. He tried that on other people. Well, we had friction like that all through, and finally I said to hell with it and did something else. But my experiences at the University of Chicago were pretty poor.

Kellermann: Did you take any astronomy?

Reber: No, I didn’t take any astronomy. I took some courses in mathematics, these series. But, well, I also had friction with the other graduate students there. They couldn’t understand why I was over at the Oriental Institute. I said, “Well, that’s what I’m paying money for, taking courses that I think I want.” And they couldn’t understand that. And I said, “What are you here for?” They replied that they were there getting a degree. I said, “What do you want a degree for?” And the reply was not quite as blunt, but what it amounted to was, “I got to get a card in the right labor union.” In order words, if you are going to get anywhere in the education business, you got to have a degree, which is a card in the right labor union. So I said, “What do you want to get into education for?” And two of them I remember gave me a curt answer of, “Why work?” In other words, they perceived it as an easy way of making a living. Well, I didn’t fit in with them either. So I was an outcast. And finally I decided to hell with it; there are other things more interesting to do that to argue around with this bunch, especially after I had a talk with (Barkey?). Do you know (Barkey?)? He was head of the Department of Physical Sciences— mathematics, astronomy, and so on. And (Barkey?) knew about Jansky and he was dead sure that Jansky had made a mistake. I told you this.

Kellermann: Yeah, you told me yesterday. Right.

Reber: And the reason was that there is an electrified layer overhead called the ionosphere. And that’s reflecting radio waves from the Earth, around the curvature of the Earth. And the ionosphere was mirrored on both sides, and any celestial radio waves would be reflected back into space. And he was right but he didn’t have any comprehension of magnitude. When the electron density is low enough when the waves are short enough, the ionosphere becomes transparent. Well anyhow, my experiences were poor. And then I went up to Yerkes Observatory and got the brush off from that bunch.

Kellermann: Where did you first meet Jesse Greenstein?

Reber: Up at the Yerkes Observatory. He has completed his degree at Harvard, I think. And he was sort of a sub-sub-sub-professor at Yerkes Observatory. I don’t think he did much observation work. I think he mainly did theoretical work at Yerkes. Jesse was better than several. I remember when I first went up there Jesse told me about how he and somebody else who’ve I forgotten, maybe Henyey, had seen some of the works of Jansky. And that they had sneered at them. That here was somebody professing to say that radio waves are coming in from the cosmos, and they sneered at it. It just couldn’t be. But then they thought about it later and decided that, you know, there might be something to this. See, their minds were frozen too by the stuff they had gotten at Harvard and it took them awhile to loosen up. But Jesse was a supporter of mine in later years.

Kellermann: Yes, I know. And, of course, years later when he went to Cal Tech, he started the radio astronomy work there. He got John Bolton from Australia.

Reber: And he’s got some pictures there of what Potapenko and Folland had, and it was single pole. I don’t have a copy of that but it didn’t amount to anything anyhow.

Kellermann: It’s in that book that I was showing you.

Reber: The book?

Kellermann: That book that I was showing you this morning.

Reber: Oh yeah, I don’t have that here. It may be back in that room. Are there pictures of…?

Kellermann: Yes. It’s a mess here; I don’t know where… Here it is.

Reber: No, that isn’t it. That’s different. Yeah, here’s the fellow that drew those beautiful pictures of the 200 inch telescope. The ones that Jesse had was an old car, I think a Dodge.

Kellermann: Well, this came from Jesse.

Reber: There that’s it. Potapenko and Folland, the antenna used to detect the Galaxy Center. It was the late 1930s. Well, they went all about putting this thing up, which looks to be about 30 feet high. And they had an antenna wire which they walked around. Does it tell about this in here?

Kellermann: I think so. This is Jesse’s article. I don’t think he does in detail.

Reber: Well anyhow, they went to all that bother and they didn’t read any meters, or if they read them, they didn’t write the numbers down. That’s sciences, of sorts. So I don’t know. See there were these people… and then that other picture you showed with the turntable framework, that was imaginary by this fellow Porter.

Kellermann: I’m curious. What kind of work did your father do?

Reber: Well, it dates back to my grandfather’s time. Grandfather got himself traded off in the Civil War, and once you were traded off, you were out of the war. In other words, you get yourself captured and then they trade prisoners. And once he got himself out of the Civil War, he had a funny way of making a living. And he fussed around in Pennsylvania for a while and in about ’63 or something, he came out to Chicago, which was the edge of the west in that day. And he bought an assortment of fruits and… particularly different kinds of fruits. And he took them back and cooked them up with sugar and made them into jams and jellies. And then he walked down the street and peddled these things door to door.

Kellermann: In Chicago?

Reber: And so he had prospered. And he formed what was called the Reber Preserving Company. And he had three sons; my father was the second one. And the three sons followed on in Grandfather’s footsteps, and ran the Reber Preserving Company. But they had some kind of a wrangle with the consortium on preserving and bowed out. But they are still in business out of the Reber Preserving Company name, and they made things like asparagus, corn, and sauerkraut, and such like, beans. And that continued but it was the old story of the first generation having gumption and push to build the thing up. The second generation coasts and the third generation runs it into the ground. And so the Reber Preserving Company is gone.

Kellermann: Your father…

Reber: Oh, he died.

Kellermann: But he stayed in this company?

Reber: Yeah, Father… well it there were three sons, and apparently it that day, it was the 1860s and ‘70s, it was a common or popular thing to name your kids after people you admired. That’s how Jansky got his name; it was Karl Guthe, an educator in Michigan. Well anyhow, the first son was named after the writer and poet, Washington Irving. They called him Irv. The second son was my father and he was named after a politician that my grandfather admired named Schuyler Colfax. So he was Schuyler Colfax Reber. And the third son was named after the inventor of the steam engine, James Watt. James Watt Reber. Well, Schuyler Colfax was a Pennsylvania politician and I’ve been informed that he was also Grant’s Vice President. So by good luck, they didn’t hang that on me. My brother got stuck with it. So my younger brother is Schuyler Colfax Reber Jr. Well anyhow, they are all gone and the Reber Preserving Company is gone too. And that’s the end of it, which is probably just as well.

Kellermann: When you were young did you get much encouragement from your father in scientific and technical things?

Reber: Well when I was young, say about 8 to 15, he used to take me over to the Reber Preserving Company and show me around and try to get me interested. But I wasn’t and they finally gave up and decided to buy me a soldering iron. It was more to my liking.

Kellermann: Now how old were you when you first got interested in electronics?

Reber: I don’t know, probably about 12.

Kellermann: And how old were you when you got your amateur license?

Reber: Well, we tried to find the one that I can seem to remember but we can’t find it over there. It may be there, but we don’t know where. And the first one was a white piece of paper. The two that they got over there are blue, but the one I remember is a white piece of paper, about the size of this. And it testifies that Grote Reber had passed the examination for his amateur radio license. And it’s signed down here by one Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce, which would be about 1927. So I would have been about 16. And see, apparently the government wasn’t anything to anybody, and in that day there wasn’t anything for the Secretary of Commerce to do. So he whiled always the idle hours signing amateur radio operator licenses.

Kellermann: That reminds me. So Martin Ryle, he was…

Reber: This is Martin Ryle’s QSL card. He gave me one.

Kellermann: Like you, you can read on the back, he was a ham before the war and then he said that after the war he lost interest because it became too commercial and people didn’t build their own equipment anymore.

Reber: Well, it’s the same thing.

Kellermann: Same as what you said.

Reber: Very interesting. You keep that.

Kellermann: Yes. You don’t have any?

Reber: No. Well, there may be some over there but I don’t know where they are.

Kellermann: Of your cards, I mean.

Reber: Yeah, W9GMZ.

Kellermann: You sent you, I have it, the collection of cards you received. I didn’t see any of your own.

Reber: We can get some printed. I did look in the amateur radio callbook about three or four years ago. And my call has not been reassigned; it’s still open. So maybe they think I’m coming back, but I’m not.

Kellermann: I think the computer program that they use doesn’t understand how to do that. They have never reassigned…

Reber: In other words, it’s blank because the computer hasn’t figured it out.

Kellermann: So you can still get it.

Reber: I probably could. I would have to pass the examination again.

Kellermann: I don’t think so. I think there is some rule that if you held a license before a certain time, I think it’s 1918 or something…

Reber: Well, that’s before my time.

Kellermann: There’s some clause that if you held a license for a certain time, in fact you can get the most top license.

Reber: Well, my parents, like most parents, during the heyday years of the ‘20s, were pretty liberal with their money. And I didn’t have any trouble getting Father buy me radio equipment and this that and the other thing. But see then after Hoover got in, it was only about six months after he get inaugurated that they had the crash. And a lot of things went down the drain, so Father became more tight. He wouldn’t buy me anymore of this junk, see. It was a good adventure.

Kellermann: I think you said yesterday that you built the antenna in a vacant lot next door to you.

Reber: That’s right.

Kellermann: Most of the literature describes it as being in your back yard on your property.

Reber: That’s wrong. In fact if you look at those pictures, you can see that the house is in the background. That doesn’t show the house.

Kellermann: In the paper?

Reber: I don’t think that’s it either. That doesn’t have any pictures.

Kellermann: Ok, so it was next door then?

Reber: I saw one where it did. They don’t have any pictures either. That’s the same one. I think maybe this is the one. Nope. I’ll try another one. I think that might be it. The house is not very visible there. Here, this is the one. See there’s the dish and that’s the 480 megacycle focal equipment and there’s the house. And that’s front, and this is back, and that’s towards the west. And there were several vacant lots from here to the next street, which was about 150 feet. And the cars would come down the street, and you could hear them, they would get louder and louder, until they got up to the point of this focal equipment, and then out they would go. So it really worked. It cut down the background radiation to essentially zero, which is what you need.

Kellermann: So who owned this lot?

Reber: My parents.

Kellermann: Ok it was part.

Reber: When brother and I got controls of affairs, we weren’t interested in that real estate. The real estate was a feature of the lives of our parents, not of us. And so we disposed of it gradually and sorted ourselves out and called it a day.

Kellermann: So you say there is a parking lot there now or something?

Reber: No, it happens that where the dish was is a parking lot for the Bell Telephone Company.

Kellermann: Right. And the house?

Reber: The house was moved away and that’s more of the parking lot.

Kellermann: The house still exists then. Somewhere else?

Reber: Well, there were two houses. One was built by my grandparents about 1872, I think. It was built by money they secured from the Chicago fire, which was 1871. And well that’s where we lived when I was small. And I did my amateur radioing from that place. It was facing the next street south. And then we sold that property to the telephone company and they built a vast office out of it with all the clicking noises and automatic machinery and all the junk that goes with it. And then after we got rid of that, we still had this lot and the one with the house. And the first old house was moved away about three or four blocks and turned around and rehabilitated and people were living there. And the second house, the one in that picture, was moved to a similar position about three or four blocks away. And people were living there. And they haven’t been destroyed. The last I saw them was about eight years ago and they were both in good condition. And that doesn’t have any meaning except that’s the way chance turned out. Well, we could have torn them down, I suppose. The telephone company didn’t want them obviously…

End Tape 3A

Begin Tape 3B

David Jansky: 00:05	During the war, they went back to a six-day a week.
Ken Kellermann: 00:13	Yeah, I think I’ve read that.
David Jansky: 00:14	And he would get called out at all hours, day or night, but he couldn't tell anybody. He couldn't tell his own father. Wow. He was very upset because he wrote weekly to his father and he wouldn't tell his father what was going on. Well, small pieces had leaked out what's been going on. They were doing some triangulation on German submarines. And when they would get a definite fix, they would bring up the phone and call what was the Pentagon, of course the Pentagon hadn’t been built yet - the building that was just west of the White House, I believe that was what they were using at the time. And they had a direct line and they would call and they'd say we have a definite fix and my dad was [inaudible] and they had definite fix, do something. And so then they would go back and they listened and by the end of the call he made [inaudible] transmission which means they got the sub.
Ken Kellermann: 01:27	Wait a sec, where was this listening taking place,
David Jansky: 01:29	Bell Labs.
Ken Kellermann: 01:31	Oh, I see.
David Jansky: 01:33 S2:	Right at Holmdel. And these are submarines that were right off the coast?
David Jansky: 01:36	English Channel.
David Jansky: 01:44	Now can you get anybody to admit it?
David Jansky: 01:46	The people you talk to today - probably most of them died. Luke Lowery died. Al [Sharpless?] is still alive but he is in failing health. He is in a home in Redlands. Art Crawford has passed away. Marvelous family. Just a marvelous family. Worked his way through college in his 20s playing in a jazz band. And I've heard him play the piano. He was good. George Southworth was long gone. F is gone. Angelo was gone. [Deming Lewis?] who became [inaudible] All these guys required Luke Lowery's [inaudible]. When Woody was out in -
David Jansky: 02:58	It was before he published his book. It had to be in the middle 80s and I told him, I said, "Look, Sharpless is still alive, Crawford is still alive, Luke Lowrey is now in Oregon or just moved to Colorado. You got to talk to these guys. These arenthe interesting history
Ken Kellermann: 03:23	Of course, it wasn't radio astronomy.
David Jansky: 03:25	No.
Ken Kellermann: 03:25	So he's probably--
David Jansky: 03:28	But they might have been able to add.
Ken Kellermann: 03:30	Yes.
David Jansky: 03:33	The fellow that actually did the physical building of the antenna has passed on in the last few years.
Ken Kellermann: 03:42	Al Beck
David Jansky: 03:44	Well, not Beck. Beck was not the maintenance man. We got him [inaudible] left him as a [inaudible] you could hear him almost and what was his name? Oh, man, I know I have it at home. I mean, it's difficult. The shop man who did the actual work. Zach sent me a picture, after '83, taking a [inaudible]. That's when the lab's first field station opened. If you saw this picture-- couldn't believe it. This gang in front of what looked like a chicken coop, and there's boards across-- obviously when it floods it's full of water. And there's these six motley-looking guys. It is a scream. Oh, Dad's not in that picture because it was taken before he joined. But, anyway, that's when he went to work at Crawford Beach. First, the antenna was built out there, and then they moved. It had to be taken all apart and reassembled again at Holmdel.
Ken Kellermann: 04:51	Yeah, I know about that part. So, listen, you spoke briefly on the telephone with Tony Tyson didn't you?
David Jansky: 04:59	A year ago, yeah.
Ken Kellermann: 05:00	Yeah. Year ago?
David Jansky: 05:02	Yeah, I--
Ken Kellermann: 05:02	More recently?
David Jansky: 05:03	No.
Ken Kellermann: 05:04	Have you met him?
David Jansky: 05:05	I haven't met him.
Ken Kellermann: 05:07	He worked at Bell Labs
David Jansky: 05:09	Up in Murray Hill, isn't it?
Ken Kellermann: 05:10	Yep.
David Jansky: 05:11	Or Whippany. One of them.
Ken Kellermann: 05:12	But he might be able to follow that up.
David Jansky: 05:17	Of what happened during the war?
Ken Kellermann: 05:18	Yup. I'm sure he's still--
David Jansky: 05:25	He's not an older fellow. He's a young guy.
Ken Kellermann: 05:27	Younger than me, yeah. But he would have--
David Jansky: 05:30	Access --
Ken Kellermann: 05:31	Sorry?
David Jansky: 05:31	Young fella.
Ken Kellermann: 05:32	I said he would have access too-- and he’s only a little bit younger than me. He would know where to find those-- he's the one that found your father's notebook.
David Jansky: 05:43	Before he went through it?
Ken Kellermann: 05:44	Yeah. Unfortunately, it's--
David Jansky: 05:46	Not very revealing.
Ken Kellermann: 05:47	It's not the notebook.
David Jansky: 05:49	It's not the?
Ken Kellermann: 05:50	Oh, it doesn't have any-- it's got a lot about the equipment in there, but nothing about the records and the data or anything. That was apparently in another notebook that was destroyed.
David Jansky: 06:00	Do you think that ever existed?
Ken Kellermann: 06:02	Oh. Must have been. Yeah because there were papers in the report obviously where he kept records for months.
David Jansky: 06:19	That's interesting.
Ken Kellermann: 06:21	Anyway, Tony's very interested in the history, that they found this notebook, and he was going to come down here now but he wasn't able to. There's a whole lot of messy things going on with people. You said Bob Wilson -
David Jansky: 06:38	-had cutback, too.
Ken Kellermann: 06:40	Yeah.
David Jansky: 06:40	[inaudible]?
Ken Kellermann: 06:41	Yeah.
David Jansky: 06:41	Closing a couple of buildings.
Ken Kellermann: 06:45	Well, that's what I hear. So he's been unable to get away quite-- he might be able to-- but it can't be classified anymore.
David Jansky: 06:54	It shouldn't be.
Ken Kellermann: 06:56	I mean, what happens, I guess, is a lot of the stuff doesn't get declassified unless somebody asks to have it declassified. You have to ask.
David Jansky: 07:09	That’s interesting.
Ken Kellermann: 07:10	I guess that's been a mystery. I've never heard of any discussion.
David Jansky: 07:14	Oh, I can't remember-- I talked to somebody one time and it was like somebody turned off the faucet. Nothing. Like, what do you got to hide for heaven's sake?
Ken Kellermann: 07:28	But where did you get the information you just told me, though?
David Jansky: 07:31	Curtis tracked down some of it. Sharpie has alluded to some of the events that had gone on. That's William-- Bill [Sharpless].
Ken Kellermann: 07:44	Bill Sharpless
David Jansky: 07:47	And Luke Lowry. I remember him talking about it sometimes. Very difficult for people today to comprehend what living was like back then. When my dad got out of school in '29, and he gets to work here, and he's making, what, $35 a week, which is probably a pretty good salary. They only want to work 4 days a week because of the Depression. So you get cut back at what, $28.50? Something like that? Can you imagine today telling your kid coming out of college?
Ken Kellermann: 08:36	Well.
David Jansky: 08:39	It's unbelievable.
Ken Kellermann: 08:41	But they had trouble finding jobs now I've wondered about that. You hear people say that the young generation, so, they have less to look forward to than we had and our parents. We're the ones that-- the good generation. No, I'm serious. We lived through the Depression. We were too young to know what it was about.
David Jansky: 09:10	Those people know that -
Ken Kellermann: 09:11	But our parents, they were the ones that went through the Depression.
David Jansky: 09:14	Yeah, it was really tough.
Ken Kellermann: 09:18	I don't think this - It’s better now than they were then.

David Jansky: 09:22	They didn't have any money so they entertained themselves. Bridge was very popular game. And my parents played bridge. I mean, all the time, and my dad played chess with - nobody else in the house played chess. He brought in these guys from the lab to play chess with him. I always found the game too slow, but that's another story.
Ken Kellermann: 09:55	How's your mother?
David Jansky: 09:57	Good.
Ken Kellermann: 09:57	Good.
David Jansky: 09:58	My gosh, she'll be 88 and she still drives.
Ken Kellermann: 10:04	Wow.
David Jansky: 10:05	And she's telling me she's thinking of getting another car.
Ken Kellermann: 10:08	Oh, god.
Ken Kellermann: 10:10	My mother's 83 --
David Jansky: 10:11	Another car.
Ken Kellermann: 10:13	My mother's 83 and she … that's good. That's great.
David Jansky: 10:16	She plays bridge about four times a week. She swims in a pool.
Ken Kellermann: 10:23	That surgery she had some years ago really--
David Jansky: 10:28	Oh, yeah, she had had surgery. She was in Milwaukee when ... I saw her last-- I was in Milwaukee last summer and she came up, and my sister had one of her daughters there, and her family, and her mother, and myself. And my wife was she had eye surgery. She had--
Ken Kellermann: 11:04	Talking about going to New Mexico.
David Jansky: 11:06	She has a condo out there, called Cedars
Ken Kellermann: 11:09	Where is that?
David Jansky: 11:11	North of Socorro, up near, what's the city?
Ken Kellermann: 11:17	Albuquerque is a big one.
David Jansky: 11:18	Yes, near Albuquerque. And it's a rather new residential area. Why? I don't know. Only she knows. I don't.
David Jansky: 11:35	So she's going to work for another year.
Ken Kellermann: 11:39	I like New Mexico.
Ken Kellermann: 11:41	I go out there often.
David Jansky: 11:44	I've never been there. I'll get there.
Ken Kellermann: 11:47	You should visit the VLA
Ken Kellermann: 11:50	That's a …
David Jansky: 11:53	We have a cadet at, well, he didn't go to West Point, who goes to a New Mexico School of Mines.
Ken Kellermann: 12:02	Yeah, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro.
David Jansky: 12:06	Right there. And I said, "You go over there and drop a few names and see what kind of response you get [laughter]."
Ken Kellermann: 12:13	No, our building there is on the campus of the--
David Jansky: 12:15	Oh, it is? Oh, that's right, huh? That's good. I'll have to tell him. He is in the army. The army was not [always good?] [inaudible].
David Jansky: 12:31	So that's what's happened. [inaudible] Holmdel still has pretty good zoning but the [inaudible] a thousand people in the [inaudible] but the labs [too?]-- the original labs' location, where they built that big black box. Have you ever been there?
Ken Kellermann: 13:07	Yeah.
David Jansky: 13:07	You have.
Ken Kellermann: 13:08	A long time ago though.
David Jansky: 13:09	And they had the big black box there, you don't know. It was a modern building.
Ken Kellermann: 13:15	It wasn't the chicken runs that they used to have.
Ken Kellermann: 13:16	No, no. Very modern.
David Jansky: 13:18	Because when they built the big black box, the old-time employees wouldn't work in it. That's why they built the Pioneer building about three miles away up on the side of a hill. And that's what they call them, the Pioneer Labs. That's where the original people worked after they built this six-story monstrosity, they call it. And that's where Penzias and Wilson's horn antenna is still out there.
Ken Kellermann: 13:48	Yeah.
David Jansky: 13:50	It's been preserved. They'll never get that down.
Ken Kellermann: 13:53	We ought to get that down here before they throw it away.
David Jansky: 13:56	I don't think they will because I think now it's been designated a state historical landmark or something.
Ken Kellermann: 14:03	Oh, a million dollars, they won't be able to get to it.
David Jansky: 14:04	Oh, you might. I don't know.
Ken Kellermann: 14:05	You'd have to be sure it's not a national.
David Jansky: 14:07	No, I don't think it is.
Ken Kellermann: 14:08	National I have no idea how to get it, but if it's state.
David Jansky: 14:10	You can drive right up, right around those labs and there it is. There's no gate or anything that I know of.
David Jansky: 14:25	But the roads all through Holmdel are now modern roads, much wider and better. The way you originally got to the labs was on a real narrow, barely two lanes. Probably just one and if you met somebody you move off and that was the way. And of course, the parkway came and split the township. The original road out to the labs was never built over or under a parkway then, so the people that go there now don't go the original way. So it’s been quite a bit of change. The creek still runs along the side and I remember that because that's where we took a dog, and the dog had puppies in the tree stump, a hollowed-out tree stump. And the guys at the lab took the puppies and we took the mother. And the dog used the tree stump obviously because it had been beaten. I can remember my mother any time she got out the broom to sweep the kitchen floor the dog would run and hide, so you knew the dog had been beaten with a broom. And then there were the days of the first television sets. The labs got one. This was in '46, 1946. So if you wanted to watch television you put your name on a list and you got to take the set home for two weeks,
Ken Kellermann: 16:19	I see?
David Jansky: 16:22	So we rigged an antenna up, I remember it went up the stairs and up into the attic and stuff. And you could watch this snowy picture. And you could keep it for two weeks and then you had to take the set back, okay? And the next guy on the list got it. Well when the World Series came they wouldn't let the set go. You had to go out there to watch it, if you wanted to watch the World Series you had to go out to the labs and they had it set up in one of the buildings.
Ken Kellermann: 16:52	We got a TV set. I remember a time in 1947. Oh, my. Dodgers and Yankees.


David Jansky: 16:58	That's right and I remember watching it down at the lab.
Ken Kellermann: 17:01	Right. And I'll never forget that.
David Jansky: 17:07	The list kept getting shorter and guys went out and bought. And I don't know whatever happened to that set. While my dad was alive, we never had one.
David Jansky: 17:17	We never had a TV, but we did get one.
Ken Kellermann: 17:21	I should've brought over for you. Your father died. Reber, wrote a letter to your mother. I’ve got a copy of it. It's a very nice letter.
David Jansky: 17:36	See now, he says he met my dad. Did you hear what he said?
David Jansky: 17:40	Well, he didn't have much to say. I'll ask him again tomorrow. I don't want to offend him or anything.

David Jansky: 17:45	No, don't. I mean, no, no, don't be afraid to-- We can ask him anything -
Ken Kellermann: 17:54	No, he's very--
Ken Kellermann: 17:55	[inaudible].
Ken Kellermann: 17:57	Because this is--
Ken Kellermann: 17:58	Even [inaudible].
Ken Kellermann: 18:00	I got [inaudible].
David Jansky: 18:03	He says he met him when Grote was working in Washington [inaudible].

David Jansky: 18:11	So that meant that when he picked up in the late '30s, he did it just from what, my dad's writing?
Ken Kellermann: 18:20	He read the papers, articles, [inaudible] university where you can get
Ken Kellermann: 18:29	He didn't understand [inaudible].
Ken Kellermann: 18:31	Taught it to himself.
David Jansky: 18:34	And if the story's true about the [inaudible] at one time an airplane overhead man in engine trouble.
David Jansky: 18:41	[inaudible].
David Jansky: 18:43	Authorities and the media blamed it on his antenna that--
Ken Kellermann: 18:49	I don't know. I've heard that.
David Jansky: 18:50	They thought that it was a secret ray gun or something.
Ken Kellermann: 18:55	I know, they're just not sure.
David Jansky: 18:56	So if you saw it in somebody's backyard, you'd have a few questions too wouldn't you?
Ken Kellermann: 19:00	Yeah.
Ken Kellermann: 19:00	Oh, I hadn’t heard that--
David Jansky: 19:03	Oh, yeah. You see that quite often.
Ken Kellermann: 19:06	But he was a--
Ken Kellermann: 19:11	Kept copies of all his correspondence. Early on, he wrote asking for a job.
Ken Kellermann: 19:24	He wanted to work there.
David Jansky: 19:24	I saw that.
David Jansky: 19:26	Where? At the lab?
Ken Kellermann: 19:27	Yeah.
David Jansky: 19:30	But the lab wasn't interested--
Ken Kellermann: 19:31	That's right.
David Jansky: 19:31	--in that kind of research.
Ken Kellermann: 19:32	That's right.
Ken Kellermann: 19:35	Then he had several exchanges with the - And when he died he sent a real nice letter. I should have brought over a copy.
David Jansky: 19:49	No, I didn't know that he had that [inaudible] That's not funny, that's interesting. That would have been-- when did he do that?
Ken Kellermann: 20:01	Do what?
David Jansky: 20:02	Apply for work. In the '30s?
Ken Kellermann: 20:04	Oh, yeah, right.
David Jansky: 20:05	Late '30s.
Ken Kellermann: 20:09	About then.
David Jansky: 20:10	His job was what?
Ken Kellermann: 20:12	He was working as an engineer building radio receivers for a company in Chicago.
David Jansky: 20:17	In Chicago.
Ken Kellermann: 20:21	Well, first of all--
David Jansky: 20:23	He did this business all on the side line as a hobby.
Ken Kellermann: 20:27	But we’ve come to understand now is that not only has access to the equipment at the place he works. See, it's in the late '30s, already.
David Jansky: 20:44	Mm-hmm.
Ken Kellermann: 20:45	Yes, [inaudible] I don't know. From what I've read in history, the people understood that a war was coming, and they were gearing up for it and the government was giving contracts to places like he works for pretty generously, just to do research. And if he wanted to take things home or if he needed equipment to work at home, that was okay because he was doing things the government wanted done. And so he got significant support that way. But the antenna he built was over four-month’s salary just to do that antenna.
David Jansky: 21:28	Was that the original?
Ken Kellermann: 21:28	Yeah.
David Jansky: 21:29	Or was that a model?
Ken Kellermann: 21:30	That's it. Just a few little bits and pieces changed and whatnot, but--
David Jansky: 21:33	How the devil did he keep it intact? Because he left Wheaton and came to DC?
Ken Kellermann: 21:39	Well, it was taken apart and sent to Washington and re-erected there. And then when he left there until-- it was stored for a long time and then it got re-erected here. Now the feed legs that hold up the receiver, apparently decayed. So that's new. When he originally built this, it didn't turn, it only moved up and down. And then when it was re-erected in Washington they put it on a turntable.
Ken Kellermann: 22:19	And he-- what I understand that it was, he organized Bell Lab to come down here, to rebuild …
David Jansky: 22:27	Is that right?
Ken Kellermann: 22:28	It was his initiative.
Ken Kellermann: 22:29	That's right.
Ken Kellermann: 22:30	He contacted Al Beck.
David Jansky: 22:34	I wonder where they found the plans?
Ken Kellermann: 22:37	They still had it.
David Jansky: 22:48	Does Grote have any family?
Ken Kellermann: 22:51	No.
David Jansky: 22:52	He never married?
Ken Kellermann: 22:53	No, he never married. His brother died about 10 years ago. He had a brother.
David Jansky: 23:02	No family.
Ken Kellermann: 23:02	So that's why he [inaudible]. He did a lot [inaudible] to [inaudible] Wheaton [inaudible] personal and.
David Jansky: 23:25	Wheaton.
Ken Kellermann: 23:26	It's where he lived.
David Jansky: 23:27	That's where he lived. Is any of the stuff that he sent up of any significance?
Ken Kellermann: 23:34	Oh yeah. Equipment that he used during the thirties.
David Jansky: 23:41	That far back.
Ken Kellermann: 23:42	Oh yeah.
David Jansky: 23:44	And he shifted from here or Wheaton to Washington to Hawaii, Tasmania to here.
Ken Kellermann: 23:53	Oh, we shifted it here.
David Jansky: 23:55	Yeah, I know. My God. When he worked in Hawaii who did he work for?
Ken Kellermann: 24:04	Nobody. As far as I can tell. He had this grant from the Research Corporation very much. Now he got independent--
David Jansky: 24:15	He got ticked off at the deadlines.
Ken Kellermann: 24:17	Right. That's why even now he didn't want to leave this stuff. We're not the government. He didn’t want to leave his stuff to the government
David Jansky: 24:39	[inaudible] that everything else [inaudible].
Ken Kellermann: 24:50	There's still plenty of experiments [inaudible].
David Jansky: 24:55	That’s marvelous. It really is.
Ken Kellermann: 25:00	He can stand up in front of an audience and give an hour lecture, no notes. Stand there and talk. Perfectly lucid and fascinating.

Ken Kellermann: 25:13	[I heard him give a lecture here from the last visit and he gave it here?]
David Jansky: 25:18	Oh.
Ken Kellermann: 25:19	We had him over Charlottesville and he talked to the staff and we had him come and talk to the amateur radio club one evening.
Ken Kellermann: 25:29	He started out as a radio ham.
Ken Kellermann: 25:33	[inaudible].
David Jansky: 25:38	Somebody record that talk over in Charlottesville?
Ken Kellermann: 25:42	Yeah.
David Jansky: 25:43	Good.
Ken Kellermann: 25:45	[inaudible] a copy of it.
David Jansky: 25:49	Did you ever read a book, Accidental Astronomer?
Ken Kellermann: 25:57	Name's familiar. [inaudible].
David Jansky: 26:00	Sir Bernard.
Ken Kellermann: 26:01	Oh, Lovell sure.
David Jansky: 26:05	The stuff that he did during the war had to be just -
Ken Kellermann: 26:12	All the people -
David Jansky: 26:14	just fascinating.
Ken Kellermann: 26:16	All the people that did radio astronomy after the war. Well, the-- of course, but they sort of all worked together and knew each other. Lovell, Ryle, Bowen from Australia and--
David Jansky: 26:33	[inaudible].
Ken Kellermann: 26:35	Yeah. they sort of all knew each other.
David Jansky: 26:41	But what they did, what he did during the war. Working on these radar-type bomb sites that could give the--
Ken Kellermann: 26:50	Right
David Jansky: 26:51	-- bombardier their pictures through the black night of what was done.
Ken Kellermann: 26:54	Yes. This is what saved England, of course.
David Jansky: 26:56	Yeah. And the same way the one in the nose cone when they went out submarine hunting-
David Jansky: 27:07	And when the war ended he got all this stuff for [inaudible] than nothing.
Ken Kellermann: 27:11	If you remember, you probably won't remember it.
David Jansky: 27:13	He almost wound up in jail. But I've heard of the story.
Ken Kellermann: 27:15	Lovell’s talk when he was here.
David Jansky: 27:16	Yeah.
Ken Kellermann: 27:18	Well, now why-- after the war, even though prior to that all the radio astronomy had ever been done by your father, and by Reber in this country, that after the war it really took off in England and Australia, the US fell behind.
David Jansky: 27:36	That's right.
Ken Kellermann: 27:39	Why? Lovell’s theory is that Britain developed the first radar. It was a relatively long wavelength. And of course- [tape ends]

End Tape 3B

Begin Tape 8B

Reber: 00:07	And after that, [inaudible]. And [inaudible] more accurate. So that, again, represents [inaudible]. And that means that [inaudible]. And so this [inaudible]. See, I didn't know what the trouble was, but [inaudible] service was [inaudible] each stage, so that if something went wrong, I immediately identified what the trouble was. So this was [inaudible] that receiver. And that was the signal generator for this receiver. So everything was doomed. But it paid off. And the stability was greatly—and the signal [inaudible] was greatly improved. And I was able to get much more detail there. Now, the [inaudible] of that [inaudible] from 1944 [inaudible] when the [inaudible] up. And it was really interesting, you should look at that article. The Sun crosses through the Milky Way in December. And I'd get records before, during the crossover and after. And it turned out that- see in Jansky’s original article he says he thinks [inaudible] someway associated with the sun. So the phenomena he [inaudible] disappear in the west in the evening. This is a reason he doesn't think they come from the sun because there's some kind of disturbance in the upper atmosphere caused by the sun. And then time goes on. That was in December of 1931. And then the article goes through a lot of refereeing processes. And the proofs finally get back to him in May. There's a little footnote that says this proposition that [inaudible] associated with the Sun is wrong because they're now about eight hours ahead of the Sun. So they move forward [in sidereal time?]. And that's the last we hear of it for more than a year. Well, I'm still in school. This is December 1932. And I graduated in June 1933. And in the mean time I got more experience in all this, and I write to him and say that I was quite impressed with his article and if he saw it useful, well, I would like to be considered for a job. And he writes back and says that [inaudible] doesn’t exist anymore and there's no job open for that opportunity. And so I hunted around for the academic world and got the pressure off. And I went to see the head of the physics department at the University of Chicago, fellow named [Hedrick Gordon Gale?]. And he was an old man when I knew him. But in his younger days, about 1900, he was an able and energetic supporter and assistant to Michaelson. So you see how far back he was. He's never heard of Jansky and didn’t know [anything about him?] so that closed than. So I went to his boss, fellow named [inaudible], who was [dean of?] physics and science and mathematics, astronomy, chemistry and so on. And I explained it to him and he was very cognizant of Jansky’s work, but he was sure that Jansky'd made a mistake, for a very good reason. Because [inaudible] there was an electrified layer overhead called the ionosphere. And it made long distance communication possible because a transmitter in one place would have its signal reflected from the bottom of the ionosphere around the curvature of the earth. And it made long distance communication possible. All very true. But he didn't have any comprehension of magnitude. If the frequency was high enough or the electric intensity low enough, the ionosphere becomes transparent. [Inaudible] was arguing that the ionosphere was silvered on both sides and in celestial radio waves would be sent back into the earth, in the sky. Very true. But Jansky was working in an auspicious moment when the sky was quite transparent, very quiet. So we didn't get anywhere there. And I contacted Harlow Shapley at Harvard, and he was very conscious of Jansky’s work and quite admired it and would like to do something. But the astronomers are optical astronomers. They don't know anything about radio. And they were short of money and they sure weren’t going to get stuck in something they didn't know anything about. That’s reasonable. So I contacted Caltech and it was Professor of Astronomy there, Potapenko, a student in Poland, and they wrote an article in one of the little journals describing what they were going to do. And they had this fellow, who’s the fellow that had beautiful pictures of a 200-inch, Rogers or something like that? Russell or Porter.
Kellermann: 06:04	Who?
Reber: 06:05	That's right, Porter. They had Porter gett pictures of what they proposed to do, which was a turntable going around on the track, just like with Jansky. But instead of having an outside antenna, it was going to be a rocket.
Reber: 06:23	But if you're going to reproduce somebody else's results, you do it better afterward. And Potapenko didn't seem to realize that. Well, anyhow, that never amounted to anything, so that was all. And finally, I went to Yerkes Observatory and Otto Struve was in charge. And he was the last of a long line of optical astronomers. And he didn’t know beans from bananas about radio and furthermore he didn't want to know. And he had two blokes on the staff, this Gerard Kuiper and a fellow named Henye. They were dead sure that Jansky had made a mistake. And why? Because these two blokes couldn't dream up any way by which Mother Nature could produce these celestial radio waves, and then since they couldn't dream them up they didn't exist. How’s that for conceit! Well, anyhow this occupied well over a year, about 1935. And finally, it got to the point where I thought to myself, “You know what? If anybody's going to do anything, you're it.” So after a lot of casting about, I had to build that contraption. And this receiver, finally, got it working. But it was quite a struggle. Over a period of a couple of years. So that's pretty much the story and it's no different today. I've had occasion to do low frequency radio astronomy and all I get is a bunch of folks who say, “Oh it can’t be done” [inaudible] and don't want to hear about it. Blah blah blah blah blah..
David Jansky: 07:53	There's a lot of money involved in this.
Reber: 07:57	I put up the money.
David Jansky: 07:58	You did that?
Reber: 07:59	That's right.
David Jansky: 07:59	You were working full time
Reber: 08:01	Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I worked at a radio industry in Chicago. And you remember that big drum I’ve told you about was four feet in diameter and six feet high. And then so I went to the Aluminum Company of America and I explained what I wanted. And they said the biggest sheet of aluminum is 12 feet long and 6 feet wide. So I said, how about rolling one into a circle? And then they were making some [inaudible]. Yes, they’d do that. So I said, "How much?" And they said, "$100." This would be about $5000 today, see? So $100 was about three weeks' pay, but when you're hired out for $35 a week, you got $35. You didn't get something with less and less and less and less. So I was pretty much on my own and I could haggle with these guys directly and that was something. We didn't have any intermediary or a purchasing department or any of that jazz right, and that's just— [Crosstalk]
Reber: 09:17 David Jansky:	So that’s how radio astronomy got started. And people say, “What did the neighbors think?” Neighbors were like most neighbors, can't think. From my point of view it was a really rigorous performance and from the neighbors point of view they couldn’t care less. And they did give me a hand though occasionally as I’ve explained. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Solely, [inaudible] it was an EM sensor. [The next ~3 minutes are very difficult to understand as the speakers apparently have moved away from the mic, with only occasional words and phrases audible/understandable.]
Reber: 09:49	This saved [inaudible] correctly. You'd have it broadcasted and then somehow-- I don't know. And I didn't have any housing for this setup, right? So then our originating [inaudible] to not being impaired, so. I don't go by their [inaudible]. I think you could form [inaudible]. And then again, they had nothing to do with the [inaudible]. The picture's their policies. The hole here [crosstalk]. That's just--
	Hold up. Let me check. What did you have?
Reber: 10:48	Well, I don't know if they were just here or they were there. That's--
	Signal area.
Reber: 10:55	But this is the signal generator. I'm wondering how they were on the duty there, and it is [inaudible] there. Yeah. There were trials, and the group happened. And we pushed forward. I mean, this was before I was about to take in a breath of that [inaudible]. And he claimed he changed her to scratch hiding this in the back for I was not sure I would have him back before. And just showing your receiver, I think if your receiver [inaudible] then there's it happening after here. And there was some interest about it since she knew I almost paid one because she wrote while she knew she was a mess. And she had it earlier. She just had to lead the section. Then we had the impression that [inaudible] and that was something high up at a certain point of the atmosphere they offered cover but this was the great year. And the [inaudible] stopped. Now, I thought because there had been an upward inclination there. And actually, it turns out that the bright source of low red light all the way around, including these [hieroglyphs?]. In other words, this was a little mess in the red light [inaudible]. And so that's how I got my frequency. It was currently at-- probably than a couple percent. This is another way to [inaudible] so sure, right out of the sun. This was 1943. I'd like to know the condition on the sun. So this was mounted on the service tower.
David Jansky: 13:22	And this showed you the spot activity?
Reber: 13:24	That's right.
David Jansky: 13:25	Write it down, and I'll be back.
Reber: 13:26	This would create an image of the sun--
David Jansky: 13:28	And you can see the dark spots which were the spot activity.
Reber: 13:31	Exactly. And from day to day, you could call on [inaudible] if you got sun. Most of them didn't last that long. Most of them would only last for two or three days and then I would draw pictures out in my log book showing what the sun looked like on such and such a day. And then I compared that one with the radio observations.
David Jansky: 13:52	And you made this edition?
Reber: 13:54	Well, I just made this, so. [inaudible] service tower there. And finally old Gerard Kuiper came down there, but Struve didn't wanna touch it, he didn’t come. And I showed Kuiper this thing and he turns up his nose and says, "It's being done so much better elsewhere." I said, "That is true. But if I depend on it elsewhere, I'll get the data about a month late." This way I get it minute by minute. That's true [inaudible].
Reber: 14:35	So you see, the metal condition of the thin wire [inaudible] distance or [inaudible].
David Jansky: 14:49	[inaudible] you could've [done with a partner. You were born too late?]

Reber: 14:56	Oh, I don't know.
Reber: 14:58	He was head of the Astrophysical Journal. Yeah.
Reber: 15:07	Somebody questioned him about why that article was published.
Reber: 15:11	Chandrasekhar said the [inaudible]. He decided it would be less of a bother, he’d rather have a bad article get published than to have a good article rejected. So he published it. That was his [inaudible] condition. My association with the astronomical community, something less than poor.
David Jansky: 15:35	Something less than poor.
Kellermann: 15:40	And now that was true for all radio astronomers until 1970 or so.
Reber: 15:47	Yeah. And to tell you the truth, it's not much better today.
Kellermann: 15:51	Yeah, I think it's better now.
Reber: 15:52	You think it is?
Kellermann: 15:53	Yes.
Reber: 15:54	[inaudible]
Kellermann: 15:55	No. We’ve got a generation of astronomers who, as part of their education already were learning about radio astronomy-- those people for whom radio astronomy came later in their professional careers were too old to learn anything new. They'd just [crosstalk]--
Reber: 16:15	That's actually the truth about it.
Kellermann: 16:17	--but now people learn about it in school. Yeah. And so it's just part of astronomy now. They don't consider anything special. Optical astronomy, radio astronomy, x-rays, infrared, they just all consider this different wavelengths.
Reber: 16:33	In other words, [inaudible] astronomers were all ossified heavily, so. Well, gentlemen, I've got about 20 minutes after now.
Kellermann: 16:45	Why don't we go over and see -

End Tape 8B

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Papers of Kenneth I. Kellermann > Oral Histories Series

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Papers of Kenneth I. Kellermann, “Grote Reber, Interviewed by Kenneth I. Kellermann, Spring 1995,” NRAO/AUI Archives, accessed February 16, 2026, https://www.nrao.edu/archives/items/show/43422.

Grote Reber, Interviewed by Kenneth I. Kellermann, Spring 1995

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