Alumni

Many of my memories are dominated by my dad; by the fact that we share the same name. I don't know whether this is really the kind of thing you'd want to include in an article but I just couldn't wait to get away from North Carolina. Not that I don't think it's a fantastic place to live, but every time I have an interview, even now, somebody always say "Oh you must be related to (fill in the blanks)". So I never had a persona to call my own until after I'd left North Carolina because my dad was so well known and I had the identical name.

Now couple that with having done fairly poorly in college and having no particular direction in my life and you can see that it wasn't entirely a happy childhood in North Carolina. Once I left for the Navy in 1943, I had to make my own accomplishments and I grew up a little bit. I never came back to North Carolina, really. Then also, I met and married this wonderful girl from Boston and she helped me grow up and so I think I germinated in North Carolina but I didn't sprout until I left.

It was two things, an inability and an ability. The inability was that I had no literary writing ability whatsoever, so that the temptation to try to fall in my dad's footsteps was zero or negative. The ability I guess was that I had a little bit of mechanical aptitude. I was always tinkering, so becoming an engineer or physicist or something like that... I just fell into it naturally.

I'm glad I made the choice because I got a lot out of it. That's when I really began to grow up.. when I atttended NC State. I had spent my years at Carolina (UNC-CH)... they weren't many years either, it was like three years to graduate, (you get on an accelerated schedule when you're in ROTC). I was in a fraternity and also I was just beginning to discover girls, and the net result of this was that I made very poor grades. I had no motivation to study, really a lost soul who had lousy grades.

When I got out of the Navy in 1946, I wanted to go to MIT. I had attended a Navy radar school that was run by MIT when I was in the service and I just fell in love with that place. There was no way anybody with my grades was going to get into MIT. To get into an Ivy League school with my lousy grades at Carolina as an undergrad was just out of the question.

But with the help of some family friends that knew some people at NC State, I got into State's College of Engineering and completed a masters degree there. Then I went to work at an agricultural experiment station of all things. A little over a year later I finally got accepted to where I really wanted to go to get a doctorate, which was MIT. I had good grades at NC State because I was beginning to get motivated.

The work that I'm least proud of [was] right after I graduating from NC State. I was looking around for a job and was referred to an agricultural experiment station in Oxford. This particular agricultural experiment station (which was one of many) was funded by the state of North Carolina and [was] devoted to one crop, tobacco. You know, who would have known in 1946 that one might eventually become ashamed of having worked on tobacco.

I really enjoyed the work, it was a wonderful bunch of folks, and I had some really good ideas. In retrospect, however, it was one of my jobs that had contributed the least to society. Oh, I think a journal article or two came out of it, I had fun at it, I had some good colleagues, but I didn't realize [the impact of my work] for years.

My work focused on colorimetric studies of tobacco curing and growing. There were two aspects of it, when you pick the leaf and put it in the barn to cure it along with when you stop the curing process. The way it's done traditionally is by eye, but I developed electronic instrumentation to measure those changes automatically.

The work itself was interesting, but years later I came to realize that I helped, in some way, for people to contract lung cancer.

To turn this question around, I am the most proud of my work in radar astronomy.

Inside the panel it evolved into a battle between the DSL theocracy and the cable modem theocracy and even though the final report has some stuff about fiber to the home in it, there wasn't nearly as much emphasis to that as I, a minority of one I might say, would have liked to have.

Now a year and half, two years later, the picture is very different. A lot of momentum [has been] generated towards going to fiber on a more accelerated scale than anybody thought. Because of the enormous growth of very high speed applications like video on demand, peer-to-peer videos and exchanges of pictures, bandwidth pressures can't be satisfied with either DSL or cable. The FCC has reacted by sweetening the pot for the telephone companies in such a way that they can completely escape any kind of regulation if they'll make it glass all the way to the home.

If it's copper even part of the way to the home, then they're saddled with yesterday's meddlesome regulations to make sure it's competitive. If they'll be good boys and make it fiber all the way to the premises, then the FCC will say "Goodbye and good luck, you're not gonna see us again, we're out of here". And boy, that's [the] pot of gold, that those poor old telephone companies have been looking for forever. So that's thing number one that's happened since that NAE report of a couple of years ago, rapid movement in the direction of obsoleting DSL and cable modems.

The second thing was that BellSouth, Verizon, and SBC have gotten together and issued what they call an RFP, a request for price quotation [for laying the fiber]. So all of a sudden these guys are stumbling all over each other trying to get [in on] the action to bring fiber to the home.

So on the face of it, the little snowball that starts the avalanche seems to have been launched. Two snowballs, one, the FCC decision, and then secondly, the response of these three telephone companies in trying to get some significant standards and requests for quotation. That sounds good. But, most people who are not as naïve as I am, which is pretty naive, think that this is gonna move very, very slowly, that the telephone companies don't really need it, and we'll see.

I'm glad I made the choice because I got a lot out of it. That's when I really began to grow up.. when I atttended NC State. I had spent my years at Carolina (UNC-CH)... they weren't many years either, it was like three years to graduate, (you get on an accelerated schedule when you're in ROTC). I was in a fraternity and also I was just beginning to discover girls, and the net result of this was that I made very poor grades. I had no motivation to study, really a lost soul who had lousy grades.

When I got out of the Navy in 1946, I wanted to go to MIT. I had attended a Navy radar school that was run by MIT when I was in the service and I just fell in love with that place. There was no way anybody with my grades was going to get into MIT. To get into an Ivy League school with my lousy grades at Carolina as an undergrad was just out of the question.

But with the help of some family friends that knew some people at NC State, I got into State's College of Engineering and completed a masters degree there. Then I went to work at an agricultural experiment station of all things. A little over a year later I finally got accepted to where I really wanted to go to get a doctorate, which was MIT. I had good grades at NC State because I was beginning to get motivated.

The word I've heard used mostly is transparent. That is, if somebody connects something to your house and you can put anything you want on it, it's "transparent". That's why the telephone wire was so successful. When it started out, you could just put a telephone on it, and then somebody figured you could put a fax machine on it, you could put an answering machine, you can use a modem on your PC, you could do all these things with this lousy little copper wire pair that is basically unchanged since 1880 and Alexander Graham Bell.

That's why fiber is so great, because it's completely transparent. The part of the bandwidth that nobody else is using at the moment is completely transparent in fiber. If somebody's already got some data flowing on the fiber then you can consider that part to be lit, if it's unused it's considered dark, it hasn't been lit yet. And I've been going around preaching that what the world needs is dark fiber everywhere, and what I meant by that was that if people put in fiber then it's future-proof, you can put whatever you want to on it.

It's like the copper wire that went to your house, anything with a copper wire that goes to your house today, whatever kind of signal you want to put on that copper, the copper will support. It's transparent. In the same way, a fiber that hasn't been lit yet, that is dark, it's up for grabs what goes on to it, what you install in it, it's future-proof. You can come out ten years from now with a wheelbarrow in the dead of night and take out whatever communicates on that fiber and put something new in.

So, in a sense, dark fiber with its transparency is like having something with 25,000 times as much [capacity] as the copper wires suddenly be a substituted for it, and when you look at all the inventions and all the things we have in our lives today that are made possible by this modest copper pair, and think about having something with 25,000 times more bandwidth than that, then you get excited about the unpredictable goodies that are gonna flow from having such a wide band and transparent, i.e. dark, unlit medium to innovate with. It can evolve into anything.

I guess I'd have to take a flying guess and say that the picture of an engineer, who he is in society, won't change. When I was struggling through North Carolina State College, the view of the engineer was that this is the guy who builds things, who helps society live a better life. Sometimes you get dragged off into helping one part of society to kill another part of society, but those are aberrations.

Basically what engineers do is not military research, that sort of stuff, it's to try to make the world a better place. Sometimes they also like to make money now and then. I don't think that's gonna change, I don't think it ever did and I don't think it will. But quite obviously, the content changes at blinding speed. I mean when I think of the things I studied in 1948 at North Carolina State and how beautiful and exotic and eye-popping they were and how primitive they seem today, how primitive just 10 years seems today, the content is just gonna keep changing.

The pace may speed up or it may slow down. This view that technology evolution is always accelerating I disagree with. There was a huge acceleration of technology innovation right after World War II, and then we ran out of gas for a while. It comes and goes, these high velocity spurts. But basically, there will be new devices, a new microchip, new ways of solving unbelievable problems... who would have thought that a computer could be World Chess Champion? It couldn't be. But it was. I can't predict, I can't answer the second part of that question, what's it gonna be. All I can say is, the world will always need engineers and that's what they will do.