Oral-History:Archie King

About Archie King

Archie King, the son of Alsatian immigrants, had only a year of high school education when he entered Cal Tech. He graduated in 1927. After working at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, King took a position with Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1930, where he remained until his retirement in 1961. After retiring, King returned to California and worked for several years for the Hughes Aircraft Company.

The interview begins with King's family background, his early education, and his need to work for several years in order to attend college. He discusses his experiences at Cal Tech and his subsequent work at Mt. Wilson Observatory. In 1930, King joined Bell Laboratories and the interview continues with King's recollections of various radar and microwave projects he worked on while with Bell, including one of the first range finder projects during WWII. After the war, King's work with Bell Laboratories focused on circuit electric wave problems. King retired from Bell in 1961, and the interview concludes with a brief discussion of his subsequent employment with Hughes Aircraft Company in Culver City, California.

About the Interview

ARCHIE KING: An Interview Conducted by Frank A. Polkinghorn, IEEE History Center, August 23, 1976

Interview # 032 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Copyright Statement

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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Archie King, an oral history conducted in 1976 by Frank A. Polkinghorn, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA

Interview

INTERVIEW: Archie King

INTERVIEWED BY: Frank A. Polkinghorn

PLACE: Laguna Hills, California

DATE: August 23, 1976

Family and Early Work

Polkinghorn:

This interview is with Mr. Archie P. King, first of Bell Telephone Laboratories, and later of the Hughes Organization in Los Angeles. Archie, I want to start way back with you in high school. You came to Los Angeles at an early age, or were you born here?

King:

No, I was not even born in this country. My parents were Alsatians, and they married and lived in Paris for a number of years and that's where I was born. In 1901. My father was kind of disenchanted with life over there, and he had an uncle over in this country, so he thought he would come over here. While he was in France, his training and occupation was in agriculture — he was a horticulturist. His job, while he was living in Paris, was designing the public gardens. He won some medals for it.

Polkinghorn:

That's an interesting background!

King:

There's a kind of an interesting thing there, you know. Alsace was French until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. And one of the spoils of war was the loss of those provinces to Germany. From there on, until the First World War it was German in every respect. My father was shipped over to France to avoid being caught in this mess, because they changed the languages overnight, you know. The official language in Alsace-Lorraine was German after that, despite all the French-speaking people there. That's a little background, and my father came to this country planning to exercise his profession here. He settled in a small city in western New York State — it was called Hormelsville at that time; it's now called Hormel. He had some pretty rough going, but he had some pretty good breaks, too. As in my case, he also depended a little bit on the press, because he started out and, being a foreigner starting out in a foreign country is something — you've really got to have something good to get going. And my father had the talent, but the average people I guess didn't appreciate it. By some good chance, a reporter of the local paper, who knew of France, was astounded, because my father had brought many of our things that you never would see in this country, things that hadn't ever been seen in this country before. Well, from there on, it was just an avalanche.

Polkinghorn:

How did you happen to come to California?

King:

Well, that goes back a number of years. I didn't get to California until 1920. I went to some school in Hormel, and my father sold out the business and went to Europe. He went and spent the summer in France and in Switzerland, and in Germany, and in Alsace. We looked up many old relatives and friends, and I had a great time. He took me to the Louvre, and he also took me up the Eiffel Tower, which I guess I enjoyed even more. I was only about thirteen at the time, you know, so I didn't appreciate those things as much as I would today, I'm sure. I guess I didn't actually get to high school until my parents came back in the fall of 1913, and they bought a florist establishment in Leroy, New York, which is in the Genesee Valley in western New York State. I went one year to high school and then my parents started moving out, looking for a better place, because he had respiratory problems, asthma. We went to Texas then, and I guess we were in Texas about two years: his health improved, I guess with the change maybe, momentarily, so he ended up in New York State, back in, I guess, Batinga, New York. He spent a year there, and he just about did not live through the winter. He got some good advice this time, this doctor told him, "You'd better go to California."

So they came to Pasadena in 1920, and that is where the story really begins, because I had had some early acquaintance with a chemist at Jell-O. Jell-O was made in New York, just a few blocks from where I lived, actually. The fellow there took kind of an interest in me, and I must acknowledge a lot of appreciation to this chemist who helped me. He said I'd have to get an education if I'd want to amount to anything, and I guess I was impressed enough to realize that this was the case. My mother said, "Well, sure, you've got a good school right here, why go any further?" So I made plans to enter Tech, and my parents didn't really have enough money to put me through, and I realized this. I worked for about three years, to gather enough money to carry me through, but I didn't have quite enough. I started out anyway, and the main barrier in getting into Cal Tech was the fact that while I had had a year of high school, that's about all I had. I never graduated. I realized this was kind of an essential sort of thing, you know. So I started going to Pasadena High School, to get an equivalency for high school education.

Polkinghorn:

This is while you were working?

King:

Yes, I was working. I went about the better part of a year, and I saw how slow this was going, and I said, "Gosh, it's going to take me two or three years to get the standard kind of night school diploma equivalency." So I thought I would go down to Tech and see what they would say, what was necessary. And he said, "Well, whether you go through high school or not, you still have to take an entrance examination." He said, "If you can satisfy us in other respects, other parts of your character and things like that, you can possibly get in." I thought this was great! So I studied like the devil for about three months, I guess, and went to the school, took the examination in the early fall, and by Nellie I passed it. I got in! But then my trouble started, because you know when you take an exam like that, you cram. If they ask you the wrong question you're never going to pass it.

Cal Tech

King:

Well, anyway, I got into Tech. I took a pretty tough course, so I kept busy. I took Physics and Engineering. That's the hardest course they have there, because it has all of the physics and quite a bit of the engineering. You know how the engineering is. I had some trouble the first year getting adjusted and everything, but I survived, and I survived the second year, and the third year, and I graduated in 1927. I had run out of money in the beginning of the senior year. I was able to take a loan from the college for my tuition for the last year, and so I kept busy, and I worked for the Mount Wilson Observatory people there. They had electrical wiring circuits and all kinds of things like that, that needed doing. While I was there I met a chap who also worked for the Carnegie Institute in Washington, but for a different department. He worked for the Department of Seismology, and he was looking for someone who could assemble their equipment, their guiding mechanisms and amplifiers and things like that to guide their seismometers. They used impulse motors to do that, and they developed a way to design them, a little circuit.

I was doing pretty well, and this fellow who got me the job became quite ill. As a result of that I was offered his job temporarily. I knew it was temporary, but I was glad to get it, and I thought that perhaps I didn't have to go somewhere else for work, because there was very little research and not much development on the West Coast in 1928. There was a telephone company; there was Southern California Edison company, I guess Advanced Motors, and a few other small companies.

Polkinghorn:

1927 is when I went East for the same reason.

Bell Labs

Decision to Apply

King:

Well, you know, I thought I had things pretty well made. I was getting three hundred dollars a month and I got a month's vacation a year, which you know was customary with institutions. I thought this was just fine, all these other people are having troubles — it seemed so remote. Little did I know that I was going to be riveted by problems that would demand sudden decisions. The director of the Seismic Lab called me in one day and told me that the financial situation with the laboratory was very bad because the income had fallen almost to zero, and they didn't know how much longer they could continue. He said he didn't know of anything definite in the future, but that if I had any good opportunities, to be sure to consider them as alternatives.

So I went down to school and saw the professor I knew best there. I told him the story, and he sort of laughed — he was very amused by this situation. He said, "You know, this may be the best break you've had in a long time. I've been talking to you about going back to the Bell Labs." He was an ex-Bell Labs person. I forget his name, but he was one of the main authorities in the country on gas tubes. There were all kinds of uses coming up at that period for gas lighting, and colored gas tube displays and things like that. He was an expert with this and he made a mint that way. He said I should go to the labs and apply for it, he said there's a recruiter coming in a couple of weeks, who was going to look over possible hiring. He said, "I'll put your name down and you can see him if you want to." I did, and had a very pleasant talk; that was Roy Heffner. The fellow who interviewed me at Tech. This was about 1929 or the early 1930s. It was about January of 1930. He said, "Well, we'll have to look this data over; things look very attractive. We'll write you a confirming letter; it's a customary thing." Well, I did get a letter, and they hired me, and they offered me, I guess, fifty dollars a week."

Early Work: Oscillographs and IS

This was in 1930, and my first work at the Labs was of course down in Holmdel, with its antennas. I worked various jobs — we had a fine English oscilloscope that the lab had acquired. Friis had gotten it somehow, but I was assigned to that. I worked on that for a couple of months, to get all the bugs out, and used that for diversity of reception. With just a single antenna, the signal would fade in and out due to multi-path. One minute your signal would be nice and strong and the next it would be all gone. With this Oxford oscilloscope that we had, oscillograph I guess it's called really, we could record these things and the signal would go off and you could see all of these things.

Polkinghorn:

Was that a Curtis oscillograph?

King:

Yes, it was a string oscillograph. The resonance of the string was much higher than the frequency used though.

Polkinghorn:

Probably a Curtis oscillograph there at the company. Hoffman Curtis.

King:

No, this was from England. Another make, I guess — it was a fine oscillograph, as long as you didn't use too high a frequency. What date was it that MUSA came in?

Polkinghorn:

Middle 1930s somewhere.

King:

No earlier? Was there any earlier preparation work? You see, the reason I ask is I left Friis's department and went into Southworth's in 1934. I had been working with Friis on the IS systems they planned to use for the photo MUSA.

Polkinghorn:

I said the middle 1930s. It was well along in 1937.

King:

You know, Friis and I never saw eye to eye on this IS stuff. He wanted to make it one way, and I wanted to make it another. He had some cute little boxes and tubes — in two inch squares that you built the IS circuit in and you had to couple and tune coupling rings and tuning and things like that so you could set up the circuits pretty well. I didn't like some of the aspects of the design, but I think that probably got me a graduation present over to Southworth's group.

Microwave Equipment and Experiments

Polkinghorn:

You worked with R.S. Ohl for a while didn't you? In the training lab?

King:

Yeah, we didn't get along too well together. I got this IS job with Friis, and I worked on that a year or so, and then I was transferred over to Southworth's group, where I started learning and working on microwave equipment. We started with long wave guides about five or six inches in diameter; we had trouble getting high enough frequencies to cooperate.

Polkinghorn:

Had you moved over to Robert's House on that?

King:

Yes. Well, we didn't start at Robert's House. We had a shack about twelve hundred feet down the line. There were feelers at that time, and we found a technical assistant by the name of Fred Hargraves.

Polkinghorn:

I remember. He's living in England now.

King:

I'm not sure he's still alive.

Polkinghorn:

Right. I think I did hear he had died.

King:

We started there, and our principal effort was to just get fundamental and rudimentary experiments, you know. We'd build equipment. We'd got these Barkhausen-tube oscillators, gas-tube type oscillators, and they're fussy darn things. About this time, Salters was beginning to talk with other people about getting some other tubes — these had to be bought in France, or someplace like that. With the gas tubes, if the gas pressure varies a little bit, the frequency may be very different; it may not want to work at all! We ran into this quite a bit. But in spite of all this we got things going. We began to learn more about the technical characteristics of microwaves. The transmission line equations worked just as nicely for microwaves as they do for anything else, we found!

Polkinghorn:

Southworth had been at Net Com, and that was the time he moved down.

King:

Yes, that's right. He had succeeded in sending signals through a line some eight hundred feet long at Net Com, and Hargraves was the man who helped him do that! Of course, Southworth did quite a bit ; he did quite a bit even while he was still at Yale — what he called Lecher wire experiments. Of course, we started out with the wave guide with a long pipe about five inches in diameter, because we couldn't get any frequencies high enough to use a smaller pipe, which you would have to do. That started a thing that I spent quite a bit of time on. I guess up until World War II, I worked on horn antennas, communical horn antennas, rectangular horn antennas, exponential horn antennas, just disks with a wave guide hole in the middle, and all sorts of things, and got quite a bit of information and experimental data. This is going to be published again. We're going to publish that plus quite a number of related articles, so you've got everything under one book. That's going to be a nice thing, I think. The paper on this work was published just around 1949.

Radar Experiments for Navy

King:

Well, the war started to come kind of early, you know, and we became involved. We were asked to investigate certain things. Some were for the Navy, some were for other people, and Fry was in the lab and he was very influential in guiding the lab's policies and helping the war, the technical war effort. I guess the situation was that they wanted some help, and the labs were not refusing to help as much as they could.

Polkinghorn:

Fry was on an NDRC committee. He was going around the laboratories getting what information he could, getting what contracts he could.

King:

I guess the first thing was a question by the Navy, and he said, "If these large antennas, like maybe a search light, come over a receptor or something like that, are these really good at microwaves? Can they be used efficiently?" This was one of the questions they asked. Southworth talked it over with me some, and he thought maybe we ought to get a few antenna, flat [...] antennas, and see if they're any good at microwaves, how to feed them. So we built some test towers down at Holmdel. We had the antenna at the top of the tower and could make measurements that way. And we found that these... worked extremely well, but how well it worked depended on how you fed them to a wave guide. We at this time had types about two inches wide, maybe one inch high, and we were able to get ten centimeter waves through those pipes. We used those, and we would make a little tiny horn at the focal point of the parabola, and we found the optimum range for things like that. We also found that you could put little dipoles and have just a parallel line transmission line. They get very good results with it and put a little cap over the end of the thing.

Along about this time came the very challenging thing. This is a story Southworth told me, that he got through Fortin Fry. Before the war they'd made a roundup, and they said, well, war is coming, it's inevitable, and how will we best be prepared? What do we need that we don't have now that we should get ready for? The Navy said, well, we need some good range finders, and the same was true of the military, and I guess Fry said, "Maybe we can do it some other way. Maybe we can use radar instead of optical frequencies for range finding."

Polkinghorn:

Yes, he came to me with the same story.

King:

Well, then, that corroborates it some. That was set up at Old Point Comfort on the Chesapeake Bay. They had a whole bunch of theodolites for miles along there. They used them for gunnery practice and getting the performance of their shooting. They had all this coupled up with a very complex system, and they had cameras on the equipment to record the data. The oscilloscopes, the meters, and everything were recorded. A plane would fly in a straight path, you know, maybe at some angle to the theodolites, and the optical people would see how well they could track them. The results would be photographed at the same time that the data came in for the radar performance. Radar outperformed the optical stuff, ten to one, I'll bet. Everyone was pretty happy about that, and I had the responsibility for building the transeiving equipment for it. You know these Mickey Mouse things they use for oral range finding of planes and things —

Polkinghorn:

Our group developed that some.

King:

Which version did you develop?

Polkinghorn:

We developed the type that you just said — a listening device. The device was the I 47.

King:

No, that was different. I was thinking of the truck they had with a couple of horns, or a couple of [unintelligible] or something, and they had microphones associated with it —

Polkinghorn:

That's World War I equipment left over. They gave us one of those, and we took the horns off and put visors on and a head. That was what was called Mickey Mouse.

King:

That's funny, because I put a thing like that together down in Holmdel.

Polkinghorn:

The one we put together was with Merriman, large equipment.

King:

Frank Merriman and I had worked together on this thing! We built it down at Holmdel. We got the radar, the pulser, and all that sort of stuff from Whippany.

Polkinghorn:

And as soon as we got that together I went down with Merriman and Oswood and a number of others.

King:

Oh yes, Merriman and I drove equipment down you know, it was on one of these trucks, and we just drove it down.

Polkinghorn:

And we tested it down there, and they said they wanted them, and they ordered over five hundred of them.

King:

That was certainly a pretty primitive thing compared to the later ones, wasn't it?

Polkinghorn:

It was stop gap. They had a lot of 90 mm guns in the arsenal that they were not able to shoot because they had no range finders. This was a stop gap to get one as fast as possible. The SCR 545 was coming along, but it was coming slowly.

King:

Wasn't Gardner Fox working on that?

Polkinghorn:

That was out of Whippany.

King:

He was transferred to Whippany for a short time.

Polkinghorn:

I'm not sure. I put together the finished equipment and we sold over five hundred of those.

King:

I can remember too that Oswald was involved, and he was one of the members.

Polkinghorn:

He was Merriman's boss, and Merriman made the experimental tests. I was along with him, and as soon as the job was ordered, it was given to me and I went ahead and manufactured it.

King:

I used to see Oswald occasionally after that, and I would ask how he was getting along, and he would say, "Oh my God, it's like a hospital. People will build something, and they'll build it wrong. For example, they'll build it off a thousandth of an inch or so, and to make the measurements come out right they'll wrap a little tape around it and put the winding over on that!" And he said, "The tape is so darn lousy, it spoils our circuit! It goes this way, and if it isn't this, it'll be something different next week."

Polkinghorn:

I could tell you a long story about that, but I won't interrupt you.

K-band Radar

King:

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I of course worked for the lab during the war, and my primary job was up at Hyland, at that location, about eighty feet above the water pretty much where radar might be located on a ship, as far as the height from the surface of the sea is concerned. My job there, initially, was to get performance data on K-band radar. We started out with Whippany equipment; this was all right. We used one of those hook transformers, you know, that they developed up there. We built an antenna, but it had to be a scanning antenna. So I built an antenna, a multiple reflection type of thing that used a Hotchkiss drive between the feed back and forth. You see, I was using a zone parabola for the antenna, a sectorial parabola, to get an increase in effective area, the gain of the antenna, and we used that down there and got pretty good results. We could tell if there was a rowboat out in the Sound, if there was one person, two persons, or three persons in the thing. We could plot all the big buildings in New York.

One day we had a whole lot of officers from the Navy, and some of them were captains of battleships and whatnot, and they came down to visit to see the performance. It happened to be raining. I said, "Oh my God! Can you imagine; it would have to rain." But we fired up the equipment, and got everything going, and it didn't work quite as well, but it worked surprisingly well! The Naval people were really impressed by it. We worked on that thing for a couple of years, I guess. We had developed noise measuring equipment, so we could get our noise levels in order, which is very important in radar. We got a little bit more power, and we got better magnetrons as time went by. I guess we got about twenty five KW peaks, and we had about twenty-five to thirty DBM gains. We were doing pretty well. In fair weather we could do very well — we could plot Sandy Hook with the radar equipment, just beautifully. All the big ships, gee whiz, were they real signals! But for airplanes, we really had to work on those. The airplane had an effective area of a few square feet signal, that is, a large plane did. A blimp was a pretty good target. It was the framework on a blimp, the metal framework. I guess that adds up to a fair amount of area. Well, we studied propagation of K-band radar, with measuring water tides, the water's rate up and down. This has quite an effect. Because it's a two path thing, a direct path and a path conducted through water, and when those two are a half wave-length apart you don't get much signal. We made studies like that.

Polkinghorn:

Were they still flying planes from Long Island over, air testing at Sandy Hook at that time, or was that afterwards?

King:

We saw quite a number of planes.

Polkinghorn:

There were a lot of planes flying. They were testing the radar thing that Bill Swift and that company did — the first one that was built by the Bell Labs — and they were testing a 547 and they were testing one built by the Army.

King:

There was quite a bit of that going on right at the same location.

Polkinghorn:

This work I'm talking about was going on down at the Point down at Sandy Hook. For quite a long time, they had planes flying back and forth from Long Island to somewhere in New Jersey, to see what they could do for range with this equipment.

Corner Reflectors and Vertical Scanners

King:

We did quite a bit of work with corner reflectors. They are a very reliable and calculable reflector. I mean, when you know what you're going to get back from it, you can calculate very well. We set some of those up on Sandy Hook. Maybe a couple miles, three miles away or something like that. We found that we didn't have as good luck with them at K-band as we had at X-band, but they worked proportionately well.

Polkinghorn:

They are using them at multi-frequencies.

King:

I know. I guess to get those high frequencies, the exactness of those dimensions gets to be important. You have to build them pretty accurately.

Polkinghorn:

Did you stay there all the war, through the rest of the war?

King:

I stayed there until November of 1944, and they closed out the thing. The last thing was a job in cooperation with Whippany. That was a vertical scanner, and they wanted the angle of elevation accurately. England was the fellow that came down and solved the problem of how best to switch this, to use gas tubes to drive the solenoid. I guess that was about the end of it. That work kind of drew to an end, toward the end of 1944.

Circuit Electric Wave Problems

Polkinghorn:

What did you do after that?

King:

I went back to Holmdel. I'd been giving reports all along of course to Southworth, and I'd written several confidential memoranda on our results. Everyone seemed to be pleased with the way K-band was going, and some time before they were thinking of using K-band radar for moving target indication, and they were a little bit worried about what antenna to use. I don't know at that time if it was resolved, because the war ended before it really got into service. Do you know Denny Woods the president of the college? He was working on that aspect of it, and when I returned to Holmdel on a permanent basis, we faced the question of what was in the company interest to pursue, and what was not. Southworth went into quite a few things that he felt needed doing, and he asked me if I'd like to work on circular electric wave problems. I had already done a little bit on this before the war broke out, and I said yes, I thought this was the most important thing we had, and I worked on that for the next twenty years. I retired in 1961. Some of the things I did in that field were part of our quest, of course, to get higher frequencies. This was a big problem, all through the years.

Polkinghorn:

Generating frequency.

King:

Getting high enough frequency to transmit through the line. We learned how we could do this. We learned an awfully good way of measuring this, and this was a scheme that should be credited to Doug Ring. This worked out fine. We had a fancy Tektronix, so we could send a pulsed frequency down the wave guide. We could adjust the frequency so by means of the pulse, by timing the pulse and the distance between pulses. You would go down a certain distance and come back, and when it came back the folks would know an IS frequency distance from the transmitted pulse, and that worked very well. We could make all the fundamental measurements of reflective factors and transmission loss and transmission factors. We were dealing with something that already was getting to be of the order of two or three DB per mile. There was no reason we couldn't do better, go higher. I was given the job of finding out what the transmission variation was of frequency. That is, what the transmission curve looked like over frequency bands. The line we had at that time was two inches. We were working with frequencies now from forty to over a hundred kilo megacycles.

Polkinghorn:

You're talking about two RLIs?

King:

I'm talking about a two inch wave guide. This isn't an ordinary wave guide; this is a helix wave guide. They tend to cancel out spurious modes, and if you can do that you can reduce your transmission losses tremendously, which we did learn. That was the end of my work at the labs. That was the last thing I did. Of course, there were lots of other little things that one inevitably runs across, as one is doing it. There was one thing I know that we were kind of worried about. You see, to make these experiments, you have to find some way to get into the mode. You can't just use any mode, you have to use a special low-loss mode, of the circular electric parameters. We used the first one, TEO1, because that's the lowest loss of the lot, and you get a sized pipe. One of the things we did was an awful lot of work on transducers. How do you get a wave with zero reflection out of the device you use to create the wave, to change the wave froman...wave into the TEO1? We found that we would call this device a transducer, because it was changing the energy from one form into another. Everybody is pretty well agreed on that term.

Polkinghorn:

It stuck pretty well.

King:

Yes. I proposed this name, and everybody seemed to like it.

Hughes Aircraft and Cable TV

Polkinghorn:

And you retired at age sixty, and came out here to California.

King:

That's right. I came out here and shortly after that I went to Hughes Aircraft Company in Culver City. I worked for them for several years before I retired permanently. While I was at Hughes I did all kinds of things, almost everything except what I initially thought I would be doing. I thought I'd be carrying on microwave experiments, carrying it up to maybe fifty kilomegacycles, something like that, and setting up equipment. Well, we did set up some equipment, but we just bought the stuff and put it together. We didn't develop many components. We did use it for a short propagation loop, because Hughes Aircraft had gone into a working arrangement, had a TelePrompter up in New York providing these cable TV channels needed. There are lots of places in this country, you know, where you're in the mountains, and if you're down in a hole you can't receive any TV signals. That's true in Laguna Beach! I know people in Laguna Beach who had fifty foot antennas across the street, and they couldn't get anything but noisy signals! When Teleclear came in, they put antennas on top of the hill, on top of the big hill up there, and they had a direct view to Mount Wilson. They had an antenna for each channel, so they didn't have to worry even about getting lost through the added bandwidth. They would put those on very broad banded feeders, unless they wanted to change the frequency, which they frequently did. The frequency we get there, Channel 28, is one of the ultra high frequencies. In our area, Channel 3 is blank, so 28 is hooked in there. That's the kind of thing Hughes is interested in. We thought that we'd be able to do some work with good frequency choices for doing this. There are cases with cable television where you will want to transmit a signal maybe by microwaves over quite a few miles and then put it in the cable and transmit it locally. There are communities that are isolated because of the surrounding terrain, and that's about the only way you can do it.

I found out that most of my activity was writing proposals and doing special projects when they could get orders for [them]. MIT, for example, bought a pretty nice thing that I put together for them. I guess it was a problem in turn with NASA or a military project of some sort. They wanted to have a setup where they could study attenuation through range, but to do it artificially by having two antennas separated by about a thousand feet, and some... between them that they could control, that would do anything when they wanted it. That was prepared for them, and it worked all right for them.

Polkinghorn:

So you retired, and when you were working at Culver City you lived here at Laguna Beach?

King:

Yes. I commuted there, and it got to be kind of tiresome too. I would stay up there for a couple of days; I worked three days a week. I worked Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, so I would go up on Tuesday and get a motel for that night, and Wednesday, and come back Thursday after work.

Polkinghorn:

I should think it would require that. Well, that's about your story, isn't it?

King:

There are probably some other things, but I don't know that they'd amount to too much. If you have some more questions, I'd be glad to answer them.

Polkinghorn:

Well, I don't seem to have any questions right at the moment, so thank you very much for giving us this story, and I'll turn off the recorder.