Oral-History:John Clarke
About John Clarke
John Clarke received his B.A. (1964), Ph.D. (1968), and Sc.D. (2005) from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K. After a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley (1968-1969), he joined the Physics faculty, and he has been a member of the Physics Department since 1969. He received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1983 and he was the UC Berkeley Faculty Research Lecturer in 2005. Clake is also a Faculty Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Physics (UK). He has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Miller Professor. In 1987, he was named California Scientist of the Year and was awarded the Fritz London Prize for research in low-temperature physics. He is also the recipient of the IEEE-USA Electrotechnology Transfer Award, 1995; the American Physical Society’s Joseph F. Keithley Award for Advances in Measurement Science, 1998; the National Academy of Sciences’ Comstock Prize for Physics, 1999; and the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society, 2004.
Clarke’s research fields are condensed matter physical and materials science. His principal area of research is the development, noise limitations, and applications of Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs). His research interests include fundamental aspects of superconductivity, and the development and application of low- and high-transition-temperature SQUIDs to a broad range of problems, including low-frequency nuclear magnetic resonance and magnetic resonance imaging, decoherence in mesoscopic circuits, biosensors, and axion detectors.
In 2002, Clarke received the IEEE Council on Superconductivity’s Award for Continuing and Significant Contributions in the Field of Applied Superconductivity, 2002. The citation states: “For significant and continuing contributions in the field of superconducting electronics as a researcher, educator and mentor, in particular:
- for the elucidation of the fundamental noise limitations of SQUID magnetic sensors;
- for the evaluation and exploitation of SQUID magnetic sensors in geophysical exploration, NMR, NQR and MRI;
- for low noise SQUID amplifiers, for mentoring a large number of students who subsequently have played major roles in superconductivity research and development groups throughout the world;
- for being an articulate advocate for SQUID technology at technical, scientific, and medical conferences and workshops.”
The IEEE Council on Superconductivity posted the recording of Clarke’s talk, “The Ubiquitous SQUID: SQUIDs 50th anniversary - perspectives from John Clarke,” (2014) on its website.
About the Interview
JOHN CLARKE: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, 8 September 2016
Interview #777 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.
Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
John Clarke, an oral history conducted in 2016 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
Early life and education
INTERVIEWEE: John Clarke
INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel
DATE: 8 September 2016
PLACE: Applied Superconductivity Conference, Denver, CO
Hellrigel:
Today is September 8, 2016. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel, Institutional Historian at the IEEE History Center, with John Clarke at the Applied Superconductivity Conference in Denver, Colorado. Dr. Clarke has agreed to record an oral history for the IEEE History Center’s oral history program. Thank you and welcome.
We will start with some biographical information. When and where were you born?
Clarke:
I was born in Cambridge, England.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Clarke:
In the Mill Road Maternity Hospital.
Hellrigel:
What year were you born in the Mill Road Maternity Hospital?
Clarke:
1942.
Hellrigel:
I see 1942, and where did you grow up?
Clarke:
I grew up in Cambridge.
Hellrigel:
You were born and raised in Cambridge. Let's see, would you tell me a bit about your mother and her family’s background? Did she go to college? What types of jobs did she hold?
Clarke:
My mother was the eldest of eight children. She did not go to college. In fact, her father died when she was fourteen years old, so she had to go out to work at the age of fourteen to support the family.
Hellrigel:
What did she do?
Clarke:
I believe that she ended up as an accountant in a local company.
Hellrigel:
What was her name?
Clarke:
Ethel May.
Hellrigel:
Ethel May.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
When you were growing up was she a stay-at-home mom?
Clarke:
For most of her life, after her children were born, yes, she was a stay-at-home mom.
Hellrigel:
Please tell me about your dad.
Clarke:
Originally, my dad was a carpenter.
Hellrigel:
Sure, a skilled craftsman.
Clarke:
As he matured, he moved further up in the company, becoming more of an administrator.
Hellrigel:
Did the company build houses?
Clarke:
Yes, they built houses.
Hellrigel:
All types of construction work probably boomed after the war.
Clarke:
This was before the war. This was in the 1930s and it was a depression.
Hellrigel:
Yes. The Great Depression put an end to a post-World War I construction boom in the United States.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did his business pick up after the war?
Clarke:
The Second World War?
Hellrigel:
Yes, the Second World War.
Clarke:
Oh, yes. It did. In fact, he was very involved during the latter part of the war and after the war in supervising the building of airfields in Eastern England. He also was responsible for a number of famous American airfields. It was very interesting because on the school holidays he sometimes took me out into the country to visit these American airfields.
Hellrigel:
Airfields were crucial construction projects. Did he do this work as a civilian or was in the service during the war?
Clarke:
No, he was not in military service. My dad was born in 1906, so he would've been too old. He was doing specialized work. That may have been another reason he was not in the military.
Hellrigel:
Right. Did your mom get put into specialized work during the war?
Clarke:
No.
Hellrigel:
She had children, so she had a duty to the family.
Clarke:
She had children, yes.
Hellrigel:
Your dad's name?
Clarke:
Victor Patrick.
Hellrigel:
How many siblings in his family?
Clarke:
He had two siblings.
Hellrigel:
He had two siblings, and you're one of how many children?
Clarke:
Two. I have a younger sister.
Hellrigel:
You are one of two children with a younger sister. Did she go into physics?
Clarke:
No.
Hellrigel:
Where did she end up in terms of education and employment?
Clarke:
I don't quite know how to describe her. She ended up with…I'll tell you what she did. She ended up working for a company in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, called the Oil Field Supply Center. She was the executive secretary to the boss. There are lots of stories I can tell you. The boss was quite well off, and if your son or daughter was married you were expected to have very lavish parties. We went to these wedding parties with 2,000 people.
Hellrigel:
Oh my, that is a wedding reception on a grand scale.
Clarke:
Each wedding had three parties. There was the wedding party for the women, the wedding party for the men, and wedding party for everyone.
Hellrigel:
It seems each wedding had a week’s worth of parties.
Clarke:
It's a week worth of parties and it must've cost untold millions of dollars.
Hellrigel:
You attended the weddings in Dubai.
Clarke:
Yes, they were held in Dubai.
Hellrigel:
How did she find a job like that?
Clarke:
Basically, she found an advertisement in the newspaper.
Hellrigel:
I see; she found it in the employment ads.
Clarke:
Before that job in Dubai, she had various other jobs. She wanted to move away from England and find something else, so she responded to the advertisement. Apparently, the job was advertised because the boss was a very difficult man. He had just fired his previous executive secretary. My sister was a little tougher than he was or is. She subsequently married an English guy who lived out there and they have a son. Her husband is deceased, but--
Hellrigel:
She stayed in Dubai?
Clarke:
No, she did not stay in Dubai. Now she lives in Spain.
Hellrigel:
Why did she chose Spain?
Clarke:
The summer is hot and miserable in Dubai, so she and her husband bought a house in Spain to go to in the summer. They also intended to retire to Spain, and they did retire to Spain.
Hellrigel:
Spain must be a nice place to retire.
Clarke:
Yes. The house in on the east coast of Spain.
Hellrigel:
Now, let's see, how about your childhood education? Did you go to public school, which means private school in the United States?
Clarke:
This is confusing. Yes, I went to a public school in England. I started in a tiny church school, sort of a one-room church school, when I was almost five years old. I was four years old ten months.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Clarke:
It was run by this wonderful lady named Miss Chandler.
Hellrigel:
The name, Miss Chandler’s school, sounds so pleasant.
Clarke:
Miss Chandler was a wonderful teacher and a very stern disciplinarian. She and a helper, Miss Buck, taught me to read and write, and do arithmetic at what I realized was an awesome level.
Hellrigel:
You had a solid foundation.
Clarke:
I always feel like I owe a lot to this little school. From there I went to a school called the Perse School for Boys. In the U.S. you would call it a private school because you paid to attend. It was very tough to get admitted to Perse. I think that I got in because of the education I got from the previous school and Miss Chandler. The Perse School for Boys was a wonderful school. It was very tough academically. It also was a very strict school, and you wore a coat and tie.
Hellrigel:
White shirt, coat, and tie seems like the standard uniform.
Clarke:
Yes, a white shirt; that's right. We also wore gray pants and black shoes. When I look back I realize educationally it was an incredible experience. The school was very big on exercise, so we had games every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon.
Hellrigel:
It sounds like you enjoyed that school and have fond memories.
Clarke:
In the winter we played football (soccer) and, in the summer, we played cricket.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Clarke:
Of course, football means soccer in the United States.
Hellrigel:
You played football and cricket, but not rugby?
Clarke:
Rugby came later. In Britain, you went to primary school until age eleven. Then you took the dreaded eleven class exams and went on to the senior school. In my case, I went to the Perse Senior School, so the first school was more properly considered the Perse Prep School.
Hellrigel:
Yes, the British school is organized differently than schools in the United States.
Clarke:
While attending the Perse Senior School we played rugby in the autumn, hockey in the spring, and cricket and athletics in the summer.
Hellrigel:
The British hockey game is called field hockey in the United States where it primarily is played by girls and women.
Clarke:
Yes, Americans call the game field hockey.
Hellrigel:
Did you play ice hockey?
Clarke:
No, we did not play hockey on ice.
Hellrigel:
Did you play on the school’s competitive inter-scholastic sports teams?
Clarke:
Yes, my big thing was track.
Hellrigel:
You were a runner.
Clarke:
In fact, I was captain of track for the last three years. I was a sprinter. My best distances were 100 yards, 220 yards, and 440 yards. I was a very good hurdler, and I did the triple jump, too.
Hellrigel:
Wow, you competed in many events.
Clarke:
Perse was an extraordinary school. When I look back on it, I'm still stunned at the quality and the level of education I got at Perse.
Hellrigel:
You attended Perse. Did you have a choice?
Clarke:
The Perse Prep was considered the best school in Cambridge, and I was very lucky to get into it. My parents were quite financially stressed to pay for me. If you attended Perse Prep, you were expected to go to the upper school. I won a scholarship to the Perse Senior School, so for me, it was a free place.
Hellrigel:
Did they make any difference between the scholarship boys and the other boys?
Clarke:
No.
Hellrigel:
When did you develop an interest in mechanical things?
Clarke:
Oh, very early in life, I developed an interest in mechanical things and electrical things. When I was a small child, around the age of four or five, I built Meccano sets. Each year for Christmas, my parents gave me the Meccano set upgrade to the next level. I built hundreds and hundreds of machines out of Meccano. I learned to be a carpenter because of my father's profession, and I made many things in my house in Berkeley, California. I’ve built lots of things.
Hellrigel:
When you were growing up you had a woodshop at home, and you learned many skills from your father.
Clarke:
Oh, yes, that was the case.
Hellrigel:
Did your sister hang out in the woodshop?
Clarke:
No.
Hellrigel:
If she desired, do you think she would have been allowed to hang out in the woodshop?
Clarke:
That's a good question. Quite possibly not, but I don't really know.
Hellrigel:
When you were a youngster, before college, did you have part-time jobs?
Clarke:
I did. Let me think; I would've started working at the age of sixteen. I had two kinds of summer jobs that were very important to me in my future life.
During the summer, I worked on building sites. Some summers I was a carpenter and other summers I was a plumber. While I learned a lot of skills, I also realized that it's very hard to earn your living that way.
Hellrigel:
Sure, you learned building trade skills, but you also discovered you didn't want to do this type of work for the rest of your life.
Clarke:
Yes. I had great respect for the people I worked with. I realized many of the men were doing this type of manual labor for forty or fifty years. It was tough work, and it took a toll.
Hellrigel:
Yes, construction work is physically demanding and dangerous.
Clarke:
My job in an electronic shop also played an extraordinarily important role in my subsequent career. This was still the era of vacuum tubes. I had a very, very patient supervisor by the name of John Barron. He decided he was going to teach me electronics.
Hellrigel:
Now you had an excellent opportunity to really learn that trade from Mr. Barron.
Clarke:
I learned to build a variety of equipment.
Hellrigel:
Like radios?
Clarke:
Yes, but the equipment I learned to build were more non-consumer things, very specialized things.
Hellrigel:
I guess you are talking about testing equipment.
Clarke:
Yes, things for testing equipment.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Clarke:
This experience played a huge role in my life. Yes, I liked to build things. When I was a student at Perse, I built an analog computer.
Hellrigel:
Oh my, that is quite an accomplishment for a high school student.
Clarke:
There's a historical note on this. The computer lab at Cambridge built one of the early digital computers called EDSAC, this is EDSAC-1. When I was about seventeen years old the Cambridge lab decommissioned EDSAC-1. It was big. Somehow, I heard it was being decommissioned, probably from a story in the local newspaper, and I was very keen to get pieces so I could build things. Since I wasn't well enough off, I couldn’t go out and buy a ton of components. I went to the Cambridge computer lab and begged a chassis of vacuum tubes. It was a long chassis containing forty-eight vacuum tubes. They were EF-50s.
Hellrigel:
That's a heavy collection of tubes.
Clarke:
Yes. I remember meeting and talking to a very famous person who was happy to give me the tubes. I'll figure out his name because he's a very well-known person who died not so long ago.
Hellrigel:
That's fantastic. Do you still have it?
Clarke:
No, I wish I did. I took the chassis home and stripped it down. It was a bit rusty in places, so I got a wire brush, and I got the rust off. Then I started to build amplifiers. In this day and age, it's an unimaginably small transistor, but in those days, it took four vacuum tubes to make one amplifier. I built a whole series of amplifiers and then I hooked them together to make an analog computer. At the time, I was well versed in differential equations. I took the computer to school and solved differential equations with it. People were very interested in my computer.
Hellrigel:
That's pretty spectacular.
Clarke:
Yes, and in the end, I gave it to the Perse school. In fact, I bet they still have my analog computer.
Hellrigel:
Perhaps you should call the school and ask if your computer has survived.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Well, that's just phenomenal. What did your folks think of the computer?
Clarke:
Oh, yes. Well, I built it at the home, so they saw it. I think they thought it was awesome, but they weren't really understanding it at a very interesting level.
Hellrigel:
Sure, they may not have grasped the significance of the computer and how you built it. However, they knew it was an electronic calculating machine.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I guess at home you would fix the radio when it was broke?
Clarke:
Oh, yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you have a television set?
Clarke:
No, it was pre-TV. I can remember vividly the first time I saw a television set.
Hellrigel:
When was that?
Clarke:
It was 2 June 1953, which was the coronation of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Our neighbors had fought tooth and nail to get a TV in time for the coronation.
Hellrigel:
Demand for televisions must have increased as coronation day approached. Did you watch the coronation with your neighbors on their new television?
Clarke:
Yes, I went to the neighbor's house. I don't know if I was more fascinated by the coronation itself or by watching it on the TV. It was over sixty years ago, but I remember it very vividly.
Hellrigel:
In my history of technology courses, I tell the students you used to have to let the TV warm up, manipulate “bunny ear” antennas for reception, and settle for black-and-white images. They chuckle and act like I am describing an ancient civilization.
Clarke:
Oh, absolutely. Yes.
Hellrigel:
The television was a delicate electronic instrument, so you needed to treat it gently and avoid turning the dial rapidly
Clarke:
Yes, and by the way, there was only one channel in 1953.
Hellrigel:
If you mishandled the TV, your parents yelled at you to slow down turning the tuning knob.
Clarke:
Right.
Hellrigel:
That's pretty cool. Do your remember television sales being pretty keen for the coronation?
Clarke:
It was very different. It was announced that this was the first major broadcast of some of important event. Everyone wanted a TV.
Hellrigel:
Just about the same time, the U.S. experienced its first major national television event, the 1952 presidential debate. The debate pitted the Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, against the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson. However, most people continued to rely on the radio.
Clarke:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Wow. When did your folks get their first TV?
Clarke:
They waited until after I had gone to college. They didn't want TV to be a distraction.
Hellrigel:
They wanted you to study.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Given your interest in electronics, it may have been a wise decision.
Clarke:
I have a story about my analog computer.
Hellrigel:
Sure, go ahead.
Clarke:
By the way, in order to look at the computer’s output, I had to build an oscilloscope. I also went around begging for components. After I got the parts, I built an oscilloscope so I could see the output from the computer.
Hellrigel:
Wow, you were intent of this new electronic equipment as a high school student.
Clarke:
This is a little story about how, in the last year of my time at the Perse, we moved to a new building just down the street.
Hellrigel:
Your family moved?
Clarke:
No, the school moved to some new grounds. They owned the land for a long time and now they put up a new building. If you're a somewhat famous school, and you have a new building or something, you try to get someone royal to open it. It was opened by Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandra. At the time, Princess Alexandra was about two years older than me and absolutely stunningly gorgeous. The school wanted to show off, so it was decided that I had to explain to Her Royal Highness this analog computer. It was a bit of a challenge. I made up this little model of a simple harmonic oscillator, a spring with a weight on it. Then I explained, a bit carefully, to this lovely young lady, who I'm still in love with, how this is an oscillator and here it is electronically. She stood there very kind and wisely and stroked her chin. When I got to the end, she looked at me and said, "You didn't really expect me to understand that. Did you?" I looked at her and said, “no, no, of course not.” The entire audience just totally cracked up at this response. I still remember that event. It is one of my great experiences.
Hellrigel:
She might very well remember it, too.
Clarke:
Yes, she probably does. All kinds of photographs were taken.
Hellrigel:
Ah, so you made the front page?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you make the front page of the London Times?
Clarke:
Well, no, I made the local paper at least.
Hellrigel:
Cambridge is big enough, so its newspaper garners much attention.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
That’s fascinating. I hope you have a copy of the photograph.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
When you left for college the Perse school kept your analog computer.
Clarke:
Yes.
Cambridge
Hellrigel:
You lived in Cambridge, and Cambridge University is such a fabulous institution, so you decided to stay local and apply to Cambridge?
Clarke:
Yes, it really has no rival.
Hellrigel:
Cambridge is at the top. Did you have to take competitive exams?
Clarke:
Oh, yes.
Hellrigel:
You got into Cambridge and what did you think you would study?
Clarke:
This is an interesting question. I was torn between physics and mathematics.
I just want to make one more comment about the Perse School. The level of science and math teaching there was phenomenal. I think it is way beyond freshman and maybe even second year teaching at the University of California. The amount of math I knew was amazing. They taught it and you learned it.
Hellrigel:
Perse School had high standards, so were all the boys expected to go to college?
Clarke:
Yes, virtually all were expected to go to college.
Hellrigel:
Did you have any mentors at the Perse school?
Clarke:
Yes, I had particularly important mentors.
Hellrigel:
Where these mentors your math and science teachers?
Clarke:
The two important mentors were math and science teachers. One mentor, Robert Whittaker, taught math. Sadly, he died just about a year ago. My other mentor was F.C. Brown, always known as FC, taught chemistry.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Clarke:
These guys had an enormous impact on me. I remained and still remain a very close friend of the Whittaker family. It has been that way for more than fifty years.
Hellrigel:
In the U.S., Mr. Chips is the stereotypical dedicated British teacher.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Mr. Chips was a far more supportive than the fact obsessed teacher in Charles Dickens novel, Hard Times
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Where your mentors kind-hearted and dedicated teachers like Mr. Chips? Did you have large classes?
Clarke:
Each class had about thirty students.
Hellrigel:
Did you stay at home or board at Perse?
Clarke:
I stayed at home.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Clarke:
There was a boarding school and a small fraction of the boys lived on campus. However, the school was a three-mile cycle from home, so that's what I did.
Hellrigel:
Did they have a sister school?
Clarke:
Yes. The Perse Girls.
Hellrigel:
I assume you learned the social skills that you would need later in life.
Clarke:
Yes, we had dances and other activities.
Hellrigel:
Yes, you mentioned bicycling and that was a common mode of transportation in England. Were you interested in automobiles?
Clarke:
No.
Hellrigel:
Sure, most people relied on walking, bicycles, and public transportation.
Clarke:
It wasn't part of the culture because people couldn’t afford cars. My father had a car, but it was unimaginable that I, or anyone in my age group, would have a car.
Hellrigel:
Your father must have purchased the car for business purposes.
Clarke:
Yes, it was used for business. Yes, that is exactly right.
Hellrigel:
The mass transit or public transit systems were and remain much better in England than in the U.S. After World War II, the personal automobile dominated transportation in the U.S.
Clarke:
That's right. It was crazy.
Hellrigel:
At Cambridge you're torn between physics and math. Growing up did you have any subject you hated? Someone told me they didn’t like Latin.
Clarke:
Latin. I did very well at everything, but French and Latin. This is very important though because at the time in order to go to Cambridge or Oxford you had to have two languages. This meant you had to pass exams in two languages. One of the exams had to be in Latin and there was no way around it. If you didn't pass the exam, you didn't get in.
Hellrigel:
If you did not get into either Cambridge or Oxford, you had to consider other colleges, perhaps St. Andrews?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you enjoy your Cambridge experience?
Clarke:
Oh, yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you work in any labs as an undergraduate studying for your bachelor's degree? While an undergraduate student did you have any part-time jobs?
Clarke:
No, I did not work in a lab as an undergraduate. Again, that wasn't part of the culture at the time; as it may have been in U.S. schools. It probably is in Britain now, but at the time it was not.
Hellrigel:
You had summer jobs?
Clarke:
Yes, I had summer jobs.
Hellrigel:
In the summer, you had jobs in the building trades?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Sure, most students have to earn money for books and other college expenses.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
At what point did you think, I want to go on to graduate school?
Clarke:
Just to go back to the bachelor's degree in physics. Let me back up. The courses required at that time at the British universities were far more narrow than in the U.S. The rationale was that you learned all the general stuff in high school, so you knew history, geography, and all those other stuff. Although that might be debatable, it meant one basically went right into a science tree, and that's what you did. After looking at the options, I had this dilemma between math and physics, so I decided to take a year of math and then two years of physics.
Hellrigel:
Did you also have to take [other sciences such as] biology and chemistry?
Clarke:
No, but there was an option to do that. In the first year you could take say math, physics, chemistry, and biology, and then you would specialize later.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Clarke:
I decided I wanted more math. In retrospect, that was a debatable decision, but at this point it probably doesn't matter.
Hellrigel:
You spent a year just studying math.
Clarke:
Yes, that's right.
Hellrigel:
As you explained earlier, you didn’t have to take any liberal arts courses.
Clarke:
Well, we were supposed to have done all that in school.
Hellrigel:
Yes, friends from Germany and Greece, also said they took those courses in high school.
Clarke:
Yes. I don't know, there's a lot to be said for the breadth of the American education, but this is the way it was [in England].
Hellrigel:
Then you studied physics for two years. Did you have to write a thesis?
Clarke:
No thesis.
Hellrigel:
Did you have a mentor at Cambridge?
Clarke:
Yes. I lived in college, in Christ's College, and I had tutors and supervisors. I suppose the tutor was more of a moral tutor in a certain sense. He looked after your welfare more and then the supervisors were the people you met with once a week for academics. They would typically give you homework, which you completed for the next meeting.
Hellrigel:
You met one on one.
Clarke:
At most, two on one.
Hellrigel:
That's very different than in the U.S.
Clarke:
Yes. I was supervised by some extraordinarily talented people, and it had a big impact on me.
Hellrigel:
Perhaps fewer people went to university in England, so the smaller classes.
Clarke:
Yes. It was a very inequitable system. At that time, probably 5 percent of us went to university. It was all a question of whether you got into the right school. It's what decided who went to university.
Hellrigel:
Yes, it depended on the school and how you were tracked.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Then you were encouraged to go on with your master's degree? Some of the fellows I talked with [this week at the Applied Superconductivity Conference] told me they went to graduate school because you could not do anything with a bachelor’s degree in physics. This might be an exaggeration.
Clarke:
I see.
Hellrigel:
Do you think it is true?
Clarke:
Yes. I knew that I wanted to go into research, but it wasn't clear what I wanted to do with a Ph.D. By the end of my second year of undergraduate work, I was quite sure that I wanted to go on to do research. The field that I chose was very much determined by how much I admired one of my supervisors.
Hellrigel:
Who was that?
Clarke:
That was Peter Hirsch.
Hellrigel:
He was a physicist.
Clarke:
Yes, he was a physicist in condensed-matter physics.
Hellrigel:
Did many of your colleagues at the bachelor's level go on to graduate school?
Clarke:
I wonder what the percentage was. I don't have a good sense of the number, but not very high.
Hellrigel:
Did you think of electrical engineering or mechanical engineering as an option?
Clarke:
No.
Hellrigel:
No?
Clarke:
No, because I was a physicist.
Hellrigel:
I see. It was a higher plain.
Clarke:
Oh, yes. Absolutely. Yes.
Hellrigel:
What did your folks think about you majoring in physics?
Clarke:
I think they were very happy. I believe they were happy because they thought in part, if you got an education in something that's really technical, then you're going to get a job. Right? If you have a degree in French, it's not so clear what you're going to do with yourself, other than teaching.
Hellrigel:
Right. They must've been thrilled when you got into Cambridge.
Clarke:
Yes, they were. Especially, since I got a scholarship, and they didn't have to pay for it.
Hellrigel:
Oh, that was quite pleasing and wonderful.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you come from a working-class background?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Perhaps in your immediate community you were atypical because you were not only going to university, but you were also going to Cambridge, and on scholarship, too.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Quite true.
Clarke:
I was the first person in my family to go to college.
Hellrigel:
Since you had funding for graduate school, too, you did not have to stress too much about getting a part-time job. When you were studying for the Ph.D. you worked in a lab with a professor?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
What was your thesis about?
Clarke:
My thesis was on superconductivity. My thesis was on a device I invented call the Slug.
Hellrigel:
Inventing the device was a major accomplishment at such a young age. I guess you patented it?
Clarke:
Yes, I did.
Hellrigel:
You wrote the thesis on your invention. What was the Slug and what was its intended use?
Clarke:
It was used in my thesis work to measure very, very tiny voltages. It measured much smaller voltages than people had been able to measure before. I made more superconducting structures, and I measured their properties with the Slug.
Hellrigel:
Then is that a patent that Cambridge owned, or you owned?
Clarke:
It was joint ownership, as I remember.
Hellrigel:
Were you able to commercialize it?
Clarke:
No, in a sense it was too soon.
Hellrigel:
Yes, because it seems in the mid-1960s, the other papers and findings were just coming out.
Clarke:
Yes.
Berkeley
Hellrigel:
After Cambridge University, then you ended up at Berkeley [in California].
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
How did that happen?
Clarke:
During the course of my graduate work, a former postdoc of my thesis advisor. By the way, my thesis advisor was Brian Pippard who had enormous influence on my life, a point I could come back to. The person who came back was Paul Richards. He was very interested in what I was doing because he was in a related field, so I talked to him for a long time. I thought boy, this would be a great person to do a postdoc with. Subsequently, I wrote to him, this being before email, and I said I was really glad to meet you and is there a possibility of a postdoctoral position. He wrote back very quickly. He said unfortunately I've already committed my one postdoctoral position to someone else. But he said there's a new assistant professor who is looking for a postdoc, I've talked to him, and he said he would be glad to take you on. This was all done without anything that was like an interview, or a recommendation, or anything.
Hellrigel:
Just the way things are and still are sometimes.
Clarke:
Yes, so I went there [UC Berkeley] for a year as a postdoc. This is in 1968 and I'm still there.
Hellrigel:
In 1968, you were there then for some of the rowdier times. [The public demonstrations and student protests on the Berkeley campus.]
Clarke:
Yes, oh boy, yes, I was.
Hellrigel:
We could talk about Pippard, your thesis advisor. The article you sent me noted he was quite influential.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
In what way?
Clarke:
Pippard took on two new students that year. He had a bunch of projects that he thought would be interesting to work on. He said one particular project was extraordinarily interesting and its physics, but you are going to have to invent a new device to measure it. He was very clear about that and he said if you're not interested in instrumentation at some level, you shouldn't do this. Having built all these widgets when I was in high school, I thought that was exactly the right thing for me. We had to devise a way of measuring this very tiny voltage. I started to think about this and I was sort of fiddling around with things for a month or two, realizing this wasn't going to be simple. But then one day, and this must've been early November of 1964, Brian Josephson gave a seminar. He subsequently got a Nobel Prize for his invention of the Josephson effect. Half the papers at this meeting, [the Applied Superconductivity Conference], are based on Josephson something. It's just amazing.
Josephson gave a talk about new developments in this field, including the new device called a SQUID. I sat there listening to this and thinking, why am I working on this instead of trying to make a voltmeter? The very next day, Brian Pippard came into my lab with a big smile on his face. He said “John, how would you like a voltmeter with a sensitivity of 2 times 10 to minus 15 volts in 1 second, which is of 6 orders of magnitude better than the state of the art?” [Laughs] I didn't know quite what to say, so he explained to me the idea that he figured out the night before. He asked me this question, and I mean this in great seriousness, those words defined my career. Everything I've done since then started at that moment.
Hellrigel:
This is your turning point.
Clarke:
Yes, that was my turning point.
Hellrigel:
It is interesting that you can narrow it down to the event, or moment, that became such a crucial turning point in your career and life.
Clarke:
Right.
Hellrigel:
He must've been excited, too.
Clarke:
He was very excited. Then the question is how do you make one of these widgets? This was more like what I wanted to do, so I started making some devices and they worked. However, they didn't work very reliably.
Now a very important time every day was teatime. We took it seriously and there was a tea room. There were these ladies who poured tea for a penny a cup. You'd sit around with your colleagues and talk about the weather or whatever was going on that day. I was bemoaning these problems I was having. A fellow graduate student, Paul Wraight, said: “you know John, you've been telling us for some weeks that Niobium wire has an oxide layer on it. We know that tin that's soldered is a superconductor. Why don't you put a blob of solder on a piece of Niobium wire and see what happens?” I'm sure I said something to the fact that that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard in my life. However, I went to the lab and before dinner that night I had this working device. This all happened in, I don't know, two hours.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Paul Wraight was a physicist?
Clarke:
Yes, he was a fellow graduate student. Brian Pippard was so excited. I still remember this discussion.
The development of this device was part of my dissertation, and I wrote some papers, too.
Hellrigel:
Now you were on your way.
Clarke:
I was on my way. It's true, yes.
Hellrigel:
Then from 1964 to 1968 you were working on it. That's crazy.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you take any breaks such as a vacation?
Clarke:
Yes. I was very much into traveling those days.
Hellrigel:
It sounds like a real adventure.
Clarke:
My wages from the summer, particularly when I was an undergraduate, went into travel. I often went to Greece; one summer I spent six weeks in Greece.
Hellrigel:
You hopped on the train?
Clarke:
No, you take an airplane. They had these student flights that did not cost very much.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Clarke:
You flew from London to Athens or somewhere like, got on a boat, and sailed around the islands. It was wonderful.
Hellrigel:
You'd get away from the fog and climate of Great Britain.
Clarke:
Yes. I traveled a lot, especially to Greece.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Clarke:
One summer I had a six-week bike ride all around Europe. That adventure was also very interesting.
Hellrigel:
Let's see. Herbert Freyhardt told me at the age of fourteen he bicycled around Europe by himself.
Clarke:
I was twenty.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I said, isn't fourteen a little young? He admitted he was young, but he wanted to see things. His mom cried. He bicycled from Germany all the way to England and back to Germany.
Clarke:
I bicycled from England to Ostend, then through Belgium until I got into Germany, and on to Cologne. Then I turned right, and I went all the way up the Rhine until I got to the River Neckar where I turned left. That gets you to Heidelberg, which I don't know, I decided that was an interesting place to go to. Then I cycled back to the Rhine, went down the Rhine, and turned left at Koblenz, which is where the Moselle and Rhine rivers join.
Hellrigel:
Then that brings you out toward the west?
Clarke:
You go west towards Luxembourg. I rode along the Mosel to Trier and then into Luxembourg. I cycled back through Belgium and up into the Netherlands and--
Hellrigel:
All of that bicycle riding in just six weeks?
Clarke:
Six weeks and three days, I think.
Hellrigel:
You took this trip by yourself?
Clarke:
Yes, I was on my own.
Hellrigel:
When you took this trip was it a popular thing to do?
Clarke:
I don't know. I don't know anyone else who did it. But on a side note, I grew up so much in the shadow of the war, for some reason, I was very curious to meet the Germans. I'm not sure how much you meet them. If you're on a bike, you need to stay in youth hostels; however, my few interactions were with very kind Germans. After some thought, I realized that I had a union jack on my handlebars, so people knew I was a Brit.
I remember stopping along the Rhine somewhere just to have a little bit of a rest, and there was this family. As I recall, the parents and two young kids were buying ice cream. The father had an ice cream, and he came over to me. He said, "Would you like to have an ice cream?" It was such a kind thing to do because I could really use an ice cream at that moment. Yes, it's funny how you remember these things.
Hellrigel:
Yes, the little gestures can be so memorable. You made this trip during the Cold War.
Clarke:
This was 1962.
Hellrigel:
Yes, 1962 was a pretty eventful year.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
The Berlin Wall went up in 1961, so you couldn’t have gone to East Germany.
Clarke:
Yes, that's right.
Hellrigel:
Yes. So you were in West Germany.
Clarke:
Yes, my trip to East Germany was later.
Hellrigel:
In large part, the wall went up to keep people from fleeing what became East Germany and to keep the West out.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Wow, that bicycle trip must've been fun.
Clarke:
It was a very important experience for me.
Hellrigel:
Did your bicycle break down much?
Clarke:
No.
Hellrigel:
Was it a Raleigh?
Clarke:
It was a Raleigh with straight handlebars.
Hellrigel:
Yes, my brother had a Raleigh.
Clarke:
I see.
Hellrigel:
Cool. Well, at least you got out of the lab and out of the library. What else did you do for recreation?
Clarke:
I still ran. I was very athletic as an undergraduate. I was captain of my college track team and I still kept that up. However, when I got to graduate school, I just got too busy. That's the usual problem.
Hellrigel:
Did they have the local pub, the Cambridge--
Clarke:
Oh, yes.
Hellrigel:
Go to the pub to hang out. Did they have fraternities?
Clarke:
No.
Hellrigel:
Drinking clubs, eating clubs, or other clubs?
Clarke:
They do. I wasn't that much into drinking.
Hellrigel:
Sure, serious students do not have time to waste.
Clarke:
Yes, I wasn't that much into drinking.
Hellrigel:
On campus they must've had lots of plays and cultural events.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Like Shakespeare and all.
Clarke:
Yes. I used to go to some of those.
Hellrigel:
At least the American vision of Cambridge was quite quaint and intellectual.
Clarke:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Hellrigel:
Probably a place where there's a real distinction town and gown.
Clarke:
Right.
Hellrigel:
You had a good time at Cambridge? How long were you at Cambridge?
Clarke:
Undergraduate degrees took three years. At the time, Ph.D.'s were three years, and maybe you got another half year to finish something up as I did. I was at Cambridge for six and a half years.
Hellrigel:
Then you were off to California.
Clarke:
That's right, yes.
Hellrigel:
What did your folks think about you jumping the pond and heading to California?
Clarke:
My mother didn't say much about it, but as I look back on it, she was probably happy that I had the opportunity and very sad to see me go.
Hellrigel:
Did they come over to visit?
Clarke:
Just once.
Hellrigel:
Airfare was expensive.
Clarke:
Yes, but by that time I could afford it.
Hellrigel:
After the postdoc, you went to the Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
Clarke:
I became a faculty member on the campus on July 1st, 1969. I had an appointment at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. It was a way of getting DOE [U.S. Department of Energy] money, and I had sort of a steady grant. It provided you did decent work. It was a sort of continuing grant. It was hugely important in my career.
Hellrigel:
Then that was your funding arm, so you teach at the university and the research is paid for by DOE.
Clarke:
Yes, but my labs are always on campus.
Hellrigel:
Always on campus. So, you're like an affiliation.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
How did you like Berkeley?
Clarke:
Oh, I loved it. Yes.
Hellrigel:
You were there for some of the uprising student protests.
Clarke:
Yes. Oh, very much so.
Hellrigel:
Did the protests actually close the university down at any time?
Clarke:
I think maybe briefly they did, but it wasn't for any length of time.
Hellrigel:
In California there was a backlash against the protests and Ronal Reagan was elected governor as almost a law-and-order candidate. When I taught at Cal State Chico there was still a free speech zone on campus. The free speech zone on University of California and California State University campuses was created during the era of protests.
Clarke:
That's right. The free speech movement.
Hellrigel:
Yes, the zone provided a place to hold demonstrations, but if protestors paraded around campus outside that zone, they were in trouble. It must have been interesting to be on the Berkeley campus at that time.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did your friends mention protests on the Cambridge campus?
Clarke:
I think they came later. There were, but I think that those were some later than in the U.S. Of course, the driver in the U.S. was the Vietnam War.
Hellrigel:
Right, and when you were at Berkeley then, what did you teach as an assistant professor?
Clarke:
Well, the usual physics courses. The first course I taught was statistical mechanics and then I taught quantum mechanics as well as solid state physics. I also taught the usual lower division, meaning the first two years of courses.
Hellrigel:
No graduate students yet?
Clarke:
Oh, yes. I had graduate students in my group. Oh, yes.
Hellrigel:
In your lab.
Clarke:
Right from the beginning.
Hellrigel:
Did you select them?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Sure, it is important to select your team, especially, if you are funding them.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You selected from the pool of graduate students offered research assistantships?
Clarke:
Yes. Every year the department brings in say between forty and fifty new graduate students. They are interested in all kinds of different things from condensed matter to atomic physics to general relativity.
Hellrigel:
Then you select from those interested in your field?
Clarke:
Yes. There's a little bit of looking at each other, but typically what happens is each faculty member gives a talk on his or her research to this new class of graduate students. Subsequently, students go around, asking if you are taking on new students and about your new projects. There'd be some sort of to'ing and fro'ing and eventually you take on some students.
Hellrigel:
Did you get sabbatical time?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
What did you do with sabbatical time? Go to the national labs?
Clarke:
No. I usually went back to Europe. That'd be a natural thing to do. I went back to Cambridge for my first sabbatical. My parents, especially my mother, of course were thrilled.
Hellrigel:
Yes, the Cavendish labs.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You also spent time in Denmark, so you had a lot of collaboration in Europe.
Clarke:
Yes, I did, and I still do.
Hellrigel:
Did the formation of the EU influence the collaboration?
Clarke:
Probably not with me, but within the EU it had an enormous impact. That's why Brexit is such a disaster.
Hellrigel:
I was surprised the exit vote won.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
What earned your promotion from assistant to associate? Perhaps a few papers or a book?
Clarke:
It was one paper in particular. Yes, there was one big paper in particular that got me the appointment as assistant professor. It was something I had done basically by myself in my first postdoctoral year. I did a particular measurement that got a lot of attention. Then at the beginning of my second year as an assistant professor I did another experiment that also got a lot of attention. All of this work involved the Slug and using the Slug as a measuring device.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Clarke:
That also had a lot of impact. In fact, I learned this all in retrospect, but when I went back to Cambridge on sabbatical, people in the department at Berkeley were afraid that I would stay there, so I got promoted to associate professor during my third year.
Hellrigel:
Berkeley wanted to keep you, which is always a nice feeling.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
When you were at Berkeley did you get involved with department administration such as department chair?
Clarke:
No. I did my share of committees, but I always stayed away from being chair.
Hellrigel:
High points in your career at Berkeley included being awarded tenure, but what were other key events.
Clarke:
Yes. You're thinking of key research things or.
Hellrigel:
Yes, important accomplishments, significant events, a grant, or perhaps a collaboration.
Clarke:
Right.
Hellrigel:
After people get tenure or they receive a named professorship, they may start shopping around for another senior position. However, you must have been content at Berkeley because you did not jump to another university.
Clarke:
Well, the most memorable things for me would be research events and specific people that I work with who did some particularly wonderful experiments in my group.
Hellrigel:
Sure, and that's what many of the people I spoke with always said. It's the people.
Clarke:
Yes, it's the people.
Hellrigel:
Who were important people in your group?
Clarke:
Well, this might come in random order, but in terms of my students, one particular student who was quite good is named Dick Voss [R.F. Voss?????]. He did something that was really sort of off the track in an amazing way. We had been very interested in a phenomenon called 1f noise.
Hellrigel:
1f noise.
Clarke:
If f is the frequency, as you go down in frequency the noise gets bigger louder.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Clarke:
We had a new spectrum analyzer, which at the time was very not very clever. It was a way of measuring these spectra. Dick, who was very sort of inventive fellow, decided he would attach it to a radio overnight. This led to an amazing discovery that all music is 1f noise. This discovery made the front page of Nature. It's still a highly-studied and highly-quoted result today. People keep coming out with various versions of it, but it's always held up. Speech is the same. That there's a certain way that is at least in European languages, that the way we speak and the way that the frequency changes and the way we break up words gives you this 1f noise.
For example, if you played a piece of music that didn't sound like 1f noise, it wouldn't sound like music. In fact, we turned it around and created 1f noise and wrote music with it.
Hellrigel:
This discovery launched Dick Voss’ career?
Clarke:
It did. Yes. He, he went off to IBM and--
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes.
Clarke:
Yes. He did a lot of other things too, but this has always struck in my mind as the result of someone who is very smart and really sort of thinks outside the box.
Hellrigel:
Nature is an important publication.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Well, it bridges between many scientific fields.
Clarke:
Yes. I didn’t know he was going to be on the front cover until it arrived, so it was really a big thing.
Hellrigel:
He must've been thrilled.
Clarke:
Yes, he was. That was one event that stuck out in my mind. There are many others. I had the privilege of supervising two remarkable people more or less simultaneously. One was a postdoc whose name is Michel Devoret. The other was John Martinis. These were two extraordinary, talented people who I--he could be highly recognized today in old ways, and at the time there was a lot of interest in trying to understand whether things bigger than atoms could abate quantum mechanics.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Clarke:
There was a particularly important theorist involved with this, Tony Legget [Sir Anthony James Leggett].
Hellrigel:
Sure, a theorist.
Clarke:
Legget is also a Brit, and he is still at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He had developed this theory of something called macroscopic quantum tunneling, which once again involves a Josephson junction in a particular way. We decided that we were going to work on it. The single most important thing that we observed and reported was the fact that the energy of this macroscopic energy, macroscopic object, could be quantized.
Quantization of energy is a sort of mark of quantum mechanics and the atoms have energy levels. And so, we demonstrated these energy levels that were measurable.
Hellrigel:
That were measurable.
Clarke:
Were measurable, yes. I'd like to think people see that as the beginning of this huge field now of quantum computing and many other signatures of this behavior.
Hellrigel:
I am an historian, so to me it seems a little mind boggling because it's all invisible. My research focuses on the invention and commercial development of electric light, heat, and power technology, so it more illumination, sparks, and magnets for dynamos. In comparison, the size of your magnets is incomprehensible.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you do a lot of defense work at Lawrence Lab?
Clarke:
No, rather not. I think that's because of the association with the university. I think that LBL [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory] is not allowed to take on classified work. I think that's a true statement. Lawrence Livermore Lab is down the road, and it does defense research.
Hellrigel:
I see, they are two separate labs. That's what I was confused about.
Clarke:
Yes.
Research, conferences, patents, awards
Hellrigel:
Then, let's see, in 2010 you sort of retire.
Clarke:
I became Professor of the graduate school.
Hellrigel:
Oh, you became Professor of the graduate school, which meant that you didn't teach anymore?
Clarke:
That's right. What it means is that you will go on the retirement plan, but you can keep your research position. Once you are on the retirement plan, you don't teach, and you don't do committee work.
Hellrigel:
You have taken this option?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
The Cal State system instituted a voluntary plan whereby you phase into retirement over five years. It is important that you get to keep your lab, so you can continue your research.
Clarke:
Oh, yes.
Hellrigel:
However, in reality there's no retirement for you.
Clarke:
Not on research. That's correct.
Hellrigel:
Research will continue.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Do you still take on graduate students?
Clarke:
I will not take on anymore. I have some students, but a student is a five or six year commitment.
Hellrigel:
Yes, a long-term commitment.
Clarke:
I've gotten to the age where that's more that I want to do. I can still take on post docs and visitors because that's a shorter-term commitment.
Hellrigel:
If your research continues, you really don't have any more free time to travel and things like that?
Clarke:
Oh, I travel much more.
Hellrigel:
Oh, you travel much more? For business?
Clarke:
Yes, now it's strictly for business.
Hellrigel:
Strictly for business. So, you go around to the other superconductivity sites globally?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Have any of your children become either physicists or engineers?
Clarke:
I have a daughter, Elizabeth, who majored in physics at Berkeley. In fact, I taught six of her classes, which is special. Then she went to graduate school at the University of California, San Francisco to study biophysics. But what she really became was a synthetic biologist. Synthetic biology is where you sort of doctor things. You engineer things to make them do what you want them to do. She's now chief technical officer of her own start-up, which, I think, is doing quite well.
Hellrigel:
Cool, she has her own start-up company.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I guess in Silicon Valley?
Clarke:
No. She lives in San Francisco and the company is in Emeryville. Emeryville is right next to Berkeley.
Hellrigel:
Sure, it is in close proximity to the university.
Clarke:
Her company is actually only a few miles away from where I live.
Hellrigel:
She goes by Clarke also?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did you think she was going to be a physics person when she was a kid?
Clarke:
I felt she would go into science.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Clarke:
I pushed her just a little bit towards biology because I thought that was going to be a good direction to go in.
Hellrigel:
Yes, maybe biology or biomedical engineering--
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You have one child and she sort of followed your footsteps.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You may have found that satisfying?
Clarke:
Yes, I was very pleased.
Hellrigel:
But teaching six of her courses must've been strange.
Clarke:
Well, but it was very interesting. I taught some large introductory courses. I try to keep track with her advancement, right. In the beginning I taught these very large classes with hundreds of kids and most of them wouldn’t know who she was; however, when I got into upper division where there were thirty or forty kids in the class, they figured out. Yes.
Hellrigel:
If you're not retiring, are you still applying for grants?
Clarke:
Yes, on a diminishing scale I would say.
Hellrigel:
Overall are you pleased with your career?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Now you're also a member of many societies and a fellow of many, many societies. How important have societies been to your career?
Clarke:
It's an interesting question. For example, I don’t really publish much in the Royal Society Journal. The National Academy of Sciences has PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]and I occasionally publish a paper in that. Although it's a very prestigious journal, it doesn't sort of publish that much in the general area that I work in. I published much more in journals like the Physical Review Letters, and when the winds are right, Science or Nature.
Hellrigel:
Did you publish in IEEE publications?
Clarke:
Yes. I've written one or two review articles for IEEE. This conference has the proceedings published by the IEEE and I've had quite a few articles in that over the years.
Hellrigel:
How often do you go to the ASC [Applied Superconductivity Conference]?
Clarke:
Every time.
Hellrigel:
Every time, since the first conference in 1966?
Clarke:
Not quite.
Hellrigel:
Just asking.
Clarke:
I think the first one, the thing was in 1966, which was by the way the year I published my first paper on the Slug.
I gave a talk yesterday and I said the last fifty years have been very important and I published my first paper in 1966 and this was where this technology has led to today. I think the first one I went to was 1970 because in 1966 I was still in England. I don't think anyone was aware that there was something called the ASC. Yes, which is held in Brookhaven I know.
Hellrigel:
Then you went to the EUCAS, the European conference [European Conference on Applied Superconductivity].
Clarke:
Yes, I have attended the EUCAS. It is a relatively new conference and I've been to most of them.
Hellrigel:
You've also received a number of awards.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
How important are the awards?
Clarke:
It is a question of what the award means on different levels. It plays a big role in getting your salary increased. If you get elected to the National Academy or you get some nice prize, that's very important. For example, my salary for many years was definitely above scale.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Clarke:
That's driven very much by outside recognition. If you get into the National Academy or Royal Society or you get some nice prize, your salary goes up.
Hellrigel:
You have to be nominated, so that is also outside recognition.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
In 1995, you were awarded the IEEE-USA Electrotechnology Transfer Award.
[Citation: For the development, transfer and commercialization of a key invention – a novel, ultra sensitive magnetometer based on direct current SQUID’s (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices) using high transition temperature (high Tc) superconductors and operating in liquid nitrogen at 77K.]
What is that award all about?
Clarke:
Well, I'm not sure I remember really. But it's sort of a recognition that what you've done has resulted in say devices, in my case, that have been adopted by other people. So, it's a transfer of the technology.
Hellrigel:
Sure, the transfer and dissemination of your technology, an invention or innovation.
Clarke:
Yes, exactly.
Hellrigel:
How many patents have you been awarded?
Clarke:
Not a huge number. Maybe a dozen.
Hellrigel:
You were awarded the 2002 IEEE Council on Superconductivity Award. What did this award mean to you? Does the IEEE Council on Superconductivity consider it a career-capping award?
Clarke:
It's sort of a recognition of someone who's been stuff for a long time that I'm not sure if there's an official minimum, but typically it's thirty years.
Hellrigel:
You are also a member or Fellow of the Royal Society. This is one of the highest honors in Great Britain.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Do you attend meetings?
Clarke:
Occasionally.
Hellrigel:
I went there once. In 1996, I attended a Society for the History of Technology meeting in London, there was a side trip to the Royal Society. There was a meeting there and I got to listen to a lecture there. And I was close enough, I nearly touched Faraday’s famous magnet. Of course, it is a treasured museum object, so you do not touch it, but it was on display.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Then, Helsinki I see you got another award. So you're recognized throughout Europe and the United States. Do you travel into Asia much?
Clarke:
Yes. In fact, I travel more to Asia than anywhere else these days.
Hellrigel:
China? Japan?
Clarke:
Well, this is a good example. This year I was in Sweden and Finland in January. And then I was in Shanghai in May. I was back in Sweden in August. And then late in September I went to Seoul. In October I'm going to Taiwan and in November I'm going to Japan. And then in December I'm going to Australia. So sort of which I hadn't committed myself to quite this many--
Hellrigel:
You'll be giving papers.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You are travelling a lot and giving many papers.
Clarke:
It's too many.
Hellrigel:
Since you will have all those frequent flier miles, you can schedule a vacation.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
If you take a moment to be a sage, at this point in your career, would you have any reflections or advice for people just starting in the field?
Clarke:
It's a very important question. I feel that I've been extraordinarily lucky in terms of funding. That's partly because of my association with Lawrence Berkeley Lab, for which I've always been very grateful. The decline of funding in science in the U.S. and the unbelievable escalation in the bureaucracy of funding in writing a proposal and trying to administer an award have become nightmares. I would advise someone to think very carefully if that’s what they really want to do. To me, it was a no-brainer because that's what I knew what I wanted to do, and I didn't stop and think about it. Looking back on it, it was made very easy because there were people who liked what I did, and they've kept funding me. The amount of effort it took to keep a decent funding level was quite minimal. Now it's just a nightmare and this is very sad.
Hellrigel:
Since the grant process has become a nightmare, would it be better to work for a private company?
Clarke:
No because you may not do what you want to do.
Hellrigel:
Quite true.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Have you seen a drop in the number of graduate students?
Clarke:
In physics?
Hellrigel:
Yes, in physics.
Clarke:
No. Well, that's a good question. In the 1990s there was a big drop for reasons that people don't quite understood. Then it went back up to a higher level than ever.
Hellrigel:
Trending upward?
Clarke:
At Berkeley we typically get, I don't know, 600 or 700 applications per year for fifty slots, so it's not that there's no demand for the discipline. I don't have real statistics, but my suspicion is that fewer and fewer of our graduates with Ph.Ds., end up going into a physics job.
Hellrigel:
Where do they go?
Clarke:
Oh, computer science. There's this sort of everlasting need for more people to do software of some kind.
Hellrigel:
Are the demographics of the students changing? For example, are there more women?
Clarke:
There are certainly more women, yes.
Hellrigel:
Do you find there are more international students?
Clarke:
That's a very good question. Particularly at Berkeley we've made it so expensive for anyone out of state. Financially, the University of California system is on its knees.
Hellrigel:
Right there has been a drop in state funding. For decades, the State of California has charged triple the tuition for non-California residents.
Clarke:
Yes. I forgot exactly what the numbers are, but that's about right. In California, in-state tuition fees are about $16,000 or $17,000 per year. When my daughter was in college tuition was $3,000. I think for international and out-of-state students it's about $45,000, so your number about right.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that's sounds about right.
Clarke:
I think we deliberately limit the number of international students. Of course, one of the problems is research advisors pay the student salary fees, so you could get a post doc for less than an international student.
Hellrigel:
True. If you put money into an international student, or any student for that matter, and they don't have the funding to continue, it's a waste for your project.
Clarke:
It's a nightmare. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Yes, in my field, history, there are few real full-time jobs in academia. There are so few tenure-track jobs. Most colleges and universities operate with, at best, term appointments, but more commonly, adjuncts hired on a course-by-course basis.
Clarke:
Yes, that's what's happening in physics.
Hellrigel:
Physics, too?
Clarke:
Just to give an example, at Berkeley, if you look back even five years, we had fifty-seven faculty members in our department, but now there are about forty-three full-time tenured/tenure track faculty.
Hellrigel:
When people leave, they are not replaced.
Clarke:
It's just how much money we have and it's really bad.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Clarke:
It is also limiting the number of students who want to go towards faculty positions because there are fewer and fewer jobs. All the state schools are suffering at this point, as you surely know.
Hellrigel:
Do you think the situation is different in Europe, at say Cambridge? Is funding more secure or reliable than in the U.S.?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I wonder if American undergraduates are going abroad for graduate school.
Clarke:
No, I don't really know.
Hellrigel:
I have read about some Americans going to Canadian universities for their undergraduate degree because the programs are more affordable. The cost of higher education in the U.S. keeps increasing, so I also read that international students may look elsewhere, too. However, I do not have data.
Clarke:
I see.
Hellrigel:
People are looking for cheaper options.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
These news articles mentioned the U.S. has been losing students to Australia, Canada, and Great Britain.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I don't know if there are any additional topics you would like to cover. Did we miss anything?
Clarke:
You covered a lot of ground.
Hellrigel:
Your career is fascinating. Oh, I know, MRIs. Have you done much work with MRIs?
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
This is a superconductivity technology. What type of research led to the development of these machines that can scan your body and find foreign objects and such?
Clarke:
This is very low frequencies now. This is a special kind of MRI. There's the sort of standard clinical MRI, which is done in a magnetic field that's typically 1.5 Tesla or 3 Tesla. We have this machine that is less than millitesla, so it's 4 as a magnitude smaller.
Hellrigel:
How have MRIs been used in research?
Clarke:
High field MRI is predominantly for human body imaging. Then of course you do research and try to sort of push the edge a little bit to see if there is a better way of imaging brain trauma and things like that. The ultra-low field MRI, which is very much in its infancy, although there are quite a few groups working on it now, has certain advantages. Potentially, it's much cheaper and it doesn't leave the high fields. It's more sensitive to different tissue types. For example, we've shown that you can have an intrinsic contrast between tumor and healthy tissue that you don't get in high field MRI.
There's a lot of stuff sort of like that's being researched. For example, there's a very strong group in Helsinki and a very strong group in the PTB [Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt] in Berlin.
Hellrigel:
Do you see medical applications as one of the main avenues for commercializing superconductivity research?
Clarke:
It's a likely one, yes.
Hellrigel:
I was talking to Professor Weinstock.
Clarke:
Oh, Harold. Yes.
SQUIDS
Hellrigel:
He was talking about the helmet with the SQUIDS. I think your article mentioned this work, too.
Clarke:
Magnetoencephalography. Yes.
Hellrigel:
I guess that's fairly advanced?
Clarke:
Oh, yes. There are hundreds of systems out in the world for magnetoencephalography. One of the most interesting things that's being tried right now is to integrate the system for magnetoencephalography with the system for ultra-low field MRI. People have started to show that they can bring these two modalities into the same system, and that's very interesting.
Hellrigel:
Where do you think the future is for your field and your research?
Clarke:
In SQUIDs in general or--
Hellrigel:
Well, in general and then we could go into specifics.
Clarke:
The most successful commercial system you can see out on the floor is from quantum design. That's this system for measuring the magnetic properties of things. It's been used for everything from medical samples to high-temperature superconductors, so as a commercial instrument, that's got to be the number one.
I think that more and more --in fact this is sort of what we did back in the 1980s -- SQUIDs are being used for geophysical applications. For example, there's some very nice work being done in Sydney, Australia by CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization]. I could never quite remember what the initials stand for. It is equivalent and sort of like NIST.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Clarke:
SQUIDs have been used to search for mineral deposits, and it has been very successful. There's a particularly highly-quoted find of the biggest silver deposit in the world and it was found by SQUIDs. It's a $2 billion silver deposit or something was found by this technique.
Hellrigel:
Finding mineral deposits by SQUIDS might make exploration less environmentally destructive.
Clarke:
It is, yes.
Hellrigel:
I guess they could have different types of technology that might figure out this is silver; these are diamonds; and that's platinum.
Clarke:
To some extent that's true. There's another technique that has been developed in Germany where they towed SQUIDs behind the helicopter. They have this sort of bird containing SQUIDs. It's photo of the ground. And that's been so successful. I can’t tell you which countries they use it in, but it's been very successful.
Hellrigel:
Can SQUIDs be used to find water?
Clarke:
Yes. I would think so.
Hellrigel:
Do you think they could be used to find toxic waste sites? I live in New Jersey, a small state, but we have more Superfund sites than any other state. The activities of industrialization have left a lot of toxic waste underground. Now there is talk of fracking, too. Maybe SQUIDs can be used to find these waste sites?
Clarke:
Oh, yes; I think so. The point is that there has to be someone driving that. Of course, the people doing the fracking may not want someone to come and look at all the damage they've done. Just off the top of my head, my guess would be that this technology would be very good at it.
Hellrigel:
How about using SQUIDs to detect potential earthquakes?
Clarke:
We looked at that some years ago and it's not clear what you look for. The whole earthquake prediction thing is very difficult. It's not clear what the signature of the earthquake might be. One of the problems is of course by definition you don’t know where the earthquake will be. In the early 1980s, I talked to geophysicists and mentioned you could populate an earthquake suddenly with SQUIDs. They looked at me and said who the hell is going to pay for that?
Hellrigel:
Right, that's true.
Clarke:
Right, and that's the problem. It's not to say you wouldn’t be able to do the prediction, but you don't know where to put your instrumentation.
Hellrigel:
True. Maybe SQUIDs can be used to monitor volcanoes?
Clarke:
It can be used on volcanoes, but I don't know how widely it is used for that type of work. However, I recall there have been some demonstrations of it being able to predict an eruption using SQUID techniques. Of course, in a sense that's easier because you know the location of the volcano as opposed to an earthquake.
Hellrigel:
Right. SQUIDs have a future in medicine and geophysics. How about the generation and distribution of electricity; power generation?
Clarke:
Not with SQUIDs I would think.
Hellrigel:
Not with SQUIDs?
Clarke:
There's always this hope that you can make high transition temperature wire as a way of transmitting the power. It would have lower loss and never be more efficient. I know one or two places around the world where they have demonstrations of this. I think there's a major power line going into New York, where the power is carried by superconducting wires.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Those wires have to be so expensive versus the old way of doing it.
Clarke:
Yes, and no. The argument was made in the following way: (1) As the requirements for power kept expanding, you need a bigger hole and that's very expensive; (2) Whereas if you use superconducting wire, despite the fact you need to cool the wire with liquid helium, it's actually cheaper to put the high-Tc superconducting wires in than the copper wires; (3) Furthermore, once it's running, it's more efficient because with copper wires you lose X percent in dissipation in the cable and in superconducting wires you don’t lose anything; (4) In the end, over some period of time you can calculate how much you save.
Hellrigel:
In New Jersey, Verizon is replacing copper wire with fiber optics. Is that a version of superconductivity?
Clarke:
No, it's not.
Hellrigel:
What was I thinking? Fiber optics uses glass.
Clarke:
Exactly.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Clarke:
Cosmology is another hugely expanding area of good applications.
Hellrigel:
Oh, I see.
Clarke:
This is awesome. I worked on that for a while in early--
Hellrigel:
What are they looking to do?
Clarke:
They're looking for a bunch of different things. One of them is you look at the cosmic background radiation, which is the sort of electromagnetic field that pervades the whole universe, and this is 2.7 Kelvin. The best detectors of these involved transitional sensors, which are superconductors, and they are read out by SQUIDs.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Clarke:
It has been unbelievably successful. I was involved with a telescope project on Antarctica. They were looking for galaxy clusters. A galaxy cluster may contain a thousand galaxies, so it's unbelievably gigantic. The actual distribution of galaxy clusters, exactly how big they are, and where they are located is very important in trying to understand the big bang - how the universe was formed.
This telescope over some two or three-year period discovered 677 new galaxy clusters. I got my number right. It's just huge. There's a whole lot of astrophysics based research which only works because of SQUID readout. SQUID technology is having a huge impact. There are many such telescopes around the world and I'm in many groups working on this in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.
Hellrigel:
I had no idea there are so many galaxies; one seems complex enough.
Clarke:
Yes, it is. Isn't it?
Hellrigel:
When you started your career in physics you must have had a plan or at least a dream about what you might accomplish. Have you attained your goals, fulfilled your dreams? Did you end up doing something you never imagined possible?
Clarke:
Yes, I suppose it did. You put one foot after the other.
Hellrigel:
Yes, step by step into the proverbial brave new frontier.
Clarke:
Yes. I would say that.
Hellrigel:
It is amazing.
Clarke:
Been lucky.
Hellrigel:
You mentioned applications for superconductivity technology, but it's still awful expensive. The MRI market is pretty established and has been successful. Other applications are very limited.
Clarke:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Advances in MRIs are important; changing it to lower level of frequency so people don’t get as radiated. The energy market, power generation and distribution is important, especially since Americans are such energy hogs.
Clarke:
Right. Yes, that would be. They need to get the cost of the wire down and there's been a lot of talk about that at this meeting. If they could get the cost down, they would have more impact, but it's a challenge to do that. Not everything is designed to make a profit. If you make a telescope to look for galaxy clusters, that's not a business.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that is very true. In the U.S., the politics of funding is disheartening.
Clarke:
Yes, it is a problem. Just to make a little comment on all that. If you ask where the majority of my research money goes, the answer is, it goes to pays salaries.
Hellrigel:
Salaries.
Clarke:
It's the students and postdocs, right, so it's educating people.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Clarke:
Right? And you say oh, yes, we had to give this guy a half a billion dollars a year, but probably $350,000 of it went to paying students. To hire one student now costs me $90,000 with overhead, benefits, and in particular, the fees.
Hellrigel:
Right. And, of course, university fees have gone up.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
The cost of university has exceeded the rate of inflation.
Clarke:
Yes, oh, yes. Yes, much faster.
Hellrigel:
Grant writing has become more time consuming and important, even for history professors. There is tremendous pressure to bring in funding.
Clarke:
Yes, that's right.
Hellrigel:
University budgets are being slashed, the humanities, social sciences, and arts are really being stripped.
Clarke:
Right. I'm well aware of that. I see that in my own university. They think, well, we gave this guy half a million dollars of the taxpayers' money. But, as I said, most of it goes to education and that is what it really comes down to.
Hellrigel:
I have heard some universities take 50 percent of a grant as overhead.
Clarke:
It does. Oh, it does.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and so from a grant the money is split 50/50. This must be frustrating because you have no control, it is university policy.
Clarke:
Right.
Hellrigel:
That could go to someone's slush fund. It doesn't necessarily go back to the physics department.
Clarke:
That's correct. But the point is without that university, we'd simply collapse.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Clarke:
It's all a question of who pays for what. Universities are expensive. We have ever more administration and one of the reasons for that is we have ever more federal rules that we have to obey. A lot of people spend their lives trying to understand the regulations.
Hellrigel:
The advising staff has expanded, too.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I don't know. We've covered a lot.
Clarke:
Yes, we have discussed many topics.
Reflections, closing remarks
Hellrigel:
I don't know if there's anything I left out. Perhaps there is something you thought we would speak about that has not been covered.
Clarke:
No, I can't think of anything off hand. Let me just think for a minute.
Hellrigel:
Go ahead. Take your time.
Clarke:
Well, I've had my little complaint about costs of everything. In fact, this year, the University of California, Berkeley has $150 million debt that they don't know how to deal with.
Hellrigel:
When I went on a leave from Cal State Chico to come home and take care of my folks, the State of California was served with a massive electric bill. One plan called for my colleagues to take a drop in pay for a while and that was just very upsetting. Whenever I get those phone calls from companies wanting me to change from my energy provider, I say no, I am not changing. The scenarios described in the fine print are frightening as Gray Davis, the former governor of California, knows quite well. Read the fine print.
Clarke:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Everything's great until the system hits a snag.
Clarke:
Yes. We took a pay hit at that same time. In fact, that was very unfair because people like me with grants could make up our salaries out of grant money, but if you were in history, and didn't have a grant, you couldn't do anything.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Then the classes got larger, and they got rid of some of the one-year people and adjuncts.
Clarke:
That's right. We've done that.
Hellrigel:
It makes it difficult. If required courses are not offered or there are not enough sections, students may take five years to finish. I have not heard limited offerings is as significant a problem on the east coast, but I am not an administrator.
Clarke:
Yes. Our principal problem is the fact the fire marshals says you can have X students in the classroom. If we don’t have enough teachers, we cannot open more sections and we don't have enough space for the students in the sections offered. I think that the five-year degree has become more common.
Hellrigel:
Yes, it is more common and perhaps it has become the standard.
Clarke:
Much more standard. It's very frustrating for the students because it takes them longer, it costs them more, and it keeps more students out. Right? It's a lose, lose, lose situation.
Hellrigel:
Right, and federal funding, especially the grant and loan programs, seem to be based on a four-year bachelor’s degree.
Clarke:
Yes, that's right.
Hellrigel:
In theory, it is a four-year degree, but you'd be hard pressed to finish in four years at some universities. When I taught at California State University, Chico, budget cuts meant fewer sections of a particular course and even fewer courses. Class sizes were also increased.
Clarke:
Yes, that's right, so none of it makes any sense.
Hellrigel:
It makes no sense at all.
Clarke:
But it's a usual thing. It hurts the students from poor families the most, and that's the thing that I most resent. Some families are rich enough, they don't care; however, there are huge numbers of kids who just don’t have enough money to go to university. That's a huge scandal to me.
Hellrigel:
Yes. It's creating an income gap or at least widening the gap between the college educated and those without a college degree.
Clarke:
Yes. I sort of come from this background where I think that the state owes its citizens education and health. It doesn't owe them richness, but these are two basic human needs that people should have.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and especially the healthcare.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
The politics over healthcare continues. In the U.S., healthcare is tied so much to your employment.
Clarke:
Absolutely.
Hellrigel:
When I explained the American system to friends in Manchester, England they are shocked. Until, recently, medical insurance cost me almost $1,000 per month. Family plans cost upward of $2,200 per month. Now I have far more affordable coverage through my employer, IEEE.
Clarke:
Wow. That’s insane.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and the politics is equally insane. In the U.S., the battle for a national health plan was initiated by President Harry S. Truman after World War II. The debate rages on. We'll see in the next election.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
The notion that you could be hard-working and diligently, but you can't afford insurance is really frustrating and unacceptable. Many advocates contend health care is a human right.
Clarke:
That's not a lie. That's as I said, the country owes that to its citizens. I'm not saying it should be free, but everyone should get healthcare, and everyone should have the opportunity to get a decent education. How well people do in life and how rich they get, well, that's their business, but there are some fundamental needs that people should have.
Hellrigel:
Right. Let's face it, public education in the U.S. was founded and expanded when the country needed an educated workforce. For the most part, it wasn't offered out of kindness, but out of the need for literate workers.
Clarke:
Actually, can I tell you one last story that's just occurred to me that'll just take a couple of minutes?
Hellrigel:
Go ahead.
Clarke:
There's a street in Cambridge called Free School Lane.
Hellrigel:
It is a very descriptive street name.
Clarke:
You might ask yourself, "Why is it called that?"
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Clarke:
It's because my school was founded there in 1615, the Perse School.
Hellrigel:
My, it was founded more than four hundred years ago, during the Age of Exploration and Western European Expansion.
Clarke:
It was founded in 1615 by Steven Perse and other benefactors as I think the first public school, in the American sense, in the United Kingdom. Perse left money for poor kids to get an education. You can still attend on scholarship. There's a little memorial plaque describing how the school was founded. So, that's one end of Free School Lane. Near the other end of the street, around the 10th century Saxon Church, my grandfather had a picture-framing shop. Right in the middle was the Royal Society Modern Laboratory, which is where I did my research.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Clarke:
Free School Lane is the center of my life or it was the center of my life.
Hellrigel:
Your grandfather made picture frames.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Your family has been skilled craft-workers for a few generations.
Clarke:
Yes, it’s very interesting. Someone like my grandfather you would not think of as a particularly rich person. He was very good at what he did, he could afford to buy his own home, and he and his wife could afford to raise three kids at some decent level. It's unimaginable today.
Hellrigel:
Yes, it's tough today.
Clarke:
My dad who was a carpenter was pretty savvy, so during the Depression when he couldn’t work, he had enough money to buy a piece of land and build his own house on it. Right?
Hellrigel:
Oh yes, he did well to save.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
He bought land in Cambridge.
Clarke:
Yes, in Cambridge.
Hellrigel:
The land was probably expensive because it was in Cambridge?
Clarke:
No, it was very cheap then. It was just a little bit towards the outside of town. It was right on the outskirts, but now it is swallowed up in the mass of Cambridge.
Hellrigel:
Did he have enough land to make his own garden?
Clarke:
Oh, yes, he had a huge garden.
Hellrigel:
While writing a lecture on the Great Depression in Great Britain I looked for film footage posted on YouTube. The British government made a series of educational films about food preparation and making ends meet. These 1930s films were quite interesting, so I used part of a film about raising rabbits and making rabbit pie. Most of my students were alarmed because people were eating rabbit. You know what? My late mother was Italian, and she made a rather tasty roasted rabbit. My late grandfather on my father’s side of the family was German and Irish and he raised rabbits as a source of protein, especially during the Great Depression and World War II.
Clarke:
Our next-door neighbor, the people who bought the first TV, raised rabbits basically for food. The question is what else would you raise them for?
Hellrigel:
Rabbits could be pets. However, many people probably did not consider them a pet. For many, rabbits were not considered a pet like either a cat or a dog. Culture and food are fascinating topics.
Thank you very much, sir.
Clarke:
Thank you very much, Mary Ann. I enjoyed this.
Hellrigel:
I also enjoyed our discussion. I learned a lot about education in England and the career of a scientist at a very prestigious U.S. research university. I will send you the transcript for your review and editing.
Clarke:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Have a good afternoon.
