Oral-History:William V. Hassenzahl
About William V. Hassenzahl
William V. Hassenzahl (Member, IEEE) was born in Fort Smith, AR, on July 11, 1940. He received the B.S. degree in physics and electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 1962 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1967.,He was with the Lawrence Berkeley National and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories from 1980 to 1993 and with the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory from 1967 to 1980. He is currently the President of Advanced Energy Analysis, Piedmont, CA, a consulting firm specializing in the areas of electric power and applied physics. His publications include over 200 technical papers and two books on energy storage. He has participated in the development of several superconducting magnets and other superconducting systems, and he is active in the research on medical systems using superconductivity. Dr. Hassenzahl is a Member of the IEEE Council on Superconductivity, where he represents the IEEE Power Engineering Society. He is a Member of several IEEE societies. He is a Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Electricity Storage Association. He was recently the Editor of a series of papers on the applications of superconductivity in the Power Engineering Review.
About the Interview
WILLIAM V. HASSENZAHL: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, 5 September 2016
Interview #770 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:
William V. Hassenzahl, an oral history conducted in 2016 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: William V. Hassenzahl
INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel
DATE: 5 September 2016
PLACE: Applied Superconductivity Conference, Denver, CO
Early life, education, Caltech
Hellrigel:
Today is 5 September 2016. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel speaking with William (Bill) Hassenzahl at the Applied Superconductivity Conference in Denver, CO.
Hassenzahl:
My mother, unfortunately, she never retired.
My father had been injured pretty seriously in a work accident, so he--I mean even though he would design houses and build houses and that. Some of the times he was working just as a laborer building houses, working on a house for another contractor. And he was carrying a heavy weight up a ladder and a rung broke. And then two more rungs broke when he came down and he had stuff on his shoulder. And so it, he, it messed up his back and leg. And so the left leg atrophied. So he basically quit working at that point.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Hassenzahl:
But he had some retirement. This was before my mom. This was probably in the mid/late 1960s, so eight, ten years before my mom passed away. He had two or three operations, which were basically today would've been insignificant, in that time were not successful. I don't know if you want to call it retirement because he was always in pain.
Hellrigel:
That’s not good.
Hassenzahl:
Not fun.
Hellrigel:
Did you go on vacation to the National Parks, things like that?
Hassenzahl:
No. My dad's twin brother still lived in Windsor and we lived in Southern California. And every other summer we would go up there. In the alternate summer his family would come and visit us. he had children older than my sister and I. And so it was just, I don't know. But those were the vacations that we had.
Hellrigel:
Okay, family oriented.
Hassenzahl:
They were family oriented and every once in a while we would go somewhere else, but because of my mom's arthritic conditions she was not too much able to hike and do things. And then after my dad had his problem, it was pretty much all over.
Hellrigel:
Did you get to go to Disney?
Hassenzahl:
Well, Disney didn't even exist.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I am losing track of the chronology.
Hassenzahl:
It was pre-Disney that we were there. It was built about the time I was going to CalTech, starting CalTech. I don't remember. 1956, 1958 timeframe.
Hellrigel:
Yes, around there.
Hassenzahl:
So certainly in high school we had no spare money in that family. That was just it
Hellrigel:
Working class?
Hassenzahl:
Absolutely then.
Hellrigel:
What was your aspiration when you were a kid? What did you think you would do?
Hassenzahl:
The question is a kid. As a little kid, I don't know. I probably wanted to do everything at various times just like a lot of bright kids want to do now. But by the time I was in 8th grade going in 9th grade, I pretty much decided I wanted to go into--I will quote call it physics.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Hassenzahl:
I didn't know what that meant entirely. But I read a lot and in particularly I remember if you've seen the movie Back to the Future, mm-hmm, do you remember that little car? Fusion-powered car? Life Magazine had that picture in 1952.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Hassenzahl:
They were talking about Fusion Power and they talked about Los Alamos, building a fusion device and people in Britain working on it and so forth. That was one of the things that sort of got me.
Hellrigel:
Piqued your interest?
Hassenzahl:
Yeah, piqued my interest. I thought that'd be neat to have. Just put water in it and away you go.
Hellrigel:
Why not?
Hassenzahl:
Or bananas or something.
Hellrigel:
Well, yeah. Even back in the day when they were finding petroleum or an electric automobile, people said, "Why can't we make one that runs on water?"
Hassenzahl:
Yes. You know, that was one of the things. So there really was a picture. If you go back to Life Magazine, I'm sure you can find it in that timeframe. I loved it. And when I saw Back to the Future, in my mind this other picture came to mind.
Hellrigel:
Did you figure you'd go to college?
Hassenzahl:
Nobody in the family--I mean my mom went to this business thing, but nobody in the family had ever gone to college before. I think I probably didn't know what it meant until I was going into my sophomore year in high school. The first thing was I had an interesting opportunity. There was no AP course or anything at that time. If you were going to take it, you took a science in sophomore year, which was biology, so I took biology. Again, I read the book. And then we were having classes and this and that.
I got very ticked off once when there was one question on the quiz and it had never been mentioned and I answered it wrong.
Hellrigel:
You still remember that.
Hassenzahl:
I can remember what it was too.
Hellrigel:
Okay, what was the question?
Hassenzahl:
The question was: does exercise stimulate peristalsis? Peristalsis is the natural action in your intestines to keep fluid going so the muscles contract and contract down to cause it to move. Known as peristalsis.
And so exercise stimulates peristalsis. And my reasoning was well it wouldn't because if you were in exercise you probably wanted to conserve all your energy and do other things. But I had the wrong answer.
Well, I'm logical. What I said was logical. What I did was logical. But a lot of logical things are wrong. That's not the only logical thing that's wrong.
Hellrigel:
Well, and it made sense. Why not [crosstalk] to the heart?
Hassenzahl:
Right. Yeah, why would you waste that over there? Anyway…
Hassenzahl:
So I argued with. I didn't mind making it wrong, but I argued that we had never learned that. I'm probably the only person in the class who remembers that answer.
Hellrigel:
How did you get along with that teacher?
Hassenzahl:
We got along perfect. He didn't mind arguing with me. It was okay.
Hellrigel:
So then did the teachers encourage you to go to college?
Hassenzahl:
Well, that year what happened just after three or four weeks--I don't know. This was later in the year, but after three or four weeks I was selected as one of two students from that school to be able to go to the Museum of Natural History in--right near USC in Los Angeles. It's about 10 miles away. Where they had a class every Saturday morning for the fall semester.
Hassenzahl:
And it was on biology. And so they started going through the phyla and various things. It got a little more complicated than that. And even, I mean he had already selected me to go to that, so it was--we got along fine.
Hassenzahl:
But anyway, that was really a nice, a nice class and I learned a lot. And I at that point was thinking well maybe I don't want physics. Maybe I want something else. And so the spring you got a detail thing. You go in some… And I chose entomology.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Hassenzahl:
Studying bugs. And so actually, I have a collection. I had a collection of bugs from that era where I had occasionally, well, for the next six or seven years. If you went somewhere and you found a bug, well, there's a way to pin it, label it, where it came from, date, and everything. And so just a few months ago I gave that collection to the Biology Department at Chico. So they have that.
Hellrigel:
How did you preserve the bugs?
Hassenzahl:
I had made a box with plywood on the backside and with a thing that you could put in. And what you do is you actually kill them with chloroform or [crosstalk] or something, but that doesn't preserve them. So what you have to do is you get a moth ball and you take the end of one of the pens that you have a bug on the big end, and you heat it in a fire. You stick it in a mothball. It melts a little bit and then it solidifies again. Then you just stick the mothball in the same thing where the bugs would be and you've now got not hermetic, but a seal around it and so it preserves it.
Hassenzahl:
And that worked for most of the bugs anyway.
Hellrigel:
And how long did you collect bugs?
Hassenzahl:
The last two bugs that I got were brought to me by a girlfriend [laughs] whose father was a professor at CalTech between my junior and senior year because they had gone off to Oakridge for a couple of months where he was working for the summer. And so I'd taken her out on a couple of trips nearby and anyway, that was… So that went on until--so '61.
Hassenzahl:
Yeah. Okay, and it was different and--pardon?
Hellrigel:
It was cool.
Hassenzahl:
It was a cool thing, yeah. And butterflies and months and it's just sort of another bit of information. Hellrigel:: Black widow spider? Could you get one of those?
Hassenzahl:
Yeah, no, spiders are not bugs. Only bug--spiders.
Hellrigel:
Just bugs.
Hassenzahl:
Oh, just insects, you know. Lepidoptra. Okay.
Hellrigel:
You're getting ready to graduate high school and…
Hassenzahl:
In high school, since we were so close to CalTech, CalTech had these high school seminars two Saturdays a year or something like that where the school could nominate some kids to go up and there were three or four of my buddies and I would go up, went up a couple of times. And they had some simple, straightforward knowledgeable science and then they had some fantastic explosions.
Hellrigel:
Rockets?
Hassenzahl:
No, no. Electrical. They had one of the first 1 million volt transformers in the country and so they--a lot of the stuff that people now know and do for high voltage 750 kV power lines came out of research on the transformers and on that system. So it was staged. I had one transformer, two transformers, three transformers to get up to high enough voltage.
And so they just had neat things there and so forth. And they gave lectures on what people were doing and who else was doing one thing. So by the time I was in high school I decided on thinking about technology place, either CalTech or MIT or maybe SC, maybe Berkeley. And so I applied and I was accepted at all of them.
Hassenzahl:
At all of them. But my dad was ill by the time. Not as bad as he became later, but it was sort of up to me to… I mean he was working maybe two or three days a week, but it was really hard, so I would help him do various things afterwards. And by that time I was putting roofs on and things like that for the stuff that was being built, doing other things. So I chose CalTech. I mean it was a really good school obviously.
Hellrigel:
Yeah, not a bad choice.
Hassenzahl:
No, not a bad choice. I've never regretted it. So that was the--but that was the choice. And I decided to go into physics and--but it was the funniest thing, was you couldn't go into electrical engineering until you were a junior basically. But so I was a freshman. You choose one or two different general orientations. And so physics was sort of the way I went, but I was always looking at the electrical engineering pieces and stuff.
And finally it was funny because I got A's and A minuses in physics, but every test in chemistry had an A+. I just couldn't miss a question. I don't know why. I mean I just I liked it. I studied. I studied them all. And so at that point Linus Pauling [phonetic] had just passed from--not passed away. He just stopped being the professor of freshman physics and one of his students, Jurg Wasser, was the main professor for freshman physics.
Hellrigel:
Do you remember how to spell it?
Hassenzahl:
Jurg Wasser.
Hellrigel:
Jurg Wasser.
Hassenzahl:
Jurg Wasser. Yes, Swiss.
Hellrigel:
Okay. It's German.
Hassenzahl:
Swiss, German. Zurich I think. Anyway, so I was working on these things and so they were thinking about well, I wasn't in the chemistry line. And so he asked. He got me coming to his office and talk to him for a while. So I was in there talking to him and talking to him. And I remember one quotation that you would love to have in this thing. And that was [laughs] I says well you know I really want to go into physics. And he says, "Well, chemistry is just complicated physics." Loved it. And you know he was looking at the wave patterns around the molecules, around the atoms in the molecule, which would affect how one would be attracted to another and why they would go in. But I didn't get sold. I didn't buy that.
Hellrigel:
Encouraging you to go to chemistry.
Hassenzahl:
No, he was in chemistry, encouraging me to go into chemistry and saying you want physics? Well, I've got physics. It was funny. So one other thing I should tell you back--because I read everything all the time, in 10th grade having six solids, five solids I mean, they wouldn’t allow you to do that because it's too hard.
Hassenzahl:
Okay? Whatever that is. And so instead of that I had an electrical shop they called it.
Hassenzahl:
Electrical shop meant making and connecting up a couple of tubes or something like that with some resistors. Yeah, it wasn't as hard for sure because it wasn't. And then how to splice two wires. Well, I've been doing that in houses for 10 years or something--not that long, but a few years. And then the teacher got sick after about four weeks or something like that. And he would have one day a week where he would lecture about electrical things and then the rest of the week we would work in the shop on doing something.
But once that happened, I mean you could get somebody or somebody could watch when they soldered or not. But there wasn't anybody else who understood the electrical stuff. So he asked me to come to his house and would I please give the lectures.
Hellrigel:
Not bad for a tenth grader.
Hassenzahl:
I did that for about six weeks.
Hellrigel:
What did the other kids think about that?
Hassenzahl:
Well, I don't think I knew how to lecture. That's my own personal opinion. But a couple of my buddies said well why didn't he just give you an A and let you go somewhere else or something. You know?
Hellrigel:
Yeah.
Hassenzahl:
But, they weren't--
Hellrigel:
They didn't make fun of you or--
Hassenzahl:
Oh, there was a little bit of that, but I was also… I played football and I was a varsity track as a sophomore, so there wasn't a lot of trouble they were going to give me.
Hellrigel:
You were the athletic. You did well in athletics?
Hassenzahl:
Yeah. No, I was a three-year varsity letterman in football and track. So that was okay. And I was valedictorian too. So it was--
Hellrigel:
That's a lot of--
Hassenzahl:
I did a lot of things.
Hellrigel:
Yeah. And did you think about a sports scholarship then?
Hassenzahl:
No, I never did. I was too small.
Hassenzahl:
My middle son was the same way, and he's too small. It's just, you know. Even then you had to be in football. Actually, I almost--by the time I graduated from CalTech I had Olympic qualifying half-mile time. But there were a lot of people in the U.S. that could do that at that time. It wasn’t so unique.
Hellrigel:
Did you run for CalTech?
Hassenzahl:
Yeah, I was the captain of the track team in my senior year and three-year varsity letterman there also. I only played football for two years--was it three years--at CalTech, at CalTech. And I ended up having a fairly serious injury to my left knee and my parents were the real reason. My mom just couldn't watch it. Couldn't. Too emotional.
Hassenzahl:
I can still run and so you know.
Hellrigel:
You're at CalTech and then you make the jump. You're in physics, but you'll start studying more electrical engineering.
Hassenzahl:
Well, so then there was as a junior you could study electrical circuits and a variety of other things. And so I did that. Actually there was another thing. I will give you this. This is going to take a long time. Are you okay?
Hellrigel:
Yeah, I'm okay.
Hassenzahl:
We could make it longer if you want. You can cut all you want out. So after, when I graduated from high school--I'm jumping ahead. Yeah, I'm backing. When I graduated from high school, you're looking for a summer job. What're you going to do? And so my ninth grade Latin teacher, who I kept in some--I walked passed the junior high to the high school every day and occasionally I'd stop in and do things.
At any rate, she and her husband and two other couples had known each other for many years and she recommended to the vice president of the California company that was basically Socony Mobil, that maybe I should come and get a summer job. So I went and got a summer job out of high school. And again I was really lucky because I was pulling down 2-1/2 bucks an hour and occasionally there was overtime because they were doing a lot of drilling and stuff. They had had a crew up on the north slope. I didn't go and do that, but we were doing things.
Hellrigel:
What did you do?
Hassenzahl:
Well, a little bit of everything. You got to find out what the viscosity of the oil is. You got to find out what the temperature effects of the viscosity are. You need to find out what happens to is under pressure.
Hellrigel:
You were a lab worker.
Hassenzahl:
I worked in the lab and the other thing that happened that was very interesting was this was the field research lab and they were trying to get what's called secondary and tertiary recovery in an oil field.
Hellrigel:
So that's all the byproducts--
Hassenzahl:
Well, yeah. After you get the oil out easily, you got to figure out, do you pump water in? Do you put fire in? Do you do some of these of things that people are yelling and screaming about now? We were doing all that back in the 1950s, late 1950 anyway. Send nylon balls down out so that you could split apart a sand formation to get more flow.
Hassenzahl:
And between the layers rather than through the thing. But the question was: how do you model it? And if you're going to do that, you're going to have to have a central well where you can push stuff in and then you're going to have to have something else. Or you can make a great big pump with some hot air and you can get it started burning. Then you get a flame front. The flame front warms up the stuff in front of it. The oil leaves and the old stuff that's left is tar and stuff and you just burn it. And that provides the heat on.
So we were modeling. So a couple of the engineers there were modeling that and so they had a little [crosstalk].
Perfect.
Hellrigel:
Yeah, it's pretty informal. Yeah. It's informal. It's a program that's been around for 30 years now.
Hassenzahl:
Really? I know it was, I know there were oral things before, but were they video then?
Hellrigel:
No.
Hassenzahl:
No, yeah, started--
Hellrigel:
It's only in the past few years.
Hassenzahl:
Few years. Okay, there's a form for me to sign. I read the whole thing.
Hellrigel:
Okay, that's it.
Hassenzahl:
I'll sign it assuming you didn't cheat and change it.
Hellrigel:
No, no.
Hassenzahl:
I didn't think go.
Hellrigel:
That form hasn't changed since 2009. Okay.
Hassenzahl:
Okay?
Hellrigel:
That’s that.
Hassenzahl:
Okay? Perfect.
Hellrigel:
All right. Are you comfortable?
Hassenzahl:
Yes. I'm hot, but I'm comfortable. If I had a great big fan it'd be better, but that's okay.
Hellrigel:
Okay, my script here. Today is September 5th, 2016. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel of the IEEE History Center. And I'm with William Verg [phonetic] Hazzenzahl?
Hassenzahl:
Hassenzahl.
Hellrigel:
Hassenzahl Ph.D. We're at the Applied Superconductivity Conference in Denver, Colorado. And sir, thank you for agreeing to sit down with me.
Hassenzahl:
You're quite welcome.
Hellrigel:
Did you know about The History Center before?
Hassenzahl:
Before what?
Hellrigel:
Before Peter Lee contacted you?
Hassenzahl:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Hassenzahl:
I've looked at it occasionally.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Hassenzahl:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Another person said they'd never heard of us.
Hassenzahl:
I know. Yeah.
Hellrigel:
They're going to make my boss nervous.
Hassenzahl:
I've actually been very interested in the history of all technology. But electrical engineering has been--and physics. I really have a degree in physics.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Hassenzahl:
But I have several degrees, so electrical engineering was the first. I started fixing televisions when I was about 13 in California. That's a good way to make money as a kid, you know? Fix your neighbor's television. Put in a new tube. Cost you 3 bucks and you get 5 bucks for it. And charge them a dollar and a half for an hour.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Hassenzahl:
It works out okay.
Hellrigel:
Okay. Could you tell me when you were born and where you were born?
Hassenzahl:
I was born on July 11th, 1940, in a town called Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Hellrigel:
Okay, and how long did you live there?
Hassenzahl:
My parents took--we moved to California in 1944.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Hassenzahl:
My father had come out the year before. It was during the Second World War. And he and another man had formed a business manufacturing parts for airplanes and automobiles and God only knows what. A machine shop basically.
Hellrigel:
Okay, so what was your father's name?
Hassenzahl:
William Jerald Hassenzahl with a J.
Hellrigel:
You're sort of named after him?
Hassenzahl:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Did he have any formal training in engineering or manufacturing?
Hassenzahl:
Well, he grew up on a farm.
Hassenzahl:
He went to two schools, one for the first four years and another for the second four years.
Hellrigel:
Okay, what did he do?
Hassenzahl:
Well, he did everything actually. And my comment about him is he was not nearly as educated as I, but he had a higher intelligence. He was very smart.
Hellrigel:
So eighth grade education.
Hassenzahl:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Which was common--
Hassenzahl:
At that time, yes. His comment was that it was an eighth grade education, but I got it in the fifth grade because all classes were in the same room. Well, you just hear it all. He says you read all the books and what are you going to do for the next three years but cause trouble?
Hellrigel:
Oh, boy. He lived in Texas.
Hassenzahl:
He lived in Texas, yes.
Hellrigel:
What kind of farm did they have? Cattle?
Hassenzahl:
Well, I mean at that time they had, people had combined farms. So there was both some grain and straw production and they did have some cattle and some horses. His father had been both a farmer and a Texas ranger.
Hellrigel:
So it would go back a few generations.
Hassenzahl:
Yes. And the German people who came from Germany about 1940--1840, 1845.
Hellrigel:
Okay, so you're original.
Hassenzahl:
That's from that, yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Hassenzahl:
I know the town. The town has a lot of Hassenzahls in it.
Hellrigel:
What's the town?
Hassenzahl:
Pfungstadt, P-F-U-N-G-F--no--S-T-A-D-T.
Hellrigel:
That's a formidable--
Hassenzahl:
No. Pfungstadt was the city in Germany that they came from.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Hassenzahl:
And at the end my grandfather passed away in a little town called Whitharral.
Hellrigel:
Whitharral.
Hassenzahl:
W-H-I-T-H-A-R-R-I-L, I think.
Hellrigel:
Okay, I'll check that out. And so he is the one that came to Texas.
Hassenzahl:
Came to Texas probably from Ohio. We don't have all the details.
Hellrigel:
That would've made sense. A lot of Germans--
Hassenzahl:
They came to Ohio and Pennsylvania, stayed around for a while.
Hellrigel:
Okay, and what brought your father then from Texas to Arkansas?
Hassenzahl:
The Great Depression. I mean people didn't have anything to do and they… Do you know what the world hobo means?
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Hassenzahl:
Homeward bound.
Hellrigel:
Homeward bound.
Hassenzahl:
Homeward bound. Well, he was one of the hobos for a while because they didn't have anywhere to go. They didn't have any money to travel with. They'd work and do what they could. And like I said, he and his twin brother lived in a little town called Windsor in California for about three years. He moved back when his father had passed away and his brother stayed there. And then within a few years everything in that part of Texas was dead. I mean there was nothing. Cows couldn't live. People couldn't live. So he started working on the railroad and one of the main railroad intersections at that time was Fort Smith.
Hellrigel:
Okay, that would make perfect sense.
Hassenzahl:
He worked there and my mother's father and he worked together and he was invited home and introduced to the woman that became my mother.
Hellrigel:
Wow. So her father set her up.
Hassenzahl:
That's correct.
Hellrigel:
Your father must've been a--
Hassenzahl:
He was a pretty good guy.
Hellrigel:
She was from Arkansas.
Hassenzahl:
She was from Arkansas. She was born in Fort Smith also.
Hellrigel:
Okay, railroad. That was a big employer at the time.
Hassenzahl:
That was a big, big deal. I mean it was massive. Just did not have automobile capabilities for long distance at the time. Trains were already traveling in some places 100 miles an hour.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Hassenzahl:
But cars, there's no road that would take a car that fast.
Hellrigel:
No. How many siblings do you have?
Hassenzahl:
One sister and she still lives about five miles from where we grew up in Southern California
Hellrigel:
Did she get into engineering?
Hassenzahl:
No, she's a nurse.
Hellrigel:
What did you do? You mentioned you fixed televisions when you were a kid.
Hassenzahl:
Well, for some reason I started thinking about technology, electronics and stuff. At that time you didn't have the internet. If you wanted something, you had to go to the library to read about it. I did that and then there was a man who was a television repair service a block and a half away. And I also did--but my dad did that if there was a book that we go the second day of classes. Well the third day of classes I had finished it.
Hassenzahl:
We just booked it, so I went and talked to this guy and sometimes he'd take me out and help, to help him do something. Mainly just lift and carry. Go get. And then after a while it got to the point where somebody had a television problem and he knew what the others needed. I knew what was needed. He said here's three tubes. Get on your bike and go over there and figure out which one you need to replace.
Hellrigel:
You were 13, 12?
Hassenzahl:
I was 12 at the time.
Hassenzahl:
By the time I was 14 I knew what to do too and I could buy the wholesale tubes, sell them at retail and get a buck and a half. Worked okay.
Hellrigel:
You worked at your own--
Hassenzahl:
No, I had a job every other week or two or something like that. It wasn't any big amount of money, but it was enough to realize you could start putting money away and do stuff.
Hellrigel:
Did you fix radios also?
Hassenzahl:
I did. I built radios, fixed them, and played with them, yeah.
Hellrigel:
For toys did you have erector sets, Lincoln Logs?
Hassenzahl:
Oh, yes. But I never had a Lincoln Log, but I had erector sets early on and--of course starting off in kindergarten and things there were blocks and things like that. I always made elaborate structures and that was all.
Hellrigel:
You were sort of--
Hassenzahl:
Mechanically oriented for sure. The other thing is my dad had this machine shop. They were working on motors and airplane parts and various at that time exotic materials like the airplanes in the Second World War at the end had magnesium steering wheels--whatever the things are. His company made the magnesium structures and formed them for the planes and set them up so they could put them on or just screw them into place. Then you have something that'd weight two pounds less than it used to weigh rather than aluminum or something else. It was interesting. Not very many people know that we made magnesium parts back in the 1950s for airplanes and stuff, so.
Hellrigel:
Commercial or military?
Hassenzahl:
Usually military. There were so many military planes in the like '43, '44 on. And Long Beach was one of the major manufacturing places. It was five miles away. And so they had about eight people working there and I'm guessing that they would put a couple of these aircraft steering wheels--sorry. Forty or 50 aircraft steering wheels a day.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Hassenzahl:
Well, they made, I don't know, how many DC3s, 15,000 of them or something like that over three years. This was a small company, but they were a good size manufacturer for the source for those parts.
Hellrigel:
What was the name of the company?
Hassenzahl:
I don't know. I have no idea.
Hellrigel:
Your dad, that was his business? He started it?
Hassenzahl:
That was his and he was doing that well, for a while. Then when the war was over the market for those things sort of went away. He began building houses. And so there's a lot of people coming back from the war and wanted to do things. And so he started building houses. And when I was four or five, one of the things we did is double the size of the little house that we had, that he had bought because my sister came along in 1944. She was born four years later than I was. By the time I was seven or eight, I was helping him, pounding nails. Not a real hard job for me. I never got the big things at first, but I did that.
Then the next thing is he did not understand electricity. A lot of these people who were of that era, I mean they didn't have any electricity when they grew up and they knew how you turn to flip the switch, but they didn't know much about the connections and the wiring. So I became the electrician for installing probably by the time I was at twelve, eleven years old. Also, I was doing the electricity work on his houses.
Hellrigel:
You read the books?
Hassenzahl:
I read--well, there's not much. At that point, things were really simple. All you got's 110 volts. You didn't even have full ground system. You had knob and tube. You had a few other things. It was pretty straightforward.
Hassenzahl:
And it was intuitive to me from the beginning. I don't know. I think most of the people here would, in some area would've said the same thing. It was just intuitive.
Hellrigel:
Right. And look straight up and down.
Hassenzahl:
It wasn't bad. Nothing was. I mean safety was the biggest thing and you had to be careful, but other than that…
Hellrigel:
Did you do any of the aluminum wiring?
Hassenzahl:
Never.
Hellrigel:
Okay, that's good.
Hassenzahl:
I'm not going to touch that. No. I've seen houses that have that. In fact, my son lives in Ottawa, Canada, and his house has aluminum wiring. I said as soon as there's a problem, replace that part. You don't want aluminum wiring.
Hellrigel:
No. So you were a techie from the beginning.
Hassenzahl:
I was a techie from the beginning. I decided to go into physics by the time I was fourteen.
Hellrigel:
When you were in grade school/high school, what was your favorite subjects? What were your favorite subjects?
Hassenzahl:
Well I went to parochial school for the first six years.
Hassenzahl:
They pushed people a lot on everything, which I just--it was whether I liked it or not I had to learn it. Handwriting--well, I can't write either anymore, but I could write then. And proper use of the language and how to diagram a sentence and those things. But it's good. It teaches you the structure that you need to do, have to do things.
I went through that and then again, I read a fair number of books, but there wasn't really a source of books available to me. But in seventh grade I went to the local junior high school and they had a library. It was a great discovery.
Hassenzahl:
I started reading a book every day or two. Everything. It didn't matter what I read. I almost flunked out, but I read a lot of books.
Hellrigel:
You were focused on what you wanted to do.
Hassenzahl:
I was doing what I wanted to do, yeah.
Hellrigel:
You flunked out of grade school?
Hassenzahl:
No, no. I almost flunked out of seventh grade.
Hellrigel:
For not focusing on the assignments?
Hassenzahl:
For not doing the assignments. Well, I'd had them all before in parochial school. They were boring, the addition and stuff. I mean so I figured out for myself in like fourth grade what percentages were, so how to make, how to do a percentage problem. I was taught later on this is a parochial school. I mean you look at what you're getting. You get a certain percentage for this, certain percentage for that, and you say oh, well this is the way you calculate that obviously. We were learning whatever in seventh grade, but it was--
Hellrigel:
Boring.
Hassenzahl:
Boring.
Hellrigel:
Why did you leave parochial school?
Hassenzahl:
The parochial school I had gone to was about four miles away and we were bussed to it. Then a new parochial school was formed at the local church and that local parochial school, at the beginning, it only went through the eighth grade. Maybe not even that. No, at the beginning it only went through the fourth grade. My sister went to it for a couple of years and then at the end of sixth grade that parochial school changed to the eighth grade and so therefore people from this area were not being bussed to that again. And most, some fraction of the people went to that school. But I don't know why. It wasn't my decision. I went to the junior high. I think it was a good thing.
Hellrigel:
Right, and then you went to a public high school.
Hassenzahl:
A public high school, yes.
Hellrigel:
In high school what were your favorite subjects then?
Hassenzahl:
Well it was… Actually, I have not had something I don't like.
Hassenzahl:
I mean I don't if it was history or English or music or biology. I just enjoy myself.
Hellrigel:
Foreign languages, they were okay?
Hassenzahl:
Well, I took Latin and it was a struggle. I got all A's, but it was a struggle. It was not intuitive, languages. And one of the problems is that you don’t hear it. You don't live with it. So we lived part--
Hellrigel:
Except at mass at the time.
Hassenzahl:
Well, I was an altar boy and in fact when they moved that church St. Gertrude's to a new location and the first mass was on Christmas morning and my sixth grade, I was chosen to be one of the three altar boys at that first mass because I understood what was being said and could repeat what was being said and knew what to do and was good. I liked the priest and he liked me and everything. But, it was interesting that the language itself is quite obscure. And that's because you don't hear it.
Hellrigel:
So not spoken.
Hassenzahl:
My mind. It's just not spoken. I was afraid of learning. I studied German, I studied Russian, and my grandmother spoke German so I could speak that a little bit anyway. But they were never exceptional. We lived in France 1978, 1979 and worked at an institute originally created by Marie Curie. I learned French.
Hellrigel:
You lectured in French?
Hassenzahl:
And I've lectured in French, yes.
Hassenzahl:
I still--parlez-vous français? No. Anyway, I managed pretty well. The problem is keeping up to date with practice because there are very few people who speak French in the United States.
Hellrigel:
True, yeah. It's not as popular as it used to be.
Hassenzahl:
It's just it's hard. It's very hard.
Hellrigel:
Especially in academia.
Hassenzahl:
Yeah. Yeah, they tend to other languages. But--
Hellrigel:
Right. So now a little bit about your mom. What was her background?
Hassenzahl:
So whereas my father only went through eighth grade, my mother went through two years of what would've been called I think today a business technology school of some sort. So she had been a very fast typist and did short hand things like that. And she went to a school for two years after high school where they went beyond that into secretarial skills you would call it, but it was really administrative skills at a business. And so she had--pardon?
Hellrigel:
Bookkeeping.
Hassenzahl:
Well, bookkeeping and just organizational skills. And she only worked for a while when I was young, but then once I got into junior high school she got a job. And then as I left that junior high school, she went there as sort of the secretary to the principal.
Hellrigel:
Okay, so was a working mom.
Hassenzahl:
Afterwards, yeah. She didn't work very much. When we were younger she took care of us completely. And then she had a certain… I don't think we know. Some osteoporosis problems. And so every once in a while--so I don't know. If you look at my aunts, I've beaten them up. But she had that kind of a problem. So that made it difficult for her to type. And anyway, so she worked until certainly after both my sister and I had graduated from our training, made a Ph.D. and she had a nursing degree.
Hellrigel:
Okay. Did your dad and mom actually then get to retire?
Hassenzahl:
My mom passed away when she was sixty. We do not know exactly what happened.
In the summer of 1958, I learned how to program a computer. It was just sort of a side line of--and so we would, I'd work with them and they were doing most of the things and so forth. But they'd do this. Here's a piece of the puzzle. You need to do that and here's what needs to be done and so I do that. So it was really fun to work with these guys and get the feeling for a big project like that.
Hellrigel:
It's a great opportunity.
Hassenzahl:
Oh, I was lucky.
Hellrigel:
They didn't have to worry about working papers and all that other--
Hassenzahl:
No.
Hellrigel:
Yeah.
Hassenzahl:
No, I was just working there and well the vice president had graduated from CalTech too. I guess that's sort of a plus because back in the days when he had been there, they had an oil geology or oil production courses in the 20's at CalTech. They all did. But any rate, I was just very lucky all the time. So I worked there for two summers.
Hassenzahl:
Then there was the major field research lab in the United States for Mobil Oil outside of Dallas. The third summer they sent me out there and I worked there for the summer and then came back at the beginning of my junior year to CalTech.
Hassenzahl:
But even though I'd done all that oil stuff, and looking at just so many different things, I still wanted to go into electrical engineering/physics.
Hellrigel:
They couldn't drag you out of that.
Hassenzahl:
They didn't drag me out of it, no. And so I went on and took all the courses for that. But by the time I graduated I decided physics was more interesting than electrical engineering.
Hellrigel:
Okay, and that's when you decide you go for your master's?
Hassenzahl:
So then now I decided that I was going to go for a Ph.D. in physics and I was going to go into particle nuclear plasma, some sort of physics like that. And I looked. I applied to CalTech and was accepted for graduate school in physics. But one of the recommendations, like more than one person, was you really want to go and learn about someplace else. You grew up 10 miles from here, you went to school here, everybody's happy with you, but you ought to see something else. So I went to Illinois. It's a good school.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Hassenzahl:
I mean it was a very good school at the time. And so then I had summer jobs though right out of CalTech. And then the next two summers from North American Aviation. North American Aviation was building the Apollo spacecraft and the second stage of the Saturn rocket 10 miles from my house. So I was assigned to the second stage, the cryogenic monitoring and control and everything like that. Got to go out and see them test the J2 engines for the second stage, hydrogen, oxygen. So I learned a lot about cryogenics and things.
Hellrigel:
It reminds me of another movie, Forrest Gump. You were actually at the site--
Hassenzahl:
When those things happened. Yeah. I was at a lot of places. It was amazing. So I was able to--the funniest thing. I mean there were a lot of good, hard engineering work. But the difficulty was the politics. And I really don't like politics. But at some point they were having a problem that you couldn't even test that stage properly because you didn't have all the right safety and reliability things on it.
Hassenzahl:
And man. I mean it, and it had to do with being some military specs and some other things and so forth. And finally I had this bright idea. I said okay, we have to make it reliable. I mean that's what my boss and boss' boss say: why don't we do the following. Why don't we just add a separate red phone line? We've got one between Moscow and Washington? So we had a red phone line between the test bed and the control center and if there's ever an emergency, we, we do have a human delay time of a few seconds. But that will provide us with redundancy on every system.
Hellrigel:
Yeah, and they bought that?
Hassenzahl:
It happened. It worked. It was as simple as that.
Hellrigel:
Where there accidents that--
Hassenzahl:
No. It was no problem. Well, I mean they were so careful. Everything worked. At least at that stage. Later on there was--
Hellrigel:
Right, but accidents elsewhere than encourage this focus on safety in Russia or somewhere else?
Hassenzahl:
No. Well, so military people design things so it can be run by monkeys. I'm sorry. And the navy does that. And they have to do that. I mean they have to make them simple. They have to make them so that there's some redundancy, so there's some second thing. I don't complain about it. I mean you have to be able to have the lowest-functioning working on it and have it work right. And so to me this was okay. Well, that's fine. Well everybody can pick up a phone. So that was the redundant system.
Hellrigel:
Well, things worked.
Hassenzahl:
It worked. They actually gave me $500 for putting that in as a suggestion.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Was it a red phone?
Hassenzahl:
It was a red phone.
Hellrigel:
Oh boy. Well--
Hassenzahl:
They followed what I said. It was great. I just loved it.
Ph.D.
Hellrigel:
And so you make the idea you're going to go for the Ph.D. Did you get the funding then?
Hassenzahl:
Well, so I went to Illinois and I had--at that point they give you a stipend and so basically my expenses at the University were covered and I had enough money to cover part of my living expenses. And then I had money I'd saved from the summer that I would use for that. So I didn't quite break even, but--
Hellrigel:
But you didn't go into debt.
Hassenzahl:
Well, I did in a little debt, but not a lot of debt. I mean it wasn't like some people today.
Hellrigel:
At that point did you think you were going to go into research or teaching, like university teaching?
Hassenzahl:
So I mentioned earlier the problem I'd had lecturing at the 10th grade level. And also because of those things I saw the politics even in that high school.
Hellrigel:
Yeah.
Hassenzahl:
So I decided against a real university career pretty early on. I wanted research. I wanted to do problems. And it's not that I didn't like teaching, but later on I did it. But I found it was better to teach people with a Ph.D. or with students than undergrads. But I tended away from that. When I got my final, my degree, my Ph.D., it… So my first degree and my masters was in physics. And physics? Was it just physics? I can't remember. I think it was just physics.
Hellrigel:
Yes, physics. Minor EE. MS physics, minor astrophysics.
Hassenzahl:
Astrophysics, yeah, or astronomy. It probably was astronomy, but astrophysics is the best way to describe it because astronomy--well, astronomy thinks of you're looking at stars and it doesn't mean you're understanding how they work or what is happening within the universe structurally based on Einstein's equations. And so there wasn't much of this observational astronomy or what might be astronomy on the diploma that was really astrophysics.
And so then my Ph.D. involved mathematics and physics and that one was particle physics--or particle and astrophysics are the same in my mind. They're just the same equation. It's just things are bigger or smaller.
Hellrigel:
Now what turned you to that specialty?
Hassenzahl:
I've thought about that and I can't really tell you. I can't give you that.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Hassenzahl:
But actually, there's an event in my first year at graduate school that probably had an influence. And it's a crazy event. Most of the people, up to maybe 10 years ago who went to graduate school and took electrodynamics used a book by John David Jackson. And Classical Electrodynamics I think was the name. And he had been the professor of classical electrodynamics at Illinois the year before, two or three years while he was writing the book. He was not the teacher the year that I was there, my first year, the year I was taking it. But about the third or--they had Thursday afternoon seminars and about the third or fourth seminar the a lot of people are in physics there so there must've been 150 grad students.
Hellrigel:
Wow, that's a lot.
Hassenzahl:
A lot of different fields and so they were giving a seminar and they had somebody from campus running one of these 16 mm movie projectors. Well, the film broke.
Hellrigel:
And you were there.
Hassenzahl:
And I fixed it and put it together. So I went up to do it and I saw somebody else was coming. So I got it put together and got it going and started it going again and okay. So that person who was coming was John David Jackson.
Hassenzahl:
So we got to be buddies too. And because sometimes I would go ask him questions about what was in his course and it was an interesting thing because that was the first edition of the book. And it really hadn't been tried. And the instructor that we had--I can't remember his name; I'm sorry--the instructor that we had I don't think really understand it at the level that he needed to. But that's okay. But I would go through and try to figure something out and figure it out. And sometimes I was just stuck, so I went to him. About four times the book was wrong.
Hassenzahl:
Well, the second edition you fix it. You know?
Hassenzahl:
Anyway, I just enjoyed solving problems and doing stuff. Then what happened was he then taught a course my third year on elementary particles. And that may well be the turning point.
Hellrigel:
Okay, so then it's his field. So you'll study with him.
Hassenzahl:
Well I didn't study so much with him. I mean I knew what needed to be done and he sort of had the general feel for it and tying elementary particles to not Newtonian physics, but Einsteinian physics and understanding all of these interactions. And then the way Feynman had described particle interactions was an integral part of that. So that was sort of the fun thing that happened there.
Hellrigel:
And who did you work with for the Ph.D. then?
Hassenzahl:
Okay, a Dr. Wattenberg. Albert--well, Al Wattenberg. He has been one of Fermi’s students.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Hassenzahl:
There's a good history of people along the line. But it was interesting along that. So I had worked those summers on the cryogenics of the second stage on occasion. It wasn't the only thing that had to be done. One of the questions was: how do you measure flow at a thousand gallons a minute of hydrogen, liquid hydrogen? I mean various things.
Hellrigel:
That was the fuel?
Hassenzahl:
That was the fuel. Liquid hydrogen with the fuel mix of--liquid oxygen was the oxidizer on that. So there were lots of interesting physics problems, as well as just the… But the cryogenics was always interesting to me. And then I think it was about '64 that superconductors came along, which is what's tying me into this thing. And I didn't really do anything with superconductors, but part of my thesis work was at Brookhaven National Lab. And Brookhaven had started trying to make some Niobium-3-tin superconducting magnets mainly for their accelerators. So you've heard about the LHC upgrade maybe with higher-field superconductors. Well, 310 makes a higher field quadrupole, which means you can get better focusing characteristics in a conventional iron and copper machine. And they had one of the biggest machines in the world at the time.
And so I met those people there and one of the professors at Illinois had spent some time working with them. And so I was just sort of doing other things, but they were not too far away and I met some of those people. And talked with them and to me it seemed neat. I mean here's this thing. You go to a higher field. You don't have to worry about iron. On and on. And so one of the fellows I met there received an award a few years ago here, Bill Sampson. And he was a good guy. You might've interviewed him or know him anyway. You should talk to him. Okay? I'll just tell you that he has more history than I have.
Hassenzahl:
There was another fellow there by the name of Jim Pallow [phonetic]. And Jim Pallow, I don't know where he is now, but he was very interested in magnetic levitation. How do you get on these trains and things and something without moving? I mean not just little things that you levitate for fun.
Hellrigel:
No friction.
Hassenzahl:
No friction or almost none anyway. And so at any rate I got to know these people while I was there because the job we were doing was trying to make a special detector for pions and K mesons and how to distinguish them at a variation of energies. So another graduate student needed that for his thesis and we had this device. And so we were out there testing it and you could only get beam to do something an hour or two a day, probably at midnight, something like that. And so we would do as much as we could, but we had time on our hands and being a curious fellow and--
Hellrigel:
Mechanically inclined.
Hassenzahl:
And, well mechanically inclined, yeah. So I would just go and do things. And I'd talk to these guys and see what was happening and understand a little. And I understood the theory of superconductivity. I've probably forgotten most of it. But the theory of why and how it works, but always of more interest was how do you make something that you can use for one thing or another with that.
Hellrigel:
Yeah. How do you apply it?
Hassenzahl:
How do you apply it? How do you take that characteristic and put it into something that you need for another job? That was--
Hellrigel:
Yeah, what did you think you could do with it?
Hassenzahl:
I didn't know. I was just trying to learn about it because you can't figure out what you're going to do with it until you understand it. Things keep--trying to understand more things. So that was '64, '5. And then once I started my thesis research, I was really deeply committed and complicated things there. Well, one of the things I… So we didn't have computers like you have today. We had some computers and I could program them. I used Fortran. I still have Fortran on the computer right here. I do all my scientific work in Fortran. It's to me just second nature and I don’t have to learn another language.
Anyway, so I was there working on the particle detector for this special thing. And I was looking--I guess I've confused two things here. Let's go back to my research, which is a little later.
So I was looking at the weighted detect particles for my experiment, which was looking at what happens when a proton hits a carbon or a Tungsten nucleus. How many pi mesons does it create? How many K mesons does it create? What does it do? And what's the angular distribution?
Hellrigel:
What was subparticle--
Hassenzahl:
Well, when you hit something with a proton, it's like two garbage cans hitting each other and so all the stuff comes out. So you've got some angular distribution. But you need to measure it. You need to know what it is because the next thing that's going to happen is down the road---and got involved with that later--is you're going to now take a select portion from a collision and you're going to select out of that the K or the pi mesons and you're going to try to focus them into a spot where you can interact those particles with something else.
So in the accelerator you use these Niobium-3-tin magnets, but if you have a beam line, you need to get a pair of focusing magnets to control those beams or multiple pairs of focusing. So two quadrupoles make a lens. Put it that way. Okay? Just like a regular light lens.
Hellrigel:
And were these of interest to the military or…
Hassenzahl:
Not that I know of. No, it was at the laboratories where we were looking at particles and particle interactions and particle production. But I developed an algorithm for determining what currents you wanted, how much magnetic field you wanted in two quadrupoles to get a certain kind of a transformation of the incoming beam and the outgoing beam. And I converted that into a graphical solution so that with a couple of pieces of data, anybody who wanted to have a beam-line design, they could just set it up and do it by hand. We didn’t really have computers. We had to pretty much do it by hand. But anyway, it was just a quicker way of doing it.
And so I designed the beam line that was used for my experiment. This was at Argonne National Lab at what's called the zero gradient synchrotron. And then that beam line, I had made it pretty effective. Understood by my studies so that there were six or seven other graduate students, mostly from Illinois, that got their thesis using that beam line on their own experiments. So it was a contribution to the community. So got my thesis done and then at that time I had a second child on the way.
Hellrigel:
Okay, so you got married during grad school.
Hassenzahl:
I got married, yes. So the second year of grad school for me, I met my wife Jean. She came from the D.C. area to Illinois all the way east. I came west. We met probably two or three weeks into that semester. The following summer we got married, summer of 1964.
Hellrigel:
That was a happening summer historically.
Hassenzahl:
That was a good, fun summer. She had driven with me back to California to meet my folks. I had driven to the East Coast to meet her folks during the year. And then she flew back because she got her master's degree in special ed.
Hellrigel:
Okay, that's why she was there, for the master's degree?
Hassenzahl:
She was there for her master's degree in special ed. And then I drove back to the East Coast for the wedding. And then we came back to Illinois.
Hellrigel:
You got married student housing?
Hassenzahl:
No, we didn't stay at the married student housing. You had to have really worked on getting that going earlier. We lived in a small apartment for 80 bucks a month or something like that. That was about 200 yards from the physics building and a mile from where she worked.
Hellrigel:
Well, that's convenient.
Los Alamos
Hassenzahl:
It was quite convenient. It was a good place to be. So we lived there for a year. Some time during that year, probably--let's see--April, she became pregnant and the following January we had our first child, 1966. And then we didn’t figure out what happened. So the second child came along in May of 1967, actually just before I got everything finished, but essentially done.
I had three offers for jobs, which was surprising, and I don't think that was happening two years later. There weren't very many jobs around. But I chose to go to Los Alamos. And the reason for Los Alamos was that they paid for me to come out for an interview and I sort of went around and talked to people, gave a little lecture, and met the individual who eventually was going to be my boss, and his boss. By the time I got there, the head of Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility is what it was, which had just been approved, was hit by a drunk driver and he and his wife were both injured pretty badly.
But one of the fellows who was in the group with me had grown up there, and he was back after a master's degree to work. And so we sort of went over and helped him every few days doing one thing or another. They couldn't carry luggage and couldn't carry stuff in. It had been long enough that they were able to move, but he was driven to work and things like that.
Hellrigel:
Who was this?
Hassenzahl:
Louie Rosen. He'd been at Los Alamos for many years. At any rate while we were there I gave lectures and did that and had dinner and my prior experience in biology paid off because they were talking about something like starfish and what they have and so forth. And somebody asked: what did they eat? I said come on. They got stomachs like we do. They do this and they do that. And so somebody didn't believe it. So the guy who became my boss when I came back went and looked it up. And he said they got all the bells and whistles.
Hellrigel:
They just look different.
Hassenzahl:
They just look different. At any rate, it was… So but the other thing that was neat was that at night I was staying in the Los Alamos Inn and it's at 7,000 feet. And so was Los Alamos. And you walked out in back of that at that late April/mid-April, and there were 2 feet of snow on the ground. Not recent, but it was there and it was solid enough you could walk on it. But you could look across 25 miles away to see Santa Fe also at 7,000 feet across the Rio Grande Valley towards some other mountains.
Hellrigel:
So you could see a little light?
Hassenzahl:
A lot of light. It was just gorgeous. I just was sold.
Hellrigel:
The view got you.
Hassenzahl:
The view got me amongst other--and then the other thing that happened was you look… So the next day we went around and somebody had built a laser that they had put on the top of one of the buildings. And they had put what's called a corner reflector. I don't know if you know what that might be.
Hellrigel:
No.
Hassenzahl:
But a corner reflector's a neat thing. If you sent light into a corner reflector with mirrors there, perfectly made, it comes right back to you. So it doesn't matter where it hits. It comes and it comes back. You hit it on this side. You hit it on that side. You hit the middle. And it just bounces directly back. Now you can't make it perfect. But you make it pretty close.
And the other thing is if you're going pretty far, there are variations in the flow of light through the air. So somebody had taken a corner reflector and put it over on what's called a Truchas peak about 50 miles away. And up on the top of this building they'd set this laser up. They go up there and just happen to be a day or two I was there. And you could walk around and you could see the light. And then the light reflection. And it would move around. The reflection of this area about this big and the laser's only that big, but you could, you could tell that the light was being affected by whatever the air currents and the densities of air were.
And so the combination of need science, perfect view, and I thought a, a really good program that they were going to be building this accelerator would be a good job. So I signed up.
Hellrigel:
Your wife agreed?
Hassenzahl:
I called her up and told her what we were going to do. But she agreed.
Hellrigel:
You told--
Hassenzahl:
Well, it's funny because I grew up not so--I mean I was a lifeguard and did all these things, but she'd grown up as a girl scout and a family of scouts and she'd been out in the woods 10 times as much as I had ever been. And we talked about wanting to do that. And so I told her about where we were and what was happening and that. And I said if they offer me a job I really want to come here. And I don't think there was any disagreement, but it was sort of… You know.
Hellrigel:
When she had the children, did she stop teaching?
Hassenzahl:
Yes, she stopped teaching. First of all, we were right there in Illinois and it really wasn't an easy thing to have somebody take care of the children at that age and so forth. She was nursing and we had the second one pretty quick, too. And then I was going to leave. I mean some way I was going to go. She didn't start working again until the children were… The youngest was born. So I have three. The youngest was born in 1968. And she started teaching again like maybe 1974 or something. But they'd only--
Hellrigel:
But they were all in school.
Hassenzahl:
They were all in school. But she did in fact was she started teaching and it was really hard to get a job there in Los Alamos because three-quarters of the physicists had teacher wives, something like that.
Hellrigel:
Teacher I noticed--
Hassenzahl:
Or something, yes. And so what happened was she's also a very good author. She's written several small books and things like that. And so she got a job at the lab in publications and editorial this and that. And she can organize. She can move through it very fast. She also can type well and does shorthand, so it was a good job for her.
Hassenzahl:
Anyway, I'd only been there at Los Alamos for about six months when the superconductors gotten much more interesting. Niobium titanium came along and the question was they knew--I mean I'd given a lecture about how you make an external beam for this machine that we were going to build. A main part of the work at the beginning was on the machine itself, how you build it, how you make it work and so forth. But the next step was going to be you're going to have experimenters come in and you're going to make it within this number of pi mesons. Energy wasn't enough to make enough K's to do anything, but there are going to be a lot of them and now you have to focus them and keep them and get them going.
And so when the superconducting--and so I actually designed several beam lines in the first year that I was there that eventually got three or four years later got built. But the question was: well can we make use of superconductors? So I was asked to work with the cryogenics people. Well, since I'd done the work on cryogenics before, we were speaking the same language. And I then worked with them a great deal doing two things. One was on designing and building superconducting magnets. We built some. In fact, we built the first pair of superconducting quadrupoles that was enclosed in a single cryostat, so basically the first superconducting lens that was ever made. Reported on that in Hamburg Magnet Technology in 1970. It’s on the list of things there.
Hellrigel:
It is. Cutting edge, too.
Hassenzahl:
It was right there, yeah. That was the first one, first time. People had made quadrupoles, but they weren't for beam lines. And so here was a special problem that you had to have. And that was used at a lamp that the accelerator until about 1983 on three or four different lines. It wasn't quite as effective as it might have been had we had better superconductors. That's a different story. The other thing was we had a stud to find out--because now you're going to have them right next to an accelerator that's hitting protons and producing all this garbage and you've got radiation damage.
So now what do you do? So you can do an esoteric study on what radiation does to superconductors and you start thinking about it and you find this is a hardened material that's probably not going to do very much. You can't prove that one way or the other.
Hellrigel:
Right. I remember reading about your work on that.
Hassenzahl:
Okay, well I did two things. Later on I did it on neodymium iron boron also for--and when I was at Berkeley, permanent magnets.
Hellrigel:
Interested in the biological effects of magnets.
Hassenzahl:
No, that was even different. No, I'm not an expert. I'm a jack of all trades basically.
Hellrigel:
Well, it's quite impressive. A lot of--
Hassenzahl:
I did a lot of fun things. I've enjoyed life and hard work. [Crosstalk] Pardon?
Hellrigel:
You worked at Los Alamos, but you stayed working in the federal lab system.
Hassenzahl:
Los Alamos was run by the University of California, so I was an employee theoretically of the University of California.
Hellrigel:
For twenty-seven years.
Hassenzahl:
Right. Yes. Because Lawrence Berkeley Lab and Livermore were also run by that. It was sort of neat because you didn't lose your basically seniority or years of service or anything else when you went. They didn't have exactly the same vacation and sick leave policy, but that, that didn't matter.
Hellrigel:
Right. Same retirement plan.
Hassenzahl:
All the same retirement plan.
Hellrigel:
And so that was fortunate.
Hassenzahl:
Well, it was planned sort of. There weren't too many places that I wanted after. After Los Alamos--I mean I really enjoyed Los Alamos, but we had lived in France for a year, 1978, 1979 and the kids had learned what a big city was. I mean we'd send them from where we lived on a train. Not the little one, but we'd send the other two into Paris where they could go. They were not random. We knew where they were going to go and we knew the parents of who they were going to see. And usually Americans, but sometimes French.
Hellrigel:
Were they all boys?
Hassenzahl:
Three boys.
Hellrigel:
Are any of them engineers?
Hassenzahl:
Yes. I guess it sort of depends on… So Bill senior is a structural engineer.
Hellrigel:
He is the first child.
Hassenzahl:
That's the first one. He went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He now lives in Vegas. Actually, he's unemployed right now, but he was a principal engineer doubling the size of Caesar's Palace a few years ago. He's done a lot of structural things, one kind or another. David went to Berkeley and then Princeton, as I mentioned.
Hellrigel:
He's the dean?
Hassenzahl:
He's now the dean of the College of Natural Sciences. His thesis was about risk and how do you compare the risk of something versus the risk. I used to talk to the kids about all these things. And there was a book called--and I'm probably going to get the wrong name. It's a short one. Imagine a round cow. The reason for that title was if you want to calculate something and you've got a complicated shape or a complicated problem, you've got to simplify the problem.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Hassenzahl:
If you've got a round cow, you can imagine maybe it's 3-1/2 feet in diameter. How much does it weigh? Well, that's easy to figure out. But you can't figure out how much a cow weighs looking at all of its shapes and all of these because you make an approximation. Well, the same thing's true in a lot of areas and so that was a Berkeley book. He knew that. I knew that. We talked about it. So his risk was his thesis. Should we risk it? And the risk question is really important. I mean if you got a chance of living next to a nuclear reactor or you got a chance of living at 5,000 feet where you get radiation anyway, like where we are right now, so what's the difference of the risk between these? This one for here, the probability of having a certain amount of radiation is 100 percent. If you're down there, the probability of having that amount of radiation might be only a 10th of a percent or a hundredth of a percent or a thousandth of a percent of that, but there's also the probability you're going to get a lot more radiation, I mean if that's your primary thing. Or if you're flying an airplane you're higher. Well, even after you figure out what that risk is, the next thing is it bad for you? People here live longer than they do at sea level.
Hellrigel:
I didn't notice.
Hassenzahl:
Yeah, obviously it's because of radiation. Right? Well, no, when people talk about it they say it's the altitude, it's this and that. But their body is used to having, to fight the effects of radiation, correct itself, and so maybe it's good for you, if we don’t know the answer--I mean, but you might as well tease somebody by saying it's got to be the radiation. And most--the public doesn't even understand that. But there it is. And so it's really a complicated thing. So he's been the chairman of the National Risk Association and things like that too. And then the youngest one went to CalTech also.
Hellrigel:
Okay. And the youngest one, his name?
Hassenzahl:
Eric.
Hellrigel:
Eric. He's an engineer?
Hassenzahl:
He got a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and applied physics and he does a lot of different things. Right now he's unemployed, too. The reason was his wife is a professor at the University of Ottawa. She just became a full processor and they just spent a year sabbatical in France. He had a job where he was managing the devices that you use in stores to read the bar codes all across Canada. The company that was doing that was having some problems along the way. It wasn't the only company that did that. Finally, he decided when she was going to go there that the best thing to do was stop. They got back a month ago. He'll do something.
Hellrigel:
Yeah. It's I try to tell the students the World War II generation like my uncle came back from the war and he worked for the PSE&G gas company, electric company in New Jersey for his entire career. He retired from the company.
Hassenzahl:
Okay. Right. Absolutely
Hassenzahl:
That doesn't happen anymore.
Hellrigel:
No it does not. The pre-World War II era is very chaotic.
Hassenzahl:
Yes. Although I didn’t change occupation, I mean my employer, I think my occupation changed over those twenty-seven years about six times.
Hellrigel:
You got more into management, also.
Hassenzahl:
I got more into management.
Hellrigel:
Did you like management?
Hassenzahl:
I accommodated it.
Hellrigel:
Oh, would you like to be management or to be managed?
Hassenzahl:
Well, actually, I don't get managed very easily.
Hellrigel:
Interesting perspective.
Hassenzahl:
We are we getting late?
Hellrigel:
No. We've got ten more minutes.
Hassenzahl:
You have another person coming?
Hellrigel:
Right, but they might be running late.
Hassenzahl:
Okay, so it's easy to get me convinced that something is the important thing to do if it's right and if I agree with it. If I don't agree with it, it's not likely to happen for me. But once I'm convinced, which means I get managed at some level, then you better watch out.
Hellrigel:
Full steam ahead.
Hassenzahl:
That's right. It's okay. It's a different thing. I did have a micromanager, a couple of them and that was a sad experience. Not just for me, but for several people at Berkeley. This one guy was just a disaster. But no names.
Hellrigel:
No names.
Hassenzahl:
No names.
Hellrigel:
Has your career fulfilled your dreams, what you thought you'd be doing?
Hassenzahl:
God, I really wanted to go to the moon, but some of it in that sense, no. But I have another philosophy, and that is if it's not fun, you really shouldn't be doing it for very long. And so most of the time I've been able to do something. And working hard's fun. I mean like I said before. But if it's not going to be fun for very long… Like when I worked for this guy that was a micromanager, it lasted for about two years, but I was able to--and so was this other colleague of mine-- sort of move into what we wanted and do the piece of the jobs that we wanted to do. I wrote a dozen or two papers during that time and stuff and built some good magnets and so forth. But it wasn't a lot of fun.
Hellrigel:
No. And now you're a consultant.
Hassenzahl:
I'm trying not to be.
Hassenzahl:
I've told people I'm going to retire or I am retiring and then a year or two later they come up with a fun job and they're going to pay for it.
Hassenzahl:
So, which comes and goes.
Personal life, closing remarks
Hellrigel:
Outside of work, what were your hobbies or things of that nature?
Hassenzahl:
My son David says I'm a perpetual hobbyist. I started making wine in 1975. When we got to Berkeley I met a fellow. We went from Los Alamos to Berkeley in 1980. I always used to run, so I ran at a track and I met a fellow. Then about a year later we just see each other at lunch running sometimes. He had a locker three or four from mine.
So we were at a place, a little winery. I didn't know anything about it. I didn't even know this guy's last name. His first name was Roger. I didn't know his last name. But I was tasting it. I said this is pretty good wine for a little, tiny wine place. He said yeah, my brother's got a pretty good palate. I got to meet his brother and we had very similar palates.
He had formed a wine company in 1978. It really got organized about 1980 about the time I got there. And by 1982 he was making about 2,000 cases a year. And I got involved with him. He lived four miles away from me and had a little place and so I started making wine with him and working on and off and that. And so we eventually ended up owning about 6 percent of that winery. I would say that was in 1985 or 1986. And I put some money in and I put a lot of sweat in, started. At that time if you had a meeting and you were at Berkeley, you could bring some wine and give it to the guys.
Hellrigel:
Are you inclined to mention the winery?
Hassenzahl:
To mention it?
Hellrigel:
Yes, with a name.
Hassenzahl:
Rosenblum Cellars. Kent Rosenblum was the principal. I got pretty involved in it. In fact, my card from that was the ambassador.
Hellrigel:
Not the chemist.
Hassenzahl:
No, I was the ambassador. I did some chemistry, but I was the… And part of the thing was that I don't how I view it. I mean I tend to interact pretty well with people. And, and I love to ski. So Kent and I used to ski together too. But we were up in Canada once and he and our national distributor or… The meeting was in Montreal. So each province of Canada has its own wine board. So if you want to sell wine in Canada, you have to talk to each one.
Well, so we were in Montreal and they were going to have a meeting there. And then we were going to skiing up north at the place called Botrimblant [phonetic]. I don't know if you ever heard of it, but gorgeous place. Okay, I had a meeting at MIT. And so I couldn't be there at first. But I got my business done and then I had a rental car and I drove from there up to Montreal and got to the meeting about an hour and a half after it had gotten started.
And things weren't going well. And you could just tell by looking at everybody. And so I got in. I said bonjour and just spoke French. I speak correct Parisian French.
Hellrigel:
And that worked.
Hassenzahl:
It did. We left there--I can't remember--600 or 700 cases that we had been committed at that meeting in the next two hours. I'm sure that my friend, Kent, and my friend the national distributor had said nothing different from what I said. The told them exactly where the wines came from. But hearing it in their own language was worth a fortune.
Hellrigel:
And that's a time around the referendums, the separatism--
Hassenzahl:
Yes, it was a little after that, but yeah. Okay. So they just loved it. I mean actually I'd been up there before in Montreal as a consultant on some electrical power, superconducting power stuff before. And so their comment was you're the only person in America that understands the technology and can speak French with us. So, but it worked. I mean these little things are what makes the interactions work. So when I came back, Kent says, okay, we're going to change your card. You're now the ambassador. Works for me.
Hellrigel:
Do you still work in the wine business?
Hassenzahl:
Well, not very much. What happened was in it grew. By 2008, we were making a quarter of a million cases a year. We'd had several interested buyers that had come by and it wasn't really for sale anyway. I said here's how much it's worth. And somebody would offer us 50 cents on the dollar. We're not really too interested. But somebody finally came along and said okay, we'll give you 3 bucks on the dollar. On my estimated dollar anyway. I was a little bit conservative, but not 3 dollars. And so what're you going to do? I cried all the way to the bank. It was fun. Since I'm so close, and Kent can't really work with them for a period of time or do anything because of non-competitiveness, I sometimes get asked to come and talk to customers or something like that. Which I do. It's okay.
Hellrigel:
Okay, so your hobby was wine.
Hassenzahl:
That was one of them. I was on ski patrol for many, many years and I was the Avalanche advisor for the western part of the United States. And I was a scout master.
Hellrigel:
Kiwanis.
Hassenzahl:
Kiwanis. And I bicycled a lot.
Hellrigel:
Okay, and the last topic then. What impact has IEEE had on your career?
Hassenzahl:
Well, I did not join IEEE early on. In fact, I was just a member. I'm not even a senior member, but I've been in it for twenty years or something. And because my first publications were all physics. I mean because the ASC (Applied Superconductivity Conference) was not part of IEEE until 2000 or something. I don't know exactly.
Hellrigel:
Yeah, it was a separate yeah.
Hassenzahl:
It was a completely separate entity and I'd been the treasurer of the ASC and other things in 1988 and done a lot of different things there, but it really was not IEEE.
One thing we didn't talk about was the tie in to IEEE at first was that Los Alamos after having built these magnets, the oil embargo came up. But before that there was a little bit of an energy crisis and it got worse with the oil embargo. I had been asked to head up a program on developing a superconducting--oh, an energy storage device which had a superconducting magnet in it.
Hellrigel:
Energy storage is the link.
Hassenzahl:
Energy storage was the first the link into electrical. But from doing things electrically the question is how do you tie one of these magnets into the power system. And people were thinking about how, have a rotating pair of magnets that would do this or something else. And when I looked at the problem, I said there's this thing called a silicon--what is it? SCR. Silicon control resistor I think. I think it was this. Anyway, an SCR, which you could turn on and off. Well, that came along in the mid-1960s and so by 1972 when I was asked to head up this program, to me the obvious way to put it together was just to make a three-phase converter from AC to DC and hook it up and control each rectifier along the way. So you can change the amount of time it's on or time that it's off so that you get zero voltage or negative voltage or positive voltage on the coil.
And so it was November of 1972 and the first thing I did was I figured out how we were going to hook it up.
The second thing I did was that economic study that said you can't afford it. Then I figured out how to afford it. And the clever piece of this thing was if you build something, compressed air system, you have to have a tank. And the bigger the tank, the thicker the walls because you have to hold it. Well, and there's a physical principle that ties the amount of stuff under stress to the amount of energy that you store. And you can calculate the whole thing, but you get the same answer whether it was compressed air or superconducting magnet or a dam up in the air. All of these things the same number.
And so I said well if you're going to make a big one, why don't you just put it underground and use the rocks to support it just like the rocks support the dam? So they bought a real innovation at the time. People jumped on it. It was good. Roger Boom. You probably heard about the Roger Boom award. He took it and really moved it well. Didn't give me the credit I think I should've always gotten for it, but I still have the first paper. That's okay.
Hassenzahl:
Roger Boom, University of Wisconsin. He had a lot of students and he had a lot more experience with stuff. And so it got moved ahead very well. But we built a small magnet and we built a converter system for it and we ran an electric train. Charged the magnet up, made a little train go round and round and round. And it was a trivial thing to do, but it was a demonstration of the process that worked.
Hellrigel:
Yeah, the application.
Hassenzahl:
Yeah, that happened. So I started in November of 1972 and we did that in the spring of 1973.
Hellrigel:
That’s quick turnaround.
Hassenzahl:
It was a quick, I know. Just get some materials. But the other thing, backing up to those quadrupoles, is that the first superconductors out Niobium titanium had a certain diameter and the Niobium titanium--with copper. And the Niobium titanium had a half the diameter as the copper. So it was one single thing of Niobium in the middle not having multifilament. That multifilament came along in 1967, 1968. And so the magnets we built--did not make it to the design current. And it was only after we were able to put the multifilamentary superconductor in that it worked. And it went right to the--well, not necessarily, but it was hard to calculate in that, those days all of the field distributions. But we essentially got to the design current of the magnets after we changed the conductor.
Hellrigel:
You conquered that problem.
Hassenzahl:
We conquered that problem and we had this device that worked for years at the lab.
Hellrigel:
I hate to do this, but--
Hassenzahl:
We got to quit.
Hellrigel:
Yes, but we can always have round two.
Hassenzahl:
Okay, if you want to some time. We can figure out a time.
Hellrigel:
Okay, and you're around for the conference?
Hassenzahl:
No, I'm not.
Hellrigel:
Okay. That's right.
Hassenzahl:
I leave tomorrow morning.
Hellrigel:
And you live up at--
Hassenzahl:
I live either in Vegas or Berkeley.
Hellrigel:
We'll be in touch and thank you for your time. This has been a fascinating discussion.
Hassenzahl:
Yeah, you can give me a call.
Hassenzahl:
I going to be in New York in the near future? I don't know that I will be, but I will probably be in D.C. late in the--well, I'll surely be there in January/February.
