I remember the work I did with Corning Glass Works in Blacksburg, Virginia, to get a fiber optic that didn’t lose 12 db per foot in optical transmission. And as for photodectors, I had to build my own using my own photodepositon techniques and a special vacuum chamber I built myself. Considering my exposuresure to various semiconductors such as gallenium arsenide and chemical etchants that would eat the chrome off of a 1954 Buick, it’s a wonder I didn’t poison my own self.

  A  nd like many of my early inventions, there turned out that there was a military or national securit component. The fiber optic switiching technology caught the interest of the U.S. Navy and I was asked to create a preliminary design–well, more of a concept, really–for a redundant data communications system for the Trident Class submarine. There was some fear that a nuclear explosion could disrupt electronic communications and the thinking was that a fiber optic system might be more reliable even though an optical system also involves electronic components.

  I remember flying from Washington, D.C., out to the naval base at San Diego with a high-ranking Navy admiral. This officer, who was an old school damn-the-torpedos and full-speed-ahead salt was the final sign-off on military-civilian contracts and I was trying my level best to explain the technology. Light instead of electrons? Sounded fishy to him.

  In a final attempt to clarify what it was I had invented, I hauled a bunch of drawings from my briefcase, but the old admiral waved them aside. "Listent, son," he said in a barritone voice could have parted the fog over the Bay of Fundy, "there’s only one thing I want to know. When I push the button, will it flush?"

  Which goes to explain why a reference to a head on a submarine became my motto.

  The dental x-ray system led to a instant microfilm development system and the beginnings of an association with AT&T that led to tracking and monitoring of long distance calls and my involvment–minimal, to be sure–in spies, spying, and Bush’s illegal wiretapping operation. You can read the newspaper stories at http://www.masterspies.com/press.html. Read the story, "Bush Reversal of NSA Wiretapping Questionable."

  You can also see a photograph of the actual machine I invented in the 1960s for processing 100-foot rolls of microfilm containing long distance calling data. In other words, I knew all of the details of call tracking and recording, how and why calling data was collected and how it could be used by the FBI, NSA, HSA and other agencies.

  Not all of my inventions were commercial successes–the self-powered transistor, for example. By doping semiconductors with various isotopes, I was able to create active emitters inside the transistor itself rather than from an external power source.  It worked exceptionally well, the problem was shielding the isotopes, although there is no reason these cannot be manufactured and employed in future space missions.

Sometimes, exploitation of an invention had more to do with money than feasiblity. In my work on solar cells, I ran into the classic problem of thin film surface emitters versus thick film efficiency. My solution was to create a high-density thin film. For example, I compressed a compound of bismuth telluride into a high density wafer using rather extremes pressures for the time. The result was an extremly thin and very heavy wafer that could generate current in moonlight. Fascinating science but commericial possibilities were deemed too expensive and too far away to justify investor capital.

However, out of that research came the solid state battery using high density electrolytes compressed into thin wafers. As thin as crystals and highly reactive, these things packed a lot of power into a small space. This battery, of course, is one of my patents.

It’s been a while but back then, my lab was a pretty exciting place. There were condutive plastics, self-growing electronic circuits, one of the first magetic resonance imaging systems (my own design), and organic semiconductors. There was even a plant from which we extracted an organic compound that generated electricity in sunlight.

  And there are the many inventions I never got around to patenting. I suppose I should someday. Or maybe just write them down for future generatons.

  Of course, all of this begs the quesiton, how did i go from mad scientist to poet? The fact is, imagination is the basis for both poetry and science. To envision is to create, to find a way to answer a question or solve a problem. And for both the scientist and the poet, it is the love of the quest, the thrill of discovery, and the sheer delight of creation.

When I was young, I dreamed visions
Older now, dreams are revisions.