UWO Workshop, Nov. 25, 2002

In this first meeting, that's right. I expect there are going to be more meetings with various faces. There are obviously many other people it would be interesting to sit around the table and do this with.

My name is Alister Vallance Jones. I did my PhD at Cambridge from 1947 to 1949, learning the techniques of infra-red spectroscopy which was sort of a new field at the time with Sir Gordon Sutherland, who was a man of fairly catholic interests in all sorts of things. One particular thing was the new types of infra-red detectors - lead sulphide, lead selenide, lead telluride - which made it possible to extend good spectroscopic observations further into the infra-red than had been done before. Then I was fortunate enough to get a post-doctoral fellowship in Canada working in Herzberg's group at NRC in Ottawa, and of course Herzberg was interested in many different things, including some astrophysical problems, and also the problem of the OH bands which had just been discovered by Meinel in the nightglow spectrum. I did various projects in Ottawa, but these were the ones which carried on into the future.

I was looking around for something to do - at that time it was difficult to find employment, strangely enough, in the 1951 period - and I was offered a research associateship with Dr. Petrie who had just been starting to do auroral research in Saskatoon. He was doing some pioneering work with surplus war equipment to get infra-red spectra without enormous success, but about that time the US Air Force with Nat Gerson also offered a contract to the University of Saskatchewan to do research on aurora and airglow, so they had some money to hire some research associates, myself and Don Hunten, who joined the group there. Don Hunten developed work on getting spectra of aurora with photomultipliers. This was a new technique rather than photographic plates, and produced all sorts of very interesting, important results over time. I was given the job of finding how to get infra-red spectra of the nightglow and aurora, and we were able to develop that with the help of Herb Gush, who was a graduate student, a contemporary of Gordon Shepherd's. He built a spectrometer which was developed by other graduate students and we finally succeeded in getting good spectra of the aurora and of the nightglow with these techniques. That led in time to the discovery of the infra-red atmospheric bands which was just a mysterious band that cropped up in the spectrum. It turned to be from excited oxygen produced in the dissociation of ozone by solar radiation. This led to the beginning of an ambition to do balloon experiments to measure the diurnal emission of this, because it is largely absorbed in the lower atmosphere, and also to determine height profiles with rockets. Hunten and Wayne Evans and various other people who I can't mention right off hand did some very valuable work in starting this, which in a sense you might say was the beginning of the actual space program to make these observations from balloons and rockets rather than from the ground. And that's probably enough.

My name is Ralph Nicholls, and I came into this in a very characteristically devious way. I got my bachelor's degree at Imperial College (by the way this is written up, and it is in the things that I've handed to all of you) in 1945, and Sir George Thomson, GP, in August of 45 summoned those of in a class of 60 who (I was 19 at the time, by the way) got first class honors degrees to come and see him. He shook us warmly by the hand, and he said, "Well, I want you people to teach," because he hadn't got very many staff, this was just at the end of the war. So he said, "Nicholls, you will be teaching Geophysics. Go down and talk to Bruckshaw, he'll show you the book." Of course, I had never had any geophysics, but "you can always read it and stay a couple of lectures ahead of the class." This was to a class of 60 veterans. I also ran the spectroscopy lab and demonstrated second year. The second thing GP said was "and you can look after your own PhDs," and the third thing he said was "there is room in my nuclear accelerator lab, but I only want the best. Nicholls, you go down and see Pearse," because I had made the mistake of coming third, rather than first or second. Actually, the first chap lasted for six months and collapsed. The second chap, Don Perkins, and crossed off the list anything that involved electronics and vacuum systems and ended up by putting nuclear emulsions on the Jungfrau, Switzerland, developed them, and was the first person to photograph the reaction between a meson and a silver nucleus, and the way ahead was great; he was the only one of us who made an F.R.S., and also went on and is now professor emeritus of particle physics at Oxford. So, Imperial College isn't a bad place.

I went down to see Pearse, Dr. Pearse, the identification of molecular spectra, a very kind person. GP looked down on spectroscopy and spectroscopists. One really was self-supervised. He suggested that I go and look for the photo-ionization continuum of negative ions, having just read Massey's book on the subject, which was a completely hopeless PhD project, because there was no equipment, nothing. I said, well I had better find my own problem. The tribal customs of spectroscopy were, and are, to concentrate on wavelengths rather than intensities. In fact, one gets looked down on if one worries too much about intensities. Precision measurement of line positions were important. Now it struck me that really one should pay attention to both intensities and line positions, and one should also pay attention to the mechanisms by which states get excited, so you could use the spectra as a diagnostic tool. So I, with the grudging agreement of Pearse got a little discharge tube, a DC discharge tube, running in nitrogen. I stuck eight Langmuir probes - I had to learn probery - into it - thank God we'd got a glassblower - focus that on the slit of a spectrograph, so the spectra that one got indicated the relative intensity of each of the nitrogen bands (as it was) across the inter-electrode distance, and then by suitably fiddling around with the probe analysis one could infer electron temperatures and electron densities, and one then had to develop a theory of the exitation kinetics which led one into Frank-Condon factor calculations and so on and so on and so forth. It all went very well, there was no money, there was a big room that was full of war-surplus equipment, and one went in and raided it. Pearse said, "Nicholls, if you spent more time photographing spectra and less time fiddling around with oscilloscopes, you would get a lot further ahead." But it was going very well.

As it happened, in 1947 the Gassiot committee of the Royal Society of London had an international conference - I just photographed one page, and you have that in your file here - on the Emission Spectra of the Night Sky and the Aurorae, with very notable people like Bates and Blackett and Nicolet and Massey and so on, and as a very young student I sat there, listened, and again they confirmed how there were all these wonderful lights in the sky and no one had thought to ask too many searching questions about how their spectra could be used to give one diagnostic information. So that confirmed that the lab experiments that I was doing had some auroral connection, and that was my first connection. That was 1947. In 1948, GP came and said "Well, Nicholls, you've been here for three years. There won't be a job here for you next year," which was sort of pleasant.

Fortunately, in July 1948 Dr. Ed Hall, the then new president of this university (he had come from Toronto, was Dean of Medicine for some years, was president of Western) was at the Commonwealth Universities conference in Oxford, and also was looking around for new staff members for this department and a number of others. One of the lecturers who knew what GP had done to me put Hall and me together. I had a very nice interview, and Hall hired me. And so in August of that year I was on the Empress of France in a first-class cabin - paid for by this university, by the way - coming to Canada.

All I can say is that this department was extremely kind. It was great. The older people who carried the department were wonderful. I put my equipment together, did some more experiments. By 1950 I had enough to give a paper over at the Optical Society of America meetings in Cleveland on this work. At that meeting was the well-known, well-talked-about, Nat Gerson of the U.S. Air Force. He phoned me on the next Monday saying "We'd like to give you a contract for $67,000 to do lab work on the aurorae." It all went extremely well. It helped this department a great deal. Dr. Misener was very shrewd, and we were able to spread the money around. So we got into space research, space optical spectroscopy. We launched the contract in July 1951 by holding the International Conference on Auroral Physics, July 23-26, 1951. I had my University of London PhD oral in my office during the Conference in a lunch break. Bates and Pearse were the examiners! Then in 1965 I went to York and set up physics and CRESS. The current title of my NSERC grant is "Space spectroscopy, HiRES photodissociation and molecular reference spectra." Thank you.

My name is Peter Forsyth, and you've heard most of this story several times. I got into the field by accident, as almost everybody did. You have already heard that the field of medicine was just saved from having me in it. Many of you may not know that the field of spectroscopy was also just saved from having me in it. When Cec Costain and I went back to Saskatchewan Herzberg was just leaving. One of the last things that happened was that Herzberg was giving a little course and in it he mentioned that there was a footnote in one of his books which said that there should be a line - and now I have forgotten which molecule, but I think it was the hydrogen molecule - at about this wavelength, and low and behold the wavelength was at 3 cm. Both Cec and I had lots and lots of experience so we both leapt into it. We jointly did our master's degrees - we both had separate theses, of course, but we did our research together. We had two supervisors, and the two supervisors after the first two or three months weren't speaking to each other, so we spoke individually to them. The one important thing that I will remember from that research was that one day we ran into a very peculiar effect. We didn't find the line at 3 cm. We did go and look at some of the finer details of the ammonia spectrum which by then had been found elsewhere, and nobody had done it at high resolution so we did it at high resolution. But we ran into the fact that the line saturated. For some of the lines, as you increased the power, the power absorbed didn't keep going up. So we went along to one of our supervisors, and I'd be happy to give the name privately, but I won't say it here, and he said, "That is ridiculous! Do you realize if that is true you have discovered a population inversion in the ammonia spectrum, and that can't happen." Of course now we know it can happen. At the time he said, "The equations show it doesn't happen, so don't put it in your thesis." Well, I didn't but Cec did. That meant we couldn't publish the results, that was made clear. That was about the end of my participation in spectroscopy, but Cec, of course, went on and did microwave spectroscopy for many years.

You said that I escaped from medicine; you sort of imply that I made the decision in favour of upper atmospheric physics, but in fact I have to admit that part of the influence was the fact that I had taken two courses in anatomy and I had a great big book called Gray's Anatomy, which I was slowly working my way through. And one day I looked at that big book and said "There must be more interesting things to do in the world than that." That's when I made my peace with Balfour Currie. You know most of the story, there have been all sorts of little things which have happened along the way. One of the things that I should mention as a little side issue, when I was at DRTE and I was just getting ready to move back to Saskatchewan - it must have been 57, I guess, that would be it [DM - I think it was 58 when you moved] Oh, yeah, but it was the fall of 57 when I was getting ready - and we had that wonderful incident at DRTE when Colin Hines and Clare Collins and a number of other people all participated in the search for the orbit of Sputnik, and we were so happy because we got it. It was a great time, we had a lot of fun. Colin was the one who taught us how to relearn the orbital mechanics which we should have known about from undergraduate days, and we had a lot of fun.