Interview
On May 13, 1977 Professor Joseph Henry Keenan’s daughter, Esther Keenan Carr, conducted a filmed interview with her father and Dr. George Hatsopoulos. Click below to view some excerpts from the transcript and from the tapes of the interview
Part One
On his early years and education at MIT
I was born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, in August of 1900. My father was in business for himself, not too successfully, so we were as a family struggling to live on a middle class social level, which was hard for us to maintain financially.
My father was an orphaned child because his father had been killed near the end of the Civil War after serving through the whole war and left a family of eight children, of which my father was the youngest. So my father had to go out and make his own living as a child. He arrived in Wilkes Barre probably because it was supposed to be a place where the economy was rather stable. It was a major source of anthracite coal which was the premium fuel of the day for domestic heating. It was in demand all over the country whether the country was prospering or not prospering. And that gave the town a stable kind of economy. I was brought up in a household in which I was the youngest child and was very affectionately looked after by two older sisters and an older half sister. Unfortunately, there was a lot of illness in the family. My mother suffered a great deal of illness during those years and my father, quite a little also. I went to school in what was really a lower middle class primary school, but it was a good school. The teachers were good, I learned a lot from them and I was treated well. At one point I skipped a grade and enjoyed my schooling very much. Then, at the age of nine, my parents died within two days of each other, a shear coincidence. I then went to live with a maiden aunt, my mother’s sister, who somehow managed to provide shelter, food and clothing for my sister, my brother and me. It was, as I look back on it, virtually a miracle. I don’t know how she did it. She had been employed in some work in a private charity of some sort, but I don’t know how she ever managed to meet her expenses.
I lived with her through primary school and into high school. The high school was a good one, the only public high school in the town. It was a mile or mile and a quarter away and I walked to and from it each day. The quality of instruction as I look back on it was good. This was in spite of the fact that the student group came largely from a mixture of working class people who were working up in the world, largely from the mining community, and people who had made it to the upper middle class. This was a rather turbulent mixture of young people. They, at times had quite violent struggles between the classes in the school, the third and the fourth year classes would get into a rivalry. And these struggles became at times, very violent. But, the strange thing was, despite all this, the quality of instruction was high, the quality of the performance of the students was quite good and they had two courses which were framed more or less for those who were preparing to go on to college. One called the college preparatory class, which was fairly general studies, sort of liberal arts, and the other was more practical. It was called, I think, “The Boys Mathematical and Scientific Course.” It was for boys, because it was a practical course. No girls were expected to study things like this which led to professions of engineering and manufacturing and this sort of thing. I must say the instruction was good. The instruction was good in mathematics, which carried us up through Trigonometry and we made out so well in that they would carry us even a little farther into a little introduction to Calculus, for instance. There was good instruction in foreign languages, particularly German. We were taught German through the four years of high school.
I graduated in 1917, which was of course the year that the United States ended World War I. This was upsetting because, although I wanted to go to college, a lot of my classmates were going into the military service. I wanted to go in with them. There was a draft which did not affect me because the lower limit on the draft was 18 years of age and I was not yet 18. My aunt absolutely refused to give permission for me to enter the military service and her permission as a guardian was necessary at that age. So, I needed and wanted to go to college. I needed money because my aunt certainly couldn’t cover the cost of college on her resources. So, I took one year and worked at an axel and spring factory.
Now, in the meantime, my brother had moved into the mining business. He had graduated from high school and he was a mining surveyor. I did a little mine surveying before I found an opportunity to work in this spring and axel factory which interested me because I was with engineers, working under engineers. I was actually doing quantitative chemical analysis in a chemical laboratory under a graduate metallurgist. And, in that year I learned something about Chemistry and I made a little money, very little, because the wages were very small.
As that year came to an end we were still in the war and the problem for me was the military or college. I was interested in MIT, principally because in the high school, a teacher of Physics had singled me out as being one of the good students, and said, “Keenan, you ought to go to Boston Tech.” Boston Tech was what it was called in those days. That was just about the time MIT was moving from Boston to Cambridge. I took his advice very seriously, but I was faced with an entrance examination that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pass although I thought I probably would have been able to, but I was not entirely confident.
In the meantime, I learned that the army had set up what was called a student army training corps in the colleges. And of course this combined my objectives of the military and college. Moreover, it solved my financial problems, because once I got into that, I had no expenses. I chose Colgate University because I could get accepted there easily on my high school record.
I think it might be well to go back and discuss my interest in MIT and in engineering before I went to Colgate. You recall, I said I went to the Wilkes Barre Public High School and that they had a course, “Boys Mathematical and Scientific", which was one of the two college preparatory courses. Now, the fact that I had chosen that course in my freshman year indicates that I had a bent toward Engineering or Science and that it came quite early, perhaps at the age of 12. It’s curious that a youngster at the age of 12 would have made that selection, but I think the reason was that I was brought up in a mining community and mining is a mixture of hard labor and engineering. And of the two, I preferred engineering and also I knew many people who were mining engineers and my brother was working into that profession and so the engineering seemed like a natural thing for me to aspire to, in that kind of an environment. I didn’t take after my father’s predilection. He liked to be in business and he wanted to be in business for himself. As I said, he was only moderately successful at it and whether that was the reason I didn’t take after it, I don’t know. I think perhaps it was more that Mathematics was easy for me in school and that fitted in with the feeling that engineering was a reasonably good way of life.
Go back to Colgate. As I said, I landed there by the accident of things because I didn’t have any intention of going through Colgate, but getting into MIT in those days was a matter of getting through a very demanding entrance examination. And I thought, at this point, when I learned about the SATC, the Student Army Training Corp that a reasonable approach was to go to Colgate, where a good many of Wilkes Barre boys had gone, and get my military service.
I knew many of them who had gone there and they liked it. The service would presumably be sort of an officer’s candidate kind of military service, initially, and then I would learn some things at Colgate which would make the entrance examination at MIT less of an obstacle for me. So, I went to Colgate and was inducted into the Army. We were under strict military discipline, getting up in the morning to revelry and lining up, taking a morning run in formation, coming back and going to breakfast in formation and then going off to our classes and in the afternoon coming back to military drill. In the evenings, we were to study. This went on for several months; it began in late September of 1918, but by early November the war was approaching an end. So, it was a short period. We experienced the false armistice, which most people don’t know about. There was a false report of an armistice about five days before the real armistice and we had a great celebration of the false armistice, there was a bonfire and so on. Also, I should mention that it may be that Colgate saved my life in a way because the fatal form of the flu came across the United States while I was there and as soon as it became evident, the Colgate campus, the military unit, were all quarantined, we weren’t allowed outside the campus except in formation and marching, we weren’t allowed contact with people outside. Out of something like sixteen hundred men, we had quite a number of cases of flu. We had a hospital and I served once, I remember, as an orderly in the hospital all night and in fact, the night they celebrated the false armistice I was an orderly in the hospital. There were, in the hospital, two serious cases at that time and a lot of minor cases and of the two serious cases, one of them died. So out of sixteen hundred men, we had one fatality from the terrible flu of 1918. I don’t know what the national average was, but it was far above that. So, we were much safer there than if we had been out doing anything else. It was one place where the army turned out to be a very safe place to be.
Then, after the war was over, we continued under our military discipline until about the middle of December when it was decided that this SATC would be disbanded and we would all be discharged. So we all headed for home. I intended to go back and finish the year at Colgate so I would be prepared to enter MIT the next year. But when I got home to Wilkes Barre and began to meet my old friends who were home on Christmas vacation, I began to learn things about what was going on here and there. One of them was a high school friend of mine. I think he was from a year ahead. He met me on the street and knew I was interested in MIT. He had been enrolled in MIT and had spent, I don’t know if it was a year or the past three months up there. He stopped me and said, “You can get into MIT without taking an examination, immediately.” I said, “How is that?” And he said, “Well, because of the end of the war and the return of veterans and so on, MIT has decided to take in a separate and new kind of class which would begin on the second of January, and they would be admitted according to their high school records, since they didn’t have time to put in an ordinary entrance examination. He said, “Your high school records are good, all you have to do is take them up to Cambridge and you’ll be admitted to MIT.” Well, that was great news to me, of course, and what I did was to simply pack up what little I had, because most of my things had been left at Colgate, and I got on a train and came up to Cambridge and immediately went to MIT and found that I was admitted. I had very little to go on. I had a little money saved up from my army pay and so on. I couldn’t afford the dormitories because they were more expensive than other accommodations in town. My first night was spent in the Cambridge YMCA in the gymnasium on a cot, and then I went out looking around for a rooming house or a boarding house and found one near Central Square in Cambridge.
And so, I entered MIT with a special Freshman Class out of step with every body else in the college because there had been a previous Freshman Class that had started in September. I settled in to the freshman year and then went out and found myself a job in Boston working in the evenings in a strange institution that I think still exists, the Boston Young Men’s Christian Union. It was not the YMCA, it was separate from that, and it was older than the YMCA. It was down in the center of Boston near the areas where the people of lower income lived, but it was an amazing institution that provided a gymnasium, bowling alleys, reading rooms, library and so on, but no swimming pool. The reason I went was that I had been told in the rooming house by an old gentleman there that the YMCU ran an employment agency, so I went up to the desk at the employment agency and said I was a student, (I was in my army uniform,) and that I wanted a job part time. The little man at the desk, a little man with whiskers looked me over and said, “We can give you a job.” He said it would be from six in the evening until ten. And I said, “Fine, I’ll take it.” It was looking after the bowling alleys and the towels for the people who used the gymnasium and the showers and so I’m handing out these things, taking in cash and so on. And so, every evening, as soon as I got a bite to eat I’d go over to Boston, near the corner of Washington and Essex. Well, that’s a curious thing, of course, when you go to MIT at least in those days particularly, you could not select your course of study in the first year. Every one took the same thing. Therefore, the first year your classmates are large numbers of people taking the same thing, but when you move to the next subject you move to another group and you don’t get to know your classmates very well. I did get to know a few people in the boarding house, a few students, but very few. I began to take an interest in sports so far as I could. I was always busy earning money when I could, so I didn’t have very much time for sports, but I did choose rowing. The association with fellow students came later, after I got into the second year when we were segregated into courses.
Now, why did I become a Naval Architect, why did I decide to study Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering? This is a curious thing that may have been entirely by default in a way. I had a good friend in the axel and spring works where I had worked, who had the post of chief engineer and I used to talk to him often about my aspirations and as I went through this experience of a year in a chemistry laboratory in industry, one conclusion that I came to was that I didn’t want to be a chemist. I would talk to him about this; this may have been a mistaken conclusion because I certainly didn’t have adequate grounds on which to base the conclusion. But what I did was too routine and didn’t appeal to me. I used to talk with him about alternatives and one time he mentioned the field of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering and for some reason I took fire on that and decided, “Why shouldn’t I try that?" MIT has a course in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. So, at the beginning of my sophomore year I moved into the department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering and it had certain virtues, one was a rather small number of students in a class, I think, something like 25. The second was that these students were all enthusiasts. They’d had experience with boats and they were terribly enthusiastic about boats. I was a landlubber! I hadn’t had any experience with boats, but I came and listened to these people and their enthusiasm rubbed off on me. And we had a good head of the department who came from Scotland, he had been the manager of a shipyard on the Clyde, so he was a very practical man. He was a lovable man and I enjoyed working under him and studying under him and I learned a good deal about practical engineering, almost nothing about the theoretical side of it. We also had on the faculty an esthetic type of ship designer, George Owen, who had designed one of the America’s Cup defenders. Again, a thoroughly practical man, with virtually no theoretical background, but was one of these people with an intuitive sense of how a ship or a boat ought to be. Well, I enjoyed all that, it was fun. And of course, I designed models of ships and so on, and we would work together and one of the nice things about it was that the drafting room of the Naval Architecture Department was open all hours of the day and night and when we had any time in the evenings, we would often spend our evenings there, working up one of the problems or I would find one or two of my colleagues there working on a design of his own that had nothing to do with the course. And this was a comradeship which was really very nice and provided me with a very friendly environment. I was the most scholarly among this group, with one exception. He was an older German immigrant but he was friendly and we were always, in our scholastic performance, somewhat alike and always on top of the class. Of course, there’s one interesting thing here that is very personal. Among these Naval Architecture students there was one who became very friendly with me; I don’t know just why we hit it off together. He was a rather strange person in several ways, but he seemed to like my company and I enjoyed his and then he invited me out to a party in Brookline. He was from this area and he knew people and he knew girls of our age. And I was invited to the party because he had decided that I would be a suitable blind date for one of the girls that he had chosen. The girl happened to be my future wife, Isabel, and I met her at this party and of course that was the beginning of an entirely different phase of my life. My life changed radically as a result of that. But, the amount of social life that I could indulge in was relatively little for two reasons, lack of time and lack of money. But Isabel was indulgent on those scores, so we did get in some social life and it was very pleasant with some very pleasant people that we met in the course of that time.
I went on then, through the Naval Architecture Course doing well enough. Some of the courses we took were under other departments. We took, for instance, thermodynamics, not under Naval Architecture but under Mechanical Engineering. We took Strength of Materials in the Mechanical Engineering Department. In other words, the Naval Architecture Department was small; it didn’t have the staff to cover all these subjects. So finally I graduated in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, as a Bachelor of Science in 1922 and was thinking in terms of finding a job that would be consistent with this training. It was, however a period of economic depression in the country. 1922 was four years after the war. The economic depression was bad enough every where but it was worst in the ship building business, because one of the great things that America did during World War I was to build great quantities of ships to provide the transport of munitions and of men across the ocean in the face of the attempt of the Germans, a very competent attempt of the Germans, to stop this traffic through submarine warfare. But they did not stop it, and America was building ships both on the East Coast and the West Coast, at a fantastic rate, right up until the end of the war. They could not find use for these ships after the war, and so they were stored in various places, bays, harbors, along the Hudson River, and so on. And to find any body who wanted to buy a new ship, or to have a new ship built was almost impossible. The ship yards were virtually closed down. Although, I wrote to some of them, the response was always, “We have no business that we could use you in, things are really depressed.” And then, I remembered that I was also a Marine Engineer. So, I thought of the people who made Marine Engines and I wrote to a number of engine manufacturers. In those days, no body ever came to MIT to interview students for jobs. The students went and found their jobs. I wrote about 25 or 30 letters, I suppose. One of them went to the General Electric Company in Schenectady. They did build marine engines. They built some in Lynn and they built some in Schenectady. The response from the General Electric Company was, “Yes the ship building, the ship engine industry is practically at a standstill, the turbine industry still exists, however and we could offer you a job in Turbine Engineering in Schenectady, but you would have to wait about three months before we could put you on a payroll. Well, that sounded like the best offer I had so I went home to Wilkes Barre and set out to find myself a job working around the mines which was a resource I always had because I could usually find a job around the mines working either in the superintendents office in the mine or as an assistant surveyor, or something of this sort. Just about the time I was to pick up a job of that sort I got word from General Electric Company that they wanted me to come sooner. So, in July of 1922, I was asked to come to Schenectady, I got on a train, went to Schenectady and signed in on my first job, which was working according to the schedule, from 7 in the evening until 6 in the morning, five nights a week, testing parts of turbines and elements of turbines that were operated under steam or air.
Part Two
On his career in the Mechanical Engineering department of MIT
I went to the General Electric Company, as I mentioned, and got involved in what was then a form of high technology, but finding myself with no adequate understanding of the technology that was required, and no adequate understanding of fluid mechanics which was then in a rapid process of development in certain very local areas. No understanding, real understanding of the principles of thermodynamics, but with a great curiosity about them.
I was sent up to see Harvey Davis in Cambridge, to pick up his new experimental data and get it into some kind of useful form for our turbine design work. In the course of working with Harvey Davis, I found that the translation of this experimental data, the kinds of information that engineers needed for the design of turbines and what not, involved some thermodynamics that I was not familiar with but which I relatively quickly became acquainted with because I read what books I could find, I listened to Harvey Davis and did whatever was necessary to pick it up in places where it was hard to understand, but which I could get organized in my mind. But I began to realize that there were sources of information about thermodynamics that I was completely unfamiliar with, and I had to seek them out and find them for myself. This was peculiar because I had graduated with a bachelor’s degree. I did not even consider going to a graduate school partly because I needed to go out and earn a living and people didn’t earn livings in graduate schools in those days, and partly because there were no good graduate schools in engineering in America.
One was thought to be adequately trained for engineering with a bachelor’s degree. There were, I began to find, places where graduate training in engineering could be and was very good, but these were in Europe, not in America. The best of them was in Zurich, Switzerland where the great professor Stodola was in charge of the thermodynamics and general application of the engineering principles to the design of machinery. He had written a great book which was known all over the world, called “Steam and Gas Turbines.” The book had not been translated into English when I came to the General Electric Company, but was in the process of being translated. German copies were around here and there and I could have access to them, but much of it was in an advanced form of presentation which I wasn’t ready for at the time.
Then, while I was working with Harvey Davis, I was introduced to Fred Keyes, who was head of the Chemistry Department at MIT and who was really a Physical Chemist, rather than a Chemist and he was measuring the pressure-volume temperature relationship for superheated steam. I can’t say that I learned a lot of thermodynamics from Keyes, I did not, but what I did learn was that Keyes had within his department a group of Physical Chemists whose lives centered about thermodynamics. As I looked into it a little bit, it was a thermodynamics that was completely unknown to me. And then, I discovered that it was really the thermodynamics of Willard Gibbs.
Curiously enough Willard Gibbs was an American. He had grown up in New Haven, his father had been a professor at Yale University and he had undertaken the study of thermodynamics on his own very largely, though he had gone to Europe and studied under some professors over there. Willard Gibbs brought together the existing knowledge of thermodynamics and synthesized it into a wonderful synthesis which had fantastic generality and solved many problems. It’s curious that though he published papers in the 1870’s, before the Connecticut Academy of Sciences, these papers had virtually no influence whatever on American Engineers. American Engineers hardly knew they existed. The people who knew they existed and were mining this new resource and learning about it were the physical chemists. And, because the physical chemists never talked in terms that seemed to have anything in common with what the engineers were talking about, the fluids, their flow through passages, turbines and so on, but were concerned principally with what happened between parts of systems and whether, when two things were brought together, something would happen or something would not happen, and, if something happened, in which direction it would happen. And, to the engineer, this seemed like a foreign field that had nothing to contribute to them. I began to read bits of Willard Gibbs as I had studied this availability story, but his major papers were too much for me, I wasn’t able to grasp them without some help and some guidance in the course of my studies.
While I was at Stevens Institute, then, I worked on thermodynamic problems. I produced a steam table using existing and new experimental data. That indicated that I had some kind of grasp of the principles of thermodynamics to a certain limited degree. It did not indicate that I was well informed with regard to the science of thermodynamics as a whole. Although the fact that I had gotten into the subject of available energy and available useful work soon indicated that I had really begun to penetrate the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics.
When I taught at Stevens Institute of Technology (1929 - 1934), I taught thermodynamics and built up my understanding and my ability to teach it over a period of six years. And then an opportunity came at MIT because I was convinced that my position, my understanding in the field of thermodynamics was on a higher level than that of the teaching in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. But, in 1930 there was a change of administration at MIT. Carl Compton was brought in to be the new president. Carl Compton wanted to raise the level of scientific scholarliness, the scientific base of every thing that was being done, in both the departments of science and the departments of engineering. He appointed many new department heads. Among them was the department of mechanical engineering. He appointed Jerome Hunsaker as the new department head. Jerome Hunsaker was then a famous man in aeronautics; he had designed the NC4 which was the first airplane which, as a fleet, flew across the North Atlantic Ocean. He had earlier done some teaching at MIT in the aeronautics department. He was an expert engineer, well acknowledged as a great engineer who had been engaged in high technology in the aeronautics field and he could bring to the mechanical engineering department and at the same time to the aeronautics department the kind of attitude toward the teaching of engineering that Compton was looking for. So, he became the head of both aeronautical and mechanical engineering at MIT. When I learned this I felt, well here was an opportunity for a substantial change in the quality of instruction in engineering education at MIT, and if I were to move to MIT, if I were lucky enough to get myself established there I could take part in this change, but I would also have accessible to me these people who I knew were there in physical chemistry, who knew a lot of thermodynamics, that I felt that I wanted to know.
So, I took it upon myself to make an appointment with Dr. Hunsaker and to look in on him in his office and to tell him about my career and my aspirations and what I wanted to do. Hunsaker received me sympathetically and in a very friendly way and said he would immediately take it up with the administration and the next thing I knew, Hunsaker called me from New York, and he wanted to come over and visit me on the Stevens Campus. So he came over and visited me with my wife and family and we talked more and then he made an appointment for me to come to MIT and talk with him and the vice president, then Vannevar Bush, and so, during that appointment, I found myself offered a job. This was in the 1930’s, between 1933 and 36. I had been at Stevens for six years. I had received no increase in salary during that time. This didn’t make me feel bad; I didn’t resent it because my friends that I had left behind in Schenectady were working with decreased salaries, decreased by fifty to sixty percent sometimes in order to be kept on the staff. So, if I still had my 1928 salary in 1933, I didn’t feel that I had been abused, but never the less, MIT was willing to offer me an increase in salary and an increase in rank. I went from assistant professor to associate professor and moved to MIT in the summer of 1934.
Immediately I went to work with Fred Keyes, he accepted me in a friendly way and drew me into the development of his developmental data, probably because I had been successful in working with Harvey Davis on the development of his experimental data. But, no more had we gotten started when Keyes and I were working on the development of a new steam table based upon the experimental data that he had been obtaining in the 1920’s and the early 30’s, subsequent to the completion of the work that he had done at Harvard that had brought about my meeting with Harvey Davis. There was also new experimental material coming from the National Bureau of Standards under Nathan Osborne. So we had much in our hands to bring this material together and bring it into a single format where it could be useful to people who wanted to work with steam in science or in engineering. But, along with that, I made a point of finding out who was teaching thermodynamics in the physical chemistry group.
There were two men, one was James Beattie, and the other was Louie Gillespie. Gillespie was the senior man of the two. And so, I first began to sit in on his classes and what I was learning was the thermodynamics of Willard Gibbs. And we were going through Willard Gibbs page by page and I was studying along with our graduate students, I was taking examinations with our graduate students and so on. I was not doing the work for course credit or degree or anything of the sort; still my top degree was a bachelor’s degree. But here I found a mine of information about the meaning of thermodynamics, what it was that had been a dosed book to me before and so I began to use this material and began to re-formulate my thinking as to how the underlying principles of thermodynamics should be presented to a beginning student.
I had some beginning students to work with, though the professor in charge of thermodynamics and mechanical engineering felt that I was a radical and that I really shouldn’t be teaching his students, but he allowed me to teach the students of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, which was interesting. I think for two reasons, one was, these were not in his course, he didn’t feel the same responsibility toward them that he felt toward the mechanical engineering students, and the other was they were always considered poor students of thermodynamics, they showed perhaps, little interest in it. So, I took this group of undergraduate Naval Architects and began to teach them in a new way, in a way that I had developed out of all this working around to find the meaning of the subject. And to my great surprise and joy, these students responded wonderfully, they showed enthusiasm, great enthusiasm for the course. They worked very hard at it. And, instead of being a group with no interest in thermodynamics, they turned out to be the group with the greatest interest in thermodynamics. I had them take the same final examination with the mechanical engineering students and they did very much better than the mechanical engineering students did, even though the questions were largely framed by people using the old instructional methods and were unfamiliar with what I was doing with my students.
So, in this way, I put together my understanding of thermodynamics, picking it up here and there, but finally my major step was to learn the thermodynamics of Willard Gibbs. The upshot of that was that I wrote a text book. This text book was published in 1940 or 1941. I can remember that I had been working it over in mimeographed versions that I had used with my class for several years and that finally in 1940 I was ready for a re-write which would be the final one and would be the draft of the text book.
And, that summer I was offered a job of teaching one course in thermodynamics for something like two months at the University of Michigan. So, we picked up the family and we went to the University of Michigan and settled down in a rented house for the summer and I had one lecture a day, Monday through Friday, 11 to 12. I used a little of the time before 11 o’clock to prepare for my lecture, but the lectures, of course, were coming out of the material that I was putting into this new text book. The rest of the time I used on re-writing this material, so that I essentially wrote the final draft. The draft I wrote that summer was copywrited in 1941 by John Wiley and Sons, and came on the market at that time. The reception of the book was good. Of course it didn’t hurt at all to have given the summer course at the University of Michigan because there were many teachers there from all over the country and they showed a great interest in this course. When this book came out, there the whole thing was laid out for them in print and with all the aids to teaching including problems and so on, so that they could use it. Those who had had no contact with the material before, of course, reacted differently. They looked at it; they didn’t say that it was wrong; they said it’s too difficult for our students. I think that what they meant was that they didn’t understand it yet and if they didn’t understand it then it was too difficult for their students. But, gradually, people came to understand it and it became very generally accepted. To my great surprise it was accepted often times in places that I would not have expected it, for example, it’s acceptance in England, in the engineering schools, Bristol Imperial College, even Cambridge University was almost immediate and it reached up to Glasgow University. The reflected response over there was more encouraging than any thing that I got anywhere else. It really affected England in a more comprehensive way than it did America. In America it moved more slowly. In fact, in America its influence moved out as my students moved out into the universities throughout the country. In England that was not so, it was picked up by the teachers and used. One of the consequences of that was that my only degree above the bachelor’s degree is an honorary degree from the University of Glasgow. That degree is the Doctor of Laws, because five hundred years ago the University of Glasgow was chartered by the Pope at the time who authorized them to give two degrees, one was Doctor of Divinity and the other was Doctor of Laws. Traditionally they hold to that today. The only honorary degrees they give are Doctor of Divinity and Doctor of Laws. My friends at the University of Glasgow made it through the process of getting me the invitation to come to the University of Glasgow to receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. I’ve always explained that to people by saying “well, I’m a doctor of the laws of thermodynamics."
Now, in the course of my teaching I have had many students, of course, thousands of them, perhaps. Many of them have become very prominent and I learned a great deal from some of my students. I think that the student that I can point to as having been most influenced by me and that I have been most influenced by is George Hatsopoulos, the president of the Thermo Electron Corporation.
I thought I might mention some of the other people who passed through as students of mine and some of them were dose to me because they became members of the teaching staff of MIT, either before they left or before they were advanced into the faculty. Two people in the mechanical engineering department of MIT today that come to my mind as having been my students and who remain there and have become eminent in other fields, but retain a strong interest in thermodynamics are Asher Shapiro, who later became head of the department of Mechanical Engineering, and Frank McClintock who is an internationally known expert on strength of materials.
Outside of MIT, at Stanford there is a small group who were students of mine who make up a major part of the department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. I’ll mention Steven Kline, Robert Ustice and Charles Croger. And then there was one who went to the University of Michigan, Gordon VanWylen. VanWylen has become a great text book writer as well as an important figure in the school of engineering, at the University of Michigan, rising up to high administrative posts. He’s well known for his text books on thermodynamics and in one of the earlier versions he gave credit to my work.
Another one who occurs to me is William Gouse, who is at Stanford or has been and who has spent time in Washington as an important figure in part of the Department of Transportation.
I might mention another man who came through and with whom my contacts were rather casual but who did a good deal of studying as he interacted with me in thermodynamics and this is William Reed Hawthorne who is now Sir William Hawthorne, the master of Churchill College in Cambridge University.
Another one I might mention is Paul Newell who for some years occupied an important post at Texas A & M University, but is now president of the Newark College of Engineering.
Then, there was a group of Navy Students. The Navy sent students to MIT, and had been sending them for decades, but about 1940 they decided to send the students particularly for studies in engineering and in engineering related to thermodynamics. These men came in just at the beginning of World War II. Some of them had been through military action in the early days of Works War II. One, for instance, John McMullen, who had been on a destroyer escorting an aircraft carrier across the Atlantic, and in a heavy fog, I believe, at night the two came into collision, the aircraft carrier cut into the side of the destroyer and after a little interval discovered that it had, and backed away, leaving the destroyer with a gash in it’s side that went deep under the water line. However, the aircraft carrier was the important thing, so it and its escort proceeded, leaving this injured destroyer to look out for itself. It managed to save itself and found its way back to the United States and John was a survivor. John McMullen since then has become probably the major figure in ship building in the United States.
Another one of these Navy people was Lou Rodis. Lou Rodis has had several careers, he started out under Rickenbacker in the development of aviation, he played a very important part of that and went on to an important position within the Navy, ultimately left the Navy and became a very important figure in public utilities in the United States, and is well known.
Another, a friend of mine, with whom I’ve kept contact is William Sawyer who also did some very interesting things within the Navy. He rose to the rank of Captain and then retired to do other things. He was the chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics from 1941 through 1956.
When Hunsaker was running the two departments at MIT and at the same time building up NASA, which became a great institution under him and he did this on about two to three days a week, which he would spend in Washington and other parts of the country and then come back to MIT on a night train and run his departments there for the remainder of the week. As time went on this became very burdensome to him, he needed an assistant and he chose as his alter ego, in his absence, C. Richard Soderberg who had joined the department from the Westinghouse Company where he had been an eminent esteemed Turbine Engineer.
Soderberg succeeded Hunsaker as head of the department. Hunsaker had re-built the department. He had created, for instance, the group in Fluid Mechanics which hadn’t existed when he was there. We were sending our students to the Civil Engineering Department to learn some hydraulics which was completely inadequate. But Hunsaker created a good group in Fluid Mechanics and he also supported me as I gradually worked into and took over the work in thermodynamics and heat engineering. Soderberg was his successor and occupied the department chairmanship for several years and then he was moved up to Dean of Engineering and J. P. DenHartog became head of the department.
There is no doubt that during this time, particularly at the time DenHartog was appointed, that my name had come up for consideration for head of the department, but whenever anyone in the administration edged up to the subject I indicated that I was not interested. I was interested in my scientific and engineering work and in the teaching of these things and I didn’t want to take on the burden of administering. But after a few years, I think four or five years, DenHartog decided that he wanted to go back to being a professor and the question was who would succeed him. At that point I was a little concerned as to who might succeed him. We might get somebody unsympathetic to the direction in which we wanted to go and I decided it was probably my duty to accept that position if it was offered to me. It was, and so I assumed the position of head of the department in the year 1958.
As head of the department one has a tremendous amount of details to look after. You have some 60 people on your teaching staff, who have their own individual problems and they bring them to you and you have to deal with each of them seriously and individually. I found myself spending my days on these communications with individuals, on committee meetings which involved the department heads of the engineering school. A great deal of detail prevented me from doing things that I had so loved to do in the past.
I think the major issue that we faced during my administration was that American engineering universities and this included departments at MIT, had become very science minded and in many universities throughout the country and engineering schools, they began to consider engineering as sort of obsolete, but what they really should be teaching was engineering science, or science relating to engineering. Many of them actually eliminated what they called their engineering departments and created departments of Applied Science. Now I was convinced that there was more to Engineering than Applied Science. I had been an Engineer in industry, I’d been a consultant in industry over many years and I understood that Engineering was more than taking people who knew a discipline, a scientific discipline and bringing them together and presenting them with a problem. The way that I came to put it was that the Applied Scientist is a man who looks for problems that fit his tools and the Engineer is a man who looks for tools to fit his problem and to lose this feeling that you had an objective beyond the fundamental disciplines for engineering would be a very great loss. And yet, this was the direction that not only many universities were going in but even departments of MIT and major departments of MIT were trending in this direction. In fact, the Dean of Engineering at MIT at this time felt that the Mechanical Engineering Department was defective in that it did not have a theme in science around which it focused all its things. It was a curious department. It had divisions of Fluid Mechanics, of Materials and Strength of Materials, Behavior of Materials, it had Heat Engineering and Thermodynamics, it had a department for design, not saying the design of what, but for the design of things.
As I say we were under pressure from the Dean of Engineering to justify ourselves as some sort of an Engineering Science Department with a theme, or perhaps to split ourselves up into several departments. I was opposed to both of these things. The Department of Mechanical Engineering had an esprit de corps despite the wide variety of the experts within it, experts in Thermodynamics, experts in Fluid Mechanics, experts in Materials, very competent people, and experts in design and in Heat Transfer and that the communication between these people was always open and easy. They talked to each other easily and they took problems to each other where there was overlap of interest. To me, this meant that we had the only department of Engineering at MIT that really was a Department of Engineering because it had the basic disciplines. It not only had the basic disciplines, but it headed up into the actual use of these in the design process, heading toward a real objective, a real engineering objective. We were using the tools to fit the project, to solve the problem.
The way I went at this was to bring together the faculty. I think we came together about once a month for supper about six in the evening and after supper we discussed these things and discussed the pressures that were on the department and discussed the question of what we might do about it. Was there something we should be doing that we weren’t doing? And as these discussions went on the department sentiments solidified behind the feeling that we should stand our ground. That we were a good department of engineering and that we had made ourselves into the best department, we knew how.
Now, we were glad to find, later on that other people had reached this conclusion outside of MIT. The Sun National Accrediting Group, The American Council of Graduate Education, but we’re not sure, evaluated through questionnaires sent to people engaged and involved in engineering education and related things throughout the country, asking them to evaluate the graduate schools in engineering in the different areas and the different departments, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering and so on. And they got back these questionnaires and totaled up and found that MIT was number one in Mechanical Engineering. I’m not sure it was number one in any other field, but it was number one in Mechanical Engineering. This pretty well solidified our position and I felt that we were reaching a position where I could go back to the things I wanted to do and relinquish the burden of administration and so I asked the administration if they would find someone to take my place as head of the department as soon as it was convenient. They did that.
The person they chose was H. Guyford Stever who served several years in that position and then moved on to become president of Carnegie Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh and then to become the director of the National Science Foundation in Washington.
At the first meeting of the Department’s Senior Counsel that was made up of the full professors, under the chairmanship of Guy Stever I made the statement to the assembled group that not only were we number one in Mechanical Engineering, but I thought that the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT was the best Department of Engineering Education in the world. That statement was perhaps, over enthusiastic and it was one that some people, including Stever had trouble absorbing, because the next time he quoted me on that he said I had said it was the best department of Mechanical Engineering in the world. But that wasn’t what I had said, I said it was the best department of Engineering Education in the world and I still believe that, because if any student came to me and said he wanted to become a Mechanical Engineer, or wanted to become an Engineer, where would he get the best basic training, and I would say, the Mechanical Engineering Department of MIT would give him the best basic training of Engineering of all sorts, because it has avoided becoming a department of Applied Science and has remained a department of engineering, willing to use any tool that is needed to do the job. These tools can be Mechanical, Chemical, Electrical or what not. This is true of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.
The student may find there the opportunity to learn all these disciplines as he needs them, some of them he will learn better than in departments that are named as being specialists in some of these areas of discipline that I have mentioned. So, I still believe that the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT has retained its standing because it has taken engineering seriously, engineering as it is distinguished from the parts of Engineering. Engineering is a means of reaching an objective that people, society, the government, the nation, whatever it is, wants, and that they take that objective and look to all possible means available to moving from where we are to that objective itself.
Part Three
J.H. Keenan and George Hatsopoulos on thermodynamics, MIT, and the founding of Thermo Electron Corporation
Joseph: Remember that we arrived in Athens to a greeting by a corps of reporters who wanted to gather us together in a room in the airport to ask questions of George. George arrived there as a celebrity. I can’t recall at the moment just what it was that made you celebrated to them at that point.
George: Well, if you recall, we went there in 1958 and shortly before that MIT announced the direct conversion of heat into electricity, which went through the international wires and was written up in the first page of several newspapers overseas. That was really the event.
Joseph: This was your thesis?
George: This was my thesis, right.
Joseph: I can’t recall whether they thought that I was any kind of an expert or not.
George: Yes, in fact, both our pictures appeared in the newspaper on the same page the next day and you were called “the Father of Thermodynamics."
Joseph: I didn’t remember.
George: Yes, and also they editorialized a little bit and added that you are now concerned with thermonuclear work.
Joseph: Which was not true.
George: Which was not true. But, that was apparently what was in the headlines of those days and so they decided to extend thermodynamics into thermonuclear.
Joseph: Well, my recollection of that trip is that George took us to his family’s home. He’d always told me that Greece was a country where people took life easily and always took a rest in the middle of the day and so on, but the family was fairly extensive, the families of George and Daphne, his wife, and their friends, even more so. We were being invited by these people, very hospitably to meet with them and to come to their homes and be entertained very pleasantly. But the number of these invitations was so great that we never found the siesta part of the day. We were busy from morning till late at night, usually on social engagements.
George: And I remember you said, “You promised we’re going to have some siesta and so far we haven’t, I haven’t had a siesta!"
Joseph: But, it was a meeting with delightful people that we enjoyed. We came to feel that Greece was made up of people that we took to immediately, no matter where we went. Then, of course, we did some sight-seeing and the high point was that we took a cruise on Peter Nomikos’ yacht. And I recall that cruise very vividly, the going down the Aegean, going through the straight on the Island of Poros and then we stopped at one island where we went on mule back up to a monastery, which island was that?
George: Was it Hedra?
Joseph: Hedra, I think. And then, to Santorini, which was really the objective of that trip where the Nomikos family had a homestead, so called, up called, up on the hillside on the edge of the crater. Again, it was a mule trip up the cliff to get to the old home of the Nomikos family. That was a delightful trip, it was a delightful introduction to Greece in all respects and again, when we were in Athens we went to the Acropolis. I had seen pictures of it but I wasn’t prepared for the impression it made on me, because the Acropolis was something that I found very lovely and a delightful thing to experience. For some reason, it was almost overwhelming.
There was a somewhat scandalous little involvement because you and Daphne went out and didn’t come back before we retired and as I understand it, when you came back the hotel was locked up. I don’t know how you got into the hotel.
George: Well, we were really knocking on the door for half an hour and we were certain nobody would hear it and we wanted to go to sleep so I climbed up a tree and went up to the second floor where there were some bedroom windows open. I looked inside and it was my parents’ bedroom, so I felt a little more comfortable so I climbed in the window. My father woke up and saw some shadow coming in from the window, so he took out a club and was ready to hit me over the head. Fortunately I stopped him in time and that’s how I got in that night.
Joseph: We again went out on the Nomikos yacht and there, we did do some water skiing and this time Edward Teller was with us with his wife, Mitsy. We would go off and anchor by a beach and go off in a boat to go swimming on the beach. Then sometimes we tried water skiing and Peter was of course an expert water skier, I was a dud, but could manage to do a little.
George: You did much better than I did which made me feel very much ashamed. In fact I was getting out of breath all the time and you were not, so you suggested that I cut down on my smoking. That was the trip, Joe, if I recall, that Edward got you interested in Oppenheimer and that’s when you started studying the Oppenheimer case because you wanted to see how Teller’s story compared to the record.
Joseph: Yes, well I did make some study of the Oppenheimer case. In particular, I read the entire 900 page transcript of the hearings which was published by the government and was titled, “In the matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer."
But, I remember a very lovely hotel, Venus Beach Hotel, on the eastern end of the island, and that was where the hotel had a sailfish, so we got out and sailed in the sailfish. It was pretty good sailing because near the beach the wind was relatively mild, but as you got a little farther, the wind came through a channel between islands, I believe, and became really very rough and it became very exciting sailing there, in fact, exciting enough to overturn us and we had to get ourselves back upright again and on our way.
Joseph: Why did you come to MIT?
George: How I came to MIT and how I became interested in thermodynamics, have some relation to the nature of thermodynamics and reflect partly some of my own cultural make-up. Since I was a rather young child I wanted to become an engineer and in particular I was intrigued with electrical engineering and electronics. So, I went to the Polytechnic with this in mind. I always enjoyed all parts of science and all parts of physics but there was only one chapter in physics which I didn’t like and I was very bored with and that was the thermodynamics chapter.
So, I’d never intended to even spend any time on it, but when I entered the Polytechnic we had to take a course in thermodynamics, so I took that course and as we went along I began to have questions about how they were doing things and how they would relate things in a logical fashion, and where were the principles and where were the corollaries, the degree of generality of these principles. And as I was asking these things, my professor had more and more trouble answering my questions until he essentially told me to stop asking any questions and that got me very mad and very upset.
So I started going to the library and to find more about the subject because I was sure that people had resolved these things. It was a rather old subject and I was sure that people had found answers. But as I was finding answers there were more questions coming along, in fact, at a greater rate than I would get answers. So, when I decided to continue my studies in the United States, I did inquire to find who in the United States was particularly known as a professor in sorting out the logic and the structure of thermodynamics. I came across Joe Keenan’s name, who was at MIT. Besides that, MIT was quite famous in Europe, so I thought that this would be the school in which I wanted to continue my studies. In electronics, MIT had a fine Electrical Engineering Department, very much oriented to electronics, so that was suiting my purposes fine.
So, I came to MIT as a senior. I got a transfer the last year from the Athens Polytechnic and I enrolled in electrical engineering. But I wanted, of course, also, to settle the question of thermodynamics. I started taking a course in thermodynamics and because it was the end of the spring term and there was a summer term available, I wanted to get started. Joe was not giving the course, 2.451, so I took it with Ken Wadley, an instructor there. The first time I interacted with you was in the fall. But, what happened is, as I got involved in thermodynamics and later on I took courses from Joe, I got more and more involved because Joe and the books and the instructors there did answer most of my questions, but then, as soon as the questions were answered, I was worrying even more about the more generality that these may have. So, very soon I switched to mechanical engineering to continue my thermodynamics studies and I have not stopped since.
George: I still am studying thermodynamics. But, I’d like to mention one little story that happened when I took the second term of 2.451 or 2.452.At that time—well, even later — I was not going to class regularly because most of the time I was doing the reading ahead and if I didn’t have any questions I wouldn’t go to class. But I did go to class a number of times when I wanted to get involved in a particular subject. Well, I missed one class once when Joe had announced that there would be a quiz the following class and I didn’t find out. I was not there. So next time I went to class and I walked in ten minutes late and every body was writing and taking a quiz, and was taking a quiz on availability. The previous month you had taught availability, so you gave a class on availability. Well, I knew vaguely what it was but I hadn’t really studied for a quiz and so I walked up to Joe and said, “Professor Keenan, I’m very sorry, I didn’t know there was a quiz and I’m ten minutes late and I haven’t prepared for it, can I take a make-up quiz?” And so Joe said, “No, you may not. After all, I announced that last class.” And I said, “I wasn’t there.” And he said, “Well, it is not my fault that you weren’t there, I made the announcement, you just have to take it as best as you can right now.” So I picked up the exam and sat down but every body else had the text book. It was an open book quiz and I didn’t bring a book with me. But Joe was reading his book in class while supervising the quiz. So, I got up again and I said, “Professor Keenan, I haven’t brought a book with me, could I borrow your book?” And he said, “No, I’m reading it now.” So, I was supposed to take the quiz without the book which, I think worked to my advantage because if you have a book, I always find that you do not do as well, you don’t spend as much time trying to think through a problem. So any way, I did pretty well, in fact I think I got the best mark in the quiz then, but I still remember that incident.
Joseph: Yes, I’d be glad to comment on that. I really didn’t know you at that point, but you were a person who drifted in and out and occasionally asked questions, and I thought your questions were intelligent. I didn’t know whether you were really a bright student or a student who had some kind of skill in appearing bright, and when I gave the quiz and you appeared in class, I was giving an open book quiz which was a practice that I used a great deal. The open book quiz, to me, was in a sense, a test of the student’s ability to manage his affairs and to understand the subject. I had the conviction that if I gave the same quiz to two different classes that were essentially equal is competence, and told one it was an open book before hand and told the other it was a closed book before hand, that the one that was told it would be a closed book quiz would give the better performance. For that reason, when you came into the class and wanted to take the quiz, I knew you had been thinking about thermodynamics, I was convinced that the open book would be of no real value to you and that you should try on your own to see what you could do with what you’d been able to make out of thermodynamics in the meantime, and I thought probably, that you would do well in it and you justified my confidence because you came through with a high mark. Now, I think that was probably one of the points where I began to pay more attention to you.
George: Yes, I think from that point in time on we started interacting quite a lot more.
Joseph: Interacting more, because I had become convinced then that you could use your mind to organize material to bring together the various things that you knew to answer a new question and that this was a quality that you had to a rather unusual degree. So from then on we began to interact more, as you say, you more often dropped into my office for discussions and questions and so on.
George: That was in 1953 and that’s when you and I started getting much more involved so there was a gap there which was...
Joseph: ...several years.
George: I was away from MIT for two years, from 1950 to 1952 basically. So, just shortly before I left I started meeting with you, but then I left and I was away two years and when I came back we started, we continued the interaction and that’s when I picked up my thesis.
George’s Army Experience and Two Year Absence from MIT
Joseph: The story of your army is interesting. George was the only person who ever deserted into the United States Army and—well let him go on and tell his story about that.
George: Well, I think it all stems from the fact that by 1950 after about a year and a half in the States I decided that this was the country in which I wanted to live. I had a feeling of this sort before I came, in fact. When I came I had in mind that maybe I would want to stay. After a year and half I was convinced of that. Now, basically, my thought of staying in the United States was quite contrary to what my parents wanted me to do for several reasons, not only for normal reasons that parents want their children nearby, but because my family had traditionally had many professors at the Athens Polytechnic. In fact, at that time, our family had the majority in the Senate and the president was an uncle of mine. So, in my family, because there were very few boys of my age, I was considered to be the next person that would go to the Athens Polytechnic and eventually become president of the Polytechnic. So, the very idea that I would even contemplate to stay in another country was not only shocking to my parents but to the extended family. But, on the other hand I had quite a different point of view. I thought the whole thing was too pat for me to get ahead. The environment was too constraining and I really wanted to do something completely on my own without having any family assistance. That probably was one of the fundamental reasons why I wanted to be away. Although probably I may not have recognized it as such at the time because the United States gave me a chance, whatever I would do I would do without any body saying, “He came from this family; of course he got that position.” So, I think this was fundamental. When I decided I wanted to stay in the States the question is how to do it? And the immigration laws were very tough, it was not until, I don’t know if you’re aware of it Joe, until the Kennedy years where they broadened the immigration to let in people of special skills. In those days there was a quota, so you applied and waited for your turn. The quota was over subscribed from Greece for twenty years! So, there was no hope for me. There was still a possibility of getting married to an American girl but I wasn’t ready to get married. So, when I got a draft card which they sent to everybody, I put down that I was interested in going into the army. They did not realize that I was not eligible, so they called me and I started serving in the Army. That’s when the immigration authorities discovered I was in the Army so they wrote to them and they asked the Army to discharge me.
Joseph: But that was after several months?
George: That’s correct, before they discovered it. But, the army turned around and said, “Well, we’re not going to discharge him, we have quite an investment, he’s a good soldier, he has a good record, we need people for Korea,” for at that time it was the Korean War, “and he wants to stay so we’re not going to discharge him.” So, immigration sued the Army and, not officially, I believe, but internally in the government, and made a petition for a hearing in Washington, from the Justice Department, who would decide which branch of the government was right. Immigration won, so the army called me in and they said, “We’re very sorry, we tried our best, but we have to discharge you." They gave me an honorable discharge with all the privileges at the time...
Joseph: After you’d gone through Basic Training?
George: That’s correct.
Joseph: Yes, a winter of Basic Training.
George: That’s right, and in fact, my commanding officer, who was very nice and kind said to me, “You know, you have to leave the camp,” I was at Fort Dix, “by five o’clock,” it was eleven o’clock in the morning. He said, “Don’t rush too much because the immigration people are ready to arrest you outside the gate, but that will give you a chance to call some of your lawyers.” So I did call my uncle in New York, I got some lawyers and they said, “Well, hold there as long as you can.” So I was going around Fort Dix, going from PX to PX to pass the time. I would go to the gate and I would see those people waiting there and of course, they weren’t allowed to come in so I was free to roam around Fort Dix. I had to go out at five, so they arrested me and were driving me to Philadelphia. In the meantime my lawyer got involved so that I was not detained more than the car ride from Fort Dix to Philadelphia, so every thing went all right. After that they wanted to deport me but we made a petition saying that it wasn’t my fault, it was the army’s fault, and the army said it wasn’t their fault it was the draft department’s fault, and the draft department said, “Well, it wasn’t their fault, it was immigration’s fault.” So, we said, whoever’s fault it was, certainly I shouldn’t pay the penalty. Finally, after several months of negotiations with various branches of the government, they agreed to settle this story and let me go back to MIT.
Joseph: But you had to spend a certain amount of time out of the country.
George: That’s right, yes. That was the deal we made, you see. I had to go out and get a new Visa. That’s when I went on the trip on the tanker, because I had to be away for six months to re-enter the country. I boarded a tanker and worked as a third engineer and I had a great experience because we went to all the South American ports, and living with the crew and every thing else, it was fantastic.
You could become a citizen only if you had served two years and I hadn’t served two years, that’s why the immigration was so anxious. Because if they let me serve two years which was my tour of duty, then I would be entitled to citizenship and the immigration conceived their job as to keeping people from becoming citizens, so that’s why they were fighting the Army. So, I started from ground zero. But shortly after, President Eisenhower was elected, and he was aware of several cases like mine that appeared in the Army, so he passed a law that allowed people to become citizens three months after serving in the Army instead of two years. So, in retrospect, it turned out that every thing went fine and although I thought I had wasted my time, basically it worked out perfectly.
Joseph: Luckily.
George: Luckily. But, I want to come back to a question, a point that we were discussing before, how I got involved in thermodynamics. I think, basically I got involved in thermodynamics because of the nature of the subject. My professor in Athens had trouble and at the time I thought he was unique in that he was a professor and he didn’t know his subject. But in working in the field of thermodynamics and teaching it and working closely with Joe here and abroad, I discovered something that Joe knew quite a bit before, namely that most professors in thermodynamics do not know the subject. So, my professor in Athens was not such a bum. I mean, he represented the majority. And, I think this is not because professors in thermodynamics are so bad, I think there are a lot of people who have made contributions in many other fields.
George: It reflects the fact that thermodynamics is the most subtle and the most difficult of the sciences to understand. If it weren’t so, then more physicists would know more about thermodynamics, but even the greatest of physicists, including those who have Nobel Prizes, as Joe and I have witnessed personally, have a lot of difficulty understanding the foundations of thermodynamics. And this is what is so remarkable about Joe’s career, because Joe has dedicated himself from the early thirties to finding out the foundations of the subject, putting it into rigor and logic and organization, finding the degree to which the subject has generality. By the time I started working with Joe, he had already made the subject extremely general and his approach to it was kind of radical at the time because he was making the subject much more general than just to be applied to a piston and steam engine. But I was intrigued by both his dedication to structure and logic and deduction and his dedication to prove the generality of the subject, so I started dedicating my effort to prove the subject even more general than he had shown it to be. And, that’s where I want to touch on the cultural aspects of my background, a little bit. Because I was brought up in a background, particularly because of my family, but more generally because it has to do with Greek education, where logic and rigor are put on a higher plane than any practical aspects or heuristic aspects of science. And, it is really revered with high respect, which is not so much done in this country. The more practical and the more technological things are thought of as being more important than the intellectual rigor of the mind. And of course, that probably is because of ancient roots in the works of people that brought in, like Euclid, who brought rigor in a subject. So, what Joe was trying to do in this country appeared to me extremely attractive and an important piece of scientific work, more important than anything else that was being done, including the development of computers or the atom bomb. He was touching on things concerning the mind and concerning the structure of logic, which is more fundamental than technology, which in fact is the root from which technology can really develop, and I think that Joe is unique in that respect.
The way we got started, which eventually led to the book is, in 1953 Joe started raising questions and, basically, of course, that’s his technique in any case, whether he is trying to teach or trying to learn or trying to develop anything, his basic technique is, ask questions. And, I feel that basically, most of the time he has given the idea of something already, just by asking the right question. This is a tremendous skill that Joe has. He walks into a meeting where people think that they have understood a subject and he starts asking penetrating questions and that’s when they find out that they haven’t really thought about things. I think that the first real start of our collaboration was one day, when I came to Joe in his office, and his office was next to Joe Kaye’s office. We went to Joe Kaye’s office and Joe started asking him a question. I remember what the question was, it was something to do with the fact that if you take a box which has a gas and you put a partition in the middle of it, that from a statistical thermodynamics point of view, it turns out that the entropy of the box with the partition is slightly less than the entropy with the box without the partition. Yet from a classical thermodynamics standpoint that difference, although it is only slight, and only equal to k log 2, is not justified. So, Joe asked him to look into that matter and then, I recall, he called me in and said, “George, why don’t you hear the question too, and try to work on that as well as Professor Kaye?” And, I think this was the first time that I started really working in response to something that you had assigned to me.
Joseph: May I enter into this at this moment? I think there was another question that I brought up too. I had been to a meeting in New York where M. W. Zemanski was present and I never felt I understood the statistical thermodynamics and I asked questions of those people and I said, “Now why, if you have the gas in half the box, confined with the partition and the vacuum in the other half, why is it that the entropy increases when you lift the partition?” And they said, “Well, it increases because of the enormously greater number of states that are available to the system as soon as the partition is lifted.” And I thought about this and I said, but this opens an interesting question. Suppose that I have a partition that I can open very quickly and close very quickly. I open it, immediately the entropy is increased to what it would be if the gas filled the whole box, but suppose with my high speed equipment I quickly close the partition and only a little of the gas had managed to get through in the meantime, and so, the gas had not uniformly distributed itself through the box. Now, if you examine the entropy, you find that it is greater than it was when the gas filled only half the box, but not nearly as great as when it fills the whole box, therefore my closing of the partition, resulting in the decreasing of the entropy.
George: In violation of the second law.
Joseph: Yes, an adiabatic decrease of the entropy of the system which is a violation of the second law and how do you explain that? And I think I brought that question up to you too.
George: Yes, you did that as well and basically as you know, both these questions—that was in 1953—we didn’t begin to answer them until the middle sixties, when we started identifying a general expression of entropy for non-equilibrium states. Of course, if any body had said that at the time, or even sometimes in some circles today, they would think that this can’t be. How can you define entropy for highly non-equilibrium states? But I think that these are the big questions that got us started working. From there on, I recall, I kept coming to your office and trying to tell you about the work I was doing and you would load me up with three times the months work as I tried to cover and that’s how we started working together.
Joseph: We also had a weekly conference where we brought up some of these questions and this, of course, went through the period of your thesis.
George: That’s correct. I was teaching as an instructor and then, of course in 1956, when I got my Ph.D., I went on the faculty and then we continued.
I think that for many years we religiously kept meeting at least once a week. You and I were probably meeting another two or three times, except of course, a few years before we just put all of these things together in the book that we wrote in 1965. Then we would meet every day and we would work together for several hours.
Joseph: As you and I worked together trying to formulate the principles of thermodynamics satisfactorily in our own minds, you came up with ideas which were strange to me. Of course, I had thought of the second law as the impossibility of a perpetual motion machine of the second kind. Your mind was, I think, very much sharper than mine in many respects. I could ask questions, you could find your way into the answer. The question about what a perpetual motion machine of the second kind was, you went into, and you came up with the importance of the concept of a reservoir. Practically all other teachers of thermodynamics, particularly engineering teachers of thermodynamics, had glossed over this question. It was a useful device and a conceptual device from which one could draw heat for an engine or reject heat from an engine, but otherwise left pretty much undefined. And then you decided that the undefined parts of that were very important and that this reservoir was really a system in the stable equilibrium state and the concept of the stable equilibrium state was entirely basic to the second law of thermodynamics. Here’s where you began to move out beyond me in my thinking, and now I was learning from you. You were pointing out the new ideas and I was working to understand them. The idea of stating the second law in the form of the existence of stable equilibrium states for all systems at any energy level was one that had never occurred to me, but which you brought forward and began to convince me that here was something that was probably going to bring us an entirely new approach to the second law. And as I look back on this and as I think about it, it’s very curious because if you look in nature, it’s hard to find things in stable equilibrium states and it’s still an intellectual concept. It’s a model, and indicates that thermodynamics is built around a simplification of nature into model structures. These model structures can have various states, non-equilibrium states in the greatest number and then equilibrium states of various kinds, and then this amazing stable equilibrium state which was so unique. Now, this I think is one of your major contributions to our thinking about thermodynamics and brought you to the point where at one point you wanted to state the first and second laws in a single axiom, which probably was not awfully important to the decision of a single axiom, but at least it raised a lot of questions about the way we had been thinking about these things. So, there was a period in there in which we went through a transition in our thinking about thermodynamics and it had nothing to do with statistical mechanics. And this was, I think, what started us off on writing a new textbook.
George: But, I’d like to add to what you said Joe, that recognizing that the second law is nothing but the statement of existence of stable equilibrium states, now permitted us to apply that to any system whatsoever, in fact, applied to systems that are subject to quantum mechanical rules or relativistic rules. It enabled us to free ourselves completely from any particular kind of system, or look in a particular way, which meant, in a sense, that eventually, we would have to look at the importance and the effect that the second law may have on quantum theory or relativistic theory or any theory of physical systems because obviously, it touched upon everything. It says that all systems are subject to this characteristic of being able to attain stable equilibrium states.
Joseph: I think this was the crossing point in our relationship in a sense. That, up to that point, I had been more or less the teacher and you the student and here, you stepped out and became the teacher and I was the student. I was learning from you and I was trying to find out what were the meanings of these things that you were telling me, that you had brought out in these new axioms that you were proposing and so on. And, so this led us on and as you say, into quantum mechanics and quantum thermodynamics. We couldn’t go very far in these directions without encountering some sort of problems in what might be called statistical thermodynamics. And, this was where we encountered great difficulty and we were looking for ways out. We went through a long period where we were talking with many people, including Benoit Mandelbrot. And, I’m not sure but Benoit Mandelbrot gave us a bad steer, in a way, in steering us toward Leo Szilard’s early concept of the work of identification and that was an unfortunate steer in a way, because we were too satisfied with it. And in fact, we crystallized it into our book and it is unfortunate that we haven’t been able to write a second book, a subsequent book which would allow us to do this in an entirely different way, tolerable in view of the second law.
On expanding the generality of the second law to the public sector.
George: Yes, I wanted to tie this question of the second law as it has to do with energy policy with the other idea we were talking about before on the work we did which was published in 1965 and continued later on after the publication of the book. What we were trying to do is to expand the generality of the second law into foundations of science, into foundations of quantum theory and foundations of matter. I think, in a way what we’d been trying to do with my Thermo Electron Company is another extension of the principles of thermodynamics in the other directions. Rather than extending it in the foundations of physics on theory or logic, extending in the practical work, first along developments of an engineering nature and finally, into putting these developments to work to help society function better. Now, in making this generalization in all directions is something in which I personally find a great satisfaction, but I never thought I would have the satisfaction of having the same principles have an impact on legislative policy and being so seriously considered and affecting basically our policy that we have today. Now, of course, the start of all this, bringing this subject in the limelight was when the country recognized finally, through the oil embargo, that the problem was, as a lot of people were saying, that there exists a dwindling supply of energy, and it did come and hit the public, and then we became very visible. But, of course, the problem had been in the making for a long time and it was this that made me believe that it was fundamentally sound to start an enterprise with the thought of applying thermodynamic technology to social use and to products and to go into manufacturing based on that technology. Now, at that time when I came up with that idea on the commercial sector, every body was preoccupied with computers and many other electronic types of developments and the idea that thermodynamics would have an impact on society was really so far away from what was the people’s conception, that it was very hard to get anybody to listen to the idea. But then as we got to the point where everybody was shocked into the realization that we’re going to run out of energy and all of a sudden, questions of efficiency became very significant. The questions of how the energy comes about and what kind of sources there are became very much in fashion.
George: If you recall Joe, shortly before the oil embargo, MIT had a conference on energy which was attended by about five hundred people from all over this country and other parts of the world.
Joseph: Let me intersperse here, now you’re using the term energy in a non thermodynamic sense. And we might mention that it’s the popular name for something which in thermodynamics is named something else.
George: Well, this confusion of what is meant by energy and which was reflected in the headlines of newspapers as well as the heading of the conference at MIT was a symptom of this lack of understanding. It was kind of shocking going over there and having five hundred people who are supposed to be experts. I had submitted, together with you and Elias Gyftopoulos, a contribution to that conference which we entitled “The Entropy Crisis.” Just the fact that this title was included among the dozens and dozens of papers shocked people. They said, “What’s entropy got to do with the energy story that we’re worrying about?” And I gave the talk, if you recall, and we wrote a paper together which was included in the proceedings. This was the first time that a lot of people who were supposedly concerned with energy supplies began to be exposed to the idea that it wasn’t energy that they should be worrying about but the ability of energy to do work, useful work. They were concerned about another ability that we in thermodynamics call available work or availability. And I said, “This is what is lacking, this is what is becoming very expensive and this is what is being wasted and lost, because, anybody who knows the first law of thermodynamics knows that the energy is not lost.” And, it has been a very slow process before we started getting engineers and physicists and eventually policy makers interested. We’re just beginning to get the policy makers in Washington to become familiar with this concept. For the first time I heard Congressmen saying that some fundamental questions on the efficiency of energy use can be found back in the second law. And, I heard that, which was remarkable.
Joseph: That really was an event.
On the genesis of Thermo Electron Corporation
George: I wanted to know what the technologies could do for society. How can these technologies be made into products and how can they be sold and how can they be financial successes. I was interested in the whole gamut of things, from the very foundations to all the way to the most practical thing in life, which is making a profit. I was planning to set up a company and at the same time I wanted to become a professor. Also, I was developing the first invention which was written up in my thesis, “The Thermionic Converter.” So, in June of 1956 three things happened in the same month. I graduated, got my Ph.D., and I finished my thesis, which was published; I became an assistant professor at MIT and I started teaching; and I started my company, that’s when the company was incorporated. So, all these things happened simultaneously. Later, each one of those activities became very demanding and the company started increasing in size. The company was dedicated to the application of thermodynamic principles to products and processes, both in industry and for many other social uses such as space, military or whatever, it didn’t matter. And so that began to grow and started demanding more and more of my time, so by 1960 I had to make a fundamental decision and I decided to go part time on the faculty, which I still am, and put the main part of my efforts in the company, which of course has been tremendously rewarding. As one sees things going from the research stage, into development, into the production and the marketing and having all aspects of a problem, this is one of the most fascinating things for me. And that is why I started and why I am putting so much effort in to Thermo Electron Company. And, by the way, the choice of the name, I think, reflects some psychological aspects. I always liked electricity and in fact, I wanted to be dealing with electronics. Yet, somehow something went wrong and I got involved with thermodynamics. So always my desire is to mix the two together and when I selected the company name, I picked Thermo Electron. Even today, a lot of what we’re doing is a combination of the application of thermodynamics and usually to the production of electricity or some other electrical aspects.
Joseph: George Hatsopoulos has referred to a conference on energy, so called, that was held at MIT in February of 1973, which of course was about two years before the fuel embargo. But it indicated at that time, many people were thinking about the problem of the limits on our fossil fuel resources. For that conference he presented a paper and this paper was ultimately published and in that publication we put this chart which, I believe, is informative.
This chart shows temperature as the abscissa and available useful work as the ordinate. We’ve taken petroleum fuel which at the beginning, as a fuel at atmospheric pressure and temperature, we can calculate the available useful work and it is very nearly three times ten to the fifth BTUs per mole of the fuel. But if you put this fuel into a combustion chamber and burn it at atmospheric pressure and the combustion chamber is absolutely insulated so that there is no loss of heat, in other words, no one can say that any energy is going in or coming out in the course of this combustion process, what happens of course is that the temperature of the fuel and the air or oxygen, in this case I believe it was air, rises substantially and actually comes out to about 4500 degrees Fahrenheit which is a high temperature. The interesting thing in this chart is that process in which no energy goes in or comes out and in which something which is with atmospheric pressure is suddenly raised to 4500 degrees Fahrenheit, a good white heat, results in a loss of useful work, and a very substantial loss. Actually, it’s in the order, I think, of twenty eight percent of the useful work that was there originally. This is without any further action than just carrying out the combustion at atmospheric pressure. Normally when we burn a fuel, for instance to produce electric power, we have to take these hot products of combustion and transfer heat to something else like water that’s being vaporized and converted into superheated steam and we can’t use superheated steam at 4500 degrees Fahrenheit. We have no materials that will contain it, so we must generate that steam at a temperature very much lower, probably in the order of eleven or twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit. And that means that we have to transfer heat from very hot gases down to relatively cool water and water vapor. And that process, after we have done that, we can find on the curve over here, how much of the available useful work we have left. And according to this, the figure now, where it was up in the neighborhood of three originally, it dropped to 2.05 say in the combustion process, it is now down, say to 1.95, another loss in the order of 5 percent additional. So, this is where we are, we have lost some twenty eight percent in the combustion process, we’ve lost some five percent in transferring to the working fluid, the steam at a lower temperature. Now if we have to transfer it to any lower temperature than that, still we can get from this curve how much that loss is and we see how quickly this dives down as the temperature of the receiving fluid is lowered and lowered and, of course, with it, the cooling of the produce of combustion to that temperature. For comparison on this chart, I’ve shown up here a point which is not really a value of available useful work. It’s a value of what we might call the enthalpy. This is what most people think of as the heating value of that material. It is often used as a measure that is the work that is taken out and is often compared with that value to see how well we have done. There is no thermodynamic justification for using that value. That value is thermodynamically completely irrelevant from a standpoint of the second law. But I thought I would show that chart because I think it’s basic to all these things we’re talking about, when we’re talking about the inefficiency of industrial processes and particularly the inefficiency in the use of fuels.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology