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Biographical Memoirs Volume 88 (2006) / Chapter Skim
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Edward Leonard Ginzton
Pages 110-143

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From page 110...
... Speyder Lars by Photograph
From page 111...
... It continued through his leadership in developing modern microwave technologies and megawatt-level klystron tubes during and after World War II, and in helping make possible the development of linear electron accelerators both as mile-long "atom smashers" and as medical tools still in use worldwide for cancer radiation therapy. His abilities eventually led him to take distinguished roles in both the academic and industrial worlds and in local and national community service as well.
From page 112...
... . Beyond this, to borrow from the words used by photographer Carolyn Caddes in her Portraits of Success: Impressions of Silicon Valley Pioneers, "Ginzton [also]
From page 113...
... In addition to his studies Ginzton joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps, hiked in the High Sierra, enjoyed amateur photography, played chess at a competitive level, and organized an intramural water polo team. His ROTC participation eventually led to a commission as a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve, but he was never called to active duty.
From page 114...
... Ginzton's research on feedback eventually led to an engineer degree thesis on applications of feedback at radio frequencies in 1938, and a Ph.D. dissertation on stabilized negative impedances in 1940.
From page 115...
... 1941 TO 1946: WAR YEARS AT SPERRY GYROSCOPE Stanford had entered into an agreement in 1938 under which the Sperry Gyroscope Company acquired ownership of the klystron patents and opportunities to participate in continuing klystron development at Stanford in return for the promise of future royalties to the Varian brothers and Stanford. In late 1940 as World War II broke out in Europe and American involvement came to be seen as inevitable, most of the Stanford klystron group, including Hansen, Ginzton, and the Varian brothers, transferred to the Sperry plant in Garden City, New York, to continue development of the klystron for microwave radar applications.
From page 116...
... six years I invented some 40 or 50 devices, some of which were relatively important." The Doppler radar techniques developed under Ginzton's direction at Sperry introduced the basic features of many sophisticated civilian and military radars today. Even as they devoted long working hours to these developments, however, Ginzton, Hansen, and the Varian brothers continued to think about the research plans that the war had forced them to leave behind at Stanford.
From page 117...
... at Stanford, taking advantage of new technologies and new government and industrial funding that would become available as an outcome of wartime experiences. Hansen, spending the war years in East Coast laboratories, had also proposed to his widely dispersed Physics Department colleagues that following the war Stanford should set up an interdisciplinary laboratory to continue the advances that had grown out of the prewar invention of the klystron and wartime developments in microwave technology, and to exploit these for both scientific and technological purposes.
From page 118...
... As part of his initial teaching and research activities Ginzton developed a comprehensive family of microwave measurement tools, "making our laboratory the best of its kind in the world," while Chodorow developed course and research activities in microwave electronics. But most of all, Ginzton, Hansen, and Chodorow were seeking to accelerate electrons using those microwave tubes.
From page 119...
... Such a linear accelerator, perhaps 200 feet in length and driven by sufficient microwave power, could be made to accelerate electrons to a billion electron volts (1 GeV) , and these electrons could then be used as probes to study the still largely unknown interior structures of the nuclei of atoms.
From page 120...
... It was Ginzton who realized early on that the klystron could potentially provide the needed megawatt power levels. As of 1946 most klystrons produced power outputs from a few tens of milliwatts to a few tens of watts, although during the war years Ginzton had seen in England a few klystron amplifiers with pulsed power outputs of 20 kilowatts.
From page 121...
... Megawatt power outputs required not only klystron tubes scaled up by factors of between one thousand and one million times but also power supplies that could deliver several hundred kilovolt volt pulses with peak currents of tens to hundreds of amperes, and associated structures that could stand these voltages and currents -- components that simply did not exist at the time. Ginzton's team of students and technicians failed on their first two tries: Vacuum windows
From page 122...
... 1948: FOUNDING OF VARIAN ASSOCIATES During this same period, as Sigurd Varian became the last of the Stanford klystron group to return to the West from Sperry, Ginzton joined with the Varian brothers and others from the Stanford and Sperry groups in founding their long-planned enterprise. Varian Associates was estab
From page 123...
... Hansen, Paul Hunter, Richard Leonard, Stanford physics faculty member Leonard Schiff, H Myrl Stearns, and Russell Varian's wife, Dorothy; other associates were Marvin Chodorow as a consultant and employees Don Snow and Fred Salisbury.
From page 124...
... THE EARLY 1950'S: THE MARK III LEADS TO A NOBEL PRIZE In the early 1950s as the success of the Mark III linac began to appear more certain, attention turned to the physics that could be done with Hansen and Ginzton's machine. In 1950 Robert Hofstadter joined the Stanford physics faculty then led by noted theoretician Leonard Schiff, and the two physicists began a serious examination of how they could study atomic nuclei by observing the scattering of the highenergy electrons that would be generated by the evolving accelerator.
From page 125...
... Within less than a decade the Mark III, as pioneering and productive as it was, became only the infant from which ultimately grew the very much larger and even more productive 2-mile Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. LINEAR ACCELERATORS FOR CANCER THERAPY In addition to his leadership of the Mark III project and the related klystron developments, Ginzton also supervised the construction of some 10 other microwave linear accelerators during this period.
From page 126...
... During the mid-1950s Ginzton and his colleagues also constructed a 10-foot, 35-MeV accelerator for cancer therapy at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, a 20-foot, 60-MeV linac for cancer research at Argonne National Laboratory, and several research accelerators including a 6-foot, 5-MeV linac for medial research at General Electric. After taking over the leadership at Varian six years later, Ginzton continued to crusade for the use of small accelerators in cancer treatment and steadfastly supported many years of related but unprofitable development work, which ultimately led to a line of small electron linacs called Clinacs.
From page 127...
... With regard to the second charge, Ginzton had in fact listed his only relative -- an elderly aunt -- known to be still alive in Russia. As regards the third, since no specific individuals were identified by the security board, Ginzton could only reply that the only individuals known to him that could possibly be characterized in this fashion were Frank Oppenheimer, an instructor with whom Ginzton had shared an assigned office as a graduate student in 1939, but whom he had not encountered since; a Stanford physics M.S.
From page 128...
... . the granting of clearance to you for access to classified security information is clearly consistent with the interests of national security." THE MID 1950'S: PROJECT M By the middle of the 1950s with the Mark III's highenergy physics program well underway, Hofstadter, Panofsky, Ginzton, and a number of their colleagues began to consider the possibility of building a very much larger electron linear accelerator at Stanford.
From page 129...
... In April 1957 these efforts led to a formal $100 million proposal by Stanford to the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense for the construction of the proposed accelerator on Stanford land.
From page 130...
... Ginzton and Panofsky then testified in several rounds of congressional hearings in 1959 and 1960, attempting to obtain congressional approval for construction on the Stanford campus of the world's highest-energy electron accelerator. After Ginzton stepped down as project director in 1960 to assume full-time leadership of Varian Associates, Panofsky took over as director of the renamed Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, or SLAC.
From page 131...
... Ginzton, who at the time was the director of both the Microwave Laboratory and the emerging Project M, felt a deep commitment to both of these projects, especially the completion of the proposed SLAC machine. His colleague "Pief" Panofsky, however, possessed highly regarded capabilities both in guiding the construction of large research facilities and in the basic physics to be done using them.
From page 132...
... In their earliest observation of this phenomenon as published in 1946, Bloch and Hansen in fact apparently, although quite unwittingly at the time, became the first researchers ever to observe a man-made population inversion and the associated phenomenon of stimulated emission -- the physical phenomena underlying all subsequent developments in masers and lasers. Even before the founding of Varian Associates in 1948, Russell Varian, occupying a cramped desk as an unpaid research associate in the Stanford Physics Department, had foreseen the possibilities of nuclear induction and NMR both for chemical analysis and for the precision measurement of geomagnetic fields, and had persuaded the Stanford researchers to obtain patents on their new technology.
From page 133...
... With an appreciation for the land, an eye for the unusual, and an unconventional sense of opportunities, she worked on projects including the Santa Clara County master plan for trails, a system of bicycle trails along California aqueducts, and the conversion of abandoned Pacific coast lighthouses into hostels. Ginzton also served as a director of the locally founded Stanford Bank from 1967 to 1971, a member of the Advisory Board of the Mid-Peninsula Region of the Union Bank from 1971 to 1973, and a member of Northern California Advisory Board of the Union Bank from 1973 to 1981.
From page 134...
... since his student days in 1936 and was elected a fellow of the IRE in 1951. He received the Morris Liebmann Memorial Prize from the IRE in 1957 for his contributions in the development of megawatt-level klystrons, and the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1969 for his overall accomplishments in the development of microwaves.
From page 135...
... THE EDWARD L GINZTON LABORATORY By the mid-1970s Stanford's Microwave Laboratory, the direct descendent of Hansen and Ginzton's initial efforts, had become well established in many new areas of applied physics under the direction of Marvin Chodorow, with widely recognized accomplishments in quantum electronics, lasers and nonlinear optics, acoustic and scanning microscopy, fiber optics, and superconducting materials.
From page 136...
... 136 B I O G R A P H I C A L M E M O I R S AVOCATIONS During his active years Ginzton devoted his leisure time to outdoor activities, including skiing, sailing, and hiking, all of which he shared with his children, and to avocations that included a deep and lifelong personal interest in photography and the restoration of vintage automobiles. At the time of the Carolyn Caddes portrait mentioned below, he had three Model A Fords in his garage awaiting restoration, although his ultimate pride and joy was a 1929 Packard Phaeton sedan, a car of the same vintage as his own arrival in California.
From page 137...
... Making a living is not enough." Ginzton's commitment to cooperation with others might be symbolized by the second word in the original name of Varian Associates. Throughout Ginzton's career his associates first at Sperry, then at Stanford, and finally at Varian spoke of his collegial management style, which encouraged and stimulated those around him to work at a high level of accomplishment.
From page 138...
... of Berkeley, California. It seems appropriate to close this memorial with the same words as in Edward Barlow's National Academy of Engineering memorial tribute to Ginzton: "He was truly a man of broad interests and large and persistent vision, who enjoyed life to the fullest and cared about his family, his associates, and his community." The results of that vision and that caring persist today, in major institutions and in smaller personal memories, across the Silicon Valley landscape and around the world.
From page 139...
... Carolyn Caddes's interview notes and negatives for her volume are also stored in the Stanford University archives. Reminiscences of Ginzton in interviews by several of his professional colleagues, including Marvin Chodorow, Bill Rambo, and Mike Villard, along with the IEEE Legacy and Ginzton's own 1984 interview mentioned above, can be accessed online by searching on "Ginzton" at the IEEE Web portal (www.ieee.org/portal/index.jsp)
From page 140...
... More detailed accounts of how the original Mark III linac evolved into Project M and then SLAC can be found in a May 1966 Technical Report "The Story of Stanford's Two-Mile-Long Linear Accelerator" by Douglas Dupen and in a 1983 contribution by Ginzton himself, both available on the SLAC website (www.slac.stanford.edu/history/.) Preeminent over all of these, however, are Ginzton's own very personal reminiscences as recorded in his 1995 volume Times to Remember: The Life of Edward L
From page 141...
... A linear electron accelera tor.
From page 142...
... Possible medical and indus trial application of linear electron accelerators.
From page 143...
... National Academy energy study. Science 196:372.


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