Oral-History:Bruce P. Strauss
About Bruce P. Strauss
Dr. Bruce Strauss received his ScD (Materials Science), from M.I.T., and an MBA, from the University of Chicago. He has varied experience in materials and devices for large scale applications of superconductivity primarily at the Department of Energy national laboratories and industry.
Retired (2019) Program Manager at the U.S. Department of Energy. Currently IEEE Council on Superconductivity President; Treasurer 2000-2014. IEEE Fellow (Member since 1999). IEEE Council on Superconductivity Swerdlow Award recipient 2012. Treasurer of the Applied Superconductivity Conference, Inc.
About the Interview
BRUCE P. STRAUSS: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, 6 September 2016
Interview #772 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.
Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Bruce P. Strauss, an oral history conducted in 2016 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Bruce P. Strauss
INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel
DATE: 6 September 2016
PLACE: Applied Superconductivity Conference, Denver, CO
Early life and education
Strauss:
So the format is you ask questions and--
Hellrigel:
Right, I will ask questions and we will have a conversation. Feel free to bring up other topics.
Strauss:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes, because it's really documenting your history, and you know it better than I do. Some of our general questions might seem off point because they do not pertain to your career. However, I am trying to add context.
Strauss:
We'll play it by ear.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that's my plan.
Strauss:
Yes, and here is me in two incarnations [presents two business cards]. This is me at the Department of Energy and it is last year's card. I will be the president of the IEEE Council on Superconductivity starting in January 2017.
Hellrigel:
Cool.
Strauss:
Yes, the IEEE Council on Superconductivity. We contribute a lot to this Applied Superconductivity Conference (ASC).
Hellrigel:
Now I'm going to start. I'm Mary Ann Hellrigel. I'm here with Dr. Bruce P. Strauss. We're at the Applied Superconductivity Conference in Denver, Colorado. It's the 50th conference and we're here to record his oral history.
Strauss:
It is the 50th anniversary. It's every two years, 25th conference.
Hellrigel:
Thank you for catching my misstatement. Yes, the 25th conference and the 50th anniversary. It's September 6, 2016. Welcome.
Strauss:
Thank you.
Hellrigel:
We will start with is a little biography. Where and when were you born?
Strauss:
I was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, St. Elizabeth's Hospital, 19 August 1942. I lived in Elizabeth until I went off to college. I am a product of the Elizabeth, New Jersey public schools for better or worse. Elizabeth is/was an interesting town with quite a bit of industry. Phillips, Dodds, and Simmons Mattress and--
Hellrigel:
Shipping.
Strauss:
Shipping. Later shipping, Port of New York. Probably, the national bird there is now the construction crane.
Hellrigel:
Yes, there are many cranes for moving cargo.
Strauss:
I graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School, which was a single-gender high school at that point until the feds came in and said females were getting a second-rate education. It is now a co-ed high school.
Hellrigel:
Now it's co-ed.
Strauss:
My dad was in the last co-ed class and my younger brother was in the last single-gender class. We span that. It was an interesting place to grow up.
Hellrigel:
I'm from Passaic.
Strauss:
Passaic. You're the Jerseyite.
Hellrigel:
Yes, born in the Garden State.
Strauss:
Actually, when people ask where I grew up I tell them Exit 13 [on the New Jersey Turnpike], the Sopranos exit, and they know right where it is.
Hellrigel:
Yes, please tell me a little bit about your parents.
Strauss:
That's interesting. My father was the son of a druggist, about third generation American. He also went through the Elizabeth public schools and then he went to George Washington University. He served in the European theater in World War II. He said the best thing he got out of his high school education was fluent French because besides being an anti-aircraft artillery officer, he translated for everybody else, and had a good time.
Hellrigel:
Did he go to college after the war, too?
Strauss:
He also went to college after the war, Rutgers Law School.
Hellrigel:
George Washington University before the war and Rutgers after the war.
Strauss:
He never practiced law. He was in real estate and late in life he had a very successful income tax business. I think the success of the income tax business was due to my mother, who frankly was a better business person. She had a high school education and was born in either New York City or Brooklyn. She had immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. They were shopkeepers. Both my mom and dad were products of the Great Depression.
Hellrigel:
True.
Strauss:
And --
Hellrigel:
What was your father's name?
Strauss:
Edward.
Hellrigel:
Edward?
Strauss:
My mother's name was Solea.
Hellrigel:
How many siblings do you have?
Strauss:
I have two siblings. My middle brother is Howell. He's a dentist.
Hellrigel:
Howell.
Strauss:
He's named after a dinette company.
Hellrigel:
He is in New Jersey?
Strauss:
He's in south of Philadelphia. Now as a dentist he's the medical director of an AIDS clinic and it morphed into a full-service medical clinic in--it's not Montgomery County. I forgot what county it is.
Hellrigel:
He also left Elizabeth for college.
Strauss:
Everyone left Elizabeth.
Hellrigel:
And--
Strauss:
My younger brother is ten years younger. We're each five years apart. Kevin's actually the business manager of this clinic.
Hellrigel:
I guess, Kevin left Elizabeth for college too and earned a business degree?
Strauss:
He's got a business degree from Boston University (BU). Howell earned a dental degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Kevin, attended Brandeis and BU.
Hellrigel:
Did your parents believe it was important that their children went to college?
Strauss:
Absolutely. It was a given; more for my mother than my father, but it was also my father. I went to MIT. For some reason he would've been much happier if I went to Princeton and was Ivy--
Hellrigel:
--closer to home?
Strauss:
No, it was in the Ivy League.
Hellrigel:
I see, the Ivy League.
Strauss:
But it was fine.
Hellrigel:
When you were growing up did you have hobbies?
Strauss:
I was a ham radio operator and I was probably a nerdy high school kid.
Hellrigel:
So did you have the erector set--
Strauss:
I had erector sets. I had --
Hellrigel:
Train set?
Strauss:
I had a train set, a chemistry set, the Encyclopedia Britannica and all the things that the rising middle class parents would've gotten for their children.
Hellrigel:
When did you start to develop your interest in physics, engineering, and science?
Strauss:
I gained a little bit of interest from an early TV show called Watch Mr. Wizard.
Hellrigel:
Watch Mr. Wizard? [Watch Mr. Wizard was a television program for children. It aired from 1951 to 1965.]
Strauss:
He had really great physics demonstrations that worked well. I liked the ham radio stuff and I got a license when I was twelve or thirteen years old. I really got into science in about---my eighth grade science teacher was "eh," but the ninth grade science teacher at Hamilton Junior High School was a woman who was just very, very good. I was thinking you'd probably ask that and I can't remember her name for the life of me.
Hellrigel:
No, that's fine. You were influenced by your parents, this ninth grade science teacher, and the Watch Mr. Wizard television program.
Strauss:
Yes. I'm presenting a paper at this meeting. I started it “from kilograms to tons,” and was thinking we've got to change it. My daughter had given me a book about using the right words at the right time. I remember as a young kid, I told my dad, “I'm going to grow up and be a pilot.” He said “no, I don't think so, but you're probably going to design planes.” It was that kind of encouragement. My dad could never figure out more. My brothers and I were pretty mechanical.
Hellrigel:
Was your dad mechanical?
Strauss:
Not at all.
Hellrigel:
Not at all?
Strauss:
His idea of a screwdriver was a butter knife.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I have crossed paths with similar folks.
Strauss:
Right? He knew what the difference was, but he never, never really had a set of tools.
Hellrigel:
Did you have a tool kit or tool box?
Strauss:
No, I really got tools when I was an adult and then I collected tools.
Hellrigel:
Did you have any jobs when you were in school before college?
Strauss:
Not really. No
Hellrigel:
No? Would you say you came from a solid, middle-class background?
Strauss:
Yes, absolutely.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
I think my parents, having grown up in the Great Depression, wanted their children to college and would have that background. It--
Hellrigel:
There was no choice.
Strauss:
There was no choice on that.
MIT
Hellrigel:
Why did you select MIT for your bachelor's degree?
Strauss:
That's a really good question. I applied to MIT, Stevens Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and West Point. My parents were doing well, but not that well. I figured West Point and Cornell had--I applied with an NORTC scholarship. I flunked the physical because my overbite was 2 mm over that allowable. I made a snotty remark; I said I could still hold a saber in my mouth and swing across. The dentist didn't think that was very funny. Then it came down; I got accepted to Cornell, Stevens, and MIT. I think my dad liked the cache of MIT. We had gone up on a tour and Cambridge is Cambridge. It's not Hoboken and it certainly is not Princeton. We never got to Cornell. In later life, I've become convinced that you can't get to Ithaca from any place.
Hellrigel:
I visited a friend at Cornell and got there driving Route 17 North. Now you made the decision to enroll at MIT, so did you have a major in mind?
Strauss:
Well, I liked electronics and engineering, so I had gone to MIT thinking I would go into chemistry and/or chemical engineering. However, I hated the freshman chemistry course. It turns out a lot of other students hated that course, too, as did other departments. Consequently, other departments did their own chemistry. During my second semester, I took a material science course from John Wulff, who eventually became one of my thesis advisors.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Strauss:
He was great. Every once in a while in college you will find probably four or five professors that make a difference and Wulff was one of them.
Hellrigel:
Yes. It's interesting that the chemistry department did not realize the problems with that course. The department lost potential majors. Oh well, it's hard to say.
Strauss:
It's almost like math people. You know math people are a religion and they go in.
Hellrigel:
You liked John Wulff's course, so did you have any other memorable classes?
Strauss:
I had a great sophomore physics section with a gentleman who later won a Nobel Prize. Henry Kendall was just a marvelous instructor. [Henry Way Kendall, Jerome Isaac Friedman, and Robert E. Taylor jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in1990.] Kendall could do it with complicated math and then the easy math. I wanted to learn the physics and it was just great. I had a great time at MIT, other than worrying if I would ever get through my freshman year.
Hellrigel:
What did you do besides study?
Strauss:
I was in a number of clubs. I think it was the first time I really became social and had friends and there was always something going on I have remained friends with those people for fifty years, well fifty-five years I'd say.
Hellrigel:
Why clubs did you join?
Strauss:
I was in the radio club. What else did I do there? I don't even remember what it was.
Hellrigel:
Technical and social activities Someone else told there were social events with students from area colleges-
Strauss:
In the early 1960s, at MIT you could have women in your room alone until midnight. They were a lot looser on the in loco parentis.
Hellrigel:
Was MIT co-ed at the time?
Strauss:
Nominally. In the class of 1,000, and it included 18 females.
Hellrigel:
Wow, that is an imbalance.
Strauss:
It's is now pretty close to gender neutral, which is funny when you go in the alumni magazine and there are pictures of kids at a party and the women are in them.
Hellrigel:
How were the female students treated at MIT in the early 1960s? If I use New Jersey slang, I would ask did the males students and professors bust their chops?
Strauss:
Hard to say. I can tell you a story between my junior and senior year. I went with a friend of mine, Bob Kimmel. He had a girlfriend that was in the research in Greensboro, North Carolina. We got there and the girl's father said oh, you boys will have to meet so and so, a woman going to MIT. And we're going oh, my God, an MIT co-ed. She was a really cute young woman. I looked at her and said “gee, if you got into MIT you didn't have a social life.” She goes “yes, that's right. How do you know?” I said “we're at MIT and your social life is about to change. You better learn how to say no.” She came back about ten weeks into the term and said “I should've listened to you early on. I had a whole bunch of dates and I finally picked somebody I liked and—“
Hellrigel:
Leave it at that.
Strauss:
Leave it at that.
Hellrigel:
Did you have any employment research?
Hellrigel:
I worked. The first year between freshman and junior year I worked as a swim instructor. I got the American Red Cross instructor's badge. Then between sophomore and junior year and junior and senior year I worked as a tech.
Hellrigel:
In the lab.
Strauss:
In the lab, yes
Hellrigel:
At the school.
Strauss:
At MIT in what then was metallurgy. It's become material science.
Hellrigel:
Did you have to write a thesis at MIT?
Strauss:
I wrote a thesis. I wrote an undergraduate thesis with the same people I did my doctoral thesis with and it was, "Well, you are staying on; aren't you? Don't worry about it." The thesis was about the change of magnetic properties in pure Niobium with a strain.
Hellrigel:
And when did you decide to continue education?
Strauss:
Then at MIT sort of in your senior year, if you were good in the department, it was just assumed you'd stay on. I got married after senior year. I had an NSF fellowship two of the three years at MIT and I had a great time in grad school.
Hellrigel:
Is your wife from Boston?
Strauss:
No, my wife was from New Brunswick, New Jersey. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. The first year we were married she was in political science at MIT, but she didn’t like it. She disliked it other than the fact that we attended a couple of good parties. This is my first wife. She got a master's in education at Harvard.
Hellrigel:
Did you have any children?
Strauss:
My oldest daughter was born in the second year of grad school.
Hellrigel:
Did you like grad school at MIT?
Strauss:
I loved it. I loved it. It was fun. I was in a good group. Besides John Wulff, my advisor was Bob Rose [Robert M. Rose]. They had a great attitude: You're probably not going to win a Nobel Prize, but we will train you to be a professional. In order to become a professional, they taught me how to treat the admin of people, how to write--
Hellrigel:
Yes, writing is important for grants, reports, and articles.
Strauss:
I give out grants; I wish other people would learn how to write.
Hellrigel:
Would have some instruction.
Strauss:
Some might receive some of that instruction. John Wulff died, it must be twenty years ago, but I'm still keep up with Bob.
Hellrigel:
At that point did you think you would teach or go into research for a private company?
Strauss:
The ultimate was to go to Bell Labs or GE. My wife and I wanted to stay around Boston. We probably had a chronic case of Charles River fever as I learned it was called. So, right afterwards I got a job at Avco Everett Research Laboratory. Basically, it was a NASA-funded laboratory. The director was Arthur Kantrowitz, who invented the ablative heat shield. NASA loved him. He was very, very good and very smart. Their funding went out. I also worked with another guy by the name of John Steckly, who later was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. We worked for him at a company he founded for about a while. Then I went to Argonne National Lab for a year.
Hellrigel:
Why did you leave?
Strauss:
They had grants that were not--
Hellrigel:
You ran out of money
Fermilab
Strauss:
I would've run out of money, so I went to Argonne for a year. Then Fermilab was starting up and that looked like a lot more fun. I was at Fermilab for ten years.
Hellrigel:
Fermilab is based in Boston?
Strauss:
No. Fermilab is based west of Chicago.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that's what I thought. So that's--
Strauss:
When it went there it was actually the National Accelerator Lab. Later it become Fermilab.
Hellrigel:
What made you go to the Fermilab? Where you interested because it was new?
Strauss:
It was new, and they were doing things I liked. A new lab is much more fun than an old lab. Very directed. I had a lab director that just got it done and if you could do it cheaper, you got more points for that.
Hellrigel:
Since it's a federal lab, what type of projects did you work on?
Strauss:
We were building the big accelerator. It's now a 200 GEV accelerator 4 miles in circumference. That's a small machine now. The machine at CERN is 27 km, which means it's about 18 miles in circumference. So, it was big at the time and then it became small. It was an interesting experience of getting things done. The lab director wanted it. He was the type of person that said "promise less, deliver more."
Hellrigel:
Who was that?
Strauss:
This is Robert Wilson. Robert Rathbun Wilson. It was run so well that even though the magnets were made maybe two or three times before he got it right, he still returned money to the government at the end.
Hellrigel:
He wanted to be seen as efficient and cost effective.
Strauss:
It worked sometimes. He won more than half the time and it was fun. We used to talk and he said “oh, I have a lot of trouble getting technicians and young scientists who can work with their hands.” I said, you can work with your hands because you grew up on a farm.” And he goes “oh, yes.” I said “when something is broken, you didn’t call a repair man. You fixed it on site and you learned a lot about mechanical, electrical, whatever systems.” He was very good. He was at Los Alamos during World War II. If you've ever heard of proton therapy, Wilson was at Harvard for a while after the war and he wrote a seminal paper on it.
Hellrigel:
You enjoyed working with him?
Strauss:
He was just fun.
Hellrigel:
How many people worked at the lab at that time?
Strauss:
I'm going to say within a couple of years about a thousand.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Strauss:
It's gone up to 2,000. It's come down.
Hellrigel:
Was it based at University of Chicago?
Strauss:
No. It's all Department of Energy (DOE). The labs are GOCOs, government owned, contracted or operated. The contract was between--well, at that point, the Atomic Energy Commission and the consortium of universities.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Strauss:
That form goes back to Brookhaven and Argonne laboratories. That way they could pay the scientists more.
Hellrigel:
Government salary tables versus lab pay scales were different. You rose to assistant director of Fermilab.
Strauss:
Yes. Eventually, what physicists do is once they have a machine, you know what are we going to do next? When the lab started superconducting technology was about eight to nine years old. It wasn't mature enough to do the original ring. You go with the technology that you have your arms around. But, once the ring was done, we started on superconducting magnets. And, I was in charge of getting enough superconductor to build it with an industry that had advanced to adolescence. It was probably less advanced or matured than that. I was lucky enough to work with a guy by the name of Paul Reardon, who understood scaling projects.
Hellrigel:
His name again?
Strauss:
Paul J. Reardon.
Hellrigel:
You enjoyed working with him.
Strauss:
He was a major mentor and a hell of a lot of fun. He would go around saying he was just a simple New England country boy.
Hellrigel:
It seems that what you were doing was important, but who you were doing it wait was also important.
Strauss:
Well I think what you got at Fermilab, more than most any other lab I've seen, is just the style and the panosh of getting things done.
Hellrigel:
Where working conditions at Fermilab high pressure?
Strauss:
Yes, when things needed to get done. When the first main ring was done, it wasn't working and basically Wilson said all hands on deck. I mean, again, those aren't the divisions. Everyone's in the accelerator division and we will get it done. It took about four to six months to commission that machine. Later machines were done in two weeks because there were computer controls.
Hellrigel:
What would you say your average workday was twelve hours?
Strauss:
We worked, yes. Everybody did it.
Hellrigel:
Then why did you leave Fermilab?
Strauss:
One, I got divorced and the State of Illinois wasn't big enough for my ex-wife and me. Two, John Steckly, who I worked for at Avco, founded a company in Waltham, Massachusetts. I was at the Applied Superconductivity Conference in Pittsburgh one year and I was asked “do you want to come and work for us.” I said “is this the job interview.” They said “yes”. That was short.
Hellrigel:
I have heard about Steckly from a lot of superconductivity people.
Strauss:
Steckly. His first name was Zedneck, but everybody called him John. Bright, bright guy.
Hellrigel:
You worked for their magnetic corporation remotely.
Strauss:
Right.
MRI
Hellrigel:
What I found interesting about that is you developed a MRI electrotechnology?-
Strauss:
They were doing some of the first commercial MRI magnets. They were to modern MRI magnets like the Wright Brothers' airplane was to a 747. Steckly and the others were used to making magnets for physicists. It was hard to convince them that physicians didn't care; they just wanted to turn it on.
Hellrigel:
The physicians were interested in something that worked.
Strauss:
It either works or it doesn’t and--
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
I said it's like a Sony TV set. It had on/off and automatic fine tune and now it just has on/off on the new ones.
Hellrigel:
Right. The physicians really didn’t need to know how it truly worked as long as it works and what the dials meant.
Strauss:
Yes. Come on, they're radiologists. They don't touch patients. They all look at-
Hellrigel:
Right, right.
Strauss:
Actually, we were owned by Johnson & Johnson at the time, which was interesting. It was a small company and Johnson & Johnson came in and said your lobby does not meet our standards. So, the lobby was redecorated immediately. It was interesting. It was interesting to learn how to get the medical device through the FDA. We made magnets for physics people. They were also making some for the superconducting ring at Fermilab. It was like several small companies. It operated at the financial edge, financial edge being an understatement.
Hellrigel:
The company lived contract to contract, grant to grant.
Strauss:
Right.
Hellrigel:
You did not have much to build with economically; not much of an opportunity to set aside funds for a new project.
Strauss:
Yes. It was interesting. Johnson & Johnson is in the disposable business, whether it's a Band-Aid or a Tylenol or what have you. Then suddenly they're in the capital equipment business. They hadn't realized that when you put something in a hospital, what you're really selling is the service contract.
And particularly for radiology departments, those are funding sources that people go through and it's a fixed amount. You just want to toll the people through.
Hellrigel:
When you were working on MRIs was there any concern about the impact of the machines on people? The exposure?
Strauss:
I think there was enough research. I think the first MRIs were done at the University of Illinois. Paul Lauterbur who later won a Nobel Prize. There's always been work on the magnetic exposure to people. What happens is it's not the magnetic field; it's the ramping the field up and down because that will induce current in the brain. You're a water saline solution. You change the field; you'll induce currents.
Hellrigel:
When you were working with these kinds of projects, what were the safety regulations? Were you worried about anything?
Strauss:
Well, yes, I can tell you a story with the magnets. One of the things you do is they're in a vacuum chamber and in the best of all possible worlds you get a U stamp from the ASME. You've probably heard there's a real procedure for what's going on. I'd gone to John and said “we need a U stamp on there.” He said, “I'm not spending the money for a U stamp.” And I said “John, we're going to do some role playing. I'll be the prosecutor. You be in the witness chair. John, you have a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and you're aware of the U stamp. You're a member of the National Academy of Engineering. You are aware of the pressure vessel code, but you decided not to get the stamp. And, the magnet blew up and you put my client at risk.” So, it was get the damn stamp on there.
Hellrigel:
Right. Do you think your father as a lawyer influenced you--
Strauss:
No, I think my first father-in-law, who was a Harvard lawyer.
Hellrigel:
He influenced you by making you think about the risk.
Strauss:
Yes. In all things there is risk. You balance risk with cost and--
Hellrigel:
Sure. While working at this job you got an MBA?
Strauss:
I got an MBA while I was at Fermilab.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Strauss:
I was asked by I needed an MBA. I said, “you know, I'm buying several million dollars' worth of superconductor. Look at it as a language course.”
Hellrigel:
Did you find yourself becoming more interested in the financial aspects?
Strauss:
Not so much financial, but contracts. We talked about Paul Reardon. Well, he'd talk about buying stuff and when we went to buy, we were buying long, lean line items. Getting the superconducting alloy was about an 18-month process. So, one day I'm at MIT and he said “you need to be in Portland tomorrow.” I said, “great, I'm in Cambridge. I'll drive up.” He meant Portland, Oregon because I was I was going to the company that made it.
We went to Portland, Oregon and spent the morning doing nice-nice. After lunch, Reardon started talking business. Finally, he said “tell me what your processing lot is.” They said, “several hundred pounds.” He goes “we'll buy four.” And I'm going what. He says “have the bid on Bruce's desk tomorrow morning.” As we're driving out, he told me to call up John Buckley. Who's he? He's the best copper salesman in the United States. And 48 hours later I had an order for a boxcar full of probably the best copper being made in the United States. If we were going to buy a lot of it, we better buy it now. I learned how to buy and how to write specs. Like employees of universities and labs, I had an education benefit, so I said pay for my MBA, and they did.
Hellrigel:
You left--
Strauss:
Well, Fermilab.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and then when you moved on, I see that you were a vice president of Cosign [phonetic].
Strauss:
Cosign? That was a consulting company we had. Johnson & Johnson got to the point where they realized yes, they were in the disposable business, so they sold the business making MRI magnets. They pulled a deal with GE, so for a dollar GE would take over the MRI service contracts.
Hellrigel:
Did this make you a GE employee?
Strauss:
No. They disbanded the company, sold the assets, and just closed.
Hellrigel:
I see, GE only planned on servicing the MRI machines all ready sold. Now you had to move on.
Strauss:
I moved on and ended up doing cost project consulting, mostly for the DOE. Babcock and Wilcox was one of our clients, but a lot of it was DOE projects.
Hellrigel:
What was Babcock and Wilcox making at that time? I know they made--
Strauss:
Well, that division made the nuclear reactors for subs.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Strauss:
There's a turn-down in military waters and they said we ought to find something else to do. And, again, at one of these conferences they walked up and said can you help us? So we worked with them for a long time. We did the independent cost estimates for the superconducting supercollider. I can say, without fear of contradiction, our cost was much more nearly correct than the physicists. I didn’t say we were right. We were just more correct.
Hellrigel:
A bit more accurate.
Strauss:
We made better assumptions. The physicists’ lab workers and grad students were paid very little. However, you cannot extrapolate that to a big project where you really have people you're paying an hourly wage. They made some assumptions on learning curves, which were God-awful wrong. They were three times better than Toyota, which we pointed out. I said I'm sorry; that makes a difference in factor or two of the cost.
Hellrigel:
If you could not determine the cost of doing the work, you would not last long in business?
Strauss:
What happens on a lot of government projects? If you are working for DOE, you look at it from the other side. The physicists go into a smoke-filled room, or the modern non-smoking smoke-filled room, and try to figure it out. The DOE will spend this much, so they go back into that price bucket and start making assumptions on how to it. Then you really have to go and look at the assumptions. To calibrate it, the gentleman who did the cost reviews for DOE said, “if you're an optimist, you multiply by E and if you're a pessimist, you multiply by Pi.” And again, it's scaling. It's scaling and risk and --
Hellrigel:
And it's new, so it's not--
Strauss:
It's not some, for [crosstalk]. For an academic, this is the size of their universe. Then you have to learn how to deal with vendors who unfortunately underbid to get the job and then have to figure out how they're going to deliver.
Hellrigel:
I saw a phrase "due diligence.” What does that mean?
Strauss:
It's due diligence. It started with the projects we did at Fermilab. When you start making something it's how you are making it. When do you need to test it? And that goes to how you're managing the project. Do you have the safety and do you have costs of X, Y, and Z? And for physicists it's, "Oh, I never thought of that."
Hellrigel:
You wanted to let them see all the factors that might be--
Strauss:
Yes, right.
Hellrigel:
Did you enjoy that job?
Strauss:
It's a matter of you're so smart. You'd just be in a lot of trouble.
Hellrigel:
Well, did you spend much time in the lab? It was, what, twelve years?
Strauss:
When I was at Fermilab, it was a combination. Colleagues of mine were doing the first models of the superconducting magnets. There were weeks we were the biggest purchasers of liquid helium in the United States, but there are times in an early technology where it's an Edisonian process. You don't have an engineering manual on designing a device. You make models and you learn what works and what doesn’t. I'm still trying to get people to get an engineering manual for superconducting magnets and this is like a 30-year quest, but we're getting closer.
Hellrigel:
It sounds like a project for somebody.
Strauss:
Yes.
Department of Energy
Hellrigel:
Then you left that organization. However, it seems that your relationship with the Department of Energy--
Strauss:
Yes, well I talked about Dave Sutter [David F. Sutter]. He preceded me at the Department of Energy and knew I was doing all these cost studies on the other side of the table. I think he figured it was better for the DOE to have me on their side of the table. He said, “come on down and you can run your own consulting company for a while.” Well, it's feast or famine and I got to the age where it was better to… I've had fun at DOE.
Hellrigel:
You were the vice president at your company.
Strauss:
It was my company, yes. My wife was the president, so we were a woman-owned company. Not that it made a lot of difference.
Hellrigel:
Sure, some contract bids were supposed to favor a woman-owned company. What's her background?
Strauss:
She has a degree in education, but spent most of her time in retail sales. She worked for a company called Undercover Wear that sold lingerie like Tupperware. You don't want to know.
Hellrigel:
No, we can move on. You were a small company and that--
Strauss:
It's good times.
Hellrigel:
At that point you were living in Boston?
Strauss:
We were living in Brookline, Mass. Yes, in Boston.
Hellrigel:
You got back to the Charles River?
Strauss:
Yes. My story of leaving Massachusetts. These were the days when they gave you a physical to figure out if they wanted to take you on their medial plan.
I was at Argonne and then here I am, in my late twenties, on an examining table in the middle of the Illinois Prairie. The doctor said: “You got a heartbeat. You're fine. But, you're suffering from a sickness.” I said: “what's that.” He said: “Oh, you have a chronic case of Charles River fever. You can't figure out why you're sitting on an examining table in the middle of the prairie and out of the smelling distance of the Charles.” I love the Chicago area and we had a good time there. My ex-wife stayed there.
Hellrigel:
Then you went on to MIT.
Strauss:
I was at MIT. Well, MIT was an employer when I first went to the DOE. They had me there at what's called an IPA, so as an MIT employee working at DOE.
Hellrigel:
Did you teach?
Strauss:
No. The only thing I teach is scuba diving. I am still a scuba instructor.
Hellrigel:
You're at MIT and then you make the official jump to the DOE.
Strauss:
Yes, I went from a pseudo Fed to a Fed [federal employee].
Hellrigel:
Once again, you have to relocate.
Strauss:
While I was an MIT employee I was assigned to DOE, so we--
Hellrigel:
Oh, so you were down in Washington anyway.
Strauss:
I was in Washington anyway.
Hellrigel:
Did you mind moving to Washington?
Strauss:
We had a hard time leaving Boston. My wife and I had a social life in Boston. The people she worked with and friends were in Boston. We live in the Bethesda - Potomac area and it probably has the highest concentration of Ph.Ds. or lawyers or what have you. It's got the highest total--
Hellrigel:
Folks with university degrees. The most educated in America.
Strauss:
Yes, the most degrees of any place. We have made a great social life down there, too.
Hellrigel:
You are still at the--
Strauss:
DOE.
Hellrigel:
DOE.
Strauss:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Do you enjoy that post?
Strauss:
It's fun. Somebody says what do you do and I say I have a great job. I get to correct all my former colleagues' papers. One nice thing, I became the project manager for the CERN LHC [Large Hadron Collider] for the ring components. As a result, I did all the procurement reviews at CERN, including those for the magnets, which are the major big component of the machine. I just made great friends. My favorite story is about the end of the first review. The director general's sitting there and I asked “are you going to have inspectors at the plants?” He said, “Oh, but we have a contract” and I said “I have a rule about contracts.” He goes “what's that?” I said “vendors lie.” He goes “I don't understand you.” I said “well, you get 50 percent more words.” He says “what's that, vendors lie?” I said, “Absolutely.” And on my committee was an Italian and a stream of Italian going across. I'm going I finally - -. What did you say? He says I told him you were right and gave him three examples.
You knew he had listened because one of my other colleagues went to a CERN committee council meeting, which is their board of directors, and told me the director got up and said, “I learned something really important in the last couple of weeks. Vendors lie.” Then I get a call and the person on the phone said, “That was you, Bruce. Wasn't it?”
Hellrigel:
But it's true. Even if someone's going to get the contract, they probably think they have to tell you what you want to hear.
Strauss:
He's in academics.
Hellrigel:
If the contract bid sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true.
Strauss:
It is too good to be true.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
Thinking of that, I had a mentor at Fermilab that was in the DOE side office. He said, “yes, if you get bids like that, you are morally responsible for not taking it. I will not let you knowingly lead somebody down the garden path.”
Hellrigel:
So that's the problem, if there's a policy, that you have to take the low bidder?
Strauss:
That's wrong. It's the lowest bid from a qualified vendor. I've spent the last year with Fermilab saying here's how you qualify your vendors. Here's where they need to be financially. Here's people. Here's plant. Here's fixtures.
Hellrigel:
Increasingly, you've become more involved with the financial end.
Strauss:
Yes, well, it's contracts.
Hellrigel:
Contracts. How many people do you manage?
Strauss:
Right now I'm basically an in-house consultant on projects, so I can have fun and not have the overhead.
Hellrigel:
Do you have a project you would like to pursue?
Strauss:
I'm a couple of years from retirement. I'm finishing up a project on the upgrade of CERN.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
When you are sixty-five years old CERN requires you to retire, so my contract will end soon. It is France’s retirement policy. The DOE can't force you to retire. I think we're going to retire together once it--
Hellrigel:
--retirement plans.
Strauss:
DOE had the wonderful retirement course that said you don’t retire from something; you retire to something. Now I am working on the two, making the transition and retiring to something.
Hellrigel:
Sure, you are retiring into consulting. Another person told me a similar story.
Strauss:
Yes, consulting.
Hellrigel:
You are also retiring into scuba school and teaching scuba diving.
Strauss:
Yes, scuba school and consulting. My wife has a condo in Miami and just can't see spending more than two or three weeks a year there.
Hellrigel:
Where else would you spend your time?
Strauss:
I don't know. My wife's giving me a hard time. Think about it.
Hellrigel:
She's in the--
IEEE Council on Superconductivity
Strauss:
I’ve just taken on the presidency of the IEEE Council on Superconductivity and it's like Cosa Nostra, the IRA, or whatever. Once in, never out.
Hellrigel:
You are also the treasurer of the Applied Superconductivity Conference.
Strauss:
It was actually funny. They had the opening plenary yesterday and one of my colleagues puts up the organizational chart from the 1974 conference. I'm sitting there as treasurer and this year's secretary, Kathleen Amm, goes, "You started in 1974 and you've been doing it since then?" Yes, Kathleen.
Hellrigel:
It's the treasurer.
Strauss:
It's the treasurer.
Hellrigel:
You're the one and only treasurer.
Strauss:
I'm good at corporate memory.
Hellrigel:
I'm hope to attend the history session on Thursday.
Strauss:
Yes, I'm doing a 15-minute talk, so my talk is the Fermilab scaling up.
Hellrigel:
Nobody else has volunteered to step into the lurch and take the treasurer post, so you are the long running treasurer of the Applied Superconductivity Conference.
Strauss:
I didn't want to be president. The treasurer goes on forever. As one of my colleagues said, “you're the history. You keep the same treasurer.”
Hellrigel:
Yes, you are the institutional memory.
Strauss:
The treasurer’s role means writing about four checks a year, making sure someone else does the tax returns and the 5021C3, and what have you.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and you are going to take the presidency, but you didn't want it.
Strauss:
Well, I took the presidency of the IEEE Council on Superconductivity, which is a separate organization from the Applied Superconductivity Conference.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that is true. The Council on Superconductivity is an IEEE council..
Strauss:
Yes, it’s an IEEE council.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
We were again at one of these conferences and Moises Levy came up to me and said, “I'm taking you out to dinner.” He was very suave, so I didn't realize he was twisting my arm. Levy said: “I'm making you treasurer of the IEEE Council on Superconductivity.” I asked: “What do I have to do?” He responded, “Don't worry about it.” Since then I have been the treasurer.
Hellrigel:
Since when have you been the [crosstalk]
Strauss:
2000. And that's been fun also. It's been really a good group of people and it's an interesting business model. We wind up publishing the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity, the intellectual content of the Applied Superconductivity Conference. We follow IEEE publication policy, so some material will not be published. Basically, we take the excess and dump it back in student support; we've got a fellowship program. Moises said “we don't recognize our own, so we need a lifetime achievement award which will come with a $5,000 honorarium. We’re going to get a medal and it will be made out of high-temperature superconductor.” I said, “over my dead body we're making it out of Niobium.”
Hellrigel:
Too expensive?
Strauss:
Well, no, the other stuff wouldn’t last a year.
Hellrigel:
So Applied Superconductivity Conference Incorporated then becomes affiliated with IEEE.
Strauss:
I think it's the other way around.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Strauss:
Right? So IEEE is a vendor.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
That being said, if you ever talk about interlocking director, where that line is not defined, this is an example.
Hellrigel:
I see both entities have an overlapping group of what the IEEE calls volunteers.
Strauss:
So.
Hellrigel:
It is an IEEE Council, not a Society.
Strauss:
We looked at it for a while. We came to the conclusion that we couldn't get enough members to support being a Society and the IEEE overhead on a Council is just significantly less. That being said, at IEEE you can now become an affiliate of a Council and their mailing list –it always amazes me – is close to one thousand.
Hellrigel:
Then the IEEE as the vendor, that's the publication?
Strauss:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
As we got that, just before --like 3 minutes before - I saw you I put a bid in for publishing papers from another conferences. There are two conferences in Europe next year that we're doing the publication. It's ASC on the even years and there's a conference called Magnet Technology and also European conference on superconductivity that we do.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
So.
Hellrigel:
So you're dealing globally.
Strauss:
Global. We've got a European chapter. We've got a sister society in Japan. We've supported a lot of small meetings that are related. Superconductivity goes from very small detector devices to… I should take you around and show you. You've got a 27 km ring and it's got detectors that just about fit in there. So the size difference is many orders of magnitude.
Hellrigel:
Just out of curiosity is superconductivity linked to those pills that are used for prostate cancer?
Strauss:
No. That's radiation. That's radioactive. Superconductivity is linked to proton therapy, so most of the accelerators are superconducting cyclotron because you can make them small. Then the magnets to take the beam and laser that on the patient. It's a treatment modality for prostate that is non-invasive. I think it has a 94 percent to 96 percent cure rate. Yes. The nice thing about this is it is proton smart bombs of a thing called a Bragg peak, where the energy is dumped in a tissue. In fact, plot energy dumped against the energy of the particle there's one point where it all dumps. We can dump the energy within a millimeter. In terms of radiation therapy, we get some tissue damage going in. There's no tissue damage going out. That's a big deal.
Hellrigel:
Right, right. Because [crosstalk].
Strauss:
That's also used for eye melanomas. There's a physician at Mass General that used them for a thing called an arteriovenous malformation where the capillaries and veins and arteries of the brain are jumbled up and you basically can cauterize it with the protons.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Strauss:
There are a lot of systems going in the United States now. It's not a cheap therapy, but it's non-invasive.
Hellrigel:
Right. Well, yes, and is it covered?
Strauss:
It is covered now. It is covered now.
Hellrigel:
I'm just going to check the camera.
Strauss:
Do you have enough tape?
Hellrigel:
I have a digital camera, so I am recording on a 64 GB chip.
Strauss:
Yes, we just gave out at this conference a USB key with all of the proceedings of the conference over the last fifty years, so it's now on 16 gig key.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I have four chips with 64 gigs because I am recording nine oral histories at this conference.
Strauss:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
My late father was a Boy Scout troop leader, so I have to be prepared. Just to be safe, I got a fourth chip at Office Depot down the street--
Strauss:
Yah, we have a place near us in Maryland called CompuCenter and they have their own brand. They're about a quarter of the price of everybody else.
Hellrigel:
Usually, I go to Micro Center.
Strauss:
MicroCenter.
Hellrigel:
It is a small chain of computer stores. I go to the store in Paterson, New Jersey.
Strauss:
They're great. I love them.
Hellrigel:
I originally came across the company in Cleveland when I was in grad school.
Strauss:
There's one in Chicago, too. It's near my daughter.
Hellrigel:
It's a fabulous store and the tech department is very helpful.
Strauss:
Yes, if you ask a question, there's a good chance you get an answer.
Family, personal life
Hellrigel:
Yes. You have one daughter. How many other--
Strauss:
I have two daughters.
Hellrigel:
Two daughters.
Strauss:
Yes, and a stepson and a stepdaughter.
Hellrigel:
Are any of them engineers?
Strauss:
No. My older daughter is a dean at Purdue University in management. Her husband's an oncologist. My younger daughter is a CPA and her husband does computer security. My stepson just moved from the University of Illinois to Northeastern University. He's a professor of kinesthesiology and psychology and that interaction. His wife earned a Ph.D. in microbiology. When they got married I asked “Lisa, are you going to be an academic?” She said, “I've had enough of this academic stuff. I'm going to law school.” She is an intellectual property attorney.
Hellrigel:
All well-educated and gainfully employed
Strauss:
My stepdaughter is a nutritionist. Her husband's a psychologist who does prison psychology.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Strauss:
He runs companies that provide medical services to prisons.
Hellrigel:
There's a wide variety of professions
Strauss:
Yes. They're good kids. None of them need money and they're all independent.
Hellrigel:
You gave them their wings.
Strauss:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Grandchildren?
Strauss:
Together my wife and I have eight. The oldest is Jack. He just graduated from the University of Illinois. He's working for Bristol-Myers Squibb in Princeton. I attended that last IEEE TAB [Technical Activities Board] meeting in New York and he was also in New York. I go, “Jack, you look tired and you're thirsty,” so we went into the hotel bar. He said “grandpa, what can I order?” I go, “you're twenty-two years old and a college graduate, so order anything you damn well please.” His brother's going to be a sophomore at Illinois. He's the closest one. He wanted to go into environmental engineering and I said he couldn't major in that because he'd become a dilatant. He would know a lot of things, but not be an expert in anything. So, he's studying mechanical engineering--
Hellrigel:
What do you mean by a dilatant?
Strauss:
I think the environmental engineers need to know the third law of thermodynamics and it's not a break-even system.
Hellrigel:
You did not want him to become a tree-hugging activist.
Strauss:
No hugging the trees. He's very good. During high school he did part of the work to change the building code in DuPage County. The new code requires more insulation in walls and stuff.
Hellrigel:
Mechanical engineering.
Strauss:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
His name?
Strauss:
He's Josh.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
Those are my two grandchildren.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Strauss:
Suzanne's grandchildren are all younger. My stepson grandson, AJ is thirteen and I think he may be taller than me. He's a major hockey player. Stacia, Suzanne's daughter, has two girls. They're all within two years of each other. They're from ninth grade down to fifth grade or something.
Hellrigel:
They're beyond toddlers.
Strauss:
Yes. They give you a hard time. Well, the older granddaughter is the State of New York eighth grade debate champion, so you can't argue with her. It's very frustrating. If you get bright grandkids, you just can't pull anything over on them.
Hellrigel:
Are any of them interested in what's now called STEM?
Strauss:
The older granddaughter spent the week at West Point this spring on STEM. Her younger sister comes up and says, “grandpa, I'm not getting enough science and math.” I'm going good, just keep complaining. The boy, I can't figure out what he's going to do.
Hellrigel:
Do you help them or give them advice?
Strauss:
I said I'm a consultant, so very often I've done it with nieces and nephews. I did some math things and purposely came up with the wrong answer because I wanted them to find out what's wrong. My niece who is now a Harvard graduate, said "Uncle Bruce doesn't know math at all; does he?"
Hellrigel:
Well, it sounds like they're quite educated.
Strauss:
Yes, they're fine.
Hellrigel:
When you retire or not retire, but leave the DOE, and are going to do something else? Do you think it will be in your field or will you opt for a re-creation, reinvention?
Strauss:
I don't know. You sit and say look, I know things. I might be able to help you. Socially the field has been great. I've looked at a couple of Nobel Prize acceptance speeches and there's one that says it's the people, damn it.
Hellrigel:
True. I hear that statement often.
Strauss:
I read the speech of one guy who thought the best thing about the Nobel Prize was getting a marked parking space at Berkeley.
Hellrigel:
Oh, gosh. Well, parking must be a valuable commodity on campus.
Strauss:
He says that's a big deal at Berkeley. No, there are spaces at Berkeley. They're just stenciled NP.
Hellrigel:
I see, everybody knows a Nobel Prize winner parks in that spot.
Strauss:
Yes, right.
Hellrigel:
You're quite content with your career?
Strauss:
Yes, I've had a lot of fun.
Hellrigel:
Is there anything you would've done that you didn't get to do?
Strauss:
There are always things like that. Look, everybody in life does what ifs, if I had only done that. Then yes, I've made mistakes. Yes, there are paths that I've probably not taken. In the end you sort of look back on short term. In the end it doesn’t matter.
Hellrigel:
Did you serve in the military?
Strauss:
No, I told you I got rejected from an ROTC.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I am sorry.
Strauss:
When I got to MIT I said what should I do? And there's this wonderful lady with gray hair and says I haven't lost anybody to the military in twenty years; don't worry about it. And if you get a draft notice, come and see me. I was going to MIT. I thought I'd go into ROTC and then didn't. Although anybody from MIT that went into ROTC always got a gray bill in one of the scientific divisions of the service. So it wouldn’t have been--
Hellrigel:
--infantry Vietnam.
Strauss:
No. One of my good friends taught electronics and what's a Fort Knox.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
Or they played golf in the afternoon. I had a good deal.
Hellrigel:
Is there anything we didn't cover?
Soviet, Chinese and Italian engineers
Strauss:
I had a great time. I was a liaison physicist at Fermilab for the first group of Russians that came over. There was talk about culture things coming in. The number one story I need to tell you is about them getting out of the PX at the Russian Embassy. They used to be able to get Stolichnaya at 50 cents a half liter.
Hellrigel:
My gosh that is awful inexpensive.
Strauss:
A couple of weeks after they arrived, they invited me and my ex-wife over for lunch. All our grandparents were Eastern European, so we knew the diet. During lunch, one of them asked by Americans needed so many ice cubes. I said, “what are you talking about?” He responded, “the ice cube compartment in your refrigerator is really humungous.” I said, “we like parties and it is also for frozen food.” He asked, “what's frozen food? All I had were tin food. This is a capitalist waste.” Two weeks later he opened the refrigerator and said, “refrigerator, best American invention.” I said, “come on; two weeks ago it was a capitalist waste, so what changed your mind?” He goes “twenty-four half liters of cold vodka at one time.”
It was also interesting comparing labs We’d go out and buy instrumentation, but they made everything from scratch. The first thing they did was get manuals for Techtronic scopes and this and that.
Hellrigel:
When was this cultural exchange?
Strauss:
God. It was in the mid-1970s, yes.
Hellrigel:
It was during the Cold War?
Strauss:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Was there any friction?
Strauss:
No, no. One of the guys was on the softball team and he was a good hitter. He said, “why can't I get up all the time? Everyone gets a chance. But I'm the best hitter.” They would throw parties and there was one year I was working on my birthday. I got excoriated. You're not supposed to work on your birthday. Why? It's against the law in Russia. They had a project to get done, so we're out at the site and suddenly in the afternoon they came in with a big fruit tray and a couple of very cold bottles of vodka. The assistant lab director drives by and asked if will Professor Goldwasser [Edwin L. “Ned” Goldwasser] will be upset because we're having a party. I said “yes, only if you don't invite him.”
Hellrigel:
Yes, always remember to invite the boss.
Strauss:
They were really fun.
Hellrigel:
Did them come to the U.S. as part of an exchange program at Fermilab?
Strauss:
No, they had an experiment. They had a hydrogen gas target in the middle of the ring. They brought that over. We provided the cryogenics. You learn that when they wrote papers, the Russian language doesn't have definite, indefinite articles and they knew they had to use one and it was wrong. It was fun.
Hellrigel:
And you remember their scientific organization?
Strauss:
Yes, so one of them came over and said, “you're now a fellow of the International Institute of Electrotechnical Sciences.” It's in Russian and English.
Hellrigel:
Did you travel to the USSR?
Strauss:
I've not travelled to the USSR. I had invitations to spend the summer working there, but it just didn't work out.
Hellrigel:
Are they active in superconductivity?
Strauss:
The last time I saw them was at a conference in California. There's a great story. When they would come over and visit they always brought big suitcases and filled them with Levi's jeans. The jeans were valuable on the black market. The last time I said, “you're taking Levi's back?” He said, “no. We are bringing back sugar. Mr. Gorbachev thinks we're a family and a nation of drunks, so he's limited vodka production.”
Hellrigel:
He will use the sugar to make his own vodka.
Strauss:
I said, “didn't they learn anything from America’s prohibition.” He goes “politicians never learn.” I said, “you're making your own?” He said, “yes.” I asked, “whose bathtub are you using?” He goes “my neighbor's. When I was at Fermilab you taught me how to take a bath three times a week.”
Hellrigel:
Oh, boy. That's funny.
Strauss:
It was stuff like that.
Hellrigel:
Well, it's a cultural experience.
Strauss:
It's absolutely cultural.
Hellrigel:
There are so many cultural differences such as plumbing fixtures.
Strauss:
Yes, right.
Hellrigel:
Oh, and refrigerators are also different.
Strauss:
Well, when Fermilab was started there was a bunch of forms. Wilson always thought he was Leonardo DaVinci reincarnated. He took all of the farmhouses, lifted them up, moved them. This created terrible traffic jams. He made a village and out of a farmhouse he got two apartments, sometimes three. The Russians got one of these apartments, which was three times what they had in the Soviet Union. They had their wives over, but not their children.
Hellrigel:
Because they--that might mean they--
Strauss:
Didn't want to go back. They were going back and the wives said "What a life." He said “I make three meals a day and otherwise I go to the pool at Fermilab.”
Hellrigel:
Well, it is a different lifestyle.
Strauss:
Different lifestyle.
Hellrigel:
Especially for academics and--
Strauss:
Yes, and as academics, they lived well.
Hellrigel:
Yes. You have been active in the field and around in the early years, so what is your hope for your applied superconductivity organizations?
Strauss:
I'm trying to get people to do that as--yes, as a technology doesn't become old. Are you now a textbook technology and there's nothing to invent? I've always had a small dinosaur in my briefcase saying, come on guys, these couldn't evolve either. Usually stops people. I have to tell you we're really just beginning to look at the history. The academics never believe there'd be change.
Hellrigel:
What's the split? I would consider you more so a researcher/business person than an academic.
Strauss:
For my career, I would love teaching, but haven't. I've done big, big projects. This conference I'd say it's 40 to 45 percent big projects. The other papers split between materials development and the superconducting electronics.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Strauss:
One of the big applications in electronics is cone filters for cell phone towers. So the slight differences in the frequency and they're very fine filters. They're basically on a lot of cell phones. When you connect they adjust the frequency. So that's a big thing. The other is on electronics here at NIST, superconducting voltage standards. So the standard volt is now defined on a superconducting junction.
Hellrigel:
For the U.S. or global?
Strauss:
More globally, yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
IEEE spends a lot of time on national or international standards and we have a chair of standards in the IEEE Council on Superconductivity. Why are we doing this? We don’t want the Japanese setting the standards that we have to live up to.
Hellrigel:
When you look at early electricity there were attempts to set international standards but differences remain for example between the U.S. and Europe. But once you start to build your power plants and distribution lines according to a certain set of standards, you're set on a path.
Strauss:
Yes, the stuff gets set in concrete early on.
Hellrigel:
I noticed there are many graduate students from Asia attending the conference?
Strauss:
The Asians have brought more graduate students than other countries to the last several conferences. Number one, when you have an accepted paper here it goes into the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. It becomes a peer-reviewed paper and that's a more important thing in Asia for students than here.
Hellrigel:
I see.
Strauss:
Boy, they clearly have budgets to bring them over.
Hellrigel:
I noticed many students from Chinese universities.
Strauss:
A lot of them are from China with lesser amounts from Korea and Japan. It's a big challenge getting papers in publishable English from the Chinese presenters.
Hellrigel:
There has been much discussion of plagiarism issues.
Strauss:
It's a big deal. They all get run through this plagiarism thing.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Strauss:
There is a high rejection rate because of plagiarism.
Hellrigel:
Right. Yes, we have the issue in history articles and explaining to them--
Strauss:
And my daughter, who's at Purdue, just every paper coming in gets the plagiarism scan. You can say anything, but you have to give attribution.
Hellrigel:
True, true. And if your whole paper is cut and pasted--
Strauss:
What was the one we had? A couple of conferences ago, somebody's reading an abstract and he said “it sounds like work I did. It is the work I did.”
Hellrigel:
That's pretty bold. You must be rather obtuse to think that the original author would not recognize their work. It will not go unnoticed, especially, if the author attends the conference or edits the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity.
Strauss:
Yes. High, high percentage, so…
Hellrigel:
I notice there are many international female engineers. Does this field attract women in the U.S.?
Strauss:
It's a challenge. It's a challenge in high-energy physics. Women mainly go into the biological sciences. At a med school it's nominally gender neutral.
Hellrigel:
Yes, biomedical engineering may be a more popular engineering field for women or at least that is reflected by undergraduate enrollment.
Strauss:
Here is my best story about women in STEM. We were at a particle accelerator conference and I'm walking in with Mike Turner, who was the head of high-energy physics at NSF at the time. He goes, “oh, this is a great NSF audience. There are a lot of women.” I go “Mike, they're all Italian.” Mike said, “How do you know?” I said, “I get paid to know those things, Mike.” Mike said, “I don’t believe you.” I responded, “there's twenty minutes to your talk, so we're going to do a quick survey.” Only 80 percent of the women were Italian.
Hellrigel:
Did you notice a contingent from Russia?
Strauss:
No. Just mixed.
Hellrigel:
Does the field attract more women in Italy, do their employees have more funds to send them to conferences……
Strauss:
And it's a problem in--
Hellrigel:
Interesting. Why might there be more women engineers in Italy? [Current statistics indicate approximately 15 percent of engineers in Italy are women and 14 percent of engineers in the U.S. are women.]
Strauss:
One of my dear friends said “women will go to college. In the U.S. they'll go get a teaching degree and they'll teach before they have babies.” He also said “we do things backward in Italy. If they're going to teach science or math, they have to take that first and then we'll teach them how to teach later. That being said, it turns some of them on and we get them through graduate school.”
The other thing the Italians do--and I have a very dear friend who's got a lab in Frascati just outside of Rome--gender neutral. He said “we have better daycare, so they don't have to worry.”
Hellrigel:
That's point number one. Yes, daycare is very important.
Strauss:
Yes, he says they could be moms.
Hellrigel:
Italians are not having too many children. If it weren’t for immigrants, Italy would have a negative population growth.
Strauss:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Perhaps having daycare encouraged--
Strauss:
Yes. I can show you a bunch of Italian women here. The woman, one of the people on the LHC, Amalia Ballerino, very striking blonde. I mean super confident. Fashoinista. I love it. In our group there is a woman who every day has the bag holding her Mac absolutely match her shoes. I know from my wife the bags are not cheap, so…
Hellrigel:
It appears this woman is quite fashion conscious whereas most of my colleagues in academia worry less about fashion
Strauss:
And I can show you women at J Lab [Jefferson Lab, the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility] and other labs. The Italians--I can tell you the Italian women straightaway and I'm not being chauvinistic.
Hellrigel:
You can identify the Italian women because of their style?
Strauss:
Yes, it's their style.
Hellrigel:
I had a few stereotypical male professors identifiable by their tweed jacket with elbow patches. Those jackets are far less common amongst my generation.
Strauss:
They wear sandals in the summer.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Probably sandals in the summer for many academics in the U.S. living on the west coast and in the south.
Strauss:
Yes, I know. Well, it's true in physics too.
Hellrigel:
Did your labs hire women? If so, in what capacity?
Strauss:
While doing this history paper I pulled up some old Fermilab documents. There were two women in our group.
Hellrigel:
Where they Ph.D. physicists?
Strauss:
They were techs.
Hellrigel:
They were techs.
Strauss:
I do enough project reviews, so I know at Fermilab there are a significant number of women in project management now. I have a funny story about this big piece of equipment that came from Brookhaven on a barge around Florida up the Mississippi River. The move was a big deal. Finally, it's getting lowered about 6 meters into the ground and we had a few on site. The Fermilab project manager said to the women, “you will wear dresses. You will have heels. You will have hose on.” The women followed the manager’s orders and they went to the site where they had to have hard hats and construction boots on. So, here are the women in hose, hard hats, and construction boots. They did not say a word.
Hellrigel:
I bet the women had something to say later. Did the guys have a dress code? Maybe a suit and tie.
Strauss:
Yes, for the review the manager wanted them in ties. One guy did not wear a tie, so somebody high in Fermilab management said “we can't dress them up.”
Hellrigel:
Yes, and he would've been in trouble with the manager.
Strauss:
Yes. The women at Fermilab that I've dealt with are very, very confident. In fact, when I signed on to DOE, I was at a review with somebody I knew when I had worked at Fermilab and we were talking about kids. I say where's your daughter? He said “oh, she's a physicist at Fermilab.” I said, “good. From all the people we know that's unusual. What happened?” He said “oh, I got her a summer job at Fermilab. She came home one day and said they're not like you, dad.”
Hellrigel:
Meaning they were more--
Strauss:
They--it's easier to get a--
Hellrigel:
Oh, sure.
Strauss:
He said “I just stepped back.” She is also extremely competent, so…
Hellrigel:
Yes, I guess physicists and engineers at the labs have to be confident and competent because it is a competitive environment. In that manner, the scientific community is much like other fields.
Strauss:
Yes, probably. And that's a stereotype. During my career, I have been very lucky with the people I've dealt with. Maybe the birds of a feather coming together. It's just been great people. It's not that we see each other that often, but if we do, we know we're going out to dinner. We know we're going to eat well and we know we're going to talk.
Hellrigel:
You career has included the introduction to personal computer and internet email. Has that made it easier for your organization to operate?
Strauss:
Where the computers made a difference is in the technology. The reason you have MRI is that the calculation of the computer really made a difference. On our big machines I think I told you before the first ring at Fermilab took on the order of months. The difference in computer control if I look at CERN, it came on in three days. Factor of 30.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
That being said, now you get young engineers that do all these computer design programs, so they've never put anything together. What they design really needs to be checked more.
Hellrigel:
The inability to read blueprints because it's Autocad may be a problem. In New Jersey we have a tremendous number of old roads and bridges. One of my undergraduate students could read blueprints, so he did quite well landing a job in civil engineering.
Strauss:
Yes. The computerized age. There are blessings and curses.
Closing remarks
Hellrigel:
Is there anything else we should cover?
Strauss:
I think you got most of it, other than the fact that I've had a ball.
Hellrigel:
Cool. You mentioned scuba diving for fun?
Strauss:
Yes, I wind up teaching the instructor level math and physics course. I go on the Einstein rule. If you can't teach it to a four-year-old, you don’t know it. Usually, most scuba instructors have not had a technical background, so I teach it so people can make a decision.
Hellrigel:
Where's your favorite place to go diving?
Strauss:
I usually go in the Caymans. It's got a good industry. They're safe. When I teach my criteria is not that you did all the physical things, but at the end of the course would I dive with you.
Hellrigel:
True. Did you--
Strauss:
If I would not dive with you, I'm not letting you go with somebody else. We said that the first night and we said that the other.
Hellrigel:
Sports fan of anything?
Strauss:
I'm a fair weather Red Sox fan. They probably love me because they started winning when I moved down to Washington.
Hellrigel:
Then you have not become a Senators fan?
Strauss:
Well, it's not the Senators. It's the Nationals.
Hellrigel:
That's right.
Strauss:
Our group at work goes once a year.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Strauss:
We all sit there with hamburgers and beer and do the right thing.
Hellrigel:
Does your group have any die-hard fans like those guys in the 1980s that attended Red Skins game with the pig noses and outlandish dresses?
Strauss:
We had an admin assistant that did that, but it's just hard. The locals identify with the Red Skins and at DOE everybody comes from someplace else. My group leader is a Pittsburgh fan and we know not to get near him after a Pittsburgh loss.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes he might be grumpy. It seems like you enjoyed your career.
Strauss:
I've had fun.
Hellrigel:
Hopefully your semi-retirement will be fun, too.
Strauss:
Yes. The IEEE Council on Applied Superconductivity will keep me busy the next four years.
Hellrigel:
The presidency is a four-year appointment?
Strauss:
It's two and you can take two more, so almost everybody has held the office four years. I've got this new thing. We need to find people that are going to succeed us and we need to start training them.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes. The IEEE has a triumvirate, including the past president, the president, and the incoming president. They are expected to work together. IEEE is also quite eager to recruit and retain young members.
Strauss:
Yes. On the Council we've defaulted--we don't have that many past presidents, but they are by default members of the board. We've all worked together for, well, probably closer to seventeen years. Anyone can step in and do things, but I may be one of the younger people.
Hellrigel:
You are all part of the founder's generation.
Strauss:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Now they need to get the new generation--
Strauss:
Our secretary is probably in her mid-thirties and pregnant. Nice little belly. Every one of us are like grandfathers to her. It's cute. I'd just gotten another woman in who's a major group leader at GE. We're looking for others. It's an uphill fight.
Hellrigel:
Right. Volunteerism. Associations such as the VFW, the Kiwanis, the Elks, etc., have dwindling membership.
Strauss:
It's old. Yes, it's old.
Hellrigel:
It's not--
Strauss:
Young people don't do. Don't forget Kiwanis or Rotary were really businessmen that needed to talk to each other. We talk to each other at conferences. They had more local needs.
Hellrigel:
This year the Applied Superconductivity Conference has about 1,600 people?
Strauss:
Yes. The first few conferences had 300 or less. This conference expanded and attendance increased when high-temperature superconductors came in. We doubled from 800, let's say 500 to 1,000 at that time.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Strauss:
You know when you do a conference budget you assume some break-even point.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Strauss:
Then everyone after that is your profit.
Hellrigel:
Sure. The Denver Convention Center was designed and built for the 2008 Democrat National Convention. It's a nice place. It's modern.
Strauss:
Yes, this is very nice.
Hellrigel:
I imagine renting so much of the convention center is expensive.
Strauss:
Last year we were in Charlotte and the next conference will be in Seattle. In the past, there've been a couple of conferences were we just fit into a big conference hotel and that was convenient. Now, we'd be claustrophobic
Hellrigel:
Yes. This has been fun.
Strauss:
Thank you.
