Ensign Slichter, World War I

Some collections have a little bit of everything – or anyway, they seem like they do. In November 2013, I was assigned to arrange and describe the Louis B. Slichter Papers (Collection 1880). Slichter was the first director of UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and one of the preeminent geophysicists of the 20^th century. Slichter Hall, on south campus, is named for him. Early on as I was familiarizing myself with Slichter’s files, I ran across a folder titled “Loch Ness Monster.” Inside the folder were a few clippings, and a collection of newsletters from an organization called the Loch Ness Investigation, with a circular or two addressed to “Dear Member.” This, I thought to myself, is going to be an interesting collection. I should say up front that most of the material is pretty much what you would expect from the papers of a scientist: numbers, Greek letters, scientific symbols. There are a lot of technical terms, a lot of equations, prose written by experts to be read by other experts. But the Louis B. Slichter Papers aren’t just about science; they’re about Louis B. Slichter, the people he knew, and his times. Slichter’s professional career as a geophysicist began during the First World War. He had studied at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and was tutored in math by Max Mason, a protégé of Slichter’s own father, mathematician Charles S. Slichter. When the United States entered the war, Mason was employed by the Navy to devise an apparatus to detect German submarines with an acoustic array that Mason designed. Slichter, by now an Ensign in the U.S. Navy was a member of Mason’s team, and spent much of his time on shipboard, testing the array at sea on destroyers patrolling between New London, Connecticut and Plymouth, England.

When the war ended in 1918, Slichter returned to the University of Wisconsin, where he studied physics under Mason, receiving his Ph.D. in 1922. His association with Mason was profitable as well as academically rewarding. In the 1920s, Mason, Slichter and some other veterans of the anti-submarine program formed a consulting firm to employ the techniques they had used to detect submarines to prospect for ores. Commercial mining companies contracted with Mason and Slichter to search for ores using sound, magnetic, and gravitational readings. One particularly noteworthy item connected with the firm is a letter to Slichter from his field representative Sam Sargis, dated November 6, 1930. In the letter, Sargis recounts his foiling two men who attempted to rob him and steal his car. In a long letter, Sargis details the incident, involving pistols (on both sides), blackjacks, fists, rocks, and Sargis’ triumph over his two attackers. “My knuckles are bruised and cut… but I enjoyed the whole thing immensely…” Sargis concludes. You can tell from reading the letter that he certainly did, at least in retrospect. Slichter continued commercial consulting throughout his career, but in the 1930s focused more on his career as an academic. He spent a year (1930-1931) at Cal Tech, and while there accepted a post at MIT, where he remained on the faculty until 1946. After a year back at Wisconsin, he came to UCLA in 1947, where he remained until the end of his career. Much of his research during his time as director involved measuring differences in gravity around the earth. Gravity varies according to the composition, density and thickness of the earth’s crust in a given place. The pull of the sun and moon also affect the Earth’s gravity, and Slichter’s background in using magnetism and sound to find minerals, and his experience in the design of instruments to conduct such research, were as applicable to pure science as they were to commercial activity. Examining Slichter’s career also put his interest in the Loch Ness Monster into perspective. There was no indication that Slichter believed that there actually was a Loch Ness Monster, or that he thought there was any hope of finding it. But the Loch Ness Investigation was looking for a large object under water. And if that’s what someone was doing, Louis B. Slichter was interested in how they were going about it. Slichter’s eminence around the time he was recruited to head the UCLA Institute for Geophysics is in some ways best reflected in a single group photo in the collection. In 1950, Slichter attended a conference on the origin of the earth. The group shot includes Edward Teller and Linus Pauling, and those are just the two scientists in the photo that everyone has heard of.  The remaining attendees are a collection of Nobel laureates, Guggenheim Fellows -- in short, the top tier of the faculty of America’s top universities. They were the types of people who not only won prestigious awards, but wound up having prestigious awards named after them. In the front row is Louis B. Slichter.

Slichter officially retired in 1965, but he didn’t cease working. He spent the last thirteen years of his life overseeing a project to measure gravitational changes at the South Pole. By this time, Slichter was 75 years old, so he didn’t go to the Pole himself. He advertised for young men (not women – this was 1969, after all) with a scientific or engineering background to go to the Pole to monitor the instruments, and send the data back to UCLA. He got a great many applicants for the job. Duty at the Pole was not really fun; it was isolated, often boring, and far from family and friends. But it had its lighter moments. There’s one photo from the collection, taken in June 1975, that we’re not including here. It’s of a group of young men, long-haired, bearded, of a type you might have seen anywhere in 1975. In some cases, their faces are slightly obscured by puffs of breath crystallized by the Antarctic winter air. But they’re all smiling. And they’re all naked. A placard one of them is holding announces that they’re now members of the +200 Degrees/-100 Degrees Club. Evidently, the first time the temperature drops to -100 degrees in a given year, the team at the U.S. South Pole Station takes a sauna at 200 degrees, then dashes out and makes a quick run around the South Pole. Then back to the sauna to warm up. And yes, there is a “South Pole;” it’s a pole stuck in the ice used for photo opportunities. Or frat-boy-style hijinks, as the case may be. So there you have it, all in this collection: the pursuit of the Kaiser’s U-boats, Depression-era Wild West gunplay, the world’s most brilliant scientists contemplating the big questions, scientific research at the earth’s most remote location (with nudity!), and if that isn’t enough, there’s the hunt for the Loch Ness Monster. Some collections have a little bit of everything – or anyway, they seem like they do. By Richard Fraser, Louis B. Slichter Papers Project Archivist