Letters to the Editor
Memories Sparked
Your recent Origins article (“Ready, Set, Spark!” Summer 2020) stirred memories of my youth. My home was a short distance from Caltech, and I was able to enjoy several of the demonstrations at High Volts, which were just as Royal Sorenson described in 1985.
As for the article, the picture should not have been photoshopped! Those slick hairdos are a distraction from the real event. Also, the impulse generator was not rapid! It took many seconds, as Sorenson states, to charge the capacitors for a single pulse.
Also, the virus size chart in the recent issue (“A New Day, A New Normal”) is misleading. The influenza viruses, of which there are many variations, are about 100 nm in diameter, as is the SARS CoV-2 virus. The HIV virus is a bit larger, about 120 nm in diameter. The range listed in the table may be correct, but, in general, the size difference among those viruses is not significant.
William Hassenzahl
Note from University Archivist Peter Collopy: Alas, the photograph was “photoshopped” long before it got to us. It was manually retouched, probably many decades ago, before it made it to the collections of the Caltech Archives, where it now resides. I’m not sure where I got the word “rapid,” but I suspect I used it because it or a similar word appeared in a contemporary account of the lab or the demonstrations. I appreciate learning that it took several seconds to charge the impulse generator.
This interesting article (“Ready, Set, Spark!”) raises questions about dates. For Jack Roberts, born 1918, to have seen demos “as a teenager,” the lab must have been operating by 1937, not 1939, per the article. I recall attending lectures in High Volts, probably in freshman physics, for me 1952–53. Roberts’s vivid description is right on the mark. The lab, we were told, had been built in support of the 1931–36 construction of Boulder Dam (“Hoover Dam”), which would explain the support by Southern California Edison. It’s unlikely that the photo could have been made “in the 1920s.”
Some equipment had an extracurricular life. I recall the Jacob’s ladder (horn gap) arcing noisily in the courtyard of Ricketts House, presumably to impress our female guests at the Interhouse Dance, long before women students (and OSHA).
Sam Phillips, (BS ’56, MS ’57)
Editor’s note: You are correct. Due to an editing error, the date when High Volts opened was stated incorrectly. Construction on High Volts was completed in 1923, and Southern California Edison’s research there was completed well before they actually built the Hoover Dam.