SPAN: October 1961

DURING the evening on Halloween, American youngsters don masks and costumes, rap on windows, knock on doors or ring doorbells of homes in their neighbourhood. When the door is opened, they cry, "Trick or treat?" Implied is an invitation to treat them to a token gift of fruit, candies or cookies, or be a victim of a prankish trick. The visit is an established custom in the American scene.

Here, a housewife distributes treats to youthful sprites.

Halloween, a festival celebrated each year on October 31st, is so named because it is the hallowed or holy evening that precedes All Saints Day. Most American observances of Halloween stem from Old World customs brought to the United States by families who celebrated the ancient rites according to the traditions of the country from which they came. It is an adaptation of the ancient festival of autumn. Long before Christian times, the Romans celebrated the festival of Pomona, goddess of orchards and gardens, in the fall of the year.

Masks, a part of the trick-or-treat youngsters' costumes, have been associated from early times with spirits, both friendly and malevolent. On Halloween, many families place a jack-o'-lantern in the window as an invitation to neighbourhood children to knock on the door and accept a treat.

This festival symbol is made from a hollowed-out pumpkin with a lighted candle inside .•

OCTOBER

1961 4

WINDOW

ON THE WORLD

by Sohindar S. Rana

10

KENNEDY'S

TEN-FOOT

SHELF

by John Morton Blum

12

A SKETCHBOOK

by Richard D. Ahern

"October ... the ripe, the golden month has come again," wrote Thomas Wolfe, American novelist. ••The fields are cut, the corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows.... " This picture of a harvest moon, risen before the sun has set, was taken in Wolfe country. His story commences on page thirty-six.

16

VILLAGE MAGISTRATE

18

NOAH

20

SUSHIL KUMAR MUKHERJEE

2S

INDIA IN AMERICA

26

ROADS ON THE RUN

28

WEBSTER

POEM INSPIRED BY THE LIFE OF GANDHI

by Candy Pinger

29

ARMCHAIR

PERSPECTIVE

by John T. Reid

PUBLISHER

John V. Lund,

Acting Director, United States Information Service, New Delhi.

PUBLISHED

AT

United

States Information

Service.

Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of The American Embassy, New Delhi.

EDITOR

Edward

ART DIRECTOR

Indoo

BY

Service.

Information

Frere Road, Bombay.

Arlicles appearing in SPAN may be reprinted in English or in translalion. without special permission and with credit to SPAN, unless copyright or other reservation is indicated.

SCIENCE WORKS FOR THE CONSUMER

36

THOMAS WOLFE: A TRAGIC GIANT

by Lokenath

40

Works).

46

Bhattacharya

LOOK HOMEWARD,

by Thomas

4S

Service.

J. Middleton, at G. Claridge & Co. Ltd. (Caxton

33

ANGEL

Wolfe

ABE AND THE GLOBETROTTERS by

P. Mukerji,

United States PRINTED

Information

PROJECT MOHOLE

42

E. Post,

United States

30

c.

M. Kashyap

APPRENTICE TRAINING DR. ROBERT H. GODDARD

by Dale McKean

The annual subscription rate for SPAN is four rupees. Subscriptions should be addressed to: Distribution Manager.

United States Tnformation Service, Bahawalpur House, New Delhl-T. Paid subscriptions..Jrom outside Tndia cannol be accepted. In case of change of address please forward both old and new addresses to : Distribution Manager. USTS Tndia. Bahawalpur House. New Delhi·T. AI/ow six weeks for change of address to become effective.

of the year was a special colourcast of Macbeth, filmed in Scotland and broadcast over the National Broadcasting Company's network in November.

The play won the 13th annual award of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Among other productions were Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh," produced on The Play of the Week, and "The Heiress" on Family Classics. "Medea," starring Judith Anderson, won the Television Festival award at Monte Carlo in January 1961for the best dramatic programme.

"The Age of Kings," a Shakespearean series from the BBC, was televised in the United States on Sunday evenings.

Music was most ably represented by the highly popular commentaries of Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic in televised concerts sponsored by a telephone company. World Concert Artists, a halfhour show which featured such artists as Marion Anderson and Jascha Heifitz, was noteworthy. Several original American operas written especially for television had their debut during the winter months.

Dinah Shore is the star of a perennially popular Sunday night musical variety show.

A colour telecast of Macbeth, partially filmed in Scotland, starred Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson.

Future, Eyewitness to History, The White Paper, The Great Challenge and Project Twenty. These shows

ranged widely over such subjects as "The Changing Pattern of Our Political System," "Big City, 1980," "The Art of Criticism," "Modern Art," "World Disarmament and Security," and they added markedly to the stature of television as a public service medium.

One of the best known of informative programmes is Open End moderated by David Susskind, in which small groups of participants weekly discuss a subject extemporaneously for two or three hours, or even longer, until the subject, the participants or both are exhausted.

The surprise hit of the season was a one-man discussion programmeDr. Albert Burke's "A Way of Thinking." Launched on a local scale in New York last November, this forceful, cogent and biting blend of essay, news analysis and historical exploration attracted so much attention that a number of other cities across the land began showing it.

In the field of serious drama, perhaps the most outstanding production

Highlight of the presidential dection camjJaign and of the television year was a series of four unrehearsed debates, left, between the principal candidates, Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Nixon, which were witnessed "live" by the nation. On November 8, 1960, television cameras throughout the United States focussed on election returns and on January 20, 1961, the American nation attended via television, centre, the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as their 35th President, as well as the inaugural parade and attendant pageantry. The new President set a precedent when he conducted his first press conference, right, before the television cameras.

During one of the weekly sessions of a television series entitled Meet the Professor, Dr. Lamar Dodd, at left seated on stool, artist and Head of the Department of Art at Georgia University, conducted the television audience through his department. John Watkins, Farm Editor of a Texas television station, during one of his telecasts on improved farming techniques, took his audience into a cotton field to show them the operation of a cotton-picking machine, centre. Prime Minister Nehru answered questions put to him by American college students on one of the weekly sessions of College Television News Conference.

Outstanding among documentary programmes seen on American television during the 1960-61 season were: Expedition, left, a film of Norman Dyhrenfurth's assault on 28,000-foot Lhotse in the Himalayas; and, The Dark and the Light, centre, a film report by Helen Jean Rogers on recent events and developments in East and South Africa. Prospects of Mankind was an outstanding series of monthly, hour-long symposiums, moderated by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, right. Featured on one of the programmes were Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles and India's Ambassador to the U.S., B. K. Nehru, then Commissioner General for Economic Affairs.

Tales of Wells Fargo, left, is one of the popular series of television programmes built around incidents in the history of the American frontier of the last century. Outer space fiction has invaded television entertainment: Burgess Meredith, centre, appeared with a pair of young Venusians in a comedy entitled Mr. Dingle, the Strong. A prize-winning drama of the 1960-61 season was the original television drama, Look Ma, I'm Different, which was produced on the regular Sunday Frontiers of Faith series.

Lights in the Presidential office shine into the night as Mr. Kennedy confers with his last visitor of the day, Walt Whitman Rostow.

by JOHN MORTON Professor of History, Yale

BLUM University

JOHN F. Kennedy reads books and takes them seriously. Not content with books alone, he also collects their authors. The recent works of his advisers-among others, Richard E. Neustadt, Robert Triffin, Walt W. Rostow and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.form a kind of reference library for his convictions and intentions.

The authors around Mr. Kennedy are his contemporaries, young men whose span of adult experience, like his own, has been with depression, war and cold war. The spirit of their time has set the tone of their thought and has made them what Mrs. Kennedy once called her husband, an "idealist without illusions." They think, as he does, not about abstractions but about positions. They write as they think, and they write directly to the issues of their concern.

For Mr. Kennedy, this directness is essential. He is too busy to savour the nuances of words or concepts.

Just as President Franklin Roosevelt learned by listening, Mr. Kennedy, by his own account, learns by reading.

His office forces him to learn in a hurry. He reads quickly, retentively, always with an eye for the relevant.

James MacGregor Burns, the President's astute biographer, watched him hunt through a pile of newspapers for exactly the information he wanted. There was no hesitation, no loitering. "What good are ideas," Mr. Kennedy once said to Burns, "unless you make use of them?"

The President has at hand several useful books about the nature and the function of his office, among them Neustadt's Presidential Power, Rostow's The United States in the World Arena and Schlesinger's Politics of Upheaval. Each of these in its own way draws its lessons from recent history, of which Mr. Kennedy, like the authors, has been a keen observer. Each organizes or rationalizes that past experience, and in so doing heightens its meaning. Most important, each sanctions Mr. Kennedy's inclinations.

Professor Neustadt devotes his study to "the strategy of Presidential influence," taking examples from the Truman and Eisenhower years. In a time of "emergencies in policy with politics as usual," Neustadt concludes, the President cannot be an amateur in either policy or politics. He must be accomplished in both, ready to use (el 11161 by The New York Times Company.

The New York Times Magarine.

Richard D. Ahern's

RICHARD D. Ahern, whose pen and ink sketches and water colour impressions appear on these pages, is Senior City Planner, Urban Design Division, of the Detroit, Michigan, City Plan Commission. Since 1958, he has also had his own part-time architectural practice in Detroit and Washington, D.C. The thirty-four-year-old city planner is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Technische Hochschule, Graz, Austria. He has been on leave of absence from the Detroit City Plan Commission to make an around-the-world tour, which he accomplished largely through his talents as an artist, writer and architect. He was in India and neighbouring countries for several months, to study traditional architecture and its implications for urban design.

The sketches reproduced on these pages are on-the-spot sketches and paintings, done by Mr. Ahern at the time he visited the sites depicted.

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Selectman Matthews follows new legislation for the State of Maine, so that he can answer his neighbour's questions on local government.

IN

villages in the United States, when an elected official is called a public servant, that is what his townspeople expect him to be. Edward Matthews, a mechanic, of Union, Maine, has been elected in traditional New England town meeting for six successive one-year terms as one of his town's three selectmen. This time-honoured office, which dates from Colonial times, carries a $600 yearly honorarium, and the responsibilities of a town father.

Matthews's varied duties include guardianship of the town's budget and supervision of public services such as police, sanitation, road maintenance, and fire fighting.

As a kind of town "handyman," a selectman is on call day and night. Thus, when a farmer wants to know why the town snowplough has not got through after the storm, he is liable to call seventy-eight-year-old Ed Matthews.

Union was founded in 1776, and its 1,100 present-day citizens include poultrymen, dairymen, and blue-berry farmers. A lime quarry, casket factory, chicken dressing plant, plus many smaller businesses provide ample employment for the townspeople.

Village Magistrate Matthews pauses on Union Common in the centre of town to chat with a friend. Shaded squares such as this are typical of small towns in the United States.

The selectman qualifies as an expert on local history, having written a book about Union's first 180 years. Here he addresses a women's group on the town's history.

A Selectman

is Servant and Guardian of His Town Public service for this thriving community costs $52,000 a year, which is spent thriftily by Matthews and his two fellow selectmen. Last winter's big storms hit the budget hard with costs of clearing Union's seventytwo miles of road.

The Board of Selectmen must approve all official purchases and supervise the maintenance of town equipment. In fact, Selectman Matthews must be something of an engineer, lawyer, bookkeeper, and psychologist combined to keep the town running smoothly.

Edward Matthews has lived in Union for fifty-five years, and is called on to take part in many civic enterprises. He is presently serving on the supervisory board for a new Community Building. Like many who live in New England-scene of some of the earliest American settlements-Matthews is keenly interested in his town's history. In their 150-ycar-old home, Matthews and his wife have collected many antiques, some of them family heirlooms.

One of the selectmen's springtime chores is evaluation of property for the assessment of taxes, which means visiting everyone in his area. Between exchanges of news, Matthews lists real estate, personal property, cattle, and farm machinery in the valuation book. Everyone hails him as he comes to the door. Friendship and community respect are the greatest rewards for a selectman's tough job .• BELO W: Matthews, a mechanic, looks in on L. F. Barker, who has been in the auto business for thirty years.

TOP RIGHT: Mrs. Lou Gordon, a widow, who runs afamity general store on Union Common discusses a point of town business with the selectman.

CENTRE RIGHT: Union's Fire Chief Robert Heald shows Matthews a newfire extinguisher.

BOTTOM RIGHT: Mrs. Matthews likes to make doughnuts and her husband always offers his assistance-as a taster.

A

LITTLE more than two hundred years ago, in October 1758, Noah Webster, who has been called the "Father of the American Language," was born in the village of West Hartford, Connecticut. Among the republic's Founding Fathers the great dictionary-maker takes an honoured place, for it is primarily to his patriotism, foresight and indomitable perseverance that the United States owes the remarkable uniformity of its language and the essentially American character of its literature.

Webster was raised in a New England atmosphere of piety, industry and sturdy independence. His father, a poor but competent farmer, sent the boy to Yale University in 1774, with a parting admonition to "serve your generation and do good in the world."

Though his studies were interrupted by service as a volunteer in the Revolutionary War, Webster was graduated from Yale four years later, at the age of twenty.

He then read law with various jurists, at the same time supporting himself by clerical work and teaching in village schools. In 1781 he was admitted to the bar at Hartford.

His experiences as a schoolmaster were to have a dynamic effect upon the subsequent course of Webster's life. For the time being, he laid aside his intention of practising law. He felt impelled to write articles calling attention to the defects of country schools and of the

18

Span

October 1961

textbooks then in use, especially to their neglect of the American scene. "The education of youth," he stated, "is in all governments, an object of the first consequence.

The impressions received in early life usually form the character of individuals; a union of which forms the general character of a nation."

In 1782 while teaching at Goshen, New York, he prepared an elementary spelling book, published at Hartford the next year as the first part of "A Grammatical Institute of the English Language." Intended for use by school children, the "Institute" was completed with a grammar in 1784 and a reader in 1785.

This "Elementary Spelling Book"-popularly known as the "Bluebacked Speller"-remained in use, in revised editions, for over a century ana, it is estimated, ¡sold more than 70 million copies. As the historian Henry

Steele Commager writes: "It caught on, at once; within a few years it all but monopolized the field; under its benign influence generations of young Americans learned the same words, the same spellings, the same pronunciations; read the same stories, absorbed the same moral lessons." Not only did Webster's speller serve as a basic textbook in the schools, it also was used by pioneer families on the lonely frontiers of the new states, carried across the plains in the migration to the West, brought even to remote Indian tribes.

Professor Commager points out that Webster helped free generations of early Americans from a sense of inferiority about their language, and gave them a sense of the dignity of their speech. He contributed more than any other single person to a uniform American speech, and the avoidance of those differences in accent and vocabulary that might proclaim differences in background, in class, or in region.

Realizing the need for protection of works like his own, Webster started in 1782, even before actually completing the Spelling Book, an agitation for national copyright legislation. Travelling on horseback, by carriage or by sailing vessel, he began a series of journeys through the South and Middle States, making long sojourns in the state cap:tals to persuade the legislatures to pass uniform laws for the protection of the work of American authors. During this time he earned his living by lecturing, teaching, and by holding singing-schools. In his arduous journeyings from village to village, so the tale runs, Webster would visit every country printing-house and hand the compositor a printed list saying, as he did so, "My lad, when you use these words, oblige me by spelling them as here .... " Webster's activities in his successful campaign for copyright legislation brought him in touch with many of the young nation's leading statesmen and diverted his energies into the fields of politics and journalism.

He was one of the first to advocate a strong federal government and became an ardent pamphleteer for the federalist cause. In 1785 his Sketches of American Policy, which Webster himself regarded as the first distinct proposal for an American Constitution, won the interest of George Washington and James Madison. During the Constitutional Convention he remained in Philadelphia and, in October 1787, published an influential pamphlet urging ratification of the federal Constitution by the states.

A magazine venture in New York proved a commercial failure and Webster returned to Hartford, married and settled down to practise law. But four years later he was back in New York, editing two newspapers which he established to support the policy of President Washington.

In 1798 he abandoned journalism and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he wrote valuable studies on various scientific and historical subjects, as well as several textbooks. Turning at last to his true vocation, lexicography, he published in 1806 A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in which were recorded some 5,000 new words not found in previous dictionaries.

In 1807 he started on the great work of his life, the Americall Dictionary of the English Language, a project which was to occupy him for nearly twenty years.

Webster boldly challenged the authority of existing English dictionaries, including the classic work by Dr. Samuel Johnson. Closeted in his study in New Haven, or at Amherst, Massachusetts, where he resided for ten years, he pursued laborious researches. His famous arcshaped study-table was piled high with dictionaries in more than twenty languages.

During this period he also helped to found Amherst College and served, in 1815 and 1819, as a member of the Massachusetts legislature.

"When you use these words, oblige me by spelling them as here."

The American literary historian Van Wyck Brooks paints this portrait of Webster in his later years: "A tall, lean, black-coated man, with black small-clothes and black silk stockings, and with an odd, quaint, oldfashioned air-if you had met him in China, you would have known that he hailed from Connecticut-always a farmer's son in his heart of hearts, a busybody, selfimportant, vain, but upright and honest, aggressive, enterprising, pertinacious, a schoolmaster, lawyer, journalist, who had written on banking and medicine ....

His object was to establish a national language as a bond of 'national union.'''

In 1824, his task nearly completed, he spent a year in France and England to obtain additional material in the libraries of Paris, London and Cambridge. And it was in his lodgings at Cambridge in January 1825 that Noah Webster finished writing the body of his great dictionary.

"When I had come to the last word," he later wrote to a friend, "I was seized with a trembling which made it somewhat difficult to hold my pen steady for writing. The cause seems to have been the thought that [ might not then live to finish the work .... But I summoned strength to finish the last word, then walking about the room a few minutes, I recovered."

Noah Webster lived to see his American Dictionary published in two volumes in 1828, and to revise and enlarge a second edition which appeared in 1841. He finished the revision of an appendix a few days before his death at New Haven in May 1843 at the age of 84.

The publishing rights of Webster's great dictionary were acquired from his heirs by G. & C. Merriam of Springfield, Massachusetts, by whose staff of trained specialists and editors it has since been revised and enlarged many times. It became the international authority on the American language, was used by law courts in the United States and abroad and is followed in U.S. Government printing work. Now called Webster's New International Dictionary, it is a standard reference book in every library in the United States.

The 1828 edition of the American Dictionary of the English Language contained 12,000 new words and from 30,000 to 40,000 definitions that had not appeared in any earlier dictionary. Webster was "a born definer of words" and many of his definitions cannot be bettered today. He wrote with remarkable speed and assurance and his keen, original mind, his thoroughness, insatiable curiosity and linguistic ability all combined to bring to fruition a publication that set a standard in timeliness, accuracy, range and completeness.

H. L. Mencken, in his book The American Language, tells how Webster answered a visiting Englishman's criticism of his innovations. His countrymen, Webster stoutly maintained, "had not only a right to adopt new words, but were obliged to modify the language to suit the novelty of the circumstances, geographical and political, in which they were placed It is quite impossible to stop the progress of language " The key to Noah Webster's complex personality, the motivation that governed all his -actions, was an ardent, dedicated patriotism-a driving force that impelled this ambitious, combative spirit to accomplish singlehanded the monumental task that has won him world-wide renown as a pioneer in the science of lexicography .•

At the Stockbridge School, Sushi! Mukheljee plays the Indian bamboo flute, at right, with a music group composed of students and a friend, Jack Duffy (at the piano), who is a composer. In his art class, shown in the photo immediately below, the Indian artist explains a drawing techmque to one of his students. In the photo at bottom left, the artist studies a new, unfinished painting of his own.

His present stay in the United States has provided Mukherjee an opportunity to expand his interest in jazz, which he describes as one of the most intriguing forms of American musical expression. He has met musicians in the jazz world and has played with jazz groups, experimenting with the Indian rhythmic structure in the jazz idiom. Mukherjee is known in India primarily for his flute concerts and original orchestral compositions and music written by him for India's leading dancers. He has appeared as guest artist with Ram Gopal, the noted Indian dancer.

Standing before S. Mukheljee's painting, "Houses near the Pond," David Greer, right, co-owner of Collector's Gallery in New York, discusses the merits of the exhibition with Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., motion picture producer and art collector.

MUKHERJEE'S approach to his canvases is interesting. A painter in the modern style, he tries to grasp his themes intellectually before giving them expression in his characteristic style. Commenting on one of his pictures entitled "Oriental Inspiration," which was recently exhibited at the Collector's Gallery, he said: "I have always been intrigued and fascinated by Chinese calligraphy.

In this work, I have tried to achieve the pictorial and lyrical quality of Chinese calligraphy, without sacrificing my personal approach to painting.

It is a landscape, almost bordering on the non-objective."

And about another picture, "Mother and Child," which was also in the same exhibition, he added, "This has been a theme of artists through the ages. Consciously, I argue that a subject or a theme is merely an excuse for building up a pictorial form. But subconsciously, I am attached to something that is dramatic and yet down-to-earth, and what would be more dramatic and earthly than 'Mother and Child?' " Without being abstract, his paintings are far from what is commonly regarded as realistic in form and they possess a subtle persuasion that could result only from sincerity and sensitivity. The New York Times critic found his work "charming, forcefully composed and rich in colour scheme, worked in low key in masterly fashion."

The artist has been offered a teaching position at the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts, where he started teaching this fall.

The same private high school has offered a scholarship to his son Ronendra, and a position as school psychologist to Mrs. Mukherjee, who received her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Nebraska.-

AMERICA'S network of primary roads totals some 400,000 miles, many of them high-speed, multiple-lane (three to eight lanes) super-highways that link major cities. One recently completed stretch of super-highway in the mid-West between Kansas City, Kansas, and Ottawa, Kansas, offers a good example of modern road construction. This thirty-five-mile section, composed of twin slabs of steel-reinforced concrete (24 feet wide, nine inches thick) was laid at a speed of 322 feet an hour. Behind this construction achievement lies ingenious road-building equipment developed by men with imagination.

The steel beams which are laid down as forms also serve as runners for the concrete spreader which deposits the first course of stiff-mixture concrete. Then a tie-in wheel places steel rods just below the surface of the concrete's centre line. Following close behind comes a trailer loaded with tons of wire-mesh mats for reinforcing.

Workmen place the mats firmly on the steel tie-in rods.

Then another concrete spreader lays down the second course of concrete. The finishing operation, also once a time-consuming hand operation, is done by machine too.

As a result of such mechanization, roads are built faster, more cheaply, and with less manpower on the job.

26

Span

October 1961

roads on

the run

An endless stream of concrete is laid by a twenty-four-man paving crew. Trucks and cars of the crew are directed by radio.

A device called a tie-in wheel, moving ahead of the trailer, places centre tie rods beneath the surface of the first layer of concrete before steel mesh is positioned.

3

Enough reinforcing steel for one-third of a mile of paving is added to the trailer twice a day. The trailer, pulled behind the first of the two concrete spreaders, places steel at a uni/orm level.

4

A finishing machine uses a rubber belt in see-saw fashion to smoothe the surface of the road.

S

Moving at less than five miles an hour, a sealer sprays the sides and top of the concrete slab to protect it during the required curing period.

45

A carborundum saw cuts expansion joints about halfway through the top layer of concrete after eight hours of curing. The blade must be replaced after it has been used on 600 yards of concrete.

Thirtcen-year-old Candy Pinger, a Jlllllor high school pupil of Portland, Oregon, is the author of this poem which is reprinted here by permission of "The Horn Book Magazine," Boston, in which it first appeared.

Poem Inspired by the Life of GANDHI

Twilight calls, The cloudy sky, streaked with sunlit shallows, darkens.

The horizon, jagged with brown but nevertheless darkening silhouettes of trees, turns from a dull gray to an almost blue, as the last light patches of day fade quietly away.

And a creek, still muddy with winter's torrents, winds swiftly away, each turn becoming darker, until it slips to a shadow.

And a field, golden as with spring's approach, also darkens, until it is only a faintly light spot amid a humble, gray setting.

A frog croaks; a bird chirps; Finally all is gathered into the hushed stillness of night.

This world is silent; this world is at peace; this world is free.

The creek babbles on, over stone, around turn, with time.

As the sun pushes up, all changes; from a gray, to an orange; to a golden paradise.

A small duck paddles unharmingly in a creek, looking for breakfast.

The sky comes to a brilliant blue, a bird against it flutters.

A squirrel chatters, then scrambles, hunting for a nut.

A day is born in this world; A world of freedom, a world of hardworking, a world of nonviolence. •

Cuss J, a unique ship, manoeuvres off the California coast while carrying out experimental driliings for Project Mohole. The vessel has four outboard motors-two port and two starboard-for maintaining its position over the drill hole.

The forward starboard motor is seen taking corrective action in this phOTograph.

Project Mohole: S(.HE1"'\ATI(

THE EXPLORATION OF INNER SPACE

POIO'TllAYAL

Of DRILL SHIP ST~"N VltW WITH DllIlL HOtST

MAN's

knowledge of the earth is limited. In large part, his knowledge is based on indirect evidence. What is known has come from many sourcesgeology, radiochemistry, physics, astronomy, paleontology and other sciences. The many observations have been fitted together in what has been called a "grand-scale hypothesis" on the nature of the earth's interior.

If the earth could be peeled like an onion, four major zones would be encountered: the crust, a thin film averaging 10 miles in thickness; the mantle, a 1,800-mile thick mass of dense rock; the outer core, a 1,360-

CONTlC'OlS Sf.-"'AnR

ANO

DRIll

lUI!IQ'CATION SYSTEM

mile thick mass of molten material; and the inner core, a mass of solid material 815 miles in radius.

With a programme for outer space exploration already underway, the United States now is undertaking a plan for the investigation of "inner space."

The ultimate goal of the latter, known as Project Mohole, is to drill through the earth's crust under the ocean to determine the composition and physical properties of the crust and of the underlying rock known as the earth's- mantle. With information gleaned from t-hese sources, scientists

A Project Mohole scientist examines the first cores ever brought up from 1,000 feet below the ocean bottom.

The ship's position is determined relative to a ring of four sonar buoys anchored to the bottom and held several hundred feet below the surface by taut lines. The buoys are equipped with sonar transponders, or pingers, which respond to sound waves sent through the water by the ship in the middle of the circle. Electronic equipment on the vessel translates the signals received into distance and presents this to the pilot so that he can maintain position in relation to the buoys. The pilot regulates the amount and direction of thrust of the steering motors through a central control.

The Guadalupe Island area, in 12,250 feet of water, off the western coast of Mexico, was previously known to have a higher than average heat flow, or transfer of heat by conducOne of several positioning buoys, which were set in a pattern around the drill ship, is lowered to the water.

tion upward through the crustal rocks from the molten interior. This heat flow previously could be measured only by comparing the temperature of the ocean bottom with that of the sediments that could be reached with a probe-about 50 feet.

The first direct measurements of the deeper sediments indicated even higher readings than had been expected for these levels.

The ship obtained temperature measurements of 44.6 degrees Fahrenheit at 140 feet below the bottom, and 75.2 degrees Fahrenheit at about 500 feet.

M

OROLE drillings near Guadalupe Island yielded fossil evidence of a flowering of sea life in the area roughly 25 million years ago.

More than 100 feet of nearly continuous core of the deep ocean ooze showed that sea life in this area was prolific for some seven million years, but that now the area is an oceanic desert in comparison.

Preliminary studies of the soft sediment core have been completed

by Chief Scientist William R. Riedel and his associates. Their studies indicate that the gray-green material formerly described as a clay is more properly called an ooze, since 80 per cent of it consists of microscopic skeletons of plants and animals.

The 500 feet of sediment was determined to be upper Miocene in

geologic time on the basis of a correlation of the fossils with similar ones of known age found in continental rocks. The rate of deposit of sediments at the site was estimated as about two centimetres of ooze per thousand years. Material deposited near the surface contains few organic remains, indicating less abundant marine life in recent times.

The continuous sediments record is believed to be of value to the work of geologists ashore in that it may be used to link the intermittent fossil groups of the Miocene found in rocks on land.

PALEONTOLOGISTS are prepared, should a wide range of fossils be obtained from the experimental drilling project. They have arranged for over a dozen separate investigations of various fossil forms ranging from microscopic plants and animals to pollen, spores and fossils such as molluscs.

The fossils will range in size from the minute cocclithiohorids, resembling snow flakes but only a few microns in diameter, to sharks' teeth, molluscs and larger forms. Most of the fossil forms anticipated have living relatives in the ocean today.

In addition to dating, certain fossils can tell much about life in the geologic past. If good pollen and spores are found, for example, they may indicate a nearby area once rich in deciduous forests. Such fossil spores were found on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, indicating that the now relatively barren island once supported a forest well above the sea.

Other biological studies of the cores from beneath the ocean will include the determination of total organic carbon and nitrogen, amino acids, and other organic compounds, and a search for bacteria, moulds, and algre.

Examination and measurements of these findings will provide still more clues to life on earth in times past, and conceivably to the conditions on earth that gave rise to life itself.•

One of the most exact standards of lengthmeasurement yet devised by science is attainable with this lamp held by a Bureau scientist.

It contains mercury isotope 198, and the green light emitted from it, when held near a radio-frequency "exciter", is measurable to one part in 100 million.

SCIENCE WORKS By

supplying industry and science with better measurement standards, scientists in the National Bureau of Standards in Washington are contributing in an important way to the technological progress and scientific growth of the United States. And, the American consumer is the direct beneficiary of their efforts.

When a customer in a store makes any purchase, from a new automobile to an electric light bulb, he relies upon the manufacturer to give him a precision-made product that has built-in standards of quality and performance.

The manufacturer, in turn, has relied upon the Bureau to provide him with accurate and reliable standards of measurement which he can use to test his product at critical stages of production or during experimental stages of development.

FOR THE CONSUMER

Thousands of standards of accurate measurement are used by industrial companies in the mass production of interchangeable parts and in the development of new products and devices. They are also used by businesses in the commercial exchange of goods to insure that the buyer and seller agree on what is a pound or a yard, and by scientists for the measurement of quantities to insure that scientific data can reliably be interchanged between laboratories.

It is the job of the National Bureau of Standards, set up by the U.S. Congress in 1901, not only to establish

Headquarters of the National Bureau of Standards is located on a hill overlooking Washington, D.C. Its ivy-covered buildings create the impression of a small college campus rather than a great centre of research.

LEFT: Bureau scientists use this giant 1.4 mil/ion-volt X-ray generator to determine characteristics of X-rays such as those used for the medical treatment of deep-seated human cancer. They also use it to reveal by X-ray photography interior flaws in huge metal castings.

and maintain standards and methods for accurate measurement of natural phenomena, but also to make them available to other government agencies, business, industry and science.

Through its calibration services, it insures the accuracy of countless industrifll and scientific instruments and working standards by comparing them with the national standards.

Many new basic standards are now needed to keep pace with advances in such fields as electronics, nuclear physics, high-frequency radiation and the design of high speed aircraft.

As new areas of scientific and industrial development open up, each requires new data on the basic properties of materials, new standards as reference points, and new methods of measurement.

To fulfil their continuing responsibilities, Bureau scientists are now conducting an imaginative and vigorous research and development programme in the physical and engineering sciences. In addition, they are engaged in several projects being carried out with other nations.

The accompanying photographs show Bureau scientists using some intricate and ingenious testing devices and explain how the American consumer benefits from their skilful work in the field of measurement..

RIGHT: In order to supply manufacturers with data on the properties and characteristics of the elements that go into the making of an automobile tyre, the Bureau carried out scientific experiments such as this one, in which a steel shaft under hundreds of pounds pressure is forced against the tread of a tyre to provide data on its resistance and breaking point.

BELO W: In one year, in behalf of the government's purchasing agency, Bureau scientists tested as many as three mil/ion light bulbs of many different types to determine whether their light output and durability matched government specifications.

inches in height. He lived in that proportion. He wrote in the proportions of his physical size. He suffered in the same proportions.

Wolfe's works being a replica of his own life, the nature and causes of the qualities of his works can be best understood when viewed against the background of his life.

ANOTHER major contradiction in Wolfe's works is in their structural qualities. While his episodes within the novels often become powerful narrative units, the larger units-the whole novels-betray a formlessness and a plotlessness that baffle critics.

His artistic method itself is a unique combination of realistic representation, faithful even to the minutest details, and romantic outbursts that at times are digressive and dissipate the narrative in dithyrambic speculations or proclamations. His later view of the novelist as a public seer obligated to portray the social scene is in direct contrast with his inherent, anti-intellectual romanticism which could accept only the expression of the artist's feelings as his ultimate objective. The same contrasts are also apparent between his fulminous depiction of characters of unusual appetite and behaviour, and his subtle, lyric explorations of the inner self.

Wolfe was like a vessel that endlessly poured out the emotional residues of experience, but he was also the "putter-inner." He was himself the creation and the creator. Once, in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, his editor, he declared, "I want to assert my divine right once and for all to be the God Almighty of a book-to be at once the spirit to move it, the spirit behind it, never to appear, to blast forever the charge of autobiography while being triumphantly and impersonally autobiographical."

Wolfe wrote in great "gulps," as he ate, drank, loved, wept in great "gulps." He towered six feet four

THOMAS Clayton Wolfe was born in Asheville, a mountain town in North Carolina, on October 3, 1900.

His father, William Oliver Wolfe, was a stonecutter of Dutch descent and a huge, powerful man of great gusto and vast appetites. His mother, Julia Elizabeth, had a Scottish-Irish ancestry and was a member of a mountain clan memorialized by Wolfe as the "time-devouring" Joyners and Pentlands. She was for him the symbol of the protean texture of the American South, "the dark, ruined Helen of his blood." Before becoming the third wife of W. O. Wolfe, she had been a school teacher and a book saleswoman.

Thomas was the youngest of eight children, of whom three died in infancy. While he was still a child, his mother moved with Tom and his brother Ben, into a boardinghouse she had purchased and named the Old Kentucky Home. His father ran a marble yard and occupied a separate dwelling. Thus, Tom's early life was spent in a family of two different homes. Ben was his only companion, whom he immortalized later in his works and whose untimely death was the hardest blow of Tom Wolfe's life.

The experiences of Wolfe's childhood, particularly Ben's death, made him regard himself in later life as "God's Lonely Man." "I think," he wrote in 1933, "I learned about being alone when I was a child about eight years old and I think that I have known about it ever since."

After attending preparatory school, Wolfe entered the University of North Carolina. Following his graduation there, he went to Harvard University for three years and obtained the Master of Arts degree in English literature. The Harvard years were marked by his growing desire to become a playwright and by his active association with the University drama organization, the "47 Workshop." He also taught briefly at New York University.

During this period he visited Europe several times and had a tempestuous love affair with Mrs. Aline Bernstein, a successful scene and costume designer for the Broadway theatre, who was seventeen years his senior. This married woman, who became Esther Jack in Wolfe's The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again,

'I a'n on A,Per (c,r and I Will opefJ my heart to you on any thing that may belong to my VISion of life and not to yours, but never remember ,s G foreIgner and (l stranger •• - THO

mE C; WOLFE

was so desperately in love with him that when he wanted to break the alliance, considering the affair already outworn, she sent him letters signed in her own blood and attempted suicide.

His later resthetic view, markedly romantic, was a natural outgrowth of his education. Four teachers who deeply influenced him were clear-cut romantics. His tendency to see the reality in patterns of opposites was also a heritage from his student days.

This could perhaps be attributed to the teachings of Horace Williams, a philosophy professor at the University of North Carolina whom he represented in his works as Vergil Weldon and called "Hegel in the Cotton Belt."

Marked by paradox and enamoured In a scene from the Pulitzer Prize play, Look Homeward, Angel, based on Wolfe's novel of the same name, Eugene Gant, right, talks with his brother Ben beside the marble angel in their father's tombstone shop. The real angel, above left, from which the book took its title and which stood in Wolfe's father's shop now stands in a cemetery not far from Asheville.

Thomas second the age his life

of ambiguity, Wolfe wanted to live up to unresolved contradictions which were peculiarly his own, a part of his life.

It was in London, in 1926, that he first started committing to paper his childhood memories in the form of a huge novel. He had the habit of pouring out in rough-draft notes whatever he thought, felt or experienced. Sometimes they took the form of diaries or even' letters. He called them "the fabric of his life" from which his books were made'. This steadily mounting vast hoard of manuscripts was the only permanent possession he ever had. His life was a series of engrossments and interruptions, ever oscillating between utter trustfulness and sudden distrust that could abruptly end a close friendship. His feverish travels in America and Europe were for him both a rest and a renewal.

Almost deliberately, he fed the grist of his own life-his hopes, his loves, his appetites, agonies and tears, his despairs-into the mill of experience which would renew the store of emotional residue to be put into language.

Wolfe's first book, Look Homeward, Angel, was rejected by several publishers because of its sheer bulk. Finally, Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner's publishing house, expressed interest in the novel and asked Wolfe if it could "be worked into a form publishable by us." Thus began a fruitful relationship between Wolfe and Perkins who himself had to take a hand in cutting and revising the work. Wolfe con fessed, "The business of selection and revision

Wolfe is shown at the left in his New York apartment with the manuscript of his novel, Of Time and the River. The novelist, back row above, was photographed at of sixteen with summer boarders at "Old Kentucky Home." This was the period of with which Look Homeward, Angel, dealt.

is simply hell for me-my efforts to cut out 50,000 words may sometimes result in adding 75,000."

Wolfe was 28 when the book was published. But it blazed a trail in the 1930's American literary world.

In the remaining nine short years of his life, Wolfe published Of Time and the River, a novel, From Death to Morning, a collection of short pieces and incidents, and The Story of a Novel, a piece of literary selfexamination.

His emotional intensity and mercurial temper forbade any lasting friendship. He continuously sought freedom from too close relationships, either with an Aline Bernstein or a Maxwell Perkins Shortly before his sudden death in 1938, at the age of 37, he delivered a great mass of manuscript, perhaps a million words, to his new literary editor Edward Aswell, from which came, after his death, two posthumous novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again, and a fragmentary third member of a possible trilogy, The Hills Beyond.

His books, written in a highly individual style, poetical and rhapsodic, were autobiographical in character, despite his feverish attempts to defend them as proper fictions. He himself was patently the two principal characters of his works, Eugene Gant of his first two novels and George Webber of his second two. His works describe the experience of the universe through the soul of one man who is not an imaginary hero but the author

himself. They represent the people of his native town under the thinnest disguises.

In spite of their avowed intention to celebrate America, youth and love, his works actually celebrated their author and his stark loneliness. No American author except Whitman ever memorialized himself at such length. Wolfe was impelled by a unique homesickness wherever he went or was, in Europe or Americaa desperate, futile search for the secure and serene childhood he never had.

"Y ou can't go home again" was, for each journey, the sad conclusion of his pursuit.

ApART from the general consideration that to read any great writer is to experience the paradox inherent in man, Wolfe's contradictions reflected faithfully the vehement questioning of American youth in the modern era.

He felt "the discovery of an entire universe and of a complete language" for America necessary, since "in the cultures of Europe and of the Orient the AmeriCan artist can find no antecedent scheme, no structural plan, no body of tradition that can give his own work the validity and truth that it must have."

This continuous, restless movement ~whether to define American character or to seek communion on a purely personal level-pervades Wolfe's works. The meaning of his restless pursuit was the theme of all his books: he described it as "the search for a father," search for certainty, an¡

a

•'In his moment of terrible vIsion he saw, in the tortuous ways of a thousand alien places, his foiled quest of himself."

-

THOMAS

WOLFE

"image of strength and wisdom external to his (man's) need and superior to his hunger."

This quest can be attributed to various causes-the eternal nostalgia of an insecure and lonely childhood, his sense of irretrievable loss at the death of his father whom he never really knew, his desire to escape from his mother's domination, his need for a God-the-Father of a religion to whose belief and power his own life could be united. It must have been, above all, a consequence of the death of Ben, his brother, which left upon his spirit an ineffaceable scar. "I think," he wrote in 1929, "the Asheville I knew died for me when Ben died. I have never forgotten him and I never shall. I think that his death affected me more than any other event in my life."

Perhaps it is not wholly accurate to contend that Wolfe's futile search was a strictly private one. His was merely the personal expression of everyman's search for "a stone, a leaf," "an unfound door" through which to establish relationship with the outer world, with another soul.

It was not an .isolation restricted to himself, for he saw in it the sum-total of all human experiences which eternally seeks the "great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven."

Here Wolfe's paradox takes on its most tragic overtone. Language was not the thing he lacked, and yet he was tortured by a sense of lacking the adequate but impossible language he sought to devise. So, "Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face: from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. " Along with loneliness and memory, there was another factor that gave the Wolfean tragedy its final character.

That was his concept of time, a concept with a threefold aspect.

First, he saw in it the ordinary "clock time," the element of simple chronology. Secondly, it was the past time, the "accumulated impact of man's experience so that each moment of their lives was conditioned not only by what they experienced in that moment, but by all that they had experienced up to that moment."

Wolfe visited his mother, above, at "Old Kentucky Home" shortly before his death.

In the old photograph at the right are his father and his brother Ben.

Thirdly, "time immutable, the time of rivers, mountains, oceans, and the earth; a kind of eternal and unchanging universe of time against v.hich would be projected the transience of man's life, the bitter briefness of his day." It is against the background of this last factor of time that the ever changing universe is continuously taking new shapes. And it is also this concept which gives a sense of unity to Wolfe's life and works, adding a unique grandeur to them both.

Being the time of the river, it is a ceaseless flow that carries man inexorably away from his innocence and golden youth. That which is lost and far exists only in memory. "Home," where "you can't go again," is, for Wolfe, a symbol of the past, the treasurehouse of things never had and now forever lost.

In a sense, Wolfe voiced man's inescapable failure, but failure of a kind that is little concerned with what is commonly called success, but that contains the elements of human greatness, pathos and beauty. Wolfe's was a short life, and what heights of maturity he might have reached had he lived longer is a matter of speculation. What is certain is that the little he was able to achieve has been termed as unique and great by such eminent contemporaries as Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner. It is true that Look Homeward, Angel and the successive novels bore a certain mark of Joyce's Ulysses and that many other influences went into

sbaplllg Wolfe's personality. But on whatever Wolfe wrote, be it only a piece of a letter, is the unmistakable imprint of his genius.

In further retreat from the contention that Wolfe's writings are primarily a highly personal self-portrait, it must be admitted that Wolfe was the universal man in that aloneness which has no national boundaries. "Remember," he once said, "that I am an American and that I will open my heart to you on any thing that may belong to my vision of life and not to yours; but never remember me as a foreigner and a stranger-the real republic of this earth stretches from here to China."

Most ofthe world today, in America Asia, Africa and elsewhere, is striving towards new goals, passing through the painful, shattering, sometimes iconoclastic, transition from traditional codes to new frameworks of value. What is involved is much more than mere economies or the political structures of society. In the process, ancient values-social, moral and spiritual, collective as well as individual-are changing. Old absolutes are fading. The patterns of personal relationships, within the tribe, the family, between man and man, are shifting. In Wolfe's keen awareness of individual separateness may be reflected much of the feeling that might confront a sensitive human being anywhere today, any man mindful of his own independent and individual spirit, free in a vast new universe .•

ABE and the

GLOBETROTTERS Robert Hall is both rollicking comedian and star player.

SOMEONE once said jokingly of the Harlem Globetrotters-America's most fabulous basketball team-that if you addressed a letter to them "care of the earth," it would be delivered without delay.

This may sound blatantly hyperbolic but it is only a slight stretch of the truth. Since 1951 when the Globetrotters first played outside the United States and became globetrotters in fact, they have played thousands of games in some eighty countries on all six continents.

Their superb mastery of basketball, combined with a unique flair for comedy and showmanship, has delighted millions of people. They have played for the people everywhere and have also appeared in command performances before kings and queens, Presidents and the Pope.

Their audiences have ranged from small, select groups to record crowds of seventy-five thousand. They have> played indoors and outdoors-in drained swimming pools, bull rings, opera houses, airplane hangars and baseball parks. Once in Athens, where an asphalt court had been hurriedly prepared for them in a football stadium, they found that the heat had made the asphalt soft as pudding. But, thanks to the Globetrotters' resourcefulness, the game was postponed by only a few hours. The court was hardened by hosing cold water over the asphalt, and the surface was dusted with a special absorbent material to give the players better footing.

They have played in fair weather and in foul-in fog, rain and sunshine, in temperatures ranging from the near freezing point in Amsterdam, Holland, to a blistering 120 degrees Fahrenheit at Taipeh, where they had to wear water-soaked towels wrapped around their heads as improvised turbans! At Kuala Lumpur, where an over-zealous promoter had sold 40,000 tickets for a 42

span

October 1961

stadium to seat 20,000 people, they tried to give a repeat performance in torrential rain with their raincoats on.

But it rained so hard that the players could scarcely follow the ball and had to quit after twenty minutes.

Any time of the day or night is playtime for the Globetrotters when they have to meet their international schedules. In Spain and Portugal local promoters started their games at one o'clock in the morning! In the Philippines, to avoid the mid-day heat, they started playing at 7-30 a.m., on a solid mahogany court hewn out of the jungle and laid in a clearing.

In their peregrinations round the globe the Globetrotters have used every conceivable mode of transport.

They started, some thirty-five years ago, with a dilapidated jalopy, a model T Ford, for their inland trips. But since then they have travelled by jet planes and air-conditioned cars, also by trains, buses, horses, camels, gondolas and even dog sleds!

W

HAT makes the Globetrotters such a great draw wherever they go? To a large measure the team's phenomenal success is due to the exceptional energy and resourcefulness of their owner-coach, Abe Saperstein.

This remarkable man's story reads like a romance. Born in London's East End slum district, he arrived in the United States when he was six years old and practised dribbling a basketball before a mirror in his father's tailor-shop. When he grew up he decided to link his fortune with basketball and got together a team of Negro

Five-foot-nine Joseph Bourne, midget of the team, is an outstanding ball-handler on his feet or on his knees. Ronald Kim of the u.s. Stars tries vainly to catch up with the ball.

players which made its debut one evening in the ballroom of the Savoy hotel in Chicago. This team, originally given the label of the Big Five, developed in 1927 into Saperstein's Harlem Globetrotters. "I named the team Globetrotters to suggest we'd been around."

The suggestion was translated into reality when the Globetrotters visited Europe in 1951 and in the following year celebrated their silver jubilee by travelling 52,000 miles through thirty-four countries, starting at Recife, Brazil, and winding up at Honolulu. Before this they had of course established their reputation in the United States and South America, after a chequered-ten years of trials

Apprentice

Training

The apprentice training programme developed at the Max S. Hayes Trade School in Cleveland, Ohio, is an outstanding example of co-operative education in vocational schools in the United States. The programme, which is sponsored by the city's Board of Education, with the support of local labour unions and employers, combines classroom instruction with on-the-job training.

The core of the programme is a system of intensive instruction related to some twenty trades in the building, metal and service fields.

Students enrolled in the programme are apprentices employed in the various trades, who have been selected for training by the apprentice committee of their chosen craft. In most trades, a secondary school diploma is one of the qualifications for apprenticeship. Employers co-operate by paying their apprentices for time spent in class.A class in ironwork watches a demonstration of proper welding technique.

The students below are engaged in laboratory solutions of assigned problems involving complex electrical wirings.

In the bricklaying shop, below, students develop their skill in masonry. A secondary school diploma is required by most trades as a prerequisite for the apprentice-training programme.

N March 16, 1926, a small hisO toric drama took place on a farm in the United States, an event ~ that was to have momentous consequences.

The scene was a snow-covered field in Auburn, Massachusetts, and the hour was early morning. The skies were clear, the weather cold and windless. A group of four men and one woman met there by pre-arrangement. One man, the leader of the group, carried an odd-looking contraption, which he proceeded to set up.

It was a steel stand, holding a tall, slender object that pointed to the sky.

The other three men took up their stations at a safe distance, and the woman made ready the movie camera that was to photograph the event.

Then the leader touched a blowtorch to one end of the weird device.

It ignited with a roar and shot skyward to a height of about 40 feet. Twoand-a-half seconds later, having travelled a total distance of more than 220 feet at about 60 miles per hour, the object thudded back to earth at a spot 184 feet from the launching stand.

Thus the first liquid-fuel rocket was successfully launched and a first small step taken on the road leading to the exploration of space.

The man who designed, developed and fired this rocket was an American scientist, Dr. Robert Goddard, at that time a professor of physics at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. The woman who photographed the flight was Mrs. Goddard.

Dr. Goddard, recognized today as the "fath~r of American rocketry," had long been preoccupied with the idea of space exploration. Beneath the quiet-spoken professor's conservative appearance was a brilliant, pioneering mind in which constantly seethed a ferment of revolutionary ideas on space. In fact, this dream had begun in boyhood, when at the age of 16 he tried unsuccessfully to make a gasfilled aluminium balloon to send into outer space. In that year, also, he began to keep notebooks on all his experiments, and his first notebook contains speculation about the use of rockets for exploring the atmosphere and beyond.

Robert Hutchings Goddard was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, October 5, 1882, the son of a factory superintendent. Sickly as a youth, he survived despite medical prognostications and in 1908 was graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. From Clark University he received a master of arts degree in 1910 and his doctor of philosophy degree in 1911. He was a research fellow in physics at Princeton University in 1912-13. The following:year, he joined Clark University's faculty.

Dr. Goddard stands beside his liquid-fuel rocket just before its successful launching on March 16, 1926.

THE FATHER OF AMERICAN

ROCKETRY

He had turned his interest to rockets in 1899, anchoring them in a homemade test chamber and measuring the thrust of their gases. Later, while a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he carried out basic tests with small solid-fuel rockets. In 1912, he worked out the detailed mathematical theory of rocket propulsion and the practicability of using rocket power to reach high altitudes.

In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton had set forth his Third Law of Motion, which states that for every action there is a reaction equal in force and opposite in direction. Dr. Goddard demonstrated by experiment in 1915 that a rocket does not need air to push against to propel itself. His rocket propelled itself and worked better in a total vacuum than in the atmosphere. Its forward motion was the reaction-in accordance with Newton's law-to the rearward movement of the burning gases within the combustion chamber.

He concluded that man could reach out into space, provided a reliable rocket could be developed.

Rockets in themselves, of course, were nothing new. Their origin is lost in time, but they are known to have been used by the Chinese as an instrument of war about A.D. 1225.

Many nations later adapted them to both military and humanitarian purposes.

The Smithsonian Institution provided financial aid for Dr. Goddard's early researches and in 1919 published his first classic report, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. This paper was a summary of his mathematical explorations, the results of his solid-propellant research, and some of his space flight ideas. Today it is one of the basic documents in technical rocket and jet propulsion literature and the source of numerous developments that have come about since its appearance.

On November 1, 1923, Dr. Goddard static-tested a rocket motor using liquid propellants-liquid oxygen and gasoline. And on March 16, 1926, this rocket was successfully launched.

Supported by a grant from the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation, Dr. Goddard in 1929 moved his experiments to the open spaces of New Mexico. At his rocketproving range near Rosewell, he developed during the 1930s large and successful rockets which anticipated many features of the later German V-2s. Many of the rocketry developments in Germany were based upon the researches and some of the patents of Dr. Goddard.

Through continual improvement, Goddard rockets by 1935 reached 7,500 feet and speeds of over 700 miles per hour. In professional circles he was recognized as probably the world's foremost rocket scientist.

Dr. Goddard died in August 1945, before he could see the true advent of the liquid-fuelled rocket in space.

He had yet to receive many of the 200 patents that eventually were issued in his name. "In time to come," wrote the directors of the American Rocket Society, "his name will be set among the foremost of American technical pioneers."

In 1960, the Smithsonian Institution's Langley Medal-first given to the Wright brothers in 1909-was awarded posthumously to the rocket pioneer. This year, on the 35th anniversary of the successful launching of the first liquid-fuel rocket, the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, a new facility of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was dedicated to the peaceful exploration of space and named in Dr.- Goddard's honour .•

OPPOSITE: Detail from the painting, "Fisher of Men,"

by Sushi! K. Mukherjee. See story beginning on page twenty.