http://movieboozer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Steelhelmet.jpg
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: July 13, 2006
What was my jersey number when I played little league? That was before I started playing football. I think it was '10' but not sure. I played for the team in De Queen that was sponsored by the Mountaire chicken plant. I don't remember anyone ever kidding us about that though. I also remember our first game beating the other team that was considered the best to play for. I think they were the Rotary Lions. I used to always get on base because no one could pitch to left-handers and I would either get hit or get walked.
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 13 July 2006 excerpt ends]
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: 9/26/2006 4:54 PM
I do have a memory that could support an advanced education at an early age. After Theda married James Nevells, he re-joined the Marines. He was assigned to the El Toro base in California and we moved from Arkansas to live in Santa Ana. I started 2nd grade out there and I remember my teacher talking to me one day. She said that I was being moved into an advanced class with 3rd graders. But I eventually went back to the class of 2nd graders.
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 26 September 2006 excerpt ends]
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: - posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 10:33 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Tuesday 03 March 2015 - http://hvom.blogspot.com/2015/03/mountaire.html
Sometime before or after that Thedia and James had some people over to visit. I guess the man was a Marine he worked with but I don't recall. I can recall Thedia telling me off to the side they weren't accustomed to having young children around. That might have been before or after her brilliant idea to let me drink a small cup of the alcoholic Knoxberry Farms Wine and then the way I recall it she figured out later I was going back when she wasn't looking and I was drinking more of it from the bottle. I recall she brought me back from off the balcony outside the apartment that overlooked the open-air courtyard when I was certain I could successfully fly down to the concrete surface below from the railing above. I had on my Mountaire baseball helmet so everything was going to be okay.
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 03 March 2015 excerpt ends]
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: - posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 10:33 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Tuesday 03 March 2015 - http://hvom.blogspot.com/2015/03/mountaire.html
Mountaire
That was the second grade for me, I recall, when we moved to California from De Queen Arkansas.
Thedia's first re-marriage was to James Nevells. As I recall he had served in the United States Marine Corps and then began serving again after they married. I can recall us all living in that cul-de-sac house in De Queen Arkansas when I was getting ready to start first grade. That would have been the year 1972.
So I guess that would be the year 1973 we moved to California. If I recall correctly I started the second grade year there in Santa Ana. We moved there because James was assigned to a US Marine Corps base there which if I recall correctly was El Toro. I can recall walking through a parking lot there on base and there were a lot of cars in the parking lot and I asked my mother if those cars all belong to Marines who were sent to Vietnam. Maybe I asked her if those were the cars of all the Marines who weren't returning from Vietnam.
Sometime around two years ago or so I found a place on the Google Streetview that I think is that apartment building we lived in Santa Ana back then. I have no idea if that is the place we actually lived in but it sure looked the same as I remember it.
The place I found was the result of me looking at the railroad lines and I looked at the Google Streetview images at a place next to the railroad lines because I remember getting in serious trouble with James Nevells because a neighbor woman told him I had been climbing onto stationary railroad cars parked there next to our apartment building. She was the woman who couldn't pronounce my name correctly and always pronounced it similar to "curry".
Sometime before or after that Thedia and James had some people over to visit. I guess the man was a Marine he worked with but I don't recall. I can recall Thedia telling me off to the side they weren't accustomed to having young children around. That might have been before or after her brilliant idea to let me drink a small cup of the alcoholic Knoxberry Farms Wine and then the way I recall it she figured out later I was going back when she wasn't looking and I was drinking more of it from the bottle. I recall she brought me back from off the balcony outside the apartment that overlooked the open-air courtyard when I was certain I could successfully fly down to the concrete surface below from the railing above. I had on my Mountaire baseball helmet so everything was going to be okay.
The problem with that memory is that I don't think I started playing for the Mountaire baseball team until the third grade so I think Thedia was telling me a story at some point later in my life, a story that caused me to record memory in my mind that visualizes that red batting helmet.
First off, how did I get that helmet. That wasn't issued to us individually. Second of all, I am not certain I had a batting helmet at that time.
So anyway, I can recall Thedia telling me that story before and many decades ago. Doesn't add up though.
I can still recall playing organized baseball in De Queen. I can vaguely visualize the first night of tryouts. I was really lousy. I can sort of recall a document I filled out. If I recall correctly I started off as the lead-off batter when I was playing for Mountaire, which was the team I was assigned to after the first night when we auditioned for a team. During team play I was left-handed so the kids pitching to me would always walk me onto first base. The way I remember it now my first-at-bat was me getting hit in the knee by the baseball from the pitcher. I can still recall that point years, or less, later that bitter disappointment I felt when they started striking me out. I can recall another kid trying to explain to me the strike zone and when I should, something something, and that's all I recall and that was great when I could just stand there and do nothing and get onto first base and I can recall being on the other bases. I don't think I played for a team after the fourth grade.
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 03 March 2015 excerpt ends]
From 3/16/1991 ( my first successful major test of my ultraspace matter transportation device as Kerry Wayne Burgess the successful Ph.D. graduate Columbia South Carolina ) To 10/17/1996 is 2042 days
2042 = 1021 + 1021
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 8/19/1968 ( Lyndon Johnson - Statement by the President Upon Signing the Wholesome Poultry Products Act ) is 1021 days
From 1/10/1951 ( premiere US film "The Steel Helmet" ) To 12/25/1981 ( Heinrich Johann Welker deceased ) is 11307 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 10/17/1996 is 11307 days
From 9/27/1984 ( from my official United States Navy documents: "UA from class from 0600-0800" ) To 10/17/1996 is 4403 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 11/22/1977 ( the successful TCP/IP protocol link test ) is 4403 days
From 8/4/1958 ( premiere US film "A Tale of Two Cities" ) To 7/19/1989 ( the United Airlines Flight 232 crash ) is 11307 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 10/17/1996 is 11307 days
From 7/14/1938 ( Franklin Roosevelt - Executive Order 7927 - FOREIGN SERVICE REGULATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES ) To 10/17/1996 is 21280 days
21280 = 10640 + 10640
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 12/20/1994 ( in Bosnia as Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps captain this day is my United States Navy Cross medal date of record ) is 10640 days
From 12/25/1991 ( as United States Marine Corps chief warrant officer Kerry Wayne Burgess I was prisoner of war in Croatia ) To 10/17/1996 is 1758 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 8/26/1970 ( premiere US film "The People Next Door" ) is 1758 days
From 5/7/1992 ( the first launch of the US space shuttle Endeavour orbiter vehicle mission STS-49 includes me Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps officer and United States STS-49 pilot astronaut ) To 10/17/1996 ( ) is 1624 days
1624 = 812 + 812
From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 1/23/1968 ( North Korea captures the United States Navy research ship USS Pueblo ) is 812 days
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=52119
The American Presidency Project
William J. Clinton
XLII President of the United States: 1993 - 2001
Remarks in Santa Ana, California
October 17, 1996
Thank you. Good morning. What a crowd! Thank you for being here. Thank you. Mayor Pulido, thank you for that wonderful welcome. Thank you for your leadership of this great city. And let me say that the mayor was a little too modest. I want to brag on him a little more. We have had a great partnership with this city. Among other things, our program to put 100,000 police on our street has brought 54 here, and the crime rate has gone down by 50 percent in Santa Ana. Thank you, Mayor, for your leadership and your work here. I'd like to thank Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis for being here. Senator Chris Dodd is here, all the way from Connecticut, the chairman of the Democratic Party. Thank you, sir, for being here. Thank you, Art Torres, our Democratic Party chair, for being here.
I'd like to say a special word of thanks to the mayor of Tustin, Tracy Worley, for being here. She spoke earlier. Thank you, Mayor. God bless you, and thank you so much. I'd like to thank the other congressional candidates who are here, Sally Alexander, Tina Louise Laine, Dan Farrell. I thank Stephen Weber for speaking earlier. And I want to thank the Santa Ana High School Marching Band, the Saddleback High School Road Runners. Thank you both for being here. Thank you both. Thank you.
I'd like to thank all the young AmeriCorps volunteers who are here for the work you're doing to make our country a better place. Thank you, Lou Correa, for your speech and for what you're doing. Give him a hand, folks. He did a good job. [Applause] And I was watching Loretta Sanchez give her speech, and I thought, boy, I'm glad she's not running against me. [Laughter] Thank you for running for Congress. Thank you for your commitment to give this congressional seat back to all the people of this congressional district. Thank you, Loretta Sanchez.
Ladies and gentlemen, a lot of people have asked me what I thought about the debate last night. And what I thought was that everybody in California should be very proud of those 123 citizens from San Diego and the surrounding area. They did a fine job, and they spoke for all of America, and I was very proud of them. I know you were, too.
When I came to Orange County in 1992, many people said, "Why are you going there? It's the most Republican county in the country." And I said, "Because I'm trying to change our country, and Orange County has got to be a big part of America's future." I came because I was tired of the politics of blame and division and name calling that had dominated Washington for far too long, because people being put into little boxes and labeled gave everyone an excuse not to work together to solve our problems and move this country forward. I did it because I believed that you could go beyond the tired rhetoric of yesterday's politics, that the real issue was how you could be both good for business and good for working people, how you could both grow the economy and protect the environment. I believe that you could be a fiscal conservative and still be progressive enough to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow for all these young people in the audience. That's what I believed then; that's what I believe now.
And so, in 1992, I came to California and Orange County saying that I wanted to create a country in which there's opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and an American community in which everyone has a place.
Do you feel that we're better off than we were 4 years ago? [Applause] You know 4 years ago, the people of California had to take me on faith, but now there is a record. There has never been a partnership between the National Government and the people of any State like the one we have forged over the last 4 years. A lot of it was born of necessity, of earthquakes and fires and floods, of the economic dislocation caused by defense cutbacks, of the terrible recession you were facing when I came here. But little by little, day by day, month by month, we worked together to meet the challenges the people of California faced. And look at the difference 4 years can make.
Four years ago, we had high unemployment and rising frustration. We still have a lot of challenges, but compared to 4 years ago, we have lower unemployment, 10 1/2 million new jobs, a 15-year high in homeownership, the biggest drop in childhood poverty in 20 years, the biggest drop in inequality among working Americans in 27 years, the lowest rates combined of unemployment, inflation, and home mortgage interest rates in 27 years. We are on the right track to the 21st century.
After inflation, the typical family's income is up over $1,600. Nearly 2 million people have moved from welfare to work. The crime rates have gone down for 4 years in a row. And we have invested more money in education and research and in environmental protection while holding Government spending to slower growth than my two Republican predecessors did. And we brought the deficit down every year for 4 years, the first time in the 20th century any administration has done that.
Our friends on the other side, they complain about Government all the time. They set it up as the enemy; it's Government versus the people. The last time I checked, the Constitution said, of the people, by the people, and for the people. That's what the Declaration of Independence says. That's why, even though we have abolished more regulations, ended more programs, and reduced the size of the Government more than our predecessors did, we have also done more to create opportunity, to reinforce responsibility, and to bring the American people into a community together instead of always dividing us. I am tired of that. I want us to go forward together, and I think you do, too.
Let me say, I was just looking at this magnificent new courthouse that's coming up up here, and I want to give special credit to one citizen of Orange County, a Republican, Roger Johnson, who worked in our administration and had a lot to do with the progress of the last 4 years. He's not here today, but I want to thank him for what he did.
Ladies and gentlemen, the FBI reported last week that our crime rate is at a 10-year low. In California, it's dropped to a 25-year low. We can change this country. You don't have to wonder anymore about whether what we do and you do together can make a difference to make life better. Four years ago, it was simply a matter of faith. Today you have a record.
Now, I'm glad we've got some of our friends in the opposition over there, and I understand why they have to try to shout us down every now and then, because for them the evidence hurts. But let's talk about the evidence and welcome them here.
But the question is not what have we done, but what will we do? Last night, I was so moved by the questions, because repeatedly what people wanted to know was, what are you going to do about this, that, or the other thing; how does what you do affect how I live; how does what you do, Mr. President, affect the world my children will live in.
And I was so impressed because the people who asked questions were not just concerned about what's going to happen next week or next month, they were also worried about what the world would be like in 20 years, in 30 years. And I tell you what I try to think about every day—and I recommend this to all of you, before you vote on November 5th, you ought to try this: Every day I ask myself, can I say in 30 seconds or a minute what my vision is for America in the 21st century? Can I say in a minute what I want my country to look like when my daughter is my age, when our children are our age? What do you want to be able to say about America and be absolutely sure it's true when we go roaring into this new century?
The young people in this audience today, many of them will be doing jobs that have not been invented yet. Some of them will be doing work that has not even been imagined yet. And what we have to do is to create a world that will enable all of them to live up to the fullest of their God-given potential, a world in which all citizens take responsibility not only for themselves and their own families but for bringing us together and moving us forward.
As I said, I think you saw two very different visions of the future last night, two honestly different visions. We need not say bad things about our opponents to say we just have different views. We just have different views.
I believe the most important things in all of our lives are the personal things—that your individual life, your family life is clearly the most important thing. I believe many things have to be done at the grassroots level by people in the private sector, by religious and community organizations and civic organizations, by local government. But I believe the National Government is not your enemy; it is your servant, your partner. I believe it does take a village to raise our children and build our future.
And let me say to you, what does that mean in practical terms? It means I'm proud of the fact that we lowered the deficit for 4 years in a row, but I want to finish the job of balancing the budget, to keep interest rates down and the economy growing. California has not come all the way back. Not everybody who wants a good job has one. We've got to balance the budget, but we do not have to wreck Medicare or Medicaid or cut education or environmental protection or research and turn our back on our future to do it. And we should not blow a hole in it with his $550 billion tax scheme. We should keep going.
I believe we have to help our families. I go all over the country talking to people, and whenever I go home, I also spend a fair amount of time talking to people I grew up with. Most of them are just solid middle class citizens leading the lives that we all assumed we would lead when we were children. And everybody I talk to, when they talk about their real concerns, somehow or another it always gets around to: Can I succeed at home and at work? Can I raise a successful family and have a good career? Will I be able to do well enough financially to take care of my family, but will I have enough time with my family so that the money means something to me? I hear it everywhere in different ways. That's why I'm proud the first bill I signed was the Family and Medical Leave Act, an honest difference between my opponent and me.
So what are we going to do about it? First of all, we ought to have a tax cut, but it ought to be one we can afford and still balance the budget, one targeted to childrearing, to education, to buying a home, to dealing with medical costs.
Secondly, we ought to keep working to protect our children from the dangers of crime and guns and gangs and drugs and tobacco. We need to finish the job. We have only funded about half of those 100,000 police. The opposition believes we're making a mistake putting these police on the street. The mayor knows better. I say let's finish the job of putting 100,000 police on the street. Will you help me do that? [Applause]
The second thing we ought to do—we passed the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban and this country is safer because of it. But our police officers are not as safe as they ought to be, and we ought to ban bullets whose only purpose is to pierce the bulletproof vests that police officers wear, and protect them.
We ought to continue to expand the safe and drug-free schools program so that in every grade school in this country there's a D.A.R.E. officer, there's somebody in a uniform telling our kids that drugs are wrong, drugs can kill you, giving them somebody to look up to. We shouldn't cut that program back for 23 million kids, as our adversaries tried to do. I say let's stay with the safe and drug-free schools program. Will you help me do that? [Applause]
We ought to continue until we have finally put into effect a set of legally binding rules that will stop tobacco companies from advertising and distributing tobacco to children. Three thousand kids a day start smoking illegally; 1,000 will die sooner because of it. It is illegal. It is wrong. We should not reverse course. That's another difference between me and our friends on the other side. Will you help us prevail in that fight? Will you stick up for our future? [Applause]
We ought to expand the family and medical leave law so parents can take a little time off from work without losing their jobs to take their children to regular doctors' appointments and to go to parent-teacher conferences at the schools. That's important, too, and our economy will be stronger if our parents are happier at work because they know their kids are doing better. Will you help me do that? [Applause]
We passed health care reform to say you can't have your health insurance taken away just because you changed jobs or someone in your family gets sick. Twenty-five million Americans could be helped by it. We stopped insurance companies from forcing hospitals to kick mothers and newborn babies out of the hospital after just a day. They can't do that anymore.
But we have more to do. Our balanced budget plan will provide coverage to families when they're between jobs for up to 6 months, will add another million children to the ranks of health-insured instead of uninsured, will provide mammograms for women on Medicare, and will help families who are caring for a member with Alzheimer's. And it's all paid for in the balanced budget. Will you help me do that? [Applause]
We've worked with States all over the country, without regard to party, including California, to move nearly 2 million people from welfare to work. I signed a welfare reform bill that says, we'll still guarantee to poor families health care and nutrition, but the money that the Federal Government used to send to the States for a welfare check now has to be turned into a paycheck within 2 years for able-bodied people. That's a good thing to say, but you have to have the jobs there if you're going to make people take them. I have a plan to say that this is the beginning, not the end of welfare reform. We have to create at least another million jobs in the private sector with tax incentives and other support. Will you help me do that? [Applause]
We have made the air and the water cleaner. We have made our food safer. We have cleaned up more toxic waste sites in 3 years than the previous administrations did in 12. But 10 million American children still live within 4 miles of a toxic waste dump, and that is wrong. We have a plan, paid for in our balanced budget plan, to clean up the 500 worst sites in this country so that we can say, by the 21st century, the children of America—rich, poor, or middle class—are going to grow up next to parks, not poison. Will you help us do that? [Applause]
And finally, and most important of all, we have got to guarantee that every child in this country has access to the finest educational opportunities in the entire world. In part because we are more than ever a nation of immigrants, 40 percent of our children cannot read independently by the third grade. That means that everything they try to learn later on in life, they are handicapped in learning. It is wrong for us to permit children to leave the third grade not being able to read on their own.
I have a plan to mobilize 30,000 trained reading tutors, including AmeriCorps volunteers, to enlist a million volunteers across America so that we can go into the schools of America and teach our children. We did this in a rural county in Kentucky, and within a year the average child had increased their reading level by 3 years— 3 years. We can do this.
So I ask you, will you help me put a million people out there so that every 8-year-old can say, "This is a book, and I can read it all by myself"? Will you help me? Will you help us to hook up every classroom and library and every school in the United States—free access to the Internet, to the World Wide Web, so that every child in America can be part of this new technology age? [Applause] And to grownups here who aren't as expert in computers as a lot of the kids are, let me tell you what that means. That means—if we can say that every 12-year-old in America can log on to the Internet, let me tell you what that means in practical terms. It means for the first time in the entire history of the United States, for the very first time, we can say that every child in America—rich, poor, or middle class—in every community in America, now has access to the same learning at the same level of quality at the same time. It will revolutionize education in America. Will you help me do it? [Applause]
And finally, we must open the doors of college education to all Americans of any age who need further education. I want to give every family the ability to save for an IRA but withdraw tax-free if the money's used to pay for college or health care or buying a first home. I want to make 2 years of education after high school just as universal as a high school diploma is today. And we can do it in only 4 years if we'll simply say we're going to let you deduct from your tax bill, dollar for dollar, the cost of a typical community college tuition. Will you help me do that? [Applause] And we should make any college cost, any college tuition tax deductible up to $10,000 a year for any Americans of any age, including older people who need to go back and get school. Will you help us do that? [Applause]
Now, this election is 19 days away. And they always tell you when you're 19 days away, just come in like this, give a whoop-dee-doo speech, talk 3 minutes, leave—no more issues. But I'm telling you, the big question is 19 days is, who's going to show up. Are you going to show up? Are you going to show up? [Applause]
And example, after example, after example— some of which I was able to cite last night— the people of the State of California can say, "There is a direct consequences between the vote I cast, the person who is in charge in Washington, and the decisions made here on the streets of Santa Ana and every other city in this State that affect my life."
So I ask you—I talk a lot about our responsibilities—it is your responsibility to go vote, your responsibility as a citizen, your responsibility to be there, your responsibility to build that bridge to the 21st century. In 19 days let's do it.
Thank you, and God bless you. Thank you.
NOTE: The President spoke at 11:26 a.m. at the Old Orange County Courthouse.
http://www.mountaire.com/wp-content/themes/evolution/video/still-frame.jpg
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29084
The American Presidency Project
Lyndon B. Johnson
XXXVI President of the United States: 1963-1969
451 - Statement by the President Upon Signing the Wholesome Poultry Products Act.
August 19, 1968
EIGHT MONTHS AGO I signed into law the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967. That landmark bill capped a crusade that had begun 60 years ago--to assure American housewives that the meat they served their families was pure, not harmful or dirty or diseased.
Today I am proud to sign a bill that will extend the same coverage to all poultry products. It is the fulfillment of a promise I made to every housewife--in my first consumer message just after I became President.
In the early days of this century, Americans took for granted that there were risks in buying food. They even joked about it in print. One newspaper printed a little poem:
"Mary had a little lamb,
and when she saw it sicken,
she shipped it off to packing town,
and now it's labeled chicken."
In 1968, we cannot tolerate the image, or the fact, of unwholesome food:
--Not when Americans last year consumed more than 12 billion pounds of poultry.
--Not when a full 13 percent of that supply--or 1.6 billion pounds--was subject to little or no inspection because it didn't cross State lines.
That loophole did not necessarily mean that all, or even most, of those 1.6 billion pounds were unsafe.
But it did mean that shady processors could avoid Federal inspection laws by distributing tainted poultry within the same State.
It did mean that the housewife often took an unnecessary risk--for her children and herself--when she bought a chicken.
The Wholesome Poultry Products Act of 1968 will insure that dirty plants will have to clean up or close down.
It will give a State 2 years to develop an inspection system as good as the Federal system. If, at the end of that time, the State has not done so, then Federal inspection will be imposed.
It will give the States financial and technical assistance in establishing inspection programs and training inspectors.
It will let the Secretary of Agriculture take action against any plant where the State fails to correct conditions endangering the public health.
When I was a year old--the same age as my grandson is now--President Theodore Roosevelt stated a principle which has survived the test of time: that "No man may poison the people for his private profit."
I believe that. I think all Americans believe it. And this bill will help us make sure it becomes a reality.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29085
The American Presidency Project
Lyndon B. Johnson
XXXVI President of the United States: 1963-1969
452 - Remarks in Detroit at the Annual Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
August 19, 1968
Commander Scerra, General Westmoreland, Reverend Varner, Congressman and Mrs. Teague, Governor Docking, Mayor Cavanagh, my beloved friend Bill Driver, ladies and gentlemen:
Tonight, as we meet here to honor American veterans, I want to first of all thank you for your kindness to me and to my family. As we assemble here tonight, one of the great veterans of our time is waging one of the greatest struggles of his life.
The hearts and the hopes of all of us in this room--and of all our people across the entire United States--go out at this moment to our beloved President, Dwight David Eisenhower.
President Eisenhower's life is witness to a firm conviction. He believed that democracy can only survive by accepting freedom as a responsibility. He believed that the first responsibility of a democratic people is to unite in defense of freedom whenever and wherever it is threatened.
He fought for freedom on the battlefield. And when he led his Nation at home, he sought through all the years to bind us together with a single overriding purpose-the preservation of freedom.
I am very proud to say tonight that I spent some of the most rewarding days of my public life working closely with President Eisenhower to draw the line against division and against disunity.
As Majority Leader of the Senate--and as a member of another political party--I worked with him because I shared his faith that responsible Americans must always-always--place the Nation's cause above any partisan or petty personal interest.
So, tonight, as the prayers of this Nation go out for President Eisenhower, let us honor him with the strength of our resolve. Let us show that we are one people--committed to the cause for which he has dedicated his entire life.
Ladies and gentlemen, I should like to ask each of you now to stand and to join me in a moment of silent prayer for this great beloved American.1
1 On July 18, 1968, the President issued proclamation 3859 "Salute to Eisenhower Week." See Item 399.
More than a century ago, President Abraham Lincoln looked beyond a terrible war to the day when peace would come, and high among the country's obligations, he saw this imperative, "To care for him who shall have borne the battle."
Through other wars, and through troubled days, President Lincoln's words have endured as the rock of our commitment.
To no group does America owe more than it owes to the men who have borne arms in defense of America and in defense of their fellow man--some of whom could not always be there with you--and in defense of freedom.
From Valley Forge to the jungles of Vietnam, you knew and they knew what they were fighting for--and that knowledge became a well-spring of dedication and courage.
Nothing can ever quite adequately express the gratitude that all of us should owe to our veterans. But one thing is certain: Those who have been injured and disabled in the line of duty have a right to all the help that their Government can give them to live useful and productive lives.
So, tonight, I am signing here into law a measure in your presence, and I think it is a historic moment. This measure will provide service-disabled veterans with the help that they are entitled to and with the help that they need.
--Compensation for 115,000 totally disabled veterans will be increased by $100 a month. Very soon, monthly rates will now range from $400 to $700.
--Almost 2 million veterans whose disabilities are less than total will receive an 8 percent increase. This bill provides much more, though, than just financial stability for a disabled veteran. It offers him new hope--and it offers him new help--in his fight to resume a normal life.
This bill reaffirms our gratitude to those who have sacrificed so much for freedom. It represents our pledge that they will never be forsaken and they will never be forgotten.
I want to express my personal thanks to Administrator Driver, the Veterans Administrator than whom there has never been a better one; to that very able Chairman, Congressman Olin Teague, who made this measure possible; and also to that man who spoke to you today and who honors us always when he is in our presence, that great and gallant and unequalled courageous leader, General Westmoreland, the present Chief of Staff.
I came here tonight because I wanted to say a few words about Vietnam.
We are in the midst, as you may have judged, of a national political campaign. And I think it is altogether proper that there should be a great deal of discussion and speculation about a war in which more than 500,000 of our young men are at this moment, tonight, deeply engaged. These things are quite clear:
--Those more than half a million American men are not out in Southeast Asia as Republicans or Democrats or American Party or fourth party members. They are out there as American sons fighting to protect the vital interests of America, as those interests have been determined by more than one President and by more than one Congress.
--Until January 20, 1969, until another President takes the oath with those closing words, "So help me God," I bear the responsibility of the Presidency, and of the executive policy of this Nation towards Vietnam--a policy that has been fashioned over many years on a bipartisan basis, by several Presidents and by several American Congresses.
The interests of the Nation and the interests of peace are not advanced by ambiguity at any time about that policy.
Therefore, I am not going to speak in ambiguous terms and I am going to lay out a few fundamentals for you and for the rest of the Nation here tonight.
First, our objective in Southeast Asia is peace, and the essentials of what we mean by peace for a long time have been quite clear. And I am going to repeat them briefly:
--reinstall the demilitarized zone at the 17th parallel, as the Geneva accords of 1954 require, and let the matter of Vietnamese unity be decided by the people of North Vietnam and the people of South Vietnam in the future;
--remove all foreign forces from Laos and reinstall and make fully effective the Geneva accords of 1962 on Laos;
--withdraw the United States forces from South Vietnam under the circumstances described in the Manila communiqu?;
--encourage the people of South Vietnam to exercise their rights of self-determination. It is for them to decide in peace without any coercion of any kind--from anyone--their own political future on a one-man one-vote basis--in a free election-in the spirit of reconciliation reaffirmed by President Thieu at Honolulu. He said there that all can vote in Vietnam, and all can run for office, if they will forsake violence and if they will live by the Constitution. We in the United States agree.
That is what I mean by an honorable peace. I doubt that any American President will take a substantially different view when he bears the burdens of office, and he has available to him all the information that flows to the Commander in Chief, and he is responsible to our people for all of the consequences of all the alternatives that are open to him.
Second, the United States took a major initiative toward peace on March 31. We not only made an offer, but we immediately acted. We took a first dramatic step to deescalate the conflict. I immediately ordered our aircraft and our naval vessels to make no attacks on North Vietnam north of the 20th parallel. This excluded from bombing almost 90 percent of the North Vietnamese population and almost 80 percent of the North Vietnamese territory.
I then, that night, in that televised speech to the Nation had this to say, "I cannot in good conscience stop all bombing so long as to do so would immediately and directly endanger the lives of our men and our allies. Whether a complete bombing halt becomes possible in the future will be determined by events."
Thus far Hanoi's response has been:
--to reject every single suggestion made by ourselves or others to deescalate the conflict;
--to proceed since March 31 with the highest level of infiltration that we have observed during the war in Vietnam, the highest level of southward movement of military supplies, and the highest level of preparations for the third major wave of attack in 1968.
I do not know whether or when such a new attack will, in fact, take place. It may have already begun. But I can assure you that we are doing everything that's imaginable and in our power to avoid it.
But I do know that Hanoi has rejected our every offer for prompt deescalation and movement toward peace in favor of their massive military preparations for intensified battle.
So the next move must be theirs. In affairs there is no more basic lesson than it takes two to make a bargain and to make a peace. We have made a reasonable offer and we have taken a major first step. That offer has not been accepted. This administration does not intend to move further until it has good reason to believe that the other side intends seriously to join us in deescalating the war and moving seriously toward peace. We are willing to take chances for peace but we cannot make foolhardy gestures for which your fighting men will pay the price by giving their lives.
So tonight I hope you will ask yourselves: Where would the position of this Nation and its allies be if, having taken a major step toward deescalation and peace already, we responded now to their hostility with still another major unilateral step? If you were in Hanoi would you then deescalate and negotiate? Or would you not demand another unilateral step, until finally the whole foundation of freedom for the nations of Southeast Asia was gone beyond repair?
This President--this administration--will not move down that slippery slope.
This is a time tonight when Americans have to face certain hard questions and they have to keep certain facts clearly before them.
First, are we Americans prepared to say to Hanoi that we are ready to have their men by the thousands and their supplies by the tons pour down through the DMZ against our American sons and our allies without obstruction, whether or not Hanoi takes action to deescalate the conflict? Well, that is what would be involved in an immediate halt to all bombing in North Vietnam.
Second, are we Americans ready to let the Communist forces assemble without any interference around Saigon, Danang, Hue, and other cities and, then and there, deliver their attacks at times and places of their own choice, when it suits their own advantage? Well, that is what would be involved if we should give up our search-and-destroy operations.
Third, let us all remember that it is a long-established policy of the Government of the United States and the Government of Vietnam that the political future of that country should be decided by free elections based on the principle of one-man one-vote. It is the Communists who have refused to even discuss these elections. It is they who seek a solution by bullet rather than by ballot.
Fourth, let us all remember that with the encouragement of the American people, these gallant South Vietnamese have created their own Constitution, have created their own government.
They have voted freely--often at the risk of their own lives--in elections as closely observed as any elections in modern times-in which 60 percent of the total electorate participated.
In that government and closely associated with it in the Vietnam Senate, are candidates who received more than 56 percent of the popular vote in the Vietnam presidential election.
The people of South Vietnam and their government have demonstrated--in action-a willingness and an ability to let the people speak--peacefully--by democratic means. It is not they, but it is the other side, who now tonight must be persuaded that the election process is the road to peace in Vietnam.
I can tell you that I believe peace is going to come--that is, if we are steady and it is going to come, if I have anything to do with it, on honorable terms. I cannot tell you precisely when it will come, but I believe that it will come:
--because I believe military victory is beyond the enemy's grasp;
--because the South Vietnamese are gathering political and military strength and confidence day by day; and finally
--because I believe in America.
However great our anxiety for peace; however great our concern for the war in Vietnam; however great our passionate desire that the killing shall stop, I do not believe that the American people are going to walk away from this struggle unless they can walk away from it on honorable terms.
When we sent our negotiating team off to Paris I told them two things:
--first, put aside all considerations of domestic politics;
--second, work for a genuine peace--the peace which is a vital interest of the United States now, and which will serve us well 10 years from now.
I did not take myself out of personal partisan presidential politics on the night of March 31st in order to permit our pursuit of peace to be colored in the slightest degree by domestic political considerations. I want peace in Vietnam. I want it perhaps more than any single living American individual. But the pursuit of peace in this administration is going to be governed by America's abiding interests as we see them.
I do have faith, a faith that strengthened me on March 31st, that when the political campaign is all over, and the man takes up the responsibility of the Presidency--whoever he may be--he will take a similar view.
Right now we are doing all that diplomacy can do to end the war through the talks in Paris. And we shall continue.
We shall try again and again, every conceivable thing that human ingenuity can produce. I shall do everything I possibly can between now and January, every waking moment, to bring an honorable peace to Southeast Asia. I do hope that it can be possible. But if not, I have faith that the next President-faced with the consequences to his own people, and the consequences to the peace of the world--I have faith that he, too, will stand up and insist on an honorable peace.
So these are my views on Vietnam. This is my faith.
But let me add another word about why we came to commit ourselves as a nation in Vietnam and to the security of Southeast Asia.
Almost two-thirds of the men, women, and children on this planet, living in this world, now live in Asia. In the year 2000, that proportion is going to be even higher than two-thirds of the world. It is as certain as the sun rises that in the world of modern technology and communications, the prosperity and the security of your United States will, with the passage of time, be more bound up with the fate of Asia--and not less.
This Nation--not this administration, but this Nation--has three times in the past 30 years reacted when one power or another sought by aggression to enlarge its power in Asia: in 1941 on December 7, in 1950, and then in the present conflict. Our responsibility was recognized in 1954 when the SEATO Treaty was adopted by the United States Senate by a vote of 82 to 1. That treaty was accepted by the United States Senate for one simple reason--because in their hearts and their minds, the Members of the Senate knew that this Nation could not and would not ever stand idly by and see all the countries of Southeast Asia placed under the aggressor's heel. They hoped--and they stated in the speeches on that treaty that they hoped--that that treaty and the warning that it represented would deter aggression.
But the men in Hanoi believed that they commanded a method of aggression that would succeed even in the face of our commitment. They have been supported by others who felt that Hanoi's success would drive the United States out of Asia and leave it open for a takeover.
Well, there is no serious and responsible leader in Asia who does not already know that the struggle now taking place in Vietnam tonight is the hinge on which the fate of Asia will swing--one way or the other-for many years, far into the future. When we insist on an honorable peace in Vietnam, we are insisting on a solution to the struggle which has the promise of permitting the independent nations of Asia to go forward in confidence to build in freedom a life consistent with their own traditions and their own ambitions. We are talking tonight not about 17 million people of South Vietnam, but we are talking about nations which contain hundreds of millions of people.
There are some among us who appear to be searching for a formula which would get us out of Vietnam and Asia, on any terms, leaving the people of South Vietnam and Laos and Thailand--and all the others--to an uncertain fate.
Laos, South Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia--pretty soon we could be back to the Philippines--and even back to Honolulu.
I profoundly believe that this course would be disastrous to the interests of the United States. I believe it would be disastrous to the world--now and in the years to come.
On the other hand, I am equally confident that if we have the will to see this through in Vietnam to an honorable peace, the way will be open for better times; for a period of relative tranquillity in which the forces of moderation, of national independence, of freedom and regional cooperation will assert themselves in Asia as they are tonight asserting themselves in other parts of the world-permitting the United States not to return to isolation but to work as a partner with a vital region of the world which will more and more assume responsibility for its own destiny.
Well, that is the ultimate stake in Vietnam--for Americans, for Asians, and for the world.
That is why three different Presidents have taken and have held the position they have taken.
And that is why the American people, in my judgment, are going to hold steady and see it through and not cut and run.
I want the killing in Vietnam to stop--but we cannot stop the killing if North Vietnam insists on sending another 150,000 new aggressors into the South to kill Americans and allies since January the first of this year.
Remember, it takes two to stop the killing. We are ready now, tonight, to stop the bombing when the other side is prepared not just to see our bombing stop and weapons taken from our men, but the other side is willing to stop their aggression as well.
We are ready to stop the war now by stopping the fighting when they are ready to stop the war by stopping the aggression.
We have stopped the bombing already now eight different times. The last time, out of respect to Buddha's birthday. Then, on their own religious birthday--their answer to our stopping the bombing was the Tet offensive when tens of thousands of casualties were suffered by our people. We stopped the bombing again before that, for 37 long days. And what did they stop? Their answer was not to stop aggression, but, General Westmoreland will tell you, they greatly stepped up their aggression while we were stopping the bombing.
So, my friends, let's not be hoodwinked. Let's not be misled. In short, our people and their people must understand one thing: We are not going to stop the bombing just to give them a chance to step up their bloodbath. We are not going to stop bombing their trucks or bombing their ammunition or bombing their supply lines while they bomb our cities and while they bomb our headquarters and while they mine South Vietnamese territory and they require our American fighting men to bear the brunt of the increased firepower that the Communists would rain on our men if we did not stop every truck and every bit of the ammunition we could.
On March 31 we stopped 90 percent of the bombing. Have they stopped 90 percent of their infiltration or 80 percent or even 50 percent? No. They didn't stop anything. They increased their infiltration 100 percent. That was their answer to our stopping the bombing.
We are ready tonight and we are ready tomorrow, either on the battlefield or the conference table in Paris, to put into effect any fair and reasonable cease-fire on both sides--but not just one side.
We are not going to trade the safety of American fighting men whose voices are not here to be heard in this election campaign for any Trojan horse. They are going to have a voice in this campaign before it is over.
So tonight, I appeal to all well-intentioned citizens who are demanding that Americans stop the bombing to tell me what they are demanding of Hanoi. I ask each well-intentioned good American to search his conscience when he goes home tonight and ask himself: "Why, oh why do we hear nothing of any demands on Hanoi?"
You can look at that Marine sergeant and say, "Please sacrifice and give up the best implement you have to stop those trucks, and those handgrenades, and those divisions that are coming toward you. I ask you to give up the best weapon you have and lay it down."
And he would look at me with those innocent, boyish eyes and say, "Yes, Mr. President, but what are they going to give up?"
And I say, "That has not been mentioned." I am not going to answer him that way. It is one thing when you are seeking responsibility and it is another thing when you have it.
One day I pray--and I pray every night that it will be soon--the men who bear the brunt of battle are going to come back home. And when they do come they are going to ask an accounting of us for the support that we gave them or that we denied them in the hour of greatest need when we sent them away to protect us and to defend us.
I hope and I pray that we are not going to be found wanting in that judgment.
So long as I am the American Commander in Chief we are not going to be found wanting.
In our great democracy--from the American Revolution to the war in Vietnam-struggles on the battlefield have been accompanied by contention and dissension and a great deal of debate here at home.
But always this great Nation has produced men like yourselves, men who were ready to do their duty; in your case, ready to go abroad, ready to fight for their Nation, ready to give their lives to preserve freedom.
You men who grace this banquet hall tonight did your job, in your time, and you did it in faraway places, in great fear--because no man ever got shot at who wasn't frightened. I know. But you brought home your Nation's flag in honor--and you brought it home unstained. And they are going to do the same in Vietnam.
In time--and I pray that time will be short--these almost 600,000 young men are going to come back and join us. In time the debates and the personalities will pass, and they and the American people will look back on what we have done and, I think, they will look back with the same pride that we feel in our other efforts in the cause of freedom when we have defended it with our blood.
And we all shall know that those who do not come back--your brothers in arms--will not have died in vain.
Every day I read reports of the courage of Americans in battle in Vietnam. Every day I read reports of our civil efforts to help the South Vietnamese build a nation, expand education, plant new rice seeds, strengthen their constitutional government. Every day I read about our men teaching them to read and write and helping to cure the sores and heal the bodies of these unfortunate deprived people.
Behind these military and civilian efforts are, I am here to certify tonight, as fine a generation of young Americans as America in all her history ever produced.
So I hope that you have faith, and I hope you keep the faith. I hope you give us the support that we are going to need so dearly in the trying months ahead.
So tonight I come here to thank you for your honor and for your kindness to my family and to tell you that I am of good heart. Let no one--let no one ever tell you that love of country, that dedication to freedom, that determination for an honorable peace is dead in this land.
Note: The President spoke at 8:37 p.m. at Cobo Hall in Detroit.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044072/releaseinfo
IMDb
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Release Info
USA 10 January 1951 (Los Angeles, California)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044072/plotsummary
IMDb
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Plot Summary
In the Korean War, the prisoner of war Sergeant Zack and only survivor of his company is released by the South-Korean boy Short Round. The walk together trying to reach the American lines, and they stumble with other survivors, forming a ragtag platoon. When they reach a Buddhist temple, they learn that it is abandoned and they camp there, transforming it in an observation outpost. When they realize that they are under siege of the communist army, they have to battle to survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Welker
Heinrich Welker
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Heinrich Johann Welker (September 9, 1912 in Ingolstadt – December 25, 1981 in Erlangen) was a German theoretical and applied physicist who invented the "transistron", a transistor made at Westinghouse independently of the first successful transistor made at Bell Laboratories.
https://www.siemens.com/history/en/news/1141_welker.htm
SIEMENS
News
September 9, 1912 – physicist Heinrich Welker is born
Heinrich Welker was born on September 9, 1912, in Ingolstadt. Upon completion of his secondary school education, Welker moved to Munich to study mathematics and physics. From 1935 to 1940 he worked as a scientific assistant to Arnold Sommerfeld at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. He received his doctorate in 1936 with a dissertation on wave mechanics. His interests during this period were focused on superconductivity, a specialization that would earn him a lecturing position at the University of Munich three years later.
Following his employment at the Wireless-Telegraphic and Atmospheric-Electrical Testing Station in Gräfelfing and its successor, the Air-Ground Communication Research Institute in Oberpfaffenhofen, he worked as a scientist at the Physical-Chemical Institute of the University of Munich: It was here in 1942 that he succeeded in demonstrating the semiconducting properties of germanium and developed a rectifier design for high-frequency electromagnetic waves. Following this patent, Siemens produced some 10,000 crystal diodes from purest germanium by 1945. Welker also developed an initial theory of what was later called the field-effect transistor with capacitive control of electricity in a three-electrode semiconductor design.
After a brief intermezzo running his own engineering firm in Planegg outside Munich, Welker decided to go abroad. In 1947 he accepted the position of laboratory director at the French headquarters of Westinghouse in Paris. But he returned to Germany only four years later. In 1951, as director of the department of solid-state physics for Siemens Research in Erlangen, he discovered the III/V compounds consisting of elements of the third and fifth groups of the periodic table. This discovery led to broad application of galvanomagnetic and optoelectric effects and to completely new switching elements in microelectronics – including gallium arsenide, which to this day is still important for high-frequency components and laser diodes in optoelectronics.
After the complete Siemens-Schuckertwerke research laboratory in Erlangen was acquired, Welker and the research group he built became a pioneer of microwave semiconductor elements as well as LEDs and laser diodes based on compound semiconductors. When Siemens AG was founded, the research labs in Munich and Erlangen were merged in 1969 under Welker’s management. From 1973 to 1977, Welker was the head of Corporate Research and Development. After his retirement, the 65-year-old remained president of the German Physics Society for one more year.
Heinrich Welker died on December 25, 1981, in Erlangen.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-europe-missed-the-transistor
IEEE SPECTRUM
How Europe Missed The Transistor
The most important invention of the 20th century was conceived not just once, but twice
By Michael Riordan
Posted 1 Nov 2005 5:00 GMT
In late 1948, shortly after Bell Telephone Laboratories had announced the invention of the transistor, surprising reports began coming in from Europe. Two physicists from the German radar program, Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, claimed to have invented a strikingly similar semiconductor device, which they called the transistron, while working at a Westinghouse subsidiary in Paris.
The resemblance between the two awkward contraptions was uncanny. In fact, they were almost identical! Just like the revolutionary Bell Labs device, dubbed the point-contact transistor, the transistron featured two closely spaced metal points poking into the surface of a narrow germanium sliver. The news from Paris was particularly troubling at Bell Labs, for its initial attempts to manufacture such a delicate gizmo were then running into severe difficulties with noise, stability, and uniformity.
So in May 1949, Bell Labs researcher Alan Holden made a sortie to Paris while visiting England, to snoop around the city and see the purported invention for himself. "This business of the French transistors would be hard to unravel, i.e., whether they developed them independently," he confided in a 14 May letter to William B. Shockley, leader of the Bell Labs solid-state physics group. "As we arrived, they were transmitting to a little portable radio receiver outdoors from a transmitter indoors, which they said was modulated by a transistor."
Four days later, France's Secretary of Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones (PTT), the ministry funding Mataré and Welker's research, announced the invention of the transistron to the French press, lauding the pair's achievement as a "brilliante réalisation de la recherche française." Only four years after World War II had ended in Europe, a shining technological phoenix had miraculously risen from the still-smoldering ashes of the devastation.
"This PTT bunch in Paris seems very good to me," Holden candidly admitted in his letter. "They have little groups in all sorts of rat holes, farm houses, cheese factories, and jails in the Paris suburbs. They are all young and eager." And one of these small, aggressive research groups, holed up in a converted house in the nearby village of Aulnay-sous-Bois, had apparently come through spectacularly with what might well be the invention of the century--a semiconducting device that would spawn a massive new global industry of incalculable value. Or had it?
As was true for the Bell Labs transistor, invented by John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain in December 1947, the technology that led to the transistron emerged from wartime research on semiconductor materials, which were sorely needed in radar receivers. In the European case, it was the German radar program that spawned the invention. Both Mataré and Welker played crucial roles in this crash R&D program, working at different ends of the war-torn country.
Mataré [see photo in " Transistor Twin"], who shared his remembrances from his home in Malibu, Calif., joined the German research effort in September 1939, just as Hitler's mighty army rumbled across Poland. Having received the equivalent of a master's degree in applied physics from Aachen Technical University, he began doing radar research at Telefunken AG's labs in Berlin. There he developed techniques to suppress noise in superheterodyne mixers, which convert the high-frequency radar signals rebounding from radar targets into lower-frequency signals that can be manipulated more easily in electronic circuits. Based on this research, published in 1942, Mataré earned his doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin.
At the time, German radar systems operated at wavelengths as short as half a meter. But the systems could not work at shorter wavelengths, which would have been better able to discern smaller targets, like enemy aircraft. The problem was that the vacuum-tube diodes that rectified current in the early radar receivers could not function at the high frequencies involved. Their dimensions--especially the gap between the diode's anode and cathode--were too large to cope with ultrashort, high-frequency waves. As a possible substitute, Mataré began experimenting on his own with solid-state crystal rectifiers similar to the "cat's-whisker" detectors he had tinkered with as a teenager.
During the 1920s, he built crystal radio sets to listen to classical music on the radio waves then beginning to fill the ether. Of Belgian extraction, he was raised in Aachen, Germany, in a family immersed in music. At the heart of each of his radios was a tiny chip of semiconductor material, such as galena (lead sulfide) or silicon, with a fragile wire jabbed gingerly into its surface. For reasons nobody fully understood until the late 1930s, this detector rectified the alternating-current signal from the antenna into the direct-current signal needed to drive headphones.
Similar point-contact devices, especially those made with silicon, could be used as the rectifier required in the superheterodyne mixer circuit of a radar receiver, which shifts the received frequencies down by mixing the input signal with the output of an internal oscillator. Because the electrical action of such a crystal rectifier is confined to a very small, almost microscopic region on the semiconductor surface, the device can rectify currents at relatively high frequencies.
Theoretical work by Walther Schottky at Siemens AG, in Munich, Germany, and by Nevill F. Mott at the University of Bristol, in England, had given Mataré and other radar researchers a much better understanding of what was happening beneath the sharp metal point. When the point touched the semiconductor surface, excess electrons quickly flowed into it, leaving behind a neutral "barrier layer" less than a micrometer deep in the material just underneath it. This narrow zone then acted like an asymmetric barrier to the further flow of electrons. They could jump the barrier much more readily from the semiconductor surface to the metal point than vice versa, in effect restricting current flow to one direction.
As the war ground on, the leaders of the Berlin-based German radar establishment urged the Luftwaffe to pursue research on systems operating at wavelengths well below 50 centimeters--in what we now call the microwave range. They argued that such systems would be small enough to mount in warplanes and detect approaching enemy aircraft through dense clouds and fog.
But German military leaders, basking smugly in their early victories, ignored those pleas. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring, who had served as an open-cockpit fighter pilot in World War I, adamantly believed that the intrinsic fighting abilities of his Aryan warriors made electronic systems superfluous. "My pilots," he bragged, "do not need a cinema on board!"
Everything changed after February 1943, however, when a British Sterling bomber downed over Rotterdam in the Netherlands revealed how far behind the Allies Germany had fallen in radar technology. Göring ordered a thorough analysis of the bomber's 9-cm radar system and recalled more than a thousand scientists, engineers, and technicians from the front in a desperate attempt to catch up. By summer they had built a working prototype, but it was much too late. Allied bombers, aided by onboard radar systems that allowed pilots to operate even in foul weather, were pulverizing German cities with increasing impunity.
Mataré recalled the sudden urgency in an interview. He intensified his previous R&D efforts on crystal rectifiers, particularly those made of silicon, which seemed best suited for microwave reception. But the Allied bombing of Berlin was making life exceedingly difficult for Telefunken researchers. "I spent many hours in subway stations during bomb attacks," he wrote in an unpublished memoir. So in January 1944, the company shifted much of its radar research to Breslau in Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland). Mataré worked in an old convent in nearby Leubus.
Laboring full-time to get silicon rectifiers into production, Mataré had scant opportunity to work on reducing the oscillator noise in radar receivers--an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation. But he did manage to build and study an intriguing new device, the crystal "duodiode," in which two closely spaced metal points contact the semiconductor surface, forming two adjacent crystal rectifiers. If they possess the same resistance and capacitance, these two rectifiers can be used in a special circuit to cancel out noise from the oscillator of a superheterodyne mixer. The noise through one rectifier adds to the overall signal transmitted by the mixer, and the noise through the other rectifier subtracts from that signal. But to ensure identical electrical characteristics, the points must be extremely close--far less than a millimeter apart--so that both contact the same tiny crystal grain on the surface of the semiconductor.
Mataré worked with silicon samples provided by physicist Karl Seiler in Breslau and germanium samples from a Luftwaffe research team near Munich that included Welker, his future co-worker. Although silicon worked better for radar receivers because it rectified at higher frequencies, germanium duodiodes exhibited intriguing behavior. When the two points touched the surface less than 100 micrometers apart, Mataré claims, he occasionally noticed that by varying the voltage on one he could influence the current through the other--a phenomenon he dubbed "interference." It seemed as if one of his points could affect a region extending far beyond the narrow barrier layer predicted by Schottky's theory.
Mataré had stumbled upon a method to influence this layer, which had stubbornly blocked earlier attempts to make a solid-state amplifier. But wartime urgencies kept him from pursuing this intriguing possibility much further.
Germany's eastern front collapsed in January 1945, and the Russian Army was swiftly approaching Breslau. The Telefunken lab in Leubus was hastily abandoned, and all of Mataré's lab books and records were burned to keep them out of enemy hands. The group attempted to reconstitute its R&D program in central Germany, but the U.S. Army terminated this effort when it swept through in April 1945, mercifully sending Mataré home to rejoin his family in nearby Kassel.
Mataré's future colleague Welker wasn't spared the indignities of war, either. Allied bombs destroyed his laboratory near Munich in October 1944. Early the following year, this theoretical physicist, who during the 1930s had worked on the quantum mechanics of electrons in metals, began speculating about how to use silicon and germanium to fabricate a solid-state amplifier.
These two elements were widely regarded as metals during the 1930s, but their apparent metallic behavior was due largely to the high level of impurities in the available samples. When foreign atoms of elements in the fifth column of the periodic table--arsenic and phosphorus, for example--become lodged in the tetrahedral crystal structure of silicon or germanium, four of their five outermost electrons form strong bonds with nearby atoms, but the fifth is easily knocked away and can thus transfer current through the crystal. The much-higher-purity silicon and germanium that researchers used to build radar systems during World War II had far fewer of such current carriers and behaved more like semiconductors than like metals.
In early 1945, Welker, who was mastering the art of purifying germanium, recognized that the two semiconductors could be used to make what we now call a field-effect transistor. In fact, the device he had in mind was strikingly similar to one that Shockley was to suggest at Bell Labs a few months later.
In this scheme, an electric field from a metal plate should penetrate into a thin surface layer of a semiconductor strip beneath it, ripping electrons loose from their parent atoms to serve as current carriers. A voltage applied across the semiconductor strip would induce a current through it. Crucially, a varying voltage on the metal plate would modulate the current through the strip. Thus, small input signals would result in large output currents flowing through the strip. Or so Welker figured.
But tests he performed in March 1945 revealed no such amplification. In his logbook he recorded "only small effects," orders of magnitude less than what was predicted by Schottky's theory. Shockley, Brattain, and their Bell Labs colleagues attempted similar tests that very same spring, with similarly disappointing results.
The failures soon led Bardeen to postulate a novel idea of "surface states"--that free electrons were somehow huddling on the semiconductor surface, shielding out the field. This conjecture, and Brattain's follow-up experiments to determine the physical nature of the surface states, led to their invention of the point-contact transistor in December 1947--a month after they discovered how to overcome the shielding.
After his failures, Welker returned to research on germanium and resumed the theoretical studies of superconductivity he had reluctantly abandoned during the war. In 1946, British and French intelligence agents interrogated him about his involvement in German radar. They subsequently offered him an opportunity to work in Paris in an R&D operation set up under the auspices of a Westinghouse subsidiary, Compagnie des Freins et Signaux Westinghouse. The immediate goal was to manufacture germanium rectifiers for telecommunications and military electronics.
While teaching in Aachen at his alma mater in 1946, Mataré was also interviewed by agents. Fluent in French, he received a similar offer. He eagerly agreed to join the Paris effort, because doing research in devastated, occupied Germany was almost impossible.
Then in their mid-thirties, the two German physicists met in Paris and began organizing their operation. They found a vacant two-story stone house in the middle-class suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, just northwest of the city. In its basement, Welker set up his equipment to purify and crystallize germanium. Mataré's testing and measurements laboratory went on the ground floor, where later that year a production line began fabricating what soon amounted to thousands of rectifiers per month.
On the top floor the men kept offices and rooms where they often stayed overnight--especially during that frantic first year. Mataré wistfully remembers awakening now and then to the soft trills of Welker playing his violin in the adjoining room.
With the rectifiers finally in production by late 1947, Welker resumed his research on superconductivity, while Mataré began to address the curious interference effects he had seen in germanium duodiodes during the war. When he put the two point contacts less than 100 mm apart, he again occasionally could get one of them to influence the other. With a positive voltage on one point, in fact, he could modulate and even amplify the electrical signal at the other! Mataré reckons he first recognized this effect in early 1948 (perhaps a month or two after Bardeen and Brattain's breakthrough at Bell Labs). But it still happened only sporadically.
On a hunch, he asked Welker to fashion larger germanium samples, from which they could cut slivers of higher purity. Using this higher-grade material, Mataré finally got consistent amplification in June 1948, six months after Bardeen and Brattain. Encouraged by this success, they phoned PTT Secretary Eugène Thomas and invited him over for a demonstration. But Thomas was apparently too busy--or perhaps not interested enough--to come by.
About that time, Welker put aside his theoretical work and tried to analyze what was going on just beneath the shiny germanium surface of Mataré's odd contraption. In an undated, handwritten document, now in the archives of Munich's Deutsches Museum, Welker speculated that one point--which he called the "électrode de commande," or "control electrode"--was inducing strong electric fields in the germanium just beneath the other electrode, altering the material's conductivity there.
But Mataré was not buying that explanation, which followed the logic of Welker's unsuccessful 1945 attempt at a semiconductor amplifier. If the phenomenon were caused by an electric field, Mataré remembers thinking, he should have witnessed a decrease in the current at the second electrode, not the increase he observed on his oscilloscope. According to this field-effect idea, a positive potential on the control electrode would induce negative charges in the germanium under the other electrode, which should reinforce the current-blocking effects of the barrier layer there.
Mataré argued instead that the control electrode must be injecting positive charges, called holes, into the germanium. And perhaps by trickling along the boundary between two crystal grains, he guessed, they reached the other electrode--many micrometers distant. There they would bolster the conductivity under this electrode and enhance the current through it. "Welker didn't really understand my measurements," Mataré says. "At the time he was too busy studying superconductivity."
But as the two men were debating the merits of their competing interpretations, surprising news arrived from across the Atlantic. In a 30 June press conference, Bell Labs suddenly lifted its six-month veil of secrecy and announced the invention of the transistor by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley. The breakthrough was reported in The New York Times on 1 July and published in the 15 July issue of Physical Review . Incredibly, the Bell Labs solid-state amplifier also had a pair of closely spaced metal points prodding into a germanium surface. [See photo, " Getting to the Point."]
Mataré soon learned Bardeen and Brattain's explanation of the curious effects he had been observing. Electrons trapped on the germanium surface induce a shallow, positively charged layer just beneath it. Holes emitted by the control electrode (which they had dubbed the "emitter") travel easily within this layer over to the output electrode (or "collector"), markedly boosting the conductivity beneath it and therefore the current flowing through it.
After the Bell Labs revelations, Mataré and Welker had little difficulty getting the PTT minister to visit their lab. Thomas urged them to apply for a French patent on their semiconductor triode; he also suggested they call it by a slightly different name: transistron. So the two physicists hastily wrote up a patent disclosure and passed it on to the Westinghouse lawyers.
On 13 August, the company submitted a patent application for a " Nouveau système cristallin à plusieurs électrodes réalisant des effets de [sic] relais électroniques " to the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. Its brief description of what might be happening inside the germanium mostly followed Welker's field-effect interpretation but was probably influenced by Bardeen and Brattain's explanations.
By the May 1949 press conference, the two Germans had the device [see X-ray image in " Invention and Inventors"] in limited production and were beginning to ship units for use by the PTT as amplifiers in the telephone system--initially in the line between Paris and Limoges. Speaking to the Paris press, Thomas compared these devices with vacuum tubes and demonstrated their use in radio receivers. Reporters hailed the two physicists as " les pères du transistron " (the fathers of the transistron). The French device "turns out...to be superior to its American counterpart," read a more measured but still favorable account in Toute la Radio , a technical journal [see drawing and photo in " "]. "The latter has a limited lifetime and appears to be fairly unstable, whereas the existing transistrons do not show any sign of fatigue."
According to Mataré, this superiority could be attributed to the care they employed in fabricating their devices. While observing the process with microscopes, the women working on the small assembly line would measure current-voltage curves for both metal points with oscilloscopes and fix the points rigidly on the germanium with drops of epoxy after the curves matched the desired characteristics. When Brattain and Shockley visited the Paris group in 1950, Mataré showed them telephone amplifiers made with his transistrons--which allowed him to place a call all the way to Algiers. "That's quite something," admitted Shockley a bit guardedly, Mataré recalls half a century later.
But the French government and Westinghouse failed to capitalize on the technical advantages in semiconductors that they then appeared to have. After Hiroshima, nuclear physics had emerged as the dominant scientific discipline in the public mind, and nuclear power was widely heralded as the wave of the future. France became enchanted with pursuing the nuclear genie unbottled in the 1940s, while ignorant of its promising transistron.
Mataré and Welker struggled on in Paris for two more years, but as support for their operation waned during the early 1950s, they started looking for jobs in their native land. In 1951 Welker accepted a post at Siemens in Erlangen, Germany, where he pioneered early research on III-V compound semiconductors, such as gallium arsenide. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, those materials fostered a small optoelectronics revolution in semiconductor lasers and light-emitting diodes. Welker became head of all R&D projects at Siemens in 1969 and retired in 1977. He died in 1981.
In 1952, with solid funding from a wealthy German businessman, Jakob Michael, Mataré moved to Düsseldorf, Germany, and founded a company called Intermetall. It began manufacturing germanium rectifiers and transistors similar to the point-contact devices he had made in Paris. The company bought or built equipment that helped it produce semiconductor devices of even higher quality.
The summit of Intermetall's achievements came at the 1953 Düsseldorf Radio Fair. There a young, dark-haired woman demonstrated what was probably the world's first transistor radio, built around four Intermetall point-contact transistors [see photo, " Tuning In"] more than a year before Texas Instruments Inc., in Dallas, publicly claimed that milestone for itself.
But after Michael sold the firm to Clevite Corp., then in Cleveland, later that year, its focus shifted almost exclusively to production and away from research. Discouraged by that about-face, Mataré left Germany and immigrated to the United States, where he found work in the U.S. semiconductor industry. Even today, at 93, the IEEE Life Fellow remains active, consulting from his Malibu home on such projects as a large, innovative photovoltaic array built in Southern California [see The Back Story, in this issue].
What is arguably the most important invention of the 20th century remarkably occurred twice--and independently. Given the secrecy shrouding the Bell Labs device, there is no possibility Mataré and Welker could have been influenced by knowledge of it before July 1948, when news of the revolutionary invention became widespread. And it seems clear from the still-sketchy historical record that they indeed had a working, reliable amplifier by that time.
This dual, nearly simultaneous breakthrough can be attributed in part to the tremendous wartime advances in purifying silicon and, in particular, germanium. In both cases, germanium played the crucial gateway role, for in the immediate postwar years it could be refined much more easily and with substantially higher purities than silicon. Such high-purity semiconductor material was absolutely essential for fabricating the first transistors.
But the Bell Labs team had clear priority--and a superior physical understanding of how the electrons and holes were flowing inside germanium. That advantage proved critical to subsequent achievements, such as Shockley's junction transistor [see "The Lost History of the Transistor," IEEE Spectrum, May 2004], which was much easier to mass-produce with high reliability and uniformity. By the mid-1950s, nobody was trying to make point-contact transistors any longer, and the industry was moving on to silicon.
A factor crucial to success in the nascent semiconductor industry was the sustained innovation that flourished at Bell Labs--as well as at Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor--leading to silicon transistors and integrated circuits. And that required extensive infrastructure, both material and intellectual, to keep these companies at the frontiers of this fast-moving field. Such an infrastructure already existed in the United States after World War II because of its wartime radar efforts. But France had no comparable infrastructure and had to import talent from occupied Germany, which could not exploit its own radar expertise until the 1950s.
In the absence of any such advantages, it was inevitable that Europe's fledgling transistor would soon be eclipsed by other, better semiconductor devices and eventually fade from memory.
http://knightnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/61-61295.jpg
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/professor
Dictionary.com
professor
a teacher of the highest academic rank in a college or university, who has been awarded the title Professor in a particular branch of learning; a full professor
the principal lecturer or teacher in a field of learning at a university or college; a holder of a university chair
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044072/quotes
IMDb
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Quotes
Lt. Driscoll: Well, Sergeant, I told you it was a waste of time.
Sgt. Zack: If I was right all the time I'd be an officer, Lieutenant.
https://www.wired.com/2012/08/bob-kahn-internet-hall-of-fame/
WIRED
CADE METZ BUSINESS 08.13.12 6:30 AM
Bob Kahn, the Bread Truck, and the Internet’s First Communion
THE WORLD’S FIRST internet transmission occurred on October 29, 1969. At least, that’s what some people believe. Others say the more important moment arrived eight years later, when a repurposed delivery van equipped with a wireless transmitter sent a message from San Francisco to Norway and back to California by way of satellite.
The date was November 22, 1977, and no one seems to remember what message was sent — or even who was in the van. But they do remember how it was sent. This marked the first time the TCP/IP protocol — the same protocol that underpins today’s internet — was used to send information across not one, not two, but three independent computer networks.
“It wasn’t just a transmission,” says Bob Kahn, one of the key figures behind that moment. “It was a whole system of network protocols being demonstrated over three different networks.”
https://www.cnet.com/news/internet-van-helped-drive-evolution-of-the-web/
cnet
'Internet van' helped drive evolution of the Web
Few have probably ever heard of it, but a broken-down van in California was a stepping stone on the road to the Internet as we know it. Photos: Computer History Museum celebrates the 'Internet Van'
November 9, 2007 12:32 PM PST
by Erica Ogg
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--If not for this nondescript, gray van with the letters "SRI" painted on the side, you might not be reading this article right now.
Parked feet from the entrance of the Computer History Museum here in the heart of Silicon Valley, the vintage van is being feted at a celebration marking the very first true Internet connection.
The first Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)-based transmission between three separate networks--Arpanet, packet radio, and satellite--was made possible by the van, which was built by the research and development agency SRI International. It was driven for the first time on November 22, 1977. The same van was the key to the first packet radio network--that is, the first mobile digital radio network--a precursor to Wi-Fi and the other wireless networks of today.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/internet-pioneer-cerf/
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Vint Cerf: Connecting with an Internet Pioneer, 40 Years Later
Cerf reflects on the cobbling together of four network nodes, a moment that helped usher in the invention that changed life as we know it
By Larry Greenemeier on December 4, 2009
Forty years ago—on December 5, 1969—the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected four computer network nodes at the University of California, Los Angeles, (U.C.L.A.), the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., U.C. Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah for the first time. This doubled the size of the embryonic ARPANET, the network that would grow over the years into the global nexus of interconnected computers we know today as the Internet.
Vint Cerf has been there from the beginning, from with his work co-developing TCP/IP (the communications protocols that the Internet uses to route information across different networks and hubs) to his present position as Google's chief Internet evangelist.
We sat down with Cerf, who is often called "the father of the Internet," to talk about why the ARPANET was built and how it grew to become the Internet, not to mention the pros and cons of social networks.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
While we're honoring the 40th anniversary of the first time the four-node ARPANET was connected, what in your opinion was the single most important "event" in the development of the Internet?
Choosing a single most important development is incredibly hard to do because a lot of different things had to happen before the Internet could be deployed in the fashion it is today. ARPANET validated packet switching, which was important, because without that we wouldn't have gone down the path of toward the Internet. The idea was that you could grow a system like the Internet one network at a time and then interconnect them. In some sense the most important thing was the invention of the architecture protocols that enabled the Internet. Then came the implementation [on November 22, 1977] that interconnected different packet networks together. This included a radio network and a satellite network connected as well as the ARPANET. The most important thing in this three-network test was to show the TCP/IP protocol would link all three together.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052270/releaseinfo
IMDb
A Tale of Two Cities (1958)
Release Info
USA 4 August 1958
http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=the-simpsons&episode=s02e14
Springfield! Springfield!
The Simpsons
Principal Charming
Skinner's gonna kill you!
[ Bart Simpson: ] Skinner? He works for me now.
- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 12:29 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Friday 14 October 2016
