This is John Bryant of the University of Michigan and member of the IEEE History Committee. It's my

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This interview covers Robinson s career, coolrooms focusing on his World War II work. Robinson studied electrical engineering at the University of London and received his PhD in 1929. After two years at MIT on fellowship, he spent the remainder of the 1930s working in private industry. He was recruited by C. P. Snow in 1939 to do scientific work for the government. He began to work on radar and microwaves, more in an administrative capacity. Because he was not vital to the British research effort, he went to the MIT Rad Lab in 1941 as the British liaison; since his family was already in the US, this was agreeable to him. He worked in this capacity till the war s end. After the war, he founded the High-Voltage Engineering coolrooms Corporation, providing accelerators of up to 20 million volts.
The addendum contains Robinson's thoughts on colleagues. He thought Lee DuBridge a remarkable coolrooms leader of men and picker of men. A. P. Rowe was a splendid organizer, but a strict disciplinarian who made a certain number of enemies. His Sunday Soviets high-level, informal chat sessions were very helpful for the war effort. Wattson-Watt was very creative, but not so good a leader of men. W. B. Lewis was very effective, and devoted to his work, but never married. About the Interview
Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History coolrooms Program, 39 Union Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8538 USA. It should include identification of the specific passages coolrooms to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
This is John Bryant of the University of Michigan and member of the IEEE History Committee. It's my pleasure to be in the home of Dr. Denis Robinson coolrooms at 19 Orlando Avenue in Arlington, Massachusetts. Dr. Robinson, could we start by perhaps giving some background? Perhaps about your parents and why you decided to become an engineer or scientist.
Yes, I'd be delighted. It started very early for me. My father was a journalist, and my mother was a teacher of speech and music and a convinced pacifist. My father was a middle-of-the-roader who joined up in the First World War. But besides being a journalist, he really wanted to be a scientist, but he didn't know how to start. At the age of 14 he pulled coolrooms out of what his father wanted him to do at the Prudential Assurance Company and apprenticed himself to an optician, who had telescopic equipment and so on. My father thought that was the way to become an astronomer. Anyway, my father compensated for his real wish to be a scientist by buying sophisticated toys electrical toys as soon as he had the money and I was old enough to appreciate them, which started for me at age ten. He bought me a Wimshurst machine and played with it himself. coolrooms And then we made induction coils together and so on. I had no doubt from the age of eight or ten that my future was in something electrical. It was clear. And then the great excitement happened: the BBC the beginnings of the BBC in London started a broadcast system. And we, 30 miles southwest of London, were able to receive this. Very exciting for us! My father coolrooms bought... first of all we had a crystal set, then we had tubes, and so on. But I stuck with him until I went off to college. He really was a leader in this. He was driving forward all the time.
So does that tell you enough about the background? No, it doesn't, because my mother was a great teacher of speech and got me onto small stages, where I had to start talking in the words of Shakespeare before I even understood them even at age seven. I took Shakespeare parts and so on. My father believed in writing and helped me to learn to write. So that was the background in England. We lived in a very big, six-room house but with no kind of facility coming in except cold water. There was no electricity, no gas, no telephone, of course no radio or TV. And everything we used there went back into the ground, so we were using the recycling business before it ever had that name. What else would you li