Looking for Dad in Cyberspace   ; -)
 
H. Victor Neher  (aka Victor and Vic and Grandpa and Dad)

Archives
Neher, Henry Victor
    from CalTech Archives at http://www.caltech.edu/~archives/bios/NeherHV.html
    The oral history is listed and described.  This is the description of the papers:

        Papers, 1927-1994. General correspondence; data and correspondence from cosmic ray studies; slides of
        apparatus and expeditions; three personal journals (1939-40, 1951-59, 1960-83); memoirs.

    Photo Archives for Neher

Center for History of Physics Newsletter: Report from the International Catalog of Sources for History of Physics and Allied Sciences   This site lists the Memories book:

        Addition to papers of Henry Victor Neher, 1904-. Cosmic ray physicist; professor of physics at
        California Institute of Technology. Copy of his "Memories," written 1993-94.

Guy Stever recalling remarks at Vannevar Bush Award event
Alumni News from Colgate quotes a letter from Guy to the Newsletter about his Vannevar Bush Award
    From the Colgate Scene Online at http://www.colgate.edu/scene/sept1997/alumni/news35.html

On May 7 H Guyford Stever received the Vannevar Bush Award from the Natl Science Board,
"For charting with vision, dedication and valor new frontiers in science, technology and public service."
Guy, of course, had to say a few words in accepting this prestigious award. I quote in part from his letter:
"Also included is a copy of the remarks I intended to make. I made most of them but enlarged on some points and diminished others in the heat of the battle of presenting ‘prepared’ extemporaneous remarks." (I liked
that). "I have not gotten copies of the remarks written by Bill Clinton and read by his science advisor, Jack Gibbons. Even so, it was nice to be mentioned by yet another of our recent presidents. My 90-year-old thesis advisor Victor Neher and his wife Sara were at the presentation ceremony. Victor added greatly to the occasion by making remarks at the end. He said he had been on the graduate admissions and scholarship committee at Caltech in 1938 when they received an application (Guy’s) accompanied by some fancy recommendations from people none of them knew, and what is worse, they had never had a student from Colgate. After much debate one of the Caltech committee said, ‘Why don’t we take a shot in the dark?’" Guy made the grade and then some.

    "Do you know if there has ever been a great physicist who lectured on freshman physics?" I said,
    "I don't know, but I don't think so!" And he said, "I'll do it!

    Sands went to Leighton and told him that Feynman had agreed to give the introductory lectures on
    physics. Leighton said,'Oh no, that would never do. He has no experience of teaching freshman and
    undergraduates. His head is too high in the sky. That would not be any good." At their meeting, Victor
    Neher said, 'Oh, that would be marvelous!" Neher and Sands convinced Leighton that this was an
    interesting possibility. Together, all three of them went to Bacher and proposed that Feynman should
    give the lectures to freshmen. Bacher exclaimed: 'Oh, no! He is much too valuable for advanced courses,
    graduate courses, and he has never taught freshman physics. So that's not a good idea. I don't think
    we should do that.'

    --from Jagdish Mehra, The Beat of a Drum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 484-87.

Ranger Mission
Ranger Mission Statistics 1961 from JPL
    A summary of the Ranger Mission at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mip/info/ranger1stat.txt
    Cosmic ray ionization:  Principal Investigator: Dr. H. V. Neher, Caltech
    Other P.I.s on that mission: Van Allen, Neugebauer

Mariner Mission
Mariner Radiation Experiments from JPL
    A summary at http://www.seds.org/pub/spacecraft/MARINER/mariner12.28.62.2

    One experiment, for observing the higher-energy
particles (protons above 10 million electron volts (Mev) and
electrons above 0.5 Mev in energy) was designed by Dr. H. R.
Anderson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Dr. H. V. Neher of
the California Institute of Technology.  Somewhat lower-energy
particles (protons above 0.5 Mev or electrons above 0.04 Mev) are
detected by the experiment of L. A. Frank and Dr. J. A. Van Allen
of the State University of Iowa.  Preliminary results of the two
experiments were reported at the Stanford meeting by Dr. Anderson
and Frank, respectively.
          The instrumentation for the high-energy experiment
consisted of a large spherical ionization chamber and two matched
Geiger counters.  The ionization chamber, which was invented by
Dr. Neher, has been widely used by him and by other investigators
for several years as a standard instrument for surveying the
absolute intensity of the cosmic rays.
          In addition to its use in almost countless balloon
flights, airplane flights, and ground-based experiments, this
type of chamber was also carried on the earth satellite Explorer
VI and on this country's only previous successful interplanetary
probe, Pioneer V.  The two Geiger counters are matched to count
the same kind of particles which are registered by the ionization
chamber.

    Written by James A. Van Allen from an article originally published by Annual Reviews Inc.,
    that appeared in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 18, 1-26, 1990

As early as 1960 and in parallel with the activities just sketched, one of my driving aspirations was to push on with magnetospheric studies of the other planets.

The emphasis at NASA in the early 1960's was on manned lunar flights. But the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other groups had already made extensive general studies of the ballistics of flight to other planets -- especially Venus and Mars. The interest in Mars was driven by the desire for geological studies of its surface and, perhaps more importantly, by the desire to search for any form of biological activity there. Also Mars and Venus were ballistically much easier to reach than was Mercury or the outer planets. The first planetary target to be adopted by JPL/NASA was Venus. I proposed a simple radiation detector for the first mission with the purpose of searching for the existence of a Venusian radiation belt and the consequent inferences on the magnetization of this planet, then completely unknown. My instrument was selected and was incorporated into the payload of Mariner I, an early in-flight failure, and of Mariner II, launched successfully on 27 August 1962. The cruise phase was quite successful, yielding, most importantly, the first continuous measurements of the solar wind by Conway Snyder and Marcia Neugebauer, the interplanetary magnetic field by Paul Coleman et al., and the detection of numerous solar energetic particle events by my apparatus and a companion instrument of Hugh Anderson and Victor Neher. Mariner II passed by Venus on 14 December 1962 at a radial miss distance of 41,000 km. In our measurements there was not the slightest indication of the presence of the planet, thereby implying an upper limit on its magnetic moment as 0.18 that of the earth, its "sister" planet. A casual, and perhaps even correct, interpretation of this result is that Venus is simply rotating too slowly (period 243 days) to drive an internal self-excited dynamo.

Papers: One Was Voted "Most Memorable"
Memorable Papers from AJP
    Editorial listing those papers that readers nominated as best; at  http://www.amherst.edu/~ajp/hits/hits1.html
    The list includes H. V. Neher and R. B. Leighton, "Linear Air Trough," 31 (4), 255-262 (1963).

One is cited in 1998!! (now that's durability)
Terrestrial cosmic ray intensities, a 1998 paper by J. F. Zieglergler posted at IBM
    Cites as reference 48. H. V. Neher, J. Geophys. Res. 72, 1527 (1967).

And carryover to current CalTech experiments
Caltech Senior Physics Laboratory  Experiment 15.  August 1998
    at http://www.pma.caltech.edu/~derose/labs/exp15.html

This experiment allows the measurement of the mean lifetime of the muon (m) using contemporary instrumentation and experimental techniques. The muon was discovered by J. C. Street and E. C.
Stevenson at Harvard University and almost simultaneously at Caltech by C.D. Anderson and S. H. Neddermeyer in 1937 [See Phys Rev, 51, 884 (1937)]. The subsequent work here of Millikan, Anderson, Neddermeyer, Neher, Stever, Leighton, et al, during the decade preceding, and the years immediately
following World War II helped establish the foundations of cosmic - ray physics. Natural muons continue
to be of interest in many areas of physics, while the production of intense beams of the artificial variety at various "meson factories", permits exploiting the muon's large magnetic moment, violation of parity, and unique ability to closely approach nuclei, and to develop the muon spin - relaxation techniques that
provide for an exceptional sensitivity in investigating the structure of materials.

Bryant: That's very interesting, On magnetrons, did you have a lab set up for building experimental units?

Purcell: No, none. No experimental units were built at Radiation Lab; there was no tube lab.

Bryant: Was there ever?

Purcell: Only for some very exotic things like Vic Neher's oscillator, a K-band oscillator. The person you should ask about that is H. Guyford Stever. He's an interesting person because of his subsequent career.

Purcell: But the reason I mentioned him in this context is that Guy Stever worked directly under Vic Neher and knows more than any living person except Vic Neher about the Neher tube.

It all happened in a rush at the Rad Lab: V-E Convocation in early May 1945 with the message that that we were to plan for the end. Then the V-J Convocation on August 14, 1945 saying an orderly closing was starting. I was given the job of educating Life magazine and photographer Fritz Goro about microwaves for a picture essay to appear on November 19, 1945. I set up a studio in Wing E of Building 20. Photographer Ben Diver in the Building 20 photo lab developed endless rolls of films. That ended October 6. Later that Fall J.C. Slater, I, and others came in one Saturday and covertly expropriated desks, work benches, electrical apparatus, etc., and moved them across the second floor connection from Building 22, before it was sealed off for termination work for Radiation Laboratory. I claimed 20A-214 to the end of the wing; the end of the wing had been Vic Neher's klystron tube laboratory and was the only space that rated an air conditioner. So when Radiation Laboratory terminated at the end of 1945, it was continued on as Basic Research in the space and with the equipment we took that weekend.

Millikan had become interested in cosmic rays in the early 1930s. Cosmic radiation was first studied by Victor Hess in Austria, but was not well understood. To study the radiation Millikan organized three groups at Caltech, which were to use electroscopes, Geiger counters, and cloud chambers as tools. Carl Anderson handled the cloud chamber investigations. H. Victor Neher developed electroscopes. I was responsible for the Geiger counters. The Wilson cloud chamber is a short cylinder with glass end plates containing a gas saturated with water vapor. The pressure is dropped suddenly so that the gas expands and cools to a supersaturated state. If an ionizing particle has just passed through the chamber, there will be a trail of water droplets on the ions along its path. These droplets are photographed. The density of the droplets is a measure of the ionization produced and, therefore, of the nature of the ionizing particle. For inventing the chamber C. T. R. Wilson was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1927. Carl improved his own chamber by using a piston expanding into a vacuum to drop the
pressure very rapidly and by using a mixture of water and alcohol in the chamber. Consequently, he obtained much better photographs than most other cloud chamber experimenters.

Note: the Neher electrometer is referenced in John Hersey's book Hiroshima -- "Japanese physicists had entered the
city with Lauritsen electroscopes and Neher electrometers..."   (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993; p. 81-82; on
p. 81-82 in other editions as well.)   [I think Dad had left instruments with Japanese physicist colleagues when he passed through that area on the way to India with Millikan in the 1930s. -- Topsy]

Topsy Neher Smalley  11/29/98; rev. 01/29/00
email  Topsy