Authors: James Lovelock
Homage to Gaia (26 page)
During the summer of 1961 I prepared for our move as a family from Bowerchalke to Houston. The job offered was also tenured, but my long-term plan was to save enough spare cash from my generous American salary to set up an independent laboratory in Bowerchalke. There was sadness about my last month at Mill Hill; now that the stress of commuting would soon be over, I began to see how fine an institute it was. What a wonderful community of scientists they were, but I had no serious doubts about my decision and somehow sensed that before many years passed Mill Hill would cease to be the whirlpool
of excellence that I had swum in. We sold our house in
Bowerchalke
to a retired Canon of the church. He told me later that its efficient central heating gave warmth, which was a joy to him and his wife after the long years spent in cold and draughty rectories.
We travelled to New York on the old
Mauritania.
It was almost her last voyage and we were able to savour the grandeur of this
impermanent
monument of a once great and powerful nation. We stayed one night in New York and then took an early version of a passenger jet, a Boeing 707, to Houston. Ab Zlatkis met us and took us to a motel near the university in downtown Houston. Ab was a lean dark tallish man who looked and moved like Groucho Marx. The Zlatkis family was kind and hospitable to us during our stay in Houston and we were especially fond of Esther, Ab’s wife, who freely gave her friendship and practical help. I soon found that the lipid research centre at Baylor was not yet built, so there was plenty of time for house hunting, and it did not take long to find a delightful five-bedroom house being built by a craftsman builder on Stony Creek Drive. This was a quiet road in the wooded Memorial district of west Houston and by far its most pleasing suburb. It would be completed in November, two months ahead; meanwhile, we rented an apartment close to the University of Houston. It was a tough two months for Helen and the family, living in an apartment whose air-conditioning system consisted of buzzing boxes built into a wall below the windows, and with Houston in October and November tropical in its heat. The knowledge that soon we would live in a fully air-conditioned house with a pleasant
garden made our stay in the apartment tolerable, and there was much to keep us busy. We had arrived in the United States illegally on a visitor’s visa. A helpful United States Consul who operated from Southampton in southern England advised us to do this. He told us that the United States Embassy in London was full of career civil servants forever dreaming up new jobs for themselves, and that the long and tedious process of visa application was partly to justify their existence. ‘Have nothing to do with them,’ he said. ‘I will give you visitors’ visas, then when in Houston go to the Immigration and Naturalization Service there and ask to be admitted as resident aliens. There’s no hurry to do it; get yourselves settled in and then go.’ This we did, and to our joy, instead of having long waits and endless crazy questions at the London Embassy, a kindly official welcomed us and said how glad he was ‘that you nice folk want to live in Houston’. The paperwork was over in an hour and we received our green cards shortly afterwards. This, if it still works, is by far the best way for prospective immigrants to enter the United States.
We had furniture to buy for our new house. At first we were surprised to find that the local stores would not take payment by cheque, ‘where are your credit cards?’ was their cry. In England in the early 1960s credit cards barely existed, and even if they had, the Houston shops would not have accepted them. Zlatkis came to our rescue. He had a relative who was part of the Nieman Marcus
organization
. Nieman Marcus is a department store with branches in the large cities of Texas, very upmarket and somewhat like Harrods once was. Soon we had a Nieman Marcus credit card and suddenly financial doors were open to us.
Before Christmas 1961 we settled in at Stony Creek Drive. Our plot of land had recently been wild wood and our garden terminated at a creek leading to Buffalo Bayou. It was rather like living in a tropical forest without the inconveniences. Armadillos would wander up to the door at night and the most amazing varieties of insect life buzzed and flitted before our eyes. There were over twenty species of snake in our garden, including coral snakes, water moccasins,
copperheads
, and several kinds of rattlesnake. None of these seemed to mind our presence and they were a source of endless fascination. On Christmas Day we sat in the newly planted garden, enjoying warm sunshine and a temperature of 84° F. I had invited my Mill Hill technician, Peter Simmonds, who had just graduated, to join me at Baylor and use the time there to take a PhD degree. He and his wife
Tina stayed with us for the Christmas period whilst they house hunted. The Lipid Research Laboratory at Baylor College of
Medicine
was now open and we set up working in one of the most lavish laboratory environments of the 20
th
century. So generous were the funds available that we were able to buy any equipment we thought might be needed. Strangely, the two and a half years in the Houston laboratory were among the least scientifically productive of my
lifetime
. There were many reasons for this, not least, the frequent visits to JPL and the long summers back in England, but I do believe that a surfeit of equipment is a handicap, not a benefit, to a scientist like me. It stifles invention and instead of devising new instruments with which to ask questions of Nature I was playing with the instruments we had bought.
I greatly enjoyed the time in Houston. I thrive in hot weather and like the ant seem to move faster and work harder when warm—and it could be very warm in Houston. However, my family, in spite of the air-conditioned comfort of our home, rapidly grew to dislike it. Helen did not drive and so was trapped in the house, and although the neighbourhood was quiet and there were sidewalks and an easy walk of a mile to the shops, it was too much for her when the temperature exceeded 85° F and was humid as well. She loved gardening in an environment where lemons and bananas grew outdoors but there is more to life than gardening. My daughters enrolled at the University of Houston. They allowed Christine to enrol in the English
Department
but Jane, lacking a High School Diploma was only allowed to audit, that is, attend lectures but receive no credits for having done so. This was a cruel blow for Jane who was seriously studious and given a chance would have proceeded to a degree. Christine, who could have graduated, had other ambitions. They seemed to spend most of their time in the Cougar Den of the student’s union, where they met and consorted with a fine group of Arab students. One of them was Wallid Sharib, with whom Christine became engaged to be married. Wallid wanted her to return with him at the end of his studies to the Gaza Strip where his family owned and farmed orange groves. They were both in love but in the end sadly chose to part. The cultural differences and the lot of a woman in traditional Arab society, they both realized, made a life together too difficult to undertake.
One consequence of the girls’ love of Arabs was that we met few of the local Texan boys or their families. I made up for this by forming a close friendship with Haskell Lilley, a salesman for the engineering
firm Barber–Coleman. He was a true Texan, with an accent that was delightful to hear. He, like many Texans I met, was well read and familiar with European history, and our conversations were often political. I noticed that Haskell and other Texans put on a country bumpkin persona when faced by smart but less intelligent Americans from the North. It could be achingly funny when these Northerners were unaware of what was happening. By the end of our stay in Houston I found myself doing it, and on one occasion it nearly led to my undoing. I was having a sandwich and a coke in a bar at La Guardia Airport in New York, while waiting for a plane to
Washington
. When I opened my wallet to pay, I found that I had nothing smaller than a $100 bill that I kept as emergency credit. The barman, when I gave it to him, sniffed and said, ‘Don’t you carry anything smaller than this?’ Without thought, I replied, ‘We don’t use anything smaller in Texas.’ Almost instantly, the other customers and the
barman
became threatening, and it was only my English accent that saved me from a beating or worse.
My work for JPL required me to commute by air once a month from Houston to Los Angeles, a journey of about 1,700 miles, but taking only a few hours. A few times the whole family took the journey and we then travelled by car. Driving in Texas was easy after densely crowded England; we would travel for hundreds of miles along straight, wide roads that seemed to vanish thirty or more miles ahead. When crossing the wide flat plains of the desert landscape the distant mountain ranges had a beckoning beauty that enthralled me. Only occasionally did another car or truck appear in the far distance, and in these conditions it was no more arduous to travel 700 miles a day than it is in Europe to travel 200 miles. The journey from Houston to Los Angeles by car took two and a half days and we usually stayed at motels just before El Paso and at Yuma in Arizona. Sometimes we would take a holiday and stop for a day at one of the National Parks along the Mexican border—the Grand Canyon, the Meteor Crater, and the Petrified Forest.
At JPL the first year and a half was not as exciting as I had expected. Most of my time there was spent in technical discussion on the design of the chromatograph to be used for analysing the lunar surface. It was good to know that the purpose behind our work was to ensure that the moon was safe for astronauts to walk on, but after a while the discussions themselves became repetitive and to me boring. Towards the end of our stay in Houston, JPL became more interested in Mars
than the Moon, and discussions on the JPL space instruments now had Mars as the target. I felt that I had made all the contribution I could to the chemical side of the design and gravitated towards the space engineers who translated our ideas for instruments into
space-worthy
hardware. They found me useful as an interpreter who could translate their thoughts and ideas into the language of the biologists and planetary scientists. For those of you who can remember the 1960s, scientific electronic equipment, and indeed domestic
electronics
like televisions and tape recorders, were fallible. We almost expected our televisions to break down once or more times in a year. The hardware that was to make its long journey to Mars had not only to endure the shocks of being lifted by rocket—a shattering and vibrating experience—but also had to endure exposure to the hard vacuum of space for a period approaching a year, and then survive atmospheric re-entry and the stress of landing on that
inhospitable
planet, Mars. And even when there, the stress was not over, for on Mars the temperature cycles daily between near 20° C in equatorial sunshine to night-time temperatures cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide from the air, and if this were not enough, the surface of Mars is acid and oxidizing and everywhere there is abrasive, windblown dust. For these reasons, the engineering required to build
instruments
for space vehicles and landers was of an order quite different to that used to make the 1960s car or television. It was as different indeed as was 1960s engineering from that of Roman times. I
consider
that the opportunity I had to mix freely, talk, and discuss problems with these competent engineers at JPL was the greatest of my rewards for working there.
I often felt like young apprenticed artists must have felt to be welcomed into the studios of a Leonardo or a Holbein. On one occasion, a scientist I worked with was demonstrating his version of a gas chromatograph for Mars. From the point of view of Earth engineering, it was a well-made portable instrument suitable to take into the field, as they call it, to analyse the soil at any place on the Earth. The space engineers then told us what they would do to such an instrument to make it space-worthy. First, we would need to think about the power needed to run the apparatus. The total power
available
on Mars would be about 100 watts and this would be shared amongst all of the experiments and all of the necessary housekeeping of the spacecraft itself. The energy-hungry part of our Earth-type gas chromatograph was the oven used to keep the chromatograph
column and the detector at its operating temperature, usually in the region of 200° C. We were using about ten to twenty watts to heat the oven and this was too large a drain on the spacecraft power supply. The space engineers told us to aim instead at a power consumption of not more than two watts for the entire operation of the
chromatograph
. It seemed at first impossible to design a chromatograph that would run on as little power as that required to light a flashlight bulb. But it was done.
One of the most difficult problems faced by the spacecraft
engineers
was how to transmit back to Earth the data gathered by our instruments. A distinguished electronic physicist wrote an article during the 1960s on the impossibility of making radio or television transmissions from a place as far away as Mars. He calculated that the power required to transmit useful information over such vast
distances
would be in the region of hundreds of kilowatts and he doubted if we could ever send a transmitter this powerful to Mars. Yet, here I was a few years later, sitting in a room with sensible engineers who were talking confidently about how and when we would be sending messages from Mars. They would broadcast from Mars not only the data from the instruments, but also colour pictures of the Martian surface. They would do it with 100 watts of power, using a transmitter no more powerful than a ham radio transceiver—more than one thousand times less than the distinguished physicist calculated that we would need.