What Mad Pursuit Read Online Free Page A

biologists.
    When the Second World War started in September 1939, the department was evacuated to Wales. I stayed at home, occupying my time by learning to play squash. My brother (who was then a medical student) taught me on the squash courts at Mill Hill School. The students had been evacuated to Wales, while the school buildings had become an emergency hospital. Tony and I played on a sliding handicap. Every time I lost a game I started the next game with an extra point. If I won a game my advantage was reduced by one point. By the end of the year we were about equal. I played squash occasionally, on and off, for many years, both in London and Cambridge. I always enjoyed it because I never tried to play it seriously. As it is no longer a sensible game for one of my age, I now take my exercise by walking or by swimming in a heated swimming pool in the Southern Californian sunshine.
    Eventually, early in 1940, I was given a civilian job at the Admiralty. This enabled me to marry my first wife, Doreen Dodd. Our son Michael was born in London, during an air raid, on November 25, 1940.1 worked first in the Admiralty Research Laboratory, next to the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, a South London suburb. Then I was transferred to the Mine Design Department near Havant, not far from Portsmouth on the south coast of England. After the war ended I was given a job in scientific intelligence at the Admiralty in London. By good fortune a land mine had blown up the apparatus I had so laboriously constructed at University College, so after the war I was not obliged to go back to measuring the viscosity of water.

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The Gossip Test
    D URING MOST of the war I had worked on the design of magnetic and acoustic mines—the noncontact mines—initially under the direction of a well-known theoretical physicist, H. S. W. Massey. Such mines were dropped by our aircraft into shipping channels in the relatively shallow water of the Baltic and the North Sea. There they sat, silently and secretly, on the seabed until they were exploded by an enemy sweep or they blew up one of the enemy ships. The trick in designing their circuits was to make them distinguish in some way between the magnetic fields and sounds of a sweep and those of a ship. In this I had been relatively successful. These special mines were about five times as effective as the standard noncontact mines. After the war it was estimated that mines sank or seriously damaged as many as a thousand enemy merchant vessels.
    When the war finally came to an end I was at a loss as to what to do. By that time I was working at the Admiralty Headquarters in Whitehall, in the windowless extension known as The Citadel. I did the obvious thing and applied to become a permanent scientific civil servant. At first they were not sure they wanted me, but eventually, after pressure from the Admiralty and a second interview—the committee was chaired by novelist C. P. Snow—I was offered a permanent job. By this time I was reasonably sure that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life designing weapons, but what did I want to do? I took stock of my qualifications. A not-very-good degree, redeemed somewhat by my achievements at the Admiralty. A knowledge of certain restricted parts of magnetism and hydrodynamics, neither of them subjects for which I felt the least bit of enthusiasm. No published papers at all. The few short Admiralty reports I had written at Teddington would count for very little. Only gradually did I realize that this lack of qualification could be an advantage. By the time most scientists have reached age thirty they are trapped by their own expertise. They have invested so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely difficult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new things. I was sure in