The battle for technology at the birth of the computer age
At the height of the Cold War, Dudley Buck was a brilliant young scientist working to develop a functioning microchip. Author Iain Dey revisits the era and unearths incidents worthy of any conspiracy thriller
Dudley Buck hated waiting. He would climb staircases two or three steps at a time. He never had enough time to do all the things he wanted to do.
The young professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was finding that his patience was being particularly tested now that he knew he was close to perfecting his prototype microchip, which he had named the Cryotron.
It was spring 1959. For months, Buck had been making headlines around the world with his claims that he had created an ultra-fast computer for $1,000 that “could fit in a man’s shirt pocket”.
Given that the most advanced computers at that time cost millions of dollars and occupied whole floors of office buildings, it was an attentiongrabbing concept.
Although still just 32, Buck was fast becoming one of America’s best-known scientists.
He started to tell his wife Jackie, who had just given birth to their third child, that everything was about to click into place. Their days of using old bedsheets as curtains were now far behind them, he said.
He received letters from fans all over the world, asking for more details on the Cryotron and how to build them. Kodak thought the Cryotron could be used to make a digital camera. Every branch of the US military was keeping a watchful eye on its development.
An article in Life magazine two years earlier had claimed that Buck’s tiny computer chip would be used as the guidance system for America’s new intercontinental ballistic missile. At the time the article was published, Buck’s prototype device was a long way from being capable of deployment with a nuclear warhead. Yet now there was a team of more than 100 computer scientists at IBM working on a contract from the National Security Agency to attempt to make that possibility a reality – and to develop Buck’s cryotron into the first military supercomputers.
American officialdom was convinced that the Cryotron would become the invention that changed the world.
The Russians knew about the Cryotron too. In April 1959, a delegation of eight of the Soviet Union’s top computer scientists had been granted an audience with Buck at MIT where he had explained his work – but stopped short of offering a demonstration.
Buck had been on the radar of the Russians for years, declassified CIA papers reveal. Although his students had no idea, the young MIT professor was a former codebreaker for the US Navy who had spent time on covert missions to eastern Europe. He had never really left the military, having served as a consultant to the NSA on countless top secret projects – including spy satellites, missile defence systems and early projects related to the space race.
With the invention of the Cryotron, his academic and military lives had started to collide.
There was now a whole team of undergraduate and postgraduate students working under Buck’s guidance to finalise the design of the Cryotron. Each experiment came a little bit closer to success, but there were still glitches. The point was to create an electronic switch that could flip between “on” and “off” very quickly – creating the “ones” and “zeroes” that form the basis of binary code, the core language upon which every computer depends.
For it was only once the switches got quicker that computers would be able to start fulfilling their potential, by performing ever more complex tasks.
There were many different avenues being pursued, including the semiconducting silicon chip that eventually won the battle and drives most computers today. Yet, at the time, Buck was considered to have the scientific lead with his Cryotron.
Buck’s Cryotron used superconductors to create this switch, meaning that it only worked in extreme sub-zero temperatures.
There was an apparatus mounted on a workbench that looked a bit like a glass television tube placed on a table with its screen down. Some chemicals were inside it – substances he had only ever seen before on the Periodic Table. On the opposite bench, large metal probes attached to electrical wires disappeared into bulky steel canisters filled with the liquid helium used to create ultra-low temperatures.
While he had started by winding small pieces of wire together, Buck and his lab partner Ken Shoulders had developed a technique to make tiny circuits by layering different metals in microscopic strips using a beam of electrons.
He was testing different chemicals to see what formula worked best. Sometimes the chemicals did not react to the electron gun as expected, and sometimes the gasses emitted during the reaction would pollute another part of the experiment.
The group in the lab was tinkering with all of the variables in their experiments: adjusting the temperature or altering the chemicals involved, the length of exposure to the electron beam, or the size of the current passing through the superconductors. The electron guns were replaced, then modified to try to improve the results.
The chemicals he needed were not all easy to come by. He had been waiting for weeks
In official archives, some mentions of Buck’s death have been heavily redacted – with page after page of blacked out text following his name
for a new delivery, leaving his experiments in something of a hiatus.
Eventually, on 18 May, 1959, Buck got word that the United Parcel Service delivery from his chemical supplier was on its way.
The timing was apt. A week later he was due to attend a summit at the NSA headquarters near Washington DC regarding the government’s efforts to develop Buck’s Cryotron.
Maybe the magic formula needed to perfect his invention would be found in the package that was due to arrive. The day dragged on as he waited for the parcel.
Finally the deliveryman placed the box on Buck’s desk and asked for his signature. Buck started ripping into the cardboard, desperate to get his hands on his new toys.
“He was really anticipating that one of these chemicals would be the breakthrough,” explains Chuck Crawford, one of the students who ran Buck’s experiments. “They were basically bottles of slightly different sizes and shapes. He looked at all these chemicals. He didn’t eat any of them, he might have stuck a finger in a bottle. We paid no attention whatsoever to the potential hazard of taking a bunch of organic chemicals that hadn’t really been studied that carefully and messing around with them. The thought hadn’t entered our heads.”
It was quite late by the time they had worked through the whole box. Buck started complaining that he didn’t feel too well. He left Crawford to plan their next phase of experiments with the new chemicals and headed for home.
Jackie Buck had never known Dudley to be sick in his life. He was a man of boundless energy. That night, not long after he walked through the door, he announced that he was going to bed.
By 3am, Buck was coughing heavily. By 5am he had a high fever and was barely able to move. Jackie brought him a glass of water, which he sipped slowly.
Jackie called the local doctor, who ordered an ambulance immediately to take Buck to Winchester Hospital, where he had been just eight weeks earlier to pick up Jackie and baby David.
At 8:20am on 21 May, 1959, a little more than 48 hours after he was admitted to the hospital, Buck died.
Official records offer conflicting accounts of what happened to this young scientist; none of which tally with the facts. His death certificate claims he died of a throat infection. MIT sent a note to students claiming he had been off sick for a week prior to his death. In official archives, some mentions of Buck’s death have been heavily redacted – with page after page of blacked out text following his name.
Is it just coincidence that Buck passed 29 days after being visited by a delegation of Soviet scientists? Several former KGB assassins have confessed that they had access to advanced chemical weapons that could replicate countless medical conditions from about 1957 onwards.
And Dudley Buck was not the only American computer scientist who died that day in mysterious circumstances.