Walter Orr Roberts

Mr. Roberts, what changes occurred in the ‘60s that brought about the funding and support for the creation of NCAR? And what was there about Boulder that led to NCAR choosing to locate here?

The story of science here in Boulder, and in Colorado in general, goes back, way back, to when a professor, William Dunn came here to the Physics Department. He was here from 1898 until 1907. He was the first person at the university to hold the title, Professor of Physics. He was also an organist at the Presbyterian Church here and one of the first owners of an automobile in Boulder. He worked on X-Ray generation and telephone circuits. Then he wrote some papers on X-Ray safety procedures, because a lot of the early workers in X-rays got severe burns and long-term damage from X-rays.

In 1907, a man named Oliver Lester came to Boulder, to the University of Colorado, to work in physics. The thing that attracted the early scientific community here was the fac that Duane, a world-famous person was here. And that’s what attracted, also, Dr. James W. Broxson, who came in 1922. He had worked on his PH. D. under W.F.G. Swann, who was world-famous, who also worked with radioactivity. Broxson was doing research on radioactivity and he was put out of business because the ore from the Colorado Radium Company up Boulder Creek (became unavailable). When radium was discovered in huge abundance in the Belgium Congo, the price of radium dropped to such a point that the Colorado Radium Company folded. Jim didn’t have the material to go on with his research.

As a consequence, he turned his attention to cosmic-ray research – natural radioactivity. He still worked on that under W.F.G Swann. One of Broxon’s laboratory assistants was Earnest Lawrence, the cyclotron inventor at Berkeley. H had started his thesis on cosmic-rays. In those days, it was called penetrating radiation. They didn’t (yet) have the term cosmic rays.

Robert A. Milliken and a man named Otis in 1924 published the results of some measurements on Pikes Peak that they had made at the time. He said: “We conclude, therefore, that there exists no such thing as penetrating-radiation, as we had assumed.” “Second, we found, as a result of a snow storm on the mountain, we found as large a percentage of change in ionization inside our lead shield as outside it. We interpreted (from) this result, also, that the whole of penetrating-radiation is of local origin. How such quantities of radioactive material get into the upper atmosphere is as yet unknown.” And yet, that was totally wrong. Milliken himself was the one who discovered that it was wrong and invented the term “cosmic-rays” to explain radiation from space.

Milliken spoke at the semi-centennial at the University of Colorado in 1926. Dean Hellems, for whom Hellems Hall is named on the C.U. campus, introduced him as the discoverer of cosmic-rays. He named them, although he wasn’t their discoverer, and was widely credited for that.

In the ‘20s, the American Association for the Advancement of Science gave a grant of $350.00 to Broxon to buy a cannon barrel. The cannon barrel he made into a cosmic ray detector. Mountain States Telephone Company gave him two tons of lead to put up around his cannon barrel and the plumbers from the University of Colorado had their plumbing headquarters in Mackey Auditorium and they gave that to Broxon to do his research in. He and several students went to work and found out that cosmic rays were influenced by sunspot acitivity. They found that they went up and down with a 27 day period which is the rotation period of the Sun. This was the first time that (the rotation period) had been discovered. That was a very pioneering bit of research.

In World War II, all kinds of advances occurred. First of all, Harvard, under my professor that I wrote about, started the observatory up at Climax and I went up there to run it. We had originally considered putting the observatory up on Pikes Peak, but Climax turned out to be a better location. The Department of Agriculture gave us the money to start the observatory. The hope was that we’d find the connection between solar activity and the weather, but we didn’t find that.

I came here to Colorado in 1940 to start that observatory as a student at Harvard. Then I came down here to the Boulder campus in 1945 at the invitation of Professor Cohen in the Philosophy Department and gave some lectures about science and society.

In 1946 the University of Colorado and Harvard formed the corporation to run the observatory that we had started up at Climax. We decided to build the headquarters here in Boulder on the university campus. Robert Stearns was the president of C.U. and McGeorge Bundy represented the president of Harvard. Local trustees, some who had graduated from Harvard and some from Colorado, went on to the Board of Directors, including the Chief Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court – a guy named William S. Jackson.

We established the first office of the High Altitude Observatory at 973 Grant Place. My Assistant Director up at Climax, a person named John Evans, came down and worked from one room in his house. That was the beginning of the High Altitude Observatory. There were all kinds of people involved, (including) Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard Observatory; and my professor, Manzel; and a man named Richard M. Thomas, who was then at Utah, and later at Harvard. We started Eclipse Expeditions. We built the Sacramento Peak Observatory down in New Mexico to parallel the Climax Observatory.

At the same time, the University of Colorado started the so-called Rocket Program. The Germans had launched V-2 rockets, and those rockets, after the war . . . the ones that were left over were brought to White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. The University of Colorado tried to put spectrographs in the tails of those rockets and send them into the stratosphere to photograph the spectrum of the Sun from outside the atmosphere. The people involved with it were Frank Walz, for whom Walz Auditorium is named at the University now; Dr. Will Pietenpol who was head of the Physics Department. The others were Russ Nidey, Dave Stacey, and R.R. Mercure, who later went to Ball Brothers. He got an honorary degree at the university this morning (5-13-1987) along with a man named James Jackson. Professor Bill Rense was the scientific brains behind the whole thing. He’s now retired and lives somewhere else. He built the spectragraph that later succeeded in taking ultraviolet spectrum of the Sun from one of those V-2 Rockets.

Later, the physics department grew and they built an instrument that was based, somewhat, on the coronagraph design that I had built up at Climax (where) I had assisted them as an advisor, although I never played a major role in that project. That spun off from the University of Colorado and became Ball Brothers Research here in town, and most of those people went over there (to work).

Then there was a guy named Al Weaver who later went to the University of Arizona and carried on cosmic ray research at the university. Wesley Brittin, who later became head of the university Physics Department, went up to Alaska and got his PH. D. under Dr. Sydney Chapman and was oscillating between Alaska and Boulder as a member of my staff and also at the University of Alaska. Bill Rense and Pietenpol and so on. The Physics Department attracted George E. Gammof , who was Igor’s father. He was a world-famous physicist and author of the Big Bang Theory of the universe. Gammof Tower, at the university where all the physics activity is going on, is named for him. There was a woman named Leona Marshal who was a very famous physicist at Boulder at the time.

Then, in 1949 the National Bureau of Standards, which was then directed by Edward U. Condon, was required to decentralize, in case of a future war, out of the Washington area so everything wouldn’t be sitting in one place. They hunted all around the country for the best place and Edward Condon and a team consisting of Alvin McNish, Newbern Smith, Sam Welch, and Alan Shapley came out on a site survey team. We took them up to the top of Flagstaff Mountain on a day when the temperature in Washington was about a hundred and the (percent) relative humidity was ninety nine . . . and they loved it here.

The next day, plans developed to move the National Bureau of Standards Laboratory here . . . the so-called Radio Propagation Lab. And that became the laboratory out at South Broadway. It wasn’t called South Broadway then. That became the National Radio Standards Laboratory. Senator Milliken and Senator Johnson, a Republican and Democrat, fought for that in the U.S. Senate. That was the beginning of all of the laboratory research here.

My laboratory, by 1949, had become fairly substantial, and we worked very closely with that Radio Lab to develop methods of prediction of radio communication based on solar activity and things of that sort. Meanwhile, the Cryogenics Lab, which was also a part of the National Bureau of Standards came here, and a whole bunch of people were involved. Alan Shapley, Bob Knecht (who later became mayor of Boulder), Virginia Lincoln, who still lives here in Boulder – a famous woman scientist. Marion Wood, who later married a Professor Horowitz . . . she was a scientist. Connie Warwick – her name is now Constance Sawyer. Donald Billings was also on my staff. And S. Matsushita, a Japanese who became a U.S. citizen. They were all part of the team that started doing work in the Bureau of Standards or in my laboratory, working cooperatively with it.

Meanwhile, the vast strengthening of NBS Boulder in many atmospheric fields began, leading now to upper-air physics, radio standards, radio astronomy, tropospheric radio propagation, whistlers, geomagnetism, and ionospheric phenomena.

At the same time, during the ‘50s, Harvard University dropped out of the High Altitude Observatory. It remained The High Altitude Observatory of the University of Colorado. We built up our work fairly rapidly moving into weather research . . . weather and climate.

I brought three distinguished scientists here. One was Bernard Haurwitz, who was head of the Department of Meteorology at New York University. Another was Professor Julian London of NYU. He got an honorary degree at the university today. No . . . he got the Stearns Medal. And a fellow named Paul Julian. They started a meteorological group in my laboratory.

Meanwhile, I built up my scientific staff with Harold Zirin, who was a graduate student at Harvard. Zirin, Newkirk, and Warwick were all students of mine when I taught that one year at Harvard. They all came here and joined my staff and went to work as young people with fresh Ph. D.’s from Harvard. We set up what became one of the two or three major solar research centers in the country. We also started the Institute for Solar Terrestrial Research where we did weather research.

Simultaneously, beginning in about 1955, the country realized that meteorological research was in a bad state. The National Academy of Sciences set up a committee headed by John Von Neuman, the famous Princeton mathematician, who was head of the Atomic Energy Commission later, and one of the inventors of the digital computer. He later got cancer and it was taken over by Lloyd B. Berkner.

Berkner was a very distinguished geophysicist. They did a report that said a national laboratory had to be created in order to upgrade the quality of the research done in meteorology. Simultaneously with that, the President of the United States appointed a committee to look at operational weather forecasting in relationship to airlines, ocean transportation, construction, and things of that sort. They also came up with very heavy criticism of the quality of the weather service. Those two things led to the recommendation of a big push in meteorology.

To make a long story short, in 1959, led by many, many people and thirteen national conferences, a recommendation came out to build a National Center for Atmospheric Research. Three people were considered for the direction of that. Jim Van Allen, the famous space scientist and a man named Herbert Freedman at the Naval Research Lab. They were both brilliant and close friends of mine. I also went on the list.

In the Fall of 1959, I was asked if I would be willing to become the Director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It had a different name at the time. It was called the National Institute for Atmospheric Research, which is RAIN spelled backwards. I said “no.” I didn’t want to leave the High Altitude Observatory, (rather), I wanted to be associated with an academic institution like CU. The President of the University was, (at the time), Quig Newton, and he and some other sat with me and they convinced me that it would be a good thing to go ahead and do it. I said I was willing to go ahead and do it, but I didn’t want to leave Boulder and if they had decided to put NCAR somewhere else, then they were going to have to find a different director, but I’d be willing to start it without any promise that it would be here in Boulder.

In June, 1960, I became the first director. The first grants of money were made by the National Science Foundation to start it off. Within a year it merged with the High Altitude Observatory and all of my previous staff came into NCAR. I shouldn’t say all of them, because about the same time we created the Department of Astro-Geophysics in the University. And about half to a third of my staff decided to go into the University department and the rest of them stayed in the High Altitude Observatory, which became part of NCAR.

The merger occurred in 1961, and (after that) NCAR built up very rapidly. We had to locate a site, first deciding whether it should be in Boulder, and then locating a site. The decision was made by a national committee. We investigated four sites here in Boulder. We hired a committee of consultants to pick the best site. I had my eye on the Mesa site, but it was above the Blue Line, which had recently been enacted. (The Blue Line was intended to prevent development in the foothills above Boulder). Bob Turner, who was then City Manager, and I went on a public campaign to get the city Blue Line amended to permit us to build the laboratory up there. At that time, the land was owned by four private owners (who) where talking about building a Broadmore-type luxury hotel up there. But they wouldn’t be able to get water from the city because of the Blue Line. They would have to build their own water supply, if that was feasible. (For example) they could have gotten water from Eldorado Springs.

The upshot of it was the state acquired the land and the city passed the Blue Line Amendment allowing NCAR to be built. (So) we went ahead and built it. It was (then) annexed to the city. All of the development when the National Bureau of Standards moved here in 1950, or whenever it was . . . everything south of Baseline Road was (prior to that) just pasture, empty fields, and a few farm houses. All that building has occurred since then. The Blue Line limited how high up it could be built and the city acquired the land behind NCAR and put it into the greenbelt and (also) acquired Shanahan Mesa. Of course, now that’s all protected parkland.

I promised that NCAR would be open to the public, except in time of war, and that the architecture would be built in such a way that was consonant with the environment. And then I built up my staff. We grew from the small previous staff at the observatory, which was about two and a half dozen people, to a size of about eight hundred. Now, (in 1986) the NCAR operation is eighty million dollars a year. There are laboratories not only in Boulder, but in a number of other places, including Louisiana, Texas, Hawaii and New Zealand.

UCAR is the corporation that runs NCAR. UCAR is the management and NCAR is the laboratory. It is the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research . . . it is a membership organization. There were fourteen members at the start – fourteen universities. Now there are fifty seven (members). They’re all the major universities in the U.S. and Canada that offer Ph. D.s in meteorology or atmospheric science, which includes Astrophysics , the Sun’s atmosphere and the atmospheres of the planets (including Earth) and the interactions of the oceans and the land-masses and so on. It’s a very broad definition of atmospheric science.

Would you describe a bit more the Harvard-CU connection?

My professor at Harvard, Donald H. Menzel, before I had become associated with Harvard, had decided to find a location somewhere in the United States at a high altitude so that the telescope could operate as free from dust and smoke as possible. We studied sites in California and New Mexico. Climax, Colorado was the best site available in 1940.

Later, other sites became available that were better, in particular, a site in Hawaii where we now operate. But in 1940, Climax was the best place. After the war was over and the work was beginning to expand and the importance had been realized, we concluded, and I was particularly convinced, that we had to be affiliated with a university and have a university –type academic atmosphere for the main part of the research, even though the telescopes could be up on the mountain.

We looked at the University of Colorado, the University of Denver, and the Colorado School of Mines. DU couldn’t do it for some legal reasons because they were a private institution. The School of Mines wasn’t particularly interested, so the University of Colorado and Harvard (formed a joint venture). We set up in 1947 at Grant Place, and later set up on campus next to the observatory there. The building was originally the High Altitude Observatory. I raised the money to build that building.

Has the air quality over North America gotten so bad that you have to go to Hawaii to find clear air for a telescope?

No. That’s not really the reason. You could get to Climax. You couldn’t get to Hawaii in ’49. You didn’t have airplane service. To go back and forth, you’d have to go by ship. Hawaii was probably vastly superior even then. There were practical reasons. You had to have electrical power, and there was a molybdenum mine in Climax. It was the highest community in the United States, the highest altitude. And the mine was willing to build the observatory for us, as a grant in the public interest. The Climax Company built the observatory, and that’s where I started out. I came to Climax in July of 1940. My wife and I had only been married a month. We liked it up there.

It was a rough life, you know. The last snows occurred in the middle of June, and the first snows in the middle of August. It only snowed once or twice in July. The winter was long and rough and the winds blew. Our first three children were born while we were up there.

Life became very difficult with three young children up there. It was a mining town thirteen miles from Leadville. Our house was 11,500 feet above sea level. We were higher, colder, windier . . . and there weren’t movie theaters, stores, or anything like that. There was a company store. There was also a gymnasium built by the mine and they showed movies there sometimes. We had a good time. The skiing was great. I helped start one of the first ski tows in Colorado. We had the first lighted ski run. We called it the Continental Ski club, and I was the first president of the company. I helped start the National Ski Patrol Division here in Colorado. I also did mountain rescue work during the war.

Copyright 2026  S. Byron Gassaway