family. Her mother, Marguerite Jones Pearse, had died at the age of forty. Her father, Henry William Taunton Pearse, sent what little money he could from working days and nights in horrible conditions as a lighthouse keeper on barren Rottnest Island, a longtime penal colony off the coast of Western Australia.
She had spent most of the war supporting the New Guinea campaign as a plane spotter and ground controller.12 Barbara and Tom had met in Perth in 1943 when Paine was first stationed in Fremantle. But he had been unable to go back to Australia after the Pompon left the base on her fourth war patrol in February 1944. When he reached Guam after the surrender, he asked naval command there to help him find a way back to Perth so they could marry. But McDowell told him that all US nonessential operations in Australia had been halted. He wrote Barbara the disappointing news: she would have to find her own way to America. He wrote home to his parents that “Barbara and I are determined to wait forever if need be.”13
Following the war, there was an enormous waiting list of Australian war brides who were left to anxiously apply and make their way to the United States. After being discharged from the RAAF on October 2, 1945, she waited a year and a half before her name was finally called. With the money she had saved from the war, Barbara Pearse caught a Matson Line steamer to America in the fall of 1946. With the polished samurai sword he had buccaneered on the I-400, Tom and Barbara Paine cut their wedding cake on a sunny southern California Tuesday afternoon, October 1, 1946, in a traditional naval ceremony at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.14
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.—Arthur C. Clarke
The panorama along the winding curves of the Pacific Coast Highway stretched on for miles. Going from Seal Beach north to Palo Alto finally gave him a chance to relax, gather his thoughts, and move on. The war that he had fought on the other side of the ocean was behind him. Like others who had endured and lived, he was still readjusting to life back in the States. The young were coming home to a changed postwar America filled with more hope, opportunity, and optimism than ever before. Tom Paine was ready for the challenge.
Returning from the Pacific, he applied to several graduate schools around the country: Brown, Columbia, MIT, and in-state at nearby Cal Tech and the University of California at Berkeley. He wanted to really understand engineering, but thought also of architecture. Although his undergraduate grades at Brown had only been fair, his wartime service record and recommendations had been sterling. It was enough to gain him admission to Stanford University. In the fall of 1946, he enrolled in the School of Engineering and entered the mining and metallurgy program. In October, Barbara joined him. They moved into a one-room apartment in an old Palo Alto hospital near the campus. With an influx of postwar students enrolling on the GI bill, the school had converted it to a dormitory for childless, veteran couples.
Highly technical courses such as Mining, Geology, Industrial Process, and Pyrometry filled his days. He liked these subjects, and received mostly As and Bs. Others, like Russian, were not quite as appealing. Although it was a difficult language to learn (he received a C), he recalled thinking that knowing some Russian might turn out to be useful in the world of international commerce after the war.1
He immediately began work on the Navy’s early nuclear reactor program as part of his research. In the years following World War II, the US Navy was in a tight race with Great Britain and the Soviet Union to develop the first wholly contained nuclear reactor. A reactor sealed inside a pressure vessel could theoretically power a ship or submarine for decades. Such a vessel would be able to stay at sea for years without refueling. The security clearance he had from the War Department and his wartime experience on the Pompon made him an ideal choice for the Navy research program.
Under O. Cutler Shepard, a pioneering metallurgist and the department’s distinguished professor, Paine conducted laboratory research whenever he was not in class. His thesis research was to find out how liquid metals could be made to interact in a useful way with high-temperature alloys. A nuclear reactor requires a great amount of cooling. The Office of Naval Research had asked Shepard to see if liquid metal could be used (instead of water, for example) to cool a reactor. Led by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the reactor program was one of a number of highly classified postwar Navy efforts involving the universities, and one of the largest. Eight students under Shepard would receive their PhD degrees by working on the project.
Paine recalled finding the highly theoretical work “intensely interesting.” The hours were long. He often sat alone at night performing experiments. The university had a stress-rupture machine in its Mineral Sciences Laboratory that was his primary research tool. Paine became quite proficient at using it to test the compression, shear, and tensile limits of different kinds of materials. Using the powerful lens of an electron microscope, he scanned for traces of cracks and fractures in a variety of steels and alloys.
Stanford did not pay him much, just $110 a month. An additional graduate student subsistence allowance of $90 made a big difference. It was enough for him and Barbara to get by. After two semesters, he received his Master of Science degree in Physical Metallurgy on June 15, 1947.2
He continued to study for his doctorate. In his second year, Shepard made him his lead graduate student. For the next two years, he wrote papers on the results of his research; several written with Shepard were published in classified Department of Defense literature.3 In April 1949, he passed his comprehensive examination in General and Metallurgical Engineering. This put him into the School of Mineral Sciences PhD program. The Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies approved his dissertation on May 20, 1949. Ten days later, he successfully defended his thesis, a technical treatise titled “The Effect of a Molten Lead Bismuth Eutectic Alloy on Steel.”4
He now had a decision to make. A doctorate in the very specialized field of Physical Metallurgy meant he could either teach at a university or work in the burgeoning high-tech industry. Shepard asked him to stay, and offered him an accelerated professorship in the department. Paine wanted to teach, but just not yet. He recalled telling Shepard that he thought it was important, before teaching someone, to “first acquire a broader level of practical work experience for himself.” So he reluctantly turned his professor down.5
In its heyday, General Electric was the preeminent technology company in the world. No other had quite the cachet of GE. Young engineers and scientists came from all parts of the industrialized world to try and make their mark at the flagship company of modern high technology. Paine was no different. In the fall of that year, he and Barbara packed up and headed east to Schenectady, New York. That was where Thomas Edison had first set up shop in 1892. On October 1, 1949, he joined the GE Research and Development Center as a research associate. Throughout the industry, the campus was known as Schenectady Works, or “The Knolls.” To the public, it was a wondrous place of modern marvels at the dawn of the space age. Many simply called it “The House of Magic.” GE had it all: electric blenders, washing machines, fluorescent lights, refrigerators. Every Sunday night for ten years, millions gathered in their family rooms in homes all across America and watched the General Electric Theater hosted by a Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan on live television. Everything that made for the perfect image of American suburbia of the 1950s was embodied in General Electric.
Paine was now a new but highly trained materials engineer. For the next twelve months, he experimented on the magnetic properties of unusual metals. The work was very specialized. Hours of laboratory work were needed to return one data point. His team discovered that strong, man-made magnets could be formed by mixing iron-cobalt with lead powder. The magnets had a lot of uses. GE engineers could
