a process called powder metallurgy. The magnets could then be used in everyday microscopic applications. These ranged from hearing aids to automotive test equipment. His work led to GE’s patent on the Lodex permanent magnet. It has since been continually used in the commercial automotive, electronics, and communications industries.
When Paine first started, J. Herbert Hollomon, his supervisor, had given him a verbal promise. Hollomon was the laboratory’s assistant manager for metallurgy research. He told Paine that after being in New York for a year, he would have the chance to set up his own section at the Meter and Instrument Laboratory in the company’s Lynn, Massachusetts, facility. There, he could run his own programs and branch out into new areas of research. Hollomon kept his word. On December 1, 1950, he signed Paine’s transfer papers and sent him 150 miles east to Massachusetts.
Paine continued the research on fine-particle magnets while in Lynn. The work led to production of GE’s first one hundred thousand Lodex magnets. He and his chief scientists, L. I. Mendelsohn and F. E. Luborsky, ran and grew the laboratory. Over the next five years, the quality of its research reached new heights. In 1956, it received the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science award for Outstanding Industrial Application of Science. By 1960, the Lodex magnet was well on its way to becoming an industry standard, as annual sales surpassed $1 million.6
When his supervisor, M. A. Princi, left on November 1, 1955, to take a job as the GE executive engineer in Milan, Italy, the company promoted him to general manager of the Lynn Instrumentation Laboratory. At thirty-four, he got his first taste of directing a large technical organization.
The focus of his laboratory was to support the Lynn facility in its primary job of making jet engines. In the 1950s, jets revolutionized transportation and defense at an astonishing pace. Between them, General Electric and Pratt & Whitney made virtually all of the jet engines in the United States. His laboratory found ways to use leading-edge metals to improve engine performance at higher temperatures and pressures. The first of some two dozen patents he would receive was for a time-temperature integrator control system. GE used it to test aircraft ranging from the popular civilian Learjet to the super-sleek B-58 Hustler strategic supersonic bomber.
He also continued his work on shipboard nuclear reactors. The laboratory developed a first-of-its-kind solid-state instrument that could monitor the temperature inside a nuclear reactor. The US Navy would use the invention in its fleet of nuclear submarines and ships throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The USS Enterprise (CVN-65) was the most recognizable of these ships. It was the world’s first nuclear-powered super-carrier and was just then becoming operational.7
Back at Stanford, Shepard still wanted him back. But Paine was quite content now. Times were good for Tom and Barbara. They now had four small children: Marguerite, whom they called Greta, was seven; George, four; Judy, two; and their youngest, Frank, had just been born. They thought they just might stay a while in the Massachusetts Bay community. He wrote to Shepard, saying, “General Electric has been very good to me and can promise an interesting future.”8
It was late in the afternoon. Up until he heard the news, October 4, 1957, had been much like any other Friday. He was at his desk getting ready to go home when someone told him to come over to the lounge and listen to the breaking news coming over the radio. The announcement soon silenced everyone in the room. The announcer said that the US Air Force had just confirmed that the Soviet Union had launched the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit. They were told that in the early morning sky the next day, they would be able to see the light from the satellite that the Soviet Union called Sputnik.
Before sunrise the next day, he and Barbara put jackets on the children and went down to the beach. Standing on the shore of the Atlantic, they gazed into the sky and waited. Then four-year-old George suddenly looked up and yelled, “There it is!” They looked to where the boy was pointing and saw Sputnik gliding effortlessly across the dawn’s morning sky. He remembered feeling only a stark sense of awe.9
Ralph J. Cordiner was an influential businessman. In 1958, the iconic CEO of General Electric ordered the complete decentralization of the vast high-tech company. He separated the various groups of the corporation and put product line responsibilities under a brand-new management structure. The change streamlined GE and saved millions of dollars while boosting its stock value. But part of the savings came by way of eliminating management layers and cutting the number of mid-level managers. Paine was one of them; he found himself with no choice but to leave Lynn. In September of that year, he transferred back to Schenectady. Herb Hollomon was waiting for him, this time in the Metallurgy and Ceramics Research Department.
Studying the behavior of composite materials in a time before there were digital computers was not easy. Solutions to “finite element” analyses of materials that are solved entirely by computers today took hundreds of hours to do by hand. Paine performed thousands of calculations using a slide rule and plotted the data on translucent onionskin graph paper with a wooden pencil, all by hand.10 The tedious work supported other parts of GE. The applied research he performed had one goal, and that was to improve the commercial products the company made and sold to consumers around the globe.
In the spring of 1960, Hollomon left for Washington, DC, to become assistant secretary of commerce for science and technology in the new Kennedy administration. This left Paine in charge of the materials lab. Paine liked Hollomon, but was glad he left. They had worked closely together for many years. He considered him a fair mentor, a good technical manager, and an excellent engineer. He recalled learning most from Hollomon about the nuances of GE’s complicated partnership with the federal government. But he did not always endorse Hollomon’s inflexible way of doing things. Now, he was in charge, and had his chance to run the lab as he saw fit.11
He thought the laboratory had underperformed with Hollomon as manager. To reach its full potential, it needed to broaden its customer base and win new government prime contracts by relying on the laboratory’s proven technical merit and past performance. Paine received permission from the corporate office to branch out to reach a more diverse set of clientele from various agencies of the federal government. He brought in new, nontraditional GE customers such as the National Bureau of Standards and the US Geological Survey, agencies that would go on to use the lab’s expertise in unorthodox and esoteric ways. They looked to his lab for quick results. Projects became much more dynamic and were no longer limited to research and development in material science. Work in medicinal electronics, water purification, and urban transportation now complemented the other engineering programs. GE headquarters began to take note. At age forty, Tom Paine was starting to make a name for himself.
In August 1956, General Electric had opened an office in the quiet seaside community of Santa Barbara, California. Nestled in the narrow range between the steep Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific coast, it was a new kind of office, gathering in one place many of the company’s top engineers and scientists from around the country. Their job was to use science and math to forecast the fast pace of change in the world of high technology. It was officially called the GE Center for Advanced Studies, but most people just called it TEMPO.12 Over the next couple of years, the office grew and became the center of excellence for GE’s national defense research business.
East-West tension between the US and the Soviet Union was at an all-time high in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One miscalculation on either side could have led to an all-out nuclear war. Civil defense exercises were part of daily life for school children across America. Backyard bomb shelters were not uncommon. It was in this precarious Cold War setting that TEMPO had the very difficult job of trying to predict the needs of the country fifteen years into the future. They had to come up with creative solutions to better the country’s military, recommend ways to grow the national economy, and actually predict the future without being too hyperbolic. Experts gathered intelligence from government and private sources around the world and from classified materials in order
