NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Ralph Baldwin, planetary scientist, part 2 of 3

We're out of film. Why don't we we'll pick it up right there. Thank you Two let's talk about what you were doing in 1942 In 1941 I had come to the conclusion that something big had happened in the middle of Maury Embrium and on this chart Maury Embrium is this great circle here. I put an ink and outline of various prominent valleys in this system and they're open like a fan and they will if you project them back as acts of great circles the lines which I've drawn in Maury Embrium all intersect in the

central region of that basin. This is the original picture that I worked with and published in 1942 publication is in 1942. It's one of the two things which ultimately convinced people, convinced scientists that the creators of the moon really were of impact origin. When you say ultimately you hadn't published face of the moon yet let's jump forward to that. Did that convince anybody? Yes it convinced a few people. Now I'll come back to that in just a minute. The face of the moon was published in a quantity of three thousand by the University of Chicago Press and it didn't sell. Finally about 1952 the university wholesale the rest of them for a few cents a piece and then about 1955 maybe 56. They said

we've got to have another book people are getting interested. I said I'm working on one but it isn't going to be ready for several years. So the University of Chicago Press re-issued the face of the moon in the second edition. They couldn't pull back those they'd sold for a few cents and it made a real difference as the 1950s went on people began to more and more to realize that hey there's something to this impact business. Among the people who read the face of the moon and were influenced by it and I'll just list three or four of them. One was Harold Uri. Harold was a Nobel Prize chemist but he became fascinated by the moon. Unfortunately he was fascinated for the wrong reason

because he thought the moon was a primitive body it had not gone through a differentiation chemical as I knew it had but he got interested and he published on it but more than that he was the man that NASA credits with being the force behind going to the moon and he would go down to NASA and make himself a pest and telling them they ought to do that and they finally realized that well it's a pretty good idea to combine science and the engineering and they did go to the moon and they brought back 800-odd pounds total of lunar rocks on all of the Apollo flights but I feel very fortunate that my work was sound enough so that I had to have not had to back down on any of my major theses. The second

book came out in 1963 the measure of the moon covering far more than the face and the third one is a little one that McGrawhill published in 1965 and I closed that book with a statement that the battle concerning the origin of the lunar craters is now over and that was five years four years before the first Apollo landing on the moon in other words I'm very much in favor of the moon landings they did wonderful work but they didn't demonstrate that the moon's craters and therefore similar craters on the earth were of impact origin that had been proven before they went you had another major convert by

all tellings of it and that was can you tell us about him Gerard Kuiper was one of them he was a great student of the moon in his later years did very very good work but when the face of the moon was offered to the University of Chicago press he refused to review it on the grounds that he didn't know enough about the moon to give an honest review but he certainly changed Peter Millman was probably the greatest astronomer in Canada and Millman read the book and he went to CS Beels at the Dominion Observatory and he prevailed upon Beels to start a study of the Canadian shield which should have large numbers of ancient impact craters if my hypothesis were correct and they found

them in great quantity from little ones about a mile across the clear water lake is a double crater is I remember the figures there 18 and 25 or 18 and 30 miles across others in that general range Sudbury was like 120 miles across that was before mountain range was formed it was squeezed until it's only half as wide as it was when it started but it's a real crater remnant of a crater and there were others wepple Fred wepple was one about the four or five six Jean Jean Shoemaker tell what tell us what you know of Jean and because obviously he's not with us so he's a sort of a shadow character in our show Jean was tops he read the face of the moon but he was interested in the

moon before that but this kind of triggered him and he started going he was a geologist he was a great authority on the Colorado Plateau that he came interested in the moon and solar system and in his later years was very much interested in a program of finding out what asteroids would come or could come close to the earth enough so that they might be dangerous in a future time and he and one other organization Jean worked with his wife by the way at Jet Propulsion Lab the two groups have discovered so far over 200 asteroids mostly a kilometer or more in size whose paths bring them closer to the sun than the earth at times from the statistics of them they estimate that there are

ten times that many still out there to be found well I hope they find the one that is ultimately going to hit the earth because sooner or later it's going to happen and if it does happen and we don't do anything about it and it happens to be one of the larger ones that hits that could be the end of the human race and frankly I'd prefer that not to happen so Jean has been a marvelous inspiring individual I'm only sorry that his health wouldn't permit him to be on one of the moon rockets he wanted it did you ever think about going to the moon or want to go to the moon well there are three reasons one I'm too big two I didn't know anything about piloting a jet plane and three by wife would have taken a dim view of it but you might have wanted to

go oh I'd have gone if I'd had a chance it would have been worth it let's cut there more for ourselves then okay thank you I can't remember and our boom man like you're doing great what were two you got into the army files why and how did that relate to your

own research only as a sideline by play I spent World War II and a year later at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University where we were doing military research on the proximity fuse and one of my jobs was to be the liaison to the U.S. Army so I often was in the Pentagon or the Army War College they knew that I was working during that period of time starting to

prepare for the face of the moon so they opened their files to me not on anything connected with the fuse but on explosives and I got a good deal of information on how explosives acted to produce a crater and how much energy it took to produce a crater of a given size and those produced small craters up to 300 feet in diameter something like that but fortunately I had developed a chart was in process of developing the chart showing on a log log scale diameter versus depth of craters and I had way up here I'd have the lunar craters down here military mines explosions of underground explosions which would blow craters up to maybe 300 feet in diameter and then way down

to the bottom end explosives from shells and bombs the smallest craters were three or four inches in diameter the largest craters were over a hundred miles filling the gaps in that chart were the points for four impact craters on the earth one of them was the Arizona crater 4,000 feet across and that relationship between diameter and depth of craters on the earth on the moon man made and not man made but all explosive craters formed a beautiful curve that could be closely represented by a quadratic equation one little equation and that equation that chart and this one on Embrium are the two things above all that convinced most people that the craters on the moon

really were of impact origin great let's cut there were you a voice in the wilderness with face of the moon and and following yes and I think you might call it the wea small voice I was convinced early that the craters of the moon were of impact origin not volcanic but very few people agreed with me even after seeing the evidence the chairman of my doctoral committee at the University of Michigan said Baldwin what do you wish in your time doing that for don't you know the moon is dead and gone dr. Lee at the Derban Observatory laughed at the idea nobody from the symposium meeting that I conducted at Yerkes was convinced that I was right and I began to realize that I was not

fighting an active scientist I was working with people who really were not interested enough to examine the evidence and that my real opponent was not a scientist of today my real opponent was Galileo 350 years ago he had said that those craters were volcanic they weren't great let's jump ahead I think was May 25th 1961 Kennedy makes his well-known speech we are going to the moon where were you what were you thinking when you heard the news or when you

heard I was right in front of a television set I heard him say it I don't know whether I believed it or not I knew that theoretically it was possible but he had given a goal of reaching the moon and bringing the people back safely before the decade was out and that meant a perfectly fantastic program had to be started and I didn't know whether we could do it in that time frame I knew that ultimately we would do it in fact let me give you this story we had a company dinner from the Oliver machinery company every year also I took some of the foreman down to Ann Arbor occasionally to a football game for the University of Michigan and at one of these dinners one of our superintendents stood up and he said Ralph do you remember going down to Ann Arbor to a

session such a game yes you know who went with you I said I have to assume it was you Harold yes do you know what we talked about well knowing me I have to assume it was the moon you know what you said no you said that within 10 years we'd land somebody on the moon you were wrong it was only nine that's great let's talk about what you were doing during the 60s as Gemini and later Apollo were getting underway you had another life you were in business can you tell us a little bit about that I was an officer and ultimately president and then chairman of the board of the Oliver machinery company and Grand Rap is Michigan we made woodworking machinery metal sawing machinery

bread slicers in fact we introduced the bread slicer to America packaging machinery and roll type heat seal paper labels we had about 500 employees and when I came after the war to Grand Rapids my father asked me if I would come with the company and I said yes but I must be able to continue my astronomical research and he said if you can do it without damaging the company fine and on that basis I spread a lot of spare time doing astronomy and a lot of non-spare time doing company business would you say you were moonlighting on the moon damn I was in 1978 awarded the a when they get into a situation like that

or words to that effect anyway anyway I wish I had said it but if we slayed it okay okay the French call it with the scallion with the staircase meaning that you know after you're left this alone do you tell us that I don't think we got that that's a nice story you want to do it over sure about when you got the award let me see if I can think of the name in 1978 I received the Smith Award from the National Academy of Sciences I was up on the platform along with others who were getting awards and as my name was called and I walked toward the microphone the president of the Academy handler said Ralph how did

you ever do it how did you find time to do something like that well I mumbled some answer wasn't a good one probably but my wife was in the audience and later on she said what you should have said there was that you moonlighted and when I wrote up my history for my family I told that story and I put in another line to the effect of what that one could say when it was important what one can think of after the event is all over or words to that effect what did your wife and your family think of all of your intense interest in the moon that's a loaded question don't have to answer well I can answer it in this extent

when you're driven and frankly I was you spend an awful lot of time trying to solve whatever problem you're solving and that takes time away from your family Lois is my wife Lois is very proud of some of the things that I have accomplished but she also feels that and logically that I didn't spend enough time with the family I didn't mean it to be too too personal question but it would just feel like I was the interest to me because when you do things I'm not fooling myself at all on this oh yeah well that was good we on on four or good this will be four this will be four and this and