Dudley Buck was an American electrical engineer and inventor who worked at MIT. He served in the U.S. Navy and did scientific advising work for what would later become the National Security Agency (NSA) before joining MIT, where he contributed to the Whirlwind computer program. He invented a multitude of devices related to computer development. but he is perhaps best know for the Cryotron, a superconductive switching device that operated magnetically in liquid helium near absolute zero temperature (approximately 4 Kelvin or -452°F)
It used two superconducting wires with different critical temperatures (typically niobium and tantalum). One wire acted as a control element, while the other was the switch. When current flowed through the control wire, it created a magnetic field that drove the switch wire into its normal (non-superconducting) state, effectively turning the circuit "off"
Within two years of the initial concept (by 1955), Buck built practical cryotrons and demonstrated a wire-wound ring-oscillator circuit by 1954. Buck envisioned cryotrons as ultra-miniaturized, low-power logic elements that could replace bulky vacuum-tube systems. Until then, before the development of integrated circuits and the transistor (he also had his hand in these) computers had been huge and horribly expensive, but their value in processing large amounts of information rapidly was becoming clear. The cryotron promised very small computers and minimal power consumption, so the military was extremely interested.
Buck partnered with A.D. Little's low-temperature laboratory to develop thin-film versions and explore integrated arrays. This research produced rare cryotron memory chips and contributed significantly to early superconducting digital electronics history.
The temperature of the Cold War was becoming ever frostier, and satellites were emerging as potential weapons, i.e. dropping bombs from space. Collier's magazine had run an article about that possibility with an editorial comment that they couldn't be installed soon enough!
Despite its initial hype, the cryotron faced insurmountable practical challenges. It required extreme cooling with liquid helium to function at temperatures near absolute zero, making it difficult to use in standard environments. Scientifically, it is now often viewed as a technological dead end because it was eventually outpaced by the development of the integrated circuit, which proved to be both faster and more versatile. Critics have noted that while the idea was ingenious, it was ultimately a failure that has been over-inflated in some historical accounts.
Buck, himself, knew the path of electronics would go in a different direction and he was already doing seminal work in the development of what we now know as integrated circuits, i.e. putting thousands, now millions, of transistors on silicon wafers. The Cold War was in full swing by this time and space was seen as the next war zone. The U-2 had revealed the value of intelligence (even if it wasn't used properly) but it also revealed its frailty after Gary Powers was shot down. Buck was an integral part of working on a satellite-based surveillance system, some of the details of which remain classified to this day. The U.S. was ahead of the Russians in this regard and the way they solved some of the problems was amusing. They had really good cameras that could provide excellent pictures from space. The problem was getting the film back to earth. They designed a box that would survive reentry into the atmosphere, but anticipating where the box would come down was not a precise science, and weird things coming from on high led to many UFO sightings. One even landed in the Arctic creating a rush to get there before the Russians. That event provided the plot for a book and a movie: Ice Station Zebra.
Buck remained tied to both the NSA and the Navy while teaching at MIT. In one amusing feat of bureaucratic silliness, Buck was denied a promotion by the Navy because he had failed to take a course in elementary electronics. Here was one of the world's per-eminent electronics engineers who had designed all sorts of stuff for both the Navy and NSA, teaching advanced courses at MIT being punished for not having taken a course he could have taught in his sleep.
The circumstances of Buck's death in 1959 remain a central mystery of the Cold War era. He died of a sudden pulmonary condition shortly after opening a package of chemical substances meant for his experiments and just four weeks after a visit from a group of the Soviet Union's top computer experts. The mystery is deepened by the fact that on the same day he died, his close colleague and fellow scientist Louis Ridenour was also found dead of similar causes. These coincidences, combined with Buck's sensitive intelligence work and missions abroad, have led his son (co-author of the book) and other investigators to spend decades searching for the true cause of his death, questioning whether it was an accident, a result of his own recklessness, or a targeted act of espionage.
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