Word: fairbanks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...issue of Wednesday, May 4th, The Boston Globe printed a front-page account of Professor John K. Fairbank's valedictory lecture in History 1711. Since the Globe story impugned both my competence as a slide-projector operator and my loyalty to Chairman Fairbank--and since I am told that some members of the Harvard community read the Globe--I would be grateful to the Crimson for printing my heartfelt rebuttal...
...Globe's reporter made two untrue assertions: First, she reported that Fairbank's effort publicly to "exorcise Jim Thomson's phobia about sheep dung" related to my mishandling of a sheep-dung lecture-slide back in 1958 when I was his teaching assistant. Second, she reported that I was not even present at the Chairman's valedictory lecture...
...reporter got the sheep-dung story all wrong. What had happened, back in 1958, related to my then lofty position of audio-visual aide in Fairbank's famous course, "Rice Paddies." That meant that I ran the slide projector in the last ten minutes of each lecture. Fairbank would give me a box of slides he had selected and arranged; I would then show them...
...morning the subject was the nomadic life of Mongolia--therefore endless slides of yaks. yurts, camels, and the like; also, toward the beginning, a picture of multiple mounds of dried sheep dung which, Fairbank explained, the Mongols used for fuel. Imagine my consternation when, several slides later, there appeared on the screen a precise duplicate of the sheepdung vista. Fairbank once again patiently explained the significance of the mounds, but added to the audience of 300, "I am frankly at a loss as to how to account for Mr. Thomson's infatuation with sheep dung...
Heeding traditional scientific protocol, Fairbank last week was not talking publicly in advance of the scheduled publication of his results in Physical Review Letters. But the basic operation of his quark-hunting experiment is known. As their tool, Fairbank and two young colleagues-Arthur Hebard, now at Bell Laboratories, and George LaRue-devised an updated version of the classical "oil drop" experiment, first used by Robert Millikan in 1910 to measure the charge on a single electron. Instead of oil drops, the Fairbank team relied on tiny spheres of niobium, a metal that becomes a superconductor when it is chilled...