Geophysical Laboratory early 1900s |
Built in the early 1900s, the
Geophysical Laboratory, two blocks off of busy Connecticut Ave. in Washington,
DC, was designed specially for sensitive temperature measurements important for
determining how the interior of the Earth was structured. The Laboratory’s interior
walls were 18 inches thick (about 40 cm) and the exterior walls, at least two
feet thick. Perched on top of the 2nd highest hill in Washington
(the National Cathedral is the highest), the Lab commanded a view of much of
downtown D.C. through the filter of tall trees that graced the grounds. I first
saw the Lab in July 1977, a couple of days before starting my postdoc. It was
the 4th of July weekend, so I was to start work immediately after
the holiday. My friend Nancy “Nat” Peters drove me by. We stared in awe of the
august building. I was humbled.
When I arrived for work a day or so
later, entering into the double doors of the main entrance, the 1st
Floor hallway was eerily silent. Wooden museum cabinets flanked the walls
containing mineral specimens that had been given names in honor of the famous
scientists who had worked at the Geophysical Lab. I reported first to Tom
Hoering in his office and lab suite on the 1st Floor. Hoering’s office centered
on his old oak desk and was flanked on either side by lab benches holding a balance
for weighing, a small refrigerator, and two gas chromatographs. He loved being
among the hum of instruments, even in his office. The main lab held three mass
spectrometers—an old homemade instrument, a new Nuclide mass spectrometer to
measure hydrogen isotopes, and a 3rd mass spectrometer for measuring
the chemical structures of unknown compounds from sediments, oils, and rocks.
Lab benches by the front windows were covered with custom made glass vacuum
lines with columns of liquid mercury, pumps, and furnaces. A smaller interior
lab included two ancient, soapstone hoods that barely worked, a
bromine-pentafluoride vacuum line, and the laboratory bench that became my
“home” for doing research for the next several years.
Tom Hoering with his mass spectrometer, circa 1977 |
After a brief meeting, I was taken
to the 2nd Floor where the Director had a suite of offices and the
secretarial staff was located. In those days, people used telephones and
letters to communicate, rather than email or text messages. Secretaries
answered most phone calls, then used a complex series of bells to summon us to
answer the phone. My call sign was 5-1: ding ding ding ding ding pause ding.
Hoering’s was 5-2. When we heard five rings, we both listened up. The
secretaries also typed all of our manuscripts and correspondence. They were
sources of important information on how things really worked.
I was assigned a desk space at the
other end of the hall from Tom’s lab, just outside of Larry Finger’s
crystallography laboratory on the 1st Floor. With tousled curly
brown hair and a matching beard of a similar unruly nature, Finger had designed
an automated laboratory with two or three sophisticated X-ray instruments
specially designed to measure the crystal structure of very small pieces of common
and rare minerals. He was an early computer whizz. His inner office, stacked
with paper computer codes, punch cards, and various computer parts, was the
typical scientific mess. Larry was assigned the job of computer support for the
Lab, which took up a considerable amount of his valuable time. Often he was
seen as a grumpy tyrant, but in reality, he was very generous with his time and
knowledge.
Over the next few years, my Lab
“real estate” expanded from the Basement all the way to the Attic floor. To
sterilize the media for my microbial cultures, I used an autoclave—a large,
hot, pressurized cylinder that was installed in the basement room where the
maintenance staff ate their lunches and changed their clothes. When I was
coming down the spiral staircase into this room—the support staff lair--I
whistled so that I wouldn’t literally
catch them with their pants down. One floor lower was where the Boiler Room and
Electrical Vault lay. The Lab’s only shower, peppered with mold and grime from
years of neglect, was located on this level. The few women at the Lab rarely,
if ever, used it. The Electrical Vault doubled as a Barber Shop, run by our
mail clerk, Harvey Lutz. Budget conscious staff scientists had their hair
trimmed there on a regular basis.
L. B. Patrick "Pat", Dave Ratliff, and Pedro Roa, Janitorial staff, circa 1985 |
The Attic was a similarly unusual
place that served many purposes. It housed a storeroom of used glassware and
chemicals, a dark room for processing photographs and slides, an archive of old
papers, a museum-like office with former staff member Frank Scheirer’s pipe,
desk, and papers, and a small room that I used for transferring microbial
cultures. When any postdoc needed a few beakers for an experiment, she/he was
sent by Dave Singer, the Assistant to the Director, to the Attic to see if some
could be found in the jumbled storeroom. The storeroom held a treasure trove of
old historic junk, including all of the radioactive samples analyzed over the
Lab’s history.
In order to maintain sterile
conditions, I needed to shine ultraviolet lights on the bench tops for 8 hours
prior to working. Here was my routine: 1) make the culture media in my lab on
the 1st Floor; 2) carry it and the glassware for growing the
microbes into the Basement where it was sterilized; 3) bring it up to the Attic
for inoculating with microbes; 4) carry down the cultures to my lab on the 1st
Floor. Hardly convenient, especially since the Laboratory had no elevator!
Tucked underneath the stairs on the
Ground Floor, Doug Rumble’s small lab housed the Nuclide isotope ratio mass
spectrometer we shared. I would prepare samples in my 1st Floor lab, then
shuttle them downstairs for final analyses. Our gas tanks came into the Ground
Floor from an adjacent parking lot. When we needed one upstairs, our janitorial
staff used an old-fashioned dumbwaiter to physically haul it up. The instrument
shop took up much of the real estate on the Ground Floor. Employing three to
four machinists at any one time, the Shop could make any complex metal
structure you could imagine. Having this facility on site made the difference
for most of the Lab’s scientists, who designed their own specialized equipment.
The men’s only restroom was on the Ground Floor and was the only restroom in
the building when it was built, meaning there was no ladies restroom! Sometime in the
1930s, a Ladies room was built on the 2nd Floor.
The Shop and Electronics Staff, circa 1983 |
The rear of the Laboratory held
three external, separate buildings—the Dog Sheds, low “temporary” laboratories
built for research during World War II; the Electronics Shack, housing our
electron microprobe; and a metal shed holding years of old, often-leaking
chemicals. Rus Hemley managed to build a nice lab in the Dog Sheds that
overlooked the volleyball court, that was outside the Dog Sheds and actively
used for games at lunchtime. We also used the court for disposing waste bromine
pentafluoride, a nasty explosive chemical reacted safely with the water vapor
in DC’s humid air.
The exterior of the Lab was tan
stucco, with a very distinct patch on the side that was replaced after a
serious fire. Two tall holly trees dwarfed the front flanks of the building.
Rambling roses covered the front entrance giving the appearance of a modern day
Sleeping Beauty castle. Azaleas imported from Japan by visiting scientists
rimmed the front lawns. We held picnics and barbecues there, as well as the
Friday afternoon beer sessions. A curving driveway swept up from Upton Street
in a loop. It was not that unusual for someone’s car to roll off the driveway
into the lawn because their parking brakes weren’t set.
Front of 2801 Upton Street, circa 1987 |
In photos of the Lab when it was
first built, all of the trees were small saplings. A large weeping willow,
planted by staff member Joe Boyd to hide the electrical lines, frequently took
out our power at the first sign of wind or a thunderstorm, something that
happened almost weekly in the summer. The saplings grew into massive oaks,
maples, and walnut trees. In one of the massive storms that swept through the
area, postdoc Zach Sharp and I watched from the front doors as tall trees were
completely uprooted, flying like tooth picks under the influence of the violent
winds. The grounds were nearly destroyed; electric lines were downed. A large,
uprooted walnut tree at the rear of the Lab was recycled one weekend by my
husband Chris and postdoc Susse Wright’s husband Tom. Tom Wright, an NSF
program director, grew up on a tree farm in Alabama and had a chain saw. He and
Chris sawed off the limbs, loaded the heavy trunk onto the back of Chris’s Jug
Bay Wetlands Sanctuary work truck and took it to a small sawmill in southern
Maryland. We have a picnic table built with the lumber and shared some of it
with others at the Lab. I cherish it as a memory of that day and of the old
Upton St. Laboratory.
Without question the old Geophysical
Laboratory building had history, class, and a unique character. We all loved
it, but eventually it began to limit our scientific research. The electrical
system was a rat’s nest. My laboratory had power lines coming in from three
sources, one of which ran through the Instrument Shop. When they turned on a
certain milling machine, one of my mass spectrometers would catastrophically
shut down. We didn’t have enough space for new equipment; if we did, it often
got stuck on the stairways bringing it in. NSF refused to fund a new mass
spectrometer we desperately needed until we moved to the new lab. The fume
hoods could no longer handle the chemicals we were using. The DC Environmental
Protection agency was appalled at our old chemical storage shed. In summer
time, the room air conditioners were insufficient to cool labs. In winter, the
old boiler often broke down for days at a time. The Lab was contaminated with
radioactive carbon, so our work on dating bones needed to move to the National
Bureau of Standards. It was time for a change.
Bottom row: Charlie Prewitt, Joe Boyd, Doug Rumble, Ed Hare, Tom Hoering; | Back row: John Frantz, Dave Mao, Dave Virgo, Bob Hazen, Larry Finger, Rus Hemley, Bjorn Mysen, Marilyn, 1990 prior to moving |
In 1990, we moved to 5251 Broad Branch
Rd., N.W. campus amid a flurry of activity. Ed Hare claimed he wouldn’t move
and refused to pack up his lab when the moving trucks came. The Laboratory
photo that year showed us all in our work clothes, informally posing on the
front steps. Tom Hoering worked so hard, he took naps on cardboard spread out
on his old lab benches, now vacated. The move took over two weeks. When it was
over, we came back to see the bones of our beloved building. Even today, when I
dream about the Geophysical Lab, which I do often, it’s always the Old Lab that
I dream about. Memories of the old Lab are dear to many.
Moving Day, 1990 |
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