William A. Farrand '43, M.S. '49, Ph.D. '73

I am the son of William Augustus Farrand, a triple alumnus (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.). I believe that you should include him as a “notable alumnus” because of his contributions to engineering, technology and history. He always kept a low profile, mostly because he worked on government secret projects, but also because he was no fan of blowing one’s own horn. He also was no writer, although he once mentioned that he had more referrals than anyone else to replace Martin Gardiner at "Scientific American."

He received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1943, enlisted in WWII, was discharged, returned to UCLA for his master's in engineering, which he received in 1949, then continued on towards a Ph.D. while teaching and helping to organize the new field of electrical engineering. In 1950, I came along, so he dropped out to take a full-time job with North American Aviation. When he took note that his kids were likely to get doctorates themselves - and he had the time - he returned to UCLA to work with some of the professors he had hired. He received his Ph.D. in 1973. He later taught Engineering at Cal Poly Pomona and Cal State Fullerton. He died in 2001.

Three highlights of his career are:

• He designed and built the inertial guidance computer used by the USS Nautilus to find the North Pole in August of 1958.
• He designed and supervised the construction of the guidance system for the Minuteman I ICBM. This was the first accurate long-range guidance computer.
• He designed the first commercial chip-based electronic calculator, introduced to the market by Hiakawa Sharp.

Dad In History

William Augustus Farrand will not be much noted in the write-ups of history, but he made major contributions nonetheless.

After getting his bachelor's degree from UCLA in 1943, Dad took a job building instruments for Arnold Beckman before he started his company, Beckman Instruments. What he did I do not know, but it was what Dad, a Chemistry major with a strong background in electronics, wanted to do. “Building instruments” was his career goal at that time.

After Dr. Beckman closed his shop the following year, Dad enlisted in the Navy. Because he got his draft board interviewer arrested for demanding a bribe to recommend him for officer status, he entered as an enlisted man. At least they made him a radio (and radar) technician.

Nagasaki, Devastation, Kamikazes and POWs

Dad never mentioned any of this. Never.

However, in looking at the record of when Dad joined the crew of the USS Renville, it became obvious that Dad had a couple of major brushes with history.

Right after the war his ship docked at Nagasaki. That's right, he saw the devastation of the second atomic bomb. Later, his career was spent perfecting missiles to deliver atomic bombs. But, for whatever influence it had, he saw what those atomic bombs could do.

The reason he docked there was that his ship, the Renville, evacuated American POWs from Japan. Over a thousand of these emaciated men boarded his ship to be delivered to hospitals in Okinawa and the Philippines. He got to see the consequences of the war (many of these men they were so far gone that they died before they could get to the hospitals).

The ship he joined, before he came on board, had delivered marines to the landing on Okinawa. This was one of the greatest battles of the war. The ship left the island the day before the bulk of the Kamikazes struck the fleet. Nonetheless, his shipmates had seen those attacks. And, according to Scott, Dad once mentioned that he had seen the Kamikaze attacks (we don't know when this would have been).

The Nautilus' Trip to the North Pole - April to August, 1958

Dad built the gyroscopic inertial guidance navigation computer, which he moved to the Nautilus to allow it to find the North Pole.

He had designed and built the navigation computer prototype in the mid-50s for the Navajo missile. The Navy got a hold of it and tested it on a ship that spent a year going around the world. When it returned to its home port the current location was only a few feet off. This so impressed the Navy that the idea for the Nautilus' stunt was generated.

Dad flew to the East Coast, supervised removal of the delicate instrument from the ship (he had been a Navy radio technician, you remember), and brought it to New London (or maybe Groton, I don't know) where the Nautilus was docked. However, the Nautilus was still a Top Secret facility. Although Dad had Top Secret clearance for many projects, such clearance was task specific. Paperwork had not yet come through to allow him inside the Nautilus. So he stood on the dock as a technician ran back and forth to ask him how to do this and that as the instrument was mounted in the sub.

From the “Undersea Warfare” magazine article on the Nautilus:

“The inertial navigation system was the most useful piece of equipment brought aboard Nautilus in April, 1958. The device was designed by North American Aviation for use in the Air Force’s winged Navajo missile, which had recently been discontinued in favor of the Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). The inertial navigator operated independently of any reference point – unlike any navigation aid then in use – except for the craft’s starting position. An elaborate set of sophisticated internal mechanisms and electronics calculated the direction and distance of the boat’s every movement and rotation. The navigator created a virtual map of Nautilus’s voyage from start to finish.
”

At the time he never said anything about this accomplishment to us. The trip was front page news and a big thing on the evening news. I'm sure there was plenty of opportunity for him to mention it to us. However, he worked in a secret facility and never talked about his work.

Werner Von Braun's Peenemünde Scientists

I believe it was sometime around 1960, shortly after we moved to Fullerton, that Dad got an unusual teaching job. As the designer of the Minuteman I guidance system and the expert on modern missile guidance, he was asked to teach a course on that subject to the German scientists we brought back from Peenemünde. They had been settled at an air force base in Huntsville, Ala. Still working on missile design there, Dad had to fly to Huntsville once or twice per week. He flew to Dallas, caught a connecting (prop plane) flight to Huntsville, taught his course, then flew back. A long day.

Frequently his flight home would be late. He told of several times being met by a jeep, driven across the tarmac, and being loaded onto the flight home after it had left the gate. The airline knew he was a frequent flyer.

Von Braun's workers were a strange bunch. Dad said they were the most “unsharing” students he ever knew. Apparently they protected themselves by becoming experts on one aspect of the problem, and never letting anyone learn what they knew. They maintained their positions as necessary parts of the team by being the only ones able to do what they could do.

Dad flew a lot for his job, but this was extraordinary. I think he logged more than a million miles during his career.

Minuteman I Missile — around 1960

The Minuteman I was tested in 1961 and brought on line in 1962. Dad designed the guidance system (the D-17 Guidance Computer) and managed the crew that developed it. An example of this computer (a toroid to fit in the missile) is to be found in the Mountain View Computer History Museum. They do not mention him by name, but they do attribute the computer to North American Aviation (Autonetics, a division of NAA).

Again, his children had no idea what he was doing at work. Later on, when he reminisced, what he was proud of was not the invention itself, but rather the fact that in all the time the guidance system was deployed it never once failed. Yes, the way they made that more likely was swapping out guidance systems and sending them back to Autonetics for maintenance and parts replacement. However, a faultless deployment is unheard of.

Minuteman II Missile

Dad did not design and manage the Minuteman II guidance system. However, there were problems with the design. They brought Dad on as a consultant to fix their problems, which he did.

Autonetics Selling Their Guidance Systems to the United Kingdom

One interesting possibility almost happened. Dad’s contract with his employers said that his inventions were their property. His salary was his remuneration for his inventions. However, if they were sold outside the US he would get paid significantly for their rights. Great Britian wanted to buy his guidance system, which Dad suggested would make us rich. However, at the last minute the US Government decided that his guidance system was sensitive technology, too sensitive to let it out of our hands. They nixed the deal, and our family riches as well.

The First Commercial Calculator

Autonetics was producing some of the first integrated circuit chips in the late 1960s — MOS chips. They needed a market for those chips. Autonetics asked Dad to design a calculator that used those chips so that they could sell it cheaply to Hiakawa-Sharp in Japan, making their profit on the chips they sold to Sharp.

Electronic calculators were all over the labs, but no commercial calculator had yet reached the mass market. The ELSI-8 was a desktop calculator for plugging in to a 120 volt outlet. Dad's second calculator was also a desktop model which ran on batteries. The third design, which he was working on in the summer of 1969 when I worked with him, was a pocket version built inside a hard pack cigarette case. It was never produced.

The first commercial calculator offered only add, subtract, multiply and divide functions. It used six or seven chips. Its numerical display was nixie tubes, real vacuum tubes that displayed digits from 0 to 9. In the summer of 1969, when I worked at Autonetics, the production line for the MOS chips had an abysmal yield rate. About 98% of the chips failed. However, the workers discovered that they could use their fingernails to scrape off excess gold from the chips and up the yield rate so that only 95% failed. The nixie tubes, and maybe the keyboard, used much more power than other calculator functions. Different power requirements were specific to different chips. Besides, putting all those functions on a single chip would have decreased the yield rate to negligible. A couple of years later INTEL put all the calculator functions on single chip. Their PR department misidentifies their product as the first electronic calculator. Actually, they offered the first single-chip electronic calculator.

Desktop Publishing

Dad was the child of two printers. That was the family business. He spent much of his childhood in the shop. So when computers started to offer new ways to do old tasks, Dad imagined using them for printing and publishing. He wrote up a patent proposal for what we now call “desktop publishing.”

Dad was the head of his company's committee to consider patent proposals. However, he thought it was improper for him to be involved in the consideration of his own proposals (even though he had more proposals than any other individual). The rest of the committee thought that only three or four publishing houses would ever want to use this approach, so they chose not to apply for a patent. Of course, it turned out that this could have been a billion dollar business. But they passed on it.

I like to imagine that this patent could have made Autonetics fantastically successful, so that instead of Rockwell buying North American Aviation, North American Aviation could have bought Rockwell. Later, instead of Boeing buying North American Rockwell, North American Rockwell could have bought Boeing. A fantasy, I admit, but a fun fantasy nonetheless.