| Chuck Hayse |
| ETM Electromatic founder Kicked out of three high-schools fastest in his class. Stanford EE Graduate TWT designer Electronics enthusiast A drinker Lanky and inept. Technically impeccable. The guy with the bad luck. |
| Chuck made an exam that asks the applicant engineering riddles. When he interviewed me, we used my responses to redline the exam. So began the whorlwind tour of my life. He'd been doing a lot of high power engineering. He had at least ten people assembling to his designs. It was all the toughest engineering. Ten killowatt water-cooled tubes were everywhere. It was all about operating big fancy transmitting tubes . . . which was what I had been doing for a hobby. Chuck channeled my enthusiasm correctly. Good programs benefitted. We worked on the Patriot and Aegis systems, high energy physics experiments; for power-tube manufacturers, Skunk-Works, JPL, Air Force, Navy, etc. And our pledge was to do it right. Chuck always held that line. |
| We had this 30 KV supply running at high voltage, with the panels off. So we had the area roped off. Chuck gets himself astraddle the rope, and he trips. He goes down, tangled, into an oil slick and a bunch of empty oil drums. They went flying like bowling pins! Poor guy, all oily down there. His glasses looked all crooked. It was typical. |
| We did a houseboat trip on the Sacramento River Delta. Chuck showed up with a speedboat. He blew out the prop upon mooring. He'd hoped to do waterskiing. But no, and he had to pay $80 for the prop. I think we were all got blotto that night. At one point I jumped down from the houseboat roof to the lower deck. Chuck had the misfortune to appear in my line of fire. Then I find myself sitting on his chest. He slept in the speedboat and awoke the next morning with a terrible cric in his neck. He really tried to be the life of the party. He got duped instead. A month later we were all cracking up about one of my clumsy moves and he said "but of course Jeff, you're an oaf." I could not stop laughing. |
| Chuck developed a crowbar system using ignitrons. I was the only witness that it had been a failure, all along. It worked, mostly. But I saw the look of anguish in the eyes of each engineer who had to see it fail, before shipping it anyway. I was tired of it. I worked with the ignitron manufacturer to get the deionization baffles removed. I saw failures after that. They spurriously fire too. Ignitrons are a nussance. So when Chuck asked me to head up two production-runs for the Navy, I was forced to reiterate my dismay about our track record. It was tough because I had to tell him the personnel-safety device of his choice wasn't up to the job. And my choice was a device that had dogged him before, the triggered vacuum gap. He knew he had to let me have my way. He wanted my turn-key services. I thought he'd never stop rooting for ignitrons and maybe I overreacted. I put in ontold overtime on that system after-hours, especially when I was having trouble. I'd actually wait for Chuck to leave before I went back in each night. Everything went wrong too. But it cleaned up to be a good system. The day my customer's were to accept my baby, SN 804, she blasted. The crowbar driver board was one big crater. Chuck was kind and understanding. I said I was sorry. He said he liked my system. He believed I'd make it. He egged me on. We did make it too, to easy scalability. He knew I wouldn't let him down. It paid off. |