Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–110
THOMAS A. TOMBRELLO
SESSION 6
December 28, 2010
ASPATURIAN: We continue today with Professor Tom Tombrello, who has been at Caltech for—
TOMBRELLO: Almost fifty years.
ASPATURIAN: —almost fifty years, and he is going to talk now about some of the many
interesting and unique personalities he has encountered in his years here. Does that sound like a
fair description?
TOMBRELLO: Yes, I think so. One name that occurred to me today, because I was reading an
article on old manuscripts in the new Economist, is John Benton, professor of history—
ASPATURIAN: In the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences.
TOMBRELLO: Right. Wife Elspeth Benton, who was the first director of the Children’s Center at
Caltech. I did not know John very well until I was on the President’s Fund committee, which
dispenses small amounts of money for joint research between Caltech and JPL [Jet Propulsion
Laboratory]. This is probably getting on toward thirty years ago. We tended to get proposals to
do things in technology, science, and engineering. There would be a PI from Caltech and a PI
from JPL. Typically these were grants of, at most, $50,000—the money came out of the
management contract that Caltech gets for running JPL. You don’t often get proposals from a
professor of history, but we got this proposal from John Benton. He wrote in and said professors
of history want to go look at old manuscripts in person, because you can see things in the
original that you couldn’t see if you saw just a photograph. But they don’t have very much
money. He said he wanted to use some of the new image-enhancement techniques—remember,
this is now thirty years ago—that JPL was developing and apply them to manuscripts so that
scholars who can’t afford to travel where these manuscripts are can get a facsimile of the
manuscript that shows things like erasures. We were—the committee was—just swept away by
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