Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–16
had a lot of required courses. I have tried to convert the course load to what Caltech had, and I
think the required level for the average over four years was about sixty units a term. To succeed
at Rice—in those days, it was the Rice Institute—you needed to be a bright kid. Rice was very
demanding, and very much connected to science and engineering. I think the entering class was
something over 400. There were maybe 1,500 undergraduates, maybe 300 graduate students.
The big major was chemical engineering, probably because of the petrochemical industry,
although physics was growing very rapidly.
ASPATURIAN: And you decided on physics?
TOMBRELLO: What else was there? The physicists had won the war! [Laughter]
ASPATURIAN: I see. I see.
TOMBRELLO: It was clearly hero worship, you know. American physicists produced radar, or at
least developed radar after the British really got it started—the high-frequency radar, the cavity
magnetron. I always wondered what the inventors of the cavity magnetron would have thought
if they had realized that its ultimate future was to warm leftovers in your microwave.
ASPATURIAN: Interesting.
TOMBRELLO: Oh, yes, but the cavity magnetron was the big thing, and that’s what broke open
radar, and of course the fact that a bunch of scientists had left Europe, like [Enrico] Fermi, [Leo]
Szilard, [Edward] Teller—
ASPATURIAN: So these were all your heroes?
TOMBRELLO: Those were my heroes. They had won the war. Of course, I was interested in
science anyway. And I was interested in taking things apart and trying to fix them, and doing
little experiments of my own. Nothing very grand, but it was something I really enjoyed.
Physics, in my mind, was the way to go. You could continue to play with toys. I’ve said several
times that the family’s always thought—my wife, my children—that I’m nine years old. And
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