Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–17
they’re probably right. Nine-year-olds get a lot of fun out of life. Though I remember I was out
to dinner with some of my ex-students and their wives up in Seattle a few years ago. One of the
wives looked at me and said, “You’re not nine years old, Tom.” I said, “What do you mean,
Kate?” She says, “You like girls too much.” [Laughter] I said, “You’re right.”
ASPATURIAN: With that exception.
TOMBRELLO: With that exception.
ASPATURIAN: Nine going on fourteen.
TOMBRELLO: At Rice I met a local high school girl who had actually come down to Houston
from Dallas. I hadn’t known her in Dallas, but she had known a friend of the family—a girl I
knew, who was just a friend. She’d tell me, “You ought to look up Ann Hall,” so I did. You
know, people got married young then, and we ended up getting married in 1957, at the end of my
junior year at Rice, and maybe eighteen months later we ended up with a baby boy, Christopher.
In 1958 I started grad school in nuclear physics, and there was hero worship again. But
first I should mention my summer jobs at Rice. I had them mostly in the gadgets side of the oil
industry. After my sophomore year, I think, I worked for a company called Varo, building
transformers. After my junior year, I worked for a company that had just been bought by
Dresser Industries. Then after my senior year I worked at Shell’s [Shell Oil Company] research
center in Bellaire, Texas, and that’s where I—I can’t say I met—I saw, observed, [Marion] King
Hubbert, observed Ken [Kenneth S.] Deffeyes. Both peak-oil types.
ASPATURIAN: How did their predictions go down at that time?
TOMBRELLO: People didn’t want to believe them. It was only later that it proved inescapable
that Hubbert had been right about U.S. oil production, but it took decades. You know, the
prediction was made in ’56 that it would peak in 1971. This was U.S. oil production; he hadn’t
made a world prediction. And even then, when it reaches a peak, you don’t quite know it’s a
peak until a little later when it comes down. In fact, one of the things I did when I left Caltech
for a couple of years in the late 1980s to run the research lab at Schlumberger [Schlumberger-
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