Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–18
Doll Research Center] was get some bright young guy to repeat Hubbert’s calculation for world
oil. And it was a nice report. I wish I could show it to you, but the company seized it, destroyed
it, and essentially there was no more talk of it, because we got basically the same results,
although probably with much less precision than Ken Deffeyes got a few years ago. We realized
that we were looking at a short period in the history of man in which hydrocarbons, particularly
oil, were going to be important. It was a nice report, but the company felt this was not something
they were going to show their clients. I wish I had a copy [laughter] but they’re gone. They
were very careful to grab—I’m sure there’s some around somewhere—but I don’t have one. It’s
an interesting story.
ASPATURIAN: So you stayed on at Rice for your PhD.
TOMBRELLO: Let’s see, I started graduate school there in the fall of 1958, and I got my master’s
degree about 1960 and my PhD a year later. Rice was a curious place, in that they didn’t attract
very good graduate students. I stayed because I had a pregnant wife and I wanted to get out of
graduate school quickly and I wanted a minimum amount of trouble. It was good enough in
nuclear physics. It may have been comparable to Caltech in nuclear physics.
ASPATURIAN: Interesting. They had some good people.
TOMBRELLO: But they didn’t have any good students. But they had a Darwinian approach to
students. They let lots of people in, and lots of people got master’s degrees and disappeared.
ASPATURIAN: Who was your thesis advisor?
TOMBRELLO: His name is Gerry Phillips. Gerald Cleveland Phillips. He’d been a Rice grad, a
Rice undergrad, and had been in naval ROTC and had been a lieutenant commander or
something, second-in-command on a submarine in the Pacific. Gerry came back, got his PhD at
Rice, and after a year or two somewhere else he’d come back. And he was a bit of a wild man
but fun to work for. We shared the idea that if you saw something interesting, just work on it.
So I published a handful of papers.
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