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Ike Liked the Labs

How a "Scientific Siberia" Became the Hub of U.S. Atmospheric Research

by Carol Knight

Fifty years ago this month, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood at a podium in Boulder, Colorado, with the famous Flatirons rock formation in the scenic background. He rose to dedicate a building that was to serve as the new home for an area of science that was expanding after the war - radio waves and their propagation in the atmosphere.

This research was important militarily, and in the areas of telecommunications, in understanding solar activity and its affects on the Earth, and the dynamics of the upper and lower atmosphere.

Thus began a proud history of exploration and discovery in the atmospheric sciences at Boulder facilities and institutions that eventually would evolve into six of 12 research laboratories of NOAA Research as well as two of its university partners at the University of Colorado and Colorado State University. It also was the foundation for one of NOAA's centers for collecting and disseminating data on the Earth and space environment.

A few years before the President attended that sunny September ceremony (it is told that he was on a golf vacation with his in-laws, Mamie's Denver family), a newly created laboratory - the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory (CRPL) -- was looking for a home.

In the late 1940s and at the beginning of the Cold War, President Truman had declared that new government facilities not be built within the Washington, D.C. metro area so as not to concentrate so many federal facilities within range of one atomic bomb. As recollected by 85-year-old Alan H. Shapley, a longtime Boulder resident who joined the CRPL in 1947, Congress had appropriated funds for the lab and it was established within the National Bureau of Standards in 1946. (Shapley served as director of the geophysical data center in Boulder from 1972 to 1981.)

For the new lab's permanent home, however, Shapley said the general consensus was that it should be located near a major university and within commuter plane distance to D.C. for lab scientists and administrators who needed to check in regularly with their bosses. The University of Virginia at Charlottesville was mentioned as a possibility.

At about the same time, Shapley recalled, Walter Orr Roberts -- founding president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the first director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), now an important research collaborator with NOAA - had been collecting solar observations from an observatory high in the Colorado Rockies. After the war, Roberts decided to move the high-altitude facility closer to Boulder, and now it is part of NCAR. Roberts was in contact with scientists at the CRPL, and with the then-director of the NBS, who also had Colorado connections, Roberts asked that a delegation be sent to Boulder to see whether the lab might be moved "out West."

Shapley said many of the folks involved in these areas of science - solar-terrestrial disturbances, high atmospheric dynamics, and radio wave propagation studies - lived and were schooled in the eastern U.S. The prospect of moving "west of the Hudson (River)" - let alone 1800 miles from the East Coast to "a scientific Siberia" -- was not regarded as such a grand idea by some, he recalled..

A site-inspection delegation (including Shapley) winged its way to Colorado in 1949, in a DC-6 that Shapley described as a popular commercial aircraft that featured a lounge in which passengers could relax and visit. The delegation "had a huddle in the lounge," he said, and decided to present a unified front in Colorado: They agreed that they would recommend Boulder as the site for the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory.

Nevertheless, and probably not knowing that a decision had all but been made already, the Boulder Chamber of Commerce and city officials "brought out the heavy-hitters" to lobby the delegation when they arrived in the town. A reception was held at Roberts' home near the Flatirons, and all the stops were pulled, Shapley said.

Later, Shapley said, an official site-selection committee was appointed, and they drew up requirements for the CRPL location. They were looking at Boulder, as well as Stanford and a site in Mississippi, but Colorado had "two trump cards," said Shapely - land donated by businesses and citizens through a Chamber fund-raising effort, and "Big Ed Johnson," Colorado's influential Senator.

Thus it was that President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood at a podium September 14, 1954, and dedicated the new home of the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory in Boulder.

(Two other federal agencies besides NOAA maintain laboratories at the Boulder campus today - the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. All three agencies continue to conduct aspects of the early research begun by the Central Radio Propagation Lab.)

[9/6/04]

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