Leo Merrill Interview

L: There was a high-pressure conference in Hawaii, and Tracy kind of wanted to go, and David wanted to go, but he didn’t want them to go by themselves, and so we went with them. And Marie went around with them during the day, particularly with Ida Rose, to visit things. And I kind of stuck to the conference, but it was a just nice trip with them. So she got to know her quite well. And then before we went our mission to the Ukraine, we visited them a short time before we left. (1:23) 

J: Did you learn the language when you went to Ukraine?

L: Yeah, kind of. I had studied Russian earlier. When I started working for Tracy, we were doing a lot of correspondence for the Russian scientists to collect all literature that they had published on high-pressure, and also trying to keep up with the current literature, and we’d see so much in correspondence that was written in Russian and also papers that were written in Russian, and we had a project with what was then called the Bureau of Standards. It has a different name now. We had a contract with them to evaluate the pressure scale, and in order to do this, we needed to know what everybody was doing. One of the things that was happening was people would publish a paper, and they’d say, “This phenomenon occurred at a certain pressure,” and from one lab to another you really didn’t always know what the reference was. (2:50)

J: What year was this?

L: This was in the1965-70 period. So at that time, we had a little money to translate some of these things. But the translations we got I thought were not very scientific oriented. It was somebody who knew the Russian language well, but they didn’t know the correct scientific terms to translate some things. So I went to Bro. Jarvis in the Russian Department and asked him, “What can we do?” And he said, “Why don’t you just come over and take my scientific Russian course?” And so I did that, and I really enjoyed it. And so I went back, and the classes were three times a week. And so I took the (4:08) first three years of the beginning Russian series. And, I got so I could read the Russian very well—the scientific Russian. And in the process I made a Russian-English dictionary on the computer after we got a computer, around 1981-82. It was all in basic at that time. And later on, in about 1986, I converted it to a program in Pascal which I wrote. And, so I became able to read the Russian literature. So that was a little bit of training before going over there. (4:57)

J: How did your wife do?

L: She did well. She hadn’t had any basis. It worked out well.

(Interruption)

(5:53) We got a call from Elder Oaks’s office wanting us to come and visit him. And somehow he had learned that I had studied Russian, and they were beginning to move east and open up new missions over there. And I said, “Well, there’s a lot of younger men who know Russian a lot better than I do. And he said, “Well, to be rather frank, we’re looking for places where we can’t send young families, we don’t have the facilities for schools and things for young families. We’re looking for people who are retired, or could retire, or take a leave, or something like that. He says, “Do you know ho many people I’m able to find like that?” And so we got to go over to a brand new mission.

J: So were you regular missionaries?

L: First mission president.

(7:11)

J: How did Tracy first get acquainted? I know it was out in New York, right?

L: Yeah, that was the first time. The second time was I came here. I graduated from the state university from Albany with a Master’s in Physics. And I wanted to go get a Ph.D. And I thought maybe BYU would be a good place, so I came out here, and they had my schedule all messed up, and they had me signed up to get a Master’s degree here, and I had kind of a tussle with them about that. So I was here as a graduate student, and Dean Barnett said, “Tracy Hall has done some very interesting research. Do you know him?” And I said, “Yeah, I know him.” (8:29) And he said, “Why don’t you go talk to him, and see if you could work.” And so I talked to him, and I worked in his laboratory as a graduate student for a while. Then I came to a point that I wasn’t clicking with the faculty or something. And so I left there and went to work for the Atomic Energy Commission. While I was up there, Tracy called me one time, and he said, “Would you like to come back? We’d like to have you come back. I have a position with this contract with the Bureau of Standards, and I’d like you to work on it. So he told me what the salary was, and I said, “No,” after thinking it over. He called me back. He said, “Well, I’ve talked to them. We can do a little bit better than that.” And so, we thought it over and prayed about it. And the impressions were so distinct that this was what we ought to do. So we came down here and I worked for him for about five years, I think. (9:49) 

J: Was this in the pressure center?

L: Yeah. We had this organization. He named it the High-Pressure Data Center, which was under contract with the Bureau of Standards (10:04) to use some evaluations on the pressure scale and a number of other things that developed as we went along. So after I had been here five years, a friend from the University of Rochester, a professor there, said, “My colleague and I would like to have you come down to Rochester, if you’d be interested. We have a good Ph.D. program. It would give you the opportunity to finish your Ph.D.” I said, “Well, I’m getting a little bit older, and I don’t know if I really want to do that. And he said, “Well, think it over.” So I came home and I mentioned it to Marie, and she said, “Well, didn’t you say ‘yes’?” And so we talked it over then and decided maybe that would be a good thing to do. And so we corresponded with them, and they gave me one of these government fellowships for about two years. (11:17) And I went there and in two years I finished all my coursework and had started on my research. And then I came back to BYU and continued working for him, and at nights finished up the evaluation of my research. I had collected all the data out there. And, so within a year I had reduced all the data and had written up my dissertation and took it back, and got through the orals and everything and finally passed. I was about 40 when I finally got my doctorate.

(12:06) One of the things I have to say is that Tracy was awfully good to me. I really credit him in giving me the opportunity to enhance my career. And I always like to mention that because he was really a person who felt that some of the people in the physics department treated me pretty poorly. These are things I like to forget. But just to kind of let you know the perspective. I don’t want you to write about me. But this is kind of my background, just so you kind of know. And particularly after I received my doctorate, I got into geophysics, (13:00) and that was because these people invited me in the geology department. And they had a very good high-pressure program there that was well recognized. I would rather go into a physics department, but I had had enough physics at BYU, so I knew physics pretty well. This was just a good experience. The thing that came out of this program—I knew the research I wanted to do, because working with Tracy, I had read so many high-pressure papers and looked at the problems in high-pressure, and while I was working with him, I became interested in crystallography because there’s a certain amount of crystallography being developed in high-pressure. One of the problems—there were some limitations in what was being done, and there was a lot of powder x-ray diffraction work being done. And sometimes when you convert a material from a phase that you know to a crystal structure that you don’t know—a new crystal structure—sometimes, with a powder diffraction pattern, it’s easy to reduce it and decide what the new structure is.

(14:35) But there are some structures that are more complicated and sometimes there are some changes that take place which are very subtle, and you’ll see the old x-ray pattern plus a few extra lines, and a lot of the residuals of the old structure stay there. And so the powder x-ray diffraction was somewhat deficient in solving these problems. The problem I was really interested in, and a lot of people had taken a crack at, was the mineral calcite. (15:25) Percy Bridgeman from Harvard, early on, had discovered two high-pressure phases in calcite. A number of people had studied them. One person from UCLA had gotten his doctorate on these two high-pressure phases. And from his work—I read his work—he was a good friend of mine—but it wasn’t correct. He hadn’t come up with the right answer. I didn’t know it for sure, but it just seemed that there was something wrong with what he’d done.

(16:08) So I thought that that would be a good one to study. Then following his work, the people at the Bureau of Standards developed quite a large high-pressure cell. It was made out of beryllium metal, and the reason it is made of Beryllium—beryllium is a very low atomic number, and so x-rays can penetrate it very easily and not be absorbed by the beryllium. In other words, it’s like window glass is to light. It lets it right through. And they had studied the high-pressure phase calcite, and they were only able to get about ten to twelve x-ray lines, which is really inadequate to determine what a new structure is. When I was working with Tracy, I had done some high-pressure work on a mineral phase which somebody had made in the lab. And they found single crystals. Now when you find a single crystal of something, you do what they call a single crystal analysis, and it’s quite different from these x-ray powder patterns. Normally you can measure a lot of reflections. (17:39)

You’ve probably seen some of Tracy’s models of these crystal structures. You can see these crystal planes at all different angles. It’s kind of like going down and seeing a field planted with some kind of produce, and you can see rows this way, and you go a little way, and you can see rows this way. Well that’s the same thing that the x-rays see in a crystal. And you orient it to these different orientations. (18:10) From the measurement of those angles and the measurement of the intensity of the x-ray reflections, there are mathematical ways to reduce that data and determine what the crystal structure is. So it’s a more powerful method than the x-ray powder diffraction method, because from that way you don’t know what the planes are and you don’t know the orientations in there. They’ve developed a lot of techniques for reducing that kind of data, but it’s generally quite difficult. (18:51)

I wanted to devise a new instrument that I could do the single crystal study of the mineral calcite as it went through these high-pressure phases. And I didn’t have any idea of how I was going to do it. So when I went back after getting my coursework pretty well done, I began trying an instrument which they had at the laboratory. And that wouldn’t work. And I was really kind of up against it because I didn’t have any instrument to do what I wanted to. And I became quite concerned about it. And this one day I went into my office there, locked the door. I spent the whole day in my office with some graph paper and compass, protractor, and pencils and erasers. I just made all sorts of designs. And finally, about 4:30 in the afternoon, I came up with a design, very miniature, about that big around, of a little pressure (20:06) cell maybe about that thick, which was made partly out of beryllium discs inside, so I’d send the x-rays through, and these beryllium discs would hold these little (20:17) diamond anvils which would generate the pressure in this single crystal. And I showed it to this professor and said, “I’ve been working here for some time, and I think we can generate high-pressures this way.” And also, the other idea—this was to fit on a single crystal x-ray (20:48) goniometer so you could rotate it around and get reflections off those various planes, and actually measure the angles from which they came off. And normally—a person doing single crystal—they’d mount that single crystal on the end of a little fiber and put it in the x-ray beam, and now I’ve got a thing about an inch-and-a-half in diameter, and about a half inch thick, which we have to mount on the x-ray goniometer and to make all these measurements. And so I showed it to the professor. He looked a little skeptical. He was a little concerned about it, but he says, “Let’s give her a try.” (21:36)

So I took it to this machinist, and they made the things and they just happened to have some little beryllium discs just like what I needed. I don’t know why they had them or how they had them. And so when we got the thing all done, I took it, and in this little encapsulation (22:01)??? I had, I put water in it and (22:04) pressed it up, and I could see water solidify in it, and I knew I could get to the pressure I needed because I could see the water solidify. And, I looked through the little hole through the middle of it, and it was really neat. I knew I had something then that was working. So a week after that there was an American Geophysical (22:38)??? conference in Washington D.C. So I took this little cell down to the Bureau of Standards, and talked with (22:49) ??? who had invented this other big beryllium chunk which hadn’t been very successful. And I showed it to him, and he looked at it, and he says, “Well, Leo, I see what you have here, but it won’t work. You’ve violated three cardinal principles in the construction of this, and it won’t do this, and it won’t do that.” And I said, “Well, it works. I’ve tried it and it works. You can freeze water in it. He said, “Yeah, it’s just not going to work.” And five years later I met him at a conference in Japan, and he said, “Leo, remember that meeting we had when I told you that your high-pressure cell wouldn’t work?” He says, “You know what’s happened? Everyone is using yours, and no one is using mine now.” (23:51) But it worked, and up to the present time, I just looked in the science citation index, and it’s been cited in the literature, since we published the paper, over 400 times.

J: So, what is it called? Does it have an official title?

L: They used to call it the (24:13) Merrill-Bassett cell. And you might see that reference somewhere. And it just turned out to be so successful. And so I used to go to conferences, and people would talk about it in their papers. It really was an ego-booster! That’s a little bit of my history. And I got my doctorate there at the University of Rochester.

J: And, you went to the State College of New York?

L: The State University has a number of colleges all around the state. There are probably twelve or fifteen around the state.

J: Where did you grow up?

L: I grew up in Northern New York, along Lake Champlain. This conference is held in Lake Champlain, it’s just north of there. (25:32).

J: How close is it to Rochester?

L: From Rochester, it’s about 240 miles.

(Discussion of geography of New York)

J: (27:41) So were you always LDS?

L: Yeah, my father joined the church in 1931, but we lived in an area as I grew up where there was no church. We didn’t have any organized branches. And so as long as I can remember, we listened to the Tabernacle Choir broadcasts on Sunday, and then missionary visits from time to time.

J: You became acquainted with Tracy when you were going to school?

L: Yeah, I think it was 1952-53. He was the district Sunday School Superintendent in the Albany/Hudson District. And I was a member of the Sunday School superintendency in those days. And I was the second assistant, and he came to visit our branch, and I met him there.

(28:46)

When I came to school in Albany, I really didn’t have much background in the church. I didn’t know what a ward or stake was. I’d never heard of those. It wasn’t too long there, they’d asked me to teach a priesthood lesson. And I’d never taught a lesson before. And it was about twenty miles away, Schenectady branch, and I would go over there to their priesthood meeting and listen to the person who was teaching the priesthood class and get ideas on how to present the lesson. And then the next Sunday, in our branch, I would give the priesthood lesson. And so I did that for a number of weeks because I just needed that. (29:44)

L: So I knew who he was.

J: Not too much?

L: Yeah, but then the other thing was that there were a lot of engineers. The Schenectady branch was really thriving with LDS people who had come from Utah state and University of Utah. There was none from BYU in those days. But the University of Washington—they had lots of engineers, very young families, active people. And so they were often assigned to go up in upper state New York here where there was no organization, and to home teach, make visits monthly, or just periodic visits to the member. And Tracy, on occasion, went up and visited my dad who lives up there. I didn’t know that at the time, but he told me in later years that that’s what they had done. (30:50)

J: How long of a drive is that?

L: About 130 miles. They had what they call the Northway—the interstate goes from New York City to Montreal. And it’s one of the most beautiful drives in the Fall.

J: Was that a home teaching calling back then? Where Tracy would go visit people? (31:43)

L: I don’t know whether it was a priesthood assignment, or what. It was just something the branch did, I think under some coordination from the mission president.

J: So you were in a district in the Schenectady area . . . (32:04)

L: This area all up here was called the Champlain District. I think on my baptismal certificate, it lists it as an outlying district. It was presided over by missionaries when they had missionaries there. (32:20)

But that’s the only calling that I know of that he had—was the district Sunday School superintendent.

J: Is that the same thing as president?

L: Yeah. I think that was changed in the 1960s sometime.

J: Were you married by the time Tracy’s family was still around? Or you just never got to know each other really well?

L: We didn’t know them at all back there. I wasn’t married at that time. After that, in 1953, I became the first missionary to be called from Albany branch. Albany has an old history, as far as church history is concerned, but to my knowledge, as I’ve done research, in the early days of the church, the missionaries went through Albany, but never obtained a very large membership like some other places did. (33:29)

J: When GE made the announcement that they had synthesized diamond, did you hear anything? Was there anything in the community . . . ?

L: I wasn’t there then. I was on a mission, and the Elder’s Quorum president would send out a little newsletter to all the missionaries. I think there were only two or three missionaries after I left, and they would send us out a little announcement that mentioned that Tracy Hall had been successful in the synthesis of the diamond in the laboratory. And I remember looking at that, and I recognized the name, but I didn’t really, I don’t know how to say it.

I was a math major as an undergraduate, and then a physics major in graduate work, and never really, at that level, had gotten into material science. Going to school in a little high school of maybe 80 people in the whole high school, we didn’t have a very deep science curriculum—just the very basics. And so I wasn’t really well oriented in that. The experience I had working for Tracy, I was able to get immersed in material science.

(35:48)

J: So you decided to go to school at BYU. Now how did you get to know Tracy enough to where after you left school and went to work somewhere else, that he called you up and said, “Why don’t you come back and work for me?”

L: I’m not sure what impressed him that he called me, but I’ll give you a couple of possibilities. When I worked in his lab . . .

J: Did you have a class from him?

L: No.

J: Oh, but you got a job in this lab.

L: I worked in his lab, and I became interested in rare earth metals, and he had a bunch of samples of rare earth metals, and one of the ones that I worked on was the metal (36:43) ytterbium, you’ve probably never heard of it.

J: I have, and I’ve seen your name on a few papers.

L: This goes into another segment of his collaboration with Dean Barnett. They got the idea of doing x-ray analysis of materials under very high pressure, and I think they wanted to look at phase transitions, and, of course, their approach would be the powder approach, and that old x-ray press is right out in the front foyer of his Novatek building. You’ve probably seen that. Well, Dean Barnett and Tracy designed that. Tracy was really good at designing, and I think Dean played a big part in that, and the idea of doing the x-ray work I think was Dean Barnett’s because Dean was very knowledgeable about x-ray work. In their collaboration each contributed probably quite a lot to it, but I think Dean’s was the x-ray, and (38:06) as they got you know how in discussions, you iterate and keep moving on. And anyway, so they designed this thing, and I don’t know whether they got a grant or what they did to build it, because it’s quite an expensive thing to build. And after working on the original tetrahedral press, I got to work on the x-ray press.

J: Do you remember what year this was?

L: This would have been about 1962 or1963. (38:57) And I had been doing some things with (38:56) ytterbium metal, and so I thought, “We’ll design a little cell, and put that ytterbium metal in the x-ray press, and see if we can get a pattern, and sure enough, ytterbium metal is very absorbing of x-rays, so it had to be a very thin sample. So we shot the x-ray beam through that, and measured the patterns, and it’s a (39:20) phase centered cubic. It’s a crystal structure. We knew where the phase transition was because we measured that with electrical (39:31) resistivity. We’d done that all previously. So we moved up, and we could see the old x-ray pattern of the normal metal leave and the new x-ray pattern emerge, in other words, these spikes, lines, and so we were able to solve that. In fact, one afternoon while BYU was playing the University of New Mexico, Dean and I were in the lab and looked at the nature of these peaks, and [said] “Look at that!” (40:08) It was body-centered cubic. And I was very interested, and I think other students were also doing this sort of thing. But this was the first time that anybody had really measured a structure of a high-pressure phase. It probably wasn’t the first time, but it was one which seemed to be quite successful. And, it got on the front page of Science magazine.

(40:59) I just went over some of the litigation that they had with U.S. Synthetic, with the Popes. The lawyers tore his stuff all apart. I used to talked to Tracy, and he said, “I don’t know where anything is anymore.”

J: Well, I’ve been charged with finding it all.

L: The other thing I did was I spent a lot of time in the library looking through the literature to find what people had done. And, in doing that, I would find current work that was being done, and I became very knowledgeable of the literature, and who was doing work, and the things that were being published, and I think from that, Tracy wanted someone like that on this job. (41:56)

J: So you left BYU and went where to work?

L: (42:32) Idaho National Laboratory, or something like that.

J: Do you remember what city it was in?

L: Idaho Falls. It’s still out there. It’s a reactor site. It was a testing program for the atomic energy commission. It was really a safety program where they tested all sorts of things. And I went there—they were looking for somebody who had a lot of solid-state physics and were wanting to use solid-state devices to do radiation measurements. Radiation measurements were a big thing. And in the 1960s, they were really in their infancy. (43:19)

And so, I was up there I think two or two-and-a-half years, and when I got a call from Tracy wondering if I’d be interested in this. Because this program from the Bureau of Standards required that we do a lot of work in the literature and pull a tremendous amount of literature together in order to do an evaluation of the pressure scale. I think that was a connection because I really enjoyed that part of it. Knowing the literature is as important as doing the research because you get a lot of ideas. (43:59)

Engineering and Scientific Abilitites

In the early 1960s, we called it the x-ray press—Tracy and Dean Barnett. I think that’s kind of an important development in equipment. (44:23)

One other thing about Tracy, he’d be in his office very early in the morning working on equipment designs. You’ve seen the old drafting boards, and these T-squares which move around, and pencils, and erasers, and little templates which they used? You can hire an engineer to do a design, and you can tell him what you want, but if the scientist is doing design, as he goes along, he thinks of things that need to be done, which the engineer—he takes the information you give him, he can create the tetrahedral press with the right angles and everything. But if the scientist is doing this, he thinks of things as he goes along that will help improve the design, and he might improve the design dozens of times as he’s moving along. And Tracy was good at that. He was as good at designing equipment as he was in science discovery, in scientific investigations. (45:49)

If you could know the number of hours that he spent in designing equipment, you’d be amazed. It was unusual for a prominent scientist to spend that much time in design. He had a vision of what was possible, and he could design something, and if he did it, it would enable him to solve the problem that he wanted to solve. (47:52)

Let me tell you another man that worked for him. I don’t know if he’s still living—Lane Compton. Lane worked with him for quite a while, and then Lane became acting director of research sometime after Tracy left that office. Very nice and personable individual. How about Dan Decker? He’s a solid-state physicist, and he didn’t work as close with Tracy as Dean Barnett, but he and Howard Van (47:40) Cleet had a tetrahedral press which they were doing high-pressure experiments with. It was off using Tracy’s design—that large x-ray press, although they didn’t use it with x-rays. They were using atomic sources and looking at how high pressure affected the movement of ions through a solid. And they did some quite good work with that. (48:33)

(Advice to John to get interviews with Dan Decker and Howard Van Cleet)

Dan Decker worked out what we call an equation of state for sodium chloride, so when people did high-pressure experiments, they could put sodium chloride along with their sample and measure the x-ray pattern of the sodium chloride (49:20) binds, and from this equation of state, they could  tell closely to what pressure they were, and this was an attempt at pressure calibration. Pressure calibration was a very important thing. And Dan made a well-recognized worldwide contribution to the measurement of pressure—sodium chloride equation of state. Equation of state just means you can measure how much the volume is compressed at a certain pressure. It’s what we call a PVT—pressure/volume/temperature. Well, the temperature would usually constrained to be room temperature. (50:11) It was just a PV—pressure/volume type of thing. If you knew the volume from these sodium chloride patterns, you could determine the pressure according to his scale. (50:26)

J: Does he live around here?

L: Yeah, he lives in Provo. I think he’s probably still living. He’s retired from BYU.

Leo Merrill’s Employment History

J: So you came back down, you worked in the high-pressure lab five years, you say?

L: Yeah, for five years and then went to the University of Rochester for two and then came back. I was back in the fall of 1972 and left in 1970.

J: Did you come back to a similar position?

L: Same thing. In the meantime, there was a man who had been a graduate student who had finished. He was anxious to stay on—John Cannon. He was a graduate student of Tracy’s. Working with Tracy, he had made a number of high-pressure compounds—new compounds which were published. He wanted to stay at BYU as long as he could. So he was going to take over my position working for Tracy. So he worked those two years in my place, and then when I came back, he had been doing some teaching of freshman courses in chemistry. And by the time I got back, they had hired him to some kind of position—supervisor of the laboratories in chemistry or something like that. It was something that worked out well, and I continued as the assistant director of the high-pressure data center. (52:24)

J: So were you still working under Tracy?

L: Yeah. I got back in 1973, and he was the one who had the contract, and I was working with him on that.

J: Did you retire from BYU as well?

L: No. After Tracy and Ida Rose went on a mission to Zimbabwe, and that was when President Reagan became president. And incidentally, at that same time the congress had been funding science very heavily. And the notion came through to the country to give more recognition to social-type projects, and the science funding just really dropped. (53:31)

And so the Bureau of Standards had to define to congress certain critical areas they were funding. And they came to a point where they just said, “We can’t fund this any longer.” So at that time, I began looking for other work, and since I wasn’t in a regular department while working on this project, I was actually in the chemistry department, but not covered with any tenure, seniority, or even a job. (54:30)  At this time, this was really miraculous, I thought, Christensen Diamond Products in Salt Lake City had been bought by the Norton company in Massachussetts. It’s a big company in diamond tooling and abrasives, and all sorts of abrasive materials. Christensen Diamond Products had been using diamond tooling for drill bits for (55:04) ???  drilling, and were probably some of the leaders in that use, and the Norton company thought that was a good investment. And they had built a modern research laboratory in West Valley, which they were doing all kinds of research in diamond abrasive tooling and that type technology, and they were having difficulty with the suppliers of the synthetics, particularly with GE and De Beer, who were the big suppliers then. Mega Diamond was also a supplier. And they wanted to get into the study of the synthetics, and it was their intention to buy a high-pressure apparatus, and duplicate some of these experiments themselves, and see if they could identify ways to improve the product. (56:11)

When they had dealt particularly with General Electric, their scientists wouldn’t tell them anything. But, even though they’d published information about (56:30) thermal conductivities, they wouldn’t tell us. They’d say, “Well, you can find it in the conference report that was published in Uppsala, Sweden.”

And so, at that time, a man from Salt Lake came to BYU who was looking for somebody who might have had experience in some high pressures. They talked to Howard Van Cleet, and he said, “I know somebody who probably fits your description, and so he gave them my name. And, this was just a perfect exit, and so I went to work for them, and worked for quite a number of years for them, and retired from them. (57:30)

End of High Pressure Era at BYU

J: What did they do with all the equipment that was in the lab down here in Provo? Did they just shut everything down?

L: Pretty much. The physics people kept on with some high-pressure research. Geology had done some high-pressure research, and I think they had a press, but I think that kind of went by the wayside.

J: Was that the beginning of the end of the high-pressure?

L: When Tracy went, things sort of dropped off. He was really the driving force of high-pressure.  You know the building B-31?

J: Is it still standing?