William Kaula
BILL KAULA WAS THE father of space-based geodesy. As an academic scientist for some 37 years at the University of California, Los Angeles, Bill was unique: He graduated from West Point and did not have a Ph.D. His initial move into geodesy was to improve missile trajectories. He soon learned that tracking satellites could provide revolutionary information on how Earth works. He lived to see the determination of absolute positions on Earth to a millimeter accuracy using the military Global Positioning System array of satellites. Bill was also one of the fathers of comparative planetology: Understand the planets and you improve the understanding of Earth.
Bill Kaula was born in Sydney, Australia, on May 19, 1926, to Edna Mason, an Australian of British descent, and Edgar (Ed) Kaula, an American of Czech descent. Ed was a Texaco executive in the days when the United States exported petroleum products. Moves to New Zealand and Holland followed, but in 1935 Ed lost both his job and his wife due to alcoholism. Edna stayed in New York with their younger son David, while Ed and Bill returned to the Kaula home in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Bill found schoolwork easy, so he spent his adolescence in ways consistent with his introspective nature--chess, playing the piano, and reading novels, philosophy, and so forth: a true nerd. As graduation from high school approached, Ed suggested that Bill apply to West Point, which Bill did, for lack of an articulated alternative. In his own words, "Turning 18 in the middle of a world war made West Point relatively attractive. Otherwise, I probably would have eventually become an English professor, like my brother."
As a plebe, Bill continued in his indolent introspection, which garnered a lot of demerits and a modest academic standing. At the start of yearling year, he had the good luck to be assigned Graham Kent as a roommate. Graham had trouble with his studies, so to help him Bill started studying the night before class for the first time in his life. Suddenly Bill's grades shot up. Bill kept studying even after Graham went off in 1947, and remained a starman for his last three years, despite being near the bottom of the class in athletics and military aptitude.
Bill considered going into the Air Force, but after nearly killing his instructor and himself goofing his first recovery from a tailspin, Bill decided he lacked the coordination, patience, and attention to detail to survive as a pilot. Hence he went into the Corps of Engineers. Meanwhile, he became engaged to a pretty French girl, Denise Bouche, which led after EOBC to an assignment in Hanau, Germany (the bachelor engineers gallantly volunteered to take the assignments in the Far East, where there was a shortage of family housing).
Two years in the Hanau Engineer Depot were rather desultory, but a year in the Fourth Combat Engineers was quite stimulating. Meanwhile, Bill was offered a year in graduate school. He decided that civil engineering was dull and that his record was not good enough to qualify for nuclear engineering, and so he chose a new option: geodesy. In his own words, "In 1951, as a regular officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, I was offered a year of graduate school, with the program option of nuclear engineering, civil engineering, and geodesy. I elected the geodesy because it was vaguely a mixture of something easy--mathematics--and something that got you out-of-doors--surveying. Later I tried to renege but was compelled to go because no one else had asked for it. The resulting year at Ohio State was stimulating because I was the only student in the program; I did not have to attend lectures in my subject; I wrote my own syllabus; and I got to do a thesis leading to a published paper."
Bill often referred to the geodesy assignment as the biggest piece of dumb luck in his life. On arriving in Columbus in June 1952 Bill found that he was the first student in a new program with one faculty, an aged Finn, Weiko Heiskaneu, who said, "I thought you weren't coming until September. I'm going to Finland for the summer. Here, study this book." Hence the West-Point-taught self-reliance paid off. Bill studied the book (and other geodetic texts) diligently and signed up for summer courses. In the fall no other students showed up, and the Finn said he would not give lectures to only one student--so Bill wrote his own syllabus for weekly discussions, thus getting a more comprehensive view of the subject. He also cooked up a thesis topic that led to his seeing a lot of Ohio countryside.
The geodetic label resulted in his assignment as project officer for the topographic survey of the island of New Britain, just northeast of New Guinea. This proved to be his most satisfying military posting: a tri-racial, quadri-national command, 2,500 miles from his boss in Tokyo, lasting one year. Bill was very proud of the Pidgin English he learned during this assignment. This spell of independence spoiled him, because two years later when the word from OCE was "your next turn is with the Third Engineer Combat Battalion at Fort Benning," he decided to seek other employment for which his talents were more satisfying to himself as well as useful to the nation, in those days of the "missile gap."
Bill quickly found his choices were limited to the Department of Defense: three offers, two Air Force, one Army. He chose the one with the most stimulating boss: John O'Keefe, head of geodetic research at the Army Map Service. In November 1957 Bill resigned from the military to support five dependents on a GS-12 salary ($7,520 a year, but an adequate house in nearby Bethesda, Maryland, cost only $17,000 then). On arrival at the map service he was surprised to be asked the question "What do you want to do?" To which his immediate response was "research on properties of Earth's gravity field" (then thought to affect inertial guidance significantly). He was further surprised to get the freedom to do it, with support.
A year later O'Keefe moved to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), leaving the map service research supervision to Bill. In 1960 Bill moved to NASA to be project scientist for a geodetic satellite. The project, however, kept being postponed because of security objections, which left him free to do his own research. After mastering satellite orbit dynamics Bill turned his interests in two directions: implications of the gravity field for Earth's interior and applications of the dynamical techniques to the evolution of natural orbits. The void of talent in satellite geodesy made it easy for Bill to get papers published, and he regularly presented his results in the Journal of Geophysical Research and similar outlets--an average of about six papers per year for 40 years.
Bill's work interested a visiting consultant at NASA, Gordon MacDonald of the University of California, Los Angeles. This led to a tenured faculty appointment at UCLA, an unusual event for someone without a Ph.D. In partial compensation for never having gotten a Ph.D. Bill wrote two books, Theory of Satellite Geodesy (1966) and An Introduction to Planetary Physics (1968).
In addition to teaching, Bill served UCLA twice as a department chair and twice as a member of the Council of Academic Personnel, a committee that advises on appointments and key promotions for the entire campus (about 600 cases per year). He frequently served NASA as a project participant (e.g., team leader for the altimeter on Apollos 15, 16, and 17) and proposal reviewer. He was twice a member of the National Research Council Space Science Board. His other principal association outside UCLA was with the American Geophysical Union, as section officer, journal editor, and advisory committee member.
During the mid-1970s Bill's scientific productivity was invigorated by a move into comparative planetology. He made many important contributions concerning the origin and evolution of the solar system. Another very important event in his life took place at about this time, the marriage to his second wife, Gene. They remained inseparable until Bill's untimely death. I remember one wonderful trip with the Kaulas in the late 1970s. We were attending a conference in Newcastle and for a lunch we drove across England to the Lake District. We had an unforgettable lunch at the Shallow Bay Hotel. We reminisced about the decadent sticky toffee pudding right up until a few weeks before Bill's death.
William Kaula
Great Post!
Whats the source? I would be interested in reading some more.
William Kaula
> Great Post!
>
> Whats the source? I would be interested in reading some more.
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom.php?book=biomems&page=wkaula.html
Just Google William M. Kaula, As I recall he was a friend of Mr. G's. He wrote a little 106 page paperback dealing with the very complicated subject of Satellite Geodesy called "Theory of Satellite Geodesy, Applications of Satellites to Geodesy". He was also tenured at UCLA without a PHD.
> Oh I don't know, let's paint a broad picture and say space exploration, medicine, technolgy in general, weapons development. Name one country that can match the US in any of those fields.
I'm going to bow out of this discussion.
> They dropped out of Grammer or High School?
You meant "Grammar" right?
Before I go further with this discussion, I'm going to suggest you read both Jobs' and Gates' bios. At which point perhaps you'll realize where I'm coming from.
No, it's because I have topcon and trimble products and don't need another one.
> No, it's because I have topcon and trimble products and don't need another one.
:good:
I agree with you. Not the snotty Swiss part, but the fact that their software does need to improve. We have to remember that outside the US, Viva Smartworx is a big seller. I think they're trying to full more of a gap worldwide instead of making a complete new software for the US. That being said, their engineering and mining software incorporated in this software far outweighs that of any other on the market (as another Surveyor on the post has explained.
Lets not lie to ourselves...Leica has software options. Definitely more than aTrimble to say the very least, soon more than most as we are seeing more of a push on the Topcon side to TopSurv and Spectra to Survey Pro. Almost all of Leicas equipment works with Carlson Software including the newest Viva line (TPS and GPS) and everything also works on MicroSurvey.
I really like Leica products and here in NC, SC and VA we sell the heck out of it. The hardware quality can not be matched. The optics can not be matched. Leica service can not be matched. There are plenty of other good guns or GPS out there made by other manufacturers that I really like as a service guy. However, when looking at an entire product family I believe Leica is a forward thinking leader.
> I agree with you. Not the snotty Swiss part, but the fact that their software does need to improve. We have to remember that outside the US, Viva Smartworx is a big seller. I think they're trying to full more of a gap worldwide instead of making a complete new software for the US. That being said, their engineering and mining software incorporated in this software far outweighs that of any other on the market (as another Surveyor on the post has explained.
>
> Lets not lie to ourselves...Leica has software options. Definitely more than aTrimble to say the very least, soon more than most as we are seeing more of a push on the Topcon side to TopSurv and Spectra to Survey Pro. Almost all of Leicas equipment works with Carlson Software including the newest Viva line (TPS and GPS) and everything also works on MicroSurvey.
>
> I really like Leica products and here in NC, SC and VA we sell the heck out of it. The hardware quality can not be matched. The optics can not be matched. Leica service can not be matched. There are plenty of other good guns or GPS out there made by other manufacturers that I really like as a service guy. However, when looking at an entire product family I believe Leica is a forward thinking leader.
:good: :good:
We had been a Leica shop for 20+ years but I can tell you after my last Leica GPS and Robot purchase we will not purchase Leica again. Both had mechanical problems and getting Leica to acknowledge and fix them was a challenge. The GPS also had software issues and they still will not fix them.
The attitude of the Leica reps were unbelievable from a business standpoint, they wouldn’t even tell us the things they fixed on the equipment because it was still under warranty. As for the days of lost field time they could have cared less.
It is my impression that most of Leica sales now are to governments and they are selling on past reputation and unlimited public funds.