James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles

James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles , Abigail Foerstner , U. Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2007. $37.50 (322 pp.). ISBN 978-0-87745-999-6

James Van Allen (1914–2006) has been one of the most widely recognized names worldwide for the past 50 years. Fame came soon after he and his team of scientists at the University of Iowa recognized that their “malfunctioning” Geiger counter aboard the Explorer 1 satellite, launched on 31 January 1958, was actually performing properly but had been saturated by the intense flux of energetic particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field. Their understanding of what was happening did not come easily: It actually required data from a tape recorder aboard Explorer 3, which was launched on 26 March 1958. Van Allen announced the discovery of the “belts” of radiation at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society on 1 May 1958 in Washington, DC. To the world those trapped energetic particles became known as the Van Allen radiation belts. Van Allen himself didn’t use that term, but he was fond of noting around his house that the Van Allen belt held up his trousers.

Although the discovery of the energetic charged particles trapped in the geomagnetic field made him famous, Van Allen had been a leader in international cosmic-ray research for more than a decade and had been an important member of the team that developed the radio proximity fuse during World War II. Except for those of us steeped in the history of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, few people know much about Van Allen’s work during the war. But Abigail Foerstner’s James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles provides a fine description of both his work and the global context for it. The subtitle refers to the fact that Van Allen’s instrument on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft had operated continuously just after launch in 1972 until the last signals from the spacecraft were received in 2003. During those 32 years Pioneer 10 had traveled almost 8 billion miles. Although Van Allen’s career has been well documented in a number of awards ceremonies and conferences, this book appears to be the first authorized biography.

Foerstner, a lecturer at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, has written an extraordinary book about one of the most influential scientists active during the last half of the 20th century. For more than six years, Foerstner had almost unlimited access to Van Allen’s papers and journals; she also interviewed members of his family and dozens of his colleagues and former students. Most importantly, she had frequent and regular access to Van Allen himself. From her voluminous research, she has produced a fascinating story, beginning with his grandfather’s move to Iowa in the 1860s. Van Allen’s father, Alfred, was born in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, in 1869. He became a lawyer, joined his father’s law firm, and was active in local government and politics. He began courting school teacher Alma Olney in 1907; she was 23 years old. They married in 1911, and Van Allen was the second of four brothers born during the first 10 years of their marriage. All four were raised to appreciate hard work, and to enjoy learning.

With the advent of satellites and space probes, space science became big science, with all the competition and politics that involves. Beneath his soft-spoken manner, Van Allen was a fierce competitor and a skilled negotiator in determining the course of the nation’s space program. Those personal traits appear to have been inherited from his scholarly and disciplined ancestors.

Van Allen’s experience in designing small and rugged electronic assemblies for the proximity fuse put him in good stead when he returned to his cosmic-ray research using German V2 rockets after World War II. He was a strong believer in keeping his instruments simple, reliable, and inexpensive; hence, he worked diligently to launch his detectors on ever smaller and cheaper rockets. He was instrumental in developing the Aerobee sounding rocket and the even cheaper rockoon, which used a balloon to launch a small rocket from high altitudes. As for the detectors themselves, it may be fair to say that he was unique in his ability to wring information from Geiger counters, detectors that were on the verge of obsolescence at the time of Explorer 1.

Throughout his career Van Allen was a champion of unmanned spacecraft and a critic of the manned space program. He did not denigrate the technology or excitement of manned spaceflight, just its effect on the budget for the unmanned program. Many of us planetary scientists agreed with him and are pleased that Foerstner has faithfully presented his views in her superb biography.