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[Interruption]

HM: ...getting really tired of this instructor job. And then Parker got his, enough points to get out of the service. And so all the interest levels that I had, all my friends were now assigned in Japan, most of 'em. They used to send me letters saying, "How come you haven't joined us here?" It used to aggravate me. And so I got involved in couple of things. I, I made two patent applications. One was because during the time I was assigned to the school, we used to go on temporary assignments, like I used to get assigned to the second army in Fort Meade. And they would assign me a mike plant job in the, on the post because the army had jurisdiction of all the housing within the Fort Meade complex. And we did a job on a person that had a complaint against him. And the allegation was that he was providing Germans with intelligence information because he used to have visitors from Germany come over to his place and they used to have parties. His previous assignment was in Germany and he got to know a lot of people there. He had, he was, his -- that guy had a assignment as a PX officer. And unfortunately the, the neighbor was jealous of all his high-revved economics. He had a brand new car and all this kind of stuff. And so the complaint was that he was involved with some mili -- military intelligence function. So that was the reason we bugged his house. And unfortunately the guy had been embezzling funds from the PX, which is not a military intelligence type area. But nonetheless, because they got that information that executive officer of that detachment decided to bring it to the criminal investigation detachment's attention, indicating that this guy had been doing these funny activities. But later on that, that got involved into a court martial situation for me.

I used to have to haul around this crazy tape recorder. It's army type tape recorder and it's built to military specs, heavier than get out, very rugged. And we used to get complaints from people like in, in the European sector saying that, "This unit is not suitable for our purposes. It's too heavy. It's too cumbersome, and all the information should be fed back to our department because we're teaching this stuff." So I decided, well, why, why can't we take a standard, fairly high quality tape recorder and make a different power supply so we could adapt to different countries' electrical feeds. So like we knew in Japan they, they were using 100 volts and some of it was 50 Hertz, European sector was 200 volts or 220 volts or, and some of it was 50 Hertz and some of it was 60 Hertz. So I made a adaptive type power supply as part of my conceptual patent thing. And I did that, and I -- the other instructor that was there in the same organization, was from, he graduated from Stevens Institute, which is a, at that time was the foremost ship building design technical institute in the United States. And they used to have a towing tank, which is a long, looked like a long swimming pool and they used to drag these different hull configurations through the tank to determine drag, all these different constants. It's similar to a wind tunnel except you're just running it through water. Anyway, since I had the car, he didn't have the car and he wanted to go home. We used to -- two weekends I guess, I, I drove him up to his place and I was the family's houseguest. And he was located pretty close to Stevens Campus. So I had often wondered about different things about marine design. So I said, "Hey, if they're open, can you, can we take a tour of the place? I'd sure be interested in seeing what you people had there." So anyway he -- and that was a Saturday afternoon when we went there. And there, his old professor was there. And so they had some kind of a, I don't know -- it wasn't a open house but it was kind of a introductory thing to new students to come and see if they want to enroll there. So anyway, we got in a huge discussion about shipbuilding design and the noise from different things in the hull, like a propeller makes a huge amount of noise.

TI: Right.

HM: And so I got this crazy idea, well, why don't we have a propeller-seeking, noise homing underwater torpedo. And I, I -- that just came out of my mind because --

TI: Because you could figure out some kind of device that would, that would home in on that, on that vibration or that noise?

HM: Noise on the propeller. And that's a real noisy, noise, high noise generator on a ship. So since I was making this patent application or going through this red tape of filing this stuff I decided I, I would do one for the acoustic torpedo.

TI: Now what gave you the idea to patent this information? Where did that come from?

HM: At that time Captain Jenkins, who was the head of the department said, "Hey, if you guys could figure out something better than what we're using," and he knew this other kid was from Stevens, had a pretty good background in electronics. He says, "Why don't you guys apply for a patent? At least we will get our department name in the, in the news." And so he was encouraging us to do that.

TI: But this would be a patent owned by the U.S. Government?

HM: Yeah. You have to sign everything, all your rights to the government. And the army in this instance, in this specific case, to the CIC, because this recording equipment was relative to what the CIC needed in their field functions. And the, the missile thing, the underwater torpedo thing, was -- he thought well, they'd just file it and it would go to some other department of defense area. So he was encouraging us to do this. He was a ham himself. He wanted us to be participant in the military amateur radio system. Under his encouragement, all of us that were hams, we signed up with this system. So we became part of the emergency Mars network. And well, I didn't think anything about that patent for a long time. And we got a call from this outfit in Chicago and they said they wanna see if they can talk to me about the patent application I made. Well it was long since I had forgotten about it. I couldn't care less.

TI: This was years after you -- you're still in the...

HM: No, no, this was months after...

TI: Okay.

HM: ...the situation.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.