Article published in Tuscaloosa News Dec 12, 2004
SOUTHERN LIGHTS: Robert Van de Graaff never received his due in Tuscaloosa

By Ben Windham, Editorial Editor

Tuscaloosa’s Hargrove Van de Graaff was one tough hombre on the football field.

In a 1913 game against Tennessee, he nearly lost an ear.

It “had a real nasty cut and was dangling from his head, bleeding badly,” Tennessee tackle Bull Bayer recalls in Winston Groom’s book, “The Crimson Tide.” “He grabbed his ear and tried to yank it from his head. His teammates stopped him and his managers bandaged him … He wanted to tear off his own ear so he could keep playing.”

Van de Graaff hung on to his ear and Alabama hung on to a 6-0 lead to beat the Vols.

Hargrove’s brother W.T. “Bully” Van de Graaff was an even bigger star for the Tide. A fabulously gifted athlete, he became Alabama’s first All-American.

A third brother, Adrian, also played Alabama football; not until the Britt family came along nine decades later did Alabama have three siblings on the same football roster.

The Van de Graaff boys came by their love of football honestly; their father, Adrian Van de Graaff Sr., was virtually present at the creation of the game. He was a sub on Yale’s first 11-man football squad in 1880.

Robert Van de Graaff, his youngest son, was destined to be different. He showed promise when he played football for the Tuscaloosa High School Black Bears, but he had a season-ending injury in the fall of 1917, breaking his femur and severely damaging his back.

Hobbled by football injuries, Tuscaloosa’s Robert Van de Graaff poses with his crutches in December 1917. Later, he would invent the world-famous Van de Graaff Generator.
photo Courtesy of Jim Young, Jemison-Van de Graaff

He spent the rest of his senior year recuperating in his family home and birthplace, the Italianate mansion that his great-grandfather, Robert Jemison, built on Greensboro Avenue. To pass the time, he read books about engines, says Jim Young, the mansion’s manager.

It was an odd choice of literature for a Van de Graaff boy.

“Basically, he came from a family of lawyers,” says Patricia Hanson of Burlington, Vt., “Bully” Van de Graaff’s youngest daughter.

Robert’s father was a prominent local attorney and judge and other Van de Graaffs and Jemisons were active in the local bar.

They were known as community movers and shakers. Perhaps the genetic energy that found an outlet in his brothers’ gridiron heroics emerged as an interest in engines in Robert.

Whatever the case, it developed into a lifelong passion. His football-playing brothers may have made the Van de Graaffs a household name in the Deep South, but Robert’s invention of the Van de Graaff generator made it famous worldwide—and beyond. Today the family name is even written on a map of the moon.

Bear Bryant used to talk about the little turning points in games—a single incident on which the outcome of the whole contest might revolve. As a young man, Robert Van de Graaff had one of those moments in his personal life.

Because of his injuries, he never graduated from high school. Even so, he enrolled at the University of Alabama in the fall of 1918, determined to follow his brothers on the football field.

Robert made the “scrub” team, playing left end. But he realized that he would never be able to rise to the heights of his older brothers.

Young, a bluff, outgoing man with a keen interest in history, tells what happened next:

“One day a young woman asked him how football was going. He replied, ‘It’s not my game.’ She gave him a cynical look and asked, ‘Well, Robert, what IS your game?’”

It shook Robert to the core; later on, he counted it as a life-changing moment. From that point on, he immersed himself in science.

He graduated from Alabama in 1923 with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Aided by a state grant, he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1924, attending lectures by the famed radiation pioneer Madame Marie Curie. At one of them, she demonstrated how emissions from the nucleus of an atom could make clicking sounds on a loudspeaker.

The potential of the developing science of atoms clicked with Robert. He won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1925 to study at Queen’s College in Oxford, where one of the world’s leading scientists, Ernest Rutherford, was experimenting with atomic particles.

Rutherford’s goal was to accelerate the particles to speeds sufficient to disintegrate nuclei. He believed it would allow scientists to unlock the secrets of individual atoms.

Van de Graaff absorbed the teachings of the eminent scientist. He graduated from Oxford with a Ph.D. in physics in 1928 and returned to the United States energized with Rutherford’s ideas.

He joined the Palmer Physics Laboratory at Princeton University as a National Research Fellow. In the fall of 1929, he constructed the first working model of what came to be known as the Van de Graaff Generator.

Crude and cheaply built, it produced a relatively paltry 80,000 volts. But it sparked a revolution in physics.

Science was on the edge of things undreamed of just a few decades before. Some of them were wonderful; others were terribly frightening.

One of the early applications of Robert’s generator, which he patented in 1935, was treating cancerous tumors with precisely penetrating radiation.

But the world was rolling toward another war, and scientists soon found his invention was valuable to the military.

Earlier this month, there was a dinner at the Jemison-Van de Graaff Mansion in honor of the 75^th anniversary of the generator. The keynote speaker was 87-year-old L. Worth Seagondollar, who worked on the famous Manhattan Project.

“He’s the guy who physically built the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima,” Young says. “What he talked about was the importance of the Van de Graaff accelerator in determining what the nucleus of plutonium was in regard to how they would cause the explosion. They were only able to do that using the Van de Graaff accelerator.

“And he said if we hadn’t had the Van de Graaff accelerator or generator, the war would have lasted a whole lot longer. It would have taken hundreds of thousands of additional lives, not only United States soldiers but Japanese as well. The bomb killed 185,000 Japanese, but many times more would have been killed if the troops on Okinawa and in the east would have made the invasion into Japan.”

Robert’s influence as a scientist and inventor didn’t end with the war. In 1946, he started his own company, the High Voltage Engineering Corporation. The beam-control techniques it developed made possible the manufacture of microchips by shooting atoms into silicon, laying the foundation for the Computer Age.

Robert Van de Graaff’s contributions to science are staggering. But you wouldn’t know it to visit his hometown.

Perhaps it’s the local culture. But in Tuscaloosa, it was his brother Bully who was something of a living legend.

Bully followed his college football days with a career in the military; assigned to ROTC duty at Alabama, he coached here during the Wallace Wade era.

Then he became football coach at Colorado College. He and his family lived much of their lives in the American West.

The first glimpse that Bully’s daughter had of the family mansion on Greensboro Avenue was in 1962 when she accompanied her father here for his induction in the Alabama Athletic Hall of Fame.

Sold years before to pay off family debts, the house by then had become a public library. Hanson remembers her father taking her from room to room, pointing out where things had been.

“It was quite a thrill,” she says.

But Robert, she says, never came home.

“I think he may have had some problems coming back, just in terms of the pain of remembering some of things,” she says. “The family went through some very difficult times” in the years of the Great Depression. “They lost three siblings in a matter of three or four years. And the family had to declare bankruptcy—and I think he may have felt a little bit of guilt for not having been as involved in trying to work through those things with the family. I think it may have affected him in terms of not wanting to face up to that.”

Robert had physical problems as well.

“One was that he had the football injury, which was not only a broken femur but also some injury to his back,” Young says. “And he had an operation in the ’40s or ’50s where the transfusion gave him hepatitis.

“And all that was complicated in the ’50s when he was involved in a car wreck. Somebody had hit him from behind on an ice-slick road and he stopped and he and the fellow were standing behind his car—I guess, waiting for the police—when a third car came up and hit the car that hit him and trapped him between his car and the fellow behind him. And broke his legs again. So he just had multiple injuries.”

Young says that Robert’s son told him the injuries were so severe that he spent a lot of his life lying down.

“He couldn’t travel as you or I could because he had to make arrangements to lie down most of the time. He had a bed in his office, as I understand it, and he had a bed at home and he did most of his work from a bed.

“It gives you a great deal more respect for a man who’s having every day, every hour of every day, to overcome those kinds of physical difficulties just to go to work, just to do basic things,” Young says.

So blame disconnects, physical problems or local culture. The fact remains that despite the efforts of Young and others, Robert Van de Graaff has never received his due in his hometown.

There’s no Van de Graaff Boulevard. No Van de Graaff Park. Nor is there a Van de Graaff science museum, where a hands-on generator would be a magnet for youngsters.

Even his alma mater, the University of Alabama, has given Robert short shrift.

After World War II, the university planned to construct a building with a three-story shaft for a Van de Graaff generator. It was never built, however; the director of the program left UA to become head of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Only after a lapse of a quarter-century was the study of subatomic particles re-established at UA.

When Joab Thomas was president, plans were made to establish a Van de Graaff Institute for High Energy Physics in Tuscaloosa. Again, for various reasons, the project fell through.

Robert, who died in 1967, was inducted posthumously into the state Engineering Hall of Fame in 1989. But in Tuscaloosa, the family name lingers on primarily at the mansion and in the memory of those who remember when the municipal airport was known as Van de Graaff Field. Hargrove Van de Graaff donated property to the city to use as an airstrip.

Hanson, who has studied the family’s genealogy for two decades, said she knows of no Van de Graaffs living in the Tuscaloosa area.

“We’re pretty much scattered now,” she says with a wistful smile. The Tuscaloosa nucleus of the family, once a vibrant part of life here, has disintegrated.

Young, working with limited resources, has done what he can to promote the legacy of Robert Van de Graaff.

“It’s funny,” he says. “I get these teenage kids in here and I’ll talk about Jemison and the Civil War—they don’t have a damned clue about what I’m talking about. It’s politically incorrect to teach about the Civil War in schools these days.

“But when they see that Van de Graaff generator right there, they go Ho! And they know exactly what it is. They know the name Van de Graaff and they know everything about the generator. Of course, most of them know that if you put your hands on it, your hair stands straight up,” he says, chuckling, “but nevertheless, they all know what it is.”

So do people the world over.

Van de Graaff Generator is an instantly recognizable name in Europe, Africa, Asia. Van de Graaff institutes have been established at many universities, including one in Holland, where Robert’s family originated.

A progressive rock band of the 1970s named itself for Robert’s invention.

In a much more signal honor, the International Astronomical Union designated a crater in the Sea of Ingenuity in Van de Graaff’s honor.

Perhaps tellingly—as far as Tuscaloosa is concerned, at least—it’s on the dark side of the moon.

Reach Editorial Editor Ben Windham at (205) 722-0193 or by e-mail at ben.windham@tuscaloosanews.com.