THE PASSING OF A PIONEER

"We are the only laboratory in the world that has the basic knowledge on how to go from the direct output of the pellet laser-fusion reaction to the production of hydrogen," testified Keeve ("Kip") Siegel before the Joint Atomic Energy Committee on March 13. Then he suffered a stroke and died shortly afterwards, aged 55 years.

What Siegel was talking about is a saga in both science and free enterprise. In 1960 Siegel, then a professor of electrical engineering at the U. of Michigan, founded an electronics research company with only $12,000 capital; by 1967 it was making $50 million in sales. When an aircraft company began buying it out, he founded a new company, KMS Inc. Two years later it had turned into a $58 million company with 24 subsidiaries.

And then he did a crazy thing. He took his company into laser-fusion research. For a $58 mill. company to go into this field, without government subsidy or access to government research, was like competing in the Indy 500 on a bicycle with two flat tires. So everybody laughed.

And with good reason. For Siegel not only had no government help, he had its active hostility. How petty bureaucrats in the AEC used senseless secrecy chicanery to harrass KMS and stifle its work for four long years (Fortune, Dec. 1974) makes some very disgusting reading. But Siegel believed in "the lesson of the Cavendish Laboratory [Cambridge, England], where a few bright people outinvented the world for a long period...with wires and chewing gum." And he organized a team of some of the best brains in the country, including physicist Brueckner, Nobel Prize winner Hofstadter, and of course, himself, an outstanding expert in electromagnetism.

What Siegel set out to do was to harness mankind's ultimate source of energy: thermonuclear fusion. For nearly three decades, this has been attempted (and will probably succeed) by confining a hydrogen plasma magnetically to reach the needed temperature and density for long enough to make hydrogen nuclei fuse and give off vast energy from inexhaustible fuel. Siegel went a different route: Hit tiny hydrogen pellets with high-powered laser light from several directions simultaneously, so that the pellet reels inward under the blow (lasting 1 billionth of a second) and the nuclei, or at least some of them, fuse. The idea was not new; but KMS developed new techniques of hitting the pellet symmetrically, of producing the fuel pellets, of diagnosing the neutron flow, and others.

It was tough going. Siegel cannibalized the other KMS divisions and put in $3 million of his own, gambling everything on fusion. The company became a cliff-hanger, living from month to month.

But at 4:30 p.m. on May 1, 1974, the gamble paid off. The scientists at KMS registered a neutron flow which they knew to be caused by fusion. Of course, they were still removed from a net energy flow by a factor of more than 10 million, and they did not pretend otherwise; but they had, for the first time anywhere, achieved controlled thermonuclear fusion.

Eyewash, hoax, said many experts. A trick to boost KMS stock, said the brokers. But an obscure pink sheet hailed the event as historic and gave reasons why "we believe the KMS claim perfectly true" (June 74 issue). And so it was, as now acknowledged by ERDA (formerly AEC) and scientists working in the field, including Soviet and French laser-fusion workers.

The cyclists had beaten the Maserattis.

Though KMS was now established as a leader in the field and recently obtained ERDA support, its troubles were not over. Siegel appeared before the JAEC to ask for a loan (not grant!) of $60 million toward the $114 million for his most ambitious project yet: a pilot plant to use fusion neutrons for producing methane by 1979 (see below). Few but Siegel believed it could be done by then; but he had defied all forecasts before. The money remains to be raised.

Kip Siegel was one of a rare breed -- the scientist-entrepreneur. He preferred risk and selfreliance to the security of being chained to a trough. Few are good enough; and none is better.