00:00:35 Your father was a blacksmith?

00:00:37 My father was a blacksmith.

00:00:39 Is that where you learned at his knee in terms of how to work with your hands?

00:00:43 I imagine my early childhood did have something to do with gaining familiarity with tools.

00:00:49 The time I was six, seven, eight years old I used to hang around the black shop, the backsmith's shop, and do various things.

00:00:57 The simplest thing, I'd dust the flies off of the big draft horse that my father would shoo out.

00:01:05 Horseshoe tail on a broomstick.

00:01:09 Stay out of the way of the big feet of the horses by the way, but I'd keep the flies out.

00:01:14 But then I'd do other things. I learned for example how to make wooden wagon wheels

00:01:21 I mean wagon wheels, wooden wagon wheels for a big wagon.

00:01:26 Put the hub and the spokes and the felloes and then put a steel band ring round the large shrink the iron rim onto the wheel.

00:01:34 A lot of practical things I never used in life later on, except you do get a familiarity I guess with the use of tools and your hands.

00:01:44 My mother died when I was twelve years old

00:01:48 so her obviously had an impact on my life, but didn't extend into the teen years.

00:01:54 My father was one of four competing blacksmiths in a town of five hundred.

00:02:01 Despite that he did well. He built a lovely little house for us, the house in which I was born, matter of fact.

00:02:10 But he himself had never gone through or beyond grade school.

00:02:15 He had four children. Every one of them graduated from college.

00:02:23 Now what the motivating force was behind him to see to it his kids went to higher education

00:02:30 I don't know, but there was something that was there. Maybe it was his own lack of education that he felt so strongly,

00:02:38 and he said his kids were not going to suffer that way.

00:02:42 We had to make our way through education during high school, for example.

00:02:49 My father didn't have the money to support it, but I paid my way through high school playing for the silent movies and dance bands,

00:02:59 the dance orchestras we called them in those days, not bands.

00:03:02 Do you still play a little bit today?

00:03:04 A little bit, but not much.

00:03:06 Did you have any kind of person who was primarily influential in your life and moving you into a scientific career?

00:03:14 Yes and no. What really got me into science was when I was nine years old,

00:03:20 I found in the attic of my home a book on chemistry.

00:03:24 Steele's Fourteen Weeks in Chemistry.

00:03:27 Chemistry was pretty simple in those days.

00:03:31 Half the book was on doing simple experiments using chemicals you found around the house,

00:03:39 lye, soda, vinegar, anything like that.

00:03:42 But I got interested.

00:03:44 Here's where my father played a role.

00:03:46 For my tenth birthday, he built a shed on the back of our lot with a bench and tools.

00:03:52 I guess he hoped I'd become a carpenter or blacksmith.

00:03:56 But anyway, I put a two-by-twelve plank across the back of it.

00:04:01 That was my chemistry lab.

00:04:03 So that was where my interest really started.

00:04:07 Then when I went down to high school, we moved out of Column down to Normal, Illinois,

00:04:14 and I went to the University High School,

00:04:17 which is the teaching academy part of the Illinois State Normal University at that time.

00:04:23 So we had good teachers there, university students going on to become teachers.

00:04:29 Well, I wish I'd had a recorder or something like that.

00:04:36 Let's see what went wrong on my mind.

00:04:39 For some reason, I said I did not want to take Latin,

00:04:44 and I persuaded that, which is a four-year—Latin was a standard part of the curriculum.

00:04:49 I said I wanted to study chemistry instead of that, and I got away with it.

00:04:53 In other words, they allowed me to take chemistry in my freshman year instead of in my junior or senior year,

00:04:59 and I got very good grades.

00:05:02 Then there was a professor in the university,

00:05:05 Professor Howard W. Adams, who got interested in me

00:05:09 because I was one of the few people there that liked chemistry.

00:05:14 So then he allowed me to take the university chemistry courses as an overload while I was still in high school.

00:05:22 So I had two-and-a-half years of university chemistry,

00:05:26 which is all I had while I was still in high school.

00:05:30 So he helped me, and he really got interested.

00:05:36 I'm indebted to him because he did—one thing he did.

00:05:43 He and I took a correspondence course in metallography from Subway in Boston and Harvard University.

00:05:55 Well, Illinois State Normal University had no equipment for grinding and polishing or photographing their specimens.

00:06:02 So on weekends, he would drive me over to Urbana,

00:06:06 and we would grind and polish our specimens and then come back and do that.

00:06:11 Now, how many professors would take Saturdays at their own time and expense

00:06:16 and take just some goofy student who was interested in chemistry?

00:06:20 He did that.

00:06:22 And so there was a case, I think, of a man who really saw a person who was interested in chemistry

00:06:31 and he did all he could to encourage him.

00:06:38 Well, at the University of Illinois, one of my classmates was Glenn Joseph.

00:06:44 He and I got quite well acquainted because the two of us put out a publication

00:06:51 called The Illinois Chemist, quite a good little publication, four issues for the year.

00:06:57 He was the advertising manager and I was the editor.

00:07:02 After graduation, he went to the University of Wisconsin for his doctorate degree

00:07:08 and finally ended up out here in California with the California Fruit Growers Exchange,

00:07:14 whereas I came back to Caltech and got my degree there.

00:07:18 Well, he came into my office one day and told me the problems he was having.

00:07:23 He was making byproducts from lemon juice that had been heavily dosed with SO2,

00:07:29 and the glass electrode was the only way to do that.

00:07:34 The SO2 ruined colorimetric indicators such as litmus and phenylsaline,

00:07:42 and also it ruined oxidation-reduction electrodes such as the hydrogen electrode,

00:07:48 the anionic electrode, and so on.

00:07:51 But the glass electrode was the only one that worked

00:07:54 because it is not an oxidation-reduction electrode.

00:08:01 It works by concentration cells, so it's independent of the oxidizing substances

00:08:08 that may be present in the solution.

00:08:10 The trouble was that it was extremely high resistance

00:08:14 and the electrodes had to be made of very, very thin-walled glass and large diameter,

00:08:22 which meant a very fragile electrode.

00:08:25 And furthermore, the current available from that was extremely small

00:08:31 because electricity had to go through the glass.

00:08:35 So he was using the best instrument available,

00:08:38 which was a Legion Northrup high-sensitivity galvanometer.

00:08:43 It was a very good instrument, but a fragile instrument,

00:08:46 and he complained that it kept breaking on him,

00:08:49 and the instrument had to be sent back to the federal office for repair,

00:08:54 so there were days when he couldn't do his work.

00:08:58 Well, it turned out that I had spent a couple of years at Western Electric Engineering,

00:09:06 which later became Bell Labs,

00:09:08 and I had become exposed to a little elementary electronics.

00:09:13 So I suggested to him that the galvanometer was the wrong instrument.

00:09:18 It was too fragile, delicate, and they ought to substitute a vacuum tube voltmeter,

00:09:24 which was rugged.

00:09:26 And so I sketched out a two-stage direct-coupled amplifier for him,

00:09:33 and he came back some two months later and won't know if I'd make another one for him,

00:09:40 but others in the lab were using that, and he wanted to have one for his own use.

00:09:46 So that's when I realized there might be a market for a glass-electrode pH meter.

00:09:52 If he could use two of them in his rather modest laboratory.

00:09:57 Where did you build the first one?

00:09:59 I built it in a tin shed at 3600 East Colorado Street.

00:10:07 The tin shed belonged to Fred C. Henson,

00:10:11 who was formerly the instrument maker in the chemistry department at Caltech.

00:10:18 I was his supervisor there, so he and I became very good friends.

00:10:22 So he allowed me to have some space in the back of the shed in the back of his shop,

00:10:29 a shed where he kept his Studebaker trucks.

00:10:33 He was partial to Studebaker, and wood for making castings and things of that sort.

00:10:40 So we actually partitioned off nine feet off of the back of this tin shed with a beaver board,

00:10:49 and that was our company's operation.

00:10:53 That was the beginning of Beckman Instruments.

00:10:55 And it was a very convenient place because he made the metal parts,

00:11:02 would bend the metal parts for us, because we had no tooling of any kind.

00:11:07 And we stayed there for perhaps, oh, maybe a year.

00:11:12 I don't know the exact time, but we outgrew that to our amazement

00:11:17 why there was a greater demand for these things than we had anticipated.

00:11:21 So we moved up the street to 3330 into a store that was owned by Ernest Swift,

00:11:34 remember, the head of the Analytical Chemistry Department at Caltech?

00:11:38 It had been rented to a dry cleaner, and during the Depression,

00:11:43 the dry cleaner went out of business.

00:11:46 So we rented the building.

00:11:49 Our overhead shot up at that time.

00:11:52 We were paying Fred Hansen against his wishes.

00:11:55 He wanted us to use the space free, but we wouldn't have that.

00:11:59 So we paid him $5 a month rent for our first street.

00:12:04 When it went up to 3330, our rent, quintupled, went up to $50 a month.

00:12:12 Of course, that's not much to pay for 50 feet of frontage

00:12:16 on the Colorado Street, the main street.

00:12:19 But nevertheless, at the time, it was a lot of money.

00:12:23 If you were going to pick a year to start a business,

00:12:26 you wouldn't choose the year at the height of the Great Depression, would you?

00:12:30 That has advantages, because you learn the value of money.

00:12:35 Too many of our new venture capital companies failed

00:12:38 because they got a lot of upfront money,

00:12:40 and they spent it on nonproductive things like fancy offices and things like that.

00:12:44 Pretty soon, they ran out of working capital.

00:12:47 So when you had to live from one sale to the next,

00:12:53 we sold the first pH meter and used that money to buy parts for the next two or three.

00:12:59 We never had any venture capital in my company.

00:13:04 There came a time when you made a choice to leave teaching

00:13:08 and then to devote your time to business.

00:13:11 Tell me about how that happened.

00:13:13 Yes, that was one of the toughest decisions I ever had to make.

00:13:18 I was teaching at Caltech and very happy.

00:13:22 Caltech at that time was an ivory tower institution,

00:13:27 particularly the chemistry department.

00:13:29 Dr. A. A. Noyce was not interested in applied research.

00:13:34 His sole love was for basic research.

00:13:40 In fact, the basic scientists looked down their nose a little bit upon applied science,

00:13:46 as though they were sort of a second-class citizen.

00:13:50 Having got my degree and lived in the atmosphere,

00:13:55 it was quite a job for me to convince myself that I should leave that

00:14:01 and go over into the gross business of making money.

00:14:05 As a matter of fact, that was never my goal.

00:14:11 I'm not a businessman.

00:14:15 The bottom line figures were not the things that drove the company.

00:14:19 The thing that drove the company was,

00:14:21 here's a technical job to be done, let's do it.

00:14:25 The money came afterwards.

00:14:27 That's different from many of our modern-day companies,

00:14:30 who look at the bottom line.

00:14:33 Accordingly, the bottom line is what dictates policies.

00:14:37 That was not true, beg your permission.

00:14:40 The profits, fortunately, came along, but they were not the driving force.

00:14:45 What was the driving force?

00:14:47 Solving a technical problem.

00:14:49 Is that what motivates people who you hire to work for you?

00:14:52 Yes.

00:14:54 We see a problem.

00:14:57 I can see right now, I went through a meeting the other night with a group of people,

00:15:02 all enthused over the capillary electrode, capillary electrode freezes apparatus.

00:15:07 It's a terrific instrument. It has great potential.

00:15:10 You're familiar with it, are you?

00:15:12 I'm not. You'll have to explain it to me.

00:15:15 This is an instrument that, are you familiar with electrophoresis?

00:15:20 Generally.

00:15:22 This is electrophoresis, which is carried on within a quartz capillary,

00:15:27 about the size of a human hair.

00:15:30 Your sample size is maybe not over a centimeter length.

00:15:35 Imagine what a small sample that is.

00:15:40 I don't know what it is, how many billionths of a millionth of a milliliter.

00:15:46 So it has the advantage of extreme small sample,

00:15:51 and it has amazing specificity and accuracy.

00:15:55 You can get down, I'm told, to some cases, down to the lowest,

00:15:58 down to the minus 18th mole,

00:16:01 which is a billion times less than you can do with conventional things.

00:16:07 And it's fast, and it's extremely specific.

00:16:11 You can distinguish between different related amino acids, for example,

00:16:15 with that very, very sharply.

00:16:17 So I think it's, I won't say the instrument of the future,

00:16:20 but I'm just highly enthused.

00:16:22 So are our people the same way?

00:16:24 That's what we do to get on with it and get into practical use.

00:16:40 Well, I should point out that I've never had any training in business,

00:16:45 and I was not conscious at the time of some of these factors.

00:16:50 I had a group of people who were honest.

00:16:56 That's the one thing I taught, that integrity was the first criterion.

00:17:01 The second one was enthusiasm.

00:17:04 And we had people who were certainly honest.

00:17:08 They obtained and retained the respect of their associates and of our customers.

00:17:15 And if they weren't enthusiastic, I felt they were on the wrong job.

00:17:22 So those are the two key elements.

00:17:25 Plus, it was an interesting phenomenon to be in the business of making new instruments,

00:17:33 just that you're creating something new, that itself was attractive.

00:17:39 I was going to ask you the question whether or not the kind of excitement

00:17:43 and the opportunity that existed in 1940 exists today.

00:17:47 But you sort of answered my question

00:17:49 when you started talking about the meeting you attended the other night.

00:17:52 You seemed to be as excited about the developments of the 90s

00:17:55 as you were about your first invention in the 40s.

00:17:57 Oh, yes, the opportunities, the unlimited opportunities are always there.

00:18:03 Have you given any thought to what makes a person a creative person?

00:18:08 Yes, I've given a lot to that general subject matter.

00:18:11 I can't say I can come down with a list of things to do,

00:18:14 but I think that we should do everything possible to expose the young generation

00:18:22 to chances of using their own ideas, their own ingenuity.

00:18:27 That's one thing that's wrong with our teaching system.

00:18:31 Teachers want the kids to do things the way the teacher wants it done.

00:18:36 That's a mistake.

00:18:38 They should allow the kid to do it the best way he can,

00:18:41 even if it comes up with the wrong answer.

00:18:43 So the fact that he's using his own powers of induction and trial and error,

00:18:47 that develops the brain.

00:18:50 How do you create that environment, though, in our educational system?

00:18:54 You have to have a sympathetic teacher

00:18:57 that understands it's not the answer that's important,

00:19:00 it's the thought process that led to the getting of the answer.

00:19:04 That's the training of the mind that's going on there.

00:19:07 Do you believe it's possible to teach people how to be creative?

00:19:11 Oh, I think so.

00:19:14 The main thing is to throw challenges at them.

00:19:22 To get teachers to encourage the kids to do their own learning,

00:19:30 rely on learning rather than on teaching.

00:19:33 Go out there and make mistakes.

00:19:35 Try it with a little guidance, of course, for safety reasons.

00:19:39 Get the kids to go through a process of reasoning,

00:19:45 coming to some end that may be wrong,

00:19:47 but at least they've trained themselves in how to think and think and think.

00:19:51 That's what we need to develop.

00:19:56 We don't have examinations with fixed answers in there.

00:20:03 That encourages stealing and encouraging mental sluggishness.

00:20:10 Once you come up with a number that's what you think is the right number,

00:20:13 you stop thinking about it.

00:20:16 You should have people thinking along the way.

00:20:19 I have one of my good friends, Professor Unterreiner at Caltech,

00:20:23 professor of economics.

00:20:26 Caltech has the honor system.

00:20:31 He was talking to a professor from another school.

00:20:34 He said, even with the honor system,

00:20:37 and Unterreiner made a statement,

00:20:40 he uses the same examination question year after year.

00:20:47 Certainly, even with your honor system, which is highly touted,

00:20:51 some students must violate it.

00:20:54 Oh, no problem at all.

00:20:56 We simply change the answers every year.

00:21:02 Forty years ago, we were the greatest nation in the world.

00:21:06 We were the wealthiest, we had the biggest army,

00:21:09 and we had the greatest production capacity.

00:21:12 In 40 years, we reversed that.

00:21:15 We're the greatest nation in debt.

00:21:18 We're no longer the biggest producer.

00:21:21 Germany and Japan, and more than that,

00:21:25 we're the world's greatest nation in debt.

00:21:28 I guess it runs $3 trillion, something like that.

00:21:33 How did it happen?

00:21:36 I have many ideas.

00:21:39 One is that I think it's due to the misfortune of television.

00:21:45 I think on balance, television is probably more harmful,

00:21:49 the way it's been used, than it has been helpful.

00:21:54 It's great, of course, for communication,

00:21:57 transmitting news worldwide, for education, things like that.

00:22:00 But unfortunately, the tremendous revenue

00:22:04 produced from potential paid television,

00:22:08 and particularly coupled with the Americans' obsession with sports,

00:22:15 has just destroyed our value system.

00:22:19 When we pay a guy $3 million or even up to $15 million

00:22:25 for a baseball player,

00:22:29 what in the world is his contribution to mankind?

00:22:32 He drops a few baseballs over the fence.

00:22:35 We're just cockeyed.

00:22:37 The opportunity is there.

00:22:39 The thing I'm sorry is that so many of our people

00:22:42 don't realize the opportunity is there

00:22:45 and see how much more interesting life would be

00:22:49 if they would do something, do something productive,

00:22:52 rather than just watch somebody else do something.

00:22:55 We've become too passive in our outlook on life.

00:22:59 What do you see happening in your field of chemistry

00:23:02 in the next decade, in the next century?

00:23:05 What are likely to be the areas of great improvement and great innovation?

00:23:09 I think you're going to see instrumentation.

00:23:12 It will go to ever smaller samples,

00:23:16 ever faster results, things like that.

00:23:20 You'll see then applications to such things as the human genome.

00:23:26 Lord knows where that's going to go to us.

00:23:29 That's a project I think has to go on.

00:23:32 I have my biases, of course.

00:23:34 I'd rather see the money going there

00:23:36 rather than build a space station

00:23:38 or a superconductor magnet on that.

00:23:43 I don't see the practical applications in the reasonable future

00:23:47 coming from those things that I can see from working on the DNA.

00:23:52 But that's just a personal bias.

00:23:55 If I was a physicist working in magnetics,

00:23:58 I'd look at it differently.

00:24:01 You were granted a patent for the pH meter.

00:24:05 I'd like to talk to you a little bit about the patent system.

00:24:09 To what extent do you feel that our patent system

00:24:12 encourages invention

00:24:14 and is a necessary part of our growth in the 20th century?

00:24:18 It's a very important part of our growth,

00:24:22 particularly in certain areas

00:24:27 where to produce a product requires substantial up-front money.

00:24:34 A lot of capital plays at the beginning.

00:24:37 If you didn't have a patent system,

00:24:39 it would be very hard to get that up-front money

00:24:42 because your competitor would come in

00:24:44 and let you spend all the development money up front

00:24:47 that needed to be in a copy of the thing

00:24:49 without that and undercut you.

00:24:51 So I think it's important,

00:24:54 particularly for products,

00:24:56 where it calls for extensive up-front development money

00:24:59 or capitalization and equipment to do it.

00:25:07 To what extent is success based on having a great intellect

00:25:11 or just the kind of constant attention to trial and error

00:25:16 to produce a result?

00:25:18 I think most of the things are just paying attention,

00:25:22 not great intellect.

00:25:26 I'll say something like E equals MC squared.

00:25:29 That's a matter of intellect.

00:25:32 But solving the practical little problems comes down.

00:25:35 It's a case of using common sense.

00:25:39 As a matter of fact,

00:25:41 at this meeting I mentioned back when this was last night,

00:25:44 I said the most common word, the most useful word for me

00:25:48 and one I would recommend to replace the word think

00:25:52 that IBM put out on the little paper.

00:25:56 Instead of think, because that implies

00:25:58 maybe you weren't thinking before they reminded you.

00:26:01 I said the word is why.

00:26:03 Just keep asking why.

00:26:06 They've been going through a cost-reduction program

00:26:09 in which they've cut down the number of parts by two.

00:26:13 Why do we do this?

00:26:16 If you keep asking yourself why,

00:26:18 you'll come up with some useful inventions.

00:26:26 I'm trying to take the money that's been produced

00:26:29 by making instruments,

00:26:31 which you say have been useful to scientists,

00:26:34 and take this money and invest it in research

00:26:39 which will advance the state of the art in basic science.

00:26:44 By the time you get 90 years old,

00:26:46 you realize you're not going to take it with you.

00:26:49 So if you're smart, you'll do something useful with this.

00:26:53 So rather than leave it to the IRS

00:26:56 and the faceless bureaucrats in Washington

00:26:59 to spread it around,

00:27:01 I thought I ought to be able to direct the way

00:27:05 in which this money is used a little better than they can.

00:27:08 So I made the decision that I would give the money

00:27:12 that showed promise of continuing on and doing good work.

00:27:19 The first one was Illinois,

00:27:21 because that's where I got my training.

00:27:25 I thought that was the natural place to start.

00:27:28 The second one was Caltech.

00:27:31 There have been others since then,

00:27:34 like the Laser Institute here.

00:27:38 But these have all so far been institutions

00:27:44 in which I've had some direct interest.

00:27:48 I found that having money to give away was a burden.

00:27:53 I've often said that it's harder to give it away sensibly

00:27:57 than it is to make it.

00:27:59 And that was true.

00:28:01 I had these proposals,

00:28:03 between 2,500 and 3,000 proposals here,

00:28:07 and I was trying to do the screening.

00:28:10 And I just became a bottleneck.

00:28:13 When they packed up here, I got embarrassed by it.

00:28:16 And furthermore, I was spending all my time.

00:28:19 I was having no time to do other things

00:28:21 that it put off,

00:28:23 so I decided that there had to be a change.

00:28:26 Caltech has agreed to handle the money.

00:28:29 They'll pool these funds with the IRS,

00:28:32 keep it separate, but still they'll do it.

00:28:34 So I don't have to worry.

00:28:36 I don't have to look at the Wall Street Journal each day

00:28:38 and see what happened to the stock market.

00:28:40 They've got an outstanding investment group.

00:28:43 I've been associated with Caltech ever since I was 26.

00:28:47 I've been on the investment committee for 18 years,

00:28:50 and I'm just greatly impressed by the way they do the job.

00:28:54 And I can't think of a better organization

00:28:58 to look after the funding of the money,

00:29:02 so Caltech has agreed to take that on.

00:29:05 The money that's involved here was made in instruments,

00:29:09 and the goal of Buckman Institute has always been instruments.

00:29:12 I wanted to have somebody in there

00:29:14 who would preserve the feeling

00:29:19 that instruments should be a key part of considerations.

00:29:23 I didn't want to get some theoretical people

00:29:26 who ran the thing that had no feeling at all

00:29:29 for the role that instruments have played and should play.

00:29:34 Mr. Buckman and I, years ago,

00:29:38 decided that we would try to distribute

00:29:43 the money we had during our lifetime.

00:29:48 Distribute the assets, not just the income from it.

00:29:52 The main reason for that was that we saw so many cases

00:29:56 where foundations had gone off the track.

00:30:01 They got directors in there who were doing things

00:30:04 that the donors were just turning over in their grave.

00:30:07 Henry Ford was one, for example.

00:30:09 Even Henry Ford II had to get off.

00:30:11 So we didn't want to get in that.

00:30:13 So one way to make sure you don't have it

00:30:16 is to give away before you die.

00:30:18 So we tried that, and that's where we gave a few major gifts,

00:30:22 $40 million, $50 million.

00:30:25 But then Mrs. Buckman died, so we failed on that.

00:30:30 So then we decided now to take the remaining money,

00:30:35 there's a fair amount left,

00:30:37 put that into a foundation in perpetuity.

00:30:40 And that comes back again,

00:30:44 how are you going to prevent this thing?

00:30:47 Well, one way, instead of going to Merrill Lynch or something like that,

00:30:55 I decided to go to Caltech.

00:30:57 We were associated with Caltech ever since 1965 years,

00:31:03 and I'd seen them.

00:31:05 I had virtually every job there, wherever it kept their head.

00:31:09 And then finally retired as chairman emeritus.

00:31:14 And I've been so impressed by the way in which they've handled their funds.

00:31:18 This is an able group, and furthermore, it's one that's going to continue.

00:31:24 Ten years from now, no matter who the individuals are,

00:31:27 it will still be a well-run institution.

00:31:30 So that's why I'm glad that Caltech agreed to take over that responsibility.

00:31:35 Let me ask you what role Mrs. Beckman played in your career.

00:31:39 Mrs. Beckman and I were very, very close.

00:31:42 We were married for 64 years.

00:31:48 She's not a scientist, but she was good to talk to.

00:31:53 She could find weaknesses in arguments and things like that,

00:31:57 and it was always a joy to talk with her.

00:32:03 In fact, I tell my daughter that she has a hard time to believe this.

00:32:11 We've never had a hot argument in all of our 64 years of life.

00:32:17 We never shouted once at each other or anything like that.

00:32:21 We had different opinions on many things,

00:32:24 but we respected each other's rights for the opinions.

00:32:28 When we found we were going to get hot under the collar,

00:32:32 we just backed away.

00:32:34 But I don't recall a single time

00:32:36 when either of us ever raised our voice against the other.

00:32:40 Did you talk to her about what you were thinking about doing

00:32:43 in terms of invention and creativity?

00:32:45 Oh, yes.

00:32:47 She was not technically trained,

00:32:49 but still there are many things that have to do with dealing with people

00:32:53 and how people might react to this or that.

00:32:57 She's a very sensitive person.

00:33:00 She was very helpful.