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Recollections of Dr. Charles Holmes

Some recollections of Charles Holmes:

Two of Doc Holmes' longtime colleagues, Dr. Paul Krehbiel and Dr. Gerardo Gross, provided their reminiscences of Holmes.

From Paul Krehbiel, Professor of Physics

Charlie Holmes was an experimental scientist in the long tradition that began when E.J. Workman became president of New Mexico Tech. In keeping with the tradition, Charlie was a plain-spoken, hard-working, no-nonsense, but good-humored guy, both a good teacher and researcher, and a mentor to a number of students, as well as to myself. He was a long-time colleague of fellow geophysicists Allan Sanford and Gerry Gross and fellow physicists Marx Brook and Charles Moore.

Early in his Tech career, Charlie set up the R & D Division's Tritium Laboratory, which was used to study underground water flow in New Mexico by monitoring radioactive tritium levels in water wells for several tens of years following the A-bomb test at the Trinity Site on White Sands Missile Range.

He worked for many years on studies of lightning and thunderstorms, bringing his experimental and instrumentation expertise to bear on studies of the acoustic properties of thunder, low frequency pressure perturbations below thunderstorms, and radar echoes from lightning.

In the process he developed a variety of advanced instrumentation systems for Tech's Langmuir Laboratory, including a network of electric field mills, an S-band radar, a centralized digital data recording system in the main Langmuir building, and a computer lab for data analysis on the fourth floor of the original Workman Center tower.

The data analysis lab, set up in the late 70s, was a state-of-the-art facility based around a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 mini-computer that had two massive 1.5 MByte removable disk drives.

How things have changed.

Drawing on his instrumentation abilities, Charlie started a series of electronics courses in the Physics Department that developed into the Electronics Option in Physics and eventually led to the establishment of the Electrical Engineering Department at Tech. Without the courses that Charlie started and taught for many years, the EE program would have been much more difficult to get going; Charlie was the true originator of this highly successful program.

Holmes was a charter member and initial chairman of the New Mexico Weather Control and Cloud Modification Commission, charged by the legislature in the mid 1960s with ruling on early cloud seeding operations in New Mexico.

He also served the Institute as interim president of Tech from 1982 to 1983, between the tenures of Ken Ford and Larry Lattman. He retired from Tech in 1988.

I came to Tech in 1966 and soon began working in conjunction with Charlie on a study of electric field and pressure perturbations of thunderstorms over the "Snake Ranch Flats" along Highway 60 toward Magdalena.

We built a series of cattle-excluding 'corrals' to house the instruments and set up military surplus radio telemetry systems (sans FCC licenses) to bring the data to a central recording van at the base of the Magdalena Mountains.

At Charlie's suggestion, as I vaguely recall, we got overly ambitious and wanted to relay the data up the back side of M-Mountain and down into Workman Center, where we could more readily monitor and record the data.

But no sooner had we started doing this than we received a phone call from the FCC that a radio frequency interference truck was on the way to Socorro to investigate what was going on. We had to quickly turn everything off, just as the best thunderstorm of the entire season developed right over the middle of our hard-earned network.

That marked the end of that summer's research, and we learned our lesson to get things properly licensed.

Since he retired 16 years ago, many people now at Tech did not know Charlie. He was one of a number of first-rate faculty that came to Socorro during the Workman era around the 1950s who made the school into the top-notch institution that it is today.

from Dr. Gerardo Gross, Professor Emeritus of Geophysics

My friendship with Charlie dates from the time when we were both graduate students at Penn State (1959).

In his quiet and unassuming way, Charlie was an electronic wizard who made signal and original contributions to research in geophysics and atmospheric physics at Tech. I shall refer to those in my own field, geophysics.

Before coming to Tech, Charlie worked for an oilwell logging company where he distinguished himself by developing instrumental improvements,

Possibly his earliest contribution at Tech was in the creation of New Mexico Tech's Tritium Laboratory. Tritium is the radioactive isotope of hydrogen which can be used as a natural tracer of water movement throughout the hydrologic cycle. Our Tritium Laboratory was the first ever to be applied to the problems of groundwater recharge and flow.

Our laboratory was developed with the co-operation of Drs. Haro von Buttlar and Imo Wendt, visiting scientists from Germany. Charlie designed, built, calibrated, and maintained the delicate Geiger counters and the sophisticated electronics required for these difficult measurements of low-level radioactivity. Charlie's contribution led to important insights into groundwater flow in the Socorro area and the Pecos groundwater basin.

Another of Charlie's contributions was the development of instrumentation for the (then new) method of Induced Polarization, and its application to the study of groundwater quality and levels in the Tularosa Basin.

Charlie introduced and, for many years taught, courses on Potential Theory and Electronics at Tech. He was always willing selflessly to advise and give practical help to colleagues and students, frequently at considerable personal expense of time and effort. Thus, on one occasion, he spent the whole month of Christmas break helping me overhaul the Tritium Lab electronics.