Bill Wattenburg’s academic training explains some of the technical tricks he has pulled off in the public domain. He has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics from U.C. Berkeley, and he has kept up very successful careers in science and business throughout the entire time he has been doing radio, television and publishing.
(The following comes from KGO Radio promotional material.)
Bill Wattenburg was born in Chico, California, on February 9, 1936. He grew up in the mountains of northeastern California in the lumber industry and ranching areas of Plumas County. His mother died when he was nine. He and his younger sister were raised by their father. They often lived with family friends when their father was away seeking work as a logger, road builder and mechanic. When he was nine to thirteen years old, Bill lived and worked with an old gold miner friend of his father’s most of the time. The family friend had a mining claim and cabin twenty miles from the nearest town and located at 7,000 feet in the Sierra. They were snowed in several months each winter and Bill got his education from books, a short-wave radio, and correspondence courses supplied by the school district.
When asked how he got where he is today, Wattenburg says it began shortly after he graduated from high school when he was 15. His father walked up to him one afternoon on their logging job and told him to get off the bulldozer he was operating. He said that he had told his father that he wanted to work as a logger instead of going to college. His father then threatened to “knock him on his butt” if he didn’t get on the Greyhound bus that very night and go to U.C. Berkeley where he had been offered a scholarship. He had never been out of the mountains of northern California except for a few trips to nearby Reno to buy school clothes. His high school science teacher had insisted that he take a National Science Foundation examination before he graduated. This teacher helped him apply to several universities. He had never opened the letters that came back from the universities. But his father, who had not finished high school, had opened the letters and seen the scholarship offer from U.C. Berkeley.
Bill Wattenburg enrolled at Berkeley as an engineering major and finished his freshmen year with honors. The following year he moved to California State University at Chico because it was closer to home and his father needed help to support the family in Plumas County. He worked in the logging woods and as a ranch hand. He commuted to college at Chico during the week. His records at Chico State show that he played football and boxed on the Chico State teams for three years.
Young Bill Wattenburg evidently had some trouble with the law in his home town in Plumas County. Some of the local people we interviewed remembered that Bill was involved in some fights in local bars around the county when he was eighteen or nineteen. The other men involved had reputedly threatened or attacked Bill’s father while Bill was away in college. These were disgruntled former employees whom his father had given jobs when no one else would hire them.
However, the Plumas County Sheriff’s Department and the local newspaper have records of only one incident in 1955 involving a man who was formerly convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. Bill’s father had given him a job while he was on probation, but later fired him over some disagreement. This man later got in a fight with Bill and then filed assault and battery charges against Bill. The charges were dismissed after witnesses said that the man threatened Bill with a hunting knife. The news story quoted witnesses as saying that Bill approached the man in a local bar and asked him: “Would you like to point that knife at me the same way you did my father?” The man was returned to county jail after he was released from the county hospital with a cast on his broken right arm.
Bill Wattenburg graduated summa cum laude from California State University, Chico, with a double major in electrical engineering and physics. He returned to Berkeley as a graduate student on a National Science Foundation scholarship in 1958. There he studied electrical engineering under Professor Harry D. Huskey, who was intimately involved in some of the world’s first digital computers [and was the president of the Association for Computing Machinery in the early 1960s—PKS]. Professor Edward Teller (known to many as the “father of the hydrogen bomb”) was one of his physics teachers. He was awarded a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics at Berkeley (summa cum laude) in 1961, after only three years in graduate school. He was immediately offered a position as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering on the prestigious Berkeley faculty.
The following year he was captivated, he says, by President John F. Kennedy’s call for an end to atmospheric nuclear testing and the development of cleaner underground testing procedures. He took a leave of absence from Berkeley and moved to the Livermore National Laboratory where he worked in the physics division on the design of nuclear devices and the first underground nuclear tests. He then spent six months at the Nevada nuclear test site.
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory official confirmed that he was the inventor of still-classified nuclear test measurement and diagnostic procedures that are essential to our nuclear test ban treaty verification technology today.
He returned to teaching and research at the University of California, Berkeley campus in 1964 where he continued his research in the design of digital computers systems and supervised a large group of graduate students. He taught the main graduate courses in digital computer design and programming at Berkeley for the next five years. Many of his graduate students are today high level executives in major American computer and communication companies. He also continued his work in nuclear weapons testing at Livermore as a part-time consultant and became a consultant to IBM, General Electric, and Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in various defense and space projects at those companies from 1964–1970. He was a member of the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board from 1966 to 1970.
From 1961 to date, he has published over twenty scientific research papers and technical articles and has been awarded six U.S. and foreign patents. [The total is now eight U.S. patents—PKS]