When SRI's Antenna Systems Laboratory was divided up, Dr. Tetsu Morita became director of a major portion of the remainder—the Electromagnetic Sciences Laboratory. Tetsu was a superb experimenter and had a remarkable ability to recognize important, evolving technical areas and to get established in them at minimum cost. He also surrounded himself with people who could carry on in this manner, gradually changing as the technology grew.
Tetsu often proved that good experiments could be done with only a modest expenditure for instrumentation. For example, he learned that NASA was planning to build a massive shock tube to study plasma formation around a reentry vehicle. He decided that we could very inexpensively build a smaller version and conduct several years of meaningful experiments before the NASA system became operational. He was right, and our shock tube was used for years as we explored important reentry problems.
When he asked, "Could we get a flame to burn in a vacuum chamber?" we saved funds by making the vacuum chamber from an old mattress sterilizer left over from the days when SRI was an Army hospital. We used the chamber for studying another set of reentry vehicle problems. When NASA speculated whether satellite measurements of the ocean surface might be used to provide wind information for meteorologists, Tetsu arranged for the construction of a wind-tunnel-driven water wave tank in the lab to generate surface waves that could be studied using electromagnetic illumination. This facility, too, was assembled at lost cost, using common construction materials and second-hand blowers.
Tetsu regularly visited clients and potential clients to review ongoing programs and develop new ones. He always took a lab member along on these trips, with the result that all the lab staff became adept at program planning and marketing and developed familiarity with a substantial group of sponsors. The degree to which Tetsu prepared laboratory staff in all aspects of doing research in the area of electromagnetics is shown by the smoothness with which the lab was able to continue to develop when health problems forced Tetsu to retire. In fact, the largest current contract at SRI ($8 million a year) is one started when Tetsu was Lab Director.