It was this imperturbable faith in his own faculties that led Tim to Larry Brown’s office in 1978. Brown headed up an outfit of explosives experts at the Denver Research Institute, an applied-engineering firm housed in a trio of boxy, formalist buildings atop a former army barracks on the University of Denver campus. Brown had placed an ad seeking an instrumentation engineer. The gig entailed working with state-of-the-art electronics designed to quantify the destructive force of military ordnance—bombs, that is—among other highly explosive odd jobs. Tim approached Brown’s desk wearing jeans that were ripped at the knees, and a T-shirt. He projected an aura of easy confidence, but he wasn’t cocksure.
“I’d like a job,” he said.
“Well,” Brown replied, “I need a résumé.”
Tim had brought along no such thing, nor had he ever drawn one up. He told Brown he’d be back, and the next day, sure enough, he walked in with a yellow sheet of paper summarizing, in handwriting, his limited experience. Brown had to admire Tim’s gumption. The kid had brass, but no experience beyond working in a mom-and-pop radio-repair shop. Yet here he was, twenty years old, with no college education, and he’s knocking on the door of one of the premier research contractors in the West. Despite the fact that Tim was staggeringly unqualified on paper, Brown saw something in the young man. He couldn’t explain it, but he could look past the thin résumé to what Tim might become. Brown had been building research organizations for years; he prided himself on spotting talent and had long ago learned to listen to his gut. He offered Tim the job.
The young technician was given little time to acclimate at DRI, and as it turned out Tim didn’t need it. A quick study, he taught himself as much electrical engineering and physics as was demanded by his duties: namely, testing and exploding weapons systems. Before he was old enough to drink, he had already earned himself a Pentagon security clearance.
Among his earliest projects was a mammoth conventional-explosives test, which was to be the largest of its kind ever attempted. At White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, not far from the Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated, DRI had some 4,440 tons of ammonium nitrate explosive and fuel oil (ANFO) rigged to blow. Under the aegis of what was then known as the Defense Nuclear Agency, the Cold War–era test was intended to simulate the blast of a nuclear weapon.
To measure the blast wave, which would require detail right on down to the millisecond, the agency had contracted with Brown’s posse of hotshots to handle the high-speed instrumentation. Brown’s techs were consummate MacGyvers, accustomed to dreaming up weird solutions to complex problems. To track the blast’s cratering characteristics and the flight of ejected rubble, they buried bowling balls stuffed with flares. At T-minus one second, the flares would ignite, allowing cameras to trace their smoking arcs across the sky.
Tim’s role was to manage the more than one hundred ultra-high-speed cameras arrayed around the site. Triggering each at exactly the right moment was an engineering feat in itself—a far cry from repairing a CB on the fritz. The cameras were state-of-the-art machines worth more than Tim’s annual salary, each capable of inhaling film at rates of anywhere from 5,000 to more than 200,000 frames per second. At that speed, the canister could empty in two seconds or less. His sequencer had to trigger each camera just seven-tenths of a second before the explosion. If activated too early, they would run out of film; too late and they wouldn’t be up to speed. Tim knew he’d only get one shot.
The day of the test, he and Brown were hunkered down in a small bunker under roughly four feet of earth. They were less than a mile from the ANFO, closer than anyone else. At T-minus zero, observers saw a point of light, and from it the shock wave grew. It traveled upward and out, an expanding, translucent dome, the density of the air at its leading edge bending the light. They felt it in their feet before they felt it in the air. Tim and Brown were sure to keep their legs slightly bent; the sudden upward lurch of the earth would be painful to locked knees. A wall of sound washed over them and, after that, the negative phase, as a vacuum was created in the blast wave’s wake. Tim felt every pulse as the fist of smoke, fire, and soil rose from a crater some 250 feet deep into the New Mexico sky. The test had gone flawlessly, exhilaratingly. It was a moment—among many others on the test range—that would stick with Tim: if even a nuclear explosion could be simulated, studied, picked apart, and known, what couldn’t be?
The six young engineers at DRI became like brothers. When handling 30,000-joule lasers and military-grade explosives, each entrusted his life to the man working next to him. They traveled often, to White Sands or the Suffield Research Centre, near Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. The hours were long through the week, and on the weekend they were often together, grilling burgers and drinking beer. The tumbleweed ethos of the rootless, traveling geek was a lifestyle, and Tim became its embodiment: seldom home and usually without significant attachment.
By all
