Havelock in the Marlborough Sounds is unique. Two New Zealand icons of science and technology, Ernest Rutherford and William Pickering, attended school there. Ernest Rutherford is well known to New Zealanders, Bill Pickering less so. Though four generations apart, there are many curious links between them.

Bill Pickering was born in Wellington on Christmas eve, 1910. Tragically, his mother died when Bill was four. His pharmacist father who worked in Samoa, sent Bill to Havelock to be raised by his paternal grandparents, William and Kate Pickering.

William Pickering pioneered coach routes in Marlborough, being the first to drive a coach from Blenheim to Nelson after the Rai Valley horse track was improved to a wagon track. This event occured in 1885, two years after young Ernest Rutherford arrived in Havelock. William's business was starting to fall on hard times as motor transport started overtaking horse-drawn transport.

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Bill's life was much the same as Ern's had been. Feeding the family chickens, hunting for the eggs, fetching and cutting firewood for the family stove and fireplaces, fishing off the wharf for herring, and catching eels at Kaituna River. Their school lives were also similar and both sung at school or church concerts.

Bill's life interest in electricity was first stimulated when Havelock's first electric power scheme opened. It was a modest one driven by the creek that supplied the town's water supply and ran for just two hours each evening. But it was enough to inspire a boy.

In 1923 Bill went to Wellington College. Radio broadcasting was just starting. Bill's attention turned to this modern application of electricity. He built a crystal radio set. On holiday back in Havelock he introduced this new technology to Havelock. His grandmother was horrified to listen in to the type of popular music broadcast on a Sunday by a Sydney radio. However, she endeavoured to encourage his new-found interest. On learning that a crystal (actually a semiconductor) was the heart of this new magic, she gave Bill one of her best crystal glasses (a non-conductor) thinking he could use that.

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In 1924 Bill (aged 13) and Fred White and others founded the Wellington College Radio Club and built a radio transmitter with which they communicated, via morse code, with other enthusiasts as far away as the USA. Wellington College was the first school in New Zealand to hold an amateur radio license. Bill can still tap out its call sign Z2BL in Morse code.

After graduating from Victoria University College of Wellington, Fred White went to Britain's Cavendish Laboratory to work on radio under Ernest Rutherford's overall direction, returning to teach at Canterbury College with radio research funds Rutherford extracted from the New Zealand Government. During the war Fred went to Australia on radar research, where he rose to a knighthood and Director of the CSIRO.

In 1928 Bill did the engineering intermediate course at Canterbury College when fate once again intervened. An uncle married an American woman and they took him to America. He obtained three degrees from the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech), in physics and electrical engineering. He carried out research on Cosmic rays with Robert Millikan, who had received a Nobel Prize for accurately measuring the elactrical charge on the electron. (Their detector of cosmic rays was a Geiger-Muller tube, first invented by Ernest Rutherford in 1907.)

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Bill's main interest switched to transmitting data from balloon-born equipment, then later from early rocketry flights. Bill was on the staff at Cal Tech from 1936, and, in 1944, also joined its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). In 1947 his frequency modulation telemetry system for transmitting data from rockets was adopted as the standard. In 1947 Bill headed the JPL team which converted the Corporal research rocket into the USA's first surface-to-surface guided ballistic missile. Bill was elevated to Director of JPL in 1954.

The USA administration was not interested in putting a satellite in orbit as such effort would take resources from the military rocket programme. That attitude changed overnight when, on Jan 31st 1958, Russia launched Sputnik 1. The space race was on. Not suprisingly, Bill chose a comsic ray experiment for his first payload. The principal researcher was James Van Allen who was tracked down to being on an ice-breaker in the Antarctic and rushed home to begin work assembling the equipment.

Within four months of Sputnik, Bill was ready to launch. He had worked for the Army on medium range rockets (200 or so kilometres). The Navy had been responsible for long range rockets so, in front of a large media contingent, the Navy launched first. Their vanguard rocket blew up on the launch-pad, to considerable national embarrassment. JPL launched in secret. Astutely, Bill, in Washington, was going to wait until Explorer 1 had completed one orbit before making any announcement. When the time came for the satellite to emerge from behind the Earth there was only silence. A few agonising minutes later, the radio signals were picked up. The satellite had gone into a slightly different orbit so took longer rounding the Earth. For Bill it was the longest wait of his life.

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The midnight Press conference brought in an excited and large crowd of media people. By morning Bill was famous throughout America, even though the Army claimed all the credit.

The USA's space programme was quickly condensed into a new, non-military agency. The National Aeronautical and Space Agency (NASA). Bill was offered the choice for JPL's role: Earth satellites, the manned space programme or unmanned deep space research. He chose the latter, a role JPL fulfills well to this day. Currently they are assembling the two self-contained Mars rover vehicles that will be launched mid-year.

For some years the USA played catchup with Russia's space programme. It wasn't until 1963 that the USA finally beat Russia at something. JPL's Mariner spacecraft to Venus propelled Bill onto the first of his two covers of Time magazine. Another sign of fame was his appointment as the Grand Marshall to lead that year's Pasadena's New Year Tournament of Roses Parade. Subsequent Grand-Marshall's include President Eisenhower, Arnold Palmer, Walt Disney and Kermit the frog.

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Many other missions followed, including close-up photography of the moon to choose landing sites for the manned programme. Bill's many honours include a National Medal of Science (the USA's highest scientific honour) and an honorary knighthood from New Zealand.

So it is fitting that in a small village in New Zealand there is on the landscape a permanent monument, honouring two New Zealand country boys who rose to international fame through their interest in science and technology. A place where New Zealanders can come to learn about, and appreciate, a space pioneer, and where Americans can learn of the New Zealand connection.

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