Dr. William R. Haseltine
By Elizabeth Babcock, East Sierra Branch
A name likely to come up whenever former China Lakers reminisce about the colorful characters of the Navy’s desert lab is that of Dr. William R. “Duke” Haseltine – the prototypical absentminded genius.
After earning a doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Haseltine had a doctorate in physics from MIT and research experience at UC Berkeley and in the Army Ordnance Department when he arrived at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (predecessor of today’s Naval Air Weapons Station) in 1946.
Still a decade away from its invention of the world’s first successful guided missile, the station of the 1940s-’50s was best known for its aerial rocketry. Haseltine developed a worldwide reputation as a solver of complicated control problems to maximize the chances that a rocket would hit its mark.
As he worked on knotty problems of exterior ballistics and celestial mechanics, Haseltine filled his blackboard with scribbled calculations, then changed the color of the chalk and kept going. And the blackboard didn’t necessarily need to be his. China Lake scientist Dr. Jean Bennett remembers that Haseltine would walk into her office, grab the chalk and start scribbling on her blackboard, all the while muttering to himself. After an hour or so of scribbling and muttering, he’d leave – without ever speaking a word to her.
Haseltine also thought on his feet, prowling the corridors of China Lake’s Michelson Laboratory wearing a Harris tweed jacket and smoking his ever-present pipe. Frequently, deep in thought, he’d thrust his lit pipe into his pocket and continue pacing, trailed by a cloud of smoke. He ruined a lot of tweed jackets that way – but his pacing and scribbling invariably solved the problem.
After several years as head of the Research Department’s Ballistics Division, he became the department’s senior research scientist, a position more suited to his iconoclastic ways. He retired from China Lake in 1977, then lived in San Clemente until his September 2005 death at the age of 94.
Haseltine passed his love of learning along to his children, William, Florence and Eric, all of whom excelled in their chosen professions.
Journalist and prominent historian on all things China Lake,
Elizabeth Babcock first penned this for the article
“East Kern Eccentrics” for Bakersfield Magazine Spring 2008.
It later also appeared in the CWC East Sierra Branch’s anthology,
Planet Mojave (2008).