Sir Charles Wright at Byrd Station
Posted Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at 11:21 PM

Robert Flint's book report in the December newsletter is especially interesting to me. I helped Sir Charles lay out his huge horizontal loop antenna on the ice near Byrd Station during the 60/61 summer at old Byrd. Sir Charles and I had much to talk about since the same summer I was conducting an airborne Very Low Frequency study for Robert Helliwell. Of course Sir Charles was preparing to measure much lower frequency magnetic fields than I did but mine were more interesting whistlers, dawn chorus, and hisses of different frequency bands. It was very difficult keeping the audio tape recorders warm in the unheated tents.

RETURN TO ANTARCTICA: The
Amazing Adventure of Sir Charles Wright on
Robert Scott’s Journey to the South Pole.
Adrian Raeside, John Wiley & Sons Canada,
Ltd., 2009, 324 pages hardback, $29.95 US.
Reviewed by Rob Flint
In a way, Sir Charles was my first employer.
When I graduated from a Master’s Degree
program in electrical engineering at Stanford
University my first job was a research
assistant at Byrd Station, Antarctica. One of
the programs for which I ran equipment and
collected data was the recording of magnetic
micropulsations for Pacific Naval Lab of
Victoria Canada. This program was under
the direction of Sir Charles, who had been
the physicist on Scott’s last expedition.