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Majestic Feature. In the race into space, the Russians can claim bigger satellites and more powerful rockets. If the U.S. can retort that it has a big lead in scientific achievement, the man most responsible is James Van Allen, whose instruments, designed and largely constructed in his basement laboratory, brought back from space discoveries the Russians never made.
But Van Allen never expected to find himself, at 44, a key figure in the cold war's competition for prestige. He is and always has been, by inclination and intent, a "pure" scientist. His real interest is in cosmic rays. He started being curious about cosmic rays back in the prewar days when they were considered as wildly abstruse and impractical as a study of the mating habits of sea horses or the inner structure of a grasshopper's brain. But today he can tip back his head and look at the sky. Beyond its outermost blue are the world-encompassing belts of fierce radiation that bear his name. No human name has ever been given to a more majestic feature of the planet Earth.
Life with Father. While tops in a science that is thick with foreign accents, Jim Van Allen is about as American as a man can be. Born in 1914 at Mount Pleasant, a county-seat town in southeastern Iowa, he was the second son of a successful lawyer. Alfred Van Allen, whose Dutch ancestors came to the U.S. soon after the Revolution. His mother was raised on an Iowa farm.
Father Alfred did not believe in play or leisure. He thought that everyone should be doing something useful every waking hour. Jim was sent to school when he was four years old. When not at school, he and his three brothers were set to chopping wood and household chores.
Mealtime conversation was expected to be serious. On winter evenings, Father often read to the family from The Book of Knowledge. The boys were sometimes allowed to play baseball or football in their own yard, but their father banned their participation in school athletics—"Circus games," snorted Father. After the boys suffered a long series of illnesses, Father took steps. Winter or summer, the windows of the family car were always kept shut to exclude drafts.
Jim was smaller than most boys of his age, and his early sicknesses made him weak and shy. Unable to compete in any physical way, he threw himself into school-work with burning enthusiasm, getting top marks in all his subjects. Not eager to let him get too far away, his parents sent him to Iowa Wesleyan, a small college right in Mount Pleasant. There he quickly attracted the attention of Professor Thomas Poulter, a first-class physicist.
Working eagerly with Professor Poulter, Jim tracked meteors, made a magnetic survey of Mount Pleasant, and measured cosmic rays at ground level. He moved on to the State University of Iowa in nearby Iowa City, to do post-graduate work in nuclear physics. In 1939 he got a job with the Carnegie Institution of Washington.