Second Part

0:05:07 At Imperial I got a good first; I wanted to return to Pakistan but my father suggested I should do some sort of industrial training; I became an apprentice for the second time, the first being before I was a student; I was then not committed to electronics as such but to electrical engineering because in Pakistan there wasn't much in electronics; I was going to go back and set up power systems which my father wanted me to do; when I was at Imperial I was asked if I wanted to stay on and do a PhD; I didn't even know what it meant so said no; while I was an apprentice I met Donald Beck and David Young, two other apprentices who had graduated from Cambridge; by chance I became very friendly with them, and still am with Donald Beck; they told me stories about Cambridge and how wonderful it was and how you could spend all your time playing sport if you were minded to; I went back to Imperial to consult Mr King, my project supervisor; I felt that being an apprentice was not such a good idea and I was not that good with my hands; as part of my apprenticeship I was sent to Wembley to their research labs which I loved; I had been given a problem to solve which had bothered one of the research scientists; he was very pleased with the outcome and suggested to me that I should be doing research; that was very formative and it was afterwards that I went to see Mr King; he suggested that I try for a scholarship to Cambridge to do a PhD; with his help I found one advertised at King's and another at Trinity; I applied for both; the one at King's was an open studentship; I was interviewed at King's by a group including Paul Dykes, a Fellow in engineering, and Kendal Dixon; after the interview I heard nothing so assumed that I hadn't got the scholarship; when I got the telegram it said that if I didn't return my acceptance by the next post the scholarship would be awarded to the next candidate; I responded immediately and Kendal Dixon admitted that the original letter was still on his desk but there was no need to send it now; he was very kind to me and made a point of giving me a room in college in my first year which research students usually did not get; the interview had gone badly as I admitted I much preferred sport to music; I did not realize then that it was the wrong thing to say in King's; Dixon said he would get me a room in college so that I could get to know some of the other sportsmen who were mostly undergraduates; I did so, and had a wonderful time

6:16:07 I still have the book that I bought when I came for the interview, to keep me from staying awake; at Cambridge railway station there was a book stall and I bought 'The Masters' by C.P. Snow to read, never realizing that I would suffer the same fate; I remember getting to the Catholic Church and thinking it was King's; I was too nervous to take a taxi; my PhD subject was electron emitters, cathodes, under the supervision of A.H. Beck and Sir Charles Oatley; the latter was a Fellow of Trinity and a very strong influence in my life; King's had Professor Moullin who was very ill by then, the first Professor of Electrical Engineering, so the person who was running the engineering department was Sir Charles Oatley; he was an outstanding scientist; he suggested that I should work with the scanning electron microscope so I moved from cathodes to that; it was a much bigger and much more open topic; when I did reasonably well with my PhD work he asked me whether I would like to stay on to do some post-doctoral work; I said I had been offered a job in California - it might have been one of the big mistakes in my life not to have gone - but I was offered a Turner and Newell Fellowship, which I took; after a year I think I gave a presentation of my work; he caught me in the lab where I was acting as a demonstrator and asked if I would like to stay on and teach; it had not been my ambition and I did not apply for the post he had mentioned, but he called me for the interview and I was appointed as an assistant lecturer or Demonstrator as it was then called; I have hugely enjoyed teaching and feel I have had a wonderful life; I taught myself to teach; in those days we were unprofessional in teaching; the delivery of the lecture was enough in itself; I did not believe that and felt that the purpose of the lecture was to teach and not just to show off one's own knowledge; I think that it led to changes that I was then part of creating in Cambridge; I wrote my second book, 'Electronics for Engineers', as a teaching book; that was a success as the book is still in print, from 1973 until now; for an electronics textbook, thirty-six years is a long time; I believe very strongly that one should teach principles as once they have been understood, the rest is frills which you can acquire; that book is still in print because it did concentrate on principles; I wrote it with my colleague Peter Spreadbury who was also a very big influence on me

13:10:16 I was here first as the only foreigner in the engineering department; yet Cambridge has the duality of department and college; I was not elected to a fellowship; I was promoted to a lectureship three years after my appointment as a Demonstrator; by this time I had become strongly aware of the college system, particularly the fellowship system, and I wanted to be a Fellow; I had a horrible time as I looked around and saw others getting fellowships, but not me; four different colleges interviewed me as having been recommended to them by the engineering department, but I wasn't elected; one was a very interesting experience; after the interview I had a letter saying they really liked me but would I accept a two year period of probation before being made a fellow; I declined as I thought it rather insulting; I was then invited to have tea with the Master, but the letter was couched in such a pleasant manner that I thought I would have to go; the Master explained to me very politely that it was nothing racial but was cultural; would I be able to cope with the cultural aspects of living in college as a bachelor, mixing with the fellows on equal terms; he asked me to reconsider, revealing that although he had supported me, other fellows had not and the votes had gone against me being elected immediately; I declined; it was a difficult time in Cambridge in those days, though Corpus was wonderful as they elected me in 1967; I think Sir Frank Lee, the Master, had seen me playing cricket; I don't have any negative feelings about Cambridge as it was a different world then, but it was a pioneering moment because I was elected to teach in Corpus; I think I was the first teaching fellow from Asia in any of the Cambridge colleges; interesting that I then thought that the students would have trouble with my accent; after giving my first set of lectures I asked them if they had difficulty following me; they said that I was absolutely clear and that it was a pleasure to hear me

19:07:24 I did a huge amount of supervisions at Corpus and enjoyed them very much; I supervised from five to seven because I was committed to research and could not possibly leave the lab in the daytime; my children learned to eat their supper at quarter past seven while their friends all ate at six; I have friendly relationships with large numbers of former students; I lectured to seven thousand in the Engineering Department, so at one time I could go to almost any part of British industry and someone would greet me asking if I remembered him; I stopped taking supervisions when I became a Reader and concentrated on research after that; I have had nearly one hundred PhD students, a huge number; that was wonderful; every time I was tempted away from Cambridge the one thing that brought me back was the wonderful people one has to work with here; they stretch one even if they are twenty-one and you are a fifty year old professor; I think my PhD students were just gold; I would be strongly opposed to separating teaching institutions from research institutions because the two play a part in making things work; people have to have the information which comes from teaching; a clearer understanding of a subject comes from actually teaching it; my belief is that those things that I have taught well I have been forced to understand at basic principles; I strongly believe that teaching and research must go together and helps both sides; many people who do research feel teaching can be done in a second rate way because their research is so good, and I would be strongly opposed to that; one is paid to teach here; it is a big effort to teach well; I bought myself a tape-recorder to listen to my lectures to improve my accent and style; I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to teach and some of this is reflected in the book that I mentioned; you must make sure that you are teaching not to impress but to inform, excite, and inspire; what we did in the book was to create a stop in the lecture half-way for a quiz; Peter and I experimented with prepared overhead projection of quiz questions on the lecture so far which would take five minutes and give a break; it would also show how much they had understood and encourage concentration; in a twenty lecture series I would do this during every fourth lecture; the students were very nice to me in their reports on my lectures which were started during my time; my daughters would plot out the results and I could see that I was improving as a lecturer

25:58:20 I started my research using the scanning electron microscope but early on I had come to the conclusion that this subject was something that had moved on and that I would like to start something new; this was to use the electron beam which is used in microscopes to actually make things; I had come to this through the work of my mentor, Alec Broers, with whom I spent a very formative year in IBM; he had shared a flat with me and I had got to know him; he is a very fine research worker and had set up this activity in America; when I spent a year with him at his invitation, that year was wonderful, I learnt so much; first of all it was America where everything moves at twice the pace; I came back I thought we should do this in England; the first work with electron beam lithography, writing electronic circuits on chips, was what I started; I am very proud of the fact that I started it here; it never reached what they were doing in America but at least we got started; I started it with my colleague Geb Jones who is now a Reader in the Cavendish; having done that I later went back to America for another period to work in the semi-conductor industry, making chips, but also becoming more interested in how semi-conductor chips worked; when I came back I started working on semi-conductor devices at the time when they could just about be put into personal computers; that again pioneered this activity in this country; I set up the collaboration with the Hitachi company from Japan; that is the second topic; the third topic that arose out of that work was that we became interested in reaching the fundamental limit to where chips could go; a fascinating thought was can we actually make an information bit using just one electron; mostly chips use collections of electrons, the presence of electrons would be 0, their absence, 1; that was very exciting because at the end of my career we published the work on single electron devices; although you had to reduce the temperature that that of liquid helium they could in fact define an information bit; of that work I am immensely proud and thought it would get me some pleasure and recognition, but that was about the time that I was leaving science because of the unexpected move towards college matters; those are the three areas that I became most involved in and aware that I had made a contribution; Hitachi was important as people from it had helped me a lot; Sam Edwards, the then Cavendish Professor, was enormously helpful in facilitating my move from engineering to the Cavendish; I had spent twenty years in the former, and the opportunity to work in the Cavendish with colleagues like Sir Michael Pepper and others, who had a very basic understanding of physics, was very important for me; and again with Professor Broers when he returned to Cambridge where he was a forceful figure in science until moving off to become head of Churchill and then Vice-Chancellor; he is a long-standing friend to this day

31:43:16 The way that chips have gone into our lives is that as they become smaller - the actual device that controls the flow of electrons is the transistor - and as that becomes smaller it has become possible to put more and more information on one small chip; the amount of information, and the functionality that can be put on a chip defines how complex a system one can make with it, not only complex but how portable a system; complexity and portability are both enhanced by making the chip more functionally capable; the more you reduce the number of electrons taking part, the more complex you can make the chip; there are many subtleties to this argument but the basic principle is absolutely right; eventually chips use fewer and fewer electrons and when we get down to fifty, one hundred, electrons, there is some uncertainty about whether their actions have taken place; the one electron device brings certainty; it is a very interesting philosophical concept as well; it is approaching the limits and therefore pioneers the way to what might happen twenty years from now; it may never reach one electron, but until we reach it Moore's Law will continue to give us more and more complex devices; if you only had to charge your mobile phone once a month or your laptop once a week, it would make life much easier

35:14:12 With reference to conservation, anything that uses less energy is good; the more important thing is that as you become aware of the environment and what is happening to us, we have two possible solutions, one is to use less energy and deal with carbon emissions, the other is to provide ourselves with some technological solutions; I think that anything that we have done in chip technology and microelectronics is to arm us with the means for developing technology which may make it possible to solve some of the problems that face us; I play golf, and when I go to Scotland the courses used to close on 1st November, now they play the whole year round; the climate has changed; think that Richard Friend is doing some fantastic work but I have been out of science now for ten years so am not in a position to comment in detail

38:27:10 I was so honoured to be elected a Fellow of Corpus that Sir Frank Lee became something of a hero figure for me; chance, many years later, gave me access to those papers on my election; I realized that he had played a fundamental part in my election because even in Corpus there was powerful opposition on bases that I can now sense was racist disguised as cultural; he had fought those forces and got me elected; many colleges up to 1919 did not permit the admission of Indians; the telling moment came at the end of the Great War after so many Indians had given their lives for King and country so should be admitted and rules were changed; I fell in love with Corpus because it had done something extraordinary in electing me as the first immigrant teaching Fellow; I then decided to do whatever I could to do my duty at Corpus; later on I was made an assistant tutor; I knew it would interfere with my research but did it for Corpus; once I became a Reader I was left alone to get on with my research; the then Master, Michael McCrum, asked me to be head of the research students part of Corpus at Leckhampton; first I was asked if I would be President and declined as I did not think I would be good at social occasions; I had been married by then for a long time; Ann and I did things together, so we have shared our lives; I did become Warden of Leckhampton and we shared that job; when I finished that I felt I had done my duty towards Corpus; in the Corpus Mastership selection I believed that the College selected an internal candidate to be a stalking horse for a much more distinguished external candidate; when they were advertising worldwide for applicants they isolated me as the stalking horse; they then decided to elect me; I was flattered to be asked, but also felt I owed it to them; what gave me most pleasure was when a daughter of a Master from the twenties, wrote to me saying that I was the first internal candidate for nearly a century; one of the odd letters of congratulations that I received read that it said much for the Fellows of Corpus that they had elected me; one of the high moments as Master was when John Taylor, the inventor of the cordless kettle, wrote to me asking to come and see me; we got along well and discovered we were the same age; he offered to help with whatever ambition I had for the college; I said that we would like to build a new library; he offered to give us half the money needed; what a wonderful way to start a Mastership; he was at Corpus when I was at King's, and was a physicist; I had to look after the Parker Library and the building of the conservation centre; again, an old member managed to raise the money for the latter; also we were able to get the Corpus clock put in, the digitization of the Parker manuscripts was begun by me, so it was a very active Mastership; in a college to get things done is a curious interplay of democracy and leadership, and I found I was able to do these things; it was partly because I had been a Fellow for so long that they more or less trusted me; the most touching moment was when I left and they gave me a silver present; it was inscribed in Latin so I asked William Horbury to read it for me; it said 'to a much loved Master'; I thought that was very nice, to be efficient was one thing, to be loved was another; I retired happy, that although there had been ups and downs, on the whole I had a wonderful time

50:34:22 Uniquely among Corpus Masters I actually resigned; President Musharraf and his colleague Atta-ur-Rahman, who is an Honorary Fellow of King's, jointly approached me to help them in a new scheme where five European countries were signed up to set up their universities in Pakistan, and a Chinese and Korean university also; they had looked around and identified me as perhaps uniquely, someone who was an academic, knew Pakistan, and was familiar with universities worldwide; they put a powerful case to me and in the end I accepted their argument that there was no one else in the world who was better qualified; because of this I resigned the Mastership in my last year; for the next two years I worked harder that I have ever done; my part was successful as I have left them with a scheme and with connections, and with everything in place to do something quite wonderful; alas, both Atta-ur-Rahman and I suffer from a huge disappointment that the Government changed and the new Government won't have any truck with it; just imagine these five university plus the two Asian ones, taking young people and moving them out of extremism into moderation; each one that graduated would create a thousand more moderates; it was such a missed opportunity; I am sad towards the end of my career not to have achieved this; the scheme could not be implemented at present as it meant Europeans going and teaching in Pakistan initially while they trained up Pakistani academics; I hope that in the next decade things will calm down; fortunately, in some ways, the scheme is being taken up by other countries; I am on the Board of Imperial College now, and when they told me they were hoping to set up universities in India using the same model, I was delighted

55:13:21 My life here has been so unconventional in the sense that I married an English woman who is a Vicar's daughter, and she has played a huge part in my life; when we married it was in a Registry Office, but the blessing was in her father's Church; at the ceremony were many of her father's friends who were now bishops and priests; many years later when I carried the Canterbury Gospels at the enthronement of Rowan Williams, among the Bishops was the then Bishop of Rochester, Bishop Say, and he wrote a little piece in the parish magazine that the young man whom he had blessed, with some trepidation, marrying his best friend's daughter, a non-believer, was so thrilled at seeing me carrying the Canterbury Gospels; so my wife played a huge part in my life, and so did my children; I have two daughters and a son; the two daughters are both academics, one by curious chance is working in the King's archives at the moment looking at E.M. Forster’s connections with India; the other one lives in Cambridge and is an educational psychologist advising people on how to set examination papers; my son is a tennis coach; he excelled at all sports, and is a lot younger than the daughters; he is adopted, but just as precious