Collections

The Blake W. Corson, Jr., Papers are comprised of professional and personal files, correspondence, and published materials from 1861-1984 (bulk, 1934-1979), primarily relating to Corson's (1908-1991) career as an engineer at NASA Langley.

The Dr. Richard Zallen Papers document the research and professional development of a physics professor at Virginia Tech specializing in condensed matter research. Papers largely cover the second half of the twentieth century and include information on research at Xerox; professional correspondence; Virginia Tech lecture notes; drafts of published work; and documents concerning trips, sabbaticals, and conferences. Materials include hand-written documents, published material, flat plate drawings, photographs, a sample of "melt-spun amorphous," and stamps from various countries.

The collection includes papers from Frank L. Robeson's tenure as a student at Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute, Columbia University, and Johns Hopkins University, as well as subject and research files from his nearly 50 years as an instructor and professor at VPI, dating from 1899 to 1954.

These papers are comprised mostly of correspondence from George B. Collins' time as Chairman of the Brookhavens Cosmotron Department. The collection also contains travel vouchers, research proposals, travel reports, and materials relating to Collins' work as a professor at University of Notre Dame and at Virginia Tech.

This collection contains German cosmologist Hermann Fricke's manuscript of "Eine Neue Sonnentheorie" from 1932 utilizes Sir William Siemens and William Herschel's ideas on sun spots and the solar corona to suggest new theoretical perspectives on the sun's relationship to the atmosphere.

This collection consists of the papers of engineer, mathematician and physicist James Robbins Randolph, including notes, calculations, correspondence and writings.

This collection contains NASA administrator and physicist John W. Townsend, Jr.'s (1924-2011) personal and professional papers from 1949 until his retirement from corporate and government aerospace work in 1990. In addition to professional correspondence, memos, and subject files, there are extensive travel files from 1949-1968 and 1985-1990, congressional testimony on NASA projects from 1982-1986, and files on the history of the Upper Air Rocket Research Program at the Naval Research Laboratory from about 1956-1958. Throughout his career, Townsend also served on a number of councils, boards, and panels. The collection also includes files from the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station Advisory Panel (1966-1968, the International Academy of Astronautics (c. 1981-1987), the NASA Advisory Council (1982-1987), the National Academy of Engineering (1982-1987), the National Research Council Space Applications Board (1983-1987), and the Office of Technology Assessment Advisory Board Panel on International Cooperation and Competition in Civilian Space Activities (1982-1985).