"What would it be like to live below ground? I'd always wondered, and when I found a former Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silo for sale it was clearly a unique opportunity to answer that question."

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Tony Crossley

Born in Newcastle, England, 1939
B.S. Natural Sciences

Cambridge University, UK, 1962

Ph.D. Natural Sciences

Cambridge University, UK, 1965

I was born in Newcastle, England in 1939. A memory from my childhood is the nights in our air-raid shelter underground, while the enemy bombers rumbled overhead, attacking the steel mills and railroad yards in the neighboring towns. We were safe underground.

My father had lived in the trenches throughout the First World War, and since our family was in the building trade, he could build our shelter based on personal experience of what would be effective, and do a thorough job of it. Later in the war, when the bombing had stopped, the shelter was a wonderful playhouse, with railway sleepers (railway ties to Americans) for steps going down into the ground, then a left turn through a heavy low wooden door into a small room buried beneath a big pile of dirt. The shelter smelled of apples, because we used it to store fruit from the autumn harvest to eat in the winter, and the smell of apples still transports me to that time and place.

The north of England was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, so technology was part of the landscape and the culture that I grew up in. The world's first public railroad ran from Stockton to Darlington, both nearby towns. John Harrison, a local person, built the first chronometer adequate for marine navigation. Even the humble friction match was invented right in our the local chemist’s shop (pharmacy in America) in Stockton.

I attended Cambridge University where I received a B.S. in Natural Sciences in 1962 and a Ph.D. in 1965. That same year I emigrated to the United States and went to work at the RCA David Sarnoff Labs in Princeton, New Jersey, where I designed photovoltaic power devices for spacecraft. These are solar cells that produce electricity from sunlight. Later on I worked on radiation-hard integrated circuits. These devices are used in satellites that orbit the Earth within the Van Allen Radiation Belts and must be able to work in a continuous low-radiation environment.

I moved to California in 1974 and joined the Fairchild Palo Alto Research Center to work on charge-coupled device design and fabrication. These solid-state sensors for detecting and recording images allow us to build the tiny cameras mounted in astronauts’ helmets. They are also used in weather satellites and spy satellites, and in the camcorders and digital cameras that are now widely available to consumers.

I have been at Schlumberger since 1977, first at the Palo Alto Research Center where my work was on machine vision and automated image analysis. I moved to Austin, Texas in 1988. My current research work is centered on remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems to support field operations planning and execution. A GSS is the digital equivalent of an atlas, but contains much more information that can be accessed and presented in many different forms. In addition to generating maps, a GSS can give us street addresses, information about plants and animals in an area and more.

My other interests include amateur astronomy, especially observing earth satellites, building and flying model airplanes, gardening and rebuilding antique clocks. And, like Demos Pafitis, I have an old Citroen that I care for.