To top it all off, Dudley Buck had worked as an undercover spy for the US government and is believed to have been involved in Operation Paperclip — the secret program to bring top Nazi science and engineering talent to the US.
His story has all the makings of a classic Cold War thriller, but despite being at the vanguard of computer technology and leaving an indelible mark on the evolution of crucial tech, Buck is largely a forgotten figure in mainstream history.
And to the conspiratorially minded, satisfying answers regarding his sudden death remain elusive.
"Nobody's heard of Dudley Buck. He kind of got airbrushed from history, and there are only a few people left who are around and able to verify all the stuff he did," says former journalist Iain Dey.
But that's starting to change.
'FOUND IT DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE'
Iain Dey met Buck's son, Douglas, through his in-laws and recalls hearing the stories he would tell about his father's apparent scientific prowess during the Cold War.
"I found it difficult to believe, when Doug initially sat there and said 'My dad knew the Manhattan Project scientists, and my dad knew Noam Chomsky, and my dad was involved in the first space missions, and my dad knew (mathematician) Gerald Reisner and all these guys involved with JFK'," Dey told news.com.au.
Late in their adult life Douglas and his brother begun compiling an archive of all their father's work and achievements. When Buck died, the family was taken under the wing of staff at MIT where their mother had landed a job.
The boys would often be knocking around the halls and have academics come up to them, showering them with stories about how impressive their father was.
Fast forward a few decades and they have a "slightly crazy office stacked to the roof" with old papers, notes and diaries related to their scientist father. Among the archives are expense claims Buck filed with the NSA — one of the few clues his family has that he worked as a covert government operative who went behind enemy lines.
The plan was to write a book about their dad and Dey, with his experience as a journalist, eventually got pulled onto the project.
When he started helping dig into the life of Dr Dudley Buck, Doug's stories didn't seem so far fetched.
"I was taken aback by all the lateral connections to so many people," Dey said.
"The Forrest Gump of computing science."
TWO MYSTERIOUS DEATHS
Outside of the aficionados of computing history, few people know the importance of Dr Dudley Buck and the immense legacy he left behind.
As an electrical engineer at MIT in the 1950s, he was part of the team who invented the first RAM computer memory before going on to create an early version of the flash drive. He contributed to the first light gun devices and devised big data coding systems crucial to the space race.
But his Croytron invention — a prototype superconductive computer chip that worked in freezing temperatures and which Buck hoped would become the fundamental building block for future digital computers — is what got the most attention.
Including from the Russians.
At this point in history, the USSR were quite far behind in the computing arms race in part because Stalin had suppressed certain kinds of research over concerns that computers would replace workers.
But in 1959, the US agreed to let a delegation of top Soviet scientists see inside their most high profile computer labs, including a walk through at IBM and Buck's MIT lab.
Four weeks after the high-profile fact-finding mission, Buck dropped dead. So too did his 48-year-old friend and close colleague Louis Ridenour. The death certificates say both men died of natural causes, but both undoubtedly bore the hallmarks of a KGB hit.
Dey is careful not to stoke conspiracy theories and has no evidence of an assassination to offer up. "These were serious scientists. I don't credibly suspect that any of them bumped him off," he said.
Buck received a shipment of chemicals on the day he died, and some suspect there was something lethal in the chemicals.
"For me it's a very large coincidence," Dey says of the timing around the Soviet visit. But as he notes, "there are a great many KGB agents over the years that have confessed to being able to replicate the diagnosis that appeared on his death certificate."
"And the fact is he was working on multiple top secret projects central to America's ambitions in the Cold War."
BUCK'S TECHNOLOGY LIVES ON
Late last year, Dey and Douglas Buck's book was finished and published following years of research.
The Cryotron Files: The strange death of a pioneering Cold War computer scientist gives the most comprehensive account of the life and work of Dr Dudley Buck and his once vaunted cryotron invention.
Inspired by Buck's vision in the late 1950s and 1960s, a number of top American companies including IBM and GE, as well as the US military all mounted major cryotron-research programs before shifting their focus to silicon microchips for computer logic and memory.
"But once I stared digging, I saw evidence that people has been working on (Buck-inspired technology) in the background all the way through," Dey said.
For instance, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an organisation responsible for leading research to overcome difficult challenges relevant to the United States Intelligence Community are working on machines now based on the successor of Dudley Buck technology, Dey said. It's back in fashion.
And MIT now teach Dudley Buck technology again. They stared doing that again a few years ago as researchers look to find new ways to push past the limits of silicon in computing amid the march towards quantum computing, he said.
What ever the true circumstance of his untimely death may be, it seems he is having a resurrection.
