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• Physicist Highlights
• Bill's Parents and Sister - The John W. Koch family was a small one. Betty was seven years younger than Bill.
• Early Education - All of the schools that Bill attended for the first 20 years of his life were relatively close to where he lived on Long Island.
• Graduate Education - Bill Koch arrived on Campus of the University of Illinois the latter part of August 1941. He was all set to begin his career in physics at the ripe young age of 20.
• Post - Graduate Education - Bill's first assignment after receiving his degrees was to prepare for the trip to London with the betatron. The betatron was a reasonably large package that was about the size of an office desk.
• Career at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) - The director of the NBS at that time was Ed Condon, who had been the target of Congressional investigations by Senator Joe Mc Carthy. Condon was also a very famous physicist who liked to think big. He had committed NBS , with the encouragement of Lauriston Taylor, Chief of the Radiation Physics Division, to acquire both a 50 Mev betatron and a 100 Mev betatron from the General Electric Company.
• Career at the American Institute of Physics (AIP)) - AIP was an interesting challenge for Bill in that it was his first involvement with a business operation, as contrasted to a research laboratory. Not only was it business , it was also a heavily political business as can be seen from its institutional relationships.