Early life Clarence Hickman was born on a farm established by his grandfather Leak on . The nearest town was
Lizton, Indiana, to the south. Clarence and his siblings attended the Leak country school until 1898, when the family moved northward to the Job Hadley farm, where the children attended another country school. In both residences, Clarence pursued an interest in archery, playing with bows and arrows made by his father. By his own account, The arrows had heavy heads so that we did not need feathers to guide the arrow.... We boys
shot fish with bows, using umbrella staves as arrows. I well remember that I could not understand why we had to aim under the fish to hit it. It was not until I attended high school, where I learned about refraction of light, that I understood this phenomenon. In 1917, Hickman began pursuing his master's degree at
Clark University in
Worcester, Massachusetts. His work at the university had a focus on rocket development. At Clark, Hickman met rocket scientist
Robert Goddard, who was head of Clark's physics department at the time, and with whom Hickman continued working after graduation. During the 1920s, Hickman then worked for the
American Piano Company (also known as Ampico), improving the company's
player piano products. The inventor of the Ampico piano,
Charles Fuller Stoddard, needed a physicist and mathematician to develop improvements to reproducing instruments as well as manufacturing aspects of automatic pianos. He employed Hickman in this role at a research laboratory that Ampico established in 1924 at the
Chickering Hall in New York. Hickman's work enabled the development of Ampico's dynamic recording machine and the Model 'B' player piano. Author Larry Givens wrote: Dr. Hickman's employment with American Piano Company, from 1924 through the end of 1929, may accurately be said to represent the only period in the history of the player piano industry in which real
scientific methodology was applied to the development of the player piano. Most development work in the industry had theretofore consisted of scratch-paper sketches and empirical constructing of models with hopes that they would function! For his achievements at Ampico, Hickman was inducted into the
Automatic Musical Instruments Collector's Association Hall of Fame in 1976. He participated in ASA First Meeting along with thirty-nine other persons, at the
Bell headquarters in New York City, on December 27, 1928. When the
Great Depression forced the research department to close, Hickman joined
Bell Telephone Acoustical Laboratories. At Bell, he renewed his interest in the physics of archery, performing laboratory experiments and publishing several papers in archery journals. He also invented a method of making silk backing for bows. Also at Bell, Hickman developed
metal tape recording, devices for analyzing speech patterns, and new methods of
telephone switching. In that position he guided rocket development in various organizations, leading to completing the development and fielding of the
bazooka in 1941, which he had started with Goddard during the First World War. Hickman retired from Bell in 1950 and began working at the
Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, working on guided missiles. He lived in New York as a consultant to industrial companies until his death in 1981. ==Awards==