I had a few responses from those who were there during the era:

'I suspect many brilliant but younger radio astronomers do not realize how the early detections of "radio molecules" came about.  A different story for each of them.' - Mark Gordon

'Bonn got into Ammonia in the mid-1970s when we bought an expensive paramp from AIL. Then came a maser receiver in 1980. I thought we did some interesting work on Ammonia in Orion, with Effelsberg and the VLA. This included some isotope studies, Ammonia masers in W33, DR21 and an 15NH_3 maser in NGC7538. Lew Snyder referred to us as "The Ammoniaks". ' - Tom Wilson

'Thanks for the birthday greetings and the notice of the ammonia celebration. OH onward were indeed heady days of discovery. Alas my detailed remembrance of them have become faint with time.  Wish I could attend but it is very unlikely.' - Mort Roberts

'I was doing x-ray astronomy at Coumbia U. in 1968 and paid little attention to the discovery of NH3.  I'm sure Pat was onto it and we may have talked.  He used to laugh about Townes antenna on the roof of Pupin.  Never really got in use and then Townes left for MIT.' -Paul vanden Bout

'I actually have nothing to say about NH3, except that I can remember precisely where I was when I learned about it.  I was an undergrad co-op working for Mort Roberts in CV and Bill Howard stuck his head in Mort's door when we were discussing something and said "Charlie Townes just detected ammonia" or something like that. - Jay Lockman

Jack Welch: “Well, that was embarrassing.” That was the comment by a senior member of the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley after I presented my first-ever talk to the annual joint meeting of all the University of California Astronomy Departments. I was at the time a young member of the Electrical Engineering faculty at Berkeley, and just getting interested in radio astronomy.  I had previously used a 10-foot antenna mounted on the rooftop of Cory Hall on the Berkeley campus to measure and model the ammonia (found in the infrared) in the atmosphere of Jupiter, and now I was building a high frequency receiver for a 20-foot telescope that had been purchased for the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in northern California. I had read Townes and Schawlow’s book on Microwave Spectroscopy and thought it would be interesting to look for ammonia in the interstellar medium. Having been invited to speak to this gathering of astronomers, I thought that I should do more than talk about the engineering details of the receiver I was building, so I told them about the observations I was planning on making.  Hence the comments by the senior astronomer.  This gentleman knew far more about the interstellar medium than I did. He knew so much that he could categorically state that the density of the interstellar medium was so low that while a few diatomic molecules had been detected, there was no chance that polyatomic molecules would be able to form. Needless to say, this dampened my enthusiasm for building the receiver, and in reality, I lacked the funding to procure some significant components.

Then in 1967, Charles Townes came to the Physics Department of UC Berkeley.  He was eager to return to experimentation, after his time as the Director of Research of the Institute for Defense Analyses in D.C. and Provost at MIT.  He came to talk to me about whether I had ever considered using our radio telescope to look for molecules in the interstellar medium. I told him about my experience with the astronomers, and he told me about his own experience when he was at Columbia University trying to get the first ammonia maser to work. The renowned physicist Isidor Rabi told Townes to stop wasting his time because the maser would never work. But Townes told me that he had tenure, and thus could ignore this guidance/directive. Likewise, he counseled me to take the wisdom of my colleagues with a large grain of salt. In addition, Townes had some start-up funds from the university and a talented graduate student and postdoc and together with an engineering colleague in the Radio Astronomy Lab, we completed the high frequency receiver for Hat Creek.  Following the advice of Harold Weaver, we pointed to the cloud in Sagittarius B2 and discovered ammonia.  Shortly thereafter, as a sort of Christmas present, we detected water in the same cloud at such intensity that it necessarily had to be a maser.  Turns out that all along, mother nature had been doing what Townes finally managed to do at Columbia.

The next chapter, weeks later, was water:
Townes recalls the Christmas 1968 discovery of water in Orion: 'After water had turned up in Sagittarius B2, we of course wanted to search other sources to see if it was more widespread. Al Cheung was the graduate student doing his thesis on these spectral lines, so he had the assignment of looking for water in other sources just as Christmas was approaching. The holiday season did not deter Al. One night during Christmas week, while Frances (Townes) and I had most of the research group and other friends over for drinks and a good time, Al was hard at work up in northern California at Hat Creek.  The party was hitting its stride when he phoned. When I asked him how things were going, his excited reply was, 'It must be raining in Orion! It has a very strong water line." He had found water, lots of it. The Orion water line was 20 times stronger than the previous one, much more than we would have expected.  What Cheung had found in the Orion Nebula turned out to be a huge water maser. While he sat, happy and tired, at the control panel at Hat Creek, we all poured some champagne in our kitchen in Berkeley and toasted his success.'



I have not yet heard from Lew Snyder or Pat Palmer,