IEEE EMC Founders Found

Leonard Keeps Giving: Another Dig Into The Past

Mike Violette

About thirty minutes from the National Archives is a humble storage complex at Tysons Corner, an architectural inversion of the federalist-style granite building that cradles the scriptures from the founding of our country. For the EMC Society, this humble Virginia facility holds the recovered scrolls from our early summer trip to Leonard Thomas’ inner sanctum, a critical link to the history of our group’s founding.

As Summer reluctantly left the stage to Fall on a brilliant blue-sky Friday, Dan Hoolihan, EMCS Historian, continued his hunt for the near-legendary, possibly mythical list of the names of the original EMC Founders. Words have been whispered, theories proposed and emails exchanged: somewhere in the first secretary’s earthly possessions was that fabled List. That morning, fortified by a life-shortening, but delicious egg and sausage and swiss cheese breakfast sandwich, lovingly assembled on a fresh multi-grain brioche and washed down with a truly above average cup of coffee, we advanced like knights in search of the Holy Grail, but with maybe less ecclesiastical fervor and certainly less clunking, and not on steeds, but in four cylinder sedans.

As traffic in Tysons wound up to its usual frenetic and loathsome neck-muscle tightening swirl, we set forth off to find it: The List.

Once again, we found much more.

Dan’s reverent guidance was simple and direct, I posit not unlike Lewis Leakey’s gentle words to his staff as the first indications of the fossilized bones of Australopithecus afarensis or Lucy were swept clean of eons of limbo. “Careful lads,” I imagine him saying. “The smallest scrap might hold the biggest clue.”

Maybe we would be as lucky and our Lucy would be brought to light. It was with measured optimism that we pulled into a cookie-cutter orange storage company where people keep their treasures that they rarely visit and have mostly forgotten: toys they no longer play with and clothes that don’t fit and appliances that will never again feel a crackling glow in their electrical circulatory system.

Not unlike Howard Carter’s feeling of elation upon discovering the resting place of Tutankhamen (ok, ok it’s a stretch), we gently coaxed the cypherlock open.

With a soft click the door yielded and we entered the climate-controlled tomb of unloved prized possessions.

With a clattering rattle, the overhead metal door was flung open and light bathed a wondrous scene. We had to pause and catch our breath, brows wet, despite the conditioned air of the place. My nostrils filled with the sweet smell of timeless nostalgia; the air swirled mysteriously overhead as a motor kicked to life someplace (did I catch a whiff of mimeograph ink?). I reeled for a moment. In those lovely white cardboard sarcophagi was the march of time, possibly five decades or more: pencil, pen, carbon paper, Xerox, thermal facsimile, so many ways of communicating.

Again back to Carter: I imagined him studying the cuneiform and hieroglyphs under flickering lights. If only we could douse the glaring incandescent lights and hold torches to our treasure, we might then understand fully that thrill.  Unfortunately, the Fairfax County Fire Department generally frowns upon the possession and burning of kerosene-soaked torches in enclosed spaces.

The Forties

We set to work, opening the boxed files as hundreds of voices of EMC past fairly chattered. We searched each and every file in pursuit of the List. At another time, with more leisure, each set of documents could entertain and inform for hours. But time was against us.

Did we fear that the precious documents would crumble to dust? Or was there a meticulous but benign spirit whose essence shadowed the fifty years of carefully-typed minutes and meetings? Did the engineers who invented the devices in the catalogs and specifications cry out in haunting voices: “Remember My Oscillator. I Have Created It!”? Or did we feel the ghost of a WWII Navy Technician, forever bound to the Earth, hopelessly searching for the Spare Parts Catalog for Panoramic Radio Receivers, published nineteen forty five? No, no–No such thing, all imagined.  Dan had to hop a plane at noon.

The Fifties

Advancing my search a decade and more than slightly off-task, I marveled at the deft innovation of the motor-operated “Mechanical Sweep Drive” from the General Radio Catalog which “attaches to knobs, dials or shafts” to speed EMC tests. Even in its infancy, a certain tedium accompanied our work. Confession: It has not been too long since we rigged an electric drill to our venerable HP 8672 signal generator to accomplish the same thing. (And a paper clip jammed in the frequency increment button does the trick on an 8656.) As to the frequency standard, I can’t imagine calculating the uncertainty accompanying a calibration on the four hundred pound, seven foot rack of wire, knobs and tubes.

A third box produced a yellowing kraft-paper envelope which granted us some more gold, complete with black and white photographs. Locale: off the coast of California. Maybe a studied propeller-head reader of this journal can weigh in on the make and model of the airplane while the rest of us can marvel at the RF rig that this young engineer is using to do his EMC thing. Check out the “graphical interface”: pre-pandisplay; pre-Polaroid; post-papyrus.

We’re not sure who this pioneer is (Leonard, himself, perhaps?), but the caption of the photo reads “ambient test” and this particular project looked like a site survey or RF system performance measurement of some kind; in the envelope were multiple aerial photos taken through the window of the small tail-dragger in the background.

The Sixties

The US was firmly in the grip of the hysteria of the Cold War and apocalyptical fear gripped the pen of the author of the article on EMC in the New Englander, a general-interest publication. In the October 1963 edition it carried an ominous article on EMC, likening the problem of RF Interference to that unveiled in Rachel Carson’s book of that time on the environment: Silent Spring. The bent of the article was that the uncontrolled growth in radio frequency emissions was going to leave the spectrum a hostile and toxic place. There are some amusing snippets in the piece, including likening RF propagation to nuclear ‘fissing’, to wit:

“…when the static energy travels and snowballs, picking up more energy and gathering strength as it goes, ending up miles from its original source, that can be dangerous…” Hmmm.

And “Another Silent Spring may be in the making.” Yikes! The article goes on its exposé of the various levels of interest, ignorance and denial that are the human condition, and again, the more things change..“ As a result of man’s inventiveness and passion for miniaturization, products emitting electrical energy have been made even smaller and smaller–and packed closer to other sources of spurious emission”

and finally, a time-proved statement:

“The FCC staff is overworked and understaffed.”

In the fine but faulty rhetoric of the Post-McCarthyera, it speaks of “an EMC-riddled atmosphere.”

If that were true, we’d all be looking for jobs. Too much EMC? Let us pray not!  But smug observations aside, it’s an interesting read, for sure, and talks about the origins of the Electromagnetic Compatibility Analysis Center (ECAC) in Annapolis. One interesting paragraph harkens to the early formation of the EMC Society. “…in 1957 the Professional Group on Radio Frequency Interference of the Institute of Radio Engineering was formed and has now changed its name to the Professional Technical Group on Electromagnetic Compatibility (PTGEMC) in order to include the entire interference field.”

The Seventies

But before we advance to the present, we have to pay homage to one more decade. Tripping along through the sixties we welcomed the engineering community to the summer of Love and and the Groovy EMC Society with the “1970 International Symposium on EMC”. That is some Aquarius cool, the Expanding Science of EMC. WOW! Let’s jump in the hot tub, celebrate the next few decades of discovery (and hope there’s no leakage current). Aha! Another click of the Rubik’s Cube. We can’t be far-off…

Engineers in bell-bottoms.

Far out!

Our Plutarch remained steady at his task and muttered quietly, reading off the names of the Founders and followers of the EMCS,lost in a certain reverie as he scanned minutes of years of meetings and various correspondences, reading the names:

Fisher, O’Neill, Nichols, Kesselman, White,Showers, Heirman, Schlicke, so many others.

We must be close to finding the Keystone.

Meanwhile, I had the good fortune to sift through some of the collection: correspondence, professional and semi-personal collections of articles, standards and publications.

The first ANSI C95.1 was about five pages long. Ten milliwatts per cm squared.

Curiously, a letter written to a young Mr. Thomas slipped from a manila folder and floated to the floor. Dated March 18, 1949 on Bell Telephone Laboratories letterhead, carefully typed on a Remington or Smith-Corona Manual, it read, in part. (Iimagine Leonard ’s thrill: Ah, publication!).

“Dear Mr. Thomas, I am glad to inform you that your paper “Interference Reduction” has been accepted for presentation at a meeting sponsored by Commission 4 of the URS in Washington on May 2-3. You will be informed of detailed arrangements later.”

Interference? Back in 1949? The transistor was still in swaddling clothes! But, I am reminded: The more things change, &c. And as to the pursuit of the paper: “Interference Reduction”, truthfully, I am not unhappy that Mr. Thomas’ paper did not reduce all of the interference, for, lo it is often a lonely and painful pursuit, were it not for interference, we would not be slabbing words on a page for Ms. O’Neil’s journal.

List Ho!?

At this point, our time was running out and we hadn’t found what we were looking forand the effects of the morning’s coffee had worn off. We decided to stop after one more box and leave the rest to another time when fortuitously a folder with title: “EMC History” was pulled from the fourth box.Dan’s hands trembled as his eyes fell to handwritten sign-in sheets and finally, perhaps, the Grail itself–a transcribed list of names on graph paper.

“I think we may have it,” Dan said, his laconic mid-western manner thinly and insufficiently covering his excitement. “I’ll write this down and see if our members recognize these names.”

Buoyed, but cautious, we re-sealed the tomb and left, vowing to return and sift through the archives once more, should our mission not be complete.

Dan made his plane.

Thanks again Mr. Thomas.

Epilogue

Well, is it the list? Dan, what did you find?

Bibliography

The Leonard Thomas Archives. 1940s-2006

The New Englander. The New England Council for Economic Development. October 1963.

An Archaeological Expedition to Washington DC Unearths Engineering Gold

The hunt for treasured artifacts—not the stuff of gems and jewels, but the stuff of hearts and memories—was on our minds as we descended the steps of a 1940s era brick home in Northeast DC on a warm May day. Leonard Thomas, the fifth Secretary of the EMC Society passed away over a year ago and his archives and collections beckoned EMC Historian Dan Hoolihan. With members of the Washington/Northern Virginia EMC Society in-tow, Dan’s mission was to ferret out the lost records of the society during Mr. Thomas’ sixteen year tenure from 1965 to 1981.

 We got more than several boxes of records and remembrances; we got an eyeful as Mr. Thomas was, obviously, a quintessential engineer and an inveterate tinkerer. Surrounded by radios that had not tuned a carrier in at least twenty years were the notes from meetings, the history of the development of EMC standards and, somewhere, hopefully was the EMC equivalent to the signature page of the Declaration of Independence: the document with the 50 or so names of the first signatories to the EMC Society.

 Why here? Well, chances were good and for a few reasons: first, Mr. Thomas, the fifth person to serve as Secretary of the “EMC Group”, as the first agglomeration of the afflicted was called. Perhaps to give it more ‘cachet’, the EMC Group was renamed the “IEEE EMC Society.” Makes you think of white gloves and tuxedos. The second reason we held out hope to find the documents was that Mr. Thomas was, ah, a collector, and one can have quite a collection if one succeeds to make it to a 97^th birthday.

Much can be written about such a life and much already has; suffice it to say that his career made for a fascinating tale and included participating in state-of-the-art interference studies in the Stoddardt Mobile Test Vehicle. Took leaded gas. Played Jefferson Airplane.

Stoddardt Mobile Testing Van

He was a meticulous record-keeper, for which we are grateful, and each drawer peeled back another layer of the standards-onion. CISPR, ANSI C63, MIL-STD—all the great fairy tales—were there. Early in the exercise, with such a bounty, we focused our mission on EMCS matters, particularly those that dealt with personalities and correspondences.

 

Dan Hoolihan and Barry Wallen Begin the Archiving

 There were files back to the forties.

What DNA Standard is NOT represented?

 

 While Tom Boughner and Tom Revesz catalogued, crated and hauled, I poked around at a man’s life of treasured possession, curiosities, hobbies and passions. 

I noticed a not-so-distinctive piece of RF gear with a Dymo®-label that said “IDIOT BOX – TURN ON WHEN IDIOT TALKS”. Must be a story there somewhere (and someone’s not telling).

Other shelves held ancient archival IRE Proceedings; so regarded with nostalgia (well, maybe not so much nostalgia for this writer).

Institute of Radio Engineers – precursor to the IEEE

 

 And finally, lots of fundamentals, predictions, studies, reports and handbooks:

RFI Handbook

The stacking and sorting will be left for another day.

 We dropped off the bounty at a storage locker for later research, sorting and cataloguing; Dan says: “I’ll go through it when I return to Washington.”

Right. I wonder why I have this sneaking suspicion that I just inherited all this history? Dan, you listening?

Dan and Barry in the Inner Sanctum

 From his obituary, we learn that Mr. Thomas was born in Birmingham, Ala., as the eldest son of British immigrants from Cornwall. He was the 1920s equivalent of “a nerd,” said his daughter Sarah Ellen Sandel. He built radio sets as a youngster and discovered electrical engineering in high school.

 As every good engineer keeps things running as long as possible, the radios that were in his possession certainly were things of beauty. I’m at a loss as to what all the particular buttons on this thing were.

WJSV, Later WTOP

 

After taking a degree from Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn), his career took him from radio stations (the old WJSV) in DC to the Navy to ECAC to retirement and service with the IEEE.

Again, from his obituary: His suggestions were instrumental in the construction of an interference-free radar system for the military, and he helped write national standards for future communications devices. Mr. Thomas also resolved interference problems in the White House radio room when he discovered that fluorescent lighting from the kitchen was the culprit. After the war, he became the first U.S. representative to the International Special Committee on Radio Interference (CISPR).

Tom and Tom dig in...

In the meantime, Tom and Tom keep at it. We barely scratched the surface. 

Mr. Thomas wrote numerous technical papers. He was elected an IEEE Fellow and received the institute’s Standards Medallion and the Laurence G. Cumming Award. Mr. Thomas passed away on January 31, 2007.

For all his collecting and documenting and archiving, we are forever grateful. Now, Dan when are you coming back?

Mike Violette

May 2008