Clifford Ryerson

Biography

Clifford M. Ryerson (IRE Senior Member, 1955) was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 23 September 1915. He received the B.S. degree in physics from Stetson University, De Land, Florida, in 1937, and the M.S. degree in electronics from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, in 1938.

Later, on the technical staff at Duke, Ryerson managed three cosmic-ray expeditions, and then received a Meritorious Civilian Service Award for a war-time instrumentation program for the Navy. In 1946, he organized and managed the Applied Physics Branch of the Naval Gun Factory, Washington, D.C. Five years later, in 1951, he became a systems designer, and soon advanced to Project Manager of the RCA Moorestown Plant. Expanding his earlier work on product reliability, he then advanced to the main Camden Plant, where he developed the RCA Reliability Engineering Program. He then expanded this effort into a broad program of control for product assurance, which included the management and integration of all control specialties, such as reliability maintainability, value engineering, quality assurance, and system effectiveness. In 1962, he was concerned with making consulting and technical audit service in this field available to all industry and to the government. That year, he was also Vice President of the EL-TEK Divisions of EL-TRONICS, Hawthorne, California.

Ryerson was a registered professional engineer, a senior member of the American Society for Quality Control, an official of the National Reliability Symposia, the organizing chairman of the National Reliability Training Course, and a participant in many military-industry programs, such as AGREE, BIMRAB, and PSMR.