Oral-History:Richard Gowen (2010)

About Richard Gowen

IEEE Life Fellow, Richard J. (Dick) Gowen (1935-2021) received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Rutgers University in 1957, where he also served in the ROTC. He then began work at the RCA Research Laboratories, but was called to active duty with the Air Force. While in the Air Force, he began graduate study at Iowa State University. He earned his M.S. in electrical engineering in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1962.

Gowen then joined the faculty of the Air Force Academy. While at the Air Force Academy, he directed the joint NASA-Air Force space medical instrumentation program and led the design of medical experiments in the Apollo and Skylab space programs. He was also a member of the NASA astronaut medical launch recovery team for six capsule space flights. Additionally, he served as a government consultant for the Department of Defense. He retired from the Academy in 1977 as a professor of electrical engineering with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Dr. Gowen continued his work in education as Vice President and Dean of Engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. After seven years there, he moved to Dakota State College as President. In 1987, he then returned to South Dakota School of Mines and Technology as president of that institution. The school’s profile was raised under his leadership. Gowen guided the development of new engineering programs and an expansion of graduate research, including projects served the needs of NASA and the military. SDSMT’s ROTC also flourished under Dr. Gowen’s tenure. Gowen actively promoted Native American involvement in the sciences and worked to improve South Dakota’s retention of state-educated individuals.

Gowen retired from SDSMT in 2003. Afterward he was appointed to the South Dakota Board of Education. He has coordinated the conversion of the Homestake Gold Mine into a National Science Foundation supported National Underground Science Laboratory. He served as President and CEO of Dakota Power which was established to develop lightweight electric drive systems for military and civilian use.

In 1984, Gowen served as president of the IEEE. He served as president of the IEEE Foundation from 2005 to 2011. He also served as president of the American Association of Engineering Societies in 1986. He was named as an Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu in 2002.

About the Gowen Oral Histories

During a ten-year period (2009-2018), Gowen recorded four lengthy and detailed oral histories with staff of the IEEE History Center. In these life story oral histories, Gowen discussed his early life, education, military service, and his career as an engineer, inventor, professor, administrator, and President of South Dakota School of Mines. His successful career included decades of service to professional organizations, especially IEEE. In addition to service as the 1984 IEEE President, and the President of the IEEE Foundation (1984 and 2005-2011), he also served as president of the American Association of Engineering Societies in 1986. And, he and his wife Nancy had been extremely very active volunteers and philanthropists in South Dakota and in many educational, community, and church organizations especially in Rapid City and the surrounding area.

In the oral histories, Gowen spoke about being born and raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and after graduating high school attending the hometown university. He received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Rutgers University in 1957, where he also served in the ROTC. He started work at the RCA Research Laboratories, but the Air Force called him to active duty. While in the Air Force he and his wife Nancy, moved around the USA, and he began graduate study at Iowa State University, earning an M.S. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1962, both in electrical engineering with a focus in the emerging field of biomedical engineering. He directed the joint NASA-Air Force space medical instrumentation program, and he supervised the design of medical experiments in the Apollo and Skylab space programs.

Gowen also reminisced about his more than sixty-five-year membership in IEEE. He recalled many joyful IEEE experiences, especially his decision to join the AIEE, one of IEEE’s predecessor organizations, as a Rutgers student while working on his senior project. He said: “I was doing my senior design project. I submitted that as a student paper, so that’s how I joined IEEE. I presented a paper in Brooklyn at Brooklyn Poly. It was either in the early summer or I guess late winter. As matter of fact, I think I’ve got the paper upstairs. I can pull that out and we can just get dates and things off it. In the process, I ended up being the number two paper. It was a very, very frustrating piece for me, and I ended up calling this ‘Mysterious Michael Maze-Mastering Mouse.’”

Indeed, he joined as a student member, was elevated to IEEE Fellow, and as IEEE’s Centennial President, in 1984, he travelled the world representing the Institute at many commemorate celebrations, conferences, and events. Then post-presidency, he spent nearly three decades volunteering for both IEEE and the IEEE Foundation. He remained active through dynamic, and sometimes challenging times, as the AIEE and IRE merged in 1963; IEEE-USA was founded; and then beginning in the 1980s, IEEE became more active globally.

As an IEEE Past-President, Gowen remained a tremendously active IEEE volunteer who appreciated history, and while Chair of the IEEE History Committee in 2007-2008, Gowen guided the development of the IEEE Global History Network (GHN), which evolved into the Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW). Indeed, his desire to help preserve the history of IEEE and its related technologies, led him to write a First-Hand History about GHN and another about leading a research team to develop the capability for the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) to evaluate physiological changes in astronauts that occurred during the weightlessness of zero gravity spaceflight.

Gowen’s oral histories include:

• Richard Gowen, #522, an oral history conducted on 14 November 2009 by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
• Richard Gowen, #533, an oral history conducted on 6 March 2010 by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
• Richard Gowen, #568, an oral history conducted on 23 September 2011 by Michael Geselowitz, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
• Richard Gowen, #818, an oral history conducted 7 June 2018 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Gowen wrote two First-Hand Histories, A Quest for Understanding Weightlessness and History of the GHN and a very well-received speech celebrating the IEEE Centennial in 1984 (see Richard Gowen Speech (1984). The speech made on 5 April 1984 began with an introduction by Eric Herz, Executive Director, IEEE. In this speech, Gowen provided a brief history of IEEE and thanked IEEE staff for their service and presented them with several centennial celebration gifts in recognition of their contribution to the success of IEEE.

About the Interview

RICHARD GOWEN: An Interview Conducted by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, 6 March 2010

Interview # 533 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Copyright Statement

This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.

Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Richard Gowen, an oral history conducted in 2010 by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Interview

INTERVIEWEE: Richard Gowen

INTERVIEWER: John Vardalas

DATE: 6 March 2010

PLACE: Piscataway, NJ

Interview

INTERVIEWEE: Richard Gowen

INTERVIEWER: John Vardalas

DATE: 6 March 2010

PLACE: Piscataway, NJ

Early life and education, Rutgers

Vardalas:

It is Saturday, March 6, [2010].

Gowen:

March the 6th.

Vardalas:

We’re at IEEE headquarters, and I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Richard Gowen. Let’s start very simply from the beginning and then work our way through your formation as an engineer, which means your education, your training, your early work experiences with the U.S. Air Force, the Air Force Academy, and NASA, and your memories of all that, and then get right into your role as a volunteer, your recollections of various positions you held and what you’ve extracted from that about IEEE over the years, and share that with everyone.

Let’s start with what are your earliest childhood recollections of having an interest in science and math or any technical thing?

Gowen:

John, we grew up in New Brunswick, [New Jersey] which is where we are now. As I went through school, I really didn’t know engineering. I didn’t have a focus on it at first. It was high school before it really came into being. I recall that in elementary school I had a teacher who was very supportive of encouraging me to go on and do things. Then that led through several teachers in middle school and in high school. In New Brunswick High School there was a chemistry teacher, Mrs. Lutz, who was an incredible lady. She was a person who was very focused, and she took me under her wing and encouraged me to ask what I was going to do, to what college was I going, and what was I going to do next. I had an interest in building things, and at one point I was building models, and I built a model boat out of tin cans.

Vardalas:

Boat out of tin cans.

Gowen:

Out of tin cans. They were like soup cans that you get. You cut them open, you put it together. We talked about that, and she knew that I was interested in what I could do. I wanted to make something electrical, so I made an electric xylophone where one would just hit the keys. She saw that and said, “well, if you’re interested in electrical engineering, that’s what you do.” That opened me to thinking about what I would do in electrical engineering. This was in high school, in the junior year of high school. As she encouraged me, I began to think about where I go to school. I thought of Rutgers [University], and I applied to Rutgers. Very, very fortunately I had a scholarship to go to Rutgers, or else I’m not sure I could’ve gone to college. I had a State of New Jersey scholarship, which paid for my tuition. It really, really made the difference for me

Vardalas:

Were you a commuting student?

Gowen:

Yes, I lived in New Brunswick, and I commuted back and forth each day.

Vardalas:

What role did your family play in all this? Were they professionals? Or were they blue-collar workers?

Gowen:

Oh no, we were not an affluent family. We were an average family at best, and I was the first one who thought about going to college.

Vardalas:

Oh, really?

Gowen:

The encouragement that I got in school really made a difference because it began to open the door and get me to try. Being able to stay at home, I could go to Rutgers, and the scholarship gave me the tuition to be able to go. That’s what let me be able to go to school with support. It was a tremendous opportunity.

Vardalas:

Did relatives understand your interest in science? I mean did, were they saying go for it or were they unsure what you were doing?

Gowen:

For the most part our family had no one who’d really gone to science—had gone to school. No one had gone to college. I was the first one to go to college, so everyone was, what’s college about? We knew of Rutgers, so that was okay. I went back and forth to school, and I had a lot of encouragement from my family. My grandmother was a great encourager, so it was a warm environment. John, it was a supportive environment.

When I went to Rutgers it was much like you continued. It was a jump out of high school, but it was a continuation of studies and activities.

Vardalas:

It’s clear then you intended to do electrical engineering when you went into Rutgers or were you just interested in engineering?

Gowen:

John, it was a funny way. When we came together, I recall, in the freshman year, in the first or the freshman year, we used to look at each other and say, “why are you here?” Why did you come to school?

Vardalas:

To your fellow freshmen?

Gowen:

Yes, the fellow people in electrical engineering. We all sort of decided, and I want to say this carefully, that being an electrical engineer was a good thing to try because we saw ourselves sort of on the apex of the mountain. Wherever we could go, if it didn’t work out with electrical engineering there were so many other places we could go. We could always end up in business school and still do something.

Vardalas: Are you trying to say you could fall off that mountain and still do something?

Gowen:

It was the way we were and the way we kind of looked at it. We knew that on the engineering side the word was that the electrical engineer would push you a lot. We all felt, “well, let’s try it.”

As the year went on, you saw people fall by the wayside. The class, I can’t remember the exact numbers, but the class just diminished in size. Lots of folks left EE and went to other areas, but there was a core of people who went through four years.

Vardalas:

I remember you telling me you had a particular interest in mathematics. Is that true?

Gowen:

I enjoyed mathematics, and I enjoyed putting it all together. The math, the ideas, the models, all of that was exciting. It was fun because you began to take concepts that were very new and try to find a way that you could express those concepts and in a way that you could then write mathematical equations for them. I enjoyed all of that going through school.

I had had a good background in the school that was here in New Brunswick. When I came in, I was the valedictorian of my class at school, so I had the ability. I was recognized reasonably well, so that all helped. It helped me get the scholarship and I had lots of teachers and people who supported it. I enjoyed a lot of folks who came along and helped me do this.

Vardalas:

What was the focus in electrical engineering at Rutgers at the time? Power? What were the strengths of the department? Were they spread over many disciplines or was it just electrical power or—?

Gowen:

When we had our course at Rutgers, in the first year we started with drafting, and we began to figure out how you express your ideas on paper. Along with that was the strain of mathematics. In the first year it was basically “what is engineering about?” I remember we had a course in shop, in which you took the drawings you had. At that time, we went across the river to Busch campus because the classes were over here in New Brunswick. We went across the river over to the new campus where it had been developed in World War II as part of the military camps. There were barracks over there, and we had our courses. That’s where we learned drafting. Across the street was a shop where we learned how to cut metal and run milling machines. The idea was to get you prepared very early on with your thought process of here’s an idea, now take it to the shop. There was this feeling of preparation, of being involved in producing something. Engineering, from the very beginning, was oriented upon what will you do with this. In electrical engineering there was a strong power component, but the electronics component was also very good. We had a balance between these two. I graduated in 1957. Now, when I graduated, sort of the last classes we had in electronics encouraged us to look at transistors as though they were pentodes because we really hadn’t done much with transistors. It hadn’t come into the curriculum yet.

Vardalas:

You were exposed to them in your last class.

Gowen:

The last couple of weeks.

Vardalas:

Oh.

Gowen:

We joked, “now what do we do?” This was something new. All that we learned, where is that all going to go? All the tube uses were obviously there. I smile because the way that we were prepared we were told “now when you go out, think about transistors, whatever they are going to be, and use your basic knowledge to help you be able to design by using transistors.” That’s where we were. We had good lab work and we had excellent professors. I think of the people who were there, and the dedication they had, frankly, they were a good model in education for me. As I continued through education, I thought of them often, and how they helped people like me come through. They were encouraging; they were supportive.

Vardalas:

In a previous conversation you referred to the “three musketeers.” These are fellow students.

Gowen:

There were three of us. There were several of us that came together, but three of us were basically lab partners throughout the program. We came together with different perspectives, and one of the partners went into the Army ROTC. I went into the Air Force ROTC. The other one looked at us and said I’m not interested in any of that. So, we came together in different ways. We worked competitively, but at the same time we worked together. It was a great involvement because as you thought of something, you shared it. Two of us ended up always battling for one and two. It was just a good way of going through because you understood what you were doing, but if you didn’t, you had someone who you could talk to. It was very helpful as we went through the process.

Vardalas:

Whatever happened to these fellows?

Gowen:

I don’t know. I’ve gone back to reunions, and they haven’t been there. It’s one of those things, John, that your best intentions are someday to look them up and see if you can find them. I have. I’ve tried, but I haven’t found them. I know one of them lived down the street from where my mother-in-law lived, and for a while they were there, and then we lost track of them, too.

Vardalas:

You mentioned ROTC. What were your reasons for joining, was it just expediency or …?

Gowen:

Back in those days, after the Second World War, land-grant institutions like Rutgers, continued to have ROTC. ROTC was compulsory for the first two years. Every man who was there had to go to ROTC. It wasn’t open for women at that point. For the first two years you had to attend every Tuesday afternoon, which was scheduled university wide. There was an Army ROTC and Air Force ROTC in Rutgers. We drilled in Buccleuch Park. We formed up on the streets and marched down to Buccleuch Park. After the first two years, I found it enjoyable. We drilled and went to a big old park and paraded.

Vardalas:

What park is it?

Gowen:

The one that’s across from the hospital, from St. Peter’s Hospital. It was challenging, but it was good. And I’d been involved, when I was in high school, with the Boy Scouts. Then at Rutgers I was a scoutmaster. I had a Boy Scout troop. I was involved in a lot of activities. The ROTC was an extension of all that. When I became a junior, I continued at ROTC. I became involved with the drill squad. I look back at it with a smile. We used to be able to do things like take a rifle, spin it around, throw it back and forth, and do all the competitive stuff. I had the opportunity to lead that group in my senior year. It was a fun kind of activity. It was also one of those challenging things that just pushed you for a bit. That’s what I’ve enjoyed in life. Doing something that’s a little unusual. The drill squad was part of what kept me at ROTC.

Vardalas:

Now did you realize the commitment you were getting into when you signed on the dotted line and stayed in ROTC in your junior year?

RCA

Gowen:

No, but I knew I had a commitment. When I graduated, I ended up with a great opportunity to go to work at RCA Labs.

Vardalas:

Let’s go into that. Tell me about the interview.

Gowen:

As a senior, I had several job interviews. I was trying to make up my mind. I had offers. It was coming to the point in time at which I had to respond back to the offers. I had always wanted to know what RCA Labs were about, because I heard how good they were in electronics and development. I was given an opportunity to have an interview, so I cut a lab, and went to RCA Labs at Princeton.

I spent an afternoon there. John, it was a different kind of involvement. I had never had the experience of an oral interview like that. The attitude in RCA was much different than the other companies because the other companies sort of told me all the things they were going to do for me. At RCA Labs, the question was, “what are you going to do for us?” My interview consisted of three, one-half-hour sessions, each with two engineers, members of the lab. As soon as they understood that I knew how to answer, the question would change. I was back and forth at the blackboard, diagramming and talking about what I could do. Their questioning was to find out how much I knew.

Vardalas:

Every time they knew you knew something; they went to something else to find out what you didn’t know.

Gowen:

It was a challenge, but in the process, which was humbling, you began to understand what you didn’t know because they took you right up to the edge of where you were. I remember visiting with the human resources manager. He asked me, “how are things going in the interviewing?” I said, “pretty well” and I was feeling pretty low at that point. He asked what kind of money was being offered to the graduates. I told him about the interviews, and I told him about some of the offers that I had. We had a good conversation. He was a very pleasant man. I was very, very interested in RCA, but I didn’t think that anything would come up. Two weeks later I got an offer. It was better than any of the other offers I had. I really wanted to go to RCA. If they probably didn’t offer me the same, I would’ve gone anyhow. I went to RCA, and I was assigned to a group that was working on mural television. Now this is 1957.

Vardalas:

Mural television. Like wall-to-wall television.

Gowen:

A wall television that you could project or have a wall that would have television on it like a television screen. This group had its roots back in some of the very early television. Jan Rachman was the director of the group, very distinguished engineer. It was a very fine group at RCA. My task was to understand the nonlinearities of the various granulars of carbon. We thought you could make sort of carbon resistors as part of the projector screen so that you could put energy into it and display. It was an interesting piece of work for a new graduate coming right out of college. I was working now with people who’ve had years and years of experience.

Vardalas:

It must’ve been quite exciting.

Gowen:

It was an exciting time. Each day you went to work, and it was fun. Then one day I got a letter that started with “Greetings and salutations.”

Vardalas:

[Laughter]

Gowen:

Signed by the President of the United States.

Vardalas:

Before we venture to what the President of the United States wanted from you, what else do you recall about the environment at RCA? Was it a nurturing place? Were you just thrown in and told sink or swim?

Gowen:

I was in a room, a laboratory room, in which there were two other senior engineers. They were very easy to visit. I had the benefit of people who came over and talked to me and said “well, have you thought about this, have you thought about that?” It was an encouraging environment. It was also an environment in which I learned to write in a lab book. I learned to keep lab notes. I understood intellectual property. RCA was very much orientated towards a real professional laboratory environment. Your efforts were expected to produce real intellectual property. I began to understand the industrial library. I began to understand how you could get information.

It was a neat way to come out of an undergraduate program and then step into this environment. While it had many of the contexts of being in an educational environment, it was also a challenging environment that urged you to go ahead. You were working with a team that was trying to achieve a goal, and as a junior person coming to the team, I was given a bit of work to do that would bring me along to at least have the team evaluate how I thought and what I could do. It was pretty obvious what we were doing, but it was fun.

Vardalas:

All the facilities at the RCA Labs must’ve been great.

Gowen:

Down the hall, they were pulling germanium. It was interesting to walk around the building and look in the rooms. In one room they’re pulling this ingot of germanium out.

Vardalas:

Before we go on again to the president’s call, I recall you once told me that you had a project in senior year. Was it to do with a mouse?

Gowen:

I was a junior when [Claude] Shannon’s work had just come out. The idea of information theory, the thought of how you could begin to develop the elements that we now know as a computer program.

Vardalas:

Right.

Gowen:

We were at that stage of talking about the logical thinking process, and Shannon’s work was great. There was a graduate student who really was working in the area, and I spent time visiting with him. It all led up to the thought of, I needed a project for my design project. I was fascinated, because Shannon’s had developed the algorithm of what would it take to have a mechanical mouse find a piece of cheese and then go back and program a device so it could track to the cheese. The search algorithms were a challenge. Once you had developed those, then could you program them in a way that a machine would drive those experimental ways to get to the cheese and immediately run to the cheese. It was really a computer program. The thought was how would you develop the capability? What did you think through, so the logical steps. This was relatively early in the process, as we now look back. But it was very exciting for me.

In those days, we did not have transistors. We had vacuum tubes. But in doing the basic logic, I used relays. We ended up taking and making a mouse maze. It must’ve been 6 feet square. It sat on four chairs. It had a frame for the relays. I could get inside of it to hook up the relays. To run it, I needed an AC/DC generator because I needed enough energy that I had to hookup a DC generator to run this. It was a large maze of relays: 3 feet. high by 10 feet. long.

Vardalas:

Did anything actually physically move?

Gowen:

We had a glass plate. Beneath the glass plate we made an XY plotter. I made up two motors that would run an XY. On that we put a big magnet. And, then on top of the glass we had a mouse. You could take a device and move it either way.

Vardalas:

[Laughter]

Gowen:

The mouse had an ability on the nose that if it touched a wall, it turned a light on.

Vardalas:

Did you have barriers in front of it?

Gowen:

It was you set up barriers. You set up a maze.

Vardalas:

Maze, so it was a maze.

Gowen:

It was like you see, the mazes.

Vardalas:

Yes, yes, yes.

Gowen:

I think it was something like a four by four maze that you could change the walls on. As you changed the walls, then you put the mouse down somewhere in the maze, and the machine then went through the process of finding wall. Back in those days we were just thinking about what you could do. For me it was an experiment in understanding enough of the logic diagrams. It was of interest in the department because we were teaching very fundamental activities, and this was a push beyond that and applying it. It also brought together the power side. There was the suggestion at times—I’d be down there working, one of the professors would come and would say,” now be careful, don’t electrocute yourself now in the process.”

It was a big contraption, and that’s what started me in IEEE. It was a student paper in Region 2 at a student paper contest in Brooklyn, I think it was at Brooklyn Poly. I came out number two in the contest because it wasn’t finished. I was talking about it in theory; how it would come together. I remember the number one person had his project finished. My project, in my mind, was much larger. I went away a little bit unhappy, but it was the way that I really became involved in what you can do in IEEE, and it just continued.

Vardalas:

Were you a student member then?

Gowen:

I was a student member. I don’t remember what I did, but I was involved as a student member in IEEE. In my junior year I was selected to be in the honor societies, Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi member.

Vardalas:

Why did you become a student member? Was it the advice from faculty? What prompted you to become a student member? Did you see any advantages?

Gowen:

There was a feeling, in general, about being involved. The thought that you’re professionally involved, being in IEEE, was viewed as entering the profession, and we had strong IEEE involvement in the faculty. The feeling was that if you’re going to be a professional, this is the society that you should belong to, and then as a complement there were the honor societies. It turned out that Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu did have functions going on, but the honor societies were much different in what they did than what IEEE did.

Vardalas:

Do you have a copy of this student paper that you gave

Gowen:

I think I may even have that. I haven’t thought about it, John, but I think about where papers and books are. At one time I did. The Maze-Mastering Mouse is what it was called.

Vardalas:

The Maze-Mastering Mouse.

Gowen:

Mastering Mouse.

Vardalas:

Three M’s.

Gowen:

Yes.

Vardalas:

[Laughter]

Gowen:

It was an interesting piece. When it worked, it was marvelous. After working on it all year, it came together. There were many hours that I spent in the lab making it.

Air Force

Vardalas:

Tell me about Uncle Sam calling you.

Gowen:

When I graduated there was no discussion about coming to active duty. This was 1957. The Korean War was over. We were kind of quiet. We didn’t expect to be called to active duty. While I had been in the ROTC, I was put in the reserves and I didn’t expect that I’d ever have to come to active duty, so it was a surprise to be called to active duty. I was enjoying RCA. I was enjoying everything we were doing. I found out that there were ten of us, double-Es, around the country who were called to active duty because there were two superpowers. As a country we were worried about what the Russians were doing and what was going on. We were all just being brought in. We didn’t really understand much when we started. We were taken to Biloxi, Mississippi, for training.

Vardalas:

Tell me about your experiences in Biloxi.

Gowen:

We were six months in Biloxi.

Vardalas:

When you say we?

Gowen:

The ten of us and Nancy. Nancy and I went down together. We were married.

Vardalas:

Oh, so you were married then.

Gowen:

Yes. We had our first son. When we went down to Mississippi, we were not prepared for what we came into. We came out of New Jersey, and if you had bugs in New Jersey, you were very worried about what was going on. We come down to the South, and here there are these large roaches that are common, so the first thing we came down was “my god, what did we come to, and how do we take care of this baby?” That’s how we started, John.

We were in the South when the equal rights movement was just beginning to start, the movement of looking at how would you basically change the situation. When we were down in the South there were still separate bathrooms. There was separate this and that. We had come from a place where everything was integrated, so when we got there, we looked around and said, “we don’t like this”.

Vardalas:

First of all, you went down there for training?

Gowen:

Down there for training. The military at that point were very worried about a new fleet of Russian bombers that were long-range bombers. Across the DEW line, across the Arctic Circle and across Canada, there were rings of radars that the nation had put in to protect the country from an attack. Early warning system. Those radars were put on mountains, basically wherever you could, so that you had the best view. One of the characteristics of radars is they typically sweep up, and therefore in the valleys that are between the radars you can bring an airplane and the Russians came out with a fleet of bombers that had the capability to be very low. They were efficient enough that you could fly them under the radar.

The worry was that our radar systems could be penetrated by flying under them. Then the military brought in classes, and as I subsequently found out they kept bringing together classes of engineers. They had a special program in Biloxi where they exposed us to radar and prepared us to be able to go out and to operate special radar situations that could in effect be gap fillers as they were called. In our class, eight of the ten of our class were assigned to special operations, and two of us had the opportunity to be assigned to work in gap filler activities in the United States. The ten people were assigned to go out to a listening post, a monitoring post, where we did intelligence gathering. Our background in Biloxi was to prepare us to be able to go out and be the technical managers, so we were all going to go out as communications electronics officers. Our role was to be able to go out and take on a facility and prepare the facility. It was a six-month crash course in radar technology. How does it work? what does a magnetron do?

Vardalas:

Was that your first exposure to that kind of stuff?

Gowen:

Yes. In class it’s theoretical. Now suddenly you’re out here. Here’s radar, now you’re worrying about how you are going to repair it. What are you going to do? In effect, I was the technical Air Force person. There would be civilians in some instances that’d be there to help you, but you were responsible for being smart enough to know what had to be done if there was a problem. We were prepared with problem solving and we were also prepared then within the security base. We were prepared to be cryptographic people. We were prepared to go out in the place and operate. There were two assignments in the United States. One was at Panama City, and one was in Yaak, Montana.

Having already spent time in the south we’re not quite comfortable with this situation emerging down there. We knew that we probably didn’t want Panama City, so we chose Yaak, Montana, not knowing where Yaak, Montana even was. We looked at it on a map. We couldn’t find it, but there was an Air Force station, and we went there. That’s how we got our first opportunity. I had a choice in the class, and I chose Yaak, Montana. The postings were given by going down the ranking in the class.

Vardalas:

The other eight must’ve got stuck someplace?

Gowen:

Yes. [Laughter] John, it’s how things come out. Fortunately, I came out of the class at the right spot, and therefore I had the choice

Vardalas:

How did you live in Yaak?

Gowen:

We found out that in Yaak, Montana, the only housing involved us bringing a trailer. We left Mississippi in December. I had to report to Montana in January, so we had a couple of weeks. We went home to New Jersey and bought a trailer. We had this trailer, John, that was forty feet long.

Vardalas:

Is this the kind you pull or the kind that has an engine in it?

Gowen:

It was at that time when Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball appeared in a movie where they were in a New Moon trailer. It ended up that we bought one of those.

Vardalas:

[Laughter] Oh, a New Moon trailer?

Gowen:

New Moon trailer. John this is a trailer that when we ultimately got it to Montana and had it set up, it had a kitchen in the front, and in the kitchen, it had a washer and dryer. So, it was very, very nice as a trailer.

Vardalas:

Trailer with a washer and dryer.

Gowen:

Yes. It was great. But one of the problems is that the trailer, of course, is a platform like a teeter-totter, and the wheels are in the middle, so when the washer and the dryer were to go on, the front of the trailer would begin to move. It taught me a little bit about dynamics because you had to stabilize it. Yaak was a tremendous opportunity because we lived in a place that was forty miles by logging road to the nearest town.

Vardalas:

So isolated.

Gowen:

John, when you come from forty miles outside of New York City to forty miles outside of basically anything. As a young officer I had responsibility for five 100-kilowatt horsepower diesel generators because that’s how we got our electricity. Two years in Yaak, Montana, was probably one of the best postgraduate courses I could ever have. There were many, many opportunities to work with people. First coming out of a school environment where you are a student and then RCA comes along. Then suddenly you are being thrown into the middle of an organization in which you have responsibility for operations, and you have responsibility for people.

Vardalas:

You’re there by yourself? There’s no one else around.

Gowen:

There were twelve officers and 200 enlisted men. I was responsible for the communications electronics and radar area, and as a lieutenant you walk in and you’re suddenly here. It was much as the popular program of MASH that you see had meaning in the context after I left being involved at Yaak. It was life. We lived in a valley. It was 2½ miles to the top where the radar station was, and the road had 22 switchbacks on it. You went up in a truck. In the winter it was sleds. The way you came down you could beat the truck by 20 minutes by taking a sled and coming down, and you always counted how many people came off because of the switchbacks, you didn’t want anybody left in the trees. As a young person, just out of college, it was a tremendous experience.

Vardalas:

[Interposing] - - as an engineer

Gowen:

I had a strange opportunity, which was really good, because Gap Filler Radars had just been installed there. We studied these radars in Biloxi.

Vardalas:

Gap Filler Radars.

Gowen:

The Gap Filler Radars that we had studied in Biloxi were now put into Montana and Idaho. Yaak was way up in the Northwest corner, about six miles from Idaho and six miles from Canada. It’s tucked up in the corner from everything. It was ninety-five miles to the post office. This was an area that was remote, but it’s where you wanted to put the radar stations. In a valley in Montana and a valley in Idaho we had Gap Filler Radars.

Gap Filler Radars were small radars that basically set on an edge, but they were low down so they could look under the major radar nets. They filled the gap and that’s why they were gap fillers. The Gap Filler Radars had a diesel generator because if anything went wrong with the electric power supply, the generator would kick in. It was the first time that I began to understand about loading in a practical sense. The Gap Filler Radar used, oh, a third of the power that the diesel generator put out, so when the diesel generator would kick on, you’d lose the radar. It didn’t really keep the radar up even though that was what the diesel generator was supposed to do.

What happened was that you had so little power that the diesel generator frequencies would just vary all over, and you couldn’t have a good load. I got to thinking about how you could load it down. In the northern part of the country there’s a lot of snow.

And at the large radars that we had at the main site, we had great big light banks, probably 15 by 20 feet of, of heat-intense lights that kept the radome warm and the snow off the radar dish. I figured if I took one of those banks of lights out to the gap filler radars, I could load up the diesel generator. In this small town outside of where we had the gap filler radar, one night you looked up and saw the sky was bright as can be. We had put the load on by turning the lights on and connecting it to the diesel generator. The diesel generator then stabilized, and we had good radar.

Vardalas:

Must have been quite the sight all those lights.

Gowen:

Oh, it was quite the sight. [Laughter] It was like northern lights, but they were bright as could be.

Vardalas:

[Laughter]

Gowen:

That all led to a discussion because these radars began to work. This caught the attention of the air defense command. Suddenly, these radars were starting to work, and it was the first time. Here’s a young lieutenant out here somewhere, and these radars worked. They started to ask, “What did you do?” How did it work? That began to get a different flavor. The intent was to build a bigger radar further into Montana, and this site was also going to become a gap filler.

I gave them an idea of how you could take the radar we had and basically move it over to be like the technology that we learned about when we were in Biloxi. I had the authority to take apart the radar in an operating sense and turn it into gap filler. It was an interesting challenge, because here we were at an operating load, and we were now going to try to rebuild the radar differently.

Vardalas:

It was a big cost saving?

Gowen:

It was a cost saving, but it was also innovative. John, at that point I had no idea what all this really meant. Here I was this young lieutenant, in a large Air Force involvement, at this operating station, taking apart and playing with a major piece of equipment. [Laughter] It’s like a Tinker Toy. Could you take it apart? Well, of course we were successful, and that was good.

While I was in Montana there was this little announcement about an organization called the Air Force Academy. It had put out a call for faculty. I saw it and I got to thinking about it. I thought, I have an obligation to spend, I think at that time, another four years in the Air Force. Well, if I’m going to do it, then this looks like something that would be interesting to do.

Vardalas:

This would count as four years.

Gowen:

Yes. I applied to join the Air Force Academy faculty. Now, of course, I’m a baccalaureate electrical engineer. I got a very nice response back. It said that we’ll sponsor you to go to graduate school. If you are going to be at the Air Force Academy, we want you minimally to have a master’s degree because our faculty has at least a master’s degree. That was another exciting opportunity.

While I was waiting for that to come, I had a security assignment because of the way things were going in the world and what I had done at Yaak. They were going to pull me out and send me off on another assignment and that was a challenge. Ultimately, I had the chance to go to graduate school. The Air Force sponsored me to graduate school at Iowa State.

Iowa State

Vardalas:

What did you go there intending to study at Iowa State?

Gowen:

I must tell you I didn’t know Iowa State. I didn’t have a choice. The Air Force said, “we’re going to assign you to Iowa State to go to graduate school.”

Vardalas:

And you had no idea of the logic behind this?

Gowen:

No. I’m not sure what the logic was. But anyhow, I ended up at Iowa State. I didn’t know what I had to study, and as I worked it through, I discovered that it was really up to the Air Force Academy what I would study. I looked at computers. With what I had done in my senior design project, I was very fascinated by how you could do design and all of the things you would do in programming. I entered Iowa State to join the computer program.

Vardalas:

Now is this a master’s level now?

Gowen:

Master’s level. At the time, Iowa State was just building its computer modeled after the ILIAC. Remember, in 1947 we had the UNIVAC, and we began to move into machines that could do significant calculations. Iowa State was building a computer. It was an exciting time. The level of work at that point was, you have A and you’re going to move that into register this. And B is going to do that. And you’re going to register to tell what to add. It was all very basic programming. We were doing Assembly language. There were, at the time, in Iowa State, discussions about putting together advanced types of software; higher-level languages that were coming. It was an exciting time, but I found myself sort of sitting there and thinking is this something I want to do. How much of this passing of A to B and adding it together did I really want to do? [Laughter]

Down the hall there was another program starting up. There was a gentleman who was a mathematician, initially, who did his advanced work in electrical engineering, Victor Bolie, who I found pretty exciting. He was a gentleman and I enjoyed being with him. I shifted my major professors, and I became involved in the biomedical engineering program.

I came in the second year of this program. We basically took electrical engineering control theory, the understanding of system logic theory, and applied it to modeling in the life sciences, particularly to the interface for humans. At that time, we studied physiology and biochemistry in addition to the electrical engineering and math courses. My first minor of the major was math and my second was in biomedical engineering. My research was in biomedical engineering. In those days, we studied neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, biochemistry, all the things that are important if you’re going to begin to work with one foot in engineering and one foot over in the life sciences. And it was a very innovative and very exciting time.

Vardalas:

Does this slide right into your doctoral program?

Gowen:

What happened is that my master’s level work turned out to be in the study of blood pressure; looking for different ways to measure blood pressure. You can measure blood pressure and different points on the body. I did a study on how you would systematize and calibrate the measurement of blood pressure external to the body. We normally do blood pressure with a cuff on, but what else could you do?

I entered Iowa State in 1959, and then in 1961 I finished my master’s. I finished my coursework, and I basically had my master’s. Since I was a full-time student, the Air Force paid me. It was a great opportunity. Then I was invited by Iowa State to stay on for my doctorate. I then went back to the Academy and asked if it would sponsor me to get my doctorate degree. I didn’t know what to expect. At about that point in time, RCA also contacted me. While at Iowa State I contacted RCA after I had contracted with the Air Force to go to school and continue to be involved. The folks at RCA came back and said, “why don’t you come back to us? We’ll help you go to graduate school.” And it was this kind of, “oh boy, I’m committed”.

Vardalas:

Didn’t you owe a number of years to the Air Force?

Gowen:

I still had time to serve. When it all came together it was a tremendous opportunity because I could continue and do my doctoral degree. I did additional coursework and graduated in 1962. The philosophy of the faculty was basically “get your doctoral degree and then go out and do something.” I had a very involved and very supportive [faculty].

My Ph.D. research was in measuring people’s blood pressure while they did something, in particular, on a treadmill. As you hold on to a treadmill walking everything is moving, so it’s very difficult to take blood pressure with a cuff on. That’s just not something you can do. I ended up with a device that you put your finger into. This device measured blood pressure from your finger. While walking and on the treadmill, you could get the blood pressure on your finger.

Vardalas:

Even if it was free moving?

Gowen:

You were holding on to the bar. When you held onto the bar, you put your finger in a device, and in that way while you’re moving, it could take your blood pressure.

Vardalas:

It was accurate and it worked well?

Gowen:

It worked very well. I ended up getting a patent on that device. It put me into the paper business because my first paper was on taking blood pressure while moving. And that gave me the opportunity to go down to San Antonio and give my first paper to biomedical people. Here I was, this young officer coming in from studying at Iowa State and giving a paper. That opened doors. That became my professional involvement.

Vardalas:

You finish the doctorate and you’re ready to go back to the Air Force Academy, right?

Gowen:

What happened at Iowa State is that I finished in thirty months, but I could not graduate. Iowa State had a stipulation that the earliest you could graduate was in thirty-three months. I hadn’t paid enough money. Having been a president of a university, I know that it’s also a business, too.

Vardalas:

They still wanted you to stay.

Gowen:

I had to stay three months, one quarter, and it gave me the opportunity to really look at the application of what I was learning. I did animal experiments. I looked at blood pressure and in control systems I looked at vaso-motor control, and I did a number of experiments on it. At the time, I didn’t know where that was going to lead, but it ultimately put me in the space program because it gave me the opportunity to look at some of the aspects of cardiovascular deconditioning. I had no idea that this would happen when I was doing these experiments. These experiments fascinated me. They put together all of the studies I had had. It was an opportunity to take all the engineering theory and system design and put it into the cardiovascular system and the interaction of the physiology and tie that together in a way in which you could look at the system dynamics.

Vardalas:

Were you modeling the process to develop instrumentation?

Gowen:

With my doctoral work all done, I did a special design course that modeled the cardiovascular system and looked at the vasomotor response. If we are sick in bed for a while, and we are weak, and then stand up, suddenly, at times, we’ll feel dizzy. Well, that’s your cardiovascular system responding. You know, 40 percent of the space that we have in our body that blood can be in is, is basically open. The body has vasomotor system that controls where our blood is. It’s a dynamic system, constantly in change. It’s done through our arterial walls, through all the arteries and receptors. It’s a very dynamic and active system.

The body then controls enough blood so that our brain continues to be infused and the body is infused. If a person goes into shock, this system is losing its control. In effect, in cardiovascular shock, your system loses dynamics, and you bleed, so to speak, inside of you, and you don’t have enough perfusion going to the places where you need it. If you lose control, and that’s what I was looking at, how does this system work. In this case, we were working with dogs to see how their bodies would control it. We did a number of experiments modeling it. My course was to prepare a model of the cardiovascular system and to look at the dynamics of it, and to see the interactions. In many cases there are hormones also involved, and the metabolic differences that occur. What are the impacts that come into the system that in a living system would change?

Space program, Air Force Academy

Vardalas:

This is drawing you into the space program eventually.

Gowen:

Yes, but I did not know it at the time. In 1957, when I was in Biloxi, we heard about Sputnik. The U.S. space program was starting. While I was at the Academy, President Kennedy called for the U.S. to go to the moon. But I did not have any connection with the program then. I finished at Iowa State and went to the Academy. The space program was still disconnected from me. I was concentrating on getting into an academic environment, becoming a teacher, and being in the classroom.

Vardalas:

Did the Air Force Academy want you to teach this stuff? What were you going to do with all this? I assume that you wanted to continue research. How did that work out at the Air Force Academy?

Gowen:

The Air Force Academy is a very, very formal, very involved atmosphere. They train the future leaders of the Air Force. Spit and polish would be the way you’d describe it because as faculty you’re on parade as effectively you’re the models. You were expected to be able to do things in a very correct way. The assignment for faculty at the Academy is to teach. We taught five courses over two days. Three courses one day, two courses the next day. That was the typical expectation. And some of the excitement that you had as an instructor was being able to go around the board, and on the third time of that day you were putting your diagrams up to see if you might fill over the place that you’d done before, because you have twenty students, twenty cadets, sitting in front of you, so you’re involved, and your goal is to help them succeed. You have bright students, some of America’s best people, and in many ways the best students from around the globe because you had international students sitting in front of you.

This was an exciting didactic opportunity. I was a young officer, professor, excited about having finished this Ph.D. I wanted to come in and tell everybody all the things. And here were these people out there wondering. At that time, we did not have majors at the Academy. When I came in everybody had to take electrical engineering. It was a required course. As a matter of fact, two courses were required. You were going to get steeped in electrical engineering because the Air Force, the technology, the electrical base of all the airplanes.

When you started your first assignment is the basic courses because these were the majority of the courses. That’s what we were doing.

At the time that I was at the Academy, the discussion was majors for all. The Academy shifted from a general curriculum that everyone completed to now becoming involved with recognizing the way the Air Force and life was changing. It was important to have leaders who were educated well within disciplines, so that opened majors.

One of the first things that I did at the Academy as a young officer was to help put together the electrical engineering curriculum. In that environment there was a focus upon teaching. It was a focus upon being involved in the undergraduate program. The Academy had part of the Air Force Research Command that was there looking at astronautics and navigation. We actually had an attachment at the Academy of a regular Air Force research group that gave an opportunity for cadets to experience some of the research involvement. It had to do with navigation gyros and all of that.

Even to the extent that there was in the program you had to be in excellent facilities. It had a facility that you could put jet engines into and test it. The laboratories were first class. We had all of the equipment that you would want, so that you could take the cadets and move them ahead. We had great power labs in which we were teaching machines and power. We had electronic labs, and the labs were oriented with experiments.

At any point in time, you’ll have 900 to 1,000 students that you run in your classes. When we were teaching electrical engineering, we’re teaching a large number of students and there are many sections. The teaching involvement was primarily undergraduate. I came in and I had been very much involved in the research. I was enjoying the research side, and I wanted to sort of stay involved in research, but that’s not principally what I was supposed to be doing. I was hired to teach.

I got a call one day from the folks at Sandia. Through my paper presentation I did in San Antonio, people began to recognize that there’s somebody up at the Air Force Academy. They found me and they asked if I would help them put together a temperature measuring wireless pill. The first thing that I did at the Academy was a temperature monitor that you could put inside of animals. This was a very special set of experiments because as a nation at that point in time, we did not have adequate enough information on radiation sickness.

Vardalas:

Oh, so this is radiation sickness.

Gowen:

This is radiation sickness. We were exposing sheep and donkeys to radiation, and then watching the level of the radiation and what happened to them with radiation sickness. One of the elements that became important was that radiation sickness came on and it seemed to peak up at the time just pre-death, and then it would lead to termination and the animals would die. The imperative was to be able to know when that happened. They were seeking some type of a device that would monitor the temperature and then relay temperature out wirelessly because you would take the animals back out of the exposure and put them into pens where you would take care of them. In the middle of the night, if something happens, somebody had to get out right away because you wanted to be able take the temperature.

Vardalas:

Temperature was a good indicator?

Gowen:

Temperature was the indicator because temperature would change and go off. The body would go into such a reaction that the antibodies would basically come together with the exposure, so temperature would be a major indication. I put together that experiment. I would make those pills and send them down to Sandia and they would put them into the animals. That was the first thing I did. That was a little bit unusual because in addition to teaching I’d come in at night and work. I had done that as a graduate student for years, so why not?

Vardalas:

How big were these pills by the way?

Gowen:

A little bit bigger than my finger. It’s around my finger size, that’s all. You could surgically go in and just put them subcutaneously under the skin. It was the first application that I did of what I finished in graduate school.

One day I get a call from one of my fellow graduate students who was associated with NASA. NASA was looking to get more involvement. They knew about the biomedical side and asked if I was interested. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was probably one of the first biomedical engineers, if not the first biomedical engineer that was a Ph.D. EE. NASA couldn’t find people and that led NASA to ask me if there was some way that we could do joint work. I didn’t know if I could do joint work. I was down here, far down as a junior [Laughter] member of the Academy. I ended up coming back from NASA with my first contract. It was $35,000.

Vardalas:

That’s pretty big though.

Gowen:

Oh, at that time it was very big. I went over to the folks who handle the money at the Academy. They said, “you can’t do this, you can’t have it.”

Vardalas:

They told you that “you can’t do this”?

Gowen:

Yes. I can’t have it. They asked me, “how did you get this?” [Laughter] I said, “The folks at NASA gave it to me.” And that started an opportunity, so at the Academy I had the chance, ultimately to be not only teaching but to also build a laboratory.

Vardalas:

You built a lab?

Gowen:

NASA put up the money for basic level laboratory that looked at cardiovascular deconditioning. The work that I had done at Iowa State brought me into contact with the NASA group; Dr. Berry and the cardiovascular group under him who were cardiologists. I came in as an engineer, and we could begin to talk about what was happening. For them it was a very strange involvement because I was not trained as an MD, but I understood enough of the vasomotor system and how it all came together that we could talk about the various intercepts.

The work that I had done in the lab with the animals, with dogs, really helped me better understand what was going to happen as we were thinking of putting people in space. At that point Gemini was up. We had already had people in space. The Mercury program was finished, and it was Gemini that we were doing. We were beginning now to figure out how to monitor astronauts more closely. We were preparing for the Apollo program and the moon shots because it was, of course, the moon that we were going to. The effort was to understand enough about what would happen to them in space so that when they came back into the Earth’s environment, we would be able to know what to do for them to make sure that they readapted.

We did not understand what would happen in space. If you’re bedridden for a long time, your muscles atrophy and your muscular control, the tone of muscles would go away as we would describe it. Muscle tone has an impact on the cardiovascular system. When you or I stand up, blood comes from the upper part of our body to our legs, and our legs then are like buckets, except the muscles close on them and control how much blood goes into our legs. And that’s part of the vasomotor system. We control where we need the blood.

Vardalas:

The purpose of this was to understand what changes would happen to these astronauts when they’re in space. In other words, if you know what changed you know how to readapt them? Is that the idea?

Gowen:

That’s the idea. We had no experience of what would happen in space. We made trips around the earth and those were twenty-four or forty-eight hours, not very long at all. When we were doing Gemini, those were not long flights. But what we were moving toward were two-week flights, and we did not know what two weeks would do to the cardiovascular system. We had no experience, so the best experience we could have was with people who were bedridden. However, it’s not quite the same experience because there’s still gravity involved. We looked at the astronauts that we were flying and monitored them as best you could, but we did not have the real physiological monitoring that we’ve ultimately come to today.

Vardalas:

What are some of the highlights do you recall with your involvement in the NASA space program?

Gowen:

We had to look fundamentally at what were we measuring, and if you think of the way that engineers work, we typically like a cohesive model. You’d like something that is complete, and you’d like to be able to look at a device. So, John, when we look at a physical world, we can do modeling. We can basically get it together. But when you look at a world that is in the living system, the living system is constantly adapting. In effect there are no wiring diagrams for us. We know generally where we are, but when it comes to the details of how we’re controlled we’re still learning.

Now, this was back in the 1960s, where we were beginning to do this, so from a relative point of view of today, it was the dark ages. We were still trying to figure it out. We didn’t quite understand what was going to happen with blood pressure. We didn’t know how the vasomotor control would control the volume of the body. We didn’t know if the vasomotor control would become too far atrophied. Would we have our crewmembers coming back and go into shock? Would the body lose its ability to control? When you entered the Earth’s gravitational environment, what would it do to the individuals?

Today, we’ve put people up for six months, and we were talking about people going to Mars and the moon. We now understand what to do. We went through all of those processes. But back here at the beginning [Laughter] we were still trying to figure out what were we doing and that led to a number of discussions and experiments. At the Academy we built the “tilt table” where would lay subjects flat and then suddenly tilt them up to 70 degrees in the air. Tilt tables they’re still used.

Vardalas:

My sister’s been subjected to one to test if she has problems with her blood pressure.

Gowen:

That’s exactly what you do with them. In effect sit on a saddle, and your legs hang limp, so the legs are bags, and what occurs then is as the fluid goes down, you can get dizzy, and you faint. All of those are elements of what happens with the tilt table involvement. We built a laboratory that had a tilt table and rather advanced system instrumentation. We had a room that had three walls on it with the tilt table in the middle. On the outside sat the physicians. We had people outside who controlled it. Everything could be done remotely. We’d monitor EG, ECGs. We’d monitor blood pressure.

Vardalas:

Were the subjects the astronauts themselves?

Gowen:

No, we were at Colorado, at the Academy and the astronauts were in Houston, in Texas, so we got faculty member. At the Academy, you’ve got a number of young officers in excellent physical condition, so we had people who were equivalent to astronauts. We had a crew of officers who were faculty members who would come in be the subjects of these tests. We developed the instrumentation that you could put on people to observe what was happening. The tilt table was a mechanism to create a difference in their cardiovascular system that would then let us measure the changes and calibrate them and know what was happening.

Looking ahead to the time when we were going to be able to fly on Skylab, we began to develop a device called a lower body negative pressure device. It’s like taking a 55-gallon drum, like a big oil drum, and cutting a hole in one end of it and putting a person in up to their waist. We would then seal that off, so the legs and the lower part of your body are inside the drum. You could then make an artificial gravity, physiologically, by connecting the tank to a vacuum. In space you have nothing but vacuum. You could fix it so that the tank would suck down, and in effect get a differential pressure. The normal atmospheric pressure of the cabin in Skylab would then push blood down to the legs. It’s equivalent to you or I standing, so it was physiologically an artificial gravity. We had that unit at the Academy. We helped build that as an experiment. We took an oil can, and for $2 million, built an experiment you could fly.

Vardalas:

[Laughter]

Gowen:

We did that. If you were going to put someone in and the fluid was going to go down to the legs, then you wanted to know how much fluid went in. Part of the effort that we did from a science point of view was to try to figure out how you could measure blood flow in the body.

Vardalas:

You can’t get inside.

Gowen:

Externally, all externally. It could not be in vivo. And what we looked at were things like the body’s impedance. We would pass a voltage through the body and current, and measure the phase differences, and be able to measure the impedance. You could see how fluid would change. With my background, I was quick to see that we were not only measuring the resistance changes. We were also measuring the biochemical changes.

It was a very complex set. But it didn’t come together the way we had hoped it would. We also looked at using ultrasound. We looked at the ways that you externally put information in. One day I got to thinking about measuring the changes in the body by using the skin as a plate of a capacitor. Our skin would be one plate of a capacitor. If you could somehow magically put another plate separated from the body, then as the skin got bigger because you were putting fluid into it, the capacitance would change also. Now when you calculate that, it’s about equivalent to taking a piece of coax cable, tying a knot in it, and then asking the question of “how tight are you pulling the knot?” It’s a very small change. But we managed to do it. This became the plethysmograph.

Vardalas:

Say that again?

Gowen:

Plethysmograph.

Vardalas:

Plethysmograph.

Gowen:

Is what it’s called. In the tilt table and in the lower body negative pressure, we measured the change in the leg by using very flexible tubing, which we filled with mercury and then wrapped it around the leg. As the leg got bigger, it stretched the tubing, and the resistance would change. It’s like the Chinese finger. As a child if you had this little tube that you kept pulling apart, it would grab your fingers tighter. We changed the resistance.

In space, of course, you couldn’t fly mercury, because if a drop of mercury got into the whole environmental system would be deadly. Mercury was prohibited. We needed something to replace it, and we developed a capacitor plethysmograph, which when we first put it together it’s a very light instrument and it looks like a tube that you would put around your leg. The astronauts put it around the leg when they would be in the tank. In effect what we ended up with is an experiment with this 55-gallon drum, but you could open it up. Then around the calf of the leg you would put on a cylinder of a very, very light foam, [it was 98% air] that would not restrict the leg. A major part of our development was to make this instrument that would be softer than skin.

We went through some interesting design reviews at NASA. Think of taking some foam that is mostly air, and if you were to ignite it, it would flash, and it does. But when you have foam that’s on the leg of an astronaut and in a tank, if there is any ignition source at that point in time, the foam isn’t your issue. The ignition source is. And you’ve got a much bigger problem.

It helped me understand design review. It helped me understand how you begin to really apply engineering. One of the elements of taking a concept and putting it through a development almost took me back to the undergraduate days in which you draw a diagram, figure out how you model it, go over and make it. Here we’re developing it in the laboratory

Vardalas:

Did you have any direct interaction with astronauts themselves?

Gowen:

Oh yes, because what happened along the way, John, while we’re developing all of this for the Apollo shots, and we were developing for Skylab. Skylab was after Apollo. The Apollo shots to the moon were extending in days. In Apollo XV, two of the three astronauts came down with a very interesting set of tachycardias. They came down with a change in their EKG that showed that something was going on within the heart. For two out of three of our crew to have a change is very exceptional and that became a very, very major red flag. What is happening within the crew? What’s changing? The worry was that we knew that muscles atrophy. We had really no experience of cardiac muscle because cardiac muscle in a person who’s in bed rest still is pumping, still has its active time. When we were looking at the astronauts, the worry was that something was happening to cardiac muscle. NASA convened a group of internal medicine cardiologists to come in and we went to O’Hare at the Hilton. We had a large conference trying to figure out what was happening and that led to an ask from NASA. Could we build a way to go in and measure cardiac muscle change?

This was in November. We had another flight that was going to occur in February. Since I was still teaching like most faculty you teach and then do your research whenever you can, so during my holiday time, the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. I built a computer. I built a computer that you could go into a sick bay, in the case of an aircraft carrier, and take the X-ray machine, which is basically a battlefield X-ray machine, and turn it into a research machine. The computer would control the X-ray machine, turning it on at the right time of the heart cycle. And, John, this environment is a very noisy environment. It’s not an environment that you would normally want to hook up people to devices. We ended up using the chest X-ray, like you were standing in front of the chest X-ray. We would put on EKG onto the astronaut. It was very early in the optics, but I managed to get some diodes and devices that we could put together and optically link the EKG out of the astronaut into the computer so that we could control the X-ray machine.

Vardalas:

And take pictures at certain key moments?

Gowen:

We wanted to take it at the maximum size and the minimum size. At systole and diastole, you wanted to take a picture and you wanted to be able to repeat that so that from preflight to post-flight you could know whether there was a change. That led us to the point where we suddenly found our way down to Cape Kennedy. We were on a crash program to get down there. I had another officer with me who has gone on to be a physician, who has got a very fine career in his life. We went in and we were still quarantined with the space crew. In the hours before they got into the capsule to be launched, we did the evaluation of the cardiac muscle. We took their X-rays. That was the reference point. Two weeks later, in in the middle of the Pacific Ocean I was on the carrier, and I did the test on the astronauts after they landed.

It was a heady time. You’re just out here running to do all these things, and in the process, I discovered that a ship’s power is different than dock power. You know, we’re still developing equipment. There was one period in which I turned it on, and it wasn’t working because the ship’s power was so different. It was an exciting time. We found some interesting results out of it.

IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society

Vardalas:

Now let me bring you close to IEEE and talk about EMBS [IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society]. How did it come together? What role did you play in it?

Gowen:

Back then, the whole biomedical area is just really getting started. We had physicians who understood the value of what you could do with this knowledge.

We had life science people who were interested in what they could do to begin to better understand each other. An industry was emerging that began to look at instrumentation and devices. Wilson Greatbatch was doing his EKGs and developing pacemakers, so this was an active area with several different kinds of groups coming together. IEEE began to consider the question of what one would call this effort. It basically was starting almost in parallel with IEEE, as an organization was emerging as a Society. It was one of the early societies. I came in from the point of view of a biomedical background. There was just a few of us that were coming out as biomedical graduates. We began to look at how we would present papers and what we would do.

It was the first organization in a biomedical track. Before that we had the medical side and the life science side. Now we’re merging and we’re coming together and basically forming the structure. Part of the development of the area, for instance I was asked by the National Institute of Health to help get together a way that you would classify research papers. As this new discipline was emerging, we had to put a classification system together. What terms were we going to use? In the early days of IEEE involvement, we had started to get our journals published. We had a group of folks that were willing to read journals and put together a classification system. How do you put together a classification system of keywords? When I became involved in what was to be EMBS, the question was one of creating a classification structure that could allow us to grow. How could you get all the biomedical terms?

Early on I had the opportunity to work with a number of people. Some were physicians and some were life science people, and this began to give rise to the ways that we could begin to talk about an interface between these communities. Clinical engineering words began to emerge because we had people who were going into hospitals serving as the engineer to put together the new equipment that was coming out. How could you know that it was safe? How could you be sure that things are being hooked to patients who are going to be safe?

Vardalas:

Was this within EMBS?

Gowen:

Yes. It started in EMBS. IEEE, at that point, was not in the certification business.

Vardalas:

What did that entail?

Gowen:

We ended up forming the American Board of Clinical Engineers and a certification process. We were all involved in IEEE, but to do this certification process we stepped out of IEEE because of the legal involvements. IEEE wasn’t yet ready for certification.

Vardalas:

There’s always resistance to forming EMBS?

Gowen:

There was resistance on two sides. One group was young, and the other group involved senior people, who were distinguished in certain areas. There was a group of folks that came in from the medical side, people who were researchers in physiology. They would come into the group and sort of say, “well, you know, this is how you ought to do it.” We, the group of engineers, looked at each other and responded “well, wait a minute. That’s not the way we do it. We do it this way.”

We had some issues to work out in forming the Society because the two groups had different philosophies, different viewpoints, and different cultures. The challenge was to merge these cultures together to have an organization that would cohesively work together as opposed to always exploding. Those were some interesting days, but we survived. Once we got a little bigger and our culture was set, then the culture carried you through.

Now within IEEE you had the other side of it. In IEEE we had the traditional research fields, the traditional reporting fields. Here we came, this new group which was an amalgamation of various ideas. It was a little hard for IEEE people to know who we were. We came into the IEEE line with a different feeling. We were not necessarily an engineering group anymore. It was a group now that had people in it from the life sciences, and people from the medical sciences.

It was fascinating for many people in IEEE to try to understand what we were, but it was also difficult for them to see that this was IEEE because now we were talking about things that are not engineering. We were talking about things that are not defined in the usual terms of IEEE. We’re talking about a new set of terminology, a new set of aspects.

Vardalas:

There was some resistance as to whether you should be a Society or be within IEEE?

Gowen:

It was an enigma in the sense, John, that you came in and IEEE wanted to be able to work with us and bring it together, but we were not smooth in the IEEE.

Where did we, as a group, fit in to TAB [IEEE Technical Activities Board]? In those days, we were really working within the TAB development and organizing the divisions. EMBS was put in the Division, and I had the opportunity to ultimately be the Division Director and that put me on the Board of IEEE. During that period of formation, we wanted to be involved because that gave us the opportunity to lead and to do things.

Over my life, as I look back, one of the things that I’ve enjoyed is going down the path that most people don’t go on. I discovered that if you take the path that most people aren’t on, and you can begin to see things, ultimately people agree on the path. It was an interesting way to do that.

Vardalas:

Did you become the president of the Society?

Gowen:

I was president of EMBS. John there’s a piece of the story here that was quite instrumental in the process. As the biomedical area emerged, in Fort Collins and Boulder, Colorado, and in Laramie, Wyoming, there were people who were now becoming biomedical engineers. There were about a dozen of us. We wanted to be able to communicate our work. We came together and formed the Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium. Our first effort, as a matter of fact, we were going to be meeting on the Monday in which President Kennedy had been assassinated. I recall that the Academy was closed when the announcement was made, so we had to delay the meeting. We formed the Symposium with the thought of mind that it would be Rocky Mountain based. Another officer at the Academy and I were the initiators. We wanted to get a Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium going in order to invite all of our friends that were coming together in this new field. We would spend a day and a half, maybe two days, and just talk about what this new area of bioengineering was and how it was going to happen.

We tried to go to IEEE. I had been involved in forming the Colorado Springs Subsection. The Denver Section was the major Section in Colorado. I’ve enjoyed having people together, so my feeling has been if you get people together, they want to talk, so we formed a Subsection. I first became the Secretary and then the Chair of the Subsection.

My work in the Subsection put me in touch with the IEEE Denver, which then put me in touch with Region 5. I became involved in the regional side initially, and that began to give me a feeling of what you could do in IEEE. We asked if Region 5 would be a supporter of the Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium, the biomedical efforts. We were politely told go elsewhere. Then we tried to find within IEEE a home so that we could take this Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium and get support from the point of view that we wanted to publish what we were doing.

We couldn’t find anyone at IEEE. We began to ask, “just a moment, here’s IEEE and why will they not want to do something with a group like the Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium?”

After all, our field was something new and upcoming. But we didn’t have connection. We ultimately went to the Instrument Society of America. ISA published the proceedings. And that got me involved with ISA, which is another story.

Vardalas:

Did this experience then reveal to most of you that you needed your own Society then?

Gowen:

That led us to say, “we don’t like the way this is being handled at IEEE.” In the Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium, people came together and asked “what’s happening? So, where’s EMBS?” Then we began to get involved in EMBS. I had been presenting papers. I had been involved nationally. I knew several people who were involved in EMBS. A coalition came together, and we began to ask “why are you [EMBS] being so restrictive? We had the questions about the fields of interest in EMBS. Were you going to stay in modeling or you’re going to stay in instruments? Biomedical engineering was an emerging area. Why don’t you emerge with it?

This little organization, the Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium still exists today, but the meetings range across the United States. It emerged into one of those boutique types of organizations. They have a great conference, and the people come together. It’s a place where the collegiality is vital. You share with each other. You build the relationships. And it still fills a niche, even in these days.

Vardalas:

If I understand correctly, EMBS was already in existence when you tried to get support from IEEE for the Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium?

Gowen:

Yes, it was in existence. EMBS was in early steps of recognizing that engineering had something to offer to medicine, and that medicine had an interest in trying to understand what engineering could do. There was Wilson Greatbatch and the pacemaker. There were the early developments of some of the instrumentation. You had medical companies sitting off on the side that were starting to emerge. And we had people who were eminent modelers in physiology who could talk in these terms. You had folks who were involved in looking at EEGs. There was a group looking at things like what were the brain patterns. We had people like Otto Schmidt, who was up in Minnesota. He was a physicist who was basically excited about what he could do in engineering. And so, you had elements all around into which came this new breed of people who were graduates of biomedical engineering programs.

It’s almost oil and water coming together. People who’ve been stars out here in EMBS with great people, wonderful conferences, and with people that you enjoy talking to. But then a new group of people appears who have a different orientation, a more integrated orientation. It’s the question of a different homogeneity.

You’re putting this together in a different set of ways. The group out here that were biomedical engineers, and just by a set of circumstances several of us had been involved at Iowa State. Iowa State was a very early program, and we had begun to study as graduate students and got our degrees. Then we went out to other places. We were at the Academy. My partner at the Academy was a classical physiologist. In Fort Collins, we had Colorado State University. We had engineers there who had come out of basically the involvement of engineers, but they began to want to be part of the biomedical efforts. We had Francis Long and his people up in Wyoming.

Vardalas:

This is the new group?

Gowen:

This is the new group, the biomedical engineering symposium, the Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium.

Vardalas:

Did you, as a group, feel that you have to get inside EMBS and change it?

Gowen:

We didn’t have that feeling yet. We were still emerging, and we didn’t know what was out there. We hadn’t really had the opportunity to be engaged. Retrospectively, you can see what was happening, but at the time, John, we were just a group of people that were emerging, and we wanted to be involved. We couldn’t understand why we were being ignored. We couldn’t understand why we couldn’t be part of the group.

Vardalas:

What did you guys have to do to change that?

Gowen:

We joined it.

Vardalas:

[Laughter]

Gowen:

We needed to get smart. We realized that we were not going to change the people that were there being outside, so let’s join them. We became involved in EMBS. We started to be involved with the conferences, we started to present papers, and the spiral just continued to grow. More people came in, some of us had brought others in, and it started to change the flavor of EMBS.

Vardalas:

Were you the first president of EMBS from this group?

Gowen:

There are number of us involved, so I don’t know whether I was the first. It was an interesting group as we came together. We had some very neat people come. Thelma Estrin joined. Thelma, a computer person and modeler, was from UCLA. Her husband was also very much involved. They liked the flavor and became friends. We found that within the classical group that had been there, there were people who joined in. There weren’t any feelings of disparity within the group. There was instead a feeling of cohesiveness. The way that it was changing resonated with the people who were involved. We were building the group together in a way that saw the emergence of a different science.

Vardalas:

Now did this have repercussions in the way journal articles were chosen and selected?

Gowen:

It became the question of who volunteered to be editors and who sort of became assistant editors, so all of those elements were real. We saw a very important involvement. People in this new biomedical engineering area, who were coming together, had dedicated their future to an idea of integration, the integration of the sciences, the life sciences and the engineering aspects, and the physical sciences. That group had things on their mind that they wanted to share. They had the confidence to bring it together. The rest of the groups that were in EMBS were still there, but there was a new cohesiveness that had not been there before. Now we had a middle ground. You had people who understood what the physicians wanted to say. You had people who understood what the physiologists wanted to say. Now you could bring together sessions that were more inclusive, and that gave an opportunity to build this strength in EMBS. It wasn’t necessarily the birth of a new EMBS. It was an emergence of an EMBS with a different culture. It reflected the fact that, at that time, we were just now experiencing the growth of the biomedical engineering programs across the university campuses.

Vardalas:

As president of the Society, and then as a Director, what were your expectations when you walked into the IEEE Board of Directors? Were you surprised at how things worked? What are your recollections of your first experiences of being on the Board when compared to your expectations?

Gowen:

In EMBS for instance, we were struggling with the recognition that we should be a full-fledged Society. We struggled with that issue and that gave me the opportunity to appreciate the Executive Committee in IEEE. I recall the impression that many of us had in that this was a group of folks who had become so hardened in their ways, that they couldn’t change. We came together and said, “we ought to get on the Board.” We pushed for the division directorship, because there were several societies that were part of the division. We drove for that. It wasn’t clear that somebody wants to be on the Board, so the group said, “okay, we’ll put you up.” That’s how I ended up being a division director and on the Board in 1976.

The first time I came to a Board meeting was at Disney World, down in Florida. At that time, IEEE was going through a discussion about changing the general manager. I came in as a bright young shiny new Board member who didn’t have a clue. Yet, I’m in the inner circle. I had the ability to go down and be there during the meeting as other people were coming in. I just stood around and watched and it was an education. It helped me appreciate how IEEE came together because some of the folks who were in that room were involved back in 1963 as IEEE was founded. These were people that I greatly respect to this day. I respected them then, and it helped me appreciate the industrial side of IEEE versus the academic side. At that point the academic community was about 8 percent of IEEE because it had a very strong industrial component.

There was very strong involvement of people who had feelings about what IEEE should be. The IRE and AIEE groups were there. We had merged in 1963. This is now fourteen years later, and you have people who were living that, coming into it. There was a bit of the strong industry, the strong science involvement. It was very good. It was very impressive to have a chance to see what our leaders were, what they were doing, and to understand some of the issues.

IEEE-USA

Vardalas:

Tell me about your involvement with IEEE-USA?

Gowen:

When I came into IEEE, there was a gentleman, John Guarrera, who was a president. John was a person who you couldn’t help but like. John and Pat, his wife, were tremendous people. John was a teddy bear, a big man, but he was a cuddly kind of teddy bear. He was a person who really was a politician. He would have made a great member of Congress if I can describe that in those terms. He was from California. John had the feeling that IEEE needed to have a voice that would talk about where our technology and our nation’s policies were going. In John’s mind it was vital that IEEE have a way of influencing the congressional issues on technology. Both from a point of view of the industry and what we needed to be handling in the industry side, but also from a point of view of what was happening within the profession to individuals.

Vardalas:

What do you mean?

Gowen:

In the early 1970s, after having gone to the moon, we were now taking the space program apart. The Cold War was having different feelings. The parking lots in California, where our space programs had been, were now empty. We had the feeling that it was very difficult for engineers who had been very much dedicated to building the space program to find employment. At Cape Kennedy in Florida, we found that there was a great deal of competition for contracts. Engineers who were employed well, one day found themselves still employed by the same company, but with their salary cut because the company in winning the contract had dropped its rate. The only way that it could continue was to have the engineers reoriented and basically start over again. It’s a very, very disheartening thing to have happen to a person. These were the professional issues that were beginning to emerge. John Guarrera saw this, and said “why don’t we come together and build a part of IEEE that would help these aspects?” Those were the early beginnings of what became the United States Activities Board.

John became the vice president for professional activities. Within the Board of Directors there was the issue of whether this orientation for IEEE was right because we’re a scientific organization. However, now we were talking about what do we do in lobbying? What do we do in the Congress? How do we try to shape what the United States is doing? We are a global organization, so why are we concentrating on the United States? These were the issues at the Board and there was discomfort amongst the members of the IEEE Board of Directors. There was also discomfort in many areas of IEEE.

Our members from industry and industry leaders were comfortable with the science, the research portion, our publications, and our standards. They were a little uncomfortable with what’s happening over here when you start talking about immigration issues or you begin to speak about where are pensions. The feeling of the industrial side, from the management point of view, was that these were issues in which IEEE should not be involved.

When I came into the organization, I saw this activity beginning to emerge, and as I sat on the Board of Directors, I saw this as an issue. Then I watched the way that IEEE leadership began to try to handle this. There was a need to say, “you know, we are going a little bit off the line. We need to bring this organization back to where it had been in 1963.” This effort took on the character of a change in governance and it became known as the “good governance movement.” The “good governance movement” had in its mind that what IEEE leadership should do is find leaders in industry who would come back in and reorient IEEE as it had been formed in 1963.

In the early days of forming IEEE, there was the feeling, of course, that the leaders of the IRE and the AIEE, names that were part of our formation of IEEE, were giants. Now we needed to bring in people who were the giants of industry that would begin to work with us.

It was an interesting time because, in part, when you’re trying to bring in giants of industry who are used to working at the level of orientation at which IEEE started in 1963, but now we have this new business starting of turmoil bout where we are going. You can realize that within the IEEE there are many, many members who are equally worried about where they’re going. There were members with their jobs are on the line. This led to efforts to reshape what was happening in IEEE. It has now become IEEE-USA.

Bruno Weinschel was my predecessor. Bruno worked in electromagnetics. He was involved with microwaves and microwave devices at a company, and he would sort of be the epitome of what you would look at as a person in industry. Before him we had other industry leaders, so we went through a three-year period of people who were leaders in industry that we brought in to be involved as Presidents of IEEE.

Bruno Weinschel was the Vice President for Professional Activities before me. When I came in as vice president, my thoughts were more towards trying to organize our operations in the United States Activities Board. IEEE-USA came out of those discussions. These efforts became important to figure out how do we reach out to members and start having members be able to be involved in the programs. We organized a conference over Labor Day. Those efforts emerged with the thought that rather than have disharmony we ought to come together so that the various elements could communicate. Out of that communication you could build a program. It’s been interesting for me to still go back and look at IEEE-USA and see its roots that were back to the days of the good governance movement.

Vardalas:

What was the resolution between the “good governance movement” and the precepts of a voice for American engineers?

Gowen:

John, if I sort of summarize it for you, when I came on to IEEE there was the feeling of a need to bring IEEE back to where it had been in 1963. In 1963, it emerged with the recognition of leaders that had come out of industry, and over the period from 1963 until I came on in 1976, there were changes within IEEE. There had been changes in the general manager. For instance, at that point in time the general manager had a military background and a distinguished leader. But his orientation towards what IEEE would be was not necessarily the orientation that some of the leaders felt. As I watched, I began to understand a little more why that was so. A part of it had to with the effort that John Guarrera brought. It was an effort of that looked to more of the political sides, to the issue of lobbying in Congress, and to the issue of jobs for engineers. All of which were prompted by the changes in the aerospace industry

Vardalas:

Socioeconomic issues.

Gowen:

Socioeconomic issues, but also the issues that had to do with whether you had a secure future as an engineer, things like pensions. The issues of changing jobs frequently before pensions could be vested. Those were issues which were vital to many of our members, but it was a different orientation from the one in 1963.

We found that there was an IEEE that in people’s minds had emerged, but at the same time there was an IEEE that was emerging because where the members were. This led to a discussion of a good governance group, where good governance meant going back to the IEEE of 1963 because IEEE was sort of getting off track. The feeling was that we needed to bring IEEE back to the days of its early formation. But the reality is IEEE is made up of members, and they come together and want to have a place to discuss those issues. IEEE was well established as a research and development group, but there was another group of people out here who are what came to be called the “working engineers” as opposed to the sort of the research, management engineers. That group of people, the working engineer, was facing some very difficult unemployment problems. From the heydays of the 1960s and the moon shots, there was unemployment or suddenly you found that your salary’s cut because the company had to rebid its contract.

Vardalas:

How did IEEE address these issues? What was the answer, was it “good governance movement”?

Gowen:

It was the answer for some of the people, but it wasn’t the answer for the others.

Vardalas:

What came about?

Gowen:

What came about, within the IEEE side, we brought in and had some good leaders that came out of industry. We purposely went out for presidents coming out of industry who had not been involved at IEEE, but were willing, understood it, and would come over. We also learned that that was a very difficult process because you didn’t have leadership that understood all the details.

Fortunately, in that process, we had a general manager come in, Eric Herz. He was an IEEE member who deeply understood IEEE and who also understood the industry. He understood the unemployment issue because he had been involved in the space program. We now had a general manager who was committed to trying to work IEEE and its roots of 1963, but who is also able to look across and understand what had to be done for the rest of the activity. We had a general manager at the right time for the right purpose. You could then afford to have presidents that came in who were not necessarily involved at IEEE because they had someone they could rest on as a resource.

Now on the side of the United States Activities Board, for the professional area, we began to recognize what we should do. The gentleman who came in ahead of me, Bruno Weinschel, was very much involved with the U.S. Congress. He was a person who was steeped in technical involvement, he had a company, and he made microwave devices. He had a German background and was an interesting person, and very, very much involved with knowing that you had to be able to shape the technology. He was worried about competition around the world. He was worried about where industry was going, and what was happening. His thrust was to look for the right involvement with the U.S. Congress, making sure that we looked at things like tariffs and where we were moving. He understood that and was very devoted to it. I worked with him, and then I became the vice president for professional activities.

During this time, we found from within our members that the space program really was closing. We no longer had the activities at the Cape. During the 1960s, I had been down for the launches. I understood all of that. There were several times when I spent time down on the Cape and in Orlando meeting with groups. The Region 3 groups in Florida were very much concerned with what was happening. They had some good leaders and we worked together. This helped form a grassroots effort within IEEE for people who wanted to be involved, and we put an organization together.

We met over Labor Day in Phoenix, [Arizonia] where we typically met. We brought in 200 people to talk about what they needed. The feeling of dedication was so intense. We had leaders that were out there worrying about how they could help others. That added a flavor into the United States Activities Board and into professional activities. We found that we were lobbying for issues like portable pensions. IEEE took a major role in supporting IRAs, individual retirement accounts. We were involved with helping AARP. As a senior citizen group AARP was much more appropriate to lobby for IRAs than engineers. We were coming in as reasonably high paid people who had a problem; we were not getting our pensions. We didn’t have pensions. From the Congressional side, it was an enigma because here are people who are professionals, who are now worried about having their pensions. That led us to work with other groups, so we built alliances. AARP was an alliance because the people who are retired and are talking about pensions are appropriate. We got smarter in how to work this.

Vardalas:

Is this all for the U.S. Activities Board?

Gowen:

This is all in the United States Activities Board, and when I was Vice President for Professional Activities, the equivalent of the President of IEEE-USA. These were the things that we were doing. We were forming the organization. We began to build on what John Guarrera had started and that Bruno Weinschel had worked with. Now it was time to bring it together and build an organization, and that organization for the most part still exists in IEEE-USA. When I visit them and look at the meetings and activities, I smile because it’s like watching one of your children grow and mature.

It has been very good and that helped create stability. Now there are still issues about why the United States still has its own board within the global IEEE. Yet, the United States engineers’ groups are organized differently than in other countries. We do not have a national society. We don’t want everyone else to do this. Those are the realities of an organization that has almost 400,000 members in 160 countries, but that’s what you evolve.

Vardalas:

Do you think that that tension might increase as more and more of the membership shifts to outside the U.S. shores, and 60 percent of the members are outside? Will they start asking why we have an IEEE-USA in an organization that’s 60 percent non-U.S.?

Gowen:

John, it’s going to be there, and it’s going to emerge. With the emergence of the global IEEE, we’re a different organization. There is an opportunity and IEEE is emerging to meet the needs of its members. We’ve had that history. We speak to serving our members, but at times it’s important to have the members who are being served tell you what they ought to be served. The difficulty is that as we grow outside of the United States, having more of the leaders outside of the United States become involved in the organization is a critical issue, and that’s hard to do, John, because the groups outside of the United States are relatively young.

It’s almost like I found things when I first came in, in which we had a group that was 1963 on that was the organization that existed, and the way it was formed, and therefore it should stay that way. Then over here on the side we find the group like the John Guarrera - Weinschel group, the group that we brought together that sees needs and needed to go in a different area. And that’s the tension that we’ve had, and that’s IEEE. That tension is there and has been there, all the time that I’ve been involved at IEEE.

IEEE Presidency

Vardalas:

Let’s move on to your presidency. It’s a natural segue from you being involved so heavily with the U.S. Activities Board. As I understand it, there were two candidates running. The Board nominated two candidates. Was this the first time that the Board had proposed two candidates?

Gowen:

Yes. After I had finished being the Vice President for Professional Activities, I was off the Board. By coincidence, Nancy and I were in Washington, D.C. for another meeting while the IEEE Board was also meeting, so we were invited to lunch with the Board. John Slaughter, who was the director of the National Science Foundation, was a friend, a person that we knew, and we wanted to go and hear John make his comments to IEEE.

When we arrived members of the Board were out in the hall waiting for the Board to come out of executive session. Some members came out and said to me, “Dick, you don’t want to be here.” I asked, “why?” They said because we’re discussing the presidential candidates for the centennial year. Your name is being discussed and there are a lot of issues about how we are going to handle this. “What are you talking about,” I asked. Then I learned that there was a discussion about having two candidates. Now that was different because for years the way IEEE handled its presidency is that it selected the president. The Board put the President forward and sent it out to the members for basically ratification. The centennial year, the decision was we needed to be able to get a President.

No one’s ever told me clearly, but I think in part my background had come out of academics and it had come out of the United States Activities Board with a political involvement. My industry background at that point had been minimal. I’d been involved with the Academy and activities, and the space program. So, the effort was well, why don’t we, for reasons of good governance, get somebody who is a leader in industry. That’s how the candidates came together. The vice president of Philips in the United States, and I, were the two candidates.

Vardalas:

Prestigious fellow.

Gowen:

Yes. Prestigious. Very, very strong. Within the IEEE Board there was a group that wanted an industry leader.

Vardalas:

How did you feel about that? Did you tell yourself, “I’ve been thrown into this pit where I have to compete?”

Gowen:

Absolutely, John, my feeling was that “this is incredible. I don’t want to be involved with this. This is not something I want to do. I don’t want to put my name in and lose.” The feeling that I was going to lose was a driver. All the way back home from Washington I was beside myself trying to figure out how was I going to pull my name out because I had the intention of taking my name off the ballot. There was a problem with the airplane, so I stayed overnight in Denver. By the time I got home I was a little more sanguine, but I’m still trying to get comfortable with a candidate. I didn’t think I had to run for election, but I had to run for election, and that started a different flavor.

One of my faculty members came up to me and said, “you know, you cost me a bottle of wine. I didn’t think you’d get elected because you’re an academic. You’ve been involved in the political stuff and you’re with all the Washington issues worrying about what’s going to happen to people. You’re from South Dakota. No one knows where that is, so you’re probably not going to get to be elected.”

Vardalas:

I would imagine your stint at U.S. Activities Board [USAB] actually gave you a big advantage.

Gowen:

I think it did. Many, many folks knew me. There were a lot of people with whom I spoke. I understood their needs, and that, I think clicked. You never really know, John. I was elected to be the President-Elect of IEEE, and that started a very exciting time because the centennial was a big time for everybody, including me.

We put together a program committee, and we had a gentleman from GE, Don Braiten [name unclear]. He was a manager in General Electric, and he had a flair for doing things in special ways. Don became the genius behind putting together the centennial activities. Don wanted to make sure that we had a good show and that helped set the flavor. Eric Herz was the general manager, who was vital in the process. The Board was very, very supportive.

The centennial had an influence upon IEEE in many ways. You and I have had the chance to work on history. History activities emerged out of the need to be able to understand our hundred years, to go back and to bring in a cohesive way the memorabilia and recognize the people. It set the Century of Giants concept together, where we went back and celebrated the many leaders who formed our profession, and who formed our technology. That all came out of the history activities. We decided that we would have major celebrations around the world, and that started the flavor of recognizing people.

Vardalas:

Thinking back, do you think that this big celebration, the centennial, had wider impacts, wider consequences in IEEE? Do you think it had any lasting effect on our organization?

Gowen:

I think it did a number of things. In the first place, it gave IEEE a chance to go back and to celebrate who it is. By looking backwards, you have a feeling of where you came from and that led to the recognition of our strengths. We began to talk about our strengths. To give you a quick perspective on it, we decided that we needed a brochure that would talk about IEEE, and we hired a firm to put together the artwork to make the brochure. The discussions with the firm ultimately led to the point where we wanted a brochure that could be shown to someone for only five seconds and that person would still grasp what IEEE is about. The brochure ended up being a globe with images of the technologies, and the space program transmission lines. That brochure came out of that with the thought in mind of getting public visibility so that people would know what IEEE was. We talked about handing it to members of Congress so that they would know who we were. If you handed it to his staff, or you handed it to a person who was in a library or a person who just happened to be on the street, you could tell them what IEEE was.

That began to open the feeling of how we communicate to people. Where and what and why we were celebrating this centennial. It was a time to celebrate. We came together as a group, but we really didn’t have a message to deliver publicly. The centennial was the ideal time now to go back and to talk about publicly who we were.

PSAs, public service announcements, became important. We started thinking differently and those roots are still here as we continue to figure out how do we, IEEE, communicate better to people what IEEE is about. In that whole process, it was interesting to be able to bring our members together cohesively. We did things like having our Centennial Medals and we provided opportunities to give awards to people. That year Nancy and I visited some thirty-eight different countries. In each of those locations we had a major awards activity or awards ceremony.

It was an opportunity to recognize the people who had been involved, and to have an opportunity to bring together people who were distinguished scientists, distinguished engineers, and technologists who were developing. I think of a meeting that we had in Japan. At that time, we had about 5,000 members in Japan. In one room we had the giants of the electro-technology industries in Japan. I found myself just standing there looking around the room in awe because here were the people who were our competitors in the United States and were global leaders in the marketplace. It changed from where we had been back in New York City forming something that would take place in Philadelphia to now going to a place in which your industry competitors are and looking at the people who were here. It sort of was full cycle because you began to appreciate what happened over those hundred years.

Vardalas:

Do you think the centennial also had an effect on the rank and file? Did it give them a new appreciation of their own organization?

Gowen:

Very much so. And matter of fact, it’s still enjoyable, frankly, to have people come up to me today and speak about the centennial that we had. They can look back and see what their heritage is, what our heritages are. How did we get to where we are? We adopted the “Century of Giants”, which was a very appropriate way to give people the feeling of why it’s important to have an organization like IEEE, and what we do, and how we reach far beyond what many of us as individuals, i.e., the global aspect, and the recognition of what the technologies do. Today, we talk about for the benefit of humanity. We talk about it, technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity as IEEE’s core issues.

Vardalas:

Oh really? Okay.

Gowen:

It gave the engineers the sense of being part of something bigger, of being involved in a long tradition and an industry that was big. Many of the members are involved in their industry, and when we come to activities, we come to it from our roots or experiences, our industries. But in the centennial, we looked at the integration of all these industries together. What did they achieve? What technologies did we create? How did the world change? What does it mean for the benefit of humanity? The centennial brought all that together in a way that had meaning and in a way that you could grapple with.

Dakota State University, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology

Vardalas:

You’ve had a chance now to see an organization change over several decades. How has IEEE evolved from your perspective? What have been the changes, and where do you think IEEE is going?

Gowen:

I finished my term as the IEEE Centennial President, I was on the Board, and one of the things I was involved with at the time was the IEEE Foundation. The Presidents of IEEE were Presidents of the IEEE Foundation at that point. We had talked about what the Foundation could do to help IEEE. Then I left IEEE pretty much and became a university president.

When I left the Air Force Academy in 1977, John, I was invited to come up to South Dakota. I came up to South Dakota School of Mines and Technology as the vice president. In 1984, in the centennial year, South Dakota went through a period of development. Citibank came into South Dakota and developed a credit card office, where you sent your money or your credit card. Citibank and the government of the state came together and talked about taking the university and making it into an organization that would prepare people in computers and information.

In 1984, when I was the President of IEEE’s Centennial, on my way to South America, I found that I was being asked to take on the development of a new school. Suddenly, in August I’m now the president of a former teacher’s college. It was called Dakota State [College] and it was the first teacher college of the Dakota Territory. It was an historic school, and now an engineer was to go into this college and turn it into a computer information university.

Vardalas:

Was the college renamed?

Gowen:

It has become Dakota State University. It went from teacher programs to having Ph.D. programs. I was there for three years and involved with changing the mission of the school. It was a great time. I had expected to stay there, until one day the Board of Regents asked me to consider being reassigned. Now I had not been really reassigned in the Air Force, but I was being reassigned in civilian life.

Vardalas:

[Laughter]

Gowen:

I became the president of South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and seventeen years later I retired. In that period, I’ve been involved with IEEE in various functions. When you’re a Past President, IEEE typically asks you to do special things. Before I retired, I was asked if I would consider going on the IEEE Foundation’s Board and help build the Foundation. I was very interested in doing that. Before I could really accept that offer, I ended up working for two years in the South Dakota to take a gold mine and make it into an international laboratory for studying neutrinos.

After I retired, I also spent a year and a half working for the governor. Finally, IEEE asked: “Are you still going to do anything with the Foundation, or if you’re going to keep doing the other things.” I replied, “I’m going to do it.” In 2004, I came on the IEEE Foundation’s Board, and ultimately, I became the president of the Foundation, which is a role I play today.

IEEE Foundation

Vardalas:

It’s interesting, twenty-five years ago, you were the President of IEEE during the centennial. Today, you are president of the IEEE Foundation as IEEE celebrates its 125th. What changes have you seen in those twenty-five years?

Gowen:

The size of the Board has just gotten a little bigger, but it’s basically the same Board. In many ways the Board operates in the same way. Back in the time when I was President of the Board and on the Board, we could basically do a meeting in one day. We would have meetings before for the other boards, much like things are done today. It was pretty much the same operation mode. We’ve added two Directors for the Computer Society, but there were ten Division Directors, ten Regional Directors, and the Vice Presidents of the same, so the Board’s pretty much the same composition.

Vardalas:

Are you saying that the Board is not too big?

Gowen:

I’m not saying that. That’s not an issue that I would resolve. But I would say the Board hasn’t changed and in many ways the Board almost goes back to as it was in 1963. The operation of the Board is still pretty much concerned with managing the details of IEEE. We come back and forth with the question of how you change the Board. It reminds me of the movements for good governance. You want to have a Board that looks more strategically, [so one] that looks at things that are less operational. Yet, within the organization we have structured, there’s a need for detail developments to come together.

The IEEE Foundation is legally a separate corporation. As President of the Foundation there are many times that I’m not involved in day-to-day activities of the IEEE Board. But I have an opportunity to be involved with lots of the organizations and the people because of what we do. The Foundation exists only to serve IEEE. Our role is to try to cultivate the resources with people, and to go out and to raise the resources that IEEE would need. These days we are talking about how you launch capital campaigns.

Some of the differences that I see within IEEE is there are organizational differences that are responding, and we’ve already done that over the years. That was part of the centennial. Responding to differences was the way we formed the United States Activities Board [USAB].

Today, IEEE is looking at the Smart Grid, which is a technological development that’s been around for a while but is now crystallizing. It’s an area in which IEEE can be very much involved. Our Power and Energy Society is taking a leadership position in this area. We have eight Societies working together in some piece of the Smart Grid and the Foundation will help to raise funds for workforce development. There’s an estimate that we will need 14,000 new engineers over the next two years. The Foundation is moving ahead to try to bring that together in a way so that there can be funding for universities, and that will help bring the programs together. These are all elements of the way the Foundation and IEEE are working together in our technical and the Society forms. They are also about the way IEEE as a whole functions.

In a parallel mode, when we looked at things like the involvement of Professional Activities, IEEE is beginning to move into a new era. We’re looking at the issues that are related to humanitarian concerns. If you think of IEEE as an organization, our heritage is that we are 30 percent of the world’s electro-technology literature. We’re a publisher. We’re respected. We’re a research organization that has no similarities. Our recognition is strong. We focused upon the issues of our members for their workplace. If you think of IEEE over the years, our strength has been that we have been there to work with our members to provide the tools, the information, and the breadth of development that are needed for them to be good engineers, to be good scientists, to be good technology developers. That has made a big difference.

There’s a feeling within people, particularly as we become more global, of recognizing some significant humanitarian issues in the world today. When we bring more of our members together with a global presence, [43 percent of our members are outside the United States], and when we reach into places that are very much developing, into Africa, into India, and to other pockets of the world that have great needs, we begin to recognize that for the benefit of humanity and innovation excellence for the benefit of humanity take on a different meaning. There are portions of Europe in Region 8 that have needs for developing support. It’s not just humanity in global sense of all the people, but it starts focusing on all those people who are, as the term is used, at the bottom of the pyramid economically. They do not have the resources that many of us enjoy elsewhere. That’s a different flavor for IEEE.

We’re beginning to have the recognition that we could do things using technology in a way that would ultimately recognize sustainable economic growth, that would be there day after day. There are needs for things like water. Just for the basic survivability issues. The sustainability of life. These are issues that are now beginning to emerge within IEEE. These days we’re finding that within some of the leadership at the Board level it’s almost like, to use the Yogi Berra phrase, “déjà vu all over again,” because we’re going back and trying to say this is what IEEE is, but now it’s really become more global. We begin to see issues that are outside of what our experience base is.

Vardalas:

There’s still some tensions and resistance?

Gowen:

It’s humankind. It’s basic human nature that the only thing we have is our own experiences. IEEE, as an organization, has its experiences; our leadership has its experiences, but now we’re realizing that as we become more global the experience base changes.

Vardalas:

Now is there any possibility that what you describe now can lead to the reemergence of a good governance movement again with the call, “let’s go back to our roots, or we’re not supposed to be doing this kind of thing?”

Gowen:

Absolutely. That’s one of the tensions. My role, as President of the Foundation is to serve IEEE, but we stand apart from IEEE. It is of very great importance that when I look at a donor in the eye and know that the donor wants to give money to IEEE, we must be able to show the donor where they can give. The donor wants to know what’s available and what they can give money for. What do you have that’s the same area that I’m interested in? People give money to things we are interested in, but unless IEEE has programs that resonate with the donor’s feelings, we don’t have an opportunity to get the funds.

Vardalas:

You believe that humanitarian needs are something that resonates with donors?

Gowen:

Very much so, particularly when you think of humanitarian in its broad sense. We know that health is vital, and we have the ability to assist in health areas. We have the ability to share communication capabilities that will let people get more access to healthcare. In the area of economic development, we have in the industries that IEEE is associated with, the technologies are there It’s almost like picking apples or cherries off the tree. You can bring the right technologies together, and you can use those in a way that they’ll be an enabling type.

Vardalas:

Now you say that the Foundation is to serve IEEE, but does the Foundation take on a more active role in trying to help IEEE understand its own needs? The humanitarian role is one area where you’re trying to influence, aren’t you?

Gowen:

For the Foundation to serve IEEE, we reach out to the donors. Once we identify donor interests, we say “it would be good if IEEE had some of those areas.” What we’re observing is that because IEEE’s changing there is now the emergence of an interest in the “life place” that we live in. IEEE has been the workplace. Now there’s an emergence of what’s happening to other people. What’s happening around the world? It’s the recognition that many of us have had in church involvements, or even university involvements that have been out here. Now because of the change in the membership of IEEE, these issues are being brought into IEEE by the new membership that’s coming from around the globe. Now that’s an aspect that’s important for people to see. As we become more and more global, these issues are more and more on the minds of our members.

I’ve just recently come back from Kerala which is a state in India. You were over there. When we attended that conference, we saw our leaders in Kerala, we saw the members, and we saw the leadership of the Kerala Section. We saw those who’d been former leaders who are very much involved. We had the opportunity to see the students. These are people who have great interest in what happens on the humanitarian side.

Vardalas:

Yes.

Gowen:

If you think of what we witnessed in Kerala, we witnessed first-hand that Section’s leadership in humanitarian activities, and they’re very good at it. We saw that they were talking about what to do in disaster relief. When we visited with the government agency or when we visited the computer group that was there, the C-DAC [Centre for Development of Advanced Computing], you see that group working all over India. That’s a group working to help the humanitarian space, underwriting the hearing aid business.

That’s a different culture than what we have within IEEE in the United States. When you look at that, it is hard to think of how you could get the same thing going here. We don’t have the experiences that the people in Kerala have. They’re living in those circumstances and see the needs. It was intriguing to visit with the students and see how they have merged in communication with each other. The humanitarian area and the opportunity to change things binds them together.

Vardalas:

Yes, I was impressed with the sense of idealism. One does not necessarily associate idealism with engineers.

Gowen:

They had no question of working with NGOs. There was no doubt whether this was appropriate. On a relative scale, this is one Section out of our 324 Sections, or whatever we have. Here is a Section that is very much alive and thriving because of its humanitarian involvement. Now that’s a message that needs to be able to be translated over to a board of people who are involved in our cultures here, and who are the majority. There are global people on the Board, who could communicate this, but they’re in the minority, very much in the minority. The Board is still the industrial leaders. People who are engaged as managers. It reminds me of the days when we were trying to get the biomedical activities going in IEEE.

Vardalas:

A big circle isn’t it.

Gowen:

It’s like a big circle, and that’s the point I’m making. I look at IEEE and go back to the centennial days, the way the Board was then. Now when we see the emergence of the Smart Grid effort, that’s starting to get some interest together, but there’s a tension in who’s going to lead that. We’re always going to have the tensions.

Now when you come together in the humanitarian side, here’s a potentially large program, because it goes beyond IEEE. If we’re feeling it, the other engineering societies, ASME, are feeling it. There are people all over that want this. The world has changed. When we see the world of the economic status in which the United States was one of the superpowers and there from the economic base, we led everything. Now we’re beginning to see that around the world there are pockets of economic growth that are competing with us in ways that we’ve never experienced before. The world is changing and we’re seeing that within IEEE and it is difficult for IEEE to grapple with it, particularly at the leadership level. I look through IEEE and ask, “what are our challenges?” Our challenges are that the people that are the leadership are like us. We have commitments to IEEE, but we only have the commitments in our experience base, and how do we bring together that communication of activities.

I see some very good things that the new general manager, Jim Pendergast, has got a good wide perspective. I’m pleased to see him here at this time because again we’re going through that effort of asking ourselves “what is IEEE?” And if you keep IEEE sort of what it should be, so to speak, and stick with our publications, stick with our standards, which we’re very good at, and do a great job. Now we’re being challenged to reach out and ask, “in a changing global context, how do we serve the people who are out there within the global community?”

Vardalas:

You’re saying, then, you’re hoping he’ll play the same role that Eric Herz played when he came in?

Gowen:

Oh absolutely. IEEE is a combination. The volunteers are a passing parade. We come by and you stand on the street corner, we wave, and we’re gone. [Laughter] The staff like you and others who are here are sort of the backbone of how we keep the organization going. That tension between volunteer and staff is an important part of what we are, but equally the tension of what we’re doing is vital.

IEEE is a very, very large business. If you look at it from the business point of view, this humanitarian area is sort of out here in the ether almost. It’s something that we know we ought to do, but we haven’t quite figured out what the product is, or what the services are. How do we provide that? That’s our challenge. Now there are always going to be challenges. If you go back and look at 1963 as the coalescing years of the two organizations, AIEE, the IRE, and where they emerged, they came together because it was right at that time. Now as we do things, it’s always right. When I looked at, one small sense, the biomedical side, but with all of the societies we have, there’s the microcosm of that all the time that goes on in TAB. But on a larger, more macro scale, now we’re beginning to see the issues of how we put things together.

At the last Board meeting there was tension over the question of what we are doing in humanitarian activities, so there’s tension within the Board. From the point of view of should we put some money into projects and just go out and do a project, and you kind of say that might be helpful in a way. However, there are many NGOs out there that are already doing projects, so ought we try to help them? Are we enablers? Can we use our technology in a way that we will enable a change sufficient for the people who are working within the needs of the villages and the needs of the emerging communities?

It’s an economic issue. Can we find ways to make some technical capabilities available at a lower price? That issue of price point becomes point. This is something that we are now starting to talk about. If you want the leading technology, you pay the price. Now we’re talking about how much can you pay?

There’s a whole set of these circumstances, which I find interesting. Lew Terman is very much involved in this, and he has been a great leader in trying to bring focus on it. We’ve had a number of staff people. We’re finding our Gold Members are perhaps some of the most dedicated people trying to do things in the humanitarian space. In India, I met Emma Raja, and I was extremely impressed. There were other impressive people. That’s the change that’s coming in IEEE. Now will it stop? I don’t think so. I think that twenty-five years from now people like you and I will be together and be talking about what is IEEE? We will find the organization’s changing because the economy changes. Economic life is just going to change us.

Vardalas:

On that note, I want to thank you, and let’s see in twenty-five years whether somebody goes back and looks at this videotape and sees what’s come to pass. Thank you so much.

Gowen:

Thank you, John.