Oral-History:Richard Gowen Oral Histories
During a ten-year period (2009-2018), IEEE Life Fellow, Richard J. (Dick) Gowen (1935-2021), the 1984 IEEE President and Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu (2002) 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.
