Philip H. Trickey
- Birthdate
- 1906/03/29
- Birthplace
- Charleston, ME, USA
- Death date
- 1991/12/24
- Associated organizations
- Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Singer Company, Sperry Rand Corporation
- Awards
- IEEE Nikola Tesla Award
Biography
Philip H. Trickey lists himself as a Visiting Professor at Duke University, but he actually devotes more time to his independent and extensive consulting practice, in which he assists clients with technical problems of all kinds of small electrical machines, from razor motors to windmill generators. His special field of interest is the development of methods of calculation and design of rotating electrical machines. For the last eight years, he has been one of two lecturers giving a one-week course in Single-phase Motor Design as a part of the Continuing Education Program of the University of Missouri at Rolla, Missouri.
Mr. Trickey was born in Charleston, Maine, in 1906 and was graduated from the University of Maine in 1928. From then until 1935, except for time out to get his Master's degree from the University of Maine, he was employed by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation as design engineer on small motors of all types. For the next thirteen years he was employed by Singer Company, Diehl Division, first as design engineer, then later as Chief Engineer. He left them in 1948 to become Chief Engineer of the Vickers Electric Division of Vickers, Inc. In 1948 he went with the Wright Machinery Co. Division of Sperry Rand Corporation as Manager of Motor Engineering and Manager of Development Engineering, which position he held until 1965 when he became Visiting Professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He has had over three dozen technical papers and articles published, and has been awarded nine patents. Thanks to a grant from the Grainger Foundation of Chicago, he has been able to collect, edit, and publish his technical papers and memoranda in fourteen volumes of an incredible collection of calculating formulas and procedures for an unbelieveable variety of small electric machines.
He has served on several committees, subcommittees, and working groups of IEEE and of its predecessor society, the AIEE. In 1947 he was elevated to Fellow grade of AIEE. He had a daughter and two sons by his first wife, the former Mae Hutchinson, who died in 1972. About three years later he married Jeannette Noble who, unfortunately, was to drown in 1976. His hobbies included tennis and chess. He had a delightful sense of humor and often comes up with charming gems of witty homespun philosophy.
